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| Accelerate Your Mac! Cats-n-Dogs Living Together by Alex Koyshman 8/4/98 |
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Issue 1 "Your Mac sucks, because it’s a closed environment that’s incompatible with 90% of the universe." Good. I got your attention. We’ve had to put up with this kind of nonsense since 1984, and you know what? Mac users should not need any excuses for their platform of choice. I’m not talking about the usual Apple marketing drivel about how Macs being able to read PC Disks, or the you can run virtual PC so you can run Windows software- After all, if I remember correctly, no Mac user bought one because he wanted to run PC Software. I am writing this column not to prove that Macs can run Windows, nor that Macs can open PC Formatted disks. This column is about researching and answering real world interoperability concerns that deal with Macs on foreign networks and foreign boxes on AppleTalk networks. The simple truth is that in the last 5 years there has been a near complete convergence in computing. From a capability standpoint, it’s nearly impossible to differentiate Macs from PCs from Unix workstation. Aside from a momentary bragging right that a new CPU brings, the MIPS and MegaFLOPS of modern machines are more than any single task we can throw at it requires- regardless of your OS choice. I know, I’m probably going to gain some enemies here, but it comes down to this- Macs don’t need excuses, but at the same time, PCs are no longer inferior (Please, don’t drag me into an OS debate- its not a question of easier or harder.) Apple squandered their immense lead in computing usability technology. "So who the hell is this jerk (meaning me) that makes these stupid statements? Macs rule forever!" I guess this is a good segway to introducing myself ;) By day, I’m a mild mannered bespectacled Analyst at a large company in sunny (read: Hotter than hell) Southern California. Within my scope fall administering a segment of the corporate WAN including 200+ Win95 clients on an NT Domain spanning 30+ servers across the US. By night, I take off the glasses and… I am the co-proprietor of a graphic design firm, Designamics (hopefully I’ll get more shameless plugs later) where my wife and I serve a variety of clients in the California area. The rest of my time is spent consulting; specializing in multi-platform networked storage applications. I breathe, eat, and sleep computers, and yes, it does make me a whacko. In my studio, I have a Umax S900, a Win98, and a WinNT Server on the network in complete harmony. The NT machine serves as a proxy server, a backup server, a fax receiver/FOD, and an ohmigodineedanotherworkstation machine. The Win98 machine is a PII-300, that I use primarily for application development, but its got a 20" monitor and Quark, PhotoShop, and Illustrator- always a second workstation. The Mac is the design workhorse, as you can imagine. With 192Megs, a 20" monitor, a palette monitor, 12 gigs of HD space on an Initio Miles card, this is where most of the creative work is actually done (oh, and a G3 upgrade is forthcoming.) It is the goal of this column to help readers make the most of their equipment, regardless of what it is and the environment its in, because we all know we don’t always have the luxury to use the tools we are used to. I welcome all questions and comments at akoyshman@jps.net or designamics@jps.net |
Disclaimer: The opinions/comments expressed here are the author's alone, and do not necessarily represent those of the site publishers. |