The Mac:
In a recent discussion on what Linux needed to be a contender on the desktop the ‘Magic’ and polish of the Mac. Most everything has a single place to get things done – that’s the biggest difference so far. There is, however, consistency about where that single place is across applications. For a given operation that you will do with any application – say, resizing the window – you learn it once and your done.
Networking with Windows machines is a bit of a pain thus far; I miss being able to specify a single IP-address based path as where something exists. It’s probably one of those ‘bad’ things that Microsoft does that the Mac doesn’t for some good reason. Stil miss it though.
Windows Home Server
Liking it thus far. There are a few things I wish it could do, but they mostly relate to things that I believe are HP-based additions. I wish I could figure out how to assign it an IP address instead of leaving it to the random nature of DHCP – but doing a manual address breaks something when it comes to talking with the MAC. I’m missing a setting somewhere and I don’t know what it is.
Still, being able to toss a few hard drive at the thing and it Just Works… I like this. Especially that I didn’t need to turn the machine off to add those hard drives.
Right now we have moved all our files over to this system. Add together the drive the system came with, the extra drive I bought for the now dead system, and the ‘large’ drive I pulled out of the dead system… we now have 2.9 TB of space, with 2.1 TB available. Overkill at the moment for sure, but I’m ok with that.
Very interesting, though I don’t understand everything you said. I have been curious about the Mac. I have thought that perhaps your dad would get along better on a Mac because I understand it has fewer idiosyncrasies and is more dependable and predictable. The thing that makes me pause is that it would require he learn a new operating system and he would still be using a PC at work. I look forward to your opinion as you become more familiar.
So… this server thing… Would that be like a computer that sits in the closet that one could access wirelessly from other computers anywhere in the house? Like having a server and 2 or more laptops, the server act as the storage for all? Would it be possible to run photoshop or a similarly resource demanding program from the server on a laptop that doesn’t have the program loaded or the resources to run it?
Congrats on the Mac.
The server is a computer that you would put off somewhere out of the way and it would just do its thing; mostly storing files. Windows Home Server does have the ability to do other things that I haven’t really explored yet. I know it can convert videos from one format to another (though I like being able to control that process a little more on my own). There are also other packages out there that people have created to extend the abilities of the server. I know there is a torrent client, some website clients, and other things out there. I like the torrent client – I occasionally download large software packages, usually linux things, and it would be nice to offload that task to the server.
However, this isn’t one that you’d want to toss into just any closet. The hardware is, more or less, full on PC specs. (minus a video card) So if you stuffed it in a closet without much airflow you might have heat problems. Right now ours is sitting in the living room behind the TV; plenty of room to breath there and mostly out of site.
Right now our only frustration with the system is that we don’t have the house wired for physical internet; everything here goes over wireless, so transferring files around isn’t fast. One of these days we’ll get things setup with wired connections and life will be much better.
Right now most of my annoyances are things with the Mac. No mapping persistent network locations, hard to have a real shared folder between users. Shared as in everyone has full read/write/delete privileges on all files – I could setup a share that let everyone read everything from it… but that isn’t useful to our purposes.
I’m also re-learning all my keyboard shortcuts – not really a problem, just slows me down.