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At my last job, I was supporting Apples for a small college. I was the token the Mac guy. I started working with an Art professor to bring photoshop and Macs into one of five computer labs. The professor wanted to go more digital in his art program. The IT hardware manager and this professor started fighting?neither seemed to listen to other. I did not like being in the crossfire. Has anybody else seen this?

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The thing IS that for IT reasons windows is a godsend for us IT people. Group policy has no equivalent in OSX . That is why especially in a school setting why apples arent good.

I work in a library and I know where the IT guy is coming from . College kids will try to hack everything they can get there hands on . They dont care if they bring down the whole network. Group policy makes it much easier to lock the system down.

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Stay out of it. And, if it comes to trying to persuade you to one side or the other, make it clear to them that you are not the decision-maker in the process and they will have to talk to each other to sort it out.

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Considering Photoshop has X64 support on Windows, and not on OSX I would personally encourage them to go for X64 Windows machines. The view of macs as the only machines good for editing of this nature are old and outdated now, as another poster said Photoshop is very good on Windows

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One other thing that may or may not be an issue. GPU support for Photoshop. There are plug-ins that work for utilizing the GPU for some acceleration of Photoshop. I'm not sure if that is exclusive to the PC world. May be another talking point for the professor to hear.

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The thing IS that for IT reasons windows is a godsend for us IT people. Group policy has no equivalent in OSX . That is why especially in a school setting why apples arent good.

I work in a library and I know where the IT guy is coming from . College kids will try to hack everything they can get there hands on . They dont care if they bring down the whole network. Group policy makes it much easier to lock the system down.

Mac's can be locked down to an icon in the middle of the screen and thats it. It's quite comprehensive.

However being in IT you have to fit the right tool to the fit the job. If they have a lot of windows computers, then i would have gone for Windows workstations. If the professor wanted students to experience mac's so they are not so blindsighted when they start looking for work i would go for Mac's, mac's fit really well into Active Directory networks, the tools and hook up are very easy, it's really easy to get both windows and mac's to work togeather in an AD.

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At my last job, I was supporting Apples for a small college. I was the token the Mac guy. I started working with an Art professor to bring photoshop and Macs into one of five computer labs. The professor wanted to go more digital in his art program. The IT hardware manager and this professor started fighting?neither seemed to listen to other. I did not like being in the crossfire. Has anybody else seen this?

Yeah I see it on TV every day:

"I'm a PC...And you are Mac"

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At my last job, I was supporting Apples for a small college. I was the token the Mac guy. I started working with an Art professor to bring photoshop and Macs into one of five computer labs. The professor wanted to go more digital in his art program. The IT hardware manager and this professor started fighting?neither seemed to listen to other. I did not like being in the crossfire. Has anybody else seen this?

You just described Neowin.

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One other thing that may or may not be an issue. GPU support for Photoshop. There are plug-ins that work for utilizing the GPU for some acceleration of Photoshop. I'm not sure if that is exclusive to the PC world. May be another talking point for the professor to hear.

CS4 has OpenGL acceleration in OS X, though I've personally turned it off because it makes the guides all wonky (good old Adobe quality assurance).

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At my last job, I was supporting Apples for a small college. I was the token the Mac guy. I started working with an Art professor to bring photoshop and Macs into one of five computer labs. The professor wanted to go more digital in his art program. The IT hardware manager and this professor started fighting?neither seemed to listen to other. I did not like being in the crossfire. Has anybody else seen this?

Sounds like typical office nonsense due to poor leadership. Given that it doesn't sound like you're in a position of authority here, there really isn't much to say. None of us know enough about your network to make realistic suggestions. Even if we did, it doesn't sound like you're in a position to act on those anyway.

Sucks to be you, fortunately there are plenty of other jobs out there.

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The thing IS that for IT reasons windows is a godsend for us IT people. Group policy has no equivalent in OSX . That is why especially in a school setting why apples arent good.

I work in a library and I know where the IT guy is coming from . College kids will try to hack everything they can get there hands on . They dont care if they bring down the whole network. Group policy makes it much easier to lock the system down.

MCX isn't bad..

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This is a common problem you will find in any organization, not just education. The core issue is neither the professor or the IT group has defined a business reason for one platform or another, based upon functions or requirements.

There are pros and cons to either approach, and Active Directory and GPO manageability is pretty low on the list. Considering most graphic designers and illustrators use Macs, the college might actually want to use the same tools you use in the "real world". Personally, if I were the prof, I would want a mixed lab, mostly Mac with a few PCs running Windows 7, especially to see differences in certain softwares like Avid, Adobe CS, video editing, etc. between the 2 platforms.

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The thing IS that for IT reasons windows is a godsend for us IT people. Group policy has no equivalent in OSX . That is why especially in a school setting why apples arent good.

I work in a library and I know where the IT guy is coming from . College kids will try to hack everything they can get there hands on . They dont care if they bring down the whole network. Group policy makes it much easier to lock the system down.

Er, OS X Server can manage OS X clients just as well as Windows Server group policy can on Windows.

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So you can lock down every machine to one user, online profiles on the server and all that stuff right from the server. Even down to Wich sites they can visit and which programs can be run with only using the server?

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So you can lock down every machine to one user, online profiles on the server and all that stuff right from the server. Even down to Wich sites they can visit and which programs can be run with only using the server?

Yup.

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  • 2 weeks later...
So you can lock down every machine to one user, online profiles on the server and all that stuff right from the server. Even down to Wich sites they can visit and which programs can be run with only using the server?

Yes. This is even possible with Solaris and things like Linux. Windows is absolutely not the only one capable of doing this. Actually, Microsoft made a mess of what you can manage with Windows Server editions. You need to buy 3rd party tools to do the real magic. Novell has done this a lot better in Netware and it's unbelievable what you can do when you combine that with Zenworks. For that reason, Netware was used a lot back in the day. Nowadays you can do the same with Windows Server editions and 3rd party tools and people seem to favour this setup. The only real problem with this is when using non-Windows clients. GPO's can only be used with Windows clients as they have Windows-only settings. In a multiplatform environment Windows is not something you want as it is aimed at Windows for like 99% of the time. Novell's Netware is better prepared for non-Windows systems as they have some features for those in eDirectory and there are some clients for Linux. It's not proper support and they really have to work on that, especially if you can manage Macs the same way as you can manage Windows and Linux clients. I don't know how good Solaris, MacOS X Server and some other open source tools are at this so I can't tell whether they'll run into the same problems as Windows Server does.

If you don't have a server you can use the parental controls in OS X to confine a user account. You can limit what apps are allowed to be used by that useraccount. As far as I know, Windows XP, Vista and 7 are not able to do the same. Just to give you an idea that non-Windows machines can even outrun Windows when it comes down to managing the machine and users.

Which sites can be visited are things that you control on a firewall/proxy. In Windows this would come down to ISA (absolutely NOT recommended! use a real and proper firewall/proxy instead).

@ TS: if you become annoyed by the fighting just tell them or ask their boss(es) to mediate in the situation (you could do that yourself if you want).

Edited by dyn
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If you don't have a server you can use the parental controls in OS X to confine a user account. You can limit what apps are allowed to be used by that useraccount. As far as I know, Windows XP, Vista and 7 are not able to do the same. Just to give you an idea that non-Windows machines can even outrun Windows when it comes down to managing the machine and users.

That is a per machine, and per user account thing though, it cannot be stored on a server as a roming profile, and local profiles aren't much use on a network, if you want a user's files and settings to be stored on the server.

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Chances are the IT manager is against Macs because he or his team doesn't know (or want to know) how to manage them in a predominantly Windows network. There was another horror story posted here recently of what happened when a bunch of (possibly bad) Macs were introduced to a school where the IT department clearly had no experience with them.

From what I've seen, Photoshop runs just as good (if not better) on Windows these days. Adobe and OS X have never been comfortable bedfellows. But as Macs are still the dominant machine in professional print and design, I can see the professor's point of view. Students learning on PCs will get accustomed to keyboard shortcuts that are different in OS X. Plus they'll have no experience of basic troubleshooting and good practice.

Unless you're being paid enough to get involved I'd just let them duke it out.

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