Re: [Fed-Talk] FOSE 2005
Re: [Fed-Talk] FOSE 2005
- Subject: Re: [Fed-Talk] FOSE 2005
- From: Michael Johnson <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 16:24:23 -0400
On 11 Apr, 2005, at 12:04:27. 0 AM, Dave Hale wrote:
For those that came by the Apple booth at FOSE - what did you
think? Did we have the right products and people there? Was there
anything that you thought should have been there that was not?
Anything you especially liked?
For the most part, I liked the booth. However, I like Apple and try
to use Apple's products whenever I can. *I* am an easy sell.
The booth seemed to show off a lot of what Apple has traditionally
been known for. There was the "see how great it looks" part and all
the strong video stuff, but not a lot immediately visible about the
strong server side. Personally, I'd put an Xserve up against an HP
or Dell rack-mount server any day. But then again, I know how
powerful the Xserve is. I know what it can do in a real situation
where I have 50 Windows machines, 150 OS X machines, and another 20
UNIX machines, all connecting via SMB, AFP, and NFS respectively.
The massive power of the G5 is really underplayed.
I wouldn't want to see a big "THE POWER IS HERE!!!" banner or
anything tacky. I like the clean look. However, the current
emphasis could be moved to the other areas where there is a lot of
misconception:
1. Have a bake-off. Put an Xserve (or G5 desktop) next to a big-
name Intel/AMD machine, both running a massive 3d visualization/
reconstruction application. Demonstrate how the Apple machine can do
the process n times faster with the lower clock speed G5.
2. Have Shawn Geddis give a talk on the security of OS X. Not just
the "here's my card reader" type stuff, but the real serious stuff
about ssh tunnels, OpenSSL, Password Server, and other high profile
stuff. Show how secure the OS is right out of the box. Shawn is a
good speaker and can capture and maintain an audience.
3. Have X11 apps running...ones people know. Also, try forwarding
the display of a UNIX machine to the OS X machine to show how well it
works for those folks with "big iron". I remember back when we got
our AIX machine, showing the guys from IBM and the CIO how I
forwarded the display of the AIX and Linux LPARs to my OS X machine,
viewing it on the 20" widescreen monitor, and doing all the GUI
stuff, how they stared in disbelief. It was priceless. Not to
mention the reaction when they realized the single processor 1.8GHz
G5 was able to run most applications faster than the 8x 1.4GHz POWER4
+ on either AIX or Linux.
4. Show off the capabilities of ARD. When I installed ARD 2 on my
machine, the administrative folks in the IT department were
skeptical. When I selected 20+ machines and had it monitor with the
cube effect, several jaws literally dropped. It was cool.
5. Open the space up. Everything was on the "wall" in the middle of
the booth, with a few islands. The open feel is good, but some
shelter would also be nice. A balance of both. While you guys are
at NAB, take a look at the booths from people like Avid/Digidesign.
Parts of it are open, but other areas are slightly closed in making
you feel like you belong. Had it not been for the different color of
carpet, some people might not have known where the Apple booth
started/stopped.
Overall, it seems there's too much of the "we're cool so you should
come see us" mentality going on. It's fantastic when someone like
Tracy comes out with Dave, Themis, or one of the other SEs, and puts
on a demonstration of the capabilities and how they fit into our
situation. So many times, the bigwigs just don't realize how good
Apple is. Doing the same sort of thing at a show like FOSE would be
helpful. Get out there and be more aggressive. It was nice to have
the invitation to FOSE directly on this list, but also sending it to
the folks in charge at companies like SRA and SAIC would be even
better. They're very Windows centric and don't realize Apple has
already solved many of the problems they currently have. With a show
like FOSE, you don't have to worry so much about getting in the door,
as you're already there. The people just need to realize they need
you. Going back to number 3, sponsor a workshop with someone like
Shawn as the keynote speaker. Use both Apple and other products.
Design the program to subtly highlight how much more secure and
simpler OS X is over the solutions they're currently using or
considering. You could even start out the presentation with a rigged
PC laptop, although you may not need to rig it, where it blows the
Powerpoint, then, you take the CD, load it into a Powerbook, and run
the PP show in Keynote (or even Powerpoint if you really must). It's
sort of like that old Apple commercial with the guy trying to do a
presentation and his laptop won't work. People are yelling out to
check his config.sys and other files. Finally, at the end, one voice
calls out, "Get a Mac!" If you did something like this, only the
people on this list would know it was intentional, and I don't think
we'd say anything. =-)
This is just a start. I could go on for hours about this. I
remember sitting in the front conference room at the Reston office
about a year ago, talking to Shawn about these very things. We
chatted for about 45 minutes on stuff just like this. They could
help to change the image of Apple as a little computer good for
graphics, to the powerhouse it really is. I don't know of any other
machine I'd feel equally comfortable with as a desktop, web server,
smtp/pop/imap server, video production machine, audio production
machine, firewall, etc., simultaneously. I can cut a quick video
edit, the music for it, put it on the web server, open up Mail and
fire off an email to the client (using the local mail server) and
then stream the approved copy to the world once I've gotten the reply
using the IMAP server, all from the same machine. And, not a glitch
anywhere. No hiccups in the video or audio, the web server keeps
feeding web pages, and the mail server keeps the mail going. QTSS
hums along happily as if nothing else on the machine had been running.
I have a bad network port to try to diagnose, but we can revisit
this. For now, duty calls...
-Michael
-----------------------------
Das Verhalten von Gates hatte mir bewiesen, dass ich auf ihn und
seine beiden Gefaehrten nicht rechnen durfte.
(The behavior of Gates proved to me that I couldn't count on him or
his two companions.)
-Karl May, Winnetou III Das Testament des Apachen
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