RE: iPod Shuffle / ITunes

["Ian Lowe" <ianlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Quite frankly my experiences of using the ipod shuffle have quashed
any
desire to buy and sort of
> Mac...

Consider yourself lucky - my enthusiasm for Mac got crushde by buying an
imac... :

Admittedly, it's an old G3, so not exactly your normal Mac Pricing, but
still smarted a little.

Actually, I had the opportunity recently to build a suite for demonstrating
interoperability and business systems - a very nice environment, with a
frankly delicious set of environments to play with ^H^H^H^H^H^H demonstrate
;)

We had Ubuntu linux on desktops, talking to a mixed back end of the
Contribs.org e-smith server and SBS 2003, with AD integration all round -
we
had XP workstations happily using resources from either server without
blinking..

The only fly in the ointment? That would be the OSX machines, which
resolutely refused to play nice. The Directory tool saw the AD, yet refused
to bind to the domain - we could only get basic SMB networking going, and
even then... The powerbook would be fine for half an hour, then suddenly
decide that it couldn't see the Linux server - until you rebooted the
beast.
The big iMac (one of the 20" screen ones) would play better, as
(bizzarely)
it had a different version of the Directory softwre, despite both machines
saying that they were up to date.

What really did it for me was what seemed to be the sheer perversity of
Apple's devs - SBS defaults to a domain name of mydomain.local to prevent
the whole "can't see our own website" thing: it's an eminently
sensible
configuration, and something that the Linux and MS boxes implement
trivially... But OSX won't!

It's the most fiendish problem going - you can ping a host but can't
resolve
it, but can resolve anything else. DNS seems to work okay, for everything
except your MS servers...

Cue the frankly bizzare discovery that apple have chosen to resolve any
domain which ends in ".local" using a multicast DNS
implementation that only
works with... Mac OS! It's hard to see it as anything other than
deliberately breaking interoperability with Windows, and frankly, that's no
more acceptable  from Apple than it is from Microsoft.

Basically, I can see the appeal of Apple kit - it's *very* nice, but their
business practices (ie, the clone vendor fiasco, DRM implementation, DRAM
lockout, GPL issues etc) just make me want to scream. Bizzare though it
sounds, I actually that Balmer and crew are a little *more* ethical than
Steve Jobs.

If I bought myself a powerbook... I'd be running Ubuntu on it, and I'll
stick with a Creative ipod lookalike (without the dodgy DRM!), thanks!

I.