Brian wrote:
I hate it when campuses go all PC. It really has nothing to do with
doing the job better or saving money, it's really about a staff of
incompetent IT personnel who refuse to learn anything but the most
basic PC skills. Take the school I go to: all PC network, and the IT
staff haven't a clue what they are doing. The wireless went down in
one building for 2 weeks, the guys on site never bothered to say
anything about it to anyone else despite numerous complaints, and the
only answer to us students was "it's not our responsibility." so the
main IT office never even got word that the wireless was down. Once
they did find out, they didn't even know what was wrong for another
week. Complete incompetence. What really pains me is that they have
a B&W sitting under a table in a computer lab, no one knows how it
works, no one cares, so it jsut sits there taking up space.
Brian
Please don't generalize about a "staff of incompetent IT" pushing these
kinds of decisions, because at the University I work for, and several
others that I know about, it's not the IT staff who hate Macs, but the
IT MANAGEMENT who decide "thou shalt standardize". We've lost several
Mac & UNIX labs over the past few years because they weren't "getting
enough use, and we'll save money by standardizing the labs." With the
volume deals that our supplier of XP boxes gives us, we actually do save
some money, unless you count the amount of time spent diagnosing
problems or calling for warranty service or putting "out of order" signs
on the PCs.
A number of the IT staff actually preferred to keep the Mac & UNIX labs,
because there are students who otherwise have to go across campus to the
CS department's building in order to use one of their UNIX labs, or go
across campus to the building that houses our College of Liberal Arts,
where we still maintain a couple of Mac labs. Fortunately, the
standardization of the labs does not extend to the faculty and staff,
and we're allowed to choose whatever platform will allow us to get the
job done, whether that's MS-Windows, Mac OS9, Mac OSX, UNIX, LINUX, etc,
though it is preferred that you try to be relatively current in the
version of the OS you're using. The students are welcome to use
whatever platform they wish, with possible exceptions where a particular
class requires they use a software package that is not available on
their platform of choice.
Kurt
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