Migrating to Mac OS X (Pixar, Government?)

[MacRumors]

MacWorld details (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/10/28/pixarosx/index.php?redirect=1067352579000) Pixar's previously reported (http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2003/07/20030731182852.shtml) migration to Mac OS X.

Pixar leveraged the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X to help create maintenance and administration scripts and moved their 400+ Macs over from OS 9 to Mac OS X.

Meanwhile, Apple has now published (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25526) a knowledge base article with an Installation and Setup Guide for using the Department of Defense Common Access Card with Mac OS X. Previously reports (http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2003/09/20030907013401.shtml) had noted that Panther contained U.S. Government specific login interfaces. No specific government migration announcements have been made, so the implication of these tools are left to speculation.

[Macmaniac]

I'm glad to see Apple moving into the government, which really needs some decent security, with windows getting hacked all the time, I bet they are looking for new solutions.
As for Pixar, its about time:)

[gwuMACaddict]

:D

if the government starts using panther, i'll feel a lot better about paying my taxes

[aethier]

Maybe people will see that the US Government uses Macs, and will think "hey those computers cannot be that bad" and sells of Macs would then in theory, go up. Proving that Macs are not just for video editing like the average Joe blieves.


aethier

[greenstork]

Does this mean that the Pixar server farms will eventually migrate to Apple too? I don't have time to read the whole article here at work so apologies if the answer to this question is in there.

[the_mole1314]

You mean you can do more than iMovie!! :eek:


;) :p

I think that OSX in the Gov would be cool, but I think that we need more Macs in view of the regular civilian instead of congress and the prez.

[kwajo.com]

anybody remember how to see the gov. specific login graphics? I saw them once, but no idea how now that the final version has shipped

[dho]

kwajo.com: I am looking around for them too

[DeusOmnis]

Anyone using Mac OS X is great. Having the government use it means that contract companies of the government would be encouraged to use it too. If those contract companies are using it then there would be a huge trickle down effect.

Also, the number of government employees is huge, and the number of government contract employees is even greater.

[autrefois]

Hmm...hidden interfaces in Panther destined for the Department of Defense and other government agencies to log in...Is Big Brother watching us?? (turns on FileVault) :)

[cosmicsoftceo]

Originally posted by DeusOmnis
Anyone using Mac OS X is great. Having the government use it means that contract companies of the government would be encouraged to use it too. If those contract companies are using it then there would be a huge trickle down effect.


Oh no! The government & the trickle down effect again!

*Flash back to Reagan years...*

[stoid]

Maybe they are taking lessons from the successfulness of Jack Bauer's CTU...


ONE HOUR TILL SEASON THREE!!!!!

*wipes drool off keyboard

[Phil Of Mac]

Isn't the whole point of the Mac to fight the Man? So why is the Man using a Mac now?

[Head Wound]

Originally posted by Phil Of Mac
Isn't the whole point of the Mac to fight the Man? So why is the Man using a Mac now?

It was created to fight "big blue", not "big brother".

Besides, it was created to fight 'the man' and now 'the man' has chosen it, then would not that be final victory?

[MrMacMan]

Originally posted by gwuMACaddict
:D

if the government starts using panther, i'll feel a lot better about paying my taxes

Ha, don't pay taxes, move to canada... er I mean... ;)

To begin migrating, the first thing that administrators at Pixar did was create a custom Mac OS X image that they could use to install not only Mac OS X on all of their machines but also all the applications that every person at Pixar uses and Pixar's specific network and machine configurations.

ARG, HOW CAN THEY MAKE BOOT DISKS AND WE AS REGULAR MAC USERS CAN'T!?!?!?

ARG!!!!!

:mad: :mad:

[Phil Of Mac]

I remember an incident where Steve Jobs was upset to learn that they were using Apple II's at nuclear missile silos.

Might be apocryphal...

[hayesk]

Originally posted by MrMacman
ARG, HOW CAN THEY MAKE BOOT DISKS AND WE AS REGULAR MAC USERS CAN'T!?!?!?


We can't?

[ITR 81]

After seeing what can happen when world wide virus goes out across the board in the intel sector of mil. I'm surprised the gov. didn't do this sooner. Heck in my old job we could hack classified servers all the time which went up to HQ stating MS 2000 and Xp Pro are not as secure as they were told.
Trust me when I say OS would fail at company levels all the damn time. Whats bad is the mil. doesn't have enough contractors out to fix all the issues with down sys so soliders get trained up to take care of it which is good and bad.

I told friend right before leaving the mil. that Apple is making a comeback and he just laughed.

[jaykk]

Is 2003 the year of laptops or year of Apple? Look at all those news - G5, iPod/ITunes Music store, Viginia Tech Super computer, all these people writing about switching to Mac because of all the virus on windows platform. Apple is finally ready to take on big brother( this time it is M$, 20 years apart 1984-2004). I think we will see a Documents from Apple next year. The next couple of year is looking really bad for M$ with all these never ending virus threats and longhorn slipping past 2006. Mac OS X and Linux is going to capture a significant market share by that time.

[aethier]

Doesn't being a Mac user just Rock! :D

aethier

PS: yeah it would be cool to have the government login screens.

[2112]

Panther has some very interesting stuff that points to US Gov. acceptance.
Secure delete ... go into your Finder menu, there it is, Secure Empty Trash.
In the earlier builds it had 1, 7 and 35 rewrites (when deleting a file).

FileVault is another one.

Funny, i was going to post this yesterday but I just felt like going to bed ...

[jholzner]

Originally posted by cosmicsoftceo
Oh no! The government & the trickle down effect again!

*Flash back to Reagan years...*

LOL...beat me to it!:D

[cdkf92]

Hey, has anybody seen Pixlet? As someone who does a lot of video work, I was excited about the potential of this Codec. However, it didn't seem to get installed with 10.3. There's almost no info about it on the Apple website, except for the little blurb in the panther sidebar. I don't think it made it into the initial panther version. :mad:

[Phil Of Mac]

Pixlet is only important on the production side. It's not a consumer or a default feature.

[cdkf92]

Originally posted by Phil Of Mac
Pixlet is only important on the production side. It's not a consumer or a default feature.

Okay, maybe that's true, but there's no information on how to buy it/ download it/ install it that I can find. Anyway, the line between personal and professional is very blurred these days. Most people don't need ColorSync but there it is on every mac. The Shake Qmaster renderer is automatically installed on most machines even though Shake is about as high-end as Apple gets. Heck, even xCode gets its own disk included in every package of panther, and how many families are gonna use that?

Pixlet was important enough to mention on both the Quicktime and Panther pages, and now it seems to have vanished. Does only Pixar get to play with it?

[JBracy]

Originally posted by kwajo.com
anybody remember how to see the gov. specific login graphics? I saw them once, but no idea how now that the final version has shipped

1) Install "Common Access Card Viewer" from "CD 3"
2) Control Click (or Right Click) on the "Common Access Card Viewer" Application in your "Utilities" Folder
3) Select "Show Package Contents"
4) Navigate to "Resources"
5) Have Fun!

The only way to actually use them is to have the Card reader and a DoD CAC and to have your sys admin configure OSX to use that for login instead of standard Username and password.

Instructions are here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25526 (it's available as a separate download for 10.2.3 and later)

[Phil Of Mac]

Too bad.

I think my dad might be more willing to use a computer if it had a USMC login screen!

[JBracy]

Originally posted by Phil Of Mac
Too bad.

I think my dad might be more willing to use a computer if it had a USMC login screen!

I'm sure you could hack something if it would make a switcher out of him!

[balconycollapse]

I have a close relative (parent? maybe :) ) that is a gov employee and has informed me daily on the fact that the gov is very slow to adopt technology. Right now this person uses slow outdated wintel machines in a job that requires them to monitor data on 3 computer screens all day long doing an extremely important job for both you and me. They were just recently treated to LCD monitors but not new computers which suffer from inadequate processors and poorly written software. Sadly the gov is all about lowest bidder contracts (this is a huge problem...do it right the first time especially if your spending my ******** tax dollars) and apple unless they are willing to cut the gov an awesome deal won't be taking over anytime soon. Especially when Microsoft and Republicans are in bed with campaign finance and court room leniency. The only places i would expect to see osx are senators offices and "glamour" government like high ranking military and heavily funded research.

In another interesting note-

Today i was sitting with my doctor who was asking me about my computer. When i told them i upgraded my os the other day they said "so what latest greatest thing do you have that i am missing out on windows xp?" assuming i had wintel. I said mac os x 10.3 and they said "soo...your a mac person (surprisingly not in a disgusted tone)". Then they went on to say "you know...microsoft writes all their software". then and there i told him about apple being vertically integrated writing all of their soft except 3rd party and office, being one of two companies that posted a profit in the comp industry. I told them of the inflitration and gold standard in audio, graphic design, film also made them aware that the macs from 1980s are not the macs of today. Also the part about apple buying their stock back after M$ helped out. This person was not closed minded at all, just grossly misinformed!!! They weren't offended and were curious to hear me out. Someone ought to start a website about debunking mac myths! <---APPLE should!!!!

[Phil Of Mac]

I hope you didn't make him cry by telling him about Exposé.

[sushi]

Originally posted by balconycollapse
Someone ought to start a website about debunking mac myths! <---APPLE should!!!!
You might want to check out:

http://www.apple.com/myths/

Sushi

[kevib]

Originally posted by cdkf92
Pixlet was important enough to mention on both the Quicktime and Panther pages, and now it seems to have vanished. Does only Pixar get to play with it?

If you check the panther site and the quicktime site they both still mention it. They say it's a codec so I assume that if you want to "play" with it you would need QuickTime Pro because that's the only way you can encode stuff. I would also assume the plain old QuickTime can play Pixlet encoded stuff. I'm tempted to get QuickTime Pro just to see this 25:1 compression in action. I then I will realize my dream... Get XServe Raid, compress my 100 movies and use it as a streaming server in my house. Anybody know of a remote control I can use on my Mac?

[Phil Of Mac]

Originally posted by kevib
If you check the panther site and the quicktime site they both still mention it. They say it's a codec so I assume that if you want to "play" with it you would need QuickTime Pro because that's the only way you can encode stuff. I would also assume the plain old QuickTime can play Pixlet encoded stuff. I'm tempted to get QuickTime Pro just to see this 25:1 compression in action. I then I will realize my dream... Get XServe Raid, compress my 100 movies and use it as a streaming server in my house. Anybody know of a remote control I can use on my Mac?

Unless you're a Hollywood producer and videophile who has a bunch of movies as uncompressed digital video, that's not going to work. DVD's are already compressed beyond what Pixlet can do. The difference is that Pixlet is lossless compression, while DVD's use lossy MPEG-2 compression.

[kevib]

Originally posted by Phil Of Mac
The difference is that Pixlet is lossless compression, while DVD's use lossy MPEG-2 compression.

Yeah, there are actually some really bad artifacts in some DVD's. Check out the first season of Futurama and you'll see what I mean. Hell, even VHS would be better. Maybe pixlet will catch on and replace mpeg-2 compression. I mean who really wants lossy compression. I don't, especially when I'm watching movies. You say, but there's not enough room on a DVD. I heard a quote of 13GB per hour of uncompressed DV. Compressed with Pixlet that would be 520-650 MB for an hour. Average movie, 2 hours... for a grand total of 1.04-1.3GB. Wow, there's room to spare on that Pixlet DVD! More added features I guess. Sigh. At least it would be lossy and I wouldn't have to put up with banding in light field gradients. Just watch Futurama on DVD, you'll see what I mean. In that one episode where Fry's a zillionaire, ouch!

[j05h]

I saw a comercial today for the official web portal of the US Government, firstgov.gov. The computer they used in the comercial was a Titanium PowerBook. You can see tv the comercial the the website.

[ITR 81]

I talked to a friend about this and he said he has seen two 15 inch powerbooks with smart card readers. Both had bar codes showing where it came from. When he asked an officer what was on the Powerbook he said "mind your own d*mn business". So my friend asked well tell me what it's running he said 10.3 and rest is TS. TS short form in Army for saying Top Secret. Which means whatever is being used on that Powerbook is critical to mission ops. I also got email from a friend in new styker unit and he said he has also seen one these gov. issued Powerbooks. He said he asked because it looked just like mine I had when we were in same unit together at one time. He has TS clearance just like I did but he couldn't view it.

I betting they are being used on selective basis for right now...to see how they perform in the field.

When I was in I was issued new Panasonic tough books which could take a beaten but the OS usually failed alot when trying to do mission critical tasks and thats last thing you need is see is the blue screen of death when your guys are in firefight somewhere.

[legion]

Originally posted by Phil Of Mac
Unless you're a Hollywood producer and videophile who has a bunch of movies as uncompressed digital video, that's not going to work. DVD's are already compressed beyond what Pixlet can do. The difference is that Pixlet is lossless compression, while DVD's use lossy MPEG-2 compression.

I have uncompressed digital video, I have Quicktime Pro 6.4... where exactly is the Pixlet codec???

It still seems like vapourware to me unless someone out there has seen it in the "field"... Wintermute, are you around.. I know you're an avid FCP user, have you seen this codec?

[cdkf92]

I have Quicktime Pro, FCP4, and use many other professional video editing and compositing applications. I have not seen pixlet anywhere. In fact, the Apple panther website says you can download a sample of a Pixlet encoded movie "below", but there no link to that movie!

Also, there is no way that Pixlet will compress a video clip to 1/4 the size of MPEG-2 with no artifacts. It's not going to happen. But it will get HiDef video small enough to play back off of a standard drive, and therefore it's very useful to me and many others in the Mac community.

[wymer100]

My company has research space within the US Dept of Agricuture research station here in town. They really don't care which OS you use since they use Novell for their email, etc. As long as it'll run MS Office (which they are standardizing to in the future), they don't care.

As for the guy above saying the government is slow to buy new technology, you're absolutely right. We have shelves in the basement for surplus computer equipment. It's amazing how many 486 or pentium machines get put down there.

BTW, I thought that Dell won a big contract to supply Pixar with servers for their rendering farms (to run under linux). I doubt Pixar would start shifting over that part of their business to macs until a G5 xserve was available.

[andybru]

The ability to read smart cards may not be an indicator of a big overnment buy. There already are a large number of Macs in use around the ederal government.

The Air Force (and the rest of the DoD) are moving to use what they call a "Common Access Card" for accessing network services (as well as unlocking doors to secure areas, etc). It's a "smart" ID card with, I believe 32k of memory.

Without some kind of ability to read this card a computer cannot login to the network, etc.

[Frump]

The common access card is going to be used by all DOD employees. This system is not 100% up and running yet.
I just received the security lockdown instructions for OSX in the DOD theater. It looks like I have my work cut out for me.
I will have two macs on the network soon and hope to convert a few more people.


Frump

[ddbean]

Originally posted by ITR 81
... thats last thing you need is see is the blue screen of death ...

Not to be too sarcastic, but it gives a whole new meaning to the "Blue Screen Of Death" doesn't it?

[MacRonin]

Originally posted by wymer100
BTW, I thought that Dell won a big contract to supply Pixar with servers for their rendering farms (to run under linux). I doubt Pixar would start shifting over that part of their business to macs until a G5 xserve was available.

I believe the newest renderfarm at Pixar is a bunch of Xeon blade servers from IBM, leased from RackServe...

Running Linux, of course...

Bye bye Winblows! Hello OS X!

There, now isn't that better!?!

[solvs]

Yes, they are leased. Xeons running Linux. Maybe they didn't want to buy because they'll be updating again as current technology evolves, or maybe the CEO knows something we don't. ;)