|
Original submission by Ollie Butt
Pros
Victoria are Mac friendly in that they offer a configuration service for Apple laptops which, in theory, allows students to log on to the university network and access the internet, stored files on university servers etc. This service is advertised on their Student Computing Services website. The configuration service apparently offers configuration for OS9 and OSX.
At the same time, reader reports are that there are two or three flat-screen iMacs and a number of beige G3s in the deep recesses of the School of Education, as well as the School of Mathematics and Computer science offering a lab of Macs (according to their site). General labs do not appear to have Macs available for use.
Cons
A report of a personal experience with the SCS service...
"Thinking 'wow this is great. I bowled on up to the IT helpdesk, iBook in hand. Perhaps the tech's lack of communication skills didn't help. Having sent SCS an email saying that my ibook runs mac OS X 10.2.8, I expected to be greeted by a person with some experience with Macs. This was not the case. The tech was instead armed with a short document (complete with illustrations) explaining what to do (yes I know what you're thinking, he could have just e-mailed it to me). Unfortunately the document wasn't for 10.2.8, it was for 10.3, not a big difference but a big enough one to leave the tech very confused. It took him about 15 minutes to semi-complete the configuration, skipping several steps for which he couldn't find the control panels (network card configuration for example seems to be new in Panther).
I am now left with several problems. The first is that the configuration doesn't really work. Accessing several websites causes IE to crash unceremoniously and I can't check my email using Apple's Mail application. Furthermore, the tech overwrote my existing network settings (not bothering to create a new location) meaning connecting to any other network is difficult."
Comments
Victoria University should be congratulated for offering connection facilities for student's own laptops. This is not something that all universities offer. At the same time, it's understandable that the technician may not have know exactly about how to set up the Mac, however logic would suggest that calling upon a Mac user within SCS (let's hope there is one!) would have been a wise move. These positive comments need to be balanced by the fact that there isn't a large number of Macs available to all students on campus in a communal laboratory of some sort.
Rating: Good
Evidence
|
