Hacker News Reader

Comment by patwolf | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to know what percentage of help desk calls are related to hardware vs OS vs software.

I can believe that the Mac hardware is more reliable. However, a lot of help desk calls I remember making were because some legacy software wasn't working which wasn't directly related to Windows, e.g. I can't read my lotus notes mail because there's a problem with my remote mailbox configuration. I'd like to know if those calls get marked as a PC problem.

I'm sure much less of the legacy software runs on Mac and therefore they get fewer help desk calls related to it.

View on HN

There could be other biases too. For instance, if the Mac users at IBM were in largely technical roles (e.g. working on their MacOS integration service) vs large non-technical departments working on Windows machines (e.g. HR and accounting).

It wouldn't be very surprising that technical departments had less help-desk complaints than non technical departments.

Not always. One of the software/hardware architects at D.E. Shaw Research (with a Ph.D. from MIT) was _legendary_ among our support team for filing and expecting followup on scores of internal support tickets for minor and often non-reproducible issues like the behavior of his laptop touchpad buttons or weird one-off website behavior. He filed tickets for everything and almost always for things we couldn't do anything about.

I'll never forget his name for that reason alone. He was, and I imagine still is, a serious drain on the support staff.

Totally brilliant though.

He probably just figures it's delegating minor roadblocks so he can get to the 'important stuff'. If I could get a whole team dedicated to smoothing the highway in front of me of every little thing I probably would stop differentiating what was a pebble vs a tack. If he's the source of enough funding to pay for more than all of the man hours then it's more or less justified even if frustrating/frivolous. He's a cog and tripping up the workflow costs money.

Idk, I've seen a lot of dev guys try a lot of fruitless troubleshooting on systems when it would have been better to blow away the entire install and load up only necessary components...the troubleshooting cost a lot more because of the disparity in their paycheck and the revenue they brought in vs. the IT departments. The IT department should want calls since it reduces the disparity in earned department revenue, better showing the value of IT staff. Unless there isn't interdepartment accounting, in which case 'screw those time wasters, lol'.

I see and considered the exact argument brought up, but he also wasn't unaware of the fact that we had an entire 1200-person staff to support on 4 continents. He filed at least three new support tickets like this _per day_.

His group was also the company's moonshot offshoot project -- not bringing in the bread and butter of the business.

It really depends. Developers may have better skills, but also have bigger needs, in terms of software we need to use on daily basis. And with things like proxy servers, ActiveDirectory, group policies, or antivirus softwarem which you cannot reconfigure or turn off, working on Windows can be real pain in the ass.

Realistically though those are organisational decisions not requirements of the Windows platform. there's nothing that mandates that a windows environment must have AD/Group Policies or Anti-Malware software, you can configure a stand-alone windows 10 PC quite happily without any of those. Personally I work in a Windows environment but don't sign into a domain.

It's more that organisations demand that windows, which they understand, be configured in a specific manner.

Some might say "ah well you've got to have A-V on windows or you get malware", but at actual technical level there's not a lot of reasons that MacOS is less susceptible to malware than Windows, and indeed its rise in popularity has seen more emerge

There are definitely other biases. Macs simply can't do as much as Windows can in a business setting.

That's why companies like Disney and Google have to build their own systems management tools. I could not imagine running a financial services house, an insurance company or a warehouse without Windows.

Even simple software like remote desktop does not exist on the Mac. Yes the Mac has screen sharing but it is nowhere as good as remote desktop.

There's this[1] or are you looking for more functionality than it offers?

[1]: http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

ARD is functionally the same as RDP on Windows, but if you're used to the speed of RDP, it can be painful to use ARD even on a fast network.

There aren't many things that Windows does better than Mac, but in my opinion, RDP is definitely one of them.

You're speaking out of ignorance. There are applications like TeamViewer that are cross platform, if you don't want to use Apple's own Remote Desktop...

Windows' Remote Desktop feature is different from regular screen sharing. It's able to transmit data at a lower level than the actual pixels on screen, making it a lot faster.

And there's a Mac version distributed for OSX/macOS by Microsoft that's arguably superior to the Windows client. But I understand the RDP protocol. In a decent corp environment with a gigE LAN, the data compression benefits of RDP compared to TeamViewer or Apple's Remote Desktop aren't that necessary.

OK you can focus on the little nuances of whether RDP is better or not on Windows or Mac. The fact is that becomes built into windows where is you have to buy it for the Mac. You also cannot RDP from windows to a Mac. And team viewer is ridiculously expensive.

Please ignore the other fact that I stated about how big companies have to build their own systems management frameworks for the Mac though. And I think you probably know that there is a ton of other software that just does not exist for the Mac. So you're going to end up writing your own and that is definitely not cheaper than buying it off the shelf and many many many cases.

Large corporations generally use JAMF Pro for managing fleets of Macs. It makes it pretty trivial compared to the hassles of using SCCM/SCOM for Windows desktops.

You can always use VNC to connect to a Mac, though that's not the best tool. If you're deploying and managing more than 10 or so Macs, the price for JAMF or other tools isn't an issue.

>> In a decent corp environment with a gigE LAN, the data compression benefits of RDP compared to TeamViewer or Apple's Remote Desktop aren't that necessary.

The performance gap is very noticeable even on GB LAN, especially as the screen resolution goes up. There were a couple of products on Mac that were almost as fast as Windows RDP, but they weren't cheap, and one of the two major companies (iRapp from CodeRebel [1]) went out of business earlier this year. I can't remember the name of the second company, but I think it came from an academia background.

1: https://www.coderebel.com/about/

> The performance gap is very noticeable even on GB LAN, especially as the screen resolution goes up.

I find that hard to believe, I can play games like Rayman (that require reflexes and a low latency) over my steam link on a 100mbit network. Surely on a GB LAN there shouldn't be noticeable latency?

Is steam link VNC?

I've played games via VNC, but only visual novels. In all cases i've known real games require special transmission protocols, which operate in a specific domain, and are a lot faster than RDP, which operates in a broader domain, and is faster than VNC, which is the most general solution.

I'm not sure exactly how it works, as far as I am aware it streams video and sound, and sends back input, but I'm not sure about the underlying protocol. I think the resolution is 1080p. But regardless of the underlying technology they use, they've clearly proven that you can get a great remote desktop experience on a sub-GB lan without using RDP.

Sure, just not with VNC. :)

Any idea how? some sort of compression? other?

Remote Desktop passes draw calls from server to client instead of screen-capping and sending bitmaps. Similar to remote X11.

Ah. May make a lot of difference - or would it also partly depend on whether the data (e.g. args sent with the calls) was raster or vector? Think I read recently that some versions of OpenGL do the same or similar. Not an expert here, but interested in the concepts and techniques.

And yet the boys over at xorg wants to throw that part of X11 out the window and use screen scraping instead...

You must be high.. remote desktop works on mac, teamviewer works on mac etc. Etc. Etc.

>teamviewer works on mac etc

... at $809 a seat. I mean, just, ouch.

> Macs simply can't do as much as Windows can in a business setting

https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/Office-...

> Even simple software like remote desktop does not exist on the Mac.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-remote-desktop/id7...

https://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

Where on earth did you come up with this belief?

It only works from Mac to Mac though. You cannot do remote desktop from Windows to Mac. That's typical Apple bullshit that will not fly in the enterprise. RDP also comes built into Windows where is you have to buy this from Apple.

Also for anybody suggesting team viewer… Come on that's a ridiculously expensive package that does not even work as well and it's not ubiquitous.

> "It only works from Mac to Mac though. You cannot do remote desktop from Windows to Mac. That's typical Apple bullshit"

What are you talking about? Here are five ways:

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/remote-access-apple-mac-os-x-via...

TL;DR: Turn on the built-in open standard VNC server on the Mac, use a VNC client on Windows:

Mac OS X actually comes with a built-in remote management feature that allows other computers on the local network to access the Apple computer using the Apple Remote Desktop which we mentioned earlier. However, there is a setting where you can allow third party VNC viewers to connect and control the Apple computer. First click on the System Preferences icon at the Dock and click on Sharing. Click on the checkbox for the Remote Management to turn on the service.

Click on Computer Settings button. Tick on the “VNC viewers may control screen with password” and type in a password. Click OK to save the changes...

VNC is pretty laggy to use when you could have RDP instead.

There's a whole lot more to business than Microsoft Office.

Apple hardware has been designed on Windows PCs (at least until the last time I read about it a few years ago). This is because the (best) software for electronic design has only been available for Windows, and the developers refused Apple's terms and conditions (despite being directly approached by Apple for a port). This was the cause for some embarrassment for Apple by people in the electronics industry.

It's also about how much 3rd party software is installed and how many complex features like Domain integration etc are used. I am fairly certain if you were to keep your usage limited mostly to browsing and email the support differences between Macs and PCs would be non existent.

Trouble is your typical Windows PCs have a whole lot more 3rd party software (AV, Encryption, r likes of tanium , firewalls you name it.) And they do more too - whether or not the employees actually need that stuff. Most support calls are direct result of stuff like that - firewall blocked my program, AD password issues, antivirus causing CPU burn etc.

Until 2015 the vast majority of Macs at IBM were BYOD, largely driven by the EOL of that last generation of "our" Thinkpads (T6X series was the last IBM design) drove a lot of technical IBM'ers to buy their own Mac. All of the Mac support was an internal forum created by advocates and a small IT team. VM's for Windows were common and remain for a few old legacy products that are too complex to port.

Separate from the Mac stuff, the IT folks were working on web/app based solutions (web email access vs notes, etc). So that has softened some of the transition headaches. If some mac notes fix breaks, you've got the web and smartphone reader backups.

All that got formalized into a "real" organization but it was really several years of trench Mac advocacy + webification that makes the numbers look so good now.

This isn't just for technical people. IBM has been talking about this for a while and giving updates as the deployment proceeds. Machines are cheap enough that TCO is dominated by other factors so even a 50% reduction in support requests can save more money than the cost of the machine.

10% hardware vs 70% software and 20% OS for my case supporting user in MNC.

Most common: Printers, VPN, windows updates glitch could cause hours to reverse. Symantec AV is still unreliable or broken that it didn't update it definition and apply different access permissions to network drive/software take hours to approve.

Included hardware faulty and seriously parts can drag from days to months due to shortage.

Self services software is a good features which windows does not provide except 3rd parties.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com