Army working in more Macs to diversify systems, thwart attackers – Engadget:
Posted Dec 22nd 2007 8:04AM by Nilay Patel

The Army’s been poking around with OS X for a while — Xserves have run army.mil for a couple years now — but it looks like it’s about to deploy even more Apple machines in an effort to diversify its install base and frustrate would-be attackers. The move is partially due to the upcoming release of software that will allow OS X machines to work with the Army’s Common Access Card smart card system, but the Army’s experience with the Xserves seems like it’s really the deciding factor: “[The Army’s Xserves] are some of the most attacked computers there are,” according to Lt. Col. C.J. Wallington, of the Army’s office of enterprise information systems.

Wow.  My brother just told me about this last night.

I think it’s fantastic news for both the Army and Apple.

Since moving to a job that’s primarily Macs, I’ve noticed a distinct difference in the amount of support necessary compared to past jobs where Windows was the workstation OS.  That’s not to say that they’re perfect, but life’s been pretty good.

I’ve found that the machines that have the most problems are the ones that are driven by impatient and disorganized users.  These are the types of users who cannot wait for the machine to finish a task.  If, for example, they click the print button, and the dialog button doesn’t come up right away, they’ll click it a few more times, then click on their mail’s send/receive button, then open a spreadsheet, then go back to the print dialog, then open InDesign, then chat on iChat and then launch a few more programs.

I try to explain to them that if the machine isn’t responsive, then it’s either working very hard on trying to complete a task, or it’s got something wrong w/ it.  Adding more tasks to the to-do list only complicates matters.  What’s worse is that they also tend to have thousands (12k in one instance) of files on their desktop, and hundreds of documents strewn about all over the hard disk.  While neither of these are catastrophic, what I’ve noticed about these users is that they don’t read dialog boxes and generally drag files all over the place.  My suspicion is that they eventually drag an important system file or directory out of it’s proper place, and then click through the warning dialogs.

I’m sure the Army has their share of users like this, and OS X isn’t impervious to their particular brand of (unintentional) attacks.  Nevertheless, for the other 98% of my users, OS X is very stable, rarely gets in their way, seldom is cause for frustration and is almost always dead simple to troubleshoot.

I doff my cap to you, US Army.

(Go Navy!)