The latest computing survey results from the University of Virginia's freshman class show evidence of continued Apple marketshare growth in the higher education market (via Daring Fireball). The chart above shows that Apple has made steady gains since 2003 in the percentage of incoming UVA freshman who own a Mac. The latest year (2008) shows that 37% of incoming students owned a Mac while the percentage owning a Windows computer had shrunk to 62% from a peak of 96% in 2001. The growth tracks closely with the trend towards laptop ownership amongst the Virginia freshman. In 2008, 99% of the incoming students owned a laptop.

For almost any system administrator, the idea of "off-time" is fictional. Even when I'm on vacation, there's an unwritten expectation that if need be, I'm going to be summoned to solve a problem. (Even on my honeymoon, for example, I found myself spending a half-hour or so dealing with a work issue.)

For individual Mac users or small businesses, it's usually not a problem deploying new Macs with a standard image -- as a Mac support specialist, you might just load each machine manually. But imagine if you need to deploy hundreds or thousands of Macs, PCs, or XServes. You'd need a small army of techs or a way to do the job automatically. That's where DeployStudio comes in handy. This freeware tool can be used to create deployment files using Netboot, external USB or FireWire drives, or any AFP, SMB, or NFS sharepoint on the network.

Apple's new IT tutorial series provides an immersive, step-by-step experience in Mac integration. Learn a variety of tips and tricks from our IT experts - from directory architecture to client management, there's something for everyone. Click on the videos that interest you most.

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.

In Mac OS X 10.5.7 or later, access to add or delete network printers on a client computer is controlled by membership in the lpadmin group. You can control the ability of managed user accounts to add and delete printers by controlling the membership of this group.

After updating to Mac OS X 10.5.7, a user may not be able to log in to a managed client workstation. On startup, or after entering the user name and password, the user may be prompted for an administrator name and password, but nothing can be entered. This issue can occur on PowerPC-based Macs if the file /etc/authorization is not updated correctly when installing the Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update.

EazyDraw provides a full editable vector import of AppleWorks 6 drawing (*.cwk) files. Complete editable vector graphic import that conserves, colors, patterns, wallpaper gradients - all native content and accents. The only thing you will notice is how much better the drawing looks when produced with EazyDraw and the full capability of the OS X Quartz graphic engine.

Timer is a complete and professional stopwatch, alarm clock, countdown and clock utility for Mac OS X. Apimac Timer is freeware and gives you the known ease of use of other Apimac Applications.

With its use of the latest Mac OS X technologies, breakthrough ease-of-use and innovation, all Mac users will find CheckUp very useful and even fun. It's the dashboard of your Mac! CheckUp is designed to check your disks and memory but also to monitor the usage of CPU, Memory, Disk Drives and Network Adapters in a very visual way. By adding rules that will be triggered when certain conditions are met for a specified resource on the computer, you can receive visual notifications. For example, CheckUp can alert you when a hard drive seems to have hardware failures, even when the application is not opened (thanks to an innovative background process).

Twin is the most flexible online backup solution for Mac OS X, compatible with most Internet servers: FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, MobileMe. It even supports offline backups to external drives. Twin is a true Mac product that preserves Finder info, resource forks, ACLs, Privileges and comes with an elegant user interface and a powerful assistant. It also provides numerous high-end features like AES-256 encryption, efficient bz2 compression, powerful exclusion rules and scheduler, support for splitting large files during network transfers, network-error recovery, individual digital signature for backed up files, multi-cores machines optimization and much more!

According to the X-Force 2008 Trend & Risk Report (PDF) released early this year, Mac OS X Server and Mac OS X top the list of operating systems with the most disclosed vulnerabilities for 2008. Each accounts for 14.3 percent, and has been in the top five in each of the last three years. Rounding out the top five were: Linux Kernel at 10.9 percent, Sun Solaris at 7.3 percent, and Microsoft Windows XP at 5.5 percent. The purpose of this data is to compare the total number of disclosed vulnerabilities with each individual operating system. Vulnerability data is submitted to the Mitre Corp. and then appears in the CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) List.

The Leopard T&T doc has a few changes in format from the earlier Mac OS X versions. I took out any sections on imaging, and tried to pull the setup in tighter. There are too many things to cover in imaging, and so much of it involves 3rd party tools, that I decided to separate that out. My focus in this doc was to cover the keys points of MCX, why Leopard is important, mobile accounts, and PHDs (portable home directories).

The debate over the financial advantages of various OSes first sparked around 15 years ago, when the Gartner Group industry analyst firm came up with the concept of total cost of ownership (TCO). Since then, a number of other theoretical models have also been coined to weigh the business pros and cons of various OSes.

Super Get Info was designed to address the numerous shortcomings of the Mac OS X Finder's "Get Info" command. Specifically, it allows you to take the following actions (most of which aren't possible using the Finder's Info window): open one information window for each selected Finder item, so you can view (and change) multiple selected items discretely; view and edit the Mac OS type and creator codes for a given file; view and edit Unix owner, group, and permission settings; empty the Trash with authentication to remove privileged files; and much more!

Because iWork.com is web-based, the projects you publish to it can be viewed by anyone using a current browser. You don't need to know whether your colleagues use a Mac or a PC. Publish your work and invite others to view it without ever leaving Pages, Numbers, or Keynote. Just click the iWork.com button in the toolbar, and your document, spreadsheet, or presentation is uploaded instantly. Mac OS X Mail sends each invited reviewer a unique URL.

My name is Charles Edge.  I recently moved from sunny Los Angeles to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where it's colder on the outside but far warmer on the inside.  I enjoy spending time with my wife Lisa and daughter Emerald, and Archie the dog too.   Professionally, I am an engineer.  I consult, speak and write about my engineering endeavors but at the heart of it all I am an engineer.  I work at 318, the largest Mac Consultancy I am aware of.  At 318 I manage projects, training, engineers and many other aspects in my role as Director of IT.  I also still do a pretty decent number of fairly complicated jobs for clients and occasionally write a piece of code or somesuch, which I'll start making available on the apps page of this site.