How wrong could you be about safety...

Ok, so I happen to dislike large SUVs, but it is more the fact that they are a danger to themselves and other people.

Put it like this: the majority of other cars on the road are normal cars. They are designed to withstand impact from other, normal cars. Your SUV may protect YOU better in an accident because your impact zone is above that of the normal car you are ploughing into because you just can't stop quickly enough in that huge fat SUV. But to the occupants of the normal car, the impact zone is just at the right level to completely avoid theirs - basically at their torsos and heads. Now you could argue that in driving an SUV YOU are safe, but what about the safety of the people sharing the road with you? And no, not everyone should go out to buy an SUV as a result - for the reasons below...

Then there are pedestrians. Modern cars all look fairly similar from the front end because they are designed to minimise the impact of low speed impacts with pedestrians. The idea is that if you hit a pedistrian, they are rolled onto the the hood/bonnet of the car, then away from the vehicle (off to the side or behind); the idea is to try to minimise the impact on the pedistrian. It is still going to hurt them, and possibly kill them, but the chances of survival are much greater with a car. With an SUV in a frontal impact, the pedestrian is hit, then they bounce (breaking probably every bone in their body, smashing their skull and collapsing their lungs) away from the car in the same direction the car is going. I've spoken with police officers who have to pick up the mess after impacts and they said that modern cars save a lot of lives but the really gruesome and sad cases come when when SUVs, trucks, buses etc hit people.

Then there are your chances of rollover and ability to control the vehicle. With any vehicle that is raised higher off the ground, the engine is mounted higher up and because of the engine's weight, the centre of gravity is much higher. If you have to avoid anything at speed, or come off or on to a highway ramp too quickly you have a much greater chance of rolling the car in an SUV because the centre of gravity is so high. No amount of all-wheel-drive or traction control is going to stop you from tipping over. Newton's law takes effect and over you go.

I'm not sure the environmental argument against SUVs is that strong on the face of it; it depends on how many miles you drive. The lady up the road from me in her Crapillac Escapade is probably doing the world more good driving to get her coffee every day than myself driving 30 miles a day in my car.

Personally I'd never buy an SUV for any of the above safety reasons, because I care about the safety of the occupants of my car and everyone else's.

... but if I was to by an large SUV AND do the miles every day I'd surely be an ignorant and selfish fool. Choice and difference is what makes our social world go round, but it would be prudent for governments around the world to step in and address the burning safety issues of SUVs in relation to other vehicles.

In terms of 'green' all cars need to be be better; not just SUVs. That includes hybrids like the Prius people - how much energy goes into making those batteries and what do we do about them once they are gone?

The fact of the matter is that ALL cars, large or small are terrible for the environment. They consume a tremendous amount of energy to build in the first place and have to consume a tremendous amount of energy to keep them moving and maintained. Just because you may be able to plug a car into the wall in a few years doesn't mean your car is green - that energy comes from the grid and the grid is powered by filthy carbon producing power plants and will be for the foreseeable future.

So nothing is truly 'green' and everyone should get a grip on reality, cut through the marketing crap and understand that cars will always be bad for the environment, no matter what they run on. If you really want green, get a horse and cart and harvest the methane it produces to power your kitchen oven.

Absolutely no place in the engineering industry eh? What a blinkered view! They may not understand fully which companies are using them; they probably have no idea what the modern Mac is now capable of with the Intel chips. Running multiple OS is a dream come true for educational institutions - no more having to buy multiple machines.

Mac is far more flexible as a system - you can choose the best software packages that do the best jobs AND expose the students to different OS environments.

The Mac market share is getting bigger and bigger and as a Dean I'd be a total idiot if I ignored the possibility that I'd be denying my students the ability to experience those different ways of working. Being more well rounded is extremely important when it comes to employment and a Mac running multiple OS is a great learning tool to facilitate that. Students applying for jobs may be limited to only positions that they have experience of certain packages and/or OSs.

As a Masters graduate myself (Geographical Information Systems) I was extremely grateful for the lengths that my faculty went to to ensure that we came away with a broad knowledge of (very expensive) different packages and platforms. It wasn't in their interest to buy every latest and greatest software license; it was in ours. When I left I had no idea what I'd be using, but for the following two positions I obtained I was totally set up because I was exposed to the different platforms.

At the end of the day the head of department was totally aware that 95% of us were there to make ourselves more employable; the other 5% to extend their academia. It sounds like your Dean does not have the best interests of their student's futures at heart, just the bottom line of their department. This isn't an 'I love Mac; hate PC debate'; this is about giving people the most out of their education and ultimately students will look at a department when deciding on a University and assess the tools available.

Having a Mac available allows the best of all worlds and for the student that's the best for their futures. Sure they cost more money, but if the department suddenly realised in a year that many in the engineering world was using a program that was Mac or dependent on Mac systems (and many are) they'd have to go out to buy loads of Macs. At the very least consider it insurance; at the most consider it to be the best for the student.

You can get special discounts on education purchasing.

http://www.apple.com/education/shop/

DO NOT use Time machine over the Airport Extreme unless you have the Time Capsule.

As with any application that sends or receives information over a network, Time Machine relies on the packets of data that are being checked in to be actually 'checked in'. As far as I'm aware (after reading several articles), although you can hack a drive to be used as an airport disk, time machine doesn't actually check in the packets. What you're doing in the hack is fooling Time Machine to think that the airport disk is a local disk (and therefore doesn't need to have the extra packet checking required for network data).

So, when you do a time machine backup, all may look well, but if any packets don't get through, Time Machine won't alert that a backup is failed as it isn't coded to work this way and do the checking. Your backups will appear to be fine, but you can bet that some of the packets don't get through and therefore your backup won't be successful.

Unless you're using the new time capsule I'd strongly recommend NOT hacking to get this to work.

If you really want to use Time Machine with a network, take a look at Drobo+DroboShare (www.drobo.com). I believe their NAS system actually checks in packets correctly and therefore would be suitable to use time machine.

Or, why not use an alternative such as the free ibackup? Not sure if this has the same problems though.

Yes it is a great shame Apple won't allow us to use the Airport Extreme to do time machine backups. At the end of the day Apple wants to make money and by crippling one device and bringing one out that does support it, Apple is going to make more money.

Personally I've already chewed up 200GB in a couple of months, backing up a Macbook Pro's 80GB drive onto my Drobo using time machine (a lot of PSD files that change a lot). There's no way I could consider a time capsule as the 500GB limit isn't going to be enough; using the Drobo affords me piece of mind that I can keep going and going with my backups if I want to. In this way, the time capsule is very limiting and boo to Apple for not understanding the needs of their users once again.