The great OS Wars, you had to either be a Mac or PC person. It was a Holy War people took sides, Brother against brother, Father against daughter.

You were either on one side or the other. Mac ran PowerPC chips and PCs X86. Some said Macs were only good for ‘artists’ and if you wanted a real computer you could customize our upgrade, or do ‘real business work’ on you had to get a PC. Some said the PC ws always playing caught up to the Mac, Mac had the GUI first, Mac hada mouse before the PC, you could do all the ‘business work’ on a Mac and still get your artist work done.

Blah, Blah, Blah.

I got my first Mac in these dark times, A used iBook G3 700 it was around 2003 when I bought it from Small Dog Electronics a company I found online that specialized/specializes in Macs. Earlier in the year the third generation iPod and as soon as I saw it I had to have one.

At the time I had a Toshiba laptop, that frankly sucked ass. Windows 2000, no wireless, slow processor, big and heavy. At the time i was quite happy with the laptop, I waas able to get on the internet at least oer the wire, until broke down and brought a PCMCIA WiFi card for it.The battery was shot and wouldn’t hold a change for more than 10 or 15 minutes, still that was ok I could sit in my chair in the living room and surf the net while watching TV.

Once I got the iPod though I starting feeling the pain. I loved the iPod but ma n was it a pain the ass using it with the Toshiba laptop. I started lusting over the Mac machines and started looking for something to replace the Toshiba.

Once I got the iBook I went Mac and never looked back…

For quite sometime now I have called myself an oddball. My day job is Database Administrator. A Microsoft SQL Server Database Administrator.

And I use a Mac.

I have found was to get my job done without running VMs on my MacBook Pro. I found a great bit of software called Aqua Data Studio that replaces Microsoft’s Sql Server Management Server it does more than SSMS for me, SSH client, GIT Client, and a couple others built in.

Basically I try to do everything I can natively on the Mac, I do have to cheat sometimes and use a Win 8 virtual machine that I have set up on a VM on my VMWare server. Sadly since I have to support a crappy Access client to my SQL DBs I have to run said crappy client and since there is no Access for Mac…..

All of this is a long way to get to my point that the computing world has changed. Microsoft is really pushing Open source and cross platform software now days. IN march of last year the announced SQL Server on Linux. Which for me is very exciting. I immediately applied to try and get in on the beta so that I could start running workloads on Linux.

Then today Powershell was open sourced and is available on Linux AND macOS. This is huge. I had been writing Powershell scripts for sometime now, but to execute them I had to use my Win8 VM. Now I can write and execute them natively on my Mac.

Microsoft has changed and for the better in my opinion. It is really a brave new world out there.