Leopard Server - nice for a small office, nicer for podcasting.

I just spent a day at an Apple event - Leopard and Leopard Server technology show. I thought I'd be a little bored, but I did want to see leopard server and actually look at an Apple X-Serve. It appears that my Mac Pro is effectively the same thing. The more interesting thing is the price. At around $3500, you would think it's very pricey. If you discount the Leopard Server Unlimited software at $999, you are at $2500 for a pretty slick rackmount (which is about the same as a similar MacPro).

This OS is designed pretty effectively to provide a business infrastructure. The $500 version is similar to MS Windows Small Business Server, but it's limited to 10 users - the $999 version is unlimited. You get some pretty impressive integration and a few extras, so it's pretty much a comparable offering to Small Business Server Premium.

There is nothing in here that you can't do with Open Source, but it is nice to see it all wrapped up together in a unified package that actually seems like it was designed that way. If you think about it, you'd spend at least that much on getting someone to implement the unification if you wanted to go Open Source, so it's not such a bad deal.

I'm not going to get into price comparison or feature comparison. I just happened to like what I saw.

If there was a truly killer app that comes with the server package, it's the app called podcast producer. I can't do it justice, but a very short and simplified description is that it is an automated work flow system for producing podcasts. I've been spending quite a few hours just producing the audio portion of the BSDCan 2007 conference and once you are in the zone, it takes a good 30 minutes to set up and produce one single episode. Lets see... 2 days of 3 rooms with 6 sessions is about 16 hours once everything is in place.

Just doing a cost of my time, I could easily justify the limited version on my desktop just for this alone and save time if I do the audio again in 2008.

In other news, I was lurking on the OCLUG IRC and saw reference to the ship that ran aground in Antarctica...

The MS Explorer, an adventure travel ship operated by a Toronto company, was on a 19-day cruise off Antarctica when it hit an iceberg on Nov. 23.

The full article is available online.

I find it amusing that the MS Explorer is listed as threatening penguins (think for a few seconds).