[asd]

My girlfriend is a resident in kidney diseases in Houston. She needs to access patients labs from home.

The hospital she works at has a website that allows you to get it. Problem is, you need Intenet Explorer/Windows to access it. Yes, I tried it with IE on the mac and it did not work. I called the IT department and the dude said "I think you need windows for this to work"

Question is, do you think it would work if I got a PC emulator and ran IE over it. I.E. how good and accurate is the PC emulator.

Alan

[TETENAL]

This will work with VirtualPC.

[turtle777]

Wow, has Dell become synonymous with PC ? How sad...

-t

[kiskynet]

You could try changing your user agent to Windows MSIE 6.0 or whatever you like, see if that works.

command in Terminal (while Safari is NOT running):

% defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Then launch Safari, and enjoy the new Debug menu.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by turtle777

Wow, has Dell become synonymous with PC ? How sad...

I'm actually more miffed that "PC" has come to mean "personal computer that is not a Mac."

Oh, and Virtual PC generally doesn't misbehave (in the sense of doing things differently than a real PC with the hardware it's emulating). It's pretty slow, but you should be fine if you just want to use it for IE 6.

[AB^2=BCxAC]

Some dynamic websites run stuff that requires the latest .Net from microsoft, or IE, because of the way the developers relied on Microsoft software for development. It really does bite that in this day and age people would still choose to develop software for the internet (for remote browsers) that is not as universal as possible. But s*** happens.

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally Posted by Chuckit

I'm actually more miffed that "PC" has come to mean "personal computer that is not a Mac."

I'm more miffed that idiot IT people think NON-STANDARD = SECURE

[DeathMan]

Originally Posted by mitchell_pgh

I'm more miffed that idiot IT people think NON-STANDARD = SECURE

do you mean non-standard != secure?

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by mitchell_pgh

I'm more miffed that idiot IT people think NON-STANDARD = SECURE

What's even more scarey is that they chose DirectX for security.

[ManOfSteal]

Dude....

[ghporter]

You can tell Safari to report a different "user agent" as kiskynet mentioned. This will have the browser tell a site "I'm an Internet Explorer for Windows browser!" and it has a chance of actually working. Of course not all sites check the user agent in deciding whether or not they'll cooperate.

This means that they may depend on "implementation specific details" in how a particular browser works to produce the display. And of course this is both non-standard and BAD, as there is no guarantee that those implementation specific details will remain in even the tiniest of upgrades or bug fixes. And unfortunately, medical applicatons seem to be rife with this sort of bad programming.

On the other hand, you can get an inexpensive Windows laptop (and I would definitely go with a Dell over an HP or Compaq!) for quite a low price when you buy through Dell's educational discount site, and ANY new Windows laptop will be more than adequate for simply accessing the kind of data your girlfriend needs. (She should also complain vociferously to the hospital IT people that she had to buy a whole new computer just to be able to use their non-standard, non-conforming, browser-dependent application-and is this application in compliance with HIPPA? That should get their attention very quickly.)

[phillryu]

And I assume you tried Firefox on the site on your Mac? Who knows, it might work if you haven't given it a shot.

[Superchicken]

Check with using the user agent set to MSIE 6.0 otherwise VPC is an option. After that then you might want to look at Dull.

[wallinbl]

Opera will fake it for you as well, if the Safari UA change doesn't help.

[budster101]

Wait a second. This IT guy tells you that you cannot log into the VPN without IE and a PC?

You mean he cannot set you up so that you can do this with OS X?
I did this with my Grad School. I just spoke to the Network Administrator and he gave the ok...

I think this is just laziness on his part, ignorance, or something else. I don't know.

VPC will work... but yuck.

[Superchicken]

You'd be surprised at what some IT people think they are fine to force down people's throats. You should have seen the IT guy at the smallish (800 students) Bible College I went to. When he found out I had a Mac he just looked at me with contempt. He had M$ posters all over his office... twas disgusting.

[Paco500]

Originally Posted by Superchicken

You'd be surprised at what some IT people think they are fine to force down people's throats. You should have seen the IT guy at the smallish (800 students) Bible College I went to. When he found out I had a Mac he just looked at me with contempt. He had M$ posters all over his office... twas disgusting.

ASTOUNDING! The IT guy at a small Bible College was not open-minded! Who would have thought?

[Paco500]

But on a more serious note, VPC will almost definitely work, but man is it slow. You could probably pick up a used Windows desktop for $150 that would blow VPC away performance wise. If you are "lucky" enough to find one running XP Pro, you could you RDC to connect to it from your Mac and never actually have physically touch the beast. If you are not familiar with RDC, look it up. It's a useful tool.

[budster101]

Remote Desktop Client. right?

[Paco500]

Originally Posted by budster101

Remote Desktop Client. right?

In fact yes.

[budster101]

Go buy a terminal and have them link you in directly.

I remember logging into my dorm terminal, and thinking this is cool!... ack.

[jasonsRX7]

Originally Posted by budster101

Wait a second. This IT guy tells you that you cannot log into the VPN without IE and a PC?

He didn't say it was a VPN. The hospital likely just bought a software package that is designed around IE. Not necessarily intentionally forcing Windows on people, they just bought whatever package suited their needs, not concerned about it playing nice with other OS/browsers.

If you don't want to go the VPC route, you can buy a used Dell with Win2k license for around $150.

Edit: Paco beat me to it. I'm not sober, took me too long to write.

[budster101]

I find it incredibly insulting that any web based product would pigeonhole one into using one type of browser that is only available on one platform... why didn't Microsh t release a version for Mac? They suck , that's why. It's just this type of thing that makes me angry at IT people who buy the company line and proudly wear it on their foreheads.

It's contemptuous I say.

Get a cheapo Dell. Gag.

I need a beer.

[jasonsRX7]

Lots of developers that write specialized apps for specialized markets don't have the resources to devote to cross platform development and testing. I urge our in house programmers to write with portability in mind, but there's times when I have to buy a package that requires Windows simply because it's the only thing available and we don't always have the time to write it in house. I've gotten one of our programmers to start porting some Access apps to PHP/MySQL, it's cool to see that happen.

[OogaBooga]

Originally Posted by budster101

I need a beer.

Amen. Me too.

[Superchicken]

Originally Posted by Paco500

ASTOUNDING! The IT guy at a small Bible College was not open-minded! Who would have thought?

Troll.

And I'll have you know the school is extremely liberal/open minded. One of the major reasons I won't be going back. "We're going to be studying theology... but really... you can't be sure of a whole lot so... don't worry about really having any theological standards or anything... really... just make sure your papers are formatted right."

[budster101]

No beer in the house. :/

[goMac]

Don't buy Dell. Everyone I know who's bought one has had nothing but trouble. Get some parts together, and build a nice cheap one yourself.

[budster101]

They just got a DELL store at our local Mall. Well it's one of those carts... I had some fun with them today.

I told the guy I use a Mac, and he looked like he just ate something sour. I was like, why the long face?

[goMac]

Originally Posted by budster101

They just got a DELL store at our local Mall. Well it's one of those carts... I had some fun with them today.

I told the guy I use a Mac, and he looked like he just ate something sour. I was like, why the long face?

I always thought about asking the guy the following during the PowerPC days:

"Excuse me? I was wondering when Dell was going to come out with G5 computers. I heard about the G5 and apparently it's this really fast processor that IBM makes. It's a lot faster than the Pentium 4 supposedly. Apple is using them, but I was just wondering if Dell sold any machines with them."

: smirk :

[Paco500]

Originally Posted by Superchicken

Troll.

And I'll have you know the school is extremely liberal/open minded. One of the major reasons I won't be going back. "We're going to be studying theology... but really... you can't be sure of a whole lot so... don't worry about really having any theological standards or anything... really... just make sure your papers are formatted right."

1. You are young and hot-headded, and you will out-grow it in time.
2. Due to your age, you may not be aware as to what the term "troll" actually means. You seem to think it means "someone who posts something I don't like." This is incorrect. The term does not derive from the name of the nasty creature that lives under the bridge, but rather from the term "trolling," which means to tow a baited line behind a boat. It's a metaphor. The term was originally applied to one who posted irrelevant or erroneous information in an attempt to elicit a reaction from others. In this case, you were the "troll" and I was the catch. The point of your post seemed to be "dig me... I went to BIBLE college! Not to some heathen college where people drink alcohol, listen to "devil-music" and, god forbid neck!" You, while odd, are bright enough to know that most technical people in the world still (foolishly) look down on Macs and it is absolutely no shock that the likely poorly paid and moderately skilled IT admin at a tiny Bible college in the North Woods would not be terribly enlightened. No, you knew that going in, you were just looking to toot your God-fearin' horn and hoping for a knee-jerk response. I took the bait. I was weak.
3. As for the rest of your post, not your theology does not necessarily mean no or poor theology. Education is about questioning and the study of ideas different than your own. If you are just looking for someplace to reenforce and validate your already ridged beliefs, I would recommend saving your money and just going to a local bible study.

[budster101]

What did you mean by that comment anyway? The sarcasm was not necessary and your tone was disrespectfull inviting a reply in kind, which is what a troll is in forums.

Your disdain was not required to comment properly. It doesn't matter weather you went to Bible College or not, your comment was out of line. Simple.

What bait? He just mentioned what and where, and you leaped at an opportunity to blast away.
Hence you overly lengthy retort to his comment in reply. You in fact baited him.

[Paco500]

Originally Posted by budster101

What did you mean by that comment anyway? The sarcasm was not necessary and your tone was disrespectfull inviting a reply in kind, which is what a troll is in forums.

Your disdain was not required to comment properly. It doesn't matter weather you went to Bible College or not, your comment was out of line. Simple.

What bait? He just mentioned what and where, and you leaped at an opportunity to blast away.
Hence you overly lengthy retort to his comment in reply. You in fact baited him.

The sarcasm was not necessary, true. My tone was disrespectful, true. It is, however, my contention that the post to which I replied was another example of SC's attempts to insert his religious beliefs into a discussion in which they have no place or add nothing to the conversation. Much like Ca$h can turn any thread into an anti-suv, I hate people that don't use turn signals rant, SC will toss out Bible college or Christian Rock music. Either of these are no more than attention-getting +1 posts.

DId I expect a response? I suppose so, but I was expecting a direct response, so maybe "flamer" would be a better characterization than "troll." He was looking for indiscriminate attention- which is trolling. I was going after him, which is just garden-variety anti-social behavior.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Paco500

The sarcasm was not necessary, true. My tone was disrespectful, true. It is, however, my contention that the post to which I replied was another example of SC's attempts to insert his religious beliefs into a discussion in which they have no place or add nothing to the conversation.

He mentioned Bible college in the context of telling where an event took place. His anecdote had nothing to do with religious beliefs of any kind. You were the one who brought up religion, Paco.

[besson3c]

If you really need to emulate Windows (i.e. having a physical PC to remote desktop into is not feasible), there are free, open source emulators such as qemu. I can't remember whether qemu will run XP, but I'm pretty certain it will run Windows 98.

Win 98 would be a little less painful to emulate than XP anyway, and you can run IE 6 in Win 98.

Just trying to help you save some bread....

[Paco500]

Originally Posted by Chuckit

He mentioned Bible college in the context of telling where an event took place. His anecdote had nothing to do with religious beliefs of any kind. You were the one who brought up religion, Paco.

Ok, I was tired. Perhaps I misjudged. Reading it all again and taking into account past history I don't think I did, but I will relent to the collective thinking of the forum and apologize for my outburst.

[budster101]

Dude,

Best thing you could have done. (Apologize). I've seen him baited several times in other threads to start talking about religion, and it worked. Anyway, coolness.

-

Back OT:

Bite the bullet and buy the brick. (Dell) or any other machine you want that runs Windblows. Get the cheapest one that you can and hook it up, what is more important here is your ultimate goal. Your GF needs to access patients from home. Hook her up.

Can you afford a decent piece of equipment? Thinkpad. That sony vaio portable is neat.

Done.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by jasonsRX7

Lots of developers that write specialized apps for specialized markets don't have the resources to devote to cross platform development and testing. I urge our in house programmers to write with portability in mind, but there's times when I have to buy a package that requires Windows simply because it's the only thing available and we don't always have the time to write it in house. I've gotten one of our programmers to start porting some Access apps to PHP/MySQL, it's cool to see that happen.

This doesn NOT sound like a cross-platform issue. It sounds for all the world like a "I don't feel like doing the extra two hours of research to make this HTML app work on ALL browsers, so I'll go lazy and just tweak it for IE on Windows" issue. There is ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE for this behavior. It is lazy, dismissive and insulting to users, and as unprofessional as you can get. ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING YOU CAN DO WITH A WINDOWS-BASED HTML CLIENT YOU CAN DO WITH A MAC-BASED CLIENT.

I do indeed have very strong feelings about this, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

asd, where in Houston is your girlfriend doing her residence work? Does it have anything to do with the UT system? (I have an "in" with someone in the system...).

[Paco500]

Originally Posted by ghporter

This doesn NOT sound like a cross-platform issue. It sounds for all the world like a "I don't feel like doing the extra two hours of research to make this HTML app work on ALL browsers, so I'll go lazy and just tweak it for IE on Windows" issue. There is ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE for this behavior. It is lazy, dismissive and insulting to users, and as unprofessional as you can get. ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING YOU CAN DO WITH A WINDOWS-BASED HTML CLIENT YOU CAN DO WITH A MAC-BASED CLIENT.

I do indeed have very strong feelings about this, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

asd, where in Houston is your girlfriend doing her residence work? Does it have anything to do with the UT system? (I have an "in" with someone in the system...).

While much of what you are saying is absolutely true, you are making assumptions that might not be. This is most likely not a static HTML based site. It is very possible they are:

A: Using ActiveX controls for dynamic content- IE for Windows only
B: Using .net for dynamic content- IE for Windows only
C: Actually tying in to Win32 APIs and delivering over the web, IE for Windows only

While almost everything that can be done with these methods can be done in other ways, it's quite often easier and less expensive to do it this way. An organization with limited knowledge and resources would need more than a "few hours" to learn a completely new development environment such as Java, PHP, etc.

It stinks, but that's the reality of living with a monopolist in our midst.

[budster101]

Not for long.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Paco500

While almost everything that can be done with these methods can be done in other ways, it's quite often easier and less expensive to do it this way. An organization with limited knowledge and resources would need more than a "few hours" to learn a completely new development environment such as Java, PHP, etc.

It stinks, but that's the reality of living with a monopolist in our midst.

I hold that "an organization with limited knowledge and resources" has no business building such an important app. Unless the hospital is going to issue a computer to every practitioner who needs access to that data, they should DEMAND that their practitioners be able to use ANY browser on ANY platform to access the data. It isn't necessarily a problem with the coders per se, but it is definitely an executive problem. It is CERTAINLY bad software engineering
-and is yet another example in a very long list of such badness. My Dean would have failed a student for such lack of forethought as to make a project platform dependent.

[budster101]

What happened to standards? OUT THE WINDOW....

[Randman]

Originally Posted by Paco500

But on a more serious note, VPC will almost definitely work, but man is it slow.

IE on VPC is going to be pretty similar to IE on a PC.

Try the Safari debug. Or Firefox. Or Internet Explorer on the Mac.

[budster101]

IE on VPC is exactly the same as on a PC just slower.

There should be no reason why you can't use debug on Safari to get in. (Emulate 6.0)

Firefox won't do it. Maybe most of the pages will load but forget about e-mail through the page.
IE on the Mac will not work, I'll almost guarantee that. You need a version that doesn't exist.

This is utter nonsense why she cannot get in using any browser, even IE 5.0 on a Mac. It's BS.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by budster101

There should be no reason why you can't use debug on Safari to get in. (Emulate 6.0)

Last year my wife could not get Safari to work with an app called WebCT. No matter what we did, it would NOT work. We used the debug menu and had it pretend to be IE, Netscape, just about any other option, and WebCT refused to work. It turns out that it was a WebCT issue, and the software has since been upgraded-I use it at a different school and it's fine. It all boils down to how they check for "acceptable browsers." Through the standard method (user agent) or through some kludge of their own creation. (Sorry for using such a nasty word as "kludge," but sometimes vulgarity is really called for.)

[budster101]

I hate it when IT people tell me that they cannot allow Macs on their network because of security concerns.
I just tell them, I'm not worried...

Is it because we don't necessarilly check for viruses since we get none, and then may have attachements and be carrieres? What gives?

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by budster101

I hate it when IT people tell me that they cannot allow Macs on their network because of security concerns.
I just tell them, I'm not worried...

Is it because we don't necessarilly check for viruses since we get none, and then may have attachements and be carrieres? What gives?

In some cases it pains me to say that "IT" stands for "ignorance-tremendous!" ANY IT person who is concerned about security with Macs in a Windows-dominated environment is smoking some odd form of crack. Truly professional IT people KNOW that the virus/spyware incidence in the Mac world is of intellectual interest only, or they have real tools that satisfy some corporate requirement that all users have a good antivirus application installed. (Symantec's AV for Mac-NOT the Norton product!-is great, by the way).

A friend who is responsible for computer security at a Large Medical School here became a Mac convert in part because he never had to deal with idiot users who got infected because they "forgot" to update their AV software. (He does have to deal with intentional misuse of resources by Mac users, but that's another matter.)

[Randman]

I always thought IT was just a way of not having to spell "dio" inbetween the letters to save time.

[Scotttheking]

Originally Posted by turtle777

Wow, has Dell become synonymous with PC ? How sad...

-t

Quoted for more emphasis.

That's just pathetic.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Scotttheking

Quoted for more emphasis.

That's just pathetic.

What's worse is that HP and Micron, and to some extent ThinkPad (formerly IBM) have practically given the laptop market to Dell. They either gouge the buyer, or sell absolute CRAP, or both. If I could afford a ThinkPad that performed as well as a Dell, I'd go that way...but then I'd be able to buy a BMW instead of a Honda. HP descended to the quality that Compaq put out-not something to crow about-and has managed to fall from that low point. Micron is simply fading away, after having some really innovative and solid products for a long time. I think the laptop market really is shifting to a two product decision: Apple or Dell.