SPUG: Bye bye XP PC!!! Hello Leopard Mac???

[Greg Forties]

Bryan's post is spot on.  All the developers at my company got Macs
after our lead found that using a Mac increased his productivity.  We
also just transitioned from from a .NET/Windows environment to
java/Linux, so it just made sense to put devs in a similar environment
to production servers.

I can't speak to Mac support for perl, because I've never owned one,
or had to develop for one, but again, I think Bryan covered this well.

I don't mean to start a religious war here, but you do have another
option.  I'm running debian on a Thinkpad T43 (~$400 on CL) and it
absolutely screams; not to mention it makes a pretty nice development
environment.  Linux has come a long way in the past couple years.

The real question you need to ask yourself, again, is what you're
going to be using the machine for.  If you guys are a Windows shop,
you'll have no end of frustration trying to run open source.  If you
aren't, I highly recommend making the switch to one of the Unix
derivatives.  Learning a new OS comes with its own set of
frustrations, but in the end I think you'll be glad you did.

Best of luck,

greg

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 4:01 PM, Bryan <spug at whohasit.com> wrote:
> Now, I don't think the issue is any particular language so much, but rather,
> all of the other things you may want to load into your local system that
> should work nicely with those language(s) of choice.
>
> Frankly, developers here tend to install and configure as many tools as
> necessary to emulate a virtual production environment, similar to that faced
> within our datacenter .. not perfect, but that does save a lot of headaches
> moving from end to end.
>
> So in the end, that means in addition to your perl/modperl packages and
> dependencies, stuff like memcached, perlbal, tomcat/java, mysql, etc. and
> lots of more less obvious things like netpbm, imagemagik, et al should to be
> maintained with little or no variation.
>
> While the list of influential developers that I know running open source in
> the datacenter who also choose to run mac behind their primary keyboard gets
> longer, virtualization tools are clearly invaluable.
>
>
> Bryan
>
> Shiftboard, Inc.
> 311 1st Avenue South Suite 201
> Seattle, Wa 98104  USA
> http://www.shiftboard.com
>
> "Shiftboard online scheduling:  people connect, stay informed and pick up work
> instantly -- anytime, anywhere".
>
>
>
> On Thursday 06 November 2008 10:49:18 Michael R. Wolf wrote:
>> My laptop PC's motherboard is fatally injured.  It's time to exercise
>> Washington's newly passed right-to-die initiative.
>>
>> A lot's changed in the 6-8 years since I last made this decision.  I'd
>> like to consider a Mac this time around.
>>
>> I'd be interested in anyone's Perl-centric (and business-owner-centric)
>> pro/con list for both sides.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Michael
>>
>> P.S.  If it's generally useful to the group, please post here.  If not,
>> would you prefer email or a quick phone call?
>>
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