Hi Everybody, May I ask for technical advice, please, from you who are probably the most knowledgeable and informed community I know?
I have a friend who is likely to spend the next several years in a very high-travel situation, with six months or so in Asia each year and six in the U.S., and the latter six probably spent moving around among states. She is a photographer and videographer, which means she needs relatively high-performance graphics computing power, but also expensive software that takes time to accumulate. (The move toward subscription-everything is so predatory and rapacious that she is staying with one-generation old software to avoid falling into that pit, which means owning the software and having it installed on some particular disk.) She is a mac user. It is likely that, in the various locations, she will be able to arrange access to a loaner computer, which (in my ignorance) I imagine could provide CPU and display, which are the things that both need to be big but are a pain and a hazard to ship around. Is there some _good_ solution by which everything that makes something "my" computer can be put on a small mobile volume? This means principally OS and applications; data can to some extent be journaled on secondary disks, which will be required for backup anyway. I have assumed that one can make bootable external volumes, but I have worried that on external volumes the access may be so much slower than on installed hardware that for graphic-intensive or video development, it may be unusable. There are also solutions like Mac minis, but that is another non-modifiable treadmill, where you buy the most you can afford and then are soon bumping your head on its limitations. Is there really enough hardware-specific variation among machines that it is necessary to have your OS and applications software installed and configured for the whole computer? Or is there enough of a separation between the hardware and apps by the OS, and a reduction to a small enough number of instruction sets, that one can separate the compute and display engines from the repositories for instructions? Something like a durable, compact flash drive from which the OS is run would seem attractive for both price and flexibility if it is possible. Many thanks for advice, Eric ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
