On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 01:00:13PM -0500, paul stenquist wrote: > > On Jan 4, 2011, at 12:42 PM, John Francis wrote: > > > On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 09:23:41AM -0600, Darren Addy wrote: > >> > >> I can say that Macs have a much longer practical lifespan and far > >> fewer support issues than their PC counterparts. There are (many) good > >> reasons that people swear BY Macs and swear AT PCs and its not just > >> because they are fanboys. > > > > There's really only one reason - Apple have a very controlled environment. > > > > If you buy a PC built with good name-brand components, and exercise tight > > control of what gets to run on it (and which accounts have privileges), > > then it will be just about as reliable as the Mac. It will probably be > > a bit cheaper, though. > > > > There can still be issues based on compatibility. But that's a decision > > you have to live with; is it better to have support for older applications > > at the cost of some reliability issues, or to just pretend that those old > > applications aren't important? > > > > In any case, this is (at last) gradually becoming a non-issue. The days > > of running a single environment on a physical machine are beginning to > > slip away; VMWare/Virtual Box/whatever lets you run a virtual machine > > for a particular purpose. It's taken a while to get here, but it looks > > as though the time might have eventually come. And with virtual machines > > becoming available "in the cloud", hardware purchases are less significant. > > > > > But we're going to need much faster internet service to perform tasks like > photo retouching "in the cloud." I don't see that coming soon -- at least not > at an affordable price. Too many monopolies among internet service providers. > Paul
Oh, I agree. We'll still buy physical machines for some purposes; high- bandwidth applications such as photo editing, and high-security applications (I personally don't want to put financial and tax information on somebody else's hardware). But we won't need our home systems to be able to run every application natively; we'll be able to run virtual machines at home for commonly-performed tasks, and have access to cloud servers for others. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
