
Good bye Microsoft!  MS employee and author of 9 Visual Basic books has now left the building (for RoR). - vlad
http://peterwright.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-bye-microsoft-pete-has-now-left.html
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vlad
With the best comments I've ever seen in a blog post.

I found that article at an appropriate time, for many reasons...

So, has anybody tried using a MacBook Core 2 Duo with 1GB RAM connected to a
24 inch dell fpw monitor and wireless usb keyboard? Is that enough ram for
development? How well can it handle standard-definition video editing, since
the hard drive operates at 5400rpm? Anybody over 6' tall who finds the MacBook
keyboard comfortable? Can you run Visual Studio (last Microsoft product I
hopefully will ever use) in parallels?

~~~
brianmckenzie
1 GB is more than enough RAM for development, no Mac would even ship with too
little.

I'm 6'3" and the MacBook keyboard is too small for me, so I bought the iMac
and have not looked back. The iMac has a 7200rpm drive as well, together with
the gorgeous screen would be better for video editing.

~~~
martin
1GB might be enough RAM if you don't use Parallels, but with Parallels, forget
it. Running Windows XP with less than 1GB RAM while trying to do anything
intensive is torture, and running Visual Studio certain qualifies. So you'd
probably need 2GB, with 1GB allocated to your virtual machine.

Heck, even that might not be enough for you. I have a MacBook Pro (2.33ghz
C2D) with 2GB, and Parallels slows my machine down enough that I don't leave
it running unless I'm actively using it. (To be fair, I tend to leave a lot of
OS X apps open at a time.) I'm probably going to upgrade to 3GB one of these
days and see if that helps -- I've read in a couple of blog posts that's
really Parallels' RAM sweet spot.

In any event, if you're not sure, you can always just buy the MacBook and
upgrade the RAM later. In fact, I've read that you can even stick 3GB in the
MacBook, even though Apple advertises 2GB as being the limit.

As far as Dell monitors go -- I got one recently (3007WFP -- I do IT work for
my father and get paid in merchandise :)). It works great as a monitor, but
I've been having issues with the built-in USB hub, to the point that I can't
really use it (when it's plugged in and the computer goes to sleep, it either
immediately wakes it or causes a kernel panic a large percentage of the time).

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brianmckenzie
Ahh, Parallels will take more RAM - I wasn't considering that, thanks for
pointing it out. As soon as you start running XP your memory requirements go
through the roof.

------
gyro_robo
...and Python and Perl.

By the time kids born today are in college, they probably won't need to know
any special programming languages. AIs will intuit what you _mean_.

~~~
omouse
We can only hope.

