| That's a bet you'd lose. More specifically I can't without taking a huge hit in productivity (and there are somethings I wouldn't be able to do at all on a Sparc station). In order to do my job, here's a short list of what I run on my MBP: Eclipse (explaining why Eclipse is better for my needs than emacs (which I used to use) would take a while, but lets assume I'm actually more productive with Eclipse) Parallels Linux VM running Oracle 10 XE Parallels Windows XP VM for testing with IE and IE 7, and running a couple of windows only tools I need on occasion Mail.app Adium Safari Firefox iCal iTunes TextMate OmniFocus VPN Client SQLDeveloper JBoss + ATG Commerce JVM (768 MB of RAM) JBoss + ATG CSC JVM (768 MB of RAM) Ant builds triggered from Eclipse that compile hundreds of Java files and deploy 5k+ files to the various JBoss servers The JVMs have to be restarted frequently to pickup code and config changes While I'm sure there are lots of people who could do their jobs just fine on a SparcStation 5, or any old computer, there are some people who need large amounts of RAM and very fast CPUs in order to not spend their day waiting for builds, JVM restarts, and VMs to come out of swap, etc... |