Michael T Pins wrote:

> The main justification, at least for me, is the drastically improved
> productivity. In my current job I was stuck with nothing but a Windoze
> laptop for the first month or so. It cost me at least an hour a day
> (likely more) in lost productivity by having to deal with Windoze dreadful
> UI. It doesn't take very long to pay for itself.
>

EXCELLENT POINT

Currently I'm using a rather old Sun Ultra 80 (4 x 450 MHz, 4 GB RAM)
which must be worth all of a couple of hundred pounds now here in the UK.

Also I have here a top end laptop (Sony VGN-SZ4XWN/C) which cost me over
1600 pounds ($3200) a few months back. It has 2 GB RAM, 120 GB disk, 2
Duo Core T7200 2 GHz CPU, Nvida GeForce 7400 graphics, Windows Vista
Ultimate etc etc. At the time I bought it, it was the second most
expensive laptop in the Sony Vaio range.

Basically the laptop is about as good as laptops go, but the old Sun is
definitely more productive! I've spent the day writing UNIX scripts and
C programs to process some experimental data. Doing this on a laptop via
SSH or similar would have been a pain in the butt to say the least.
Writing the code on Windows, without having a UNIX box at all would have
been very painful.


One other thing.

I often play chess online, using the Internet Chess Club. I must admit I
don't use a UNIX client (the Windows ones are generally better), but I
do often use the client software for the chess server (Blitzin) on my
SunPCi card in the Sun. Clearly this 733 MHz celeron processor SunPCi
card, which as 1 GB of RAM is not as fast as my dual core 2 GHz laptop.
But, it is a lot more plesent to use than the laptop.


It seems there can be quite a few god arguments for keeping the Blade.

--
Dave (from the UK)

Please note my email address changes periodically to avoid spam.
It is always of the form: month-year@althorne.org
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