markjgsmith

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The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook - I started out reading this article thinking I wasn't that interested in the topic, but as I read, memories of jobs past, and various digital collaboration environment infras I helped setup, flooded my thoughts. Turns out I actually have quite a lot to say about high end mac hardware. Most of the VFX shops I worked for used Windows and Linux, because of upgradeability/modularity but also because it was easier to integrate them into the workflows. The folks running macs tended to be one offs, on their own island so to speak, with their own custom setup. From a sysadmin perspective, those systems were harder to maintain. At one place all the engineers actually got Mac Pros because then we could have any OS we wanted by running Parallels, which made sense given we were supporting artists running all 3 OSs. I loved my silver tower, it was freaking awesome! But probably way more power than I actually needed at the time. Oh how things change. Dear lord how I wish I had enough power to not have to wait 5 minutes switching feature branches or pushing to remote. Life is waiting for progress bar atm. www.theverge.com #

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