Take any sport you can think of where equipment is involved. Without their equipment the top athletes of that sport will be vastly better than most people. But they use the very best equipment they can to squeeze out every last drop of performance.
I suspect that many top athletes can get whatever equipment they want for free under the guise of "endorsements". Tiger Woods doesn't pay for his golf clubs, if anything his golf club manufacturer pays for the right to say "Tiger Woods uses our golf clubs".[1] Michael Jordan never paid for his Air Jordans, but Nike paid him a pretty penny.
It's the same for top musicians, incidentally. If you're selling musical instruments, you're selling to people who follow music and are influenced by which instruments their favorite musicians use. So it's cost-effective to give famous musicians whatever they want in exchange for a plug or two.
[1] Bad example as of late since Tiger Woods has become unpopular and is struggling with his form.
Yeah, I'd think so too, in general, but having a laptop with a good sized screen, quality keyboard and large, responsive touchpad sets my mind at ease and really lets me get work done.
The MacBook Pro touchpad is the only one I've ever used that doesn't leave me wanting to plug in an external mouse.
I imagine you're in the minority, running Windows as a developer in this community. A lot of the software and tools just don't play as nicely with something that isn't as tightly integrated with a shell.
Currently I'm running a Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit on my desktop with two monitors (24" and 19"), and 10.04 64-bit on my laptop (mid-2008 model MBP with 8GB RAM). For a server I typically use my desktop for prototyping things for myself, and use a Linode server (again, running Ubuntu 10.04, but Server edition, rather than Desktop) to host things I want more reliable, consistent access to (blog, etc). Having consistency across my setup is pretty nice for making sure everything interacts well, both on my development machine and production instances.
I also run Ubuntu on my dual monitor lab machine. I'm an undergraduate student, but I do security research for the university part time with one of the professors.
My most common work programming scenario: editing files on our Debian build server via sshfs in emacs running in a screen session on my dual-monitor Ubuntu desktop which I log into using Putty on my XP laptop.
I should hope not! Windows 7 is the only OS that can readily handle recent (within the last year) graphics cards, both for gaming and programming (when you can offset some calculations to the GPU, things become fast). Whenever I try Linux, getting all the hardware working is fiddly, and the hardware in Apple computers is about a year behind everywhere else.
I still run a virtualised Linux environment, though, because there are some things (such as Git integration in Emacs) that I couldn't get working quite right. It works oddly well overall. I also have four monitors, 'cause I'm weird.
[Edit: I originally wrote "modern" graphics cards, which is a term so variable it doesn't have a meaning.]
Same here. I even own a Macbook Pro but just can't use it as my main because of all the awful UI quirks. Maybe it's the 15 years of Windows conditioning, and I'm not trying to start a flamewar but come on, if I have a window in the far right of my display I'm supposed to go all the way to the top left to click on a menu item? Why doesn't maximizing actually maximize? Do I need function, control, alt, option, and command keys? Where are the Page Up, Page Down, Home, or End keys? Why is Alt-Tab retarded?
Argh! I could go on but I'll just go move files around my sanely organized file browser for a little while to calm down.
in response to the last usesthis.com post here, i created a "setups" subreddit. if any of you have an unusual setup worth sharing, please post about it somewhere (or even just a picture) and submit it to http://reddit.com/r/setups
