virtually excellent

I'm still loving the mac. The coolest thing for now is virtualization. Virtualize, virtualize, virtualize.

I work for all these customers who have security concerns. They give me one of their laptops to use to access their systems. Most of the time I can't even plug my laptop in to their network. I've never had my equipment confiscated or anything, but they are very clear on this point. Only their image is allowed on their network. One of them is a big name bank that everyone knows. They are so anal retentive that they installed software on their laptop that disables anything USB except for printers or mice. The idea is to keep people from copying off or on files via thumb drive. I had a heck of time once trying to copy some SQL code up to their development server that I had written on my laptop on an airplane. And we had the same trouble going the other way, though I can't remember now exactly why we needed to do that. I can't remember exactly how we got around that situation, but I do know that crossover ethernet cables are easy to make if you have cable and a crimper.

But I digress.

The coolest thing right now on this mac is how easy it is to virtualize everything. I now have about 5 laptops stacked up in the corner of my office because I can run vmware converter on them, make an image, copy it onto my mac, and then load it up with vmware fusion. And with a 64 bit operating system that doesn't suck, I can run several virtual images at once, as fast or sometimes faster than they would run natively on a PC. The 8 GB of RAM I have doesn't hurt. The Solid State Drive doesn't hurt either.

The only problem I'm having now is that I've almost chewed up the 256 GB drive. Maybe they'll come out with a 1TB Solid State Drive soon. Actually, I could use about 4.