Reply #127: InfoWorld: A migration project changes everything [View All]

[emulatorloo]

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/10/10/40OPcurve_1.html

Ahead of the Curve
A migration project changes everything
Wholesale Mac migration yields initial disruption, but ultimate productivity payoff
 
<snip> (summary he has trouble initially setting things up, and isn't thrilled w the OS X 10.2 server version of Samba)

I think the news from the client side is more interesting because it caught me by surprise. Over the course of a week, my two-headed (dual display) Power Mac G5 became, without my conscious effort to make it so, the nerve center and productivity hub for my entire lab.

I kept loading the Power Mac G5 with software. Right now, on the Cinema display, iChat and iCal are open. So is Radio Userland. I have Terminal Server sessions open to two PCs under test (one is a laptop). I'm watching my Xserve cluster fill my Xserve RAID with a huge tests database. The Xserve RAID admin console is visible just to make sure that I don’t actually set the thing on fire. There are two text Terminal windows, one local and one remote, and an X Window session into an Opteron Linux server that’s running SPEC benchmarks.

What surprised me is that as I opened each of the windows I planned to use, I didn’t feel the need to close others to keep things “clean.” It isn’t a question of real estate or performance or capacity. It’s subjective, and I haven’t found a way to explain it to myself much less express it here.

My standard desktop has been four PCs and a keyboard/video/mouse switch. I have always multitasked deeply (to observers, disturbingly so), but serially. Concurrent multitasking is a trick I periodically attempt, but I always return to my KVM switch. For the past couple of weeks, that switch and its connected PCs have been idle. Sometimes I forget that the consolidation of thought and working style is as important as the consolidation of technology.