IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

I had been running a PC at home for many years, but with a failing disk in a mirror and four year old hardware, it was time to replace it. For years I had run many different operating systems, XP, Solaris, Debian, Ubunto without really having a great user experience.

This all happened right before going to the LISA conference in December. (Large Installation System Administration). At the conference I was somewhat surprised to see so many Mac laptops. At a previous LISA conference in 2001 about 5% of the attendees were running Macs. At the 2006 I estimate that 30-40% of the attendees were now on Macs.

I attended classes on security and Solaris 10. Both classes contained labs that 60 students participated in. All 60 students were logged into 60 separate Solaris virtual machines running under Parallels VM on one Mac laptop. It was amazing that not only was it possible, but it also ran very smoothly.

The conference was six days long and during that time I had at least nine different speakers. Only one of them wasn't running a Mac.

I was not only curious, I was sold. I arrived back in Denver late on a Friday night. On Saturday morning, 35 minutes after the Apple store opened, I was now a MacBook owner.

I have had nothing but a positive experience with my Mac. It has become so much more than what my PC was. I still run Solaris for product evaluation, testing and writing scripts, but now I run it under Parallels on my MacBook. My experience has been so positive, I don't think I will ever own another PC.