Posts by Fsckus

11 days WITHOUT YOUR COMPUTER? a true tragedy

Or 55 days, whatever. You're either not very intelligent, or your time is worthless. This has nothing to do with Mac or PC, I work in IT and whenever people who work at home talk about how they're being screwed by X company because they can't work without their precious laptop, I laugh. Let me explain myself with a story.

I have a friend who is a professional photographer. He shoots architecture with a 1DsMkII and canon tilt-shift lenses. His camera cost him something around the order of $8000, with thousands more for lenses. He has a fast desktop computer with two expensive large screens and Photoshop CS3. He processes all his photos himself. If his camera were to break and he had to send it in for repair, it wouldn't affect him greatly.

Do you know why? Because he's a professional. He has a backup body (Canon 5D), and a backup computer to boot. Sure, his backup isn't as powerful as his main camera, but he knows that if he were legitimately to be without work he'd be in serious trouble, and as a real working professional he recognizes the cost of a backup unit is far outweighed by the the lost revenue during time spent having his kit repaired.

Electronics fail. I know this, in the course of my job I see expensive servers, fibre channel arrays, 'reliable' desktops, and even network cables fail all the time. Companies who aren't run by morons buy redundancy, because downtime costs them. They don't live in an imaginary world where they can have their equipment fail and whine about how the vendor should have made a perfect product while they bleed cash from every orifice.

In my experience it is this willingness to pay for redundancy, and the understanding of business that goes along with it, which separates the amateurs from the professionals.

Someone who relies on a £700 computer for their whole business is the opposite of a professional. One day without work pays for a new computer at that price in revenue lost.