Respect Sakura

I think you can pretty much guess what the crux of this is going to be about, but as I love words so very, very much, I might as well subject you to them anyways.

When January 1st rolled around, I took a good look at where I was in terms with the platforms I use, my current gaming habits, my current hardware habits, and what have you. I took a good, hard look at what I currently use my computer for, and what I do on the Mac vs what I do on Windows. I looked at how the Xbox 360 influenced my gaming habits. I looked at what games I played on the PC last year, vs what I played on the 360. I looked at the difference that going from a 7800 GTX to an 8800 Ultra did for me, and so on, and so on. Finally, I looked at what I actually did on my gaming PC - what is it mostly used for?

The shocking truth, ladies and gentlemen, is that out of everything released last year - The Orange Box was about the only gaming experience I enjoyed, and out of that, TF2 was the only online multiplayer game I actually played. Furthermore, my iMac running XP in Boot Camp can handle that without breaking a sweat. TF2 has now gone from a fun way to spend Friday and Saturday night to maybe a quick game, once or twice a month. It’s certainly not a good excuse for a behemoth of a system like my gaming PC, Mahoro.

So.. if gaming is on the decline, and I can’t think of any upcoming games that I’m interested in that requires such grunt, what else am I going to do with such a beefy machine? The next best resource hog in the computer industry is virtualization. Considering my intended career path, having an enormous box that can run a whole network of VMs, coupled with my Technet Plus subscription, gives me an entire network to mess with, screw up, and learn from. It’s a whole goddamn computer lab on the one machine, and such a purpose would be great for Mahoro, surely?

There’s just one limiting factor - memory, both RAM and storage space. To run VMs of that kind of scale, you’ll need disk space (which I have in spades), and a hell of a lot of RAM. That second part is the issue, because 32-bit Windows is limited by the 4GB RAM barrier. In fact, it’s even worse because of the way Windows and computer BIOS’s map RAM, leaving you with 3.5GB of RAM. Worse than this, Windows NT’s 32-bit memory model gives 2GB of virtual memory to user space (where your VMs run) and 2GB to the system space (which you can’t touch). Furthermore, Vista x64 just plain ain’t ready and a good portion of what I have left that runs on Windows simply won’t have a bar of it, making the 4GB barrier simply insurmountable. In the end, it’s simply not necessary for what it was originally designed for, and it’s poorly suited towards what I plan to do in future.

Enter Mac OS X. From OS X 10.3, to 10.4 and finishing up with 10.5, Apple successfully moved from a strictly 32-bit based operating system, to a full 64-bit OS and no-one outside of application developers even saw the difference. Hell, they changed entire CPU architectures with the same ease, proving Steve Job’s prophetic claim of “most users won’t even know they’re running it!” to be quite true. Apple pulled off the most incredible kind of transition one can see in the industry today - the kind of transition that doesn’t impact the user in a negative way. Users didn’t see a migration from one completely foreign CPU architecture to another, they just saw faster computers. Likewise with their 64-bit implementation - they won’t see a move from 32-bit to 64-bit, they’ll just see faster performing apps and more benefit from larger amounts of memory. Coming from the days of multiple CPU architectures and different OS’s, the way Apple did this is simply “white man’s magic” to me. It’s by far the most impressive feat Apple have pulled off, since the introduction of OS X to begin with.

So naturally, if you want an entire computer lab of VMs running on the one box, then the brand new Mac Pro is mighty tempting. Not only is the OS itself a perfect platform for wanting to run virtual machines off, but the hardware is a hell of a starting platform as well. 8 cores running at 2.8GHz, with two separate dedicated buses to the memory, and support for up to 32GB of RAM? With 8GB of RAM for it alone being as cheap as $1,200 AUD and possibly cheaper depending on where you shop around? Not to mention a decent array of video cards for it now.. such as the 8800 GT which makes it good for the occasional gaming in Boot Camp as well.

So it comes without much shock to you all that I am announcing my New Year’s Resolution. I am going to finally migrate from Windows XP and Vista, to Mac OS X for all my day-to-day and non-work related needs. I intend to sell Mahoro off, and purchase a custom Mac Pro by February to serve as my powerhouse research box for my career needs and will be the last fully fledged desktop machine I’ll be buying for quite some time. The only remaining function Windows will serve (other than being a VM platform for work and career related purposes) is to act as a Boot Camp partition to play the occasional Windows game on. This won’t likely be often, because my secondary resolution is to gear myself more towards the Xbox 360 as my gaming platform of choice, with general exception to first person shooters. In other words, sure.. I’ll play a round of Halo 3 or some other exclusive on the 360, but if there’s a PC version of a first person shooter that I want to play, then I’ll do so first on the Mac Pro. To me, stuff like Gears of War or Mass Effect are best left on the console.

So.. in a nutshell, I’ve been quasi-switching for the past 3 to 4 years, but this is the year I go all the way, baby. For me, this is the year of the switch.