I loved Tom Yeager's article The next best thing to OS X. As several people have noticed at my talks over the past few months, I no longer carry a Mac laptop. As much as I love the Mac's eye candy, it really hasn't been keeping up as a developer's machine - their attention has clearly been elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Solaris folks have made huge strides in Solaris's usability on a laptop with recent Nevada builds: the latest Gnome is quite lovely. Firefox, Thunderbird and Lightning kick ass. The new installer is totally slick. The nwam (network automagic) service makes network hassles almost totally disappear. And Java, NetBeans and Glassfish go like the wind! It's amazing how fast things run.