We don't have the infrastructure to do that, but I did recently spend a week working out of town where I had only my 17" MacBook Pro. I became frustrated on the first day, and switched to coding on my Mac Pro back in Tokyo via remote desktop.
Japan is small and fiber-wired, so there is no lag typing. There's only some flicker when dragging large windows.
It worked well, but I don't think that us grunts working in the trenches of modern consumer software have the special luxuries that you do--yet.
With the advent of cheap on-demand cloud infrastructure, though, I think those types of benefits will start percolating down soon. Huge suites of automated tests are the new bottleneck (compiling is so 2005, etc), but they are so easily parallelized that it can't be long before cool tools start to emerge... write code on your Air, but execute your tests in parallel on AWS, or whatever.
So yeah, I think the need for having fast local hardware will diminish over time... but faster for some than others.
>> Japan is small and fiber-wired, so there is no lag typing.
I've been using an 11 inch Air in Japan for the last few weeks and thanks to the full size keyboard, there is nothing you can't do on it when combined with wifi or a tethered iPhone. Have your large desktop machine in the office or at home always on and just remote into it. Remote desktopping into an 8-core i7 over a 3G connection gives you 7 hours of battery life and a very powerful machine to work on.
The Air is almost the perfect "thin client" - even the 2GB/64GB model is more than enough if you have decent connectivity. Use local mail client, browser and Office for light local work and click an icon in the dock to instantly have access to a powerful development machine.
Now, the cluster I have access to is impressive (several hundred nodes of 4 cores machines, separate development and execution nodes). But as a grad student, it was one Dell PowerEdge server that was the head node to a PS3 cluster, and another Dell PowerEdge that served as the backup file server. Both of the Dell PowerEdges cost between $5-10k.
I did have luxuries - most of the time I was the only one using the machines. But as a grad student, I don't think I had access to more resources than someone at a small software firm. However, I did only need to deal with text input and output. I can see having to compile, execute and test locally when dealing with consumer software.
We don't have the infrastructure to do that, but I did recently spend a week working out of town where I had only my 17" MacBook Pro. I became frustrated on the first day, and switched to coding on my Mac Pro back in Tokyo via remote desktop.
Japan is small and fiber-wired, so there is no lag typing. There's only some flicker when dragging large windows.
It worked well, but I don't think that us grunts working in the trenches of modern consumer software have the special luxuries that you do--yet.
With the advent of cheap on-demand cloud infrastructure, though, I think those types of benefits will start percolating down soon. Huge suites of automated tests are the new bottleneck (compiling is so 2005, etc), but they are so easily parallelized that it can't be long before cool tools start to emerge... write code on your Air, but execute your tests in parallel on AWS, or whatever.
So yeah, I think the need for having fast local hardware will diminish over time... but faster for some than others.