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Ultimate Software Developer Setup?
wicked coding asks: "I'm a professional software engineer and I'm planning on building my ultimate setup for longer hours coding and hacking, but I'm kinda stuck when it comes with what to choose. What hardware would you choose to use, if money was no object? Obviously there may be some constraints on space. Leave no stone unturned, I'm looking for suggestions on desks, seating, lighting, keyboard and pointing device, monitors and even the computer system itself. Ideally it needs to be as comfortable and ergonomic as possible. What software would you choose to use, if the intended targets were Java and OO PHP5? Currently I'm using Eclipse on Gentoo. Is there a more suitable IDE that works with most popular OSS (and not so OSS) languages including XML, SQL, CSS, PHP, Perl, Java, and C/C++?"
Java is mostly a server-side language. It's used on many of the largest websites in the world. Your insinuations are idiotic, and do nothing to answer the question at hand. You are a non-contributor. Please do everyone a favour and leave at once.
Unlike Linux, it has a nice, fast GUI interface, and it runs Photoshop and Quicktime.
Unlike Linux, you can actually close the laptop lid and put the thing to sleep.
Unlike Linux and Windows, your iPod will work really well (if you think an iPod works well on Windows, try it on a Mac; not the iPod's fault, just the way Windows handles USB devices).
Unlike Windows, it's much more organized, has better tools, and actually supports UNIX tools (including Apache & PHP) natively (sans-Cygwin).
Unlike a Windows laptop, it's light and has great battery life.
Unlike Windows and Linux, you can sync your Bluetooth phone and PDA over Bluetooth. Imagine that, devices that actually talk to one another!
TextMate supports syntax highlighting and some great customizability for almost every language out there. Comes with lots of ObjectiveC, Ruby, and PHP stuff right out of the box.
Unlink Eclipse, TextMate is actually fast and responsive. (Anyone else ever notice that as Eclipse approaches Idea's level of functionality, it gets slower and slower? I'll stick with Idea for Java development, thank you very much.)
You'll actually start doing something *with* your computer, instead of doing something *to* it, and you'll enjoy your computer again.
P.S. My recommendation is for anyone who doesn't have a problem actually paying a little money for a decent product, nor tied his line to RMS's ship of folly. I figure you get what you pay for.