Damn right it comes in pints.

Like empirically or at the time? I was like 13 and on a mountain in Japan I shot some bottle rockets into a tree full of wild monkeys. Which I thought was super awesome at the time but now I think it was just mean.

To be fair though, the elementary school had to close earlier that day due to monkeys (throwing poops etc) so I felt like I was avenging their education.

Most unusual breakup?

Tried watching this yesterday, got about to where the guy said something like, "Faces are important" and couldn't fucking take it anymore.

Impression is a weird metric to use when judging a movie.

Mac/Linux towers at work. Lots of cores, lots of ram.

2008 Macbook Pro at home. With quick external eSata drives I've been pleasantly surprised how well it has been holding up, especially for little production things. I've been comping this little promo for a friend's cycling crew the last couple weeks. Every shot is a vfx shot, ~70 secs long, lots of layers, HD, and Nuke has been mostly usable. A little crashy, but fine for this.

I'm not an expert in the tech and only follow it a little, but I think there's a future for stuff like GPU acceleration to be done through Thunderbolt accessories once it goes fiber optic, making laptops even more sensible production machines than they are now.

There's always work being done on the outskirts of what is technologically capable, like complex simulation, rendering work, Flame/Smoke boxes, but all that is available on Linux anyway.

To answer your question, you need to define "capable". This little promo is just me making something for a friend. If it was a real job with money and deadlines behind it, it wouldn't be an acceptable machine. You pay that premium on the high end desktop machines for the agility, and right now laptops are still incapable of that kind of performance.

Important to remember that they aren't mutually exclusive endeavors. A professor I had recommended working for five years in a field, and then pursuing grad school in that field only if you feel limited by your lack of higher education or compelled into years of expensive and heavy research.

Alternately, you can do something so cool and impressive with that time that you end up with a scholarship or something. At the very least enough field experience to really get something out of it.

They will stop when they stop making money. *

* They won't ever stop making money.