A set of fair points. Allow me to clarify:

1.) The BitTorrent Sync software is freeware; I pay neither for a license nor any monthly fee. While you're obviously correct with the hardware aspect of it (more on that in a bit), the nice part is that the client is available for plenty of different operating systems, so the odds of it running on /something/ that's around is helpful. For example, the 'Old XP desktop" that is still lying around can be used for this purpose in conjunction with an external hard disk that would have been purchased for backup purposes anyway. I'm not necessarily saying that having a FreeNAS is the correct solution for everyone, but BT Sync works as a solution for everyone that has a second computer that can act as a storage hub, regardless of OS.

2.) On the heels of point 1, the hardware lying around can do the syncing, which was more what I was getting at. A FreeNAS is the hardware that I personally "have lying around", which clearly isn't everyone's situation. However, though Black Friday deals and an AMD CPU and DVD drive I had lying around, I built a FreeNAS with all the other required parts (PSU, MOBO, 16GB of ECC RAM, 5x3TB HDD's, case, assorted cables, cheap GPU) for $950 that gives me 8TBytes of storage on a RAID-6. Is it at the level of an Equalogic or EMC solution? Certainly not. Is it affordable for someone who needs 8 real-world terabytes of storage? I've had a rough time finding something less expensive; the price can be brought down even more if less space was needed or if more parts could be re-used.

3.) FreeNAS itself is getting a bit big, I'll admit. ZFS has always been worse than Windows and Adobe combined in its ability to very effectively eat up whatever RAM is availed to it. Nas4Free (the more-open-source fork of FreeNAS after iXsystems bought them) is a bit better at hardware usage efficiency, but if you're using older hardware, you may find yourself better off not using ZFS. Conversely, the (1GB RAM)/(1TB Storage) rule isn't atrocious to hit if you're doing, say, a simple 3TB RAID-1 with a pair of drives and a motherboard that can support DDR2 RAM. Nas4Free uses about the same amount of RAM because it's also using ZFS, but it's going to give you slightly better throughput rates for older hardware. Similarly, a less powerful CPU is perfectly fine if you're okay with leaving compression off; I used a $35 Sempron processor in my old one flawlessly, albeit with ~55MBytes/sec over a gigabit LAN because I had compression on and was pegging the CPU during transfers.

4.) If you're doing a simple rsync on your exising setup, BT Sync runs on both Linux and BSD, and it uses a CLI/json config file / web GUI, so you can run it on your system even if it's a CLI-only box. Richard Stallman probably wouldn't because it's not FLOSS, but that's a matter of ideology, not what's technologically possible.

The difference between Live Mesh and BT Sync is that Sync is decentralized; stuff isn't stored on a hard disk that isn't yours. I find the performance hit to be difficult to measure, unless you intentionally tell it to do so (you can force it to high disk priority, which is helpful for the first sync on a LAN).

As far as conflicts go, I tend to use it in a somewhat conservative way - I always make the initial sync involve a blank folder; I've never synced two folders that are both pre-populated for the very reason you specify. To me, it's always made more sense to manually weed out the differences, since it will be more likely that I will be able to deduce the 'correct' version than not. Additionally, BT Sync gives both a read-only folder key and a read/write. By giving my NAS the read-only key, I'll never be wrong. Finally, BT Sync has a special folder where deleted files go, so 'oops' moments can be restored somewhat easily on either end.

PowerShell: Get-NetAdapter | select macaddress
Bash: /sbin/ifconfig | grep -Eo ..\(\:..\){5}

Which is shorter?
Which is more readable?
Which is more robust against changes (like new properties/columns)?
Which is more consistent across related commands?
Which is more discoverable?
Which is more extensible?

Note how the PowerShell version does *not* need to engage in string parsing, and how it does *not* need to rely on specific file content formats. The advantages of objects in the pipeline.

Btw, if you want PowerShell to output in the same metadata-stripped format as from bash/ifconfig, you can make the PowerShell command even shorter, without sacrificing readability:
PowerShell: (Get-NetAdapter).macaddress

Sorry, BS. PowerShell is a foundation technology in Windows, unlike VBScript. Since Windows 7, the troubleshooting packs are actually written in PowerShell! The troubleshooting utilities are automatically launched by the system when e.g. network problems occur.

PowerShell is every bit as COM capable as VBScript. PS uses a "unified" type system where multiple object models (COM, .NET, WMI etc) are surfaced as common PS objects.

VBScript is definitively legacy (and deprecated). I will actually wager a bet that there is not a single meaningful VBScript that could not be written shorter and more elegant with PowerShell.

I pasted (18*(567/23))+67 into the powershell prompt:

PS C:\Users\Me> (18*(567/23))+67
510.739130434783

PS C:\Users\Me>

That's brilliant!

Most bashers (no pun intended) miss several aspects of PowerShell simply because they view it as just another shell.

One such aspect is the fact that PowerShell is designed to operate directly with an application's core logic (the object model) whether that application was designed using COM or .NET. Virtually *all* of Window's features and even 3rd party applications for Windows are designed using one of those models. So the barrier to exposing the functionality to the CLI (PowerShell) is really, really low, and even older applications that predates PowerShell or that were never designed for PowerShell (like iTunes) lend themselves to CLI manipulation. Forget about needing to craft a suite of external CLI tools - your app is inherently exposed to command line manipulation.

Another often overlooked aspect is how PowerShell is designed to run in-process within an application. The CLI is just *one* possible host for PowerShell. Alas, you can add the PowerShell engine to your app and immediately leverage existing commands to manipulate the in-process memory objects of your application. So not only is it *easy* to expose your application to automation, you can actually take advantage of the PowerShell engine to save work for your own in-application automation. With workflow engine integration in PowerShell 3.0 (it is now at 4.0) this is a great way to orchestrate workflows activities in an easy-to-manage way.

Microsoft Security Essentials for the free stuff - I'd like AVG or Avast or Avira more if they weren't the Overly Attached Girlfriend of software.

ESET's NOD32 for the paid variety. It doesn't nag, it doesn't go nuts on your CPU or RAM, and it's very accurate.

Well, it sorta depends. Some variants do versioning; Acronis does this, and I think Carbonite does, too.

This is also true. However, the underlying point here is that there are different means of accounting for different kinds of failures. A RAID-1 means that you're screwed if you hit the 'delete' button, but a disk failure won't bit-bucket everything on the drive. Cloud syncing with a provider that enables versioning means that you can go back and fix an 'oops', but very few of them are going to give enough storage to do a multiversion backup of even a healthy-sized My Pictures folder without being expensive to the point that it's more cost effective to buy a Western Digital My Book World Edition or similar.

Personally, I use BitTorrent Sync to go to my FreeNAS box, which has 30 days worth of snapshots on the dataset containing the folders I sync, itself on a RAID-6. It's great, it's simple, it's free, it's fast on my LAN, it stores in real-time, and the storage on the NAS dwarfs that of my laptop.

If you have an iPhone/iPad/iPod, Apple.
If you have an Android phone/tablet, Google, and likely Samsung/HTC/Hawei/LG.
If you have a Windows Phone/tablet, Microsoft, and likely Nokia/HTC/Samsung.
If you watch movies on your phone, the MPAA.
If you play music on your phone, the RIAA.
If you have a data plan on your device, then AT&T/Verizon/Sprint/T-Mobile, or your regional MVNO.

It has been available for several years now. It is used in App-V to access applications running on a server but displaying it'a GUI in windows on the local machine. I don't think you can use app-based RDP in a client Windows to client Windows configuration, though.

It's not only about cost savings. You say that you do video editing; ever heard of a Black Magic Decalink card? They are awesome if you're doing real-time capture, or broadcast grade output in which you need an alpha channel or genlocking. They're also PCI-Express. How about a Matrix Mojito Max system? Sure, they've got offboard variants, but if you have one of those $1,500 PCI-Express cards, you can do an impressive amount of stacked effects that won't hit your CPU nearly as much as the bundled plug-ins. At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this thread, what about storage? The external Thunderbolt RAID arrays cost upwards of $1,000, and that's not including the cost of the drives. It sounds like you're doing this in a corporate setting so it's probably less of a thing in your situation, but delivering Blu-Ray discs or DVDs requires yet another off-board purchase.

Saving money is but one aspect of the equation. The other is the fact that there is some pretty nice - and expensive - hardware choices out there that either are only possible internally, or are possible externally at greater expense with little to no other benefit.

Additionally, as a guy who cut his teeth on a Premiere workflow myself, the switching editing platforms conundrum is an understandable one - because I would have similar issues moving over to Final Cut if I were to try to. The Adobe Production Studio has always come with some form of audio editing, be it either Soundbooth (single track audio mastering somewhat resembling Sound Forge or Wavelab) or Audition (most of Soundbooth's features, but also does multitrack editing and better 5.1 mastering). Still, there is plenty of value in muscle memory and previously done project files that isn't always obvious, so I do feel that.

All of that being said, yes I edit on Windows, and no, I haven't had a major issue with that...but that's also because I administer Windows systems professionally as well. I'm not at all suggesting that getting a Mac Pro was a bad idea in your specific case (existing knowledge, presumably existing copies of Final Cut), but "saving money" isn't the sole reason to get a Windows-based alternative. It's the combination of "exactly the hardware I need, even if it's not possible on a Mac", "ditching the hardware I don't, even if it's required on a Mac", and "between the two I can usually save a significant amount of money" that make a Windows system enticing.

P.S. To answer your question as to "who's going to stake their job on the PC working right", I know that Origin PC is incredible in that regard, and that B&H builds turnkey systems which also include some high quality support as well. Just throwing it out there that there are ways to have your cake and eat it, too.

I never intended to use OCZ drives :-P.

But seriously, I do understand that that's the case. It was a quick and dirty example, and it's really Pandora's box that can be sliced any number of ways. For example, a pair of 500GB drives is still cheaper than Apple's upgrade cost. For cost parity, My local Microcenter has had a healthy supply of refurbed Corsair M4's on the shelf for $130 a pop; you could buy half a dozen of them, plus an LSI RAID controller to connect 'em, and then you've got 1TB of storage in RAID-6. Also for just-a-smidge-higher-than-cost-parity, Samsung's got 1TB drives you can put in a RAID-1 in order to halve your expected failure rate, with a single drive still being hundreds of dollars cheaper than Apple's cost. All of this ignores the elephant in the room, that lots of people - including me, on the very computer on which I write this response - are very well taken care of with a 256GB system drive and a terabyte (or two, or three, or four) of spinning rust storage, which is obviously significantly cheaper than an all-or-nothing SSD approach.

The point I was trying to make is that the Mac Pro doesn't even have these as conceivable options. If you want a terabyte of storage, you're paying through the nose for it. If you want more than a terabyte, you'll need a thunderbolt cable. Depending on how much more storage you need (i.e. if you need some sort of storage tower to hold 4/6/8 drives [that could otherwise be fit, along with the rest of the computer, in a regular computer case]), you'll need to spend at least another $1,000 on one of those, and you'll still need drives on top of that. For all of this added expense, the benefit was the form factor, and ONLY the form factor.

The crux of the difference - and why the comparison is all but impossible to make - is the fact that you get to truly choose your parts, based on exactly what you need. Entry level Quadro card? $600 or so for one of them. Uncle-Sam-is-picking-up-the-tab model? $5,000 each, I think they support triple SLI.

64GB of ECC RAM? For a handful of use cases, sure. for the vast majority of workstation work? 16 or 32GB can usually suffice, and saves a whole lot of coin.

1TB of SSD? There's that...and then there's a quartet of 256GB SSDs with a spanned partition or RAID-0, possibly with another quartet of 3TByte SATA drives in a RAID5, the latter of which is possible with either no expenditure (depending on the motherboard), or limited expenditure (anywhere from an inexpensive host bus adapter to an IBM or Adaptec RAID controller), which still ends up being less expensive than having to get one of those Thunderbolt drive bay towers that cost twice the price of a half decent SATA RAID controller. Even without that, Thunderbolt drives made by LaCie are nearly double the price of internal Western Digital drives, and you'll still need to shell out $40-$60 for cables.

Super skinny case? Yeah, that's Apple's thing. Cases of every possible shape and size, anywhere from cheap, flimsy aluminum, to completely transparent plexiglass to neon lights to almost fully soundproofed to half a dozen case fans to having room for 13 hard drives or half a dozen Blu-Ray burners? Apple will never have that number of options.

The question of whether it's worth the cost really depends on what the business need is. If the business need is for cubic inches, then the Mac Pro is about the best desktop computing experience you're going to get per square inch. If any higher amount of storage is necessary, the pendulum quickly swings in favor of the PC route. If an optical drive is necessary (yes kids, there are video producers who still give DVDs or Blu-Ray discs to their clients), external drives are invariably more costly and slower than internal drives. If you've got something like a Presonus Firepod or any number of other Firewire peripherals (remember, Firewire was Apple's darling before Thunderbolt, so there's plenty of very expensive add-on gear that uses it), you're adding adapters for those on the Mac side, while plenty of PC motherboards still support it - and if they don't, a PCI(e) card that can support several pieces of hardware costs about the same as a single adapter from Apple.

The way I ultimately figure it is this: If Apple's product, as it ships, fits the bill, get it. No sense in spending time and money for redundant work. If you're looking for even the slightest amount of hardware variation, or you need any meaningful amount of onboard storage, or you can part with just a little bit of performance or the ECCness of its RAM or a nice GeForce card will fit your needs...it's incredibly trivial to avoid parting with that kind of money.