There are many factors that go into selecting an appropriate hardware specification for any given task; and the final specification will vary greatly depending on a particular environment, budget and time available to accomplish the task. In general, however, the things that need to be considered are: the speed of the processor, the amount of memory, size of the local hard drives, network connectivity, the video card and the display. Depending on the development projects to be undertaken, additional devices such as modems, sounds cards and the like will also need to be considered.

The three situations that we will consider are a single developer working on a project alone, a distributed environment in which multiple developers are accessing a single machine via remote log-on (telnet, ssh or X-Windows), and a distributed environment utilizing a software repository.

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