Yeah...because I want to tell you how to train the future labor that will take my job when it gets outsourced.

Uhhh..I mean...yeah...teach them...Fortran...and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Those are useful skills. Novell Netware (and Groupwise) administration is also big. Active Directory is just a passing fad.

I do two spaces, except on my iPhone. It does one space automatically after double tapping the space bar for a period. Oh...and I still do the tab indents when I code (which is pretty rare anymore...my C++ is so rusty it belongs in a scrap heap).

Well actually there is cake in the permanent sense. It has always and will always exist as an idea. However it can be - given the proper circumstances - a lie.

I'm actually okay with this depending on how it gets implemented. If I've got to pay money to go to the next level (for example) I want the game to cost less to begin with. Maybe I buy a new PS3 game for $20, but to actually finish the game I'll have to pony up an additional $30-$40 by the time I'm done. This could also have some real interesting repercussions for the used market. Considering that you would be buying the basic game, but a someone buying a used copy may still need to buy all of the DLC in order to actually complete the game.

That's a good point. I was watching liveblogs of the keynote and I had the same initial response. I just forgot about my initial reaction until I read your comment.

It's all just marketing speak anyway. It IS a higher-resolution display, but giving it a name like "retina" to a display is just the marketing guys trying to make you think that you won't notice any pixelation. That being said it is a better looking display than what's on the 3G/3GS. I think it's also likely that the average person won't notice much pixelation on the new display anyway.

My machine choice for my computer labs is based on application availability. Some of the software used by the academic programs I support is only available on Windows so I'd just be loading Windows on the Macs anyway if I bought them. If I could go all OS X and not have to worry about Boot Camp I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Well I use Macs (plus my dad works for Apple), but I do mainly Windows support for a living. I'm an IT Manager at a University and I support about 200 faculty, 12 computer labs, and manage a whole slew of servers - by myself. If I didn't have good deployment strategies in place I'd have jumped off the roof of a Foxconn building long ago.

Since none of my computer labs are Mac-based my knowledge of networking technology and deployment strategies have to be based on Windows. I'd switch to Macs if I could during my summer lab rebuilds, but I'd just be putting Windows on them anyway. I spent a lot of time looking at my options and it just wasn't cost effective considering the existing investments in software and infrastructure.

While I'm a confessed Apple zealot I'd go with PCs running XP. It's the more common, more supported platform. A lot more of the "industry standard" type of applications will be running on PCs running either Windows or Linux. In the computer labs I support we're replacing all of the machines this summer, and I toyed with going Mac, but it just doesn't fit the educational needs of the students software-wise. Not to mention support for any sort of specialized hardware.

As far as the concerns from your network admins go - tell them to find a good hardware independent imaging solution. There are some great products out there that do this type of thing. I'm partial to Altiris (now Symantec) Deployment Solution. It can kill the hardware abstraction layer and then drops in replacement drivers based on the hardware it's imaging. It runs over the network and images via PXE boot and I've heard of a lot of places that use it in pretty spread out setups (thousands of machines in far-flung locations). It scales extremely well and in cases where you do need specialized drivers for things like video cards or other special equipment they do provide a way to install those drivers. Although if you're using Novell Netware it really causes problems - in which case you'd want to look at Zenworks but it's definitely not as easy to use as Deployment Solution (works great with Active Directory though). I've been using it since the beginning of this year and I love it. I've got 12 labs of varying sizes to maintain and I only have to keep up one base image. Each lab has a scripted OS install setup that installs any special software that's needed in the lab. It's also handy to be able to reimage the labs overnight and not have to wait for semester breaks to update software.

Well if you ask the movie studios and big music labels that's exactly what they'd say.

I work at a university where we use McAfee anti-virus as our corporate AV. Guess what I've been doing all morning?

Oh...I forgot to mention that this is all network-based imaging. Deployment Solution works via PXE booting to a WinPE image. You can use Linux as your boot image, but the WinPE image Symantec supplies seems to work best based on what I've read on their forums.