Jim said the same stuff during his keynote at the recent Red Hat Summit 2010. If you want to see it, watch the video here: http://www.redhat.com/videos/summit2010/Jim_Whitehurst.html

I really wanted this book since I'm a Druapl user and want to find out about the upcoming changes / features in Drupal 7. I found out that the Packt Publishing website has a special going... and I was able to pick up the electronic release for $9.99. I bought myself a copy. They let you download a PDF that has your name and address embedded in the footer of each page. I like to have printed copies so I fired it off to the laser printer. Great value. Of course you can order the print version, or the print / ebook combo from them too if desired.

I'm a long time Prince fanatic. I *LOVE* Prince's music but the stuff he says when not performing music, not so much. I'll admit that in many areas, Prince is a nut. Aren't most of us?

Anyway... I think his point about the Internet is that, generally speaking, there aren't a whole lot of artists making money off of their works by distributing them over the Internet. There are a few monopoly sites / services who are getting the Lion's share of the money. Yes, there are a number of free music systems, or donation music sites where you can donate or pay what you want, but not really what Prince is looking for.

As many of you already know, Prince was an early Internet pioneer... creating several music clubs online to distribute his music. I think his main reason for stopping those is that people have very little control / discipline when it comes to pirating his music. With a later iteration of his online music club DRM was added but what a major pain that was for the end user (speaking for myself). Music without DRM gets pirated too much, and music with it is painful.

While I believe media piracy acts as a superior form of marketing, I'm guessing it would be hard to convince Prince of that.

So, from one aspect... online media content distribution has become just as corrupted as the pre-online... with only a handful of players making most of the money and to a certain extent, dictating the terms... and I think that is what Prince is talking about... and I agree with him... although I am encouraged by many of the free/donation type sites. I think Prince should be one of the first major artists to distribute content via some of our preferred services that are primarily independent music... to see how it goes before he calls it quits. I mean, giving away your CD in a UK newspaper is going to help your sales (compared to non-DRM Internet-based, easily pirated delivery) how?

I think if Prince gave his fans a chance, they'd be happy to donate... and just maybe he'd do as well or better as those efforts from Radio Head and Nine Inch Nails.

Here is what I use for the classes I have run (two so far): A server running an OpenVZ kernel with a public IP address that can be accessed from on or off campus. Then I recommend making a course container with a public IP address and give each student a user account on that container.

Then create a container for each student with a private IP address. A simple iptables line will allow you to NAT the containers with a private IP address through the host node so each container can reach the outside world.

To access their containers students would just ssh into the course server and then ssh from there to their containers. Containers don't take up a whole lot of resources nor disk space compared to a full virtual machine.

That will provide you with a virtualized environment for each student where they have full root access, can install software, and if they screw it up somehow, you can easily repair or replace it. You aren't limited to what Linux distribution you can run in a container so if you want to give them access to multiple distros, you can.

Of course that only gives you a command line only environment which is suitable for a sysadmin type class (what I teach). If you absolutely need a GUI environment, you can easily install one or more desktop environments in your containers which would be accessible over the LAN with VNC. Routing private IPs over a LAN isn't too difficult, you'd just need a static route to the host node.

Of course you could do the same thing with KVM on a server but it would require a whole lot more resources.

If that still will not meet your requirements because they turned down a server-based solution, I'd recommend external USB hard drives. You can get a fairly large one for about $80 and you'll have way less problems than with LiveUSB media that tend to mess up easily. Then you can either run a regular OS from it OR uses it to store disk images for VirtualBox or whatever virt solution the students would have to use on their personal computer.

Yep, I definitely meant olpc... darn fingers. You don't think they are coming anytime soon? I don't have any inside information but I'm guessing within a year or less. Why? Because as Mary Lou points out, unlike many new technologies, her design doesn't use any new materials nor require any new manufacturing process... as they use existing materials and can be made in existing plants. They are going to be inexpensive too... and available on netbooks initially I would guess. What more could you want?

Have you seen the videos on oplc.tv of the new screen technology coming? Much cheaper and better... no special materials or new manufacturing facilities needed.