We consolidated about 20ish old servers (and added new systems) in to two Dell R720xds that are VM hypervisors. Not only does this save on power n' cooling but it is way faster, more reliable, and flexible. It is much easier and faster to rebuild and stand up a VM, you can snapshot them before making changes, if we need to reboot the hypervisor or update firmware we can migrate VMs over to the other host so there's no downtime. Plus less time is wasted on admining them since there are less systems, and they are newer.

On top of that they have good support contracts, and some excellent reliability features that you didn't get on systems even 5ish years ago (like actively scanning HDDs to look for failures).

Big time win in my book. Now does that mean we rush out and replace them with new units every year? No, of course not, but when the time comes that they are going out of support, or more likely that usage is growing past what they can be upgraded to handle, we'll replace them with newer, more powerful, systems. It is just a much better use of resources.

To paraphrase Syndrome: When everyone's impacted by everyone's compile, no-one is.

Also, find me something other than a full kernel compile that takes measurable amounts of time on a real machine.

Short answer, smallpox control has never really been that good. Also an answer - each government wants to keep the only supply as a potential weapon.

This is hilarious. So was in College several decades ago. Large computer labs and lots of SSH/X forwarding to do work. The only time I remember getting in "trouble" was when we were on a LISP module as a freshman. Their resource management only allowed a few LISP interpreters on the machine - otherwise it would deny them for resource reasons. I quickly got sick of typing $lisp and waiting for my session to actually start - so I created a shell script that ran an infinite loop asking for a lisp interpreter...
15 minutes later, someone tapped on my shoulder and asked me what I was doing - I had taken the full processing capabilities for a while. I showed my script - gasp horror, and a 1 second pause was added to the script and I was good to go. Learned a lesson too.
The year before I got there - enough people were learning how to hack the system to crash it that they were having trouble keeping the system up. Their solution - install a button next to each keyboard that when pushed would crash the system. No work was accomplished for a week - then it didn't go down again. We were told about the button, it was rough for a couple days - and then the systems were rock solid.
Kids will be kids - good kids will create a nightmare for you - work to focus that energy in a positive way and good things will result.

The article linked in the summary requires you to answer survey questions or post it to your google+ / facebook before you can read it.

Don't put up with that crap. It's even worse than forcing you to watch advertisements before reading something. Filter out pcpro.co.uk with your hosts file or whatever other method instead.

Seems like you are trying to work out a solution to a problem you don't have yet. Maybe first see if users are just willing to play nice. Get a powerful system and let them have at it. That's what we do. I work for an engineering college and we have a fairly large Linux server that is for instructional use. Students can log in and run the provided programs. Our resource management? None, unless the system is getting hit hard, in which case we will see what is happening and maybe manually nice something or talk to a user. We basically never have to. People use it to do their assignments and go about their business.

Hardware is fairly cheap, so you can throw a lot of power at the problem. Get a system with a decent amount of cores and RAM and you'll probably find out that it is fine.

Now, if things become a repeated problem then sure, look at a technical solution. However don't go getting all draconian without a reason. You may just be wasting your time and resources.

What kind of real environment allows boot from a USB drive?

Only pussies use sudo.

...if it is, it's more a symptom than cause.
I believe it's societies in which the economically optimal behavior is cheating.

In Socialist East Germany as many have posted here anecdotally, the system was so broken that cheating - going outside the formal rules of the system - was the only way to get many basic and preferred needs met.

This is endemic to CORRUPT societies, not just socialist ones.

For cheating to be optimal, you have to have two elements:
- a system that gives people motivation to break the rules AND (importantly)
- an alternative - a black market, corrupt officials, etc - that is workable.

I'd argue that *any* overbureaucratic society will eventually reach this point.
Capitalism - insofar as it mitigates the issue - allows people to DIRECTLY follow their self-interest, without having to 'cheat' around the system.
I'd argue that the conflicted desire of the US populace for ever-greater safety-nets and protection by the government (and thus control) will likewise ever-more incentivize cheating in precisely the same way.

Let's check America in about 5-10 years (give it time to settle in), and then we can confirm that it's independent of socialism.

He probably booted you from the project when you failed to spell his name right.

Slavishly reimplement millions of models in the new medium's physical construction...

You make it sound like implementing one million cells in software is a million times more difficult than implementing just one.

Doesn't your phone provider get cranky about your "unlimited" use of the 4G?

No monthly bandwidth limit on FiOS, up or down. It has been that way for years.

Call me when I can get more than 3 Mbps. Bastards.