agreed. I do this and use ESXi, and it's a great little setup. The only problem I've had is making sure to use supported hardware. If you use an intel motherboard you should be good to go. Just check to make sure the storage controller is supported. Most of the intel based stuff is (hence, the suggestion to just get one of their boards). If you want to be able to install a card and direct it at a particular VM, make sure you get a board that supports VMDirectPath (or something like that). That's the VMware name, I think in the BIOS it tends to be called VT-d for intel boards, or IOMMU on amd boards. VT-x is the support for virtualization in the CPU.

As for the other virtualization options. I've tried doing this in my setup with VirtualBox. It's nice I guess, but you have the problem of the host OS needing maintenance too. Xen and KVM might not be as bad, but again there is some host maintenance. Personally I've never had trouble with VMware products and have always found them to be the easiest to accomplish what you want, and ESXi is free and has a crap-ton of features. Don't forget you'll never interact with this other than to setup your VM's.

Finally, RAM is cheap these days, especially the DDR3 stuff. 8GB is nice, 16GB might be better depending on how much "testing" you wanna be able to do at once. Hard drives are equally cheap these days. A couple of 1-2TB's should do you well enough. The beauty of virtualization is that you can "pause" machines and shuffle them depending on the work you wanna do with the machine.

I can't say I agree with the decisions, but no one who's lived in Florida can say they didn't see this coming.

Schools here seem to be going in the direction of privatization. Current plans have whole-school futures pegged on the results of their english test scores. Music, math, etc... all funding hinging on a single subject, which is just a mechanism to make the schools look bad so they can push for closing the public schools. Once the schools go private, parents won't have a choice but to give up their kids' rights in order to get them into school. It's going to be a matter of contract.

Sure, there will be public schools left, but they're not gonna be in nearly the same shape as they are now. And they're not exactly in good shape now. With the funding going towards vouchers for private schools, we'll see safety and standards continue to drop. Private schools will be allowed to take all the disciplinary action public schools can't which will make them seem like cathedrals next to their public bretherin. Your kid get slapped? You have a problem with it? You really wanna send them to *gasp* public school?

Can't really blame them either. A number of my friends are teachers. They get attacked (yes, ATTACKED) by students that are sometimes bigger than them, and they are explicitely told that they cannot raise a hand to stop a student that's attacking them. They are expected to take everything a student has to dish out for fear that any other behavior will get them fired.

Parents are a whole nother problem. Most of them get upset when schools bother them during the day about their kids. The ones that do care about their kids really only care about their kids being happy. They often will refuse to believe that there could be anything wrong with their kid and will refuse to discipline them at all. When their kid fails a class they'll take it up with the principle and create such a fuss that the teacher is forced to pass the student on when they shouldn't. A number of teachers have become apathetic about the whole process, but who can blame them when they're paid hardly anything to deal with seemingly psychopathic children on a daily basis.

Fingerprinting may be a really bad decision, and I certainly wouldn't want my kid going through that. But given the way parents here treat the schools, it almost seems like the only way to make sure students are where they're supposed to be. When it's all private, we won't have a choice because the state isn't doing it. And if you want your kid to have a decent education, you'll put up with it.

Was gonna suggest this as well. Depending on how feature packed and recent the laptop is, you likely have the makings for a sexy little media player.

I have an AppleTV running Jaunty + XBMC... the AppleTV is a 1Ghz Pentium M class CPU, 256 meg ram, 40 gig 4200 RPM laptop drive... If I can run a well behaved media player on this that can handle up to 720p video... anyone can :-)