Read that post again, this time in Ron Perlman's voice.

Where I once had a rotation of 1 or 2u racks, I now have a couple of i7 Mac Minis (with several external dual drive LaCie's in mirrored mode) running VMWare.

As I traded my consulting gig for straight employment a few years ago, I'm housing far less data, too... Nas4Free for files/media, VPN for when I'm at work (which is funny, because as soon as I'm home I VPN into work...), MySQL, GLPi and Calibre.

Other than that, I've got my workstation (probably my last custom build....) in my home office, a couple of Pi's running XBMC and my ever present MacBook Air.

You know it. Carts before horses. Every year is something new and last year's new just isn't sexy enough to revisit.

We're a big operation with a small shop. I'll be wrapped in this duct tape for quite a while.

Depends on the framework... we use Brainhoney which integrates pretty well with Google Docs; which is fortunate for us as we're rolling out a pretty extensive 1:1 Chromebook initiative this year.

Don't take that as a rebuttal to your point, though -- we lucked out, truth be told. It's not as if we planned that to begin with, it was merely a happy coincidence.

As a result, we're modeling our blended learning programs around the idea of the Chromebook/Google Drive as a tool to collect and prepare content and our labs as a place to create the final presentation: Content is prepared on the go and assembled (if need be) in a lab. Of course, the side effect to all this is transitioning to a Google district (zero to ~50k accounts over the last week) and the sanity of that is up for debate.

It's also meant a myriad of third party solutions to be brought in... Gaggle (email and document discovery), Hapara (teacher dashboard), integration with our SIS, synchronizing AD with Google for accounts and passwords... all so we can transition from cheap laptops/netbooks to cheaper Chromebooks.

Sorry, rambling. Early morning coffee... I now live, breathe and eat Google. Quite a change from the last few years of iPads (and, in certain ways, welcome -- at least there are real tools available for management!).

Best of luck to your daughter. Stay involved; the whole on online learning game is a new one.

No, you don't.

I've created thousands of iTunes accounts and I just bashed out 70 Monday morning (I'm an Apple sysadmin with over 4 thousand iPads in a large school district, no underlings, minions or temps at my disposal. How I wish Apple would allow for a simple .csv import to create accounts...).

You don't even need to specify a "free" account as it now defaults that way -- as long as you begin the process by "buying" a free app. All you need is an email address to receive the verification email.

My workflow starts with iBooks. It's free, so the follow up "payment options" is defaulted to "None" when building the account itself.

I respectfully disagree. With the persistent sway of legal favouritism toward corporate entities, not private citizens, now is precisely the time to worry.

Ben Croshaw (aka Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation) also does an admirable job; to the point of questioning how video games can achieve the status of art when so many AAA producers refuse to break away from bad television cliches.

Back on topic, never having known the man (Roger Ebert, that is), I'm still saddened by his passing. He was a standard in his field -- and always appeared to approach his task with professionalism and genuine integrity. Regardless of whether I agreed or disagreed with his final view, I managed to respect him for his efforts.

..and you can use Terminology to edit that Hosts file, too.

Who'd have thought this troll would have an actual reference point to a submission...

Somewhere between the two was YDL on a first gen G4. Yaboot was a piece of cake, throw Windowmaker on post install. All the goodness I needed until OS X got up to speed.

That was a sexy G4 back in '00.

Yup, YDL first, too. Kept it going until my old Yikes G4 bit the dust.

Got the buzz and went Redhat on x86 from there for a bit, then Debian, played with Gentoo during my Debian days and then realized my Debian days would probably never end.

So far, they haven't.

Dude, I didn't roll a lawful/good character. Deal with my chaotic/evil ways. :P

Not really the case. InstaDMG, DeployStudio and Munki will get you quite far down the road without a dollar spent and not much by way of a headache.

Yeah, pretty much.

My work life is primarily OS X (read: ARD and a crap load of ssh sessions) on the desktop and a fair mixture of Linux and OS X Server in the rack (I've still got a couple of Xserves...). Home is a fair mix of Win 7, OS X and Linux (FreeBSD if you count FreeNAS, but you probably shouldn't as it just sits and runs without interference).

Booting into Win 7, I get an immediate jolt of discomfort. Apps run as expected (stable and mostly sane), but I feel weird having to reach for Putty to get into my comfort zone. This is much less pronounced with a *nix box, but if I invoke a GUI (outside of WMaker or wmii), it feels... flimsy, cheap.

I despise so much of Apple's direction and philosophy; but damn it all. They make a slick OS that's downright comfortable.

Jesus.

The educational market doesn't focus on Linux, hell, they barely focus on Macs (disturbingly, although not surprisingly, they are all over the iOS band wagon; which is why I'll have four thousand of iPads by fall).

We have all kinds of state mandates as to what is taught and how dollars are spent (i.e. state approved vendors). Tech in education is NOT what many of us grew up with. The day of a mismashed C64/A2 lab held together with duct tape by a volunteer group of kids playing D&D every afternoon are over. Because kids cutting their teeth learning to write a program that accesses a flat text file, draw a moire pattern on the screen and other activities that teach basic concepts are over.

Primary tech is all about Lexia, Compass, First in Math and the like. It's a bunch of crap, substandard, third party software thrown onto a SMART board. It's got zero to do with life prep, it has everything to do with reinforcing the drill and test mentality while building brand loyalty.

I love Linux. I'm at my most comfortable with a fresh Debian netinstall and moving on from there. But this is education we're talking about. If it isn't "media rich", "Web 2.0 ready!", "Cloud enabled for a dynamic user experience!" or whatever bullshit catch phrase that is being spewed this week, it doesn't go anywhere.

Maybe my district is just too big. Perhaps this kind of idealism really is still possible in a small district (in which case, I need to find a new fucking job). But in my experience thus far, K-12 has turned into prestage for Corporate America. If it's not being used in the cubicle farm, it's got slim chance in the primary educational market.

It's all about numbers. Just trade profit margin for graduation percentages -- and if your numbers aren't high enough, prepare to have your funding cut.

Sigh.

How often do you really need gigabit?

Every time I expect a policy for a system reimage to succeed.