Just started a 1 year foreign exchange program to a country I've never visited. It's back to school (4th year uni) but feels like a fresh start. I've only been here 3 weeks so everything still feels shiny and new. Forget that this country has terrible winters and no money. Travel while you can!

I've never understood why distributing binaries has been a bad idea. Sure, having the source available is fantastic, but why is that diametrically opposed to binary distribution? Sometimes it's nice not having to compile everything from source, and especially for this use case. It's the same software compiled for the same platform. Compiling once and distributing the binary patch makes more sense than to send out a diff file and require a recompilation. Not every machine running google chrome is a development machine with all required libraries. If you want the source it's available. Why attack this method of updates? Isn't open source about choice and multiple solutions?

I have a Computer Science professor (her field of focus is data mining) who insists on installing bonzai buddy on every machine she encounters. She likes having the purple monkey tell her jokes and remember her passwords. She complains that she can't find it online, so she carries a copy of the installer on a thumb drive. At a presentation by one of her star grad students a few years back, bonzai buddy was introduced as an example of modern spyware. She left the room and later had a stern talking to him about. c She's even managed to install it on one of the room administrative consoles (the ones for lights, blinds, and projectors). I can't tell who that reflects worse on. Anyways, just because she's clueless at the IT side of computing doesn't mean she's completely inept with computers. It's a varied enough field that there's sufficient room for people from all walks of technical prowess. It's a shame there's no drivers license for computing... -Z

My web development class does exactly this. We were given a debian image with apache, mysql, php, and a whole host of other configured libraries. We do our development in the image, and then submit it to our professor. It avoids all the little incompatibilities with browsers (only browser in the image is FF3), and different library settings, and if there are any changes made (i.e. xdebug, pdo), they're present on submission.

I know that anecdotes do not constitute evidence, but I've had the opposite experience as you. Back when I used to run WinXP as my primary OS, it would bluescreen out (no message. just 1280x1024x0x00F) every eight hours. I chalked it down to a bad graphics card, but Ubuntu would keep going for weeks at a time. I eventually ditched Ubuntu too, but (in *nix land) a GUI is seperate from the core OS. Between screen and top, I've never had the command line lock up on me.