I just hosted Richard Stallman at my university (http://csee.wvu.edu/rms video coming soon). After the lecture was finished a student asked him "What can I do to be a better programmer" to which he responded "Learn LISP."

I can say from my experience with the language, that RMS, ESR, and PG are all right. Learn LISP. It will change how you think.

Here at WVU in the CS department we run everything on linux. Most of the greater campus is penguin friendly. There's two clubs here working to make the campus even more interoperable with linux.

I'm downloading the x64 Jaunty Beta right now via bit torrent at a rate of 2 MB/sec. I'm saturating my 16 Mbps connection :-)

To continue...

You can reverse your configuration options, apply what I'm saying abstractly.

Have a blanket DENY option. Then when you find a friend you can add them specifically. Much simpler than having to start blocking the internet.

For example, on my personal wiki page I have registration set to disabled right now. When I find a friend needs access I enable registration.

Furthermore, to avoid some of the /. effect you could protect the actual pages. The entire contents of the folders storing your board HTML and code could be authorization required.

I agree with request tracker. If you are a professional at what you do and take your job seriously you won't have problems with RT performance. Configuring and tuning your RT instance will be crucial.

DocBook sounds like you could benefit from it a lot. It's a standardized XML namespace (http://www.docbook.org/) which allows you to use the more popular XSLT stylesheets. AND you can put a customization layer on top of that should you want.

You'll typically transform from XML to TeX and then to any of the 98234098409234 other formats that tex can be exported into.

I saw the headline before I saw the photograph and my first thought was "I bet some Asian guy made that."

Imagine my surprise when I saw the photograph....

Let me back up. The majority of educational software is now web-based. 90% of middle and high school computer usage is either web based or using a dedicated word processor. It's not the Asus specifically that has us interested, but the concept. If you've seen the Asus, it's really more like a web appliance. The average person would look at it the same way they look at the iPhone or an ATM machine... they don't know or care what the OS is underneath.

So for education, this could be huge. As competition increases and these devices get down to $199, the previously expensive idea of "one laptop per child" does not seem so expensive any more. There are three groups of people who need to be paying close attention to this: Microsoft, Apple, and Textbook makers.

Put this together with education's interest in "Web 2.0," aka "The Read/Write Web" where all your school books and files are available to you online anywhere, and you're brewing up the perfect storm. Apple should be working on a device of their own right now, if they're smart, and Microsoft.... Microsoft should be praying.