I work with my university's RoboCuphttp://www.robocup.org/ team. We've been looking at Microsoft Robotics Studio http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/learn/default.a spx for doing a lot of our simulation (since it incorporates a plethora of features, and a great physics engine, and because Microsoft give us lots of *bling*).
The thing that struck me most while going over the studio was it's great tie-ins to real Lego robots, namely the old Mindstorms and the new NXT. It's pretty exciting and a great way for people to get into serious robotics without all the hassle of machining parts, soldering electronics, and programming firmware. Definitely a cool product.
In my mind, the issue here is not what the product was, or if it was acceptable. Because, this would be fine if it were private Coast Guard dollars paying for the boats. The issue is if tax dollars, gleaned from the hard working citizens, were squandered on a goverment program intended to protect the people, and the people end up not being protected either because of government inefficacy, or corporate greed. That is the real question.
I find myself torn after reading the issue. Obviously, what hacker 1069 is doing is good and aiding the authorities by stopping the exploitation of children. However, his means are questionable as well as those of the authorities.
What if third party multinationals are allowed to hack into US systems to aid in the capture of terrorists? Obviously, there was a large amount of evidence provided that made sure the pedophiles being caught were definitely guilty, but couldn't evidence just as likely be planted?
What's even more concerning is that this person doesn't seem to be a third party hacker from Istanbul, but an American citizen (note the american telephone number). If this is the case, isn't this a message saying vigilantism (which strikes at the very base of authority, the fact that it is only the government that is allowed to use force against it's citizens) is accepted? If it is accepted in catching pedophiles, which is a pretty black and white case, what about when it enters the gray areas? What about when it starts being entangled with constitutional rights? (Due process of law seems to be a big one involved).
I believe the authorities involved might very easily have started on a slippery slope. Who knows where it will lead? How much do we value due process? How much do we value freedom? How much do we value results, irregardless of how they were gotten?
But remember:
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
Did you read the study? About how it was difficult to compare legacy games to modern ones, about how games rated for different age groups should be evaluated differently, and that well... her suggestions to the House really weren't that ridiculous? (The ESRB play the video games first then rating them.)
I mean... just asking. It just seems a little crude to make vague threats against people that you don't know, for things you only thought they did. Unless you truly believe the ESRB is the perfection of the video game rating system, is it really too much to read someone else's work and insights, and try to understand what they're promoting before your random sputterings?
And actually, these "stupid video games" which millions of children play and have become a new form of mass media, is a pretty important topic for a lot of citizens. At this rate, you'll likely be waiting for your PhD for a long time...
Oh, and just my personal opinion. You deserve your foot 100% in your mouth.
I don't get how appending more X's, T's and the occasional G to ever increasing numbers help me understand the capabilities of a card... except that it's *Awesome* and I HAVE to buy it!
Not neccessarily issues. What if they live in rural Kansas? What if local friends are still a 7 miles away? Or, what if they live in New York and they live in Queens, and their friends in Manhatten? What if they live in Florida, and all their neighbors are 70 yr. old retirees. As people become increasingly mobile, and suburban sprawl ever increases... we will see less and less of all your friends living on the same street. As geographical location becomes less of an issue in life, they also become less of an issue in making friends.
Your friends are your friends because of who they are, not because of where they live. Should we really make it more difficult for our kids by saying that he/she should play with Johnny instead of Suzy because Johnny lives down the street? Even if Johnny is an asshole? And besides, I'm not sure increased parental involvement in the friend-making department of your life ever really helps. If that's needed, you're probably (at least somewhat) socially awkward and parents aren't going to help.
It's not whether the child can survive or not without a cell phone. They obviously, physically, can. But the question is that if this is a neccessary thing to do. When the punishment doesn't fit the crime, you breed confusion... or worse. Resentment.
But in all seriousness... consider this. The cell phone is the primary method of communication for many young individuals. It's the way to instantly access their friends. It's mobile. It's easy, and pretty damn cheap. It's how a teenager keeps in touch with friends (and to a lesser extent, family). Although other methods obviously exist (IM, email), they are not nearly as omnipresent (how many kids do you know that have a blackberry?), and aren't immediately answered (it's harder to avoid a call than to forget about an email). Taking that away from a child, especially one that is physically distanced from his/her friends... could easily be placing them in a state of confinement, especially if internet priviledges and so forth are also revoked.
If you start seeing it from this sense, you realize that you're essentially putting the child into digital solitary confinement. It might only be during the evenings, after school... but at that age the child is so dependent on the presence and company of friends, even when they're all doing absolutely nothing, it might very well seem like torture. If this "torture" is not of absolute neccessity (no cell phone for a week, because you didn't take the trash out!) or doesn't reinforce a point, or is punishment that's unreleated to the crime... and chosen only because that's "what hurts"... isn't that a little cruel? Even... abusive?
I personally believe that using the term "child abuse" is a little strong, but we should also realize and respect the importance that cell phones and other communication devices play in the lives of our children, and then act accordingly.
Actually, in some of the deer infested portions of the world (like Northern Minnesota, where I'm from), it isn't unheard of for the traffic accident to involve the deer hitting you... not you hitting the deer. You might very well have just stopped the car, and it's just then that the deer decides to bolt across the road. Into your passenger side door. They're truly brilliant animals. (This is obviously a corner case).
However, you also miss the fact that driving at a certain speed could be much to slow for safety. For example, note the minimum speeds on interstate highways. Although it is almost always the case that accidents can be avoided with increased attention paid to road safety laws... the speed isn't neccessarily too high.
What you start arguing at the end gets a little ridiculous.
No accidents are caused by stationary cars travelling at zero mph... apart from stopping on level crossings, airport runways etc. And even then, if the plane or train was going slower could it have stopped in time?
Yes... it is true that if two objects exist at different physical locations will not collide... and that having different velocities will contribute to them not being at a physical location (at a particular point in time) that would allow a colloision... but doesn't the argument get a little trite there?
"You lose 3D, sound, and most of them run a bit slower than native."
Not quite true. Yes, with the 3D. But the two main players (VMware and VPC) both support sound, and VMware even USB 1.1 passthrough.
With the thin-client option, Microsoft Terminal Services (if you're on a windows platform) has good scaling capabilities. Though it might not go into the hunderds or thousands, it should get you into the high dozens. Since most of the microsoft tool's dlls are loaded and shared between the clients, it has pretty good performance.
It'll be difficult to have a fully virtualized solution. Going with thin clients, or a pxe-served image would be a more viable solution (no matter how beefy your servers and fast your network).
"Any changes, and I mean any changes to the base configuration of the computer the user is sitting at result in unforseeable and often nightmarish problems with the virtual machine."
But the VM sits a-top... VMware or VPC... Unless you break those (and they're pretty solid applications), how does the VM break? Where is the abstraction barrier crossed?
I've personally had good experiences with both linux and windows machines, running in both VMware or VPC. I've found that the linux machines are kinder about freeing memory, while windows seems to want to keep it around for possible future use (not a bad ploy). Other than the lack of virtual machine additions on VPC for linux, both work pretty decently (when critical performance isn't neccessary).
Oh, and these Mac VMs you speak of... they don't really exist. Unless you count that leaked Mac OSX x86 image floating around on the torrent sites.
If there was a reason that the windows vms broke, please share it. I'm curious.
Why not just have a PXE server on hand to quickly and easily image your computers over the network? If a system goes down, it'll take only a few minutes to image it with a sysprepped base install and bring it back. Acronis SnapDeploy http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/snapdep loy/ provides this functionality quite handily, bundling the PXE server and image deployment in one nice little package. This is quite a viable solution if you don't have too many hardware platforms to support, or one need a few basic images of a locked down XP workstation.
With VM's, aside from the bandwidth and performance considerations, realize that the host machine could just as easily go down. Then you're stuck again. Though this is less likely, it is a possibility. If you do decide to go this route, do consider cacheing the downloaded VM between sessions (so the mass download every morning doesn't happen).
I've heard of a company, Moka5 http://www.moka5.com/, attempt to do something similar. I'm not sure what their status is, but it might be something to look into for the future.
Though this is an interesting idea, there are a number of detractions. I'm a huge fan of virtualization, and have found it great for development, testing, and on server platforms. Rolling it out on desktops as primary workstations seems a bit ambitions. However, I still wish you the best of luck.
As a college student, it definitely seems like a cool competition. It isn't neccessarily for the money as much as it for the possible prestige. Perhaps this matters less to professionals with "better things to do with their time".
Also, if you register, there's a place to upload your resume. This seems like a good way to possible create an opening for a future job...What better way to recruit than a programming competition?
From TFA:
One question we get is if this works in the US. Yes, it does.
It looks like just a PPTP connection to a Swedish ISP, doling out some Swedish IP addresses. I'm curious as to the speed the service offers. What's the pipe feeding into Relakks?
The issue isn't so much Active Directory (as I implied, I apologize), but GPOs. The only article I was able to find that allowed a GPO to be applied to Macs was this: ahref=http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/06/07/centr ify.directcontrol/rel=url2html-5780http://www.macn n.com/articles/06/06/07/centrify.directcontrol/>. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
If this is the only way to control how users use their computers (which usually is company property), then it seems like an extraneous investment on top of the premium that's already been paid for the shiny design and good hardware (which is worth it for some, but perhaps not ever workstation amongst hundreds or thousands). This might sound like the paranoia of a control freak, but that's often the way an IT department usually acts. Users inevitably shoot themselves in the foot.
Though I'm not a Microsoft fanboy by any means, I've always found their IT administration tools well designed, intuitive, and easy to tie together.
Unfortunately, user stupidity is something IT constantly has to worry about. Imagine if you're the IT Director, and the President has just locked the annual budget reports in an encrypted vault. It's somewhat difficult to just point a finger at him and laugh.
Though Mac OSX has some great features, and is a fine operating system, it does not support some of the niche software and does not have the capabilities to be deployed in a company of hundreds, or thousands of computers. There could very well been issues with the filevault had it been deployed in corporate environments en-mass. Tools like Active Directory is absolutely crucial to running most IT infrastructures, as is controlling user access to the server and their own computer.
One of the key goals of an IT department is to make it impossible for the user to screw up their system, not to say "nope. we don't support that" when someone makes an error, which is inevitable.
I find your post somewhat naive. What you're suggesting isn't practical or realistic. It just isn't how departments of any sizable company work. To allow "Joe to crack his thumb with the hammer" might very well leave systems vulnerable to outside attack, or allow precious company data to be lost. Just because Joe was stupid doesn't mean that the consequences of his actions will be acceptable.
Instead, it would make more sense to have such a feature off by default (in Corporate versions), and easily controlled through GPOs in the Active Directory. Another option is when it's enabled, an additional key is created and stored by the IT department, preferably on a backed-up drive inaccessible to everyone.
Brilliant. Good quick synopsis. Much of what being taught today in college doesn't belong in only one of the the subfields, whether it be EE, CS, or ME. Instead, a lot of the focus is trying to get students to work across fields, and play with systems integration. This is one of the exciting parts of the RoboCup competition, especially in the small sized league.
Future work, for both money and glory, will likely require you to be much more than a code monkey, and instead require knowledge of how to create components of larger systems, and then integrate them seamlessly into a larger solution. By providing a way to see how a practical end is possible from vague beginnings (which CS most definately is for the uninitiated), this is definately a cool project.
I was running workstation before, and am now trying server. I can't seem to find many glaring differences, except that the server management console offers the ability to connect to and administrate another machine running vmware server (whereas the workstation version implicitly assumes localhost). Hope that helps.
Yes, VPC can run a variety of Linux distributions and is very useful for testing code, or having a secondary operating system. See this http://vpc.visualwin.com/ for the full list of supported platforms. However, VMware workstation is still much more configurable and powerful (though not free) and will allow you to run almost every x86 operating system completely unmodified.
But you're installing it on a virtual machine, one that is seen as a completely different computer by the OS and, also by licensing. Think about it for a second.... Alright, now take in account for how virtualization is often used, to run a lot of server-class operating systems (Windows Server 2003) on a gigantic hardware setup, and it really doesn't become that absurd anymore. The hardware and the operating system are completely seperate, and you're really paying for an instance of using the operating system. That's why you can use the OS again if you choose to upgrade to a new computer.
Oh, and by the way, Office and ofther Microsoft products are usually licensed by machine, not install, (not always, since it can also be done by the number of users in a corporation). So you can install it as many times as you want, but doing so in the different virtualized environments might cost you.
Slashdot Mirror
doesn't mean you lose your rights. Your rights to privacy or anything else. What Fortuny did was clearly malicious, illegal, and sociopathic.
It doesn't matter that the people who responded were foolish. That's a red herring. That doesn't make what was done any more acceptable.
I work with my university's RoboCuphttp://www.robocup.org/ team. We've been looking at Microsoft Robotics Studio http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/learn/default.a spx for doing a lot of our simulation (since it incorporates a plethora of features, and a great physics engine, and because Microsoft give us lots of *bling*).
The thing that struck me most while going over the studio was it's great tie-ins to real Lego robots, namely the old Mindstorms and the new NXT. It's pretty exciting and a great way for people to get into serious robotics without all the hassle of machining parts, soldering electronics, and programming firmware. Definitely a cool product.
wget -r http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html
Ross Perot.
In my mind, the issue here is not what the product was, or if it was acceptable. Because, this would be fine if it were private Coast Guard dollars paying for the boats. The issue is if tax dollars, gleaned from the hard working citizens, were squandered on a goverment program intended to protect the people, and the people end up not being protected either because of government inefficacy, or corporate greed. That is the real question.
I find myself torn after reading the issue. Obviously, what hacker 1069 is doing is good and aiding the authorities by stopping the exploitation of children. However, his means are questionable as well as those of the authorities.
What if third party multinationals are allowed to hack into US systems to aid in the capture of terrorists? Obviously, there was a large amount of evidence provided that made sure the pedophiles being caught were definitely guilty, but couldn't evidence just as likely be planted?
What's even more concerning is that this person doesn't seem to be a third party hacker from Istanbul, but an American citizen (note the american telephone number). If this is the case, isn't this a message saying vigilantism (which strikes at the very base of authority, the fact that it is only the government that is allowed to use force against it's citizens) is accepted? If it is accepted in catching pedophiles, which is a pretty black and white case, what about when it enters the gray areas? What about when it starts being entangled with constitutional rights? (Due process of law seems to be a big one involved).
I believe the authorities involved might very easily have started on a slippery slope. Who knows where it will lead? How much do we value due process? How much do we value freedom? How much do we value results, irregardless of how they were gotten?
But remember:
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
A quandry indeed.
Did you read the study? About how it was difficult to compare legacy games to modern ones, about how games rated for different age groups should be evaluated differently, and that well... her suggestions to the House really weren't that ridiculous? (The ESRB play the video games first then rating them.)
I mean... just asking. It just seems a little crude to make vague threats against people that you don't know, for things you only thought they did. Unless you truly believe the ESRB is the perfection of the video game rating system, is it really too much to read someone else's work and insights, and try to understand what they're promoting before your random sputterings?
And actually, these "stupid video games" which millions of children play and have become a new form of mass media, is a pretty important topic for a lot of citizens. At this rate, you'll likely be waiting for your PhD for a long time...
Oh, and just my personal opinion. You deserve your foot 100% in your mouth.
I don't get how appending more X's, T's and the occasional G to ever increasing numbers help me understand the capabilities of a card... except that it's *Awesome* and I HAVE to buy it!
Not neccessarily issues. What if they live in rural Kansas? What if local friends are still a 7 miles away? Or, what if they live in New York and they live in Queens, and their friends in Manhatten? What if they live in Florida, and all their neighbors are 70 yr. old retirees. As people become increasingly mobile, and suburban sprawl ever increases... we will see less and less of all your friends living on the same street. As geographical location becomes less of an issue in life, they also become less of an issue in making friends.
Your friends are your friends because of who they are, not because of where they live. Should we really make it more difficult for our kids by saying that he/she should play with Johnny instead of Suzy because Johnny lives down the street? Even if Johnny is an asshole? And besides, I'm not sure increased parental involvement in the friend-making department of your life ever really helps. If that's needed, you're probably (at least somewhat) socially awkward and parents aren't going to help.
It's not whether the child can survive or not without a cell phone. They obviously, physically, can. But the question is that if this is a neccessary thing to do. When the punishment doesn't fit the crime, you breed confusion... or worse. Resentment.
But was the movie good? I mean, if it's Office Space... I think the network is a justified sacrifice.
Post time... 9:20 AM ...
You aren't possibly at work right now, making those "deliverables" late by reading and posting at slashdot are you?
Probably Earth. I mean... just sayin'.
But in all seriousness... consider this. The cell phone is the primary method of communication for many young individuals. It's the way to instantly access their friends. It's mobile. It's easy, and pretty damn cheap. It's how a teenager keeps in touch with friends (and to a lesser extent, family). Although other methods obviously exist (IM, email), they are not nearly as omnipresent (how many kids do you know that have a blackberry?), and aren't immediately answered (it's harder to avoid a call than to forget about an email). Taking that away from a child, especially one that is physically distanced from his/her friends... could easily be placing them in a state of confinement, especially if internet priviledges and so forth are also revoked.
If you start seeing it from this sense, you realize that you're essentially putting the child into digital solitary confinement. It might only be during the evenings, after school... but at that age the child is so dependent on the presence and company of friends, even when they're all doing absolutely nothing, it might very well seem like torture. If this "torture" is not of absolute neccessity (no cell phone for a week, because you didn't take the trash out!) or doesn't reinforce a point, or is punishment that's unreleated to the crime... and chosen only because that's "what hurts"... isn't that a little cruel? Even... abusive?
I personally believe that using the term "child abuse" is a little strong, but we should also realize and respect the importance that cell phones and other communication devices play in the lives of our children, and then act accordingly.
Actually, in some of the deer infested portions of the world (like Northern Minnesota, where I'm from), it isn't unheard of for the traffic accident to involve the deer hitting you... not you hitting the deer. You might very well have just stopped the car, and it's just then that the deer decides to bolt across the road. Into your passenger side door. They're truly brilliant animals. (This is obviously a corner case).
However, you also miss the fact that driving at a certain speed could be much to slow for safety. For example, note the minimum speeds on interstate highways. Although it is almost always the case that accidents can be avoided with increased attention paid to road safety laws... the speed isn't neccessarily too high.
What you start arguing at the end gets a little ridiculous.
No accidents are caused by stationary cars travelling at zero mph... apart from stopping on level crossings, airport runways etc. And even then, if the plane or train was going slower could it have stopped in time?
Yes... it is true that if two objects exist at different physical locations will not collide... and that having different velocities will contribute to them not being at a physical location (at a particular point in time) that would allow a colloision... but doesn't the argument get a little trite there?
But I am serious about the deer thing.
"You lose 3D, sound, and most of them run a bit slower than native."
Not quite true. Yes, with the 3D. But the two main players (VMware and VPC) both support sound, and VMware even USB 1.1 passthrough.
With the thin-client option, Microsoft Terminal Services (if you're on a windows platform) has good scaling capabilities. Though it might not go into the hunderds or thousands, it should get you into the high dozens. Since most of the microsoft tool's dlls are loaded and shared between the clients, it has pretty good performance.
For linux, while SSH is always a favorite, look at NX-Servers (http://www.nomachine.com/ and http://freenx.berlios.de/) which is like X-forwarding with compression and caching.
It'll be difficult to have a fully virtualized solution. Going with thin clients, or a pxe-served image would be a more viable solution (no matter how beefy your servers and fast your network).
Wait. That doesn't make sense.
"Any changes, and I mean any changes to the base configuration of the computer the user is sitting at result in unforseeable and often nightmarish problems with the virtual machine."
But the VM sits a-top... VMware or VPC... Unless you break those (and they're pretty solid applications), how does the VM break? Where is the abstraction barrier crossed?
I've personally had good experiences with both linux and windows machines, running in both VMware or VPC. I've found that the linux machines are kinder about freeing memory, while windows seems to want to keep it around for possible future use (not a bad ploy). Other than the lack of virtual machine additions on VPC for linux, both work pretty decently (when critical performance isn't neccessary).
Oh, and these Mac VMs you speak of... they don't really exist. Unless you count that leaked Mac OSX x86 image floating around on the torrent sites.
If there was a reason that the windows vms broke, please share it. I'm curious.
Why not just have a PXE server on hand to quickly and easily image your computers over the network? If a system goes down, it'll take only a few minutes to image it with a sysprepped base install and bring it back. Acronis SnapDeploy http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/snapdep loy/ provides this functionality quite handily, bundling the PXE server and image deployment in one nice little package. This is quite a viable solution if you don't have too many hardware platforms to support, or one need a few basic images of a locked down XP workstation.
With VM's, aside from the bandwidth and performance considerations, realize that the host machine could just as easily go down. Then you're stuck again. Though this is less likely, it is a possibility. If you do decide to go this route, do consider cacheing the downloaded VM between sessions (so the mass download every morning doesn't happen).
I've heard of a company, Moka5 http://www.moka5.com/, attempt to do something similar. I'm not sure what their status is, but it might be something to look into for the future.
Though this is an interesting idea, there are a number of detractions. I'm a huge fan of virtualization, and have found it great for development, testing, and on server platforms. Rolling it out on desktops as primary workstations seems a bit ambitions. However, I still wish you the best of luck.
Roy Shi.
As a college student, it definitely seems like a cool competition. It isn't neccessarily for the money as much as it for the possible prestige. Perhaps this matters less to professionals with "better things to do with their time".
Also, if you register, there's a place to upload your resume. This seems like a good way to possible create an opening for a future job...What better way to recruit than a programming competition?
From TFA:
One question we get is if this works in the US. Yes, it does.
It looks like just a PPTP connection to a Swedish ISP, doling out some Swedish IP addresses. I'm curious as to the speed the service offers. What's the pipe feeding into Relakks?
Apologies. I posted the URL incorrectly. Here it is:
MacNN - Microsoft Group Policy for Mac OS X.
The issue isn't so much Active Directory (as I implied, I apologize), but GPOs. The only article I was able to find that allowed a GPO to be applied to Macs was this: ahref=http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/06/07/centr ify.directcontrol/rel=url2html-5780http://www.macn n.com/articles/06/06/07/centrify.directcontrol/>. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
If this is the only way to control how users use their computers (which usually is company property), then it seems like an extraneous investment on top of the premium that's already been paid for the shiny design and good hardware (which is worth it for some, but perhaps not ever workstation amongst hundreds or thousands). This might sound like the paranoia of a control freak, but that's often the way an IT department usually acts. Users inevitably shoot themselves in the foot.
Though I'm not a Microsoft fanboy by any means, I've always found their IT administration tools well designed, intuitive, and easy to tie together.
Unfortunately, user stupidity is something IT constantly has to worry about. Imagine if you're the IT Director, and the President has just locked the annual budget reports in an encrypted vault. It's somewhat difficult to just point a finger at him and laugh.
Though Mac OSX has some great features, and is a fine operating system, it does not support some of the niche software and does not have the capabilities to be deployed in a company of hundreds, or thousands of computers. There could very well been issues with the filevault had it been deployed in corporate environments en-mass. Tools like Active Directory is absolutely crucial to running most IT infrastructures, as is controlling user access to the server and their own computer.
One of the key goals of an IT department is to make it impossible for the user to screw up their system, not to say "nope. we don't support that" when someone makes an error, which is inevitable.
I find your post somewhat naive. What you're suggesting isn't practical or realistic. It just isn't how departments of any sizable company work. To allow "Joe to crack his thumb with the hammer" might very well leave systems vulnerable to outside attack, or allow precious company data to be lost. Just because Joe was stupid doesn't mean that the consequences of his actions will be acceptable.
Instead, it would make more sense to have such a feature off by default (in Corporate versions), and easily controlled through GPOs in the Active Directory. Another option is when it's enabled, an additional key is created and stored by the IT department, preferably on a backed-up drive inaccessible to everyone.
Brilliant. Good quick synopsis. Much of what being taught today in college doesn't belong in only one of the the subfields, whether it be EE, CS, or ME. Instead, a lot of the focus is trying to get students to work across fields, and play with systems integration. This is one of the exciting parts of the RoboCup competition, especially in the small sized league.
Future work, for both money and glory, will likely require you to be much more than a code monkey, and instead require knowledge of how to create components of larger systems, and then integrate them seamlessly into a larger solution. By providing a way to see how a practical end is possible from vague beginnings (which CS most definately is for the uninitiated), this is definately a cool project.
I was running workstation before, and am now trying server. I can't seem to find many glaring differences, except that the server management console offers the ability to connect to and administrate another machine running vmware server (whereas the workstation version implicitly assumes localhost). Hope that helps.
Yes, VPC can run a variety of Linux distributions and is very useful for testing code, or having a secondary operating system. See this http://vpc.visualwin.com/ for the full list of supported platforms. However, VMware workstation is still much more configurable and powerful (though not free) and will allow you to run almost every x86 operating system completely unmodified.
But you're installing it on a virtual machine, one that is seen as a completely different computer by the OS and, also by licensing. Think about it for a second.... Alright, now take in account for how virtualization is often used, to run a lot of server-class operating systems (Windows Server 2003) on a gigantic hardware setup, and it really doesn't become that absurd anymore. The hardware and the operating system are completely seperate, and you're really paying for an instance of using the operating system. That's why you can use the OS again if you choose to upgrade to a new computer.
Oh, and by the way, Office and ofther Microsoft products are usually licensed by machine, not install, (not always, since it can also be done by the number of users in a corporation). So you can install it as many times as you want, but doing so in the different virtualized environments might cost you.