So, I'd say someone was on the ball just waiting for "April Fools!"  This appears to be a very well constructed practical joke for April Fools Day.

(I admit this suckered me in.  I came back and modified my post after testing and remembering what day it is...)

"As we have just announced over 1 MILLION downloads of Virtual PC 2007 (since its release on February 19, 2007), I have been cleared to post about a hidden feature in VPC 2007.  As it is still in a Technical Beta phase, the option to enable support for the installation of Mac OS X  is not part of the GUI, but can be enabled at runtime with a command line switch.  Although the feature is still experimental, I have been running it at home for the last 2 months, and have had very few stability problems."

Source: Running Mac OS X on Virtual PC 2007

 For those of you on other EDU blogs, especially the tablet-related blogger's, this looks promising.

Bring your drawings to life with the Physics Illustrator, a motion simulator for the Tablet PC. Simply draw two-dimensional bodies, connect them in various ways and apply forces, then watch as animation makes the bodies move, collide, and interact.

Link to Download details: Physics Illustrator for Tablet PC

Ben is a great BDD resource and the original creator of the idea to open notepad as an application during the capture process.  If you are interested in BDD, subscribe to Ben's feed.  This article shows how to "mod" the ZTIPatches script so that BDD can deploy update patches in addition to Language Packs.  You may have already discovered that if you otherwise try to apply patches using BDD, for example if you share your distribution folder between BDD and SIM and it already contains patches, they do not appear in the LTI menu.  With this change they will and the only consequence appears to be that Language Packs could potentially get applied more than once.  Careful planning can easily thwart that caveat. 

Link to Ben Hunter : BDD 2007 - Tips and Tricks - Patching Vista

WOW!  This is slick.  Logitech has published a sidebar gadget that works as a motion detector.   When you click the play button it starts watching for motion.  Any movement gets recorded as a video and placed in your videos folder.  It works!  Try it out!  The only caveat I've found is to leave the resolution as default.  I cranked it up to 800x600 and it crashed when I activated it.  Resetting it to 320x240 fixed the glitch.

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm?CONTENTID=13265&CRID=2203&PAGE=products/topics&countryid=19&languageid=1

Now I can finally prove to my wife it's HER dog that chews up the garbage, not mine...  ;-)

I'll give Credit to TechLEARNing.com, which you should visit, before linking directly to the site below.  This is a good high level overview for educators to understand what "podcasting" means, how the process works, and what value it offers to education.

http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/apr06/Eash.shtml

Source: Podcasting 101 for K-12 Librarians

In my own blogging, I've often considered podcasting, netcasting, vidcasting, webcasting, etc.  Essentially all the same, just many different ways to say posting an audio or audio/video recording via RSS feed.  I'm particularly thinking about whether I should start looking for LiveMeeting presentations that our field in the Education vertical are recording and possibly posting them in Soapbox for public archival and feed-based aggregation.

What topics would be most valuable to EDU?

BDD is mostly open source to begin with, given that it relies on windows script files and XML to carry a majority of the task sequencing workload.  There is some compiled code such as the C sharp that goes in to making the MMC console, etc.  That remaining compiled code has been released under the Microsoft Permissive License.  The open source code can be downloaded at the link below.

Link to Download details: BDD 2007 Source

 I'm a very big fan of our PiL group and luckily I get to work with them a few times a year on various projects.  This press release outlines a great program that Partners in Learning is assisting to replicate the program's success to other schools.

U.S. Partners in Learning grants will help expand four groundbreaking organizations offering educational opportunities outside the classroom.

Source: Microsoft Funds Massachusetts After-School Learning Programs Focused on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

 Interesting article on a University leveraging SoftGrid to lower application costs.  The very nature of Education environments makes SoftGrid a valuable tool because there are so many versions of applications and applications that tend to break the rules and really should be run within a protected environment.  The benefit of SoftGrid is to take these applications and deliver then within a virtualized application environment with workflow built in to determine how the application should be delivered, and for how long, etc.

Virtualized Application Environment?  That means not an entire OS, just the application is living in a virtual bubble.  Kevin has a link to one of his recent webcasts to explain more.

Link to Application virtualization paying off for university - Network World