Mac Minis as school PCs

After using a Mac Mini as a primary workstation for approximately a month, I believe that we should examine the feasibility of using these on grad desktops. We could roll out perhaps three or a half dozen to a selected group of students, with the caveat that they will be responsible for writing a report after a period of time (a term, a couple of months).

Pros

• easier management, if we don't dual boot them
• Unix underpinnings of OS X give us flexibility and the ability to use some familiar tools: ssh, rsync, even rsh if we want it
• several projects (fink, DarwinPorts, pkgsrc) to bring F/OSS to Macs, but some tools are already available anyway: gcc, X11

Cons

• difficult to secure, and relative newness and "sexiness" makes them attractive targets
• not easily expandable (but do we care?)

-- MikePatterson - 04 Dec 2005