Whilst perusing the latest VMWare Workstation offering from their website, I noticed that not only does VMWare offer a free VMWare player (in other words, take a VMWare disk image created by somebody else and use it), but the VMWare site also has links to various pre-built VMWare disk images, including one for BEA's complete WebLogic 8.1 environment.... Whoever thought this idea up deserves to be knighted--what a great way to make it trivially simple for somebody to get started with a rather intimidating task (be that either installing a new O/S or a new app server).

Are you listening, Microsofties? VPCs of Vista, Visual Studio Team System and, heck, even just a base Visual Studio Express (pick a language, C# and VB sound like good starters) image are definitely something to consider if you want to make it easy for dev's to play with your tools.... Particularly people who DON'T want to install Windows just to play with Microsoft's implementation of .NET....