To the extent it integrates well in an all-Windows shop, I could see it being very attractive. As a consumer, maybe not so much.

It hasn't been a good week for science in the Italian courts, has it?

True enough. With only me and my wife, simultaneous streaming isn't often a problem

I'm on 6/0.8 mbps for $35, which is adequate for streaming from a variety of sources at 720p, with a little headroom for checking your email or browsing. That's adequate for me, and I can get reasonably priced 25/7 service from my provider. The real issue isn't speed, it's bandwidth. I'm in Toronto, and most providers provide a cap of some sort. The caps provided by Bell and Rogers simply don't cut it if you do stream TV at HD resolutions reasonably often. I recently changed from Bell to Teksavvy to get more reasonable bandwidth caps (they also have an unlimited plan, which so far I haven't needed). My point is just that you have to shop for a plan that fits your use pattern, and as CubicleZombie says, for most purposes I and I suspect most of us simply don't need a very fast line. I do, however, expect to actually use the speed I do have.

Since we're telling stories: a friend of mine who is, among other things, a proper audio engineer, recorded the narration for my wife's last film in his office since a studio wasn't available and renting one wasn't in the budget. He used an excellent microphone, an excellent D/A converter, and the result sounds very good. Her narration sounds great, as do the trucks and streetcars going by. Studios do matter.

Just to be clear: they can't. The recording equipment has become much cheaper, but the the cost of making an acoustically designed studio has not. Nor has the cost of hiring an experienced engineer for the recording. I love what can be done with today's PC-based recording equipment, but a real studio is still a real studio and a garage is still a garage, even if the tracks ultimately end up on a Mac either way.

Friending your students on Facebook makes your page public for all practical purposes. It's really easy, as a university professor, to find that your work and teaching life intrudes just a little too much on your private life, and I imagine the same is true for high school teachers, for example. I keep Facebook for real-life friends and a few colleagues. However, it is very important to students to have some form of contact with you that is outside the university environment. A little while ago, I broke down and set up a Linkedin profile, and my students are welcome to connect with me there.

Monitoring faculty email in this way may well violate the U of T's collective agreement with their faculty. I'm at another Canadian university, and I'm pretty sure it would violate ours.

That's like saying we don't need programming languages more complicated than basic. Complex societies have complex legal systems.

That would alleviate some of my concerns, but from the engaged writeup: "Most importantly of all, any book that you publish must be an exclusive to iBooks." (http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/19/apples-ibooks-author-hands-on/#continued) Not too open.

As a university professor and a mac user, I'm the obvious target for software like this, and in many respects it looks very attractive. However, I can't, in good conscience, force my students onto a particular platform, and that's what using this for course materials would do. I suppose it would be good if the university required all students to buy and iPad (and that's probably Apple's goal here), but without that it's useless. Proprietary formats like iBooks or the Kindle are out, and I'll continue to distribute materials to my students as pdf files, despite the limitations of that format.

When I've felt the need to provide audio recordings of my lectures, I simply record them with a pocket voice recorder that records directly to mp3 and mounts as a usb drive. My recorder is a Sony, but there are many on the market that are as good or better. From there it's easy to post them on Blackboard, Moodle, WebCT, or whatever courseware the teachers are using. When we do video, that's generally more of a production involving IT people and a different hosting server, but for audio a very simple approach seems to be the best.

They'd better watch out for the Streisand Effect.

I'm always surprised how often this is described as a 'new' problem. I have a home network in a very highly populated area, I can see over fifty networks from my apartment, and I switched to a dual-band router as soon as they came on the market. I would have thought that planning a university network to work on both bands would have been on the radar for a number of years.

The speed test numbers in the article are worthless. I tried the first test (ba.net) on my iphone GS from home where I'm on a pretty middle-of-the road DSL line, and got about twice the download speed reported in the article. Using the speed test app on the same phone, the results I generally see represent the limit of my DSL line. The point isn't to defend the iphone, I'm sure there are faster/better phones out there. The point is that the testing methodology is poor and the results in the article are poo. (You can also see that the wifi tests are limited by the tester's network connection: the upload/download rates are different. That is a characteristic of a DSL line, not wifi itself which should show similar speeds in both directions.)