I was once talking with a friend who is a longtime school teacher, and suggested that perhaps teachers who aren't up to speed with basic computer usage, for the purposes of managing curriculum, homework etc., aren't likely to be very good teachers because they are outdated/outmoded and don't mind being as such. My friend strongly disagreed with my conclusion, and said that in practice, many great teachers can't use computers at all, but understand their subject matter adequately, and have a facility for engaging their students and teaching. Since this is a matter of opinion based on empirical observation, I'm inclined accept prima facie that such might be the case. If this were so, then it would further explain why schools aren't ready for computerization yet. We live in an era where, for various sane and insane reasons, there is a paucity of good teachers. If the intersection of "good teachers" and "computer illiterate" (or close) is non-trivial, then computerization might result in a good chunk of them being forced out, causing a further worsening of problems associated with quality of teaching.

How is this different from a company offering full functionality software for download on their site - free for personal use vs. paid for business or enteprise use? some software does include licensing/activation code that can technically do just what they are threatening - track IP's and get to them through ISP's. Nobody does this in practice, but the threat implicitly (sometimes explicitly) exists. This newspaper is just taking that precedent one extra step from desktop software to it's online web service, no?

If Microsoft can continue to sell Win7 rather than continue to extend the life of XP for various reasons (netbooks), they'd have set themselves up for surviving the recession as gracefully as possible. Now, how bad that would be despite potential good efforts is a wait-and-see game. 1. XP costs less than Vista partly because OEM's can ship cheaper hardware for XP. If Win7 would run on comparable hardware, and not be 'slow' (or require premium upgrades for graphics chipsets, extra RAM etc), OEM's can sell Win7 for almost the same price, and get consumers to like what they have to offer. This has been hard to do with 'slow' Vista, but Win7 seems to work well on 'less' hardware. It seems like at least not poised to lose again. 2. Businesses like appcompat, and better group policy management. http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/ mentions (very briefly) that Microsoft has a separate 'triad' for appcompat. Hopefully, they are delivering. Also, Windows has been good with group policy for a long time, and one can only hope that Win7 has grown in that front. The key question is whether it will be worth the while for businesses to upgrade to Win7. If they can upgrade on existing hardware without too many problems, that would have been a win. They get better administrative control with a newer OS. Again,the key question is one of performance with 'less' hardware. 3. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Win7 is really solid on netbooks. If this is true, then Win7 is already a better chioce in this market. Ordinary people are seeking out netbooks because they are cheap and attractive, and a good OS like Win7 that is likely to support good touchscreen controls is exactly what's needed in this market to help the non-geek consumers. Hopefully Microsoft has improved Win7 to play nice with SSD's. It doesn't look like Win7 is too huge on big-ticket features that can be 'seen'. But that's not where Vista needed improvements - Vista already had plenty of big new features that one could 'see'. So Win7 should ideally be trying to deliver on the 'unseen' fronts to make the whole OS more viable. Again, I'm getting the feeling that this is true.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/msi-wind-coming-to-major-retailer-new-models-coming-soon MSI's director of sales for US is quoted as saying that Linux based netbooks are returned 4 times as often as Windows based netbooks.

Geeks like their toys - and they(we!) know what to do with the toys. They don't need an advice column to tell us to run linux. But ordinary users do need this advice. And most of them listen to music on their computers, or at least use their PC's or laptops to sync with iPod. iTunes and iPod are no longer used by only "some" users - they are used by a vast majority. And until linux can run iTunes, recommending linux would be a generally bad idea when such advice is targetted at 'normal' users. The least that such advice columnists can do is to note that there are some defciencies to this advice that readers should be mindful of. For eg., if the assumption is that a netbook is a 2nd or 3rd computer owned purley for 'roaming' purposes, maybe this is not a huge concern. But 'normal' users tend to own 1, or max 2 PC's. Many don't care to own even 1, and if they can get a mobile PC for $300, they'd jump at it. And if it won't run iTunes, they'll return it, or worse, complain about linux (bad publicity is worse than no publicity).