I saw in the International Herald Tribune an interview they conducted with Robert Calliau who with Tim Berners-Lee put together in 1989 a way to access documents and call it the World Wide Web.

Robert answered the question "Computers aren't as easy as they should be, are they, comparred with TVs. for example?

"That's because computers are not machines. A television is a machine, in the sense that it doesn't have an internal state. When you switch it off and then go away on holiday and then come back and switch it on again, it's the same TV. But if you do something on your computer and switch it off, the state it is in when you switch it on is not at all the same state when you switched it off.

The machine I have on my desk can run Linux, or Mac OS X, which it does at the moment, but I can also put you in front of it when I start up Virtual PC, and it runs Windows 2000. In each case, you are faced with a totally different-looking machine. It's the same box, but it's the software that is the machine. You have to learn not just a language but also all the culture that goes with that."

This reminded me of the PopG solution that includes space, screen and mouse sharing in "narrowing the digital divide", as well as the article Visions Worth Working Toward: Narrowing the Widening Gap by Steven W. Gilbert president of the Teaching Learning Technology Group on the same subject http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/vwwt.html

Learn one culture regardless of the machine with PopG and PopG pops up in the same state that you left it before you went on holiday, or home from work or school and all collaboration that's taken place by your team when you were gone is fully synced when your PopG pops open to where you left it.

This is a White Paper that was commission by Groove Networks: "There should be more to collaboration than email, Is email spurring - or slowing - collaboration? Can Groove Workspace help? IDC analysts talk to enterprise managers and Groove customers to find out at