News.com published an article about the new digital copyright bill, which is currently being prepared by Congress. According to the information from News.com the new bill is nothing else but the DMCA on steroids. Instead of scaling down the controversial DMCA, as was requested many times by computer scientists, security experts and technology folks in general, the Congress wants to give more freedom to law enforcement structures in “fighting the IP crimes”. And, of course, this bill is already widely supported by RIAA and others.
I really do hope that this bill will not go through. Generally speaking, there is nothing to be afraid of: the digital future is coming anyway, whether the lawmakers want this or not. Looking at the trends and the general direction of the development of the “technology world”, one can easily see that the current copyright-based business models do not belong to that future.
What this bill might change, however, is the price we would have to pay for entering this brave new world. And it depends on the lawmakers whether the road to the Tomorrow will be an easy and fast one, or bloody and hard one. I hope (though, probably, without any reason) that the intelligent and educated people in Senate will overcome the narrow-minded conservatives, and that the money would be spent on development of the new business models rather than on enforcing a law which protects old ones.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Office 2.0
It’s funny – quite recently I wrote about “Web Desktop” being a new concept, and today I’ve stumbled upon a whole blog dedicated to this very idea – but it’s called there “Office 2.0”. Well, I never was able to coin a catchy phrase or name – so, I have to admit, “Office 2.0” is much better as a buzzword than “Web Office”. Anyway, the blog is extremely interesting - doesn't matter whether you support the idea of moving totally to online space, oppose it or just interested in new and useful web applications.
Technorati tags: Office 2.0, Web 2.0
Friday, April 14, 2006
Web Clipboard
Here is a small, simple, but quite useful tool - web clipboard: http://cl1p.net The idea of the tool is also very simple: you pick any URL that starts with http://cl1p.net (for example: http://cl1p.net/myclips) , and it gives you a place to store some text or upload some file (up to 2 MB). Then from another computer you use the same URL to access your data. The data can be password-protected to prevent others from modifying and/or reading you record. And that’s it!
While definitely not fully functional clipboard (you cannot paste OLE objects there. Hmmm, and what about ALE? That might be interesting…), this tool might be very useful – especially if you work behind a firewall. Another interesting thing is that cl1p provides a URL to directly download data (without getting through a web-page). This might help people write some utilities, which will use cl1p for data exchange – maybe even a full-scale web clipboard will become possible.
Nice and useful tool.
Technorati tags: cl1p, web 2.0, tools
While definitely not fully functional clipboard (you cannot paste OLE objects there. Hmmm, and what about ALE? That might be interesting…), this tool might be very useful – especially if you work behind a firewall. Another interesting thing is that cl1p provides a URL to directly download data (without getting through a web-page). This might help people write some utilities, which will use cl1p for data exchange – maybe even a full-scale web clipboard will become possible.
Nice and useful tool.
Technorati tags: cl1p, web 2.0, tools
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
"Web Desktop" and ALE
It seems like the whole Web 2.0 world goes faster and faster towards creation of a “Web Desktop”. All basic desktop applications are already there, for example:
One thing missing from this “Web Desktop” equation is application integration. On Windows I can easily embed images into spreadsheets, spreadsheets and images into documents and so on. Web 2.0 applications were missing this functionality – but now Zimbra came with a solution for this problem, called ALE (Ajax Linking and Embedding).
I think this is a very important, even fundamental step in the development of Web 2.0 and “Web Desktop”, and I am sure that the new generation of web applications, utilizing ALE, will appear soon, and will begin competing with the traditional office desktop applications. (And I want to play with this cool new technology too!)
Great job, guys at Zimbra! Technorati tags: web 2.0, Ajax,Zimbra, ALE
- All internet applications (browsing is obviously there, email, rss-readers, instant messengers (Meebo))
- Word processing, spreadsheets – even PowerPoint presentations editing: ThinkFree Office Online,Writely and others.
- PIMs, organizers – HipCal
- Collaboration - BaseCamp,Zimbra
One thing missing from this “Web Desktop” equation is application integration. On Windows I can easily embed images into spreadsheets, spreadsheets and images into documents and so on. Web 2.0 applications were missing this functionality – but now Zimbra came with a solution for this problem, called ALE (Ajax Linking and Embedding).
I think this is a very important, even fundamental step in the development of Web 2.0 and “Web Desktop”, and I am sure that the new generation of web applications, utilizing ALE, will appear soon, and will begin competing with the traditional office desktop applications. (And I want to play with this cool new technology too!)
Great job, guys at Zimbra! Technorati tags: web 2.0, Ajax,Zimbra, ALE
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