I just read an article on zdnet.com about a new policy issued by the French Goverment that is intended to restrict internet access to those users that download a lot of illegal content. The policy is a product of the pact – French Goverment, ISPs and the Music industry which has been calling for action for some time now. The important thing I noticed is that they completely miss the point. It is not the fact that we can download stuff from the internet that is the problem. The whole music market changed – I think iTunes has proven that if we can get open content for a reasonable price – we will buy it. The consumers have spoken – we want to be able to download content via the internet, seamlessly without any hassle. Give us this service! Suing customers is bad for business as well as cutting them off from the one place they still are interested in getting content from. The whole music industry paradigm shifted and I think these people haven’t been able to adapt and therefore will loose in the long run. One other thing – here a quote from the Article:

"The Internet must not become a high-tech Far West, a lawless zone where outlaws can pillage works with abandon or, worse, trade in them in total impunity. And on whose backs? On artists’ backs,"

Nicolas Sarkozy said this and my question would be – if you are so concerned about the artists why aren’t they in your pact? Or do you really think the big Music Labels represent them in this topic rather then themselves?

Today one of the people behind Hotmail, Sabeer Bhatia, launched a new project called Live-Documents. This service is intended to deliver functionality equal to that of MS Office products through a web browser. Whether it can do that – well we shall see. Here the release.

Indian software product company, InstaColl today announces the launch of Live Documents, a hybrid online-offline Office suite of applications.
Live Documents is a full-featured suite of online Office productivity applications offering functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Built using RIA technologies such as Flash and Flex, Live Documents allow users to view and edit documents within any common browser on any operating system from anywhere. Live Documents uses a Flash-based user interface that offers a richer and responsive user experience that is comparable to native Office software applications.
In addition, Live Documents is available as a optional desktop client application that wraps around Microsoft Office and embeds collaborative capabilities into these hitherto standalone software applications – Live Documents converts Microsoft Office applications from static standalone software to smart clients that are connected to the Internet and facilitate in-context document sharing (multiple people can edit a document at the same time) and management (security, access control and revision control) without requiring users to give up their familiar user interfaces. The Live Documents desktop client also ensures offline access to documents – a key failing of current online Office applications.
With its hybrid “Services plus Software” approach, Live Documents gives users the choice and flexibility to work on their documents either on the desktop or on the browser and while they are online or offline – any changes made on either side are automatically synchronized to the other side ensuring that the desktop and web versions are always in sync without requiring manual actions like check-in/check-out, upload/download or import/export. Live Documents is designed to increase consumer choice when it comes to purchasing hardware, selecting an operating system, choosing a network and accessing and sharing file formats.

Check it out at http://www.live-documents.com.

Mozilla has today released the first beta of their next generation browser Firefox 3. I have browsed through the Release Notes and there is a couple of things I find interesting. First of all there are some nice security enhancements but the one that really got me interested was this one:

• Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.

For me this means that Firefox will have an overall better integration with Vista and not only in the look&feel area that we already saw in some prior posts by Mozilla bloggers. This is reaffirmed in another note:

• Integration with Vista: Firefox’s menus now display using Vista’s native theme.

There is some integration with Mac OS X and also linux which is a very good thing. Other cool new features I noticed:

• Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.
• New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files.

The download manager even supports resuming downloads after you closed Firefox and opened it again. Also upon closing Firefox will prompt you whether you want to save your open tabs. This is a very nice feature as I never got to understand how the current Firefox saves the tabs and under what conditions.

The last part that was interesting to me is about performance. Now Firefox has some nice performance but I among many suffer from the Memory Usage problem. If I have Firefox open the whole day ( and believe me I do) it starts eating up my memory at some point till it allocates more then 500 Mb. At that point the only thing that helps is a complete restart of Firefox which don’t like doing. According to the notes they fixed quite a lot of memory leaks so I am hoping they fixed this as well.

Overall the beta looks really nice and I’ll be watching the development.

In my mission to get the hang out of all the available web services and really get to understand the competitors in the web service war I got myself a Flickr Pro account and gonna try and use it. ‘Till now I never really used a service like this much though I do have a picasa account at Goolge. The point is to see whether the 25$ bucks you pay for a Flickr pro account can beat the free Picasa service. Most people I talk to say definitely but let’s see….

Btw you can check out my first pics @flickr now.

Well am back to trying blogging. It’s not like I wouldn’t want to but life sometimes has a way of stopping you from doing the stuff you like.

Anyway, in my obsession with tech I’ve downloaded the new Windows Live Beta to test all the features this app-pack contains. Now I have to say I don’t like Microsoft software in general. Part of it is connected to the the fact that their software is closed and usually not very stable (Windows lol). But with the Windows Live suit MS may have stumbled upon something. The package consists of:

• Messenger
• Writer
• Mail
• Photo Gallery
• A MS Live toolbar
• Some Parental control enhancements

Now this line-up doesn’t seem to be anything special and the only reason I wanted to try it in the first place is my mentioned tech obsession. The fact is though that for a common pc user these apps could have some added value. The messenger is a nice upgrade to an already established platform – adds some new sharing functionality, it’s less buggy and has a much more polished feel to it. The writer is one thing that could end up be a killer app. This app is technically a client based blog environment that allows you to add posts to your

blog located on some of the most common blog sites. I have actually written this post using writer and it was capable of reading out the style I have on the page, publish using a single button and lot’s more. It is definitely much more powerful then web-based wywsig editors. Live mail is actually a new much better and powerful Outlook Express. What does this mean? Well for one thing you got a new much better UI, better performance, better handling of contacts but what really makes it a top notch mail client is it’s seamless integration with Live Mail / Hotmail web services. The only thing what it really lacks is calendaring support but hey – we got Outlook for that. Photo Gallery is an enhanced picture viewer for Windows. It has some nice functionality similar to Google Picasa or iPhoto on the

Mac but again the important feature is the integration with the online Live.com services. The other stuff (Toolbar, Parental controls) are of no use to me so no attention to those.

From using these tools I feel that Microsoft is making a bid for the people really using web services for most of their computing. There is a war brewing between three major players. We got Microsoft with the whole Live suit – Mail, Calendaring, Pictures, Blogs, Social networking, we got the package from Google and Yahoo as well. Currently I am a Google user and these Ms apps aren’t really enough to make me switch and go through the painful process of migrating. On the other hand I welcome the initiative and effort on MS side and I will be watching how these evolve.