NextSpace and Helicopters

This is pretty cool. A free service, it lets multiple people work on the same document at the same time. I haven’t seen anything quite like this. Especially not for free.

“In the end, the judge asked if he wanted compensation for being there

Today

IEEE Spectrum reports on the Bilski patent decision and its impact on the contentious issue of software patents.

Apple has announced the beta release of Safari 4 — the latest edition of the Apple Web browser, for both PC and Mac.

A security researcher has published a home-brewed patch for a critical Adobe Reader vulnerability that hackers are exploiting in the wild using malicious PDF files, beating Adobe Systems Inc. to the punch by more than two weeks.

The president of the Authors Guild wants to put an end to text-to-speech engines, specifically those on the Amazon Kindle 2. Even assuming better and better voice engines, could this be truly considered a public performance akin to a public reading by a human author?

On a related note, should you, the reader, be prohibited from reading a book aloud or having someone read it to you, even though no copying has taken place? Is reading a book aloud actually a copy? If the Kindle 2 cannot legally read it to you — following this logic — does that mean parents cannot read to each other or to their children either?

Update: Amazon is [voluntarily allowing authors to decide|http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/amazon-backs-off-text-to-speech-feature-in-kindle/] whether or not they want to allow text-to-speech. Amazon maintains that they were in good shape legally either way, but appears to be acting out of goodwill.

Working practices are evolving from traditional proximity or geographical collocation paradigm to virtual collocation paradigm where experts (professionals) have to work together whatever is the geographical location of everyone involved. In this context, eProfessionals are using a Collaborative Working Environment providing the capabilities to share information¹ and exchange views in order to reach a common understanding. Such a level of common understanding is enabling an effective and efficient collaboration among different expertises.

In typical use, the SheevaPlug draws about as much power as a night-light. Yet, with 512MB each of RAM and Flash, and a 1.2GHz CPU, the wallwart-sized device approaches the computing power found in the servers of only a decade ago.

E-professional or “eprofessional” or even “eProfessional” is a term used in Europe to describe a professional whose work relies on concepts of telework or telecommuting: working at a distance using information and communication technologies, as well as online Collaboration (i.e. Virtual_team¹, Mass_collaboration², Massively_distributed_collaboration³), online community_of_practice such as the Open_source community, and Open_innovation principles.