OpenOffice is dood

The guys at Oracle put out a statement sometime last week about their free and open-source office suite, OpenOffice. Guess what? They’re making it a “community project”; dat wil zeggen. they’re leaving it to die.

The sad part is that OpenOffice was very popular: many Mac users used it (since Office for Mac costs a ton) and plenty of Windows users used it as well (most people aren’t going to use all the features of Microsoft Office, which costs, what, $100?) But don’t be discouraged, it’s not as bad as you might think. Read on to see.

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Firefox’s new release strategy

Back in the day (and by that I mean a week ago), new versions of Firefox were released “when they were ready” – dat, when all the features they wanted to put in were in it. That’s called feature-based releases, and most developers use that strategy.

But there’s another release strategy that focuses on releasing new versions every so often. Some features might not make a version, but that’s OK; a new version is coming in x weeks so it’ll be included then. This is called fixed releases.

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Nog een andere tirade over BCC:s

Ik kreeg net een e-mail gericht aan niet minder dan 78 mensen, en alle 78 van mensen e-mailadressen waren in het veld. Je zou denken dat de zender zou al onze e-mails in het veld BCC sinds gezet, goed, de ontvangers niet echt nodig om de e-mails van de ander kennen 77 mensen die de e-mail kreeg. (In haar verweerschrift, zetten van alle e-mails in het Aan veld maakt stalking makkelijker, maar is dat niet wat Facebook voor?)

Ik kan begrijpen waarom Cc is niet zo populair: het doet hetzelfde als te, behalve het draagt ​​een andere semantische betekenis. De meeste tieners (en een bos van volwassenen ook) kon niet minder zorg over de fancy schmancy semantische betekenis, zodat ze gewoon te gebruiken om.

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De zoektocht naar een fatsoenlijke home page

Ik weet niet zeker waarom homepages zelfs werden uitgevonden in de eerste plaats. Ik bedoel, zeker, u een pagina moet openen wanneer u start uw browser, maar ze gewoon dingen maken, goed, onhandig. Plus ze zijn niet erg nuttig: de meesten van hen slechts dienen als een landing page; you don’t really use them except to read news about how kids can’t bring bagged lunch to school (*cough* Yahoo *cough*.) And when you do that kind of stuff, you just get distracted from what you were originally meaning to do all along.

I want to know why that is and how I can help fix it.

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DuckDuckGo – the best thing since Google

I was looking on my analytics page (tracking visitors to the site) and noticed someone came to hathix through DuckDuckGo. Being bored, I looked up DuckDuckGo and I was impressed automatically. It’s a great search engine. Here’s why.

Zero-click info

DuckDuckGo’s got this great feature that lets you see some quick background info on a subject when you search it. If I want to know who Nelson Mandela is without having to read a lengthy article about apartheid, South Africa, and that sort of stuff, I can just DDG it and look what I get:

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Earth Hour

I’m not sure if you remember, but a few years back (2007?) the city of Sydney turned off all non-essential lights for an hour to raise awareness for the need to fight climate change. That “Earth Hour” has now spread around the globe, en, goed, today’s the day.

Earth Hour will take place at 8:30 naar 9:30 pm your local time.

What can I do?

Weer, in Earth Hour you turn off all non-essential lights and other electronics. That means you shouldn’t go around and turn off all the streetlights you can find (that would lead to mass chaos.) In plaats daarvan, you should turn off:

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Firefox 4 is out

It’s been about a year in coming (it was in beta for a full year), but Firefox 4 is finally out and can be downloaded at firefox.com. The open-source web browser’s latest version is a gigantic step forward from the 3.6 version (the old stable version from a year ago, which is pitifully outdated by now.)

What’s changed

  • Firefox 4 is about 3 times faster in page loading and JavaScript performance than 3.6. This means your favorite web apps and websites are – get ready for this – 3 times faster than before.
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