OpenOffice là chết

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”; i.e. 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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Chiến lược phát hành mới của Firefox

Trở lại trong ngày (và do đó tôi có nghĩa là một tuần trước đây), phiên bản mới của Firefox đã được phát hành “khi họ đã sẵn sàng” – đó là, khi tất cả các tính năng mà họ muốn đưa vào là ở trong đó. Đó được gọi là phiên bản tính năng dựa trên, và hầu hết các nhà phát triển sử dụng chiến lược.

Nhưng có một chiến lược phát hành, tập trung vào phát hành phiên bản mới cũng thường. Một số tính năng có thể không làm cho một phiên bản, nhưng đó là OK; một phiên bản mới đang đến trong tuần x do đó, nó sẽ được bao gồm sau đó. Này được gọi là phát hành cố định.

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Yet another rant about Bcc:s

I just got an email addressed to no less than 78 nhân dân, and all 78 people’s email addresses were in the To field. You’d think the sender would put all our emails in the Bcc field since, cũng, the recipients don’t really need to know the emails of the other 77 people who got the email. (In its defense, putting all the emails in the To field makes stalking easier, but isn’t that what Facebook’s for?)

I can understand why Cc isn’t that popular: it does the same thing as To, except it carries a different semantic meaning. Most teenagers (and a bunch of adults too) couldn’t care less about the fancy schmancy semantic meaning, so they just use To.

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Nhiệm vụ cho một trang nhà phong nha

I’m not sure why home pages were even invented in the first place. Tôi có nghĩa là, sure, you need a page to open when you boot up your browser, but they just make things, cũng, awkward. Plus they’re not very useful: most of them just serve as a 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, và, cũng, today’s the day.

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

What can I do?

Một lần nữa, 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.) Instead, you should turn off:

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Firefox 4 là ra

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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