Autor: Neel Mehta

OpenOffice é morto

Os caras da Oracle divulgou um comunicado na semana passada sobre a sua suíte de escritório livre e de código aberto, OpenOffice. Adivinha o quê? Eles estão tornando-se um “comunidade do projeto”; I.e.. eles estão deixando de morrer.

A parte triste é que OpenOffice foi muito popular: muitos usuários de Mac usado (desde o Office para Mac custa uma tonelada) e muitos usuários do Windows usado como bem (a maioria das pessoas não vai usar todos os recursos do Microsoft Office, que os custos, o que, $100?) Mas não desanime, 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” – que é, 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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Yet another rant about Bcc:s

I just got an email addressed to no less than 78 pessoas, 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, bem, 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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The quest for a decent home page

I’m not sure why home pages were even invented in the first place. Quero dizer, sure, you need a page to open when you boot up your browser, but they just make things, bem, 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, e, bem, today’s the day.

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

What can I do?

Novamente, 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.) Em vez, you should turn off:

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Firefox 4 está fora

Foi cerca de um ano em que vem (ele estava em beta por um ano inteiro), mas o Firefox 4 está definitivamente fora e pode ser baixado em firefox.com. Versão mais recente do navegador de código aberto é um passo gigantesco para a frente do 3.6 versão (a antiga versão estável de um ano atrás, que é lamentavelmente ultrapassada por agora.)

O que mudou

  • Firefox 4 é de cerca de 3 vezes mais rápido no carregamento da página e desempenho JavaScript que 3.6. Isto significa que seus aplicativos web favoritos e sites são – prepare-se para este – 3 vezes mais rapidamente do que antes.
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