Posted 10/05/08 at 02:13:26 PM by Justin Kerr

Open Office has been around in one form or another for over nine years now. But the once little known productivity suite known back then as StarOffice has evolved considerably over the years. Today the Sun Microsystems freebee is admittedly a fairly full featured alternative to Microsoft Office. Open Office in fact has become so useful that Maximum PC Editor and Chief Will Smith has admitted its open source charm (and free price tag) has finally won over his home PC for casual word processing. Fans of the platform have another reason to get excited these days with the impending launch of version 3.0. The new version will further improve compatibility when working with Microsoft Office files and will include additional support for the open file format OpenDocument which is to be integrated into Office 2007. For those looking to give version 3 a try, a public beta is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. But for corporate users looking to implement Open Office you should follow the links instead to the version named StarOffice. The retail version will cost you about $69.95, but it includes technical support and intellectual property indemnification. For those keeping track Open Office 2 launched on October 20th 2005 and the latest stable version is 2.4.1 which was released in June.

So are you ready to abandon Microsoft Office?

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12

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Software, linux, open source, ogg, docx, xml, odf, free software, openoffice

Posted 04/21/08 at 02:18:14 PM by Michael Brown

iRiver’s new E100 digital media player offers a several terrific features, including a MicroSD memory slot, FLAC and OGG support, and the ability to record audio (there’s a built-in mic and a line-level input). Unfortunately, all that goodness is undermined by the device’s many flaws.

Click Read More to continue.

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iRiver, FLAC, ogg, consumer electronics, digital media player, E100, reviews

Posted 07/10/07 at 06:23:11 PM by Robert Strohmeyer

Why you should (but may find it difficult to) use open formats for all your files.

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4

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linux, open source, ogg, docx, xml, odf