LibreOffice on stage at the Libre Software World Conference in Zaragoza

The Internet, November 9, 2011 - The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.4.4, an improved version of the award-winning free office suite for Windows, Mac and Linux. LibreOffice has recently won InfoWorld's BOSSIE Award 2011 as Best of Open Source Software, and the Open World Forum Experiment Award of Most-Popular Software.

If you are like me then you were very excited about HTML 5's video tag. Simplistic, great functionality, and now it is even supported by all of the latest browsers. Video is just a source away, and easier than ever to portray high quality videos right on your website. HTML 5, like anything else, doesn't have everything we want.

Read the full thing at http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2011/10/videojs-open-source-html-5-video-player.html

I bought a Windows game last week. What I got was a scenic tour through the demise of the Windows platform. I knew that Windows as gaming platform was troublesome, but it never was as clear that it's actually moving towards irrelevance. If you ever have seriously played games on Windows you know this cocktail of driver updates, googling error messages, entering illegiible cryptic codes from stickers hidden in game boxes, waiting for online activation, going through update popups of various origins, and what not. It took me something like two hours before I was even able to start the game. I love games, and I have played quite some games on Windows, but I might be done with this now.

Read the full thing at http://blog.cornelius-schumacher.de/2011/10/demise-of-windows-platform.html

Today, the time-zone database was closed down.

It is perhaps easy to read that line, think it doesn't affect you, and then move on. But thats just not the case.

The time-zone database (sometimes referred to as the Olson database) is the computing world's principle source of time-zone data. It is embedded in every Unix and Java for starters, and will be used by many websites and probably by your iPhone. You may know it via the IDs, such as "Europe/London" or "America/New_York".

Read the full thing at http://blog.joda.org/2011/10/today-time-zone-database-was-closed.html

Legacy file formats are evil. They tend to have no written specifications, and when you start reverse-engineering them, you often discover layers of questionable solutions built on top of even more questionable solutions that are carried around for backwards compatibility sake.

So why go through pains of supporting them at all? Simply put, because it's the legacy which isn't always in the past really, because businesses don't like upgrades. Designers keep local cliparts in all kinds of arcane file formats, big publishing houses keep using DOC instead of DOCX, and system integration companies still toss around VSD files.

Read the full thing at http://libregraphicsworld.org/articles.php?article_id=41

Ever heard of WebKit2 and wondering what it means from a Qt perspective? Here’s an attempt to explain QtWebKit and QtWebKit2 in simple terms. I make no attempt to be completely technically correct, it’s meant to be able to explain terminology to the WebKit uninitiated.

Read the full thing at http://blog.forwardbias.in/2011/08/on-webkit-and-webkit2.html

So, here's a bit of an opinion piece on the /etc/sysconfig/ and /etc/default directories that exist on the various distributions in one form or another, and why I believe their use should be faded out. Like everything I say on this blog what follows is just my personal opinion, and not the gospel and has nothing to do with the position of the Fedora project or my employer. The topic of /etc/sysconfig has been coming up in discussions over and over again. I hope with this blog story I can explain a bit what we as systemd upstream think about these files.

Read the full thing at http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/on-etc-sysinit.html

Greetings PHP geeks,

Don't panic! This is not a proposal to add errors or remove this popular extension. Not yet anyway, because it's too popular to do that now.

The documentation team is discussing the database security situation, and educating users to move away from the commonly used ext/mysql extension is part of this.

This proposal only deals with education, and requests permission to officially convince people to stop using this old extension.

Read the full thing at http://news.php.net/php.internals/53799

There we are, after giving you access to some of the latest features coming in Flash through the Incubator program, I am happy to announce the availability of Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 in public beta (for desktop). You will find below the list of features available in this release. Please test your content against these builds, report any bug you find, log bugs

Read the full thing at http://www.bytearray.org/?p=3216

Now that NVIDIA has officially released the 275.xx Linux driver, they're onto the 280.xx driver series. Just in time for the US holiday weekend they have released the NVIDIA 280.04 binary Linux driver beta.

Read the full thing at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTYyMw