if you ever tried to use OpenOffice or NeoOffice to create a presentation with images and timed animations (bare-bones, standard stuff, in other words), do yourself a favor and delete those useless applications from your machine. you’ll thank me. how those clowns can ship software that randomly replaces your images with the dreaded ‘broken image’ image, or that forgets about the animations it is supposed to show, and gives you a blank slide instead, is beyond me. with desktop “productivity” applications this bad, no wonder people are defecting to online.
Tag: opensource
OpenWetWare
an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering.
Drone Paparazzi
Paparazzi UAV is an open-source drone hardware and software project encompassing autopilot systems and ground station software for multicopters/multirotors, fixed-wing, helicopters and hybrid aircraft that was founded in 2003. Paparazzi UAV was designed with autonomous flight as the primary focus and manual flying as the secondary. From the beginning it was designed with portability in mind and the ability to control multiple aircraft within the same system. Paparazzi features a dynamic flight plan system that is defined by mission states and using way points as “variables”. This makes it easy to create very complex fully automated missions without the operators intervention.
wow
OSAF Transitions
Strategically, we find ourselves at a crossroads
4 years on and they still got nothing? why not come out and say “we screwed up”? i expect more transparency from an OSS project.
Competing with free
neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23k other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap. By some reckonings, Linux fans will soon outnumber Macintosh addicts. Linus Torvalds should be rightly proud.
Open Social coming to ASF
open social is coming to the ASF, looks like. myspace, ning and hi5 all have committers, too
Unbureaucratic Computers
why the ai lab gave everyone root, including strangers. the waste of “are you authorized” is still going on in most orgs to this day.
Google HS OSS
the summer of code is coming to high schools
SimCity donated to OLPC
The goal is to renovate it and take it in new directions, by applying Seymour Papert’s ideas about education, Alan Kay’s about oo programming, and many exciting ideas about blogging, game mods, and lessons learned from WoW, The Sims, Spore, etc
2007-11-30:
The goals of deeply integrating SimCity with Sugar are to focus on education and accessibility for younger kids, as well as motivating and enabling older kids to learn programming, in the spirit of Seymour Papert’s work with Logo. It should be easy to extend and re-program SimCity in many interesting ways. For example: kids should be able to create new disasters and agents (like the monster, tornado, helicopter and train), and program them like Logo’s turtle graphics or Robot Odyssey’s visual robot programming language!
heh. it appears the OLPC may be the best (last?) chance for alan kay’s ideas to be implemented at scale.
Zumastor
a community project started by Google members to bring enterprise storage features to Linux.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 
