I had already mentioned in passing here that I am using Emacs for a variety of tasks: outline, project management and planning with Org-Mode, IRC (go figure, my default email client on all my machines is Emacs’ ERC), notes editing or quick scribbling with the Scartch buffer (happens to me …
LibreOffice 4.3 has been released this week and it has already been noticed quite a lot, judging by the number of articles in the press worldwide. The announcement may be found here, and a thorough, technical description has been written by Michael Meeks on his blog (detailed release notes are …
On Tuesday the news that the UK Government had decided to use ODF as its official and default file format started to spread. The full announcement with technical details may be found here; the Document Foundation published its press release on Thursday morning there. This decision is a landmark for …
If you have been following the news and stories on Linux distributions since over ten years like I have been, you tend to have a fairly standard view -yet an educated one- about what’s going on with them, why every year since about 2002 this could have been the year …
It’s been interesting to watch the latest patent litigation between Microsoft and Motorola. The judge’s opinion has been well documented (see Groklaw’s copy here and an annotated one there over at the Essential Patent blog). Now I’m not going to offer an informed legal perspective in this post and by …
I was invited the other day to a conference about innovation in the information technology sector. There was nothing remarkable about that event, except perhaps that it led me to voice an opinion I held for years: I do not understand what people are really talking about when they talk …
The light is shed on OOXML; I’ve lost count of how many officious, ISO sub-versions (and subversions) , alongside the proprietary formats also called OOXML but used in MS Office are now floating in the air. In any case, this short document from the ODF Alliance explains this obscure matter …
These days it’s pretty fashionable to discuss the iPad, and indeed the other evening Jerome, (the other co-founder of Ars Aperta) and I were talking about the iPad when he made a comment that is I think the key to understand Apple’s strategy. Just after Steve Jobs had made the …