ome immensely powerful features will be included in OpenOffice.org version 2. I recently attended a live demonstration; therein it was shown that regular expressions are included in the package, along with other features that make OO.org more attractive than its commercial equivalent — Microsoft Office.

Open Office is composed almost purely of C/C++, which makes it fast. According to one source, Open Office performs better than a recent Office release.

The CPU load when closing and opening Writer (OO.org) and Word (Office)

The BBC runs an interesting article on future potential for ‘teleports’.

…within a human generation, we might be able to replicate three-dimensional objects out of a mass of material made up of small synthetic “atoms”…

…You capture it digitally, ship it over across the network, and then reproduce a physical object that looks just like the original object, and moves just like it…

The biggest challenge yet is how to construct objects with ‘nano-dust’. It is a huge barrier to get past and, in the mean time, just the mentioning of teleporting seems laughable.

I have been following the writings of John Dvorak for several months and in his column, he expresses the main difficulty that Microsoft are now facing.

All we hear about Longhorn, though, seems to be about the removal of one promised feature after another…

…These were the fancy file structure, the new presentation manager, and a communications system—things that were going to make the OS a platform for what were described as Service-Oriented Applications (SOA).

Longhorn is often characterised as Service Pack 3 and it can motivate a large proportion of Windows users to seek alternative platforms. One might add the statistic that half of all businesses still use Windows 2000, so can Longhorn give a compelling reason to upgrade? Clearly this will be a serious hurdle to Microsoft.

After Apple’s recent switch to Intel, let us see if Mac OS becomes available to third parties. This can easily balance the cost of hardware with the added value of security.

Longhorn: screenshots of prototypes

Fortune Magazine reports that Michael Dell, who has already become Linux-friendly, is interested in licensing Apple’s Mac OS.

…Dell (the company) has for several years fearlessly—and lucratively—sold servers loaded with Linux, the operating system Microsoft reviles and dreads. And as the industry’s top dog it wields more bargaining power with Microsoft than other PC-makers. So I emailed Michael Dell, now the company’s chairman, and asked if he’d be interested in the Mac OS, assuming that Apple CEO Steve Jobs ever decides to license it to PC companies. (For now, Jobs says he won’t.)

The hard-drive peripheral in for the Playstation 3 will run Linux. This news is by no means surprising as Sony’s direct opponent in the realm of home gaming is Microsoft. This news item, as usual, opens the door to common jokes (snippet from my post at Slashdot):

Who wouldn’t buy the Playstation 3, even just to play a game that no-one can resist: compiling the Linux kernel. That sure can keep one up until 5 AM.

…

Salesman: Here you see the latest Xbox which renders a zillion polygons per second.

Customer: Does it come with gcc?

Salesman: Is that one of the latest patches?

Customer: *sign* Not interested…

Google take their satellite maps service one step further:

…trucks would drive along every San Francisco street using the lasers to measure the dimensions of buildings, to create a 3D framework onto which digital photos can be mapped…

One wonders if they can acquire full-colour information. Perhaps their 2-D, top-down pictures can be mapped onto 3-D surfaces. We shall wait and see.

In other news, Google Maps have come under fire recently.

Several sites are running an article on the recent statistical figure: laptops sales surpassed desktop sales in the States.

Will it take another 5-10 years until PDA‘s outsell laptops? Hardware is becoming smaller and cheaper; CPU speed increases rather slowly; RAM matters very little at this point where the O/S just doesn’t require it. So, smaller units might be equally good. To get a convenient workspace, one can attach an external monitor and other peripherals to the PDA while having the choice to just pull the PDA out of the pocket.