Author: Leonid Mamchenkov

OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice?

OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice?

CyberNet News has a nice coverage of StarOffice / OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice history.

  • August 1999 – Sun Microsystems buys a company (StarDivision) and gets StarOffice.
  • October 2000 – An open source version of StarOffice, called OpenOffice.org, was released.
  • … almost 10 years goes by with several major and successful OpenOffice.org releases.
  • January 2010 – Oracle buys Sun Microsystems.
  • September 2010 – Some members that worked on OpenOffice.org started “The Document Foundation” due to concern over the future of OpenOffice.org now that Oracle owns it. The concerns were understood since Oracle took the OpenSolaris project, which had been around for nearly 20-years, and discontinued open development of it.
  • January 2011 – OpenOffice.org 3.3 released.
  • January 2011 – LibreOffice 3.3 was released (based on OpenOffice.org 3.3). This is the first stable version of the product.
  • April 2011 – Oracle announces that it will no longer be supporting development of OpenOffice.org.
  • June 2011 – Oracle announces that they will contribute OpenOffice.org (the trademark and the code) to the Apache Software Foundation.
  • June 2011 – LibreOffice 3.4 released.
  • February 2012 – LibreOffice 3.5 released.
  • May 2012 – Apache OpenOffice 3.4 released. Note that it’s not called “OpenOffice.org” anymore, and is instead called “Apache OpenOffice”.

Atomic Bookmarks for Google Chrome

Via CyberNet News I came across a nice extension for Google Chrome – Atomic Bookmarks.  When installed it provides a quick access to bookmarks via single click.  It has a few nice features, such as quick bookmark search and saving of currently open tabs into a new folder with a single click again.

The user interface has a few minor glitches, but if you are using bookmarks in Google Chrome, this add-on is definitely recommended.

Fukushima butterflies mutations

Fukushima butterflies mutations

Genetic mutations have been found in three generations of butterflies living near Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. The gruesome discovery has led scientists to fear that the leaking radiation could affect other species.

The study was published by Scientific Reports. Researches said that around 12 per cent of pale grass blue butterflies that had been exposed as larvae to nuclear fallout developed abnormalities, including broken or wrinkled wings, changes in wing size, color pattern changes, and wider-than-normal variations in numbers of spots on the butterflies.

Though the insects were mated in a lab well outside the fallout zone, about 18 per cent of their offspring displayed similar problems, said Joji Otaki, an associate professor at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, in southwestern Japan.

That figure rose to 34 per cent in the third generation of butterflies – even though one parent from each coupling was from a group unaffected by radiation.

Researchers also collected another 240 butterflies in Fukushima last September, six months after the disaster. Abnormalities were recorded in 52 per cent of that group’s offspring – “a dominantly high ratio,” Otaki told AFP.