OpenOffice 3.1 has been around quite sometime and now there is an updated version 3.2 just released on Feb 11th, 2010. Many companies like Oracle (earlier Sun), Red Hat, IBM etc have worked on this community driven Office Software suit. Great features and extra stability have been introduced post OpenOffice 3.0.  Here is our review on OpenOffice Calc, a worthy alternative to the most popular Spreadsheet software, Microsoft Excel.

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Microsoft Office Word 2007 is perhaps the most used document software out there. Microsoft have once again done a great job with Office Word 2010. It now offers many new features which has made document editing more easier than before. Since getting our hands on Word 2010, we have been finding the exact new features and improvements Microsoft has made. Below are the key features and newly added options that you will find in Office Word 2010.

Update: We have written a summarized post on both Microsoft Excel 2010 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 as well.

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Lust, gluttony, greed, anger, envy, pride, and sloth – Microsoft’s new OS suffers from each deadly sin. Here’s what you can do to minimize the toll each sin takes

The seven deadly sins — for centuries, they’ve shaped the imaginations of poets, priests, and politicians, while giving the great unwashed a frame of reference: Do these things and you’ll burn for sure!

When it comes to software, few products have inspired as much debauchery as Windows. From lust to sloth to envy, Microsoft’s flagship OS platform has proven to be a source of manifold transgression. Zealots have praised it, and pundits have cursed it, while those of us in the IT trenches are forced to actually live with it.

So with Windows 7 just around the corner, it makes sense to examine the product through the prism of these 7 deadly sins. Just how does Microsoft’s new OS drive users to acts of iniquity? And what, if anything, can you, the IT administrator, do to manage the carnal impulses and aberrant behaviors this interloping force of nature engenders?

Lust: Beware Windows 7’s faux-Mac experience, which may drive users to the real thing
Windows 7 inspires lust. Specifically, it arouses an unhealthy yearning for a better computing experience. If you’re an IT administrator, you can see the signs easily: a lingering glance at a contractor’s MacBook Pro, an iPhone in use instead of the standard-issue BlackBerry, browser histories filled with links to macworld.com articles, telltale “my other PC is a Mac” bumper stickers adorning their cubicles.

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Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system is receiving raves in its pre-release testing. While much of the kernel that lies at the heart of the operating system is based on Vista code, several key advances have been made that get rid of Vista annoyances and greatly improve the user experience. Inside the kernel, one important change centers on how multithreaded applications are run. The threading advances provide benefits in energy reduction, scalability, and, in theory, performance.

To check out the benefits on the desktop, I ran tests that reflect the most common use case for heavily threaded desktop apps — namely, graphics-oriented software. Programs such as Adobe Photoshop and other graphical applications query a system’s capabilities at startup and self-configure workloads accordingly. They typically use all the processor cores and as much RAM as they can get away with monopolizing. This approach enables them to provide the fastest performance. So I checked how such programs perform using the Viewperf benchmark (an omnibus graphics benchmark from SPEC, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) and Cinebench, which is a pure rendering benchmark from Maxon Computer. Both benchmarks follow InfoWorld’s tradition of using benchmarks that you can download and run on your own systems to see how your mileage varies. Both benchmarks can be obtained at no cost.

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History is littered with good ideas that didn’t work out because they were ahead of their time. Tablet PCs didn’t work out a decade ago, but with technology advances, they’re poised to make a comeback. Microsoft’s local information web site Sidewalk.com was a bust in 1997, but now sites like Yelp and Google Maps offer local information that many people couldn’t fathom living without. Virtual currency sites like Beenz and Flooz never took off, but the idea is making a comeback on social networks.

This week we saw the release of the highly anticipated Google Wave (). Wave is an innovative communications platform that combines asynchronous communication (like email) with real-time communication (like chat), an application platform, and discovery tools. It’s been touted as both an email killer and a Facebook killer. In short, there’s a lot of hype, and while Wave may prove to be a huge success, I think one thing it potentially represents is a great opportunity for Facebook .

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Does your job fit you like a glove or is it a straitjacket? When I come across the current crop of job sites, I wish we had Web 2.0 in our career planning days; a search engine, a bit of social networking and a host of sites willing to flash your resume to prospective employers.

With the Web, information isn’t a problem…information overload is. A few clicks and you find yourself navigating away from the information you wanted. What we all want is a single window giving us career occupation descriptions on a list of different career choices.

Mindopia seeks to answer that call by cutting short the path from career research to job hunting. Mindopia calls itself a career discovery website. Positioning itself as a single point source for job seekers to get the ‘inside scoop on careers’.

Old fashioned career planning wasn’t bad, was it?

Not at all, but don’t you feel that it was a bit too toilsome? Starting with a gut feeling about what we wanted to do…getting influenced by our peers or parents…going after subjects of our interest…oops, only to find that the reality of 9 to 5 work life was a bit different from what we had conjured up. A generation back we leapt before we looked. Some of us landed on our feet and some didn’t. Those of us who didn’t, started wishing that we researched a bit more before the leap.

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We all need a personal assistant to stay on top of all our social media commitments, it can be difficult and time consuming. Twitter, Facebook, Myspace … Digg, Delicious … and not to mention kepping your personal blog up to date. We need help.

One solution for the MAC user are widgets, those small indispensible apps that run on the dashboard. Below you will find a selection of the best social media widgets for your MAC Dashboard, I hope they help.

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Mini programs, gadgets or widgets, are simple time saving apps that provide you with easy and quick access to the information or tool that you frequently use. With Vista they are called gadgets, and they are organised and displayed from the sidebar.

With the gadgets below you will be able to access the information, perform tasks, and interact with your favourite social media platform. You will find gadgets for Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Wordpress…and much more. You can now have all the info you need at your fingertips.

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Todays news features a new web service, called card.ly. The idea behind it is very simple, much a-like Twitter, in simplicty terms, you’ll love it. We also have the most outrageous geek furniture that your wife would never allow you to buy and, finally, the “The Battle of the Browsers” results are in, no surprises to be honest.

Card.ly

card.ly is a new online service that has potential to be big. Basically you create a tiny a portfolio (all the themes are styled like a business card) by integrating all your social networks, it could be Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Delicious… then you add a little bio and your contact details, and you are good to go. Cool.

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Editing, enhancing or having fun with photos in your iPhone is not a dream anymore as the latest 3Gs iPhone is now furnished with an auto-focus mechanism taking 3 megapixel images. A look around the internet will show you rather decent photos taken by iPhone as people quit printing photos – who will when with a few taps, they can share theirs instantly.

Plenty of photography apps are available for that cause, be it subtle enhancements or quirky modifications – It’s time to put your new iPhone on play and show off to your friends! In this article, we put together 20 Free Photography Apps and recommendation of some good paid apps. On top of that, we’ve also included 10 best Free Video Applications. Free apps after jump.

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Some have embraced it, some have discarded it as too far in the future, and some have abandoned a misused friend in favor of an old flame in preparation. Whatever side of the debate you’re on, you’ve most likely heard all the blogging chatter surrounding the “new hotness” that is HTML5. It’s everywhere, it’s coming, and you want to know everything you can before it’s old news.

Things like jQuery plugins, formatting techniques, and design trends change very quickly throughout the Web community. And for the most part we’ve all accepted that some of the things we learn today can be obsolete tomorrow, but that’s the nature of our industry.

When looking for some stability, we can usually turn to the code itself as it tends to stay unchanged for a long time (relatively speaking). So when something comes along and changes our code, it’s a big deal; and there are going to be some growing pains we’ll have to work through. Luckily, rumor has it, that we have one less change to worry about.

In this article, I’m hoping to give you some tips and insight into HTML5 to help ease the inevitable pain that comes with transitioning to a slightly different syntax.

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