Category: Computers, Science & Technology

The Open Source OUYA console is available for pre-order, and now has a web-site of their own, ouya.tv! Check them out here: Pre-Order of OUYA Console.

It is out, and it is pretty! They have updated the graphics! I like it! Upgrade NOW!

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/

“The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6, the fourth major release of the best free office suite ever, which provides a large number of new features and incremental improvement over the previous versions. Innovations range from invisible features such as improved performance and interoperability to the more visible ones such as user interface tweaks, where theming has improved to more closely match current design best-practice. A full list with screenshots is available here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-6-new-features-and-fixes, because a picture says more than a thousand words.

Wherever you look you see improvements: a new CorelDRAW importer, integration with Alfresco via the CMIS protocol and limited SharePoint integration, color-scales and data-bars in spreadsheet cells, PDF export watermarking, improved auto-format function for tables in text documents,, high quality image scaling, Microsoft SmartArt import for text documents, and improved CSV handling. In addition, there is a lot of contributions from the design team: a cleaner look, especially on Windows PCs, beautiful new presentation master pages, and a new splash screen.

LibreOffice is becoming increasingly popular in corporate environments. During the last months, several large public bodies have announced their migration to the free office suite: the Capital Region of Denmark, the cities of Limerick in Ireland, Grygov in the Czech Republic, Las Palmas in Spain, the City of Largo in Florida, the municipality of Pilea-Hortiatis in Greece, and the Public Library System of Chicago.

Dave Richards of the City of Largo has commented about the new release on his blog: “I have been testing LibreOffice 3.6 and am happy to see the progress. At this time all of our showstoppers are fixed and we probably will upgrade almost immediately when it’s released. Nice work. CMIS is shaping up nicely. I’ll be looking at 3.7 when it appears in the daily builds”.

In France, the MIMO Working Group – the ministries of Agriculture, Culture and Communication, Defence, Education, Energy, Finance Interior and Justice – with a total of 500.000 end users, has certified LibreOffice for deployment on every desktop. At the same time, the OSB Alliance joined the efforts of German and Swiss cities and communities sponsoring development on the LibreOffice codebase.

Corporate users are joining consumers who quickly switched to LibreOffice. Giorgio Buccellati, Professor Emeritus of History and Near Eastern Languages at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles), says: ‘LibreOffice is wonderful software. I am an avid user of the Hybrid PDF feature, which allows to exchange PDF files with all other users while preserving the possibility of editing the same document like a native file.’

LibreOffice 3.6 has been developed by the growing community of hackers gathered around The Document Foundation, thanks to a friendly and welcoming environment, and the compelling Free Software ethos. The community has surpassed the threshold of five hundred developers providing new features and patches since the announcement of the project on September 28, 2010.

According to Ohloh, LibreOffice is the third largest developer community focusing on free software applications, after Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and the largest to be independent from a single corporate sponsor. This result has been achieved in less than two years, and is now a benchmark for free software projects.

The Document Foundation invites power users, able to help iron out any final wrinkles, to read the release notes carefully, install LibreOffice 3.6.0, and report any problems. More conservative users should stick with LibreOffice 3.5. Corporate users are strongly advised to deploy LibreOffice with the backing of professional support, from a company able to assist with migration, end user training, support and maintenance.”

You know that I have been fascinated by the OUYA Open Source game console project. Well, the final contribution has been cast at Kickstarter, and to say it was wildly successful is an understatement!

OUYA’s Kickstarter funding is complete: over $8.59 million raised, starts shipping in March

“It’s a wrap! Suffice it to say, it’s a been a relatively short, yet astoundingly fruitful — and initially record-breaking — funding run for OUYA, the hackable, Android-based gaming console. With just 29 days to work with since being announced, the Yves Behar-designed system has raked in over $8.59 million thanks to just under 63,300 backers on Kickstarter as of its official 1AM ET funding deadline today.

Those who opted for developer editions will be able to start tinkering with their own units around December, while the majority of backers should receive the console as early as March 2013. Missed the Kickstarter bandwagon? Don’t fret, because OUYA plans to take pre-orders from the general public over the web soon, expecting those units to arrive at doorsteps near April.

The numbers are only part of the picture, of course. If you’ll recall, OUYA swiftly acquired a slew of partnerships from companies like OnLive, Square Enix, XBMC, Vevo, and Robotoki — and as if that wasn’t enough, just yesterday Namco Bandai and Plex officially joined the content-providing party as well. What’s more, we now know that each console will support up to four of those touchpad-equipped controllers for local multiplayer action. Even with all that, this story is far from over, as Joystiq points out that Julie Uhrman and company ‘promise’ to have more updates before its official launch. Naturally, it still remains to be seen how OUYA’s (literally) tiny, Tegra 3-powered footprint will fare against the big three in gaming, but we’re cautiously optimistic.

So, while the final, mass-produced product is still months away, in the meantime you’ll find a recap of all the highlights from OUYA in the nifty saga module below. You can also hit up our friends at Joystiq here for extra insight from the company about its successes so far.”

From a Press Release I got today:

“Roku Inc. today (actually July 26, 2012) announced it has received $45 million in a new strategic investment. News Corporation, British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), prior Roku venture investors Menlo Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners as well as an unnamed strategic investor joined the round. The new relationships include both financial backing and business agreements that demonstrate the industry’s confidence in Roku as the leading distribution platform to bring streaming entertainment to mainstream consumers.

Roku will use the new capital to build further brand awareness through advertising, develop new international markets, and increase engineering and production to support sales growth of both hardware and digital media services on the platform including advertising, games, transactional and pay-per­-view video as well as content packages.”

Sure, it costs almost twice as much, but look what you get for your $60.00!

Hackberry A10 developer board: $60 PC board with Allwinner A10 CPU

“A Hackberry A10 Developer Board with 512MB of RAM is available for $60. A 1GB model should be available soon for $65.

Both models include:

• 1.2 GHz Allwinner A10 ARM Cortex-A8 CPU
• Mali 400 graphics
• 4GB built-in storage (1.5GB available in the Android user partition)
• 802.11n WiFi
• 10/100 Ethernet
• 2 USB 2.0 ports
• SDHC card slot
• HDMI
• 3.5mm mic jack
• composite video output
• 4-pin serial header

Miniand is selling a new developer board called the Hackberry A10. It features an Allwinner A10 processor for about $60. It’s basically a little computer with a CPU, memory, and storage built in. It also has a range of input and output options.

What it doesn’t have is a case. You’ll want to buy or build your own if you plan to use the Hackberry A10 Developer Board as a desktop computer or set-top-box for your TV. You could also theoretically use this sort of box to power a robot, web server, or a range of other devices.

It’s a lot like a $35 Raspberry Pi, except the HackBerry A10 costs $60 and up, has more memory, built-in-storage, a faster processor, and WiFi.

The Allwinner A10 processor is a single core ARM Cortex-A8 chip with Mali 400 graphics. It’s not as fast as an NVIDIA Tegra 3 or Samsung Exynos 4412 chip, but it’s a lot cheaper, and it can still handle HD video and a range of basic tasks.

That’s one of the reasons it’s proven popular with budget Android tablet makers such as Coby. But the chip is also showing up in a growing number of mini PC devices that are designed to be used with a TV, mouse, keyboard, or remote control.

We’ve seen a range of these devices, including the MK802, Mini X, and Mele A1000. While most ship with Google Android, they’re also capable of running Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux-based operating systems.

Like those devices, the Hackberry A10 will ship with Android 4.0, but Miniand plans to offer Linux images for the device. These are the same folks who brought us some of the first Linux images for the MK802, so they have a pretty good track record with this sort of thing.”

This is their Hotmail replacement. The article is from their Outlook Blog.

Introducing Outlook.com – Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

“Recently, we talked about how we’ve reimagined cloud services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. And we described new apps for Windows 8, updates to SkyDrive, and how cloud services power the new Office Preview, We’ve also been hard at work on a mission to reimagine personal email – from the datacenter all the way to the user experience. Today, we’re starting to deliver on that goal with a preview of the new Outlook.com – modern email designed for the next billion mailboxes.

Webmail was first introduced with HoTMaiL in 1996. Back then, it was novel to have a personal email address you could keep for life – one that was totally independent from your business or internet service provider. Eight years later, Google introduced Gmail, which included 1 GB of storage and inbox search. And while Gmail and other webmail services like Hotmail have added some features since then, not much has fundamentally changed in webmail over the last 8 years – though yesterday’s frustrations about the small size of inboxes are now things of the past. At the same time, email is becoming less and less useful as inboxes become cluttered with newsletters and social updates, and people increasingly keep up their personal connections in social networks instead of their email address books. All of this has led many to hope for a better solution so you don’t have to settle for today’s webmail.

We think the time is right to reimagine email. So today, we’re introducing a preview of Outlook.com. We realized that we needed to take a bold step, break from the past and build you a brand new service from the ground up. You already know Outlook via the Outlook desktop application-for PCs and Macs-as the world’s most popular application for reading email, managing a calendar, and connecting to people. And you may have used the Outlook Web App connected to Exchange Server in your organization. Now, in addition to a desktop application and a service for businesses, we’re offering Outlook as a personal email service – Outlook.com.”

This is from the OUYA Kickstarter site:

“We’ve been saying that OUYA will offer all kinds of games.

This morning, we are honored to announce that OUYA is partnering with Square Enix to bring you one of the most beloved franchises in gaming — Final Fantasy. We will kick this off with Final Fantasy III, which will be a launch title on OUYA. This will be the first time gamers outside of Japan can play FFIII on their televisions through a console.

But that’s not the end of it: We’re promising to deliver Final Fantasy III like you’ve never seen it before – Hironobu Sakaguchi’s third installment in the role playing game franchise will be updated to exploit OUYA’s high-definition resolution in glorious graphic detail. For those of you who are new to Final Fantasy, we’ll offer a free demo so you can give it a go!

Previously unreleased in the U.S. until it appeared as a 3D remake for the Nintendo DS in 2006, Final Fantasy III was widely referred to as one of the ‘missing pieces’ in the FF series. OUYA players can now proudly claim this piece of the puzzle.”

In the last Netcast I talked about M$ getting all “social” with it’s new Office, well, now it is getting “cloudy” as well!

SkyDrive features for Office 2013 detailed

“Office 2013 is now available to download in a preview version, so its users already know that the next version of Microsoft’s productivity software suite also has SkyDrive features. Today, Microsoft offered up more details on how its SkyDrive cloud-based storage service will be integrated and used in Office 2013.

In a new post on the Office Next blog, Microsoft points out that saving an Office document to a SkyDrive account should be no different than saving the same file on a PC hard drive. It states, ‘Like other default locations in File Explorer, such as the Documents Library, the SkyDrive experience is accessible from other Windows applications and available offline.’

If you want to read and/or edit an Office file you have created on another PC, you can log into your SkyDrive account and edit that same file you have synced with your home PC with Office Web Apps or even with the current Office 2010 suite. Microsoft states, ‘This is a major advantage of saving to your local hard drive because it gives you access to your documents wherever you sign into Office, and this approach is also a huge improvement over the cloud solutions that force you to stay online to do anything.’

But what if you have a bad online connection while you are traveling, but you still have to edit and sync up your Office documents for a big presentation? Microsoft says that any file uploads to your SkyDrive account are handled asynchronously by Office 2013. It states:

Therefore, if you are working on your document from a coffee shop with a weak WiFi signal, you will be able to continue making changes to the file while uploads are in progress. This ensures that the performance and latency associated with editing Office documents is not affected by the bandwidth, latency or even availability of your network connection.

Office 2013 will also let people know if they are working on files while they are also offline and can even alert Office 2013 users of any changes that have been made to documents that are awaiting an upload to their SkyDrive account.

Microsoft has also made sure that editing any Office 2013 documents will take up as little bandwidth as possible. It states, ‘For example, if you are working on a 50 MB PowerPoint presentation and decide to insert a new bullet point, Office will only upload that single bullet point.'”

OUYA, the Open Source Gaming Console, and very successful Kickstarter project, is gaining steam (no pun intended!) Get it? “Steam” is a big on-line gaming platform? OK, OK.

OUYA secures OnLive partnership, teases controller design as it passes $5.5M on Kickstarter

“OUYA, the wildly successful Kickstarter project that recently passed $5.5M in funding, has just announced a partnership with cloud gaming company OnLive, a service which delivers popular gaming titles on-demand over the Internet. This, at the very least, will guarantee games will be readily available from the start, in addition to OUYA’s plans on working directly with developers.

If you haven’t heard of OnLive yet, you can think of it as the Netflix of on-demand gaming. The service first launched on PCs, Macs an TVs, and then expaned to iOS and Android in December of last year. Here’s a tease from OUYA’s announcement:

According to OnLive, this partnership will bring “hundreds of top-tier games” from 80+ publishers onto the OUYA console — games that will also be playable on a tablet while you’re on the go. Instant demos (lasting up to 30 minutes) will also be available for nearly every game in OnLive’s library, including the likes of Ravaged and Darksiders II.”

Just a note, that we will be skipping our Dr. Bill.TV show this week (and this week only) due to the passing of my Mom, Bonnie Bailey. We are dealing with funeral arrangements, and other necessary things, and trust that you will understand the brief hiatus. Thanks, guys!

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