Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

You should download it now! It is cleaner and more modern. I immediately installed it on all my systems!

LibreOffice 5.0

“LibreOffice is a powerful office suite; its clean interface and powerful tools let you unleash your creativity and grow your productivity. LibreOffice embeds several applications that make it the most powerful Free & Open Source Office suite on the market: Writer, the word processor, Calc, the spreadsheet application, Impress, the presentation engine, Draw, our drawing and flowcharting application, Base, our database and database frontend, and Math for editing mathematics.”

Comparison of Features between Microsoft Office 2013 and LibreOffice

Berlin, August 5, 2015 – “The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project and the first of the third development cycle. LibreOffice is a full feature open source office suite which compares head to head with every product in the same category, while it stands out for superior interoperability features.

LibreOffice 5.0 builds on the success of the 4.x family, which has been deployed by over 80 million users (source: TDF estimate, based on users pinging for updates), including large organizations in Europe and South America.

LibreOffice 5.0 sports a significantly improved user interface, with a better management of the screen space and a cleaner look. In addition, it offers better interoperability with office suites such as Microsoft Office and Apple iWork, thanks to new and improved filters to handle non standard formats. Other improvements have been added to every module of the suite, and Windows 64bit builds (Vista and later) have been added.

A new version for new endeavours: LibreOffice 5.0 is the cornerstone of the mobile clients on Android and Ubuntu Touch, as well as the upcoming cloud version. As such, LibreOffice 5.0 serves as the foundation of current developments and is a great platform to extend, innovate and collaborate!

A beautiful office suite designed by a fantastic community: With new icons and major improvements to menus and sidebar, LibreOffice looks nicer and helps users in being creative and getting things done the right way. In addition, style management is now more intuitive thanks to the visual preview of styles right in the interface.

Spreadsheets that rock: LibreOffice 5.0 ships with an impressive number of new and enhanced spreadsheet features: complex formulae, new functions, conditional formatting, image cropping, table addressing and much more. Calc’s blend of performance and features makes it an enterprise-ready, heavy duty spreadsheet capable of handling all kinds of workload for an impressive range of use cases.

Better filters for better documents: LibreOffice 5 ships with many improvements to document import and export filters, for an enhanced document conversion fidelity all around. In addition, it is now possible to timestamp PDF files generated with LibreOffice.

A complete list of the most significant new features is available on the accompanying press release, and has also been published on the website at the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.

LibreOffice 5.0 has also been improved ‘under the hood,’ thanks to the precious work of hundreds of volunteers. According to Coverity Scan, the number of defects for 1,000 lines of code is now consistently below 0,001. This translates into an open source office suite which is not only easier to develop but it’s also easier to maintain and debug. In fact, the amount of solved bugs is now over 25,000, and is increasing rapidly.

Last, but not least, LibreOffice 5.0 has been improved in terms of quality and stability thanks to a large number of tests performed on new builds by going through thousands of documents to spot crashers, bugs and regressions.

‘In 2010, we inherited a rather old source code, which had to be made cleaner, leaner and smarter before we could reasonably develop the office suite we were envisioning for the long term,’ says Michael Meeks, a Director at TDF and a leading LibreOffice developer. ‘Since 2010, we have gone through three different development cycles: the 3.x family, to clean the code from legacy stuff; the 4.x family, to make the suite more responsive; and the 5.x family, to make it smarter, also in terms of user interface.’

A summary of what has happened “under the hood” of LibreOffice 5.0 is available here: https://users.freedesktop.org/~michael/under-the-hood-5-0.html.

‘LibreOffice 5.0 is such a good product that people used to legacy open source office suites feel overwhelmed by the amount of new features and improvements,’adds Thorsten Behrens, TDF Chairman and leading LibreOffice developer. ‘Switching from any OOo derivative to LibreOffice is a giant leap into the future of free office suites.'”

There is a secret trick in your new Windows 10 PC! “Right-Click” on your Desktop and create a regular Folder on your Desktop in Windows 10. Then change the folder name to this exact string:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Be sure to paste EXACTLY the string above as the name of the folder. The folder icon will change and you will get lot’s of “God Mode” settings in the contents of the folder. Weird but cool!

Smartwatches are definitely changing the watch industry!

Smartwatches Decimated Traditional Watch Sales Last Month

Techcrunch – By: John Biggs – “An NPD survey is suggesting that the Apple Watch has pushed watch sales to the lowest point since 2008. NPD has found that watchmakers sold $375 million worth of watches in July, down 11 percent from last year.

This decline is the largest since a similar decline in 2008 due to the financial crisis.

The suggestion that Apple had something to do with this is, at this point, specious. However, I would argue that the entire gamut of smartwatches – from Pebble, Motorola, Fitbit and Apple – are putting a serious dent in the fashion watch market.

Summer is traditionally a tough time for watchmakers. Kids have graduated so there are no Rolexen to be bought. There are few holidays in these fallow months and, barring a bit of duty-free tourist trade, there are few opportunities for folks to pick up anything new.

Furthermore, the industry has been fairly low-key over the past year in reaction to confusing consumer demand. The Sistem 51 by Swatch has gained a certain notoriety in the low-end market, but other manufacturers have priced themselves up and out of the fashion world, forcing them to work in cyclical holiday markets.

Ultimately the watch industry is up against the wall. When faced with the choice between a Fossil and a Fitbit, I suspect the average tech-savvy buyer would buy the fitness band. While this should leave watch lovers aghast, it’s the state of things and it will soon be the new normal.”

Samsung purchased Boxee back in 2013 for $30 million. It was a risk, and one that has, unfortunately, not paid off. Samsung has killed the Boxee Project and fired the Boxee Team. Wow. Harse.

Former Boxee CEO Avner Ronen left Samsung as well. They were trying to perfect the TV experience, instead, they got canned.

Oh, really!? Use VLC, folks! Whatta bunch of maroons!

Windows 10 is free, but it makes you pay to use its DVD player

The Telegraph – By: James Titcomb – “Want to watch a DVD on Windows 10? Well first you’ll have to shell out £11.59. That is, if you want to use Microsoft’s official app.

While Microsoft is ending the pattern of charging for major software updates, making Windows 10 a free upgrade, several programs that users would have once taken for granted must now be paid for.

Solitaire, a Windows gaming staple, is now supported by adverts unless gamers pay a subscription fee, a move that baffled long-time fans last week.

On top of this, Microsoft is charging £11.59, or $15 in America, to download its official DVD player. Windows 10 has scrapped Windows Media Player, Microsoft’s native DVD program, meaning the ability to play video discs no longers as standard.

Windows 8, Microsoft’s previous operating system, did not support DVD playback as standard either, with Microsoft charging £6.99 to upgrade the software, although many hardware manufacturers installed their own programs to allow users to play discs.

Many Windows 10 users, however, will be upgrading from Windows 7 and may be surprised when they attempt to load up a film, however.

The lack of DVD support is likely to be down to licensing issues, with Microsoft saving money by not paying out as standard.”

Yep, it is happening, people are sacamming foplks based on tehir desire for Windows 10. Who’d thunk it?

New Windows 10 scam will encrypt your files for ransom

ZDNet – By: Zack Whittaker – “Just days after Microsoft released its latest operating system, hackers have begun targeting soon-to-be Windows 10 users with an emerging kind of malware.

Cisco security researchers are warning users against opening email attachments purporting to be from the software giant. The ‘ransomware’ malware, which encrypts files until a ransom is paid, is being sent as part of an email spam campaign.

In a blog post, Cisco researcher Nick Biasini said the attackers are ‘impersonating Microsoft in an attempt to exploit their user base for monetary gain.’

The emails claims its attachment includes an installer that allows users to get the new operating system sooner.

‘The fact that users have to virtually wait in line to receive this update, makes them even more likely to fall victim to this campaign,’ said Biasini.

Once a user downloads and opens the attached executable file, the malware payload opens, encrypting data on the affected computer, and locking the owner out.

Often, the user is forced to pay in bitcoin, which is far more difficult to trace than using a traditional bank account. And, because attackers are communicating with a command server over the Tor anonymity network, it makes them almost impossible to trace.

Biasini said the malware payload, called CTB-Locker, is being delivered at a ‘high rate.’

‘The functionality is standard however, using asymmetric encryption that allows the adversaries to encrypt the user’s files without having the decryption key reside on the infected system,’ said Biasini.

That means that there’s no clear way to get the decryption key until the ransom is paid.

Ransomware attacks have been on the increase since the start of 2015 as a quick, easy, and often near-untraceable way to generate vast sums of money in a short space.

In more than a year, a division of the FBI received almost 1,000 complaints related to crypto-locking malware, costing consumers $18 million in losses.”