The Free Office

Everyone loves free stuff and when it comes to software everyone has its own definition of free. For most of us free actually means downloading pirated software from warez sites, but for the rest of the masses (those who doesn’t believe in piracy) Linux and OpenOffice.org are the names that comes to mind. In recent years, the popularity of OpenOffice.org has grown by leaps and bounds. With its version 3.0 set to be released in 2008, the suite is second in popularity next only to Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice.org (OO.o or OOo) is an office suite application which is available for various operating systems. As its default format OpenOffice supports OpenDocument standard for data interchange. In addition to that it also supports Office '97-2003 formats. OpenOffice is based on Sun Microsystems’s office suite package StarOffice. The source code for the suite was released in the year 2000. OpenOffice is a collection of various applications like Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math, and Writer. Base is a database application that will help you create and manage databases—similar to Microsoft Access. Calc is a spreadsheet application similar to Microsoft Excel. Draw is a charting application that lets you make flowcharts, network diagrams and any other organization charts. Impress is similar to Microsoft PowerPoint—it is a presentation creation tool. Math is a formula manipulation tool that can be used inside other OOo applications,
or as a standalone tool as well. Finally, there’s Writer, a word processing application that is OOo’s answer to Microsoft Word. The suite also has a small program known as QuickStarter which runs when the computer boots for the first time. It loads the core files and libraries for OpenOffice.org during computer startup and allows the suite applications to start more quickly when selected later.
API of the suite is based on a component technology known as Universal Network Objects (UNO). It has a wide range of interfaces defined in a CORBA-like interface description language. The document file format used is based on several export and import filters and XML. All external formats are converted back and forth from an internal XML representation. By using compression when saving XML to disk, files are smaller in size than the equivalent binary Microsoft office documents.

Internet Explorer 8 coming up

Microsoft Internet Explorer (most commonly known as IE) is the Microsoft’s graphical web browser. Having its debut launch in 1995 IE is one of the most widely used web browser today. With seven versions already launched, Microsoft has announced release of its eighth version in 2008. It will be Microsoft’s first major update in the browser technology since IE-7. In December 2007 Microsoft announced that Pre-Beta code for IE-8 has already passed the so-called ACID2 compatibility test (a test which determines how well a browser works with different web standards). IE-8 will have support for CSS 2.1, Data: Uri’s, CSS generated content and the HTML tag ‘abbr’. Dean Hachamovitch, the guy who runs the IE team, said that beta release of IE-8 is expected in the first half of 2008 although it is unclear when IE-8 will be officially launched.

DirectX 10 what's new???

Microsoft DirectX is a set of APIs for handling tasks related to multimedia, and gaming. It was designed to provide a much broader gaming or multimedia environment. Starting off with DirectX 3, various DirectX versions are out, namely DirectX 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. It works by giving direct access to low-level functions of a peripheral by providing a set of APIs (application programming interface).Every new version of DirectX adds support for new hardware features, allowing game developers to push the boundaries of realism a little bit further.
DirectX9 being a huge hit embedded a lot of unique and new features but due to fixed number of vertex units and pixel processing units and its huge dependability on CPU DirectX9 had to face problems like API object overhead.
With games becoming more and more realistic there was need for a newer and powerful API, and the answer came as DirectX 10.The API of DirectX 10 has been written from ground and the new and improved API reduces API overhead to a greater extent. Object overhead is also reduced so that more unique objects can be shown in a scene at one time. A new exciting feature called Geometry shader is added in the new API. So, what makes DirectX10 so powerful? The answer lies in the unified architecture of the new API. This unified API and GPU architecture sums the traditional vertex, pixel and geometry units into one processing units instead of separate ones. So the API can handle these instructions through one single instruction only. The key idea behind a unified architecture is to make the GPU from a render processor to a complete processor; i.e the GPU can now perform more functions like physics, AI, animation and many other processes improving the gaming experience. New features will also allow the possibility of new 3D effects in games.
Although power packed the only demerit with DirectX10 is that it is tied to Windows Vista, so in need to experience DirectX10 powered games we have to switch to windows vista. For now, the DirectX 10 API is a move in the right direction when it comes to gaming, and it can be easily said that it will allow future GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA to rise in the gaming arena.
The figure shows how images are rendered in DirectX10: