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Filed under: Office, IBM, OpenOffice.org, Beta

IBM releases updated beta of Lotus Symphony office suite

Lotus Symphony beta 2
Remember Lotus Symphony? A few months ago IBM launched its open source MS Office competitor based on OpenOffice.org code. We downloaded it, installed it, weren't particularly impressed, unloaded it and forgot about it.

Now IBM is back with a second beta release of Lotus Symphony. The application still runs pretty slow on our Windows Vista test system. There are versions available for Windows XP, Vista, and Linux. A Mac release is scheduled for next year.

Computer World reports that IBM plans to release updates every 6 to 8 weeks. The next version will include support for 23 languages. Right now, Lotus Symphony is only available in English.

As for major changes in Lotus Symphony Beta 2, we didn't notice much in the way of new features. So we're guessing most of the tweaks are under the hood bug fixes.

[via Computer World]

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, E-mail, Yahoo!

Yahoo! Messenger opens up to corporate IM from MS & IBM

Y Messenger and Lotus SametimeFor all you corporate users that want to connect to the outside world, the Yahoo! Messenger blog just announced that Y! Messenger can now connect to users on MS Live Communications Server and IBM \ Lotus Sametime. This is in addition to the previously released support for MSN Messenger (now called Windows Live Messenger).

I'm not sure how this functionality can be found - I pulled the current version of Y! Messenger from the official website, and it doesn't yet have Sametime or LCS listed - maybe I'm just a little impatient...

[Update: I just booted my PC and the options appeared auto-magically...]

Filed under: Business, Fun, Windows, Office, Freeware

VisiCalc - a retro download

If you've ever been curious about the first ever computer spreadsheet, you can download VisiCalc itself and give it a try. Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet, received permission from Lotus who now own the copyright for VisiCalc to allow him to offer it for free on his website. The actual executable weighs in at a paltry 27 kilobytes, and would run on a PC from 1981 - in fact it is virtually identical to the one that shipped for DOS 1.0. The only difference is that the copy protection has been removed.

VisiCalc is a piece of personal computing history, and is arguably the "killer application" that ushered in the era of personal computers.

We were lucky enough to have Dan post a comment recently at The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog.

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Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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