The city of Freiburg, Germany adopted OpenOffice back in 2007, mostly replacing the Microsoft Office software it had been using previously. Now, an anonymous reader tips news that the city council is preparing to abandon OpenOffice and switch back. “‘In the specific case of the use of OpenOffice, the hopes and expectations of the year 2007 are not fulfilled,’ the council wrote, adding that continuing use OpenOffice will lead to performance impairments and aggravation and frustration on the part of employees and external parties. ‘Therefore, a new Microsoft Office license is essential for effective operations,’ they wrote. … ‘The divergence of the development community (LibreOffice on one hand Apache Office on the other) is crippling for the development for OpenOffice,’ the council wrote, adding that the development of Microsoft Office is far more stable. Looking at the options, a one-product strategy with Microsoft Office 2010 is the only viable one, according to the council.” The council was also disappointed that more municipalities haven’t adopted OpenOffice in the meantime. Open source groups and developers criticized the move and encouraged the council to consider at least moving to a more up-to-date version of the office software suite. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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German City Says OpenOffice Shortcomings Are Forcing It Back To Microsoft
MrSeb writes “A team of researchers from MIT, Caltech, Harvard, and other universities in Europe, have devised a way of boosting the performance of wireless networks by up to 10 times — without increasing transmission power, adding more base stations, or using more wireless spectrum. The researchers’ creation, coded TCP, is a novel way of transmitting data so that lost packets don’t result in higher latency or re-sent data. With coded TCP, blocks of packets are clumped together and then transformed into algebraic equations (PDF) that describe the packets. If part of the message is lost, the receiver can solve the equation to derive the missing data. The process of solving the equations is simple and linear, meaning it doesn’t require much processing on behalf of the router/smartphone/laptop. In testing, the coded TCP resulted in some dramatic improvements. MIT found that campus WiFi (2% packet loss) jumped from 1Mbps to 16Mbps. On a fast-moving train (5% packet loss), the connection speed jumped from 0.5Mbps to 13.5Mbps. Moving forward, coded TCP is expected to have huge repercussions on the performance of LTE and WiFi networks — and the technology has already been commercially licensed to several hardware makers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes “It’s approximately 11 years since Windows XP was unveiled, and this week Microsoft was still at it trying to convince users that it’s time to upgrade. A post on the Windows For Your Business Blog calls on businesses to start XP migrations now. Microsoft cites the main reason as being that support for XP ends in April 2014, and ‘most new hardware options will likely not support the Windows XP operating system.’ If you run Windows Vista, Microsoft argues that it’s time to ‘start planning’ the move to Windows 8. As this article points out, it’s not uncommon to hear about people still running XP at work.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.