Oh,the irony! After Apple tried to have the sale of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet blocked in Europe, Samsung may in turn try to have the release of Apple's iPhone 5 blocked there -- and possibly elsewhere around the world. That's because the iPhone's expected to make use of "some basic telecoms technology that Samsung has patented".

According to The Korea Times,it'll almost certainly be banned in Korea for the same reason.

Last month's scheduled release of the Galaxy Tab was delayed in Australia because of Apple's patent claims, so there was little surprise when, on Monday, Samsung filed a counter-claim, accusing Apple of infringing seven of its Australian wireless patents in the iPhone and iPad.

Now do you see how software patents encourage innovation and the development of new products ...?

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 3:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Now you can take it with you! LibreOffice has been released as a PortableApp, meaning you can carry it around with you on a USB stick and use it anywhere -- and all your files -- on any Windows machine, without having to install it. (It will also run under Wine on Linux machines.)

More details about LibreOffice Portable here, and here are the links.

In other news, LibreOffice have started a couple of new sites to house extensions and templates. Both are currently in beta, but you can check them out here and here.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 5:44 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

More Linuxes. Oh goody! That was my reaction to discovering VirtualBoxes. 
 
I've sung the praises of VirtualBox a couple of times in the past.
 
Now here's a site that provides virtual machines images to save you the hassle of downloading and installing them individually. There are more than 30 Linux images -- everything from ArchLinux to Zenwalk.
 
There are three OpenSolaris images, a couple of FreeBSD ones, and more than half-a-dozen others, including Android-86, Plan 9 and FreeDOS.
 
There's some good documentation on how to register and download an image,  and how to manage users and passwords.
 
So what are you waiting for ...?

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )