Ktn

By now you may have already seen the announcement and press releases around the release of a free office suite that you can take advantage of (and stay legal or to not buy expensive licenses of products that pack tons of things that you never use, you know who “those” are ).

Yep, it’s IBM Lotus Symphony and as I was reading through the press release I saw that it mentions that it “is the same tool inside some of IBM’s most popular collaboration products, such as the recently released Lotus Notes 8“, so this made me realize that this is actually what we (as of a couple of days) called IBM Productivity Tools (you can see this mentioned on Luis’ blog post titled Finally Joining the *Expensive* Mac Side!) and that I tried as Hannover Productivity Tools back in January! What a nice surprise!

For those that like to read and be up to date and the several happenings, here are some online articles that talk about it:

• IBM’s Symphony Slams Door on Microsoft Office (System iNetwork)
• Free IBM Software Is Bid to Challenge Microsoft Office (WSJ.com)
• I.B.M. to Offer Office Software Free in Challenge to Microsoft’s Line (New York Times)
• Rivals make run at Microsoft Office (CNET News.com)
• IBM takes on Microsoft Office again with Lotus Symphony (Tech news blog - CNET News.com)
• IBM To Offer Free Office Software In Challenge To Microsoft (InformationWeek)
• IBM’s attacks Microsoft with an OpenOffice symphony (Between the Lines - ZDNet.com)
• IBM Launches Lotus Symphony (Open Sources - InfoWorld)
• IBM Challenges Microsoft with Free Office Suite (Slashdot)
• IBM to launch free rival to Microsoft’s Office software (Forbes.com)
• IBM to offer free word processing, office software (Reuters)

Try them and let the Lotus guys know what you don’t like or if you find bugs. Oh, yes, here’s the link to the support forums.

I just found a little example of something that we were mentioning a few weeks ago on one of the courses in the Master degree I’m doing. It is about how nature is perfect and doesn’t produce waste whereas human beings do everything producing waste (and are the cause of the extinction of plants and animals) and that the nature’s (the creation of God) technology is by far superior to the technology we have.

The Bytes and the Bees PC Magazine article is just one of a ton of articles that talk about such things.

A coworker yesterday sent me this link to a good blog post created by Karl David Moore that actually talks about things I, as many others, have seen day after day; and it is that many guys seem that just entered the Informatics, Computer Engineering or Computer Sciences school just because they thought it was cool (or I don’t know) and, as he says, half the guys that entered the grade graduate! And then, you ask them if they like to code and (what I recall from my college friends) is that 4 out of 20 liked to code, only one fifth!

I just recently told my team something that I read in The Pragmatic Programmer book a while ago, and that I do (even years before I bought the book) think is very important, which is that you and nobody else will really take care of your skills, you should invest on yourself because no one else knows for sure what you really like, your interests, weaknesses, strengths, etc. It’s basically the same that Karl mentions:

Developers that aren’t interested in what they do, don’t invest in themselves and don’t strive to improve not only their skills, but also those of their team mates. […] They will never read technology blogs or articles, they will never be found viewing DZone, TSS, infoQ and they will never pick up a technology book.

Go and read the full post, it’s called Beware, the developer who isn’t interested in development!