My thoughts on Google's October 29th Nexus and Android updates

A few months back, I gained an interest in the Android mobile operating system. I like the openness of it, the integration it has with apps, and its high customizability. And Google just announced some new stuff, which was supposed to be done at an event on Monday, but it got cancelled due to the hurricane. Google just ended up sending out press releases and posting stuff to their website. Anyway, here's a summary of what they announced along with my thoughts on it.

Protecting your computer and yourself, with common sense.

In my last post, I explained how to update Windows and Mac OS X, and other programs, to install security updates. I also mentioned some free antivirus and antispyware software that do the job quite well. But even after that, there's still one thing that software can't necessarily protect you from...

LibreOffice, a fork that isn't cutlery

I figured I should write a bit about what LibreOffice is since my next post gives a brief mention of it.

When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, they gained four open-source projects that Sun was working on. MySQL (Database engine), OpenOffice.org (Office suite), OpenSolaris (Unix-based operating system), and Virtualbox (Virtual Machine application). It's not really that Oracle was being hostile towards these projects, it was more that they ignored them outright... except OpenSolaris, they killed that off. Because these projects are open-source, people (likely developers) are able to obtain the source code and create a fork of the project. OpenSolaris was forked into Illumos and OpenIndiana. MySQL has a bunch of forks, but they aren't as popular as the OpenOffice and OpenIndiana forks.