In other OSDC news, speaker Stewart Smith gave a Lightning Talk on OpenOffice 2.3 yesterday. To illustrate the speed issues with the open source office suite, he started to open the program at the start of his talk. And finished the talk before the program had successfully opened. Admittedly Lighting Talks are usually 5-7 minutes long, but still. Ouch.
I’ll admit I’m disheartened to hear that even on a high end laptop, OpenOffice can be so ridiculously slow. Have you used Open Office, or are you using it now? How have you found it? Should I be looking around for a different open source office suite? More »
The Open Source Developers Conference is on in Brisbane this week and one tidbit of cool news to come out of it was Google’s announcement of the Highly Open Participation Contest – an open source competition for teenagers.
Google’s teaming up with a swag of open source organisations to provide a list of challenges for entrants, ranging from code, documentation, research, outreach, quality assurance, training, translation and user interface.
Participants will be in the running to win $10,000 and a trip to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.
So if you have a smart kid brother or sister who you think might get a buzz out of it, point them towards http://code.google.com/opensource to get started.
The contest is open to students age 13 and older who have not yet begun university studies. Contestants will be able to claim tasks until 7pm on January 22, 2008, with winners announced on February 11.
More information is available here.
