The free office suite OpenOffice is now offering a beta of version 3.0 for testing and it's easier than ever for Mac owners to start using it right away. Why would you use OpenOffice when Google Docs is so easy? Some times it's nice to have a more robust, desktop toolset than Google Docs offers. The new OpenOffice could fill that need nicely.

With strong looking support for importing and exporting even the newest Microsoft document formats, OpenOffice is easy to try out. Mac users no longer have to run the X11 program in order to use the suite.

Sun Microsystems has released the first beta for OpenOffice.org 3 for Windows and Mac. The new version of OpenOffice, which is a popular open-source competitor to Microsoft Office, looks to offer users improvements on every component from interface to features to behavior.

OpenOffice now natively supports OS X, so Mac users won't have to install the X11 module before running the suite. Full Vista support is also included in the beta, and didn't cause any problems during light testing. Notably, OpenOffice 3 includes filters for the new Microsoft Office document formats such as DOCX and XLSX as well as continuing support for standard Microsoft formats. Support for Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for Mac has been lacking until now.

Macworld's initial review of the MacBook Air was based on its stock £1,199 configuration, which features a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 80GB of storage provided by a 1.8in traditional hard drive. Since then, we've obtained two 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Airs: one with the same 1.8in 80GB hard drive, and one with 64GB of flash memory as its primary internal storage device (what Apple calls a solid-state drive, or SSD.)...

Both upgrades did improve things. The processor upgrade improved calculation-based tasks such as 3D rendering and video encoding and the SSD upgrade enhanced disk-intensive tasks such as duplicating a file or launching Photoshop....

We spent two weeks using a 1.8GHz MacBook Air equipped with the 64GB SSD as the primary system. It turns out that trimming down a system in order to fit on the 64GB SSD was – for us – almost impossible.

Since most Mac models don't offer extra drive bays, external hard disks are the way to go for adding vast storage capacity to your computer. External HDs are great for storing large projects, moving huge amounts of data from place to place, or backing up via Time Machine.

Hard disks are a commodity product nowadays: the market is flooded with a cornucopia of options, most of them cheap and easy to install. So which is right for you?

The trick is this: find out who makes the actual hard drive inside the external enclosure (that is, inside the nicely-designed plastic or metal box that sits on or under your desk).

Backup, Backup, Backup. While it sounds like I'm giving a driving lesson, I'm really preaching about the necessity of keeping our memories and work safe from outside threats, and from ourselves (accidental file deletion, etc.). While Microsoft and Apple have given us tools in Windows Vista and Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, respectively, people still aren't using these backup apps.....

The thing is, even though you have the tools, you need somewhere to store all these files in case the hard drive in your PC or Mac goes kablooey (which is inevitable if you keep your machine long enough). Enter the compact hard drive. Compact hard drives... have capacities larger than the hard drives most desktops and laptops came with, and they're portable, to boot! You can use them either as an insurance policy for your laptop, or to shuttle data back and forth from your home PC to your work PC.

Finally, eight months after the aluminum iMac made its debut, Apple has released an update to its flagship consumer desktop model. Under the hood, the new iMacs differ significantly from the original aluminum iMac, and those differences result in speed increases.

On the outside, nothing has changed, and the iMac is still available in 20- or 24-inch aluminum-encased models. The major changes involve the Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) processor now at the heart of the iMac.....

However, a slate of under-the-hood improvements have facilitated a performance spike in the standard models that makes them an especially good value for people looking to upgrade....

IBM earned top honors among electronics manufacturers on a recently-updated climate friendliness scorecard (.pdf), earning 77 out of a possible 100 points to beat runners-up Canon, Toshiba, Sony and HP in a ranking of the companies' responsiveness to climate change. IBM, which makes big, hulking servers and mainframe computers, even beat out Microsoft (38 points) and Google (55), whose products are composed entirely of electrons. Apple, which has taken heat from Greenpeace for the allegedly toxic chemicals in its iPhone, scored a pathetic 11 out of 100.

Soon after Michele Goins became chief information officer at Juniper Networks in February, she decided to respond to the growing chorus of Mac lovers among the networking company's 6,100 employees. For years, many had used Apple's computers at home and clamored for them in the office as well. So she launched a test, letting 600 Juniper staffers use Macs instead of the standard-issue PCs that run Microsoft's Windows operating system.....

Funny thing is, she has never received a single sales call from Apple. While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference.....

It's a people's revolution, of sorts, with workers increasingly pressing their employers to let them use Macs in the office....

Mac fanboys have been singing Apple's praises for years, of course. But now the call is coming from mainstream users, people who may have started off with an iPod, then bought a Mac at home and no longer want a "Windows-by-day, Mac-by-night" existence.

A new Apple retailer has opened in Lahore, Pakistan. It's not an official Apple Store, but a joint venture between Apple and Pakistan-based retailer Raffles.... Called "iRaffles".....

Wikipedia, the free, user-generated online encyclopedia, faces a court battle to protect itself from liability for everything that users post on the site. The company behind the site will argue that it should be granted immunity under US law....

Wikimedia argues overall, though, that it is protected from liability by the Communications Decency Act (CDA), whose section 230 protects a publisher from liability for things said by other people on its electronic services until it is made aware of the comments. At that point it must take action or risk becoming liable.

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