Team Inspired Safety: What I Learned from Astronaut Mike Mullane

Team Inspired Safety: What I Learned from Astronaut Mike Mullane

Blender - Open Source 3D Rendering and Wireframe Model Development

Hold on to your hats game devleopers! Blender is an Open Source alternative to Caligari TrueSpace ($80) and AutoDesk Maya ($1,999). From what I have seen, Blender's functionality fits somewhere inbetween TrueSpace and Maya. Blender can be used for game graphics development or rendered video development (think "Toy Story", "Robots", and "The Incredibles"), in addition to developing unique web graphics and logos. Blender offers exceptional raytracing quality for both Windows and Linux. For those seeking to instantiate a 3D graphics shop like that of Pixar, this means that once a graphics video concept is developed in a Windows environment, the real number crunching to produce it can occur on a Linux cluster, enabling it to be produced more rapidly. Gotta love it!

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WinDirStat - An Open Source Application - See the Files that Clog your Hard Drive

So there I was, chugging through one of my computers trying to free up some space. I found an ancient artifact. A zip file at 3GB. It made me wonder if there were others just like it. With MS-Explorer, this is very time consuming. WinDirStat gives you a method to see your files visually, examine your cache's and find things on your drive that you had no idea were there and sitting on valuable hard drive space. WinDirStat is a must!

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Vitrite - Make your Windows Transparent

Before Vista, most Windows users have never experienced the joy of Gnome where windows can be made transparent (as a window should be).   Now that Vista is out there,  there is a large crowd of us who prefer the speed of WinXP over Vista.  Wouldn't it be cool to give yourself a Vista desktop effect on  your WinXP and 2000 OS?  Wouldn't it be nice to have a Linux like feel of your desktop (if you have never used a Linux desktop, here is your chance to simulate).  With Vitrite, you are able to take any desktop window, and make it transparent by 9 degrees of transparency so you can see other windows behind it.  I cannot tell you how many times I have needed to hand type a scanned PDF into Word and have had to flip back and forth between windows.  With Vitrite, you can see right through.




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GIMP for Windows - Open Source Graphics Editor

GIMP is an Open Source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. GIMP is a graphics manipulation tool with many of the filters and capabilities of earlier versions of Adobe Photoshop (presently Adobe Photoshop CS is $599). If you are not a graphics editor, using Photoshop to do basic graphics manipulation is expensive and overkill. GIMP is the alternative. GIMP supports graphic layer composition, has a wide array of graphic filters and other gizmo's. GIMP may not be for everyone, however is likely more than enough for most.

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FreeMind - Open Source Mind Mapping

FreeMind is an Open Source Mind Mapping application built upon Java (requires JRE) that helps one pull all the details that one tends to squirrel around in one's head, map them, organize them, then communicate them. FreeMind has a server Java applet component that supports free exchange of ideas on the internet or local intranets. FreeMind is a free alternative to MindMapper ($245).

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Open Office - Open Source Business Productivity Suite

Unhappy that you now have to pay for another flavor of MS Office Pro? Does this pain in your side hit you every 3-4 years? Now is the time to begin using Open Office. Open Office is a free alternative to MS Office ($349). It is Microsoft file format compatable and contains the Open Office Writer (alternative to MS Word), Open Office Calc (alternative to MS-Excel), Open Office Impress, (alternative to MS-PowerPoint), Open Office Base (alternative to MS-Access), Open Office Draw (alternative to MS-Visio and Open Office Math (an advanced mathematical equation editor that is non-existent in MS-Office). Open Office, unlike Microsoft Office, is free, will contunue to be free, and is updated freely on a more frequent basis. Use it at home, roll it out across your enterprise. Save money. It works!

Writer	Calc	Impress
Base	Math	Draw

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