GenTechReview

This amazing video was found on http://www.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page2173.html?theme=light 

It is truly an amazing video, whats more amazing is that the Japan Airlines plane can take a lightning strike like that without  damage.  More photos and video of this lightning strive can be found on the Coast to Coast website.

Many years ago before the dawn of the internet age a company dominated the word processing market. Wordperfect was the standard in most businesses that used word processing. Then another powerhouse entered the market in 1995 and there was a significant shift in the business market to Microsoft Office. Quite honestly at that time Microsoft had a little better package available for business and Businesses converted in masses and never looked back. Should they? In the title wave of Microsoft dominance, Wordperfect now owned by Corel has been responding by pushing invasion to make a better product and reducing their price to make an office suite more affordable. Has all of this work been enough to catch up with Microsoft? Well in sales no, but when it comes to the quality and value of the product, I think they have.

I am reasonably adept at Microsoft Office, and personally love the enhancements in Office 2007. I have not used Wordperfect in 10 years, So I thought that I could not give a fair comparison to the products since Corel Wordperfect X3 is so new to me. I was wrong. Within 5 Minutes on Corel Wordperfect X3 I knew I was using a far superior tool than Microsoft Office 2007. I was doing advanced formating of a document with tables, photos, dynamic links, within 20 minutes without even referring to the help menu. I have used Corel Wordperfect X3 for about 4 days and can not ever see me going back to the miserable limitations of Microsoft word. Unfortunately my trial version runs out in about three weeks, and I’ll have to pay for my copy, but with the reasonable price point I have no problem with the change. There ya go Corel your market share just went up .00001% Another small step in the right direction.

http://dapple.geosoft.com/default.asp 

Dapple makes it easy to find and visualize massive quantities of geoscientific data available on the Internet.

• View geoscience data, satellite imagery, remote sensing data, geology maps, geophysical data, and many other earth data sets of interest to geoscientists.
• Save an earth view and share your view with colleagues.
• Add new Geosoft DAP and WMS servers of interest.
• View GeoTIFF files.

Dapple is a great resource and product. It is fun to use, and interesting. Is it a replacement to Google Earth? well no. Google Earth has many capabilities that make it a powerful tool itself. Dapple is a great addition to Google Earth however, and is great for those that really want to get in to geology.

It has been a very busy summer, and thus I have had few posts, but I have stumbled across a product that I think deserves mentioning. The program is made for writing scripts with competitors such as Final Draft, Sophocles, and Movie Magic Screenwriter.

The biggest difference in Celtx and the other screenwriting software is that Celtx is Open Source. In addition to Celtx being free, it is also much more than just screenplay formatting software. Celtx has the Screenwriting component, a storyboard, scheduling, with online collaboration capabilities. The software was easy to download and get started. I have used both Movie Magic Screenwriter and Final Draft, and I found that the ease of use, and the powerful capabilities of Celtx are as good if not better than the competition that costs much more.

So why am I discussing this in a education blog? I believe that creating films in the classroom is a powerful educational tool. You can just put the kids on a word processor to write their script, but I feel that it is important to teach the kids the correct formatting for the script. I have considered using Final Draft but I did not feel that the cost even with academic pricing was justified. Celtx is a perfect solution because it’s free and can take students through the preproduction process. It begins with listing characters and coming up with a story line, and then scripting it. Students can also crate a story board to help out line there film. I believe that this is a great writing activity even if you do not progress to creating the actual films.

Unfortunately when it comes to Mac Products and software you get reviews from wither Mac Haters, or Mac Lovers, and the reviews are biased as such. Hopefully this review will be a little fairer, and approach it from one who jumps between Macs and PC’s with the grace of a ballet dancer. On my first impression I like the new I Work 08 suite. The suite is made up of three different applications to meet your office needs. The first is a presentation program that has been around for a few years. Keynote is a well polished application that has few rivals on the market. It is far more adept than Power Point in many aspects. If I were a Professional Presenter, or doing presentations was a major part of my workday this application is very powerful. Early versions of the program were a little more difficult to get going, but in the 08 version of the program it is just as easy to use as power point, except with keynote your end result looks a lot better and you have more options. Pages is a very good and intuitive word processor and layout application. I like that these two great tools are tied together seamlessly in this program. It is very easy to get the layout you want quickly. If you are putting the word processor alone head to head with Microsoft Word, Word wins out with expanded features and ease of finding advanced features. When you combine the layout capabilities with Pages 08 it becomes a very powerful product that most users will be very happy with. If you are a Microsoft Word, or even Apple Works power user, you will likely be disappointed Pages 08. The newest addition to the I Work family is Numbers. I personally like Numbers for laying out documents that need basic spreadsheets for presentations. It is easy to lay out a page that looks great and makes your data stand out. When it comes to serious calculation, or data processing though numbers falls short. In my opinion it is a totally different tool than Excell. Excell is a serious tool that assists you in tracking vast amounts of data and performing complex calculations. Numbers at this stage of development does not meet that need at all. When it comes time to taking that data and presenting it in a clear and good looking way Excell does not hold a candle to numbers. I personally keep all of my data in Excell and export the data I need to numbers to create documents to present to people.

For most people the Apple IWork 08 suite is a great tool that will meet your needs, and wants very well. You can create great looking documents with little effort. For power office application users, at this point this product is not for you. It simply does not have the advanced features needed, with the exception of Keynote, which in my opinion is the best product in it’s field.

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