GenTechReview

This is a quick smack down of the leading operating systems in the market. I will look at price, performance, tools, and compatibility for each and declare the winner.

Vista Business Editon

Price: A bit on the high side, but considering the distance between major upgrades, and there willingness to release major upgrades as free service packs it becomes more reasonable

Performance: The interface is great eye candy, and works well over all. There are some sluggish moments, and everything does not neccsarily work as advertised

In a previous article I wrote regarding my pleasant surprise of the ease of use and power of Corel WordPerfect X3.  I stand behind the article and still claim that it is the best office product I have used.  But one issue with its use did put a kink in my workflow.  As an early adopter of Microsoft Office 2007 many of my files are in the new.docx format.  Corel WordPerfect X3 could not open the new Microsoft format.  The work around for me is obvious, I simply Open it in Word and save it back to the old  format.  But if I used Corel WordPerfect exclusively it could present problems if clients sent documents in the new format.  I contacted Corel regarding this issue, and they too expressed concern about this issue.    Corel made the following statement regarding support: “Corel would move to make “Open, view and edit” capabilities (Saving will be to the binary formats at first) available in WordPerfect Office for both Microsoft Office OOXML and OASIS ODF in 2007″
Although they did not give me a date of when this would be supported they said it would be soon.  I will post information as soon as it is available.
If you are not sharing files on a regular basis with MS Office users this is not really an issue, but for those actively sharing documents with office users this is an area of consideration.  My personal recommendation would be to keep using what you are now until the support is available.  If you must make a purchase now, I would still recommend Corel Word Perfect X3 because the time and effort you will save by using a better product will be well worth a few headaches until the new format is supported.

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.