Every Techie needs to read something.

Monday, March 27, 2006

The US Plans to build a Moonbase?

I saw this little blurb about how the US Plans to build a Moonbase, and it struck me a couple of ways. First off, let me admit that I don’t get a whole lot of news; I just don’t have the time. So maybe I missed it, but shouldn’t this have been a bigger story? One of the obstacles listed in the 5th paragraph is how to reacquire our “culture of exploration”. How little press this topic received helps to illustrate how big of a problem that is.

I know that when I was a kid, we actually watched shuttle lift offs in class. It was something that was supposed to help kids get motivated, and make them want to study math and science. These days, I don’t think that I can tell you when the last shuttle lift-off was. I don’t know if it hits the news unless there is some disaster.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Microsoft Has Stopped Competing with Linux?

I read a interesting article on LXer stating that Microsoft Has Stopped Competing with Linux. I wasn't really sure about it to start with, but it made a whole lot of sense.

It does seem that on the Desktop front, Linux is really just trying to catch up with windows, rather than innovate. Linux still has a number of strengths, but it isn't on the desktop.

One other thing that the article points out is that Microsoft is changing their push, and moving more into markets like Enterprise Solutions for collaboration and resource management. This is something that I have noticed with a release of a whole slew of new products, like BizTalk Server, Commerce Server, and Small Business Accounting, just to name a few.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Free ScreenCapture Utility

If you write instructions and/or documentation, then I guarantee you will like this Great little Screen Capture Utility, especially if you are on a budget.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't stay memory resident, and when you hit the capture hot key (Ctrl + Shift + A by default), you get this handy little zoom window, so that you can get a nice clean capture that you will not have to crop later. Then you just copy it, and paste it into your documentation program and you are good to go.

Of course, the price is right, it is free! Go ahead, give it a download.