Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock in Madagascar for the last few years, you undoubtedly already know about the All-Star open-source applications for Windows. I’m talking about applications such as Firefox , Thunderbird , GIMP , OpenOffice , and VLC . However, there are hundreds of lesser-known but highly-useful open-source applications available for Windows. A few of my favorites are below. These applications range from moderately popular to downright obscure, but all of them are open-source and FREE. All of them are worth the install time if you have never tried them. As a side bonus, many of them are cross-platform as well. Here they are, in random order: 1. ZScreen ZScreen is an open-source screen capture program that quietly resides in your system tray until needed. It can take screenshots of a selected region, the active window, or the entire screen. It can even send screen captures via FTP and copy the URL to your clipboard, all with just a single keystroke. Oh yeah,

Dell Inc., on Tuesday announced the commencement of work on its India manufacturing facility at Sriperumbudur Hi-Tech park, near Chennai. Chief minister M. Karunanidhi launched the project with the ceremonial unveiling of an architectural model of the proposed plant. Dell Asia Pacific president Steve Felice told reporters the $30-million project would be completed by July 2007 and would start shipping desktop computers from Chennai from August 2007. The new facility coming up in a 50-acre land in the special economic zone would be set up in three phases and would have an initial production capacity of 400,000 desktop computers. Desktop computers make up about 60 per cent of Dell’s current business in India. The state government has also allotted 150 acres land adjacent to the plant where the company will house its suppliers. The suppliers are likely to invest $210 million in the setting up plants. Dell has already commenced hiring for the new plant. The new facility will provide 1,000