I haven’t had much time to play with it as of yet but, it is supposed to be much faster for those who love lots of tabs and multitasking.  They also overhauled the graphical interface a bit, added a favorites star right into the address bar and also made it so if it seems like you are typing one of your favorites, it will display the option to click on it below the address bar as well.

These are the things I have discovered in 2-3 minutes playing with it.  That, and 1 negative, some of your extensions may not work.  This is simply because the people who make the extensions need to re-make them for firefox 3.

Check it out at: http://www.firefox.com

God Bless,

Chris

The fact is, very few things in life are free. However, one of the biggest free gifts to us, is that of our faith, and that of God’s great sacrifice of love for us. Our God and Father loved us so much that he gave us his only Son, that we might have life through His death and resurrection. God’s love for us is free, we do nothing to deserve it, to earn it or to pay for it, with the exception of choosing to love Him back. Even if we don’t make that choice, he still loves us.

Recently, I discovered a website that really does give something away for free. It is a library of books and writings that have all gone out of copyright, so nobody owns the works to charge for them. Some of the titles include Frankenstein, The War of the Worlds, Alice in Wonderland and many other classic titles that you may have heard of in english class.

The website is called Project Gutenberg and can be found at www.gutenberg.org . As you may remember, Gutenberg developed the printing press, and it is the goal of Project Gutenberg to continue his work of spreading information through modern means. It is their goal to find books that are out of print, out of copyright or otherwise in the public domain and to make them available for download to the world.
Everything listed on the site is free. Again, there are books from many famous authors, including Shakespeare. There are even free audio versions of some of these books as well!

The best part is, Project Gutenberg also has works of the Early Church Fathers! They have The Confessions of St. Augestine, St. Thomas Aquinas’ Suma Theologica and even a history of the Catholic Church up to the French Revolution. Given, there are also works by Luther but, the fact is there are important theological resources available to everyone for FREE.

God so loved us that he gave up his only Son that we might have eternal life. This was the ultimate free gift of God to us, that and the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith. Just remember, there is very little in the world that is truly free. We need to appreciate those things that are truly given to us free, and use them for the greater glory of our Lord. Project Gutenberg can assist in this by bringing great literary classics to us for free, as well as some great Christian history and theology as well.

Take for instance Open Office. Open Office is a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, which costs hundreds of dollars! It reads and writes to Microsoft Office formats, so you can still use it for all of your school projects.It has an excel-like program, as well as a Powerpoint clone and works pretty much the same as Microsoft office with the exception of certain menus and other things. However, for everyday use, it works just fine.

However, the free open-source software movement doesn’t stop with mere office programs that really aren’t that much fun. If you are an artist, or digital photo enthusiast, you may want to look into The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Project). The GIMP is basically a free, open-source version of the $400-600 Adobe Photoshop.

Using The GIMP you can cut and crop photos, apply effects and do more professional touch-ups to your photos and images. Or, if you want, you can make it look like you have a Saintly halo around your head, then you can print out the photo and say to your parents that they are wrong and that you are indeed a Saint!

A third example of a great free program is Blender. If you want to go into game design or computer animation, this may be the program for you! Blender is a free, open-source 3-d modeling program that can be used for anything from designing buildings, to creating game characters, and even to make animated movies such as Elephant’s Dream and the soon-to-be-released Big Buck Bunny (May 2008). The software is very complicated but, if you know to use it, it becomes very powerful. Commercial 3-D programs generally cost in the THOUSANDS so, this is a great alternative!

You’ll notice that all of the programs discussed are open-source. This means that the programming code used to make the program is available to the public. Open-source programs are great because they are usually free, will usually work on multiple operating systems and if you are a programmer you can adjust or make improvements to the program and re-release it.

Other examples of open-source software include: Mozilla Firefox, Flock, Audacity, Electric Sheep (screensaver), Opera and many other programs out there! You can find more at http://www.opensourcewindows.org or by doing a search for open-source using your favorite search engine.

While these programs may lack some of the bells and whistles of their commercial partners and can be a little harder to learn, once you get the hang of them they are very powerful. In fact, some of these programs have plug-ins, add-ons or features that professional products charge you extra for! For example Photoshop and 3D studio Max or Lightwave charge extra for filter packs, effects and other such things, but, in the open-source community these things are created by other users free of charge, again saving you valuable time and cash.

The other great thing about these open-source options, is that they encourage creativity and gives normal people the opportunity to explore things that they couldn’t normally do legally. A lot of people will want to pursue photography or 3-D modeling and get so overwhelmed with the costs that they obtain the software illegally through file sharing software. Stealing is NEVER an encouraged behavior for any Christian. So, these programs offer a way to learn the basics in the field you are interested in, without stealing thousands of dollars worth of intellectual property from software companies like Microsoft and Adobe.

Lastly, because open-source programs are usually free, you don’t have to spend anything but your time and creativity on them. This way, you can save those couple hundred or thousand dollars for better use, like donating to my ebook reader fund!

Seriously though, God wants us to be good stewards of the money he gives us. For example, right now there is a major food crisis in many countries. Did you know that a donation of $200 to the Haitian Health Foundation can provide a year’s worth of food for an entire family!? That’s $200 that you could have spent on software but, instead you can provide a better life for those in need! There are other charities as well, not to mention the needs of the Church and your own community.

So using open-source software is a great way to support the open-source movement, allow you to create in ways that you didn’t think were possible due to costs and to save money to be placed aside for better purposes, like supporting the Church or those in need around the world. How’s that for putting your money where your faith is?