Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

… or so that seems to be the general consensus among many of the reviewers out there. The latest buzz is in regards to CNet UK’s Top Ten Terrible Tech Products, where they place Windows Vista at number 10. Is it deserving of such a pitiful ranking?

Personally, I don’t think it is. My experience with Vista has been rather good, but I strongly believe that every operating system has its own benefits:

• Windows XP – It’s small in size and requires little in terms of system requirements. It’s also been out for over six years and has two Service Packs under its belt, which attributes to the wide compatibility and stability it has to offer.
• Windows Vista – Whether you want to believe it or not, Vista utilizes system resources better than any other version of Windows. If you constantly monitor the memory usage in Vista you’ll quickly see that it eats up a lot of your RAM, but that’s because it wants to use it! It’s not that it requires 2GB of RAM to run, but it will use as much as it can to increase the performance of the system. One of the ways it uses your memory is to preload the most used applications so that they launch almost instantaneously. If another application needs the memory, however, Vista will release what it can to meet the needs of the application.
• OS X Leopard – I’ve never had much hands-on experience with Mac’s, but I know one of the reasons that people love them is that they work without needing a lot of configuration. A large reason why things just work is that the selection of hardware is limited in comparison to what’s available for PC’s. The near idiot-proof technology does come at the expense of your pocketbook though.

And guess what, Vista’s reception is no different than XP! Six months after XP was released here’s what CNet had to say in 2002:

Microsoft’s latest operating system just turned six months old, and most would say that it’s neither a failure nor a raging success. While XP promised the latest and greatest multimedia, security, and ease-of-use features available, many users have not yet upgraded, fearing the hefty system requirements and potential compatibility disasters inherent in a major OS upgrade.

If you replace the instance of “XP” in that article with “Vista” you would essentially sum up what people are saying about Vista right now. Kinda funny, huh?

There are over 88 million people already running Vista (as of October 2007), which is double what XP had in the same time frame. Microsoft has also said that there are tens of millions of corporate volume licenses out there that have not been included in the 88 million users mentioned above. It’s estimated that 13% of businesses have already adopted Vista, which is quite good considering many enterprises will wait until Vista SP1 is released next year.

I think it’s safe to say that people are getting sick of all the Vista-bashing that is going on. I know Ed Bott is, and many of the readers over at Neowin are as well, so I think it’s time to bring an end to it.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

Freespire 2.0 was just released today, and it brings a lot of great things to the table. For starters it uses Ubuntu 7.04 as its baseline, and was built off of that. So you get the benefits of using Ubuntu, but a lot of the proprietary software, drivers, and codecs since it is created by Freespire!

I couldn’t have said it better than CNet when they expressed their feelings on the inclusion of proprietary software:

Think of it like adding sugar-free Splenda to your morning coffee, only to find there’s actually a dash of sugar in the powdery substance to make it taste better.

Here are some of the benefits of using Freespire 2.0:

1. CNR Plugin provides free one-click access to thousands of open source applications, as well as options for legally licensed DVD playback software, Sun’s StarOffice, Parallels Workstation, Win4Lin, CodeWeaver’s Crossover Office, TransGaming’s Cedega, commercial games and many more.
2. KDE is added for an easier-to-use and more comfortable interface, with a familiar look & feel for Apple Mac and Microsoft Windows users.
3. Enhanced applications and features are added for enhanced usability and ease of use, modifying software applications like Firefox and Thunderbird, along with adding Linspire-sponsored open source software like Nvu, Lsongs and Lphoto.
4. Proprietary software is added when necessary, like Java, Flash and Adobe Acrobat, to provide overall increased interoperability.
5. Proprietary codecs are added to expand multimedia compatibility and provide a superior overall experience so users can listen to MP3 files, play Windows Media files, and much more.
6. Proprietary drivers are added to expand hardware compatibility and provide optimum 3D graphic card support, better WiFi support, and more.

It’s extremely nice that Freespire includes things like Java, Flash, and Adobe Acrobat so that you don’t have to worry about downloading it. Not to mention that you get to use the Click-N-Run (CNR) service for free, which makes installing, updating, and uninstalling applications a one-click process.

I can’t wait to try this out myself, and I could easily see it becoming my choice of Linux distributions since it takes out a lot of the guesswork. The download site that they have setup only supports 100 simultaneous users, and it has been pretty saturated with requests all day. So if you’re like me you’ll just want to jump on the Torrent to get it.

Freespire 2.0 Screenshot Gallery
Download Freespire 2.0

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 31, 2008 by CyberNet.

It has taken a little while to get to this point, but WordPress 2.5 was released earlier this weekend. The biggest thing about the new version is the completely revamped administration area (pictured to the right). It not only has a new color scheme, but has also been reworked to make you even more productive. And the cookie system has been made more secure, and so any of our users will need to login again to our site.

Note: I noticed that you can switch back to the old color scheme by pulling up your profile page. The new layout will remain intact, but the colors will be changed.

I upgraded our site to WordPress 2.5 yesterday, and I have to say that it handles itself quite well. Performance is better according to some early benchmarks I’ve done, productivity will definitely increase, and best of all WordPress is now able to upgrade plugins for you. Since nearly all of the changes have been made to the administration section of WordPress you should find that the upgrade process will go rather smoothly. Very few themes should break as a result of the upgrade, but there could be issues with some of your plugins.

I also spent some time getting our Recommended Tags plugin working on WordPress 2.5. There is now a version available solely for the WordPress 2.5 series because of the significant changes to the administration screen. I considered rolling both versions of the plugin into one, but overall the performance is better by keeping them separate.

Want a better idea of what’s new in WordPress 2.5? No problem! Here’s an overview of the features organized according to users and developers:

User Features

• Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
• Dashboard Widgets — you can customize any of the dashboard widgets to show, for example, news from your local paper instead of WP news.
• Multi-file upload with progress bar — now you can select a whole of folder images or music or videos at once and it’ll show you the progress of each upload.
• EXIF extraction — if you upload JPEG files with EXIF metadata like camera make and model, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, et al. WordPress will extract all the data into custom fields you can use in your template.
• Search posts and pages — search used to cover just posts, now it includes pages too.
• Tag management — you can now add, rename, delete, and do whatever else you like to tags from inside WordPress, no plugins needed.
• Password strength meter — when you change your password on your profile it’ll tell you how strong your password is to help you pick a good one.
• Concurrent editing protection — now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done.
• Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory since 2.3 we’ve told you when they have an update available. Now we take that to the next logical step — downloading and installing the upgrade for you.
• Friendlier visual post editor — I’m not sure how to articulate this improvement except to say “it doesn’t mess with your code anymore.” We’re now using version 3.0 of TinyMCE, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML. It also now has a “no-distractions” mode which is like Writeroom for your browser.
• Built-in galleries — when you take advantage of multi-file upload to upload a bunch of photos, we have a new shortcode that lets you to easily embed galleries by just putting [ gallery] (without the space) in your post. It’ll display all your thumbnails and captions and each will link each to a page where people can comment on the individual photos.

Developer Features

• Salted passwords — we now use the phpass library to stretch and salt all passwords stored in the database, which makes brute-forcing them impractical.
• Secure cookies — cookies are now encrypted based on the protocol described in this PDF paper.
• Easy taxonomy and URL creation — probably best illustrated with an example: I can call register_taxonomy() with a few arguments to register a “people” taxonomy and whenever I edit an image I’ll see a UI like tags has for identifying the people in a photo, and these will be URL addressable with /person/firstname-lastname/.
• Inline documentation — the vast majority of the new code going into WordPress include inline documentation that explains the functions and documents their arguments.
• Database optimization — we haven’t changed the table layout in this release, which is one of the reasons so many plugins work fine with 2.5. We have added a few new indicies and made a few default fields more flexible based on some bottlenecks we found on WordPress.com.
• $wpdb->prepare() — now almost all of the SQL in WordPress is prepared first, and the same functions are available to your plugins. This should prevent elementary SQL escaping issues.
• Media buttons — the add media buttons above the post are both expandable, so you could have an “Add Google Map” button if you like.
• Shortcode API — the new gallery functionality is powered by the new shortcode API. Shortcodes are little bracket-delineated strings that can be magically expanded at runtime to something more interesting. The Shortcode API is fully documented.

Get WordPress 2.5

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Windows powers tablets and PCs. It supports desktop and “Windows 8-style” apps using touch and keyboard / mouse and can run on x86 and ARM CPUs. You can even get it on hardware from Microsoft and third parties. Microsoft refers to this as creating a “no-compromise” operating system.

Some of its users will run Windows on an Intel Ultrabook, which an Intel blog post has referred to as a “no-compromise” notebook. But it won’t run on the Google Nexus 7, which Google describes as a “no-compromise” Android tablet. And it certainly won’t run on a Wang 2200 SVP from the early 1980s, which was hailed by a sales brochure as “the low-cost, no-compromise computer.”

Companies should play to a product’s strengths.

What? My no-compromise operating system won’t run on my no-compromise tablet? That could compromise expectations. Tech companies occasionally position their products as having fewer compromises or no compromises. It’s an alluring ideal, but one that is of course unachievable. There is no compromising on the notion that all products involve compromises, lots of them. Show me a product with features and I will show you one with compromises. Rather than hide from compromise or pretend that it doesn’t exist, companies should embrace it. For the compromises or tradeoffs a product embodies reflect the thoughtfulness of how it was designed.

No one would suggest that a company should highlight what a product does poorly nor should they deny potential disadvantages. Companies should play to a product’s strengths. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he prefaced the device’s appearance by acknowledging it had to do only some things better than a smartphone or laptop. Apple customers clearly got the message and accepted the product for what it does well while continuing to purchase plenty of iPhones and MacBooks. Apple didn’t, for example, talk about how typing on an iPad can be a frustrating experience compared to a physical keyboard. (Jobs did, in fact, praise typing on the iPhone’s screen at its introduction.) But it does embrace the tradeoffs of the iOS touchscreen focus by refusing to put touchscreens on the Mac.

Similarly, Microsoft deftly highlighted the benefits of its compromised Surface Touch keyboard. It focused on the thinness of the resulting product and claimed that it was still far more effective than typing on glass. Plus, it has the added benefit of not obscuring half the screen. The compromise of a lack of tactile feedback is implied.

Even when technology advances to allow such simultaneous benefits as better battery life and faster processing speed (via multicore technology, for example), companies must evaluate whether it is worth raising the price to include such a chip or delaying a product to take advantage of such benefits. Engineering is about making the right compromises and marketing is about communicating them to achieve the ideal position at the intersection of mass appeal and profitability. So, as we move further into 2013, let us no longer pretend that there is such a thing as a no-compromise product, or at least one that doesn’t compromise a company’s credibility.

Come on technology companies; work with me on this.

Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, a research and advisory firm focusing on consumer technology adoption. He shares commentary at Techspressive and on Twitter at@rossrubin.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Apple, Microsoft

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Andy Rubin has added another response to Alibaba’s Aliyun OS, after Google’s insistence that Acer put the launch of its new smartphone on pause. He focuses (again) on the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which OEMs agree to when they work with the platform, promising to keep Android a happy (and relatively compatible) platform. Amazon dodges any similar issues with its Kindle Fire tablets, because it didn’t sign up to the same alliance. Rubin says that because Aliyun uses Android’s framework and tools — as well as housing some suspect Android apps (and pirated Google programs) within its own App Store — the mobile OS “takes advantage of all the hard work that’s gone into that platform by the OHA.” Google’s looking to protect how Android behaves as a whole, and the senior VP suggests that if Alibaba’s new OS wanted “to benefit from the Android ecosystem” then they could make the move across to full compatibility. We’re still waiting to hear what Acer (and Alibaba) plan to do next.

[Thanks Jimmy]

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

Google Senior VP of Mobile: Aliyun OS ‘under no requirement to be compatible’, but it won’t get help from Android ecosystem alliance originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 16 Sep 2012 11:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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