Hasta La Gadget!

As one of the most well-received tower defense games in its day, gamers have long been chattering about a second iteration of the game Defense Grid. Hidden Path Entertainment and … Continue reading

This article was written on March 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has spoken up on his personal blog what he feels about the recent happenings with Dell, and the possibility that users will be offered the chance to have some distribution of Linux (such as Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, or Fedora) pre-installed on a new PC.

His article explains a lot of things that is important for some people to realize. I’ll recap a few of the things that caught my attention:

This means that one of the biggest issues a computer manufacturer or reseller faces in considering Linux pre-installations is the impact it will have on the Microsoft relationship, and hence bottom line.

That is very true, and I’m sure Microsoft gives discounts to OEM’s who sell a large quantity of their products such as Windows and Office. If Dell pursued the Linux PC’s then Microsoft might increase the pricing of Windows which will cause Dell to have to increase their prices. I think that the impact might not be as drastic initially, but I’m sure Microsoft isn’t too fond of Dell offering Linux systems.

Here’s another quote:

The worst-case scenario is a customer who buys a computer at the lowest price off your website, assuming it’s a Windows machine, and then calls, infuriated, because it “won’t work with the game they are trying to install”. One customer who accidentally gets Linux without knowing what that means is an expensive proposition for a company that makes relatively little on the low-end product range.

This is going to be one of my biggest fears as well. People seeing this “great deal” on the Dell site and impulsively purchasing it. Then I receive the call one night asking why none of their Windows programs can be installed on the computer. I’m hoping in a case like this Dell would simply let users pay a little extra to get a version of Windows shipped to them.

And now for the last quote:

Second, we free software fans are a fussy crowd, and very hard to please. You know what you are like – you sit and configure that Dell system down to the finest detail, you want a specific model of HP laptop, you want the one that has the Intel graphics chipset not the other chipset because you prefer the free driver approach from Intel… you are in short an expert, demanding customer. This means, that in order to reach us with Linux, a reseller has to offer Linux EVERYWHERE, not just on a few select models.

Yes, Linux users in particular are often very knowledgeable about their computers and want to choose exactly what they are getting. In this case, however, I’m sure a lot of users will just build their own PC’s. By Dell offering computers with Ubuntu pre-installed I think it will possibly attract some new Linux users that may have not previously tried out Linux. The biggest benefit by Dell doing this is that a user is sure that all of the hardware in the system functions well with the operating system itself.

I’m still skeptical about the number of people who will actually purchase Linux PC’s from Dell, but maybe I’ll be surprised in the end. I think it also depends on how much Dell actually tries to promote Linux, and I don’t think that will really be done since their real revenue will come from selling Windows PC’s.

Note: The image used in this article is from DeviantArt, and is freely available as a wallpaper (1600×1200 resolution).

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 08, 2011 by CyberNet.

Many of you have likely heard of Amarok which is a popular cross-platform music player, and Clementine is a cross platform player that is benefiting from its open source nature. To me it has a clean interface the features people are looking for, such as iPhone syncing. It also includes a slew of other features most people will never even use, such as controlling the player with a Wii Remote.

Here are some of the other features they highlight:

• Search and play your local music library.
• Listen to internet radio from Last.fm, SomaFM, Magnatune, Jamendo and Icecast.
• Create smart playlists and dynamic playlists.
• Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX.
• CUE sheet support.
• Visualisations from projectM.
• Lyrics and artist biographies and photos.
• Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC.
• Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music.
• Fetch missing tags from MusicBrainz.
• Download missing album cover art from Last.fm.
• Cross-platform – works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl).
• Remote control using a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line.
• Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player.
• Queue manager.

Clementine Music Player (Windows/Mac/Linux; Freeware)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on October 23, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Ever since we wrote about Mint, the free finance management site, we have received a few requests from those looking for good software to manage personal finances. Sure there are popular alternatives like Quicken and Microsoft Money, but with those you have to fork out the same money that you’re trying to save. I just knew that there had to be something out there worth using that you didn’t have to pay for.

I spent a countless amount of time trying out feature-limited versions of software only to find that their restrictions rendered the software virtually useless for most people. Then I found exactly what I was looking for: Money Manager Ex. Not only is it free, but it is open source and available for both Windows and Linux!

–Setup/Importing–

I was able to get Money Manager up and running in no time at all. There’s a version available that requires no installation, and that’s what I chose to run. This is also great for throwing it on your USB drive and doing your finances wherever you are!

One of the first things that you’re going to do is create a database for Money Manager to store all of your information in. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be familiar with the workings of a database because it does it all for you. Just specify what default currency you want to use, and an optional username:

Then you’ll have to create an account that falls under one of two different types: checking/savings or investment. The checking/savings account can also be used for credit cards, or for that matter anything that you deposit and withdrawal money from. The investment accounts are for stocks which you’ll want updated daily.

Many of you probably already have some software that you use to manage your finances, but that’s okay. You can switch to Money Manager by exporting your current data in a variety of formats:

• Import information from Excel (Comma Separated Value -.CSV) format
• Import information from QIF format (Microsoft Money & Quicken)

–Homepage & Register View–

Money Manager has a homepage that gives you a quick account overview so that you can see financially where you stand. It tells you the balance of each account, and graphs the current month’s expenses against the income:

After you have created an account you’ll be able to manage the transactions in the register view. You can sort the transaction according to any of the columns, but you cannot reorder or remove ones that you don’t use:

Another interesting thing is that each of your accounts can have different currencies associated with them. That makes it a bit easier to manage accounts that are held in different countries.

–Adding Transactions–

As with most personal finance managers, adding new transactions is pretty cut and dry. When you go to add a new transaction you’ll have to pick from a list of payees, which are added by you, as well as categories. Money Manager comes with a pre-built list of categories that should suffice for most of your needs – there weren’t any categories that I had to add.

–Stock Portfolio–

I think the stock portfolio is one of Money Manager’s shining points. You can have it “Refresh” the price of stocks automatically each day, which are fetched from Yahoo! Finance. It will update the price of every stock in your list, and tell you what the respective gain/loss is according to the price you purchased it at. You can also specify an automatic refresh interval if you want it updating the prices, let’s say, every 30 minutes.

–Budgets–

With the budgets you’re able to keep track of your spending in each of the various categories, and you can provide estimated values for each one. That way you can see which categories you have spent more in than you had originally anticipated.

–Reports–

It’s always nice to know where your money goes so that you can try to find areas where you can cut back. Money Manager has several different types of reports that will tell you just that:

• Summary of Accounts
• Where the Money Goes
• Where the Money Comes From
• Categories
• To Whom the Money Goes
• Income vs. Expenses
• Transaction Report
• Budget Performance
• Cash Flow
• Transaction Statistics

If one of those reports doesn’t satisfy your needs you can always create your own, given that you have some knowledge of the SQL syntax. 🙂

–Making it Better–

I realize that this is a completely free program and therefore shouldn’t complain, but there are some things that I think would really make this an exceptional program:

• It seems like the program is popping up with too many windows to enter in information. I should be able to enter in a transaction from within the register view without a popup window being needed. Similarly, payees and categories should be autocompleted as you type instead of opening in a popup window.
• Even though you can use the checking/savings account type for credit cards there should actually be a separate account type for those. That way the columns can read “charge” and “credit” instead of “withdrawal” and “deposit”.
• If you want to accurately track the gain/loss of your stocks you’ll need to to create a new entry for each share purchase. There’s no way to enter in multiple purchase prices (nor dividends) into the stock portfolio. This would be a nice feature to have though.

Money Manager Ex Homepage

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on April 08, 2008 by CyberNet.

Last year Wal-Mart started selling a Linux-powered computer for under $200 called the gPC. After some confusion amongst consumers they decided to boot the budget computers from the store shelves, and offer it solely online. Ever since it looks as though the operating system that powers the low-cost computer, called gOS, has started to go through an identity crisis with Mac OS X.

The most obviously clone is the dock that is the home of your application shortcuts. The gOS has had that ever since it debuted last year, but it’s worked hard to become even more Mac-like in its latest release dubbed gOS Space 2.9. The goal of the new version was to become more appealing to the 100+ million MySpace users, and thanks to the Avant Window Navigator a feature remarkably similar to Mac OS X’s Stacks has been added to the dock. Not to mention that it includes Compiz Fusion for some added eye candy.

And as Crunchgear noticed even the gOS site has become remarkably similar to that of Apple’s:

gOS Website:

Apple’s Mac OS X Website:

So what do you think? Are they smart for trying to grab ideas from an operating system that is often lauded for its great design, or should they be trying to distinguish gOS from the competition?

The gOS Space 2.9 Linux operating system is freely available for download.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com