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 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

Microsoft offers a lot of free apps, but the problem is that finding the programs isn’t always easy to do. We’re always on the hunt for free programs put out by Microsoft, and when we stumbled across Microsoft Pro Photo we definitely had to look into it.

After you download Microsoft Pro Photo you’ll quickly realize that the sole purpose of the program is to manage the metadata attached to the photos you take. You can do things like adjust the date/time a photo was taken, assign categories, view information about the shot (aperture, focial length, etc…), and more. The really handy part of the program is the geotag capabilities.

Once you have Microsoft Pro Photo up and running you’ll want to open some images located on your computer, which can be done through the File menu. After that select one or more images from the thumbnail section, and then click the Location option in the left sidebar. This is where you can adjust the geotag information that is associated with a single or group of photos. The best part is that you don’t need to fiddle around with latitude/longitude… just enter in the address of the location and click on the Get GPS Info button. That’s it, you’re done.

With Microsoft Pro Photo you can also geotag photos by simply browsing a map. It will give you a pin on the map that you can drag around, and it will automatically determine the coordinates based upon where you drop the pin. This is a nice option for anyone wanting to more precisely geotag their photos.

While the program is really nice there are a few things that I’d like to see in a future release:

1. You should be able to browse the photos in your pictures folder instead of having to open each image.
2. Instead of being able to geotag by address the user should also be able to geotag according to points of interest. That way you don’t have to lookup the address of, for example, the Eiffel Tower. You can kind of do this when using the “Map Browse” feature, but it should be as simple as it is when entering in an address.

Microsoft Pro Photo Homepage
Microsoft Pro Photo Direct Download (No WGA Check)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on February 25, 2008 by CyberNet.

Opera is starting to tease us with a new product that they have coming out later this year called Opera Dragonfly. They currently have it hidden under a shroud of secrecy, but they did say that “It won’t directly affect everybody, but will hopefully become invaluable for those that it does.”

That one line, at least for me, points directly to the developer tools that they’ve been working on for some time now. Being a web developer myself I have found the Firebug, a Firefox extension, to be an extremely helpful tool when creating new sites. I’m not sure what the Opera team will do to really set their offering apart from the others, but I’m sure they will have an ace hidden up their sleeve.

It looks as though Opera Dragonfly might be unveiled at SXSW in Texas, which runs from March 7th to March 16th. I’m definitely anxious to see if it has anything to do with the developer tools many of us have been waiting for.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on May 21, 2007 by CyberNet.

I feel pretty bad for those people running the Chinese version of Windows XP SP2 along with Norton Antivirus. It appears that last Friday around 1:00AM Beijing time Symantec updated Norton’s antivirus definitions which flagged two system files, netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll, as “Backdoor.Haxdoor” trojans.

If the user restarted the computer after receiving the update they are going to have a fun time recovering those two files. After the computer restarts users will be prompted with a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), and trying to boot into safe mode won’t do them any good. Symantec has posted instructions (translated to English) on using the Windows XP recovery console to restore those two files from the installation CD.

Those people who didn’t restart their computers after the updated definitions are much more fortunate. Symantec released a corrected version of their definitions that same day at 2:30PM Beijing time, and if you update the definitions to the latest version it should counteract the effects.

The number of computers affected has been reported to be between 7,000 and several hundred thousand. It has caused that much damage, and yet Symantec has nothing posted on their front page about the event. The only article they have regarding the situation is for the instructions (posted above) and is only in Chinese.

There is another sticky situation to be talked about now, and that is what people will do who are running pirated copies of Windows XP. They probably don’t have the installation CD anymore, which means they will look for the files online to download them. This could be extremely bad because they may end up downloading files that contain viruses themselves, which would just result in an even larger mess.

Symantec definitely took the wrong approach on this. In my opinion they should have done many things differently:

• Updated their virus definitions sooner than 13–hours later after the destructive update was released.
• Have a nice big link on their homepage so that people looking to solve the problem can easily locate the solution.
• Finally, they should offer some sort of downloadable patch that users can put on a floppy disc or CD. Then they could boot-up the utility on their computer, press a button, and it will automatically copy the two needed files over to the proper location. That way Symantec can verify that the two files being used are legitimate, and that the proper steps are being taken to correct the issue.

All I can say is…what a mess!

Source: ComputerWorld

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

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