This article was written on June 19, 2006 by CyberNet.
Firefox 2.0 Alpha users will be happy to know that the final version of Firefox 2.0 is scheduled for August. Here is an overview of the milestone releases:
Beta 1 – June 2006
all feature work is complete, including UI
all strings are complete and available for l10n to start
intended for beta users
Beta 2 – July 2006
based on feedback from Beta 1
all feature work is complete, including UI
all strings are frozen
intended for beta users
RC1 – August 2006
based on bugfixes from Beta 2
should represent final product
intended for wide audience of early adopters
RC2 (if needed) – August 2006
based on bugfixes from RC 1
should represent final product
intended for wide audience of early adopters
Final – August 2006
based on bugfixes from RC 2
If Mozilla can stick to this schedule then I will be very impressed. I am still testing out the nightly builds of Firefox 2 and they keep getting better. I was also excited to see that the new UI is still scheduled for Beta 1 because some of their meeting notes were making me a little skeptical that it would make this milestone.
This article was written on November 02, 2006 by CyberNet.
Microsoft must have decided to do some house cleaning today because they gave Microsoft Max the boot. I covered the last Beta release of Microsoft Max back in September when it started to show some signs of potential. Sure it wasn’t the most feature rich application but they had just added RSS capabilities and it had an interface that the less computer-savvy people would love.
It actually had a smart concept behind it with the photo manager. It would let you share photos with other people and draw on them wherever you wanted. I never had a chance to use this because it wasn’t Vista compatible, but it could have been a useful tool for collaboration purposes. If someone sends you a design you could quickly mark it up and send it back to them without much effort. Unfortunately Microsoft never really tried to publicize the software so few people even knew that it existed.
So I guess we can officially put Microsoft Max in the trash.
As Nokia X is introduced to the world, Nokia suggests that they’re opening up a new door, aiming for a segment in the affordable international smartphone market that they’d not … Continue reading
This article was written on June 13, 2007 by CyberNet.
Web Browser Wednesday
The new Safari on Windows is boasted as one of the fastest browsers available for the Windows operating system. Well, that might be a little biased considering that it is according to Safari’s homepage, but I’ve tinkered with it over the past day and it is among the fastest browsers that I’ve used. It also has some shortcomings though…
First and foremost there have been a number of security concerns with Safari on Windows, which is something I definitely expected. Apple released Safari saying that their “engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one.” We all know that talk is cheap, and the vulnerabilities are something that I expected since Apple doesn’t make Windows software very frequently. Not only that, but this is also a pre-release application, so they have time to correct things before anyone can really start criticizing.
All browsers have their security woes, so in this review I’m going to set that aside and look strictly at the features. I’m going to give a bulleted list of the things that Safari includes, and then I’ll provide a short screencast where I’ll point out some of the cool features as well as the things that it lacks.
Performance – As the Safari homepage points out, this browser is very good at loading Websites quickly. I was able to notice a significant reduction in page load times as I was browsing the Web, but that’s not the only kind of performance that is important. The Safari site fails to say what the memory usage is like for the browser, and I’ll be the first to say it’s horrible. At any given time, it is twice what Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer is using up even when visiting the same sites.
Interface – Ahh, this is something I don’t really know that I can touch on. Apple made sure that they gave people the feeling that they are using a Mac computer by preventing the Windows operating system from controlling any aspect of the appearance. I think it is safe to conclude that people will be able to easily see when you’re using Safari on a Windows computer. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
Bookmarks – This is something that I cover more in the screencast, but overall this is one of the biggest downfalls in Safari. I’m a right-click/drag-and-drop freak and the Bookmarks Bar hardly allows for any of that. You can’t arrange your bookmarks by dragging them around in that bar, instead you have to use the Bookmark Collections which is a hassle. Oh, and did I mention that there is no Bookmarks sidebar for you to use?
Searching – The searching in Safari is almost its best feature. They have done a great job of making the results stand out, and that is something I very much appreciate.
Tabbed Browsing – Come on, all of the cool browsers have tabbed browsing these days. The only thing cool about Safari’s is that you can drag a tab off of the tab bar and it will open in a new window.
SnapBack – This is pretty nice as well since many of us perform a lot of searches. After doing a search and clicking on a result there will be a little orange icon in the upper-right search box in Safari. That will always be there as a means to take you back to the initial search that you performed.
AutoFill Forms – Meh, it’s a form filler and nothing more.
RSS Reader – The built-in RSS reader is a nice cross between the Live Bookmarks that Firefox has and a full RSS feed reader. It even has a cool slider that instantly lets you adjust the length of the articles being displayed. It’s important to note, however, that they do not let you configure an external feed reader for subscribing to the feeds though.
Resizable Text Fields – This seems to be the hot new thing since Netscape 9 Beta also has this feature. All it does is let you resize text boxes on a site, such as the one we have below for commenting.
Private Browsing – With Private Browsing enabled, Safari won’t store your Google searches, your cookies, the history of sites you’ve visited, your download history, or information from online forms you’ve filled out. With the increasing concern over privacy, this is a feature some users will appreciate.
Security – I think I said enough about this up top.
So that’s how I feel about the features Safari has in it that is supposed to make it the browser for you to use. Some of them are cool, but a lot of them have already been seen in existing browsers which makes them far from spectacular.
–The Screencast–
Latest take a more hands-on look at how I feel about the features in Safari:
–The Overview–
As you can see, Safari has several cool features that I would like to see available in other browsers. There is nothing in it that makes it better than Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer in my opinion, so there will probably be few people actually using it. The only way that it will benefit me is allowing me to easily test my site to make sure it renders properly in the Safari browser.
Shortly after the Xbox One launched, UK gamers reported issues with video quality, namely in the form of “juddering” when streaming television — the unfortunate result of television frame-rate differences. … Continue reading
This article was written on September 03, 2009 by CyberNet.
I think that in the future we will be encrypting a lot of our data because, well, most of it probably won’t be located on our own machines. When all our files are in the cloud encryption will be important to ensure the security of our data, but up to now most people have never worried about encrypting anything.
Free solutions for encrypting files and hard drives are available, such as TrueCrypt, but it’s not always the most user-friendly thing to set up. The free (and open source) DiskCryptor is pretty straightforward though. This solution will encrypt hard drives, flash drives, and even CD/DVD’s. Unfortunately DiskCryptor is restricted to encrypting entire drives, but for some people that won’t be a problem if the sensitive data is kept on a secondary drive. Or, of course, DiskCryptor supports the encrypting of your boot drive if you want to go that route. Personally I encrypt all my drives except my primary (bootable) one.
What about performance? Here’s the claim they make on their site:
On the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU, data encryption speed amounts to 104Mb/s per core. The maximum speed of reading the data from a single hard disk, equals to 80Mb/s, thus consequently, one can work with up to 5 different disks without the loss of performance, when using the aforementioned type of processor. In case if your disks are not operating under a constant high load, then it is possible to work with even higher number of disks, and on a weaker system, without losing the performance.
That’s pretty impressive, but those particular stats are for a quad core processor. On a dual core that should still mean you can read from two drives simultaneously even if they are at maximum load. So you shouldn’t see too much of a performance hit just because you’re encrypting your data.
Here’s a list of some other features they highlight:
Disk partition encryption of any configuration, including boot and system partitions.
Choice to select an encryption algorithm: AES, Twofish or Serpent. Cascaded modes are available as well.
Full support for dynamic disks.
Full support for encryption of external USB storage devices.
Ability to create encrypted CD’s and DVD’s.
High encryption performance, comparable to efficiency of a non-encrypted system.
Support for hardware cryptography found in VIA processors.
Support for disk devices with large sector sizes, which is important when working with hardware RAID.
Automatic mount of disk partitions and external storage devices.
Extended configuration possibilities of booting an encrypted OS. Support for different multi-boot scenarios.
Full support for 3rd party boot loaders (LILO, GRUB, etc.).
Ability to place boot loader on external medium and to authenticate using the key medium.
Support for key files.
Support for hotkeys to dismount partitions, initiate emergency system stop, etc.
DiskCryptor works on Windows 2000 up to Windows 7, and is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.
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Netflix recently held a Hack Day for its engineers to come up with tweaks to the popular streaming video service. Even though the activity was made primarily for fun, one of the resulting hacks is quite promising: a hack that uses information from a Fitbit to detect when you fall asleep and then pauses the video in response. It could give lazy people a reason to buy a fitness tracker.
Made by Sam Horner, Rachel Nordman, Arlene Aficial, Sam Park and Bogdan Ciuca, the Sleep Tracker not only pauses the video but also makes a bookmark of that point. And then it’ll report the boring video to Netflix. Just kidding. It should though.
Netflix makes no guarantee that the hack will make it into their software, specially since not everyone has a Fitbit or fitness tracker in general. But wouldn’t it be nice if all displays had this technology built in? Check out the Netflix blog to see more hacks from their engineers.
This article was written on June 02, 2006 by CyberNet.
Installing Linux has never been so easy for Windows users. Instlux allows Windows users to install either OpenSuse or Ubuntu. It will grab user information from the Windows installation and user it in the Linux distribution so that the conversion to Linux isn’t so cumbersome. Here is what the developers say about Instlux:
The final goal is not only to provide a way of installing Linux on a Windows system, but being a tool for a complete migration from Windows to Linux, by getting the system and user information stored on Windows, and writing default values to the Linux installation according to them, easying this way the migration.
Instlux will support other Linux distributions in the future but they seem to have picked two of the most popular for right now. They have done a nice job of lending a hand to Windows users who are migrating over to Linux by making it a little more painless.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Microsoft must have decided to do some house cleaning today because they 
The new Safari on Windows is boasted as one of the fastest browsers available for the Windows operating system. Well, that might be a little biased considering that it is 
Searching – The searching in Safari is almost its best feature. They have done a great job of making the results stand out, and that is something I very much appreciate.
RSS Reader – The built-in RSS reader is a nice cross between the Live Bookmarks that Firefox has and a full RSS feed reader. It even has a cool slider that instantly lets you adjust the length of the articles being displayed. It’s important to note, however, that they do not let you configure an external feed reader for subscribing to the feeds though.
