Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on December 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

A few weeks back I finally broke down and bought the ESET Smart Security suite (review). I needed two licenses for it, and I decided to just buy the two-year subscription up front so that I could take advantage of the extra savings. In the end my total came out to $103.99, but it was worth it for two licenses and two years of protection from one of the best security companies around. And if the VB100 test is anything to go by it’s one of the best antivirus programs available.

The Smart Security comes with antivirus, antispyware, firewall, and antispam all rolled into one. Out of all the security apps that I’ve used ESET’s products always provide the best performance in addition to exceptional protection.

For those of you who want to jump on the bandwagon I just noticed that Newegg has a relatively good deal on both the Smart Security and standalone NOD32 antivirus apps. They all have free shipping, and that means you will receive a physical boxed product instead of just a username/password and download link. Here are the prices for the different apps:

• Smart Security 3.0 (Retail) – $49.99
• NOD32 Antivirus 3.0 (Retail) – $34.99
• NOD32 Antivirus 3.0 (OEM) – $29.99

Those are actually a pretty good deal if you’re not buying multiple licenses and don’t want to commit to two years. Here’s a price layout if you purchase directly from ESET (remember, you won’t receive a physical copy of the product with these):

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Today Microsoft announced that they’d be buying the Gears of War franchise, moving it to their own developer studios for further work on their own platforms from here on out. … Continue reading

This article was written on June 04, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mozilla has released Firefox 3 RC2 today which is right on schedule, and that means we might still be on for a June launch of Firefox 3! It’s even possible that this could be the last Release Candidate before Mozilla shoots for their world record.

This time around there’s probably nothing that you’ll notice as being different from Release Candidate 1, which is a good thing. At this point they are focusing only on bugs that could keep the user from having a great experience with the browser, and if all looks well in this release it could be signed-off on to be the final version. *cue marching band*

Mozilla hasn’t officially made the Firefox 3 RC2 announcement yet, but it will be coming in the next day or so. That also means the automatic update to RC2 won’t be available until then, but they have posted the files up on their FTP. Just like with previous releases I’ve put together a downloader for those that want to give the new version a whirl right now. And don’t worry, it balances the load between all of the mirrors unlike some of the sites that post direct links to the FTP:

For those of you waiting for your favorite add-ons to get upgraded… hopefully you won’t have to wait too much longer! I do have to say that the add-on developers are much more attentive to the release of Firefox 3 compared to that of Firefox 2.

And once you get Firefox 3 RC2 up and running I highly recommend that you checkout the AwesomeSearch extension. It’s quickly become a must-have for me.

Thanks to Cody for the tip!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

We usually hear of fictional worlds brought to life in Minecraft, but there’s more than one way to skin a globe. A group called the Middle Earth Digital Elevation Model Project or MED-EM has been using a program called Outerra for the past 5 years to make a realistic model of the world of The Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien’s other fantasy books. Redditor and MED-EM member cameni shared some images of their virtual planet online.

Outerra is a 3D graphics engine specialized for creating planets and terrain. It’s been in development since 2008 and is still in alpha, but it seems to have attracted a following already. One of its defining features is that it lets users create a world with “unlimited visibility”, where you can start viewing the planet as a whole and then zoom in and see details of entire hundreds of kilometers of lands, landforms and so on, up to tiny blades of grass. In other words, you can explore every inch of virtual Middle-earth. There’s not much to see, but that’s what imagination is for eh?

If you’re a Middle-earth tourist like me, check out these two annotated images by Redditor coomb. Here are some of the important locations in Middle-earth:

And here’s Frodo’s journey, as told in The Fellowship of the Ring.

That’s one long journey. Even if it wasn’t dangerous I can see why Gwaihir and his homies didn’t join the trek.

Before Tolkien fans get upset, MED-EM knows that their model isn’t perfect. For instance, Redditors and MED-EM members Redrobes and monkschain pointed out that Mordor is a desert and even has a little snow, but that error stems from limitations on Outerra’s biome options.

Monkschain also said that they used several real world locations as inspiration for some of the areas they made: “Parts of NZ were used for the White Mts. The Alps for Misty Mts. Carpathians for Mordor. Chalk Downs of England for parts of the Shire, Africa for Far Harad. Finland and Norway, etc for the far north.” 

There’s a banana for scale in there somewhere.

MED-EM is only focused on building the planet, not populating it.

Hence you’ll find no structures, elves, hobbits or monsters.

Here’s a video of the world that monkschain made last year:

Grab your browser and your axe and download the Outerra demo and MED-EM’s dataset.

[via Reddit]

This article was written on August 17, 2006 by CyberNet.

I thought I would remind everyone that F.E.A.R. Combat is going to be available for you to download for FREE in about 2.5 hours. You can wait patiently for the download to become available at www.joinfear.com which I am sure will get overloaded once thousands of people start to download the game.

If this is the first time you are hearing about this then I should let you know that this is not a gimmick. F.E.A.R. Combat is going to contain:

• 10 Multiplayer Game modes.
• 19 Multiplayer Maps.
• 12 different weapons.
• Punkbuster support for anti cheat support.
• The capability to download user generated content.

So even if you don’t want to play the game yourself maybe you could download it and give it to a friend. Hey, it would’t hurt to be nice once in awhile. 🙂

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