Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

The Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) was going on for the last few hours and I watched it live online. It isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, and doesn’t have the cool demonstrations that are normally found at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of each year, but there was still some interesting information mentioned that I thought I would cover here.

Bill Gates has been the primary speaker and introduces everyone for each of the demonstrations. To begin the show he talked about Vista’s sales which, as of last week, have consisted of 40 million copies of Windows Vista being sold. He continued to mention that the sales are twice as fast as the Windows XP launch (which we already knew), but he also added that 78% of the sales were from premium editions of the operating system.

He then started to show off some of the Ultra Mobile PC’s and seemed to really focus on those, especially the ones equipped with SideShow. Gates explained how a large focus of Vista was on making the operating system look good on both a 3–inch display and a setup with three 30–inch monitors. Some of the Ultra Mobile PC’s that he talked about can be seen here.

Next Bill Gates invited Glenn Ward and Jim Barber to the stage to demonstrate Windows Rally. In the demo they showed how easy it was to connect a digital camera, game console, wireless access point, and digital photo frame to the computer in the “time it would take to pop a bag of popcorn.” The hardware devices need to be enabled with this technology, and once it is we should be presented with an effortless way to connect devices. They even went as far as to stream an HD show using a wireless media extender, all of which was setup and connected during the demonstration. The whole time I was thinking that something was bound to fail, but it went surprisingly perfect.

Bill Gates then introduced Steven Leonard who discussed Windows Home Server. He showed an example Home Server device that will be offered by HP (pictured to the right) and how easy it would be to add more storage to the unit.

Steven also went on to demonstrate being able to remotely connect to the server, and it reminded me of accessing files via an FTP, but the interface was much nicer and completely browser-based. He also mentioned that anyone purchasing Windows Home Server would get a free domain name through Windows Live, therefore making it easy to connect to your remote machine.

Windows Server Longhorn (view our Beta 3 screenshot gallery) also broke free of its codename today, and is now cleverly called Windows Server 2008. They said that they put a lot of work into coming up with a clever, and distinguishable name which is demonstrated in this brief 1–minute video.

A feature in Windows Server 2008 was demonstrated where an administrator can prevent certain USB devices from being used, such as a flash drive, but still allow things like a USB mouse to be plugged in. This is useful if the server has important data on it that shouldn’t leave the computer, and it was promoted as an alternative to pouring glue in the USB port to prevent users from having access to it.

Bill Gates came back to us to talk a little more about the progress of Windows and where the industry is headed. A big focus seemed to be on the convergence over to 64–bit software and operating systems over time, and presented the graph to the right. The graph demonstrates that both the server and desktop market is almost completely capable of running 64–bit operating systems since they have 64–bit compatible processors. The mobile market is still lagging behind a little, but there has been a huge jump from last year and there is expected to be another one by 2008. The reason Bill Gates stressed this so much is because the industry is only “half way there” when it comes to making compatible drivers and such to work on 64–bit operating systems.

Bill Gates left the stage for good this time as he welcomed Craig Mundie. The only cool thing that he really talked about was this virtual checkerboard that was simply a touch-screen device. You could setup real checkers on the board which the touch-screen would recognize as you move pieces and such.

Overall this WinHEC wasn’t nearly as exciting as some of the previous ones have been. Of course that is expected since Microsoft just released a new version of Windows a few months back. No information was given about what the next consumer version of Windows (codename Windows 7) will contain so it is currently left to speculation.

If you missed it, you can watch the WinHEC presentation at 100K, 300K, or 500K. The video is currently not available, but should be shortly for those that have about 2–hours to kill.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 25, 2010 by CyberNet.

I take all kinds of videos from cameras that save the movies to a single file that is difficult to share with people who aren’t overly comfortable using a computer. When that happens I try to burn the videos to a DVD that they can watch it using any standalone DVD player, but this can be quite a pain depending on the original format of the video.

The free DVDStyler takes the hassle out of the DVD burning thanks to the wide variety of formats and simple-to-use interface. You can throw multiple videos onto a single DVD (each one can actually be a different format), integrate a menu, and you’ll be ready to roll. Here’s a rundown on some of the available features:

• Creation and burning DVD video with interactive menus
• Support of AVI, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGG, WMV and other file formats support of MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, Xvid, MP2, MP3, AC-3 and other audio and video formats
• Support of multi-core processor
• Allows using MPEG and VOB files without reencoding, see FAQ
• Allows put files with different audio/video format on one DVD (support of titleset)
• User-friendly interface with support of drag & drop
• Flexible menu creation on the basis of scalable vector graphic
• Import of image file for background
• Placing of buttons, text, images and other graphic objects anywhere on the menu screen
• Changing the font/color and other parameters of buttons and graphic object
• Scaling of buttons and graphic objects
• Coping of any menu object or whole menu
• DVD scripting

IMPORTANT: Don’t blindly install this app. It will try to install a third-party tool during the setup process unless you explicitly say you don’t want it. You’ll be fine as long as you don’t click “Next” during the install routine without actually looking at what you’re agreeing to.

DVDStyler Homepage (Windows/Linux; Freeware)

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

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

We missed out on the Full Circle issue #8 release, and so we’re combining it with the newly released issue #9. The earlier one covers how to setup a Mythbuntu box for recording your favorite television shows, and the latter issue walks through the new KDE 4 that was just released last week.

One of the interesting things in issue #8 was the introduction of the Ubuntu Women column, which went into full-swing in issue #9. With it they’re hoping to expand the female audience in the open source world, and I think the column is a great way to do that.

-Full Circle Issue #8 (JPEG / PDF)-

I’ve converted this issue into a JPEG image for those of you who don’t want to download the PDF. Here’s a quick overview of what issue #8 has in it:

• Mythbuntu – Step-by-step Install
• How-To:
• Install Wubi
• Get a Christmas Desktop
• Multi Boot Linux
• Learning Scribus Pt.8
• Review of TomBoy
• New Column for Ubuntu Women
• Top 5 Christmas Apps
• Letters, Q&A, My Desktop, and more!

-Full Circle Issue #9 (JPEG / PDF)-

I’ve converted this issue into a JPEG image for those of you who don’t want to download the PDF. Here’s a quick overview of what issue #9 has in it:

• OpenGEU – A step-by-step install from OpenGEU creator Luca De Marini
• How-To:
• Directory Server
• Ubuntu on an iBook
• Installing OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe)
• Part one of the new “Create Your Own Server” series
• Review of the KDE 4.0 release
• Top 5 Download Managers
• Letters, the Q&A, My Desktop, the Ubuntu Women column, and much, much more!

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

This week the folks at the Internet Archive have released a new collection of in-browser emulated games, a whole mess of vintage titles released recently into the public domain. This … Continue reading

When I first saw OpenEmu, it was already able to play games from different previous gen systems, but it had this experimental streak to it. Four years later, it has put its wild days behind. The new OpenEmu is a suave and streamlined application that looks and behaves like a native OS X program.

OpenEmu uses open source emulators for the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Gear, NeoGeo Pocket, Nintendo DS, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Sega 32X, Sega Master System, TurboGrafx-16 and the Virtual Boy. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to switch between emulators to play digital copies of games that you legally own (henceforth known as DCOGTYLO). Simply load DCOGTYLO into OpenEmu and it will figure out what emulator each one runs on, similar to how your computer automatically opens your other files in their respective programs (well, most of the time anyway).

Another great feature of OpenEmu is that it downloads game covers for your DCOGTYLO over the Internet, then presents it in interfaces that OS X users will be familiar with, such as Cover Flow. Those two features combine to give you an elegant way to organize and view your DCOGTYLO collection.

But OpenEmu really shines if you take the time to get to know its more technical features. For starters, it supports a wide variety of gamepads, from generic USB controllers to the DualShock 4. It also has a variety of video filters that can make you fell like you’re back in third grade, looking up at a 15″ CRT TV, when you’re actually playing a DCOGTYLO on your MacBook Air. At work. Here’s a great preview of OpenEmu by Lon Seidman:

You can download OpenEmu for free. The emulator’s developers also bundled a pack of homebrew games for those that don’t have a DCOGTYLO to play.

[via OS X Daily]