Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on September 22, 2006 by CyberNet.

This was absolutely shocking to me when I opened my Inbox and an anonymous tipster had sent me an email with the public download page for Vista 5728! I was pretty excited as you could imagine but I’m not sure if I want to go through the whole process of setting my computer up again after getting RC1 all perfect. Well, I say that now but I’m sure tomorrow you could contact me and I’ll be reformatting my computer!

I know I could just do an upgrade (Microsoft recommends that owners of a Toshiba model M400, M4, or M5 do a clean install) but that just doesn’t seem as “clean” to me…and it takes several hours!

Here is what Microsoft has to say about why they decided to release it:

This build (5728) has a number of improvements and updates from RC1, but has not been put through the same internal testing process as RC1 and therefore may be unstable in certain installations. We are making this release available for a limited time only (and only by download) in order to get broad distribution and testing in a variety of PC configurations.

Here is some of the information on the file:
File size: 2622MB
Type: 32-bit
Name: vista_5728.16387.060917-1430_x86fre_client-lrmcfre_en_dvd.iso
Build Number: 5728.16387

Note: Your Beta 2/RC1 product keys will still be valid for this version.

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This article was written on June 10, 2006 by CyberNet.

World of Warcraft, the ever popular on-line game that has millions of users has just announced that they have closed 30,000 accounts in the month of May alone due to users who were violating their terms of use policy. Those that were banned included users who were using third-party programs to farm gold and items.

Some of the accounts were closed as a result of tips of suspected cheating being sent to a Hack Team whose job is to investigate such claims. It seems as though the issue of cheating is being taken very seriously despite the monetary losses they may face from banning thousands of users. If you are a World of Warcraft player and have reason to believe that someone is cheating, you may submit an e-mail tip to their Hack Team that can be found here!

Report Suspected Cheating Here!

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This article was written on March 11, 2007 by CyberNet.

This past week I spent some time at a local bookstore reading through some books. When I went there I realized that I had not yet seen what kind of Windows Vista books had been made available to get people acquainted with the new operating system. Of course, there were shelves of books available to teach beginners the ropes…but some of them were quite disappointing.

First off, I like checking out these books because from time to time I’ll have people ask what’s a good way to learn how to use an operating system. While many of us can just jump right in and start learning as we go, there are many people who still need to be walked through how to do things. So in those cases I want to point them to a good book.

One book by a publisher called Visual (quite ironicly as you’ll see) was called Microsoft Windows Vista Simplified. There were indeed a lot of pictures, but I noticed something wrong with nearly 90% of the screenshots. To show you some of what I was looking at I went to Amazon who happens to offer the Search Inside feature on this particular book so that I can see random pages. Take a look at one of the images from the book:

Anything catch your attention there? The image might be a little small so you may not have noticed it right away, but the theme being used is the old one (called Scrap Metal) that was only available in early pre-release versions of Vista. It was then replaced with the blue-colored one back in July 2006:

I continued to flip through many other books by the same publisher, Visual, just to find that most of them had used the Scrap Metal theme in their screenshots. However, one book called Maran Illustrated Windows Vista not only had Aero Glass enabled in their screenshots, but their tutorials are laid out a lot better. I noticed that the book also had a bonus chapter available online as a PDF that you can download here. That little bonus edition should give you a great preview with what to expect from the book itself.

I’m in no way getting paid to promote any of the books mentioned in this article (not even any referral links), and it is purely my opinion on which book is better. I looked through several different books while at the bookstore and the Maran one came out on top by a mile…for both content and appearance. Most people I know who are buying a new PC will receive it with Vista and Aero enabled, and that is what I would want them to see in a book. So Maran will be the book I’ll recommend to everyone.

For more information on Windows Vista please read our review or checkout our tips.

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Say it with us, finally a PS3 firmware update that actually does something useful! We’ve grown so accustomed to Sony refreshing the software on its console just to spite jailbreakers that we almost started to believe that’s all the word “update” entailed. But, here comes Kotaku with word that v3.6 of the PS3’s firmware will come with a neat little addition: saving games to the cloud. This seems a very logical step toward delivering Sony’s overall goal of giving users a holistic, integrated experience. Indeed, during the NGP presentation, guest speaker Hideo Kojima specifically referred to saving your PS3 game on the console and resuming it on the Next Generation Portable. “Online Saving,” as Sony’s reputed to be calling it, would be the conduit through which that can be realized, though it doesn’t appear like it’ll come for free. Kotaku‘s sources indicate it’ll be part of the PlayStation Plus subscription, at least initially. Still, we like cloud storage, and if it means never having to see another hard drive again, we’re all for it.

Next PS3 update rumored to add ‘Online Saving’ for PlayStation Plus users originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 Jan 2011 13:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Kotaku  | Email this | Comments

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

Web Browser Wednesday

I am actually surprised at how many times I see people asking whether Firefox needs to have some sort of widget engine built-in. I think a lot of that stems from Opera having the built-in widget handler, so a lot of people think that Firefox is behind in the times as far as this goes.

One of the big reasons that Opera does have this feature is to allow people to add more to the browser since it is not extensible in other ways. For example, there is a widget for Opera that will retrieve and display the weather which is something an extension for Firefox already does. So it is kinda a tradeoff in some sense, but most people prefer to have extensions like Firefox offers over the widgets that Opera has.

Not only that, but you also have to keep in mind that widgets are all over the place already. Both Mac and Windows users can download the Yahoo! Widget Engine that is compatible with thousands of widgets users have already made. Well, Mac users already have a built-in widget system so they probably won’t need to use this and Vista users also have what are called gadgets and they too are the same thing. Widgets are very rapidly becoming more and more part of the operating system.

If you’re really a widget freak and you need to have them in Firefox, then you’ll want to checkout a service called YourMinis. It is yet another personalized homepage but I would say it is just as nice, if not better, than Netvibes. A few months back I started to tinker around with the service and have loved it ever since. What makes it unique?

One of the things I love the most about it is being able to see a view of all my tabs and actually drag-and-drop them from one tab to another. You can get to this view by using the little icon next to the Sign In/Sign Out links in the upper-right corner. It’s really just something you need to play with because you won’t realize quite how cool it is until you try it.

Yeah, I know it is just a website, so why bother mentioning it as a widget handler for Firefox? They actually offer an extension for Firefox that will let you overlay the YourMinis page onto any site that you are currently visiting. It makes the background semi-transparent so that you can still see the page that you were in the process of viewing (pictured to the right).

YourMinis definitely has its perks over a traditional gadget system. One of the biggest that comes to my mind is that your computer is not doing the bulk of the work, so your memory usage won’t be quite so high. In the past I have always been selective with the widgets I choose to use because each one will add more work to my computer. By using YourMinis, my computer can take it a little easier.

Not only that, but I’ll also have my widgets with me wherever I go, which I’m sure is huge for anyone that has more than one computer. It just makes some things so much easier, like checking my 6 different Gmail accounts from one convenient location. Or create a tab just for doing countdowns to upcoming events. With YourMinis you can create as many widgets as you want and you can even use their wonderfully designed feed reader to keep up on the latest news from around the Web.

There is one thing that I have found to be a little distracting with YourMinis though, and that is the load time for the widgets on your personalized page. I recommend creating multiple tabs and dividing up your different widgets, making sure to place only the most important ones on your main tab. Right now when I load the site it can take 15 to 20 seconds to completely load all 11 of my widgets, but after trimming them down to just 5 on my main tab it only takes about 5 seconds to load them.

So to answer the question that this article revolves around…no, Firefox does not need a widget system. I think a very limited number of people would actually use it, so it would hardly be worth the developers’ time to create a feature only a handful of people would use. Widgets are definitely making their way into everyone’s lives, but they don’t need to be built-in to the browser.

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