Author Archives: NeoSmart Technologies

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 Reviewed

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
16

Internet Explorer 7

This week Microsoft released Beta 3 of Windows Internet Explorer 7, and NeoSmart Technologies has a review (with screenshots!) ready for our faithful readers and members.

Since Windows Vista was first announced, for many users Internet Explorer 7 was actually the big reward: a new version of what used to be the world’s favorite browser, and – for the most part – they weren’t disappointed. Despite the progress issues in Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 has been coming along fine, and this new version brings its (Lion’s) share of features and improvements. In short, this browser has come a long way and promises to put up a real fight against the competition that only so recently overtook IE7, namely the latest versions of Firefox and Opera. Beta 3 makes subtle changes to the GUI and display that give it a nicer, more “exotic” appeal; with IE7’s focus on softer highlights and shadows, it’s begging for Web 2.0 – but can it handle it?

Continue reading →

10 Steps to Vista Upgrade Success

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
2

Since Beta 2, Windows Vista has had a fairly versatile and reliable upgrade path from Windows XP to Vista, and in Build 5456, it’s been improved on even more – now you rarely hear of people that couldn’t upgrade, but nevertheless, people suffer as a result of upgrades whether they know it or not.

The most common “symptoms” include patchy Aero performance (if at all), frequent BSODs, drivers refusing to install, and general system unresponsiveness. The problem is that even the experts tend to forget that there is a difference between a clean install and an upgrade, even if everything else worked. When an upgrade is performed, evil things may brew just beneath the surface, waiting for the user to forget that an upgrade is the root of all those problems.

Fortunately there are quite a few steps you can take to protect yourself from buggy upgrades and their corresponding headaches, and they’re not too hard either.

Continue reading →

Digg, Slashdot, OSNews, and More!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
Reply

Just when we decided we’re going to take a break and re-organize, we get hit by our biggest traffic surge ever.

In the past 48 hours, NeoSmart Technologies has been featured on the homepages of Digg (twice!), OSNews (twice!), and Slashdot (once) for three different articles we published. It seems even our amazing host with their equinix data centers couldn’t keep up with the demand, and unfortunately we experienced a 12 hours of downtime as a result (from 2200 to 1000 UTC).

If anyone is interested, the featured articles were “Windows Vista 5456 Released” on OSNews.com and Digg.com, “WinFS: What’s the Big Deal Anyway?” on Digg.com and OSNews.com, and “What XSS isn’t” on Slashdot.org.

Continue reading →

What WinFS is all About

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
Reply

WinFS has been officially pulled out of Microsoft’s road map for products and services – permanently. People all around the web are shocked and complaining. But the thing is: who didn’t expect this?

OK, sure, maybe Mr. & Mrs. John Q. Public didn’t expect this, and maybe Joe Blogg didn’t either, but then again, does it really matter to them? But for everyone else, WinFS was gone. Although no one came out and said it directly, no one spoke of WinFS except as a distant memory, it was quite obvious that people didn’t buy Microsoft’s story of it shipping separately. If people had believed it, the shock and outrage today would be ten times as big as it was when the LH project was rebooted and WinFS torn out with the veins strings still hanging.

But the question many people are asking these long years later is: What is WinFS anyway? And what’s the big deal if everyone already knew it wasn’t coming?

WinFS was the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Anyone that is familiar with the term “Cairo” should know immediately what we’re talking about. For 15 years now, Cairo was Microsoft’s vision, almost every single decision made for the desktop operating systems came from a vision of Cairo becoming a reality, and over the years, Cairo began to take shape. Everything was in place, and only WinFS was left.

Continue reading →

Opera, Redirection, Security, and You

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
Reply

I like Opera. Opera 9 is a great piece of software that demonstrates high levels of innovation and understanding for the audience… but there is one thing in Opera that can at once be seen as the beginning of a new form of innovation, or the beginning of a new type of battle for online rights and privacy.

A browser runs on the end-users’ computers obviously, and it may be argued that end users have the right to choose how they want to be able to view web pages, what they see, how they see it, and where they go from there. To that end, Opera (like several other cool browsers) offers an “Author Mode” and “User Mode” CSS display styles: basically a place where users can locally overwrite CSS selectors defined on the website in question. That is, after all, what the web is all about, isn’t it? Information at the fingertips, in an internationally recognized format that can be twisted at will to make things show up the way the user wants them to.

Continue reading →

Windows Vista Build 5456 Released

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
20

Microsoft has just released a new build of Windows Vista for technical beta testers. Windows Vista Build 5456 offers many security, functionality, and performance advantages over the previous build (Beta 2 – build 5384.4). Vista Build 5456 is quite a large leap number-wise, and according to Microsoft, in features and performance as well.

Some of the new features include a revamped Aero/DWM subsystem, and a completely overhauled and siginficantly less obtrusive UAP for all those that couldn’t stand the previous one. From what we have been told by Microsoft, the Time Zone bug that plagued all most all previous builds of Windows Vista has been fixed and works great now, and quite a few fixes in the Regional Settings and IME are now implemented. And for the first time since Windows 3.0 Microsoft has finally announced that new mouse cursors will be made available for Windows – something they promised to do in XP with “Watercolors” but failed to deliver for internal reasons!

The build details and autochk values for the x86 and x64 builds respectively are as follows:
vista_5456.5.060620-1700_winmain_idx03_x86fre_client-LB2CFRE_EN_DVD.iso
Size: 2,572.91 MB - autochk: 0x80E3B54D
---
vista_5456.5.060620-1700_winmain_x64fre_client-LB2CxFRE_EN_DVD.iso
Size: 3,356.9 MB - autochk: 0x0D680F43

Continue reading →

Massive Internal Changes at NeoSmart Technologies

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
2

NeoSmart Executive Announcement!

We’d like to take this opportunity to announce something we’ve been planning for the longest time, but never got around to executing.

NeoSmart Technologies is different from most other organizations out there. Our lax and friendly/informal style has served us well for the past year-and-a-half of our existence, but we feel that the world unfortunately isn’t ready to accept an organization under these terms.

This is more of a “self-imposed audit” than it is a restructuring of NeoSmart Technologies, meaning that our focus will be the same, you’ll see the same friendly faces you used to, but there are going to be quite a few changes beneath the surface in the way things work, where each thing is distributed, and the medium of conveying our services to our members and the general public.

Continue reading →

The Ancient Typewriter..

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
Reply

Does anyone remember those machines we used to call typewriters? They’re those really loud boxes with daisy-wheels, clickity-click keys, and frustrating tape-ink rolls.

There’s something special about typewriters that a computer can never replace. I’m normally the last person to get nostalgic all over dead technology, but if there are two things that a computer can never (not yet..) truly replace it’s reading from a real live book in your hand and writing a story or novel on a typewriter.

Yesterday I dug an old Smith-Corona out of the attic while cleaning things up…

Continue reading →

Is digitalfive Closing up Shop for Good?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
2

Take a look at digitalfive’s homepage… it doesn’t look out of the ordinary, but underneath the surface something is definitely rumbling – loud too.

For the past couple of days under cover of IRC chatrooms and furtive Instant Messaging conversations, people have been talking. NeoSmart Technologies never publishes rumors as a rule of thumb, but this time it’s digitalfive, our lifetime affiliate and long-time friend in the front ranks of technology reviews and analysis – so we make an exception.

The rumor is that many of the big names in technology have in the past week or so taken a keen interest in digitalfive, and we hear that several of these well-established sites have recently sought to offer digitalfive’s founder and owner Kristan M. Kenney a position in their ranks, but it seems no one really knows.

Continue reading →

JavaScript “Protection:” Don't Fall for it!

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
2

Every once in a while it comes up again. JavaScript – used totally wrong. This times it’s Hivelogic’s “Enkoder” script reborn for Wordpress. What people just don’t get is: JavaScript was never meant to be used as a heavy cavalry, a knight in shining armor, or else a bit of code that can may be used to do anything – because it’s not.

JavaScript can do a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean it should be used that way. But that’s not the problem – not this time. The problem is that people are still insisting on believing that using JavaScript to hide text means that the bad guys won’t ever see it. But that’s just not true.

Continue reading →