It seems that I may have coined a new word :)!
Payware
I’m surprised its not already mainstream, I mean, come on, it fits the mold. Shareware, Spyware, Freeware, Adware….. I could write a mathematical formula for those names! Anyway, since it makes sense (for those of you who still did not get it: -ware is used to describe any SOFTware, and since for you give $$$ for those, they are hereby called payware.. DUH). It seems to now be quite a popular word! Another NeoSmart touchdown! :)

This is supposed to be a short post, kinda to give you guys a break from the heavier content of the previous posts, but, you know us, we can never be nice ;)
Come back in a couple of hours, we still have (give me a minute to count here…) 7 or 8 controversial topics to discuss here…

When I first heard about the Sony rootkits, I figured it was a bit of unobtrusive software that people had found just to complain about.
Where I currently reside, there are no Sony CDs, so I had not a chance to test it, and I figured that it would brew over soon, and there would be no need to mention it, especially seeing as bloggers world wide were covering this topic and ripping it from head to toe. But you know me, and you know NeoSmart Technologies: we like the ingenious stuff. The dirt that, without trying, is presented as wrapping paper.

What am I talking about?! Well, I figured that while everyone was discussing how evil Sony’s rootkits were, and how we can use to our benefit, sorry, how it can be used against us in WoW and CS, I’d look at something bigger and more important: what this means for Sony.
No, I am not talking about Lawsuits (though if you are interested, and reside in California or New York you can join the litigation suit!) those are plenty and too obvious. Sony has taken things too far, and in doing so, they have literally buried themselves alive.

Is it just me, or does anyone else seem to recall that Sony makes Playstation??? And that Sony is in a deadly neck-to-neck race with Microsoft and their XBox 360? Don’t worry if you forgot, apparently Sony’s President, and all of his PR staff have forgotten as well. It goes further than this….
Continue reading →

This is a very quick post, I have been out of the country for most of last week. (Cyberterrorist on the loose! :P)

Anyway, with Opera’s new debut in the 100% freeware market, no ads, no catches, its on everyone’s minds. I have said it time and time again, that no matter how good of a browser Opera is, so long as it packages with ads, or sells at a fee, it will never be number one.

1) Their motto: “The Fastest Browser on Earth”
I have to ask: is the browser fast, or does it load pages fast? Either way, they need to recheck their game plan.

a) Most competent browsers are now equally fast (AOL and MSN Explorer not included obviously), since they load pages almost as fast as your PC can receive. Also, with 60+% of America on broadband, a nano-second load-time is as negligible as the weight of an electron in chemistry :).

b) The browser (as a program) is fast, but certain parts of it are murder. I’m talking about the message boxes. Do you want to save this password? or Would you like to subscribe to this web feed? They load fast enough, that’s not the problem. The problem is that it takes 3+ seconds for the box to unfreeze. Whilst its frozen, its useless. Obviously.

2) Its very pretty. Believe it or not, this is the slickest-looking browser on the web. Firefox with themes does not count, I mean, what kind of company cannot make a decent theme for its browser to ship with??? But Opera? Its beautiful. I enjoy looking at it.

3) Very incompatible. Of the three leading browsers (no need to list them, esp. since this bulletin includes Opera as one of the three), Opera fails the Acid test the worst. But forget Acid, no crazy webmaster writes pages like that. If they do, they should be banned from writing pages. Hell, ban them from using a PC! But, Opera is not compatible with any BB-code shortcuts, AT ALL. I’m typing this from Opera 8.5, just to be fair, and I have to manually hit the B button for bold and the i button for italics. No ctrl+b and ctrl+i for me…. Also it has issues displaying many CSS-Positioned tables.

This may not have been as brief as I intended it to be, but it’ll do ;) I hope this clears up what Opera needs to do to get some more ground. Its a nice browser, but not yet ready for the masses I’m afraid.

This can be looked on as a continuation of the Vista Beta 2 post that I put up less than an hour ago. In short, this is simply a list of new applications (note, NOT enhancements to Windows, but rather bundled apps) that we have seen.

Microsoft does not offer a list of these features, and some of them are quite extensively hidden beneath the surface but trust us, they are there. Not all of these are new to Beta 2, some of them are in previous versions of Vista, but all are programs that you poor XP-bound people will find interesting…

1) ActiveSync
ActiveSync is no longer that program that some losers use to connect their Windows CE PDA to their Desktop PC. In Vista ActiveSync promises to be the life of the party. Thus far it seems that it will support streaming video to other media consumer electronics, synchronizing MP3 Players, PDAs, Phones, and more. It is VERY different even from ActiveSync 4.0 Beta that we are testing, which, though it is loaded with new features, is still something entirely different.

2) Peer-to-Peer
Nope, you read right. It seems that Beta 2 comes with a P2P Application! We’re still looking into it though. We have managed to get the server up and running, but the client interface is somewhat of a mystery…. We don’t know yet, but we will keep you posted.

3) Windows Media Center
We mentioned this in the last post briefly. In short its a place where everything digital and everything entertaining comes together. You can do almost anything you want here, and it comes with more codecs than Windows ever did before. It also seems to be a sign that Microsoft has stopped its bloated ‘MCE’ line, which was too slow, but had some promising features.

4) Parental Control
I haven’t really looked into this, don’t want to lock myself out of *certain* things, do I? :) But really, its a nice addition. Content locking in Internet Explorer just didn’t cut it, since most webmasters never rated the content of their site. Let’s face it, they do want to corrupt us, right?

5) iSCSI
Just a platform management thing. Not of much interest this far… But we’ll let you know once we have something more definitive.

6) Speech Recognition
Yep. Speech recognition. I cannot wait to see the EU’s action to this blatant violation of antitrust, but I’m with MS on this one… It seems to just be a placeholder: ‘No plugins detected,’ is not really the way to go… But it looks promising.

7) Tablet PC
Part of the ActiveSync program is another app that adds Tablet PC functionality to your Vista, which makes us suspect that Tablet PCs will run the same Windows as everyone else, no preferential treatment :P.

8) MSN Desktop Search
What is now called ‘Indexing and Search’ seems to be MSN search on steroids. Very smooth and minimalistic, giving results without exhausting your PC or making it look unprofessional with all those colors.

9) Solutions to Problems
This is, I guess, more of an enhancement than a program, but its not truly a part of Windows, so here goes. Its a nifty app that sits in your Control Panel and… Well, remember the Windows Error Reporting service that always asks if you want to be informed when a solution is found to your problem? One thing, they never ask for your email, and MS doesn’t collect personal information, so, yes, you guessed it, you never find out what happens. Solutions to Problems (what is up with the name????) keeps track of your error reports, lets you attach bug reports to them, and tells you when a fix or hint is available.

Its interesting to note that all these new things live and thrive in the Control Panel, which has been given new Life. It has a shortcut on the desktop, has a new look, and has millions of new features that make it worthy of the seat on your homepage..