We felt compelled to assemble this article after PCWorld put together their list of the biggest tech disappointments of 2007. What they claimed to be the worst products of the year were things like Office 2007, iPhone, Yahoo!, and even Vista. Needless to say they were way off the mark, and I lost some respect for them because of their poor decisions.
The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) has decided that they want to try and catch software pirates red handed. If you purchased software from on an online auction site, such as eBay, you might be eligible for a $500 reward if the software is pirated! Here's how it works:
The new Netvibes Ginger launched into a private beta yesterday, and the Netvibes team was kind enough to give us non-testers a glimpse at what it's all about. I know for some of you, it's going to be hard to just sit by and wait for the final release which is expected to come in January, but I think the wait will be worth it.
Back in June, Google Maps got a new drag and drop routes feature which allows someone to tweak the route that Google provides them so that it's just the way they want it to be.
At last, Google has released something that will benefit Google Talk users too! Just yesterday they announced that new translation bots have been added to Google Talk. That means that you can essentially "chat" with the bot, and whatever you say to them, they'll translate it back. It works by adding a bot as one of your friends. So for example, I added the Chinese speaking bot to my friend list (, and then when I said "Hello," it responded with "Hello" in Chinese. When I said "How are you?" it responded with the same, just translated in Chinese, nifty, huh?
Dell has announced that they are now shipping Ubuntu computers running the latest 7.10 release. On the Dell blog they said that it took so long because they wanted to do extensive testing first, but I would say that it was a rather fast turnaround considering that it was such a big upgrade.
Welcome to Daily Downloads brought to you by CyberNet! Each weekday we bring you the Windows software updates for widely used programs, and it's safe to assume that all the software we list is freeware (we'll try to note the paid-only programs).
Gmail 2 has introduced some exciting new features to users including AIM messenger support, color coded labels, and several backend improvements. All of these changes have helped remove the need for some Greasemonkey scripts, but such drastic alterations have caused a lot of broken scripts.
For this installment of the 2007 CyberNet Awards we are taking a look at some of the Best Sites for Sharing files, data, and movies on the Internet. We managed to come up with three different sites that all play an important role in how CyberNet functions, and we therefore wanted to mention each of them.
Over the next few days Mozilla will be making the official announcement that Firefox 3 Beta 2 is available, but you don't have to wait until then to get your hands on it! We've got an easy-to-use downloader below that puts you just one click away from downloading the latest version.
George Ou, a writer over at ZDNet, will surely be getting some fan hate mail with his latest work of art. He was curious as to how Windows stacked up against Mac OS X in terms of the number of vulnerabilities, and using data from the impartial Secunia he managed to gather some rather interesting facts to say the least.
About a month ago Ryan introduced me to Peggle, a game from PopCap Games. He had been playing it and it looked like fun, so I decided I'd try it too. Little did I know how addicting this game would turn out to be.
Day! Hard to believe, isn't it? Spam eats 512 terabytes of space each and every single day. This is just an extremely rough estimate, and it's likely that it's in fact more than 512 terabytes each day. Pingdom came up with this estimate after finding out that there are about 120 billion spam emails that pollute the web each day.
I'm not sure how many of you have used the free GOOG-411 service before, but I've used it over a dozen times since its release. The speed and accuracy of the automated system is rather astounding, and the fact that you don't have to pay $1.25 just to get a phone number is what really catches people's attention.
Three new features were introduced to Bloglines Beta last night that will make the experience just a bit better. As most of you know, Bloglines is one of the most popular web-based news aggregator services used by many.
Welcome to Daily Downloads brought to you by CyberNet! Each weekday we bring you the Windows software updates for widely used programs, and it's safe to assume that all the software we list is freeware (we'll try to note the paid-only programs).
Back in October 2006 the free OpenOffice 2.0.4 was released, and one of the big new features that it shipped with was an extension management system similar to that of Firefox. With it, developers are able to create add-ons that are easily incorporated into the suite of applications.
One of the things that the Opera browser does way better than Firefox is skinning. In Opera you can go to their skin site, find a theme that you want to install, and preview it immediately in the browser. No restart is required.
As you witnessed earlier today with the iPod Touch, Amazon is a great source of deals. The real question is how do you find all of the deals that you're looking for without spending hours browsing through their products each day. Deal Locker has setup a great search tool for Amazon that will help you hunt down some of the cheapest stuff being sold.
It's time to hand out the first of many 2007 CyberNet Awards! The category is Best Customer Service, and we have three different winners in this category. These are all companies that we've had to deal with on items that we've purchased, but ended up having troubles somewhere down the road.
