Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

If you want to protect your website, the best way to do so, is to use an SSL certificate. Now, these certificates can be expensive, and requires some knowledge to set up.

However this week GlobalSign is offered to give a free wildcard SSL certificate to qualified open source projects. It’s their way of supporting open source and encouraging industry best practices among open source developers.

In order to qualify for a free SSL certificate the open source project must have an OSI approved license, be active in terms of development, the noncommercial, and pass some other simple requirements.

It’s not clear whether this is a limited offer or not, but this is an encouraging sign of corporate support for open source!

At this week’s game developers conference in San Francisco, Microsoft gave some details on DirectX 12, Microsoft’s multimedia API.

Microsoft is reportedly trying to get “closer to the metal” in terms of using hardware resources, which should result in faster performance. Reportedly, the new version will be called Direct3D 12 and will be a significant departure from the older version of DirectX. Microsoft claims to have overhauled a lot of the API including three key areas: pipeline state representation, work submission, and resource access.

The new APIs are designed to create a richer visual interest, better memory management, and give developers more tools to work with to increase visuals in video games and other graphic applications.

Microsoft is targeting Christmas of 2015 for the release of this new version of DirectX, or Direct3D, whichever name the end up going with.

DirectX 12 is said to work on over 80% of existing gaming PCs currently being sold, so hardware upgrade may not be necessary.

Pres. Obama met this week with the CEOs of Facebook, Netflix, Dropbox, Box, and other companies, in a move to relieve snooping fears. They met Friday of this week to discuss the president’s proposed reforms on computer privacy.

The president told the assembled high-tech CEOs that his administration has a commitment to take steps to give people greater confidence that their personal rights are being protected, while preserving the government’s ability to keep us safe.

Of course, the concern has arisen due to the fact that the government has been caught looking into data, and metadata, of American citizens, presumably to try to track down terrorist activity. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was quoted as saying that they had an “honest talk about government intrusion on the Internet and the toll it is taking on people’s confidence in a free and open Internet.”

Zuckerberg had previously taken the Obama administration to task and expressed his frustration over the damage that the government has created in the high-tech industry. “Unfortunately, it seems like it’ll take a very long time for full reform,” he wrote, adding that government spying posed a threat to the Internet.

Are you thinking about your security on the Internet? Keep in mind that it’s ultimately up to you! There are a number of tools that you can use to secure your Internet activity, as well as your private information, and, of course, you need to harden your passwords and change them often!

So, I’ve told you before that Windows XP support is ending next month, April 2014. And, since Microsoft’s base of users includes some 30% using Windows XP; they are quite concerned!

This means that Microsoft has a big incentive for users to upgrade to at least Windows 7, preferably Windows 8.X. So, they’ve come up with an offer to give users the incentive to upgrade not only their operating system, but also their hardware is well. By upgrading their hardware Microsoft users will be able to run the operating systems of the future that Microsoft might create, given that Microsoft likes to create “bloatware,” and, in most cases, their operating systems get larger and larger and require more resources as time goes by.

I have seen however, that Windows 8 bucks this trend to a certain extent and does seem to do pretty well on hardware that isn’t quite up to the specs that Microsoft specifies for their operating system. I hope this trend continues.

Their offer is this: if you buy computer valued at $599 or more, and you bring it in to the dealer proving that your old computer is running Windows XP, Microsoft will give you $100 off the purchase of the new computer.

Now, this sounds a bit unwieldy to me, because imagine having to tote your Windows XP computer into Best Buy to prove that you have Windows XP! This seems to be a bit silly! Maybe some stores will “trust you” when you say you have Windows XP. We’ll see.

Johnathan Nightingale, Vice President of Firefox at Mozilla, announced last week that they had abandoned development of the “Metro” version of Firefox. The reason he gave? The fact that no one cares about Metro. This is just one more sign that Microsoft is “barking up the wrong tree” when it comes to this particular interface design. “Metro,” or the “Modern” interface, or whatever they want to call it this week, should be shelved as a failure!

Nightingale says that in late 2012 when they started the Firefox for Metro team there was some excitement about it. It took them a while to break open Metro and get Firefox to work in that environment.

They are prepared to release Firefox version 1.0 for Metro, however, after only seeing 1,000 active daily users in the Metro environment, and considering the size of the installation of Windows at large, they basically decided that there just was no interest. They have decided to focus their efforts on the more traditional Windows environment, where there is still a lot of interest.

This should be instructive to Microsoft. If they were paying attention, and listening to their users, they to would drop the “Modern,” or “Metro,” environment in favor of a desktop that their users would actually like, and use. But, as always, Microsoft is not paying attention to it’s users, it is arrogantly trying to force it’s users to do its bidding.

To slightly misquote the Beatles at the beginning of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “It was 25 years ago today, that Sir Tim Berners Lee taught the ‘net to play!” OK, that was lame, and it was yesterday that the 25th Anniversary actually occurred, but hey! I’m trying! Keep in mind that the World Wide Web, which Sir Tim came up with, is NOT the Internet, it is actually riding on top of the Internet. It is the whole hyperlink thang!

The idea came to him when he was working at CERN in Geneva. He wrote a paper called: “Information Management: A Proposal.” It didn’t sound exciting, but it was! Sir Tim says that after 25 years, he just would like to see the World Wide Web free, and available to all! So say we all, Sir Tim!