Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Tech News

Couple of noteworthy tech news items...
Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft. Love him or hate him, one cannot deny the impact he has had on our lives. I have spent many years buying, using, fixing, playing with and even selling Microsoft operating systems and software. Although he is generally considered a lousy programmer, he was a great business man and in these later years he has improved his personal image dramatically through his philanthropy with his fortunes.
The Internet is about to open up to an unlimited number of top-level domain names. For a long time we've been pretty much stuck with .com, .org, .gov, or .country (.au, .uk, .jp). but now - if you can afford it you can have whatever top level domain you like. Expect to see .city (.sydney, .london, .tokyo, .nyc) and .company (.ford, .google, .microsoft, .bhp). Buying and setting one up will cost in the tens of thousands of dollars range so don't expect a .dgar anytime soon! :)
OS X is starting to become noticed by malware writers. Two new trojans have been discovered that can compromise the security of Mac computers. I've had antivirus software running on our Mac since we got it. ClamX is free antivirus software for OS X and has regular updates. Firewall is built in and on by default in Leopard but Safari seems to get some nasty security holes in it like Internet Explorer does! Perhaps the big companies should give up on trying to build Internet browsers and let the entire world create, build and use Firefox3.

No comments: