Answer to Last Month's Trivia Question

As you may recall, last month we presented this trivia question: The Internet uses Greenwich Mean Time (represented by the abbreviation GMT) for a universal time reference. Technically, GMT has been superceded by Coordinated Universal Time, which is abbreviated as UTC. The trivia question is: What is UTC an acronym for and in what language?

Yep, this was a trick question. The answer is that UTC is not an acronym for anything in any language. For historical reasons, issues of units and standards are generally negotiated between the United States and France. In this case, they decided to call the new time Coordinated Universal Time in English (abbreviated CUT) or Temps Universel Coordonné in French (abbreviated TUC). But neither side was willing to give in and use the other's abbreviation, so they settled on UTC, which stands for (but is not an acronym for) Coordinated Universal Time in English, Temps Universel Coordonné in French, and whatever is the equivalent in the language of your choice.

How Hard Is It Really to Work With Microsoft?

Microsoft has come in for a goodly share of criticism for its activation requirements on recent software (Windows XP, Office XP, etc.), and justifiably, we believe. We think activation hurts Microsoft's customers more than the original problem hurt Microsoft. Nonetheless, if we want to (or have to) use Microsoft software, we are stuck with activation for the moment, at least until MS is forced to think of a better way to do this. So how hard is it, really, to deal with Microsoft on licensing and activation issues?

We recently had an opportunity to test this. A friend's disk died and he asked us to install XP on a new disk. Only one problem: he couldn't find his product key.

We called Microsoft's installation support number, with, admittedly, some misgivings. We punched the menu button to speak to a real person, and within 1 minute was explaining our predicament to a live support person. She asked us a couple of questions (like what was printed on the Windows XP CD we had) and then gave us a replacement product key. She was careful to give it to us three times -- once by phone as we typed it into the system to be sure it worked, again by phone to record it for future use, and once by email to be sure we had a correct copy. Finally, she told us we'd have to activate it by phone (not Internet) and gave us the phone number for activation.

Activation was equally straightforward. A voice-recognition system took us through the steps in about 3 minutes. Were we a little surprised? You bet! But it's nice to know that, however lousy the original idea, Microsoft is trying to minimize the impact of licensing and activation.

Should You Ditch IE?

There have been numerous reports lately of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer that can be used by malicious websites to compromise your system without your knowledge, at least until your computer starts mis-behaving. Microsoft has been patching IE to fix these, but the "bad guys" seem to be able to go from discovery of the vulnerability to malicious use of it faster than Microsoft can come up with a fix and issue a patch.

The technical community is divided in their advice to users. Some advise ditching IE completely and using an alternate browser. Others feel that IE can be used safely as long as the PC is well-protected by anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall software.

Because most of our customers still use IE, we have no choice -- we have to make sure our websites work on it. But we are switching amongst various browsers these days, both to make sure all sites work on all browsers and to hedge our bets in case things get out of hand in IE-land. And incidentally, so far our protection seems to be holding.

Note that switching browsers is not without problems. Some websites will not work right or will not look the same in the alternate browsers. We went through all our customers' sites (past and present) and found only 3 that had any problems. All have been fixed (at no charge, of course).

If you are interested in trying alternate browsers, here's where to download them:

Firefox is showing a lot of promise and has some useful features, such as the ability to copy your favorites from IE. The current version is a late beta, and many (including us) have been using it without a problem, but we still advise using caution with any beta software.

Mozilla has been around for a while. It is similar to Firefox but considerably simpler and may soon be eclipsed by it, especially since they are built by the same company.

Opera is less popular, partly because it isn't free (US$39). It was developed by a Norwegian company and has less than 1% of the market, but some folks swear by it.

Remember that one reason IE gets hit by the bad guys so much is because it is the most popular browser. If one of the alternate browsers gets a significant market share you can bet that it will become a target also. So even if you switch browsers, don't neglect your basic protection.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.