Seems pretty major...and goodbye to all those older versions of IE for the most part.......



From January, Internet Explorer (IE) users will be automatically updated to the latest version of the browser.

Microsoft said it was starting the project to update millions of machines to improve security online.

Future updates to the browser would be applied without a user's knowledge to help beat scammers catching people out with fake updates.

Those who did not want their browser updated could opt out or uninstall the software, said Microsoft.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16214912

QuoteAdobe says it now believes the alternative HTML 5 technology offers the "best solution" because it is "universally supported".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15648899

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15523050

"From 1 January 2012, Google will charge for the Google Maps API service when more than the limit of 25,000 map "hits" are made in a day.

Websites, especially travel firms, use Google Maps to link customers to a view of the destinations they inquire about.

Google is rumoured to be charging $4 per 1,000 views in excess of the limit."

I've been tinkering with this script http://www.shift8creative.com/projects/agile-uploader/index.html ... very customisable and is plugged into JQuery

Very handy for users uploading photos who otherwise might be sending you 5 MB photos that are going to get shrunk server-side anyway.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20336-internet-probe-can-track-you-down-to-within-690-metres.html

"The new method zooms in through three stages to locate a target computer. The first stage measures the time it takes to send a data packet to the target and converts it into a distance – a common geolocation technique that narrows the target's possible location to a radius of around 200 kilometres.

Wang and colleagues then send data packets to the known Google Maps landmark servers in this large area to find which routers they pass through. When a landmark machine and the target computer have shared a router, the researchers can compare how long a packet takes to reach each machine from the router; converted into an estimate of distance, this time difference narrows the search down further. "We shrink the size of the area where the target potentially is," explains Wang."

I do a couple of things that require a spread of IPs. I've found that using a centralised FTP area and cheap shared hosting ($2-$4 a month) and some cron jobs can get things done quickly and reliably.

Whenever I used proxies, the connections never seemed all that reliable and it got increasingly harder to get a decent list of barely working proxies. I think they were generally overused by like-minded people....spamming the arse off blogs or the like.

So are people still using proxies for SEO/webmaster-type tasks (for fetching not browsing)... ? I hear Tor was good for getting big lists it just seems like finding a small subset of responsive, unbanned proxies is a big headache.

I'd hunted around for a dedicated server and OVH seemed to offer a much better spec than anything else I've seen. I've went for this server: http://www.ovh.co.uk/products/mg_hybrid.xml

Looking around other places, the same kind of spec is going to cost treble that, easily.

Anyone using them ? I see they have a rep for torrent servers and their tech support apparently isn't the best (it's a French company, maybe better if you're French I guess).

Just seemed like their server/costs were too good to be true. Looks like I'll be finding out soon enough.

The Sistrix data was banded around a fair bit after the recent google updates, giving some weight to tracking ranking positions on the big engines.

So is anyone rank checking, using rank checking services or think it's a total waste of time?

I've just installed Lightstreamer: http://www.lightstreamer.com/

It's basically 'real time reporting' but data is sent from the server rather than the client requesting more data... essentially data is sent only when data is available... known as push/Comet technology.

I'm looking to build some pretty admin graphs and real-time reporting for SQL loads, server load and the like, to keep away from the command line as much as possible...

Anyone using it, or a similar tech? Anything you particularly like about it or have a novel use for?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20026321-17.html

QuoteCall of Duty: Black Ops has surpassed the $1 billion worldwide sales mark after just six weeks of availability, Activision announced today.

That's one mighty sized industry.  I bought a PS3 the other week and bought this game... it's a nice distraction.

Having been a bit of a gamer on the ol' Amiga back in the day I'm looking to develop a site that dips its toes into the 'gaming world'. There had been talk of gaming by the masses having a large part to play in social networking, but I imagine the 'high end' games such as these will be around for a very long time.

https://support.uk2.net/

Click  on "lost password"

Doesn't look good does it?

I'd just bought some space off them to host a couple of sites.