RootAdmin.co.uk

Following the decision of the European Parliament that enables European member states to approve laws that force ISPs to disconnect individuals from the Internet, the UK is planning on enforcing its own version of the “three-strikes” law meant to discourage illegal file sharing.

According to The Guardian, Lord Peter Mandelson, the Business Secretary, announced that this law is supposed become reality in 2011. It will go through a 12 months long testing phase that will see warning letters sent to persistent offenders. If the scope of the illegal activity doesn’t drop by at least 70 percent by April 2011, three months later the practice of cutting off the Internet access will be set in motion.

There were a lot of voices raised against this plan. ISPs don’t want the responsibility – it’s bad for their public image, and also raises operational costs. The Open Rights Group sees it as an infringement of basic rights. Times Online reports that even UK’s law enforcement and intelligence services are against it. They fear that pirates will begin to use encryption and thus make their job even harder (not to mention the increase of workload and costs).

On the opposite side sit the music and movie industries. They are, of course, anxious to see the law in practice since they “lose” hundreds of millions of pounds every year.

SIGN THE PETITION http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/dontdisconnectus/ – UK Citizens only

GIVE IT UP, microsoft have said they will support IE 6 until 2014. IE 6 was initially realease on August 27, 2001, come the prposed end of life date – 2014, IE 6 will be 13 years old! In computing terms, that will make IE 6 a dinosaur.

As of January 10, 2009, Secunia reports 142 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6, 22 of which are unpatched, some of which are rated moderately critical in severity.

“Microsoft has underlined support for its Internet Explorer 6 web browser, despite acknowledging its flaws.

The software giant said it would support IE6 until 2014 – four years beyond the original deadline.

Critics – some of which have started an online campaign – want the eight-year-old browser mothballed because they claim it slows the online experience.

“Friends do not let friends use IE6,” said Amy Barzdukas, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer.

“If you are in my social set and I have been to your house for dinner, you are not using IE6,” she said. “But it is much more complicated when you move into a business setting.”

“It’s hard to be cavalier in this economy and say ‘oh it’s been around for so long they need to upgrade,’” Ms Barzdukas told journalists in San Francisco..

Web monitoring firms estimate that 15-20% of people still use IE6 to browse the web.

Enough is enough

Among those speaking out against IE6 is a group of more than 70 developers who have banded together to form a project called ie6nomore.” – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8196242.stm

Why not take a look at IE6NoMore

Mozilla has today released the Firefox 3.6 Alpha.

The first developer milestone of the next release of Firefox – code named Namoroka Alpha 1 – is now available for download. Namoroka is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only.

This Alpha of Namoroka / Gecko 1.9.2 introduces several new features:

• Compositor (Phase 1), which moves Gecko to using one native widget per top-level content document. See this blog post or bug 374980 for more details.
• A new focus model, described here and tracked in bug 178324
• The chromedir attribute has been replaced with a pseudoclass
• Several new CSS3 properties including background size and gradients for background images
• Speed improvements to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
• Startup and responsiveness improvements throughout the application

Anyone interested in Namoroka should read the article about Firefox 3.6 for developers on the Mozilla Developer Center. For a full list of changes, see this list (it’s big).

Please use the following links to download Namoroka:

• Windows: Namoroka 3.6 Alpha 1 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Namoroka 3.6 Alpha 1.dmg
• Linux: namoroka-3.6a1.tar.bz2

the above was extracted from https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/08/07/firefox-3-6-alpha-1-now-available-for-download/

For some time now I have believed that there has been too much importance placed on the acadmic world. Today it would appear I was proven right.

Well as HTML 5 is not yet a standard, heres some brief info on it

“HTML 5 is the next major revision of HTML (“hypertext markup language”), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. Its first draft appeared on January 22, 2008.

HTML 5 is the next advancement of both HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, as development on the next version of the latter has been ceased. HTML 5 was initially said to become a game-changer in Web application development, making obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.^[1] Such applications would be made obsolete by specifying a standard video codec for all browsers to use. However, in July 2009, the editor of the burgeoning draft specification dropped the recommendation of the free software Theora and Vorbis codecs, after opposition from Apple and Nokia. This means HTML 5 does not currently specify a common video codec for Web development.^[2]

The ideas behind HTML 5, originally referred to as Web Applications 1.0, were pioneered in 2004 by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG); HTML 5 incorporates Web Forms 2.0, another WHATWG specification. The HTML 5 specification was adopted as the starting point of the work of the new HTML working group of the W3C in 2007. The working group published the First Public Working Draft of the specification on January 22, 2008.^[3] The specification is an ongoing work, and is expected to remain so for many years, although parts of HTML 5 are going to be finished and implemented in browsers before the whole specification reaches final Recommendation status.^[4] The editors are Ian Hickson of Google, Inc. and David Hyatt of Apple, Inc.^{[3]” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_5}
You can read the draft standard for HTML 5 at http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html

Users have seen that Mysql.com has been down since about 5am Pacific time today, apparently this is because of major power outage at Uppsala Sweden where their servers are located. Its appears to be affecting www.mysql.com, dev.mysql.com, bugs.mysql.com, and forum.mysql.com

MySql was aquired last year by SUN, SUN might be getting aquired by Oracle. I wonder what will happen with MySQl is Oracle do aquire SUN.

As the UK has gone silly with the amount of cameras in the uk with Det Ch Insp Mick Neville of the Met police’s CCTV unit calling for no more camera’s saying “What I would say is we’ve got enough cameras, let’s stop now, we don’t want any more cameras.

he continues by saying “Let’s invest that money that’s available and use it for the training of people, and the processes to make sure whatever we’ve captured is effectively used.”

for more information see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8158942.stm

these guys took 24 256GB Samsung MLC SSD’s and put them in RAID to make this awesome computer!
YOU HAVE TO CHECK THIS OUT!

*should have mentioned i saw this on YaManicKill’s blog over at http://alimckinlay.110mb.com/ – all kudos to him

Now you can pre-order your copy of windows 7,take a look

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windows/buy/offers/pre-order.aspx

Note that these are an “E Edition” of Windows 7

Q: What are the differences between standard editions of Windows 7 and E editions of Windows 7?

A: The only functional difference is that the Internet Explorer 8 component is not available.

Not to worry – we all use firefox right!?!?!?!

I’m playing about currently with a wee bit of search engine optimisation. And still really like Google . I thought i’d take a look at ask.com again.

Other than the fact they brought back Jeeves the butler, their search algorithm appears to be pretty damn smart, it certainly in the few tests i did stayed relatively on par with google, and laughed in the face of bing.com (Microsoft’s new search site)

Think im going to play about with ask.com a bit more