by Matthew Ogston on February 9, 2010
Amazon have just announced their support for automatic versioning control for all files managed by Amazon’s S3 file storage service. For me, this was one of the missing jigsaw pieces of S3 – a hole filled by a number of suppliers who now are going to have to fight very hard to keep that part of the business model going.
Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects any time you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request….
…Versioning offers an additional level of protection by providing a means of recovery when customers accidentally overwrite or delete objects. This allows you to easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures. You can also use Versioning for data retention and archiving.
To get developers up and running with the new versioning server, the Amazon AWS team are running a ‘Introduction to Versioning Support for Amazon S3‘ webinar, which is free to attend.
by Matthew Ogston on February 2, 2010
Google have finally announced that they will be discontinuing support for IE6. Below is the announcement sent to all of their Google Apps customers today:
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Although i’m not a big fan of IE6 by any stretch of the imagination, I don’t think that this is a particularly good move for Google. Google are trying to pitch their Apps products to corporate customers – head to head with Microsoft. However, a large number of very big corporations still use IE6 as the browser of choice. And they certainly won’t stop using IE6, just because Google forces them to.