Street View is one of Google’s most valuable services. The ability to familiarise yourself with somewhere strange, before you arrive, is genuinely useful.

For such a rich trove of information to be presented with such a clunky UI is strange and frustrating, and very un-Googley. Happily, at SIGGRAPH this week Microsoft Research presented a new form of presenting street view imagery, and it’s well worth a look.

The “Street Slide” project presents seamless, uninterrupted perspectives as you navigate. Here’s what it looks like in action:

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Microsoft Street Slide: Street View done properly

Take a peep

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 30th July 2010 16:03 GMT

After more than two years, Apple’s Safari browser for Macs remains vulnerable to attacks that allow websites to litter a user’s hard drive with thousands of malicious files.

The “carpet bomb” vulnerability was publicly disclosed in May 2008 after members of Apple’s security team said they didn’t consider the quirk a security issue. After Microsoft took the unusual step of advising its customers to stop using Safari, Apple issued a patch Windows versions but not for OS X.

Dhanjani said he discovered a separate, high-risk vulnerability that can be used to remotely steal local files from the user’s hard drive, and the company has acknowledged the bug and promised to fix it.

Google is now using site speed – “how quickly a site responds to web requests” – as part of the criteria for ranking links on its world-dominating search engine.

With a blog post in December, Google seemed to indicate that such a change was in the cards, and the company formally announced the change on Friday with another post to its Webmaster Central blog.

“You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web,” wrote Google Fellow Amit Singhal and, yes, principal engineer Matt Cutts, the man webmasters look to as the Delphic Oracle of search results. “As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms.”

According to Google’s post, site speed “doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page” – though, of course, specific weights are not provided and they’re likely to change as Google sees fit. Famously, Google uses over 200 “signals” to rank sites.

So does your site measure up to Google’s new speed standards. Give Echo Computers as call and talk to us about our free S.E.O Report and find out how we can help you get your site noticed!

One customer is giving BT some serious grief with giant novelty cheques. Mr Humpage that a couple of years back he noticed he was being charged £4.50 a pop for paying his phone bills online. This, he suggests, actually costs the telco nothing, so why the charge?

Two years of correspondence later, BT admitted it didn’t take a financial hit for processing online payments, but explained it “averaged together all the non-direct-debit payment methods, and on that basis it costs them £4.50″.

He Said: “As I’d been paying for over two years to have non-existent cheques cashed, I thought I may as well have something for this outlay, so my last cheque was sent blown up on A3 cardboard. Remember, it’s legal to write a cheque on anything as long as it contains the right information – there are famous stories of a cheque written on a cow, or in one case on a fish. In the circumstances, I thought they got off pretty lightly.”

For the full story check out the register

Finally, a photo from Loch Ness has conclusively proved the existence of one of Britain’s most mystical creatures… The Stig.

Government Minister Vernon Coaker claims that having access to a laptop in the home can boost children’s GCSE scores by two grades.

Opening the BETT education show at London’s Olympia, Coaker used his speech to trumpet the Government’s plans to provide 270,000 free laptops to low-income families, which were announced earlier this week.

Coaker said that giving every child access to a computer in school was no longer enough. “Children only spend 15% of their time at school,” the Minister of state for schools and learners stated. “When we talk about technology education, we have to think of its place in the home as well as in schools.”

“Denying them access to technology at home can have a seriously detrimental effect on attainment,” the Minister added. “Having a laptop at home can make a two grade difference at GCSEs.”

Coaker claimed that positive results from pilot schemes to provide free laptops to families in Oldham and Sussex had encouraged the Government to expand the Home Access scheme nationwide. “On average, a child spent one hour more on learning [at home with a free laptop],” he said.

Coaker said it was also vital for schools to continue investing in the latest technology to help engage pupils and meet demand for future jobs. “We need to be able to prepare the future workforce for the future workplace,” the Minister said, adding that three million science-related jobs will become available by 2017. “We cannot allow students to be disengaged from important subjects such as science.”

The Minister’s comments follow stinging criticism of the free laptop scheme from leading ISP TalkTalk. The broadband provider claimed the Government scheme was inconsistent with plans to pay for next-generation broadband with a £6-per-year landline levy and a copyright clampdown, claiming that the “additional burden could lead to 600,000 financially stretched families being forced to give up their broadband connections.”

Online retailers have forecast record sales as they prepare for the busiest internet shopping day of the year.

The first Monday in December is considered the peak and one-day sales are expected to top £350m, with the busiest hour between 1300 and 1400 GMT.

Stores have already seen a surge in sales compared with 2008, when about £320m was spent on the busiest day.

Online, the signs look good. Sales were up 17% last month compared to the same month the year before, the British Retail Consortium said.

And retailer John Lewis said last week saw its best ever sales figures on the high street and online. On Saturday, sales at johnlewis.com were up by a fifth on the previous year.

Last year, an estimated 29 million people used the internet to buy Christmas presents, and forecasts suggested 5.2 million did so at work.

Overall retail sales last year were predicted to reach £13.6bn ($19.9bn), according to the internet trade body IMRG.

Netbooks are 20% more likely to fail within the first year than their more expensive laptop brethen, according to new research.

SquareTrade, an independent US warranty provider, analysed the failure rates of more than 30,000 laptops covered by its own warranties.

It found that 5.8% of netbooks malfunctioned within the first year, compared to 4.7% for regular laptops and 4.2% for premium laptops costing more than £600.

Overall, more than a fifth of laptops are likely to malfunction within three years, according to the company’s research. Netbooks haven’t been on sale long enough for the SquareTrade to reveal what the three-year failure rate of the mini-laptops will be, but the company predicts that just over a quarter will fail within that timescale.

Apple Not So Reliable

The research also raises question marks over the famed reliability of Macs.

Three PC manufacturers – Asus, Toshiba and Sony – boasted better reliability rates than Apple. Macs have a 17.4% malfunction rate over three years, compared to market-leader Asus, which has a 15.6% failure rate.

HP Compaq was the worst of the nine PC vendors listed, with a malfunction rate of 25.6% over three years.