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Thursday, March 6, 2008

During a media event held at its Cupertino headquarters, Apple released the long awaited iPhones Software Development Kit (SDK) and the associated iTunes “App Store” and iPhone Developer Program. The SDK will allow third party software developers to create applications for the iPhone and then distribute them on the iTunes Apps Stores. Any members of the iPhone Developer Program can add applications to the store for free; the program costs $99 (USD) to join. Developers will be able to set the price of the applications or release them for free. All applications will have to be approved by Apple before being allowed on the store. Some of the disallowed categories are”porn”, excessive bandwidth users and anything malicious or illegal. VoIP applications would be allowed over Wi-Fi only. Enterprises can setup private pages on the store to distribute internal applications.

At the event several third party developers that had been given early access to the SDK demonstrated their applications. Among the applications demonstrated were EA‘s Spore, AOL‘s AIM instant messenger and a client for epocrates, a drug reference service.

The company also announced the iPhone 2.0 update that was released as a closed beta for developers and is scheduled for public release in June. In the new version Apple has been focusing on enterprise features in an attempt to compete with rivals like RIM‘s BlackBerry and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. The update adds support for ActiveSync, which Apple has licensed from rival Microsoft, WPA2 and virtual private network support. The update will also be available to iPod Touch users for what Steve Jobs described as “a nominal charge”, as Apple have done in the past with the previous iPod Touch and MacBook Wi-Fi updates.

Monday, July 18, 2005

Utah Senator Chris Buttars has decided not to introduce a bill requiring the teaching of “divine design” in Utah schools, at least for this year. Buttars withdrew after State Board of Education director Patti Harrington assured him that Utah public school curriculum does not teach that man descended from apes.

Buttars had hoped his divine design proposal would escape the controversy of creationism or intelligent design. “The only people who will be upset about this are atheists,” he stated on June 6 when he announced his intention to run the bill.

Utah is home to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints also known as the Mormon Church. On the surface it would seem Utah would be a likely scene of intense religious pressure in public schools over the teaching of evolution. But unlike states with a strong Christian conservative presence, Utah’s LDS leaders have avoided some of the more contentious separation state and church battles.

On the topic of divine design, official LDS church spokesmen have been largely silent at least in public. But with more than 90% of the legislature made up of members of the LDS faith, few in Utah would deny the influence of the church on public policy.

Groups on both sides of the issue are gearing up for what many consider an inevitable fight. The ACLU of Utah has posted a paper on divine design on its web site (http://www.acluutah.org). The Eagle Forum which wields significant policital power in Utah has expressed its support for Buttars proposed legislation.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Google has started phasing out support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), following a hacking attempt that exploited an IE6 vulnerability, despite the flaw being fixed promptly.

From March 1 on, some services, such as Google Docs, will not work “properly” when accessed from the browser. Google recommends that both firms and end-users upgrade “as soon as possible”. Google now only officially supports Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 3+, Chrome 4+ and Safari 3+.

Hackers exploited a weak spot in Internet Explorer to find the contents of Gmail accounts of human rights activists in China. Following this, both the French and German governments advised that users should switch to a different browser until the flaw had been plugged.

Microsoft issued a patch quickly after the revelations, pushing out a scheduled update just under three weeks earlier than they had scheduled. The software giant normally issues updates once a month, but the high press coverage led it to run an unscheduled update. However, Microsoft admitted that they knew about the problem “since early September”, and were planning to patch it in February, leaving the hole open for five months.

Rajen Sheth, the Senior Product Manager for Google Apps, said in a blog post that the web had “evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice”, and that “very old browsers cannot run many […] new features”.

20% of users still use the browser, released in August 2001 in order to complement the then-new Windows XP operating system, including many governments. Microsoft will support the browser until 2014, although the browser has attracted strong criticism among people in the web industry.

The bad publicity garnered from the attacks has allowed rivals, such as Mozilla Firefox and Google’s own browser, Chrome, to gain market share, allowing the open-source Firefox, of which a new version (3.6) has just been released, to claw a 40% share, close to overtaking Microsoft’s 45%.

Last July, Google also dropped IE6 support from the popular video sharing site, YouTube. Popular sites, such as Facebook and Digg, have also dropped support. IE6 does not support several key technologies, making compatible web-design hard to do. For example, it does not render partial transparency in png images, and many site designers must work around the fact that Internet Explorer 6 does not support many important parts of the cascading style sheets (CSS) family of standards, which is how the majority of websites are designed.

Monday, June 13, 2016

The following is the first edition of a monthly series chronicling the U.S. 2016 presidential election. It features original material compiled throughout the previous month after an overview of the month’s biggest stories.

In this month’s edition on the campaign trail: a former Republican congressman briefly joins the Libertarian Party and runs for vice president; the Democratic Party names its National Convention Platform Drafting Committee amid controversy; and Wikinews interviews a candidate who had a surprisingly strong performance in the West Virginia Democratic presidential primary.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

The bestselling US novelist Tom Clancy died yesterday in a hospital in Baltimore, according to his publisher. The sixty-six year old is best known for a series of novels themed around espionage, military affairs and geopolitical intrigue, many of which have been adapted into movies and video games.

The Hunt for Red October, Clancy’s first novel, sold over five million copies and was made into a movie with Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery. President Ronald Reagan described the novel as a “perfect yarn”. The protagonist of Red October, CIA analyst Jack Ryan, starred in a series of Clancy adventures featuring wars, terrorist attacks and international political power games. Ryan has been played by Harrison Ford and later Ben Affleck.

Seventeen of his twenty novels have reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2002, Forbes magazine estimated Clancy’s earnings at US$47.8m. His final novel, Command Authority, is to be published in December.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

A paste containing synthetic tooth enamel can seal small cavities without drilling. Kazue Yamagishi and colleagues at the FAP Dental Institute in Tokyo say that the paste can repair small cavities in 15 minutes.

Currently, fillers don’t stick to such small cavities so dentists must drill bigger holes. Hydroxyapatite crystals, of which natural enamel is made, bond with teeth to repair tiny areas of damage.

Yamagishi and colleagues have tested their paste on a lower premolar tooth that showed early signs of decay. They found that the synthetic enamel merged with the natural enamel. The synthetic enamel also appears to make teeth stronger which will improve resistance to future decay. As with drilling, however, there is still the potential for pain: The paste is strongly acidic to encourage crystal growth and causes inflammation if it touches the gums.

The paste is reported in the journal Nature.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

In the year 2000, Dries Buytaert created Drupal, a freely licensed and open source tool to manage websites, as a bulletin board for his college dorm. Since Dries released the software and a community of thousands of volunteer developers have added and improved modules, Drupal has grown immensely popular. Drupal won the overall Open CMS Award in 2007, and some speakers in Drupal’s spacious developer’s room at FOSDEM 2008 were dreaming aloud of its world domination.

Buytaert (now 29) just finished his doctoral thesis and has founded the start-up Acquia. The new company wants to become Drupal’s best friend, with the help of an all-star team and US$7 million collected from venture capitalists. Wikinews reporter Michaël Laurent sat down with Dries in Brussels to discuss these recent exciting developments.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Six Orbcomm satellites have been launched by a Russian Kosmos-3M carrier rocket. Lift-off, from Site 107 at the Kapustin Yar launch site in South-West Russia, occurred at 06:36:28 GMT. This is the first orbital launch to occur from Kapustin Yar since April 1999.

Orbcomm is an American company which operates a constellation of communications satellites in low Earth orbit. The satellites launched today were five Quick Launch satellites, and a technology demonstration spacecraft which will be operated in conjunction with the United States Coastguard. A seventh satellite, Ufa State University‘s UGATUSAT nanosatellite, was originally scheduled to be launched, but was moved to a later launch aboard a Soyuz-2 rocket for unknown reasons. The launch was conducted by COSMOS International, a Russo-German organisation, and Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces.

This is the 31^th orbital launch of 2008, and the second of which to have been conducted by a Kosmos-3M rocket. The next Kosmos-3M launch is currently scheduled for the end of July, when the SAR-Lupe 5 satellite will be placed into orbit.