The Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched, carrying 11 satellites to low-Earth orbit. The flight marked SpaceX’s first successful landing of the first stage booster. Eric Berger writing for Ars Technica:
However, it is worth noting that on Monday night the Falcon 9 rocket descended from about twice the altitude as the New Shepherd vehicle, and at about twice the speed, approximately Mach 7.5. It did not simply drop back to Earth from a vertical launch; rather, the Falcon 9 flew hundreds of kilometres away from the coast before turning around and flying back. By doing so it became the first orbital rocket ever to achieve such a feat, and presumably the first of many.
New Shepard is Blue Origin’s reusable rocket which successfully returned to earth after flying into suborbital space on November 23, 2015.
UPDATE: SpaceX has published the full video of the flight (45:27), with Tim Urban as special guest.
§Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Facebook:
We’re also testing a new tool that will let people provide more information about their circumstances if they are asked to verify their name. People can let us know they have a special circumstance, and then give us more information about their unique situation. This additional information will help our review teams better understand the situation so they can provide more personalized support. This information will also help inform potential improvements we can make in the future.
I understand the motivations behind this for some users. My guess is, as usual, you will have to provide even more information about yourself to Facebook and it will keep it, even if your situation changes.
§Friday, December 18, 2015
Owen Williams reporting for TheNextWeb:
To fix the bug Google needed to switch to a new pseudo-random number generator called xorshift128+ which fixes the not-quite-random problem found in the older MWC1616 algorithm.
xorshift128+ results in random numbers that are actually random and offers significant performance improvements, however is not cryptographically secure, so shouldn’t be used to create GUIDs or other secure hashes.
§Thursday, December 17, 2015
Vindu Goel reporting for The New York Times:
The change in Yahoo’s strategy, which follows deliberations by the board over the last week, is the latest effort by Marissa Mayer, the chief executive, to assuage shareholders. Ms. Mayer, who was hired in 2012 to turn around Yahoo, had planned to spin off the company’s 15 percent stake in Alibaba, bundled with a small-business services unit, into a new company called Aabaco. She then planned to focus on improving the company’s core business, the sale of advertising that is shown to the roughly one billion users of Yahoo’s apps and websites.
Ms. Mayer is now effectively back to square one. Yahoo’s core Internet operations are struggling, even though the chief executive has made dozens of acquisitions, added original video and magazine-style content, and released new apps. The shares in Alibaba remain Yahoo’s most lucrative asset, with the company’s $8.5 billion stake in Yahoo Japan a distant second. The rest of Yahoo is worth $3 billion to $8 billion, according to analysts’ estimates.
I wonder what David Pogue thinks about this.
§Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Owen Williams reporting for TheNextWeb:
Chakra is the engine used to execute JavaScript that was developed from scratch in 2008 and has the most compatibility with the ECMAScript 6 standard over other engines, including Google’s V8.
Peter Bright concluding for ArsTechnica:
The broader plan is to ensure the engine is useful for more than browser scenarios. The V8 engine developed by Google for Chrome has a whole parallel existence on the server, courtesy of the Node.js server-side JavaScript platform. ChakraCore could easily move into a similar space. Internally, Microsoft uses Chakra to run services such as Cortana and Outlook.com. Externally, Microsoft has already developed a version of Node.js that uses Chakra instead of V8, something that can now be fully open source too.
I would add this excerpt from the Microsoft Edge Blog (May 18, 2015). The post is well worth a read:
Starting in Windows 8.1/IE11, Chakra added support for a new set of public hosting APIs called the JavaScript Runtime (JSRT) APIs, which shipped as part of the Windows SDK. While these APIs allowed hosting of Chakra outside the browser, the set of functionality exposed by these APIs during Windows8.1/IE11 was mainly focused on specific server side scenarios across Microsoft products and services like Outlook.com and Azure DocumentDB.
§Tuesday, December 8, 2015
With the launch of the open source Swift project, we are also releasing a port that works with the Linux operating system! You can build it from the Swift sources or download pre-built binaries for Ubuntu. The port is still a work in progress but we’re happy to say that it is usable today for experimentation. Currently x86_64 is the only supported architecture on Linux.
It is hosted on GitHub.
§Thursday, December 3, 2015
Michael Gorman writing for Engadget:
The code that powers Engadget has been completely rewritten from the ground up to reduce load times and increase efficiency. The responsive design is equally at home on a desktop as it is on a smartphone (and all screen sizes in between).
§Thursday, December 3, 2015
Adobe announces Animate CC which will replace Flash Professional in 2016. From the Adobe blog:
For nearly two decades, Flash Professional has been the standard for producing rich animations on the web. Because of the emergence of HTML5 and demand for animations that leverage web standards, we completely rewrote the tool over the past few years to incorporate native HTML5 Canvas and WebGL support.
§Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Mitchell Baker writing on the mozilla.governance newsgroup:
Given this, it’s clear to me that sooner or later paying a tax to support Thunderbird will not make sense as a policy for Mozilla. I know many believe this time came a while back, and I’ve been slow to say this clearly. And of course, some feel that this time should never come. However, as I say, it’s clear to me today that continuing to live with these competing demands given our focus on industry impact is increasingly unstable. We’ve seen this already, in an unstructured way, as various groups inside Mozilla stop supporting Thunderbird. The accelerating speed of Firefox and infrastructure changes -- which I welcome wholeheartedly -- will emphasize this.
I did not know that Thunderbird was still alive.
§Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Dave Mark writing for The Loop:
As a user, I would much prefer to buy my apps through the App Store, to rely on the scrutiny of a solid malware/counterfeiting screening. I imagine that Apple is hearing the klaxon calls from the developer community, reading blog posts like this one from Daring Fireball.
§Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Bohemian Coding, developer of the award winning application Sketch:
There are a number of reasons for Sketch leaving the Mac App Store—many of which in isolation wouldn’t cause us huge concern. However as with all gripes, when compounded they make it hard to justify staying: App Review continues to take at least a week, there are technical limitations imposed by the Mac App Store guidelines (sandboxing and so on) that limit some of the features we want to bring to Sketch, and upgrade pricing remains unavailable.
The whole Apple blogosphere is relaying the event, insisting on the fact that it is another top indie developer that is leaving the Mac App Store (Federico Viticci, Michael Tsai, Dan Moren, Milen Dzhumerov, etc.) I like how John Gruber sums up the problems with the Mac App Store:
The Mac App Store should be designed to make developers like Bohemian Coding (and Bare Bones, and Panic, etc.) happy. It should make developing for the Mac better, not worse than selling outside the App Store. These are among the best apps on the platform, from developers who have been loyal to Apple and the Mac for decades.
The Mac App Store is rotting, at least for productivity software. There’s no other way to put it. If this hasn’t set off alarm bells within Apple, something is very wrong.
§Wednesday, December 2, 2015
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