April 7, 2005 Bitmover, the company producing a management program for computer source code named Bitkeeper (BK), announced on April 5 that it will no longer be providing a free version of its product. As a result of Bitmover’s announcement, the programmer who wrote the original Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, stated on a mailing list that he “decided to not use BK mainly because [he] need[s] to figure out the alternatives”. As to an alternative to Bitkeeper, Torvalds hinted that he is considering Monotone but that Subversion, a recent replacement for CVS, is out of the running. Bitkeeper was originally developed to allow Torvalds to manage code contributions more easily,…

Monday, March 21, 2005 Automobile industry pioneer, John DeLorean, died Saturday in a New Jersey hospital by complications from a stroke. DeLorean was born in 1925 in Detroit, Michigan to European immigrant parents. He received an education in automotive engineering and quickly rose through the ranks of Packard and later General Motors (GM). DeLorean was credited with the development of the Pontiac GTO, which helped introduce the era of “muscle cars”. By 1965, DeLorean led the entire Pontiac division, and four years later was promoted to the prestigious position of leading GM’s Chevrolet. In 1973, DeLorean quit General Motors and started his own company, the De Lorean Motor Company. The…

Thursday, January 24, 2013 1 2 3 4 A group of researchers published a paper about their discovery of a new species of Madagascar mermaid skink lizards last December. The species is the fourth forelimbs-only terrestrial tetrapods species known to science, and the first one which also has no fingers on the forelimbs. The species was collected at Marosely, Boriziny (French: Port-Bergé), Sofia Region, Madagascar. The Sirenoscincus mobydick name is after the existing parent genus, and a sperm whale from the 1851 novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. This week, Wikinews interviewed one of the researchers, French zoologist Aurélien Miralles, about the research. ((Wikinews)) What caused your initial interest in Madagascar…