For those of us who have not heard of Wayland, the following is how the summary reads:
The x.y.z release of Some Software is now available for download. The project thanks all who have contributed, and especially the desktop environments and client applications that now converse using Some Software. In an official announcement from Some Author of Some Company, he says the Some Software protocol may be considered 'done' but that doesn't mean there's not work to be done. A bigger importance is now given to testing, documentation, and bugfixing. As Some Software is maturing, we are also getting closer to the point where the big Linux distros will eventually start integrating it to their operating system.
So what does Some Software actually do and why should I be interested? I know that I can Google Some Software, but is it really that hard to start with the summary with the following:
The x.y.z release of Somesoftware, a package which does blah blah blah, is now available for download....
After all, phrases such as "As Wayland is maturing", imply that this is a relatively new piece of software still under development of which everyone is not familiar, especially for those of us using BSDs, Solaris, and Slackware.
When is Microsoft going to patch those flaws in Windows XP!
Hmm, Windows XP is over 13 years old and has been end of support for 5 years, and still released a security patch 7 months ago.
Android 4.3 was released 2 years ago. So the EOS was when? A few months after it was released?
Not that Windows XP and Android are great comparisons, but your jab does not exactly help Google's case. A better example would have been Apple iPhone 1 vs Android 4.3, but even Apple supported the first iPhone for 3 years before ending support.
The majority in the House of Representatives is Republican, however the organization called Majority House PAC is Democrat. From the Majority House PAC website:
As the super PAC focused on holding Republicans accountable and helping Democrats win seats in the House, House Majority PAC combines innovative new approaches with time-tested strategies to do battle with Republican outside groups and make a difference.
I should have worded that a little better. I meant that Slackware is an alternative to Debian (since the submitter was asking for options other than Debian). I personally and professionally use Slackware with a little FreeBSD.
Slackware is an alternative mainstream Linux distribution which does not use systemd. Instead of systemd, it uses a combination of custom rc scripts and sysvinit. If Slackware ever adopts systemd as the default system init, they would likely lose most of their user base.
And, as far as your point of needing to crank it for a while, if that's the case, there are issues that need repairing, so it's not as if you're being deprived of some designed, intended function of the vehicle.
Unless, you live in a cold climate such as Fairbanks, Alaska during the the middle of winter and you stop at a shopping center which does not have electrical outlets for the block heater thus allowing your engine to cool to a nice refreshing -20 F. It does sometimes take a few extra cranks to get a gasoline engine to start, even if it is tuned and in working order.
Although the blog mentions, trademark , I bet the multi-meters were actually infringing upon trade dress of Fluke's multimeters. Trade mark reserves a specific logo/phrase/design. Trade dress protects the look and feel of the product. I learned a great deal about this distinction from Mattel when I created a Magic Eight Ball app for iOS when the iTunes app store first opened.
And number of techie types that actually manage consumer grade routers for businesses, I would guess, is an extremely small cross section of techie types. Most businesses that actually employ a technician probably use at least something along the lines of a Juniper SRX as the public router. The point still stands, that automatic firewall updates is a good idea for the vast majority of consumers and techie types (just not in their professional arena).
I must confess, that I have been using the Apple base stations for nearly a decade for home use. My business uses a Slackware Linux router, and Junipers for our clients.
I forgot to add a sarcasm tag. I was responding to
Why this distinction matters is that the problem with our healthcare isn't so much the insurance, but the out-of-control costs for the care itself (ridiculously expensive hospital bills, compared to what it costs to get the same procedure done in western European private hospitals, for instance). Obamacare didn't do anything at all to fix the problem of these out-of-control costs...
The ACA not only "didn't do anything at all to fix the problem of these out-of-control costs", but actually made the problem worse.
The out of control healthcare costs are why this administration is trying to reduce overall costs by:
* creating a 2.3% medical device excise tax for manufacturers and importers.
* increasing percentage (10%) of your income you must spend in unreimbursed medical costs before they can be used in itemized deductions on your tax return.
* forcing parents cover the cost of insurance of "children" until the "children" are 27 granted this makes it cheaper for the "children" but not for the parents * creating an annual fee (i.e. tax) for certain health insurance providers (granted this does not directly increase the cost of healthcare)
Please note that these are just the first few I found (on government sites) after a few seconds of searching, so this list certainly is not exhaustive.
So... is electric a service or a product? Since you can't possess or store it I think the law considers it a service (You start and stop your electric service).
If you cannot store electricity, then what is a battery or capacitor and why did the man plug his car into the school's outlet? If I have physical possession of a fully charged battery, how am I not in possession of the electrical charge stored within the battery?
I believe the service part of "electric service" is the service of delivering electricity to your home. If I have water service from a local water delivery company, the service is for the delivery of the service and I pay the delivery company based upon how much water I requested.
You're confusing "CA" with "third party CA." You need a CA to have a certificate. Hint: the "C" in "CA" stands for "Certificate."
You are confusing a certificate with a certificate which most users trust (aka a Certificate Authority). A root certificate from a known Certificate Authority (i.e. an organization) is just a self signed certificate which is trusted by a large group of users. You need to have a certificate to have a CA, a CA without a certificate is well, useless.
The certificate usages 2 and 3 in the DANE specification should work with a self-signed X.509 cert and thus work without needing to involve a recognized CA, third-party CA, formal CA, or what ever you choose to call it.
I mean, I guess you could just open an editor and type something out that looks like a certificate pair, but it won't be mathematically usable, and it won't work when you try to do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange with it:)
Was this even suggested or are you trying to make yourself appear more intelligent by refuting an unmade claim which is condescendingly absurd?
Unless I run my own DNS, which is far easier than running a CA.
Not if you are using DNSSEC, it isn't. You talk about running your own DNS under those conditions as though a self-signed cert doesn't require a CA; it does. There's no such thing as certs without a CA...
DANE (DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities) RFC6698 does NOT require the use of a recognized CA, although it does not disallow it. There are four "usage" types for certificates (excerpts from the RFC follows):
Certificate usage 0 is used to specify a CA certificate, or
the public key of such a certificate, that MUST be found in any of
the PKIX certification paths for the end entity certificate given
by the server in TLS.
Certificate usage 1 is used to specify an end entity
certificate, or the public key of such a certificate, that MUST be
matched with the end entity certificate given by the server in
TLS.
Certificate usage 2 is used to specify a certificate, or the
public key of such a certificate, that MUST be used as the trust
anchor when validating the end entity certificate given by the
server in TLS.
Certificate usage 3 is used to specify a certificate, or the
public key of such a certificate, that MUST match the end entity
certificate given by the server in TLS.
Both Certificate usage 2 and Certificate usage 3 allow a domain's administrator to issue a certificate without requiring the involvement of a third party CA.
For more information on DANE, refer to either rfc6698 or the the wikipedia article.
What people like about it is that they don't have to pay the credit card companies their 4% of the sales. Instead 4square is only about 2% so small business gets to keep more of their money.
I believe you are thinking of Square which performs credit card payments, however the article is about Four Square which is some social restaurant service I had not heard of until this article. I agree that Square is immensely popular, even here in Alaska.
You know, for a bunch of well educated lawyers, the founding fathers sure drafted a terribly ambiguous amendment. It could mean:
Own a gun? We can draft you
Only members of a Militia can own guns
Own a gun? You must join a militia
Actually, I think the last one should be the way it works: only people who receive proper, thorough, and repeated training in weapons handling should be allowed to have guns. It would cut down tremendously on gun accidents.
Hmm, let me enlighten you with the definition of a militia:
1. a part of the organized armed forces of a country liable to call only in emergency 1. a body of citizens organized for military service 3. the whole body of able-bodied male citizens declared by law as being subject to call to military service.
Actually, since the militia during the time of the revolutionary war and the militia used in the suppression of Shay's Rebellion consisted of able-bodied male citizens whom were not professional soldiers or apart of a government military force, I think the last one is the definition intended by the founding fathers.
You in the U.S. has your gun laws exactly for cases like this. The original idea was, when government (or its minions) eventually gets too tyrannical
No, the original idea was so they could form militia and defend themselves without having an expensive military. The military was explicitly not to be given funding for more than two years at a time precisely for this reason. It's all in the constitution.
Look what happened: we ended up with the - by far - most expensive military in the world, and people buying guns for reasons the founders never intended.
No, the grandparent post is correct. The founding fathers were very weary of a strong central government. This is why the first government based upon the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was so weak it was unable to leavy taxes and fund an army to suppress the Shay's Rebellion and instead the rebellion was suppressed with a privately funded army.
The second amendment is a compromise in choosing between a weak central government and strong federal government. To quote the second amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The active part of the second amendment is "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,". The right is not imparted to the individual states, but to the people. The right to bear arms is part of the checks and balances between the rights of the People and the power voluntarily given to the government by the people.
Have the DNC set aside $400k or so to keep a 3 member team of coders updating it for the next 4 years. Don't forget, there are midterms in 2 years.
Hmm, I'm guessing they would need to set aside the "or so" since $400k comes out to $16.03/hour if the team has 3 full time members. Taking into account office supplies, equipment costs, and labor overhead costs, the members would be lucky if they each make $10/hour. The DNC would need to set aside $873,600 just to cover the base salaries of 3 devs making $35/hour for four years.
you're talking about porting half of OS X to windows and linux!
I would fully support Apple porting the OS X Objective-C frameworks to Windows and Linux since it would allow an iOS/OS X developer to write cross platform applications without needing to learn a second widget library or use a second language.
That is not just my two cents, I'd back up those two copper Lincolns with green Franklins if Apple considered making UIKit and AppKit cross platform.
For something of a smartphone class, a one-off PCB may cost several hundred dollars. Then the parts will cost another several hundred dollars in small quantities, as well as being difficult to obtain.
Now, you have to solder the parts onto the board, which is a decidedly nontrivial thing - and if you decide you want someone else to do this, it's probably another several hundred dollars.
I recently heard of BatchPCB vendor by reading the tutorials on SparkFun's website.
$10 setup fee plus either $2.50 (2 layer) or $4.00 (4 layer) per square inch of PCB board. So a 4.5" by 2.5" PCB would cost between $38 and $55 for the first board, which is a tad less than several hundred dollars. Granted, I do not know much about PCB classifications, so it may not be smartphone class, but I would think DIY open source hardware would not be designed so to an extremely narrow physical layout which could not be done by hand.
I'm not associated with either SparkFun or BatchPCB, I've recently run across them since I started researching how to get a custom PCB for a toy I am designing for my son.
You could use a free IPv6 brokering service such as Hurricane Electric or SixXS to provide IPv6 network access to your home network. I'm currently using Hurricane Electric tunnel brokering service with an Airport base station connected to DSL. It works well for browsing IPv6 sites and connecting to my Linode servers. In addition the servers at home are now available via IPv6 to the public Internet.
My comment was in response to a comment which stated that
All "open source" is prohibited in many app stores.
Speaking from my experience, you are spot on. A few years ago I started migrating the few libraries I have written from the LGPL to a modified BSD license just for this reason. It is also why I am more inclined to hunt down bugs and submit patches for non-GPL/LGPL software packages.
Why do you think open source is prohibited on many app stores?
I recently released an LDAP administrator for the iPad which is built around the OpenLDAP libraries. In the about section of the app, I clearly state that the app uses OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, and Cyrus-SASL libraries. I also provide links to a framework on github which I developed to provide the visual elements and convenience classes used within the app. When submitting the app to Apple, I disclosed that the app uses OpenSSL.
The app was approved in less than a week by Apple. If they were anti open source, would they have approved an app that makes liberal use of open source libraries?
Further more, how is it anti ethical to use open source software in iOS? I release the parts of my software I think might be useful to others under a modified BSD license and fully expect others to use it in both proprietary and open solutions.
I generally prefer the apps on my desktop rather than the remote apps.
"ssh -D 8080 " will start a SOCKS4/SOCKS5 server running on your local port 8080 and proxy the connections out the remote side. This allows all of your SOCKS enabled applications on your local workstation to make use of the tunnel without having to setup a one to one port mapping.
While I can understand your pain, this really is not Apple's fault, but the app developer's choice.
App developers can set the deployment version of an app to iOS 3.1. Granted, newer API methods/libraries are unavailable, however it is easy for a developer to test for the presence of a newer API method with "-(BOOL)respondsToSelector:(SEL)aSelector") before using the method within the app. Granted this may not be possible for apps whose core functionality are centered upon the functionality of the new API interfaces, however if the app was originally released on older iOS versions, it is hard for me to imagine how not supporting older iOS revs moving forward is difficult unless that app has been re-written from the ground up.
Disclaimer, I am actively developing a new database app and am running dev versions of the app on an iPhone1 with iOS 3.1. and other devices running iOS 4.3, 5.0, 5.1.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, for those not familiar and who have not yet googled it, according to Wikipedia, Wayland aims to be a replacement for the X Window System.
<rant>
For those of us who have not heard of Wayland, the following is how the summary reads:
The x.y.z release of Some Software is now available for download. The project thanks all who have contributed, and especially the desktop environments and client applications that now converse using Some Software. In an official announcement from Some Author of Some Company, he says the Some Software protocol may be considered 'done' but that doesn't mean there's not work to be done. A bigger importance is now given to testing, documentation, and bugfixing. As Some Software is maturing, we are also getting closer to the point where the big Linux distros will eventually start integrating it to their operating system.
So what does Some Software actually do and why should I be interested? I know that I can Google Some Software, but is it really that hard to start with the summary with the following:
The x.y.z release of Somesoftware, a package which does blah blah blah, is now available for download. ...
After all, phrases such as "As Wayland is maturing", imply that this is a relatively new piece of software still under development of which everyone is not familiar, especially for those of us using BSDs, Solaris, and Slackware.
</rant>
When is Microsoft going to patch those flaws in Windows XP!
Hmm, Windows XP is over 13 years old and has been end of support for 5 years, and still released a security patch 7 months ago.
Android 4.3 was released 2 years ago. So the EOS was when? A few months after it was released?
Not that Windows XP and Android are great comparisons, but your jab does not exactly help Google's case. A better example would have been Apple iPhone 1 vs Android 4.3, but even Apple supported the first iPhone for 3 years before ending support.
As the super PAC focused on holding Republicans accountable and helping Democrats win seats in the House, House Majority PAC combines innovative new approaches with time-tested strategies to do battle with Republican outside groups and make a difference.
I should have worded that a little better. I meant that Slackware is an alternative to Debian (since the submitter was asking for options other than Debian). I personally and professionally use Slackware with a little FreeBSD.
Slackware is an alternative mainstream Linux distribution which does not use systemd. Instead of systemd, it uses a combination of custom rc scripts and sysvinit. If Slackware ever adopts systemd as the default system init, they would likely lose most of their user base.
And, as far as your point of needing to crank it for a while, if that's the case, there are issues that need repairing, so it's not as if you're being deprived of some designed, intended function of the vehicle.
Unless, you live in a cold climate such as Fairbanks, Alaska during the the middle of winter and you stop at a shopping center which does not have electrical outlets for the block heater thus allowing your engine to cool to a nice refreshing -20 F. It does sometimes take a few extra cranks to get a gasoline engine to start, even if it is tuned and in working order.
Although the blog mentions, trademark , I bet the multi-meters were actually infringing upon trade dress of Fluke's multimeters. Trade mark reserves a specific logo/phrase/design. Trade dress protects the look and feel of the product. I learned a great deal about this distinction from Mattel when I created a Magic Eight Ball app for iOS when the iTunes app store first opened.
And number of techie types that actually manage consumer grade routers for businesses, I would guess, is an extremely small cross section of techie types. Most businesses that actually employ a technician probably use at least something along the lines of a Juniper SRX as the public router. The point still stands, that automatic firewall updates is a good idea for the vast majority of consumers and techie types (just not in their professional arena). I must confess, that I have been using the Apple base stations for nearly a decade for home use. My business uses a Slackware Linux router, and Junipers for our clients.
Why this distinction matters is that the problem with our healthcare isn't so much the insurance, but the out-of-control costs for the care itself (ridiculously expensive hospital bills, compared to what it costs to get the same procedure done in western European private hospitals, for instance). Obamacare didn't do anything at all to fix the problem of these out-of-control costs...
The ACA not only "didn't do anything at all to fix the problem of these out-of-control costs", but actually made the problem worse.
The out of control healthcare costs are why this administration is trying to reduce overall costs by:
* creating a 2.3% medical device excise tax for manufacturers and importers.
* increasing percentage (10%) of your income you must spend in unreimbursed medical costs before they can be used in itemized deductions on your tax return.
* forcing parents cover the cost of insurance of "children" until the "children" are 27 granted this makes it cheaper for the "children" but not for the parents
* creating an annual fee (i.e. tax) for certain health insurance providers (granted this does not directly increase the cost of healthcare)
Please note that these are just the first few I found (on government sites) after a few seconds of searching, so this list certainly is not exhaustive.
For references see:
* http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/faqs/faq-dependentcoverage.html
* http://www.irs.gov/uac/Affordable-Care-Act-Tax-Provisions
So... is electric a service or a product? Since you can't possess or store it I think the law considers it a service (You start and stop your electric service).
If you cannot store electricity, then what is a battery or capacitor and why did the man plug his car into the school's outlet? If I have physical possession of a fully charged battery, how am I not in possession of the electrical charge stored within the battery?
I believe the service part of "electric service" is the service of delivering electricity to your home. If I have water service from a local water delivery company, the service is for the delivery of the service and I pay the delivery company based upon how much water I requested.
You're confusing "CA" with "third party CA." You need a CA to have a certificate. Hint: the "C" in "CA" stands for "Certificate."
You are confusing a certificate with a certificate which most users trust (aka a Certificate Authority). A root certificate from a known Certificate Authority (i.e. an organization) is just a self signed certificate which is trusted by a large group of users. You need to have a certificate to have a CA, a CA without a certificate is well, useless.
The certificate usages 2 and 3 in the DANE specification should work with a self-signed X.509 cert and thus work without needing to involve a recognized CA, third-party CA, formal CA, or what ever you choose to call it.
I mean, I guess you could just open an editor and type something out that looks like a certificate pair, but it won't be mathematically usable, and it won't work when you try to do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange with it :)
Was this even suggested or are you trying to make yourself appear more intelligent by refuting an unmade claim which is condescendingly absurd?
Unless I run my own DNS, which is far easier than running a CA.
Not if you are using DNSSEC, it isn't. You talk about running your own DNS under those conditions as though a self-signed cert doesn't require a CA; it does. There's no such thing as certs without a CA...
DANE (DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities) RFC6698 does NOT require the use of a recognized CA, although it does not disallow it. There are four "usage" types for certificates (excerpts from the RFC follows):
Both Certificate usage 2 and Certificate usage 3 allow a domain's administrator to issue a certificate without requiring the involvement of a third party CA. For more information on DANE, refer to either rfc6698 or the the wikipedia article.
What people like about it is that they don't have to pay the credit card companies their 4% of the sales. Instead 4square is only about 2% so small business gets to keep more of their money.
I believe you are thinking of Square which performs credit card payments, however the article is about Four Square which is some social restaurant service I had not heard of until this article. I agree that Square is immensely popular, even here in Alaska.
You know, for a bunch of well educated lawyers, the founding fathers sure drafted a terribly ambiguous amendment. It could mean:
Actually, I think the last one should be the way it works: only people who receive proper, thorough, and repeated training in weapons handling should be allowed to have guns. It would cut down tremendously on gun accidents.
Hmm, let me enlighten you with the definition of a militia:
1. a part of the organized armed forces of a country liable to call only in emergency
1. a body of citizens organized for military service
3. the whole body of able-bodied male citizens declared by law as being subject to call to military service.
Actually, since the militia during the time of the revolutionary war and the militia used in the suppression of Shay's Rebellion consisted of able-bodied male citizens whom were not professional soldiers or apart of a government military force, I think the last one is the definition intended by the founding fathers.
You in the U.S. has your gun laws exactly for cases like this. The original idea was, when government (or its minions) eventually gets too tyrannical
No, the original idea was so they could form militia and defend themselves without having an expensive military. The military was explicitly not to be given funding for more than two years at a time precisely for this reason. It's all in the constitution.
Look what happened: we ended up with the - by far - most expensive military in the world, and people buying guns for reasons the founders never intended.
No, the grandparent post is correct. The founding fathers were very weary of a strong central government. This is why the first government based upon the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was so weak it was unable to leavy taxes and fund an army to suppress the Shay's Rebellion and instead the rebellion was suppressed with a privately funded army.
The second amendment is a compromise in choosing between a weak central government and strong federal government. To quote the second amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The active part of the second amendment is "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,". The right is not imparted to the individual states, but to the people. The right to bear arms is part of the checks and balances between the rights of the People and the power voluntarily given to the government by the people.
Have the DNC set aside $400k or so to keep a 3 member team of coders updating it for the next 4 years. Don't forget, there are midterms in 2 years.
Hmm, I'm guessing they would need to set aside the "or so" since $400k comes out to $16.03/hour if the team has 3 full time members. Taking into account office supplies, equipment costs, and labor overhead costs, the members would be lucky if they each make $10/hour. The DNC would need to set aside $873,600 just to cover the base salaries of 3 devs making $35/hour for four years.
you're talking about porting half of OS X to windows and linux!
I would fully support Apple porting the OS X Objective-C frameworks to Windows and Linux since it would allow an iOS/OS X developer to write cross platform applications without needing to learn a second widget library or use a second language.
That is not just my two cents, I'd back up those two copper Lincolns with green Franklins if Apple considered making UIKit and AppKit cross platform.
For something of a smartphone class, a one-off PCB may cost several hundred dollars. Then the parts will cost another several hundred dollars in small quantities, as well as being difficult to obtain. Now, you have to solder the parts onto the board, which is a decidedly nontrivial thing - and if you decide you want someone else to do this, it's probably another several hundred dollars.
I recently heard of BatchPCB vendor by reading the tutorials on SparkFun's website.
$10 setup fee plus either $2.50 (2 layer) or $4.00 (4 layer) per square inch of PCB board. So a 4.5" by 2.5" PCB would cost between $38 and $55 for the first board, which is a tad less than several hundred dollars. Granted, I do not know much about PCB classifications, so it may not be smartphone class, but I would think DIY open source hardware would not be designed so to an extremely narrow physical layout which could not be done by hand.
I'm not associated with either SparkFun or BatchPCB, I've recently run across them since I started researching how to get a custom PCB for a toy I am designing for my son.
You could use a free IPv6 brokering service such as Hurricane Electric or SixXS to provide IPv6 network access to your home network. I'm currently using Hurricane Electric tunnel brokering service with an Airport base station connected to DSL. It works well for browsing IPv6 sites and connecting to my Linode servers. In addition the servers at home are now available via IPv6 to the public Internet.
My comment was in response to a comment which stated that
All "open source" is prohibited in many app stores.
Speaking from my experience, you are spot on. A few years ago I started migrating the few libraries I have written from the LGPL to a modified BSD license just for this reason. It is also why I am more inclined to hunt down bugs and submit patches for non-GPL/LGPL software packages.
Why do you think open source is prohibited on many app stores?
I recently released an LDAP administrator for the iPad which is built around the OpenLDAP libraries. In the about section of the app, I clearly state that the app uses OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, and Cyrus-SASL libraries. I also provide links to a framework on github which I developed to provide the visual elements and convenience classes used within the app. When submitting the app to Apple, I disclosed that the app uses OpenSSL.
The app was approved in less than a week by Apple. If they were anti open source, would they have approved an app that makes liberal use of open source libraries?
Further more, how is it anti ethical to use open source software in iOS? I release the parts of my software I think might be useful to others under a modified BSD license and fully expect others to use it in both proprietary and open solutions.
I generally prefer the apps on my desktop rather than the remote apps. "ssh -D 8080 " will start a SOCKS4/SOCKS5 server running on your local port 8080 and proxy the connections out the remote side. This allows all of your SOCKS enabled applications on your local workstation to make use of the tunnel without having to setup a one to one port mapping.
While I can understand your pain, this really is not Apple's fault, but the app developer's choice.
App developers can set the deployment version of an app to iOS 3.1. Granted, newer API methods/libraries are unavailable, however it is easy for a developer to test for the presence of a newer API method with "-(BOOL)respondsToSelector:(SEL)aSelector") before using the method within the app. Granted this may not be possible for apps whose core functionality are centered upon the functionality of the new API interfaces, however if the app was originally released on older iOS versions, it is hard for me to imagine how not supporting older iOS revs moving forward is difficult unless that app has been re-written from the ground up.
Disclaimer, I am actively developing a new database app and am running dev versions of the app on an iPhone1 with iOS 3.1. and other devices running iOS 4.3, 5.0, 5.1.