The issue is that people program at a pixel ratio as if it is some measurement of minimal perceived size. If they had just quadrupled the pixels, most websites for instance would expect to scale to fill the larger size, but without any notion of whether the page was being rendered large enough to see.

Not to mention all the people who hard-coded mobile sites based on the horizontal width of the device. Which, btw, still hasn't changed even with the new dimensions.

Accessory manufacturers (particularly case manufacturers) burnt all their bridges with Apple long ago. Since around when the iphone 3gs came out, nobody has gotten any advance notice of new hardware because of all the leaks.

Even now, many of the apple rumors come from case manufacturers who are attempting to bribe employees at the manufacturer for information.

Right now Apple has only even hinted that there may be an iphone 5, and if they are going to deprecate a decade of accessories with a new connector they want to do it on their own terms. There is no way Applw have confirmed or denied the dock connector except perhaps in controlled leaks to the media. Nobody making alarm clock docks is gonna know a damn thing until the rest of us do on the 12th.

How is this any more a flagrant act of GPL violation than a linux install CD (which does not ship source due to space)? The help menu takes you to the project's github repo.

Why wouldn't it be usable as-is? The license is GPL v3-compatible

WHATWG split off from the W3C work because they couldn't organize additions and clarifications to the HTML 4 spec under the W3C. It is mostly a group of browser-makers (everyone except Microsoft).

The W3C then asked if they could standardize the WHATWG's work as HTML5

What happened a year ago (and is just being put on slashdot today?) was that the WHATWG announced that they weren't going to stop producing additional work. The version under the W3C would eventually be released as version 5.0, but WHATWG would effectively be the HEAD/master version of work on extending HTML.

Which HTML5 is an easy question to answer - there will only be one HTML5. People will put pressure on the browser manufacturers to support the W3C's standardization of HTML as version 5.0. But browser manufacturers will also continue to cram new crap and functionality in ahead of W3C standardization, and attempt to define interoperability of that under the flag "HTML" in WHATWG, a "specification" that grows as the members gain consensus on how new functionality should work (or in some cases, how to advertise the functionality is not offered).

In reality, this is how HTML has _always_ operated.

They did stop calling it HTML 5. They call it HTML.

The recent Eclipse launch had several benefits for Eclipse users; the big one is that the donors got access to binaries 48 hours earlier, while anyone else supposedly could build the same release it is a huge project and that would be a labor-intensive process.

I would recommend something like this over denying users binaries, as your project probably does not need any barriers to user adoption.

While tablets are definitely a cool gadget and sound like a draw to the school, in reality the switchover is to save money by killing paper books. They have worked the numbers out such that it appears cheaper for a school which buys new paper books to instead buy tablets per student (at edu pricing) and per-student licensing for the book content.

I don't know if these numbers take into account schools reselling those new books after a few years to schools with more budgetary constraints, and I suspect those poorer schools are going to be hurt hard by having their supply of second-hand books dry up. But this is not just about every kid getting a gadget.

Apple's iOS App Store rules state that all in-app purchases must use the In-app purchase mechanism. In addition, you cannot link to an external purchase mechanism. Finally, Apple charges their standard 30% fee for purchases for in-app purchasing.

The issue in the Dropbox SDK is that it fires up a web view for authentication, and the page it went to was not properly sandboxed. By creating an account, then clicking a link to go to the desktop version, you got to a page that let you pay to upgrade to a pro version. At this point, it broke the rule above. Since this was functionality within the SDK, all the applications being submitted to the store using this version of the SDK are breaking this rule and getting rejected.

My guess is Dropbox released a new SDK version that sends the user to a different web page for authentication, this one being properly sandboxed. I do not know what Dropbox would be talking to Apple about; unless Dropbox API support is added to the OS, you would need the Dropbox client installed in order to be able to even support in-app purchasing of a pro account.

I believe (like FreeBSD) they are fine with GPL v2. It seems like projects switching to GPL v3 is motivating Apple and a few other of the BSD'ers to create new open source projects for all the functionality they were getting from these projects. I love that it finally motivated someone to invest heavily in coming out with a gcc alternative (clang + llvm).

I have noticed a pattern that apple's replacements only implement the newest defined functionality or protocol, however. For an example, there is work going on to replace libstdc++, but the replacement is only meant to target compilers that support C++11. So I wouldn't be surprised to find out that say, a Lion Mac has trouble connecting to a Windows 2000 server using their samba replacement.

I've been wondering for a now if there is a project somewhere to come out with a BSD-licensed replacement for bash.

OS X no longer ships Samba as of 10.7 (due to the switch upstream to GPLv3). So yes, if by broken you mean 'was replaced with an entirely new project', it will remain so.

I believe all of the large companies had rights to the patent as part of the Intellectual Ventures portfolio, and part of the deal of the sale of the patent to Lodsys included that companies who had license to the portfolio retained the right to use the patent.

I believe apple has a head-start on the technology, not an exclusive. Intel's stock parts do not include thunderbolt, stock video cards do not support thunderbolt and I believe most PCs have HDMI or at best Displayport, not Mini-DP.

Until PC vendors want thunderbolt enough to get it integrated into third party video cards, or until Intel ships Ivy Bridge which is supposed to include Thunderbolt for its integrated video, Apple will be the only vendor producing computers with Thunderbolt.

Even then, it looks like Sony is interested enough in the technology to try to create a proprietary version of Thunderbolt which uses additional connects on a USB port, and most likely does not support the DisplayPort video channel.

Firewire 800 is slower, what about firewire 3200?

Damn it, uid envy