The developer site doesn't authenticate the user; they redirect to another site for that.

This is because most funding that comes from outside of the local community (from state and federal-level taxes) comes with significant strings attached on what the funds can be used for. This is for example pretty much the only reason most schools even have internet access today - because some program somewhere is funding it.

Realize primary school textbooks actually cost new the same level as college-level textbooks, and the security requirements which are being placed on schools. Moving to an iPad per student not only saves them money (since replacements are built into the cost to schools), but it allows them to eliminate lockers because students no longer have 60 lbs of books issued to them for their classes.

On the flip side, books never really die - they just get too worn for a school to use. But typically these are repaired and given to a school which has less money. And then, scarily, again they are given to schools which have less money (apparently a lot of my old text books which were all third+ hand were being sent to Mississippi - and a significant number of my books in high school were already the same age or older as I was).

The book publishers are not interested in having book licenses be transferrable - instead, a Math book is discounted down to $10 for a student on condition that the book is not transferrable to any other student, and is "theirs for life". New versions are actually pushed out to the book itself digitally, so tricks like you have in college of having the "14th edition" come out with the same text but new problems go away.

This not only starts to create a much more predictable revenue for the book publishers, but will have a trickle-down effect where the poorer schools will have to get in line, since they no longer have a source of repairable books for their classrooms.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Do you mean generate compiler/platform independent code (some IR like bytecode/LLIR)? Or do you mean ntoh/hton and the like?

Should both be fixed with C++11. Except 24-bit characters, which I've never heard of before.

Seem rather special-cased here.

You can do this by returning a std::pair, a std::tuple, or a structure you build. However, I don't believe there is an easy syntactic way to split a pair/tuple into multiple local variables.

Never going to happen. Most of those "undefined/implementation dependent" items are features, and compilers take advantage of them to optimize code. It does make some quirky edge cases, but makes a lot of code optimization techniques in use today possible.

Do you know a system that does this max time? Because it sounds ridiculously difficult, and would lead to cases where a program would have to fail because it has no memory yet is not allowed to do a full garbage sweep/reclaim.

I actually don't believe this is the problem with C++ - you can write verbose, bloated code in most languages. The problem I see is that C++ was made to be as strict a superset of C as possible, and inherited an audience who want full control of things like object size, and memory allocation/deallocation behavior. Because of this, generialized code requires way more knobs to be tweaked than you expect, and templates have evolved to be a hacked-together functional programming language to determine optimal operation. In order to generate an optimal, generic library you have to make the code itself incredibly difficult to maintain.

Although I don't have the means or desire to test it, it is far more likely that they decided most of what people would want to output via HDMI was H.264-encoded video. So they made an interface where H.264 was streamed over the lightning connector, and converted by this adapter to HDMI. Probably both sides use HDCP or similar protections.

The limitations Panic encountered are because the video support in the iPad mini can only h.264 encode the screen (for 'mirroring') at lower-than-1080p resolutions.

But, does it look like a women's hair clip painted gold?

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.