No, the "fail" is in that very chain of thought. Those web devs should not call themselves web devs since they do not understand the fundamental differences between the old media they used to work with and the new media, having to resort to web browser version to achieve what they foolishly are striving for.

At first I was not too keen on version number inflation, but thinking about it I couldn't care less. Actually, I find it good if it rids the world of people targeting web browser versions when they develop for the web. Target standards, not web browsers.

The only problem as I see is the plugins. That could be handled if Mozilla decided to create a stable API for plugin development and have version numbers on that API instead. This could even create a more stable browser with less unpredictability when multiple plugins are used. Another way, although more anarchistic, is to create a crowd sourced database of version compatibility between browsers and plugins, not having installers contain that information, but rather let us (the users) try it out and report.

Yes, and the OP wrote "[...]technology being crippled for no good reason" and "[...]IP nonsense!".

No one is questioning whether or not anything is against the spec, what was questioned is why you cripple technology (through a spec or otherwise) without a good reason, and as of yet no good reason has been produced. Thus: IP nonsense. I don't think anyone is questioning Phillips move as anything other than "good reason" (with the possible exception of the DRM advocates).

If HDMI LLC can give some good reason, they might sway my opinion. If I dare guess, the only reason I think they can give is that the HDMI spec is supposed to ensure that unauthorized copies cannot be made, and if you are able to produce HDMI-to-anything cables you could connect your HDMI capable output device to something that can record the information. But that I do not consider to be a good enough reason. I am not interested in making copies but I do want to be able to (or at least have the possibility to) connect my legacy HDMI products to newer products that might not have HDMI, in the future.

I don't understand what you mean with "both ways". Phillips is not crippling technology with their stance on the CD, in fact, they are doing the opposite by telling manufacturers that DRM is not a part of the CD-specification and might prevent consumers from playing those discs. Thus they are not allowed to be called CDs. The DRM is the crippling part, not the fact that the manufacturers that insist on having DRM on their discs can't call them CDs.

Who wrote such a narrow-minded license and for what purpose? I would like how they thought this would benefit end-users.

It smells like greed, incompetence and arrogance.

Why do you only measure "free" in terms of money?

It might not have cost you a dime, but hasn't it cost you time? For me time is more valuable than money. Money I can get more of, time I can never get back. You might think it is worth your time to be on Facebook, good for you. Still, it is not free, you gave up something to use Facebook.

If your personal data is of no value, then you might say that it is free in that sense, otherwise Facebook is very costly.

So, "free" is a very loose term, and money is a very minor factor in determining if something is free.

"Serious restrictions on freedom of expression"? It would be nice to know WHAT part of Europe you are referring to. IMHO, the country I live in stille are more free when it comes to expression than the US. The copyright restrictions pushed on us now are backed by interests over in the great media publishing giant in the west, and the limits on competition as you call it is to *protect* competition from being destroyed by a monopoly-like situation.

I seriously doubt that software patents are pushed onto the european member countries by the EU unless there were a precedent in the US backed by very strong and determined economic interests.

D'oh! :-)

Keep calling? What are you mumbling about? In the GP there is ONE mention of "Abserger's" and TWO mentions of "Asberger's".

I seriously doubt that this counts as "keep calling". Being a wise-ass about a typo is just stupid. Then again, what can one expect from an AC at slashdot?

No. They might both be of the same magnitude of order, as in around 1GHz, but there definitely is a real noticable difference between the old 1GHz processor i bought around a decade ago, the 1GHz processor in my iPad and the 1.42GHz on my relatively old desktop.

Clock speed is not comparable when you have different architectures and the surrounding hardware differs greatly.

How many developers contact Apple before starting to design an app, while just in the idea phase, just to check if it might get approval? I doubt that there are that many.

Since I am not an InfoWorld subscriber I could not read the report by Andrew Borg of the Aberdeen Group that Galen Gruman wrote about (nice plug about your own article BTW). Thus I have a hard time to see what Borg really meant and what got lost in the filtering of TFA.

But of course we will have to think of wired and wireless networks as two separate entities. Not that we cannot think about them at the same time and how they should work together, but because of their different characteristics.

For an end-user the experience should be roughly the same, but from an engineering point-of-view, you have to take all factors into account when designing your network. The limitations, security concerns, cost, etc of each medium is important to acknowledge.

So even if I might agree on that we shouldn't view wi-fi as the "neglected stepchild", we cannot dismiss the differences. Doing so would be plain stupid.