Do you still have to buy the production version when it ships?

In the past, apple seeded the GM build to developers shortly before the release date. So no need to go buy the same build in the store.

Although it's worth noting that Apple sometimes has a very weird definition of "Gold Master". The latest Xcode 4 GM, for example, is pretty much just another beta version. It's not production ready at all.

Wait, is this true?

iOS GMs have always been ready to ship, minus a few 3rd-party apps and last minute exploits(JBs). If they are throwing GM designator on anything that isn't usable than I'm severely disappointed.

It's sad that some investors & retirement plans will get hit... On the other hand, when you invest in a company, you're not just getting a share of the profits, but you also get a share of the liability as well.

That joke was anti-climatic.

So what exactly keeps someone from writing an open version of flash player? It couldn't be that hard could it?

It is not so much hard as very tedious. The open source Flash clones look like they have caught up to Flash 7 or 8 so far.

http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/ http://www.gnashdev.org/

That almost sounds like a dare. :-)

Yes. Electric guitar and bass.

So if you're new to rails, is it better to learn rails 2.x and move to 3.0 later, or to just learn 3.0 now?

2.3. The public API supposedly won't change much. There are a lot of internal changes that will make a lot of new things possible on the public side, but they have said they plan to support the existing Rails 2.3 public API in Rails 3.