The GP is a reference to powerplants in SimCity, not in the real world.

Is that true of IMAX as well? I was under the impression that IMAX is still mostly film-based, though it's been a few years since I've actually seen an IMAX projection system. (The Tuttleman IMAX Theater at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has a big glass wall that lets the public see the projection room with the big reels in the center; I'd be sad if they're no longer present.)

Speaking of IMAX, you mentioned the polarizing filter needing power to sync with the projector. That's true of RealD 3D, which uses a single digital projector alternating between the left and right pictures (three times each) for every frame. Do you know if it's also true of IMAX 3D, or does that use dual projectors to show both pictures at the same time? I've been wondering whether IMAX might be better than RealD for some people who get headaches watching 3D movies, if it avoids the temporal dithering needed when using a single projector.

I assume the "special reflecting screen" is one that doesn't alter the polarization of the light it reflects.

Switching from ext3 to ext4 resolved this for me. Since ext4 allocates files in extents of up to 256MB, deleting even a very large file involves freeing just a handful of extents, rather than a huge number of individual 4k blocks.

Another advantage of ext4 is much faster fsck times on large filesystems — minutes rather than hours.

The JavaScript is the high-level "business logic" that manipulates nodes in a scene graph to move things around on the screen. The actual scene-graph library, Clutter, is written in C and renders via OpenGL.

I think it's a pretty reasonable design decision, actually. High-level behavior in a high-level language that's easy to maintain, lower-level implementation details in efficient compiled native code. It's similar to what browser-based apps like Google Maps do, with Clutter taking the place of the HTML DOM.

DoS is any attack that deliberately prevents people from being able to use the system, without actually damaging the system. Flooding the system with service requests is just one way of doing that. Sending commands to hang everyone's terminal is another.

Hey, I heard the Sonic the Hedgehog ring-pickup sound at a convenience store two days ago, as the sound that the barcode scanner makes when it scans an item.

Plain UDF 2.01, the kind you'd use on a hard drive or USB flash drive, is readable in Windows XP (I tested this recently), and is read/write in Vista and Win7. It's also supported in recent versions of OSX. Unless one needs to support old operating systems, UDF seems like a reasonable choice.

By "window manager hacks" you mean switching to a compositing window manager like Compiz, right? What Compiz (or any compositing manager) does is not really very different from what its counterparts in Windows and OS X do. What you're complaining about is the fact that X11 allows a choice of window managers, and not all X11-based desktops use a compositing one yet, as opposed to the Windows and Mac platforms where there's essentially only one window manager available (it's built-in) and it's a compositing one.

As for new APIs, not really. Applications don't have to do anything different to display themselves on a composited desktop instead of a non-composited one. All the work for that is done by one program, the compositing manager, and the X enhancements needed to make its job possible (a new X11 protocol extension and a new GLX extension) were implemented in Xorg several years ago.

At this point, the lack of out-of-the-box compositing on Linux desktops is due mostly to accelerated 3D drivers (for the most common GPUs) not being installed by default for licensing reasons, not some fundamental problem with X.

They're not hacked on, you're just misunderstanding what the word "extension" means in X11 terminology. X11 extensions are named groups of commands that an X server can optionally implement. The core X protocol includes commands for checking what extensions are available, so that applications can use those additional commands when they're supported, or work around the lack of them (or just display an error message) if not.

This is a designed-in extensibility mechanism, not some afterthought kluge. Many "standard" facilities are provided through X11 extensions, such as displaying anti-aliased text (with the RENDER extension, though it can also be done in a slower way if RENDER isn't available), overlay-based video playback (with the XVideo extension), changing screen resolutions (RANDR), turning off the monitor to save power when idle (DPMS), and OpenGL (GLX).

OpenGL, by the way, has a similar extension mechanism, and that's what allowed it to support new GPU features (such as multitexturing and pixel shaders) as they were developed, without requiring a whole new version of the core OpenGL spec.

Desktop compositing in X11 is done by asking the X server to give each window an offscreen area of video memory to draw itself into, rather than drawing directly on the screen, and then asking the OpenGL implementation to make these offscreen areas accessible as OpenGL textures. The compositing manager paints the windows onto the screen by putting these textures on rectangles, applying whatever visual effects it wants to display (like the Compiz cube), using normal OpenGL drawing operations. The command to make the X server redirect window drawing to offscreen pixmaps is provided by the COMPOSITE extension, and exposing those pixmaps as OpenGL textures is done with a GLX command, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap.

If Compiz is unstable, that's an application bug that doesn't really have anything to do with the design of X11. The compositor in Metacity (the GNOME window manager) is pretty stable (I've been using it for several years), and its scenegraph-based successor (called Mutter) is the foundation for Gnome-Shell.

Americans won't stand for it. They want to know NOW damnit, not tomorrow.

I don't think the American public would really be all that upset if the election results didn't come in until the next morning. I suspect it's actually the news media that wants the results ASAP, in order to get everyone watching the election day evening news so that they can charge more for ad space.

That much? I bought one at an anime convention about a year ago -- original Japanese Super Famicom cartridge with box, manual, and holographic cards -- and I don't think I paid more than $30 for it.

Katz vs. United States, which established that private telephone calls are protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The X server and your application are running in different processes, so communication between them can't be done with function calls. But for clients running locally, pipes haven't been used in a long time -- Xorg uses shared memory for transferring messages efficiently between the client and the server.

The "basic set of menu-bar, scrollbar, list, tabs etc." are provided by toolkits such as GTK and Qt, which are used by most modern applications. These work fine already; building a toolkit into the X server itself wouldn't bring any benefit, and would just complicate the protocol.

Cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop work fine for me in GNOME, and I believe they work well in KDE too. The toolkits provide this functionality to applications for free.