What's wrong with the kirby yarn game? It's obviously meant for kids and, as such, I think it's a great design. As a kid's platformer, I don't really see what more people could be asking for.

Photon mapping is a raytracing technique. Photons are traced from the light source, precisely the same way that rays are traced from the camera. Where photon mapping differs is that the contribution of the photons is computed by local density estimation. This reduces the noise in the output, at the expense of introducing bias (ie. bluriness).

In raytracing, there is no requirement to trace rays from the camera or the light source, either direction is valid. Actually, a variant called bidirectional pathtracing traces rays from both the camera and the light source. This is also the approach of photon mapping. Raytracing in itself is simply the process of modeling the physics of light transport. There are however some limitations. For instance, it's not relly suited for modelling diffraction, but it's hardly limiting.

Your comment reminds me of a Billy Bob Thorton interview in which he states he accepted to star in the Cohen Brothers' film "The Man Who Wasn't There" without even reading the script since he liked everything they had done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6tWv-HaHAc. Whether or not you consider the track record of Schafer and Glibert sufficient to blindly give them money is another story, but I actually like the way this project is being funded on no other ground than "it will be a point & click adventure": there can be no mistake as to the reason why people are backing this project.

Maybe we should rephrase the proverb “When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger”, into "When shown a new display technology, the imbecile looks at the weather widget design".

It's actually Alt-"key-over-tab", so it's the same place for all keyboard layouts. Ctrl-tab is to move between tabs (ex: switching tabs in a firefox window), while this Alt-"key-over-tab" is to move between instances of an application (ex: moving from one firefox window to the next).

Of course, ads never made anything free in the first place, you are still paying but indirectly. Marketing budget for clothing, movies, games, etc. are gigantic and factored into the price. In addition, ads are displayed all around us, whether or not we care about the product. The long term consequence of adblocking is that no one will pay for ads at which point they will simply go away. I don't have a problem with this.

From the linked ChromeShell page: "ChromeShell is a non-google affiliated replacement shell for windows", ie. this _is_ windows, which would explain why it's not much better than windows. Any observed gain would be linked to the presumably lighter ui of this new shell. Since, this has nothing to do with google's chrome-os appart for the fact that it copies its interface, no performance implication should be derived from it.