Actually handling multitouch gestures in a special way is up to the window manager, DE, and applications.

Not so much.

See for example this, where a spec for X multitouch gestures is described. This is not something WMs can effectively support without help from X. A couple of years later, support lands as a result. Yes, it's up to the WM or whatever to interpret the events, but X needed updating to give them enough information.

Multi pointer is not the same as multi touch. I was using two mice with xfree86 3.x, but that doesn't mean much.

The n9 is a better phone and better for normal people, but hackers will like the n900 better. Certainly it's got nicer multitasking. It makes a very good hand-sized tablet, but only a so-so phone; if the phone experience could be improved it would be easy to recommend.

You're right, they are far more open than most. And, indeed, almost all closed parts could be replaced without extreme effort, barring only some of the driver stuff.

Real, fully-open phones are indeed possible but the n9 isn't the way to get there. It's just the best intersection of practical and open at the moment.

Full disclosure: I own an n9 and an n900 and I love them both.

cm is a little better because it's at least a fixed size, even if it's not proportional to the screen width. Example: 15px may be so narrow on your screen that you can't see it or it may be as wide as your finger, but 1cm is always 1cm. At least the spacing is guaranteed, even if the result is not pleasant, whereas with 15px there may be no space at all. Worse is when you have a very small screen and a book which was px-layed-out for a very large screen. CM layout mitigates this problem somewhat. Of course, em is still better.

I'm just waiting for the follow-up Uplink MMO. The only thing the game was missing was real people on the other end. Imagine if they added the (eventual) ability to buy and build your own network and required you to learn to defend it.

Please, Introversion, please?

The UI changes for $everything haven't been all for the better.

How long before CPU benchmarks are measured in how deeply you can nest this and still achieve some fixed number of results per second with a computationally intensive task?

"Doom3 is running at 30FPS... inside 8 levels of emulation."

That isn't shameless self promotion, that's topically awesome.

Totally apart from a pretty slick MVC framework the Mojolicious project has my undying affection for producing the mojo tool.

How many times have you wanted to scrape something out of a web page and you thought "I know, I'll use wget (or curl) and sed! Easy enough." so you write

# get story titles from slashdot
wget slashdot.org -O - 2>/dev/null | sed -e 's/uh, what now?//'

And then you get stuck fiddling with ever-crazier sed expressions to filter down to just the data you want? I know I've been there a dozen times and wound up with various unpleasant solutions or, when necessary, I've broken down and written a proper perl script which parses the HTML (and taken about 20 times as long as I planned to take to do it!) Maybe you try

# get story titles from slashdot
wget slashdot.org -O - 2>/dev/null | sed -n '/"title-/{s/<[^>]*>//g;s/^[ \t]*//;p}'

And just go with it, because it's good enough. Well, no more! Now I can say

mojo get slashdot.org 'h2.story > span:first-child>a' text

And have my results just like that!

Just as jQuery was a revolution in DOM scripting, to the point where I just won't write JS without it, so is mojo a revolution for these kinds of applications. I can now pull down pages and parse the actual structure and select just what I need. Beautiful.