So what would you propose, that the web go back to the days where all the pages are static? It may be that this whole internet apps is a trend that will go away, but I don't think that will be the case. With more and more people accessing the web from handheld devices, and with the recent announcement that Windows will work on ARM, the traditional idea of a desktop is rapidly becoming obsolete. Desktop linux is also obsolete, or at least I see it, a futile effort. Linux developers shouldn't be working on the iTunes clone, or OpenOffice or GIMP. Try grooveshark, pixlr, and google docs (or any number of web office suites). Linux is great elsewhere, but just not on the desktop. Ironically, if Linux can get a web browser that can support all the latest web technologies, it might remain relevant because as more people transition to using web apps, the desktop platform will matter less. Example is the CR-48 laptop and Chrome OS, just a web browsers running Linux underneath. That may be the future of Linux on the desktop (not necessarily chrome OS, but some sort of basic OS to get people on the web that Linux fulfills nicely). So yeah, as you can see, getting hardware accelerated web browser for Linux is important, and you shouldn't dismiss it so casually.

yup. I'd love to see some siggraph paper on how it is implemented. But yeah, it seems like this was doable years ago. Were there technical limitations, like hardware not mature or flexible enough that got in the way?

If I understand what megatexture is, it is like a paging system for textures so that the amount of vram used can be minimized and unnecessary texture paged out. If this is the case, what took so long for this idea to be developed? It seems obvious to me and actually I thought this was already done in all games already? I'm just curious to learn more about the technology and development behind it, and understanding how it works.

Have to agree. I hated the shade of brown with default Ubuntu. I could never stand it and that stop me from using Ubuntu.

Now that I have found LinuxMint I will never go back (Ubuntu with a much more pleasant color).

ONE HUNDRED MILLION LINES? Excuse me, but that seems excessive. At the previous job I worked on a CAD software suite for windows for a company that rhymes with "desk" and that was only 12 million lines of code. Even if counting the real-time OS, which shouldn't need to have any UI or that much other stuff, I think you'd be far off from 100 million. Sure the operations are complex but 100 million and you are talking about a dev team that rivals the army that Microsoft has and that's for each model on the market. Sorry, I don't think that is realistic.

I believe you can use it today. I haven't tried the 3d plug-in (one more thing that needs to be installed) but the photsynth integration seems to be working well in places that have them. It's not as flashy as the one shown in video but that's probably because I haven't figured out all the controls and the power I have with it.

I think google just wants to make sure it's chrome os and cloud based apps can succeed and compete with MS's traditional desktop offerings.

I mean, making these AJAX based apps are relatively easy but not going to work if the user experience is horrible. Google is investing in the future, and not many companies are doing that.

I read somewhere that google's china market accounts for 2% of their revenue. I was in Shanghai when the news broke and I read it in their papers. I don't think there is a big uproar about their departure. Most people can use baidu for search but maps and gmail will be harder to replace. Google actually has less market share than baidu in China, which is surprising. Maybe they are not used to playing catchup in their own business. Maybe the Chinese government is secretly (or not) favoring baidu and hacking google causing google to feel the market is a lost cause, and fighting an uphill battle with ball and chains tied around the ankles doesn't help. I think it's a bluff from google to tell the chinese government to stop the bullshit and let them operate equally. I don't think they are going to give up the market to Microsoft and others that easily.

according to the wikia page for vim ole:

"Disclaimer: This is NOT a tip on how to get Vim to run inside of MS Visual Studio .NET. I have not yet found anyone who can make that work, so this is the next best thing. VisVim.dll seems to only work with VS6."

And that had been my experience as well - it is not possible to "embed" vim into the editor window like I had thought and wanted. It is not possible at the moment. The best I did was the create an external tools shortcut to vim and had a hot key assigned to it but I quickly found that to be more counter productive than helpful.

I also tried the Komodo editor the grandparent mentioned and the vim mode is a bastardized version of vim. It is basically so stripped down that you only have the very basic like jklh working and i mode. Really not worth the effort.

Chrome has it's share of issues on Windows too.

Using Chrome dev 4.0+, slashdot scrolls very slowly when browsing with the weird slider bar at top (as guest). No problem in FF.

I also experienced several crashes, and it sorely needs a bookmark tree or side panel.

A lot of the extensions didn't work as advertised.

It's definitely a work in progress like it warned.