Not only grander but usually physically and logistically impossible. e.g. the people who assert controlled demolition for 9/11.

Just because some conspiracies are real does not mean they all are. And paranoia is an adequate explanation for many of the conspiracies floating around the kook-o-sphere.

Even if you strip away the non essential frameworks (i.e. the javax namespace), it's still a sizable chunk of code and pretty complex. And regardless of the OpenJDK being GPL or not, I bet the fear / threat of litigation ranks highly in the consideration of people thinking of using it in other open source projects.

JS would be a fairly lightweight, unencumbered library so it makes some sense to adopt it for app development if it were hooked up to some kind of visual development environment a la VB. QT did something similar with QTscript which is JS with extensions hooked up to QTDevelop. I expect the intention of GNOME is to facilitate a simple, visual editor which makes it easy to knock together apps.

Personally I think JS the language is horrible though. Just as VB was a terrible choice for novice programmers, so too is JS. I think Python would have been a better choice from that regard, but perhaps that too comes with its own baggage that ruled it out.

I was speculating that it was the only way to obtain acceptable performance through emulation, that QEMU could emulate the client side, thunk calls to Win32 which would be executed natively and then the response is thunked back into emulation again. If everything were emulated it would be horribly slow. If it were partially emulated then it would still be slow, but perhaps not unusably so especially with older apps which make less demands of the CPU.

Another option of course is to recompile with winelib and everything is native. Obviously that is the most desirable situation but it isn't viable for most games or commercial apps. Another might be something which disassembles the x86 code and recompiles the binary into equivalent ARM instructions but I wonder if this is even viable.

An ARM processor emulating x86 is not going to be fast in any circumstances. The best you could hope for is that everything on the other side of the Win32 API is native so only the client code is emulated. It might suffice for older Windows apps or games.

I like GNOME 3 and I think it gets far more criticism than it deserves. That said, there is a perception that a streak of elitism / arrogance runs through the project that they know better than anybody else and sometimes I think they could do well to listen to users a bit more.

I can't say I like Javascript as a language but at least its ubquitous and more modern, lightweight and flexible than some other candidates. It's also far better than something heavy like Java or god forbid Mono which bring a lot of baggage in terms of runtime size and potential lawsuits.

Huff glue.

I'm wondering when the first device will appear which shows GUI elements even before the user has touched the screen. i.e. it senses the user moving their hand close to some portion of the screen and a hidden GUI associated with that area pops up in time to be there when they touch it. It'd have to be done carefully to avoid frustration but I think it'll come in time.

Didn't you know? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

It was with the introduction of MagicGate and Minidisc that Sony began to lose its marbles. Somebody in that company must have given themselves a big pat on the back when they hobbled the hardware with DRM and ATRAC3. They probably thought the public would roll over and eat that shit up, but instead the public just shunned Sony and started buying from the competition who used more open industry standards.

I wouldn't be surprised if the media arm foisted this insanity on to the consumer electronics arm but it's all Sony as far as the end user is concerned. About the only ray of sanity in Sony was the PSP and PS3 which were pretty standards friendly and still are but even there it's not hard to see signs of interference. e.g. the PS3 has for the last 18 months or so enforced Cinavia audio watermarks which appear in some DVD and Blu Ray discs. Will it stop people ripping discs into media files? Of course not. Instead they'll just buy non-Sony kit to play it on. It's self defeating.

The Cg compiler can spit out GLSL. It's possible the GLSL is optimized for NVidia hardware but using Cg makes it portable to OpenGL or Direct3d. Tools like Unity use Cg for that reason.

I don't profess to have tried every brand of PC, but I had no trouble installing OS 2.1 and Warp on random OEM boxes in work and at home that I tried.

Please grow up.

Are you seriously suggesting that there are many OpenGL drivers which cannot adequately draw a polygon or quad even when presented with degenerate params? This stuff is old hat and has been part of the OpenGL spec since almost the beginning. Besides, even if you did force it in the app layer, why do you assume it would be any more reliable?

As for WebGL, I've voiced my own concern about WebGL, but since it's essentially OpenGL ES 2.0 with relatively minor differences I don't it's particularly relevant to the point I was making.