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.

I don't doubt it's done in the driver. One reliable piece of code which has been tested to death which performs exactly as it says on the tin. It doesn't force apps to use it - they can use triangles if they want - but I see no reason to force them to use triangles if their geometry is something else to begin with.

I agree OpenGL ES 2.0 could do with some proper client side code for matrix calculations and so on. It's very frustrating to program in JOGL, or libgdx or Android and realise they all implement essentially the same stuff (e.g. they all have a column first matrix class) but in entirely different ways

I think pretty much everyone recognizes fixed function is toast. If you need that sort of thing then you probably need something higher level which expresses the world as a scene.

Show me any computer hardware (with the exception of vectrex etc.) which doesn't use pixels at the core. You can't. Everything uses pixels for a reason.

Just because a high level representation of a shape is decomposed into something else does not mean it's convenient to force an app through the lowest level. Forcing an app to decompose a mesh, quad or a poly into a fan, strip or individual triangles, including coping with all the degenerate cases is a needless development burden.

OpenGL ES 2.0 is meant for embedded devices where such a restriction might be a reasonable compromise. It isn't a reasonable compromise in a desktop where the GPU or the driver could do it far more reliably, efficiently and accurately than some random app.

OS/2 2.1 onwards were pretty easy to set up on non-IBM hardware. I didn't encounter a machine which didn't work with them. That said, OS/2 had so many other issues that hurt its own chances of success that someone could write an essay on the subject.