Well, you're sort of right, but mostly wrong on the details.
Though Ed Catmull has developed more seminal graphics algorithms than any individual has the right to do on his own, the alpha channel was first pioneered by Alvy Ray Smith (another graphics pioneer type). Tom Porter and Tom Duff pushed the concept further and wrote a siggraph 84 paper about it.
The a-buffer is something else entirely. It was developed by Loren Carpenter (another Pixar rendering person) and although it does store partial coverage/transparency information at each pixel, it does so in a much more general manner than with a single floating-point number, like alpha.
The REYES algorithm (Rob Cook, Loren Carpenter, Ed Catmull) isn't based on the a-buffer at all. It's a totally different technique, though it does store per-sample color, alpha, and depth information.
ext2 will mount much more quickly if you mount it with the "nocheck" flag in/etc/fstab. This disables a number of consistency checks at mount time that generally aren't worth the time. I believe that nocheck is the default, as of 2.4 kernels for sure, and possibly for newer 2.4 kernels. Nevertheless, I still like ReiserFS better for plenty of other reasons.
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Though Ed Catmull has developed more seminal graphics algorithms than any individual has the right to do on his own, the alpha channel was first pioneered by Alvy Ray Smith (another graphics pioneer type). Tom Porter and Tom Duff pushed the concept further and wrote a siggraph 84 paper about it.
The a-buffer is something else entirely. It was developed by Loren Carpenter (another Pixar rendering person) and although it does store partial coverage/transparency information at each pixel, it does so in a much more general manner than with a single floating-point number, like alpha.
The REYES algorithm (Rob Cook, Loren Carpenter, Ed Catmull) isn't based on the a-buffer at all. It's a totally different technique, though it does store per-sample color, alpha, and depth information.
ext2 will mount much more quickly if you mount it with the "nocheck" flag in /etc/fstab. This disables a number of consistency checks at mount time that generally aren't worth the time. I believe that nocheck is the default, as of 2.4 kernels for sure, and possibly for newer 2.4 kernels. Nevertheless, I still like ReiserFS better for plenty of other reasons.