it is never in the public interest to tolerate authors throwing obstacles into the path of people wishing to engage in fair uses. All DRM schemes fail in this respect for exactly the reasons you note -- DRM schemes fail to allow those otherwise infringing actions which, if fully adjudicated, would be determined to be fair uses
What sense does it make to bar copyright holders from preventing infringement so that infringements can later be tried in court? How does that help the artists, economy, or anything other than technophiles who feel entitled to everything? You just made the DMCA make complete sense to me. The valid reasons people might have for infringing on copyrights needs to be much more concrete, and need to be weighed against the need to provide incentives to you know.. people that actually produce copyrighted work. I personally think the economy might benefit from digital works that are more flexible by mandate because it would encourage more innovative third party products - I'm not saying it should be this way.
All the arguments against things like the DMCA, that I've heard, are from the consumer's point of view entirely, not being able to do this or do that. Wah, producers won, they are allowed to actively prevent infringement (why on Earth shouldn't they?), and third parties still work out licensing deals with the producers, continuing a long tradition of letting the market work..
When you say 'public' that includes both consumers AND producers AND everything in between. It's in the public's interest to keep generating quality work, and keep spending money on it. If the economy is healthy, what some fraction of consumers cry about doesn't matter. The producers ALWAYS matter; they make shit. That is unless you want to toss the idea of intellectual property out the window. Yay. Free crap. With regulation. It will be like (Linux * the World). Gag me.
Simply due to the economies of scale, a large electric plant will be more efficient than a bunch of gas engines.
Just to pick a nit, that electricity also has to be distributed, consumed and discharged by a bunch of batteries and electric motors, none of which are free.
No it would not. You are looking for ABI compatible, not source-level compatible (or even API compatible). And who the hell would want to duplicate the nightmare in OS X programming where Apple couldn't even decide if they were going to go with Carbon or Cacoa for 6t4-bit? Then of course, they axed one in-spite of what they were saying previously.
It was not a this or that decision, Carbon is a legacy API that got left at 32-bit, and Cocoa was always the one to use going forward. In the end it forced developers like Trolltech to port to Cocoa which is A Good Thing TM.
Sure there can. After reading the article, I have drawn the conclusion that the participants in the survey consider themselves more literate than they are.
No, you don't know how literate they actually are.
This is like asking people what kind of shoes they own, and how fast they think they can run, then concluding that people who own running shoes run faster than those who don't.
So you know some people consider themselves to be better at something than others, and that is hardly original.
is there really any benefit to not running as root?
yes from your same post
desktop applications still prompt regardless of that setting.
when you run as root not only can do you anything to your system, so can any application that you run. any malicious program can do anything to your computer it wants when you aren't running as root, it has to ask your permission first
This is true. However, in the case of Linux, there is no framework in place for an application to ask permission for anything, or fine gained access controls with which to grant permissions. A process starts as root or it doesn't, unless things have changed recently. I might be wrong. Anyway, OS X and Windows still don't really have the process dialed in perfectly. There's lots of opportunity for other systems to innovate and explore better ways of controlled privilege escalation, but I'm not holding my breath. Even systems that already have great fine grained access controls in place don't seem to be in any sort of rush to make them useable:\
You're stuck with the problem that a large proportion of people leave as soon as they see several people bearing the same tag join the game
Uh, the problem is you and your friends showing up to a pickup match and the flawed logic allowing you to play on the same team.
If a bunch of dudes show up all at once to your free-for-all, after work, grabass football match with matching helmets, pads, and jerseys, they sure can play - on both teams. I guess I could see little children stacking one side with all the "good" players, but this should not be encouraged, or allowed behavior when the user base is spread across several maturity levels... or ever. Groups of players allowed to play on the same team should queue with similar sized groups, or face the risk of being split up. I would even go one step further and intentionally keep players with the same clan tags apart if they didn't queue as a group. I also think restrictions on team switching and strict team balancing are good ideas on top of a fair matchmaking system.
Now, I do have friends and family I like to play with, but the simple fact of the matter is, if we played too well together, the other players would make us play opposite teams or get the boot. In real life, even the suspicion of unbalanced teams is addressed; by taking turns choosing players, mixing up teams, etc. If you really really want to play with people you practice with, you organize matches. I KNOW this game has facilities to arrange this. I don't know why Internet gamers think they're special or why game designers are so boneheaded, it's perplexing.
I've never heard of a vendor *supporting* third party power supplies in other forms, so USB power supply & draw specs sound like they need to be nailed down a lot tighter to be taken seriously.
If you apply dynamic range compression (so that the difference between the loudest sounds and quietest sounds is reduced and then amplified --- higher RMS amplitude --- louder) the music has no subtleties to be lost by compression.
Unless the subtleties include changes in volume... but, that never happens, or you're saying most speakers suck? I'd buy that argument I guess, but range still matters, doesn't it? I'd imagine with live recordings, it'd matter a whole lot.
Time to switch our systems to using challenge-response auth even when the entire site is carried over SSL...
Umm.. most sites don't use SSL for authentication (client certificates), so I don't know what you're implying. Authentication aside, you still have the equally serious loss of integrity that comes with broken crypto.
If you're behind NAT, the remote system can't send reply packets if you didn't initiate the connection, because the router won't associate the incoming replies with an outgoing connection, and won't forward them to the internal machine.
A firewall can do that, a NAT mostly doesn't have a choice.
all of whom should have a more sensible password policy.
Why does a cellphone OS need a user authentication system in the first place? Maybe at the application level.. no, I can't see that either. Anyway, this phone has one, and it's not meant to be used this way. These things are not meant to have SSH running on them, and whomever released the SSH package for them is irresponsible for not taking that into account. It doesn't even need to authenticate using system methods, it could generate a random password at install - display on screen, and do it's own authentication. Maybe even offer to pop up an accept dialog before allowing access? Just a thought..
Sorry, I just can't understand how the phone and users continue to be blamed because in free software land developers are void of any and all quality concerns. At some point.. not the developers involved, but "free software" is going to get rap it deserves. It is what everyone makes it. Look after your own, if you see a free turd, call it a turd.
Generally, I think it would be a bad idea to allow an enemy to freely spread propaganda (unless it works for you)... besides, what's the saying? All's fair in love and war? Their servers are fair game, IMHO.
You are clearly not an engineer of scientist. Aside from the fact that some people just like to solve technical problems, I am betting google's logic goes something like this:
... because I question your efficiency? I'm keenly aware of the "just because" excuse, and to hear Google say that would make my day. They have the resources to do it for sure.
We have a problem that is basically only costing us $0.01*10,000computers/day. While that seems low, we plan on staying in business a long time, we could pay someone to solve the problem. Then there is that X factor, that if you don't do it, if you stop innovating, your competitors will, and they will get more and you will get less from the pool of money that is out there. In addition to that, the CS guy you paid to solve that is now worth more to your company (if you employed him) because [s]he now has a better understanding of a complex bit of code (the linux kernel) that you rely on heavily.
I see many of the things added/backported in Linux by Google are already included in other current operating systems. Google does not sell operating systems. What is the relationship between computing efficiency and advertising revenue? How have these practices affected Google's bottom line? I agree with that last sentence you wrote.
Call me not an engineer or not a scientist, but Google is a public company. When you hear "just because", any good engineer, scientist, or investor should start asking questions.
Really... why should we have to look up something stated in the summary as "100% useless to us"? Thanks fuck head!
Here
"Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.
The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.
The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer."
That was real painful, now the readers can skip the whole damned thread they only opened to find out WTF COFFEE is, it really is useless to them, and move on. OUTSTANDING.
I don't think this is too surprising, except that it hadn't happened sooner. Large similar populations make for easy targets for viruses. This seems to be a universal. For example, you can see the same principle as mono/multi-culture in agriculture. Compare, say, the diseases apples get with the ones pawpaws get. Apple has always been the minority but here, Apple is the apple. Welcome to having a large marketshare.
This was a problem with the jailbroken sshd config. The people effected by this should not be written off as stupid though! Cellular phone + RTFM or it will get broke into = _serious_ usability flaw. Yes, even something as simple as changing a default password to a remote service on a 24/7 public network connected device. Really, this shows how irresponsible the sshd for iphone package authors were, and why Apple locks things down in the iphone as much as they do. Good job! Now more people will be afraid to jailbreak, and Apple may have to spend more time making sure it can't happen. Way to spoil it for the rest of us.
The whole article sounds so painful, what do they actually get out of it?
Google started with the 2.4.18 kernel - but they patched over 2000 files, inserting 492,000 lines of code. Among other things, they backported 64-bit support into that kernel. Eventually they moved to 2.6.11, primarily because they needed SATA support. A 2.6.18-based kernel followed, and they are now working on preparing a 2.6.26-based kernel for deployment in the near future. They are currently carrying 1208 patches to 2.6.26, inserting almost 300,000 lines of code. Roughly 25% of those patches, Mike estimates, are backports of newer features.
In the area of CPU scheduling, Google found the move to the completely fair scheduler to be painful. In fact, it was such a problem that they finally forward-ported the old O(1) scheduler and can run it in 2.6.26. Changes in the semantics of sched_yield() created grief, especially with the user-space locking that Google uses. High-priority threads can make a mess of load balancing, even if they run for very short periods of time. And load balancing matters: Google runs something like 5000 threads on systems with 16-32 cores.
Google makes a lot of use of the out-of-memory (OOM) killer to pare back overloaded systems. That can create trouble, though, when processes holding mutexes encounter the OOM killer. Mike wonders why the kernel tries so hard, rather than just failing allocation requests when memory gets too tight.
Ooooh... efficiency.. I'm curious what the net savings is.. compared to buying more cheap hardware.
So what is Google doing with all that code in the kernel? They try very hard to get the most out of every machine they have, so they cram a lot of work onto each.
(30 * kernel engineer salary) / (generic x86 server + cooling + power) = ?
X itself is undergoing incredible levels of development and improvement. Way back when, "The Open Group" tried to say that X was "complete" with X11R6, and no more development was needed, though somehow defects and omissions let numbers start creeping in after the decimal point. IIRC it got to somewhere in the X11R6.3-X11R6.5 range. Then XFree86 took over, ramping up some innovation, though still slower than many liked. After that X.Org took over, decided it was high time for X11R7, (They did X11R6.9 as a stage to get there.) and things started moving faster.
At this point, they're redrawing the lines (KMS, DRI/DRI2, DRM) between kernel and user space to (hopefully) get a better balance speed and stability/security. They've pretty much reworked the 2D acceleration (*XA) and are reworking the 3D acceleration (Gallium3D) which will also simplify driver development. The inteface has been reworked down near the protocol level (xcb) to improve speed and memory usage. One thing I've heard talk of is "inverting" the stack to put all primitives on top of the 3D hardware, since that's where most of the hardware performance work has been done.
Read your second paragraph again and tell me The Open Group wasn't on to something and you should've left it as is while writing a better rendering system from scratch. But nooooooo, no Linux userland (or otherwise) API can be stable, stable is all ooold and smeeely.
Compiz is cute and all, but Windows & OS X both provide GPU accelerated frameworks to applications in addition to a compositing system wheres compiz does GPU accelerated window dressings. API? Wot API?
With the indirect rendering architecture in X11 right now
Using compiz to say X11 has an 'indirect rendering architecture' is just a tad extreme. Oh, but hey, this is/. of course, and it's the year of Linux on the desktop or something..
Take a look at the fundamental model. When you move a window in Windows, the app is notified and it has to respond. Try moving the window of an unresponsive app, it does not redraw because Windows is asking the app to redraw it. When you move the window of an unresponsive app in X, the window redraws because X already knows what it needs to know about redrawing the window without having to make a trip back to the application.
Errr.. what? You can move windows without them redrawing, but if you resize it or cover portions of it, it will need to be redrawn. This is no different in X11, AFAIK. The only way around that are compositing systems, such as Compiz.
Slashdot Mirror
it is never in the public interest to tolerate authors throwing obstacles into the path of people wishing to engage in fair uses. All DRM schemes fail in this respect for exactly the reasons you note -- DRM schemes fail to allow those otherwise infringing actions which, if fully adjudicated, would be determined to be fair uses
What sense does it make to bar copyright holders from preventing infringement so that infringements can later be tried in court? How does that help the artists, economy, or anything other than technophiles who feel entitled to everything? You just made the DMCA make complete sense to me. The valid reasons people might have for infringing on copyrights needs to be much more concrete, and need to be weighed against the need to provide incentives to you know.. people that actually produce copyrighted work. I personally think the economy might benefit from digital works that are more flexible by mandate because it would encourage more innovative third party products - I'm not saying it should be this way.
All the arguments against things like the DMCA, that I've heard, are from the consumer's point of view entirely, not being able to do this or do that. Wah, producers won, they are allowed to actively prevent infringement (why on Earth shouldn't they?), and third parties still work out licensing deals with the producers, continuing a long tradition of letting the market work..
When you say 'public' that includes both consumers AND producers AND everything in between. It's in the public's interest to keep generating quality work, and keep spending money on it. If the economy is healthy, what some fraction of consumers cry about doesn't matter. The producers ALWAYS matter; they make shit. That is unless you want to toss the idea of intellectual property out the window. Yay. Free crap. With regulation. It will be like (Linux * the World). Gag me.
Simply due to the economies of scale, a large electric plant will be more efficient than a bunch of gas engines.
Just to pick a nit, that electricity also has to be distributed, consumed and discharged by a bunch of batteries and electric motors, none of which are free.
> Environmentalism is the religion of the 21st century
No it is not. That is simply a bad analogy. It is a political movement, no more, no less.
*cough*Roman Catholic Church*cough*cough*
No it would not. You are looking for ABI compatible, not source-level compatible (or even API compatible). And who the hell would want to duplicate the nightmare in OS X programming where Apple couldn't even decide if they were going to go with Carbon or Cacoa for 6t4-bit? Then of course, they axed one in-spite of what they were saying previously.
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/03/03/qtmac-cocoa-port-alpha-released/
It was not a this or that decision, Carbon is a legacy API that got left at 32-bit, and Cocoa was always the one to use going forward. In the end it forced developers like Trolltech to port to Cocoa which is A Good Thing TM.
Sure there can. After reading the article, I have drawn the conclusion that the participants in the survey consider themselves more literate than they are.
No, you don't know how literate they actually are.
This is like asking people what kind of shoes they own, and how fast they think they can run, then concluding that people who own running shoes run faster than those who don't.
So you know some people consider themselves to be better at something than others, and that is hardly original.
Happens all the time, it's called peer review.
Am I missing the sarcasm here? A non-specific group of kids graded themselves, not each other.
"BadAnalogyGuy" is just so appropriate for you!
BadAnalogyGuy wins. You fail Slashdot.
is there really any benefit to not running as root?
yes from your same post
desktop applications still prompt regardless of that setting.
when you run as root not only can do you anything to your system, so can any application that you run. any malicious program can do anything to your computer it wants when you aren't running as root, it has to ask your permission first
This is true. However, in the case of Linux, there is no framework in place for an application to ask permission for anything, or fine gained access controls with which to grant permissions. A process starts as root or it doesn't, unless things have changed recently. I might be wrong. Anyway, OS X and Windows still don't really have the process dialed in perfectly. There's lots of opportunity for other systems to innovate and explore better ways of controlled privilege escalation, but I'm not holding my breath. Even systems that already have great fine grained access controls in place don't seem to be in any sort of rush to make them useable :\
You're stuck with the problem that a large proportion of people leave as soon as they see several people bearing the same tag join the game
Uh, the problem is you and your friends showing up to a pickup match and the flawed logic allowing you to play on the same team.
If a bunch of dudes show up all at once to your free-for-all, after work, grabass football match with matching helmets, pads, and jerseys, they sure can play - on both teams. I guess I could see little children stacking one side with all the "good" players, but this should not be encouraged, or allowed behavior when the user base is spread across several maturity levels... or ever. Groups of players allowed to play on the same team should queue with similar sized groups, or face the risk of being split up. I would even go one step further and intentionally keep players with the same clan tags apart if they didn't queue as a group. I also think restrictions on team switching and strict team balancing are good ideas on top of a fair matchmaking system.
Now, I do have friends and family I like to play with, but the simple fact of the matter is, if we played too well together, the other players would make us play opposite teams or get the boot. In real life, even the suspicion of unbalanced teams is addressed; by taking turns choosing players, mixing up teams, etc. If you really really want to play with people you practice with, you organize matches. I KNOW this game has facilities to arrange this. I don't know why Internet gamers think they're special or why game designers are so boneheaded, it's perplexing.
Something tells me the situation is more complex than you think it is.
http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/usb_stuff.html
I've never heard of a vendor *supporting* third party power supplies in other forms, so USB power supply & draw specs sound like they need to be nailed down a lot tighter to be taken seriously.
That depends on the OS. On some the price of creating a new process is very high. On others a process costs only a little more than a thread.
Please, when you get into the multiple seconds range, you are WELL beyond any OS process creation overhead...
Well, are they?
If you apply dynamic range compression (so that the difference between the loudest sounds and quietest sounds is reduced and then amplified --- higher RMS amplitude --- louder) the music has no subtleties to be lost by compression.
Unless the subtleties include changes in volume... but, that never happens, or you're saying most speakers suck? I'd buy that argument I guess, but range still matters, doesn't it? I'd imagine with live recordings, it'd matter a whole lot.
Time to switch our systems to using challenge-response auth even when the entire site is carried over SSL...
Umm.. most sites don't use SSL for authentication (client certificates), so I don't know what you're implying. Authentication aside, you still have the equally serious loss of integrity that comes with broken crypto.
If you're behind NAT, the remote system can't send reply packets if you didn't initiate the connection, because the router won't associate the incoming replies with an outgoing connection, and won't forward them to the internal machine.
A firewall can do that, a NAT mostly doesn't have a choice.
all of whom should have a more sensible password policy.
Why does a cellphone OS need a user authentication system in the first place? Maybe at the application level.. no, I can't see that either. Anyway, this phone has one, and it's not meant to be used this way. These things are not meant to have SSH running on them, and whomever released the SSH package for them is irresponsible for not taking that into account.
It doesn't even need to authenticate using system methods, it could generate a random password at install - display on screen, and do it's own authentication. Maybe even offer to pop up an accept dialog before allowing access? Just a thought..
Sorry, I just can't understand how the phone and users continue to be blamed because in free software land developers are void of any and all quality concerns. At some point.. not the developers involved, but "free software" is going to get rap it deserves. It is what everyone makes it. Look after your own, if you see a free turd, call it a turd.
The people effected by this should not be written off as stupid though! Cellular phone + RTFM or it will get broke into = _serious_ usability flaw.
Yes, but what makes you think jailbreaking apps writers are interested in usability?
I used an exclamation point, but it seems you have missed it. Maybe this helps. The intent of the SSHD authors is not in question.
Generally, I think it would be a bad idea to allow an enemy to freely spread propaganda (unless it works for you)... besides, what's the saying? All's fair in love and war? Their servers are fair game, IMHO.
You are clearly not an engineer of scientist. Aside from the fact that some people just like to solve technical problems, I am betting google's logic goes something like this:
... because I question your efficiency? I'm keenly aware of the "just because" excuse, and to hear Google say that would make my day. They have the resources to do it for sure.
We have a problem that is basically only costing us $0.01*10,000computers/day. While that seems low, we plan on staying in business a long time, we could pay someone to solve the problem. Then there is that X factor, that if you don't do it, if you stop innovating, your competitors will, and they will get more and you will get less from the pool of money that is out there. In addition to that, the CS guy you paid to solve that is now worth more to your company (if you employed him) because [s]he now has a better understanding of a complex bit of code (the linux kernel) that you rely on heavily.
I see many of the things added/backported in Linux by Google are already included in other current operating systems.
Google does not sell operating systems.
What is the relationship between computing efficiency and advertising revenue?
How have these practices affected Google's bottom line?
I agree with that last sentence you wrote.
Call me not an engineer or not a scientist, but Google is a public company. When you hear "just because", any good engineer, scientist, or investor should start asking questions.
Really... why should we have to look up something stated in the summary as "100% useless to us"? Thanks fuck head!
Here
"Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.
The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.
The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer."
That was real painful, now the readers can skip the whole damned thread they only opened to find out WTF COFFEE is, it really is useless to them, and move on. OUTSTANDING.
I don't think this is too surprising, except that it hadn't happened sooner. Large similar populations make for easy targets for viruses. This seems to be a universal. For example, you can see the same principle as mono/multi-culture in agriculture. Compare, say, the diseases apples get with the ones pawpaws get. Apple has always been the minority but here, Apple is the apple. Welcome to having a large marketshare.
This was a problem with the jailbroken sshd config. The people effected by this should not be written off as stupid though! Cellular phone + RTFM or it will get broke into = _serious_ usability flaw. Yes, even something as simple as changing a default password to a remote service on a 24/7 public network connected device. Really, this shows how irresponsible the sshd for iphone package authors were, and why Apple locks things down in the iphone as much as they do. Good job! Now more people will be afraid to jailbreak, and Apple may have to spend more time making sure it can't happen. Way to spoil it for the rest of us.
The whole article sounds so painful, what do they actually get out of it?
Google started with the 2.4.18 kernel - but they patched over 2000 files, inserting 492,000 lines of code. Among other things, they backported 64-bit support into that kernel. Eventually they moved to 2.6.11, primarily because they needed SATA support. A 2.6.18-based kernel followed, and they are now working on preparing a 2.6.26-based kernel for deployment in the near future. They are currently carrying 1208 patches to 2.6.26, inserting almost 300,000 lines of code. Roughly 25% of those patches, Mike estimates, are backports of newer features.
In the area of CPU scheduling, Google found the move to the completely fair scheduler to be painful. In fact, it was such a problem that they finally forward-ported the old O(1) scheduler and can run it in 2.6.26. Changes in the semantics of sched_yield() created grief, especially with the user-space locking that Google uses. High-priority threads can make a mess of load balancing, even if they run for very short periods of time. And load balancing matters: Google runs something like 5000 threads on systems with 16-32 cores.
Google makes a lot of use of the out-of-memory (OOM) killer to pare back overloaded systems. That can create trouble, though, when processes holding mutexes encounter the OOM killer. Mike wonders why the kernel tries so hard, rather than just failing allocation requests when memory gets too tight.
Ooooh... efficiency.. I'm curious what the net savings is.. compared to buying more cheap hardware.
So what is Google doing with all that code in the kernel? They try very hard to get the most out of every machine they have, so they cram a lot of work onto each.
(30 * kernel engineer salary) / (generic x86 server + cooling + power) = ?
X itself is undergoing incredible levels of development and improvement. Way back when, "The Open Group" tried to say that X was "complete" with X11R6, and no more development was needed, though somehow defects and omissions let numbers start creeping in after the decimal point. IIRC it got to somewhere in the X11R6.3-X11R6.5 range. Then XFree86 took over, ramping up some innovation, though still slower than many liked. After that X.Org took over, decided it was high time for X11R7, (They did X11R6.9 as a stage to get there.) and things started moving faster.
At this point, they're redrawing the lines (KMS, DRI/DRI2, DRM) between kernel and user space to (hopefully) get a better balance speed and stability/security. They've pretty much reworked the 2D acceleration (*XA) and are reworking the 3D acceleration (Gallium3D) which will also simplify driver development. The inteface has been reworked down near the protocol level (xcb) to improve speed and memory usage. One thing I've heard talk of is "inverting" the stack to put all primitives on top of the 3D hardware, since that's where most of the hardware performance work has been done.
Read your second paragraph again and tell me The Open Group wasn't on to something and you should've left it as is while writing a better rendering system from scratch.
But nooooooo, no Linux userland (or otherwise) API can be stable, stable is all ooold and smeeely.
Compiz is cute and all, but Windows & OS X both provide GPU accelerated frameworks to applications in addition to a compositing system wheres compiz does GPU accelerated window dressings. API? Wot API?
With the indirect rendering architecture in X11 right now
Using compiz to say X11 has an 'indirect rendering architecture' is just a tad extreme. Oh, but hey, this is /. of course, and it's the year of Linux on the desktop or something..
Take a look at the fundamental model. When you move a window in Windows, the app is notified and it has to respond. Try moving the window of an unresponsive app, it does not redraw because Windows is asking the app to redraw it. When you move the window of an unresponsive app in X, the window redraws because X already knows what it needs to know about redrawing the window without having to make a trip back to the application.
Errr.. what? You can move windows without them redrawing, but if you resize it or cover portions of it, it will need to be redrawn. This is no different in X11, AFAIK. The only way around that are compositing systems, such as Compiz.