Depends on the field, but it is very common in computer science and generally in natural sciences. Studying computer science, I don’t think I ever even wrote as much as a paper in German; everything’s English.
This is the first time we're hearing performance in that magnitude, and it's definitely not the intended frame rate. It sounds like your system is switching to software OpenGL rendering, rather than running directly on your GPU. Could you please share more details about your system on Github? https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/issues/new
> I'm not sure why there's a bias factor of 2 in the "raster" fragment shader -- looks like it might have been added by accident.
Yes, that was an accident. Thanks for noticing! We definitely have a lot of information to share about the process. Regarding clipping, we're not sure yet whether what we have right now is the best thing; there will certainly be improvements in that area.
Basically the answer to all of these questions is that it's easier to decode in the browser. A UTFGrid is just plain JSON, so we can just run it through JSON.parse(). PNG uses zlib compression, so we can get that benefit for free when sending gzip over HTTP. Here's some more design rationale: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/21/how-interactivity...