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Comments · 262
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Re:UNIX?
bah. all of us old timers know the best anti-UNIX jokes come from the guys who wrote UNIX . including a foreword by none other than dennis ritchie himself.
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Re:Who cares?I know guys that worship swords.
I feel happy for them, but only because we live in a world were some worship bombs and bullets.
I know guys that worship cars.
and we know what they say about those people... you know, inverse proportions...
But the fact of the matter is that nobody, nowhere, under any circumstances have been able to produce an operating system that worked under so many different architectures and situations.
and this is for a very particular reason: Capitalism cripples technological development. Having many companies compete to death in the tech market makes technology suffer, and leaves us stuck with crap systems like Unix, Windows, DOS and MacOS. Good, newer systems can't take off because those who push technology stand to lose from it.
And sure, lots of people are making new OSes, and showing them off as "better than Unix", but I'll bet if you took the cover off, you would still see Unix like methods and alogrithms.
You obviously worship your little puny OS too much to evaluate it objectively. Those "Unix like methods and algorithms" came from MULTICS.
And anyway, take a look at the Lisp machines; they are nothing like Unix.
Maybe you should ask Steve Jobs. He just based the entire future of his company on Unix.
No he didn't.
People who worship Unix keep thinking that NEXTSTEP is Unix, when it just isn't; the correct thing to say is that it *has* Unix. The kernel is Mach, the windowing system in OpenStep; BSD is just a subsystem, available for convenience in interoperatin with the obsolete world. And the way OpenStep organizes its resources into bundles is very un-Unix.
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Re:A Better Written article on Why X-Windows is Ba
An interesting article, yes. Considering its a part of the Unix Haters Handbook, I had a slight smile before even starting to read it. The writer's inability to understand why clients and servers are called clients and servers on X was what made me laugh first.
For some perverse reason that's better left to the imagination, X insists on calling the program running on the remote machine "the client."
To help the author out, the server is the machine or more appropriately, software, providing a service. The client is the software needing the services. Labelling machines as clients and servers is not necessarily the 'right thing' unless you're running a large VAX machine with dumb terminals. At any rate, it seems obvious, when you understand how X was designed to work, that the software package needs a number of things to be able to work. It needs a screen to display on, and a keyboard to get input from or maybe a light pen or plastic rodent thing. It needs a font management utility and basically anything else that would help it talk to the user.
Putting most or all of those 'services' into a package would make it the 'server' software. Thus, X is the server and the software package is the client.
If you still think this is strange, you're not allowing for the possibility of multiple layers of abstraction
To give credit where credit is due, the author does manage to pull out a lot of features of X that were added, naturally, as after-thoughts because the hardware didn't exist yet. That said, the 'other answers' (ahem, Windows or BeOS) don't really excite me much, and I'd be much more impressed with a ground-up redesign of X.
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Re:A Better Written article on Why X-Windows is Ba
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!!UNIX DOES SUCK!!
Okay Moderators, I've taken the flame bait. Moderate this down!! Come on!! I've only a got a few Karma points anyway, might as well take them away by cursing your precious Open Source and your damn UNIX!
I hate UNIX. I despise UNIX. I would rather work in DOS than spend another day in X Windows.
The whole platform sucks, although, from what I have heard about Miquel's post, he doesn't explain as well as you might find at Don Hopkins' page (here).
At first I thought that I might like UNIX, heck, I liked DOS back when I used it consistently. Then I actually tried using it. Ha! Using it? More like be used by it. I REINSTALLED THE DAMN THING FOUR OF FIVE TIMES BEFORE I GOT IT EVEN TO REMOTELY RESPOND TO THE HARDWARE!! I found it impossible to get a PS2 mouse working and had to resort to dumb serial mouse! In order to use a peice of software you have to write the equivalent of War in Peace in a bizarre techno-reliogious language that even the Druids wouldn't claim. The software is always IDIOTIC just so the no-life jerk who actually learns how to use every facet of it gets a kick from his superiority complex. Not to mention X Windows: X Windows is the mother of all of these idiot software designs. Not only to have to write the equivalent of War and Peace, but you have to do it backwards with eyes closed! I AM A GEEK, BUT I DON'T NEED IDIOTIC SOFTWARE TO FEEL SMART.
Sheesh... and Slashdot is full of you GPLamers who have GPL shrines in their basements. Seriously, as a Geek who deals with newbies on a continual basis, I wonder whether you GPLamers like building stupid software on purpouse, or is the lack of Sun melts some of your brain when it comes to enjoying the idiotically arcane and inane. I DON'T USE ANY OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN MY DAY-TO-DAY WORK, AND I DON'T PLAN TOO!! I use Windows everyday, and don't see that changing anytime soon.
One these days I'll just create my own Operating System and move to a Private Island and be free of stupid software. I want my software to be SMART. MWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
Besides, I have a life, I don't need to spend useless time tweaking a stupid peice of software just so I can use my damn mouse.
GO AHEAD MODERATORS!! DO YOUR WORST!! I WOULD RATHER THIS POST BE MODERATED DOWN TO THE WORST AREAS OF SLASHDOT's POST HELL THAN TO HAVE IT IGNORED!! I'M TIRED OF ALL THE STUPID UNIX-IS-THE-BEST, OPEN-SOURCE-CAN'T-BE-BEAT POSTS. SLASHDOT NEEDS TO GET ITS HEAD EXAMINED, AND SOME PEOPLE WITH LESS RESPECT FOR THE ALMIGHTY GPL, AND THE HOLY LINUX.
WorldMaker -
of course!
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Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
Much of this is a rant about various utills. I could not care less! X is customizable; people who argue otherwise are inept. X is insecure; correct. X's device in/dependence needs work, but is still better than anything that's viably out there. The UI discussions are a yawn.
Where are the discussions of tradeoffs when designing these things. An engineering trade-off is in every design.
As for the architecure, I've read his arguments for NeWS before. NeWS being a distributed windowing system, I have no fundamental arguments against it -- I was equally happy using NeWS as I am X. The tradeoffs (which are not discussed on this site) are not sufficient to warrant the huge shift that a move from X to NeWS represent. This is particularly so considering that the battle-lines (so to speak) are against the PC world. (See most other comments in this discussion.)
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Trivial. Most X apps handle resizes very well. I'd talk to the xcalc developers if you often need to resize calculators!
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
venting!
I sometimes come across people who criticize X window managers. It's always fun to watch them at their own desk
As for X, if you don't like your wm, change it! It lets you!
UI rant -- at best. Note the unix-haters/ directory. This falls under unix.
It's sad how often engineers/developers don't understand modular/hierarchical design. I once logged in as a different user (used a different wm) on a Sun ('andromeda'), and I had to spend 5 minutes reassuring this other engineer that we were *actually* on the same machine! He kept on saying, 'log into andromeda'.
I'm getting tired of this. IT'S A GRAPHICS LIBRARY, STUPID!
It's an app!
Here are more apps/utils: xinit, xterm, fvwm,
They are _all_ replacable (even xinit), and not integral to X.
All of these are from the "unix-haters handbook" site. Great choice! How telling!
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Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
Much of this is a rant about various utills. I could not care less! X is customizable; people who argue otherwise are inept. X is insecure; correct. X's device in/dependence needs work, but is still better than anything that's viably out there. The UI discussions are a yawn.
Where are the discussions of tradeoffs when designing these things. An engineering trade-off is in every design.
As for the architecure, I've read his arguments for NeWS before. NeWS being a distributed windowing system, I have no fundamental arguments against it -- I was equally happy using NeWS as I am X. The tradeoffs (which are not discussed on this site) are not sufficient to warrant the huge shift that a move from X to NeWS represent. This is particularly so considering that the battle-lines (so to speak) are against the PC world. (See most other comments in this discussion.)
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Trivial. Most X apps handle resizes very well. I'd talk to the xcalc developers if you often need to resize calculators!
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
venting!
I sometimes come across people who criticize X window managers. It's always fun to watch them at their own desk
As for X, if you don't like your wm, change it! It lets you!
UI rant -- at best. Note the unix-haters/ directory. This falls under unix.
It's sad how often engineers/developers don't understand modular/hierarchical design. I once logged in as a different user (used a different wm) on a Sun ('andromeda'), and I had to spend 5 minutes reassuring this other engineer that we were *actually* on the same machine! He kept on saying, 'log into andromeda'.
I'm getting tired of this. IT'S A GRAPHICS LIBRARY, STUPID!
It's an app!
Here are more apps/utils: xinit, xterm, fvwm,
They are _all_ replacable (even xinit), and not integral to X.
All of these are from the "unix-haters handbook" site. Great choice! How telling!
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Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
Much of this is a rant about various utills. I could not care less! X is customizable; people who argue otherwise are inept. X is insecure; correct. X's device in/dependence needs work, but is still better than anything that's viably out there. The UI discussions are a yawn.
Where are the discussions of tradeoffs when designing these things. An engineering trade-off is in every design.
As for the architecure, I've read his arguments for NeWS before. NeWS being a distributed windowing system, I have no fundamental arguments against it -- I was equally happy using NeWS as I am X. The tradeoffs (which are not discussed on this site) are not sufficient to warrant the huge shift that a move from X to NeWS represent. This is particularly so considering that the battle-lines (so to speak) are against the PC world. (See most other comments in this discussion.)
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Trivial. Most X apps handle resizes very well. I'd talk to the xcalc developers if you often need to resize calculators!
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
venting!
I sometimes come across people who criticize X window managers. It's always fun to watch them at their own desk
As for X, if you don't like your wm, change it! It lets you!
UI rant -- at best. Note the unix-haters/ directory. This falls under unix.
It's sad how often engineers/developers don't understand modular/hierarchical design. I once logged in as a different user (used a different wm) on a Sun ('andromeda'), and I had to spend 5 minutes reassuring this other engineer that we were *actually* on the same machine! He kept on saying, 'log into andromeda'.
I'm getting tired of this. IT'S A GRAPHICS LIBRARY, STUPID!
It's an app!
Here are more apps/utils: xinit, xterm, fvwm,
They are _all_ replacable (even xinit), and not integral to X.
All of these are from the "unix-haters handbook" site. Great choice! How telling!
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Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
Much of this is a rant about various utills. I could not care less! X is customizable; people who argue otherwise are inept. X is insecure; correct. X's device in/dependence needs work, but is still better than anything that's viably out there. The UI discussions are a yawn.
Where are the discussions of tradeoffs when designing these things. An engineering trade-off is in every design.
As for the architecure, I've read his arguments for NeWS before. NeWS being a distributed windowing system, I have no fundamental arguments against it -- I was equally happy using NeWS as I am X. The tradeoffs (which are not discussed on this site) are not sufficient to warrant the huge shift that a move from X to NeWS represent. This is particularly so considering that the battle-lines (so to speak) are against the PC world. (See most other comments in this discussion.)
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Trivial. Most X apps handle resizes very well. I'd talk to the xcalc developers if you often need to resize calculators!
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
venting!
I sometimes come across people who criticize X window managers. It's always fun to watch them at their own desk
As for X, if you don't like your wm, change it! It lets you!
UI rant -- at best. Note the unix-haters/ directory. This falls under unix.
It's sad how often engineers/developers don't understand modular/hierarchical design. I once logged in as a different user (used a different wm) on a Sun ('andromeda'), and I had to spend 5 minutes reassuring this other engineer that we were *actually* on the same machine! He kept on saying, 'log into andromeda'.
I'm getting tired of this. IT'S A GRAPHICS LIBRARY, STUPID!
It's an app!
Here are more apps/utils: xinit, xterm, fvwm,
They are _all_ replacable (even xinit), and not integral to X.
All of these are from the "unix-haters handbook" site. Great choice! How telling!
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Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
Much of this is a rant about various utills. I could not care less! X is customizable; people who argue otherwise are inept. X is insecure; correct. X's device in/dependence needs work, but is still better than anything that's viably out there. The UI discussions are a yawn.
Where are the discussions of tradeoffs when designing these things. An engineering trade-off is in every design.
As for the architecure, I've read his arguments for NeWS before. NeWS being a distributed windowing system, I have no fundamental arguments against it -- I was equally happy using NeWS as I am X. The tradeoffs (which are not discussed on this site) are not sufficient to warrant the huge shift that a move from X to NeWS represent. This is particularly so considering that the battle-lines (so to speak) are against the PC world. (See most other comments in this discussion.)
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Trivial. Most X apps handle resizes very well. I'd talk to the xcalc developers if you often need to resize calculators!
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
venting!
I sometimes come across people who criticize X window managers. It's always fun to watch them at their own desk
As for X, if you don't like your wm, change it! It lets you!
UI rant -- at best. Note the unix-haters/ directory. This falls under unix.
It's sad how often engineers/developers don't understand modular/hierarchical design. I once logged in as a different user (used a different wm) on a Sun ('andromeda'), and I had to spend 5 minutes reassuring this other engineer that we were *actually* on the same machine! He kept on saying, 'log into andromeda'.
I'm getting tired of this. IT'S A GRAPHICS LIBRARY, STUPID!
It's an app!
Here are more apps/utils: xinit, xterm, fvwm,
They are _all_ replacable (even xinit), and not integral to X.
All of these are from the "unix-haters handbook" site. Great choice! How telling!
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Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
Much of this is a rant about various utills. I could not care less! X is customizable; people who argue otherwise are inept. X is insecure; correct. X's device in/dependence needs work, but is still better than anything that's viably out there. The UI discussions are a yawn.
Where are the discussions of tradeoffs when designing these things. An engineering trade-off is in every design.
As for the architecure, I've read his arguments for NeWS before. NeWS being a distributed windowing system, I have no fundamental arguments against it -- I was equally happy using NeWS as I am X. The tradeoffs (which are not discussed on this site) are not sufficient to warrant the huge shift that a move from X to NeWS represent. This is particularly so considering that the battle-lines (so to speak) are against the PC world. (See most other comments in this discussion.)
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Trivial. Most X apps handle resizes very well. I'd talk to the xcalc developers if you often need to resize calculators!
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
venting!
I sometimes come across people who criticize X window managers. It's always fun to watch them at their own desk
As for X, if you don't like your wm, change it! It lets you!
UI rant -- at best. Note the unix-haters/ directory. This falls under unix.
It's sad how often engineers/developers don't understand modular/hierarchical design. I once logged in as a different user (used a different wm) on a Sun ('andromeda'), and I had to spend 5 minutes reassuring this other engineer that we were *actually* on the same machine! He kept on saying, 'log into andromeda'.
I'm getting tired of this. IT'S A GRAPHICS LIBRARY, STUPID!
It's an app!
Here are more apps/utils: xinit, xterm, fvwm,
They are _all_ replacable (even xinit), and not integral to X.
All of these are from the "unix-haters handbook" site. Great choice! How telling!
-
Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .
Much of this is a rant about various utills. I could not care less! X is customizable; people who argue otherwise are inept. X is insecure; correct. X's device in/dependence needs work, but is still better than anything that's viably out there. The UI discussions are a yawn.
Where are the discussions of tradeoffs when designing these things. An engineering trade-off is in every design.
As for the architecure, I've read his arguments for NeWS before. NeWS being a distributed windowing system, I have no fundamental arguments against it -- I was equally happy using NeWS as I am X. The tradeoffs (which are not discussed on this site) are not sufficient to warrant the huge shift that a move from X to NeWS represent. This is particularly so considering that the battle-lines (so to speak) are against the PC world. (See most other comments in this discussion.)
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Trivial. Most X apps handle resizes very well. I'd talk to the xcalc developers if you often need to resize calculators!
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
venting!
I sometimes come across people who criticize X window managers. It's always fun to watch them at their own desk
As for X, if you don't like your wm, change it! It lets you!
UI rant -- at best. Note the unix-haters/ directory. This falls under unix.
It's sad how often engineers/developers don't understand modular/hierarchical design. I once logged in as a different user (used a different wm) on a Sun ('andromeda'), and I had to spend 5 minutes reassuring this other engineer that we were *actually* on the same machine! He kept on saying, 'log into andromeda'.
I'm getting tired of this. IT'S A GRAPHICS LIBRARY, STUPID!
It's an app!
Here are more apps/utils: xinit, xterm, fvwm,
They are _all_ replacable (even xinit), and not integral to X.
All of these are from the "unix-haters handbook" site. Great choice! How telling!
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Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .You asked for it:
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
-Don
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Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .You asked for it:
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
-Don
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Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .You asked for it:
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
-Don
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Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .You asked for it:
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
-Don
-
Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .You asked for it:
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
-Don
-
Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .You asked for it:
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
-Don
-
Re:Uhh. . .pass the crack pipe this way. . .You asked for it:
What happens to XCalc when you resize it too many times?
Official Notice, Post Immediately!
-Don
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A lovely summary of all that's wrong with X
There you go: the X windows disasater
Possible the greatest work of literature ever written about X. Guaranteed to entertain you for several minutes at least. I think he hangs around
Really, it's solid stuff. Think about it, instead of having a knee-jerk reaction.
w/m -
A Better Written article on Why X-Windows is Bad
Here's an article entitled the X-Windows Disaster written by Don Hopkins.
Anyone who reads this article may be inclined to yell FUD, FUD, FUD as has been written in comments to this article or MSFT supporter but not in this case.
Don Box is a migrant user interface designer and graphics programmer. Don received a BSCS degree from the University of Maryland while working as a researcher at the Human Computer Interaction Lab. Don has worked at UniPress Software, Sun Microsystems, the Turing Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Kaleida Labs, and Interval Research. He ported SimCity to NeWS and X11 for DUX Software.
X-Windows has serious problems that are evident to anyone who has ever done any serious investigation but since it's *nix most people put up with it's clunkiness. Similar to how an alternative to GNU getopt(3c) has not been written yet, because getopt works well enough (or so people think).
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This is much more interesting than Linux Sucks
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Re:last I checkedAnd then there's the "Pseudoscientific Visualization" of ARPANET Psiber SPACE (circa 1986). More on that in the paper The Shape of PSIBER Space.
-Don
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Re:last I checkedAnd then there's the "Pseudoscientific Visualization" of ARPANET Psiber SPACE (circa 1986). More on that in the paper The Shape of PSIBER Space.
-Don
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Re:Pie chartsThanks a lot!
Basically, yes. I'm sure that anything in the marking menu patent that applies to the pie menus in The Sims is totally covered by prior art.
People I know at SGI (who have long since fled the sinking ship) tell me that their marketing department just likes to have those two magic words "patents pending" on every product announcement. So they encourage everyone to apply for at least two patents per project. It doesn't matter if they're worthless, invalid patents.
Unfortunately, when SGI finally runs out of money and Microsoft buys them up, their patent portfolio will be in Bill Gates' hands.
As the disclaimer in the forward to RISKS digest of Tom Davis's famous "Software Usability II" memo says, "This memo should not be seen as an indictment of SGI, which is hardly unique." It's a indictment of the entire software industry.
-Don
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Re:Pie chartsSee my previous posting about implementing pie menus in dynamic html/javascript/xml. If somebody ever gets around to implementing pie menus in the web browser using Dynamic HTML/JavaScript/XML, they could look like anything you can put into a web page.
The pie menus in The Sims go a bit further than you could do in a web browser, though. Instead of using an opaque circular window, the Sims pie menus use a circular feathered real time image processing effect. It shows through to the live 3d graphics going on behind the menu, but the menu background is desatureted, darkened and lowered in contrast, so the text labels and the colorful person's head in the menu center stand out sharply against the background, but there is no sharp edge to the circular shadow effect, and you can still see what's going on behind the menu.
The problem I was trying to solve, was that I wanted to clearly separate the interface elements (the pie menus) from the virtual world (the house), because the pie menus pop up overlapping the world view, wherever you click on an object.
The pie menu has the selected person's head floating in the center, and without the shadow separating the head from the rest of the world, it would look disconcertingly like a giant head and menu labels appearing in the middle of the room among all the people and furniture.
So the desaturation, darkness and low contrast of the background made the head in the menu center and the labels pop out much better against the otherwise colorful background. The circular shadow is smoothly feathered so it does not have a distinct edge, and the menu labels overlap out over that edge, breaking the frame, yet obviously associated with the menu.
The overall effect is intended to be that the selected person is thinking about which action to perform on the selected object, their disembodied head outside of the world at another level of thought, looking up and down and all around around at the labels, trying to decide which action to do next.
There's an illustration at the end of this web page, or you can pick up a copy of The Sims anywhere that sells computer games:
http://catalog.com/hopkin s/piemenus/NaturalSelection.html
Right now, The Sims is only available on Windows, but I'm making a lot of progress porting it to Linux, and looking for a distributor. Please contact your favorite Linux game distributor and tell them if you would like to buy a copy of The Sims for Linux.-Don
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Re:Pie chartsFirst, I'd like to say that I'm really happy to see the pie menus in Gnome -- great work!!!
Unfortunately, there are a couple of stupid reasons why pie menus aren't widely used. One is technical and one is political.
The technical one has been the lack of plug-in component architectures that allows new widgets like pie menus to be integrated into new and pre-existing applications. The other is that companies like Alias/SGI are abusing the patent system to discourage their competitors from using useful techniques like pie menus.
Some of the technical problems have finally been solved for Linux and X11! Thanks a lot to everyone who contributed.
NeWS took a stab at solving of those problems a while ago. You could download piemenu.ps to the NeWS window server, and replace all the linear menus in the system with pie menus, and download pietab.ps and replace all the window frames with tabbed window frames, that let you drag the tab anywhere around the edge of the window, and pop up optimized window management pie menus.
"Bring to front" was up, "Push to back" was down, the "Stretch edge/corner" submenu had 4 corners and 4 edges in the appropriate direction, so you could mouse ahead into the pie menus very quickly once you learned them, etc. Pie menus are great for window management, since the tasks are so spatial and you use them so often, you soon learn to mouse ahead very efficiently, it saves you a lot of time, and is very reliable.
The litmus test for a pie menu window manager is that you should be able to reliably start up programs and manipulate windows, even while the window system is busy starting up, paging and thrashing virtual memory, and only slugishly responding to input events. Mouse ahead is that good! Pie menus must be very careful how they synchronize and handle input events, never dropping any mouse clicks on the floor!
All that PostScript pie menus source code I wrote is freely available, but only runs on NeWS, which would be more effort than it is worth to resurrect.
When NeWS died and I had to start use X11 on a regular basis, I hacked pie menus into one of the window managers (that I called "piewm"), so I could use them to control the windows and run programs without going crazy with frustration at linear menus. That source code is also freely available, and it probably still works ok. But the code is not very reusable or up to date, since the X11 window manager is monolithic and does not use any plug-in component framework. It would be better to start with the following code instead.
When I ported SimCity Classic to Unix in 1992, I used the TCL/Tk toolkit, and implemented a Tk pie menu widget for the game, to select between city editing tools (bulldozer, road, residential zone, etc). I distributed the source code for the TCL/Tk widget for free, but it was not widely used in other applications, because it required a programmer to integrate the C and TCL source code into another program, then recompiling and relinking. At the time, TCL/Tk did not have a dynamically loadable component framework.
Microsoft has developed OLE (aka ActiveX) to solve this problem. It allows components written in any language to be loaded dynamically at run time and integrated with any other language, and it allows programmers as well as more casual interface designers to plug components together and configure them with property sheets.
I implemented an ActiveX pie menu control, so that pie menus can be used on web pages and in other Windows applications. The source code as well as the binary is freely available. Now it is quite easy for other people to integrate ActiveX pie menus into their own applications and configure them to their liking.
I've used ActiveX pie menus as a vehicle to experiment with all kinds of different layout and interaction styles. They've got lots of property sheets to set all the various modes and attributes, and you can type in a nested submenu tree as an indented text outline.
I implemented graphical menu items, but I still want them to be animated. A while ago I started adding the ability to read and write nested pie menu specifications as xml. I wanted to add all kinds of other features, but there needed to be an easy concise way to read, write and configure them all. I finally realized that I had hit a brick wall with ActiveX, in the face of all the complexity and things I wanted to be able to do with pie menus, compared to what could be done on a web page with dynamic html.
I want each menu item to be any dynamic html object, like a movie, or a java applet, or an ActiveX control. And I want the graphics and interactive feedback to exploit the full capabilities of dynamic html, like making the point size of the label grow continuously larger as you move the cursor into the slice.
I realized that it was going to be impossible to play keep-up with the capabilities of a web browser by adding feature after feature to my little ActiveX control, and what I really needed was for pie menus to be specified in xml, and implemented inside the web browser using dynamic html on the web page itself, instead of using a shrink wrapped plug-in control that opens and draws its own windows, but can't interact with the rest of the web page.
So I have basically shelved the ActiveX pie menu, and decided to rewrite pie menus in JavaScript and dynamic html, if I ever get around to it, and if the browsers ever get around to supporting dynamic html.
In the mean time, I have been working on the political problems that have kept pie menus and other useful techniques from being widely used.
I was at the computer game developer's conference several years ago. Since I was using 3D Studio Max at work, I stopped by the Kinetix booth, and asked them for some advice integrating ActiveX pie menus into their 3D editing tool.
They told me that Alias had "marking menus" which were like pie menus, and that Kinetix's customers had been requesting that feature, but since Alias had patented marking menus, they were afraid to use pie menus or anything resembling them for fear of being sued for patent infringement.
I told them that sounded like bullshit since there was plenty of prior art, so Alias couldn't get a legitimate patent on "marking menus".
The guy from Kinetix told me that if I didn't believe him, I should walk across the aisle and ask the people at the Alias booth. So I did.
When I asked one of the Alias sales people if their "marking menus" were patented, he instantantly blurted out "of course they are!" So I showed him pie menus on my laptop, and told him that I needed to get in touch with their legal department because they had patented something that I had been working on for many years, and had used in several published products, and I didn't want them to sue me for patent infringement.
When I tried to pin him down about what exactly it was that they had patented, he started weasling and changed his story several times. He finally told me that Bill Buxton was the one who invented marking menus, that he was the one behind the patent, that he was the senior user interface researcher at SGI/Alias, and that I should talk to him.
So I called Bill Buxton at SGI/Alias, who stonewalled and claimed that there was no patent on marking menus. He said he felt insulted that I would think he would patent something that we both knew very well was covered by prior art. I told him that companies try to made illegitimate patents all the time, and that I did not mean to insult him by repeating to him the misinformation that his marketing people were spreading around the computer industry, in his name.
I tried to explain how Alias's FUD had adversely effected the user interface design of 3D Studio Max, in spite of user requests, but he did not care about 3D Studio Max, since Kinetix was his competition. I asked him whose side he was on, the users or the patent lawyers.
He claimed to be on the side of the users, since he is such a well known user interface researcher, but I believe he has totally sold out to the point of abusing the patent system for profit, and is in the thrall of SGI corporate lawyers. Users beware.
A year or so later, I ran across a marking menu patent issued to Alias, that is probably the one the Alias sales people were spreading rumors about. Now it all makes a lot more sense in perspective.
At the time I found out about it from Kinetix, Alias had just applied for the patent on marking menus. The Alias sales people had heard about it, but could not keep their mouths shut, even though there were damn well supposed to. So they repeatedly spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt by bragging about this PENDING patent that they really didn't know much about. The only reason I ever learned about it, was that their FUD was so successful if effected Kinetix's plans.
When it got back to Buxton that they had leaked news of the pending patent to Kinetix, which was supposed to be secret, he was furious, but certainly wouldn't tell me what was really up, so he took his anger out on me instead. He wanted to keep me in the dark, so I didn't go to the U. S. Patent Office and inform them of all the prior art that was conspicuously missing from his patent. But I'll bet he was sure proud that the leak about the patent successfully discouraged Kinetix's plans to put marking menus into 3D Studio Max. It's a textbook example of successful FUD!
Anyway, I did not let that discourage me from my long term plan of incorporating pie menus into a mainstream product (The Sims from Maxis). That is the only way that a lot of people will ever be able to see them and get used to the idea.
Now, when the users of a program like 3D Studio Max demand a feature like pie menus, companies like Kinetix will not be fooled by FUD spread by corporations like Alias/SGI. They will realize that their kids play a game that has pie menus, and they seem to work ok, so there must not be anything wrong with using them for a 3D graphics editing program.
-Don
Pie menu web page:
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/piemenusNotes from a talk about Pie Menus I gave to BayCHI at Xerox PARC:
http://catalog.com/hopkin s/piemenus/NaturalSelection.htmlA description of ActiveX pie menu features:
http://catalog.com/hopk ins/piemenus/PieMenuDescription.html -
Re:Pie chartsFirst, I'd like to say that I'm really happy to see the pie menus in Gnome -- great work!!!
Unfortunately, there are a couple of stupid reasons why pie menus aren't widely used. One is technical and one is political.
The technical one has been the lack of plug-in component architectures that allows new widgets like pie menus to be integrated into new and pre-existing applications. The other is that companies like Alias/SGI are abusing the patent system to discourage their competitors from using useful techniques like pie menus.
Some of the technical problems have finally been solved for Linux and X11! Thanks a lot to everyone who contributed.
NeWS took a stab at solving of those problems a while ago. You could download piemenu.ps to the NeWS window server, and replace all the linear menus in the system with pie menus, and download pietab.ps and replace all the window frames with tabbed window frames, that let you drag the tab anywhere around the edge of the window, and pop up optimized window management pie menus.
"Bring to front" was up, "Push to back" was down, the "Stretch edge/corner" submenu had 4 corners and 4 edges in the appropriate direction, so you could mouse ahead into the pie menus very quickly once you learned them, etc. Pie menus are great for window management, since the tasks are so spatial and you use them so often, you soon learn to mouse ahead very efficiently, it saves you a lot of time, and is very reliable.
The litmus test for a pie menu window manager is that you should be able to reliably start up programs and manipulate windows, even while the window system is busy starting up, paging and thrashing virtual memory, and only slugishly responding to input events. Mouse ahead is that good! Pie menus must be very careful how they synchronize and handle input events, never dropping any mouse clicks on the floor!
All that PostScript pie menus source code I wrote is freely available, but only runs on NeWS, which would be more effort than it is worth to resurrect.
When NeWS died and I had to start use X11 on a regular basis, I hacked pie menus into one of the window managers (that I called "piewm"), so I could use them to control the windows and run programs without going crazy with frustration at linear menus. That source code is also freely available, and it probably still works ok. But the code is not very reusable or up to date, since the X11 window manager is monolithic and does not use any plug-in component framework. It would be better to start with the following code instead.
When I ported SimCity Classic to Unix in 1992, I used the TCL/Tk toolkit, and implemented a Tk pie menu widget for the game, to select between city editing tools (bulldozer, road, residential zone, etc). I distributed the source code for the TCL/Tk widget for free, but it was not widely used in other applications, because it required a programmer to integrate the C and TCL source code into another program, then recompiling and relinking. At the time, TCL/Tk did not have a dynamically loadable component framework.
Microsoft has developed OLE (aka ActiveX) to solve this problem. It allows components written in any language to be loaded dynamically at run time and integrated with any other language, and it allows programmers as well as more casual interface designers to plug components together and configure them with property sheets.
I implemented an ActiveX pie menu control, so that pie menus can be used on web pages and in other Windows applications. The source code as well as the binary is freely available. Now it is quite easy for other people to integrate ActiveX pie menus into their own applications and configure them to their liking.
I've used ActiveX pie menus as a vehicle to experiment with all kinds of different layout and interaction styles. They've got lots of property sheets to set all the various modes and attributes, and you can type in a nested submenu tree as an indented text outline.
I implemented graphical menu items, but I still want them to be animated. A while ago I started adding the ability to read and write nested pie menu specifications as xml. I wanted to add all kinds of other features, but there needed to be an easy concise way to read, write and configure them all. I finally realized that I had hit a brick wall with ActiveX, in the face of all the complexity and things I wanted to be able to do with pie menus, compared to what could be done on a web page with dynamic html.
I want each menu item to be any dynamic html object, like a movie, or a java applet, or an ActiveX control. And I want the graphics and interactive feedback to exploit the full capabilities of dynamic html, like making the point size of the label grow continuously larger as you move the cursor into the slice.
I realized that it was going to be impossible to play keep-up with the capabilities of a web browser by adding feature after feature to my little ActiveX control, and what I really needed was for pie menus to be specified in xml, and implemented inside the web browser using dynamic html on the web page itself, instead of using a shrink wrapped plug-in control that opens and draws its own windows, but can't interact with the rest of the web page.
So I have basically shelved the ActiveX pie menu, and decided to rewrite pie menus in JavaScript and dynamic html, if I ever get around to it, and if the browsers ever get around to supporting dynamic html.
In the mean time, I have been working on the political problems that have kept pie menus and other useful techniques from being widely used.
I was at the computer game developer's conference several years ago. Since I was using 3D Studio Max at work, I stopped by the Kinetix booth, and asked them for some advice integrating ActiveX pie menus into their 3D editing tool.
They told me that Alias had "marking menus" which were like pie menus, and that Kinetix's customers had been requesting that feature, but since Alias had patented marking menus, they were afraid to use pie menus or anything resembling them for fear of being sued for patent infringement.
I told them that sounded like bullshit since there was plenty of prior art, so Alias couldn't get a legitimate patent on "marking menus".
The guy from Kinetix told me that if I didn't believe him, I should walk across the aisle and ask the people at the Alias booth. So I did.
When I asked one of the Alias sales people if their "marking menus" were patented, he instantantly blurted out "of course they are!" So I showed him pie menus on my laptop, and told him that I needed to get in touch with their legal department because they had patented something that I had been working on for many years, and had used in several published products, and I didn't want them to sue me for patent infringement.
When I tried to pin him down about what exactly it was that they had patented, he started weasling and changed his story several times. He finally told me that Bill Buxton was the one who invented marking menus, that he was the one behind the patent, that he was the senior user interface researcher at SGI/Alias, and that I should talk to him.
So I called Bill Buxton at SGI/Alias, who stonewalled and claimed that there was no patent on marking menus. He said he felt insulted that I would think he would patent something that we both knew very well was covered by prior art. I told him that companies try to made illegitimate patents all the time, and that I did not mean to insult him by repeating to him the misinformation that his marketing people were spreading around the computer industry, in his name.
I tried to explain how Alias's FUD had adversely effected the user interface design of 3D Studio Max, in spite of user requests, but he did not care about 3D Studio Max, since Kinetix was his competition. I asked him whose side he was on, the users or the patent lawyers.
He claimed to be on the side of the users, since he is such a well known user interface researcher, but I believe he has totally sold out to the point of abusing the patent system for profit, and is in the thrall of SGI corporate lawyers. Users beware.
A year or so later, I ran across a marking menu patent issued to Alias, that is probably the one the Alias sales people were spreading rumors about. Now it all makes a lot more sense in perspective.
At the time I found out about it from Kinetix, Alias had just applied for the patent on marking menus. The Alias sales people had heard about it, but could not keep their mouths shut, even though there were damn well supposed to. So they repeatedly spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt by bragging about this PENDING patent that they really didn't know much about. The only reason I ever learned about it, was that their FUD was so successful if effected Kinetix's plans.
When it got back to Buxton that they had leaked news of the pending patent to Kinetix, which was supposed to be secret, he was furious, but certainly wouldn't tell me what was really up, so he took his anger out on me instead. He wanted to keep me in the dark, so I didn't go to the U. S. Patent Office and inform them of all the prior art that was conspicuously missing from his patent. But I'll bet he was sure proud that the leak about the patent successfully discouraged Kinetix's plans to put marking menus into 3D Studio Max. It's a textbook example of successful FUD!
Anyway, I did not let that discourage me from my long term plan of incorporating pie menus into a mainstream product (The Sims from Maxis). That is the only way that a lot of people will ever be able to see them and get used to the idea.
Now, when the users of a program like 3D Studio Max demand a feature like pie menus, companies like Kinetix will not be fooled by FUD spread by corporations like Alias/SGI. They will realize that their kids play a game that has pie menus, and they seem to work ok, so there must not be anything wrong with using them for a 3D graphics editing program.
-Don
Pie menu web page:
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/piemenusNotes from a talk about Pie Menus I gave to BayCHI at Xerox PARC:
http://catalog.com/hopkin s/piemenus/NaturalSelection.htmlA description of ActiveX pie menu features:
http://catalog.com/hopk ins/piemenus/PieMenuDescription.html -
Re:Pie chartsFirst, I'd like to say that I'm really happy to see the pie menus in Gnome -- great work!!!
Unfortunately, there are a couple of stupid reasons why pie menus aren't widely used. One is technical and one is political.
The technical one has been the lack of plug-in component architectures that allows new widgets like pie menus to be integrated into new and pre-existing applications. The other is that companies like Alias/SGI are abusing the patent system to discourage their competitors from using useful techniques like pie menus.
Some of the technical problems have finally been solved for Linux and X11! Thanks a lot to everyone who contributed.
NeWS took a stab at solving of those problems a while ago. You could download piemenu.ps to the NeWS window server, and replace all the linear menus in the system with pie menus, and download pietab.ps and replace all the window frames with tabbed window frames, that let you drag the tab anywhere around the edge of the window, and pop up optimized window management pie menus.
"Bring to front" was up, "Push to back" was down, the "Stretch edge/corner" submenu had 4 corners and 4 edges in the appropriate direction, so you could mouse ahead into the pie menus very quickly once you learned them, etc. Pie menus are great for window management, since the tasks are so spatial and you use them so often, you soon learn to mouse ahead very efficiently, it saves you a lot of time, and is very reliable.
The litmus test for a pie menu window manager is that you should be able to reliably start up programs and manipulate windows, even while the window system is busy starting up, paging and thrashing virtual memory, and only slugishly responding to input events. Mouse ahead is that good! Pie menus must be very careful how they synchronize and handle input events, never dropping any mouse clicks on the floor!
All that PostScript pie menus source code I wrote is freely available, but only runs on NeWS, which would be more effort than it is worth to resurrect.
When NeWS died and I had to start use X11 on a regular basis, I hacked pie menus into one of the window managers (that I called "piewm"), so I could use them to control the windows and run programs without going crazy with frustration at linear menus. That source code is also freely available, and it probably still works ok. But the code is not very reusable or up to date, since the X11 window manager is monolithic and does not use any plug-in component framework. It would be better to start with the following code instead.
When I ported SimCity Classic to Unix in 1992, I used the TCL/Tk toolkit, and implemented a Tk pie menu widget for the game, to select between city editing tools (bulldozer, road, residential zone, etc). I distributed the source code for the TCL/Tk widget for free, but it was not widely used in other applications, because it required a programmer to integrate the C and TCL source code into another program, then recompiling and relinking. At the time, TCL/Tk did not have a dynamically loadable component framework.
Microsoft has developed OLE (aka ActiveX) to solve this problem. It allows components written in any language to be loaded dynamically at run time and integrated with any other language, and it allows programmers as well as more casual interface designers to plug components together and configure them with property sheets.
I implemented an ActiveX pie menu control, so that pie menus can be used on web pages and in other Windows applications. The source code as well as the binary is freely available. Now it is quite easy for other people to integrate ActiveX pie menus into their own applications and configure them to their liking.
I've used ActiveX pie menus as a vehicle to experiment with all kinds of different layout and interaction styles. They've got lots of property sheets to set all the various modes and attributes, and you can type in a nested submenu tree as an indented text outline.
I implemented graphical menu items, but I still want them to be animated. A while ago I started adding the ability to read and write nested pie menu specifications as xml. I wanted to add all kinds of other features, but there needed to be an easy concise way to read, write and configure them all. I finally realized that I had hit a brick wall with ActiveX, in the face of all the complexity and things I wanted to be able to do with pie menus, compared to what could be done on a web page with dynamic html.
I want each menu item to be any dynamic html object, like a movie, or a java applet, or an ActiveX control. And I want the graphics and interactive feedback to exploit the full capabilities of dynamic html, like making the point size of the label grow continuously larger as you move the cursor into the slice.
I realized that it was going to be impossible to play keep-up with the capabilities of a web browser by adding feature after feature to my little ActiveX control, and what I really needed was for pie menus to be specified in xml, and implemented inside the web browser using dynamic html on the web page itself, instead of using a shrink wrapped plug-in control that opens and draws its own windows, but can't interact with the rest of the web page.
So I have basically shelved the ActiveX pie menu, and decided to rewrite pie menus in JavaScript and dynamic html, if I ever get around to it, and if the browsers ever get around to supporting dynamic html.
In the mean time, I have been working on the political problems that have kept pie menus and other useful techniques from being widely used.
I was at the computer game developer's conference several years ago. Since I was using 3D Studio Max at work, I stopped by the Kinetix booth, and asked them for some advice integrating ActiveX pie menus into their 3D editing tool.
They told me that Alias had "marking menus" which were like pie menus, and that Kinetix's customers had been requesting that feature, but since Alias had patented marking menus, they were afraid to use pie menus or anything resembling them for fear of being sued for patent infringement.
I told them that sounded like bullshit since there was plenty of prior art, so Alias couldn't get a legitimate patent on "marking menus".
The guy from Kinetix told me that if I didn't believe him, I should walk across the aisle and ask the people at the Alias booth. So I did.
When I asked one of the Alias sales people if their "marking menus" were patented, he instantantly blurted out "of course they are!" So I showed him pie menus on my laptop, and told him that I needed to get in touch with their legal department because they had patented something that I had been working on for many years, and had used in several published products, and I didn't want them to sue me for patent infringement.
When I tried to pin him down about what exactly it was that they had patented, he started weasling and changed his story several times. He finally told me that Bill Buxton was the one who invented marking menus, that he was the one behind the patent, that he was the senior user interface researcher at SGI/Alias, and that I should talk to him.
So I called Bill Buxton at SGI/Alias, who stonewalled and claimed that there was no patent on marking menus. He said he felt insulted that I would think he would patent something that we both knew very well was covered by prior art. I told him that companies try to made illegitimate patents all the time, and that I did not mean to insult him by repeating to him the misinformation that his marketing people were spreading around the computer industry, in his name.
I tried to explain how Alias's FUD had adversely effected the user interface design of 3D Studio Max, in spite of user requests, but he did not care about 3D Studio Max, since Kinetix was his competition. I asked him whose side he was on, the users or the patent lawyers.
He claimed to be on the side of the users, since he is such a well known user interface researcher, but I believe he has totally sold out to the point of abusing the patent system for profit, and is in the thrall of SGI corporate lawyers. Users beware.
A year or so later, I ran across a marking menu patent issued to Alias, that is probably the one the Alias sales people were spreading rumors about. Now it all makes a lot more sense in perspective.
At the time I found out about it from Kinetix, Alias had just applied for the patent on marking menus. The Alias sales people had heard about it, but could not keep their mouths shut, even though there were damn well supposed to. So they repeatedly spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt by bragging about this PENDING patent that they really didn't know much about. The only reason I ever learned about it, was that their FUD was so successful if effected Kinetix's plans.
When it got back to Buxton that they had leaked news of the pending patent to Kinetix, which was supposed to be secret, he was furious, but certainly wouldn't tell me what was really up, so he took his anger out on me instead. He wanted to keep me in the dark, so I didn't go to the U. S. Patent Office and inform them of all the prior art that was conspicuously missing from his patent. But I'll bet he was sure proud that the leak about the patent successfully discouraged Kinetix's plans to put marking menus into 3D Studio Max. It's a textbook example of successful FUD!
Anyway, I did not let that discourage me from my long term plan of incorporating pie menus into a mainstream product (The Sims from Maxis). That is the only way that a lot of people will ever be able to see them and get used to the idea.
Now, when the users of a program like 3D Studio Max demand a feature like pie menus, companies like Kinetix will not be fooled by FUD spread by corporations like Alias/SGI. They will realize that their kids play a game that has pie menus, and they seem to work ok, so there must not be anything wrong with using them for a 3D graphics editing program.
-Don
Pie menu web page:
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/piemenusNotes from a talk about Pie Menus I gave to BayCHI at Xerox PARC:
http://catalog.com/hopkin s/piemenus/NaturalSelection.htmlA description of ActiveX pie menu features:
http://catalog.com/hopk ins/piemenus/PieMenuDescription.html -
What was NeWS
i know nothing about NeWS, but have been very curious about it ever since i first heard of it.
I first heard of it in the X chapter of the UNIX haters handbook, which makes occational references to NeWS as a windowing system done right. It's also a very interesting read (not FUD at all, just reasonable if incendentary analysis..) and probably would tell you a little about NeWS..
The URL i just listed above, btw, which i just found now on Google, happens to contain a link to a series of NeWS resources, which i haven't read yet. draw your own conclusions.
I am very curious about NeWS, and if anyone out there has used it, please post and let us know anything about it you may have to say.. Or is there anyone who STILL uses it?
What are the differences between this, DPS, and Quartz? DPS and Quartz aren't capable of running over a network are they? (i fear this last sentance will ignite an irrelivant flamewar, but i'm curious, so i'll include it anyway..) -
What was NeWS
i know nothing about NeWS, but have been very curious about it ever since i first heard of it.
I first heard of it in the X chapter of the UNIX haters handbook, which makes occational references to NeWS as a windowing system done right. It's also a very interesting read (not FUD at all, just reasonable if incendentary analysis..) and probably would tell you a little about NeWS..
The URL i just listed above, btw, which i just found now on Google, happens to contain a link to a series of NeWS resources, which i haven't read yet. draw your own conclusions.
I am very curious about NeWS, and if anyone out there has used it, please post and let us know anything about it you may have to say.. Or is there anyone who STILL uses it?
What are the differences between this, DPS, and Quartz? DPS and Quartz aren't capable of running over a network are they? (i fear this last sentance will ignite an irrelivant flamewar, but i'm curious, so i'll include it anyway..) -
The Current State of X :)
I believe this site summarizes the complaints against X (and a few other things) fairly well. There's a chapter on the X-windows disaster available in full-text. Even if some of it's claims are overexaggerated, it is still extremely amusing reading.
-
The Current State of X :)
I believe this site summarizes the complaints against X (and a few other things) fairly well. There's a chapter on the X-windows disaster available in full-text. Even if some of it's claims are overexaggerated, it is still extremely amusing reading.
-
Motif not dead? AIEEE! HOW DO WE KILL IT?
Motif set about to capture the 'visual elegance' of Windows (pre-95), and has been stuck there ever since. The stupid drop-down fly-out menus (as opposed to drop down - scroll) Motif has are grounds enough for shooting someone. Motif does not "provide a GUI for Unix applications" -- it makes UNIX look retarded! It says, "Warning! This system is unusable! Try your toaster instead!"
http://yawara.anime.net/gaijinFAQ/n etscape.html
It being the case that Motif sucks beyond belief, and that Netscape Navigator uses Motif, you basically have to maim it to let it display Japanese in things like the Menu-bar, Bookmarks, and Forms.
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/ simcity/keynote.html
It wouldn't have been possible to port SimCity to X11 using Open Software Foundation's Motif toolkit. It just absolutely sucks. It's not open, and you have to pay for the source code, and it's not being maintained.
http://www.mandrakeuser.org/connec t/cbrowse.html
The interface sucks. It is built with the legacy Motif library.
http://shadowrun.html.com/ubb
And I programmed in C/X-windows/Motif for ten years. The most far away I can stand from that monster, the happier I am
http://www.motifzone.com/resources/sta rt.htm
Let's face it, X/Motif are sophisticated pieces of system software with lots of flexibility and power.
http://slashdot.org/articles/99
I'm a professional X11 programmer, and GTK+ is one of the nicest widget sets about. Combined with GNOME it has the potential to beat even the object frameworks produced by Less Palatable Companies. For people who have never done professional X11 programming, Motif is CRAP. Everybody hates it. It was designed by a committee, and damn it shows. There's a reason it's called Bloatif. Even the addon packages to make Motif more usable (by giving it workable file dialogs, tree views, and a drag and drop you don't have to implement 90% by hand) are buggy, slow and memory hungry.
http://slashdot.org/books/99/03/22
If it weren't for GTK I'd probably be programming Motif (well, OK, actually I'd be programming in QT, but that's besides the point). Motif is much like raw X Window System calls, except that Motif is MUCH MUCH WORSE! Motif is much like the stinky dead fish that your dog insists on digging up every time you try to throw it away. The world needs more Motif applications like I need a hole in my head. I can go on and on about this. Really, I can. Moral of the story: Learn a toolkit. Believe me on this one. I've made dumber comments, but few have been more true. Just don't do Motif.
[...]
BTW, I agree about Motif. I think it was the worst thing to happen to Unix, ever. I think it did more to harm Unix as a platform than anything else that ever occurred during the 30+ years that Unix has been in existence.
[...]
Motif/Lesstif is arguably worse than gtk, and I programmed a lot of Motif.
If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that. - Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation
http://ecco.bsee.swin.edu.au/un ix/uh/x-windows.html
The Motif Self-Abuse Kit
X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want for years: a standard that allowed programs built for different computers to interoperate. But it didn't give them enough. X gave programmers a way to display windows and pixels, but it didn't speak to buttons, menus, scroll bars, or any of the other necessary elements of a graphical user interface. Programmers invented their own. Soon the Unix community had six or so different interface standards. A bunch of people who hadn't written 10 lines of code in as many years set up shop in a brick building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was the former home of a failed computer company and came up with a "solution:" the Open Software Foundation's Motif. What Motif does is make Unix slow. Real slow. A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP's circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not. Recipe for disaster: start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which was designed and hand coded in assembler. Build something on top of three or four layers of X to look like Windows. Call it "Motif." Now put two 486 boxes side by side, one running Windows and one running Unix/Motif. Watch one crawl. Watch it wither. Watch it drop faster than the putsch in Russia. Motif can't compete with the Macintosh OS or with DOS/Windows as a delivery platform. -
Re:UNIX sucks.
dude, you have no sense of humor (and neither does that kaufmann guy). you might want to actually look at the damn link before spouting off. BTW, the UNIX haters handbook was written by people who contributed significantly to UNIX itself..heres a clue - dennis ritchie contributed to the book as did programmers who worked on the solaris NeWs system, NeXT and others. and moderators - that applies to you too. man...i dont believe i got moderated down for posting a link to the handbook.
-
Alec Newman
This guy looks like a spaghetti western character. Could be a real star in the making. He's got the Clint Eastwook stare down pat.
- Link to updated English info on Dune
- A play "Plenty" with Alec Newman
- A little info from Cannes about another movie featuring Alec Newman called Greenwich Mean Time also by Icon Entertainment International.
-
Simson is also an editor of...
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook!
I mean, Simson Garfinkel is a notorious UNIX hater.
Check out:
http://www.catalog.com/hopki ns/unix-haters/preface.html
Although I consider myself a Linux/Unix enthusiast, I'll admit some of the things on this page made me laugh.
Sorry for the marginally offtopic post.
Who said Slashdot was biased? -
IRIX 5.1 comes to mind
-
The return of Sun's NEWSAnyone remember Sun Microsystem's NEWS ? (Network Extensible Window System; I found a very old page referencing it; a web search might turn up more). It was an early contemporary to X windows which was based on Display Postscript. You could even upload code to the NEWS server (although god knows what sort of security risks that posed, nobody was worried back then).
Sounds like IBM and friends need to either fund conversion of open-source apps to X11-DPS, or form a new consortium to develop a new Open Source resolution- independent (or at least less-dependent) protocol and libraries.
-
Re:Lacking features in GTK
GTK suffers a bit from not-invented-here syndrome, and ignores existing standards like
Standards are good if they aren't completely borked. If they are, they simply make life intolerable. The following URL explains how this applies to X in more detail than I could: The X-Windows Disaster -
The Broken Window FallacyIf anything, a problem of this magnitude that requires nearly a trillion dollars in fixes would have pulled us out of a recession or at least kept it from getting worse. Just like WWII, all it took was for something to require billions and billions of dollars to be spent on something. The ripple effects of all that money would create jobs all over the place.
This argument is "the fallacy of the broken window". By this reasoning, a street punk who thinks it's kewl to break windows should be hailed as a public benefactor, since he creates jobs for glaziers.
Obviously, this reasoning must be fundamentally flawed, since it leads inescapably to an absurd conclusion. The flaw was pointed out by economist Frederick Bastiat in the essay "That Which is Seen, and that Which is Not Seen". Yes, destruction creates jobs for those who are hired to repair it, but this drains money that otherwise would have been spent on new goods and services. The fact that the former is seen while the latter is unseen leads to the fallacy.
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Frank Zappa
You guys are forgetting the obvious, genius, comedian,
Frank Zappa! His style is amazing, and his
solos, awesome...
And he is a geek. He never did drugs, he had a
funny voice, and named his kids, well, odd names.
Matt Groening did this back in 93'....a funny read - Life in Hell.
I guess I'm not good at explaining myself....but Zappa brough music to a new, untouched level.
He was an autodidact genius. He is much appreciated.
- "You are what you is" -
Don't panic! (Basic TM law info)
I'm a lawyer and (worse?) a law professor, so I have to start with disclaimers: this isn't legal advice, consult a lawyer who is familiar with the facts of your situation, etc. etc. YMMV. Consult the other disclaimers at once, etc. etc..
I should also note that what follows is based on the law at the time the letter was written (i.e. I am not taking account of the cybersquatting bill, which AFAIK has not actually passed both houses yet although I gather it's almost a foregone conclusion).
Furthermore, trademark law varies some (but only some) from country to country. I know much more about US law than I do about other countries. What I do know about European trademark law, however, suggests that the position of a domain name registrant viz a viz a brick & mortar trademark holder is a little less favorable in, say, the Netherlands, than it would be in the US because the distinction between commercial/non-commercial uses is less strong, and because mere registration may qualify as "use" of a trademark or some other type of infringing activity. What follows is primarily geared to the US domain name registrant.
As a general rule, trademark law divides the universe of trademarks into two families: a fairly small set of "famous" marks (think "CocaCola (tm)" and everything else. In the US the "famous" marks (and, weirdly, maybe some non-famous marks) are protected by relatively new federal anti-dilution statute and in many but not all states by (older) state anti-dilution laws which do vary. All trademarks, whether famous or not, are also protected against "confusion" and "tarnishment" (and other stuff we'll ignore for now). Tarnishment prosecutions are rare, but the law protects against the association of a trademarked name with something really bad (porn or drugs), modulo first amendment concerns (but then beware libel law). Running a porn site, even a free one, might well be considered tarnishment if the site's name was easily confused with a trademarked name.
The critical points to understand, as a first approximation to the law only, are these:
- In the US, although not necessarily in other countries, mere registration of a domain name, without something more (infringing use and/or an offer to sell the domain name, especially one that is part of a pattern of such offers), is NOT a violation of trademark law. There might be some special cases sounding in unfair competition law (e.g. registering the domain name of a competitor), but we'll ignore that.
- If
- your use is purely non-commercial (you are not even selling T-shirts), and
- you have never offered to sell the domain name to anyone for anything, and
- you are not guilty of tarnishment
- If you are engaged in any sort of commercial activity using the domain name, it matters whether the trademark is famous or not.
- If it is (and fame can be just regional instead of national) , you might want to talk to a lawyer as this part of the law is in some flux since the federal statute is fairly new and state laws vary.
- If the mark is not famous, the most important issue is whether there is a likelihood of confusion between your site and the trademark. This is a question about how you are using the site, not a question about the name itself. On the other hand, the court will look at the totality of the circumstances, including how different your line of business is from that of the trademark holder. Just running a little disclaimer is not inevitably going to be enough to protect you, especially if there is substantial similarity between your line of business and theirs. Yup, probably lawyer time again.
- If you have offered to sell the domain name for $$$ the court is going to suspect you of being a cybersquatter. The more the $$$, the worse it looks. It also looks worse if you initiated the contact; it's less bad if they contacted you and they first broached the subject of $$$.
Note also that all new registrations and all re-registrations in
So, don't panic. Please keep in mind that the new cybersquatting bill may obsolete some of the above. I understand the bill was amended last week and I have not had a chance to look at the latest text, which is why I'm not discussing it.
A. Michael Froomkin,
U. Miami School of Law,POB 248087
Coral Gables, FL 33124,USA -
X11 is an engineering disaster
This article is laughable. I will debunk myself only a couple of its claims, but do yourself a favor and read the X11 chapter of the Unix-Haters Handbook . They do a much better job than I could even if I really tried.
X [is] beautiful from an engineering standpoint. It functions excellently on networks and uses shared memory to efficiently coexist with programs running on the same machine as the X server.
[...]
A specialist in California can run a program on a computer running IRIX in Japan and display it in the comfort of his own home on his Mac--complete with high quality 2D and 3D imaging--securely and even over a low bandwidth link.
Ahahahahahahah! This one is actually funny! What do you think he calls a "low bandwidth link"? I hope it's not some kind of phone line, because last time I tried to use xv (your basic image displaying program) with a modem, I almost threw the computer out the window. Try it for yourself, it's impressive... in slowness. Even with custom "compression protocols", X is a bandwidth (and memory) hog.
"Securely"??!!! You mean that the ugly hack known as MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE is considered secure? Who are we trying to fool here?
I'm sorry, X sucks. I've never seen anything quite as bloated and slow. The only reason everybody uses it is because there really isn't anything else. The only good thing about X is that it's not integrated in the OS and I can do without if I want to. Oops, wait, that's because it's running on top of Unix.
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X11 is an engineering disaster
This article is laughable. I will debunk myself only a couple of its claims, but do yourself a favor and read the X11 chapter of the Unix-Haters Handbook . They do a much better job than I could even if I really tried.
X [is] beautiful from an engineering standpoint. It functions excellently on networks and uses shared memory to efficiently coexist with programs running on the same machine as the X server.
[...]
A specialist in California can run a program on a computer running IRIX in Japan and display it in the comfort of his own home on his Mac--complete with high quality 2D and 3D imaging--securely and even over a low bandwidth link.
Ahahahahahahah! This one is actually funny! What do you think he calls a "low bandwidth link"? I hope it's not some kind of phone line, because last time I tried to use xv (your basic image displaying program) with a modem, I almost threw the computer out the window. Try it for yourself, it's impressive... in slowness. Even with custom "compression protocols", X is a bandwidth (and memory) hog.
"Securely"??!!! You mean that the ugly hack known as MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE is considered secure? Who are we trying to fool here?
I'm sorry, X sucks. I've never seen anything quite as bloated and slow. The only reason everybody uses it is because there really isn't anything else. The only good thing about X is that it's not integrated in the OS and I can do without if I want to. Oops, wait, that's because it's running on top of Unix.
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The opposite viewAnd one that I'm sort of more willing to believe. Take a look at this.
I don't know about this guy. He seemed way too committed to something that at best is a good idea that got screwed up somewhere along the way. And anyone who says that we should all use Motif frightens me. Makes me wonder if he's ever seen Motif. "I know! Let's make all the widgets HUGE and CORPSE GRAY! Yeah, that'll be kick-ass!" Phew.
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in answer to the original questions...
With this question, I don't want to start a discussion if X should be replaced or not, but I only want to find out what's bad about it and where other solutions are better.
There has been a lot of discussion here already about what X's failings are. Quite a lot of it has been wrong (X has many problems, but it's not that ``tvtwm sucks.'' That has nothing to do with X.)
The X chapter of the Unix Haters' Handbook really does do a great job of covering the major points. Yes, this was written several years ago, and not all of it is relevant any more (for example, most Linux users don't use Motif, so all the abuse piled on the Motif implementation probably isn't relevant to most of you; and GTK doesn't even use the X resource manager, so most of you probably don't use your
But none of that matters . Why? Because it doesn't matter how much X sucks, because X is entrenched. It works badly, but it works well enough. It is the de-facto sub-standard. It cannot be replaced, or even fixed, without rewriting every single graphical application you have ever seen, and that's just not practical.
Another point I feel the need to make is that most of the people who have been posting to this thread don't understand what X actually is. Some people are talking about X, and some people are talking about ``the sum total of the graphical Unix experience'', of which X is only a small part. In particular, if you're flaming the way your window manager works, you're not talking about X, you're talking about some random crummy application. There are a ton of window managers (there are possibly even more WMs than there are IRC clients, and that's pretty impressive.)
The source of this confusion is that most other window systems come with policy: the look of the window management controls are built in to the window system itself, as are all kinds of other things like cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop: in the interest of ``flexibility,'' X left all of these things undefined, meaning there is no consistency at all.
X itself is very low-level, handling graphics operations and little else. Though small, it imposes serious performance restrictions by the nature of its design.
Because X itself does close to nothing, on top of it, many organizations have built the so-called ``toolkits'' that let you actually build user interfaces. These toolkits impose policy, and implement all the things that one would expect from a window system if one's first experience with a window system was something other than X.
These toolkits inherit all the limitations of X, and then add more of their own: Athena is ugly as sin, and does very little (it doesn't even have real menubars.) Motif was insanely buggy for years, and is still incredibly inefficient. GTK is slow, and isn't really finished yet. KDE requires C++. And so on. And of course all of them are incompatible with each other to various degrees.
If you're bitching about things not being ``object oriented'' enough, then you're bitching about a toolkit, not about X. X itself is so low level that there's just no need for OO hair: those abstractions come at a higher level.
Some people think it's a great thing that X doesn't come with policy. I say nonsense: rampant customizability is almost always an excuse for not having taken the time to get it right in the first place. I just want an appliance that works, I don't want to have to spend days tweaking it before I can turn it on.
Here's what X's lauded ``flexibility'' has given me: right now I'm looking at a screen that has applications on it written using five different toolkits. They all work basically the same (which is to say, they all work basically like a Xerox Alto), but each one renders menus differently, and half of them do cut-and-paste in incompatible ways. Thanks to the flexibility of X, there is no consistency. I really don't care what menus look like, or how cut-and-paste works; I just wish it was possible to pick one and stick with it.
The other efforts to provide consistency across the desktop (Gnome, KDE, whatever) all start off with the requirement of rewriting every single application to do so! What a colossal waste of time! But there is simply no other way, thanks to the legacy of X: thanks to X's refusal to dictate policy, there is no one policy to replace, there are dozens.
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in answer to the original questions...
With this question, I don't want to start a discussion if X should be replaced or not, but I only want to find out what's bad about it and where other solutions are better.
There has been a lot of discussion here already about what X's failings are. Quite a lot of it has been wrong (X has many problems, but it's not that ``tvtwm sucks.'' That has nothing to do with X.)
The X chapter of the Unix Haters' Handbook really does do a great job of covering the major points. Yes, this was written several years ago, and not all of it is relevant any more (for example, most Linux users don't use Motif, so all the abuse piled on the Motif implementation probably isn't relevant to most of you; and GTK doesn't even use the X resource manager, so most of you probably don't use your
But none of that matters . Why? Because it doesn't matter how much X sucks, because X is entrenched. It works badly, but it works well enough. It is the de-facto sub-standard. It cannot be replaced, or even fixed, without rewriting every single graphical application you have ever seen, and that's just not practical.
Another point I feel the need to make is that most of the people who have been posting to this thread don't understand what X actually is. Some people are talking about X, and some people are talking about ``the sum total of the graphical Unix experience'', of which X is only a small part. In particular, if you're flaming the way your window manager works, you're not talking about X, you're talking about some random crummy application. There are a ton of window managers (there are possibly even more WMs than there are IRC clients, and that's pretty impressive.)
The source of this confusion is that most other window systems come with policy: the look of the window management controls are built in to the window system itself, as are all kinds of other things like cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop: in the interest of ``flexibility,'' X left all of these things undefined, meaning there is no consistency at all.
X itself is very low-level, handling graphics operations and little else. Though small, it imposes serious performance restrictions by the nature of its design.
Because X itself does close to nothing, on top of it, many organizations have built the so-called ``toolkits'' that let you actually build user interfaces. These toolkits impose policy, and implement all the things that one would expect from a window system if one's first experience with a window system was something other than X.
These toolkits inherit all the limitations of X, and then add more of their own: Athena is ugly as sin, and does very little (it doesn't even have real menubars.) Motif was insanely buggy for years, and is still incredibly inefficient. GTK is slow, and isn't really finished yet. KDE requires C++. And so on. And of course all of them are incompatible with each other to various degrees.
If you're bitching about things not being ``object oriented'' enough, then you're bitching about a toolkit, not about X. X itself is so low level that there's just no need for OO hair: those abstractions come at a higher level.
Some people think it's a great thing that X doesn't come with policy. I say nonsense: rampant customizability is almost always an excuse for not having taken the time to get it right in the first place. I just want an appliance that works, I don't want to have to spend days tweaking it before I can turn it on.
Here's what X's lauded ``flexibility'' has given me: right now I'm looking at a screen that has applications on it written using five different toolkits. They all work basically the same (which is to say, they all work basically like a Xerox Alto), but each one renders menus differently, and half of them do cut-and-paste in incompatible ways. Thanks to the flexibility of X, there is no consistency. I really don't care what menus look like, or how cut-and-paste works; I just wish it was possible to pick one and stick with it.
The other efforts to provide consistency across the desktop (Gnome, KDE, whatever) all start off with the requirement of rewriting every single application to do so! What a colossal waste of time! But there is simply no other way, thanks to the legacy of X: thanks to X's refusal to dictate policy, there is no one policy to replace, there are dozens.
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X puts the network division at the wrong point
A lot of people have been pointing out X's ability to run programs over the network, which is certainly one of its best aspects. (As I was fond of saying when Microsoft tried to do the same thing: "Bringing you technology a bunch of college students developed decades ago.") However, people seem to be overlooking one of the major flaws of this system: the division of work between the client and server requires way too much traffic between the two.
In X, every single key press, mouse click, redraw, and move of the mouse sends messages from the server to the client. Every graphic drawing operation sends messages from the client back to the server. This is a lot more network traffic than is necessary for a GUI application. It can also incur a lot of latency for the user on simple operations that they shouldn't have to wait for.
A much more sensible division is to have the system with which the user interacts directly (the server in the backwards X parlance) handle all the simple stuff (drawing, direct GUI interaction like button widgets, pulldown menus, etc.) and only talk across the network when there's something meaningful to communicate machine doing the work (client in the X sense). There are systems that work this way, such as the lng dead NeWS (which has already been mentioned here), and of course Java (which was developed by some of the same people who worked on NeWS). The main problem with this kind of division is that it's hard to automatically partition an application into the two parts (user interaction and engine). It's certainly very manual with Java. (Does anybody know how much of a pain it was or wasn't with NeWS?)
