Slashdot Mirror
XFree86 10 Years Old
ChazeFroy writes "XFree86 is now 10 years old. To quote from the page, 'What makes this particularly eventful is that it is fully backwards compatible; this is a true testament to the spirit of the original X protocol of which XFree86 is its finest implementation.'" Ten years and
still binary compatible. Very cool.
"Mach is the biggest intellectual fraud of the last decade."
"Really, not X-Windows?"
"I said 'intellectual'."
-- overheard in Silicon Valley
You dont have to deal with several hundred students using Xterminals...
.xsession and window manager configs until I haven't a clue what does what and can't help them sort out problems.
- it's flexible, meaning each of our lecturers wants the students to use a different window manager, and the students edit their
- it's network portable, which means our students could be using machines on the other side of the world and running netscape on that and then complaining to me that it's running slowly and I cant tell they are running it on foo.bar.au
- it's cross platform, meaning whatever machine someone has on their desk, they want a copy of it installed! Grrr! There's nothing a BOFH hates more than having someone want some software!
- it allows you to run a screensaver as background, using up CPU cycles that the rest of our students would like to use for statistical analyses! killall -9 xscreensaver!
- it's free, which means I cant use our budget as an excuse to not get it so I dont have to install it, thus creating more work for me!
No, I love it really. X is fantastic. Here's to X more years!
Baz
Men and women have lived in millions of years and we're still compatible.
What the fsck are you talking about? Yes, we may be compatible at the lowest Physical layer, but for those same millions of years you speak of, we (men) have also been trying to reverse engineer their (women's) higher-level protocols. We've barely broken the Data-Link layer and even our understanding there is only minimal. Compatible? We can barely keep our sockets connected. Hell, the last time I tried to ping my wife she gave me a protocol mismatch error! My Session layer with my her has been working reasonably well for many years now, but you ought to see the Presentation layer break down, especially on birthdays and anniversaries! I'm afraid, my friend, that we've got a long way to go to achieve full compatibility.
--Jim