Good grief... I certainly hope that Coverity's analyzer strips out comments before it starts evaluating code. Even the dimmest pointy-haired manager would see right through that scam.
``What is this third kind of software that is neither open source nor proprietary which is bringing down the average industry standard for software quality?''
Internally-written software that is not being released for ``external'' consumption, perhaps? There's likely far more of that in use than what is being sold for profit or being given away.
... the class was never taught because no one ever signed up for it. The interest was zero.
Probably because: a) students' friends who'd already graduated reported back that their employers didn't give a damn about doing much testing and b) it definitely isn't something that pulls down the big bucks.
It seems to me that testing is barely being done if at all. I think that any one who takes a look at the state of the SW market sees that; especially web applications (though I may be finding more fault in their nearly complete lack of what was once called "human factors" testing and that really needs to be done in the design phase, IMHO). I used to work with a couple of guys who were software testers for a while. It was very, very under-appreciated. You end up being the pain-in-the-ass who caused either the delivery date to slip or the Death March needed to fix the problems. ("Gee! Where do I sign up?") Both of those problems could be solved by putting the Marketing people in their place; product shipping dates aren't set until all the testing has been done. First to market with a piece of crap doesn't do the company any good.
``However, if you run existing code or use an "off the shelf" open source application, chances are, it will be tested and developed on MySQL/MariaDB and not on Postgres.''
That was my experience back when I was looking for web site software a few years ago. It's not so much that the "off the shelf" application hasn't been tested against PostgreSQL but it's almost certain that the developers only considered MySQL, taken advantage of non-standard SQL statements that are available in MySQL, and locked users into using only that database. I downloaded untold numbers of web site packages and found that most of them had used things like MySQL's "REPLACE" statement which meant they wouldn't be useful in my existing PostgreSQL environment without significant reworking. Standards, shmandards.
Ideally, it'd be nice if more developers would write their application to use some of the database abstraction layers that are out there (PEAR, ADOdb, etc.). At least then users would be able to merely use the database they may already have installed.
Segways will never be ubiquitous because they provide no protection from the weather and you can't really carry anything when riding one (other than what will fit in your backpack). Until we all live in domed cities cars will still be more useful than Segways for getting around. I'm still wondering how they'll be able to transport more than one person at a time. A family outing to, well, anywhere isn't going to work with Segways.
The article is right on about the dorkiness factor of Google Glass. I've gotta wonder about the genius at Google that OKed the development of Glass without a better understanding as to whether people will even want to be broadcasting everything they're seeing onto the Web. And looking like a Borg while doing it.
My dad used to "write" programs for those computers. He took me to work one day and I was amazed that the tangle of wires was somehow useful. For a long time I had one of the two-pronged plugs/jumpers that were used on those boards. (Lost in the sands of time now.)
The sequestration cuts were intended to be across-the-board cuts; not targeted as the Republicans are now wanting. The people bitching and complaining about the cuts that the FAA don't seem to want to own up the the fact that they agreed to these across-the-board cuts so they could go back home and crow about how tough they were on reducing the deficit but now want us to forget about all that and place all the blame on the Executive branch for implementing the sequestration as it was intended. Weasels, all of 'em.
(I'm surprised that the auto-spell checker is not flagging "sequestration" as incorrectly spelled.)
``our organization of +50,000k users was affected''
So who at your company gets dinged when 50,000 employees are sitting on the hands while Google fixes their problem? Surely some monetary value can be assigned to a loss of productivity this widespread. Or does management take advantage of Google's outage by calling impromptu staff meetings?
... one could argue that Steve Forbes has less insight into the value of a dollar than the kid flipping burgers at Mickey D's. When I even listen to Forbes, I take everything he says with a huge grain of salt because whatever stand he takes on an issue or policy is based, primarily, on it making him more money. Once he figures out how to exploit bitcoin to his advantage, he'll be singing a different tune.
``No getting slowed down having to satisfy rigid rules imposed at compile time, just pure productivity.
Which is great if the quality of what is being produced is no longer a concern. We encounter too many examples of that each day. To paraphrase from an old joke: ``This stuff is just awful but just look at how much of it we're making.''
``The funniest alternative is a box I've seen that is sealed. The signal goes off when your device is inside, but you have no idea how the device responded.''
... do something special: name an exoplanet after someone.
(Maybe it's only funny because on my way to work I used to drive past that outfit that names stars for you, registered the name in a book at the Library of Congress, and gave you a hokey star map so you could find it.)
``I haven't found many who insist on a Word version of resumes; the ones who do that usually do so because they want to edit your resume and replace your name and info with their own letterhead before passing it out to employers, to make sure the employers don't go around them and call you directly.''
I had one do something like that but it was even worse than what you mentioned: the asshole headhunter changed my resume -- adding experience I didn't have -- and sent me off to an interview. When the interviewer picked up the copy of my resume from his desk and started asking me odd questions -- for example: "Tell me about how you used technology XYZ" and "XYZ" was not in my resume; or so I thought -- that had absolutely nothing to do with my background, I asked to see the resume and found that the headhunter had added text that indicated that I had experience in using 2-3 technologies that I had zero experience with. I apologized telling him that my resume had been significantly altered before it was sent to him and ended the interview at that point. I later called the headhunter and read him the riot act and never worked with anyone from that firm ever again.
THAT's why I prefer to submit PDF-formatted resumes. It's all to easy for someone to go messing around with your resume when it's in Word-format. (Granted it's not impossible to muck around with my PDF file but why make it easy for 'em.)
``It's equally easy to collect the bunch in a database, pick away the few that you want to interview then hit the red "reject" button sending a "sorry you didn't make it" reply.''
And it ought to be possible to include the reason why your application did not make the cut. Failure to provide that is, IMHO, unreasonable. The logic is already in the filtering software. All that is lacking is the automated reply code. Maybe the employers already have this feature but they disable it in order to avoid being seen as spammers. I mean if they're getting as many applications as they claim... maybe they're afraid of running afoul of some clause in their ISP's ToS if they send out automated rejection letter. (Aside: in a previous job, I helped automate an email process that sent product/pricing changes to customers. There were times we'd be sending out 1000s of emails a day. (We included a batching function to only send "N" at a time before waiting a few minutes to avoid clobbering the corporate email servers. Part of the concern from the messaging team was that these emails would all be headed outside the company.)
``Since company job boards are likely designed for IE, why not use it, especially if it reduces your chances for errors ?''
What about the job seeker who is not using Windows? You relegate those potential employees to having to either borrow someone's computer or go to a public library to apply for a job. When was Microsoft granted the right to determine who is going to be able to enter the work force?
``Demanding that employees use IE6, particularly if it is restricted to internal networks and is necessary to run particular software, is certainly reasonable.''
I've worked at companies, though, that had a policy like "IE required for internal web services" and the trouble is that the same developers who are writing the internal sites are also writing the external sites.
I agree, though, that refusing to use a turkey of a browser for the internal sites is a problem. One that will eventually bite the obstinate employee in the backside when they don't get their annual review forms completed using the browser that they refuse to use.
``just copy from the pdf and paste into there word app.''
My previous experience was that I could submit a resume in PDF format and not get any grief. But that was then...
My wife's re-entering the job market and is having much more "fun" than any job seeker should have to tolerate. You get the choice of uploading your resume to a company site or entering (cutting-n-pasting if you're smart) it into a form.. ".DOC" and ".RTF" (really!) are the most commonly accepted formats; PDFs less often than I'd like to see. Now if you were to think that uploading your resume is the easy way to apply for a job, you might want to think twice. What seems to be pretty common is for the company web site to scan your resume and fill in the form automagically. The problem is that their scanning process sucks like a tornado and you have to manually correct all the things that it gets wrong. Given the inability of the HR scanning software to properly go through your resume, you've got to wonder how badly it's mangled someone's cover letter before it's seen by HR's filtering software.
While cutting and pasting is turning out to be the way to go, it significantly slows limits the number of applications you can complete in a day. When I told the missus that I'd read in a newsletter about some guy who claims he had been applying online to as many as 70 companies per day (I'm pretty sure he wasn't talking about using services like Resume Rabbit and the like), she loudly said "There's no way in hell he can do that!"
If these sites are the state of the art in HR software, there is no hope for the vast majority of today's job seekers responding to jobs on corporate web sites. It's no longer a surprise why corporate America claims it can't find qualified candidates?
``Why is it that in every field you always see a jackass like that coming up with totally unrelated methods to weed people out. Why not have them do the actual job you want and see how they perform.''
Short answer: because the people doing the screening have absolutely no idea of the skill set that's actually required to perform the job. All they know is that the hiring manager supplied them with a laundry list of things that Joe did for the company before he left -- likely because of boredom and there being no chance for career advancement.
Long answer: Because they'd have to actually hire you, run you through the onboarding process, and put you in the position to evaluate your performance. In the meantime, the recruiter has been paid 25-30% of your salary as a fee. If you don't work out, the company would have to fight to get their fee back. My understanding is that many -- most? -- recruiters agree to refund that fee if the candidate turns out to be a complete bozo, it's still a hassle and the employer would, I'm sure, prefer to avoid if they can, hence the ridiculous requirements with insane years of experience, specific software versions, and so on. The downside is that the hiring manager winds up going through a much, much longer hiring process -- along with all the other staffers who participate in the interview process who are, frankly, getting more than a little pissed off over how long they've been doing Joe's job while the hiring process drags on and on. For some reason, nobody at the company seems to notice this. Or they realize there's a problem but don't give a damn because it doesn't affect the HR person's job.
I saw an open position at a company where a friend's ex works advertised for over a year. Imagine what that's doing to the workload of people who are filling in for that open position. I never did learn from my friend whether they actually filled that position or whether they just divvied up the work for everyone else to do and saved the company the salary/benefits. Personally, if someone has all the years of experience and broad exposure to all the hardware and software that employers -- or HR people -- are demanding nowadays, I'd be wondering why they aren't looking for a higher level job and not a simple parallel move where the only thing that's changing is the company that's paying them. "Wow! We're impressed that you did X, Y, and Z for your employer for 5-8 years. How would you like doing the exact same thing for us?" Doesn't sound so tempting to me.
But I sense we're drifting off the topic of browsers, aren't we. (heh heh)
Gosh, it's nice to know that my employer sees me as a good bet to stick around after I was hired. But I can remember having to resort to using my wife's Windows laptop to even apply for jobs at many companies because their damned web site would not render properly unless you used IE. I had found that company's jobs sites that employed a popular (*cough* Taleo *cough*) to run their job listings and application process were pretty bad with Firefox compatibility (making you re-enable all the add-on toys that many FF users turn off due to their annoyance factor and their security holes). The absolute worst, though, were the "homegrown" HR pages.
Aside: let's not even get into the requirement for a Word version of your resume when applying for a UNIX- or Linux-heavy position. Again, the wife's Windows laptop was handy since all the other computers in the house have been Microsoft-free for the last ten years or so. Saved me from having to schlepp over to the local public library with my resume on a USB drive just to make Word versions. The Word/Office files that are created from LibreOffice/OpenOffice are considerably larger than the same file created directly from MS-Word, sometimes larger than the company's upload limit. (Clever means of filtering out older, more experienced UNIX/Linux people with longer resumes?)
``Because, while distracted driving is a problem, navigation aids do more good than harm. It is easier to defend them than eating, applying makeup, listening to music, etc. that we permit.''
Does that map aid in your ability to safely drive your car? And don't try to claim that not getting lost or missing a turn is unsafe and that your cellphone map is helping you to be safe.
Any navigation aid that requires that you take your eyes off the road while the car is moving should be covered by the law (Even though IANAL, IMHO that was the intent of the law when it was passed). It shouldn't matter if that is a map on your cellphone or in the dashboard. (I would argue that it should cover paper maps or even printed Mapquest driving instructions though the law didn't mention those; I have seen idiots hurtling down the expressway with a paper map unfolded in front of them). People don't seem to get that their toys are compromising their ability to control a couple of tons of metal while driving at speeds where their reaction time could only be a second (or less). Most folks will argue that "No! Not me!. I can read the tiny map in the dashboard or on my phone, manage to stay in my lane, and keep an eye out for other drivers!" and that they are not distracted but they're wrong. They'll kill someone one of these days. If you need to refer to a map... pull over to the side of the road.
As for eating? If you have to look at your food? Yeah, it's a distraction. But most people don't need to look at their quarter pounder to eat it. Putting on makeup? Huge distraction. A good idea only if you want to risk jabbing that mascara brush into your eye. Listening to music? I fail to see how that's a distraction. Unless you are one of those people who has to read the cutesy little messages that appear on radio displays nowadays (radio stations ought to reconsider that feature) having music playing is not much more of a distraction than driving with the windows open and having to hear traffic. (Aside: If driving with headphones on isn't illegal in all 50 states, it should be. It used to be in Illinois but I've seen morons driving while wearing earbuds. You're supposed to be able to the sirens on emergency vehicles.)
If you need to drive somewhere and need a map, read the map beforehand. Or have a friend who can read maps give you instructions during the drive. Or get an in-dash navigation computer with voice instructions. But keep your damned eyes on the road.
Again... you show that you misunderstand how X works. It is the X client that is shooting bitmaps across the network. If you cannot get the terminology right, your arguments aren't going to be taken seriously.
And if an X application running on the client system is doing that, then, IMHO, the blame lies with the developer of the application and not X11. Perhaps it's the graphics libraries that have been employed for developing the X application that are the main source of all this inefficiency. My guess is that it's things like skins, themes, bizarre fonts, etc. that are probably the biggest reason that bitmaps have to be sent across the wire. It's wrong to blame X11 for developers using bitmaps when drawing objects. It's not X11's fault that developers have taken to using inefficient programming practices. Much like web developers that design web pages that are only rendered quickly when viewed on the same LAN as the server and load so slowly to be all but unviewable by users who don't live next door to the phone company's local office. Maybe having the developers work from home and have to see their work running in an environment similar to that encountered by the vast majority of the application users would have been helpful. I just think that throwing out the infrastructure because application developers got lazy or forgot to test their application in a realistic setting is the wrong solution.
``... you are breaking the classic backwards server-client paradigm of X.''
I found it hard to take much of your argument seriously when you wrote the above. "Client-server" does not mean "PC client running Windows-Windows server. The Wintel crowd pretty much co-opted the term "client-server" and when they encounter a case where "server" doesn't mean a Windows server, they go nuts.
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Good grief... I certainly hope that Coverity's analyzer strips out comments before it starts evaluating code. Even the dimmest pointy-haired manager would see right through that scam.
Internally-written software that is not being released for ``external'' consumption, perhaps? There's likely far more of that in use than what is being sold for profit or being given away.
Patrol -> Nagios
Control-M -> ????
before the licensing costs go through the roof.
(I predict that they'll be laying off software developers once Bain starts "improving" the business.)
Probably because: a) students' friends who'd already graduated reported back that their employers didn't give a damn about doing much testing and b) it definitely isn't something that pulls down the big bucks.
It seems to me that testing is barely being done if at all. I think that any one who takes a look at the state of the SW market sees that; especially web applications (though I may be finding more fault in their nearly complete lack of what was once called "human factors" testing and that really needs to be done in the design phase, IMHO). I used to work with a couple of guys who were software testers for a while. It was very, very under-appreciated. You end up being the pain-in-the-ass who caused either the delivery date to slip or the Death March needed to fix the problems. ("Gee! Where do I sign up?") Both of those problems could be solved by putting the Marketing people in their place; product shipping dates aren't set until all the testing has been done. First to market with a piece of crap doesn't do the company any good.
That was my experience back when I was looking for web site software a few years ago. It's not so much that the "off the shelf" application hasn't been tested against PostgreSQL but it's almost certain that the developers only considered MySQL, taken advantage of non-standard SQL statements that are available in MySQL, and locked users into using only that database. I downloaded untold numbers of web site packages and found that most of them had used things like MySQL's "REPLACE" statement which meant they wouldn't be useful in my existing PostgreSQL environment without significant reworking. Standards, shmandards.
Ideally, it'd be nice if more developers would write their application to use some of the database abstraction layers that are out there (PEAR, ADOdb, etc.). At least then users would be able to merely use the database they may already have installed.
Segways will never be ubiquitous because they provide no protection from the weather and you can't really carry anything when riding one (other than what will fit in your backpack). Until we all live in domed cities cars will still be more useful than Segways for getting around. I'm still wondering how they'll be able to transport more than one person at a time. A family outing to, well, anywhere isn't going to work with Segways.
The article is right on about the dorkiness factor of Google Glass. I've gotta wonder about the genius at Google that OKed the development of Glass without a better understanding as to whether people will even want to be broadcasting everything they're seeing onto the Web. And looking like a Borg while doing it.
My dad used to "write" programs for those computers. He took me to work one day and I was amazed that the tangle of wires was somehow useful. For a long time I had one of the two-pronged plugs/jumpers that were used on those boards. (Lost in the sands of time now.)
The sequestration cuts were intended to be across-the-board cuts; not targeted as the Republicans are now wanting. The people bitching and complaining about the cuts that the FAA don't seem to want to own up the the fact that they agreed to these across-the-board cuts so they could go back home and crow about how tough they were on reducing the deficit but now want us to forget about all that and place all the blame on the Executive branch for implementing the sequestration as it was intended. Weasels, all of 'em.
(I'm surprised that the auto-spell checker is not flagging "sequestration" as incorrectly spelled.)
So who at your company gets dinged when 50,000 employees are sitting on the hands while Google fixes their problem? Surely some monetary value can be assigned to a loss of productivity this widespread. Or does management take advantage of Google's outage by calling impromptu staff meetings?
... one could argue that Steve Forbes has less insight into the value of a dollar than the kid flipping burgers at Mickey D's. When I even listen to Forbes, I take everything he says with a huge grain of salt because whatever stand he takes on an issue or policy is based, primarily, on it making him more money. Once he figures out how to exploit bitcoin to his advantage, he'll be singing a different tune.
What a great idea! Piss off kids who will be voting in a few years. Let's see how well Rogers does with the 18 year old vote in the next election.
Which is great if the quality of what is being produced is no longer a concern. We encounter too many examples of that each day. To paraphrase from an old joke: ``This stuff is just awful but just look at how much of it we're making.''
Ah... Schroedinger's cellphone.
... do something special: name an exoplanet after someone.
(Maybe it's only funny because on my way to work I used to drive past that outfit that names stars for you, registered the name in a book at the Library of Congress, and gave you a hokey star map so you could find it.)
I had one do something like that but it was even worse than what you mentioned: the asshole headhunter changed my resume -- adding experience I didn't have -- and sent me off to an interview. When the interviewer picked up the copy of my resume from his desk and started asking me odd questions -- for example: "Tell me about how you used technology XYZ" and "XYZ" was not in my resume; or so I thought -- that had absolutely nothing to do with my background, I asked to see the resume and found that the headhunter had added text that indicated that I had experience in using 2-3 technologies that I had zero experience with. I apologized telling him that my resume had been significantly altered before it was sent to him and ended the interview at that point. I later called the headhunter and read him the riot act and never worked with anyone from that firm ever again.
THAT's why I prefer to submit PDF-formatted resumes. It's all to easy for someone to go messing around with your resume when it's in Word-format. (Granted it's not impossible to muck around with my PDF file but why make it easy for 'em.)
And it ought to be possible to include the reason why your application did not make the cut. Failure to provide that is, IMHO, unreasonable. The logic is already in the filtering software. All that is lacking is the automated reply code. Maybe the employers already have this feature but they disable it in order to avoid being seen as spammers. I mean if they're getting as many applications as they claim... maybe they're afraid of running afoul of some clause in their ISP's ToS if they send out automated rejection letter. (Aside: in a previous job, I helped automate an email process that sent product/pricing changes to customers. There were times we'd be sending out 1000s of emails a day. (We included a batching function to only send "N" at a time before waiting a few minutes to avoid clobbering the corporate email servers. Part of the concern from the messaging team was that these emails would all be headed outside the company.)
What about the job seeker who is not using Windows? You relegate those potential employees to having to either borrow someone's computer or go to a public library to apply for a job. When was Microsoft granted the right to determine who is going to be able to enter the work force?
I've worked at companies, though, that had a policy like "IE required for internal web services" and the trouble is that the same developers who are writing the internal sites are also writing the external sites.
I agree, though, that refusing to use a turkey of a browser for the internal sites is a problem. One that will eventually bite the obstinate employee in the backside when they don't get their annual review forms completed using the browser that they refuse to use.
My previous experience was that I could submit a resume in PDF format and not get any grief. But that was then...
My wife's re-entering the job market and is having much more "fun" than any job seeker should have to tolerate. You get the choice of uploading your resume to a company site or entering (cutting-n-pasting if you're smart) it into a form.. ".DOC" and ".RTF" (really!) are the most commonly accepted formats; PDFs less often than I'd like to see. Now if you were to think that uploading your resume is the easy way to apply for a job, you might want to think twice. What seems to be pretty common is for the company web site to scan your resume and fill in the form automagically. The problem is that their scanning process sucks like a tornado and you have to manually correct all the things that it gets wrong. Given the inability of the HR scanning software to properly go through your resume, you've got to wonder how badly it's mangled someone's cover letter before it's seen by HR's filtering software.
While cutting and pasting is turning out to be the way to go, it significantly slows limits the number of applications you can complete in a day. When I told the missus that I'd read in a newsletter about some guy who claims he had been applying online to as many as 70 companies per day (I'm pretty sure he wasn't talking about using services like Resume Rabbit and the like), she loudly said "There's no way in hell he can do that!"
If these sites are the state of the art in HR software, there is no hope for the vast majority of today's job seekers responding to jobs on corporate web sites. It's no longer a surprise why corporate America claims it can't find qualified candidates?
Short answer: because the people doing the screening have absolutely no idea of the skill set that's actually required to perform the job. All they know is that the hiring manager supplied them with a laundry list of things that Joe did for the company before he left -- likely because of boredom and there being no chance for career advancement.
Long answer: Because they'd have to actually hire you, run you through the onboarding process, and put you in the position to evaluate your performance. In the meantime, the recruiter has been paid 25-30% of your salary as a fee. If you don't work out, the company would have to fight to get their fee back. My understanding is that many -- most? -- recruiters agree to refund that fee if the candidate turns out to be a complete bozo, it's still a hassle and the employer would, I'm sure, prefer to avoid if they can, hence the ridiculous requirements with insane years of experience, specific software versions, and so on. The downside is that the hiring manager winds up going through a much, much longer hiring process -- along with all the other staffers who participate in the interview process who are, frankly, getting more than a little pissed off over how long they've been doing Joe's job while the hiring process drags on and on. For some reason, nobody at the company seems to notice this. Or they realize there's a problem but don't give a damn because it doesn't affect the HR person's job.
I saw an open position at a company where a friend's ex works advertised for over a year. Imagine what that's doing to the workload of people who are filling in for that open position. I never did learn from my friend whether they actually filled that position or whether they just divvied up the work for everyone else to do and saved the company the salary/benefits. Personally, if someone has all the years of experience and broad exposure to all the hardware and software that employers -- or HR people -- are demanding nowadays, I'd be wondering why they aren't looking for a higher level job and not a simple parallel move where the only thing that's changing is the company that's paying them. "Wow! We're impressed that you did X, Y, and Z for your employer for 5-8 years. How would you like doing the exact same thing for us?" Doesn't sound so tempting to me.
But I sense we're drifting off the topic of browsers, aren't we. (heh heh)
No. They get a warning from their boss that they should stop wasting time because IE is the corporate standard.
Gosh, it's nice to know that my employer sees me as a good bet to stick around after I was hired. But I can remember having to resort to using my wife's Windows laptop to even apply for jobs at many companies because their damned web site would not render properly unless you used IE. I had found that company's jobs sites that employed a popular (*cough* Taleo *cough*) to run their job listings and application process were pretty bad with Firefox compatibility (making you re-enable all the add-on toys that many FF users turn off due to their annoyance factor and their security holes). The absolute worst, though, were the "homegrown" HR pages.
Aside: let's not even get into the requirement for a Word version of your resume when applying for a UNIX- or Linux-heavy position. Again, the wife's Windows laptop was handy since all the other computers in the house have been Microsoft-free for the last ten years or so. Saved me from having to schlepp over to the local public library with my resume on a USB drive just to make Word versions. The Word/Office files that are created from LibreOffice/OpenOffice are considerably larger than the same file created directly from MS-Word, sometimes larger than the company's upload limit. (Clever means of filtering out older, more experienced UNIX/Linux people with longer resumes?)
Does that map aid in your ability to safely drive your car? And don't try to claim that not getting lost or missing a turn is unsafe and that your cellphone map is helping you to be safe.
Any navigation aid that requires that you take your eyes off the road while the car is moving should be covered by the law (Even though IANAL, IMHO that was the intent of the law when it was passed). It shouldn't matter if that is a map on your cellphone or in the dashboard. (I would argue that it should cover paper maps or even printed Mapquest driving instructions though the law didn't mention those; I have seen idiots hurtling down the expressway with a paper map unfolded in front of them). People don't seem to get that their toys are compromising their ability to control a couple of tons of metal while driving at speeds where their reaction time could only be a second (or less). Most folks will argue that "No! Not me!. I can read the tiny map in the dashboard or on my phone, manage to stay in my lane, and keep an eye out for other drivers!" and that they are not distracted but they're wrong. They'll kill someone one of these days. If you need to refer to a map... pull over to the side of the road.
As for eating? If you have to look at your food? Yeah, it's a distraction. But most people don't need to look at their quarter pounder to eat it. Putting on makeup? Huge distraction. A good idea only if you want to risk jabbing that mascara brush into your eye. Listening to music? I fail to see how that's a distraction. Unless you are one of those people who has to read the cutesy little messages that appear on radio displays nowadays (radio stations ought to reconsider that feature) having music playing is not much more of a distraction than driving with the windows open and having to hear traffic. (Aside: If driving with headphones on isn't illegal in all 50 states, it should be. It used to be in Illinois but I've seen morons driving while wearing earbuds. You're supposed to be able to the sirens on emergency vehicles.)
If you need to drive somewhere and need a map, read the map beforehand. Or have a friend who can read maps give you instructions during the drive. Or get an in-dash navigation computer with voice instructions. But keep your damned eyes on the road.
Again... you show that you misunderstand how X works. It is the X client that is shooting bitmaps across the network. If you cannot get the terminology right, your arguments aren't going to be taken seriously.
And if an X application running on the client system is doing that, then, IMHO, the blame lies with the developer of the application and not X11. Perhaps it's the graphics libraries that have been employed for developing the X application that are the main source of all this inefficiency. My guess is that it's things like skins, themes, bizarre fonts, etc. that are probably the biggest reason that bitmaps have to be sent across the wire. It's wrong to blame X11 for developers using bitmaps when drawing objects. It's not X11's fault that developers have taken to using inefficient programming practices. Much like web developers that design web pages that are only rendered quickly when viewed on the same LAN as the server and load so slowly to be all but unviewable by users who don't live next door to the phone company's local office. Maybe having the developers work from home and have to see their work running in an environment similar to that encountered by the vast majority of the application users would have been helpful. I just think that throwing out the infrastructure because application developers got lazy or forgot to test their application in a realistic setting is the wrong solution.
I found it hard to take much of your argument seriously when you wrote the above. "Client-server" does not mean "PC client running Windows-Windows server. The Wintel crowd pretty much co-opted the term "client-server" and when they encounter a case where "server" doesn't mean a Windows server, they go nuts.