I have to wonder how anybody could possibly believe it's full of contradictions and absurdity. The contradictions start when one half of the book is about vengeful, spiteful, cruel god who'll kill the shit out of you in imaginatively sadistic ways, and the other half features a non-interventionist, loving god whose gay son does crowd pleasing magic tricks.
You'll have to tell me what points 2 & 3 are since they're not numbered.
But addressing window decorations, that confused me too for a while. As far as I can tell, Wayland does not see it as its job to adorn a surface with decorations. So the simplest solution is the client does it and I expect a library or theme engine of some sort will appear which will take care of it and ensure a consistent appearance over the desktop. But client side decoration isn't the only option - KDE is talking of server side decoration implemented inside the window manager that underpins their desktop.
It's not like you can't override the frames in X even if you have to do tricks - look at Google Chrome for example. Or Steam. Or Wine apps running on X. I assume they all disable server frame and paint their pseudo decorations and frame in its client area. While this looks a bit odd, it also brings advantages too. For example Chrome wastes far less space in GNOME 3 than Firefox is because it condenses 3 horizontal strips of buttons, menus and title bar into a single strip. Sometimes an app does need to be in control of it's appearance.
And to reiterate my point, remote desktops and apps don't go away even on Wayland. There is even an XWayland which I expect that dists will ship and run with for a good while since some apps may be more gnarly to port than others (e.g. what does Firefox do about plugins). Just do what you did before or avail of the other options, or scratch the itch, or fork. I don't see the issue at all. It doesn't mean the entire desktop needs to be hampered by a 30 year old architecture with numerous recognised bottlenecks.
Why not $100 billion? After all, this challenge is merely asking a person to prove a negative. Since that is a logically impossibility, the money cannot be won.
An applicant might methodically go through the copious evidence demonstrating the geological age of the earth is billions of years old. Or expound on the multiple plausible ways that abiogenisis (life) may have occured. Or how evolution is both a fact and theory supported by multiple strands of evidence. Or that there is no evidence supporting the biblical creation story. Or that there are many similar creation myths of which the Bible is just one.
And after this exhaustive presentation they still would not have proven biblical creation did not happen. They might have demonstrated beyond all doubt to a reasonable person that it was extremely implausible and unlikely, but they haven't proven it didn't happen. And if this "judge" is biased or following exact letter of the challenge, then the money will not be won.
Carl Sagan's "The Dragon In My Garage" essay demonstrates this point with a deliberately absurd example just to hilight the point. And contrast this challenge James Randi's $1 million challenge where applicants are not required to employ tortured logic - they perform a paranormal feat in a self evident way under agreed controlled conditions and they win.
In case it wasn't clear, I wasn't prepared to wade through another longwinded, restatement of the more or less the same points which were wrong the first time around.
I expect anyone could breach it given the time although it's probably simpler to just alarms and steel cages around all the exits, cut the outside power and network and let them stew in there for as long as they can tolerate it. When they attempt to leave the alarm goes off and the cage will hold them long enough for the cops to arrest them.
It appears we've hit the problem of the person who is dismissing X out of hand does not actually understand why people use it, which I suppose it why your suggestions have failed to address the questions.
I'm not dismissing X out of hand. That would be a straw man. What I am saying is that it clearly impacts on the local desktop performance (and it's not hard to find comments by leading X devs who state this for a fact). And most of the objections raised for switching to something more efficient concern a feature that not many people use, and even if Wayland were to become the default experience, could be achieved anyway.
Anyone who absolutely cannot abide the change can just use an X11 fork, or vnc / MX / X over Wayland or scratch the itch and implement in Wayland what they perceive to be missing.
X11 involves a large number of context switches thanks to all the processes working to update the display. The intent of Wayland is to reduce that complexity and context switches which means the desktop will be more responsive and lightweight. I'm quite willing to accept that it will take some time for Wayland to mature sufficiently to reach optimal performance and stability, but that aside, it's obviously a smart idea to pursue. Many prominent X devs think so do, such as Keith Packard.
Well if the inclusion of JFS meant that the experience for the majority using EXT3/4 or BTRS was degraded then yes. But it isn't, so it doesn't matter. But for the majority of people using a local desktop, they are suffering a degraded experience for the sake of a fairly esoteric workflow (one which can be accomplished anyway even if the desktop did move to Wayland).
Probably though I haven't tried. The keyboard would need to support the sorts of keys that many DOS games expect though - numeric and function keys, or have some way to map them.
What is someone want to run things on multiple machines and doesn't want to juggle half a dozen full "desktops"?
I wonder for how many people this scenario would even apply though, or why it should mean the experience in a Linux desktop should be hampered by X11 just to facilitate it.
VNC only restricts you to one session on windows. On Linux you can have one XVnc session per person if you liked. Or if the remote machine has X, then run a rootless X11 server over Wayland and run apps like you always have (just because your machine is Wayland doesn't mean the machine hosting the executable does). There'll probably be a vnc server running over Wayland too at some point, as well as a proper network protocol for Wayland.
Most of the objections raised about network transparency seem pretty silly IMO. Network transparent apps are a niche feature even in Linux and there are alternatives even in the short term, not to mention longer term possibilities.
Perhaps you're thinking of the drawing mechanism? Only some parts are unused. When coupled with the XRender extension it works just fine, and the two work together.
Huge swathes of X are obsolete or unused, glyphs, logical fonts, rendering primitives, codemaps, and more. The fact you mention XRender means you recognize how obsolete X11 is yet all that shit must be implemented all the same.
So... your solution for requiring clients keep massive backwards compatibility is to break backwards compatibility. Okay, but you could jus tnot code clients with backwards compatibility to non extended X as well. Did that even occur to you?
I can't even parse that. If you want backwards compatibility, install and run X11. Otherwise what do you mean? Most apps have minimal dependencies on raw X. There might be some which tap an API, or implicitly get stuck on X through GLX or similar. But most call GTK or QT. Moving to a different display server is a matter of changing some compiler and linker parameters.
The only efficiency improvement is that you input events will go from kernel->wayland->program not kernel->X->WM->X->program. If that has measurable latency then you're running on a 386 (good luck---it's out of support for Linux now) and rendering is the least of your worries.
No it isn't. The composition path would be more efficient too. There are diagrams on the wayland site which demonstrate why it is more efficient. Maybe go look at them.
FUD ATTACK!!! This has been rebutted many times including by me (again) elsewhere in this thread.
No, it's reality. You can use X11 over Wayland or go make your own distribution fork where it's pure X11 all the way through.
What X is, is a heap of arcane apis which nobody uses and a raft of extensions that have popped up over time to make it cope with the modern world. It's inefficient, complex (since clients must explicitly code for exensions with fallback behaviour). Proposing to get rid of it is not "esoteric" or "boredom", it's rational and pragmatic.
And yes I'd like my desktop to "draw shit to my screen fast and efficiently". Doing away with X11 will facilitate that. And for people who "like using X11" can continue to do so - over Wayland. Or they can spin their own dist which bans Wayland entirely and remains on X11.
X11 has extensions that shift all the damage and recomposition out to hardware, but it requires jumping through inordinate hoops which impact on performance, e.g. passing messages around between processes which increases latency from additional context switching. Basically X is a bottle neck in the middle mostly handing off tasks to extensions these days.
Wayland does not preclude a network transparent transport. Despite your aversion to framebuffers, that's exactly how most X apps draw themselves these days. They're not using X primitives, they're rendering themselves into surfaces using abstract drawing APIs like cairo.
So when you run a modern app over a network, X is just shifting chunks of bitmap around anyway. Producing something analogous for Wayland is hardly an insurmountable task, and in the meantime things like vnc exist. It's even possible that GTK / QT and other APIs could intelligently detect which backend to use, e.g. by looking at the DISPLAY variable and the app largely doesn't have to care. And if the app in question is not modern, e.g. it's an older GTK or hits X APIs directly then an X server can be run locally over Wayland to host it - but without requiring everyone else suffer the same overhead.
There is also a very good explanation on the wayland site as to why X is so awful for performance which can be summarised as too much context switching. It would be worth reading it.
QEMU and Dosbox are already ported to ARM and Rasbian, so what does this do that it couldn't do already (albeit slowly). I've even seen Dosbox running on ARM powered Android device though the lack of keyboard in most of them would get in the way I would think of using it in a meaningful fashion.
a) Javascript is rarely turned off except for the most security conscious / paranoid, and b) I'm mainly talking of client side where JS and CSS cover most of the use cases, including mobile vs desktop, c) server side covers the rest and without using the user agent.
Arguably, web sites that test against user agents to redirect mobile / desktop are evidence as to why using the user agent is such a fucking stupid thing to do in the first place. It's infuriating when my 10" tablet redirects to some mobile site when I could easily render the desktop version. Many user agents are now tantamount to saying "I'm everything" to persuade broken sites to work. It's dumb and user agents just get bigger and bigger as a result.
The correct behaviour is to run a filter on the server which tests for some layout cookie. If the cookie isn't there, redirect the user through a discovery page which finds out some basics about their browser (testing for screen res, HTML5 features etc.) before issuing a cookie and sending them to the most appropriate layout. The url doesn't change regardless of mobile or desktop. The user could change the preference themselves from that point. And anyone who has disabled cookies or scripts gets the desktop version.
User agent should be an absolute last resort. Sites which are hardcoding this mobile / desktop or iPad / Android shit in are impeding the web as much as those testing for IE 6 / 7 did in their day.
Agreed! My PC would be 5x as fast without the animation, Aero and other useless crap.
Aero Glass and its W8 successor maintain windows as surfaces in the graphics cards. Repairing damage to a window involves repainting the surface already in the GPU as part of recomposition. In W2K, every damaged window would be sent a WM_PAINT with a clip region for the damage and the screen would only recover after each process was woken up and repainted their windows. It's far more CPU and memory intensive and makes less use of the GPU. In other words it wouldn't be any faster at all.
The difference is that cars are typically showing you information related to your driving whereas your google glasses could be showing you a hilarious cat video.
Hmm yes. It's entirely psychogenic. It may be that if you give someone a fake injection, or a sugar pill which they think has curative properties it puts someone in a positive frame of mind that alleviates worry or fixation on the condition and provides some space for it to improve. It does not mean the placebo is doing it, or that it's acceptable to give someone magic sugar pills in place of an effective treatment. It's also not hard to find articles such this, which methodically demolish notions about placebos usually put about by homoeopaths.
Bad JS has code such as "if (document.all ||/MSIE/.test(navigator.userAgent)) isIE = true;" or some variant thereof. So changing the user agent and also removing any IE specific extensions like document.all, CreateObject() etc would be a good way to force browsers down the other path which is presumably more browser agnostic. IE could implement a whitelist test which enables the cruft on intranets which absolutely refuse to work otherwise.
I suppose we have to be grateful for MS in doing this providing they're now supporting standards rather than half implementing them. Sites shouldn't be testing for Gecko or Webkit either though or they'll be creating a problem for themselves down the line just like the one with IE 6/7 now. They should be programatically testing the features they need and avoid what the browser engine is as much as possible.
The placebo effect has been objectively measured as being able to heal a patient.
Nonsense. The only effect of a placebo is in someone's imagination. It might in some cases such as chronic pain take someone's mind off their condition sufficiently that they experience relief. Otherwise it does nothing. It absolutely under no circumstances heals anything. This is precisely why double blind controlled studies are tested against placebos. If one group receives a sugar pill and the other group receives the actual drug, the efficacy (or harm) of the actual drug can be measured accurately, accounting for psychogenic factors.
Go check the research. It's very real. This is why for instance homeopathy treatments are assessed against whether they heal the patient, they're assessed against whether they heal the patient MORE than a placebo.
Homeopathy treatments have been tested repeatedly against placebo and there is no difference in response. Not surprisingly since they're just sugar pills and water.
a) A placebo doesn't heal the patient by definition, b) While "take these pills for 14 days and come back if it doesn't work" might stop a patient bothering the GP for a bit, it doesn't constitute an acceptable standard of care c) it fosters the culture of a cure in a bottle of pills, d) it costs the patient time and money to fill the prescription - the standard NHS prescription charge being £7.65, e) it diminishes the reputation of the medical profession, f) in practice it's little different from quackery like homeopathy.
Medicine should be evidence based as much as possible. Fobbing someone off with a phoney treatment that has "helped" others is irresponsible.
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I have to wonder how anybody could possibly believe it's full of contradictions and absurdity. The contradictions start when one half of the book is about vengeful, spiteful, cruel god who'll kill the shit out of you in imaginatively sadistic ways, and the other half features a non-interventionist, loving god whose gay son does crowd pleasing magic tricks.
But addressing window decorations, that confused me too for a while. As far as I can tell, Wayland does not see it as its job to adorn a surface with decorations. So the simplest solution is the client does it and I expect a library or theme engine of some sort will appear which will take care of it and ensure a consistent appearance over the desktop. But client side decoration isn't the only option - KDE is talking of server side decoration implemented inside the window manager that underpins their desktop.
It's not like you can't override the frames in X even if you have to do tricks - look at Google Chrome for example. Or Steam. Or Wine apps running on X. I assume they all disable server frame and paint their pseudo decorations and frame in its client area. While this looks a bit odd, it also brings advantages too. For example Chrome wastes far less space in GNOME 3 than Firefox is because it condenses 3 horizontal strips of buttons, menus and title bar into a single strip. Sometimes an app does need to be in control of it's appearance.
And to reiterate my point, remote desktops and apps don't go away even on Wayland. There is even an XWayland which I expect that dists will ship and run with for a good while since some apps may be more gnarly to port than others (e.g. what does Firefox do about plugins). Just do what you did before or avail of the other options, or scratch the itch, or fork. I don't see the issue at all. It doesn't mean the entire desktop needs to be hampered by a 30 year old architecture with numerous recognised bottlenecks.
An applicant might methodically go through the copious evidence demonstrating the geological age of the earth is billions of years old. Or expound on the multiple plausible ways that abiogenisis (life) may have occured. Or how evolution is both a fact and theory supported by multiple strands of evidence. Or that there is no evidence supporting the biblical creation story. Or that there are many similar creation myths of which the Bible is just one.
And after this exhaustive presentation they still would not have proven biblical creation did not happen. They might have demonstrated beyond all doubt to a reasonable person that it was extremely implausible and unlikely, but they haven't proven it didn't happen. And if this "judge" is biased or following exact letter of the challenge, then the money will not be won.
Carl Sagan's "The Dragon In My Garage" essay demonstrates this point with a deliberately absurd example just to hilight the point. And contrast this challenge James Randi's $1 million challenge where applicants are not required to employ tortured logic - they perform a paranormal feat in a self evident way under agreed controlled conditions and they win.
In case it wasn't clear, I wasn't prepared to wade through another longwinded, restatement of the more or less the same points which were wrong the first time around.
I expect anyone could breach it given the time although it's probably simpler to just alarms and steel cages around all the exits, cut the outside power and network and let them stew in there for as long as they can tolerate it. When they attempt to leave the alarm goes off and the cage will hold them long enough for the cops to arrest them.
It appears we've hit the problem of the person who is dismissing X out of hand does not actually understand why people use it, which I suppose it why your suggestions have failed to address the questions.
I'm not dismissing X out of hand. That would be a straw man. What I am saying is that it clearly impacts on the local desktop performance (and it's not hard to find comments by leading X devs who state this for a fact). And most of the objections raised for switching to something more efficient concern a feature that not many people use, and even if Wayland were to become the default experience, could be achieved anyway.
Anyone who absolutely cannot abide the change can just use an X11 fork, or vnc / MX / X over Wayland or scratch the itch and implement in Wayland what they perceive to be missing.
Wow, so passionate, so longwinded, and so utterly wrong.
X11 involves a large number of context switches thanks to all the processes working to update the display. The intent of Wayland is to reduce that complexity and context switches which means the desktop will be more responsive and lightweight. I'm quite willing to accept that it will take some time for Wayland to mature sufficiently to reach optimal performance and stability, but that aside, it's obviously a smart idea to pursue. Many prominent X devs think so do, such as Keith Packard.
Well if the inclusion of JFS meant that the experience for the majority using EXT3/4 or BTRS was degraded then yes. But it isn't, so it doesn't matter. But for the majority of people using a local desktop, they are suffering a degraded experience for the sake of a fairly esoteric workflow (one which can be accomplished anyway even if the desktop did move to Wayland).
Probably though I haven't tried. The keyboard would need to support the sorts of keys that many DOS games expect though - numeric and function keys, or have some way to map them.
What is someone want to run things on multiple machines and doesn't want to juggle half a dozen full "desktops"?
I wonder for how many people this scenario would even apply though, or why it should mean the experience in a Linux desktop should be hampered by X11 just to facilitate it.
Most of the objections raised about network transparency seem pretty silly IMO. Network transparent apps are a niche feature even in Linux and there are alternatives even in the short term, not to mention longer term possibilities.
Perhaps you're thinking of the drawing mechanism? Only some parts are unused. When coupled with the XRender extension it works just fine, and the two work together.
Huge swathes of X are obsolete or unused, glyphs, logical fonts, rendering primitives, codemaps, and more. The fact you mention XRender means you recognize how obsolete X11 is yet all that shit must be implemented all the same.
So... your solution for requiring clients keep massive backwards compatibility is to break backwards compatibility. Okay, but you could jus tnot code clients with backwards compatibility to non extended X as well. Did that even occur to you?
I can't even parse that. If you want backwards compatibility, install and run X11. Otherwise what do you mean? Most apps have minimal dependencies on raw X. There might be some which tap an API, or implicitly get stuck on X through GLX or similar. But most call GTK or QT. Moving to a different display server is a matter of changing some compiler and linker parameters.
The only efficiency improvement is that you input events will go from kernel->wayland->program not kernel->X->WM->X->program. If that has measurable latency then you're running on a 386 (good luck---it's out of support for Linux now) and rendering is the least of your worries.
No it isn't. The composition path would be more efficient too. There are diagrams on the wayland site which demonstrate why it is more efficient. Maybe go look at them.
FUD ATTACK!!! This has been rebutted many times including by me (again) elsewhere in this thread.
No, it's reality. You can use X11 over Wayland or go make your own distribution fork where it's pure X11 all the way through.
And yes I'd like my desktop to "draw shit to my screen fast and efficiently". Doing away with X11 will facilitate that. And for people who "like using X11" can continue to do so - over Wayland. Or they can spin their own dist which bans Wayland entirely and remains on X11.
X11 has extensions that shift all the damage and recomposition out to hardware, but it requires jumping through inordinate hoops which impact on performance, e.g. passing messages around between processes which increases latency from additional context switching. Basically X is a bottle neck in the middle mostly handing off tasks to extensions these days.
So when you run a modern app over a network, X is just shifting chunks of bitmap around anyway. Producing something analogous for Wayland is hardly an insurmountable task, and in the meantime things like vnc exist. It's even possible that GTK / QT and other APIs could intelligently detect which backend to use, e.g. by looking at the DISPLAY variable and the app largely doesn't have to care. And if the app in question is not modern, e.g. it's an older GTK or hits X APIs directly then an X server can be run locally over Wayland to host it - but without requiring everyone else suffer the same overhead.
There is also a very good explanation on the wayland site as to why X is so awful for performance which can be summarised as too much context switching. It would be worth reading it.
QEMU and Dosbox are already ported to ARM and Rasbian, so what does this do that it couldn't do already (albeit slowly). I've even seen Dosbox running on ARM powered Android device though the lack of keyboard in most of them would get in the way I would think of using it in a meaningful fashion.
Arguably, web sites that test against user agents to redirect mobile / desktop are evidence as to why using the user agent is such a fucking stupid thing to do in the first place. It's infuriating when my 10" tablet redirects to some mobile site when I could easily render the desktop version. Many user agents are now tantamount to saying "I'm everything" to persuade broken sites to work. It's dumb and user agents just get bigger and bigger as a result.
The correct behaviour is to run a filter on the server which tests for some layout cookie. If the cookie isn't there, redirect the user through a discovery page which finds out some basics about their browser (testing for screen res, HTML5 features etc.) before issuing a cookie and sending them to the most appropriate layout. The url doesn't change regardless of mobile or desktop. The user could change the preference themselves from that point. And anyone who has disabled cookies or scripts gets the desktop version.
User agent should be an absolute last resort. Sites which are hardcoding this mobile / desktop or iPad / Android shit in are impeding the web as much as those testing for IE 6 / 7 did in their day.
Agreed! My PC would be 5x as fast without the animation, Aero and other useless crap.
Aero Glass and its W8 successor maintain windows as surfaces in the graphics cards. Repairing damage to a window involves repainting the surface already in the GPU as part of recomposition. In W2K, every damaged window would be sent a WM_PAINT with a clip region for the damage and the screen would only recover after each process was woken up and repainted their windows. It's far more CPU and memory intensive and makes less use of the GPU. In other words it wouldn't be any faster at all.
The difference is that cars are typically showing you information related to your driving whereas your google glasses could be showing you a hilarious cat video.
Hence my last sentence.
Hmm yes. It's entirely psychogenic. It may be that if you give someone a fake injection, or a sugar pill which they think has curative properties it puts someone in a positive frame of mind that alleviates worry or fixation on the condition and provides some space for it to improve. It does not mean the placebo is doing it, or that it's acceptable to give someone magic sugar pills in place of an effective treatment. It's also not hard to find articles such this, which methodically demolish notions about placebos usually put about by homoeopaths.
I suppose we have to be grateful for MS in doing this providing they're now supporting standards rather than half implementing them. Sites shouldn't be testing for Gecko or Webkit either though or they'll be creating a problem for themselves down the line just like the one with IE 6/7 now. They should be programatically testing the features they need and avoid what the browser engine is as much as possible.
The placebo effect has been objectively measured as being able to heal a patient.
Nonsense. The only effect of a placebo is in someone's imagination. It might in some cases such as chronic pain take someone's mind off their condition sufficiently that they experience relief. Otherwise it does nothing. It absolutely under no circumstances heals anything. This is precisely why double blind controlled studies are tested against placebos. If one group receives a sugar pill and the other group receives the actual drug, the efficacy (or harm) of the actual drug can be measured accurately, accounting for psychogenic factors.
Go check the research. It's very real. This is why for instance homeopathy treatments are assessed against whether they heal the patient, they're assessed against whether they heal the patient MORE than a placebo.
Homeopathy treatments have been tested repeatedly against placebo and there is no difference in response. Not surprisingly since they're just sugar pills and water.
Medicine should be evidence based as much as possible. Fobbing someone off with a phoney treatment that has "helped" others is irresponsible.