That's because the multi-user environment in Windows 3.x and 9x was duct-taped on. These OSes were never meant to run in as multi-user machines. While this is not really a good excuse, it's how these OSes were developed.
NT and its successors were designed to be multi-user systems running in a networked environment. User permissions and the like are all a part of this method of OS design.
Also, Outlook and IE allow users to define how a web page is handled. Perhaps it's not the most intuitive way to approach this problem but security zones work rather well for deciding how a web page it opened and what it can do.
IE runs under the users permissions. If you have admin permissions then IE has Admin permissions. If you have guest permissions, then IE has guest permissions.
And copyright is an exclusive right granted for a limited time. The US Constitution NEVBER spelled out that time frame nor did it even attempt to establish a reasonable timeframe for copyright protection. That was left for future generations to determine and our generation ahs determined that life of author plus 70 years is fair.
By making the term so long people will not be able to wait out the copyright terms to wreck their memory because 70 years is a long time in a fast paced capitalistic economy. 10 years is a fairly long time but I can easily envision corporations eagerly awaiting the ability to use popculture icons freely or to pen derivative works without compensating the author or their estate.
I argue that this was a "much simpler" time. Musicians woudl not think of stealing another's work or they would recieve such scorn from the musical community they would be a veritable pariah. Attitudes have changed drastically and people would nary give "borrowing" a song or artistic idea a second thought.
I would also point out to the/. Linux users that without intellectual property protecion the GPL would not be enforcable. While it takes a different stance on copyright protecion, it reauires intellectual property law to be effective. The OSS community will lose as much control over their creations as would the artistic community and I think we can all agree that would be a bad thing.
,blockquote>Publishing a file on the Internet is republishing, and *that* is prohibited by law for a specific reason.
Actually, it's redistribution, but it's illegal none the less. "Artists" or creators of intellectual property have five basic rights concering their intellectual property; make copies, make derivative works, public display, public perforamance and distribution. They can give up all, some or none of these rights for any given period of time. That's how the music industry works. Musicians don't give up their entire copyrights (unless they don't read the contract carefully), they normally give up distribution rights and they share the right to make copies, though they only give up mechanicals here which allows a company to press multiple CDs, cassettes or LPs.
The public only has a couple of rights that were granted through fair use and subsequent litigation to better define fair use. Making copies of a CD to be played in your car stereo is an example of the audio home recording act, an act formed out of better defining fair use. When you give this copy to a friend you have violated fair use and copyright laws.
The digital world creates a number of problems with this system and I find DRM fixes most of these without causing too many problems. I can personally atest to this as I use DRM when copying eBooks and WMA files to my PocketPC. It's simple and painless unless you try to violate copyright laws.
The only drawback is reselling digital media. DRM hasn't been fleshed out enough to allow for this right but give it time. Beaming a file should delete the local copy and hinder any attempt to recopy the file to your system without wiping the whole flash memory (some things DRM won't be able to get around).
Contrary to popular belief, copyright laws protect an artists rights to benefit financially or otherwise from their work. They don;t have to strictly enforce these laws and they can give their work over to the public domain at ANY time. However, this is a choice the IP holder, not the public, should be allowed to make.
I think many people misunderstand what a disabled person is. They do not have ot be in a wheelchair, walk around with a cane and a seeing eye dog or wear a hearing aid to be handicapped. Some can have partially impaired vision and the magnification utility in Windows aids their use of the OS. People with arthritis, not just those who have lost their arms, can benefit from speech recognition built into the OS and other applications.
These are just a couple of examples. Just because someone does not LOOK disabled does not necessarily mean they are. That's how there can be 50 million disabled people in America.
Palm bought BeOS. Sony and Palm are working very closely in the handheld arena as the Clie is the best handheld running the current PalmOS. It wouldn't be a stretch to have Sony license the Palm version of BeOS for their internet enabled PS console in exchange for further development of the Clie handheld and supporting PalmOS.
You forget that movies make their return ontheir investment in the theaters, not as much on video rentals and sales; for now anyway. Musicians, onthe other hand, make their money primaily off record sales, not concerts and live events; and concerts will NEVER replace album sales as the primary source of income because it would not be possible given how the money is handled in each case.
"their sole intent was around making legal backups or mixed tapes?"
Then how do yo explain the role of the p2p clients in this process? If you already have the CD then you can legally rip it to your computer and share it with devices you own. I rip CD's using WMP8 and copy them to a CF card which I use on my iPaq. Completely legit. p2p does not figure into this scenario at all.
Then you need to address abuses to the system, not the system itself. Cameras in public locations do not violate citizens fourth amendment rights. They are in public and there is no expectation of privacy there. Not to mention that the camera could just as well be a cop (though not as easily). This is like the argument with guns; they don't kill people, people kill people. Well, cameras don't track people, peope track people.
I gotta agree with you and I just want to add one more point I think you vaguely hinted at. Imagine the infrastructure required to track EVERY individual (as many opponents to these systems seem to think they track everyone - themselves being of utmost importance to national security that of course they top the list) by video surveillance? Imagine the manpower required to run the system. What about the hardware infrastructure? Storage of all the video to track every individual?
These systems act as a deterrent to crime, not as a solution to stopping crime. As you are in a public place there is no expectation of privacy and law enforcement should be free to make use of electronic surveillance equipment to improve monitoring of city streets and parks.
1. LAW defamation: a false and malicious published statement that damages somebody's reputation. Libel can include pictures and any other representations that have public or permanent form.
2. attacking somebody's reputation: the making of false and damaging statements about somebody
If it's libelous, then by nature it's a false statement and CANNOT connote fact. Was the judge asleep that day in law school?
Personally I think this is a travesty because it basically says, as far as Canadian law goes anyway, you can state anything you want on the internet regardless of facts or truth and there will be no repercussions.
Ahhh, but IP rights are required to enforce the GPL. Without them the GPL is about as worthless as the paper it's written on. Companies can take form the community without having to give back because the concept of property, which the GPL relies on, believeit or not, has been removed.
Not to mention that compeltely removing the IP system would create many more problems than it solves.
How is RedHat's a valid and reasonable suggestion? While the donation of hardware and software to schools is an excellent idea, and I hope Microsoft donates even a quarter of this amount when all is said and done, the remedy itself, even if RedHat donates the software, does not address the problems faced in the lawsuit. Or was the RedHat suggestion only taken seriously beause this is Slashdot?
If you remove intellectual proerty rights, you remove any hope of protecting software under the GPL. GPL requires copyrights to exist as uch as any other intellectual idea governed by USC 17.
He's not saying that Windows did this first, the author is stating that this transparency does not come at a loss (or at a negligible loss anyway) to the system performance. X Windows kills system performance right away; alpha transparency throw out the system along with it.
Actually, this isn't all that terrible an idea. However, it limits the users ability to organize information at a later date.
There was a streaming video, on CNet I believe, with Bill Gates introducing the new line of Tablet PCs and Windows XP - Tablet PC edition. One of the most interesting features of WXP-TPCE is the concept of virtual ink. V-ink is an object as far as the OS and applications are concerned. Users can write on the screen with a stylus and then take that data and distribute it eleswhere. For instance I might scribble down a date for a future meeting. I can then select this v-ink object and convert it to an Outlook meeting complete with the original v-ink object and a transcribed version of the v-ink in the notes section.
Windows Messenger was also demo'ed with v-ink being a new feature. Users were able to send v-ink objects between one another as if it was a normal tetx object. this v-ink could then be copied, updated and resent. A application of this might be sending directions to a friend. They could ask somehting like "is this where we are supposed to meet?" along with a simple drawing and an "x" marking the spot. The other friend could then copy the map, chanhe the location of the "x" then send the updated map back with a reply like "no, here is where we are supposed to meet."
Now, these eamples are rather frivolous but they do get people thinking about the possibilities an object type like this can have.
Actually, services have always cost something. Ancient peoples would barter livestock or grain for services in trade. For instace, I might need some chickens for food. I have some wheat I would be willing to trade in kind. You might be willing to give me five chickens for a bag of wheat. The value placed on something is based on supply and demand. I might thik that five chickens is not enough for one bag of wheat. Given that wheat is scare this year I can ask for eight chickens for this one bag of wheat. I have given something of value for something or service I need in return.
Eventually this barter system evolved into coins. The Romans developed a system by which precious metals could be traded for the same livestock or grain. You set the price of ten gold coins for those very same five chickens. I might be able to go down a few stalls at the market and get the same five chickens for eight gold coins. Again, supply and demand determine the value of the chickens.
Obviously this system has further evolved into paper money representing gold in a vault. The value of the paper money is based on how much gold is in the vault and how much that gold is valued at any one point in time.
Obviously I've oversimplified things but the idea that things used to be free is absurd. Value has always been placed on goods and services people traded. Perhaps before civilizaitons arose things were "free" only in as much as there were two options. Take or die. If you did not hunt for food you would not get any food. There were no markets where you could trade your firewood for meat.
Real intelligent. Let's put pressure on teh copanies so tehy can slap together a half-ased patch without testing it so they can satisfy your absolutist views on full disclosure.
Or those in the secutiry community can pull their heads out of their asses, work out a compromise for solving these problems BEFORE they can become a much larger problem.
Full disclosure does nothing more than rush patches out the door, it does not solve security problems. It hands blueprints to script kiddies, normally people without the intelligence to write their own names (I'm using a bit of comic exxageration here), so they can snicker with their friends about how they clicked a couple of buttons and created a worm.
Scott Culp has some very intelligent points and were he not a Microsoft employee, many of you/.'ers might give his argument a chance. Instead you allow your zealotry to blind you to thinking for yourself about the issue. You decide to follow the ABM sheep. Very intelligent (once again, I'm using comic exaggeration here).
Actually, Microsoftused the Object tag in IE 3.0 to embed their activeX plug-ins. They have used it since but only recently implemented the Embed tag because this is what Netscape supported and thisis what some web developers were asking for. I believe the W3C has deprecated the Embed tag in lieu of the Object tag.
Similarly the exact same thing happened with the div tag. Microsoft' used the div tag for everything since IE 4. Frontpage would even replace things like the p tag with the div tag. The layer tag was unheard of except for Netscape. Once again the W3C deprecated the layer tag in lieu of the div tag.
How did I prove you right? The point of your statements, as I read them , was Americans are ignorant about the world. We cannot even point out Egypt on a map. I argued that not only could I point Egyptout on a map, I've visted Egypt. Have you?
I gotta say that not only do I not find this insightful, I find broad generalizations of ANY group of people completely ignorant. Not only can I find Egypt on a map, I've been to Luxor and Cairo. I've also been to Kenya and the Seychelles. Can you point out the Seychelles on a map? Cna you tell me what language the Seychellois speak? Can YOU point out Egypt on a map? Have you visited these countries?
The biggest problem with America is that only two other countries border us. It's difficult to hop on a train and travel to different countries like you can in Europe so our access to different cultures is limited to our propensity to travel by plane. This is rather expensive, a lot more than a rail pass in Europe anyway, so there are only a select few that can manage this.
I argue that travelling between different states within out union is as educational, however, as travelling between different countries in Europe. Can you tell me where Idaho is? What's the capital of Idaho? There is some excellent skiing in Idaho that many americans don't know about, much less foreigners such as yourself, but bigots like you only see Idaho as a producer of potatoes (if that - you might not have ever heard of Idaho - ignorant foreigner.)
How about Louisiana? What do you know abotu Louisiana? Can you point it out on a map? Indiana? Illinois? Tennessee? Massachusettes? You probably couldn't spell Massachusetts (or Mississippi, fot that matter) until I wrote them out for you. Does thismake you ignorant and stupid? By your logic, yes it does. I'd wger that there are a vast majority of foreigners who do not know very much about the United States either. Does this make everyone in the world stupid? Apparently you seem to think this is the measure of one'sintelligence so by your standards, yes.
What's your highest leve of education? I have a Masters degree. Do you now think me an idiot? I've travelled to places in the world many will never get a chance to see. I am also an American. If you think me ignorant now then you sir are a troll.
As to your "news" argument, CNN is not a newspaper, it's a cable television news source (Cable News Network.) But I'm sure you knew that since you're such an intelligent foreigner. As for the indemedia.org article you linked to, what thehell do you expect the Taliban to say? "Yes, we murder out own people. We treat women like crap. Our courts are not just. Our whole system of government contradicts the Islamic religion." That article proves nothing except the Taliban will lie, something I knew already. There were no facts except for the "facts" which the Taliban wished morons like yourself to believe.
While X still has some room for improvement in the performance department, its not X that is holding the Linux desktop back, it's the hodge podge of window managers, toolkits and lack of standards for look and feel that are holding the Linux desktop back.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because the multi-user environment in Windows 3.x and 9x was duct-taped on. These OSes were never meant to run in as multi-user machines. While this is not really a good excuse, it's how these OSes were developed.
NT and its successors were designed to be multi-user systems running in a networked environment. User permissions and the like are all a part of this method of OS design.
Also, Outlook and IE allow users to define how a web page is handled. Perhaps it's not the most intuitive way to approach this problem but security zones work rather well for deciding how a web page it opened and what it can do.
IE runs under the users permissions. If you have admin permissions then IE has Admin permissions. If you have guest permissions, then IE has guest permissions.
And copyright is an exclusive right granted for a limited time. The US Constitution NEVBER spelled out that time frame nor did it even attempt to establish a reasonable timeframe for copyright protection. That was left for future generations to determine and our generation ahs determined that life of author plus 70 years is fair.
By making the term so long people will not be able to wait out the copyright terms to wreck their memory because 70 years is a long time in a fast paced capitalistic economy. 10 years is a fairly long time but I can easily envision corporations eagerly awaiting the ability to use popculture icons freely or to pen derivative works without compensating the author or their estate.
I argue that this was a "much simpler" time. Musicians woudl not think of stealing another's work or they would recieve such scorn from the musical community they would be a veritable pariah. Attitudes have changed drastically and people would nary give "borrowing" a song or artistic idea a second thought.
/. Linux users that without intellectual property protecion the GPL would not be enforcable. While it takes a different stance on copyright protecion, it reauires intellectual property law to be effective. The OSS community will lose as much control over their creations as would the artistic community and I think we can all agree that would be a bad thing.
I would also point out to the
,blockquote>Publishing a file on the Internet is republishing, and *that* is prohibited by law for a specific reason.
Actually, it's redistribution, but it's illegal none the less. "Artists" or creators of intellectual property have five basic rights concering their intellectual property; make copies, make derivative works, public display, public perforamance and distribution. They can give up all, some or none of these rights for any given period of time. That's how the music industry works. Musicians don't give up their entire copyrights (unless they don't read the contract carefully), they normally give up distribution rights and they share the right to make copies, though they only give up mechanicals here which allows a company to press multiple CDs, cassettes or LPs.
The public only has a couple of rights that were granted through fair use and subsequent litigation to better define fair use. Making copies of a CD to be played in your car stereo is an example of the audio home recording act, an act formed out of better defining fair use. When you give this copy to a friend you have violated fair use and copyright laws.
The digital world creates a number of problems with this system and I find DRM fixes most of these without causing too many problems. I can personally atest to this as I use DRM when copying eBooks and WMA files to my PocketPC. It's simple and painless unless you try to violate copyright laws.
The only drawback is reselling digital media. DRM hasn't been fleshed out enough to allow for this right but give it time. Beaming a file should delete the local copy and hinder any attempt to recopy the file to your system without wiping the whole flash memory (some things DRM won't be able to get around).
Contrary to popular belief, copyright laws protect an artists rights to benefit financially or otherwise from their work. They don;t have to strictly enforce these laws and they can give their work over to the public domain at ANY time. However, this is a choice the IP holder, not the public, should be allowed to make.
I think many people misunderstand what a disabled person is. They do not have ot be in a wheelchair, walk around with a cane and a seeing eye dog or wear a hearing aid to be handicapped. Some can have partially impaired vision and the magnification utility in Windows aids their use of the OS. People with arthritis, not just those who have lost their arms, can benefit from speech recognition built into the OS and other applications.
These are just a couple of examples. Just because someone does not LOOK disabled does not necessarily mean they are. That's how there can be 50 million disabled people in America.
Palm bought BeOS. Sony and Palm are working very closely in the handheld arena as the Clie is the best handheld running the current PalmOS. It wouldn't be a stretch to have Sony license the Palm version of BeOS for their internet enabled PS console in exchange for further development of the Clie handheld and supporting PalmOS.
You forget that movies make their return ontheir investment in the theaters, not as much on video rentals and sales; for now anyway. Musicians, onthe other hand, make their money primaily off record sales, not concerts and live events; and concerts will NEVER replace album sales as the primary source of income because it would not be possible given how the money is handled in each case.
What abotu MacOS X?
"their sole intent was around making legal backups or mixed tapes?"
Then how do yo explain the role of the p2p clients in this process? If you already have the CD then you can legally rip it to your computer and share it with devices you own. I rip CD's using WMP8 and copy them to a CF card which I use on my iPaq. Completely legit. p2p does not figure into this scenario at all.
Then you need to address abuses to the system, not the system itself. Cameras in public locations do not violate citizens fourth amendment rights. They are in public and there is no expectation of privacy there. Not to mention that the camera could just as well be a cop (though not as easily). This is like the argument with guns; they don't kill people, people kill people. Well, cameras don't track people, peope track people.
I gotta agree with you and I just want to add one more point I think you vaguely hinted at. Imagine the infrastructure required to track EVERY individual (as many opponents to these systems seem to think they track everyone - themselves being of utmost importance to national security that of course they top the list) by video surveillance? Imagine the manpower required to run the system. What about the hardware infrastructure? Storage of all the video to track every individual?
These systems act as a deterrent to crime, not as a solution to stopping crime. As you are in a public place there is no expectation of privacy and law enforcement should be free to make use of electronic surveillance equipment to improve monitoring of city streets and parks.
libel [lb'l ] noun (plural libels)
1. LAW defamation: a false and malicious published statement that damages somebody's reputation. Libel can include pictures and any other representations that have public or permanent form.
2. attacking somebody's reputation: the making of false and damaging statements about somebody
If it's libelous, then by nature it's a false statement and CANNOT connote fact. Was the judge asleep that day in law school?
Personally I think this is a travesty because it basically says, as far as Canadian law goes anyway, you can state anything you want on the internet regardless of facts or truth and there will be no repercussions.
Ahhh, but IP rights are required to enforce the GPL. Without them the GPL is about as worthless as the paper it's written on. Companies can take form the community without having to give back because the concept of property, which the GPL relies on, believeit or not, has been removed.
Not to mention that compeltely removing the IP system would create many more problems than it solves.
How is RedHat's a valid and reasonable suggestion? While the donation of hardware and software to schools is an excellent idea, and I hope Microsoft donates even a quarter of this amount when all is said and done, the remedy itself, even if RedHat donates the software, does not address the problems faced in the lawsuit. Or was the RedHat suggestion only taken seriously beause this is Slashdot?
If you remove intellectual proerty rights, you remove any hope of protecting software under the GPL. GPL requires copyrights to exist as uch as any other intellectual idea governed by USC 17.
He's not saying that Windows did this first, the author is stating that this transparency does not come at a loss (or at a negligible loss anyway) to the system performance. X Windows kills system performance right away; alpha transparency throw out the system along with it.
Actually, this isn't all that terrible an idea. However, it limits the users ability to organize information at a later date.
There was a streaming video, on CNet I believe, with Bill Gates introducing the new line of Tablet PCs and Windows XP - Tablet PC edition. One of the most interesting features of WXP-TPCE is the concept of virtual ink. V-ink is an object as far as the OS and applications are concerned. Users can write on the screen with a stylus and then take that data and distribute it eleswhere. For instance I might scribble down a date for a future meeting. I can then select this v-ink object and convert it to an Outlook meeting complete with the original v-ink object and a transcribed version of the v-ink in the notes section.
Windows Messenger was also demo'ed with v-ink being a new feature. Users were able to send v-ink objects between one another as if it was a normal tetx object. this v-ink could then be copied, updated and resent. A application of this might be sending directions to a friend. They could ask somehting like "is this where we are supposed to meet?" along with a simple drawing and an "x" marking the spot. The other friend could then copy the map, chanhe the location of the "x" then send the updated map back with a reply like "no, here is where we are supposed to meet."
Now, these eamples are rather frivolous but they do get people thinking about the possibilities an object type like this can have.
Actually, services have always cost something. Ancient peoples would barter livestock or grain for services in trade. For instace, I might need some chickens for food. I have some wheat I would be willing to trade in kind. You might be willing to give me five chickens for a bag of wheat. The value placed on something is based on supply and demand. I might thik that five chickens is not enough for one bag of wheat. Given that wheat is scare this year I can ask for eight chickens for this one bag of wheat. I have given something of value for something or service I need in return.
Eventually this barter system evolved into coins. The Romans developed a system by which precious metals could be traded for the same livestock or grain. You set the price of ten gold coins for those very same five chickens. I might be able to go down a few stalls at the market and get the same five chickens for eight gold coins. Again, supply and demand determine the value of the chickens.
Obviously this system has further evolved into paper money representing gold in a vault. The value of the paper money is based on how much gold is in the vault and how much that gold is valued at any one point in time.
Obviously I've oversimplified things but the idea that things used to be free is absurd. Value has always been placed on goods and services people traded. Perhaps before civilizaitons arose things were "free" only in as much as there were two options. Take or die. If you did not hunt for food you would not get any food. There were no markets where you could trade your firewood for meat.
Real intelligent. Let's put pressure on teh copanies so tehy can slap together a half-ased patch without testing it so they can satisfy your absolutist views on full disclosure.
/.'ers might give his argument a chance. Instead you allow your zealotry to blind you to thinking for yourself about the issue. You decide to follow the ABM sheep. Very intelligent (once again, I'm using comic exaggeration here).
Or those in the secutiry community can pull their heads out of their asses, work out a compromise for solving these problems BEFORE they can become a much larger problem.
Full disclosure does nothing more than rush patches out the door, it does not solve security problems. It hands blueprints to script kiddies, normally people without the intelligence to write their own names (I'm using a bit of comic exxageration here), so they can snicker with their friends about how they clicked a couple of buttons and created a worm.
Scott Culp has some very intelligent points and were he not a Microsoft employee, many of you
The PDA is yesterday's technology. This is the future of portable, wireless computing.
Actually, Microsoftused the Object tag in IE 3.0 to embed their activeX plug-ins. They have used it since but only recently implemented the Embed tag because this is what Netscape supported and thisis what some web developers were asking for. I believe the W3C has deprecated the Embed tag in lieu of the Object tag.
Similarly the exact same thing happened with the div tag. Microsoft' used the div tag for everything since IE 4. Frontpage would even replace things like the p tag with the div tag. The layer tag was unheard of except for Netscape. Once again the W3C deprecated the layer tag in lieu of the div tag.
Anyone see a pattern forming here?
How did I prove you right? The point of your statements, as I read them , was Americans are ignorant about the world. We cannot even point out Egypt on a map. I argued that not only could I point Egyptout on a map, I've visted Egypt. Have you?
I gotta say that not only do I not find this insightful, I find broad generalizations of ANY group of people completely ignorant. Not only can I find Egypt on a map, I've been to Luxor and Cairo. I've also been to Kenya and the Seychelles. Can you point out the Seychelles on a map? Cna you tell me what language the Seychellois speak? Can YOU point out Egypt on a map? Have you visited these countries?
The biggest problem with America is that only two other countries border us. It's difficult to hop on a train and travel to different countries like you can in Europe so our access to different cultures is limited to our propensity to travel by plane. This is rather expensive, a lot more than a rail pass in Europe anyway, so there are only a select few that can manage this.
I argue that travelling between different states within out union is as educational, however, as travelling between different countries in Europe. Can you tell me where Idaho is? What's the capital of Idaho? There is some excellent skiing in Idaho that many americans don't know about, much less foreigners such as yourself, but bigots like you only see Idaho as a producer of potatoes (if that - you might not have ever heard of Idaho - ignorant foreigner.)
How about Louisiana? What do you know abotu Louisiana? Can you point it out on a map? Indiana? Illinois? Tennessee? Massachusettes? You probably couldn't spell Massachusetts (or Mississippi, fot that matter) until I wrote them out for you. Does thismake you ignorant and stupid? By your logic, yes it does. I'd wger that there are a vast majority of foreigners who do not know very much about the United States either. Does this make everyone in the world stupid? Apparently you seem to think this is the measure of one'sintelligence so by your standards, yes.
What's your highest leve of education? I have a Masters degree. Do you now think me an idiot? I've travelled to places in the world many will never get a chance to see. I am also an American. If you think me ignorant now then you sir are a troll.
As to your "news" argument, CNN is not a newspaper, it's a cable television news source (Cable News Network.) But I'm sure you knew that since you're such an intelligent foreigner. As for the indemedia.org article you linked to, what thehell do you expect the Taliban to say? "Yes, we murder out own people. We treat women like crap. Our courts are not just. Our whole system of government contradicts the Islamic religion." That article proves nothing except the Taliban will lie, something I knew already. There were no facts except for the "facts" which the Taliban wished morons like yourself to believe.
While X still has some room for improvement in the performance department, its not X that is holding the Linux desktop back, it's the hodge podge of window managers, toolkits and lack of standards for look and feel that are holding the Linux desktop back.