Come on, I've been playing MUDs for years and I have a great deal of friends with whom I converse solely over MUDs, we most certainly are a "community".
But not only are "virtual" communities real, they're something far more significant than is generally acknowledged. In the case of MUDs, what we see is an interesting new way of communicating between people. What I find fascinating about MUDs is how they distort communications, and how such concepts as idioms and body language map to the new medium. For instance, such things as different "socials" (pre-cooked strings in response to commands like 'grin') and other behaviours that would normally seem mundane take on a whole new meaning. The difference between the 'smile' and 'grin' social, for instance, is vast, but you'd never see that otherwise. Different ways of communicating with people, through private and global communication, by moving around and doing various other things, evolve new forms of humour and new ways of feeling the presence of other people and objects. It's true that most MUD players don't think this, but I think they are generally getting it anyway whether they know it or not. MUDs and computer-based communications in general provide an interesting medium for playing with interpersonal relations and the relationship between people and the world around them.
I think from this perspective it is easy to see why Timothy Leary came to see "cyberspace" as a way to get to new levels of reality, much like LSD. To neglect the reality of this is silly, all you have to do is play MUDs for a while and you'll know what I'm talking about.
Has anyone else noticed that most of these TLDs are really short-sighted and are of far more limited use than the current ones? ie are things like.radio and.dvd really going to make sense in a few years? And how wide is their true range of use? It seems to me that only generic, widely usable TLDs should be allowed, otherwise the whole thing gets confusing (people have a hard enough time remember whether something is.com,.org, or.net now, imagine trying to work out whether it's.free,.radio,.dvd,.kids, or.men!) Plus so many people assume everything ends with ".com" now that they are going to misunderstand and think you mean "playground.kids.com" rather than "playground.kids" which by the way just sounds really weird.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: domains should be regulated so the only entities capable of getting.com,.org, and.net should be global entities--90% of the current ones should be moved to.co.us,.org.us,.net.us,.mil.us,.gov.us, etc. There shouldn't even be the OPTION of having momscookiesofindiana.com. We should stop wasting the namespace and translate all the existing wastes of namespace into nation-based domains to save room for truly global things (ie, you would have ibm.com, but whitehouse.gov.us)
What did they expect? It's the standard life cycle for all my dishes and containers. They start out brand new, and then after years of faithful service eventually I end up leaving some food product in them for too long and they grow mould so monstrous the only solution is to throw them away. Naturally I think this solution applies to the Mir situation too.
It's amazing to watch these films and realise how little progress we've made in UI technology since 1968. In fact, we've actually lost the capability to easily organise hierarchical information as Engelbart demonstrates. And we've only recently regained the knowledge/use of such things as hypertext. I wish current software (like word processors) could focus more on easily organising things hierarchically; it appears that this 1968 UI is better at doing that than any of today's software. Really sort of makes you think...
I know several people who have done a lot of work in offices of political figures and can say that there are people who sit around going through every letter and probably every email sent to them. The way it works is they have a spreadsheet with all the "issues" listed, and for each issue that keep a tally of the opinions received.
Of course, totally aside from that, the flood of email is going to bring down mail servers and piss people off, which may have the opposite of the desired effect.
Unrelated to that, I find this quote from the article a little strange:
The My.Mp3.com service differs from the music-sharing Web site Napster, which faces legal challenges of its own, because it merely sends the music to listening devices, such as a computer or a wireless music player. Napster lets users download an actual computer file and make copies of it.
Now everyone knows if mp3.com sends music to a "listening device" that happens to be your computer, you can save it in a file just as easily as you can with Napster. I find it interesting how the article attempts to make mp3.com look like it's less of a copyright violator than Napster, when in fact Napster is not even violating any copyrights outright and mp3.com is! Perhaps this is an attempt to dissociate mp3.com with the "infamous" Napster...
Yes, Linux is cool and performs fairly well. But Tru64 UNIX is optimised for Alpha hardware and far more scaleable. Yes, Linux is more scaleable than ever before, but still not as scaleable as most UNIX systems. It seems like a waste to spend all this money on excellent hardware and then stick Linux on it, degrading the performance.
What this really is is a shift in processing time... With adventure games, and text games in particular, you spent a great deal of time thinking. You'd sit back in your chair or pace around frustrated trying to work out a puzzle or similar; a lot would go on in your brain (also with text games, your brain would be busy imagining what was described). What's happened is games have moved all the processing into the computer, so that you spend more time fixated on your computer and less time fixated on your brain, and in particular the imagined world inside it. I'd say it's like the difference between a TV and a book, but it's really more than that, because adventure games require more thinking (or at least a different kind of thinking) than books. Basically it's changed from an active kind of gaming to a passive kind of gaming, where you interact with the game world on a very limited level rather than using your brain to its real capacity in interacting with a fascinating and in-depth world.
If those puzzles like the one cited in the article seem bizarre and arcane, it's because they're supposed to be--they're puzzles. If you just had to go to the shop and buy a disguise, it wouldn't require any thought. That's the difference. It's not supposed to be realistic! It's supposed to be hard, it's supposed to require unconventional thinking. Yes, that takes effort. But it's gratifying as hell when you solve it. And you expand your mind by thinking on different levels to solve a problem. You get a lot more into the game than you get into something like Tomb Raider. When I played the first Gabriel Knight (the best), I was somewhat young and got very very into the game. I remember being thrilled to visit New Orleans for the first time and see all the locations from the game in real life! Strange? Maybe. But it's very easy to get deep into a game like that because you spend so much time thinking about it and interacting with it. Every mental breakthrough carries with it gratification that goes beyond reaching a certain number of frags, or whatever.
MUDs, also, are something you can never replace. So-called "graphical MUDs" (in my mind an oxymoron) are really ineffective at doing what MUDs really do, which is bring people together in an imaginitive game environment. To me, MUDs are fascinating because they twist things like communication and spatial concepts into new forms, in effect taking your thought processes to new levels they wouldn't have gone to before. Much of this is due to the textual medium. The closer we get to reality with the game environment, ie the more graphical and 3D we get, the less of this element there is. It becomes like an extension of reality, and there is no more playing with the fabric of reality. I sat in a pub recently with a couple of MUD friends and we had a discussion about MUD design that was simultaneously about how you perceive objects, space, and communication, how these could be warped in interesting ways--that kind of conversation will never exist with graphical environments because the whole idea of a graphical (and in particular 3D) environment is to approximate reality.
Anyway, to sum it up: adventure and text games have yielded to things that require a great deal less thought because people don't want to use their brains. But there will always be enough people who want to use their brains and who want to explore things that MUDs and adventure games are not going to disappear for a long time to come. I hope.
it's becoming apparent that there is now a need for a new graphing project: A Visual Map of the History of History Graphing Projects. anyone interested in working on this?
By the author's definition of an OS, UNIX is an OS, because it does, in fact, have a GUI: CDE. CDE may not be part of Linux, but it is part of UNIX. Full stop. If an OS just has to include a GUI to be an OS, then UNIX qualifies.
In reality, however, UNIX is something far better than an OS. UNIX (or more specifically, the Single UNIX Specification) is a set of standard interfaces, APIs, and tools that make up a group of systems characterised as UNIX systems. The standards range from POSIX to vi to CDE. The beauty of this is the Open Systems (not open source) model, which means that anyone can implement a UNIX system and you will know what you are getting, so ISVs, administrators, and users don't have to worry about fragmentation.
So the OS is HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, Tru64, whatever--they are all based on UNIX as a foundation, and if you were to implement _just_ UNIX with no value added, you would have a complete OS, including GUI. UNIX is not an OS; UNIX is an Open Systems spec for OSes to follow.
(Linux, by the way, does not follow it, and nearly all open source projects are non-open systems because Open Systems requires industry consensus and documented, backwards-compatible APIs)
Re:CDE is the most mature desktop available.
on
A Praise To Unix
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· Score: 1
A) They were using CDE 1 rather than CDE 2, it's not a fair comparison.
B) They were using Triteal CDE which deviates from the standard in several ways.
C) They completely ignored such technologies as ToolTalk and capability of distributed heterogeneous systems integration and only looked at one thing: the user interface. 90% of CDE is what lies under the user interface.
They're reinventing the wheel. The standard UNIX desktop environment, CDE, already has all this. ToolTalk provides a much more lightweight and nonintrusive distributed heterogeneous systems component architecture. ToolTalk is part of CDE. CDE is an excellent architecture for a complete desktop, and is already the standard. If you look into the technology, you'll see this. So basically, either these guys are completely ignorant of CDE's significance and capabilities, or they know about it and they just want their name on something (NIH).
Miguel is missing out on the fact that he's talking about Linux, not UNIX. The reason is that CDE, the desktop on real UNIX systems, has all this stuff already. Not only has it got a distributed messaging and service model (ToolTalk) that allows for integration of multiple components over networks and multiple platforms, it's also got things like standard print dialog widgets that every true CDE application uses. The GNOME and KDE people are just reimplementing this stuff, and doing it badly--all of this was thought of years ago, and is present on EVERY UNIX system.
If anything, the stuff that sucks is UNIX applications. The reason is that they fail to take advantage of all the standards like ToolTalk and other CDE services. If they did, Netscape would use ToolTalk for all its media handling rather than relying on "helper apps" and "plugins", and would use the XC-APPGROUP extension to embed the handlers in its own window. In fact, it would use Motif for layout, as Motif is capable of doing all the layout HTML needs. If they did, they'd all have the same standard print dialog, and they'd all handle virtually any media type thanks to ToolTalk.
The point is: UNIX doesn't suck. UNIX applications suck. And Linux sucks because it doesn't generally have CDE. UNIX and CDE are excellent pieces of technology.
In my opinion, the best choice for a desktop in this case is CDE.
Whether you choose to use the desktops as actual application/file machines or as Xterminals, CDE will work out very nicely. One of CDE's main strengths is its ability to integrate limitless numbers of machines and platforms together simultaneously into one desktop, so that you can launch applications and interact with files regardless of where they are or what platform they're on.
CDE will allow you to set up centralised application and file servers on various UNIX (or linux) platforms and then serve those out to X users out there, all integrated with cut and paste, drag and drop, etc. It will also make it easy to not have to make the choice about whether to use those desktops as PCs or X terminals, as CDE seamlessly mixes local resources and remote ones--you can run CDE on a 'desktop server', your applications on an application server, and get your files locally--or you can get your files remotely and run ApplixWare locally, or whatever. It's all very easily configurable into limitless configurations.
CDE 2.1 is resource-friendly, and also very easy to use and simple interface, not an overbearing one. It's got a LOT of great features, despite what you may hear from people who don't really know how to use them.
I wouldn't recommend Xi Graphics CDE though--it's not fully working--so you might want to use a UNIX box as a CDE server. Alternatively, email me and I can give you some more information about CDE choices if you're interested.
For years, the government tracked and illegally (without warrants) bugged the phones of such people as John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and more. You can see a list of some of these people and their (blacked out) FBI files at the FBI's FOIA site.
Anyone with any influence who disagrees with the government is going to be tracked, bugged, and if they're influential enough, eventually shot. No, it's not the Soviet Union, but it's a lot more oppressive than you'd like to think. The minute you speak out about the oppression, you start to find out exactly how close we are to fascism.
All you have to do is look at the FBI files on Abbie Hoffman, or John Lennon, to see that they'll just come up 90% blacked out. In many cases, they omit entire pages--in other cases, they black out everything but the page number!
Anyway, you can bet CIA, NSA, and probably FBI have been monitoring Internet transmissions illegally for years, just like they've been tapping phones illegally for years. The FBI may not be run by J Edgar Hoover anymore, but they're still the same organisation. In response to claims the CIA assassinated a Serbian official, the CIA said "We don't do that anymore." Bullshit. These are the same organisations, with the same goals, and they will continue their illegal activities against Americans and foreigners for a long time to come.
The ACLU is unfortunately not going to get much out of them.
It seems at every opportunity there's a group of people who shout "X MUST DIE! X SUCKS!" But you know, they never, ever have a rational argument. It seems to me the real reason they don't like it is that it's so successful and it's been around so long--it goes completely against the idea that everything must be NEW NEW NEW in order to be good.
X is a superb system. The X11 part is great--the X protocol, and excellent extensions like APPGROUP, XIE, LBX, PEX, etc. Also, the parts of the X Window System on top of that are great too--Xlib, Xt intrinsics. It's all extremely well-engineered. Who cares if it's large? Memory is cheap. That's one of the key components of the UNIX philosophy: "efficiency" is irrelevant because machines keep getting better, so we should focus on portability, modularity, extensibility, etc. I personally never have any speed problems at all with X. X runs incredibly quickly and I don't care about the memory usage. X programs are perfectly efficient. I think this guy just has a bone to pick--I don't see any evidence at all that X is slow.
X also has an excellent model for what it does. It provides for pretty much everything you could want from a programmer's standpoint below the widget level, and everything you could want from an integrator's standpoint, as it's just an excellent display system. What more could you want? Why wouldn't you want all these excellent extensions? Anyway, modern X servers can dynamically load extensions as modules when needed--so the idea that they take up memory is just faff.
And another thing. What's this about "the Unix community hasn't standardized on a desktop" ??? Duh! Haven't you heard of CDE? Maybe the Linux community hasn't standardised, but CDE is the standard desktop for UNIX and has been since 1993 or so. CDE and Motif, by the way, are two of the most excellent pieces of technology ever produced. Most people insult them without knowing what they're really capable of, but if you know what they're really capable of (ToolTalk, XmContainer, etc etc) you begin to realise that they really are excellent. And they're built on top of X. With Xt and Xlib. I think it's a perfect situation.
So what the hell would be the point of doing away with X? You wouldn't gain any noticeable performance. You would only gain headaches. I think it's really just a question of ego tripping. This guy and people like the Berlin guys are just ego tripping--they are going to create something with no real, practical advantages because they want to have something NEW NEW NEW, and more importantly, because they want to have their name all over it.
I sure hope they don't win, it will be a waste of excellent technology.
For all of you saying this is a "first" for "Unix", I'd like to remind you that the standard object interoperability model, ToolTalk, is part of the standard desktop, CDE, and is standard on all real UNIX systems. ToolTalk has an excellent model and I recommend you check it out, it is far more useful than this open source stuff.
(and no, this is not a troll, it's genuinely good technology)
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these mice. Unsanitary yes, but cuter than Alphas. Might use the IMPS (Infinite Mouse Protocol Suite) Oh, wait...
A plane was de-flighted today, causing the de-functioning of over 100 passengers...
But not only are "virtual" communities real, they're something far more significant than is generally acknowledged. In the case of MUDs, what we see is an interesting new way of communicating between people. What I find fascinating about MUDs is how they distort communications, and how such concepts as idioms and body language map to the new medium. For instance, such things as different "socials" (pre-cooked strings in response to commands like 'grin') and other behaviours that would normally seem mundane take on a whole new meaning. The difference between the 'smile' and 'grin' social, for instance, is vast, but you'd never see that otherwise. Different ways of communicating with people, through private and global communication, by moving around and doing various other things, evolve new forms of humour and new ways of feeling the presence of other people and objects. It's true that most MUD players don't think this, but I think they are generally getting it anyway whether they know it or not. MUDs and computer-based communications in general provide an interesting medium for playing with interpersonal relations and the relationship between people and the world around them.
I think from this perspective it is easy to see why Timothy Leary came to see "cyberspace" as a way to get to new levels of reality, much like LSD. To neglect the reality of this is silly, all you have to do is play MUDs for a while and you'll know what I'm talking about.
Has anyone else noticed that most of these TLDs are really short-sighted and are of far more limited use than the current ones? ie are things like .radio and .dvd really going to make sense in a few years? And how wide is their true range of use? It seems to me that only generic, widely usable TLDs should be allowed, otherwise the whole thing gets confusing (people have a hard enough time remember whether something is .com, .org, or .net now, imagine trying to work out whether it's .free, .radio, .dvd, .kids, or .men!) Plus so many people assume everything ends with ".com" now that they are going to misunderstand and think you mean "playground.kids.com" rather than "playground.kids" which by the way just sounds really weird.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: domains should be regulated so the only entities capable of getting .com, .org, and .net should be global entities--90% of the current ones should be moved to .co.us, .org.us, .net.us, .mil.us, .gov.us, etc. There shouldn't even be the OPTION of having momscookiesofindiana.com. We should stop wasting the namespace and translate all the existing wastes of namespace into nation-based domains to save room for truly global things (ie, you would have ibm.com, but whitehouse.gov.us)
What did they expect? It's the standard life cycle for all my dishes and containers. They start out brand new, and then after years of faithful service eventually I end up leaving some food product in them for too long and they grow mould so monstrous the only solution is to throw them away. Naturally I think this solution applies to the Mir situation too.
It's amazing to watch these films and realise how little progress we've made in UI technology since 1968. In fact, we've actually lost the capability to easily organise hierarchical information as Engelbart demonstrates. And we've only recently regained the knowledge/use of such things as hypertext. I wish current software (like word processors) could focus more on easily organising things hierarchically; it appears that this 1968 UI is better at doing that than any of today's software. Really sort of makes you think...
Of course, totally aside from that, the flood of email is going to bring down mail servers and piss people off, which may have the opposite of the desired effect.
Unrelated to that, I find this quote from the article a little strange:
The My.Mp3.com service differs from the music-sharing Web site Napster, which faces legal challenges of its own, because it merely sends the music to listening devices, such as a computer or a wireless music player. Napster lets users download an actual computer file and make copies of it.
Now everyone knows if mp3.com sends music to a "listening device" that happens to be your computer, you can save it in a file just as easily as you can with Napster. I find it interesting how the article attempts to make mp3.com look like it's less of a copyright violator than Napster, when in fact Napster is not even violating any copyrights outright and mp3.com is! Perhaps this is an attempt to dissociate mp3.com with the "infamous" Napster...
Why use this when you can get CDE for Linux so cheap these days? It's worth $25/copy for the real thing!
Yes, Linux is cool and performs fairly well. But Tru64 UNIX is optimised for Alpha hardware and far more scaleable. Yes, Linux is more scaleable than ever before, but still not as scaleable as most UNIX systems. It seems like a waste to spend all this money on excellent hardware and then stick Linux on it, degrading the performance.
CDE is actually fairly nice technology, and if you don't like the look you can customise it through X resources.
In space, no one can hear you scream.
If those puzzles like the one cited in the article seem bizarre and arcane, it's because they're supposed to be--they're puzzles. If you just had to go to the shop and buy a disguise, it wouldn't require any thought. That's the difference. It's not supposed to be realistic! It's supposed to be hard, it's supposed to require unconventional thinking. Yes, that takes effort. But it's gratifying as hell when you solve it. And you expand your mind by thinking on different levels to solve a problem. You get a lot more into the game than you get into something like Tomb Raider. When I played the first Gabriel Knight (the best), I was somewhat young and got very very into the game. I remember being thrilled to visit New Orleans for the first time and see all the locations from the game in real life! Strange? Maybe. But it's very easy to get deep into a game like that because you spend so much time thinking about it and interacting with it. Every mental breakthrough carries with it gratification that goes beyond reaching a certain number of frags, or whatever.
MUDs, also, are something you can never replace. So-called "graphical MUDs" (in my mind an oxymoron) are really ineffective at doing what MUDs really do, which is bring people together in an imaginitive game environment. To me, MUDs are fascinating because they twist things like communication and spatial concepts into new forms, in effect taking your thought processes to new levels they wouldn't have gone to before. Much of this is due to the textual medium. The closer we get to reality with the game environment, ie the more graphical and 3D we get, the less of this element there is. It becomes like an extension of reality, and there is no more playing with the fabric of reality. I sat in a pub recently with a couple of MUD friends and we had a discussion about MUD design that was simultaneously about how you perceive objects, space, and communication, how these could be warped in interesting ways--that kind of conversation will never exist with graphical environments because the whole idea of a graphical (and in particular 3D) environment is to approximate reality.
Anyway, to sum it up: adventure and text games have yielded to things that require a great deal less thought because people don't want to use their brains. But there will always be enough people who want to use their brains and who want to explore things that MUDs and adventure games are not going to disappear for a long time to come. I hope.
If this trend continues, they're going to have to beg for Stallman's forgiveness too...
it's becoming apparent that there is now a need for a new graphing project: A Visual Map of the History of History Graphing Projects. anyone interested in working on this?
In reality, however, UNIX is something far better than an OS. UNIX (or more specifically, the Single UNIX Specification) is a set of standard interfaces, APIs, and tools that make up a group of systems characterised as UNIX systems. The standards range from POSIX to vi to CDE. The beauty of this is the Open Systems (not open source) model, which means that anyone can implement a UNIX system and you will know what you are getting, so ISVs, administrators, and users don't have to worry about fragmentation.
So the OS is HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, Tru64, whatever--they are all based on UNIX as a foundation, and if you were to implement _just_ UNIX with no value added, you would have a complete OS, including GUI. UNIX is not an OS; UNIX is an Open Systems spec for OSes to follow.
(Linux, by the way, does not follow it, and nearly all open source projects are non-open systems because Open Systems requires industry consensus and documented, backwards-compatible APIs)
B) They were using Triteal CDE which deviates from the standard in several ways.
C) They completely ignored such technologies as ToolTalk and capability of distributed heterogeneous systems integration and only looked at one thing: the user interface. 90% of CDE is what lies under the user interface.
They--and you--have missed the point.
CDE. This is not a troll. CDE is the most mature desktop available.
They're reinventing the wheel. The standard UNIX desktop environment, CDE, already has all this. ToolTalk provides a much more lightweight and nonintrusive distributed heterogeneous systems component architecture. ToolTalk is part of CDE. CDE is an excellent architecture for a complete desktop, and is already the standard. If you look into the technology, you'll see this. So basically, either these guys are completely ignorant of CDE's significance and capabilities, or they know about it and they just want their name on something (NIH).
If anything, the stuff that sucks is UNIX applications. The reason is that they fail to take advantage of all the standards like ToolTalk and other CDE services. If they did, Netscape would use ToolTalk for all its media handling rather than relying on "helper apps" and "plugins", and would use the XC-APPGROUP extension to embed the handlers in its own window. In fact, it would use Motif for layout, as Motif is capable of doing all the layout HTML needs. If they did, they'd all have the same standard print dialog, and they'd all handle virtually any media type thanks to ToolTalk.
The point is: UNIX doesn't suck. UNIX applications suck. And Linux sucks because it doesn't generally have CDE. UNIX and CDE are excellent pieces of technology.
Whether you choose to use the desktops as actual application/file machines or as Xterminals, CDE will work out very nicely. One of CDE's main strengths is its ability to integrate limitless numbers of machines and platforms together simultaneously into one desktop, so that you can launch applications and interact with files regardless of where they are or what platform they're on.
CDE will allow you to set up centralised application and file servers on various UNIX (or linux) platforms and then serve those out to X users out there, all integrated with cut and paste, drag and drop, etc. It will also make it easy to not have to make the choice about whether to use those desktops as PCs or X terminals, as CDE seamlessly mixes local resources and remote ones--you can run CDE on a 'desktop server', your applications on an application server, and get your files locally--or you can get your files remotely and run ApplixWare locally, or whatever. It's all very easily configurable into limitless configurations.
CDE 2.1 is resource-friendly, and also very easy to use and simple interface, not an overbearing one. It's got a LOT of great features, despite what you may hear from people who don't really know how to use them.
I wouldn't recommend Xi Graphics CDE though--it's not fully working--so you might want to use a UNIX box as a CDE server. Alternatively, email me and I can give you some more information about CDE choices if you're interested.
Anyone with any influence who disagrees with the government is going to be tracked, bugged, and if they're influential enough, eventually shot. No, it's not the Soviet Union, but it's a lot more oppressive than you'd like to think. The minute you speak out about the oppression, you start to find out exactly how close we are to fascism.
Anyway, you can bet CIA, NSA, and probably FBI have been monitoring Internet transmissions illegally for years, just like they've been tapping phones illegally for years. The FBI may not be run by J Edgar Hoover anymore, but they're still the same organisation. In response to claims the CIA assassinated a Serbian official, the CIA said "We don't do that anymore." Bullshit. These are the same organisations, with the same goals, and they will continue their illegal activities against Americans and foreigners for a long time to come.
The ACLU is unfortunately not going to get much out of them.
X is a superb system. The X11 part is great--the X protocol, and excellent extensions like APPGROUP, XIE, LBX, PEX, etc. Also, the parts of the X Window System on top of that are great too--Xlib, Xt intrinsics. It's all extremely well-engineered. Who cares if it's large? Memory is cheap. That's one of the key components of the UNIX philosophy: "efficiency" is irrelevant because machines keep getting better, so we should focus on portability, modularity, extensibility, etc. I personally never have any speed problems at all with X. X runs incredibly quickly and I don't care about the memory usage. X programs are perfectly efficient. I think this guy just has a bone to pick--I don't see any evidence at all that X is slow.
X also has an excellent model for what it does. It provides for pretty much everything you could want from a programmer's standpoint below the widget level, and everything you could want from an integrator's standpoint, as it's just an excellent display system. What more could you want? Why wouldn't you want all these excellent extensions? Anyway, modern X servers can dynamically load extensions as modules when needed--so the idea that they take up memory is just faff.
And another thing. What's this about "the Unix community hasn't standardized on a desktop" ??? Duh! Haven't you heard of CDE? Maybe the Linux community hasn't standardised, but CDE is the standard desktop for UNIX and has been since 1993 or so. CDE and Motif, by the way, are two of the most excellent pieces of technology ever produced. Most people insult them without knowing what they're really capable of, but if you know what they're really capable of (ToolTalk, XmContainer, etc etc) you begin to realise that they really are excellent. And they're built on top of X. With Xt and Xlib. I think it's a perfect situation.
So what the hell would be the point of doing away with X? You wouldn't gain any noticeable performance. You would only gain headaches. I think it's really just a question of ego tripping. This guy and people like the Berlin guys are just ego tripping--they are going to create something with no real, practical advantages because they want to have something NEW NEW NEW, and more importantly, because they want to have their name all over it.
I sure hope they don't win, it will be a waste of excellent technology.
(and no, this is not a troll, it's genuinely good technology)