2) I've programmed on it from its very early days (Xlib, Xtoolkit, Motif, all the way to the present) and it sucks.
3) The people who developed graphic subsystems thereafter (NeXTSTEP, MacOS, Android, Windows) avoided it because it sucks.
4) The developers of Linux are dumping it because it sucks.
5) You defend X by talking about "network transparency" (the mating call of the X11 noob). "Network transparency" is a rarely used X11 feature which is fully supported in Wayland as an extension. So the rare few people who need it will have access to it.
So, pardon me, but I'll stand by my statement: X11 sucks.
p.s. "The X11 was developed purely because X10 wasn't generic enough in its hardware requirements. That was it." Around here that is considered an architectural flaw, as it couldn't be fixed by a simple extension of the protocol.
By dumb terminal I mean a thin client, something that didn't happen.
X mostly ran on engineering workstations.
Not by design dude. It was meant to run on thin clients but it ended up being such a pig that you needed a workstation to run it. At the time a "thin" X-client was more expensive that a PC.
I'm not sure why you think that is "pie in the sky" since it worked and continues to work rather well.
So a protocol designed to run on a cheap thin client ends up needing a powerful workstation to run and you call it "working rather well"? With those definitions it's no wonder you consider X a success.
Part of the reason for that was because the protocol was rich enough to transmit graphics primitives at a higher level than a bitmap. Nothing dumb about it.
No one uses such primitives because they are incredibly sucky. Hence VNC and such.
I did find NextStep and NeWS superior to X11 and it's a damn shame they didn't succeed
Of course, anything was better than X11. Steve Jobs famously declared "X11 is brain dead".
X was so "ahead of its time" that its entire architecture was dumped in version 10 to give way to X11, and then it remained so far ahead of its time that to this day NextOS, MacOS, Android and Windows have yet to adopt a single thing from it, contrary to the rest of Unix most of which has made its way into those operating systems.
And no, it was not designed to access resources from the desktop. It was mainly designed so that you could use a dumb terminal to access your server. When it became clear that was pie on the sky, instead of redesigning the turd, they just added layer upon layer of cruft, so you ended up with a dumb as doornails protocol running on a heavy weight, expensive "dumb" terminal.
Wayland is an effort to remove those layers of cruft that nobody uses (Xtoolkit?)
Lastly the web browser has nothing to do with Unix. It is platform independent. The fact that you think the web==unix shows how little you know about deep OS architecture.
The larger question I have, and asked many times before without getting any sort of satisfying answer is - what does Wayland provide that X cannot? X is mostly well tested very mature tech and it seems to work fine, and provide MORE not less capability than Wayland.
Anybody who has looked in the innards of X knows its a pig. No secret there. It's only Unix fanbois that cannot fathom that some parts of Unix were not properly designed from inception.
Most of those have been patched over the years (e.g. security which initially was non-existent, internationalization, which still lags Windows/Mac but is closing in). X is one of the few remaining *big* mistakes in Unix. It was designed with the wrong philosophy and overtaken by actual usage. Wayland is an effort to clean up and refactor the code.
Just a note to point out that IPCC has an agenda, as opposed to the climate scientists, who, while perhaps suffering from confirmation biases, have a much more neutral stake on the whole thing either way.
It should be noted that studies have consistently shown that pretty much any change in methodology leads to higher marks the first time is tested, as students place extra effort on the face of an unknown teaching technique. The challenge is to produce gains that are lasting, once the students have gotten used to taking classes this way.
Every single UK privatisation since 1979 has been ideological (where the ideology is "I take your stuff and get rich from it"), and not one has improved as a result.
Actually, to be fair there is one exception: council housing.
But yes, otherwise we agree: all other privatized services were ideologically driven and a failure, including most recently rail service.
Yet he's touted as the likely heir for CEO when Ballmer retires.
It reminds me of the resume of Gil Amelio, who had a similar record of failures yet people managed to convince themselves that he was some sort of CEO genius. He took Apple to the lowest point, when in desperation tried to buy BeOS. He fscked up that deal and then, to his incredible luck, bought NeXT instead. Jobs forced the board to fire Amelio and the recovery of Apple began then.
an ever-growing horde of professors and graduate students
[Citation needed]
To the best of my knowledge most established fields have had near zero growth since the 1970s, with new sciences (such as CS and genetics) being the exception.
Actually the biggest driver (no pun intended) will be people themselves. Think about it, do you buy cars where you have to brace yourself or do you choose the model with the automatically deploying air bags? do you buy the car with all manual brakes or the one with ABS? do you buy the car with manual headlights or the one with AUTO setting? Do you buy the car with manual radio tuning buttons or the one with SEEK forward and backward functions?
Ditto for newer features. If you ever driven a car with radar activated collision warning (and if no response breaking) you would never go back to one without one.
People will surrender their "freedom" (which in this case is a bullshit choice of term) for the safety of a car that drives himself, just like you, along with the rest of us, sacrificed the "freedom" of your ice box for a fridge that turns itself on and off. Come to think of it, that is the complete opposite of "sacrificing freedom" we actually stopped the slavery of having to feed an ice box by having a machine take over.
Same goes for an automatically driven car. Al you are surrendering is your mechanical input to the machine. You are no longer a cog in the driving system. Yay for (real) freedom!
They are responsible for their actions if they are or should reasonably be aware of the consequences. The point is that the system, as a whole can end up "making" decisions that no individual person made. This is the whole basis of the "invisible hand" economic theory from Adam Smith.
The gap between rich and poor grows every year, which means it isn't making 'everyone richer'.
Seriously dude? If I have $1 and you have $2 and we both double our wealth, now I have $2 and you have $4. Everyone is richer yet the gap grew from $1 to $2. Now lets say you tripled your money while I doubled mine. The gap is even bigger but still we are both richer.
It is perfectly possible for the gap to grow and everyone get richer. I'm not saying this is or isn't happening right now. I'm just pointing out that your mathematical reasoning is flawed.
A company cannot make any decision that isn't made by a person who made that decision.
Nonsense. A computer as a whole can take a decision that wasn't made by a single transistor in any sense of the word. It is also well known that people in groups do things that they wouldn't do alone.
Lisp fits perfectly the main two definitions of functional language
1) Functions are first class citizens that can be passed around
and/or
2) It attempts to avoid state as much as possible.
[Personally I think definition 2 is wrong. That defines a stateless language, not a functional one, but let's stick to standard definitions for the time being].
So now can you explain to us how come you don't think Lisp is a functional language?
Correct, but the conclusion from this might be the complete opposite of what you think. Say, you walk into a restaurant with $10 cover charge and you drink a coke. Then you walk out and say "I paid $12 for a coke, I'm not getting my money's worth!". Well the solution would have been to order a full meal which amortizes the cover charge.
Think about right now. We are paying just enough taxes to cover the salaries of the government bureaucratic infrastructure (chief of police, road repair department, school principals) but not enough to provide full service underneath them. Just a few percentage points more of GDP tax burden and we could have first world,developed nation public schools, free health care, low crime rates and decent pensions.
Which is false, like most Republican talking points. Yet moderated 5 Interesting because it has truthiness to it: "yeah, we are paying too much taxes, [takes swig from beer]".
States today are spending less than they did in 1990 if you consider local revenues only and the same as they did in 1974 if you add federal grants:
Hear hear. In MS Office their print preview functionality is worse than it was two product cycles ago. Their excel spreadsheets are no longer WYSIWYG. Something that looks fine on the screen might be mangled in the printout.
Starting by the board of directors. Microsoft has been in deep dodo for the last decade, what makes them believe there is any one competent in management there?
Slashdot Mirror
Let me sum it up:
1) the people who know X best, say it sucks.
2) I've programmed on it from its very early days (Xlib, Xtoolkit, Motif, all the way to the present) and it sucks.
3) The people who developed graphic subsystems thereafter (NeXTSTEP, MacOS, Android, Windows) avoided it because it sucks.
4) The developers of Linux are dumping it because it sucks.
5) You defend X by talking about "network transparency" (the mating call of the X11 noob). "Network transparency" is a rarely used X11 feature which is fully supported in Wayland as an extension. So the rare few people who need it will have access to it.
So, pardon me, but I'll stand by my statement: X11 sucks.
p.s. "The X11 was developed purely because X10 wasn't generic enough in its hardware requirements. That was it." Around here that is considered an architectural flaw, as it couldn't be fixed by a simple extension of the protocol.
The dumb terminal at that time was a VT100.
By dumb terminal I mean a thin client, something that didn't happen.
X mostly ran on engineering workstations.
Not by design dude. It was meant to run on thin clients but it ended up being such a pig that you needed a workstation to run it. At the time a "thin" X-client was more expensive that a PC.
I'm not sure why you think that is "pie in the sky" since it worked and continues to work rather well.
So a protocol designed to run on a cheap thin client ends up needing a powerful workstation to run and you call it "working rather well"? With those definitions it's no wonder you consider X a success.
Part of the reason for that was because the protocol was rich enough to transmit graphics primitives at a higher level than a bitmap. Nothing dumb about it.
No one uses such primitives because they are incredibly sucky. Hence VNC and such.
I did find NextStep and NeWS superior to X11 and it's a damn shame they didn't succeed
Of course, anything was better than X11. Steve Jobs famously declared "X11 is brain dead".
X was so "ahead of its time" that its entire architecture was dumped in version 10 to give way to X11, and then it remained so far ahead of its time that to this day NextOS, MacOS, Android and Windows have yet to adopt a single thing from it, contrary to the rest of Unix most of which has made its way into those operating systems.
And no, it was not designed to access resources from the desktop. It was mainly designed so that you could use a dumb terminal to access your server. When it became clear that was pie on the sky, instead of redesigning the turd, they just added layer upon layer of cruft, so you ended up with a dumb as doornails protocol running on a heavy weight, expensive "dumb" terminal.
Wayland is an effort to remove those layers of cruft that nobody uses (Xtoolkit?)
Lastly the web browser has nothing to do with Unix. It is platform independent. The fact that you think the web==unix shows how little you know about deep OS architecture.
The larger question I have, and asked many times before without getting any sort of satisfying answer is - what does Wayland provide that X cannot? X is mostly well tested very mature tech and it seems to work fine, and provide MORE not less capability than Wayland.
Anybody who has looked in the innards of X knows its a pig. No secret there. It's only Unix fanbois that cannot fathom that some parts of Unix were not properly designed from inception.
Most of those have been patched over the years (e.g. security which initially was non-existent, internationalization, which still lags Windows/Mac but is closing in). X is one of the few remaining *big* mistakes in Unix. It was designed with the wrong philosophy and overtaken by actual usage. Wayland is an effort to clean up and refactor the code.
X is mostly well tested very mature tech and it seems to work fine,
[citation needed] ....unless you want to concede that Windows 8 "seems to work fine" too.
Just a note to point out that IPCC has an agenda, as opposed to the climate scientists, who, while perhaps suffering from confirmation biases, have a much more neutral stake on the whole thing either way.
It should be noted that studies have consistently shown that pretty much any change in methodology leads to higher marks the first time is tested, as students place extra effort on the face of an unknown teaching technique. The challenge is to produce gains that are lasting, once the students have gotten used to taking classes this way.
Their private counterparts are the slumlords who can take advantage of a reduced set of tenant rights.
Sorry, but I call BS.
The vast majority of privatized housing is in hands of the previous occupants under the "right to buy" provisions of the legislation.
Norman Ginsburg
The privatization of council housing Critical Social Policy February 2005 25: 115-135, doi:10.1177/0261018305048970
Every single UK privatisation since 1979 has been ideological (where the ideology is "I take your stuff and get rich from it"), and not one has improved as a result.
Actually, to be fair there is one exception: council housing.
But yes, otherwise we agree: all other privatized services were ideologically driven and a failure, including most recently rail service.
Sweden, Germany, Denmark, your pick.
Yet he's touted as the likely heir for CEO when Ballmer retires.
It reminds me of the resume of Gil Amelio, who had a similar record of failures yet people managed to convince themselves that he was some sort of CEO genius. He took Apple to the lowest point, when in desperation tried to buy BeOS. He fscked up that deal and then, to his incredible luck, bought NeXT instead. Jobs forced the board to fire Amelio and the recovery of Apple began then.
an ever-growing horde of professors and graduate students
[Citation needed]
To the best of my knowledge most established fields have had near zero growth since the 1970s, with new sciences (such as CS and genetics) being the exception.
Actually the biggest driver (no pun intended) will be people themselves. Think about it, do you buy cars where you have to brace yourself or do you choose the model with the automatically deploying air bags? do you buy the car with all manual brakes or the one with ABS? do you buy the car with manual headlights or the one with AUTO setting? Do you buy the car with manual radio tuning buttons or the one with SEEK forward and backward functions?
Ditto for newer features. If you ever driven a car with radar activated collision warning (and if no response breaking) you would never go back to one without one.
People will surrender their "freedom" (which in this case is a bullshit choice of term) for the safety of a car that drives himself, just like you, along with the rest of us, sacrificed the "freedom" of your ice box for a fridge that turns itself on and off. Come to think of it, that is the complete opposite of "sacrificing freedom" we actually stopped the slavery of having to feed an ice box by having a machine take over.
Same goes for an automatically driven car. Al you are surrendering is your mechanical input to the machine. You are no longer a cog in the driving system. Yay for (real) freedom!
/\37R07URF campaign. Most captchas nowaday even included a link for an audio CAPTCHA.
They are responsible for their actions if they are or should reasonably be aware of the consequences. The point is that the system, as a whole can end up "making" decisions that no individual person made. This is the whole basis of the "invisible hand" economic theory from Adam Smith.
Businesses are, by DEFINITION, primarily interested in profits.
Not in Germany, where by law they must consider the social good as well.
The gap between rich and poor grows every year, which means it isn't making 'everyone richer'.
Seriously dude? If I have $1 and you have $2 and we both double our wealth, now I have $2 and you have $4. Everyone is richer yet the gap grew from $1 to $2. Now lets say you tripled your money while I doubled mine. The gap is even bigger but still we are both richer.
It is perfectly possible for the gap to grow and everyone get richer. I'm not saying this is or isn't happening right now. I'm just pointing out that your mathematical reasoning is flawed.
A company cannot make any decision that isn't made by a person who made that decision.
Nonsense. A computer as a whole can take a decision that wasn't made by a single transistor in any sense of the word. It is also well known that people in groups do things that they wouldn't do alone.
We used to ask these questions back when we were seven:
Who do you love more, your mom or your dad?
Oh grow up. Both are important and there is absolutely no reason or need to create a linear ordering among them.
Lisp is not a functional language.
Lisp fits perfectly the main two definitions of functional language
1) Functions are first class citizens that can be passed around
and/or
2) It attempts to avoid state as much as possible.
[Personally I think definition 2 is wrong. That defines a stateless language, not a functional one, but let's stick to standard definitions for the time being].
So now can you explain to us how come you don't think Lisp is a functional language?
Correct, but the conclusion from this might be the complete opposite of what you think. Say, you walk into a restaurant with $10 cover charge and you drink a coke. Then you walk out and say "I paid $12 for a coke, I'm not getting my money's worth!". Well the solution would have been to order a full meal which amortizes the cover charge.
Think about right now. We are paying just enough taxes to cover the salaries of the government bureaucratic infrastructure (chief of police, road repair department, school principals) but not enough to provide full service underneath them. Just a few percentage points more of GDP tax burden and we could have first world,developed nation public schools, free health care, low crime rates and decent pensions.
States are spending more than ever.
Which is false, like most Republican talking points. Yet moderated 5 Interesting because it has truthiness to it: "yeah, we are paying too much taxes, [takes swig from beer]".
States today are spending less than they did in 1990 if you consider local revenues only and the same as they did in 1974 if you add federal grants:
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Articles/2012/12/state%20local%20budgets%20gordon/state%20local%20budgets%20gordon%20fig%201.jpg
Hear hear. In MS Office their print preview functionality is worse than it was two product cycles ago. Their excel spreadsheets are no longer WYSIWYG. Something that looks fine on the screen might be mangled in the printout.
Starting by the board of directors. Microsoft has been in deep dodo for the last decade, what makes them believe there is any one competent in management there?
I don't know about a dozen, but three suffice?
Perl supports the same transformation without hairy parens, so once again you are pissing outside the bucket.
It is typical of people inexperienced programmers to confuse mere artifacts of Lisp with its true essence.