netflix, their hands are tied. the content holders want the DRM. No DRM, no neftlix. I am willing to accept that.
save your battles for things that deserve them.
netflix is not the devil. they make it possible for people to watch movies at home
if you want to change the system you are not going to do it by hacking netflix, you are just going to make trouble for everyone. they will not give up, they cannot. you will just force them to spend more engineering time and raise their costs, you will not "save the world" or even a small piece of it.
sure you can spend arbitrary resources decoding their stream and breaking their DRM but you could also just pay the fee, watch some movies, and have a life.
why does one need any of those things? The object is to watch the movie, I don't want a copy of it. I don't want to watch it on a wide variety of devices. I want to watch it on my computer.
Performance? My 6 year old opteron with its 7 year old video card can run Netflix on Silverlight on Windows on VMWare on linux and it runs just fine.
Usability? how can it be easier to use netflix? holy cow!
If I wanted more then maybe there would be something to complain about, but I want to watch movies.
What's the problem if it's all "under the covers" ???
Most users don't give a rat's ass about the display software. It's hidden under many many layers.
Shoot, even application developers should not even care at all. This is why we have toolkits like Qt, so nobody has to care about display software.
And besides, maybe an alternative to wayland will point out its deficiencies and encourage its developers to make it even better!
Believe it or not software projects can coexist! And PLEASE read "The Mythical Man Month" before you start talking about how the Mir developers could be helping the Wayland developers.
One thing Windows and OS X get right is that their GUI is based around local API calls.
That's the difference in a nutshell.
The X protocol is limited by the fact that the whole API has to be serialized, and in many cases, a network round-trip has to be performed even though nothing is drawn on the screen.
And HELLO, accelerated video on the server is not much good when 90% of the latency is in the network. Oh big deal, you optimized the part of the system that least needs it.
really? no problems ever with open source X windows? How about lack of 3-D support? You've never had a monitor sync issue with nouveau? Nouveau works PERFECTLY with ALL of your Nvidia cards? You've never gotten a blank screen from the radeon driver? You're just not looking.
X itself goes to great lengths to avoid being affected by latency.
How about this quote from Keith Packard:
---
One of the design ``mistakes'' of X11 exacerbated by its very success is the extensible type system called atoms (as in the Lisp systems from which it was derived). This has been heavily used in the interclient communications protocols used between applications (primarily toolkits) and window managers. The InternAtom function requires a round trip to provide agreement among clients on a small (32 bit) handle for a string. A modern design would almost certainly avoid round trips entirely by using cryptographic hashes (or just using strings everywhere). Unfortunately, it is very hard to retrofit this
---
X was designed when CPUs ran at 8 MHz, the network ran at 10 Mbit and the display was black and white.
In 1985, the network was FAST and the computers were SLOW so latency was not so much of an issue.
Today the network is SLOW and the computers are FAST and so network latency rears its ugly head.
I have to ask: if it works so great, why does nobody use it? Why doesn't it work with sound? Why can't I use it for my Windows or OSX apps like I can with VNC?
If X makes it too hard to write a decently performing application, THAT ALONE is good reason to dump it
The downside is that a lot of development resources are being funneled to the rewrite of functionality currently quite well implemented by Xorg.
QUITE WELL MAINTAINED???
do you actually use X windows at all?
It's buggy as heck and its performance is miserable.
Your crack about "developement resources" is pretty funny because the original X developers are also developing Wayland because they are SICK of funneling their development resources into fixing X bugs.
what are the benefits of Wayland for the end users. No benefit for users. What can I do with Wayland that I couldn't do with Xorg?
You can have a display server with 10% of the code and 10% of the bugs!
TELL US MORE about how pruning dead code and reducing the number of bugs is not a benefit for the user.
TELL US MORE about the benefits of maintaining DEAD UNUSABLE remote code! WHY should users put up with the performance issues associated with years and years of X lossage?
Everybody says "ooh noooo don't kill remote X windows! it's the best!"
except for one thing: IT SUCKS.
Have you ever tried to actually USE remote X? It's just beyond horrible.
The failure is that X was designed for low-latency between the display and the application, and that use case is just not very useful.
In reality the display and the application are connected over a high-latency link and X is UNUSABLE in this context.
VNC does not assume a low-latency link and so it remains responsive and pleasant even over a crappy ADSL connection.
Go ahead and TRY to use Firefox remotely over your ISP connection. It's just a pathetic joke and you will kill it out of frustration before even a single page loads.
Try the exact same thing with a VNC connection and it works just fine.
It is and remains -the- standard way for UNIX applications to get a graphical user interface.
Yeah let's just FORGET ALL ABOUT OSX, it is UNIX and it has a graphical user interface!
And if OSX is not "standard" well then WHY are "standard" UNIX applications like emacs and firefox written for it?
X Windows is also the standard way for VMS applications to get a user interface, but you neglected to mention this valuable addition to your pathetic argument.
You're just betraying your ignorance of Wayland. Wayland does NOT replace X windows. In fact Wayland was designed from scratch so that an X server can run in wayland WITH NO PERFORMANCE PENALTY.
So with Wayland you can STILL run your old legacy X11 apps and get decent performance too!
Slashdot Mirror
why not just pay the fee and watch some movies?
netflix, their hands are tied. the content holders want the DRM. No DRM, no neftlix. I am willing to accept that.
save your battles for things that deserve them.
netflix is not the devil. they make it possible for people to watch movies at home
if you want to change the system you are not going to do it by hacking netflix, you are just going to make trouble for everyone. they will not give up, they cannot. you will just force them to spend more engineering time and raise their costs, you will not "save the world" or even a small piece of it.
sure you can spend arbitrary resources decoding their stream and breaking their DRM but you could also just pay the fee, watch some movies, and have a life.
SURE they can tell you what you can do with the hardware you bought, if you want to use their service.
It's no different from the oil company refusing to service you if you mess with your furnace.
You sign the contract, you get something, you give something. You don't HAVE to sign.
why does one need any of those things? The object is to watch the movie, I don't want a copy of it. I don't want to watch it on a wide variety of devices. I want to watch it on my computer.
Performance? My 6 year old opteron with its 7 year old video card can run Netflix on Silverlight on Windows on VMWare on linux and it runs just fine.
Usability? how can it be easier to use netflix? holy cow!
If I wanted more then maybe there would be something to complain about, but I want to watch movies.
I fail to understand why
It's not their call, it's not their content. They do it because the content owners won't have it any other way.
X windows hasn't changed, why do the arguments need to change?
It's the only explanation I can think of for the defenders of X Windows.
They've been putting up with BAD for so long that they've lost all objectivity.
Google "The Unix Haters Handbook" start reading on page 123
What's the problem if it's all "under the covers" ???
Most users don't give a rat's ass about the display software. It's hidden under many many layers.
Shoot, even application developers should not even care at all. This is why we have toolkits like Qt, so nobody has to care about display software.
And besides, maybe an alternative to wayland will point out its deficiencies and encourage its developers to make it even better!
Believe it or not software projects can coexist! And PLEASE read "The Mythical Man Month" before you start talking about how the Mir developers could be helping the Wayland developers.
One thing Windows and OS X get right is that their GUI is based around local API calls.
That's the difference in a nutshell.
The X protocol is limited by the fact that the whole API has to be serialized, and in many cases, a network round-trip has to be performed even though nothing is drawn on the screen.
And HELLO, accelerated video on the server is not much good when 90% of the latency is in the network. Oh big deal, you optimized the part of the system that least needs it.
really? no problems ever with open source X windows? How about lack of 3-D support? You've never had a monitor sync issue with nouveau? Nouveau works PERFECTLY with ALL of your Nvidia cards? You've never gotten a blank screen from the radeon driver? You're just not looking.
Here are some RESULTS from an experiment done by lbl.gov
The first number is X windows tunneled through SSH
the second number is VNC
the third number is NX
Start Matlab (-nosplash) 9.6s 4.9s 5s
Open edit window 2.9s 1.3s 1.2s
Activate File menu 0.6s 0.1s 0.1s
Activate Edit menu 0.6s 0.1s 0.1s
Activate Text menu 0.5s 0.2s 0.1s
Close edit window, redraw main window 1.5s 0.4s 0.3s
Close matlab 0.5s 0.6s 0.6s
As you can see REMOTE X WINDOWS SUCKS
X itself goes to great lengths to avoid being affected by latency.
How about this quote from Keith Packard:
---
One of the design ``mistakes'' of X11 exacerbated by its very success is the extensible type system called atoms (as in the Lisp systems from which it was derived). This has been heavily used in the interclient communications protocols used between applications (primarily toolkits) and window managers. The InternAtom function requires a round trip to provide agreement among clients on a small (32 bit) handle for a string. A modern design would almost certainly avoid round trips entirely by using cryptographic hashes (or just using strings everywhere). Unfortunately, it is very hard to retrofit this
---
X was designed when CPUs ran at 8 MHz, the network ran at 10 Mbit and the display was black and white.
In 1985, the network was FAST and the computers were SLOW so latency was not so much of an issue.
Today the network is SLOW and the computers are FAST and so network latency rears its ugly head.
I have to ask: if it works so great, why does nobody use it? Why doesn't it work with sound? Why can't I use it for my Windows or OSX apps like I can with VNC?
If X makes it too hard to write a decently performing application, THAT ALONE is good reason to dump it
it's that they are inexperienced with software development in general.
So WHY do we let them fix X bugs?
one of the few here who knows what they are talking about
Not many people were bitching when Google went a lot farther than this with every aspect of Android
There's a small difference: Google wasn't a two-bit Linux shop with a chronic lack of cash.
Android was a two-bit Linux shop with a chronic lack of cash UNTIL GOOGLE BOUGHT THEM
The downside is that a lot of development resources are being funneled to the rewrite of functionality currently quite well implemented by Xorg.
QUITE WELL MAINTAINED???
do you actually use X windows at all?
It's buggy as heck and its performance is miserable.
Your crack about "developement resources" is pretty funny because the original X developers are also developing Wayland because they are SICK of funneling their development resources into fixing X bugs.
duh, your are just proving my point!
X windows is NOT "standard"
what are the benefits of Wayland for the end users. No benefit for users. What can I do with Wayland that I couldn't do with Xorg?
You can have a display server with 10% of the code and 10% of the bugs!
TELL US MORE about how pruning dead code and reducing the number of bugs is not a benefit for the user.
TELL US MORE about the benefits of maintaining DEAD UNUSABLE remote code! WHY should users put up with the performance issues associated with years and years of X lossage?
sound? nope, not happening
3-d effects? nope, not happening
D-BUS integration? nope, not happening
what a mess. kill it now. even the X developers are actively working to kiil X
All those rants about X windows in the Unix Hater's Handbook are STILL TRUE
Everybody says "ooh noooo don't kill remote X windows! it's the best!"
except for one thing: IT SUCKS.
Have you ever tried to actually USE remote X? It's just beyond horrible.
The failure is that X was designed for low-latency between the display and the application, and that use case is just not very useful.
In reality the display and the application are connected over a high-latency link and X is UNUSABLE in this context.
VNC does not assume a low-latency link and so it remains responsive and pleasant even over a crappy ADSL connection.
Go ahead and TRY to use Firefox remotely over your ISP connection. It's just a pathetic joke and you will kill it out of frustration before even a single page loads.
Try the exact same thing with a VNC connection and it works just fine.
huh?
It is and remains -the- standard way for UNIX applications to get a graphical user interface.
Yeah let's just FORGET ALL ABOUT OSX, it is UNIX and it has a graphical user interface!
And if OSX is not "standard" well then WHY are "standard" UNIX applications like emacs and firefox written for it?
X Windows is also the standard way for VMS applications to get a user interface, but you neglected to mention this valuable addition to your pathetic argument.
You're just betraying your ignorance of Wayland. Wayland does NOT replace X windows. In fact Wayland was designed from scratch so that an X server can run in wayland WITH NO PERFORMANCE PENALTY.
So with Wayland you can STILL run your old legacy X11 apps and get decent performance too!
Win win all around! What is the downside?
Warheads get reprocessed and used to fuel reactors.
Yeah those reprocessing plants in Hanford. they don't make any waste..