Getting to the other side of the world for a light beam if it could travel in a vacuum can take as long as 83 ms. Under real conditions it will be longer. 16ms is under 3000 miles, that doesn't even get you across the country in perfect conditions and that's not assuming round trip issues.
You can't do that under X11. Using X11 definitions for server and client. The server must have the buffer for video since it attaches to the video card. The client must have the application buffer since it is executing the code. Because of network transparency this can't just be a protocol but requires at least a RAM to RAM copy.
The security model and much of its formerly clean architecture had to be discarded
I don't know that it had to be. Microsoft choose to discard. They could easily have made opposite choices. They could have for example introduced a porting system. They could have introduced individual applications sandboxes (remember these were part of OS/2, so Microsoft did know how to do them), etc...
Microsoft choose to make the migration from Wind95/98 painless for application developers. That gave them a huge applications advantage. It helped them establish a monopoly quickly and it avoided several years of complex transitioning pains. But it bought them a security mess they still haven't gotten clear of.
It also bought them a developer culture, that expects good backwards compatibility and that has been an albatross for 1 1/2 decades.
Apple's finished product was demonstrably more secure in real world environments, for real world users, for a long time
I can absolutely agree with that. Since 2001 Mac end users who do not have complex security needs have had a much more secure experience. As my daily home and often work machine I've been on a Mac since 10.1 and don't run anti-virus don't really have to think about it. That's rather impressive.
Actually Microsoft NT started with a capability based system, not a permissions system which is vastly vastly more secure. The problem they realized very quickly was that end users couldn't handle capabilities, and their application ecosystem wasn't compatible with it. Internet Explorer being an serious example because at that point it was the default shell. So end users ended up granting almost unlimited capabilities to most applications. At that point Microsoft began introducing permissions...
I'd say Microsoft's NT problems are a classic example of different parts of Microsoft fundamentally disagreeing about objectives, like security vs. backwards compatibility.
____
Apple's initially had overlapping permissions systems: the BSD based one, the NeXT based one and the various applications one from the mess that was OpenStep's security. They had to introduce a fourth one for connectivity to Microsoft networks. They've unified them somewhat and added 2 more security modules based on capabilities but they had a tremendous mess.
_____
Arguably: Microsoft started further ahead but couldn't handle the conflicts between competing interests. Apple had a total mess but made better compromises.
IMHO I think obviously systems like calling a home phone (they call you) to do a password reset work pretty well. The phone system while not hack proof is fairly resilient.
That failing we do have institutions available in huge numbers all over the world that do authentication as part of their core business function, banks. I'd say Apple, Google, etc... should partner with banks and allow them to do resets based on physical credentials (like a passport) for a nominal fee (say $10).
Actually, it was widely publicised at the time [playstation.com] that it the publicity campaign had been pretty much a failure up till the hack and that the hack caused a vast increase in sales.
Nonsense. Paris was hacked Feb 2005. Oct 2002 the Sidekick went on sale. By the time of Paris' hack they were 3 very successful models in: original, color and Sidekick 2. This is a video which shows you the promotions on TV from the year before.
A backup failure incidentally is what killed the Sidekick. While not a security issue that does show the public cares.
the public doesn't care about security
No the public does care about security. Mac has benefited tremendously from less problems with virus and worms. Doesn't care and isn't their top priority are different things. End users want heightened security that doesn't interfere with functionality.
Ask yourself whether Apple allows the plans for their latest secret product to be stored on their public cloud? I think you will find out that Apple knows fine well how to do security better than it currently chooses to.
Of course they do. What they don't know how to do, but are working hard on, is how to do security in a way that is user friendly and doesn't interfere with other features end users care about more. They are making efforts and doing a good job in trying to balance security against other features. I think iOS is a terrific example of good compromise. Which is not to say there aren't mistakes or areas where someone could disagree. But iOS represents a major security upgrade (from OSX) that end users find palatable. That's a much harder problem then just boosting security.
Paris Hilton was a spokesperson for Danger's HipTop (Sidekick on T-Mobile). That was the phone that got hacked. And her endorsement of the phone was well known prior to the hacking. They had huge Hollywood parties and she appeared in public using the phone regularly.
Display Postscript became Display PDF which is now called Aqua on OSX. Given that has about 10x the user base of X11, perhaps not the example you were looking for.
Can we just accept that while X.org may be imperfect, it's still an extremely functional, fast, powerful system, and we can, and should, focus on it rather than throwing out everything and starting again?
Nope. We can't accept that. There are deep structural tradeoffs made in the design of X11 which appear to be strongly suboptimal for most use cases. In particular on "fast" it is the opposite, it is slow because of the complexities of buffering and buffers being copied. On powerful because of the lack of integration it is often the opposite very low power compared to the competing systems. And moreover because the codebase is so complex it is very difficult for people to make it better quickly. It is just too hard to learn because of so many legacy technologies that aren't even used.
What X11 is terrific for, is a dumb client (or semi-smart client) running of a server on the same LAN. That use case is a tiny fraction of what users expect. Clients are much smarter than they used to be (though with tablets this might start to reverse) and servers are almost always over a WAN. That in addition to the need to have much more of the app reside on the client (server in X11 speak).
Baloney. It is not just a driver issue, though the driver issue doesn't help. Complex config files that overlap in functionality with unpredictability combined with terrible quality configuration tools like xf86config make it by far the hardest GUI to configure properly.
Start with the basics that x11 configuration is based on your videocard chip set, and not the brand name. It is a computer program, computers are pretty good at matching lists with one another, why isn't that data built in?
For instance, when KDE was the only game in town (aside from the CLI)
there never was a point where KDE was the only game in town. KDE was the first GUI for Linux. There were plenty of application launchers that ran on top of window managers prior to KDE. FVWM95 was rather popular (example RedHat) before KDE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fvwm95.png
also have another application that addresses the remote connecting capabilities so that people don't think that any necessary part of X11 is being excluded.
That's a good point. Though Apple remains strongly committed to OSX for now. Their userbase is likely to stick with desktops since they tend to be power users types. I think 2020 is a bit soon for your vision, more like 2040.
But.... Microsoft has been trying to push up the hardware requirements of Windows. If they continue in this vein and get more aggressive they are going to open up a large windows at the low end of the market, for traditional high power desktops that run on in expensive hardware. Where your $300 systems could be either: a traditional Linux notebook or a tablet (most often also running Linux).
In 4% of laptops sold in the USA today are hybrids with a variable hinge and capacitive touchscreen. 6% have just the touchscreen.
In terms of ARM, I can't think of an ARM system today that's a good fit. But something like a iPad3 with a bluetooth keyboard running iPhone Linux... Or something like the Nexus 10 with a keyboard might work as a test system. So ARM is close.
I think it would have been rough. There would have been difficult integration problems trying to get Canonical into the culture. It would have been complex and messy very much like KDE having to deal with Apple and Webkit. That's far better than the alternative they got.
Canonical had already pre-determined that they were going to do their own thing. Mark has the gall to even say that they had come with the design first. As you can see that Canonical is moving Unity to QT.
I meant before that. The http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/03/11/lessons-learned/ . Ubuntu has decided to fork. Before they decided to fork they wanted to play a more prominent role. Letting them move from the later opinion to the former was a huge mistake.
____
As for Google, Microsoft... I agree with the touchscreen move.
I do want/need the ability to see if my CPU workload is starting to spiral out of control, memory is getting tight, or the network is getting congested and what the trends are.
They have that its called the Gnome 3 System Monitor. It is in the toolbar and if you mouse over a detail pane appears.
displays of critical things like system loads and server alerts
I don't know the details of what you are talking about. But that sort of functionality should be handled via. the notifications system. That's the idea that notifications that are out of process are managed through a notifications manager. You would get the same kind of protections. That's part of applications needing to support the new Gnome 3 design.
From what I am seeing, even the latest backwards-improvement to Gnome won't restore them. Moving to Cinnamon helped, but I still miss some of them.
I can relate. Disruptive upgrades can be a mixed bag. Many things have to be done in different ways. But one of the core principles of Gnome 3 is unification of notifications. All specialized notification apps are going to be hurt.
Gnome 3 is very different than 90s style desktops. No question a transition is required. Worse is that most people really don't have the right hardware to make the transition terribly beneficial yet. Once the entire stack is in place: OS, hardware, apps then the superiority becomes obvious.
As for consistency. Nope there is going to be a messy transition period where you and many others will just be using two radically different systems. But that's happening to everyone. Same thing on Windows 8. Same thing on OSX vs. iOS....
This is something I've seen over and over. Why do you think it's true?
Originally this came from early studies from IBM in the late 1950 and early 1960s. What they measured over and over is that developer productivity in teams, on average, was in lines of code almost regardless of language. The less lines of code needed to express a problem the faster developers were able to solve problems. That's why they went from advocating Fortran & COBOL for limited classes of programmers to instead advocating them for most programs regardless of class of programmer.
There still are performance shootouts happen regularly, and people still see the same effects. The functional languages crush Java / C / C++. The dynamic languages crush Java / C / C++ in writing programs. There have been studies of developer productivity you see this all the time. I can start citing articles but people believe it because there is over 50 years of research repeated again and again showing it. What you are calling "less characters" really really matters.
They tested 19,000 code based from Sourceforge in 2000-7. And found the typical result statistically that programmers were more or less producing roughly the same amount of lines of code per programmer per month.
And so on it went for every supposed advantage that Rails gave me.
Rails isn't designed to make solving hard problems easier. It is designed to make solving easy problems easier. Where Rails makes solving hard problems is because of Ruby not because of anything particular to Rails.
I've worked with other supposed "higher level" languages, and they didn't help with the meat or maintenance either. They all seem weirdly focused on saving characters.
I think you need to separate those two issues out.
Static typed variable languages are far easier better in terms of maintenance. The research here is clear cut, that there is a substantial long term maintenance penalty for dynamic. If you want to do a comparison for static, high level look at something like Haskell, OCaml / F#, Scala, Clojure...
Now in terms of meat... here I would say Ruby is likely to be helpful providing the "meat" falls into Ruby's sweet spots. That is "meat" where the abstractions in the program work well with Ruby's abstractions. If they don't then of course Ruby isn't going to help. Worse, Rails pulls against this because it brings with it, its own set of abstractions that often limit Ruby. Rails is a bad fit for most complex projects.
In terms of your personal experience, programmer experience matters. If you are much more experienced in Java your lines productivity will go way down at first in a new language. Moreover your productivity might take years to reach the same level in dynamic languages because your Java skills are well developed. Saying that programmer productivity is improved by a language is not the same your personal productivity will be improved. Productive programmers are something like 10x as productive as low productive programmers, on average. So I don't find it hard to believe you are able to generate 10 lines of Java in the time it takes you to generate one line of Ruby. And that's an average given individually it might be closer to 30 to 1, in which case something like Ruby's 4 to 1 lines advantage would be swamped easily.
For you to see a difference you might have to try it in an area you are unfamiliar with. A type of program using abstractions you've never had to use.
I'd even go a step further here. A huge group of the people that are the most passionate anti-Gnome3 learned Unix from Ubuntu. They have become very conservative, very much like the Windows powerusers who hated Linux in the 90s and early 2000s here on/.
I do sometimes, wonder, however, whether the unixes of today (i.e. Linux, BSD, Solaris and other Unixes) have too many DEs for their own good.
I think there is no question that choice has been a problem on the desktop. What worked well for server and embedded was a real problem for both consumer, small business and enterprise desktop. There was a push in the User Linux / Progeny / Java Desktop days to make Gnome the standard, much as the earlier United Linux had tried for KDE based Linux. Had either of those projects been successful things might have been different. Ultimately Microsoft in the early 2000s fought hard for the low end, that was unexpected.
Today they are moving away from it, with iOS and Android GUI taking the low end. Gnome isn't part of that though they need to make a play up market and/or on touch only.
Let me ask you your opinion. Do you think those will become popular?
Yes. If I had to guess I think Microsoft will continue to increase the pressure and by say 2015 / 2016 they will be a huge fraction 70+% of all x86 laptops. I think enterprise desktop screens might take another year or two after that.
I have never seen a signle one is actual consumers hands
You are quoting European prices and because of VAT electronics are weird in Europe. But right now, capacitive touchscreen + hinge are doing about 4% of US sales by volume. That's a huge step something like a 60% increase from the Windows 7 days. And again Microsoft is increasing the pressure on OEMs.
The manufacturers want their products to be percieved as premium, in the over 1000€ range. This is simply not going to fly.
First off it isn't just perception of premium. Those hinges that allow the screen to flip are about $150 to make. Capacitive sensors add to the complexity of screens. And moving to double density "retina" ain't gonna be free either. That's all part of Microsoft's strategy. They had been driving margin out of the x86 hardware market. They now want to move upmarket and need to put margin back in. That's increasing device costs, their customer base doesn't like it. They know that and they are going to do it anyway.
What is yours? Are they [Gnome foundation] right with their gamble?
Yes. Already phones and tablets outsell x86. They are already the more important market to be in. If Microsoft fails and x86 doesn't transform then on desktop it becomes a legacy platform for for consumer / small business. Gnome cannot be successful in that environment. All that factors that have worked against the Linux desktop get worse. The fate of Gnome, the fate of x86 as a hobbyist desktop is tied to Microsoft's success. That's why Linux thrived where other Unixes failed. It tied itself to Microsoft's hardware strategy.
It's a bit like Ultrabooks in that vein.
As an aside I'm a guy who bought the Macbook retina 15" the first week it was available. That's what I'm typing this one. That laptop cost 400% more than the average laptop in 2012.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting to the other side of the world for a light beam if it could travel in a vacuum can take as long as 83 ms. Under real conditions it will be longer. 16ms is under 3000 miles, that doesn't even get you across the country in perfect conditions and that's not assuming round trip issues.
I don't see this single user, single machine framebuffer approach as a step forward.
It isn't a step forward, it is a tactical retreat. It is admitting two fundamental problems:
a) For local execution the system must be as fast as possible. And drawing screens are at least for now going to be a non trivial latency issue.
b) For remote execution, the speed of light isn't fast enough to get latency low enough so lots of work has to be done client side.
You can't do that under X11. Using X11 definitions for server and client. The server must have the buffer for video since it attaches to the video card. The client must have the application buffer since it is executing the code. Because of network transparency this can't just be a protocol but requires at least a RAM to RAM copy.
How is X more suitable as a gaming platform given the local buffer copying?
The security model and much of its formerly clean architecture had to be discarded
I don't know that it had to be. Microsoft choose to discard. They could easily have made opposite choices. They could have for example introduced a porting system. They could have introduced individual applications sandboxes (remember these were part of OS/2, so Microsoft did know how to do them), etc...
Microsoft choose to make the migration from Wind95/98 painless for application developers. That gave them a huge applications advantage. It helped them establish a monopoly quickly and it avoided several years of complex transitioning pains. But it bought them a security mess they still haven't gotten clear of.
It also bought them a developer culture, that expects good backwards compatibility and that has been an albatross for 1 1/2 decades.
Thank you for the polite response.
Apple's finished product was demonstrably more secure in real world environments, for real world users, for a long time
I can absolutely agree with that. Since 2001 Mac end users who do not have complex security needs have had a much more secure experience. As my daily home and often work machine I've been on a Mac since 10.1 and don't run anti-virus don't really have to think about it. That's rather impressive.
Actually Microsoft NT started with a capability based system, not a permissions system which is vastly vastly more secure. The problem they realized very quickly was that end users couldn't handle capabilities, and their application ecosystem wasn't compatible with it. Internet Explorer being an serious example because at that point it was the default shell. So end users ended up granting almost unlimited capabilities to most applications. At that point Microsoft began introducing permissions...
I'd say Microsoft's NT problems are a classic example of different parts of Microsoft fundamentally disagreeing about objectives, like security vs. backwards compatibility.
____
Apple's initially had overlapping permissions systems: the BSD based one, the NeXT based one and the various applications one from the mess that was OpenStep's security. They had to introduce a fourth one for connectivity to Microsoft networks. They've unified them somewhat and added 2 more security modules based on capabilities but they had a tremendous mess.
_____
Arguably:
Microsoft started further ahead but couldn't handle the conflicts between competing interests.
Apple had a total mess but made better compromises.
That is the opposite of what you were claiming.
IMHO I think obviously systems like calling a home phone (they call you) to do a password reset work pretty well. The phone system while not hack proof is fairly resilient.
That failing we do have institutions available in huge numbers all over the world that do authentication as part of their core business function, banks. I'd say Apple, Google, etc... should partner with banks and allow them to do resets based on physical credentials (like a passport) for a nominal fee (say $10).
Actually, it was widely publicised at the time [playstation.com] that it the publicity campaign had been pretty much a failure up till the hack and that the hack caused a vast increase in sales.
Nonsense. Paris was hacked Feb 2005. Oct 2002 the Sidekick went on sale. By the time of Paris' hack they were 3 very successful models in: original, color and Sidekick 2. This is a video which shows you the promotions on TV from the year before.
A backup failure incidentally is what killed the Sidekick. While not a security issue that does show the public cares.
the public doesn't care about security
No the public does care about security. Mac has benefited tremendously from less problems with virus and worms. Doesn't care and isn't their top priority are different things. End users want heightened security that doesn't interfere with functionality.
Ask yourself whether Apple allows the plans for their latest secret product to be stored on their public cloud? I think you will find out that Apple knows fine well how to do security better than it currently chooses to.
Of course they do. What they don't know how to do, but are working hard on, is how to do security in a way that is user friendly and doesn't interfere with other features end users care about more. They are making efforts and doing a good job in trying to balance security against other features. I think iOS is a terrific example of good compromise. Which is not to say there aren't mistakes or areas where someone could disagree. But iOS represents a major security upgrade (from OSX) that end users find palatable. That's a much harder problem then just boosting security.
Paris Hilton was a spokesperson for Danger's HipTop (Sidekick on T-Mobile). That was the phone that got hacked. And her endorsement of the phone was well known prior to the hacking. They had huge Hollywood parties and she appeared in public using the phone regularly.
Apple wasn't involved.
Display Postscript became Display PDF which is now called Aqua on OSX. Given that has about 10x the user base of X11, perhaps not the example you were looking for.
Can we just accept that while X.org may be imperfect, it's still an extremely functional, fast, powerful system, and we can, and should, focus on it rather than throwing out everything and starting again?
Nope. We can't accept that. There are deep structural tradeoffs made in the design of X11 which appear to be strongly suboptimal for most use cases. In particular on "fast" it is the opposite, it is slow because of the complexities of buffering and buffers being copied. On powerful because of the lack of integration it is often the opposite very low power compared to the competing systems. And moreover because the codebase is so complex it is very difficult for people to make it better quickly. It is just too hard to learn because of so many legacy technologies that aren't even used.
What X11 is terrific for, is a dumb client (or semi-smart client) running of a server on the same LAN. That use case is a tiny fraction of what users expect. Clients are much smarter than they used to be (though with tablets this might start to reverse) and servers are almost always over a WAN. That in addition to the need to have much more of the app reside on the client (server in X11 speak).
X11 has never been difficult to use.
Baloney. It is not just a driver issue, though the driver issue doesn't help. Complex config files that overlap in functionality with unpredictability combined with terrible quality configuration tools like xf86config make it by far the hardest GUI to configure properly.
Start with the basics that x11 configuration is based on your videocard chip set, and not the brand name. It is a computer program, computers are pretty good at matching lists with one another, why isn't that data built in?
For instance, when KDE was the only game in town (aside from the CLI)
there never was a point where KDE was the only game in town. KDE was the first GUI for Linux. There were plenty of application launchers that ran on top of window managers prior to KDE. FVWM95 was rather popular (example RedHat) before KDE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fvwm95.png
also have another application that addresses the remote connecting capabilities so that people don't think that any necessary part of X11 is being excluded.
That's already done by another group.
That's a good point. Though Apple remains strongly committed to OSX for now. Their userbase is likely to stick with desktops since they tend to be power users types. I think 2020 is a bit soon for your vision, more like 2040.
But.... Microsoft has been trying to push up the hardware requirements of Windows. If they continue in this vein and get more aggressive they are going to open up a large windows at the low end of the market, for traditional high power desktops that run on in expensive hardware. Where your $300 systems could be either: a traditional Linux notebook or a tablet (most often also running Linux).
Glad it was helpful.
In 4% of laptops sold in the USA today are hybrids with a variable hinge and capacitive touchscreen. 6% have just the touchscreen.
In terms of ARM, I can't think of an ARM system today that's a good fit. But something like a iPad3 with a bluetooth keyboard running iPhone Linux ... Or something like the Nexus 10 with a keyboard might work as a test system. So ARM is close.
I think it would have been rough. There would have been difficult integration problems trying to get Canonical into the culture. It would have been complex and messy very much like KDE having to deal with Apple and Webkit. That's far better than the alternative they got.
Canonical had already pre-determined that they were going to do their own thing. Mark has the gall to even say that they had come with the design first. As you can see that Canonical is moving Unity to QT.
I meant before that. The http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/03/11/lessons-learned/ . Ubuntu has decided to fork. Before they decided to fork they wanted to play a more prominent role. Letting them move from the later opinion to the former was a huge mistake.
____
As for Google, Microsoft... I agree with the touchscreen move.
I do want/need the ability to see if my CPU workload is starting to spiral out of control, memory is getting tight, or the network is getting congested and what the trends are.
They have that its called the Gnome 3 System Monitor. It is in the toolbar and if you mouse over a detail pane appears.
displays of critical things like system loads and server alerts
I don't know the details of what you are talking about. But that sort of functionality should be handled via. the notifications system. That's the idea that notifications that are out of process are managed through a notifications manager. You would get the same kind of protections. That's part of applications needing to support the new Gnome 3 design.
From what I am seeing, even the latest backwards-improvement to Gnome won't restore them. Moving to Cinnamon helped, but I still miss some of them.
I can relate. Disruptive upgrades can be a mixed bag. Many things have to be done in different ways. But one of the core principles of Gnome 3 is unification of notifications. All specialized notification apps are going to be hurt.
Gnome 3 is very different than 90s style desktops. No question a transition is required. Worse is that most people really don't have the right hardware to make the transition terribly beneficial yet. Once the entire stack is in place: OS, hardware, apps then the superiority becomes obvious.
As for consistency. Nope there is going to be a messy transition period where you and many others will just be using two radically different systems. But that's happening to everyone. Same thing on Windows 8. Same thing on OSX vs. iOS....
This is something I've seen over and over. Why do you think it's true?
Originally this came from early studies from IBM in the late 1950 and early 1960s. What they measured over and over is that developer productivity in teams, on average, was in lines of code almost regardless of language. The less lines of code needed to express a problem the faster developers were able to solve problems. That's why they went from advocating Fortran & COBOL for limited classes of programmers to instead advocating them for most programs regardless of class of programmer.
There still are performance shootouts happen regularly, and people still see the same effects. The functional languages crush Java / C / C++. The dynamic languages crush Java / C / C++ in writing programs. There have been studies of developer productivity you see this all the time. I can start citing articles but people believe it because there is over 50 years of research repeated again and again showing it. What you are calling "less characters" really really matters.
You wanted some evidence so just to pick an example, and you google and find dozens: http://sequoia.cs.byu.edu/lab/files/pubs/Delorey2007a.pdf
They tested 19,000 code based from Sourceforge in 2000-7. And found the typical result statistically that programmers were more or less producing roughly the same amount of lines of code per programmer per month.
And so on it went for every supposed advantage that Rails gave me.
Rails isn't designed to make solving hard problems easier. It is designed to make solving easy problems easier. Where Rails makes solving hard problems is because of Ruby not because of anything particular to Rails.
I've worked with other supposed "higher level" languages, and they didn't help with the meat or maintenance either. They all seem weirdly focused on saving characters.
I think you need to separate those two issues out.
Static typed variable languages are far easier better in terms of maintenance. The research here is clear cut, that there is a substantial long term maintenance penalty for dynamic. If you want to do a comparison for static, high level look at something like Haskell, OCaml / F#, Scala, Clojure...
Now in terms of meat... here I would say Ruby is likely to be helpful providing the "meat" falls into Ruby's sweet spots. That is "meat" where the abstractions in the program work well with Ruby's abstractions. If they don't then of course Ruby isn't going to help. Worse, Rails pulls against this because it brings with it, its own set of abstractions that often limit Ruby. Rails is a bad fit for most complex projects.
In terms of your personal experience, programmer experience matters. If you are much more experienced in Java your lines productivity will go way down at first in a new language. Moreover your productivity might take years to reach the same level in dynamic languages because your Java skills are well developed. Saying that programmer productivity is improved by a language is not the same your personal productivity will be improved. Productive programmers are something like 10x as productive as low productive programmers, on average. So I don't find it hard to believe you are able to generate 10 lines of Java in the time it takes you to generate one line of Ruby. And that's an average given individually it might be closer to 30 to 1, in which case something like Ruby's 4 to 1 lines advantage would be swamped easily.
For you to see a difference you might have to try it in an area you are unfamiliar with. A type of program using abstractions you've never had to use.
I'd even go a step further here. A huge group of the people that are the most passionate anti-Gnome3 learned Unix from Ubuntu. They have become very conservative, very much like the Windows powerusers who hated Linux in the 90s and early 2000s here on /.
I do sometimes, wonder, however, whether the unixes of today (i.e. Linux, BSD, Solaris and other Unixes) have too many DEs for their own good.
I think there is no question that choice has been a problem on the desktop. What worked well for server and embedded was a real problem for both consumer, small business and enterprise desktop. There was a push in the User Linux / Progeny / Java Desktop days to make Gnome the standard, much as the earlier United Linux had tried for KDE based Linux. Had either of those projects been successful things might have been different. Ultimately Microsoft in the early 2000s fought hard for the low end, that was unexpected.
Today they are moving away from it, with iOS and Android GUI taking the low end. Gnome isn't part of that though they need to make a play up market and/or on touch only.
Let me ask you your opinion. Do you think those will become popular?
Yes. If I had to guess I think Microsoft will continue to increase the pressure and by say 2015 / 2016 they will be a huge fraction 70+% of all x86 laptops. I think enterprise desktop screens might take another year or two after that.
I have never seen a signle one is actual consumers hands
You are quoting European prices and because of VAT electronics are weird in Europe. But right now, capacitive touchscreen + hinge are doing about 4% of US sales by volume. That's a huge step something like a 60% increase from the Windows 7 days. And again Microsoft is increasing the pressure on OEMs.
The manufacturers want their products to be percieved as premium, in the over 1000€ range. This is simply not going to fly.
First off it isn't just perception of premium. Those hinges that allow the screen to flip are about $150 to make. Capacitive sensors add to the complexity of screens. And moving to double density "retina" ain't gonna be free either. That's all part of Microsoft's strategy. They had been driving margin out of the x86 hardware market. They now want to move upmarket and need to put margin back in. That's increasing device costs, their customer base doesn't like it. They know that and they are going to do it anyway.
What is yours? Are they [Gnome foundation] right with their gamble?
Yes. Already phones and tablets outsell x86. They are already the more important market to be in. If Microsoft fails and x86 doesn't transform then on desktop it becomes a legacy platform for for consumer / small business. Gnome cannot be successful in that environment. All that factors that have worked against the Linux desktop get worse. The fate of Gnome, the fate of x86 as a hobbyist desktop is tied to Microsoft's success. That's why Linux thrived where other Unixes failed. It tied itself to Microsoft's hardware strategy.
It's a bit like Ultrabooks in that vein.
As an aside I'm a guy who bought the Macbook retina 15" the first week it was available. That's what I'm typing this one. That laptop cost 400% more than the average laptop in 2012.