Well the difference is that an army needs a base of operations. A group of contractors based in America is still an American army. A group of contractors funded by American based in Argentina is an Argentinian army.
If you want an example US v. Nicaragua. The USA argued we could attack Nicaragua because they were funding rebels.
I may very well have had experience with corporate IT from when you were in elementary school. Yes. First off a well funded well staffed group doesn't take 6-12 month for testing. It might take that long for fixes. Companies who need to upgrade this frequently need to start testing their internal apps off beta versions and that means running overlapping testing and fixing groups. So cycles might have to start every 2 months with about 1 in 4 cycles reaching completion and going into distribution.
A yes business do this when they need to be on a fast upgrade track. And yes it costs a lot more than now. But it can be done.
Your generation is just so used to living understaffed that you can't imagine what an effective IT group with adequate budget can do.
Short of actual numbers, all we have is anecdotes of people saying 'X video playback sucks' and people saying 'works for me'. That in itself is no ground to make decisions on.
I didn't say playback sucks. I gave you a repeatable experiment to prove the problem. Now this problem might not be a problem for an end user. Lag is highly activity dependent, of 2-3 ms are a problem for drawing. Lags of 2-3 seconds might not a problem for watching a movie full screen.
You don't need numbers. I gave you a simple test you can do on any X11 that should be repeatable. My assertion is simple pick a workload (video frames in motion) that stresses the video card causing minor problems under Windows or OSX (recent versions) and under X11 it will be disastrously overtaxed. You do numbers when the differences aren't obvious, this is obvious.
You want to see problems overwhelm your hardware. Any hardware can be overwhelmed. Increase the number of megapixels. Increase the number of number of things the card is having to do. Heck if you have a really fast setup have it flip between a Blu-ray movie and a highres game 30x per second interleaving the frames 60x / second. I doubt your card can handle that. If you get nothing slow it down till you get something that's jarring but understandable.
I have an nvidia 650M which is an excellent laptop card. I'm using OSX which is arguably the best design for video around. Because I have a 5mega pixel screen and virtualization that Apple does I can get visible lag fairly easily. If I throw the computer into Intel 4000 mode it is hard not to get visible lag.
_____
You asked for an example. This is an infinitely repeatable example demonstrating the problem.
Xorg was a step in the right direction, and I wonder why people gave up on that and started pushing the new hotness (aside from the CADT model applying, of course).
Well that's easy. They pushed through most of the stuff that had been backlogged that the XFree86 guys hadn't wanted that kept them busy for a few years. What was left was stuff that was hard to do with the X11 codebase.
I have rarely seen problems with multiple video streams, and only on systems where decoding the video was the bottleneck. Rendering has always been as good as on Windows (which pre-XP wasn't very good either).
I'm talking Windows 7, maybe Vista. Or OSX 10.4 or later. You have to be using modern video codecs for this comparison.
I switched for OSX 10.1. Though I should say I switched from dual boot. I had been using Unixes all during the late 1980s onward and Linux offered me a way to run Unix software. OSX had XFree86, with Fink it had access to Unix software (worse than most Linux distributions but still fairly good selection).
As I saw it: OSX was only slightly worse than Windows for Office productivity and only slightly worse that Linux for Unix software. The ability to freely intermix was hugely important.
2013 I still think the same things. Linux is great for open source though OSX is still pretty good. Windows has some advantages on productivity apps though I like OSX a lot. My reasons haven't changed.
The only thing that is making me 2nd guess is I love the idea of ubiquitous computing. I really like the One Note and would want that on a tablet. I really would like to be able to twist my screen and use a finger. That might get me to switch. But honestly 85% of what I want ubiquitous for I can get from my iPad.
Sorry, that's not an attack. Yes it does matter. Yes we will blame B and not A if B starts a war because of an act of circumvention, Country B is the one who first initiated an act of War. A's actions are hostile but they are not acts of war. There is a difference between a hostile act and an act of war.
A is free to encouraged armed groups to attack B without it rising to an act of war. A is free to even pay for armed groups to attack B without it rising to an act of war. When A starts hosting armed groups attacking B then its an act of war.
Well written response. You have a very good point. That circumvention only works well in governments with a rather democratic judicial system where circumvention is not in itself a crime.
Inciting rebellion is not an act of war. It is a hostile act but one that falls short of an act of war. Other than that your analysis holds up.
It might be stretch meet the definition of international terrorism, i.e. a government attempting to pressure another government into change of policy by threatening its hold on its territory. But armed bands are required for an actual act of war.
On modern X servers the video buffer is shared, and media playback is done by direct writes into a shared buffer. If I am wrong, or you mean something different, can you provide a link? (And on a side note, I've never seen systematic video problems traceable back to X, only incidental ones, and no system is free from those).
I'm losing you. Are you talking XDirectFB or something else? As far as systematic video problems from X11, that's easy to reproduce. Boot your computer to Windows or OSX as appropriate. Start running some video streams while holding down and moving them. So you have: multiple video streams with at least one in motion. Assuming your video card(s) aren't excellent relative to your screen, you should be able to get slight hiccups and noticeable lag.
Now reboot to Linux. Take the same streams moving at the same speed. You'll see an obvious difference.
X worked in days when the network standards were slower and less responsive, and today it should be worse?
X worked in the days when bandwidth was much worse. Latency is a different issue. Latency on average is drifting upwards as:
a) The amount of distance between server and client is going from meters to thousands of miles. b) The number of routers in between increasing c) Higher latency connections (like cell phone tethering) are being used, also QoS based connections increase latency to decrease jitter.
On the plus side routers in broad use are much faster today than 15 years ago. Ultimately (b) and (c) are solvable issues, but the fact that the size of the earth is big relative to the speed of light means (a) isn't solvable. At the end of the day 1ms (what's needed for responsive touch) cannot possibly happen over distances 90 miles, 10ms latency (what's needed for most mouse interactions to feel instant) 900 miles. Can't be fixed even if all the other problems were go to zero, which ain't happening anytime soon.
The alternatives of shoving full bitmap images over the lines for remote rendering can hardly improve the situation.
Sure it can. Once the client has the bitmap it can render it essentially instantly. Also more and more we are moving towards vector graphics. Obviously a large bitmap relative to bandwidth introduces a 1x cost in latency but it is one time. Same as caching fonts on a printer.
jbolden:The X codebase is really hard to change and complex because of legacy. That drives up development times and uses resources inefficiently. mbdwedge: Boohoo. Complex problems lead to complex code. Oh those poor programmers, they don't get to reinvent the wheel for fame and glory. Fuck them.
You are actually making a different claim. My claim was that bug fixes were taking long because of a complex code base. Your counter in the article is that developers would rather rebuild than fix. Your claim may also be true. But that only compounds the problem if X11 is leading to the maintainers being bored while they are excited to work on Wayland I'm hard pressed to see how that's an argument against Wayland. The people who were working on XFree86 in the 1990s primarily were working for commercial X servers which used parts of the codebase like Hummingbird. The people working on X11 today are associated with distributions primarily Suse and RedHat. I can easily see them being less interested in maintenance work, getting people to do work they don't want to do requires money. The commercial X servers had more money to spend on X11 than the distributions have.
So even if your counter were a counter and even if it were true, how is that an argument for Wayland?
1) X applications can't share an application and the video buffer. There has to be a memory copy. On high performance complex video this introduces lag which humans can detect. Human's are very good at detecting lag. Worse they seem to be about 10 times better at detecting lag when touch is involved, because the spacing between the finger and the objects being moved shifts. When we start talking high density screens (retina display) 10" + touch there is just no feasible hardware solution in the next decade using X.
2) In terms of WAN network transparency i.e. remote over a network does not compensate effectively for lag. There is too much server to to client communication. This is unfixable because of the speed of light. We need to redistribute what is done client and server side.
3) The X codebase is really hard to change and complex because of legacy. That drives up development times and uses resources inefficiently.
I agree with you./. has become incredibly conservative over time./. today, is much more like what the BSD crowd was like in the late 1990s when they were resisting the earlier rounds of changes to get a (semi) popular desktop environment with Linux. You see it with discussions of programming languages, discussions of Gnome and Wayland.
That being said, Wayland has been sucking resources away from X11 for 4 years now without having replaced it. So from the perspective of an end user Wayland is getting very expensive. This is starting to remind me of Perl 6.
What features are missing from OS X's display system that were present in OS 9?
The OS9 Finder' which was powerful Use of Fitt's law in design Interface consistency First controls differ in location and in tone Symbols consistent with actions. Clickable action and light up zone matching Variable spacing for controls as a preference Control of justification and spacing on the menu bar
No it doesn't. There were plenty of times when Steve Jobs' beliefs were in the minority. Popular opinion being in your favor for a few years doesn't prove much. We'll know much more in a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the difference is that an army needs a base of operations. A group of contractors based in America is still an American army. A group of contractors funded by American based in Argentina is an Argentinian army.
If you want an example US v. Nicaragua. The USA argued we could attack Nicaragua because they were funding rebels.
I may very well have had experience with corporate IT from when you were in elementary school. Yes. First off a well funded well staffed group doesn't take 6-12 month for testing. It might take that long for fixes. Companies who need to upgrade this frequently need to start testing their internal apps off beta versions and that means running overlapping testing and fixing groups. So cycles might have to start every 2 months with about 1 in 4 cycles reaching completion and going into distribution.
A yes business do this when they need to be on a fast upgrade track. And yes it costs a lot more than now. But it can be done.
Your generation is just so used to living understaffed that you can't imagine what an effective IT group with adequate budget can do.
Short of actual numbers, all we have is anecdotes of people saying 'X video playback sucks' and people saying 'works for me'. That in itself is no ground to make decisions on.
I didn't say playback sucks. I gave you a repeatable experiment to prove the problem. Now this problem might not be a problem for an end user. Lag is highly activity dependent, of 2-3 ms are a problem for drawing. Lags of 2-3 seconds might not a problem for watching a movie full screen.
You don't need numbers. I gave you a simple test you can do on any X11 that should be repeatable. My assertion is simple pick a workload (video frames in motion) that stresses the video card causing minor problems under Windows or OSX (recent versions) and under X11 it will be disastrously overtaxed. You do numbers when the differences aren't obvious, this is obvious.
You want to see problems overwhelm your hardware. Any hardware can be overwhelmed. Increase the number of megapixels. Increase the number of number of things the card is having to do. Heck if you have a really fast setup have it flip between a Blu-ray movie and a highres game 30x per second interleaving the frames 60x / second. I doubt your card can handle that. If you get nothing slow it down till you get something that's jarring but understandable.
I have an nvidia 650M which is an excellent laptop card. I'm using OSX which is arguably the best design for video around. Because I have a 5mega pixel screen and virtualization that Apple does I can get visible lag fairly easily. If I throw the computer into Intel 4000 mode it is hard not to get visible lag.
_____
You asked for an example. This is an infinitely repeatable example demonstrating the problem.
That's why I used that example. It has been tried. No it is not an act of war. The criteria is strict.
Xorg was a step in the right direction, and I wonder why people gave up on that and started pushing the new hotness (aside from the CADT model applying, of course).
Well that's easy. They pushed through most of the stuff that had been backlogged that the XFree86 guys hadn't wanted that kept them busy for a few years. What was left was stuff that was hard to do with the X11 codebase.
I have rarely seen problems with multiple video streams, and only on systems where decoding the video was the bottleneck. Rendering has always been as good as on Windows (which pre-XP wasn't very good either).
I'm talking Windows 7, maybe Vista. Or OSX 10.4 or later. You have to be using modern video codecs for this comparison.
Windows 8 is amazing on modern hardware. Windows 8 kinda sucks on traditional hardware. Most people have traditional hardware.
Microsoft should have discouraged upgrades and made touchscreen mandatory for Windows 8.
Apple hasn't been getting beauty cred in a while. But look at OSX 10.1 or 10.2 relative to what was out at the time.
What they have been getting is design cred for simplicity and well thought out design and I think that's mostly deserved.
Well if you budget, you budget for annual update. All machines get updated. Once a machine isn't going to get updated it gets replaced within 9-18 mo.
Apple does this on 2 year cycles. That would be liking blocking Windows 7 next year. Of blocking XP in mid 2008.
I switched for OSX 10.1. Though I should say I switched from dual boot. I had been using Unixes all during the late 1980s onward and Linux offered me a way to run Unix software. OSX had XFree86, with Fink it had access to Unix software (worse than most Linux distributions but still fairly good selection).
As I saw it: OSX was only slightly worse than Windows for Office productivity and only slightly worse that Linux for Unix software. The ability to freely intermix was hugely important.
2013 I still think the same things. Linux is great for open source though OSX is still pretty good. Windows has some advantages on productivity apps though I like OSX a lot. My reasons haven't changed.
The only thing that is making me 2nd guess is I love the idea of ubiquitous computing. I really like the One Note and would want that on a tablet. I really would like to be able to twist my screen and use a finger. That might get me to switch. But honestly 85% of what I want ubiquitous for I can get from my iPad.
Sorry, that's not an attack. Yes it does matter. Yes we will blame B and not A if B starts a war because of an act of circumvention, Country B is the one who first initiated an act of War. A's actions are hostile but they are not acts of war. There is a difference between a hostile act and an act of war.
A is free to encouraged armed groups to attack B without it rising to an act of war.
A is free to even pay for armed groups to attack B without it rising to an act of war.
When A starts hosting armed groups attacking B then its an act of war.
Well written response. You have a very good point. That circumvention only works well in governments with a rather democratic judicial system where circumvention is not in itself a crime.
Inciting rebellion is not an act of war. It is a hostile act but one that falls short of an act of war. Other than that your analysis holds up.
It might be stretch meet the definition of international terrorism, i.e. a government attempting to pressure another government into change of policy by threatening its hold on its territory. But armed bands are required for an actual act of war.
On modern X servers the video buffer is shared, and media playback is done by direct writes into a shared buffer. If I am wrong, or you mean something different, can you provide a link? (And on a side note, I've never seen systematic video problems traceable back to X, only incidental ones, and no system is free from those).
I'm losing you. Are you talking XDirectFB or something else? As far as systematic video problems from X11, that's easy to reproduce. Boot your computer to Windows or OSX as appropriate. Start running some video streams while holding down and moving them. So you have: multiple video streams with at least one in motion. Assuming your video card(s) aren't excellent relative to your screen, you should be able to get slight hiccups and noticeable lag.
Now reboot to Linux. Take the same streams moving at the same speed. You'll see an obvious difference.
X worked in days when the network standards were slower and less responsive, and today it should be worse?
X worked in the days when bandwidth was much worse. Latency is a different issue. Latency on average is drifting upwards as:
a) The amount of distance between server and client is going from meters to thousands of miles.
b) The number of routers in between increasing
c) Higher latency connections (like cell phone tethering) are being used, also QoS based connections increase latency to decrease jitter.
On the plus side routers in broad use are much faster today than 15 years ago. Ultimately (b) and (c) are solvable issues, but the fact that the size of the earth is big relative to the speed of light means (a) isn't solvable. At the end of the day 1ms (what's needed for responsive touch) cannot possibly happen over distances 90 miles, 10ms latency (what's needed for most mouse interactions to feel instant) 900 miles. Can't be fixed even if all the other problems were go to zero, which ain't happening anytime soon.
The alternatives of shoving full bitmap images over the lines for remote rendering can hardly improve the situation.
Sure it can. Once the client has the bitmap it can render it essentially instantly. Also more and more we are moving towards vector graphics. Obviously a large bitmap relative to bandwidth introduces a 1x cost in latency but it is one time. Same as caching fonts on a printer.
jbolden:The X codebase is really hard to change and complex because of legacy. That drives up development times and uses resources inefficiently.
mbdwedge: Boohoo. Complex problems lead to complex code. Oh those poor programmers, they don't get to reinvent the wheel for fame and glory. Fuck them.
You are actually making a different claim. My claim was that bug fixes were taking long because of a complex code base. Your counter in the article is that developers would rather rebuild than fix. Your claim may also be true. But that only compounds the problem if X11 is leading to the maintainers being bored while they are excited to work on Wayland I'm hard pressed to see how that's an argument against Wayland. The people who were working on XFree86 in the 1990s primarily were working for commercial X servers which used parts of the codebase like Hummingbird. The people working on X11 today are associated with distributions primarily Suse and RedHat. I can easily see them being less interested in maintenance work, getting people to do work they don't want to do requires money. The commercial X servers had more money to spend on X11 than the distributions have.
So even if your counter were a counter and even if it were true, how is that an argument for Wayland?
:) The problems. Though I'll admit few governments have survived pissing off the United States for 60 years either.
1) X applications can't share an application and the video buffer. There has to be a memory copy. On high performance complex video this introduces lag which humans can detect. Human's are very good at detecting lag. Worse they seem to be about 10 times better at detecting lag when touch is involved, because the spacing between the finger and the objects being moved shifts. When we start talking high density screens (retina display) 10" + touch there is just no feasible hardware solution in the next decade using X.
2) In terms of WAN network transparency i.e. remote over a network does not compensate effectively for lag. There is too much server to to client communication. This is unfixable because of the speed of light. We need to redistribute what is done client and server side.
3) The X codebase is really hard to change and complex because of legacy. That drives up development times and uses resources inefficiently.
I agree with you. /. has become incredibly conservative over time. /. today, is much more like what the BSD crowd was like in the late 1990s when they were resisting the earlier rounds of changes to get a (semi) popular desktop environment with Linux. You see it with discussions of programming languages, discussions of Gnome and Wayland.
That being said, Wayland has been sucking resources away from X11 for 4 years now without having replaced it. So from the perspective of an end user Wayland is getting very expensive. This is starting to remind me of Perl 6.
Wayland has made it clear they intend to implement an RDB style remote protocol.
What features are missing from OS X's display system that were present in OS 9?
The OS9 Finder' which was powerful
Use of Fitt's law in design
Interface consistency
First controls differ in location and in tone
Symbols consistent with actions.
Clickable action and light up zone matching
Variable spacing for controls as a preference
Control of justification and spacing on the menu bar
etc...
When did I say anything about "rights". I'm talking simple behaviors, what they did or didn't do.
No it doesn't. There were plenty of times when Steve Jobs' beliefs were in the minority. Popular opinion being in your favor for a few years doesn't prove much. We'll know much more in a decade.
Yes someone commented on that above. Then a European block is going to result in lots of proxying from US carriers.
It ain't for you, its for kids waiting for the school bus
Well then if this gets interpreted broadly and not just for broadcast they are going to have a lot of work on their hands.
OK I'm an old timer who was on the internet when everyone used their real names and an employer email address. Shoot what did you want to say?