but to pretend that Java, like any of these languages offers "nothing of value" is either arrogance or ignorance beyond belief.
Java has influenced industry enormously, and in some ways for the better (e.g., garbage collection is now semi-acceptable to people). However, technically, Java has contributed nothing: it wasn't state of the art even when it came out, it has numerous serious design problems, and its libraries are bloated and badly designed too.
I know that/. no longer caters to a technically literate crowd but you take the cake. I feel stupider for even bothering to reply to you.
Yeah, same here: you really do take the cake. I mean, how could any even moderately technically literate person believe that Java has intrinsic technical merit? The best thing one can say about Java is that it's so bloated and poorly designed that it will ensure job security for programmers for decades to come.
but I presume it's got slightly more brains than US ones?
Why don't you worry your pretty little head about your own continent. If there appears to be less airport security in Europe, it's simply because European governments have instituted such a complete surveillance society that they don't even have to. And you're so dumb, you don't even realize what's going on.
And this is different... where exactly? Believe it or not, US copyright is liberal compared to Europe. The US refused to implement provisions of the Berne convention until the 1970's because they imposed too many restrictions. Eventually, the US gave in because it had to.
The UK in particular is extremely litigious in areas of speech and copyright. In Germany, lawyers can even just send you bills when they believe that you're misusing a trademark or offering a copyrighted work, with legal recourse being essentially impossible.
And who do you think are these "corporations" anyway? Many of the publishers trying to make US copyright law more restrictive are European. They like to go policy shopping, and they know that they have to make things happen in the US.
Don't blame the US for a mess that Europe created.
The British have caught the plague that began on my side of the Atlantic: kleptocrats compose a huge part of government, and they've been on a crusade against egalitarianism since the 1980s
Caught? Britain has worked that way for centuries.
Enshrining it as a right kind of suggests that the copyright holder has more of a right to the content than they actually have. In fact, the copyright holder is granted a temporary monopoly, not because of any intrinsic "rights" (he doesn't have any to the content), but to benefit society. So, you don't need fair use as a "right", you already have all the rights anyway. Fair use is an exemption to a temporary monopoly.
Well, SYNC has been a pretty standard component of X.org for a long time, so I wasn't sure whether you didn't know about it or whether you wanted something else.
If you start with a display system that's optimized for local display, and then implement, on top of that, a network-transparent display system, there's no reason the implementation of the latter should be inherently less efficient than its direct implementation
Geez, you think the X11 designers were that dumb? That's of course what the X11 designers did.
X11 is, however, unapologetically a client/server window system. And you know what? That was the right choice, because 25 years later, Windows and Macintosh have also moved to client/server window systems. Unlike WIndows and Macintosh, X11 was designed to do the right thing from the ground up, while those systems had to be retrofitted.
The Wayland FAQ [google.com] was kind of interesting to read. It's interesting what they have to say about X's legacy baggage, for instance
Yeah, there is some legacy baggage, like old font models and old graphics models. Any UNIX/Linux desktop needs the libraries to implement them anyway. It makes no difference whether those libraries happen to be in the window system server (X11) or two separate processes (X11+Wayland); either way, they are always going to be loaded. But that code doesn't affect performance, and it is pretty much self-contained. It's also not that much work to implement from scratch if you really have to.
As long as there's no inherent slowdown for X apps, I fail to see the downside.
X apps aren't just these isolated things anymore drawing a bunch of lines on the screen. We have window management, keyboards, and tons of other functionality. Much of that still relies on X11 and won't be supported by Wayland. If we keep going down this path, you'll only be able to write any kind of useful desktop apps with Gnome and Qt. It's a huge step in the wrong direction.
It seems more sensible to start with a layer that emphasizes performance and implement network transparency on top of that rather than the other way around.
All major window systems these days are architected the same: they are all user-mode client/server systems. X11 was designed that way from the ground up, while Windows and OS X were retrofitted (in different ways) and don't do it as well. X11 would be designed largely the same way if you assumed no network transparency; all the hard work is in the client/server aspect.
The features that make X11 network transparent have nothing to do with its graphics protocols, but with features such as window management and resources. They don't cost performance, but they have proven extremely useful even for local apps. For example, window decorations are consistent and functional no matter what toolkit you use. Wayland is trying to push window decorations into toolkit libraries, which is the same stupid crap Windows users have had to suffer under for years.
What do you know about the vblank syncing issue that the Wayland FAQ cites? Is there really no way to sync display changes to vblank on X? Or is something like that offered in, say, the compositing extension, or GL?
There's the SYNC extension (pretty standard). What else do you need?
The German government may pretend that hiding images of buildings and people visible from public streets is "privacy" but it's merely privacy theater.
Germany's government has one of the wost records on privacy among European nations, pushing for data retention, registration of religions beliefs with the government, extensive electronic government surveillance, even aerial photography of people's backyards.
So, don't feed the German government trolls: don't call this restriction of photography "privacy".
The basic "problem" that's existed in X forever is that it's network-transparent first and local-optimized second, via extensions. Whether this is a "problem" is largely a matter of perspective. Obviously many people, myself included, consider it an asset. [...] So the idea is to "cut out the middleman", trim a couple decades of legacy cruft.
Windows has a lot of legacy cruft in its graphics system, because it moved from a frame buffer model with synchronous calls to a client/server model. OS X has a lot of legacy cruft in its graphics system because it moved from a DisplayPostscript model to its current model.
X11, instead, uses an efficient binary encoding and an asynchronous communications protocol, plus optional shared memory optimizations. It is what a modern desktop window system should be and how it should communicate. X11 happens to also support remote displaying of windows, but you pretty much get that for free.
There is some legacy cruft in X11 related to fonts, 2D graphics, and resources, but that code is pretty harmless and it's actually still used by many apps.
"X11 is inefficient because it has a lot of legacy cruft due to having to support network transparency" sounds plausible, but it is just totally wrong.
You mean the same review process that keeps letting apps through that clearly violate Apple's policies (WiFi sharing, emulators, etc.), only to have them pulled within a day when Apple finally hears about it from users?
Apple is clearly incapable of determining reliably what the major function of an application is, so you're incredibly naive if you think they are able to figure out something like whether an app stores a password somewhere.
Many Ubuntu users are in academia, research, and industry, and they use tons of other X11 toolkits. Wx and Tcl/Tk are still extremely common, for example. Some apps have their own built-in toolkits that you don't even know about.
Nobody has made running an "X11 server ATOP a new system" work, not Microsoft, not Apple, not anybody else: keymaps don't work properly, drag-and-drop doesn't work properly, notifications don't work properly, etc.
And why even bother? X11 is fast, it has a good wire protocol, and it gets the job done. Why would you possibly want to spend years figuring out how to do all of that from scratch? What's the benefit? What real-world problem is this supposed to fix?
LASIK didn't fix what is wrong with your eyes, and in a decade or two, you'll need reading glasses anyway. And nobody knows what the long term effect of LASIK is. I looked into it and concluded that glasses are still cheaper and safer.
I think the same is true for many of these "improvements"; they are too new to know what the effects are. As far as I'm concerned, the less you mess with your body, the better. Eat well, exercise, and avoid chemicals.
Yup. It's probably the best window system you can get right now. It is a client/server system with an optimized and mature protocol, plus some really good features.
Windows started out as a direct graphics library and then was retrofitted into a client/server model--poorly and inefficiently.
OS X started out with NeXT's client/server DisplayPostscript. It had really bad performance and Apple spent a lot of time trying to fix up its inefficiencies. But they still only get good performance because they use tons of cache.
We'd all be better off if Apple and Microsoft also switched to X11, instead of spreading their marketing b.s.
This is not about killing the possibility to write applications for X, and forward them over X, if needed. This is about all graphical applications should not have to depend on TCP/IP.
X11 uses shared memory and local IPC for local applications, same as OS X.
Apple got it right with Mac OS X - what has the rest of the *NIX community been doing all years when the solution was right in front of their nose?
Apple's graphics subsystem is a derivative of DisplayPostscript from NeXT, an old, slow, and bloated technology. Other UNIX vendors tried shipping it and it was a complete failure. Apple managed to hack it so that it performs halfway decently in OS X, but it is still worse than X11.
And since Mac OS X runs X applications properly, there is no worry this can not be done. It works today and it has been done.
Desktop integration of X11 apps on OS X is essentially non-existent; not even key maps work properly, and X11 on OS X is dog slow.
The X server is an efficient, widely used, and standard graphics platform. And the X server is where all the drivers are being developed. Finally, the X server actually gets things like multi-monitor support, resolution switching, etc. right.
Why go now with something totally new and largely unproven? What problem is this solving?
First, your ISP can change their terms whenever they like, just like you can switch whenever you like.
Second, given that Netflix and services like it are becoming popular, your ISP has reasonable cause to change the charge model from flat to volume based, since their cost is proportional to volume. Most people probably wouldn't see a change, but if you're a heavy user, your bill might go up somewhat.
(Third, 10 Mbit/sec isn't "blazing" anymore. Here, we have 100 Mbit available.)
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but to pretend that Java, like any of these languages offers "nothing of value" is either arrogance or ignorance beyond belief.
Java has influenced industry enormously, and in some ways for the better (e.g., garbage collection is now semi-acceptable to people). However, technically, Java has contributed nothing: it wasn't state of the art even when it came out, it has numerous serious design problems, and its libraries are bloated and badly designed too.
I know that /. no longer caters to a technically literate crowd but you take the cake. I feel stupider for even bothering to reply to you.
Yeah, same here: you really do take the cake. I mean, how could any even moderately technically literate person believe that Java has intrinsic technical merit? The best thing one can say about Java is that it's so bloated and poorly designed that it will ensure job security for programmers for decades to come.
but I presume it's got slightly more brains than US ones?
Why don't you worry your pretty little head about your own continent. If there appears to be less airport security in Europe, it's simply because European governments have instituted such a complete surveillance society that they don't even have to. And you're so dumb, you don't even realize what's going on.
And this is different... where exactly? Believe it or not, US copyright is liberal compared to Europe. The US refused to implement provisions of the Berne convention until the 1970's because they imposed too many restrictions. Eventually, the US gave in because it had to.
The UK in particular is extremely litigious in areas of speech and copyright. In Germany, lawyers can even just send you bills when they believe that you're misusing a trademark or offering a copyrighted work, with legal recourse being essentially impossible.
And who do you think are these "corporations" anyway? Many of the publishers trying to make US copyright law more restrictive are European. They like to go policy shopping, and they know that they have to make things happen in the US.
Don't blame the US for a mess that Europe created.
The British have caught the plague that began on my side of the Atlantic: kleptocrats compose a huge part of government, and they've been on a crusade against egalitarianism since the 1980s
Caught? Britain has worked that way for centuries.
Enshrining it as a right kind of suggests that the copyright holder has more of a right to the content than they actually have. In fact, the copyright holder is granted a temporary monopoly, not because of any intrinsic "rights" (he doesn't have any to the content), but to benefit society. So, you don't need fair use as a "right", you already have all the rights anyway. Fair use is an exemption to a temporary monopoly.
Well, SYNC has been a pretty standard component of X.org for a long time, so I wasn't sure whether you didn't know about it or whether you wanted something else.
If you start with a display system that's optimized for local display, and then implement, on top of that, a network-transparent display system, there's no reason the implementation of the latter should be inherently less efficient than its direct implementation
Geez, you think the X11 designers were that dumb? That's of course what the X11 designers did.
X11 is, however, unapologetically a client/server window system. And you know what? That was the right choice, because 25 years later, Windows and Macintosh have also moved to client/server window systems. Unlike WIndows and Macintosh, X11 was designed to do the right thing from the ground up, while those systems had to be retrofitted.
The Wayland FAQ [google.com] was kind of interesting to read. It's interesting what they have to say about X's legacy baggage, for instance
Yeah, there is some legacy baggage, like old font models and old graphics models. Any UNIX/Linux desktop needs the libraries to implement them anyway. It makes no difference whether those libraries happen to be in the window system server (X11) or two separate processes (X11+Wayland); either way, they are always going to be loaded. But that code doesn't affect performance, and it is pretty much self-contained. It's also not that much work to implement from scratch if you really have to.
As long as there's no inherent slowdown for X apps, I fail to see the downside.
X apps aren't just these isolated things anymore drawing a bunch of lines on the screen. We have window management, keyboards, and tons of other functionality. Much of that still relies on X11 and won't be supported by Wayland. If we keep going down this path, you'll only be able to write any kind of useful desktop apps with Gnome and Qt. It's a huge step in the wrong direction.
It seems more sensible to start with a layer that emphasizes performance and implement network transparency on top of that rather than the other way around.
All major window systems these days are architected the same: they are all user-mode client/server systems. X11 was designed that way from the ground up, while Windows and OS X were retrofitted (in different ways) and don't do it as well. X11 would be designed largely the same way if you assumed no network transparency; all the hard work is in the client/server aspect.
The features that make X11 network transparent have nothing to do with its graphics protocols, but with features such as window management and resources. They don't cost performance, but they have proven extremely useful even for local apps. For example, window decorations are consistent and functional no matter what toolkit you use. Wayland is trying to push window decorations into toolkit libraries, which is the same stupid crap Windows users have had to suffer under for years.
What do you know about the vblank syncing issue that the Wayland FAQ cites? Is there really no way to sync display changes to vblank on X? Or is something like that offered in, say, the compositing extension, or GL?
There's the SYNC extension (pretty standard). What else do you need?
In many places, financial punishments are based on a percentage of annual income and assets. That way, you can achieve some degree of fairness.
The German government may pretend that hiding images of buildings and people visible from public streets is "privacy" but it's merely privacy theater.
Germany's government has one of the wost records on privacy among European nations, pushing for data retention, registration of religions beliefs with the government, extensive electronic government surveillance, even aerial photography of people's backyards.
So, don't feed the German government trolls: don't call this restriction of photography "privacy".
I suggest you read a bit more carefully: what I said is correct and your response is irrelevant.
The relationship between F# and OCAML is different than the relationship between C and ALGOL or C++ and Simula.
The basic "problem" that's existed in X forever is that it's network-transparent first and local-optimized second, via extensions. Whether this is a "problem" is largely a matter of perspective. Obviously many people, myself included, consider it an asset. [...] So the idea is to "cut out the middleman", trim a couple decades of legacy cruft.
Windows has a lot of legacy cruft in its graphics system, because it moved from a frame buffer model with synchronous calls to a client/server model. OS X has a lot of legacy cruft in its graphics system because it moved from a DisplayPostscript model to its current model.
X11, instead, uses an efficient binary encoding and an asynchronous communications protocol, plus optional shared memory optimizations. It is what a modern desktop window system should be and how it should communicate. X11 happens to also support remote displaying of windows, but you pretty much get that for free.
There is some legacy cruft in X11 related to fonts, 2D graphics, and resources, but that code is pretty harmless and it's actually still used by many apps.
"X11 is inefficient because it has a lot of legacy cruft due to having to support network transparency" sounds plausible, but it is just totally wrong.
You mean the same review process that keeps letting apps through that clearly violate Apple's policies (WiFi sharing, emulators, etc.), only to have them pulled within a day when Apple finally hears about it from users?
Apple is clearly incapable of determining reliably what the major function of an application is, so you're incredibly naive if you think they are able to figure out something like whether an app stores a password somewhere.
The same statement, of course, applies to any programming language in existence.
No, not at all. For C, C++, Fortran, Smalltalk, and Java, most of the basic design and most of the development was done inside private companies.
Many Ubuntu users are in academia, research, and industry, and they use tons of other X11 toolkits. Wx and Tcl/Tk are still extremely common, for example. Some apps have their own built-in toolkits that you don't even know about.
Nobody has made running an "X11 server ATOP a new system" work, not Microsoft, not Apple, not anybody else: keymaps don't work properly, drag-and-drop doesn't work properly, notifications don't work properly, etc.
And why even bother? X11 is fast, it has a good wire protocol, and it gets the job done. Why would you possibly want to spend years figuring out how to do all of that from scratch? What's the benefit? What real-world problem is this supposed to fix?
LASIK didn't fix what is wrong with your eyes, and in a decade or two, you'll need reading glasses anyway. And nobody knows what the long term effect of LASIK is. I looked into it and concluded that glasses are still cheaper and safer.
I think the same is true for many of these "improvements"; they are too new to know what the effects are. As far as I'm concerned, the less you mess with your body, the better. Eat well, exercise, and avoid chemicals.
You should see how quickly people solve puzzles once you start applying current to other parts of their anatomy :-)
they write them for GTK, KDE
That, and dozens of other toolkits, all of which will break if you don't support the basic X11 protocols and support them well.
Have you people used X?
Yup. It's probably the best window system you can get right now. It is a client/server system with an optimized and mature protocol, plus some really good features.
Windows started out as a direct graphics library and then was retrofitted into a client/server model--poorly and inefficiently.
OS X started out with NeXT's client/server DisplayPostscript. It had really bad performance and Apple spent a lot of time trying to fix up its inefficiencies. But they still only get good performance because they use tons of cache.
We'd all be better off if Apple and Microsoft also switched to X11, instead of spreading their marketing b.s.
This is not about killing the possibility to write applications for X, and forward them over X, if needed. This is about all graphical applications should not have to depend on TCP/IP.
X11 uses shared memory and local IPC for local applications, same as OS X.
Apple got it right with Mac OS X - what has the rest of the *NIX community been doing all years when the solution was right in front of their nose?
Apple's graphics subsystem is a derivative of DisplayPostscript from NeXT, an old, slow, and bloated technology. Other UNIX vendors tried shipping it and it was a complete failure. Apple managed to hack it so that it performs halfway decently in OS X, but it is still worse than X11.
And since Mac OS X runs X applications properly, there is no worry this can not be done. It works today and it has been done.
Desktop integration of X11 apps on OS X is essentially non-existent; not even key maps work properly, and X11 on OS X is dog slow.
The X server is an efficient, widely used, and standard graphics platform. And the X server is where all the drivers are being developed. Finally, the X server actually gets things like multi-monitor support, resolution switching, etc. right.
Why go now with something totally new and largely unproven? What problem is this solving?
Keep in mind that a lot of work that went into the design of F# was done in academia, as part of several languages including OCAML.
You don't even own an iPad, do you?
I own an iPad, but it's clear you don't own an Android phone or have ever used any other tablet. You're arguing from a position of ignorance.
Well, thanks for posting your CV. An artist who learned some MySQL. I think I now know what to think of your opinion: nothing.
First, your ISP can change their terms whenever they like, just like you can switch whenever you like.
Second, given that Netflix and services like it are becoming popular, your ISP has reasonable cause to change the charge model from flat to volume based, since their cost is proportional to volume. Most people probably wouldn't see a change, but if you're a heavy user, your bill might go up somewhat.
(Third, 10 Mbit/sec isn't "blazing" anymore. Here, we have 100 Mbit available.)