Contrary to you, sir, I lived in a communist country at that time and thank God I don't anymore.
No, you did not, or you would know that there is no such thing as "communist country", they were socialist countries, and every person who lived there, would know that. Unless, of course, you were twelve in 1991 -- then all you know is anti-USSR propaganda.
Sure it collapsed economically.
Again, no. There was no economic effect from dissolution of USSR, it was a purely political move. Transition to Capitalism happened later, and it was a total, unmitigated disaster for the economy if all ex-USSR countries, just like all supporters of Socialism expected it to be.
When it was legal, the loans were worse, tuition was cheaper, and scholarships more available. There was no point doing it. Now, that the government taken student loans under control, loans are more available and on better terms, so it also more tempting to abuse them.
You'll be just like the other juy sleeping next to you in the gutter, but with a government order that if the economy every improves and you find a job, someone will take $100,000 from you - but not the guy next to you who didn't go to college to be homeless.
You still won't have to pay more than given fraction of disposable income, and not for more than 25 years. This is better than being able to discharge the loan in bankruptcy.
You would be more correct if they hadn't changed bankruptcy law to prevent discarge of student loans through bankruptcy.
Then most students would declare bankruptcy at the time of graduation for shits and giggles, because they don't have any income, and won't need loans for quite a while yet.
Just the opposite. The term "ethnic cleansing" is mostly used by journalists to imply "genocide" while only having evidence of ethnic discrimination or prejudice. Ex: Kosovo.
Yeah dude. Political scientists don't think like that and tend to be fairly serious minded men. If activists are putting in bogus data, its going to stick out like a sore thumb.
That would be true if there was a large amount of speech on the subject to begin with.
I'm not going to pick sides in that one; but if you approach the debate (as some people do) with the starting point that foes "life begins at conception" then abortion is infanticide.
"Life" is not sufficient to call something a person. Nothing can be gained from discussing abortion with people who do not understand that, and at some point society has to bring down the banhammer.
If somebody says "All members of (ethnic group x/social group y) are scum! Let's (kill them/throw them out of our country/deprive them of their property rights)" then that feels like hate speech.
"Scum" and "convicted felons" are social groups, too.
Anyways, yes they both do it. 10 seconds of google and I found something that tops yours: Obama makes fun of disabled people:
Yes, and I constantly offend retarded people by comparing them to Microsoft and Adobe programmers, HP management, religious leaders, followers of Ayn Rand, and other dangerous people.
I have a friend who failed out of college and made more in his first 5 years out of college than I did with a degree.
That's meaningless. What is the average result of all people you know that failed out of college? Over more than five years?
If you consider the expense of college a "risk" and the increased pay the "payout" for the risk, then college isn't worth it in most cases
Expense is not risk. Risk is something unpredictable and undesirable -- in this case, a chance that you will not be able to support yourself after the college. This is not any more likely than if you won't go to college, even if you take into account all the loans and expenses. Even in the worst case scenario you will end up paying minimum for 25 years -- if you will be really unemployed, you won't be any worse than anyone else.
So college has a zero cost? Because if you take the risk and lose, you have a shitty job and $100,000 of debt. I think you need a refund on your "risk" it obviously didn't pay off.
Over your whole lifetime, it's pretty much impossible that college education won't pay for itself -- $100,000 over 50 years that you have on average left to live after graduation, is $2,000 per year. Even learning juggling would be sufficient to cover that.
One problem: most Americans don't want to learn anything valuable for science and technology development, and expect to be paid like people who made major contributions to their areas of science and technology.
Even foreigners with bad to mediocre education and ability look like a better choice for employers.
Second, I think there is some relativity stuff going on too. For the universe to rotate, there must be something outside the universe for the universe to rotate in relation to.
Microsoft astroturfers have no shame, why would it bother them? Please don't pretend to be an Apple astroturfer, Apple gets enough support from genuine fanboys, and you are not an Apple fanboy, you are gushing with excitement every time you mention Microsoft products.
that's me. BTW Microsoft owns one of the commercial X11s.
So what? Microsoft can't use it to improve software they actually sell, so they are trying to destroy all implementations of X11, just like they were always trying to destroy Unix-like systems despite having involved in Xenix, and despite still having a Windows-based sad mockery of Unix somewhere among their products.
It's very consistent over their whole history -- they even spent enormous amount of effort on sinking OS/2 that was written at large extent by them. Once it became clear that they can gain more by destroying a superior system that fallen outside of their control while slapping an inferior one onto every computer, it's all-out war on everything technologically superior.
I think you are missing something here. Wayland has always been primarily about Linux. Linux has always followed Microsoft's lead for a hardware strategy.
This identifies you as a Microsoft astroturfer. It also explains why you are bringing piles and piles of unrelated problems, imaginary problems, or problems solved long ago, just to create an impression that you have some kind of arguments.
1. All that was mentioned is, that the person claimed to be an author of Flashback in a private message on a board for malware authors.
2. Translation is the image wrong. It says "I specialize in finding exploits and creating bots". Original Russian text is "[my] specialty is creating exploits and bots". The whole exchange is about the person communicating with mavook mentioning something that may be "stilll relevant" asking mavook how he would want to be introduced:
Hi! Is it still relevant? If so, respond with something like, nick, area of activity (how to introduce you). We will solve the problem in 2-3 days.
mavook responds:
any random nick macbook for example creator of flashback botnet for macs specialty is creating exploits and bots
(Capitalization and punctuation, or lack of one, is preserved wherever possible.)
1. 1 in 500 infection rate was not included in the initial premise or anywhere in the article itself, but used in calculations in footnotes. 2. Decision, to administer or not to administer the cure in the case of zombie apocalypse was determined by an arbitrary criterion by an author. In reality, it would matter if the author calculated the possible outcome of detection and administering cure at maximum available rate, vs. spread of infection at its (supposedly proportional to the density of zombies) rate. 3. Zombie apocalypse is not a realistic scenario. A zombie apocalypse with disease spreading through the air is not even known fictional scenario.
This is how you DON'T WRITE THINGS, be they fictional, or non-fictional, and it's certainly how you don't write things that involve math.
You're completely misinterpreting what was actually written in the post. At no point did I claim the Soviets were expecting the attack.
But wouldn't the preparations to a war with Germany, aggressive or defensive, result in the same -- increasing the size and improving training of the military, ramping up weapons and military production, bringing troops into the Western side of the country? None of that happened, so the premise must be invalid.
Suvorov (a former GRU intelligence officer, who claims to have had access to the relevant records) indicates that
His confidence has no effect on credibility of statements that have no foundation in facts.
Stalin was not, in fact, expecting the German's to attack, as a result of military intelligence indicating that the Germans were not preparing their troops and equipment for winter operations. This, presumably, is why he felt confident in moving his units as he did.
I don't even know where to start.
First of all, there were no units. Military was too small for a large-scale war, and whatever was, was nowhere close to the Western border, and with no feasible way to get it there in time and numbers necessary for a large-scale war.
Second, there was no movement, no military production, and nothing specifically useful for war in Europe, as opposed to Asia and Pacific Ocean.
Third, winter means nothing in Western Europe.
Eurasia is a huge continent, and climate gets harsher from West to East. Russia is like Canada turned 90 degrees clockwise and stretched few times from West to East. An army prepared for a war in Western Europe would face worse conditions in Russia simply because movement East, away from Atlantic Ocean, Baltic Sea, Mediterranean Sea, etc., means dry, cold winter.
Transportation is another issue. The continent is wider to the East. The distances are long, road network provides little redundancy, railroad even less so. Russians retreating to the East, and guerillas operating in the occupied territory can literally burn enough bridges to cripple the invaders' logistics, even if it won't prevent their advance. Then (what Germans didn't reach, but Russians taken into account) there are Ural mountains and Siberia, a real-life equivalent of Mordor, as far as invasions and walking into them, are concerned. Sure as Hell, you won't want your ground forces going there, from the West, in winter.
Those things are reversed when you attack from the East to the West -- climate is milder, continent is more narrow, density of roads and railroads increases. You can fight there all year around, and Europe did just that few decades before. So no, it's a silly argument, and no one familiar with either war in Europe or Stalin's policies, would honestly support it.
Trains, of course, are the only practical way to deploy tanks long distances on land. There are pictures from the war showing some of these trains, damaged, with the tanks still on them.
But if USSR prepared for a war, wouldn't tanks be all on the border already?
As the tanks were completely helpless on the damaged trains, the Germans were able to recover many of them
There weren't even any significant numbers of them at the start of the war, so it wouldn't matter much. Germans' initial bombing was successful because USSR was not prepared for any war, defensive or aggressive. Anti-air defense, something one would establish prior to any expected war, did not exist. War in Finland was a disaster, so it was already known that military is not ready for a war of any kind. The only non-tinfoilery explanation is, USSR was not prepared for a war because it dd not expect and did not plan any.
(much as they used captured Chek tanks in the invasion of France: just because the train couldn't move due to damage didn't mean the tanks were unusable, if one had time and the right heavy e
Fine Wayland is intended to be used primarily on tablets, phones and laptops. So there isn't a problem then.
This is worth a separate answer.
If Wayland developers announced that their system is intended only for tablets and phones (or "laptops" that are actually tablets with a keyboard taped to them), no one would care what they do, like no one cares about similarly limited display engines of Android and iOS. The whole problem is, they build it as a "replacement for X11", and Wayland development would make no sense at all unless X11 at some point will be abandoned. So their plan is to destroy X11 and replace it with an inferior system, that is supposedly easier for them to develop. Keith Packard thinks, he will benefit because working on internals of Wayland (as it is designed now) is easier than working on internals of X11 (as it exists and being developed now). And I agree with him wholeheartedly. What I don't agree, is:
1. It will not hurt the users. 2. Current Wayland design won't grow into something more complex over time, and surpass X11 in complexity.
My arguments are mostly about the first, as at least one important feature, remote display, is specifically excluded from Wayland design. There is nothing coming from Wayland developers about it but handwaving and dishonest attempts to create impression that someone else is working on implementation of the same feature that will be usable in Wayland. The second is something that I have pointed out in this discussion, because lack of window manager, a supposed "better design" coming from Wayland developers, just shown itself to be not better after all, so someone will have to bring it back in, or even create a fork over it.
Both illustrate my point that Wayland design is inadequate for a desktop that can compete with X on technical merits. The only way Wayland developers can prevail is by spreading propaganda and recruiting GUI toolkits and desktop environment developers to promote Wayland and abandon support for X. This is dishonest and harmful for users.
If you don't want to participate in this campaign (and this is the only thing you do, make background noise that creates impression that Wayland design is somehow superior to X, even though all your arguments are either irrelevant or wrong), please shut up.
Sorry I'm not taking this is wrong for an answer. I own a retina, I use a retina, I can see what it does. And yes what Apple claims is exactly what it is doing.
The wrong part is, that X11 doesn't do this. It had separate font scaling since the very beginning, and scales everything in hardware already. Widget toolkits chosen to implement text rendering on the client instead of adding it to the server in addition to (admittedly outdated) text to bitmap rendering, however there is nothing in X that prevents server-side implementation. Client-side implementation doesn't even involve X, and would be the same on X, Wayland or ZX Spectrum.
But it is what Wayland is for. To support the hardware of the 2010 not the hardware of the 1990s. If your argument is that X11 should exist to support the 1990s hardware, well it did. That happened. It is like arguing that Carter should be elected in 1976 instead of Ford.
There is no demand for remote touch-controlled UI. There is for remote pointer/keyboard-controlled UI. Therefore just because remote touch interface is impossible to implement, it does not mean that suddenly everyone should stop using, or supporting all remote GUI. Maybe we will be lucky, and touch desktop/laptop interface will be proven to be a fad, and we won't have to deal with it at all. Maybe there will be a split between mushy swipe-and-drag "touch" and move-without-response "gesture" interface, the latter is already done very well with a pointer, and has inherent latency, the time that it takes a human to complete a gesture. Maybe new interfaces will utilize a mouse-like object sliding on the screen, so feedback is physical. Phones and tablets, the only devices where fast-responding touch interfaces are necessary, don't need all X features to work for all their applications, but this should not cripple desktops.
The primary touch interfaces are phone interfaces which are almost all client server.
No. UI application runs on the phone itself, it may or may not be connected to a server, but that's not a remote GUI. Whatever it does remotely or with "client-server" model, has nothing to do with remote GUI functionality provided by X -- it can't replace it, and it does not require it (but it can be implemented over it -- my N900 runs X locally, and it works just fine).
Yes it used remotely.
Don't even try this on me. Your argument is that remote GUI is impossible because touch interfaces can not be implemented over any remote protocol, so stick with it and don't try to weasel out. Touch interface can run full application locally and use server as a backend, or even download the whole GUI from the server (in Javascript or similar). This is not a viable programming model for most applications, and not a viable replacement for X. If by any chance you can use touch-based application remotely (as in, no application-specific code, machine or interpreted, is running on the display device), then your whole premise is wrong, however it's still completely irrelevant for X, because then X would be able to do it, too. Unrelated to this, no one cares because things that X is used for on a desktop, remotely, do not need low-latency touch input, and likely never will.
You didn't even notice the real issue with it, that is far greater than all privacy protections, real or imagined, combined.
Password will give your employer the ability to impersonate you. Then they can plant or destroy any evidence of anything, and spread any kind of misinformation supposedly from you. Internal investigations aren't announced to the public, law enforcement, regulatory agencies, etc., so company can do this impersonation in secret, then claim that it never happened.
Like we talked about before there is a latency problem inside computers too, because of buffer copying that comes up on big screen + lots of stuff + lots of frames.
This is irrelevant, and Wayland does not add anything for improvement of those things what X doesn't already do.
For example what OSX does on the retinas with building virtual screens and then compressing them to get 2x size for text and 1x size for images wouldn't be possible on X11, with today's hardware.
This is completely wrong.
I doubt there are hundreds of millions of people that don't care about touch, heck I doubt there are more than a few million.
On a desktop? How many people can touch their desktop screeens with any result other than leaving finger smudges and looking stupid? Touchscreen interfaces are for phones, tablets and kiosks, not desktops. Phones, tablets and kiosks also not known for being used to run large numbers of UI applications remotely.
But even if every desktop user didn't care about touch rather than about 1% or so... the touch market is 3x the size of the desktop/laptop market and while the desktop / laptop market is stagnant in users and shrinking in terms of sales the touch market is growing 16% per year globally.
X11 is intended to be used on desktops and workstations -- it does not matter what is or isn't in demand elsewhere. X11 also happens to work perfectly well on touch-based devices as long as it does not run remote applications. This is a perfectly acceptable limitation, and it still leaves X superior to all other display systems in all uses that they do and don't cover, but X does. Quite an accomplishment, really.
If running multiple touch-based applications remotely while displaying on this device will be too laggy, I won't lose any sleep over that. I am sure, Windows users will enjoy Maya Touch Edition, Photoshop Smudge Studio and Altum Fat Fingers Edition, running locally on that device, but this is not what remote functionality in X is for.
We already had this. The RDP protocol has been developed. The intention is to unify it with KDE and Gnome.
No, there is no such effort, and it wouldn't work even if there was. There are remote desktop viewers and kludges that accelerate them -- worse than remote X is accelerated by already existing wrappers.
Wayland's approach is to do that.
Wayland's approach is to pretend that someone else's amateurish efforts that produced no code whatsoever, will provide a replacement for functionality that already exists in X, and implemented much better than those efforts can possibly produce.
If your willing to address the fact that X11 doesn't solve the high latency problem then something needs to be done to address high latency.
Most of remote X11 uses are over low-latancy local networks. There is no latency problem there. Over high-latancy links, there are already wrappers, and things can be easily improved further within X infrastructure, in a nice, compatible way. Touch interface is irrelevant because it's not used remotely.
Frequent round trips need to go. That has to happen. X11 cannot work without frequent round trips. This isn't a complex argument.
No. It will be nice if applications had an option to avoid round trips by delegating UI elements response to the device closest to the user. However even if implemented, such things will never cover absolutely everything, so there must be a way to do straight remote UI by default, a
No it isn't. You don't make round trips you download client side and make sure to stay way ahead. Which is what MMORPGs do for example. That is the alternative.
Those are not remote GUI applications. If you want to develop an interface that caches user interactions locally with instant response and talks to the rest of the program remotely, in a generalized way, and with programming model that does not make people poke their eyes out (such as AJAX), you will be a hero of modern computing. Then, maybe people will revisit the question if they do or don't want remote GUI over high-latency links. Until then, the answer is resounding yes, and even lags in tens of milliseconds is better than no access at all.
None of this affects remote GUI over low-latency LANs, as X11 already provides instant response over them, with less lag, better desktop windows management, and better use of accelerated graphics hardware than all alternatives.
Which is likely usable with a mouse. Try it with a touch based application where the applications follows your finger (i.e. more than just pushing buttons) like a paint application.
I don't care about touch interfaces on a desktop, and neither do hundreds of millions of people. Touch interfaces are great for devices that have nothing but a shiny glass surface for the input device. Desktops don't have this limitation.
I've given several that work fine. Java applets, Flash, Javascript, thick client
None of them allow remote access to arbitrary applications. All of them have programming model that makes programmers want to kill themselves when anything nontrivial is supposed to be implemented.
Wayland is using something like RDP which is working the latency problem by making sure that most activities don't require a round trip.
Right now Wayland does absolutely nothing for remote access, Wayland developers merely argue that it will be possible in the future. Remote desktop viewer and server do not provide anything but slow, CPU-intensive screen-copying capabilities, and Wayland does not make any effort to provide anything beyond this (or to even make it possible).
Slashdot Mirror
Contrary to you, sir, I lived in a communist country at that time and thank God I don't anymore.
No, you did not, or you would know that there is no such thing as "communist country", they were socialist countries, and every person who lived there, would know that.
Unless, of course, you were twelve in 1991 -- then all you know is anti-USSR propaganda.
Sure it collapsed economically.
Again, no. There was no economic effect from dissolution of USSR, it was a purely political move. Transition to Capitalism happened later, and it was a total, unmitigated disaster for the economy if all ex-USSR countries, just like all supporters of Socialism expected it to be.
Yes, and if you re-read my comment, you will discover that I have already mentioned that.
When it was legal, they didn't.
When it was legal, the loans were worse, tuition was cheaper, and scholarships more available. There was no point doing it. Now, that the government taken student loans under control, loans are more available and on better terms, so it also more tempting to abuse them.
You'll be just like the other juy sleeping next to you in the gutter, but with a government order that if the economy every improves and you find a job, someone will take $100,000 from you - but not the guy next to you who didn't go to college to be homeless.
You still won't have to pay more than given fraction of disposable income, and not for more than 25 years. This is better than being able to discharge the loan in bankruptcy.
You would be more correct if they hadn't changed bankruptcy law to prevent discarge of student loans through bankruptcy.
Then most students would declare bankruptcy at the time of graduation for shits and giggles, because they don't have any income, and won't need loans for quite a while yet.
It would take a lot of genocide to get any kind of reliable statistics.
Just the opposite. The term "ethnic cleansing" is mostly used by journalists to imply "genocide" while only having evidence of ethnic discrimination or prejudice. Ex: Kosovo.
Yeah dude. Political scientists don't think like that and tend to be fairly serious minded men. If activists are putting in bogus data, its going to stick out like a sore thumb.
That would be true if there was a large amount of speech on the subject to begin with.
I'm not going to pick sides in that one; but if you approach the debate (as some people do) with the starting point that foes "life begins at conception" then abortion is infanticide.
"Life" is not sufficient to call something a person. Nothing can be gained from discussing abortion with people who do not understand that, and at some point society has to bring down the banhammer.
If somebody says "All members of (ethnic group x/social group y) are scum! Let's (kill them/throw them out of our country/deprive them of their property rights)" then that feels like hate speech.
"Scum" and "convicted felons" are social groups, too.
Anyways, yes they both do it. 10 seconds of google and I found something that tops yours: Obama makes fun of disabled people:
Yes, and I constantly offend retarded people by comparing them to Microsoft and Adobe programmers, HP management, religious leaders, followers of Ayn Rand, and other dangerous people.
I have a friend who failed out of college and made more in his first 5 years out of college than I did with a degree.
That's meaningless. What is the average result of all people you know that failed out of college? Over more than five years?
If you consider the expense of college a "risk" and the increased pay the "payout" for the risk, then college isn't worth it in most cases
Expense is not risk. Risk is something unpredictable and undesirable -- in this case, a chance that you will not be able to support yourself after the college. This is not any more likely than if you won't go to college, even if you take into account all the loans and expenses. Even in the worst case scenario you will end up paying minimum for 25 years -- if you will be really unemployed, you won't be any worse than anyone else.
So college has a zero cost? Because if you take the risk and lose, you have a shitty job and $100,000 of debt. I think you need a refund on your "risk" it obviously didn't pay off.
Over your whole lifetime, it's pretty much impossible that college education won't pay for itself -- $100,000 over 50 years that you have on average left to live after graduation, is $2,000 per year. Even learning juggling would be sufficient to cover that.
Because risk should not matter if all alternatives to taking it are exactly the same as if you taken it and lost. In reality, it's not a risk at all.
That's wrong, too.
Rotation requires acceleration toward the center. You don't need absolute frame of reference to detect acceleration.
One problem: most Americans don't want to learn anything valuable for science and technology development, and expect to be paid like people who made major contributions to their areas of science and technology.
Even foreigners with bad to mediocre education and ability look like a better choice for employers.
Second, I think there is some relativity stuff going on too. For the universe to rotate, there must be something outside the universe for the universe to rotate in relation to.
No.
Yep Microsoft astroturfer who uses a Mac,
Microsoft astroturfers have no shame, why would it bother them?
Please don't pretend to be an Apple astroturfer, Apple gets enough support from genuine fanboys, and you are not an Apple fanboy, you are gushing with excitement every time you mention Microsoft products.
that's me. BTW Microsoft owns one of the commercial X11s.
So what? Microsoft can't use it to improve software they actually sell, so they are trying to destroy all implementations of X11, just like they were always trying to destroy Unix-like systems despite having involved in Xenix, and despite still having a Windows-based sad mockery of Unix somewhere among their products.
It's very consistent over their whole history -- they even spent enormous amount of effort on sinking OS/2 that was written at large extent by them. Once it became clear that they can gain more by destroying a superior system that fallen outside of their control while slapping an inferior one onto every computer, it's all-out war on everything technologically superior.
I think you are missing something here. Wayland has always been primarily about Linux. Linux has always followed Microsoft's lead for a hardware strategy.
This identifies you as a Microsoft astroturfer. It also explains why you are bringing piles and piles of unrelated problems, imaginary problems, or problems solved long ago, just to create an impression that you have some kind of arguments.
1. All that was mentioned is, that the person claimed to be an author of Flashback in a private message on a board for malware authors.
2. Translation is the image wrong. It says "I specialize in finding exploits and creating bots". Original Russian text is "[my] specialty is creating exploits and bots". The whole exchange is about the person communicating with mavook mentioning something that may be "stilll relevant" asking mavook how he would want to be introduced:
Hi!
Is it still relevant?
If so, respond with something like, nick, area of activity (how to introduce you).
We will solve the problem in 2-3 days.
mavook responds:
any random nick macbook for example
creator of flashback botnet for macs
specialty is creating exploits and bots
(Capitalization and punctuation, or lack of one, is preserved wherever possible.)
Hardly an evidence.
1. 1 in 500 infection rate was not included in the initial premise or anywhere in the article itself, but used in calculations in footnotes.
2. Decision, to administer or not to administer the cure in the case of zombie apocalypse was determined by an arbitrary criterion by an author. In reality, it would matter if the author calculated the possible outcome of detection and administering cure at maximum available rate, vs. spread of infection at its (supposedly proportional to the density of zombies) rate.
3. Zombie apocalypse is not a realistic scenario. A zombie apocalypse with disease spreading through the air is not even known fictional scenario.
This is how you DON'T WRITE THINGS, be they fictional, or non-fictional, and it's certainly how you don't write things that involve math.
You're completely misinterpreting what was actually written in the post. At no point did I claim the Soviets were expecting the attack.
But wouldn't the preparations to a war with Germany, aggressive or defensive, result in the same -- increasing the size and improving training of the military, ramping up weapons and military production, bringing troops into the Western side of the country? None of that happened, so the premise must be invalid.
Suvorov (a former GRU intelligence officer, who claims to have had access to the relevant records) indicates that
His confidence has no effect on credibility of statements that have no foundation in facts.
Stalin was not, in fact, expecting the German's to attack, as a result of military intelligence indicating that the Germans were not preparing their troops and equipment for winter operations. This, presumably, is why he felt confident in moving his units as he did.
I don't even know where to start.
First of all, there were no units. Military was too small for a large-scale war, and whatever was, was nowhere close to the Western border, and with no feasible way to get it there in time and numbers necessary for a large-scale war.
Second, there was no movement, no military production, and nothing specifically useful for war in Europe, as opposed to Asia and Pacific Ocean.
Third, winter means nothing in Western Europe.
Eurasia is a huge continent, and climate gets harsher from West to East. Russia is like Canada turned 90 degrees clockwise and stretched few times from West to East. An army prepared for a war in Western Europe would face worse conditions in Russia simply because movement East, away from Atlantic Ocean, Baltic Sea, Mediterranean Sea, etc., means dry, cold winter.
Transportation is another issue. The continent is wider to the East. The distances are long, road network provides little redundancy, railroad even less so. Russians retreating to the East, and guerillas operating in the occupied territory can literally burn enough bridges to cripple the invaders' logistics, even if it won't prevent their advance. Then (what Germans didn't reach, but Russians taken into account) there are Ural mountains and Siberia, a real-life equivalent of Mordor, as far as invasions and walking into them, are concerned. Sure as Hell, you won't want your ground forces going there, from the West, in winter.
Those things are reversed when you attack from the East to the West -- climate is milder, continent is more narrow, density of roads and railroads increases. You can fight there all year around, and Europe did just that few decades before. So no, it's a silly argument, and no one familiar with either war in Europe or Stalin's policies, would honestly support it.
Trains, of course, are the only practical way to deploy tanks long distances on land. There are pictures from the war showing some of these trains, damaged, with the tanks still on them.
But if USSR prepared for a war, wouldn't tanks be all on the border already?
As the tanks were completely helpless on the damaged trains, the Germans were able to recover many of them
There weren't even any significant numbers of them at the start of the war, so it wouldn't matter much. Germans' initial bombing was successful because USSR was not prepared for any war, defensive or aggressive. Anti-air defense, something one would establish prior to any expected war, did not exist. War in Finland was a disaster, so it was already known that military is not ready for a war of any kind. The only non-tinfoilery explanation is, USSR was not prepared for a war because it dd not expect and did not plan any.
(much as they used captured Chek tanks in the invasion of France: just because the train couldn't move due to damage didn't mean the tanks were unusable, if one had time and the right heavy e
Fine Wayland is intended to be used primarily on tablets, phones and laptops. So there isn't a problem then.
This is worth a separate answer.
If Wayland developers announced that their system is intended only for tablets and phones (or "laptops" that are actually tablets with a keyboard taped to them), no one would care what they do, like no one cares about similarly limited display engines of Android and iOS. The whole problem is, they build it as a "replacement for X11", and Wayland development would make no sense at all unless X11 at some point will be abandoned. So their plan is to destroy X11 and replace it with an inferior system, that is supposedly easier for them to develop. Keith Packard thinks, he will benefit because working on internals of Wayland (as it is designed now) is easier than working on internals of X11 (as it exists and being developed now). And I agree with him wholeheartedly. What I don't agree, is:
1. It will not hurt the users.
2. Current Wayland design won't grow into something more complex over time, and surpass X11 in complexity.
My arguments are mostly about the first, as at least one important feature, remote display, is specifically excluded from Wayland design. There is nothing coming from Wayland developers about it but handwaving and dishonest attempts to create impression that someone else is working on implementation of the same feature that will be usable in Wayland. The second is something that I have pointed out in this discussion, because lack of window manager, a supposed "better design" coming from Wayland developers, just shown itself to be not better after all, so someone will have to bring it back in, or even create a fork over it.
Both illustrate my point that Wayland design is inadequate for a desktop that can compete with X on technical merits. The only way Wayland developers can prevail is by spreading propaganda and recruiting GUI toolkits and desktop environment developers to promote Wayland and abandon support for X. This is dishonest and harmful for users.
If you don't want to participate in this campaign (and this is the only thing you do, make background noise that creates impression that Wayland design is somehow superior to X, even though all your arguments are either irrelevant or wrong), please shut up.
Sorry I'm not taking this is wrong for an answer. I own a retina, I use a retina, I can see what it does. And yes what Apple claims is exactly what it is doing.
The wrong part is, that X11 doesn't do this. It had separate font scaling since the very beginning, and scales everything in hardware already. Widget toolkits chosen to implement text rendering on the client instead of adding it to the server in addition to (admittedly outdated) text to bitmap rendering, however there is nothing in X that prevents server-side implementation. Client-side implementation doesn't even involve X, and would be the same on X, Wayland or ZX Spectrum.
But it is what Wayland is for. To support the hardware of the 2010 not the hardware of the 1990s. If your argument is that X11 should exist to support the 1990s hardware, well it did. That happened. It is like arguing that Carter should be elected in 1976 instead of Ford.
There is no demand for remote touch-controlled UI. There is for remote pointer/keyboard-controlled UI. Therefore just because remote touch interface is impossible to implement, it does not mean that suddenly everyone should stop using, or supporting all remote GUI. Maybe we will be lucky, and touch desktop/laptop interface will be proven to be a fad, and we won't have to deal with it at all. Maybe there will be a split between mushy swipe-and-drag "touch" and move-without-response "gesture" interface, the latter is already done very well with a pointer, and has inherent latency, the time that it takes a human to complete a gesture. Maybe new interfaces will utilize a mouse-like object sliding on the screen, so feedback is physical. Phones and tablets, the only devices where fast-responding touch interfaces are necessary, don't need all X features to work for all their applications, but this should not cripple desktops.
The primary touch interfaces are phone interfaces which are almost all client server.
No. UI application runs on the phone itself, it may or may not be connected to a server, but that's not a remote GUI. Whatever it does remotely or with "client-server" model, has nothing to do with remote GUI functionality provided by X -- it can't replace it, and it does not require it (but it can be implemented over it -- my N900 runs X locally, and it works just fine).
Yes it used remotely.
Don't even try this on me. Your argument is that remote GUI is impossible because touch interfaces can not be implemented over any remote protocol, so stick with it and don't try to weasel out. Touch interface can run full application locally and use server as a backend, or even download the whole GUI from the server (in Javascript or similar). This is not a viable programming model for most applications, and not a viable replacement for X. If by any chance you can use touch-based application remotely (as in, no application-specific code, machine or interpreted, is running on the display device), then your whole premise is wrong, however it's still completely irrelevant for X, because then X would be able to do it, too. Unrelated to this, no one cares because things that X is used for on a desktop, remotely, do not need low-latency touch input, and likely never will.
You didn't even notice the real issue with it, that is far greater than all privacy protections, real or imagined, combined.
Password will give your employer the ability to impersonate you. Then they can plant or destroy any evidence of anything, and spread any kind of misinformation supposedly from you. Internal investigations aren't announced to the public, law enforcement, regulatory agencies, etc., so company can do this impersonation in secret, then claim that it never happened.
Like we talked about before there is a latency problem inside computers too, because of buffer copying that comes up on big screen + lots of stuff + lots of frames.
This is irrelevant, and Wayland does not add anything for improvement of those things what X doesn't already do.
For example what OSX does on the retinas with building virtual screens and then compressing them to get 2x size for text and 1x size for images wouldn't be possible on X11, with today's hardware.
This is completely wrong.
I doubt there are hundreds of millions of people that don't care about touch, heck I doubt there are more than a few million.
On a desktop? How many people can touch their desktop screeens with any result other than leaving finger smudges and looking stupid? Touchscreen interfaces are for phones, tablets and kiosks, not desktops. Phones, tablets and kiosks also not known for being used to run large numbers of UI applications remotely.
But even if every desktop user didn't care about touch rather than about 1% or so... the touch market is 3x the size of the desktop/laptop market and while the desktop / laptop market is stagnant in users and shrinking in terms of sales the touch market is growing 16% per year globally.
X11 is intended to be used on desktops and workstations -- it does not matter what is or isn't in demand elsewhere. X11 also happens to work perfectly well on touch-based devices as long as it does not run remote applications. This is a perfectly acceptable limitation, and it still leaves X superior to all other display systems in all uses that they do and don't cover, but X does. Quite an accomplishment, really.
As for touch being to no other sources of input, no. The goal for the next generation must to be support the next generation of Windows hardware like: http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/ideapad/yoga/yoga-13/
If running multiple touch-based applications remotely while displaying on this device will be too laggy, I won't lose any sleep over that. I am sure, Windows users will enjoy Maya Touch Edition, Photoshop Smudge Studio and Altum Fat Fingers Edition, running locally on that device, but this is not what remote functionality in X is for.
We already had this. The RDP protocol has been developed. The intention is to unify it with KDE and Gnome.
No, there is no such effort, and it wouldn't work even if there was. There are remote desktop viewers and kludges that accelerate them -- worse than remote X is accelerated by already existing wrappers.
Wayland's approach is to do that.
Wayland's approach is to pretend that someone else's amateurish efforts that produced no code whatsoever, will provide a replacement for functionality that already exists in X, and implemented much better than those efforts can possibly produce.
If your willing to address the fact that X11 doesn't solve the high latency problem then something needs to be done to address high latency.
Most of remote X11 uses are over low-latancy local networks. There is no latency problem there. Over high-latancy links, there are already wrappers, and things can be easily improved further within X infrastructure, in a nice, compatible way. Touch interface is irrelevant because it's not used remotely.
Frequent round trips need to go. That has to happen. X11 cannot work without frequent round trips. This isn't a complex argument.
No.
It will be nice if applications had an option to avoid round trips by delegating UI elements response to the device closest to the user. However even if implemented, such things will never cover absolutely everything, so there must be a way to do straight remote UI by default, a
No it isn't. You don't make round trips you download client side and make sure to stay way ahead. Which is what MMORPGs do for example. That is the alternative.
Those are not remote GUI applications. If you want to develop an interface that caches user interactions locally with instant response and talks to the rest of the program remotely, in a generalized way, and with programming model that does not make people poke their eyes out (such as AJAX), you will be a hero of modern computing. Then, maybe people will revisit the question if they do or don't want remote GUI over high-latency links. Until then, the answer is resounding yes, and even lags in tens of milliseconds is better than no access at all.
None of this affects remote GUI over low-latency LANs, as X11 already provides instant response over them, with less lag, better desktop windows management, and better use of accelerated graphics hardware than all alternatives.
Which is likely usable with a mouse. Try it with a touch based application where the applications follows your finger (i.e. more than just pushing buttons) like a paint application.
I don't care about touch interfaces on a desktop, and neither do hundreds of millions of people. Touch interfaces are great for devices that have nothing but a shiny glass surface for the input device. Desktops don't have this limitation.
I've given several that work fine. Java applets, Flash, Javascript, thick client
None of them allow remote access to arbitrary applications. All of them have programming model that makes programmers want to kill themselves when anything nontrivial is supposed to be implemented.
Wayland is using something like RDP which is working the latency problem by making sure that most activities don't require a round trip.
Right now Wayland does absolutely nothing for remote access, Wayland developers merely argue that it will be possible in the future. Remote desktop viewer and server do not provide anything but slow, CPU-intensive screen-copying capabilities, and Wayland does not make any effort to provide anything beyond this (or to even make it possible).