It seems none of you were interested in an actual intellectual response; rather some of you've resorted to name calling, while others didn't bother justifying your knee-jerk reactions while demanding me to further justify my conclusions. So here goes:
X11 is slow because it works on outdated hardware. It doesn't have much in the way of optimizations for new, fast hardware, it was designed for old Sun b/w frame buffers and such. Even the new optimizations available hardly take advantage of the latest 2D and 3D hardware acceleration.
X11 itself doesn't do much. You can't even reasonably use it without a window manager, and even then it doesn't do much. To get the features that are available in other GUI environments, you must use KDE or Gnome. Even then, you still can't do simple tasks via the GUI that you can with other OSes, such as change the resolution. There isn't a unified graphical installer for applications for Linux (although some distributions do have them), which is fine if you're a slashdot reading geek, but if you're a regular consumer you're going to find it very difficult.
Font control is probably the biggest mess out of all the issues. Fonts look just plain bad under X11. Sure, you can fidget around and get them looking descent, but that requires mucking around with KDE, Gnome, and X11 font settings, the later being way more difficult than it should be. That's great if you're a tinkerer and putterer, but again if you're a regular consumer, you don't have the time or knowledge to accomplish this.
I've used Gnome and KDE from the getgo, I remember years ago when I got the pre-1.0 beta of KDE to compile on a SunOS 4.1.4 box with a great amount of tweaking. Well I got tired of tweaking. Most people just want something that works, and works well.
It would require some work, but I think that scrapping X altogether and building a new, modern GUI from scratch would make Linux and other OSes a viable desktop platform. Mac OS X did it, BeOS almost did it. I believe there is a clone of BeOS's GUI in the works for Linux. That would be a great place to start.
Also, the Mac OS X GUI (Aqua) has nothing to do with X. It's based mostly on NeXTStep's graphical environment, which was as groundbreaking in the early 90's as Mac OS X is now. 10 years ago I could drag and drop a file into a graphical email client and it would show up as an icon. NeXT was doing it well before Microsoft.
When compared to Mac OS X, BeOS, and even MS Windows. X and KDE/Gnome still don't compare.
Seriously, I've got nothing against commercial Unix OS in theory, but SCO is the worst. It's a commercial operating system without one of the main benefita of a commercial OS, in that doesn't have any commercial ports, save for a few obscure and dated applications. That leaves open source apps to compile yourself, so why would you use a commercial OS to run open source apps? Perhaps they are using the chewbacca methodology.
I love Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, and several others. Each has advantages. SCO, as far as I can tell, has none.
I hate KDE and Gnome
on
KDE Gets The Hat
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, it's X11 that I despise the most. It's great if you're doing Unix sysadmin tasks or a network engineer, but if you're just a normal user looking to use a regular desktop, X11 just plain stinks. KDE and Gnome are both cumbersome, resource-intensive, and huge bandaids covering the shortcomings of the X11 system. The best both of them can do is cover about 50% of the features that other GUI systems such as MS Windows and Mac OS X give you without an add-on.
If you want a cheaper way to play shuttle-pilot, X-Plane offers a space shuttle landing scenario. The demo version limits you to about 6 minutes of flight time, but that's enough to land the shuttle from final approach. Of course the payed version doesn't have a time limit, and you can start from space and land from there.
I think using real chicken feathers would run into religious issues. Several world-wide religions eschew the consumption and uses of animals in such a manner. While not an issue in the West (cept for vegans and vegetarians), Hindus, Buddhists in the east might cause problems.
rather, keep adding small web servers at around $2,000 each until you've scaled enough. Get a load balancer to distribute the load. Web functions scale horribly, on any system and any OS, as you add processors, so one big machine won't run and will be a helluva lot more expensive than larger number of smaller, more affordable machines with load distributed between them.
Never go with more than two processors for a web server. Not even Solaris, which is renowned for it's processor scalability, can scale networking functions with more than 4 processors.
Get a single or dual processor intel/AMD rackmount system for your web servers, spending the extra money on a quad system isnt' worth it. You don't need SCSI either for them.
Sun's idea of a web server is a $20,000 E280R. Their Netra T1's are ony single 500 Mhz Ultrasparc IIe at roughly the same price as a dual processor intel/AMD machine, and they don't really compare performance wise running as web server.
For the backend, you can go with the huge systems to run the database. I wouldn't recommend running MySQL, it won't scale. You probably need something like Oracle if it's going to be a heavily trafficed/high transaction site.
I've rarely seen mono-unix environments. What is more common these days seems to be a combination of an open-source unix and a commercial unix.
open source operating systems such as Linux or FreeBSD for handeling things such as web serving, MRTG, to take advantage of cheap hardware, and a commerical OS such as Solaris or AIX to handle the tasks that can't be handled by an open source solutions, such as Oracle or something hardcore that requires a big and bad machine.
In these cases, it's quite easy to run two unixes. It really depends on what you need it for.
I'm using mozilla 1.0 RC3 for windows, and it's very usable. The best part about it? NO POP UPS. It's such an amazing feeling of freedom to be able to hit a website without the tiny voice groaning in the back of my head, ready for the pop-up.
HDTVs can make a big difference even with DVDs. DVDs are encoded for the 640x480 NTSC standard, but they are capable of being converted (with a progressive scan DVD player) into a progressive standard. What's the difference?
Progressive scan means all lines are drawn on the screen at once, where interlaced (normal TV signals) draw half the lines (at every other line), then draw the other half 1/60th of a second later. This was done to compensate for slow-reacting phospher elements in early TVs (from the 50's). This is no longer required with modern TVs, but the NTSC standard is interlaced.
What's the problem with interlaced? Well there is a catch with interlacing a picture. When done in motion, interlacing removes about 30% of the apparent resolution. So while it's 640x480, the apparent resoultion is 30% less crisp.
Computer screens, even at 640x480, are always non-interlaced, which is called progressive. that is why they seem much more crisp than TV, and thats why when you hook a laptop up to a TV the smaller text is blurry.
HDTV is capable of doing 640x480p (p is for progressive), and progressive scan DVD players are capable of converting the interlaced signal to progressive (because films are done in 24 frames per second, there is extra half-frames in a standard NTSC signal, a progressive scan DVD player combines these and produces a full 640x480 signal) will show DVDs with an extra 30% resolution over standard TVs.
Ever notice that playing DVDs on your computer always seem much crisper? That is because the computer does the progressive scan conversion.
So HDTV can be worth it for DVDs alone, making them much crisper and more resolute. But this is only if you have a progressive scan DVD player.
There are important reasons why Apple says Mhz isn't the only factor in a processor. Pipeline lenght, while being more complicated than it's state, still affects performance. A long-ass pipeline like on the P4 gives it the Mhz, but it takes away on performance as well. That's why an 866 Mhz processor can kick a 1.7 Mhz processor's ass.
Plus, I don't like the homophonic tones in his "fruity" references.
mhz is meanlingless unless you take into account pipeline length as well. apple did a really good demonstration at macworld NY 2001, where they showed why the g4 at 800 mhz is faster than a 1.7 ghz pentium 4.
the pentium series has a pipeline lenght of 20, which is how they got the mhz so high. g4 only has a pipeline lenght of 7, and i think ultrasparc iii has a pipline length of 10 or 11. the shorter the pipeline, the more efficient the processor is at performing tasks.
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It seems none of you were interested in an actual intellectual response; rather some of you've resorted to name calling, while others didn't bother justifying your knee-jerk reactions while demanding me to further justify my conclusions. So here goes:
X11 is slow because it works on outdated hardware. It doesn't have much in the way of optimizations for new, fast hardware, it was designed for old Sun b/w frame buffers and such. Even the new optimizations available hardly take advantage of the latest 2D and 3D hardware acceleration.
X11 itself doesn't do much. You can't even reasonably use it without a window manager, and even then it doesn't do much. To get the features that are available in other GUI environments, you must use KDE or Gnome. Even then, you still can't do simple tasks via the GUI that you can with other OSes, such as change the resolution. There isn't a unified graphical installer for applications for Linux (although some distributions do have them), which is fine if you're a slashdot reading geek, but if you're a regular consumer you're going to find it very difficult.
Font control is probably the biggest mess out of all the issues. Fonts look just plain bad under X11. Sure, you can fidget around and get them looking descent, but that requires mucking around with KDE, Gnome, and X11 font settings, the later being way more difficult than it should be. That's great if you're a tinkerer and putterer, but again if you're a regular consumer, you don't have the time or knowledge to accomplish this.
I've used Gnome and KDE from the getgo, I remember years ago when I got the pre-1.0 beta of KDE to compile on a SunOS 4.1.4 box with a great amount of tweaking. Well I got tired of tweaking. Most people just want something that works, and works well.
It would require some work, but I think that scrapping X altogether and building a new, modern GUI from scratch would make Linux and other OSes a viable desktop platform. Mac OS X did it, BeOS almost did it. I believe there is a clone of BeOS's GUI in the works for Linux. That would be a great place to start.
Also, the Mac OS X GUI (Aqua) has nothing to do with X. It's based mostly on NeXTStep's graphical environment, which was as groundbreaking in the early 90's as Mac OS X is now. 10 years ago I could drag and drop a file into a graphical email client and it would show up as an icon. NeXT was doing it well before Microsoft.
When compared to Mac OS X, BeOS, and even MS Windows. X and KDE/Gnome still don't compare.
Seriously, I've got nothing against commercial Unix OS in theory, but SCO is the worst. It's a commercial operating system without one of the main benefita of a commercial OS, in that doesn't have any commercial ports, save for a few obscure and dated applications. That leaves open source apps to compile yourself, so why would you use a commercial OS to run open source apps? Perhaps they are using the chewbacca methodology.
I love Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, and several others. Each has advantages. SCO, as far as I can tell, has none.
Actually, it's X11 that I despise the most. It's great if you're doing Unix sysadmin tasks or a network engineer, but if you're just a normal user looking to use a regular desktop, X11 just plain stinks. KDE and Gnome are both cumbersome, resource-intensive, and huge bandaids covering the shortcomings of the X11 system. The best both of them can do is cover about 50% of the features that other GUI systems such as MS Windows and Mac OS X give you without an add-on.
If you want a cheaper way to play shuttle-pilot, X-Plane offers a space shuttle landing scenario. The demo version limits you to about 6 minutes of flight time, but that's enough to land the shuttle from final approach. Of course the payed version doesn't have a time limit, and you can start from space and land from there.
I think using real chicken feathers would run into religious issues. Several world-wide religions eschew the consumption and uses of animals in such a manner. While not an issue in the West (cept for vegans and vegetarians), Hindus, Buddhists in the east might cause problems.
rather, keep adding small web servers at around $2,000 each until you've scaled enough. Get a load balancer to distribute the load. Web functions scale horribly, on any system and any OS, as you add processors, so one big machine won't run and will be a helluva lot more expensive than larger number of smaller, more affordable machines with load distributed between them.
Never go with more than two processors for a web server. Not even Solaris, which is renowned for it's processor scalability, can scale networking functions with more than 4 processors.
Get a single or dual processor intel/AMD rackmount system for your web servers, spending the extra money on a quad system isnt' worth it. You don't need SCSI either for them.
Sun's idea of a web server is a $20,000 E280R. Their Netra T1's are ony single 500 Mhz Ultrasparc IIe at roughly the same price as a dual processor intel/AMD machine, and they don't really compare performance wise running as web server.
For the backend, you can go with the huge systems to run the database. I wouldn't recommend running MySQL, it won't scale. You probably need something like Oracle if it's going to be a heavily trafficed/high transaction site.
I've rarely seen mono-unix environments. What is more common these days seems to be a combination of an open-source unix and a commercial unix.
open source operating systems such as Linux or FreeBSD for handeling things such as web serving, MRTG, to take advantage of cheap hardware, and a commerical OS such as Solaris or AIX to handle the tasks that can't be handled by an open source solutions, such as Oracle or something hardcore that requires a big and bad machine.
In these cases, it's quite easy to run two unixes. It really depends on what you need it for.
I'm using mozilla 1.0 RC3 for windows, and it's very usable. The best part about it? NO POP UPS. It's such an amazing feeling of freedom to be able to hit a website without the tiny voice groaning in the back of my head, ready for the pop-up.
Progressive scan means all lines are drawn on the screen at once, where interlaced (normal TV signals) draw half the lines (at every other line), then draw the other half 1/60th of a second later. This was done to compensate for slow-reacting phospher elements in early TVs (from the 50's). This is no longer required with modern TVs, but the NTSC standard is interlaced.
What's the problem with interlaced? Well there is a catch with interlacing a picture. When done in motion, interlacing removes about 30% of the apparent resolution. So while it's 640x480, the apparent resoultion is 30% less crisp.
Computer screens, even at 640x480, are always non-interlaced, which is called progressive. that is why they seem much more crisp than TV, and thats why when you hook a laptop up to a TV the smaller text is blurry.
HDTV is capable of doing 640x480p (p is for progressive), and progressive scan DVD players are capable of converting the interlaced signal to progressive (because films are done in 24 frames per second, there is extra half-frames in a standard NTSC signal, a progressive scan DVD player combines these and produces a full 640x480 signal) will show DVDs with an extra 30% resolution over standard TVs.
Ever notice that playing DVDs on your computer always seem much crisper? That is because the computer does the progressive scan conversion.
So HDTV can be worth it for DVDs alone, making them much crisper and more resolute. But this is only if you have a progressive scan DVD player.
There are important reasons why Apple says Mhz isn't the only factor in a processor. Pipeline lenght, while being more complicated than it's state, still affects performance. A long-ass pipeline like on the P4 gives it the Mhz, but it takes away on performance as well. That's why an 866 Mhz processor can kick a 1.7 Mhz processor's ass. Plus, I don't like the homophonic tones in his "fruity" references.
mhz is meanlingless unless you take into account pipeline length as well. apple did a really good demonstration at macworld NY 2001, where they showed why the g4 at 800 mhz is faster than a 1.7 ghz pentium 4. the pentium series has a pipeline lenght of 20, which is how they got the mhz so high. g4 only has a pipeline lenght of 7, and i think ultrasparc iii has a pipline length of 10 or 11. the shorter the pipeline, the more efficient the processor is at performing tasks.