I'll give you that perhaps "tearable" should be hyphenated (though it's pretty commonly used in a non-hyphenated form when talking about UIs), but how is "panes" misspelled?
What the world really needs is a native OpenGL underpining, not X.
Then XFree86 is exactly what you're looking for. It has GLX, and you can happily write things using OpenGL if that's what meets your fancy. Take a look at gliv if you want an interesting application using OGL pretty effectively (though it uses gtk as well).
As I have tried to point out a dozen times, that is drag & drop, not cut & paste. X's mistake was to think that drag & drop was sufficient. Suprisingly enough, Windows is starting to make the same mistake, but they lack the advantage of the middle mouse which is that you can move, reorder, and open/close windows between when you start and when you finish the drag & drop.
The drag and drop thing is an interesting insight.
Come to think of it, Mac OS went DnD-crazy for a while as well, but at least Apple had strict guidelines in place that said that DnD needed to be an *additional* (user-optional) way of copying things.
The thing is that you're assuming that all widget sets provide the same functionality (or that you can go with the least-common-denominator). In reality, that'd make for some pretty awful applications. You'd have to give up your KDE-draggable-panes (not supported under Win32), your sliders (not supported under classic Mac OS), gtk's easy layout system that provides automatic resizing support (Win32 and classic Mac OS use a pixel-based layout system). Some widget sets use infinite progress bars (XUL), some use animated icons (Windows). The two can't fit in the same space.
You're thinking of something simple, like theme engines. These *are* pluggable, and plenty exist for gtk. You can't just drop in a new widget set, though.
Xlib *was* designed so that it's easy to develop widget toolkits, though.
For some reason, people (generally folks new to X) consistently manage to completely misunderstand how X works, and happily rant about it. Among the issues:
Problem: X has bad 3d support.
Answer: No, it doesn't. Manufacturers have just barely put out drivers, and still don't have great install procedures. Starting with a new system would make this problem orders of magnitude worse.
Problem: X uses lots of memory.
Answer: No, it doesn't. Try running pixmap_mem (and the analyze script that comes in the same package) on your system. Unlike Windows apps, X11 apps store pixmaps in the server. X11 newbies frequently confuse this with X using a lot of memory. Combine this with the fact that Unix memory utils multiple-report memory usage of shared libraries, and report device mapping as memory usage, and people look at X and say ("Oh, it's blowing 30MB of memory in overhead."). No, it isn't. Trust me.
Problem: X11 is inefficient.
Answer: No, it isn't. X11 is pretty damned efficient. Today's pixmap-laden interfaces can run much more slowly over a network than the original interfaces, whicch were mostly big, flat-color rectangles, but the same is true of VNC and similar.
Problem: X's multiple-widget set system is a bad idea.
Answer: No, it isn't. People look at X and think "Gosh, I don't want to use Athena apps." The thing is, the widget-independent design of X has been a huge boon. X11 dates to 1987. If we had been unable to advance through widget sets, we'd still be using ugly, grotty Athena. But, you say, this ignores the fact that Windows and Mac OS have advanced through the years! Nope. First, Windows widget sets *have* broken user-level compatibility on a regular basis. Menus in Office XP now work a lot differently than menus in 1987 did. Second, some widget sets are hamstrung by initial design flaws. The classic MacOS widget set does not include a slider widget, for example. As a result, years of application developers misued the scrollbar widget, made up their own widget (which led to even worse user interface problems), or just went without. The ability of X11 to evolve has let things like KDE's tearable panes come to the fore. Also, when it comes to APIs...the modern, easy-to-use APIs of GTK and Qt blow away the horrific Macintosh Toolbox API (note: I am not a Cocoa developer, so things may have improved) or the almost-as-grotty Win32.
Problem: X11 is hard to use.
Answer: No, it really isn't. Occasionally, piss-poor setup on the part of distro makers has made things more of a pain than it should be. If a user isn't interested in remote windowing, he shouldn't have to worry about xauth or xhost. This is largely a problem of the past.
The main "problem" with X11 is actually newbies to it making a bunch of claims about software that they haven't used and don't understand. They've frequently just come off of a decade of Windows use, and expect things to work in precisely the same way, and are horrified when there are differences.
The majority of people I've seen complaining about X11 are Johnny-come-lately types. Most of the older folks who have been using it for a while just don't care enough to respond to the complaints, which they see as pretty uninformed.
Now, there are things about X11 that aren't that great. X11 supports an *extremely* rich color model. If you're using Xlib (which you shouldn't be doing unless you're writing a widget set), it is a royal pain in the butt to support every color model available. This was done to handle the vast array of hardware that X11 has been run on.
X11 doesn't support a great way to share identical pixmaps from different apps. This is really hard to do in a secure way.
Basically, I'm reminded of the SSL discussion that came up recently. Everyone wants to run out and rewrite SSL to be simpler, faster, easier. They don't understand that the stuff in SSL is there because it *needs*
Now let's compare it to the masses of failed projects out there and consider the fact that Linus was replacing very expensive software with free software. That wouldn't be the case for X11.
The arguement here seems to be not that the inconsistency between who puts what tools onto a given system puts off the casual users, which tbh is a fair point.
Frankly, OSS is generally not about making Joe Sixpack happy. Most OSS software is far better than the closed-source equivalent...for techies.
I'm not really broken-hearted about the state of affairs, either.
I disagree. VNC could reasonably be called a network-aware framebuffer. X, however, provides drawing primitives, color management, font rendering, windowing...
But that doesn't mean they were social rejects lacking the ability to communicate concepts to their fellow man without bristling every person they met.
Okay, I can see avoiding qmail, because there's a good alternative (actually, I prefer it to qmail) -- postfix. What program would you use instead of djbdns?
I use (and like) pdnsd, but I'm not sure that it can be considered a full replacement.
The solution is not to steal links, not to screw over users, but simply to *disallow links to sites that require registration*. It's really simple. Slashdot editors do that as a matter of policy, with a *single* exception -- the NYT and NYT-related resources. The rationale is that they started linking to the NYT before their "no registration" policy came into place. I could never figure that out, and find it incredibly frusterating. I'd like to see a poll -- "Should we allow NYT links?" without a CowboyNeal option.
Yes, speed varies. However, not by a significant amount. If you're doing 20MPH over the speed limit, you're not driving at safe speeds. You may not get in an accident as long as everything goes all right -- nothing falls from the car in front of you, you don't have to make a turn and not have enough traction, you don't get surprised by a deer.
Different vehicle types are addressed, if granularly. Frequently, heavy-vehicle speed limits *do* differ from car speed limits.
Most of the rest of the issues are enforcement issues. It is beneficial to society to enforce speeding rules. Traffic accidents cause a lot of deaths -- getting somewhere 10% faster is not an enormous benefit. It's very difficult to judge the driving level of someone in a way that everyone will consider fair -- so everyone follows the same rules.
How about that, as the previous reply mentioned, he *FELL ASLEEP* at the wheel?
The respondant mentioned is one of the notorious flamebaiters on Slashdot -- he's not worth responding to. It's true that he veered and couldn't regain control of the vehicle -- there most definitely is *not* an official decision saying that drousiness was involved, and speed was cited.
As for weather, in the US at least, the weather issues are addressed speed limits are fair-weather speed limits. You're expected to reduce speed, using your judgement, to a safe level.
Actually, speeding itself is not dangerous. DIFFERENCE IN SPEED is.
These two statements contradict themselves. If the entire world was going at the same speed, yes, you're right, there wouldn't be a problem. However:
* Traffic going the other direction isn't going at the same speed. Not a *huge* deal.
* The ground isn't going at the same speed, and neither is anything else not in a car. This means that your handling gets worse at higher speeds, your time-to-stop relative to the ground (i.e. relative to stationary objects like pedestrians, trees, curves, retaining rails, deer) increases, the danger of cars accelerating up to speed increases, and your ease of rolling over increases. Your reaction time is worse relative to all of these.
I don't have any kids, but I pay a nice big tax to fund said schools, and I don't really want my tax dollars paying for a bunch of corporate propaganda.
So who consumes a larger chunk of the total revenue from a record -- the filesharers or the RIAA members?
And the "marketing is expensive" line that publishers use is amazing. Yes, that's what you do, RIAA folks -- market records. You're expensive. Nobody is arguing with you there.
You're definitely wrong. It was, what, last month that some famous NHL coach (the "Miracle on Ice" guy, whatshisname) lost control of his SUV because he was speeding and killed himself and was plastered all over national papers? I don't remember "getting a blowjob while driving" recently causing deaths of anyone I know of. Luckily, his SUV didn't hit any other cards in the process of destroying itself and him, but it certainly could have.
110km/h is just as safe as 50km/h.
No, it certainly is not. If you do 110km/h through a residential neighborhood, you will very quickly commit manslaughter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll give you that perhaps "tearable" should be hyphenated (though it's pretty commonly used in a non-hyphenated form when talking about UIs), but how is "panes" misspelled?
What the world really needs is a native OpenGL underpining, not X.
Then XFree86 is exactly what you're looking for. It has GLX, and you can happily write things using OpenGL if that's what meets your fancy. Take a look at gliv if you want an interesting application using OGL pretty effectively (though it uses gtk as well).
As I have tried to point out a dozen times, that is drag & drop, not cut & paste. X's mistake was to think that drag & drop was sufficient. Suprisingly enough, Windows is starting to make the same mistake, but they lack the advantage of the middle mouse which is that you can move, reorder, and open/close windows between when you start and when you finish the drag & drop.
The drag and drop thing is an interesting insight.
Come to think of it, Mac OS went DnD-crazy for a while as well, but at least Apple had strict guidelines in place that said that DnD needed to be an *additional* (user-optional) way of copying things.
In fact, I've found that Mac OS X is the most consistent desktop environment I've used.
We *are* talking about the same Mac OS X? This is the OS where half of the UIs are brushed metal, and half are candy-cane-looking?
The thing is that you're assuming that all widget sets provide the same functionality (or that you can go with the least-common-denominator). In reality, that'd make for some pretty awful applications. You'd have to give up your KDE-draggable-panes (not supported under Win32), your sliders (not supported under classic Mac OS), gtk's easy layout system that provides automatic resizing support (Win32 and classic Mac OS use a pixel-based layout system). Some widget sets use infinite progress bars (XUL), some use animated icons (Windows). The two can't fit in the same space.
You're thinking of something simple, like theme engines. These *are* pluggable, and plenty exist for gtk. You can't just drop in a new widget set, though.
Xlib *was* designed so that it's easy to develop widget toolkits, though.
Thank you *very* much for pointing this out.
For some reason, people (generally folks new to X) consistently manage to completely misunderstand how X works, and happily rant about it. Among the issues:
Problem: X has bad 3d support.
Answer: No, it doesn't. Manufacturers have just barely put out drivers, and still don't have great install procedures. Starting with a new system would make this problem orders of magnitude worse.
Problem: X uses lots of memory.
Answer: No, it doesn't. Try running pixmap_mem (and the analyze script that comes in the same package) on your system. Unlike Windows apps, X11 apps store pixmaps in the server. X11 newbies frequently confuse this with X using a lot of memory. Combine this with the fact that Unix memory utils multiple-report memory usage of shared libraries, and report device mapping as memory usage, and people look at X and say ("Oh, it's blowing 30MB of memory in overhead."). No, it isn't. Trust me.
Problem: X11 is inefficient.
Answer: No, it isn't. X11 is pretty damned efficient. Today's pixmap-laden interfaces can run much more slowly over a network than the original interfaces, whicch were mostly big, flat-color rectangles, but the same is true of VNC and similar.
Problem: X's multiple-widget set system is a bad idea.
Answer: No, it isn't. People look at X and think "Gosh, I don't want to use Athena apps." The thing is, the widget-independent design of X has been a huge boon. X11 dates to 1987. If we had been unable to advance through widget sets, we'd still be using ugly, grotty Athena. But, you say, this ignores the fact that Windows and Mac OS have advanced through the years! Nope. First, Windows widget sets *have* broken user-level compatibility on a regular basis. Menus in Office XP now work a lot differently than menus in 1987 did. Second, some widget sets are hamstrung by initial design flaws. The classic MacOS widget set does not include a slider widget, for example. As a result, years of application developers misued the scrollbar widget, made up their own widget (which led to even worse user interface problems), or just went without. The ability of X11 to evolve has let things like KDE's tearable panes come to the fore. Also, when it comes to APIs...the modern, easy-to-use APIs of GTK and Qt blow away the horrific Macintosh Toolbox API (note: I am not a Cocoa developer, so things may have improved) or the almost-as-grotty Win32.
Problem: X11 is hard to use.
Answer: No, it really isn't. Occasionally, piss-poor setup on the part of distro makers has made things more of a pain than it should be. If a user isn't interested in remote windowing, he shouldn't have to worry about xauth or xhost. This is largely a problem of the past.
The main "problem" with X11 is actually newbies to it making a bunch of claims about software that they haven't used and don't understand. They've frequently just come off of a decade of Windows use, and expect things to work in precisely the same way, and are horrified when there are differences.
The majority of people I've seen complaining about X11 are Johnny-come-lately types. Most of the older folks who have been using it for a while just don't care enough to respond to the complaints, which they see as pretty uninformed.
Now, there are things about X11 that aren't that great. X11 supports an *extremely* rich color model. If you're using Xlib (which you shouldn't be doing unless you're writing a widget set), it is a royal pain in the butt to support every color model available. This was done to handle the vast array of hardware that X11 has been run on.
X11 doesn't support a great way to share identical pixmaps from different apps. This is really hard to do in a secure way.
Basically, I'm reminded of the SSL discussion that came up recently. Everyone wants to run out and rewrite SSL to be simpler, faster, easier. They don't understand that the stuff in SSL is there because it *needs*
Yeah? And do any of them get finished? Catch on in the real world? Care to admit what percentage of them do so?
Now let's compare it to the masses of failed projects out there and consider the fact that Linus was replacing very expensive software with free software. That wouldn't be the case for X11.
After all, one could have said 12 years ago:
If it doesn't run windows applications it's useless.
And the percentage of software for which this is not true is *still* vanishingly tiny. The number of failed attempts is massive.
All these people who are writing the other 10 million extra window managers can help this guy out and do something more useful.
These are completely different tasks. A window manager is far, far, far easier to write than a windowing and imaging system.
How many of them are there again? 15? 20?
Well, I don't know about you, but I sure as hell don't use anywhere near that.
There's GTK, Qt, and Tcl. I don't use (well, on any kind of a regular basis) athena, Swing, or fltk, or wxWindows.
I'd also like to point out that everything I can think of except athena is also available for Windows. They just aren't used much.
The arguement here seems to be not that the inconsistency between who puts what tools onto a given system puts off the casual users, which tbh is a fair point.
Frankly, OSS is generally not about making Joe Sixpack happy. Most OSS software is far better than the closed-source equivalent...for techies.
I'm not really broken-hearted about the state of affairs, either.
all X really is is a network-aware framebuffer.
I disagree. VNC could reasonably be called a network-aware framebuffer. X, however, provides drawing primitives, color management, font rendering, windowing...
2003 Server eats more memory and cycles in overhead than XP.
There's a missing statistic here -- in the same time period, how many people switched from Windows to Linux?
Saying that there's flow back and forth is pretty expected. It *would* be shocking if the net flow were towards Windows.
But that doesn't mean they were social rejects lacking the ability to communicate concepts to their fellow man without bristling every person they met.
Read up on Newton.
He said "*not* one person in a million", not "one in a million".
Okay, I can see avoiding qmail, because there's a good alternative (actually, I prefer it to qmail) -- postfix. What program would you use instead of djbdns?
I use (and like) pdnsd, but I'm not sure that it can be considered a full replacement.
The solution is not to steal links, not to screw over users, but simply to *disallow links to sites that require registration*. It's really simple. Slashdot editors do that as a matter of policy, with a *single* exception -- the NYT and NYT-related resources. The rationale is that they started linking to the NYT before their "no registration" policy came into place. I could never figure that out, and find it incredibly frusterating. I'd like to see a poll -- "Should we allow NYT links?" without a CowboyNeal option.
Because the point of OS X is general purpose software and eye candy, neither of which is relevant for a CS cluster.
I don't think there's anything else you mentioned for which there isn't a Linux equivalent.
Yes, speed varies. However, not by a significant amount. If you're doing 20MPH over the speed limit, you're not driving at safe speeds. You may not get in an accident as long as everything goes all right -- nothing falls from the car in front of you, you don't have to make a turn and not have enough traction, you don't get surprised by a deer.
Different vehicle types are addressed, if granularly. Frequently, heavy-vehicle speed limits *do* differ from car speed limits.
Most of the rest of the issues are enforcement issues. It is beneficial to society to enforce speeding rules. Traffic accidents cause a lot of deaths -- getting somewhere 10% faster is not an enormous benefit. It's very difficult to judge the driving level of someone in a way that everyone will consider fair -- so everyone follows the same rules.
How about that, as the previous reply mentioned, he *FELL ASLEEP* at the wheel?
The respondant mentioned is one of the notorious flamebaiters on Slashdot -- he's not worth responding to. It's true that he veered and couldn't regain control of the vehicle -- there most definitely is *not* an official decision saying that drousiness was involved, and speed was cited.
As for weather, in the US at least, the weather issues are addressed speed limits are fair-weather speed limits. You're expected to reduce speed, using your judgement, to a safe level.
Actually, speeding itself is not dangerous. DIFFERENCE IN SPEED is.
These two statements contradict themselves. If the entire world was going at the same speed, yes, you're right, there wouldn't be a problem. However:
* Traffic going the other direction isn't going at the same speed. Not a *huge* deal.
* The ground isn't going at the same speed, and neither is anything else not in a car. This means that your handling gets worse at higher speeds, your time-to-stop relative to the ground (i.e. relative to stationary objects like pedestrians, trees, curves, retaining rails, deer) increases, the danger of cars accelerating up to speed increases, and your ease of rolling over increases. Your reaction time is worse relative to all of these.
I don't have any kids, but I pay a nice big tax to fund said schools, and I don't really want my tax dollars paying for a bunch of corporate propaganda.
You're an idiot and deserve to be modded down. When 60 million people break the law, Something is wrong.
:-)
I agree. Cars should be computer-controlled and unable to exceed the speed limit.
So who consumes a larger chunk of the total revenue from a record -- the filesharers or the RIAA members?
And the "marketing is expensive" line that publishers use is amazing. Yes, that's what you do, RIAA folks -- market records. You're expensive. Nobody is arguing with you there.
Speeding is not dangerous or kills people.
You're definitely wrong. It was, what, last month that some famous NHL coach (the "Miracle on Ice" guy, whatshisname) lost control of his SUV because he was speeding and killed himself and was plastered all over national papers? I don't remember "getting a blowjob while driving" recently causing deaths of anyone I know of. Luckily, his SUV didn't hit any other cards in the process of destroying itself and him, but it certainly could have.
110km/h is just as safe as 50km/h.
No, it certainly is not. If you do 110km/h through a residential neighborhood, you will very quickly commit manslaughter.