Of course mass-media is just a tool to control people, not a power which issues directions. But it is fairly effective tool.
No, it is sufficient to let the free market control the capitalists.
You have tried? I doubt so. Since Rusvelt US never left capitalists without goverment control.
We in Russia have tried, after 1991. And I cannot say I like results very much.
Today's world contain too much natural monopolies - electricity, communications, railroads etc. There is no way to ensure fair competition in these areas.
Economy controlled by the state is economy controlled by the people.
First invent political system, where people are able to really control "their servants", rather than to be controlled by them through mass-media and false per-election promises.
Then we'll discuss two kinds of economies in this political system. Just now we need both govements to control not publically elected capitalists and capitalists to lobby publically elected goverments, becouse they have controversal interests and fighting each other have to appeal to people. If only one side left, they would totally control people.
Most of this information comes from the communists themselves, who speak through their actions.
Note that this actions happens when they tried to build communism inside of economy of scarcity. They have no ways of building real Communism (where everyone works as much as he like, and recieve goods as much as he like). They need to redistribute finite amount of goods, and without market to force people willingly give away these goods, they have to get them by opressing people.
We are now discussing situation where no one need to get things from people to have things. He might copy things instead. This opens entire new world.
Imagine civil war where one of sides has ability to produce infinite amount of armor and weapons on demand, have no shortage of fuel (remember cold fusion) etc.
Other side would have to adapt same technology as only means to survive.
You shouldn't believe everything which said in mass-media.
Sklyarov did the following
1) Investigated protection scheme of eBook and found weakness there.
Reverse engineering and disassembling without vendor permission is explicitely allowed by Russian law in certain circumstances, for instanse when it is only way to make legally bought program to cooperate with your own program. Sklyarov case fits this description.
2. He published information about found weakness, in the internet. This falls under freedom of speach rule, Americans are so proud of.
It is essential to warn people who believed that eBook format would help them to protect their intellectual property (if they believe that such thing exist) that this format is worthless.
Moreover, he warned Adobe. Adobe found it is easier to sue him for disclosing this information rather than fix the bug.
BTW, some protection schemes used in banks are equally worthless. Banks are trying to conseal these information, because they think that fixing bugs is too expensive.
Would you like an idea, that you do something in USA which is perfectly legal there. Say, you buy a gun, and keep you in safe in you US home, than you come in Russia and get arrested for illegal ownership of firearms?
It is exactly reverse Sklyanrov situation.
Or say you are published some historical work, which is concerned origins of Muslim religion. Then you came to Iran and are executed for heresy.
Not all. Richard Stallman is American, Brian Kernigan is American, Larry Wall is American, and even Donald Knuth is American. As for women I'm not sure whether I should consider Evi Nemeth American or Hungarian.
Russian author Sergey Pereslegin have some very interesting opinions about distribution of cleverness in the America and its effects on American econimics.
Since DMCA passed the Congress, USA is one of most totalitarian states out there. May be even worse than China.
Sklyarov was a victim of exactly same illusion as you have - he thought that USA is free country, he come there and was put into jail for the action which do not constitute crime at all by Russian laws - publishing information about security flaws in eBook, nd was done on Russian territory.
Note that Alan Cox of UK shares almost same opinion - he refuse to go to USENIX because after Sklyarov case he doesn't consider USA a safe place for programmer.
Chances of Korotkov's campaign to succeed are based on two things.
He, as Deputy minister of communications, has some more influence on telco companies than damned ALC. He might tell couple of words to phone operators (typically Ministry of Communication has a lot of ways to make life of phone company harder, when it comes to renew the license and such) to charge a right side of phone line, ignore abuse complaints and so on.
Technically phone poll is carried out by Russia On-Line second biggest dial-up ISP in Moscow. It doesn't matter how many multichannels phone lines would ALC buy. A fraction of ROL's modem pool assigned to the task would orders of magnitude bigger anyway.
And I think that ways how big ISP are charged for phone usage are much different from ordinary customers anyway.
A flight trained passenger could save everybody's necks.
This was known for decades. Arthur Hailey (if I properly spell his name) wrote his novel "Runway 0-8" in fifties.
About this exact situation - airplane crew is poisoned with their breakfast got from new (and untruthworthy) supplier, and passenger with some flight experience from WWII saves everyone onboard.
Why don't Americans read their own literature and need Russian to remind them?
I've once imagined a yacht simulator. Unfortunately, I haven't got a time to write it. Key feature was that there were some AI seamans and you, as captain couldn't do anything on board yourself, but rather shout orders to your crew. Of course hands should have their own characters - some are clever, some ar e stupid, some are lazy to make live interesting.
Re:Why prolong life of brain-dead personal compute
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
Yes, there is the difference.
We both discuss common general thing - how GUI, which is used by average user to interact with computers should work.
You are thinking that personal computers are acceptable, but X window should be replaced.
I think that X window is acceptable, moreover, it is only existing example of usable GUI system, but concept of personal computers is not.
Points I'm insisting on
If person is average user he should not bother with technical issues. There should be guy, which logins on the computer where user's apps run, and fixes problems when they arise. Just as average car owner drives this car to service to have engine checked by qualified mechanic. Because computers are not able to drive, but they are able to let people login from network, system, where everage user runs his apps, should allow logins from network.
It is too expensive to have personal CPU and storage for each user. It is obvois in corporate environment, but it is no different in home environment - one have wife and kids, and they want to use computer too. Only mobile devices now are allowed to have individual CPU and storage per display, but with GPRS WiFi and 3G cellular networks situation would change.
Upgrades are evil and should be avoided unless upgrading of the device is absolutely neccessary to perform desired operation. There were no significant improvement in display technology last 10 years and in keyboard technology last 20 years. And possible would never be. I.e. I cannot see why one should use 200dpi screen to read one's e-mail, while 100dpi one does the job. So, window system should be designed such way that it doesn't need to change when applications changes.
*nix like systems with X window almost fits these criteria. So we should talk about improving X windows and manufacturing cheap X terminals with some 200Mhz processors like ARM or Dragonball. No fans, no disks, etc. You cannot imagine how absolutely silent device could improve your productivity. Entire logic should fit on the small board of size of network card which should be built directly into display. Couple of USB connectors to attach your digital camera or PDA would be nice of course.
Re:Why prolong life of brain-dead personal compute
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but what about toolbars, menu bars, dialog boxes, menu lists, etc.? These are items that can be standardized and/or abstracted so that the widget can be local to the server.
Toolbars are essentially collections of images with commands bound to mouse event. There is nothing to standartize.
Menus are strange animals. Menus in Windows are very limited (becouse they ARE standartized) but in mosu X toolkits (like Tk or even Gtk) menus are much more flexible. They can contain checkboxes, radiobuttons, handle dynamic shortcut assignments etc. It is better to leave this functionality to application.
As to dialog boxes, it seems that you never tried to design informative and useful dialog box. It is art.
There is layout problems (especially if user is allowed to change fonts, which is required by accessability, or text strings vary according to current locale, which is required by i18n), which is handled by complex geometry management algorithms, which obvoisly belong to application, there is various application specific validation routines which handle input or movement of focus between controls, there is order of focus movement which should be controlled by application because it depends on semantic.
Good question. I am not sure. I suppose it would work like thus for a PNG of a kitten displayed at 240x420 in a window by itself:
GraphicFame:PNG:240x420:
You'll be surprised, but your suggestion is very close to one of real X protocol events. With only difference that you are requiring display server to know about various graphic formats like PNG, and X requires apps to convert all images it wish to display into X Pixmap format.
There is good reasons to handle it. First it makes possible to application to decide what to do if there is not enough colors. Consider map of states where states are colored in different color and photo of kitten. If display is unable to handle all colors required by on-disk representation of image, first image should have each solid color region filled by any available solid color, which is visualy different from its neighbours, and second needs dithering.
Second, and more important - application seldom needs to display images as they are stored on disk. It scales them or cuts them. So, it have to decompress them into raw array of pixels before displaying anyway, so it doesn't make sense to use variety of formats to send them further. It is just as easy to convert this raw array of pixels into standard format.
For custom widgets, there are a number of ways to do it from the current method used by X to something akin to ActiveX controls used by windows.
You seems to be completely ignorant on this problem. How awful! Active X is Windows specific thing. And we are talking about real computers here, not a brain-dead personal ones.
At my home I have local X server which runs on Linux PC, NCD ECX , which has Motorola 68020 processor and HP X terminal which has i960. With current state of X it doesn't matter on which of them I start an application. It just works if it has enough colors and pixels to work.
If X applications would want to run custom code inside these X servers, I would need to keep three copies of each custom control. Note that Java is not an option here, becouse X terminals typically has 4-16Mb of RAM and have better uses for it than to run JVM. Also Java is awfully slow.
I'd rather say that with all those GLX, Xkb and antialiased fonts X servers grow too large nowadays, and we have to restrict their functionality to achieve compactness and speed, not to extend it.
One of reasons why I think that personal computers are brain-deed and thing invented by evil vendors is endless upgrade cycle. My X terminals are about 10 years old both, and they serve their purpose perfectly. I need to upgrade only main machine, where apps are run. And becouse I run free software on it, I don't need to do it to often,
With your suggestion terminals would need to be upgraded as well as computers, to cope with newer and more bloated custom controls libraries, which would benefit only hardware vendors.
Re:Why prolong life of brain-dead personal compute
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
I am referring to what gets passed over a network connection. I think the appication should not contain the actual thing to be displayed, but rather just enough information for the server use its primitive, widgets, etc to display the information.
Things to be displayed may vary. For instance, consider a photo of nice kitten to be displayed in graphics editor. Obvoisly, it cannot be contained in GUI subsystem, and should be passed over network connection.
There is limited number of things which could be stored in X server. On NCD ECX there is only four megabytes of memory to run X server in.
How should you know that particular interface element is a standard thing, not a "kitten photo". Applications may need custom controls like dials or draggable graphs.
Of course, there are things like font, which can be requested by X server on demand. It is interesting idea to convert widget library into separate server, like font server and provide some contorl cache in X server.
Re:Why prolong life of brain-dead personal compute
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
I believe the programs look should be under the control of the user. How it is done, I don't really care.
It is good point. Problem is there is too much things to control. Users want computers to just do the job, and balance between flexibility and time to spend either tuning things up to your preferences or learning how to use things which cannot be tuned is very complicated thing.
As for the drawing level of comms, per haps I miscommunicated. I think the program should say "Draw this kind of thing here with this in it." as opposed to "Here is something I want you to show on the screen."
Problem of "miscommunication" sits in the definiton of thing or something.
X takes consistent approach, defining set of primitives such as windows, drawing primitives fonts etc, which can be used in communication protocol.
It is possible to extend this set, using common controls such as buttosn as "terms" in communication.
But I cannot see the difference between draw this thing and I want this thing to be shown. All user interface systems use event loop which makes updates on the screen only when there is no user input to process. Curses does so, X does so, Win32 does so.
BTW, why do you disable comments on your "Modern OS" Journal entries? There are few points which I'd like to comment.
Re:Why prolong life of brain-dead personal compute
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
More secure is a good idea, but transport level security (such as SSL or ssh-forwarding) handles this.
As for "consistent look and feel", I think it is most evil idea ever invented by proprietary software vendors.
Look and feel of the program should be consistent with function of program, not with other programs on the same desktop.
Of course, there might be advantages of having more complex protocol which operates on the widget level, rather than on the drawing primitives and elementary events level, but I think that standartizing complex interprocess communications as a layer above ICCCM, and audio input/output (for which we now have at least four competing standards) is much more important.
As for GUI integrated into kernel, there is nothing wrong with it on thin clients. Really, for example NCD ECX X terminal uses one binary for both kernels and X server. But if you have an application running on the machine, you should avoid as much complexity in kernel as you could.
There was also Word Perferct for Unix and VMS. And it was the better solution for host-terminal systems.
Unfortunately their open offerring of WP 8 for Linux didn't included non-GUI version, but I was quite impressed with performance of GUI version.
It works on 20Mb 486 for few users simultaneously, i.e. it ate no more resources then wordprocessing deserve.
Unfortuately, it didn't support Russian locale, although WP 5.1 for DOS have very descent Russian localisation.
Also, Quattro Pro 5.0 was best spreadsheet ever released.
Re:The *Real* Problem with X11 and the unix deskto
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 1
Problem not in X, but apps you are using. You are citing names of modern things with windows-like concepts built in it - GIMP, OO, Mozilla. Their authors never take a pain to read ICCCM specification.
Really there are protocols to negotiate any selection format between two applications.
There is some good thinks which appear last five years like xdnd.
But while people would still use Qt and Gtk in preference to older and more mature toolkits like Motif/Lesstiff or Tk, nothing really good is going to happen.
Why prolong life of brain-dead personal computers
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
The whole idea beyond "replacing X with something" is an idea to replace network transparent GUI protocol which suits perfectly for multiuser environments with something which is only able to display only programs which run locally.
Of course, KDE and GNOME developers done much work to dumb full-featured OS down to something windows-like, but nobody forces you to use this bullshit.
Even microsoft realizes that computers are not meant to be personal. They included terminal service into XP Prof. It took them nearly 20 years to reinvent great MIT invention.
If we want average dumb user to be happy and productive with his desktop, we need smart admin lurking around. Preferably behind the scenes, and without disturbing user and dragging him away from the keyboard.
Of course, there are handhelds and other such nifty gadgets. But wait a bit. I remember times where hard disk of average desktop computer was smaller than memory of present day Zaurus (it was 20Mb).
Of course, there are few problems with bandwidth of wireless networks. I doubt that someone would be happy running X over GSM 9600 baud or even GPRS, but 3G cellular networks are on the way.
It is always was OK to "steal" from architects by making photos (or even painting pictures and putting them into museums) of buildings build at the side of public streets.
Why it should be different with sites on the public network?
I'd rather say that it is very bad news for common sence that people who filed those insane lawsuits are not put into asylum immediately as completely insane, and insead are allowed to defend their positon and even sometimes win,
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the myths of mass-media control.
Of course mass-media is just a tool to control people, not a power which issues directions. But it is fairly effective tool.
No, it is sufficient to let the free market control the capitalists.
You have tried? I doubt so. Since Rusvelt US never left capitalists without goverment control.
We in Russia have tried, after 1991. And I cannot say I like results very much.
Today's world contain too much natural monopolies - electricity, communications, railroads etc. There is no way to ensure fair competition in these areas.
Economy controlled by the state is economy controlled by the people.
First invent political system, where people are able to really control "their servants", rather than to be controlled by them through mass-media and false per-election promises.
Then we'll discuss two kinds of economies in this political system. Just now we need both govements to control not publically elected capitalists and capitalists to lobby publically elected goverments,
becouse they have controversal interests and fighting each other have to appeal to people. If only one side left, they would totally control people.
Most of this information comes from the communists themselves, who speak through their actions.
Note that this actions happens when they tried to build communism inside of economy of scarcity. They have no ways of building real Communism (where everyone works as much as he like, and recieve goods as much as he like). They need to redistribute finite amount of goods, and without market to force people willingly give away these goods, they have to get them by opressing people.
We are now discussing situation where no one need to get things from people to have things. He might copy things instead. This opens entire new world.
Imagine civil war where one of sides has ability to produce infinite amount of armor and weapons on demand, have no shortage of fuel (remember cold fusion) etc.
Other side would have to adapt same technology as only means to survive.
It would have tremendous effect:
Imagine world where no one upgrades their old 486 just becouse it is impossible to buy 30-pin SIMMs,
Hi-tech corporations would have much harder times than RIAA now have.
Unfortunately, it still not possible to download pizza, so it is to early to speculate about economics of plenty.
Where you've seen thieft?
You shouldn't believe everything which said in mass-media.
Sklyarov did the following
1) Investigated protection scheme of eBook and found weakness there.
Reverse engineering and disassembling without vendor permission is explicitely allowed by Russian law in certain circumstances, for instanse when it is only way to make legally bought program to cooperate with your own program. Sklyarov case fits this description.
2. He published information about found weakness, in the internet. This falls under freedom of speach rule, Americans are so proud of.
It is essential to warn people who believed that eBook format would help them to protect their intellectual property (if they believe that such thing exist) that this format is worthless.
Moreover, he warned Adobe. Adobe found it is easier to sue him for disclosing this information rather than fix the bug.
BTW, some protection schemes used in banks are equally worthless. Banks are trying to conseal these information, because they think that fixing bugs is too expensive.
Would you like an idea, that you do something in USA
which is perfectly legal there. Say, you buy a gun,
and keep you in safe in you US home, than you come
in Russia and get arrested for illegal ownership
of firearms?
It is exactly reverse Sklyanrov situation.
Or say you are published some historical work,
which is concerned origins of Muslim religion.
Then you came to Iran and are executed for heresy.
Not all. Richard Stallman is American, Brian Kernigan is American, Larry Wall is American,
and even Donald Knuth is American. As for women
I'm not sure whether I should consider Evi Nemeth
American or Hungarian.
Russian author Sergey Pereslegin have some very interesting opinions about distribution of cleverness in the America and its effects on American econimics.
Since DMCA passed the Congress, USA is one of most totalitarian states out there. May be even worse than China.
Sklyarov was a victim of exactly same illusion as you have - he thought that USA is free country, he come there and was put into jail for the action which do not constitute crime at all by Russian laws - publishing information about security flaws in eBook, nd was done on Russian territory.
Note that Alan Cox of UK shares almost same opinion - he refuse to go to USENIX because after Sklyarov case he doesn't consider USA a safe place for programmer.
If Quebec Office would be able to persuade people
do not eat fastfood and use French restraunts instead, it would greatly increase health of people.
But I doubt that it is possible with current lifestyle.
Well, that one's easy. Most Americans don't read anything except the TV guide.
./. Nerds ought to be more educated than average people from same country.
But this is
I consider Hailey very nerdish author. He pays much attention on how things work in modern civilization.
And I think that ways how big ISP are charged for phone usage are much different from ordinary customers anyway.
Do you know a way (except electrix) to use spell-checker on Mozilla web- forms?
A flight trained passenger could save everybody's necks.
This was known for decades. Arthur Hailey (if I properly spell his name) wrote his novel "Runway 0-8" in fifties.
About this exact situation - airplane crew is poisoned with their breakfast got from new (and untruthworthy) supplier, and passenger with some flight experience from WWII saves everyone onboard.
Why don't Americans read their own literature and
need Russian to remind them?
I've once imagined a yacht simulator. Unfortunately,
I haven't got a time to write it. Key feature was that there were some AI seamans and you, as captain couldn't do anything on board yourself, but rather shout orders to your crew. Of course hands should have their own characters - some are clever, some ar e stupid, some are lazy to make live interesting.
We both discuss common general thing - how GUI,
which is used by average user to interact with computers should work.
You are thinking that personal computers are acceptable, but X window should be replaced.
I think that X window is acceptable, moreover, it is only existing example of usable GUI system, but concept of personal computers is not.
Points I'm insisting on
should not bother with technical issues. There should be guy, which logins on the computer where user's apps run, and fixes problems when they arise. Just as average car owner drives this car to service to have engine checked by qualified mechanic. Because computers are not able to drive, but they are able to let people login from network, system, where everage user runs his apps, should allow logins from network.
There were no significant improvement in display technology last 10 years and in keyboard technology last 20 years. And possible would never be. I.e. I cannot see why one should use 200dpi screen to read one's e-mail, while 100dpi one does the job. So, window system should be designed such way that it doesn't need to change when applications changes.
*nix like systems with X window almost fits these criteria. So we should talk about improving X windows and manufacturing cheap X terminals with some 200Mhz processors like ARM or Dragonball. No fans, no disks, etc. You cannot imagine how absolutely silent device could improve your productivity. Entire logic should fit on the small board of size of network card which should be built directly into display. Couple of USB connectors to attach your digital camera or PDA would be nice of course.
Yes, but what about toolbars, menu bars, dialog boxes, menu lists, etc.? These are items that can be standardized and/or abstracted so that the widget can be local to the server.
Toolbars are essentially collections of
images with commands bound to mouse event. There is nothing to standartize.
Menus are strange animals. Menus in Windows are very limited (becouse they ARE standartized) but in mosu X toolkits (like Tk or even Gtk) menus are much more flexible. They can contain checkboxes, radiobuttons, handle dynamic shortcut assignments etc. It is better to leave this functionality to application.
As to dialog boxes, it seems that you never tried to design informative and useful dialog box. It is art.
There is layout problems (especially if user is allowed to change fonts, which is required by accessability, or text strings vary according to current locale, which is required by i18n), which is handled by complex geometry management algorithms, which obvoisly belong to application, there is various application specific validation routines which handle input or movement of focus between controls, there is order of focus movement which should be controlled by application because it depends on semantic.
Good question. I am not sure. I suppose it would work like thus for a PNG of a kitten displayed at 240x420 in a window by itself:
GraphicFame:PNG:240x420:
You'll be surprised, but your suggestion is very close to one of real X protocol events. With only difference that you are requiring display server to know about various graphic formats like PNG, and X requires apps to convert all images it wish to display into X Pixmap format.
There is good reasons to handle it. First it makes possible to application to decide what to do if there is not enough colors. Consider map of states where states are colored in different color and photo of kitten. If display is unable to handle all colors required by on-disk representation of image, first image should have each solid color region filled by any available solid color, which is visualy different from its neighbours, and second needs dithering.
Second, and more important - application seldom needs to display images as they are stored on disk. It scales them or cuts them. So, it have to decompress them into raw array of pixels before displaying anyway, so it doesn't make sense to use variety of formats to send them further. It is just as easy to convert this raw array of pixels into standard format.
For custom widgets, there are a number of ways to do it from the current method used by X to something akin to ActiveX controls used by windows.
You seems to be completely ignorant on this problem. How awful! Active X is Windows specific thing. And we are talking about real computers here, not a brain-dead personal ones.
At my home I have local X server which runs on Linux PC, NCD ECX , which has Motorola 68020 processor and HP X terminal which has i960.
With current state of X it doesn't matter on which of them I start an application. It just works if it has enough colors and pixels to work.
If X applications would want to run custom code inside these X servers, I would need to keep three copies of each custom control. Note that Java is not an option here, becouse X terminals typically has 4-16Mb of RAM and have better uses for it than to run JVM. Also Java is awfully slow.
I'd rather say that with all those GLX, Xkb and antialiased fonts X servers grow too large nowadays, and we have to restrict their functionality to achieve compactness and speed, not to extend it.
One of reasons why I think that personal computers are brain-deed and thing invented by evil vendors is endless upgrade cycle. My X terminals are about 10 years old both, and they serve their purpose perfectly.
I need to upgrade only main machine, where apps are run. And becouse I run free software on it, I don't need to do it to often,
With your suggestion terminals would need to be upgraded as well as computers, to cope with newer and more bloated custom controls libraries, which would benefit only hardware vendors.
I am referring to what gets passed over a network connection. I think the appication should not contain the actual thing to be displayed, but rather just enough information for the server use its primitive, widgets, etc to display the information.
Things to be displayed may vary.
For instance, consider a photo of nice kitten to be displayed in graphics editor. Obvoisly, it cannot be contained in GUI subsystem, and should be passed over network connection.
There is limited number of things which could be
stored in X server. On NCD ECX there is only four
megabytes of memory to run X server in.
How should you know that particular interface element is a standard thing, not a "kitten photo".
Applications may need custom controls like dials
or draggable graphs.
Of course, there are things like font, which can
be requested by X server on demand.
It is interesting idea to convert widget library
into separate server, like font server and provide some contorl cache in X server.
I believe the programs look should be under the control of the user. How it is done, I don't really care.
."
It is good point. Problem is there is too much things to control. Users want computers to just do the job, and balance between flexibility and time
to spend either tuning things up to your preferences or learning how to use things which cannot be tuned is very complicated thing.
As for the drawing level of comms, per haps I miscommunicated. I think the program should say "Draw this kind of thing here with this in it." as opposed to "Here is something I want you to show on the screen
Problem of "miscommunication" sits in the definiton of thing or something.
X takes consistent approach, defining set of primitives such as windows, drawing primitives fonts etc, which can be used in communication protocol.
It is possible to extend this set, using common controls such as buttosn as "terms" in communication.
But I cannot see the difference between draw this thing and I want this thing to be shown. All user interface systems use event loop which makes updates on the screen only when there is no user input to process. Curses does so, X does so, Win32 does so.
BTW, why do you disable comments on your "Modern OS" Journal entries? There are few points which I'd like to comment.
More secure is a good idea, but transport level
security (such as SSL or ssh-forwarding) handles
this.
As for "consistent look and feel", I think it is
most evil idea ever invented by proprietary software vendors.
Look and feel of the program should be consistent
with function of program, not with other programs
on the same desktop.
Of course, there might be advantages of having more complex protocol which operates on the widget level, rather than on the drawing primitives and
elementary events level, but I think that standartizing complex interprocess communications
as a layer above ICCCM, and audio input/output (for which we now have at least four competing standards) is much more important.
As for GUI integrated into kernel, there is nothing wrong with it on thin clients. Really,
for example NCD ECX X terminal uses one binary for
both kernels and X server. But if you have an application running on the machine, you should
avoid as much complexity in kernel as you could.
See microkernel systems linke QNX or HURD.
There was also Word Perferct for Unix and VMS.
And it was the better solution for host-terminal
systems.
Unfortunately their open offerring of WP 8 for Linux
didn't included non-GUI version, but I was quite
impressed with performance of GUI version.
It works on 20Mb 486 for few users simultaneously,
i.e. it ate no more resources then wordprocessing
deserve.
Unfortuately, it didn't support Russian locale,
although WP 5.1 for DOS have very descent Russian
localisation.
Also, Quattro Pro 5.0 was best spreadsheet ever
released.
Problem not in X, but apps you are using.
You are citing names of modern things with windows-like concepts built in it - GIMP, OO, Mozilla. Their authors never take a pain to read
ICCCM specification.
Really there are protocols to negotiate any selection format between two applications.
There is some good thinks which appear last five
years like xdnd.
But while people would still use Qt and Gtk
in preference to older and more mature toolkits
like Motif/Lesstiff or Tk, nothing really good is going to happen.
The whole idea beyond "replacing X with something"
is an idea to replace network transparent GUI
protocol which suits perfectly for multiuser
environments with something which is only able
to display only programs which run locally.
Of course, KDE and GNOME developers done much work
to dumb full-featured OS down to something windows-like, but nobody forces you to use this bullshit.
Even microsoft realizes that computers are not
meant to be personal. They included terminal service into XP Prof. It took them nearly 20 years
to reinvent great MIT invention.
If we want average dumb user
to be happy and productive with his desktop, we
need smart admin lurking around. Preferably behind
the scenes, and without disturbing user and dragging him away from the keyboard.
Of course, there are handhelds and other such nifty gadgets. But wait a bit. I remember times
where hard disk of average desktop computer was
smaller than memory of present day Zaurus (it was
20Mb).
Of course, there are few problems with bandwidth
of wireless networks. I doubt that someone would
be happy running X over GSM 9600 baud or even GPRS, but 3G cellular networks are on the way.
I've tried this. And was quite satisfied with performance, so I don't plan to install vmware
on my local machine.
It is always was OK to "steal" from architects
by making photos (or even painting pictures and putting them into museums) of buildings build at the side of public streets.
Why it should be different with sites on the public
network?
I'd rather say that it is very bad news for common
sence that people who filed those insane lawsuits
are not put into asylum immediately as completely
insane, and insead are allowed to defend their positon and even sometimes win,