The US has been giving weapons to certain regimes to fight other regimes for decades now. Two instances which even the American public know about are the weapons we gave to the Contras in Iran, and the weapons we gave to the Muhajideen (who would go on to become the Taliban) in Afganistan. So these reports from the "tinfoil-hat" people are much more grounded in reality than most people would like to believe.
By "throw it around" I mean to each other while they're developing it. Amongst themselves, they probably don't call it the stupid names that the final products come out with.
A codename is cool, something the engineers can throw around while they are developing it. A final product is a dumb POS dreamed up by marketing morons to cater to their vision of what the public wants.
I'm here at Georgia Tech, and we use the BuzzCard for pretty much everything. There are still physical locks on our doors, but we use it for meals, to verify our identities for finals, to purchase things at bookstores, purchase things from vending machines, you name it. I've got $3.78 on my BuzzCard right now, so I'm not too worried. If our BookStore gets shafted by people buying thousands of dollars of equiptment with fake money, then I couldn't really care less. The company is going to eat it in the lnog run anyway.
I've used VB for several years. While Visual Studio has a good debugger, there is nothing I need that gdb doesn't do. Beyond that, I do C++, and Visual C++ 6.x is just borked when it comes to standards complience. All the debugging in the world won't help you if it doesn't compile. Now, VS 2003 should fix most issues, but g++ has been very complient for years now, and VS 2003 isn't even out yet.
Sigh. So when KHTML is used in OS X, it's "blazingly fast!" and when it's used in Linux it's "slow/inefficient/X sucks" (yes, I know that last one isn't an adjective, but it appears that most people don't...)
Well shucks. If you do nothing with your computer, why do you assume nobody else does either? I, for one, would like to get a Mac. I have no ties to stupid Windows software, and could switch on a whim. I could even run Linux on it:) But a Mac is too slow for the work I do, and too expensive for the poor performance you get. I'm sure there are a lot of other people in my position (in relation to Apple's small market share), and Apple is losing a lot of potential users by not being competitive in the speed department.
g++ is decently fast. ICC is about 50% slower, on my machine, than g++ doing an optimized build. Precompiled headers would help a lot, but wouldn't make things more than twice as fast. C++ is just a very slow language to compile, especially when you throw complex templates at it.
Maybe on the processor end, but (finally!) bus bandwidth is increasing like anything. We're already up to nearly 5GB/sec sustained bandwidth (from the benchmarks for this sucker)! That's almost as much as the GeForce4Go 440 in my laptop! These recent changes are a whole lot m ore interesting than 100MHz jumps in CPU speed.
Sigh. This happens every time hardware advances, and every time, I have to post to refute this shit. People have been saying "do we need more hardware speed?" since the 386 came out. Back when the Pentium Pro was king of the hill, a guy in PC Magazine (Dvorak I think) refuted this idea. And people are still doing it! No, computers are not fast enough. I do things every day that need lots of power.
1) Compiling. On my 2GHz P4 with 640MB of RAM, it took GCC well over 4 hours to compile kdebindings-3.1 A compile of KDE as a whole takes 6-7 hours. Even a simple 900 line C++ program I'm working on at the moment takes almost 10 seconds to compile.
2) 3D. Even the latest 3D PC games don't like all that realistic. Notably absent are realistic lighting and liberal use of curved surfaces. In an interview with Boot magazine, David Kirk (chief scientist at NVIDIA) once said something along the lines of (don't remember it exactly, it was in 1998): there is tremendous potential for growth in 3D. 'You want to be able to render a tree so well that it's indistinguishable from reality. Then, you want to be able to render a tree so fantastic that it couldn't possibly exist in real life, but is believable because of how well rendered it is.' Beyond that, 3D modeling is still a huge potential market for more power.
3) Scientific computing. It's not unusual for a simulation, even a simple one, to take hours. I remember that a X-ray diffraction project I did in school once took several minutes to process *each frame* on a 1.5GHz Athlon. When computers get fast enough that you can run that simulation in real time, and watch the diffraction patterns change with changes in the crystal, then computers will be fast enough.
4) Mathematics. Computational mathematics is very big, and there are tons of problems that take hours to solve on current computers.
So no, computers are not fast enough. They might be, if all you do is surf the internet and run Word, but a lot of people in the real world have real (demanding) work to do with their computers.
If you have no reason to use it, then you probably shouldn't be using it. Don't fix what isn't broke. On the other hand, there are a lot of reasons to use Linux, if you have the right usage patterns. Why I use Linux.
1) I program. Development tools (especially GCC) are better on the Linux side, and free to boot. I don't like IDE's I prefer a bunch of xterms and VIM. Sure I could do the same thing in Windows, but Cygwin is a little too laggy for my taste (fork() is really slow).
2) My gaming is limited to a few Linux games (NWN, Quake), a few older WINE-able Windows games (CounterStrike, StarCraft), and PSX emulators. They all work fine enough in Linux to suit me. For real gaming, I turn to my Gamecube, which I like better than 99% of PC games anyway:)
3) I've got a lot of freedom to choose software file formats. My usage of MS Office formats isn't anything that KWord or (in a pinch) OpenOffice can't handle. Usually, all my communication with the outside world is done with standard file formats like PDF, HTML, etc.
4) I run Mathematica and Matlab on occasion, which have (cheap!) Linux student versions.
5) I do 3D modeling, and SideFX has an Apprentice version of Houdini available for Linux.
Other than that, I do the same stuff everyone else does. I listen to MP3s on JuK (a KDE jukebox), I talk with my friends on AIM, send funny pictures over the school network, the usual. Since I'm used to Linux, and not very used to Windows (I stopped using it around when XP came out) my workflow is a lot faster, and the tweekability of KDE allows me to optimize the computer to my work habits much more than I can in Windows.
destabilize one of the most politically stable regions of the world. >>>>>>>>> And this is the kicker. Destabilization causes decades of turmoil in many of these countries. Colonialism in Africa ended half a century ago, and they are *still* trying to get over the f*ckups it caused. Of course, it's not like we'll ever find out about the true cost of this war over in the US. The American media just doesn't have the attention span necessary to follow up this stuff.
Judging from the past 20 years, that figure would be in the thousands. >>>>>>>> Yet, the sum total of the deaths related to the Gulf War and subsequent imposition of sanctions works out to a whole lot more than that, even from fairly conservative estimates. According to UN* sources, the death toll every month due to sanctions is in the thousands.
And yes, I agree that it is really hard to get liberals to answer questions. Unfortunately, the stuffy logical people also tend to be conservative. We also have far more blondes over here in liberal-land. And guess who are the people that show up on TV the most?
PS> And before I hear a "UN bias" comment, I'd point out that the UN is not some monolithic anti-US entity. While there are anti-US elements in certain delegations, most of the UN consists of independent organizations, and these are the ones that do most of the research. It's kinda like how governments will try to compete in scientific research, while the scientists themselves are more interested in the actual work.
Iraq actually went through a revolution of the people and ended up with the government they have. >>>>>>>>> And by Iraq I mean Iran. The students revolted and implemeneted the current government.
Do you realize that you're vision of reality is totally clouded by the culture and time you're from. Democracy is good as far as we're concerned. That was not true 1000 years ago, and will probably not be true 1000 years from now. Even right now, there are many countries that don't like democracy in it's present form. Hell, even most Americans don't like democracy the way the founding father's have defined it. Note all of the "moral values" laws that prevade US states. They're totally against the principles of the Constitution, but the government, at some level, bows to the cultural values of it's people, even if it's against its ideals.
>>>>>>>> We help them develop something remotely similar to what we've got. What we've got, despite the many, many problems, is still one of the most effective and balanced systems of government. >>>>>>>>> Almost all of the governments in the Middle East are conservative, theocracies. Yet, most of them were chosen by the people who live there. Iraq actually went through a revolution of the people and ended up with the government they have. I don't like this form of government. But I was raised in the US, so what do I know about what kind of government they should have? If the US was really looking out for the interests of the people, it would not impose a democratic government on them, but let them chose their own.
Besides, whenever the US get's involved in the destiny of another nation, it almost invariably messes things up. We helped the Afghans free themselves from the Soviet Union by giving weapons to the Muhajideen. Fast forward 10 years, and the same people turn into the Taliban, armed with the weapons we gave them. The first couple of times, you can say that we couldn't possibly have predicted that it would happen. After a while, you have to get the picture that maybe interfering with other nations isn't such a good idea.
A sizeable group of developers from the two leading free software projects developing desktops based on the X Window System, KDE and GNOME, have been discussing the current situation among themselves and decided to draft and release this document.
We acknowledge the dedication of the XFree86 project in providing us a free and innovative implementation of the X11 industry standard, something we benefit from on a daily basis. Therefore, we want to share our joint point of view with the community.
1. XFree86's recent technical progress, culminating in the 4.3
release, brought significant advancements to the X desktop. Prior
X Window System implementations were lagging behind the needs of
modern desktop users.
Cursor theming, simplified font configuration, dynamic screen
resizing, and so on address long-overdue usability issues with X
desktops. XFree86's robust solutions in these areas have been
invaluable.
However, the work is not done. Our goal is to provide the
community with desktop systems far beyond what anyone offers
today. We are ready to take advantage of an X Window System
implementation that continues to innovate.
2. GNOME and KDE have two interests in X:
- We would like to have a single organization where X innovation
occurs. By innovation, we mean the definition of new APIs,
specifications, and features - new additions to the foundations
that KDE and GNOME rely on.
- We would like to have a frequently-released, robust, stable,
open source implementation of these APIs, specifications, and
features.
We are explicitly distinguishing innovation from implementation,
because standards should be adequate to allow multiple
fully-interoperable implementations.
Within the development organization responsible for defining and
crafting new features to be adopted as standards, innovation
should happen in the open, with all affected parties able to
participate early in the process.
3. We do not want to take sides on the recent political wrangling of
who did what when and who should be in charge. Our hope is that as
a community we can find a way to involve everyone in X's
development and move forward with solving technical challenges.
4. It makes sense to us if the organization responsible for X
innovation also develops the most widely used open source
reference implementation. This ensures an emphasis on working
code, and provides a pool of active technical expertise.
5. We would like to see this forum work toward a unified
organization, governed by active contributors, that implements,
deploys, and standardizes new X innovations.
We do not want to take an a priori position on how this
organization should be organized or governed - that is a
conversation we're trying to start, rather than one we're trying
to end. We trust and will support the X community as they work to
address this issue.:: signatures clipped::
You might try to be more polite to the people who are coding you software for free... Other than that, I really don't know. The thing is, the exact source of these problems are still being worked out. The stuff I told you is really too high level to actually serve as a guide. To really get deeper info that people can change code over, testing and profiling needs to be done to see precisely what the problematic behavior is. Hopefully, it's this sort of testing and profiling that Keith and friends can do over at xwin.org.
In response to your point 3 -- XF86Config is going away in 5.0. Already, X - configure will automatically create a (usually) correct XF86Config. In 5.0, this will become the default, and XF86Config will be optional.
You can't. There are problems somewhere in the chain, but it's not in X. Far more common is poorly optimized applications. For example, right now I'm using KDE. Certain applications, even very widget-heavy, complex applications like Qt designer, resize very smoothly. For example, on my GeForce4Go, copying a 500x500 pixmap to a window (x11perf -copypixwin500) can be done at 2300 fps, or about 575 megapixels per second. For a general purpose display API, that's really fast, about 1/3 the total memory bandwidth of the graphics accelerator. But when resizing KDE Kontrol Panel, the image, not much bigger than 500x500, redraws at maybe 4 or 5 fps. The problem is not the raw speed of X, but how the application responds to resize requests. A great many X apps have the problem that they handle resize events very poorly, so when users who are just trying to Linux for a short-while try to test speed (by doing the usual resize window-quickly "test") they get a very misleading impression. Meanwhile, users who use the system all day (and almost never resize windows in that manner) don't notice stuff like that and wonder why anyone things it's slow. Another example. When I open a menu in Konqueror, and start the settings panel, the menu will sometimes go away and the area underneath won't redraw until almost a second later. The redraw is the matter of a single bit-blit. We've already established that X can do those really quickly. The problem is not that X isn't fast enough, but the application is trying to load the settings panel (waiting on the disk usually) and isn't responding to redraw requests in the meantime. There are ways to fix these problems:
1) Add some synchronization between apps and the window manager, so they resize smoothly. OS X has something like this: the window frame won't resize faster than the window contents can redraw. Since Quartz in general is little slow (because all drawing, even in QE is done in software), this leads to very jerky behavior, but is much more "elegant." 2) Multithread apps. This is the big one. A properly multithreaded GUI can respond to high-priority user events without being blocked on low-priority I/O events. It was only recently that Linux got threadsafe GUI libraries (Qt 3.x and Gtk+ 2.0) and large parts of KDE still aren't threadsafe. 3) Optimize drawing routines. Take Konqueror vs Internet Explorer. Try doing the "resize" test on the two. Each frame of resize animation is very time consuming. Thanks to CSS and other modern HTML, the *entire* page has to be laid out each frame. The algorithms for doing this in IE are much more mature than the algorithms for doing the same in Konqueror.
Um, they were testing network communication here. They found out that network performance was less than optimal because of various reasons. It had nothing about local cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Should have used preview.
Here.
Here.
Here.
Here.
The US has been giving weapons to certain regimes to fight other regimes for decades now. Two instances which even the American public know about are the weapons we gave to the Contras in Iran, and the weapons we gave to the Muhajideen (who would go on to become the Taliban) in Afganistan. So these reports from the "tinfoil-hat" people are much more grounded in reality than most people would like to believe.
By "throw it around" I mean to each other while they're developing it. Amongst themselves, they probably don't call it the stupid names that the final products come out with.
A codename is cool, something the engineers can throw around while they are developing it. A final product is a dumb POS dreamed up by marketing morons to cater to their vision of what the public wants.
I'm here at Georgia Tech, and we use the BuzzCard for pretty much everything. There are still physical locks on our doors, but we use it for meals, to verify our identities for finals, to purchase things at bookstores, purchase things from vending machines, you name it. I've got $3.78 on my BuzzCard right now, so I'm not too worried. If our BookStore gets shafted by people buying thousands of dollars of equiptment with fake money, then I couldn't really care less. The company is going to eat it in the lnog run anyway.
B-52's: Taking the 'Fun' Out of 'Fundamentalism' since 1952
>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh, you mean they bombed Bob Jones University already?
A corporation is preventing you from doing something, which is their right according to law.
>>>>>>>>>
Since when? Think about what you just said.
I've used VB for several years. While Visual Studio has a good debugger, there is nothing I need that gdb doesn't do. Beyond that, I do C++, and Visual C++ 6.x is just borked when it comes to standards complience. All the debugging in the world won't help you if it doesn't compile. Now, VS 2003 should fix most issues, but g++ has been very complient for years now, and VS 2003 isn't even out yet.
Sigh. So when KHTML is used in OS X, it's "blazingly fast!" and when it's used in Linux it's "slow/inefficient/X sucks" (yes, I know that last one isn't an adjective, but it appears that most people don't...)
Well shucks. If you do nothing with your computer, why do you assume nobody else does either? I, for one, would like to get a Mac. I have no ties to stupid Windows software, and could switch on a whim. I could even run Linux on it :) But a Mac is too slow for the work I do, and too expensive for the poor performance you get. I'm sure there are a lot of other people in my position (in relation to Apple's small market share), and Apple is losing a lot of potential users by not being competitive in the speed department.
g++ is decently fast. ICC is about 50% slower, on my machine, than g++ doing an optimized build. Precompiled headers would help a lot, but wouldn't make things more than twice as fast. C++ is just a very slow language to compile, especially when you throw complex templates at it.
Maybe on the processor end, but (finally!) bus bandwidth is increasing like anything. We're already up to nearly 5GB/sec sustained bandwidth (from the benchmarks for this sucker)! That's almost as much as the GeForce4Go 440 in my laptop! These recent changes are a whole lot m ore interesting than 100MHz jumps in CPU speed.
Sigh. This happens every time hardware advances, and every time, I have to post to refute this shit. People have been saying "do we need more hardware speed?" since the 386 came out. Back when the Pentium Pro was king of the hill, a guy in PC Magazine (Dvorak I think) refuted this idea. And people are still doing it! No, computers are not fast enough. I do things every day that need lots of power.
1) Compiling. On my 2GHz P4 with 640MB of RAM, it took GCC well over 4 hours to compile kdebindings-3.1 A compile of KDE as a whole takes 6-7 hours. Even a simple 900 line C++ program I'm working on at the moment takes almost 10 seconds to compile.
2) 3D. Even the latest 3D PC games don't like all that realistic. Notably absent are realistic lighting and liberal use of curved surfaces. In an interview with Boot magazine, David Kirk (chief scientist at NVIDIA) once said something along the lines of (don't remember it exactly, it was in 1998): there is tremendous potential for growth in 3D. 'You want to be able to render a tree so well that it's indistinguishable from reality. Then, you want to be able to render a tree so fantastic that it couldn't possibly exist in real life, but is believable because of how well rendered it is.' Beyond that, 3D modeling is still a huge potential market for more power.
3) Scientific computing. It's not unusual for a simulation, even a simple one, to take hours. I remember that a X-ray diffraction project I did in school once took several minutes to process *each frame* on a 1.5GHz Athlon. When computers get fast enough that you can run that simulation in real time, and watch the diffraction patterns change with changes in the crystal, then computers will be fast enough.
4) Mathematics. Computational mathematics is very big, and there are tons of problems that take hours to solve on current computers.
So no, computers are not fast enough. They might be, if all you do is surf the internet and run Word, but a lot of people in the real world have real (demanding) work to do with their computers.
If you have no reason to use it, then you probably shouldn't be using it. Don't fix what isn't broke. On the other hand, there are a lot of reasons to use Linux, if you have the right usage patterns. Why I use Linux.
:)
1) I program. Development tools (especially GCC) are better on the Linux side, and free to boot. I don't like IDE's I prefer a bunch of xterms and VIM. Sure I could do the same thing in Windows, but Cygwin is a little too laggy for my taste (fork() is really slow).
2) My gaming is limited to a few Linux games (NWN, Quake), a few older WINE-able Windows games (CounterStrike, StarCraft), and PSX emulators. They all work fine enough in Linux to suit me. For real gaming, I turn to my Gamecube, which I like better than 99% of PC games anyway
3) I've got a lot of freedom to choose software file formats. My usage of MS Office formats isn't anything that KWord or (in a pinch) OpenOffice can't handle. Usually, all my communication with the outside world is done with standard file formats like PDF, HTML, etc.
4) I run Mathematica and Matlab on occasion, which have (cheap!) Linux student versions.
5) I do 3D modeling, and SideFX has an Apprentice version of Houdini available for Linux.
Other than that, I do the same stuff everyone else does. I listen to MP3s on JuK (a KDE jukebox), I talk with my friends on AIM, send funny pictures over the school network, the usual. Since I'm used to Linux, and not very used to Windows (I stopped using it around when XP came out) my workflow is a lot faster, and the tweekability of KDE allows me to optimize the computer to my work habits much more than I can in Windows.
Damn. The monkey's out of the cage again. Somebody get the man some Ritalin!
Heh heh. That's what Real did with RealPlayer 4 and 5 :)
destabilize one of the most politically stable regions of the world.
>>>>>>>>>
And this is the kicker. Destabilization causes decades of turmoil in many of these countries. Colonialism in Africa ended half a century ago, and they are *still* trying to get over the f*ckups it caused. Of course, it's not like we'll ever find out about the true cost of this war over in the US. The American media just doesn't have the attention span necessary to follow up this stuff.
Judging from the past 20 years, that figure would be in the thousands.
>>>>>>>>
Yet, the sum total of the deaths related to the Gulf War and subsequent imposition of sanctions works out to a whole lot more than that, even from fairly conservative estimates. According to UN* sources, the death toll every month due to sanctions is in the thousands.
And yes, I agree that it is really hard to get liberals to answer questions. Unfortunately, the stuffy logical people also tend to be conservative. We also have far more blondes over here in liberal-land. And guess who are the people that show up on TV the most?
PS> And before I hear a "UN bias" comment, I'd point out that the UN is not some monolithic anti-US entity. While there are anti-US elements in certain delegations, most of the UN consists of independent organizations, and these are the ones that do most of the research. It's kinda like how governments will try to compete in scientific research, while the scientists themselves are more interested in the actual work.
Iraq actually went through a revolution of the people and ended up with the government they have.
>>>>>>>>>
And by Iraq I mean Iran. The students revolted and implemeneted the current government.
Do you realize that you're vision of reality is totally clouded by the culture and time you're from. Democracy is good as far as we're concerned. That was not true 1000 years ago, and will probably not be true 1000 years from now. Even right now, there are many countries that don't like democracy in it's present form. Hell, even most Americans don't like democracy the way the founding father's have defined it. Note all of the "moral values" laws that prevade US states. They're totally against the principles of the Constitution, but the government, at some level, bows to the cultural values of it's people, even if it's against its ideals.
>>>>>>>>
We help them develop something remotely similar to what we've got. What we've got, despite the many, many problems, is still one of the most effective and balanced systems of government.
>>>>>>>>>
Almost all of the governments in the Middle East are conservative, theocracies. Yet, most of them were chosen by the people who live there. Iraq actually went through a revolution of the people and ended up with the government they have. I don't like this form of government. But I was raised in the US, so what do I know about what kind of government they should have? If the US was really looking out for the interests of the people, it would not impose a democratic government on them, but let them chose their own.
Besides, whenever the US get's involved in the destiny of another nation, it almost invariably messes things up. We helped the Afghans free themselves from the Soviet Union by giving weapons to the Muhajideen. Fast forward 10 years, and the same people turn into the Taliban, armed with the weapons we gave them. The first couple of times, you can say that we couldn't possibly have predicted that it would happen. After a while, you have to get the picture that maybe interfering with other nations isn't such a good idea.
Check out their statement:
:: signatures clipped ::
A sizeable group of developers from the two leading free software
projects developing desktops based on the X Window System, KDE and
GNOME, have been discussing the current situation among themselves
and decided to draft and release this document.
We acknowledge the dedication of the XFree86 project in providing us a
free and innovative implementation of the X11 industry standard,
something we benefit from on a daily basis. Therefore, we want to
share our joint point of view with the community.
1. XFree86's recent technical progress, culminating in the 4.3
release, brought significant advancements to the X desktop. Prior
X Window System implementations were lagging behind the needs of
modern desktop users.
Cursor theming, simplified font configuration, dynamic screen
resizing, and so on address long-overdue usability issues with X
desktops. XFree86's robust solutions in these areas have been
invaluable.
However, the work is not done. Our goal is to provide the
community with desktop systems far beyond what anyone offers
today. We are ready to take advantage of an X Window System
implementation that continues to innovate.
2. GNOME and KDE have two interests in X:
- We would like to have a single organization where X innovation
occurs. By innovation, we mean the definition of new APIs,
specifications, and features - new additions to the foundations
that KDE and GNOME rely on.
- We would like to have a frequently-released, robust, stable,
open source implementation of these APIs, specifications, and
features.
We are explicitly distinguishing innovation from implementation,
because standards should be adequate to allow multiple
fully-interoperable implementations.
Within the development organization responsible for defining and
crafting new features to be adopted as standards, innovation
should happen in the open, with all affected parties able to
participate early in the process.
3. We do not want to take sides on the recent political wrangling of
who did what when and who should be in charge. Our hope is that as
a community we can find a way to involve everyone in X's
development and move forward with solving technical challenges.
4. It makes sense to us if the organization responsible for X
innovation also develops the most widely used open source
reference implementation. This ensures an emphasis on working
code, and provides a pool of active technical expertise.
5. We would like to see this forum work toward a unified
organization, governed by active contributors, that implements,
deploys, and standardizes new X innovations.
We do not want to take an a priori position on how this
organization should be organized or governed - that is a
conversation we're trying to start, rather than one we're trying
to end. We trust and will support the X community as they work to
address this issue.
You might try to be more polite to the people who are coding you software for free... Other than that, I really don't know. The thing is, the exact source of these problems are still being worked out. The stuff I told you is really too high level to actually serve as a guide. To really get deeper info that people can change code over, testing and profiling needs to be done to see precisely what the problematic behavior is. Hopefully, it's this sort of testing and profiling that Keith and friends can do over at xwin.org.
In response to your point 3 -- XF86Config is going away in 5.0. Already, X - configure will automatically create a (usually) correct XF86Config. In 5.0, this will become the default, and XF86Config will be optional.
You can't. There are problems somewhere in the chain, but it's not in X. Far more common is poorly optimized applications. For example, right now I'm using KDE. Certain applications, even very widget-heavy, complex applications like Qt designer, resize very smoothly. For example, on my GeForce4Go, copying a 500x500 pixmap to a window (x11perf -copypixwin500) can be done at 2300 fps, or about 575 megapixels per second. For a general purpose display API, that's really fast, about 1/3 the total memory bandwidth of the graphics accelerator. But when resizing KDE Kontrol Panel, the image, not much bigger than 500x500, redraws at maybe 4 or 5 fps. The problem is not the raw speed of X, but how the application responds to resize requests. A great many X apps have the problem that they handle resize events very poorly, so when users who are just trying to Linux for a short-while try to test speed (by doing the usual resize window-quickly "test") they get a very misleading impression. Meanwhile, users who use the system all day (and almost never resize windows in that manner) don't notice stuff like that and wonder why anyone things it's slow. Another example. When I open a menu in Konqueror, and start the settings panel, the menu will sometimes go away and the area underneath won't redraw until almost a second later. The redraw is the matter of a single bit-blit. We've already established that X can do those really quickly. The problem is not that X isn't fast enough, but the application is trying to load the settings panel (waiting on the disk usually) and isn't responding to redraw requests in the meantime. There are ways to fix these problems:
1) Add some synchronization between apps and the window manager, so they resize smoothly. OS X has something like this: the window frame won't resize faster than the window contents can redraw. Since Quartz in general is little slow (because all drawing, even in QE is done in software), this leads to very jerky behavior, but is much more "elegant."
2) Multithread apps. This is the big one. A properly multithreaded GUI can respond to high-priority user events without being blocked on low-priority I/O events. It was only recently that Linux got threadsafe GUI libraries (Qt 3.x and Gtk+ 2.0) and large parts of KDE still aren't threadsafe.
3) Optimize drawing routines. Take Konqueror vs Internet Explorer. Try doing the "resize" test on the two. Each frame of resize animation is very time consuming. Thanks to CSS and other modern HTML, the *entire* page has to be laid out each frame. The algorithms for doing this in IE are much more mature than the algorithms for doing the same in Konqueror.
Um, they were testing network communication here. They found out that network performance was less than optimal because of various reasons. It had nothing about local cases.