Hey, I am not in principle opposed to nuclear power to be deployed as means of propulsion but there are some things that need to be looked into first. The most important one of course is how to stop a Challenger like spectacular blow-up of the ship due to whatever reason from dispersing the fuel over large area during takeoff from Earth and thus causing major economical/envriomental and possibly international disaster. I have no clue what is involved but unless someone is able to come up with a viable and convincing safety plan, no voting public will let their politicos allow this sort of thing.
Well in your illustration of a ball rolling on a highway, if you assume there is no friction (ala space) and you had a puff of "wind" blowing from the side for a brief moment (ala burn of an engine) the ball would have went off the road completely no matter how small the wind force or how short its duration sideways. Once a velocity vector perpendicular to the path of travel is acquired, under no-friction conditions it would be there forever and thus the ball would continue at an angle to its original course with its new composite velocity vector being the sum of the old vector parallel to the road and the new perpendicular one. If applied to the orbit inclination this would result in the orbit's plane rotating with the speed proportional to that perpendicular velocity vector. I assume some other physical phenomena having to do with the angular momentum of the ship on its orbit would come to play, but I am not sure of their impact.
What you are describing in regards to orbit inclination would be shown in your example as a situation where you blow a puff of wind at the ball and as a result the ball just keeps changing changes lanes on the road as long as you keep blowing and then continues down the road on a course still parallel to the curb.
This is what I do not understand. What happens to the out of plane momentum vector of the ship that is acquired by applying an out of plane thrust vector if your example is correct? In my case the plane would rotate and the momentum is preserved. In yours it somehow gets "consumed" requiring continuous expenditure of energy to keep the plane rotating....
Thanks for the link, unfortunately this does not explain much. Does this refer to change of the inclination with one continuous burn? If that were true then what happens to the velocity vector perpendicular to the orbital plane after the burn is over? The ship just "snaps" into the new orbit like into into some road rut? If this what they say was true, that would mean that if I were to fire a ship's engine perpendicular to the orbital plane and then turned it of I would come to a grinding halt like I was trying to slide on my butt on sand. I mean this makes little sense. I am going to look for some real formulas that describe this stuff.
I just had a detailed discussion somewhere else on this thread about the mechanics of changing the orbit for the Soyuz. The Soyuz was docked at higher energy orbit and had enough fuel to completely de-orbit as in deccellerating all the way down to atmospheric re-entry. It is required of it to be any kind of life-boat. That means it could have used that propellant to do a partial burn to change orbits down to the orbit the shuttle was at. The main objective would be re-supply and prolongation of the shuttle's survival capability while awaiting rescue so the crew space was less important then the cargo it could deliver from ISS.
I agree, with what you say in principle, but the situation could have been made less critical if there was some way to re-supply the shuttle. Being in higher energy orbit, the Soyuz of course would have to do a burn to slow down to the lower orbit the Shuttle was on but as I said earlier it must have had more propellant then needed for that since it was meant to do a burn all the way to de-orbit and that would make the shuttle orbit a mere stop over for it. The inclination altering manouvers would be the trick and I really dont know what kind of issues are really in that part other then to have a feeling that it was within the realm of possible if done with reliance on altering the inclination slowly over many orbits.
Anyhow, even if I am wrong and you forget the Soyuz altogether and come up with some other means of sustaining the crew for long period of time it would likely do the trick too. All I am saying is that all these possibilities were lost by a mere strike of a pen of some managerial type.
As to future missions at IIS inclinations, sure it makes sense, not that the shuttle fleet has much of a future as it is but thats entire another discussion.
That is why I assumed the Soyuz docked at ISS was the only one viable at a very short notice and since it was in higher orbit it could have made it though the manouver would be tricky. The idea would be just to get enough supplies for the shuttle to last long enough. Actually my main point was just to show a possibly viable rescue plan as a contrast to people who just swallow the "nothing could be done" line of appologists. Maybe it would have failed but I am sure if the managers at NASA were not so dismissive of the potential problem and went into the rescue mode some other viable ideas would have been brought forth.
I am fuzzy on this: Isn't changing the inclination merely sideways motion of the craft in orbit? If you apply small perpendicular acceleration to the orbital path and thus end up with some perpendicular velocity vector, wont that cause a change in inclination with each subsequent orbit? As to the crew size, I never suggested evacuating all crew members, merely using the Soyuz as a vehicle to deliver supplies/chemical oxygen exchangers etc and maybe evacuating 1-2 crew members to reduce the rate of use of consumables. The idea was to allow the shuttle to remain in orbit for a long period of time while a proper rescue operation was mounted.
Now thats a bunch of royal crock. Not only does a draft army treat you like total shit because the officers know they got you by the balls with no recourse, it teaches you humiliation, abuse, and to be a mindless cannon fodder. Just ask anyone form the countries where such barbaric crap is practiced. The draft army and "doing your part" come only in the event of an actual invasion by an enemy army whereby there is no dispute about moral justifications and the very existence of our country is at risk. It does not come to play in some right-wing neocon thinly disguised imperial escapades whereby "doing your part" is a synonym for "getting raped anally and possibly taking a bullet for the good of the wealthy elite and bible-thumping religious nuts". I love Canada precisely because it has a principled stand on such nonsense. Your difficulties with too many social services in our country can be easilly solved. Go south and enlist.
Ha, Batman I am not but I will venture to riddle you this: If the Soyuz has enough propellant to de-orbit with some spare amount as ships always do, what stops it from performing its desgned function in 2 stages? As far as I know the engine is fully controllable and not some solid propellant type that cannot be turned off when lit. So it all comes down to manuouvering to align the orbit angles which I admit would be probably slow and complicated but we are talking efforts to rescue 7 people here.
The ISS orbits at a different angle relative to the axis of the earth. It would take more fuel to change the orbit of a soyuz to the angle that columbia was in than they carry.
Now I know you are bullshitting. Only the changes of orbits with major differences of kinetic energies of objects in them require large propellant use. The change of an angle could be accomplished with minimal propellant use albait slowly, by changing the angle by a few degrees you would end up with a sideway motion whereby each new orbit is moves you closer to the required one. Then you perform a breaking manouver to stop the sideway motion. If you want to expend minimal amount of fuel it will just take many orbits to align with the desired one. No major changes of kinetic energy of the ship in orbit are required. As I said, major fuel expense is only needed to lower or raise the orbit.
Here we go again. So you are telling me that a Soyuz in a higher orbit, full of propellant (it is basically an equivalent of an Apollo command module with a honking big engine for its size) cant lower its orbit? How the hell would it be then capable of de-orbitting? I call BS. And who is talking about dockings? Didnt the CFIB report mention crew transfer by tether? Even if the orange pressure suits could not be used for full EVA (I assume short duration emergency transfers only) then the shuttle had fully operational airlock. What stops one dude from the ISS to get his butt in the Soyuz along with the supplies and transfer them to the shuttle's airlock along with one of their EVA suits to boot and then wait for someone from the shuttle to get it on and get out. Maybe even help a third do a quick transfer in pressure suit. The 2 or 3 of them get in the Soyuz and off they go to land wherever flat. I mean there are always options. Only when people fail and look for justifications for that failure is when minds seem to close tight and "nothing could have been done" becomes a mantra.
This is precisely the kind of "nothing could be done" assumptions about stuff that are used by appologists after the fact. That is because people assume that you have to move the shuttle to the ISS that it cant be done. Well I just gave an answer to this problem earlier in this thread. You move the supplies from the ISS to the shuttle by means of the Soyuz life-boat. And as far as CFIB report was concerned, EVA was apparently possible. I assume using the orange pressure suits or what not, they were talking about crew transfer to Atlantis via a tether.
When replying to the post above I mentioned they could have tried to use the "life-boat" Soyuz at docked to the ISS to take 3 people off right away. After I hit "submit", another thought crossed my mind, they could have stuffed the Soyuz with all the extra chemical oxigen exchanger cannisters and water and what not spare stuff they could get off ISS and send that along. In the best case you could have had 3 people off the shuttle reducing the rate of use consumables by 42% and a whole pile of new suplies on top of this in one go, thus allowing the remaining 4 to hang around for months on end in there! This would certainly be good enough to get Atlantis ready.
Yes but you forget that the Russians have a pile of those ole good disposable and automated Progress resuply ships for the ISS in the pipeline and could have kicked some of those the way of the shuttle floating in wait of rescue since the shuttle would be easier to reach then the ISS those ships are meant for. Hell, they might even have some of those Soyuz ships that could have been launched since they are made on an assembly line and there are always some in varying stages of completion around. Speaking of which there is a 3-seater Soyuz parked at the ISS that might have been capable of allowing 3 people from the shuttle to board it and land in it since it is probably capable of dis-engaging and lowering its orbit to match the shuttle which also had some amount of fuel to manouver and was fully operational. Granted, all very complicated/risky manouvers and all that jazz but it beats what happened. If there is a will there is a way. Manageriots not listening to engineers who knew this shit would happen is what killed those astronauts. Not to mention manageriots with a chip on their shoulder and their "pride" to protect.
I used to have a Tivo and a DirectTV receiver. I ditched cable ages ago. At first I kept watching the dish channels but ended up doing it less and less. So I stopped screwing with the cards and went back to broadcast. And then watched that less and less. Why? There is nothing on cable, satellite or broadcast to watch but some more and more imbecillic drivel. Science channels are now Demolition Derby and Weddings channels. Everywhere else you get to see which trailer trash will vote what cretin of what island. So now my TV is used once every few months or so to play an occasional DVD. I discovered that my life is better without TV. For news there is the Net (google news service rocks) and press. For entertaiment you get to participate in real life with friends, books and you can always play computer games.
That has nothing to do with X but everything to do with the 2.4 and earlier kernels task scheduler. A major effort went into the 2.6 task scheduler to lessen this problem significantly. Basically the task scheduler is unable to manage the interactivity levels that are expected by the users of GUI interfaces like X. This problem would have occured should you run on a text-only terminal although would be less visible since terminal screen updates are much lesser then those that X has to perform in graphical mode. So as I suspected we are talking about two different things and as usual X gets the blame for a problem with some completely unrelated sub-system. Further on this note, Windows ilk of OS' has a special hack in the task scheduler which is intended to make the top level windows appear much more interactive by artificially increasing their associated tasks' scheduling priority which creates an appearance of greater interactivity under heavy CPU or I/O loads.
My experience (and it would seem many others here on slashdot feel the same) does not confirm what you are describing. I use WindowsMaker and experience no lag of any sort on any of my systems. Window dragging/resizing even with the contents being redrawn is snappy and I have absolutely no complaints about that part. Some applications (like Mozilla) are slower to start then others but thats due to their massive use of shared libraries which are being loaded at that time. So I am not sure what are you talking about, perheaps there is something wrong with your X configuration or the hardware you are using is not fully supported. In the latter case X falls back on non-accelerated blitting mode which would significantly reduce speed of drawing of any sort of items on the screen. This would be equivalent of using, say, Windows XP with "Generic VGA" compatibility device drivers instead of the proper drivers for the hardware and which would make XP draw windows really slowly just like a non-accellerated X server would.
Well I dont have a lot of time to be investigating this in detail but there are some other aspects of X architecture that that poster above and many others object to. Most of communication between applications and video hardware (all on one machine) go along the path of:
The context switches occur when entering or leaving kernel space. If one were to remove the network layer completely then what I said earlier applies (I assume thats what the poster was implying). If you were to retain the network layer and move the X starting at the initial socket interface into the kernel you would save on 2 context switches per call (assuming best case scenario). The penalty however would be extreme in the sense that X would become essentially as difficult to maintain and debug as kernel-space device drivers. Much worse actually since the X server is much more complex then any driver and lack of any memory separation would make X extremely dangerous to the rest of the kernel and introduce whole new class of security issues.
This whole discussion is almost pointless anyhow since the context switches in X even with the network layer constitute minimal overhead. Contrary to the popular belief, context switches, unless used in insane ways, do not introduce significant performance problems. Just about any application makes hundreds of them per second since any disk or network or terminal I/O for example requires them.
What most opponents of X take issue against is the network layer. And it is precisely the network layer that makes X a killer enterprise system. Also on a local socket the overhead is truly minimal since the kernel does "copy-in-place" transfers. As many other people here point out the preceived performance "problem" with X is in fact a result of sub-par performance of complex GUI toolkits found in behemoth environments like KDE or GNOME with feature-sets so complex that they come with their own distributed common object architectures like DCOM. X gets blamed for their poor performance, and no amount of pointing out that much cleaner X applications run with lightning speeds on the same very computers and even over the wire using X networking layer seems to convince the opponents. So we end up with positively looney ideas like moving X to the kernel or to video card hardware etc, while all along KDE and GNOME get bigger and more convoluted and consume more and more system resources performing vast amounts of redudnant and inefficient X operations (mostly repetetive bitmap transfers).
X has its own problems, mostly related to legacy architectural decisions and font handling but these are being solved in their own ways and in the long run the X system will deliver all the fancy aye candy at a very good performance while retaining its great advantage of built-in networking layer.
Yes I thought I understood... that is until contradicted it yourself. Which threw me back in for a loop. I am beginning to suspect that you do not care what you say or if it makes sense as long as you can be the last poster in this thread. Victory? Mod points? You seem to think this is some sort of football match. These things are completely irrellevant to me, what matters is that I put forth a view that I believe in and which is not getting enough attention. And I will respond to any counter-arguments, such as yours, as long as they are sane. Since now you are not making any sense whatsoever, unless you come up with something more to add to this then talking about "victory" I shall grant you this what you seem to want the most and so after this message you can be the last poster. I really do hope that it brings you a lot of joy because if this sort of trivia is what pleases you I am afraid there are lot more essential things that forever escape your grasp.
Nice try what? You are replying to me with statements that contradict each other. And when I try to get you to tell me what the heck do you mean you go "Nice try." What's next? Are you going to start saying: "When did you start feeling this way?", "Tell me more about it", "Do you like parrots?" like some half-baked AI generated Dr.Freud...
So now you claim Opera is free cash or not? Again?
It really is hard to determine that I use the term 'buy' exclusively when I have not even used it here.
You quoted someone else and then commented on it in a way that led me to this conclusion. I admit that is just an impression I got but otherwise your entire previous argument descends into complete illogical mess.
What made me say that was how you treat advertising in any form as an evil force that must be eliminated.
It is only an evil force when the advertisers believe that ads have no cost to the consumer and anyone should absorb any amount of them willingly and not complain and so "ad-supported" software becomes described as "free".
I would also like to point out that your writing seems to be turning into some incomprehensible ramblings which I cannot decipher, full of "blah blah blah"s and "my mod points are bigger then yours"...
I now see what you meant and come to the conclusion that we speak different languages. In my world: "buy = pay = money = any equivalent of money". In yours you buy things only with cash. When I use word "buy" I mean it that it costs something and you get to pay for it and so it is not free. I believe that is what the original poster meant. You use it to exclusively indicate that you are going to use cash/credit card. And therein lies the root of the confusion... or does it? You kept insisting later on that my stance on watching ads being a form payment is "extremist"...
You're right. After you asked me about it, I replied and explained my view, yet you replied to that as if you never bothered reading that post
I went back this thread to see if there was a point where perheaps I missed something. At no time I see you indicating that Opera is not free. All I see you insisting on is that "it does not cost a dime" or that watching ads does not bother you since they are placed in some otherwise unused spot. And I keep insisting that watching ads is a form of payment that negates your "it does not cost a dime". It does not matter if the payment is actual cash upfront, monthly payments or the brain power/time that you expend ignoring the ads. If you want to say that you pay in some other forms of payment, you say "you pay for it with watching ads" or "there are alternative forms of payment" or "in addition to cash there are other options". If you are not specific noone can figure out what you mean. "It does not cost a dime" implies free from any form of payment since the whole point of money is to facilitate measurement of payments in a universal standard.
I am truly amazed at your thinking. You post a statement that can only be interpreted as I did, realize that you did not think it through and instead of correcting it you attempt briefly to defend the undefensible. Realizing the futility of it then you proceed to ad hominem attacks and since that does not work either you are taking your ball and going home.
The punch line that I am probably going to put in my sig is "I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but not an argument". Marvellous! You are willing to discuss things as long as everyone agrees with you! Man, why did I not think of this! Its stupendous! It will change forever discussion forums and blogs like Slashdot! Thank you for this trully revolutionary idea!
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I am not in principle opposed to nuclear power to be deployed as means of propulsion but there are some things that need to be looked into first. The most important one of course is how to stop a Challenger like spectacular blow-up of the ship due to whatever reason from dispersing the fuel over large area during takeoff from Earth and thus causing major economical/envriomental and possibly international disaster. I have no clue what is involved but unless someone is able to come up with a viable and convincing safety plan, no voting public will let their politicos allow this sort of thing.
What you are describing in regards to orbit inclination would be shown in your example as a situation where you blow a puff of wind at the ball and as a result the ball just keeps changing changes lanes on the road as long as you keep blowing and then continues down the road on a course still parallel to the curb.
This is what I do not understand. What happens to the out of plane momentum vector of the ship that is acquired by applying an out of plane thrust vector if your example is correct? In my case the plane would rotate and the momentum is preserved. In yours it somehow gets "consumed" requiring continuous expenditure of energy to keep the plane rotating....
Thanks for the link, unfortunately this does not explain much. Does this refer to change of the inclination with one continuous burn? If that were true then what happens to the velocity vector perpendicular to the orbital plane after the burn is over? The ship just "snaps" into the new orbit like into into some road rut? If this what they say was true, that would mean that if I were to fire a ship's engine perpendicular to the orbital plane and then turned it of I would come to a grinding halt like I was trying to slide on my butt on sand. I mean this makes little sense. I am going to look for some real formulas that describe this stuff.
Please refer to this disucssion I had,
I just had a detailed discussion somewhere else on this thread about the mechanics of changing the orbit for the Soyuz. The Soyuz was docked at higher energy orbit and had enough fuel to completely de-orbit as in deccellerating all the way down to atmospheric re-entry. It is required of it to be any kind of life-boat. That means it could have used that propellant to do a partial burn to change orbits down to the orbit the shuttle was at. The main objective would be re-supply and prolongation of the shuttle's survival capability while awaiting rescue so the crew space was less important then the cargo it could deliver from ISS.
Anyhow, even if I am wrong and you forget the Soyuz altogether and come up with some other means of sustaining the crew for long period of time it would likely do the trick too. All I am saying is that all these possibilities were lost by a mere strike of a pen of some managerial type.
As to future missions at IIS inclinations, sure it makes sense, not that the shuttle fleet has much of a future as it is but thats entire another discussion.
That is why I assumed the Soyuz docked at ISS was the only one viable at a very short notice and since it was in higher orbit it could have made it though the manouver would be tricky. The idea would be just to get enough supplies for the shuttle to last long enough. Actually my main point was just to show a possibly viable rescue plan as a contrast to people who just swallow the "nothing could be done" line of appologists. Maybe it would have failed but I am sure if the managers at NASA were not so dismissive of the potential problem and went into the rescue mode some other viable ideas would have been brought forth.
I am fuzzy on this: Isn't changing the inclination merely sideways motion of the craft in orbit? If you apply small perpendicular acceleration to the orbital path and thus end up with some perpendicular velocity vector, wont that cause a change in inclination with each subsequent orbit? As to the crew size, I never suggested evacuating all crew members, merely using the Soyuz as a vehicle to deliver supplies/chemical oxygen exchangers etc and maybe evacuating 1-2 crew members to reduce the rate of use of consumables. The idea was to allow the shuttle to remain in orbit for a long period of time while a proper rescue operation was mounted.
Now thats a bunch of royal crock. Not only does a draft army treat you like total shit because the officers know they got you by the balls with no recourse, it teaches you humiliation, abuse, and to be a mindless cannon fodder. Just ask anyone form the countries where such barbaric crap is practiced. The draft army and "doing your part" come only in the event of an actual invasion by an enemy army whereby there is no dispute about moral justifications and the very existence of our country is at risk. It does not come to play in some right-wing neocon thinly disguised imperial escapades whereby "doing your part" is a synonym for "getting raped anally and possibly taking a bullet for the good of the wealthy elite and bible-thumping religious nuts". I love Canada precisely because it has a principled stand on such nonsense. Your difficulties with too many social services in our country can be easilly solved. Go south and enlist.
Ha, Batman I am not but I will venture to riddle you this: If the Soyuz has enough propellant to de-orbit with some spare amount as ships always do, what stops it from performing its desgned function in 2 stages? As far as I know the engine is fully controllable and not some solid propellant type that cannot be turned off when lit. So it all comes down to manuouvering to align the orbit angles which I admit would be probably slow and complicated but we are talking efforts to rescue 7 people here.
Now I know you are bullshitting. Only the changes of orbits with major differences of kinetic energies of objects in them require large propellant use. The change of an angle could be accomplished with minimal propellant use albait slowly, by changing the angle by a few degrees you would end up with a sideway motion whereby each new orbit is moves you closer to the required one. Then you perform a breaking manouver to stop the sideway motion. If you want to expend minimal amount of fuel it will just take many orbits to align with the desired one. No major changes of kinetic energy of the ship in orbit are required. As I said, major fuel expense is only needed to lower or raise the orbit.
Here we go again. So you are telling me that a Soyuz in a higher orbit, full of propellant (it is basically an equivalent of an Apollo command module with a honking big engine for its size) cant lower its orbit? How the hell would it be then capable of de-orbitting? I call BS. And who is talking about dockings? Didnt the CFIB report mention crew transfer by tether? Even if the orange pressure suits could not be used for full EVA (I assume short duration emergency transfers only) then the shuttle had fully operational airlock. What stops one dude from the ISS to get his butt in the Soyuz along with the supplies and transfer them to the shuttle's airlock along with one of their EVA suits to boot and then wait for someone from the shuttle to get it on and get out. Maybe even help a third do a quick transfer in pressure suit. The 2 or 3 of them get in the Soyuz and off they go to land wherever flat. I mean there are always options. Only when people fail and look for justifications for that failure is when minds seem to close tight and "nothing could have been done" becomes a mantra.
This is precisely the kind of "nothing could be done" assumptions about stuff that are used by appologists after the fact. That is because people assume that you have to move the shuttle to the ISS that it cant be done. Well I just gave an answer to this problem earlier in this thread. You move the supplies from the ISS to the shuttle by means of the Soyuz life-boat. And as far as CFIB report was concerned, EVA was apparently possible. I assume using the orange pressure suits or what not, they were talking about crew transfer to Atlantis via a tether.
When replying to the post above I mentioned they could have tried to use the "life-boat" Soyuz at docked to the ISS to take 3 people off right away. After I hit "submit", another thought crossed my mind, they could have stuffed the Soyuz with all the extra chemical oxigen exchanger cannisters and water and what not spare stuff they could get off ISS and send that along. In the best case you could have had 3 people off the shuttle reducing the rate of use consumables by 42% and a whole pile of new suplies on top of this in one go, thus allowing the remaining 4 to hang around for months on end in there! This would certainly be good enough to get Atlantis ready.
Yes but you forget that the Russians have a pile of those ole good disposable and automated Progress resuply ships for the ISS in the pipeline and could have kicked some of those the way of the shuttle floating in wait of rescue since the shuttle would be easier to reach then the ISS those ships are meant for. Hell, they might even have some of those Soyuz ships that could have been launched since they are made on an assembly line and there are always some in varying stages of completion around. Speaking of which there is a 3-seater Soyuz parked at the ISS that might have been capable of allowing 3 people from the shuttle to board it and land in it since it is probably capable of dis-engaging and lowering its orbit to match the shuttle which also had some amount of fuel to manouver and was fully operational. Granted, all very complicated/risky manouvers and all that jazz but it beats what happened. If there is a will there is a way. Manageriots not listening to engineers who knew this shit would happen is what killed those astronauts. Not to mention manageriots with a chip on their shoulder and their "pride" to protect.
I used to have a Tivo and a DirectTV receiver. I ditched cable ages ago. At first I kept watching the dish channels but ended up doing it less and less. So I stopped screwing with the cards and went back to broadcast. And then watched that less and less. Why? There is nothing on cable, satellite or broadcast to watch but some more and more imbecillic drivel. Science channels are now Demolition Derby and Weddings channels. Everywhere else you get to see which trailer trash will vote what cretin of what island. So now my TV is used once every few months or so to play an occasional DVD. I discovered that my life is better without TV. For news there is the Net (google news service rocks) and press. For entertaiment you get to participate in real life with friends, books and you can always play computer games.
That has nothing to do with X but everything to do with the 2.4 and earlier kernels task scheduler. A major effort went into the 2.6 task scheduler to lessen this problem significantly. Basically the task scheduler is unable to manage the interactivity levels that are expected by the users of GUI interfaces like X. This problem would have occured should you run on a text-only terminal although would be less visible since terminal screen updates are much lesser then those that X has to perform in graphical mode. So as I suspected we are talking about two different things and as usual X gets the blame for a problem with some completely unrelated sub-system. Further on this note, Windows ilk of OS' has a special hack in the task scheduler which is intended to make the top level windows appear much more interactive by artificially increasing their associated tasks' scheduling priority which creates an appearance of greater interactivity under heavy CPU or I/O loads.
My experience (and it would seem many others here on slashdot feel the same) does not confirm what you are describing. I use WindowsMaker and experience no lag of any sort on any of my systems. Window dragging/resizing even with the contents being redrawn is snappy and I have absolutely no complaints about that part. Some applications (like Mozilla) are slower to start then others but thats due to their massive use of shared libraries which are being loaded at that time. So I am not sure what are you talking about, perheaps there is something wrong with your X configuration or the hardware you are using is not fully supported. In the latter case X falls back on non-accelerated blitting mode which would significantly reduce speed of drawing of any sort of items on the screen. This would be equivalent of using, say, Windows XP with "Generic VGA" compatibility device drivers instead of the proper drivers for the hardware and which would make XP draw windows really slowly just like a non-accellerated X server would.
The context switches occur when entering or leaving kernel space. If one were to remove the network layer completely then what I said earlier applies (I assume thats what the poster was implying). If you were to retain the network layer and move the X starting at the initial socket interface into the kernel you would save on 2 context switches per call (assuming best case scenario). The penalty however would be extreme in the sense that X would become essentially as difficult to maintain and debug as kernel-space device drivers. Much worse actually since the X server is much more complex then any driver and lack of any memory separation would make X extremely dangerous to the rest of the kernel and introduce whole new class of security issues.
This whole discussion is almost pointless anyhow since the context switches in X even with the network layer constitute minimal overhead. Contrary to the popular belief, context switches, unless used in insane ways, do not introduce significant performance problems. Just about any application makes hundreds of them per second since any disk or network or terminal I/O for example requires them.
What most opponents of X take issue against is the network layer. And it is precisely the network layer that makes X a killer enterprise system. Also on a local socket the overhead is truly minimal since the kernel does "copy-in-place" transfers. As many other people here point out the preceived performance "problem" with X is in fact a result of sub-par performance of complex GUI toolkits found in behemoth environments like KDE or GNOME with feature-sets so complex that they come with their own distributed common object architectures like DCOM. X gets blamed for their poor performance, and no amount of pointing out that much cleaner X applications run with lightning speeds on the same very computers and even over the wire using X networking layer seems to convince the opponents. So we end up with positively looney ideas like moving X to the kernel or to video card hardware etc, while all along KDE and GNOME get bigger and more convoluted and consume more and more system resources performing vast amounts of redudnant and inefficient X operations (mostly repetetive bitmap transfers).
X has its own problems, mostly related to legacy architectural decisions and font handling but these are being solved in their own ways and in the long run the X system will deliver all the fancy aye candy at a very good performance while retaining its great advantage of built-in networking layer.
Yes I thought I understood... that is until contradicted it yourself. Which threw me back in for a loop. I am beginning to suspect that you do not care what you say or if it makes sense as long as you can be the last poster in this thread. Victory? Mod points? You seem to think this is some sort of football match. These things are completely irrellevant to me, what matters is that I put forth a view that I believe in and which is not getting enough attention. And I will respond to any counter-arguments, such as yours, as long as they are sane. Since now you are not making any sense whatsoever, unless you come up with something more to add to this then talking about "victory" I shall grant you this what you seem to want the most and so after this message you can be the last poster. I really do hope that it brings you a lot of joy because if this sort of trivia is what pleases you I am afraid there are lot more essential things that forever escape your grasp.
Nice try what? You are replying to me with statements that contradict each other. And when I try to get you to tell me what the heck do you mean you go "Nice try." What's next? Are you going to start saying: "When did you start feeling this way?", "Tell me more about it", "Do you like parrots?" like some half-baked AI generated Dr.Freud...
Too bad I said "doesn't cost a dime."
So now you claim Opera is free cash or not? Again?
It really is hard to determine that I use the term 'buy' exclusively when I have not even used it here.
You quoted someone else and then commented on it in a way that led me to this conclusion. I admit that is just an impression I got but otherwise your entire previous argument descends into complete illogical mess.
What made me say that was how you treat advertising in any form as an evil force that must be eliminated.
It is only an evil force when the advertisers believe that ads have no cost to the consumer and anyone should absorb any amount of them willingly and not complain and so "ad-supported" software becomes described as "free".
I would also like to point out that your writing seems to be turning into some incomprehensible ramblings which I cannot decipher, full of "blah blah blah"s and "my mod points are bigger then yours"...
I now see what you meant and come to the conclusion that we speak different languages. In my world: "buy = pay = money = any equivalent of money". In yours you buy things only with cash. When I use word "buy" I mean it that it costs something and you get to pay for it and so it is not free. I believe that is what the original poster meant. You use it to exclusively indicate that you are going to use cash/credit card. And therein lies the root of the confusion ... or does it? You kept insisting later on that my stance on watching ads being a form payment is "extremist"...
I went back this thread to see if there was a point where perheaps I missed something. At no time I see you indicating that Opera is not free. All I see you insisting on is that "it does not cost a dime" or that watching ads does not bother you since they are placed in some otherwise unused spot. And I keep insisting that watching ads is a form of payment that negates your "it does not cost a dime". It does not matter if the payment is actual cash upfront, monthly payments or the brain power/time that you expend ignoring the ads. If you want to say that you pay in some other forms of payment, you say "you pay for it with watching ads" or "there are alternative forms of payment" or "in addition to cash there are other options". If you are not specific noone can figure out what you mean. "It does not cost a dime" implies free from any form of payment since the whole point of money is to facilitate measurement of payments in a universal standard.
I am truly amazed at your thinking. You post a statement that can only be interpreted as I did, realize that you did not think it through and instead of correcting it you attempt briefly to defend the undefensible. Realizing the futility of it then you proceed to ad hominem attacks and since that does not work either you are taking your ball and going home.
The punch line that I am probably going to put in my sig is "I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but not an argument". Marvellous! You are willing to discuss things as long as everyone agrees with you! Man, why did I not think of this! Its stupendous! It will change forever discussion forums and blogs like Slashdot! Thank you for this trully revolutionary idea!