Any law prohibiting the sharing of information between people, IMO, is immoral and MUST be ignored.
Would you say that the Baath party members, abiding by Saddam Husseins laws torturing law breakers were right?
Any law is always subjected to general human values. And any law that limits the right to exchange information is a crime itself.
You may find my opinion radical, and alas it is not yet very generally accepted. But I am convinced that, once people see what the disastrous results of current "intellectual property" laws are, more and more opposition will come and one day we shall return to the situation like the 17th century where the concepts "patent", trade mark, copyright did not or hardly exist.
Without them our civilization rose, building on ideas of others the renaissance and rationalism got us out of the middle ages (when other monopolies on information existed). Now because of such laws we threaten to slide back into a new era of dark ages, where individuals have no rights and no knowledge, and a few entities can corrupt society, control politics (which merely in name is democratic).
We have been brainwashed that todays knowledge economy needs protection of intellectual property to exist and prosper, but have we seen any prove that it won't work without? I do not buy it any longer. I won't rest until all those who want to implement such laws ara safely locked away themselves, for they are the THIEVES themselves, of democracy and human rights.
And repeat: the concept of intellectual property, in whatever form, is immoral and in contradiction with human civilization.
All copyrights, patents and other limitation of sharing of information must go.
The fanatism of corporations and lobby groups, raping democracy by bribing politicians to get their way, shall result in counter fanatism. One day, I hope to see it, all such laws shall be gone.
Argh, still no radio built in. I need an AM/FM radio and don't want to always take 2 devices with me, how much would it cost to add a radio and satisfy the wish/requirement of many?
It has kept me from buying an Ipod until now. Once Irivers IHP-100 gets a larger harddisk (min. 15GB) I'll buy one of those.
Then the operating system should by standard take care of that and block them, at the users home and under his own control (if he wants). The ISP has nothing to do with that.
If windows came installed with a simple firewall that blocks any incoming connections and UDP by default when the origin is not 192.168.0.0 by default, these simple users would be safe and anyone could change it without being at the mercy of their ISP.
Once this barrier is taken, it won't take long until all incoming connections + UDP are banned, of course only to "protect the user".
This would make P2P impossible and reduce the internet to a mere client-server network. Anyone runing a "server" would be closely monitored by CIA, RIAA and other special interest groups, and would have to pay a premium.
Say goodbye to all P2P, to your own webserver, mailserver, to freenet, to accessing your own mailbox via secure IMAP, logging in remotely via ssh.
The opt out wold be step 1. Step 2 would be to remove the opt out because of "lack of customer demand" and to "protect users" because of mistakes they might make.
I am very sure this is what some industry groups are striving for: the internet must be reduced to a television network with bells and whistles. Just an extra channel for the industry to bombard you with propaganda, advertisements and other brainwashing, you are not supposed to talk back or publish independantly (you might threating a monopoly or spread terrorist information).
Don't give them a finger, they'll be eager to take your hand. Any restriction whatsoever must be vehemently fought at its roots!
Who cares about a legal gap? Does america care about a legal gap with europe? Why should europe adapt, what would be the benefit?
In the past an argument used to be that (large) corporations are important for our wealth, so we have to adapt our laws to suit them. I think recent developments show that corporations are less and less beneficial to the state of our economy (think outsourcing, bookkeeping scandals, tax fraud) so there should be less incentive to suit them, and more to push them away if that would be the result of sensible and just laws.
I hope that anti-globalization (the non radical part of it) gains and europe will bet more on its local small- and medium sized companies instead.
not whether linux infringes on their IP or not, but that they were forbidden to make further public claims about it until proof exists (to prevent FUD). Since the continued, in spite of this prohibition, that have very clearly violated this and must pay the fine.
Moderators: though the chance one of you is reading this is miniscule, and chances are bigger this posting gets moderated "off topic", please: Have you read the context?!? Is this an automatic reaction to anyone DARING to supposedly criticize one of your favourite tools? Hmm maybe one of the metamoderators will "punish" you.
Please read the parent. He was implying that the fact that Mysql comes from Sweden, being cutting edge RDBMS technology, underlines how advanced Sweden is.
Well, Sweden is quite advanced for IT technology, and Mysql does have its uses (in fact I use it because of a bugzilla instance, for which it is good). But really, anyone calling Mysql cutting edge RDBMS technology does not know what he is talking about. At best it is an equivalent of what others did 10 years ago (Oracle, DB2) but objectively it still falls short on that. Since it is free (and I did not want to start comparisons with other free alternatives) small and simple it does have its uses. But compared to most other RDBMS it simply is not cutting edge (to use an understatement).
As much as I think Iranians deserve privacy and personal freedom, I think it is incredibly hypocrit that the USA is doing this, against the will of another government, while at the same time it is bullying around individuals denying them other freedoms and privacy.
When it comes to so called economic self interests, nothing goes too far, such as procesuting russians for violating absurd laws such as the DMCA, allowing industry lobby groups such as the RIAA to deny people the right to share files and make personal copies, removing the right to reverse engineer, removing the right to invent because of software patents (which it is trying to push through worldwide).
In short: the USA government also is restricting a lot of people (their own and elsewhere), not representing the people (as should be in a democracy) but instead representing those who have the money to bribe the politicians and to buy laws.
If you use Linux for a dedicated purpose, there is no need to get the latest patch every week.
Just take some linux baseline, develop your device with it, test it well and ship it. Since dedicated devices use only a fraction of Linux functionality, it is possible to thoroughly test and make the chance for required patches very small.
What the article talks about is merely "insecure by configuration", not "by design".
OK, MSFT could and should improve in creating a more secure default configuration, but I expected the article to be more interesting regards the "design" of windows:
Graphics in the kernel, no true multi-user system and filesystem permissions. That, IMO, is what makes Windows insecure by design. And those are issues that won't be so easy to fix without large rewrites and without breaking a lot of backwards compatability. The configuration in contrast can be fixed quite easily. It is on a deeper level where the real trouble is.
Then use two (virtual) terminals. You can launch multiple X-window servers in parallel, and switch with alt-F7, alt-F8 (or on whatever virtual terminal your X-servers run).
Multiple screens is also possible.
That way you can run your coding apps on the lower res screen, and the design apps on the higher.
Switching resolution isn't nice anyway, since many apps adapt themselves at startup to the (then) current resolution. They might behave strange if resolution is changed afterwards (in windows as well).
Changing colordepths is something else, and often has even stranger effects on applications.
I used to be a decent conservative capitalist. Still with an income of over $200k/year I still should be one (yes the IT crises has not yet struck everywhere). But even I am being turned by greedy and absurd laws like these into a potentional revolutionary, getting an ever deeper hate for "the system". I'm sure I am not the only one, wait till the masses see what has happened to their "rights".
It could provoke such a counter effect (including violence) that the corporations that bought politics might very much regret they ever did! And those that let themselves be bribed (I have no other words for these "politicians") better be prepared to flee. I want revenge against those that threw our democracy away for personal gain and favours.
That shall be bigger and heavier. I don't know about you, but for me low weight and small size are #1 requirements.
These two functions integrated into one quite small and light device is nice. The only thing lacking is a cell phone. I have a P800 now and never ever would do again without a combined PDA + phone. Next purchase shall be only when PDA + phone + GPS come together.
What is transmitted, in the end, is a byte stream (over HTTP over TCP), so what is so big here?
The only thing this changes is make the browser (once thought to be a THIN client) more complex yet again. Conceptually, a form is flat: it submits a number of key-value pairs. Putting this flat data in more interesting data structures (whether hierarcical + XML or something else) is a server side thing, the THIN client should not be bothered with it IMHO.
What do they want? Cut out the middle tier so that the browser becomes a very heavy component that can directly call web services and the whole world? So that it shall become practically impossible to ever implement a browser from scratch again? Plans like these make me feel sick.
With this logic one can only say in general that file sharing costs them money, but not in a particular case (i.e. for an individual).
Thus, they would/should only be able to use civil law makers of filesharing programs, ISP's who allow illegal sharing in the large and do not try to prevent it, as long as no legitimate use for the program is plausible (i.e. quite hard).
They should never be able to use civil law (claiming financial damages) against an individual downloading and sharing, since they cannot prove a specific amount of loss in a particular case.
Only criminal law might apply (breaking a law) which is prosecuted and enforced by the state, not by an industry group or company.
For a "kind of" interpreted language, Java is really relatively fast. It comes quite close to C, something that cannot be said of tcl, perl, python etc.
Java is known for is slowness only due to
old versions used to be slow
the "pure" i.e. non native-library GUI API (AWT, swing) are slow, however nothing stops you from binding Java to native GUI such as GTK or QT.
JDK 1.4 has seen good improvement once again, especially in the area of multithreading, less global locks needed.
One month ago I was hiking in the mountains (on Corsica) and it was quite useful to be able to login on my server at home while staying in a mountain refuge at 3000m altitude. Every gram counts on such travels, and I would never be able to take a 80x25 screen with me.
Also what do you mean "not using standard protocol"? SSH is as standard as it gets when you want to have a secure login on a UNIX server.
A worker in India shall always remain cheaper than one in the west (lets also include Europe), since the politics of the countries are different. You CANNOT have equalization on wealth alone, it must go along with an equalization in politics.
Reason: a worker in Indea, even a high-tech worker, can 'afford' to accept lower wages because the cost of living is cheaper. Why is it cheaper? Only partially because of less development. An important part is because India has SLAVE LABOUR: childern and adults of lower casts have to work effectively as slaves for almost free. This enables one to have a house built, have all kinds of services delivered etc. for very low cost.
If you really want to compete on cost with another country/culture, you must also be prepared (as a whole) to compete on "way of life". Do you want to introduce child labour in the west, or to work 7 days a week 12 hours a day?
If not, there is no choice but to erect trade barriers. I am all for free trade, but only within economic and cultural blocks with peoples that more or less share the same cultural values.
Note: I do not judge on other cultures as being bad or good, just different. It is an illusion that cultural barriers of thousands of years are broken down in one generation and by some spread of wealth and 'democracy'. Just look at the former DDR (eastern germany) just 40 years divided from the west, and culture and all had changed so much that for the last 12 years the west of germany had to transfer about 50 billion $ EACH YEAR and still the differences are huge.
I am all the more pessimistic about the idea that creating one global economy and culture might wipe out differences any time soon.
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
X does not need to use a network. It is simply a protocol instead of a mere API. There also exists an API to interface to this protocol (Xlib) but you could craft your own.
As for the protocol, you can send the drawing instructions via a network, but also via shared memory. Typically, local client-server connections use shared memory instead, which is obviously faster.
One also uses unix domain sockets for local connections, a bit slower but still faster than a local TCP/IP loopback. Bandwidth runs in 100's of MB per second. Surely, communication between client and server is NOT the bottleneck for normal local X window clients. Most probably it is the hardware driver.
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
The guy who chimed in on the xfree86.org mailing list said Motif looked like it did because it was designed to use the X protocol efficiently. Everyone else on the list seemed to agree that when a "modern style" GUI is used (i.e., one that looks more like Windows), the number of draw primatives just skyrockets, and performance suffers.
That may have been true 10 years ago, although Open Look, Motifs big competitor in those days, looked very nice and was faster than Motif. Also the Motif API is horrible and irregular, it is a perversion of the nice and clean Xaw with its sample Athena widget set, and the implementation is full of memory leaks (I used to give X window programming course 10 years ago). Open Look was Suns alternative, but it lost for political reasons.
There have been many widget sets that have a mich nicer look and feel and that were faster than Motif, so I don't really buy that argument.
You have run X apps whose performance sucked. Guess what, I have also run windows apps whose performance sucked. How can you be so sure it was due to X or its network transparency, and not due to bad programmers or other issues?
As for drivers: any alternative to X would have the same problem. If no hardware drivers are available for some card, switching layers higher up won't help much. On the contrary: spme vendors have been providing closed XFree4 drivers, one would have to hope they would do the same for some other GUI environment. I doubt it.
GTK and KDE do not suffer from X windows drawing performance. They may feel laggy because of their integrated frameworks that include lots of components such as corba IPC, C++ run time libraries (which may have loader problems) etc. I am VERY SURE that X window is not to blame for perceived slowness.
If you want to see for yourself, try Xfce, a simple desktop environment that feels lightning fast. It superficially looks about the same, also has 3D looks and shadows etc, but it is very simple and doesn't have session managers, corba servers and what have you. Therefore it is a much better measure to see how fast X is.
GTK and KDE are very poor GUI "benchmarks". They are so complex that it is very hard to track where their slowness comes from, but believe me it is not X window!
It is a pity that many Unix GUI designers have always sought complexity and big frameworks. Motif was the first mistake, and Gnome and KDE aren't much better in that respect. (Qt by itself is quite nice though). X window itself is simple and direct. Replacing it by something else won't change a bit to the apparent tendency of those GUI designers to overdo. Just look at the number of libraries that any Gnome or KDE binary is linked with! Of those 20, only one or two have to do with X window (libX11). The rest would remain, you would only replace libX11 with libFB or whatever, and I am quite sure you would not feel any speed improvement, except if you are using X remotely over a 64kbit line:). Then again, at least you can if you want. With directFB you could not do that even if you wanted to.
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
X has the extentions protocols/API's for that. For example 3D (openGL) was added later to extend the X protocol with more high level primitives, and there are many more.
The drawback is that such X clients only work if the remote client has the appropriate extentions loaded.
It is well possible to develop QT or GTK X extentions. However for normal uses on a LAN any 2D application is fast enough to make it totally superfluous, and thus it makes to sense to throw away compatability with all X servers. Only for 3D, for video streaming and other special applicaions it makes sense.
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Breaking the law, breaking an immoral law.
Any law prohibiting the sharing of information between people, IMO, is immoral and MUST be ignored.
Would you say that the Baath party members, abiding by Saddam Husseins laws torturing law breakers were right?
Any law is always subjected to general human values. And any law that limits the right to exchange information is a crime itself.
You may find my opinion radical, and alas it is not yet very generally accepted. But I am convinced that, once people see what the disastrous results of current "intellectual property" laws are, more and more opposition will come and one day we shall return to the situation like the 17th century where the concepts "patent", trade mark, copyright did not or hardly exist.
Without them our civilization rose, building on ideas of others the renaissance and rationalism got us out of the middle ages (when other monopolies on information existed). Now because of such laws we threaten to slide back into a new era of dark ages, where individuals have no rights and no knowledge, and a few entities can corrupt society, control politics (which merely in name is democratic).
We have been brainwashed that todays knowledge economy needs protection of intellectual property to exist and prosper, but have we seen any prove that it won't work without? I do not buy it any longer. I won't rest until all those who want to implement such laws ara safely locked away themselves, for they are the THIEVES themselves, of democracy and human rights.
And repeat: the concept of intellectual property, in whatever form, is immoral and in contradiction with human civilization.
All copyrights, patents and other limitation of sharing of information must go.
The fanatism of corporations and lobby groups, raping democracy by bribing politicians to get their way, shall result in counter fanatism. One day, I hope to see it, all such laws shall be gone.
Argh, still no radio built in. I need an AM/FM radio and don't want to always take 2 devices with me, how much would it cost to add a radio and satisfy the wish/requirement of many?
It has kept me from buying an Ipod until now. Once Irivers IHP-100 gets a larger harddisk (min. 15GB) I'll buy one of those.
Then the operating system should by standard take care of that and block them, at the users home and under his own control (if he wants). The ISP has nothing to do with that.
If windows came installed with a simple firewall that blocks any incoming connections and UDP by default when the origin is not 192.168.0.0 by default, these simple users would be safe and anyone could change it without being at the mercy of their ISP.
Once this barrier is taken, it won't take long until all incoming connections + UDP are banned, of course only to "protect the user".
This would make P2P impossible and reduce the internet to a mere client-server network. Anyone runing a "server" would be closely monitored by CIA, RIAA and other special interest groups, and would have to pay a premium.
Say goodbye to all P2P, to your own webserver, mailserver, to freenet, to accessing your own mailbox via secure IMAP, logging in remotely via ssh.
The opt out wold be step 1. Step 2 would be to remove the opt out because of "lack of customer demand" and to "protect users" because of mistakes they might make.
I am very sure this is what some industry groups are striving for: the internet must be reduced to a television network with bells and whistles. Just an extra channel for the industry to bombard you with propaganda, advertisements and other brainwashing, you are not supposed to talk back or publish independantly (you might threating a monopoly or spread terrorist information).
Don't give them a finger, they'll be eager to take your hand. Any restriction whatsoever must be vehemently fought at its roots!
Who cares about a legal gap? Does america care about a legal gap with europe? Why should europe adapt, what would be the benefit?
In the past an argument used to be that (large) corporations are important for our wealth, so we have to adapt our laws to suit them. I think recent developments show that corporations are less and less beneficial to the state of our economy (think outsourcing, bookkeeping scandals, tax fraud) so there should be less incentive to suit them, and more to push them away if that would be the result of sensible and just laws.
I hope that anti-globalization (the non radical part of it) gains and europe will bet more on its local small- and medium sized companies instead.
Copy it anyway; there are enough tools to copy these so called protected disks.
Afterwards you can burn a real CD and play it.
or make some more copies.
In other words: only those who would not even have the intention to make "illegal" copies should not buy such disks.
not whether linux infringes on their IP or not, but that they were forbidden to make further public claims about it until proof exists (to prevent FUD). Since the continued, in spite of this prohibition, that have very clearly violated this and must pay the fine.
Moderators: though the chance one of you is reading this is miniscule, and chances are bigger this posting gets moderated "off topic", please: Have you read the context?!? Is this an automatic reaction to anyone DARING to supposedly criticize one of your favourite tools? Hmm maybe one of the metamoderators will "punish" you.
Please read the parent. He was implying that the fact that Mysql comes from Sweden, being cutting edge RDBMS technology, underlines how advanced Sweden is.
Well, Sweden is quite advanced for IT technology, and Mysql does have its uses (in fact I use it because of a bugzilla instance, for which it is good). But really, anyone calling Mysql cutting edge RDBMS technology does not know what he is talking about. At best it is an equivalent of what others did 10 years ago (Oracle, DB2) but objectively it still falls short on that. Since it is free (and I did not want to start comparisons with other free alternatives) small and simple it does have its uses. But compared to most other RDBMS it simply is not cutting edge (to use an understatement).
You want to imply that MySQL is "cutting edge" RDBMS technology?!?
As much as I think Iranians deserve privacy and personal freedom, I think it is incredibly hypocrit that the USA is doing this, against the will of another government, while at the same time it is bullying around individuals denying them other freedoms and privacy.
When it comes to so called economic self interests, nothing goes too far, such as procesuting russians for violating absurd laws such as the DMCA, allowing industry lobby groups such as the RIAA to deny people the right to share files and make personal copies, removing the right to reverse engineer, removing the right to invent because of software patents (which it is trying to push through worldwide).
In short: the USA government also is restricting a lot of people (their own and elsewhere), not representing the people (as should be in a democracy) but instead representing those who have the money to bribe the politicians and to buy laws.
If you use Linux for a dedicated purpose, there is no need to get the latest patch every week.
Just take some linux baseline, develop your device with it, test it well and ship it. Since dedicated devices use only a fraction of Linux functionality, it is possible to thoroughly test and make the chance for required patches very small.
What the article talks about is merely "insecure by configuration", not "by design".
OK, MSFT could and should improve in creating a more secure default configuration, but I expected the article to be more interesting regards the "design" of windows:
Graphics in the kernel, no true multi-user system and filesystem permissions. That, IMO, is what makes Windows insecure by design. And those are issues that won't be so easy to fix without large rewrites and without breaking a lot of backwards compatability. The configuration in contrast can be fixed quite easily. It is on a deeper level where the real trouble is.
Then use two (virtual) terminals. You can launch multiple X-window servers in parallel, and switch with alt-F7, alt-F8 (or on whatever virtual terminal your X-servers run).
Multiple screens is also possible.
That way you can run your coding apps on the lower res screen, and the design apps on the higher.
Switching resolution isn't nice anyway, since many apps adapt themselves at startup to the (then) current resolution. They might behave strange if resolution is changed afterwards (in windows as well).
Changing colordepths is something else, and often has even stranger effects on applications.
The fact that they still exist is a proof they have them.
Revolution?
I used to be a decent conservative capitalist. Still with an income of over $200k/year I still should be one (yes the IT crises has not yet struck everywhere). But even I am being turned by greedy and absurd laws like these into a potentional revolutionary, getting an ever deeper hate for "the system". I'm sure I am not the only one, wait till the masses see what has happened to their "rights".
It could provoke such a counter effect (including violence) that the corporations that bought politics might very much regret they ever did! And those that let themselves be bribed (I have no other words for these "politicians") better be prepared to flee. I want revenge against those that threw our democracy away for personal gain and favours.
Grrrrr.
That shall be bigger and heavier. I don't know about you, but for me low weight and small size are #1 requirements.
These two functions integrated into one quite small and light device is nice. The only thing lacking is a cell phone. I have a P800 now and never ever would do again without a combined PDA + phone. Next purchase shall be only when PDA + phone + GPS come together.
What is transmitted, in the end, is a byte stream (over HTTP over TCP), so what is so big here?
The only thing this changes is make the browser (once thought to be a THIN client) more complex yet again. Conceptually, a form is flat: it submits a number of key-value pairs. Putting this flat data in more interesting data structures (whether hierarcical + XML or something else) is a server side thing, the THIN client should not be bothered with it IMHO.
What do they want? Cut out the middle tier so that the browser becomes a very heavy component that can directly call web services and the whole world? So that it shall become practically impossible to ever implement a browser from scratch again? Plans like these make me feel sick.
With this logic one can only say in general that file sharing costs them money, but not in a particular case (i.e. for an individual).
Thus, they would/should only be able to use civil law makers of filesharing programs, ISP's who allow illegal sharing in the large and do not try to prevent it, as long as no legitimate use for the program is plausible (i.e. quite hard).
They should never be able to use civil law (claiming financial damages) against an individual downloading and sharing, since they cannot prove a specific amount of loss in a particular case.
Only criminal law might apply (breaking a law) which is prosecuted and enforced by the state, not by an industry group or company.
Java is known for is slowness only due to
- old versions used to be slow
- the "pure" i.e. non native-library GUI API (AWT, swing) are slow, however nothing stops you from binding Java to native GUI such as GTK or QT.
JDK 1.4 has seen good improvement once again, especially in the area of multithreading, less global locks needed.One month ago I was hiking in the mountains (on Corsica) and it was quite useful to be able to login on my server at home while staying in a mountain refuge at 3000m altitude. Every gram counts on such travels, and I would never be able to take a 80x25 screen with me.
Also what do you mean "not using standard protocol"? SSH is as standard as it gets when you want to have a secure login on a UNIX server.
A worker in India shall always remain cheaper than one in the west (lets also include Europe), since the politics of the countries are different. You CANNOT have equalization on wealth alone, it must go along with an equalization in politics.
Reason: a worker in Indea, even a high-tech worker, can 'afford' to accept lower wages because the cost of living is cheaper. Why is it cheaper? Only partially because of less development. An important part is because India has SLAVE LABOUR: childern and adults of lower casts have to work effectively as slaves for almost free. This enables one to have a house built, have all kinds of services delivered etc. for very low cost.
If you really want to compete on cost with another country/culture, you must also be prepared (as a whole) to compete on "way of life". Do you want to introduce child labour in the west, or to work 7 days a week 12 hours a day?
If not, there is no choice but to erect trade barriers. I am all for free trade, but only within economic and cultural blocks with peoples that more or less share the same cultural values.
Note: I do not judge on other cultures as being bad or good, just different. It is an illusion that cultural barriers of thousands of years are broken down in one generation and by some spread of wealth and 'democracy'. Just look at the former DDR (eastern germany) just 40 years divided from the west, and culture and all had changed so much that for the last 12 years the west of germany had to transfer about 50 billion $ EACH YEAR and still the differences are huge.
I am all the more pessimistic about the idea that creating one global economy and culture might wipe out differences any time soon.
As for the protocol, you can send the drawing instructions via a network, but also via shared memory. Typically, local client-server connections use shared memory instead, which is obviously faster.
One also uses unix domain sockets for local connections, a bit slower but still faster than a local TCP/IP loopback. Bandwidth runs in 100's of MB per second. Surely, communication between client and server is NOT the bottleneck for normal local X window clients. Most probably it is the hardware driver.
That may have been true 10 years ago, although Open Look, Motifs big competitor in those days, looked very nice and was faster than Motif. Also the Motif API is horrible and irregular, it is a perversion of the nice and clean Xaw with its sample Athena widget set, and the implementation is full of memory leaks (I used to give X window programming course 10 years ago). Open Look was Suns alternative, but it lost for political reasons.
There have been many widget sets that have a mich nicer look and feel and that were faster than Motif, so I don't really buy that argument.
You have run X apps whose performance sucked. Guess what, I have also run windows apps whose performance sucked. How can you be so sure it was due to X or its network transparency, and not due to bad programmers or other issues?
As for drivers: any alternative to X would have the same problem. If no hardware drivers are available for some card, switching layers higher up won't help much. On the contrary: spme vendors have been providing closed XFree4 drivers, one would have to hope they would do the same for some other GUI environment. I doubt it.
GTK and KDE do not suffer from X windows drawing performance. They may feel laggy because of their integrated frameworks that include lots of components such as corba IPC, C++ run time libraries (which may have loader problems) etc. I am VERY SURE that X window is not to blame for perceived slowness.
If you want to see for yourself, try Xfce, a simple desktop environment that feels lightning fast. It superficially looks about the same, also has 3D looks and shadows etc, but it is very simple and doesn't have session managers, corba servers and what have you. Therefore it is a much better measure to see how fast X is.
GTK and KDE are very poor GUI "benchmarks". They are so complex that it is very hard to track where their slowness comes from, but believe me it is not X window!
It is a pity that many Unix GUI designers have always sought complexity and big frameworks. Motif was the first mistake, and Gnome and KDE aren't much better in that respect. (Qt by itself is quite nice though). X window itself is simple and direct. Replacing it by something else won't change a bit to the apparent tendency of those GUI designers to overdo. Just look at the number of libraries that any Gnome or KDE binary is linked with! Of those 20, only one or two have to do with X window (libX11). The rest would remain, you would only replace libX11 with libFB or whatever, and I am quite sure you would not feel any speed improvement, except if you are using X remotely over a 64kbit line :). Then again, at least you can if you want. With directFB you could not do that even if you wanted to.
X has the extentions protocols/API's for that. For example 3D (openGL) was added later to extend the X protocol with more high level primitives, and there are many more.
The drawback is that such X clients only work if the remote client has the appropriate extentions loaded.
It is well possible to develop QT or GTK X extentions. However for normal uses on a LAN any 2D application is fast enough to make it totally superfluous, and thus it makes to sense to throw away compatability with all X servers. Only for 3D, for video streaming and other special applicaions it makes sense.