I had a relatively rich friend in the past. He has built a small country house all by himself. Most of the materials he transported on his Mercedes-Benz S600.
Now for the fun facts you probably would never hear anywhere else. The leather on the back sit wasn't even scratched. (And it took most of the beating because the trunk of sedan isn't designed for heavy weights.) The synthetic finish of the trunk proved to be highly resistant to any dirt, including chalk and cement: all was coming off after a single wash.
Thanks for enlightening me! I wonder then what I use everyday in the office then!
[...] since modern local rendering technique such as DRI and compositing is completely [...]
... and utterly useless. Except for the games and video. But that sector of software moving to tablets/etc.
if X were so beautifully perfect at network transparency then using it over a WAN connection wouldn't be one of the leading causes of suicide in network administrators
Nobody said it is perfect!!! I would be the last to say it. I'm doing it every frigging day in office!!!
But it is on *average* is *magnitudes* better than the alternatives. I've dealt with: VNC, RDP, Xen, NX, Xvnc and LTSP. General observation: presence of the X in the stack generally increases desirability of the remote access solution. Raw X over SSH is simply unbeatable in reliability and usability. Even if one has to wait occasionally a second or two for the process to finish rendering the shit. (The biggest downside of X over SSH is BTW the network connectivity: loss of connection means termination of the applications.)
[...] in a kludgy manner [...]
That's summarizes your argument in its entirety.
Where "Me" includes the X.org developers including Keith Packard BTW.
Since I'm not X developer, I'm not going to tell you how to do your stuff. All I can do is to express the frustration of the users who use the tech daily and then some developer explaining them what is their problem really. Sadly I have to conclude that you have no idea what problems the *users* have - only the problems the *developers* have. Which are two distinctly different things.
All in all, Wayland breaks something that is working. And it is doing it for the purpose of supporting scenarios for which the target systems are not going to be even used in near future. *rolling eyes*
Waiting in line an hour is nothing compared to the knowledge that my parcel is stuck in some cold way station. Or due to overload had to make a road trip across the whole country. Especially when it is a piece of electronics. I'd rather wait or wait in line and pay more in the retail.
I'll roll the dice, thanks.
The only thing which can't wait are the gifts. The trick is to buy gifts before, for example in November.
The lead developers of X.org agree with me that the modern version of X that real people use in the real world is not network transparent
So you apparently have no idea what they are talking about, but somehow Keith Packard agrees with you? LOL
They talk about server-side vs. client-side rendering. And it is true that it doesn't make much sense and RDP in a way is an improvement. But that argument rests on the generalization that there are no other X using applications beside GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE. There are still plenty of Motiff/Lesstiff/Athena/Xaw/Tk applications around.
Anyway, if we are to generalize, then why not generalize it to the logical end: everything is a web app. Even now, what most consumers see on their screens is a rendered HTML. And PCs are dead - long live tablets.
2008 called and it wants its complaint about RDP back (this functionality was introduced a LONG time ago). RDP can be implemented using Wayland too you know, it's not a strictly a Windows thing.
So. You have no idea what "network transparency" really means.
Or you would have mentioned the seamless RDP - and all PITAs associated with it. That thing (with the "official" XenApps) is a such miserable experience that nobody willingly is using it.
Logistic is complicated. That's why for so many years now I have a rule: never order any shipment in three last weeks of December and first two weeks of January.
I had anecdotal experience when a parcel from Amazon ordered first week of January came to me sooner than a parcel I have ordered a week before Xmas.
So for the sake of the inner calm, I have simply stopped ordering on-line during this time.
RDP is not the same as network transparency. It is the opposite of the network transparency.
With X you can run side by side on the same physical screen applications from the different servers.
Anyway. I think that Wayland is similar to tablets: it is targeted at consumers, not power users or engineers.
Who knows, by the time the Wayland matures FreeBSD might improve hardware support and finally run well on new hardware. Not only that would mean I get to keep the X but I also would get much better audio quality.
Good project manager is a rare breed. A company which would allow such person to survive professionally there - even rarer.
Architects, often ex-developers, either get intoxicated with the power and distanced from the real world or get into the apathy from the mundane and controversial nature of the architectural work.
My gig is hardware crypto, but it wouldn't be worth anything if I didn't make it work [...]
Nothing personal.
Way too often I have seen the following. A cool high-paid consultants comes in, swarmed with managers, lots of buzzwords flying around, and he "makes it work". The "it" being what he/she was hired to do. Shortly after they're gone, the people who work on the system long term find that the "it" works - but the rest of the project is broken, sometimes irreversibly.
Like a quite recent example. There were (perceived) performance problems with the transaction logic: people wanted more TPS, but the software simply couldn't deliver. Managers have invited cool specialist who "fixed" it in record time of one week. Only later, when customers started complaining about inconsistencies in the DB, people took closer look at what he did. His solution turned out to be to simply bypass the transactions completely (AKA rather run multiple actions in parallel in different transactions). And guess what: the consultant still has a perfect record with the managers. Proper solution was to give the full-time developers time/money to comb the software for performance problems and optimize what's possible to. But that can't be done in a week time. Neither would earn any "glory" since that is a mundane work, not a silver bullet solution where in a week you magically double performance.
And that basically outlines the problems with the "A" players: they are poor team players and they do not like routine mundane work.
Developing a skeleton of the application might be the task suitable for the "A" players. But the rest of it, making it really working for everybody, is very often "too easy" and "boring" for them.
Corollary. From the start on, the "A" players deem many design solutions as not feasible, because they entail lots of routine mundane work which they are unwilling to accept.
But then, Netflix doesn't do anything particularly sophisticated, so the strategy might seem to work. But in a nutshell, they are simply throwing money around.
The majority of all executable files do not require several gigabytes of RAM, hence it makes sense to streamline their address space.
I know that. Many commercial *NIX systems are doing it. Though... Having a 32-bit "cat" doesn't really changes anything.
That why I have mentioned the memory hungry algorithms. Many applications are doing it this days. Needless to mention that java this days is started almost exclusively with the "-d64".
The market for 4GB address space is really small. Because modern general programming practices generally disregard the resources in general, RAM in particular. (The (number of) CPUs being the most disregarded resource.)
General question about x32 ABI: is the OS still can use more than 4GB RAM w/o penalties? IOW, is kernel still 64bit? Only userspace is x32? Or x32 and pure 64-bit can run alongside?
Anyway. Most performance-sensitive programs went 64-bit anyway - since RAM is cheap and there are bunch of faster but memory-hogging algorithms.
Many offline apps (most notable example is the games) require network connection to load the ads. If you remove the permission to access the network, they wouldn't be able to load and display the ads. Instant (and data traffic saving) win!
S Planner apparently has given itself a huge number of permissions, including apparently reading my gmail, and I have no way of un-installing it.
The poorly names "S Planner" was found by my colleagues to be the only Android app which is fully compatible with Outlook Calender. So yeah, it needs to read your e-mail, because Outlook meeting requests/etc are sent via e-mail. (In comparison were also Sony and HTC phones. Google's own Calender is so feature-poor that it is even not preinstalled by default.)
No, I don't like it either (nor use that). But many users are very very happy about it.
(Other than dropping my $700 investment in the garbage).
There are plenty of tutorials on how to root your phone and remove the preinstalled bloatware. With some versions/phones, it is/was even possible without rooting.
Otherwise, I'm using S Planner occasionally as a calender app and it is pretty OK. Also, when investigating some problems with my S3mini I have monitored the whole of the my phone's (wi-fi) traffic with the WireShark for 2 days (~40 hours). There were only few short packets going Samsung way, while there was continuous stream of something Google was loading to/from my phone. (That was causing my phone's battery to go flat within 12 hours. And the reason why I stopped auto-updating Google apps completely. Phone runs soo much better now. Almost 3 days on single charge when idle.)
Founded by three PayPal alumni. Later purchased by Google.
2) maps
Yes. But Google also keeps the Maps squarely server-side, making them rather useless when you need them most: off road, or in a middle of nowhere where there is no signal.
3) google+
Moot. There are tons of alternatives.
4) gmail
... Considering to how functionally-limited GMail always was (folders anyone? saved searches? mass operations?) and how they keep screwing up the UI... I doubt it GMail fame would be worth mention in few years.
5) video chat
There are several alternatives. Skype pops to mind immediately.
6) voice
Obihai is not a Google product.
7) android
Originally developed by Android Inc. Later purchased by Google.
it sounds more like changing the tax to be 10x of what they were told it would be when they started doing business locally.
Actually this story bears stark resemblance to the one I have seen in Brazil. And it is not about corruption or retro-taxing.
Small company in Sao Paulo (SP) was purchased by a larger company. Eventually, after sucking everything out of the small company, the large company decided to close it, inviting around 25% to relocate to their own office.
They have actually managed to close the company and lay-offs were ongoing - but then the gov't send them some million Euro tax bill to pay.
What has happened. Brasil (or only SP?) has provides special conditions to IT companies and start-ups, where they rip lots of benefits, including almost no taxes. To enjoy the benefits gov't requires a long-term commitment and conformance to certain conditions, expressed in the form of a contract with local authorities. Closing the company and laying off people for no good reason constitutes breach of the contract and consequently gov't demands you to pay back for all the benefits the company has enjoyed over the period.
The problem with your theory is that it hits the poor the hardest.
Yes. From the comments, yours included, I have noticed that, unlike the EU, poverty and inequality is still a big problem in USA. (I'm not sure I can formulate the answer in more palatable terms.)
Your comment is a sad statement on the state of the unbound capitalism prevailing in the USA, where everybody's on their own. That, sadly, completely prevents adding any kind of predictability, stability and planning to the system. And planning is what is required if we are to solve the energy problem.
The problem is that when the "rare commodities run out," it would lead to a major reshape of our economies, states and societies. Historically that means: poverty and inequality, civil wars and wars.
IMO on the line here, is to prove that we as civilization are mature enough not to shoot ourselves into the foot.
Degenerating into primitive fighting over the scarce resources is precisely what society strives to avoid.
I love it when someone like you tells the rest of us how much and what we can consume. It just reconfirms my suspicion that everyone else is an authoritarian at heart.
May be.
My point is more about the relative cost. The energy now is cheap because when producing it, we disregard the future effects.
Yes, energy costs should go up, to pressure on the business and users to figure out ways to do more with less. Take smartphones as an example: driven by the limited battery capacity, they manage to do much much more than PCs of only 10 years ago - at a fraction of energy consumed.
But I wouldn't go as far as calling it "authoritarian". Levies and taxes throughout the history were used to regulate supply and demand. Energy is just another commodity which requires the regulation.
"Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs
The cheapness of the energy is IMO the largest part of the problem. We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy. We are overconsuming way too many goods (which cost energy to produce) and then go through even more energy wasting to compensate the overconsumption.
As the summary says: the drug it imported from Germany. If used for execution even once, the EU ban would kick in, preventing Germany to import it. Import is banned - USA gets no drug, regardless if for executions or treating patients.
[...] but critics say it will cause untold headaches for developers, admins and less-technical end-users.
The few dozen of the "developers, admins" who still insist on using applet should grow up and stop torturing the "less-technical end-users."
My company would have been impacted (search in documentation is a Java applet, because documentation should be also usable locally, without a web server) if not for never managing to approve FireFox or Chrome because of their version carousel. Ironically, Opera got approved shortly before they have also picked up the rolling releases games.
Slashdot Mirror
"No official power loss protection label" is not the same as "losing data on power loss in real life".
I had a relatively rich friend in the past. He has built a small country house all by himself. Most of the materials he transported on his Mercedes-Benz S600.
Now for the fun facts you probably would never hear anywhere else. The leather on the back sit wasn't even scratched. (And it took most of the beating because the trunk of sedan isn't designed for heavy weights.) The synthetic finish of the trunk proved to be highly resistant to any dirt, including chalk and cement: all was coming off after a single wash.
No... you don't.
Thanks for enlightening me! I wonder then what I use everyday in the office then!
[...] since modern local rendering technique such as DRI and compositing is completely [...]
... and utterly useless. Except for the games and video. But that sector of software moving to tablets/etc.
if X were so beautifully perfect at network transparency then using it over a WAN connection wouldn't be one of the leading causes of suicide in network administrators
Nobody said it is perfect!!! I would be the last to say it. I'm doing it every frigging day in office!!!
But it is on *average* is *magnitudes* better than the alternatives. I've dealt with: VNC, RDP, Xen, NX, Xvnc and LTSP. General observation: presence of the X in the stack generally increases desirability of the remote access solution. Raw X over SSH is simply unbeatable in reliability and usability. Even if one has to wait occasionally a second or two for the process to finish rendering the shit. (The biggest downside of X over SSH is BTW the network connectivity: loss of connection means termination of the applications.)
[...] in a kludgy manner [...]
That's summarizes your argument in its entirety.
Where "Me" includes the X.org developers including Keith Packard BTW.
Since I'm not X developer, I'm not going to tell you how to do your stuff. All I can do is to express the frustration of the users who use the tech daily and then some developer explaining them what is their problem really. Sadly I have to conclude that you have no idea what problems the *users* have - only the problems the *developers* have. Which are two distinctly different things.
All in all, Wayland breaks something that is working. And it is doing it for the purpose of supporting scenarios for which the target systems are not going to be even used in near future. *rolling eyes*
Waiting in line an hour is nothing compared to the knowledge that my parcel is stuck in some cold way station. Or due to overload had to make a road trip across the whole country. Especially when it is a piece of electronics. I'd rather wait or wait in line and pay more in the retail.
I'll roll the dice, thanks.
The only thing which can't wait are the gifts. The trick is to buy gifts before, for example in November.
The lead developers of X.org agree with me that the modern version of X that real people use in the real world is not network transparent
So you apparently have no idea what they are talking about, but somehow Keith Packard agrees with you? LOL
They talk about server-side vs. client-side rendering. And it is true that it doesn't make much sense and RDP in a way is an improvement. But that argument rests on the generalization that there are no other X using applications beside GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE. There are still plenty of Motiff/Lesstiff/Athena/Xaw/Tk applications around.
Anyway, if we are to generalize, then why not generalize it to the logical end: everything is a web app. Even now, what most consumers see on their screens is a rendered HTML. And PCs are dead - long live tablets.
2008 called and it wants its complaint about RDP back (this functionality was introduced a LONG time ago). RDP can be implemented using Wayland too you know, it's not a strictly a Windows thing.
So. You have no idea what "network transparency" really means.
Or you would have mentioned the seamless RDP - and all PITAs associated with it. That thing (with the "official" XenApps) is a such miserable experience that nobody willingly is using it.
Logistic is complicated. That's why for so many years now I have a rule: never order any shipment in three last weeks of December and first two weeks of January.
I had anecdotal experience when a parcel from Amazon ordered first week of January came to me sooner than a parcel I have ordered a week before Xmas.
So for the sake of the inner calm, I have simply stopped ordering on-line during this time.
RDP is not the same as network transparency. It is the opposite of the network transparency.
With X you can run side by side on the same physical screen applications from the different servers.
Anyway. I think that Wayland is similar to tablets: it is targeted at consumers, not power users or engineers.
Who knows, by the time the Wayland matures FreeBSD might improve hardware support and finally run well on new hardware. Not only that would mean I get to keep the X but I also would get much better audio quality.
Well said.
Good project manager is a rare breed. A company which would allow such person to survive professionally there - even rarer.
Architects, often ex-developers, either get intoxicated with the power and distanced from the real world or get into the apathy from the mundane and controversial nature of the architectural work.
My gig is hardware crypto, but it wouldn't be worth anything if I didn't make it work [...]
Nothing personal.
Way too often I have seen the following. A cool high-paid consultants comes in, swarmed with managers, lots of buzzwords flying around, and he "makes it work". The "it" being what he/she was hired to do. Shortly after they're gone, the people who work on the system long term find that the "it" works - but the rest of the project is broken, sometimes irreversibly.
Like a quite recent example. There were (perceived) performance problems with the transaction logic: people wanted more TPS, but the software simply couldn't deliver. Managers have invited cool specialist who "fixed" it in record time of one week. Only later, when customers started complaining about inconsistencies in the DB, people took closer look at what he did. His solution turned out to be to simply bypass the transactions completely (AKA rather run multiple actions in parallel in different transactions). And guess what: the consultant still has a perfect record with the managers. Proper solution was to give the full-time developers time/money to comb the software for performance problems and optimize what's possible to. But that can't be done in a week time. Neither would earn any "glory" since that is a mundane work, not a silver bullet solution where in a week you magically double performance.
And that basically outlines the problems with the "A" players: they are poor team players and they do not like routine mundane work.
Developing a skeleton of the application might be the task suitable for the "A" players. But the rest of it, making it really working for everybody, is very often "too easy" and "boring" for them.
Corollary. From the start on, the "A" players deem many design solutions as not feasible, because they entail lots of routine mundane work which they are unwilling to accept.
But then, Netflix doesn't do anything particularly sophisticated, so the strategy might seem to work. But in a nutshell, they are simply throwing money around.
The majority of all executable files do not require several gigabytes of RAM, hence it makes sense to streamline their address space.
I know that. Many commercial *NIX systems are doing it. Though... Having a 32-bit "cat" doesn't really changes anything.
That why I have mentioned the memory hungry algorithms. Many applications are doing it this days. Needless to mention that java this days is started almost exclusively with the "-d64".
The market for 4GB address space is really small. Because modern general programming practices generally disregard the resources in general, RAM in particular. (The (number of) CPUs being the most disregarded resource.)
General question about x32 ABI: is the OS still can use more than 4GB RAM w/o penalties? IOW, is kernel still 64bit? Only userspace is x32? Or x32 and pure 64-bit can run alongside?
Anyway. Most performance-sensitive programs went 64-bit anyway - since RAM is cheap and there are bunch of faster but memory-hogging algorithms.
Why not WTFV? (watch the fucking video) The man himself explains it all. 2003 and 2004 it was a joke - not even a hoax - 2005 and on it is real.
Many offline apps (most notable example is the games) require network connection to load the ads. If you remove the permission to access the network, they wouldn't be able to load and display the ads. Instant (and data traffic saving) win!
Google simply can't allow that.
S Planner apparently has given itself a huge number of permissions, including apparently reading my gmail, and I have no way of un-installing it.
The poorly names "S Planner" was found by my colleagues to be the only Android app which is fully compatible with Outlook Calender. So yeah, it needs to read your e-mail, because Outlook meeting requests/etc are sent via e-mail. (In comparison were also Sony and HTC phones. Google's own Calender is so feature-poor that it is even not preinstalled by default.)
No, I don't like it either (nor use that). But many users are very very happy about it.
(Other than dropping my $700 investment in the garbage).
There are plenty of tutorials on how to root your phone and remove the preinstalled bloatware. With some versions/phones, it is/was even possible without rooting.
Otherwise, I'm using S Planner occasionally as a calender app and it is pretty OK. Also, when investigating some problems with my S3mini I have monitored the whole of the my phone's (wi-fi) traffic with the WireShark for 2 days (~40 hours). There were only few short packets going Samsung way, while there was continuous stream of something Google was loading to/from my phone. (That was causing my phone's battery to go flat within 12 hours. And the reason why I stopped auto-updating Google apps completely. Phone runs soo much better now. Almost 3 days on single charge when idle.)
1) youtube
Founded by three PayPal alumni. Later purchased by Google.
2) maps
Yes. But Google also keeps the Maps squarely server-side, making them rather useless when you need them most: off road, or in a middle of nowhere where there is no signal.
3) google+
Moot. There are tons of alternatives.
4) gmail
... Considering to how functionally-limited GMail always was (folders anyone? saved searches? mass operations?) and how they keep screwing up the UI... I doubt it GMail fame would be worth mention in few years.
5) video chat
There are several alternatives. Skype pops to mind immediately.
6) voice
Obihai is not a Google product.
7) android
Originally developed by Android Inc. Later purchased by Google.
I'm sure I could go on, but [...]
Oh, please, do go on. Enlighten us.
it sounds more like changing the tax to be 10x of what they were told it would be when they started doing business locally.
Actually this story bears stark resemblance to the one I have seen in Brazil. And it is not about corruption or retro-taxing.
Small company in Sao Paulo (SP) was purchased by a larger company. Eventually, after sucking everything out of the small company, the large company decided to close it, inviting around 25% to relocate to their own office.
They have actually managed to close the company and lay-offs were ongoing - but then the gov't send them some million Euro tax bill to pay.
What has happened. Brasil (or only SP?) has provides special conditions to IT companies and start-ups, where they rip lots of benefits, including almost no taxes. To enjoy the benefits gov't requires a long-term commitment and conformance to certain conditions, expressed in the form of a contract with local authorities. Closing the company and laying off people for no good reason constitutes breach of the contract and consequently gov't demands you to pay back for all the benefits the company has enjoyed over the period.
The problem with your theory is that it hits the poor the hardest.
Yes. From the comments, yours included, I have noticed that, unlike the EU, poverty and inequality is still a big problem in USA. (I'm not sure I can formulate the answer in more palatable terms.)
Your comment is a sad statement on the state of the unbound capitalism prevailing in the USA, where everybody's on their own. That, sadly, completely prevents adding any kind of predictability, stability and planning to the system. And planning is what is required if we are to solve the energy problem.
Spending considerable effort just to optimize slightly use of a very cheap resource is a waste of the rest of society's resources.
Just count all what USA has "spent" on the influence and wars in the Middle East.
Or dealing with the consequences of the "bad weather" on the east coast.
You can that "cheap"?
The problem is that when the "rare commodities run out," it would lead to a major reshape of our economies, states and societies. Historically that means: poverty and inequality, civil wars and wars.
IMO on the line here, is to prove that we as civilization are mature enough not to shoot ourselves into the foot.
Degenerating into primitive fighting over the scarce resources is precisely what society strives to avoid.
I love it when someone like you tells the rest of us how much and what we can consume. It just reconfirms my suspicion that everyone else is an authoritarian at heart.
May be.
My point is more about the relative cost. The energy now is cheap because when producing it, we disregard the future effects.
Yes, energy costs should go up, to pressure on the business and users to figure out ways to do more with less. Take smartphones as an example: driven by the limited battery capacity, they manage to do much much more than PCs of only 10 years ago - at a fraction of energy consumed.
But I wouldn't go as far as calling it "authoritarian". Levies and taxes throughout the history were used to regulate supply and demand. Energy is just another commodity which requires the regulation.
"Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs
The cheapness of the energy is IMO the largest part of the problem. We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy. We are overconsuming way too many goods (which cost energy to produce) and then go through even more energy wasting to compensate the overconsumption.
In other words, privatize the execution industry.
Just think about all the possibilities of the privatized execution!
Reading disorder??
As the summary says: the drug it imported from Germany. If used for execution even once, the EU ban would kick in, preventing Germany to import it. Import is banned - USA gets no drug, regardless if for executions or treating patients.
[...] but critics say it will cause untold headaches for developers, admins and less-technical end-users.
The few dozen of the "developers, admins" who still insist on using applet should grow up and stop torturing the "less-technical end-users."
My company would have been impacted (search in documentation is a Java applet, because documentation should be also usable locally, without a web server) if not for never managing to approve FireFox or Chrome because of their version carousel. Ironically, Opera got approved shortly before they have also picked up the rolling releases games.