I have seen video of Keith Packard's talk which was providing quite a lot of reasons why Wayland or something similar is the way to go forward. The talk was centered on X protocol and architecture and how it works for modern applications. (Executive summary: very poorly.)
One of the main points was that most applications (both KDE and GNOME) do not use X anymore. Largest part of X is related to the 2D graphics and font rendering. Yet, most applications do not use X for that anymore and render everything by themselves, sending to X only the final image to display. X became a simple display driver with a fancy network interface. Why the layer is needed at all?
Another memorable problem is that X is unable to support full-screen games.
So those behind Wayland are not only bubbling windows fanatics - but also people who want to stream-line Linux' graphics stack.
P.S. I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely, but something tells me that the days when I was taking that for granted are counted.
That statement completely invalidates any relevance of your comment to the Mac related discussions.
Because in world of Macs those are the Apple/Mac fanbois (as opposed to "users") which generate complains. Because they feel entitled and obliged to complain because Apple "promised" quality and charges premium for it.
Because that's what fanboys are - the object of fandom can do no wrong, and when someone complains about the object of fandom, they are inherently stupid, evil and just plain need to be shut up.
I frequent to several Mac related forums, and never seen any "evil" which is as widespread as people try to make it. In fact, technical discussions remain technical all the time. General public on the forums is very civilized and constructive when it comes to discussing issues people are having. (As opposed e.g. to Engadget editors/commenters: those are after generating traffic thus inflamatory materials are must.)
On that note, your post above is a good example of relatively tame variant of fanboyism.
And your response is a lame attempt at conspiracy theory. And very lame at that - because you didn't even bother to learn what you are conspire about. Thanks to Apple secrecy policies, lots can be conspired about it and everything related to it - but your broad shot missed it all.
[...] there ARE a lot of fanboys out there who will downplay any complaint no matter how legit.
You do not own a Mac/etc. I can easily tell.
Because if you had own a Mac, you would have surely browsed the Mac related forums. And by browsing any Mac related forum one quickly finds that the fanboys are actually the very same people who generate the complains. An endless stream of them at that. Some of the complains get picked by the media, some of them are real problem - most are not.
I'm more apt to believe complaints
And that's the problem with you. You *believe* complaints. While people who commented above, by virtue of owning a supposedly affected, now purportedly useless Mac, *know*. I hope you do understand the difference between the verbs "to believe" and "to know"?
I understand you are designing for the lowest common denominator. It makes sense, and I can see where you are going with this design direction.
However, please be sure to allow configurability at the very least, and even better resist the urge to remove UI elements and hide them behind menus.
While certainly no one wants to be bombarded with 100,000 config options [...]
OMG, I hear the lie repeated over and over again. There are people who want total control and ready to pay the price in form of time it takes to learn the options. Not everybody expects (like me) the software to work out of box.
1. Create GUI editor to manage the 100K options. Let people who want to configure UI to configure it.
2. The output of the GUI editor should be an stand-alone file, similar to extension or theme.
3. Teach FireFox to read the file on start-up and adjust the GUI according to the settings.
4. And the UI-templates to the add-ons.m.o repository.
Done.
End-users would never see the 100K - and people who want to configure it would be able to configure it and share the results with the others.
[...] But I was talking about non-tech savvy users and how options are presented to them. Kind of an important part of the point.
"Think of the children!!!";)
The real question: should Mozilla assume the role of the supervisor? Or should instead Mozilla allow its users to make the decision? And provide them with the means to make the decision?
It's (part of) why most webpages scroll down.
Alternatives are available - e.g. pagination - but they mighty suck because now you also have too find with your eyes, on potentially distractingly colored web page, where the hell Next/Prior buttons are. All mice now have the wheel - alternative interfaces have lost the battle long time ago.
Another alternative (which I often implement myself) is web page adjusting the way it displays the information (and amount of the information) depending on the (total) amount of the information and the size of the browser's screen. But then again, your average web designer designs sites like e.g. Engadget, featuring two wide blank bars on the sides of the page. IOW, the problem of inefficient screen space usage also lies on the incompetent web designers - in much greater extent than on the browser.
"Healthy" innovation is the innovation which empowers the user. IMO.
If Mozilla has improved their UI customization to the point where user themselves could make the look - that would have being an innovation. Imaging: downloadable UIs, akin to the themes.
OTOH what they do now is often called "waste of resources" and "design by committee."
Even power users don't need all that crap in their face, and even if they did it would be better to shift it off into a power tool for their benefit.
While GNOME cuts too deep sometimes [...]
You're brushing off a crucial difference: in KDE, I pretty much always can disable/hide/remove the "all that crap." In the end, making out of the desktop precisely what I need or want.
If GNOME has removed or added something, one is forced to use some quirks and tricks for as long as the developers do not change their mind. It got much better after advent of Ubuntu, but still at times I want GNOME to spary "all that crap in [my] face" - instead of the "beauty is skin deep" it often present.
Though many think they can, until actually blind tested.
I listen mostly classics and jazz. MP3@320kbps sounds different from the FLAC. More I can't tell you. Test wasn't scientific and only partially blind: I accidentally picked from my friend's library a copy of my own CD in MP3 and played it. It sounded differently to what used to hear. Upon checking I found that those were not my FLACs, but my friend's MP3s instead.
But yeah, I will likely fail at a proper blind test: it is simply extremely tiring to listen to all the samples and maintain a concentration for that long. MP3/AAC artifacts they are like cracks and snaps of the vinyl: they do not bother you until you notice them first time. That's why I simply decided to encode in FLACs.
If you really can easily distinguish well-encoded AAC or MP3 from FLAC you should lend us at HA your golden ears!
FLAC sound clearer to me. Even when compared to AAC @ 192kbps or MP3 @ 320kbps. AAC or Vorbis @ 192kbps is how I archived my music before I had hi-fi - now it is FLAC. Some of my friends use MP3 @ 320kbps. And yes, I hear the difference on both jazz and classics. More on the former - less on the latter, unless this is a piano/pianissimo piece. Quiet parts suffer most from lossy compression.
Yes, I have absolute pitch, if that plays any role. In past I have tuned guitars though never learned to play them.
I do not understand why people get up in arms when somebody says they her the difference: be glad that you do not. Otherwise, you as me would become a slave of hi-fi component producers.
I'm staying mostly with FLACs. Works for me. The difference between AAC/MP3 and FLAC (and CD player *) my hi-fi allows to hear quite clearly.
(*) Source for AAC/MP3/FLAC is the Squeezebox Touch (via DacMagic) and when compared to the CD player, the difference of sound quality is noticeable. Not out right bad (that would be Squeezebox w/o DacMagic), in fact quite OK, but still far from the proper hi-fi CD player.
Small write-once read-only media? Make the 3.5" small disks a fully support format - and I might get slightly interested. Because the 5.25" disks are f****ing huge by all modern standards. Even 3.5" might be too largish. UMD-like media (2.5" or smaller; with a case) if it is still above 10GB, might be interesting too.
If you are again with the same old 5.25" shit - do not even bother. Blu-ray - disks and drives - just got sufficiently cheap to be even considered. Your tech, with the current download/cloud trends, would take even longer to get any traction in the market - probably never getting there thanks to wider adoption of broadband.
Because proprietary drivers traditionally have minor bugs and annoyances which are getting fixed like never. Not everybody is craving for the top fps on the new games - many want speedy 2D and video without glitches. I'm not sure that OSS drivers would be better in the respect, yet IMO chances are better with two alternative drivers available.
Also, OSS drivers for both nVidia and ATI would likely exchange patches or probably reuse many common features, making them more compatible to each other, thus reducing number of surprises when something works on ATI driver but not on nVidia's.
I have two invitations in my inbox. None accepted. All this exclusivity BS is IMO BS. Everybody who wanted to connect to each other electronically already do it in Facebook or one of its clones.
Main question to me is: Why would I want (potentially) ruin my main e-mail account? by linking it to a social network??
Google's Reader shared items are already more than I need. I do not see the need to broadcast my occasional musings to even more people. If nothing else, I want to have the reaction of my friends on the news item or funny picture - not jerk off comment from some strangers. If I want reaction of a particular person I would rather send it via the e-mail or the Google Talk.
They should had gone with Oracle database to begin with [...]
You probably never paid license fees for the Oracle.
While working in start-up, I had pleasure of seeing the decision making in progress: so we buy Oracle license for the server. Or we receive wages next three months. What should we pick?
Facebook might have not existed today (good riddance) if they had decided to use commercial DB back then.
And why the hell then you complain about S/H games? which do not exist in digital distribution?
The problem with passcodes, RTFA, that it renders the whole market of S/H console games of disks defunct. Which is rather vital as the largest demographics - teens - simply do not have money to buy new games as often as they are released. Unless the price isn't offset by sale of old games.
[...] and have some localized deals with publishers in some areas. Much bigger share of profit gets to us now. Seems to work, so far...
I wonder how much games you sell downloads vs. disks? If it works for you, I expect that digital downloads to dominate.
P.S. Bigger problem would be that game developers need to learn to be nicer to their customers. "Take care of your customers and business would take care of itself." But there is this tradition, especially in console markets, where they sell games like bottled water: buy it for what it is, even though probably we make it in commercials appear more than what it actually is, and removed few common sense feature everybody was taking for granted.
Don't mix game creators with game distributors into the same bag.
In that regard, only the first sale pays.
I suspect that you lack basic knowledge of how the market works. Game developers most of the time get very very limited premium from well selling game - most if not all profits stay with the publishers.
What you say applies better to the self-published indie games - "Game authors get nothing" - but not to the majority of games distributed by big publishers where game authors were already paid in advance for creation of the game.
Keep that up, and soon nobody will create anything anymore. Why feed the leeches? Can't you see that?
Nonsense.
You probably never being around creative people. People create not because of profits - primary goal is to express themselves, to be heard, to be seen. Desire for profit comes much much later.
since you can create local clocks and keep very good local time and you can get the 1's and 0's and deep buffer them and replay them once they are time-aligned with that super great local clock you have
And what happens when the "deep buffer" is empty due to excessively high latency? And that can happen if source supplies the data way too slowly for way too long time.
Slashdot Mirror
They do, but it is a fake, it is just a window stretched to cover the whole screen.
In X it's impossible to reliably change screen resolution without affecting windows of other applications.
So somebody that has not even heard of the root window is trying to tell us all what X can or can't do and getting it wrong?
I'm pretty sure Keith Packard, as a lead of X.org, has heard of the root window.
Here is the video I was referring to: X and the future of Linux Graphics.
I have seen video of Keith Packard's talk which was providing quite a lot of reasons why Wayland or something similar is the way to go forward. The talk was centered on X protocol and architecture and how it works for modern applications. (Executive summary: very poorly.)
One of the main points was that most applications (both KDE and GNOME) do not use X anymore. Largest part of X is related to the 2D graphics and font rendering. Yet, most applications do not use X for that anymore and render everything by themselves, sending to X only the final image to display. X became a simple display driver with a fancy network interface. Why the layer is needed at all?
Another memorable problem is that X is unable to support full-screen games.
So those behind Wayland are not only bubbling windows fanatics - but also people who want to stream-line Linux' graphics stack.
P.S. I would love to have some guarantees that X would survive and I would be able to run a GUI app remotely, but something tells me that the days when I was taking that for granted are counted.
Fanboys don't generate the complaints.
That statement completely invalidates any relevance of your comment to the Mac related discussions.
Because in world of Macs those are the Apple/Mac fanbois (as opposed to "users") which generate complains. Because they feel entitled and obliged to complain because Apple "promised" quality and charges premium for it.
Because that's what fanboys are - the object of fandom can do no wrong, and when someone complains about the object of fandom, they are inherently stupid, evil and just plain need to be shut up.
I frequent to several Mac related forums, and never seen any "evil" which is as widespread as people try to make it. In fact, technical discussions remain technical all the time. General public on the forums is very civilized and constructive when it comes to discussing issues people are having. (As opposed e.g. to Engadget editors/commenters: those are after generating traffic thus inflamatory materials are must.)
On that note, your post above is a good example of relatively tame variant of fanboyism.
And your response is a lame attempt at conspiracy theory. And very lame at that - because you didn't even bother to learn what you are conspire about. Thanks to Apple secrecy policies, lots can be conspired about it and everything related to it - but your broad shot missed it all.
[...] there ARE a lot of fanboys out there who will downplay any complaint no matter how legit.
You do not own a Mac/etc. I can easily tell.
Because if you had own a Mac, you would have surely browsed the Mac related forums. And by browsing any Mac related forum one quickly finds that the fanboys are actually the very same people who generate the complains. An endless stream of them at that. Some of the complains get picked by the media, some of them are real problem - most are not.
I'm more apt to believe complaints
And that's the problem with you. You *believe* complaints. While people who commented above, by virtue of owning a supposedly affected, now purportedly useless Mac, *know*. I hope you do understand the difference between the verbs "to believe" and "to know"?
I do not care about ROI of eBay - I want to see how SSD work in real-life compared to HDD.
As one never gets any meaningful information from vendors, the only hope is the feedback of the users. The user in the case is the eBay.
Finally we are getting a chance of seeing real reliability stats of the SSD!
That if eBay would be kind enough to publish the data couple of years later.
I understand you are designing for the lowest common denominator. It makes sense, and I can see where you are going with this design direction.
However, please be sure to allow configurability at the very least, and even better resist the urge to remove UI elements and hide them behind menus.
While certainly no one wants to be bombarded with 100,000 config options [...]
OMG, I hear the lie repeated over and over again. There are people who want total control and ready to pay the price in form of time it takes to learn the options. Not everybody expects (like me) the software to work out of box.
1. Create GUI editor to manage the 100K options. Let people who want to configure UI to configure it.
2. The output of the GUI editor should be an stand-alone file, similar to extension or theme.
3. Teach FireFox to read the file on start-up and adjust the GUI according to the settings.
4. And the UI-templates to the add-ons.m.o repository.
Done.
End-users would never see the 100K - and people who want to configure it would be able to configure it and share the results with the others.
[...] But I was talking about non-tech savvy users and how options are presented to them. Kind of an important part of the point.
"Think of the children!!!" ;)
The real question: should Mozilla assume the role of the supervisor? Or should instead Mozilla allow its users to make the decision? And provide them with the means to make the decision?
It's (part of) why most webpages scroll down.
Alternatives are available - e.g. pagination - but they mighty suck because now you also have too find with your eyes, on potentially distractingly colored web page, where the hell Next/Prior buttons are. All mice now have the wheel - alternative interfaces have lost the battle long time ago.
Another alternative (which I often implement myself) is web page adjusting the way it displays the information (and amount of the information) depending on the (total) amount of the information and the size of the browser's screen. But then again, your average web designer designs sites like e.g. Engadget, featuring two wide blank bars on the sides of the page. IOW, the problem of inefficient screen space usage also lies on the incompetent web designers - in much greater extent than on the browser.
"Healthy" innovation is the innovation which empowers the user. IMO.
If Mozilla has improved their UI customization to the point where user themselves could make the look - that would have being an innovation. Imaging: downloadable UIs, akin to the themes.
OTOH what they do now is often called "waste of resources" and "design by committee."
But don't we have Chrome for that already? Do we really need two identical in everything (even their unreliability) browsers?
I have feeling that soon I would move to Internet Explorer, as being the most user-friendly and feature-full. Oh irony.
Even power users don't need all that crap in their face, and even if they did it would be better to shift it off into a power tool for their benefit.
While GNOME cuts too deep sometimes [...]
You're brushing off a crucial difference: in KDE, I pretty much always can disable/hide/remove the "all that crap." In the end, making out of the desktop precisely what I need or want.
If GNOME has removed or added something, one is forced to use some quirks and tricks for as long as the developers do not change their mind. It got much better after advent of Ubuntu, but still at times I want GNOME to spary "all that crap in [my] face" - instead of the "beauty is skin deep" it often present.
Though many think they can, until actually blind tested.
I listen mostly classics and jazz. MP3@320kbps sounds different from the FLAC. More I can't tell you. Test wasn't scientific and only partially blind: I accidentally picked from my friend's library a copy of my own CD in MP3 and played it. It sounded differently to what used to hear. Upon checking I found that those were not my FLACs, but my friend's MP3s instead.
But yeah, I will likely fail at a proper blind test: it is simply extremely tiring to listen to all the samples and maintain a concentration for that long. MP3/AAC artifacts they are like cracks and snaps of the vinyl: they do not bother you until you notice them first time. That's why I simply decided to encode in FLACs.
If you really can easily distinguish well-encoded AAC or MP3 from FLAC you should lend us at HA your golden ears!
FLAC sound clearer to me. Even when compared to AAC @ 192kbps or MP3 @ 320kbps. AAC or Vorbis @ 192kbps is how I archived my music before I had hi-fi - now it is FLAC. Some of my friends use MP3 @ 320kbps. And yes, I hear the difference on both jazz and classics. More on the former - less on the latter, unless this is a piano/pianissimo piece. Quiet parts suffer most from lossy compression.
Yes, I have absolute pitch, if that plays any role. In past I have tuned guitars though never learned to play them.
I do not understand why people get up in arms when somebody says they her the difference: be glad that you do not. Otherwise, you as me would become a slave of hi-fi component producers.
I'm staying mostly with FLACs. Works for me. The difference between AAC/MP3 and FLAC (and CD player *) my hi-fi allows to hear quite clearly.
(*) Source for AAC/MP3/FLAC is the Squeezebox Touch (via DacMagic) and when compared to the CD player, the difference of sound quality is noticeable. Not out right bad (that would be Squeezebox w/o DacMagic), in fact quite OK, but still far from the proper hi-fi CD player.
The words "believe in evolution" from the video highlights the problem quite succinctly.
Your education failed to mention the difference between believing (creationism), knowing (evolution) and theorizing (Darwin's theory).
Small write-once read-only media? Make the 3.5" small disks a fully support format - and I might get slightly interested. Because the 5.25" disks are f****ing huge by all modern standards. Even 3.5" might be too largish. UMD-like media (2.5" or smaller; with a case) if it is still above 10GB, might be interesting too.
If you are again with the same old 5.25" shit - do not even bother. Blu-ray - disks and drives - just got sufficiently cheap to be even considered. Your tech, with the current download/cloud trends, would take even longer to get any traction in the market - probably never getting there thanks to wider adoption of broadband.
Why yes! Ingenious!
Most importantly we already have the (theoretical) framework in place - RFC 3514 - it only needs minor extension with "PLZ_ANON" bit .
Because proprietary drivers traditionally have minor bugs and annoyances which are getting fixed like never. Not everybody is craving for the top fps on the new games - many want speedy 2D and video without glitches. I'm not sure that OSS drivers would be better in the respect, yet IMO chances are better with two alternative drivers available.
Also, OSS drivers for both nVidia and ATI would likely exchange patches or probably reuse many common features, making them more compatible to each other, thus reducing number of surprises when something works on ATI driver but not on nVidia's.
http://isthesigningserverdown.com/beta/
OMG. Most latencies are in "seconds" range. No comments.
I have two invitations in my inbox. None accepted. All this exclusivity BS is IMO BS. Everybody who wanted to connect to each other electronically already do it in Facebook or one of its clones.
Main question to me is: Why would I want (potentially) ruin my main e-mail account? by linking it to a social network??
Google's Reader shared items are already more than I need. I do not see the need to broadcast my occasional musings to even more people. If nothing else, I want to have the reaction of my friends on the news item or funny picture - not jerk off comment from some strangers. If I want reaction of a particular person I would rather send it via the e-mail or the Google Talk.
They should had gone with Oracle database to begin with [...]
You probably never paid license fees for the Oracle.
While working in start-up, I had pleasure of seeing the decision making in progress: so we buy Oracle license for the server. Or we receive wages next three months. What should we pick?
Facebook might have not existed today (good riddance) if they had decided to use commercial DB back then.
We now do self distribution, Steam [...]
And why the hell then you complain about S/H games? which do not exist in digital distribution?
The problem with passcodes, RTFA, that it renders the whole market of S/H console games of disks defunct. Which is rather vital as the largest demographics - teens - simply do not have money to buy new games as often as they are released. Unless the price isn't offset by sale of old games.
[...] and have some localized deals with publishers in some areas. Much bigger share of profit gets to us now. Seems to work, so far...
I wonder how much games you sell downloads vs. disks? If it works for you, I expect that digital downloads to dominate.
P.S. Bigger problem would be that game developers need to learn to be nicer to their customers. "Take care of your customers and business would take care of itself." But there is this tradition, especially in console markets, where they sell games like bottled water: buy it for what it is, even though probably we make it in commercials appear more than what it actually is, and removed few common sense feature everybody was taking for granted.
Don't mix game creators with game distributors into the same bag.
In that regard, only the first sale pays.
I suspect that you lack basic knowledge of how the market works. Game developers most of the time get very very limited premium from well selling game - most if not all profits stay with the publishers.
What you say applies better to the self-published indie games - "Game authors get nothing" - but not to the majority of games distributed by big publishers where game authors were already paid in advance for creation of the game.
Keep that up, and soon nobody will create anything anymore. Why feed the leeches? Can't you see that?
Nonsense.
You probably never being around creative people. People create not because of profits - primary goal is to express themselves, to be heard, to be seen. Desire for profit comes much much later.
No. But neither the cable can affect the timing of signal to any greater extent.
since you can create local clocks and keep very good local time and you can get the 1's and 0's and deep buffer them and replay them once they are time-aligned with that super great local clock you have
And what happens when the "deep buffer" is empty due to excessively high latency? And that can happen if source supplies the data way too slowly for way too long time.