Are you sure about that? X11 was released in September '87. The first iteration of GDI was in Windows 1, in November '85.
You may be right on the release dates. Still, I got my first accelerated X server in 1987 or 1988. It had originally been built for X10, but X11 was quickly ported to it.
That work by telling the X server to draw a load of triangles? I mean, using SVG icons and things that just get rendered and rasterized in software, and then bitblited in hardware aren't particularly pertinent to this discussion.
In short, yes.
(In addition, the libraries will transparently fall back to client-side rendering if the server doesn't support the new rendering model--the user usually can't tell the difference, except for lower performance for complex graphics.)
Hundreds of megabytes of installed software costing hundreds of dollars to... fill in XML forms with text fields, buttons, and drop-down selections. And all that even without using InfoPath (?!). Will wonders never cease? I think this truly shows what kind of great technology Microsoft keeps inventing.
Yes, and X11 has had accelerated drawing and hardware specifically built to support it since before GDI even existed.
What *is* somewhat novel is accelerating normal "2D" APIs with traditionally "3D" hardware; Quartz Extreme does this right now (using OpenGL) and Longhorn will do this (using what will essentially be DirectX 10).
Except that Quartz doesn't really do that: while it uses 3D hardware for some operations, many of its drawing operations are not accelerated and are still very slow. Despite claims by Apple to the contrary, many important operations in Aqua are also still bitmapped based. Longhorn, of course, isn't even out yet.
But there are X11 servers out already that accelerate many common drawing operations with 3D hardware, and there are fully vectorized themes and desktops for X11.
Apple did re-ignite an interest in non-exact anti-aliased desktop graphics, but X11 has overtaken Apple on every front. And it looks like Longhorn is going to move ahead of Apple as well.
"Microsoft, a rather new corporation, may not have matured to the position where it understands how it should act with respect to the public interest."-U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin Teamed with the daughter of one of Bill Gates's closest associates, thirteen-year Microsoft veteran Marlin Eller shows us what it was like at every step along Gates's route to world domination, making all that's been written before seem like a rough guess. If the Justice Department had Eller and Edstrom investigating the current-headline-making antitrust case, they would have on the record many of Microsoft's most respected developers directly contradicting the "authorized" version of events being presented in court. They would know the real scoop on how Windows was developed in the first place, shedding new light on the 1988 Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit over the alleged copying of the Mac. They would even know the real story of how Microsoft killed off Go Corporation, told for the first time by the man who did the deed, Marlin Eller himself. Revealing the smoke-and-mirror deals, the palms greased to help launch a product that didn't exist, and the boneyard of once-thriving competitors targeted by the Gates juggernaut, this book demonstrates with often hilariously damning detail the Microsoft muddle that passes for strategic direction, offset by Gates's uncanny ability to come from behind to crush whoever's on top.
We do have that. The UI in Longhorn is vector based and can offload processing to the GPU.
X11 implementations have offloaded drawing to the GPU for nearly two decades. Furthermore, X11 implementations that hardware accelerate complex Longhorn/OSX-like drawing are already in testing and will likely ship before either Apple or Microsoft will release anything like it.
Many UNIX flavors use "sudo" for driver installations (and other installations). The advantage over Windows is is that the user account is not an administrative account and privileges are only enabled temporarily and specifically for driver installations.
UNIX has user mode drivers in several flavors. The most common ones are ones that access USB, SCSI, memory mapped I/O, and FireWire devices through generic interfaces. Those have been around for many years and they are widely used.
Longhorn and Gnome are ahead
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Gnome, Windows, and OS X are fairly similar in their core graphics capabilities: antialiased drawing, translucency, and scalable fonts. So, there is little difference between them in that regard. Furthermore, none of them invented those features--they have been around longer than any of them.
If there is a difference, it's that Gnome and Avalon offer GUI declarations based on XML and that those are widely used. Apple's object serialization approach is cumbersome and outdated in comparison.
What is unacceptable isn't the fact that Sun uses copyrights and patents to impose a license, it's the nature of the license Sun attempts to impose.
patents related to java: care to demonstrate?
Go on uspto.gov and search for Sun and Java. Come on, you can do it.
any place where they used (or threatened to use) those
Sun doesn't have to use them: they have successfully killed off (for now) all serious commercial or open source competition to their Java implementation.
as for your little ad-hominem attack, just don't, 'mkay?
Which part do you have a problem with? The fact that I called you on your false statements about Sun and Linux history, or the fact that I pointed to your whacky postings about evolution?
No: Sun has been deliberately misleading people about the status of Java. They have been presenting Java as an open alternative to Windows and.NET, and they have been claiming that it gives people platform- and vendor independence.
The legal situation is that Java is more proprietary than Windows: it is covered by patents, copyrights, and licenses. All conforming Java implementations are licensed derivatives of Sun's implementation. And Sun has threatened groups trying to create open and free implementations of Java APIs with legal action.
I suppose it's not surprising that someone who believes in creationism has trouble with the facts and history when it comes to Sun corporate history.
I actually can't recall a single instance where Sun released open source software even just out of enlightened self-interest, let alone as a "gift". Quite the opposite: Sun was founded by taking BSD software and making it proprietary.
NFS, OpenWindows, and Solaris weren't open sourced long after they started declining. All three are also technically miserable. OpenOffice is technically OK (it wasn't written by Sun and it shows), but was released out of spite against Microsoft. Java isn't open source at all in any sense of the word--it's Sun proprietary, licensed source code, covered by copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
The point of the trademark system is to permit people to identify products to make better buying decisions. The point of the trademark system is not to permit companies to control what people can see.
When a search or site visit for one trademark gets you information about a competing product, that is a good thing, as long as there is no confusion about the fact that the competing product is different from the trademarked product you were looking for.
The purpose of the GPL is not to help with the adoption of a piece of software, it is to ensure its long-term survival as an open source project.
The GPL gives people the additional push they need to turn good intentions ("we're going to start using this piece of open source software") into actual actions ("we are going to release our improvements to it"). It also provides crucially important protections against patent abuses.
Anybody who thinks the GPL doesn't have teeth is welcome to try to test it. So far, just about every company who has faced the issue has backed down.
Microsoft management is good at business deals, but they are incompetent at technology. In the past, they could get away with that for various reasons, but competition is getting tough.
Microsoft's introduction of.NET, TabletPC, WinFS, Avalon, and Longhorn have been poorly planned and poorly executed, and the market is getting less and less forgiving of that.
Establishing a new language and set of libraries takes time..NET is a couple of years old; give it at least another couple of years. Keep in mind that the.NET platform has come much further along within the short time that it exists than C, C++, or Java were within the same amount of time.
In the end, it may ironically be Gnome and Mono that helps.NET get accepted: C# looks like it's becoming more important and more widely used on Linux (albeit with non-.NET libraries) than on Windows.
That hardly comes as a surprise: JDS was more of an attempt by Sun to take over the Linux desktop rather than to contribute to it. One can debate whether Swing is a good toolkit, but it clearly isn't a Linux-native desktop toolkit.
Java could have become an important part of the Linux desktop, but only based on an open source implementation of the Java language (most likely, gcj) and only based on native Gtk+ or Qt bindings.
However, uncertainty about the legal status of Java has tained Java, and public comments by Sun management (McNealy, Schwartz,...) have annoyed open source developers. Given its history, Java is largely dead on the Linux desktop.
Plagarism is when you publish or submit something and call it your own. Plagarism is, by a coincidence that probably has something to do with Stallman's experience in academia, triggered by the same act that triggers the requirements of the GPL.
Plagiarism has little to do with the GPL. You can plagiarize GPL'ed source code without violating the GPL, and you can violate the GPL without plagiarizing.
For example, you can take an idea out of a GPL'ed piece of source code and publish it under your own name. Or you can tell someone that a binary you just gave them really wasn't developed by you and that its source is covered by the GPL but still refuse to give them the source code, thereby violating the GPL.
I believe the "Artistic License" comes closer to a license prohibiting plagiarism.
Just because something is patented doesn't mean it can't be released under the GPL.
That's at best misleading. You cannot release something under the GPL if someone else holds the patent on it and doesn't explicitly permit that usage. And if you yourself hold the patent on it, you have to give the recipients a transferable license, otherwise the license isn't GPL even if you call it that.
In particular, the GPL (as opposed to the LGPL) only allows non-commercial software
Quite to the contrary: the GPL encourages you to develop commercial software, but it forces you to make the licenses transferable. That happens to have the effect that some business models don't work well for GPL'ed software, but that's a side effect not a goal. All things being equal, RMS likes programmers getting paid well and companies making money with software, he just doesn't like them imposing restrictions on users of the software.
To these groups, any given tree or platypus has more of a right to be where it is than we, the humans, have to put in yet another road for our SUVs
People like you live in scifi phantasy land, where you actually think that we can make tradeoffs between more environment or more technology. But we can't.
Our current level of population, our current resource consumption, and our current environmental destruction aren't sustainable. The longer we continue, the harder the eventual crash will be. It doesn't matter how much technology we throw at the problem.
So, worrying about platypuses and trees isn't about "values" or "rights", it's about long-term survival of our own species.
I couldn't really see the need for a third widget toolkit (AWT, Swing, SWT)
Swing's integration with the Linux desktop is still lousy. By using native widgets, SWT integrates considerably better.
specially after Sun got some sense and started using the community process to discuss and enhance Java.
Brilliant: hundreds of people working for free to improve Sun's proprietary platform.
It always sounded to me like an IBMish NIH attack.
IBM's position has little to do with "NIH". Sun really has pissed off IBM and a lot of other people: they promised to deliver an ISO/ECMA standard platform, and instead Sun still owns patents, copyrights, licenses, and the approval process for Java.
You can be certain that neither IBM nor open source developers will rest until Sun loses control over Java.
I actually doubt that it is. I think you underestimate how widely X11 is still used in enterprise computing and on non-Linux machines, and few if any of those machines use X.org. There are probably more Windows desktops running X11 than Linux desktop machines. Even on Linux, Debian still hasn't switched to X.org, and many people still run XFree86.
In any case, the question then should be "when will the X.org distribution get modularized better". That's probably a valid question.
But let's not create the impression that X is a piece of software. X has survived for so long because it is not a piece of software, but a standard for a protocol.
The point is that you don't realise how USEFUL these sort of features are.
Of course people realize the degree to which those features are useful--they have been studied in the academic literature long before Enlightenment.
I think its great that X is getting a universal architecture for this sort of stuff, but I'll be disapointed if Rastermann and others dont have some sort of input in this, mainly because DR17 is showing me how *fast* this sort of thing can be
These features are standard computer graphics stuff. People know how to implement them. What's new about the X.org stuff is that people finally got around to making that kind of graphics model part of X11.
I think Enlightenment is great. Perhaps the Rasterman libraries can be used for a software implementation in the X.org server. But X.org is also going for server-side hardware acceleration, which should be even better.
X is a protocol, not a piece of software, so there is no such thing as a "distribution of X". XFree86 and X.org are both servers that implement the X protocol (version 11), but they are far from the only ones.
There have been dozens of different implementations of the X protocol since it was created 20 years ago. Some of them run in a few hundred kbytes.
Furthermore, the X server and the X client libraries are already pretty much independent. Traditionally, with the MIT X distribution, all you needed to run the server was the X server binary (a statically linked executable), the "fixed" font, and a bunch of configuration files.
I believe under Debian, you can install one without the other if you like.
but if i feel the need to read that particular item in the rss feed, i need to click the link and go to the page to view it.
Yes, that's the way it's supposed to work. That's why it's called an "RDF Site Summary".
You don't have to (unless the rss feed only gives a summary) goto another page to view it
You don't have to go to "another page" with Sage either. First of all, it will actually display a single page with all the stories on it, so you get the same functionality as with Safari. Secondly, you don't go to "another page", the summary is in the sidebar.
Sites are, however, not supposed to put entire stories in RSS. If RSS were the "Ad-Free Article Markup Language", as Apple seems to mistakenly think, then it would be called the "AFAML".
Ok i'm going to disregard Sage and the other extension based RSS plugins for FireFox/Mozilla. They aren't "included" and therefore aren't worth even discussing here.
What you "disregard" doesn't change the fact that Apple didn't come up with this and that their implementation of it sucks.
If Apple's junky implementation of RSS becomes accepted, then we'll all suffer, because web sites will just end up putting their ads into RSS.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure about that? X11 was released in September '87. The first iteration of GDI was in Windows 1, in November '85.
You may be right on the release dates. Still, I got my first accelerated X server in 1987 or 1988. It had originally been built for X10, but X11 was quickly ported to it.
That work by telling the X server to draw a load of triangles? I mean, using SVG icons and things that just get rendered and rasterized in software, and then bitblited in hardware aren't particularly pertinent to this discussion.
In short, yes.
(In addition, the libraries will transparently fall back to client-side rendering if the server doesn't support the new rendering model--the user usually can't tell the difference, except for lower performance for complex graphics.)
Hundreds of megabytes of installed software costing hundreds of dollars to... fill in XML forms with text fields, buttons, and drop-down selections. And all that even without using InfoPath (?!). Will wonders never cease? I think this truly shows what kind of great technology Microsoft keeps inventing.
GDI has been hardware accelerated for many years
Yes, and X11 has had accelerated drawing and hardware specifically built to support it since before GDI even existed.
What *is* somewhat novel is accelerating normal "2D" APIs with traditionally "3D" hardware; Quartz Extreme does this right now (using OpenGL) and Longhorn will do this (using what will essentially be DirectX 10).
Except that Quartz doesn't really do that: while it uses 3D hardware for some operations, many of its drawing operations are not accelerated and are still very slow. Despite claims by Apple to the contrary, many important operations in Aqua are also still bitmapped based. Longhorn, of course, isn't even out yet.
But there are X11 servers out already that accelerate many common drawing operations with 3D hardware, and there are fully vectorized themes and desktops for X11.
Apple did re-ignite an interest in non-exact anti-aliased desktop graphics, but X11 has overtaken Apple on every front. And it looks like Longhorn is going to move ahead of Apple as well.
Pretty damning stuff.
We do have that. The UI in Longhorn is vector based and can offload processing to the GPU.
X11 implementations have offloaded drawing to the GPU for nearly two decades. Furthermore, X11 implementations that hardware accelerate complex Longhorn/OSX-like drawing are already in testing and will likely ship before either Apple or Microsoft will release anything like it.
Many UNIX flavors use "sudo" for driver installations (and other installations). The advantage over Windows is is that the user account is not an administrative account and privileges are only enabled temporarily and specifically for driver installations.
UNIX has user mode drivers in several flavors. The most common ones are ones that access USB, SCSI, memory mapped I/O, and FireWire devices through generic interfaces. Those have been around for many years and they are widely used.
Gnome, Windows, and OS X are fairly similar in their core graphics capabilities: antialiased drawing, translucency, and scalable fonts. So, there is little difference between them in that regard. Furthermore, none of them invented those features--they have been around longer than any of them.
If there is a difference, it's that Gnome and Avalon offer GUI declarations based on XML and that those are widely used. Apple's object serialization approach is cumbersome and outdated in comparison.
you pay for them...
so it can't be all that bad, right?
What is unacceptable isn't the fact that Sun uses copyrights and patents to impose a license, it's the nature of the license Sun attempts to impose.
patents related to java: care to demonstrate?
Go on uspto.gov and search for Sun and Java. Come on, you can do it.
any place where they used (or threatened to use) those
Sun doesn't have to use them: they have successfully killed off (for now) all serious commercial or open source competition to their Java implementation.
as for your little ad-hominem attack, just don't, 'mkay?
Which part do you have a problem with? The fact that I called you on your false statements about Sun and Linux history, or the fact that I pointed to your whacky postings about evolution?
No: Sun has been deliberately misleading people about the status of Java. They have been presenting Java as an open alternative to Windows and .NET, and they have been claiming that it gives people platform- and vendor independence.
The legal situation is that Java is more proprietary than Windows: it is covered by patents, copyrights, and licenses. All conforming Java implementations are licensed derivatives of Sun's implementation. And Sun has threatened groups trying to create open and free implementations of Java APIs with legal action.
I suppose it's not surprising that someone who believes in creationism has trouble with the facts and history when it comes to Sun corporate history.
I actually can't recall a single instance where Sun released open source software even just out of enlightened self-interest, let alone as a "gift". Quite the opposite: Sun was founded by taking BSD software and making it proprietary.
NFS, OpenWindows, and Solaris weren't open sourced long after they started declining. All three are also technically miserable. OpenOffice is technically OK (it wasn't written by Sun and it shows), but was released out of spite against Microsoft. Java isn't open source at all in any sense of the word--it's Sun proprietary, licensed source code, covered by copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
The point of the trademark system is to permit people to identify products to make better buying decisions. The point of the trademark system is not to permit companies to control what people can see.
When a search or site visit for one trademark gets you information about a competing product, that is a good thing, as long as there is no confusion about the fact that the competing product is different from the trademarked product you were looking for.
The purpose of the GPL is not to help with the adoption of a piece of software, it is to ensure its long-term survival as an open source project.
The GPL gives people the additional push they need to turn good intentions ("we're going to start using this piece of open source software") into actual actions ("we are going to release our improvements to it"). It also provides crucially important protections against patent abuses.
Anybody who thinks the GPL doesn't have teeth is welcome to try to test it. So far, just about every company who has faced the issue has backed down.
Microsoft management is good at business deals, but they are incompetent at technology. In the past, they could get away with that for various reasons, but competition is getting tough.
.NET, TabletPC, WinFS, Avalon, and Longhorn have been poorly planned and poorly executed, and the market is getting less and less forgiving of that.
Microsoft's introduction of
Establishing a new language and set of libraries takes time. .NET is a couple of years old; give it at least another couple of years. Keep in mind that the .NET platform has come much further along within the short time that it exists than C, C++, or Java were within the same amount of time.
.NET get accepted: C# looks like it's becoming more important and more widely used on Linux (albeit with non-.NET libraries) than on Windows.
In the end, it may ironically be Gnome and Mono that helps
That hardly comes as a surprise: JDS was more of an attempt by Sun to take over the Linux desktop rather than to contribute to it. One can debate whether Swing is a good toolkit, but it clearly isn't a Linux-native desktop toolkit.
...) have annoyed open source developers. Given its history, Java is largely dead on the Linux desktop.
Java could have become an important part of the Linux desktop, but only based on an open source implementation of the Java language (most likely, gcj) and only based on native Gtk+ or Qt bindings.
However, uncertainty about the legal status of Java has tained Java, and public comments by Sun management (McNealy, Schwartz,
Plagarism is when you publish or submit something and call it your own. Plagarism is, by a coincidence that probably has something to do with Stallman's experience in academia, triggered by the same act that triggers the requirements of the GPL.
Plagiarism has little to do with the GPL. You can plagiarize GPL'ed source code without violating the GPL, and you can violate the GPL without plagiarizing.
For example, you can take an idea out of a GPL'ed piece of source code and publish it under your own name. Or you can tell someone that a binary you just gave them really wasn't developed by you and that its source is covered by the GPL but still refuse to give them the source code, thereby violating the GPL.
I believe the "Artistic License" comes closer to a license prohibiting plagiarism.
Just because something is patented doesn't mean it can't be released under the GPL.
That's at best misleading. You cannot release something under the GPL if someone else holds the patent on it and doesn't explicitly permit that usage. And if you yourself hold the patent on it, you have to give the recipients a transferable license, otherwise the license isn't GPL even if you call it that.
In particular, the GPL (as opposed to the LGPL) only allows non-commercial software
Quite to the contrary: the GPL encourages you to develop commercial software, but it forces you to make the licenses transferable. That happens to have the effect that some business models don't work well for GPL'ed software, but that's a side effect not a goal. All things being equal, RMS likes programmers getting paid well and companies making money with software, he just doesn't like them imposing restrictions on users of the software.
To these groups, any given tree or platypus has more of a right to be where it is than we, the humans, have to put in yet another road for our SUVs People like you live in scifi phantasy land, where you actually think that we can make tradeoffs between more environment or more technology. But we can't. Our current level of population, our current resource consumption, and our current environmental destruction aren't sustainable. The longer we continue, the harder the eventual crash will be. It doesn't matter how much technology we throw at the problem. So, worrying about platypuses and trees isn't about "values" or "rights", it's about long-term survival of our own species.
I couldn't really see the need for a third widget toolkit (AWT, Swing, SWT)
Swing's integration with the Linux desktop is still lousy. By using native widgets, SWT integrates considerably better.
specially after Sun got some sense and started using the community process to discuss and enhance Java.
Brilliant: hundreds of people working for free to improve Sun's proprietary platform.
It always sounded to me like an IBMish NIH attack.
IBM's position has little to do with "NIH". Sun really has pissed off IBM and a lot of other people: they promised to deliver an ISO/ECMA standard platform, and instead Sun still owns patents, copyrights, licenses, and the approval process for Java.
You can be certain that neither IBM nor open source developers will rest until Sun loses control over Java.
today's most common X implementation is X.org,
I actually doubt that it is. I think you underestimate how widely X11 is still used in enterprise computing and on non-Linux machines, and few if any of those machines use X.org. There are probably more Windows desktops running X11 than Linux desktop machines. Even on Linux, Debian still hasn't switched to X.org, and many people still run XFree86.
In any case, the question then should be "when will the X.org distribution get modularized better". That's probably a valid question.
But let's not create the impression that X is a piece of software. X has survived for so long because it is not a piece of software, but a standard for a protocol.
The point is that you don't realise how USEFUL these sort of features are.
Of course people realize the degree to which those features are useful--they have been studied in the academic literature long before Enlightenment.
I think its great that X is getting a universal architecture for this sort of stuff, but I'll be disapointed if Rastermann and others dont have some sort of input in this, mainly because DR17 is showing me how *fast* this sort of thing can be
These features are standard computer graphics stuff. People know how to implement them. What's new about the X.org stuff is that people finally got around to making that kind of graphics model part of X11.
I think Enlightenment is great. Perhaps the Rasterman libraries can be used for a software implementation in the X.org server. But X.org is also going for server-side hardware acceleration, which should be even better.
X is a protocol, not a piece of software, so there is no such thing as a "distribution of X". XFree86 and X.org are both servers that implement the X protocol (version 11), but they are far from the only ones. There have been dozens of different implementations of the X protocol since it was created 20 years ago. Some of them run in a few hundred kbytes. Furthermore, the X server and the X client libraries are already pretty much independent. Traditionally, with the MIT X distribution, all you needed to run the server was the X server binary (a statically linked executable), the "fixed" font, and a bunch of configuration files. I believe under Debian, you can install one without the other if you like.
but if i feel the need to read that particular item in the rss feed, i need to click the link and go to the page to view it.
Yes, that's the way it's supposed to work. That's why it's called an "RDF Site Summary".
You don't have to (unless the rss feed only gives a summary) goto another page to view it
You don't have to go to "another page" with Sage either. First of all, it will actually display a single page with all the stories on it, so you get the same functionality as with Safari. Secondly, you don't go to "another page", the summary is in the sidebar.
Sites are, however, not supposed to put entire stories in RSS. If RSS were the "Ad-Free Article Markup Language", as Apple seems to mistakenly think, then it would be called the "AFAML".
Ok i'm going to disregard Sage and the other extension based RSS plugins for FireFox/Mozilla. They aren't "included" and therefore aren't worth even discussing here.
What you "disregard" doesn't change the fact that Apple didn't come up with this and that their implementation of it sucks.
If Apple's junky implementation of RSS becomes accepted, then we'll all suffer, because web sites will just end up putting their ads into RSS.