Obviously it wasn't me, as I have not only posted I've also been banned from moderating for life, for no reason I've been able to figure.
Anyway, I don't think you're a troll, but I do think you are perceiving things as broken simply because you're used to a different way, when actually they work very well.
I used to use WindowMaker, now I use KDE, FWIW. I don't recall ever using drag and drop in WindowMaker, but maybe it was there when I used it and I simply didn't know.
It's there. I can't imagine using WindowMaker and not using it occasionally - how else you do maintain your dock?
It's true that you can't drag things and drop them on the 'desktop' because there is no 'desktop' - that's a construct of a different system. But anything you can accomplish using the desktop metaphor of another system can still be accomplished with WindowMaker, in ways I think anyone not already conditioned to expect the other way would recognise as being more efficient and effective.
You said "I dare you, name any meaningful feature MSWin has that WindowMaker lacks". Now you're saying you really meant "meaningful to me";-)
If you have two systems, and both can accomplish the same tasks, but in different ways, it's not fair to claim that one system is missing something because you're used to the other way. And if it were, then it would be just as fair either way - i.e. I could claim windows and mac are missing features because they don't implement copying the same way X does.
It's ctrl-esc, and the same thing happens in counterstrike. I want to rip that damn useless key off my keyboard and disable the switch. Did you ever find a less drastic way to deactivate it?
Actually SCO's customers are quite safe from any FSF/Linus/GPL claims. They are not violating copyright, SCO is.
So long as they don't buy a 'SCO-Source license', at least, that's correct.
However, Linus et. al. certainly could sue SCO for every penny they've made selling Linux. IANAL, but it seems like they'd have a good case. Only problem is SCO wouldn't be able to pay any award, so it would be a waste of money.
1) Select a bit of text, copy it to clipboard, switch to another app, highlight a bit of text you want replaced with your clipboard selection and past it in, replacing the newly highlighted text. Can't do this with X selections because highlighting the new text loses the old selection.
No, you can't do exactly that. So what? That's simply not the X way. In windows, or on my mac, I can't simply highlight the text I want and then yank it into another program without messing around with menu items or keyboard shortcuts. To me it seems like they're broken. But of course, objectively, neither are broken exactly, they just have a different paradigm.
When I'm working on my mac I learn to do it the mac way. Why is it too much to ask that when you work on a unix box you learn to do it the unix way?
Either way you accomplish the same thing, and the X way seems superior from the usability perspective, it involves far fewer steps. Yes, it does mean if you want to delete text you have to delete it, rather than pasting over... so? If you're used to the windows/mac behaviour, it may seem annoying at first, but how is it any worse than the annoyance I feel when I have to jump through hoops hitting menus and pushing keys to do something I could do in two quick mouse movements in X?
2) Clipboard stack, where you can copy multiple selections, the paste them into your document in reverse order.
I do think that there is a problem here, but I have a different viewpoint on what the problem is. In my view the problem is not the way X behaves, but the way many users behave - expecting X to behave like a different system, instead of learning to use it the way it actually works. I find it far more useful than the alternatives, personally, and I cringe when I see people trying to fix things that aren't broken because they are unwilling to consider the possibility that X has it's own, in most respects superior, ways of handling these things and that they could be a lot more productive if they would learn them instead of breaking them to 'fix' them. In particular because it results in a very degraded 'user experience' and usability, for me, when I run into the ever increasing number of programs that do this.
When I'm writing reports, I frequently switch out to Excel to generate a chart which I then copy and paste into the Word document.
I've done this, and my coworkers do this - and I've seen it cause problems. For instance, graphs that are pictures when you want them to be actual graphs, and vice versa. Not that I'm disputing that it can be mildly useful at times - but when you realise that implementing it in X means breaking a very clean and useful paradigm, and that the lack of it just means you save the chart in the format you want, then import it to the document - it's a feature I'd rather do without. I think the negatives outweigh the positives.
What is 'desktop'? A mac metaphor, ripped off by windows, which has no place and is not needed in X.
Quit trying to make your unix box act like a toy and start using it the way it was designed to work, and you'll quickly find out it's a lot better that way.
Having lived for years below the poverty level in the US, and now living in a prosperous European country with universal health care, and having been a 'consumer' of medical care in both, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that you are full of shit.
The very lowest rung of US health care, the kind you go to if you have no insurance and no money, are clearly superiour in every way to what everyone is stuck with here.
Umm no, in all seriousness, it's MSWindows that's stripped down in comparison to WindowMaker. Every time I have to use Windows, I miss features that WindowMaker has, but in using WindowMaker I've never once missed something that MSWin has.
I dare you, name any meaningful feature MSWin has that WindowMaker lacks.
I agree. The problems folks think they have with X are problems with software they're running on top of X, and often with lack of decent drivers. A new system isn't going to have things easier getting drivers, that's for certain.
It would be nice if there was an X replacement that had QT and/or GTK+ tied in more closely
That statement, however, I cannot agree with at all. One of the great advantages of X is toolkit-agnosticism. This allows innovation, evolution, progress that other platforms with builtin toolkits can't manage. It's a key factor explaining why X is still widely used today while other GUI systems cannot manage a fraction of its longevity.
or if we had a quartz-extreme-like OpenGL windowing system and font renderer with postscript-esque qualities (i.e. run my desktop at high resolution, but zoom everything appropriately for 'real-world' DPI).
I don't think a ground up rewrite would be required, since NT 1.0 was actually a very nice codebase, but the work involved in reverting back to that and rebuilding everything since then, only sensibly, would indeed be enormous.
the law only requires them if they have such a record to produce it when issued with a court order
ISP's generally have this information as they needed it for their own billing systems
Umm no. The vast majority of user accounts are unmetred - you pay the same price for the month if you are online for 5 minutes or the entire month.
ISPs that are serious about protecting customer privacy will simply quit keeping these records.
SCO, however, has gone from under $5 in may to over $20 today. That's very strong performance. You'd be a fool to sell it short now, since it's guaranteed to go up more.
Umm no the folk that shorted it when they first started this crap were fools, I'll grant... but it's reasonable to short it now. They've been struggling to avoid a total collapse for weeks now.
That said, a lawsuit of this magnitudeis for sure something to bank on. If it pans out, SCO is almost guaranteed to throw good dividends.
If it pans out to anything near the level SCO implies in their press release, the US Court system will be so self-evidently bankrupt that no businessman will be able to take it seriously. It will have descended to the level of an Iraqi or Zimbabwean court, if not lower.
A few hundred bucks could be worth thousands if the GPL, which has no real legal ground yet, fails to impress the courts.
"No legal grounds?" Now that's the sure sign that you're a troll, no one that's spent 20 minutes researching the subject would make such a blatantly ignorant statement. The GPL stands on legal grounds of US copyright law. It doesn't need to 'impress' the courts, it's a straightforward offer of privileges which US copyright law (and copyright law in most other countries) reserve to copyright holders, on certain conditions. If you do not agree to those conditions, you are left with the default copyright rules. Either SCO agreed to the GPL, and are bound by it, or they didn't and their entire business for several years has been copyright infringement. Either way they have no future, and idiots that follow advice like yours are going to lose a lot of money.
I'd say the odds are about even on that one.
And I'd say I hope you're rich, because if you'll back up your talk with cash I can take as much as you've got.
Even odds eh? I'll take it. By 2006 SCO's claims will have been thoroughly repudiated by the courts, or dropped. Even odds. As much as you've got. If you have the balls to make the bet we can find an escrow.
The decisionmakers. All are decisionmakers to some degree, of course, but some decide what the legal fiction we call a 'corporate person' does - they bear full responsibility. Some can only decide to stay or leave - they bear some, if they don't leave, but not at the same level.
level 8, the level for fraudulence and malice, which dante apparently considered a worse sin than murder and violence (level 7).
And for good cause. Attacking a stranger, reprehensible as it is, does not involve violating trust. I agree with your first analysis, the decisionmakers at SCO are definately 9th circle material.
I've got a really ancient version of Zmud... let me run over to the windows machine and check... 4.62 16 bit hahah. It works really well though, a great showcase for what you can do with objpascal/Delphi. When I was reduced to one box for awhile I tried to convert to tintin++, but even with a friend that was expert at it a lot of the things I did with Zmud using triggers and functions and the like just couldn't be replicated. Wound up running it under WINE. I agree about the newer versions though - and not just because of eLicense.
That's all well and good, but you have to admit that XFree86 is a little slow and hesitant to getting new features(otherwise directFB would be redundant).
No it wouldn't. FB is great for special purpose embedded applications on hardware that just couldn't support X or anything like it.
I first ran X on a 386-25 with 8mb ram too. I agree with almost everything you said. People that think X is slow are trying to run GNOME, KDE, or maybe E with a bloated configuration, a crappy video driver, and quite probably all their libraries compiled with debugging on. X is a wonderful thing, lightweight, fast, powerful, and it runs fine on hardware that any recent version of Windows (or Mac OSX) wouldn't even attempt to run on.
While many people rave and rave about Mac OS X, it's missing a lot. I've had a new TiBook for about 2 months now. It ran Mac OS X for all of about an hour. I immediately completely wiped it and installed Debian PPC. Why? Well...
Congratulations. Wish I could do that. My TiBook has to stay on OSX though, there are some programs I have to have that won't run otherwise, and I have to keep around 10gig free hd space for video conversion runs so I can't even dual boot.
What? I can't run regular Mac OS X apps through X? What the hell?
Doh! You didn't seriously expect otherwise, surely?
I wish it were otherwise, but to display those apps you have to have display-pdf. No way around that. X could have that - if a small fraction of the time and money that's gone into Gnome and KDE had been channeled to GNUStep instead... I personally think that would be a lot more worthwhile, but obviously not enough people agree with me.
Anyway, I won't whine too much about Aqua, really. The alternative in my case would have been WinXP... gack! That's enough to make Aqua look really really good.
It sounds to me a lot like you're looking for X - your "real work done" comment just shows that your version of "real work" is different from a lot of people's.
I think I agree with the original poster - X is a great system for doing real work. I don't use it for that at the moment - but only because I absolutely have to have a few programs that only run on Mac or Windows.
I've found that most 'new' X desktops that try to be cute and modern really are just flashy icons that never realy work exactly like they should... I realize that they're a work in progress, and that the're perfect for many uses... but not for everyone.
If you're talking about GNOME and KDE, I couldn't agree more. However, I'd suggest taking a look at some of the more mature, stable, and businesslike environments for X - thinks like XFCE and WindowMaker. Yes, it takes a little time to learn how to use them properly, but they're huge timesavers in the long run.
I personally find Mac OS X better for getting "real work done" - when I've got a lot of windows open, lots of graphics, lots of text, I find that Aqua buckles a LOT less than X. The X11 architecture is seeming more and more ancient -- sure, multiple desktops can be nice, and being able to run programs across a network was an idea WAY ahead of it's time - but X is starting to show it's age.
Repeat this a thousand times please - X != GNOME/KDE!
I used X on a 386-25 for nearly a year with satisfactory performance. Claiming that it is slow on modern hardware is ludicrous. X performs great. Pile 10 tons of cutesy toy crap on top of it and slows down - well what did you expect?
Aqua does have a very nice accelerated display-pdf system, I'm not knocking that. But when I get lots of windows open, lots of graphics, lots of text, I'd happily trade half my cpu cycles for a decent window manager in a heartbeat. Trying to navigate Aqua (or Windows) when you've got several dozen different pieces of work open at the same time, cycling between them, sequentially or random access - this is when you understand what *nix folk mean when they call these systems 'toys.' Practically any mature X window manager has the tools to make this a breeze. Neither Aqua nor Windows does - and neither is ever likely to, as both come from a design philosophy where 'friendliness' is more important than power, where 'power features' are considered a bad thing because they confuse users.
"simple copyleft" licenses like the LGPL and the "variations on a theme of public domain" licenses like BSD are more condusive to different business models, and thus also more condusive to non-volunteer development of projects under those licenses, than the GPL.
The first part is true, but the second part after 'thus' is not and does not follow.
A BSD licensed program, for instance, is more conducive to different business models, because it gives one the option to close the source and use it to pursue a proprietary software business model. But it is NOT more conducive to non-volunteer development, because once a company takes it to use in a proprietary produce their development will almost certainly go into their proprietary fork, not the original project, it's not contribution, it's just development of a proprietary program that happens to have been started with the help of BSD code. What company would willingly contribute at their own expense to a product that their competitors can turn around and take proprietary to use against them? Not one run by anyone vaguely competent.
GPL software isn't exactly the easiest sell to the corporate types either (and it shouldn't be, that's not the point to it,) but it's much more likely to make sense than contributing to a BSD program, simply because one knows that at least the competitors cannot legally grab the code and close it to use against the contributor.
I still remember when IBM was the big evil. I remember the geeks cheering when MSFT crushed OS/2 to secure Windows' place on the desktop. Hooray! No more IBM monopoly!
You're making a fool of y'self, youngun.
IBMs monopoly was crushed long before that point, by Compaq and a horde of come-afters in their wake. No geeks cheered when MS crushed a vastly superior OS with marketing and dirty tricks. At most, perhaps, two stupid nerds and a herd of extras in bad nerd costumes hired at union scale.
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Who can explain the ways of the moderators?
Obviously it wasn't me, as I have not only posted I've also been banned from moderating for life, for no reason I've been able to figure.
Anyway, I don't think you're a troll, but I do think you are perceiving things as broken simply because you're used to a different way, when actually they work very well.
It's there. I can't imagine using WindowMaker and not using it occasionally - how else you do maintain your dock?
It's true that you can't drag things and drop them on the 'desktop' because there is no 'desktop' - that's a construct of a different system. But anything you can accomplish using the desktop metaphor of another system can still be accomplished with WindowMaker, in ways I think anyone not already conditioned to expect the other way would recognise as being more efficient and effective.
If you have two systems, and both can accomplish the same tasks, but in different ways, it's not fair to claim that one system is missing something because you're used to the other way. And if it were, then it would be just as fair either way - i.e. I could claim windows and mac are missing features because they don't implement copying the same way X does.
It's ctrl-esc, and the same thing happens in counterstrike. I want to rip that damn useless key off my keyboard and disable the switch. Did you ever find a less drastic way to deactivate it?
So long as they don't buy a 'SCO-Source license', at least, that's correct.
However, Linus et. al. certainly could sue SCO for every penny they've made selling Linux. IANAL, but it seems like they'd have a good case. Only problem is SCO wouldn't be able to pay any award, so it would be a waste of money.
No, you can't do exactly that. So what? That's simply not the X way. In windows, or on my mac, I can't simply highlight the text I want and then yank it into another program without messing around with menu items or keyboard shortcuts. To me it seems like they're broken. But of course, objectively, neither are broken exactly, they just have a different paradigm.
When I'm working on my mac I learn to do it the mac way. Why is it too much to ask that when you work on a unix box you learn to do it the unix way?
Either way you accomplish the same thing, and the X way seems superior from the usability perspective, it involves far fewer steps. Yes, it does mean if you want to delete text you have to delete it, rather than pasting over... so? If you're used to the windows/mac behaviour, it may seem annoying at first, but how is it any worse than the annoyance I feel when I have to jump through hoops hitting menus and pushing keys to do something I could do in two quick mouse movements in X?
I'm not even sure what you're talking about here.
No, I honestly don't.
I do think that there is a problem here, but I have a different viewpoint on what the problem is. In my view the problem is not the way X behaves, but the way many users behave - expecting X to behave like a different system, instead of learning to use it the way it actually works. I find it far more useful than the alternatives, personally, and I cringe when I see people trying to fix things that aren't broken because they are unwilling to consider the possibility that X has it's own, in most respects superior, ways of handling these things and that they could be a lot more productive if they would learn them instead of breaking them to 'fix' them. In particular because it results in a very degraded 'user experience' and usability, for me, when I run into the ever increasing number of programs that do this.
I've done this, and my coworkers do this - and I've seen it cause problems. For instance, graphs that are pictures when you want them to be actual graphs, and vice versa. Not that I'm disputing that it can be mildly useful at times - but when you realise that implementing it in X means breaking a very clean and useful paradigm, and that the lack of it just means you save the chart in the format you want, then import it to the document - it's a feature I'd rather do without. I think the negatives outweigh the positives.
What is 'desktop'? A mac metaphor, ripped off by windows, which has no place and is not needed in X.
Quit trying to make your unix box act like a toy and start using it the way it was designed to work, and you'll quickly find out it's a lot better that way.
WindowMaker has drag and drop and has for ages.
Which usually doesn't work properly in windows either, is never necessary, and rarely useful.
Apparently I haven't had enough coffee yet, at first glance I thought that said get paid to smoke crack.
If many others read it that way, I see a meltdown on their server within moments.
Having lived for years below the poverty level in the US, and now living in a prosperous European country with universal health care, and having been a 'consumer' of medical care in both, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that you are full of shit.
The very lowest rung of US health care, the kind you go to if you have no insurance and no money, are clearly superiour in every way to what everyone is stuck with here.
Umm no, in all seriousness, it's MSWindows that's stripped down in comparison to WindowMaker. Every time I have to use Windows, I miss features that WindowMaker has, but in using WindowMaker I've never once missed something that MSWin has.
I dare you, name any meaningful feature MSWin has that WindowMaker lacks.
I agree. The problems folks think they have with X are problems with software they're running on top of X, and often with lack of decent drivers. A new system isn't going to have things easier getting drivers, that's for certain.
That statement, however, I cannot agree with at all. One of the great advantages of X is toolkit-agnosticism. This allows innovation, evolution, progress that other platforms with builtin toolkits can't manage. It's a key factor explaining why X is still widely used today while other GUI systems cannot manage a fraction of its longevity.
Two words: support GnuStep.
I don't think a ground up rewrite would be required, since NT 1.0 was actually a very nice codebase, but the work involved in reverting back to that and rebuilding everything since then, only sensibly, would indeed be enormous.
I absolutely get the picture. It's a much more serious problem than even you make it out to be.
It's still exactly what these corporate welfare whores are bringing about. Don't shoot me for bringing the message.
Umm no. The vast majority of user accounts are unmetred - you pay the same price for the month if you are online for 5 minutes or the entire month.
ISPs that are serious about protecting customer privacy will simply quit keeping these records.
Umm no the folk that shorted it when they first started this crap were fools, I'll grant... but it's reasonable to short it now. They've been struggling to avoid a total collapse for weeks now.
If it pans out to anything near the level SCO implies in their press release, the US Court system will be so self-evidently bankrupt that no businessman will be able to take it seriously. It will have descended to the level of an Iraqi or Zimbabwean court, if not lower.
"No legal grounds?" Now that's the sure sign that you're a troll, no one that's spent 20 minutes researching the subject would make such a blatantly ignorant statement. The GPL stands on legal grounds of US copyright law. It doesn't need to 'impress' the courts, it's a straightforward offer of privileges which US copyright law (and copyright law in most other countries) reserve to copyright holders, on certain conditions. If you do not agree to those conditions, you are left with the default copyright rules. Either SCO agreed to the GPL, and are bound by it, or they didn't and their entire business for several years has been copyright infringement. Either way they have no future, and idiots that follow advice like yours are going to lose a lot of money.
And I'd say I hope you're rich, because if you'll back up your talk with cash I can take as much as you've got.
Even odds eh? I'll take it. By 2006 SCO's claims will have been thoroughly repudiated by the courts, or dropped. Even odds. As much as you've got. If you have the balls to make the bet we can find an escrow.
The decisionmakers. All are decisionmakers to some degree, of course, but some decide what the legal fiction we call a 'corporate person' does - they bear full responsibility. Some can only decide to stay or leave - they bear some, if they don't leave, but not at the same level.
And for good cause. Attacking a stranger, reprehensible as it is, does not involve violating trust. I agree with your first analysis, the decisionmakers at SCO are definately 9th circle material.
I've got a really ancient version of Zmud... let me run over to the windows machine and check... 4.62 16 bit hahah. It works really well though, a great showcase for what you can do with objpascal/Delphi. When I was reduced to one box for awhile I tried to convert to tintin++, but even with a friend that was expert at it a lot of the things I did with Zmud using triggers and functions and the like just couldn't be replicated. Wound up running it under WINE. I agree about the newer versions though - and not just because of eLicense.
No it wouldn't. FB is great for special purpose embedded applications on hardware that just couldn't support X or anything like it.
I first ran X on a 386-25 with 8mb ram too. I agree with almost everything you said. People that think X is slow are trying to run GNOME, KDE, or maybe E with a bloated configuration, a crappy video driver, and quite probably all their libraries compiled with debugging on. X is a wonderful thing, lightweight, fast, powerful, and it runs fine on hardware that any recent version of Windows (or Mac OSX) wouldn't even attempt to run on.
Congratulations. Wish I could do that. My TiBook has to stay on OSX though, there are some programs I have to have that won't run otherwise, and I have to keep around 10gig free hd space for video conversion runs so I can't even dual boot.
Doh! You didn't seriously expect otherwise, surely?
I wish it were otherwise, but to display those apps you have to have display-pdf. No way around that. X could have that - if a small fraction of the time and money that's gone into Gnome and KDE had been channeled to GNUStep instead... I personally think that would be a lot more worthwhile, but obviously not enough people agree with me.
Anyway, I won't whine too much about Aqua, really. The alternative in my case would have been WinXP... gack! That's enough to make Aqua look really really good.
I think I agree with the original poster - X is a great system for doing real work. I don't use it for that at the moment - but only because I absolutely have to have a few programs that only run on Mac or Windows.
If you're talking about GNOME and KDE, I couldn't agree more. However, I'd suggest taking a look at some of the more mature, stable, and businesslike environments for X - thinks like XFCE and WindowMaker. Yes, it takes a little time to learn how to use them properly, but they're huge timesavers in the long run.
Repeat this a thousand times please - X != GNOME/KDE!
I used X on a 386-25 for nearly a year with satisfactory performance. Claiming that it is slow on modern hardware is ludicrous. X performs great. Pile 10 tons of cutesy toy crap on top of it and slows down - well what did you expect?
Aqua does have a very nice accelerated display-pdf system, I'm not knocking that. But when I get lots of windows open, lots of graphics, lots of text, I'd happily trade half my cpu cycles for a decent window manager in a heartbeat. Trying to navigate Aqua (or Windows) when you've got several dozen different pieces of work open at the same time, cycling between them, sequentially or random access - this is when you understand what *nix folk mean when they call these systems 'toys.' Practically any mature X window manager has the tools to make this a breeze. Neither Aqua nor Windows does - and neither is ever likely to, as both come from a design philosophy where 'friendliness' is more important than power, where 'power features' are considered a bad thing because they confuse users.
The first part is true, but the second part after 'thus' is not and does not follow.
A BSD licensed program, for instance, is more conducive to different business models, because it gives one the option to close the source and use it to pursue a proprietary software business model. But it is NOT more conducive to non-volunteer development, because once a company takes it to use in a proprietary produce their development will almost certainly go into their proprietary fork, not the original project, it's not contribution, it's just development of a proprietary program that happens to have been started with the help of BSD code. What company would willingly contribute at their own expense to a product that their competitors can turn around and take proprietary to use against them? Not one run by anyone vaguely competent.
GPL software isn't exactly the easiest sell to the corporate types either (and it shouldn't be, that's not the point to it,) but it's much more likely to make sense than contributing to a BSD program, simply because one knows that at least the competitors cannot legally grab the code and close it to use against the contributor.
You're making a fool of y'self, youngun.
IBMs monopoly was crushed long before that point, by Compaq and a horde of come-afters in their wake. No geeks cheered when MS crushed a vastly superior OS with marketing and dirty tricks. At most, perhaps, two stupid nerds and a herd of extras in bad nerd costumes hired at union scale.
Web servers with even a modest amount of dynamic content are very often CPU limited.
'The latest speed-demon machine' on your desktop is not.