When applications become too unresponsive to update under a compositing system their windows stay frozen, but do not get "erased" by dragging another window over them. Ever.
I'm dragging a Firefox window over a dead RDP session right now. It's erasing the contents of the window. I've never, ever managed to do that on MacOS X and not often on Windows Vista.
If I use a compositing window manager, that problem goes away, but in it's place comes a whole new set of issues. Ever notice how common "turn off Compiz/KWin compositing" comes up when people try to troubleshoot X issues? At least Vista is smart enough to turn it off for you when the situation merits it.
"Tearing" of Windows during dragging is still a problem for all of these systems if somewhere along the line there's enough of a difference between refresh rates between devices and/or software.
On no other platform do you ever have to think about syncing refresh rates. On X, you're at the mercy of the driver and window manager. On an nVidia card you're probably ok. On a recent Intel card you might be. On ATI it's a complete crapshoot. Throw in compositing and it gets even more complex.
Meanwhile, on much of the same hardware, you could run a hacked version of Mac OS X and not see a lick of tearing or artifacting.
I'm really not sure what day you were back in where dragging windows around in Irix didn't result in slow redraws over busy applications, I suspect that whatever it is you're smoking might have some fungus growing on it. Might be time to refresh your stash.
I'm not saying that IRIX didn't do have that problem, but that, at the time, you could buy a commercial UNIX workstation and get a decently-integrated X server. The problem then was that you had to pay an astronomical sum to get the same window management performance that you took for granted on a Mac, and that a heck of a lot of tuning, testing and integration had to happen to get your (very expensive) video or 3D application to work, again, as well as a Mac.
Nowadays, you don't have to spend a fortune tog get decent X. What you have instead is that you're stuck with one card family (nVidia) or checking experimental code out of various git respositories, and even then you're not guaranteed the level of seamless video behaviour that you'd see on a Intel-based machine running Windows Vista.
I'm glad some people get decent X performance, but spending more than a little time on, say, Phoronix or Ubuntu's forums should disabuse you of the notion that everything works.
What I am saying is that X should have been designed to provide more services than it does, and that some of the services we're trying to hack onto it are suffering as a result.
It's not so much KDE or GNOME, but Compiz/Metacity or KWin not being part of X that's the problem. The window manager should have been part of X from the get-go. So should a lot of things, for that matter.
Because, from a user's perspective, it doesn't work all that well. Here's an example:
On MacOS X, it's just about impossible to get into a situation where a) video tears or flickers, or b) menus and windows can "rub out" other menus or windows (eg, you can't drag a window around like a giant eraser on Mac OS). On X+whatever, it's pathetically easy to do either. Windows is somewhere in-between the two.
To be fair to X, managing compositing et al isn't it's job---but it should be! Between X's by-design paucity of features and the number of combinations of video driver, X server, window manager and settings thereof, it's hard to get a decent, modern desktop experience. Had X been designed a little more smartly (eg, for actual people and not for computer scientists) this probably wouldn't be such a problem. Grafting things like multiple display support, accelerated 3D, video playback and now, compositing, have shown problems. Back in the day, when you could just buy IRIX (ro whatever) and be assured of a working, end-to-end X implementation this wasn't an issue. With the clusterfuck that is X.org+DRM+GEM+Mesa+KMS+GL/GLX/AIGLX+DRI/DRI2+UXA/EXA/XAA+whatever window manager is invovled, it's a crapshoot.
By comparison, again, we have MacOS X's system, which again just works, even if in theoretical terms it's a little slower. Users don't care that much about GTK benchmarks; they do care if the user experience breaks down.
The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X. It's worth reading if you're wondering why X drives people nuts.
There will be a subset of users who will hate it, mostly serious Excel jockies and the extremely change averse, but on the whole it'll be pretty popular..
More people than you think will hate it. The average, desk-bound, minimum-wage Excel/Outlook jockey will bitch at any change. Note that these people bitch if you get them a new computer, or even if you move the coffee machine to a new room down the hall. They bitch at every change, every day, all the time. These people are, in a lot of organizations, far more pervasive than you might think.
The hard limit is 2GB, but you can have amusing things happen at any size. Heck, use Outlook for IMAP and it pretty much guaranteed to corrupt your IMAP store's PST. The recommended solution? Exchange Server.
The part that galls me, though, is how users gasp "But how could this possibly happen?" and then get really twitchy about attempting to fix it. People place, I feel, too much faith in computers in general, but Outlook has an incredible white-knight reputation. It's literally the Teflon application: no matter how much it fucks up, corrupts data, gets compromised, fails to run, stalls, kills small children, etc., it's reputation cannot be besmirched among the general population. I'm boggled, I really am.
Lack of the rule of law and economic sanctions are both significant stop-gaps for the functioning of the free markets in everywhere.
If you have to have rule of law to make a market free, you don't have a free market. It's self-contradicting, and the reason why "free markets" are a philosophical device, not something that can ever, actually exist.
All markets, everywhere, tend towards concentration of power. A concentration of power is a de-facto government, even if libertarians choose to plug their ears and chant "I can't hear you!" at the idea.
It is possible, and a good idea, to argue about the nature and degree of regulation of the market; to deny that regulation is needed and that unrestricted markets are possible is, well, messed up. Saying that "it's never been tried because one iota of regulation infected it" is self-delusion of an order higher than that which Marxists (who claim that "pure communism has never been tried") exhibit.
The whole movement would come across as a lot less pretentious if people gave up on the self-righteous philosophical and moral absolutism.
Ubuntu reached a point, once, where I thought that could eventually become true; but since Hardy, Canonical have blown it completely.
To their credit, I think they recognized they blew it when they started the 100 Paper Cuts project. It was a good way of showing, to the those who had become recalcitrant about fixing problems that mattered to actual users and were focused on latest-and-greatest instead. Even then, there's some LaunchPad comments that could lead you to suspect that some people are a little too settled in their ways.
Actually, I think they realized they were in trouble with the whole badly-broken-Intel-graphics in 9.04. I don't know how they let that slip through: badly breaking graphics performance for most laptops and many desktops seems like the kind of thing that would have shown up in QA reports and the beta period, no?
The only economic system based on freedom and personal choice.
It's not based on freedom and personal choice, it's based on a lack of restrictions. Similar concepts, but there's an important semantic difference: the first implies regulation to make sure that choice and freedom an ensured(and is thusly self-compromising); the second just crosses it's metaphorical fingers and hopes that things stay unrestricted. They don't and can't, of course.
"Good and right" or "ethical" has nothing to do with it, especially since "good and right" are highly subjective terms and certainly when dealing with government or the lack thereof. What's good and right and ethical to you can very easily seem selfish and uncaring and highly unethical to someone else because they're suffering for the lack of regulation. A lack of restrictions on you can, and does, incur restrictions upon others. That's not very ethical (by your definition), is it?
What you're advocating, more or less, is a degree of socialism, except that you don't want to call it that. There must be some kind of regulation to ensure a functioning social contract, otherwise ad-hoc regulation happens as soon as power starts to accumulate, and those ad-hoc structures can very easily be bad and wrong and unethical.
The original point though, is that an unregulated, completely free market has a lifespan that makes mayflies look like Methusela. It can't exist because the accumulation of power, which happens no matter what, negates it's existence. Marxism, at least, doesn't completely self-contradict itself, despite being almost as ignorant of the reality of human society.
Calling it "good and right" or "ethical" is disingenuous.
You cannot have a free market once economic power starts to accumulate, as it will in the absence of regulation; nor you have a free market with regulation.
The "free market", thusly, cannot really exist, except for a very brief period at the beginning before clout accumulates and capitalism takes hold. It's a philosophical fiction; a Utopia by definition. Marxism is more realistic.
More choice also means "too many cooks" syndrome. We saw this with Windows Mobile, where the core system (which, admittedly, had problems of it's own) was further crippled by vendor- and carrier-specific addons, some of which changed the UI significantly and many of which didn't integrate at all well with the base system (HTC TouchhFlo comes to mind).
Android is seeing something similar: HTC's offerings use a different UI depending on their version (some use the base Android system, some use HTC's Sense UI). Motorola uses something different. Not all phones use Android's mail client (some use HTC mail; and no, not all HTCs use HTC mail). Many phones bundle additional applications to manage the dialer, the radio, and more. And then the carriers get their grubby hands on it and pervert it further, such that otherwise identical phones on two different carriers behave quite differently. Android, to it's credit, is nowhere near as bad as WM is, but it's still young, and the cracks are starting to show.
The hardware platform may be shaping up into something like the PC market, but the software market is committing the same kind of marketing hari kari that killed UNIX as a unified platform and continues to cripple Linux today. Choice is good for some users, but by and large these devices are going to end up in the hands a "normal people" who have no patience for the complications that this value-added crap brings. And then there's Google's haphazard implementation (you can't buy apps in some countries, or under some carriers; some apps are restricted per-carrier) to further hamper things.
Then there's the significantly weaker marketing effort: instead of a unified "Google Phone" which is a strong brand, you have HTC, Samsung, Motorola and others, all with different branding and marketing. Few, if any, making any effort to promote the Android or Google brands; heck, many users are likely unaware that they have a common platform and app store. Even Microsoft does a better job than this, and RIM and Palm certainly do.
By comparison, an iPhone is an iPhone is an iPhone. The marketing is strong, the platform unified and the carriers keep their sticky fingers off it. The app store is well understood and universal. There's choice, but it's nicely balanced against complexity---which is important, since this isn't 1985 and we're dealing with a different market: it's not hobbyists and businesses and early adopters, it's millions and millions of schmoes, and trying to duplicate the Microsoft/Intel strategy of nearly three decades ago isn't necessarily a good idea.
"Why aren't you complaining that if you kill X, your desktop dies?"
Because that's not analogious to what Pulse is doing. A better analogy would be if Firefox's crashing killed your whole X session and left your video card in such a state that you couldn't bring X back up until you rebooted.
Sure, the flaw is in Firefox, but there's no way a fundamental subsystem like Pulse (or X) should be so incapable of handling errors gracefully.
The comment about video/compositing is interesting, because if there's anything worse than Linux audio, it's Linux video. At least with Pulse you can see the light at the end of the tunnel; I have no idea how the Driver/GEM/Mesa/DRM/DRI/GLX/XAA/EXA/UXA/KMS/Xv/WTF/BBQ clusterf_ck will ever get sorted out, not when everyone seems to be working on parallel, incompatible products. And yes, I know that if I get some experimental driver from X.org's git server and/or make sure I only use Intel/nVidia/ATi and/or precisely tweak xorg.conf. Eventually I did that, but there's no way that video should be as inconsistent as it is for this long.
Meanwhile, I can run a hacked-up version of OS X on the same hardware and somehow video just works. No tearing, no stuttering, no worries.
Pulse, by comparison, isn't so bad. I managed to get it working such that I could play to my Airport Express, USB headphones, desktop speakers and/or a combination of the above on a per-app basis, all without involving git or dealing with drivers. If it has a problem, it's that the tools to manage it aren't well-integrated into many distros (Ubuntu, I'm looking at you) and aren't terribly user-friendly, and that applications can bring it down. That's a serious problem: a driver killing the sound system is fine, in a way, but it shouldn't be possible for, say, Songbird or Flash to kill audio any more than it should be possible for them to kill your display server.
I can see the point of PulseAudio, and what it needs is a little polish and robustness. Video on Linux, though, is showing the worst symptoms of "too many cooks" and "herding cats". Worse is that we've come to accept this as the status quo.
Even with high-margin, business-grade phones this seems to be the case. Part of it is carrier reticence: since each carrier has a customized ROM and quality assurance is basically money down the toilet, no carrier wants to request, package, crapware-ify, test, release and support phones that hardly anyone is buying. The other part is just vendor laziness for similar reasons: you could understand Rogers or AT&T or T-Mobile not wanting to go through the exercise, but when Hewlett-Packard flat gives up on fixing bugs in handhelds targeted at business customers, you know something is very wrong. The reason people resort to hacked ROMs is that, without them, you'd never get a working handset.
The only---only!---people making WM updates are companies like Symbol or Intermec, and their units come with an incredible price premium. When you charge two to five grand per handset, then you expect a little help. We're moving off of WM outside of these very specific uses because the device support could best be described as a three-way not-my-problem clusterfuck between the vendor, carrier and Microsoft.
Google needs to be careful with Android, because the way it's update and experience is being handled (allowing the vendors and carriers control over application, UI appearance and update policy) looks suspiciously like how WM is done. Granted, it's a better platform, but one reason why the iPhone works so well is that you're not beholden to the half-assed "value-add" shit that HTC/Samsung/Motorola or your carrier sees fit to hamstring you with.
Side note: The funny thing is that WM has had a software update function since v5, but it never works. No carrier or vendor has ever used it, instead preferring whole-ROM updates.
Just to clarify: MTS is not part of Telus. MTS merged with/bought Allstream.
Interesting, MTS and Telus are having a slapfest because one or the other started poaching customers and erecting towers in the other's territory (and now both are). The end-result is that mobile/wireless in Alberta and Manitoba is a mess right now.
Do you want to know what fun is? Try getting Bell/Bell West and Telus to cooperate when you're in eastern Canada but your western Canada office(s) are down. Dealing with bitchy techs and support staff at both companies reminds me of what it must be like to teach kindergarten.
Not all of it. If you pay an astronomical amount of money, you can subscribe to a Bell Nexxia** provided service (T1, T3, etc). Then you have the privilege of being shat on by Bell Nexxia Technical Support, which is just as bad as the outsourced support, except that they've an extra layer of arrogance to them and you get a double-helping of gall knowing that, despite your spending millions of dollars per year you're treated no better than the poor bastards who order Bell DSL Basic.
Let me regale you with some tales: * I watched a Bell technician randomly unplugging fibre in Toronto's hospital district to test a problem. Just randomly unplugging shit in the middle of the day. No warning, no call to the customers, just *yank* * I watched a Bell technician get formally ejected from a downtown building for belligerence. Twice. * Bell Nexxia service desk employees didn't seem to know about a *fucking street collapsing* in western Canada. Oh, no, it must be my equipment. * I've sat across the table from a VP of customer service and a managing director and been directly lied to about incidents. When I called them on it (eg, when I started recording conversations my operators had with Nexxia staff) they grudgingly admitted to doing dick-all * I went through four sales reps in three years. They all quit after support failed to install lines as promised. Oh, did I mention the MPLS rollout and the 10% success rate? * Mapping frame DLCIs for other people's networks into mine. * Random billing errors. We're not talking minor ones, either: they dropped ten years worth of PBX rental (for equipment at a building we hadn't occupied for ten years) on us in one, million-dollar shot. Another time our WAN bill went up more than twelve-fold for no good reason. * As for billing: did you know Bell's billing systems have no link whatsoever to the services they provide you? None. Ther have no real change-management system, either: if you ask questions about how your network is configured versus what your bill says they'll admit they have no fucking clue.
And that's all premium, highly-paid, non-Bangalore staff. Bell is comically bad: it's a balkanized, badly-structured company made of all sort of autonomous divisions that don't talk. Morale among employees is terrible, and anyone who's been there more than a short time is certainly a Peter Principle example in practice. The other ex-Stentors (Telus, Aliant, MTS) are a bit better (Telus is the worst, MTS/Allstream is the best, mostly by virtue of how good the Allstream people were, but MTS seems to be dragging them down) but not much. Rogers less incompetent, but much nastier.
** Nexxia was so bad they "reorganized" into Bell Advanced Technical Services or somesuch several years ago. It's still the same useless pieces of shit doing the same work.
I'd rather buy Moblin than Android on a mobile device. Android replaces basically every part of what we usually call "Linux", except for the kernel (which of course actually *is* Linux). Moblin has a heavily custom desktop environment but other than that it seems like a reasonably "normal" distribution
I don't think I'd call that an advantage. Linux-the-normal-distribution has a lot of aspects that aren't well-suited to a small-screen mobile device, and keeping those aspects around results in a worst-of-both-worlds compromise. Think about Windows Mobile (especially pre-2003): the interface carry-overs from Windows proper are the chief reason it's an also-ran on PDAs and phones, and it's only as those features disappear (and the platform diverges further from the desktop) that it's getting any traction at all. That many WM apps pay only lip-service to the platform and obey desktop conventions makes matters worse; keeping the desktop's UI encourages some pretty bad behaviour on the part of many developers.
There's no real point to extending the traditional Linux desktop to a phone for the same reason: there's nothing worthwhile to carry over. There's enough of this problem on the Linux desktop, which suffers from the platform's focus on servers and technical users. Google was right to junk as much as they can in favour of a user interface that's built for a mobile device. If they've made a mistake anywhere, it's that they've allowed the handset makers too much control over the interface, weakening the Android brand and hamstringing the phone with glitchy, tacked-on interface garbage that doesn't integrate well with the underlying OS (have you seen HTC TouchFlo on Windows Mobile? It's like lipstick on a pig).
I'm not saying that Moblin will be Windows CE awful, but I can't see it being iPhone or even Android-good if it's carrying over just about any aspect of the Linux GUI, and I can't see ports of desktop Linux apps being anything more than oft-frustrating.
Yeah, yeah, I know, but it's not really an option to avoid it and/or download files and play them later. Skype would be the next one. I got it working, but it was nastier than doing the same in PulseAudio was. The final blow was getting my Apple Airport's audio working. Pulse got this (more or less) working more or less. I like the premise of jack, but it seems like it'll be relegated to second-fiddle status and that anyone who uses it will end up running it side-by-side with Pulse, doing pro work while Pulse does everything else.
Depends on the day of the week, the format and who's using the computer. I have the most luck with VLC outputting to either Xv (if I care about quality) or OpenGL (if I care about tearing and/or have Compiz turned off) and putting audio natively to Pulse. mplayer gets used for more esoteric files, but the interface (even with SMPlayer) is not great. Xine's not so hot either. My spouse uses VLC for the most part after getting thoroughly disgusted with Totem. Trying mplayer on her wasn't a success.
It works, more or less, but it took more experimentation than I'd like to get it all working. The horrible part is that hacking MacOS onto the same hardware more or less just works. No tearing, no audio quitting, just the occasional stutter on the more demanding files.
Video tearing is what gets me. That shouldn't happen: it should be easy to sync to vblank, but the very way X works makes it very, very hard to do without some other kind of sacrifice (eg, using OpenGL, which then gives you trouble with compositing)
You're right about Apple's approach, especially for desktop stuff. Video playback is seamless: rarely any stuttering or tearing and no problems with video conflicting with compositing. Audio works well, too: I don't recall the last time I saw a Mac app kill audio or suffer mixing stupidity. Apple made some very smart design decisions in how OS X handles these; the emphasis being on things users notice, like "Volume should be consistent", "Video should never tear", "Windows should never leave crud/blank out when dragged/etc".
As far as I can tell, the last year and bit have been a worse-than-usual time for Linux on the Desktop. Video support is in a problematic state of flux: everything seems to be changing (KMS, DRI/DRI2, XAA/EXA/UXA, Xv, Mesa, X itself, the binary drivers, new open-source rewrites of drivers, the kernel) all at once. Audio is similar: there's the cleanup from Pulse's impact, there's old apps that still use OSS or ALSA (and do so badly, thanks Skype and Flash!), there's a proliferation of bugs in ALSA, HDMI audio and then there's effort still being expended on getting ALSA and OSS to do what Pulse or Jack is supposed to do.
It looks like it'll all settle down in a year or so, but the interregnum is not pleasant. The worst part is there's people in this who seem to be hell-bent on making things worse before they get better.
It's no worse than video is, really. The four-second PulseAudio lag* matches nicely with the lack-of-vsync-based tearing in X.**
Actually, I take that back: video is worse. At least with PulseAudio I can see how it's eventually supposed to work if it didn't crash periodically. The clusterf_ck that is video playback doesn't look like it'll get fixed anytime soon, what with the six-party fight between all the various components.
You can really tell that the bills for Linux's development are being paid by server manufacturers.
* "Use jack" is not an option. Not everything works with jack. ** Yes, I know I can use OpenGL for video playback. That introduces it's own set of issues.
That's just simply not the case. If it were, Canadian citizens wouldn't come to the US for treatment...
Yes, it's true that rich Canadians who want to turbo the system go to the US, and that the Canadian provincial systems will occasionally pay for care in the US when they face a resource shortage.
I have a question, though: where do poor and middle-class Americans with no coverage go? Because they sure as hell can't go to Canada. From my perspective, it seems like the Canadian and European systems forces rich people with non-life-threatening conditions wait a bit longer, while the American system makes poor people either go drown in debt, wait until they're on death's doorstep, or actually die.
I think that's a pretty solid endorsement of socialized care, unless you're a well-to-do sociopath.
The point is that there's no really good way to seamlessly handle even low-bitrate and/or trivially-compressed video on a large range of cards without artifacts, stuttering or tearing because the API situation is terrifically bad. And yes, that the drivers are closed doesn't help, but it would probably be a lot easier for driver and application authors if they didn't have to worry about each other, or the X/Mesa/Gallium/DRM mess in between. The fact that tearing even happens is a deplorable on the state of video playback on X.
Put it this way: Windows has had DirectX video acceleration for a decade, it works well, and virtually every card and driver supports it, and all VLC et al have to worry about it supporting DirectX. X has, at best, Xv on most cards, and it's not guaranteed to perform even remotely as well either in terms of quality or performance. Again, we're not even talking about H.264 here, just basic MPEG.
I'm glad you can do this on an AppleTV. I can get video working if I'm very specific about which card and driver I use, but I really ought not to have to pay that kind of attention to it because it ought to be something that's abstracted from the application playing the video.
That does not help. Saying "well, you can just compile in support for ____" shouldn't be acceptable in this day and age. You shoudn't have to compile in support for a given piece of hardware into a player: this is why we have things called "drivers" and "APIs".
Video on non-MacOS/Windows is in an awful state, even when using the same player. If I use VLC on a Macintosh or Windows machine, I can play back content without skipping, sync, artifacts, tearing or stuttering as long as it's within reasonable processing limits. On Linux, it's a crapshoot, completely dependent on the player, video card, window manager and version of X and/or video drivers. I know it's supposedly getting better, but there's still no unified video acceleration API, it looks like nVidia and ATI are going to propose competing (VDPAU, XvBA) standards, and it looks like players are going to need to know about them in order to get reasonable performance. That's akin to having to code applications to support SoundBlaster or AdLib cards, which, I feel the need to point out, was the case in the late 1980s.
There's something seriously wrong when I can watch, say, YouTube content or a simple video file on an Intel Atom-based netbook running Windows and it plays more smoothly than on a Xeon 5520-equipped workstation running Linux. Video on Linux makes the current Audio on Linux clusterf_ck look simple by comparison; it's an unacceptable state of affairs for what is a very important consumer-level aspect of computing.
I don't want to seem as if I'm coming down on the people doing some very, very good work on this. Watching the progress on X/DRM/Mesa and the various drives is impressive and they've made great strides, but posts that talk about compiling in support for a piece of hardware into a player and/or getting bleeding-edge drivers and/or turning off things like compositing are the wrong way to address the problem.
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I'm dragging a Firefox window over a dead RDP session right now. It's erasing the contents of the window. I've never, ever managed to do that on MacOS X and not often on Windows Vista.
If I use a compositing window manager, that problem goes away, but in it's place comes a whole new set of issues. Ever notice how common "turn off Compiz/KWin compositing" comes up when people try to troubleshoot X issues? At least Vista is smart enough to turn it off for you when the situation merits it.
On no other platform do you ever have to think about syncing refresh rates. On X, you're at the mercy of the driver and window manager. On an nVidia card you're probably ok. On a recent Intel card you might be. On ATI it's a complete crapshoot. Throw in compositing and it gets even more complex.
Meanwhile, on much of the same hardware, you could run a hacked version of Mac OS X and not see a lick of tearing or artifacting.
I'm not saying that IRIX didn't do have that problem, but that, at the time, you could buy a commercial UNIX workstation and get a decently-integrated X server. The problem then was that you had to pay an astronomical sum to get the same window management performance that you took for granted on a Mac, and that a heck of a lot of tuning, testing and integration had to happen to get your (very expensive) video or 3D application to work, again, as well as a Mac.
Nowadays, you don't have to spend a fortune tog get decent X. What you have instead is that you're stuck with one card family (nVidia) or checking experimental code out of various git respositories, and even then you're not guaranteed the level of seamless video behaviour that you'd see on a Intel-based machine running Windows Vista.
I'm glad some people get decent X performance, but spending more than a little time on, say, Phoronix or Ubuntu's forums should disabuse you of the notion that everything works.
I'm not confusing it.
What I am saying is that X should have been designed to provide more services than it does, and that some of the services we're trying to hack onto it are suffering as a result.
It's not so much KDE or GNOME, but Compiz/Metacity or KWin not being part of X that's the problem. The window manager should have been part of X from the get-go. So should a lot of things, for that matter.
Because, from a user's perspective, it doesn't work all that well. Here's an example:
On MacOS X, it's just about impossible to get into a situation where a) video tears or flickers, or b) menus and windows can "rub out" other menus or windows (eg, you can't drag a window around like a giant eraser on Mac OS). On X+whatever, it's pathetically easy to do either. Windows is somewhere in-between the two.
To be fair to X, managing compositing et al isn't it's job---but it should be! Between X's by-design paucity of features and the number of combinations of video driver, X server, window manager and settings thereof, it's hard to get a decent, modern desktop experience. Had X been designed a little more smartly (eg, for actual people and not for computer scientists) this probably wouldn't be such a problem. Grafting things like multiple display support, accelerated 3D, video playback and now, compositing, have shown problems. Back in the day, when you could just buy IRIX (ro whatever) and be assured of a working, end-to-end X implementation this wasn't an issue. With the clusterfuck that is X.org+DRM+GEM+Mesa+KMS+GL/GLX/AIGLX+DRI/DRI2+UXA/EXA/XAA+whatever window manager is invovled, it's a crapshoot.
By comparison, again, we have MacOS X's system, which again just works, even if in theoretical terms it's a little slower. Users don't care that much about GTK benchmarks; they do care if the user experience breaks down.
The UNIX Hater's Handbook, which is a little bit out of date now, goes into the design errors of X. It's worth reading if you're wondering why X drives people nuts.
There will be a subset of users who will hate it, mostly serious Excel jockies and the extremely change averse, but on the whole it'll be pretty popular..
More people than you think will hate it. The average, desk-bound, minimum-wage Excel/Outlook jockey will bitch at any change. Note that these people bitch if you get them a new computer, or even if you move the coffee machine to a new room down the hall. They bitch at every change, every day, all the time. These people are, in a lot of organizations, far more pervasive than you might think.
The hard limit is 2GB, but you can have amusing things happen at any size. Heck, use Outlook for IMAP and it pretty much guaranteed to corrupt your IMAP store's PST. The recommended solution? Exchange Server.
The part that galls me, though, is how users gasp "But how could this possibly happen?" and then get really twitchy about attempting to fix it. People place, I feel, too much faith in computers in general, but Outlook has an incredible white-knight reputation. It's literally the Teflon application: no matter how much it fucks up, corrupts data, gets compromised, fails to run, stalls, kills small children, etc., it's reputation cannot be besmirched among the general population. I'm boggled, I really am.
I think I work for the same people you do.
If you have to have rule of law to make a market free, you don't have a free market. It's self-contradicting, and the reason why "free markets" are a philosophical device, not something that can ever, actually exist.
All markets, everywhere, tend towards concentration of power. A concentration of power is a de-facto government, even if libertarians choose to plug their ears and chant "I can't hear you!" at the idea.
It is possible, and a good idea, to argue about the nature and degree of regulation of the market; to deny that regulation is needed and that unrestricted markets are possible is, well, messed up. Saying that "it's never been tried because one iota of regulation infected it" is self-delusion of an order higher than that which Marxists (who claim that "pure communism has never been tried") exhibit.
The whole movement would come across as a lot less pretentious if people gave up on the self-righteous philosophical and moral absolutism.
To their credit, I think they recognized they blew it when they started the 100 Paper Cuts project. It was a good way of showing, to the those who had become recalcitrant about fixing problems that mattered to actual users and were focused on latest-and-greatest instead. Even then, there's some LaunchPad comments that could lead you to suspect that some people are a little too settled in their ways.
Actually, I think they realized they were in trouble with the whole badly-broken-Intel-graphics in 9.04. I don't know how they let that slip through: badly breaking graphics performance for most laptops and many desktops seems like the kind of thing that would have shown up in QA reports and the beta period, no?
It's not based on freedom and personal choice, it's based on a lack of restrictions. Similar concepts, but there's an important semantic difference: the first implies regulation to make sure that choice and freedom an ensured(and is thusly self-compromising); the second just crosses it's metaphorical fingers and hopes that things stay unrestricted. They don't and can't, of course.
"Good and right" or "ethical" has nothing to do with it, especially since "good and right" are highly subjective terms and certainly when dealing with government or the lack thereof. What's good and right and ethical to you can very easily seem selfish and uncaring and highly unethical to someone else because they're suffering for the lack of regulation. A lack of restrictions on you can, and does, incur restrictions upon others. That's not very ethical (by your definition), is it?
What you're advocating, more or less, is a degree of socialism, except that you don't want to call it that. There must be some kind of regulation to ensure a functioning social contract, otherwise ad-hoc regulation happens as soon as power starts to accumulate, and those ad-hoc structures can very easily be bad and wrong and unethical.
The original point though, is that an unregulated, completely free market has a lifespan that makes mayflies look like Methusela. It can't exist because the accumulation of power, which happens no matter what, negates it's existence. Marxism, at least, doesn't completely self-contradict itself, despite being almost as ignorant of the reality of human society.
Calling it "good and right" or "ethical" is disingenuous.
You cannot have a free market once economic power starts to accumulate, as it will in the absence of regulation; nor you have a free market with regulation.
The "free market", thusly, cannot really exist, except for a very brief period at the beginning before clout accumulates and capitalism takes hold. It's a philosophical fiction; a Utopia by definition. Marxism is more realistic.
More choice also means "too many cooks" syndrome. We saw this with Windows Mobile, where the core system (which, admittedly, had problems of it's own) was further crippled by vendor- and carrier-specific addons, some of which changed the UI significantly and many of which didn't integrate at all well with the base system (HTC TouchhFlo comes to mind).
Android is seeing something similar: HTC's offerings use a different UI depending on their version (some use the base Android system, some use HTC's Sense UI). Motorola uses something different. Not all phones use Android's mail client (some use HTC mail; and no, not all HTCs use HTC mail). Many phones bundle additional applications to manage the dialer, the radio, and more. And then the carriers get their grubby hands on it and pervert it further, such that otherwise identical phones on two different carriers behave quite differently. Android, to it's credit, is nowhere near as bad as WM is, but it's still young, and the cracks are starting to show.
The hardware platform may be shaping up into something like the PC market, but the software market is committing the same kind of marketing hari kari that killed UNIX as a unified platform and continues to cripple Linux today. Choice is good for some users, but by and large these devices are going to end up in the hands a "normal people" who have no patience for the complications that this value-added crap brings. And then there's Google's haphazard implementation (you can't buy apps in some countries, or under some carriers; some apps are restricted per-carrier) to further hamper things.
Then there's the significantly weaker marketing effort: instead of a unified "Google Phone" which is a strong brand, you have HTC, Samsung, Motorola and others, all with different branding and marketing. Few, if any, making any effort to promote the Android or Google brands; heck, many users are likely unaware that they have a common platform and app store. Even Microsoft does a better job than this, and RIM and Palm certainly do.
By comparison, an iPhone is an iPhone is an iPhone. The marketing is strong, the platform unified and the carriers keep their sticky fingers off it. The app store is well understood and universal. There's choice, but it's nicely balanced against complexity---which is important, since this isn't 1985 and we're dealing with a different market: it's not hobbyists and businesses and early adopters, it's millions and millions of schmoes, and trying to duplicate the Microsoft/Intel strategy of nearly three decades ago isn't necessarily a good idea.
Because that's not analogious to what Pulse is doing. A better analogy would be if Firefox's crashing killed your whole X session and left your video card in such a state that you couldn't bring X back up until you rebooted.
Sure, the flaw is in Firefox, but there's no way a fundamental subsystem like Pulse (or X) should be so incapable of handling errors gracefully.
The comment about video/compositing is interesting, because if there's anything worse than Linux audio, it's Linux video. At least with Pulse you can see the light at the end of the tunnel; I have no idea how the Driver/GEM/Mesa/DRM/DRI/GLX/XAA/EXA/UXA/KMS/Xv/WTF/BBQ clusterf_ck will ever get sorted out, not when everyone seems to be working on parallel, incompatible products. And yes, I know that if I get some experimental driver from X.org's git server and/or make sure I only use Intel/nVidia/ATi and/or precisely tweak xorg.conf. Eventually I did that, but there's no way that video should be as inconsistent as it is for this long.
Meanwhile, I can run a hacked-up version of OS X on the same hardware and somehow video just works. No tearing, no stuttering, no worries.
Pulse, by comparison, isn't so bad. I managed to get it working such that I could play to my Airport Express, USB headphones, desktop speakers and/or a combination of the above on a per-app basis, all without involving git or dealing with drivers. If it has a problem, it's that the tools to manage it aren't well-integrated into many distros (Ubuntu, I'm looking at you) and aren't terribly user-friendly, and that applications can bring it down. That's a serious problem: a driver killing the sound system is fine, in a way, but it shouldn't be possible for, say, Songbird or Flash to kill audio any more than it should be possible for them to kill your display server.
I can see the point of PulseAudio, and what it needs is a little polish and robustness. Video on Linux, though, is showing the worst symptoms of "too many cooks" and "herding cats". Worse is that we've come to accept this as the status quo.
Even with high-margin, business-grade phones this seems to be the case. Part of it is carrier reticence: since each carrier has a customized ROM and quality assurance is basically money down the toilet, no carrier wants to request, package, crapware-ify, test, release and support phones that hardly anyone is buying. The other part is just vendor laziness for similar reasons: you could understand Rogers or AT&T or T-Mobile not wanting to go through the exercise, but when Hewlett-Packard flat gives up on fixing bugs in handhelds targeted at business customers, you know something is very wrong. The reason people resort to hacked ROMs is that, without them, you'd never get a working handset.
The only---only!---people making WM updates are companies like Symbol or Intermec, and their units come with an incredible price premium. When you charge two to five grand per handset, then you expect a little help. We're moving off of WM outside of these very specific uses because the device support could best be described as a three-way not-my-problem clusterfuck between the vendor, carrier and Microsoft.
Google needs to be careful with Android, because the way it's update and experience is being handled (allowing the vendors and carriers control over application, UI appearance and update policy) looks suspiciously like how WM is done. Granted, it's a better platform, but one reason why the iPhone works so well is that you're not beholden to the half-assed "value-add" shit that HTC/Samsung/Motorola or your carrier sees fit to hamstring you with.
Side note: The funny thing is that WM has had a software update function since v5, but it never works. No carrier or vendor has ever used it, instead preferring whole-ROM updates.
Oh, yes they do. They don't compete for local land-line service, but you can bet that advanced networking are wireless are being hotly contested.
Just to clarify: MTS is not part of Telus. MTS merged with/bought Allstream.
Interesting, MTS and Telus are having a slapfest because one or the other started poaching customers and erecting towers in the other's territory (and now both are). The end-result is that mobile/wireless in Alberta and Manitoba is a mess right now.
Do you want to know what fun is? Try getting Bell/Bell West and Telus to cooperate when you're in eastern Canada but your western Canada office(s) are down. Dealing with bitchy techs and support staff at both companies reminds me of what it must be like to teach kindergarten.
Not all of it. If you pay an astronomical amount of money, you can subscribe to a Bell Nexxia** provided service (T1, T3, etc). Then you have the privilege of being shat on by Bell Nexxia Technical Support, which is just as bad as the outsourced support, except that they've an extra layer of arrogance to them and you get a double-helping of gall knowing that, despite your spending millions of dollars per year you're treated no better than the poor bastards who order Bell DSL Basic.
Let me regale you with some tales:
* I watched a Bell technician randomly unplugging fibre in Toronto's hospital district to test a problem. Just randomly unplugging shit in the middle of the day. No warning, no call to the customers, just *yank*
* I watched a Bell technician get formally ejected from a downtown building for belligerence. Twice.
* Bell Nexxia service desk employees didn't seem to know about a *fucking street collapsing* in western Canada. Oh, no, it must be my equipment.
* I've sat across the table from a VP of customer service and a managing director and been directly lied to about incidents. When I called them on it (eg, when I started recording conversations my operators had with Nexxia staff) they grudgingly admitted to doing dick-all
* I went through four sales reps in three years. They all quit after support failed to install lines as promised. Oh, did I mention the MPLS rollout and the 10% success rate?
* Mapping frame DLCIs for other people's networks into mine.
* Random billing errors. We're not talking minor ones, either: they dropped ten years worth of PBX rental (for equipment at a building we hadn't occupied for ten years) on us in one, million-dollar shot. Another time our WAN bill went up more than twelve-fold for no good reason.
* As for billing: did you know Bell's billing systems have no link whatsoever to the services they provide you? None. Ther have no real change-management system, either: if you ask questions about how your network is configured versus what your bill says they'll admit they have no fucking clue.
And that's all premium, highly-paid, non-Bangalore staff. Bell is comically bad: it's a balkanized, badly-structured company made of all sort of autonomous divisions that don't talk. Morale among employees is terrible, and anyone who's been there more than a short time is certainly a Peter Principle example in practice. The other ex-Stentors (Telus, Aliant, MTS) are a bit better (Telus is the worst, MTS/Allstream is the best, mostly by virtue of how good the Allstream people were, but MTS seems to be dragging them down) but not much. Rogers less incompetent, but much nastier.
** Nexxia was so bad they "reorganized" into Bell Advanced Technical Services or somesuch several years ago. It's still the same useless pieces of shit doing the same work.
I don't think I'd call that an advantage. Linux-the-normal-distribution has a lot of aspects that aren't well-suited to a small-screen mobile device, and keeping those aspects around results in a worst-of-both-worlds compromise. Think about Windows Mobile (especially pre-2003): the interface carry-overs from Windows proper are the chief reason it's an also-ran on PDAs and phones, and it's only as those features disappear (and the platform diverges further from the desktop) that it's getting any traction at all. That many WM apps pay only lip-service to the platform and obey desktop conventions makes matters worse; keeping the desktop's UI encourages some pretty bad behaviour on the part of many developers.
There's no real point to extending the traditional Linux desktop to a phone for the same reason: there's nothing worthwhile to carry over. There's enough of this problem on the Linux desktop, which suffers from the platform's focus on servers and technical users. Google was right to junk as much as they can in favour of a user interface that's built for a mobile device. If they've made a mistake anywhere, it's that they've allowed the handset makers too much control over the interface, weakening the Android brand and hamstringing the phone with glitchy, tacked-on interface garbage that doesn't integrate well with the underlying OS (have you seen HTC TouchFlo on Windows Mobile? It's like lipstick on a pig).
I'm not saying that Moblin will be Windows CE awful, but I can't see it being iPhone or even Android-good if it's carrying over just about any aspect of the Linux GUI, and I can't see ports of desktop Linux apps being anything more than oft-frustrating.
Flash.
Yeah, yeah, I know, but it's not really an option to avoid it and/or download files and play them later. Skype would be the next one. I got it working, but it was nastier than doing the same in PulseAudio was. The final blow was getting my Apple Airport's audio working. Pulse got this (more or less) working more or less. I like the premise of jack, but it seems like it'll be relegated to second-fiddle status and that anyone who uses it will end up running it side-by-side with Pulse, doing pro work while Pulse does everything else.
Depends on the day of the week, the format and who's using the computer. I have the most luck with VLC outputting to either Xv (if I care about quality) or OpenGL (if I care about tearing and/or have Compiz turned off) and putting audio natively to Pulse. mplayer gets used for more esoteric files, but the interface (even with SMPlayer) is not great. Xine's not so hot either. My spouse uses VLC for the most part after getting thoroughly disgusted with Totem. Trying mplayer on her wasn't a success.
It works, more or less, but it took more experimentation than I'd like to get it all working. The horrible part is that hacking MacOS onto the same hardware more or less just works. No tearing, no audio quitting, just the occasional stutter on the more demanding files.
Video tearing is what gets me. That shouldn't happen: it should be easy to sync to vblank, but the very way X works makes it very, very hard to do without some other kind of sacrifice (eg, using OpenGL, which then gives you trouble with compositing)
You're right about Apple's approach, especially for desktop stuff. Video playback is seamless: rarely any stuttering or tearing and no problems with video conflicting with compositing. Audio works well, too: I don't recall the last time I saw a Mac app kill audio or suffer mixing stupidity. Apple made some very smart design decisions in how OS X handles these; the emphasis being on things users notice, like "Volume should be consistent", "Video should never tear", "Windows should never leave crud/blank out when dragged/etc".
As far as I can tell, the last year and bit have been a worse-than-usual time for Linux on the Desktop. Video support is in a problematic state of flux: everything seems to be changing (KMS, DRI/DRI2, XAA/EXA/UXA, Xv, Mesa, X itself, the binary drivers, new open-source rewrites of drivers, the kernel) all at once. Audio is similar: there's the cleanup from Pulse's impact, there's old apps that still use OSS or ALSA (and do so badly, thanks Skype and Flash!), there's a proliferation of bugs in ALSA, HDMI audio and then there's effort still being expended on getting ALSA and OSS to do what Pulse or Jack is supposed to do.
It looks like it'll all settle down in a year or so, but the interregnum is not pleasant. The worst part is there's people in this who seem to be hell-bent on making things worse before they get better.
It's no worse than video is, really. The four-second PulseAudio lag* matches nicely with the lack-of-vsync-based tearing in X.**
Actually, I take that back: video is worse. At least with PulseAudio I can see how it's eventually supposed to work if it didn't crash periodically. The clusterf_ck that is video playback doesn't look like it'll get fixed anytime soon, what with the six-party fight between all the various components.
You can really tell that the bills for Linux's development are being paid by server manufacturers.
* "Use jack" is not an option. Not everything works with jack.
** Yes, I know I can use OpenGL for video playback. That introduces it's own set of issues.
Yes, it's true that rich Canadians who want to turbo the system go to the US, and that the Canadian provincial systems will occasionally pay for care in the US when they face a resource shortage.
I have a question, though: where do poor and middle-class Americans with no coverage go? Because they sure as hell can't go to Canada. From my perspective, it seems like the Canadian and European systems forces rich people with non-life-threatening conditions wait a bit longer, while the American system makes poor people either go drown in debt, wait until they're on death's doorstep, or actually die.
I think that's a pretty solid endorsement of socialized care, unless you're a well-to-do sociopath.
Google Docs can be used offline, albeit in a limited fashion.
The point is that there's no really good way to seamlessly handle even low-bitrate and/or trivially-compressed video on a large range of cards without artifacts, stuttering or tearing because the API situation is terrifically bad. And yes, that the drivers are closed doesn't help, but it would probably be a lot easier for driver and application authors if they didn't have to worry about each other, or the X/Mesa/Gallium/DRM mess in between. The fact that tearing even happens is a deplorable on the state of video playback on X.
Put it this way: Windows has had DirectX video acceleration for a decade, it works well, and virtually every card and driver supports it, and all VLC et al have to worry about it supporting DirectX. X has, at best, Xv on most cards, and it's not guaranteed to perform even remotely as well either in terms of quality or performance. Again, we're not even talking about H.264 here, just basic MPEG.
I'm glad you can do this on an AppleTV. I can get video working if I'm very specific about which card and driver I use, but I really ought not to have to pay that kind of attention to it because it ought to be something that's abstracted from the application playing the video.
That does not help. Saying "well, you can just compile in support for ____" shouldn't be acceptable in this day and age. You shoudn't have to compile in support for a given piece of hardware into a player: this is why we have things called "drivers" and "APIs".
Video on non-MacOS/Windows is in an awful state, even when using the same player. If I use VLC on a Macintosh or Windows machine, I can play back content without skipping, sync, artifacts, tearing or stuttering as long as it's within reasonable processing limits. On Linux, it's a crapshoot, completely dependent on the player, video card, window manager and version of X and/or video drivers. I know it's supposedly getting better, but there's still no unified video acceleration API, it looks like nVidia and ATI are going to propose competing (VDPAU, XvBA) standards, and it looks like players are going to need to know about them in order to get reasonable performance. That's akin to having to code applications to support SoundBlaster or AdLib cards, which, I feel the need to point out, was the case in the late 1980s.
There's something seriously wrong when I can watch, say, YouTube content or a simple video file on an Intel Atom-based netbook running Windows and it plays more smoothly than on a Xeon 5520-equipped workstation running Linux. Video on Linux makes the current Audio on Linux clusterf_ck look simple by comparison; it's an unacceptable state of affairs for what is a very important consumer-level aspect of computing.
I don't want to seem as if I'm coming down on the people doing some very, very good work on this. Watching the progress on X/DRM/Mesa and the various drives is impressive and they've made great strides, but posts that talk about compiling in support for a piece of hardware into a player and/or getting bleeding-edge drivers and/or turning off things like compositing are the wrong way to address the problem.