11 Oct
2011
11 Oct
'11
7:40 p.m.
On 10/11/2011 09:32 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
Of course. But that's a website. We're talking about windowing systems
and local (or "slightly remote") apps.
What's the difference between a web site (which blurs readily these days
into "web application"... Google Docs... GitHub... Twitter...) and a
"remote app"?
You are picking nits, because you are a troll. YOU know the
difference (at least I sure hope you do!), and you know that I know the
difference as well. Again you imply that I think the web sucks, X11 is
great, and X11 should replace the web, and that the web is actually
replacing X11. If this is in fact what you believe, you are incorrect
on all counts.
Again with the trolling. Nothing looks like Motif, but a whole lot
of web apps look just like GTK.
I'm not saying it's clever, or that I do it myself. But it is happening
on a massive scale.
People are moving to web-based word processors, spreadsheets, and
vertical-market software, replacing real software, on a massive scale?
Where, exactly? Prove it. Provide company names and number of seats.
"Test" installations and Utopian "future office" deployments don't
count.
Can't? Didn't think so. Ok, provide OS names and release numbers.
This would need to be OSs that people actually RUN, so Chrome doesn't count.
Quite enough to know you're wrong on that. :)
Ok, I'll trust you on that.
I have no idea. But you can damn well bet that I'll be a part of
guiding where it goes in the intervening time, because I'm not spending
my days floating along with whatever trendy, bloated,
buzzword-of-the-week thing the trenchcoat-wearing, clove-smoking kids
are programming...erm, I mean "writing scripts" in this week.
One thing you really need to get through your head is that I'm not
suggesting, nor did I ever suggest, nor WOULD I ever suggest, that X11
should replace web browsers. You asserted that X11 is somehow on its
way out (which it isn't) because everything is "moving to the web" (or
some such) now. That makes about as much sense as suggesting that nuts
and bolts are on their way out, because the world is moving to corn on
the cob.
There's a lot of representations that binary isn't terribly good for. A
good use for binary is, as you mentioned, gzipping a text format. :)
So make it all fat and inefficient, and let a compression algorithm
brute-force it back into smallness again. If you were working for me,
I'd fire you.
Further, that
low-level "mechanism, not policy" architecture of X is
one
of its big points of existence. An X display can look and act like
ANYTHING.
And that's the problem. For most uses, the detailed design of widgets
doesn't matter. You just want a CHECKBOX here, a TEXT field here, and a
SUBMIT button there. Good enough for Amazon, at least, which is a
non-trivial UI. Plenty of other examples too. Further,
toolkits that sit ON TOP OF X give you all that functionality.
They starte with Xt, went through Motif, going all the way up nowadays
to gtk. CHECKBOX here, TEXT field there, and a SUBMIT button
there...except that it's actually fast, and looks a hell of a lot better.
Then why doesn't the web look just like Motif, since the web offers
everyone unprecedented aesthetic freedom?? Until the www shows itself too embarrassingly
incapable of this, you are
going to be stuck with "cloud" app providers like Google.
*I* am? No, I'm not. I use OpenOffice (erm, "LibreOffice", thank you
Oracle) for stuff like that. Anyone who embraces the idea of storing
business-proprietary documents on someone else's network, especially
when they happen to be experts in large-scale data mining, needs to have
their head examined. (Lisp doesn't have any performance problem, but
that's another
thread...)
You haven't done much Lisp, have you. ;) And have you seen what they've done with
JavaScript performance lately?
And noticed that all these supposedly exotic languages are often faster,
now, than old, boring C? Look around... Lisp family languages included.
Seen what Erlang can do? And, more importantly, they're much more
productive to develop in.
Interpreted JavaScript has never been faster than C on the same
hardware. If you disagree, provide proof. JIT-compiled JavaScript has
the potential for being NEARLY as fast, but I have my doubts. It's an
object-oriented language running on hardware that is inherently
procedural in nature. Bridging that gap involves overhead.
The world is full of people who claim that their favorite language is
faster than everything else. Most of them are wrong.
And for the record, my favorite language, which is slower than just
about anything else but that's not why it's my favorite, is Scheme. I
don't develop in it professionally because it's...well, too damn slow!
There were
certainly windowing systems that had some technical
advantages over X11, but X11 won. It's ironic that the big negative
about X11 was always its bandwidth requirements, but web-based UIs'
bandwidth requirements are orders of magnitude worse, and nobody notices
this and complains about it because people with that much technical clue
nowadays are few and far between.
Do you expect to be using X11 in *another* 20 years? JSON is a compact format but not the only one
possible.
I wouldn't call it compact at all, but that's a relative matter. I deal
with lots of binary protocols. Before you object - There are exceptions, of course,
where binary is a
good idea...
This is the first sensible thing you've said in a week, with the
small modification of the exceptions being the rule. Computers are
binary things. Some computers, notably IBM mainframes and PDP-11s with
the CIS option installed, can operate on text efficiently. Most cannot,
and we pay for this overhead with poor performance and needing multi-GHz
machines to do the very simplest of things.
That's a very Microsoft-like attitude to be coming from you. I guess
you're not as anti-Microsoft as your rants would have us believe.
I have had enough of your trolling and your feigned cluelessness. I
believe that you actually do know quite a bit about this technology, but
you keep making unbelievably stupid assertions in an apparent effort to
stir up a fight. If you were here, I'd punch you in the mouth
repeatedly and send you home crying to your mommy. You're not, though,
so I'll just tell you to go fuck yourself until you want to talk about
classic computers.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA