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Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 1) 239

Now, now. That would make sense, which requires people in positions of authority to make rational deductions and judgement calls. Have you ever met a middle manager (a corporate "drone" if you will) in any decent-sized organization who feels both empowered to and is capable of taking responsibility and going out on a limb and making a judgement call on something potentially large and consequential? Now remind me again how big of a beaurocracy the federal government is?

Comment Re:What. (Score 1) 320

In theory, practice in theory are the same. In practice, they aren't. To the point, real science is hard. Damn hard, and always has been. This isn't new. If this were new, we'd be living for a thousand years and taking vacations beyond the far side of the observable universe.

Even things that seem obvious can sometimes break down completely when put in the crucible. And things that you thought before broke down may really not have. No less of an intellectual powerhouse than Feynman famously said that you are the easiest person for yourself to fool. People don't understand this, not really, because it isn't in their daily experience. Even if they're trained scientists or engineers, they learn a pattern of behavior, they ape it, and they say they're doing science or research, but put their work to rude scrutiny, and you often find they've just produced incestuous no-op statements because that subtle bit in their heads that should have told them to scrutinize themselves and justify their own assumptions never flipped.

Comment Re:Let me guess (Score 1) 166

Your points are valid, and make an existence proof for faster graphics than X11 had at the time the Qt4 team made their decision. You still haven't explained why it's not possible to have a graphics system that's faster than X11 and still has network capability the way X11 does. Yes, I know how 2D and 3D rendering works, and yes bandwidth counts so you can play video over a 56k connection for very fundamental reasons.

Comment Re:Let me guess (Score 1) 166

Well here's the bigger problem then. New applications are doing less server-side rendering. Now you might ask: why should the server bloat itself up on new different button styles and widgets etc, etc? It shouldn't, because then there's no end. And my answer is that you shouldn't have a system with unlimited button styles and glyphs and widgets, because that complexity and bloat will need to live somewhere, and will end up screwing everyone else over no matter where it lands. So let's ask the critical question: why on earth does anyone need to have all the bells and whistles to do their work? They don't. It's an arts and crafts project.

Comment Re:Let me guess (Score 1) 166

You can, but it's a callback function that returns back to Xlib code when it's done, and that's where the exit(-1) gets called. I flirted with the idea of manipulating the call stack to avoid that exit(-1) call, I flirted with the idea of passing back faults instead of calling exit, but both options looked way too error prone and would have taken me way more time than what I ended up doing, which is to split logic from display so that network errors wouldn't kill my core processing.

Comment Re:Let me guess (Score 4, Insightful) 166

And my reply is always the same: if you make a change, improve the whole system; don't make compromises to core functionality for the sake of cosmetic improvments. Bells and whistles in the window manager are cosmetic. Being able to display output (from a single window, mostly text and line art graphs, not the whole damn desktop) to a different machine across the building is not cosmetic, it is why I use Linux instead of Windows. Maybe X11 doesn't let you do some things that really are better (I wouldn't know, the only annoyance I have ever found with X11 code is that its error handler calls exit(-1) if it panics without letting you deal with it in the calling program, meaning you have to split display and core logic into two processes instead of being able to keep everything in one address space), but network transparency (what else do you call being able to say DISPLAY=whatever:X.Y my_program) is a core capability that people do use, and you won't get them on board if you turn it into an afterthought.

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