Seriously?

Okay, here's what you were thinking:

"Duh! Obviously sleep deprivation is bad for children!"

But here's the full implication of your response:

"Duh! Anybody who doesn't know that 73% of 9-10 year olds and 80% of 13-14 year olds in the US are sleep deprived is a moron."

Measurements are important. That's what science is all about.

And that works reasonably well for popular open source projects, where volunteers can build new binaries to keep up with updated dependencies, but it's a real problem for closed-source projects.

Whether or not paving the way for closed-source projects on Linux is a good thing will depend on whom you ask, but I suspect that's one of the major motivations for this project.

Colour me curious. I've never met a programmer who's capable of writing an H.264 codec but still has the arrogance of a sophomore. Do you have a link to your project?

You know, I'd be perfectly happy if HTML supported COBOL. My problem with JavaScript isn't that it's a terrible language, it's that it's the only language.

I'd be much happier if HTML had a standard VM and a standard API, so that we could use whatever language we want.

HTML is a software platform now, and being stuck with one programming language is stifling. Can you imagine if we were only allowed to use one language when writing Windows/Linux/Mac software?

Get back to us when you've written a GPU-powered database.

The Wayland devs were definitely a little too obscure whenever the issue of remoting came up. They kept saying that remoting was out of scope with regard to Wayland, and technically, they were right, but it lead to a lot of misunderstandings.

Imagine if somebody asked "Does the Linux kernel support email?" Of course it doesn't; email is done way higher in the stack. There's not a single line of code in the Linux kernel that has anything to do with email. But you would be giving people the wrong impression if you said "Linux doesn't support email", and that's exactly what the Wayland devs were doing.

You already have multiple incompatible remote rendering back ends in X, it's just really hard to do in X. The reason the Unix mantra "do one thing well" is so important is because it allows you to swap out parts and innovate more easily.

"Network transparent" means you can look at the bits over the wire and tell what it's doing. You can't do this with X nowadays, because nowadays it sends whole frame buffers instead of individual drawing commands. It's network opaque. Yes, X supports remoting, but it's not network transparent anymore.

The nice thing about the Wayland stack is that it's much easier to replace parts of the stack with something else. I'm sure this won't be the last remoting protocol we see layered on top of Wayland.

Here's a better example than X/OpenGL:

Q: Does Linux support email?
A: No, that is outside the scope of Linux.

There is not a single line in Linux that is written to support email. Does that mean you can't do email in Linux? Of course not! Similarly, you can have remote display when using Wayland, it's just not part of the Wayland core.

What's more, remote display on Wayland has already been prototyped. Twice.

Hey, guess what?

X is not network transparent.

No, really. I mean, it was, but it isn't anymore. Why? Because nowadays everybody uses SHM and DRI2, which don't work over the network.

So unless you're using Motif, then all X is doing is shipping bitmaps over the network, and doing it in an extremely chatty way that involves lots of round-trips from server to client for every single frame, injecting huge amounts of latency for no reason.

But chances are you don't really care about network transparency. Chances are you just think it's a synonym for remote display.

Guess what else?

Wayland supports remote display.

Here's one implementation, and here's another implementation written by somebody else.

Now, technically, those projects do not add remoting to Wayland, but instead add it to Weston, the reference compositor for Wayland. That's because the Wayland developers follow the Unix philosophy: do one thing really well. Wayland is not a kitchen sink like X is. It's part of a stack of interchangeable parts, and there's no reason remoting needs to be implemented directly in the display server.

Although I applaud you for trying not to pick sides, in this case it really does appear that the conservatives have been growing increasingly extreme.

Thankfully, XKCD compiled some research to make this trend clear:

http://xkcd.com/1127/large/

It takes a bit of time to comprehend that graph when you first see it, but once you grok it, take a look at the 'centre right' population in the house. They've been completely supplanted by the far right. So have the conservative liberals. The same trend is visible in the senate, although not to the same extreme. The left-leaning population, on the other hand, hasn't had a significant amount of extremism since before the great depression.

And these scores aren't based on how people identify, they're based on their roll call, and then their votes are compared to their peers to see how similar they are to each other. Dig into it a bit. It's really interesting.

Au contraire! The replacement has small surface details etched into it to promote new bone growth.

What you want is Microsoft's PixelSense (formerly known as the Surface before they repurposed that name). I don't know how well it deals with the multiple computers part, but I'm not sure you should look to Minority Report for that feature. When they were working with multiple computers they had to physically insert iPad-sized disks into the machine to transfer data.

I think that article has it backwards. Minority Report was modelling ideas that people in the UI community found exciting, not the other way around. It certainly helped raise the global consciousness a few years early, but without Minority Report the UI community would still have been excited about those ideas.

The article does make valid points, but most people on this site will already be familiar with them. Notably that multi-touch is not panacea, WIMP still has its place (especially for anything more complicated than shuffling photos), and that there's no such thing as an "interfaceless design"; in my opinion, the term "invisible interface" would more accurately convey the strengths and flaws of these designs.