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Comment catch-22 (Score 1) 308

If they judge him insane, then he can claim that he was incapable of making the decision to allow the truth serum

If they judge him sane, then he can claim that any information gathered under truth serum is tainted; since he was already sane, the truth serum can only make him less sane.

Comment why why why? (Score 1) 232

why not just pay the fee and watch some movies?

netflix, their hands are tied. the content holders want the DRM. No DRM, no neftlix. I am willing to accept that.

save your battles for things that deserve them.

netflix is not the devil. they make it possible for people to watch movies at home

if you want to change the system you are not going to do it by hacking netflix, you are just going to make trouble for everyone. they will not give up, they cannot. you will just force them to spend more engineering time and raise their costs, you will not "save the world" or even a small piece of it.

Comment nonsense arguments (Score 1) 232

why does one need any of those things? The object is to watch the movie, I don't want a copy of it. I don't want to watch it on a wide variety of devices. I want to watch it on my computer.

Performance? My 6 year old opteron with its 7 year old video card can run Netflix on Silverlight on Windows on VMWare on linux and it runs just fine.

Usability? how can it be easier to use netflix? holy cow!

If I wanted more then maybe there would be something to complain about, but I want to watch movies.

Comment Re:Ignorance on display (Score 1) 337

What's the problem if it's all "under the covers" ???

Most users don't give a rat's ass about the display software. It's hidden under many many layers.

Shoot, even application developers should not even care at all. This is why we have toolkits like Qt, so nobody has to care about display software.

And besides, maybe an alternative to wayland will point out its deficiencies and encourage its developers to make it even better!

Believe it or not software projects can coexist! And PLEASE read "The Mythical Man Month" before you start talking about how the Mir developers could be helping the Wayland developers.

Comment Re:Protobuf RPC mechanism - is it generic? (Score 1) 337

One thing Windows and OS X get right is that their GUI is based around local API calls.

That's the difference in a nutshell.

The X protocol is limited by the fact that the whole API has to be serialized, and in many cases, a network round-trip has to be performed even though nothing is drawn on the screen.

And HELLO, accelerated video on the server is not much good when 90% of the latency is in the network. Oh big deal, you optimized the part of the system that least needs it.

Comment Re:remote X is garbage anyway (Score 4, Informative) 337

Here are some RESULTS from an experiment done by lbl.gov

The first number is X windows tunneled through SSH
the second number is VNC
the third number is NX

Start Matlab (-nosplash) 9.6s 4.9s 5s
Open edit window 2.9s 1.3s 1.2s
Activate File menu 0.6s 0.1s 0.1s
Activate Edit menu 0.6s 0.1s 0.1s
Activate Text menu 0.5s 0.2s 0.1s
Close edit window, redraw main window 1.5s 0.4s 0.3s
Close matlab 0.5s 0.6s 0.6s

As you can see REMOTE X WINDOWS SUCKS

Comment Re:remote X is garbage anyway (Score 4, Insightful) 337

X itself goes to great lengths to avoid being affected by latency.

How about this quote from Keith Packard:

---

One of the design ``mistakes'' of X11 exacerbated by its very success is the extensible type system called atoms (as in the Lisp systems from which it was derived). This has been heavily used in the interclient communications protocols used between applications (primarily toolkits) and window managers. The InternAtom function requires a round trip to provide agreement among clients on a small (32 bit) handle for a string. A modern design would almost certainly avoid round trips entirely by using cryptographic hashes (or just using strings everywhere). Unfortunately, it is very hard to retrofit this

---

X was designed when CPUs ran at 8 MHz, the network ran at 10 Mbit and the display was black and white.

In 1985, the network was FAST and the computers were SLOW so latency was not so much of an issue.

Today the network is SLOW and the computers are FAST and so network latency rears its ugly head.

I have to ask: if it works so great, why does nobody use it? Why doesn't it work with sound? Why can't I use it for my Windows or OSX apps like I can with VNC?

If X makes it too hard to write a decently performing application, THAT ALONE is good reason to dump it

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