This only means that your friends sucked or found you to be untrustworthy. Porn was definitely easy to access and one's possession of it was of value to the group, but it was a physical contraband back then. The medium has changed, that's all.

What are you talking about? You're declaring quite confidently of their motive, but I see no evidence that is the reason. Where is your confidence coming from? If these are regulations, which ones? Can you further cite where Lenovo would have to prevent modifications to an existing system, beyond merely getting licensing on the system they're bringing to market?

Do you have actual evidence of this or are you making up a rationalization?

THANK YOU! I wish more people knew that Congress decided to make demands on the USPS that no company could ever meet. And to think that the Republicans frequently politic on "running the government like a business" yet they make actions to ensure the government business fails.

The scientists don't trust the bureaucrats, they ask for assistance. What's the alternative?

Those are great solutions, but they're already been implemented. X already has server-side (where the display is) pixbuf caches, and the network may turn on compression.

You say things like True Type Fonts and anti-aliased lines are eye candy? I sit a console constantly day in and day out, these things make the experience far better than it would be with simple X primitives.

New GUI concepts are constantly being developed. The system you want to create would be similar to taking Motif and making that the network protocol. As soon as some new widget is created and gains popularity, you're either stuck in the same situation you are now, or constantly revising the protocol to account for every new class of widgets.
To address your other concerns: Have you ever used VNC or RDP on a headless remote? It works just fine.

Keith Packard has been working on X terminals since 1983 and worked on the original X reference implementation . Since Keith has been there since basically the beginning of the project, you're completely off base with your accusations of a lack of understanding. I don't care who wrote line 1 of XFree86; I trust this man more about the operation of X and its shortcomings.

Bandwidth is very much a concern as well. All the toolkits render locally to X pixbufs and transmit them across the line. In particularly graphics heavy systems, such as GIMP, these pixbufs won't compress as well, so line compression won't help as much to cut down on bandwidth concerns.

Latency isn't the only problem, bandwidth is. Modern graphical toolkits, such as GTK and Qt, render to X pixbufs and transmit those across the wire. That's a lot of data!

Hi Bill,

You have a good point, but unfortunately the X system is fundamentally flawed at the technical level for the purpose you describe. When X was originally developed, graphics were simple aliased lines and bitmapped fonts. In the modern computer environment, this has presented itself as a grave hindrance to the usability of X.

Modern applications depend on graphics toolkits, such as GTK and Qt, which render in to X pixbufs and finally those are rendered on the display. The process by which this happens depends upon copying these toolkit-rendered images from buffer to buffer several times, quite needlessly to fit within the X framework. This is moreso true over a network connection. The very nature of modern programs has progressed way beyond what X was intended and optimized for. It is like trying to use a MUD infrastructure designed for textual interaction as the basis of a modern GUI framework, it simply isn't the right tool for the job.

An anecdote, this weekend I decided I was going to work from home. So I ssh into my work computer (6 miles, 20+ Mbps connection), and fire up an X forwarded my graphical editor session. Things were slow, but not unusable until I did something that caused a series of tooltips to be rendered. The session locked up for 2 minutes before I killed it. I then fired up a terminal-based text editor and got to work. X's network transparency was not beneficial. But there are many network protocols that have been designed for the purpose of remotely operating modern GUI applications such as VNC and RDP. These have been designed from the ground up to provide the functionality we expect on today's systems.

And before I finish my tirade, I, too, was a die-hard X fan until I decided to see what the Xorg folks had to say. Keith Packard (a lead developer on Xorg, inventor of Cairo and much more that you depend on when you fire up your workstation), has been a hard proponent of Wayland. He's given many talks outlining the design failings of X and how Wayland resolves them. I recommend you google "Keith Packard Wayland" and see what you find.

Regards,
oursland

The algorithms the GP are talking about are tied to the hardware, not simply the firmware the CPU runs. Things like beamforming, adaptive arrays, and diversity antennas are things that can drastically alter the performance of a wireless router without altering the communications protocol, but they depend upon hardware configurations that are not in the WRT54G.

Microsoft, like Apple, does design hardware and for peripheral devices they did a damn good job. For example the Microsoft Trackball Explorer is a solid design with a demand that has pushed this retired device to a price of $225.

That's a great argument against ever trying to improve the status quo.

Many distributions of Linux do not have a corporation backing them. With that in mind, Apple is far less ethical than, say, Debian.

I imagine that selection bias is present with that 80% figure.