sean@fiamass.ie (Sean Mc Grath) (04/12/91)
stty CYNICAL X11 is like a dream come true for hardware manufacturers. Just imagine, a humongous lump of code to eat CPU, network, memory and disk for breakfast - and the users actually want it!!! As long as hardware continues to improve by leaps and bounds I believe software of the X11 variety will sadly become more and more commonplace :-( stty ~CYNICAL Sean Mc Grath (sean@fiamass.ie) -- my opinions were mine last time I looked Fiamass Ltd. 12 clarinda Park North Dun Laoghaire Co. Dublin Ireland.
preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece) (04/12/91)
We have seen a long string of notes beating on X as a resource hog, a waste of the hardware performance improvements of the last few years, a threat to reliability, a performance disaster, and various other kinds of mistake. Many of these things are true, but they are both misleading and unproductive. The performance and resource costs of X are being addressed in several ways, by the X Consortium, by the various vendors of add-on toolkits, and by platform vendors selling X-based products; major algorithm changes, reconsideration of resource allocation policies, and the growing availability of shared libraries should make the next release a significant improvement over X11R4. X is relatively immature technology and its authors are only beginning to switch from constructing new functionality to examining the details of the implementation and its operating characteristics. This is hardly a startling life-cycle. You *can't* realistically evaluate the performance characteristics of a product like X until its functionality is complete enough that to allow review of real applications in real use. Most of the critics have failed to suggest what they would have liked to see as a windowing interface instead of X. Most of the other windowing systems are built on kernel implementations; most UNIX architects have reached the point where they become nauseated at the idea of adding additional kernel functionality of any kind. The open availability of X and the fact that it is a user-level implementation are extremely powerful arguments in the current technological and marketing environment. If, as some argue, X is a fundamentally broken model and the division of labor between client and server inherently implies worse performance than some other model, they are free to produce a convincing demonstration of the superiority of some other scheme; from what I've heard, the other schemes that have been suggested have other problems that are just as severe. Many of the notes have pointed at 3D appearance as something that carries no advantage and costs a lot. While I tend to agree that it adds little to the utility of the GUI (and I, in fact, run in an Athena look and feel rather than a Motif look and feel), I would be interested in any hard statistics people could present on the *cost* of the fancier look. I would seriously surprised if it were anything like the numbers that people have used here (without any supporting citations). Frankly, for real end users, I would expect that once a user starts up an application they tend to stay in it for long periods and do relatively few operations that would involve any effort in support of the 3D effects. I don't have any numbers, either, but I think my supposition better fits the expected model of end-user use of applications. scott -- scott preece motorola/mcg urbana design center 1101 e. university, urbana, il 61801 uucp: uunet!uiucuxc!udc!preece, arpa: preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com phone: 217-384-8589 fax: 217-384-8550
rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) (04/15/91)
preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece) writes: > The performance and resource costs of X are being addressed in several > ways, by the X Consortium, by the various vendors of add-on toolkits, > and by platform vendors selling X-based products;... Yes, but this is repair after the fact. Wouldn't it have been better to have done it closer to right *once* before everyone bowed down and cast it in concrete? That is, instead of grinding along for several years, letting things accumulate more and more crud (as all software does), then finally attacking performance when it became too bad to ignore--and having dozens of groups attacking the same problems--why not attack the problems at the source, at the design level? > ...X is relatively > immature technology and its authors are only beginning to switch from > constructing new functionality to examining the details of the > implementation and its operating characteristics... X IS relatively immature, but note that it is NOT relatively new. X dates to...what, 1984? and version 11 to 1987? Let's think about this a moment. It's four years into the current version and we're just now thinking about "operating characteristics"??? And the time until now has been spent on "new functionality"? Well, this is just what some of us have been com- plaining about--feature madness. The features have been placed ahead of usability. > ...You *can't* realistically evaluate the > performance characteristics of a product like X until its functionality is > complete enough that to allow review of real applications in real use. If it has taken four years at the current base level to get it "complete enough" for real applications, it suggests strongly that there's something very wrong in the design. There have been too many people--GOOD people-- working on it for too long, for it only now to be approaching reality. -- Dick Dunn rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd Boulder, CO (303)449-2870 ...While you were reading this, Motif grew by another kilobyte.
pha21@seq1.keele.ac.uk (Braham Levy) (04/15/91)
In article <26550@adm.brl.mil>, preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com (Scott E. Preece) writes: > We have seen a long string of notes beating on X as a resource hog, a > waste of the hardware performance improvements of the last few years, a > threat to reliability, a performance disaster, and various other kinds hear hear scott and well said. Now ain't that enuf ?? i get real fed up of all this X/ Sunview/ NeWS (and other) bashing that goes on (especially in wizards) can we put a stop to this for a while. just a as finale here's my twopence worth : nothing's perfect but most thigs are usable. if you can do your job with the toolset you have don't complain. if you find something that does it better then tell the world. if for your application your toolset don't work put it down to experience and let others know that for that sort of work xyz product/ windowing system/os might not work, you never know if you construct your posting well you may get some positive responses which might help you. braham email: brahamlevy@uk.ac.keele (or similar) mail-mail : phone +44-782-621111x3943 j braham levy UDSP Lab, Electrical Engineering Group, Dept. of Physics, University of Keele, Keele, Staffs, UK.
rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) (04/23/91)
In <=V6&^Q_.19037@cheers.Bungi.COM> greg@cheers.Bungi.COM (Greg Onufer) writes: > >At least if Les Hill used vt100's he'd most likely produce postings with >less than 80 characters per line... it's only courtesy, after all. Yeah. I hate this too. >If X is hated so much, where are the alternatives? The sad thing is that there aren't many. Never having used MGR, I can't really rate it. It probably doesn't do very much, but people seem to think it does it reasonably well. NeWS seems like it uses the right model, but people say it's really too slow and big to build terminals out of. And perhaps the language is too awkward; postfix if's are hard to read. As one who threw many logs onto this fire, I suppose I should reveal my purpose. One of them was to simply carp about the trials and tribulations I experienced when I attempted to implement an X protocol session recorder and playback program. During this, I learned many nasty things about the protocol. You could argue that it was not designed for this purpose, and strictly speaking, it was not. However, truly robust software often finds uses for which it was not designed. But I suppose my real purpose in bashing X, just like my bashing on NFS, is to warn people who don't really know better against following along blindly with the crowd. What I am after is for people to examine the issues, to look beneath the surface and consider the issues. To those who have done that and still support X, well, someone has to work on it. Sure, both X and NFS are useful, even worth using. But let us tell the truth about their warts. -- [rbj@uunet 1] stty sane unknown mode: sane -- [rbj@uunet 1] stty sane unknown mode: sane
mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum) (04/23/91)
rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes: >But I suppose my real purpose in bashing X, just like my >bashing on NFS, is to warn people who don't really know >better against following along blindly with the crowd. Aye, there's the rub. How many times have you heard some 'Joe User' say "I want to move to UNIX/MOTIF/OPEN LOOK/X/random thing" and after you talk with h* for a while, you find out that the impetus for the move is because they read some article in some trade rag where some vulture consultant group all nodded and said "BLAH is the Wave Of The Future". Educate the customer. Educate the user. If someone makes an informed and deliberate decision to use BLAH, despite BLAH's warts, but because BLAH does THING better than any other BLAH, more power to them - but users/customers who just jump from bandwagon to bandwagon based on the ravings of Favorite Computer Rag are sure to wind up unhappy/unproductive users/customers. You'd really think that after some of the tremendous boondoggles the computer industry has had (can you say "OS/2"?) that some kind of awareness would be growing, but it seems just the opposite. mjr. [None of this is he offical opinion of DEC, or any of the otters.]
mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta) (05/07/91)
In article <9471@sail.LABS.TEK.COM> terryl@sail.LABS.TEK.COM writes: >+My console is 42 lines by 80 columns. > > And how easily can you change that (if at all)??? What, you mean you'll >never want to change it??? What if you wanted to view a file that someone had >entered on a > 80 column terminal, and you'd like to see each line on ONE >physical line, instead of multiple physical lines??? The first time I need 132 column terminal was when we bought infamous ETA10. Its fortrans sometimes output listing with 132 columns. Solution? We told CDC/ETA not to do such a silly thing, of course. Of course, as a workaround, I could have used VT100, though it can't display Japanese characters. > Thanx, but I'll keep my X, bloated as it may be.... But, why? Masataka Ohta
terryl@sail.LABS.TEK.COM (05/09/91)
In article <160@titccy.cc.titech.ac.jp> mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta) writes: >In article <9471@sail.LABS.TEK.COM> terryl@sail.LABS.TEK.COM writes: >>+My console is 42 lines by 80 columns. >> And how easily can you change that (if at all)??? What, you mean you'll >>never want to change it??? What if you wanted to view a file that someone had >>entered on a > 80 column terminal, and you'd like to see each line on ONE >>physical line, instead of multiple physical lines??? > >The first time I need 132 column terminal was when we bought infamous ETA10. >Its fortrans sometimes output listing with 132 columns. > >Solution? We told CDC/ETA not to do such a silly thing, of course. > >Of course, as a workaround, I could have used VT100, though it can't >display Japanese characters. >> Thanx, but I'll keep my X, bloated as it may be.... >But, why? Because it makes me more productive, and there isn't a better alternative around out there. A MAC is NOT an alternative, due to the nature of my work. Actually, my example of > 80 column terminal wasn't a good choice, so here's a better example. A lot of my time is editing files, and more often than not, I need to see 3-4 files AT THE SAME TIME. Try doing that without some sort of windowing system (and a mouse is MANDATORY). __________________________________________________________ Terry Laskodi "There's a permanent crease of in your right and wrong." Tektronix Sly and the Family Stone, "Stand!" __________________________________________________________
neal@mnopltd.UUCP (05/29/91)
[rant, rave, rant, rant]
->>> Thanx, but I'll keep my X, bloated as it may be....
->>But, why?
->
-> Because it makes me more productive, and there isn't a better alternative
->around out there. A MAC is NOT an alternative, due to the nature of my work.
->
-> Actually, my example of > 80 column terminal wasn't a good choice, so
->here's a better example. A lot of my time is editing files, and more often
->than not, I need to see 3-4 files AT THE SAME TIME. Try doing that without
->some sort of windowing system (and a mouse is MANDATORY).
->
Microterm was showing the 6600 terminal at Comdex. For about $700, you get
an ascii terminal which provides at least two windows. the 3"x5" 25x80
window was absolutely razor sharp. The full screen window could be read
from 5' away. Both windows can take output at once. I suspect two
43x80 windows would be possible.
Since most of the bleating about X relates to multiple copies of Xterm,
this appears to be most of the benefits at 10% of the cost.
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