

The X Attitude - ddelony
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/thexattitude

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ajpatel
Is it bad that half the time I was reading I thought this was a sarcastic post
and that eventually the author was going to make the opposite point of the one
he actually did end up making?

Then I saw he was from NC State, my Alma mater. And everything made sense
again.

~~~
wmf
Yep, I was expecting a Unix-hater rant.

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D_Drake
You call it the X Attitude, I call it taking six thousand milliseconds to draw
a five megabyte graphical email interface in order to read a five kilobyte
email.

You say your computer is "fast enough"? Imagine how little power your phone's
processor would draw if it only needed the performance of, say, a PXA270 from
2005. What does your phone do that a seven year old PDA doesn't have the
horsepower for? High def video and flash video, and that's about it. Software
bloat is a pox upon computing technology. Something is very wrong when it
takes a hundred times the computation to read the same email ten years later.

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lsb
This was written 20 years ago! (Byte 7/91) And even truer now than then. We
run ad hoc queries against transactional relational databases on our
cellphones.

~~~
rvkennedy
It was written when Moore's Law was in full effect. You cannot continue to
expect the hardware to catch up - and certainly not in a nice predictable
curve requiring no rethought of your software paradigms.

~~~
rubinelli
The pace at which more transistors are squeezed into the same amount of
silicon has slowed down a bit, but the real difference between today and 20
years ago is that we've crossed the "good enough" threshold, and now we are
optimizing other dimensions, like cost and portability. A good computer for
web browsing and reading mail in 2006 is still a good computer for those tasks
today. Back in the 90's, a videogame company that didn't release a new console
generation after 3 or 4 years was dead; how long has it been since the Xbox360
and the PS3 were released? And nobody is clamoring for more polygons, so
instead Sony is releasing a new PSP with roughly the same power as the PS3.

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JoachimSchipper
For more in the same vein, see "the UNIX Handbook" on "the X Windows
disaster": <http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf>.

Of course, X works fine for me.

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JoeAltmaier
I remember (!) when XWindows was released. I was shocked, disappointed, agog.
That they didn't put ANYTHING in the client in the way of stored procedures,
macros, advanced primitives e.g. motion rectangles, polygon draw etc. It was
not even as advanced as printer protocols of the time.

But... what? It works? It is a standard?

------
Peaker
> The primary advantage of the X attitude is this: It is incredibly freeing
> from a creativity standpoint. No longer are designs constrained by today’s
> realities.

Creativity thrives on constraints. Removing constraints does not usually help
creativity, it hinders it.

