The X Attitude | Hacker News Reader

The X Attitude

guidebookgallery.org

37 pointsddelony9 comments

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.

Yep, I was expecting a Unix-hater rant.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com