On 2008-03-23, at 07:25, Yossi Kreinin wrote:
Peter da Silva wrote:
On 2008-03-21, at 12:24, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
I've found that stabilitywise it's hard to beat logging into a
Solaris
server (uptime counted in months, and downtimes are scheduled
maintenance windows, not crashes)
You know what's really hateful?
The fact that "uptime in months, downtimes are scheduled
maintenance windows" isn't what everyone just expects.
I think that what's really hateful is how "uptime" is measured. For
example, the krashing of Konsole doesn't affect uptime counts, even
though 75% of my apps were killed. When X crashes, it's not
downtime, either, even though 100% of my apps were killed.
One reason 75% of the apps I use are not GUI-based, but are things I
can safely hide behind a screen session on a stable server somewhere.
Twenty years ago I was appalled by the emerging model of GUI
programming, the unwonted intimacies between application and display.
For me, X11's modest attempt at establishing an arm's length distance
between the application and the display should have been only the
beginning, and yet rather than proceeding towards a situation where
the communications channel was more abstract, more "terminal-like",
everything went back the other way until now the whole crufty user
interface lives in the application, with every detail of the windows
and widgets and graphics and gadgets handled in the application's
context.
Which makes the application huge and fragile, and intimately aware of
and dependent on the user interface's state and stability. It's like
going back to the days when every program had to include code to
handle the details of the particular card reader and printer it was
working with, or at least be linked with a library that did that.
Hateful.
I have had ideas about what a cleaner model might look like. I've
hoped that somewhere in Plan 9 or Layers or NeWS would be a new
metaphor that would save us from the horrors of the GUI event loop.
But nothing ever seems to arise, except in the most remote sense
maybe the complementary hate that is "Web 2.0".
