Interview by David Ford with Jonathan Walther, on fantasy, literature, life and
primarily Xouvert the branch of Xfree86, which he is leading.
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WTF !
He mentions adding DRM to X as a good thing and the ineterviewer doesnt ask for clarification. People are going to be dropping windows when DRM starts to nanny your content, why the hell would we want it on Nix ?
Over the air TV is free (except in UK for the tax), however people have no problem in paying cable and satellite TV these days.
DF: wait a minute, I afta go to the bathroom.
JW: go.
DF: OK, I'm back.
REMINDER: We don't need to hear what is going on OUTSIDE the interview.
Also: we need more content. Know that mister Walther as his server up and running, what is he tackling first?
> He mentions adding DRM to X as a good thing and the ineterviewer doesnt ask for clarification. People are going to be dropping windows when DRM starts to nanny your content, why the hell would we want it on Nix ?
Hmm...what good would DRM do for X?
Isn't that something more appropriate to put in the kernel or some other thing to handle?
I'd think that one of the absolute requirements of an Xfree86 improve would be to migrate the driver layer over to use something like KGI or DirectFB by default.
Btw, I'm not against DRM unless it's used in an abusive fashion. IMHO a good use would be for using Linux as a basis for a gaming console or for use with licensing software.
I think he meant the "Direct Rendering Manager", part of the hardware acceleration infrastructure for XFree86.
Yes, quite:
DRM = direct rendering manager
DRM = digital rights management
Definitely not the same thing ;-)
Hey, could we have an on-topic interview please? I kinda stopped reading after several paragraphs of fantasy book discussions. Conduct the interview over e-mail or at least edit it to look professional. Not many people are interested in IRC logs.
In my mind Fnord!, the Illuminatus! portion Fnord! was the best Fnord! part!
Hail Eris Fnord!! All Hail Fnord! Discordia!
Jonathan Walther. Man. Seeing that his bathroom habits and fantasy book discussions are the topic of conversation, you can see for yourself his posting history on Kuro5hin. He is... certainly a character. I hope he permanently kept some of his personal info out of his homepage.
Just a hint to David Ford. It is not illegal to edit interviews, so the next time please edit out all irrelevant stuff.
But by the mear mention of Bowie J. Poag's name put this project in doubt. Bowie from what I have seen is a snake oil salesman. He has all these grand ideas about UI design, and curses off everyone else telling them their designs are stupid. He doesn't understand why we aren't working on OS's that can serve you breakfast in bed. His mind is stuck in the future and not the steps needed to get there. Dreaming is ok if you work twords that goal but it is best left in a SF novel and not thrown in the face of people trying to do real work. I realy hope that Jonathan is serious about this project and not just blowing smoke. This interview makes me wonder with a line like, "I worked on some Xlib apps with Bowie Poag to test some of his incredible new user interface ideas." since Bowie's biggest contribution has been seemless background images. No wonder he doesn't want to talk about Pogo yet will diverge to talk about Science Fiction. We shall see in October.
It was meant to be up a week ago, first my laptop started malfunctioning in the middle of it and then I fell ill with fever, so you have my apologies.
The interview was never really finished, and it needed editing, but it was already going stale. I got ill, and my laptop was malfunctioning, OSNews editors were going to edit it more I believe, but Jonathon wanted it posted before it was irrelevant. So its an act of the fates.
I am sorry.
Too bad Bowie J. Poag sounds like a weirdo/jerk. His scrollball idea is actually very cool. I could easily imagine using it instead of regular scrollbars -- except for one thing. The "bar" of the scrollbar indicates which part of the larger area you're viewing and also lets you know "how big" the document is. With *just* a scrollball, how you do know where you are (towards the top, or towards the bottom, or in the middle, etc.), or how big the document is?
Sorry for the OT post, but I just thought the scrollball idea was cool. Maybe if the "bar" of the scrollbar was kept, but the arrows were replaced with the scrollball? Best of both worlds, perhaps?
Jared
David, the best thing to come out of that interview is that somebody turned you on to Robert Anton Wilson.
Congratulations! An exciting world lies ahead of you.
The of scrollbars concept seems nothing special since it has previous art. But then these in the screenshots are more like "Rotation Balls"
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~rademach/glui/
ErrataI meant scrollballs not scrollbars.
Sorry for that,
Source: http://www.ibiblio.org/propaganda/pogo/pogo-2.0rc3.tar.gz
Docs: http://www.ibiblio.org/propaganda/pogo/HEARME-pogo.mp3
Final version will be released within a day or so.
Serves as a nice proof-of-concept for color-reactiveness, as well. Oh wait, I forgot..
It's all just a bunch of snake-oil. 
"JW: I think the KDE and GNOME teams are working very hard to make a desktop that not only competes, but far outstrips OS X and Aqua."
Are we assuming that OS X will just be frozen where it is today, and GNOME/KDE will continue to move forward?
Because they still have a long way to go to reach OS X for many things other than pretty screenshots, and as near as I can tell OS X will still be moving forward.
What happened to making X more responsive? I remember many discussions in which most people agreed that X needs to be faster in order to compete with Windows and OS X.
If you happen to believe that X is already fast enough, open up your favorite web browser (Konqueror, Mozilla, Galeon), browse the web for a few minutes, and then click on the "Back" button as fast as you can and count the number of clicks. Next, see how many pages your browser actually backed up. Even on fast systems, the browser will miss most of the mouse clicks.
Some would blame the developers of the web browsers, but that wouldn't be fair because just about every X application I have ever used reacts slowly, even on fast machines. This means that the problem most likely resides in X.
I am not saying these things to criticize X, or even Linux in general. Instead, I am a Linux user who would like to have a GUI that responds faster than I can. This would eliminate the need for me to wait while GUI elements are being drawn on the screen for simple tasks such as moving a window.
Right now, I'd say that X is about as responsive as the graphics engine in Windows 95 (that is not a flame - it is my honest personal experience). I think we should do whatever it takes, whether that be putting some elements of the graphics engine in the kernel (such as the KGI project intends and as Microsoft did with Windows 2000), restructuring and/or rewriting Xlib, or using traditional optimization techniques.
I will be done going to school full time in a few weeks and I hope to learn the architecture of X in my spare time and figure out exactly what makes X so inefficient. If I am successful at doing so, I hope that I could get the permission and support from the X developers to fix those inefficiencies. I more than anyone would like to see X compete with the graphics in OS X and Longhorn, but we have a long way to go before X is fast enough to produce the pretty graphics in those operating systems.
What happened to making X more responsive? I remember many discussions in which most people agreed that X needs to be faster in order to compete with Windows and OS X.
It was concluded around the web that the problem lay in the linux kernel scheduler.
Obviously because I haven't tried BSD or IRIX, I have no idea if this is true for those OSes.
It was concluded around the web that the scheduler helped all applications become faster.
X is very good adn here are some things that can be done to make it faster; http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1905&page=1
When will they put DRM into the kernel, so people buy a legal copy of Linux, instead of downloading it off a file sharing program. BTW: don't you get viruses this way.
>But by the mear mention of Bowie J. Poag's name put this >project in doubt. Bowie from what I have seen is a snake oil >salesman. He has all these grand ideas about UI design, and >curses off everyone else telling them their designs are >stupid.
I agree with Bowie, most KDE/Gnome development is dumbing down the values of Unix. There's nothing *real* innovative in KDE/Gnome compared to Windows and OS X. The Philosophy behind Unix is very valuable and flexible. Bowie understands that, and his software reflect this understanding.
Not to offend david or anything, but I wouldn't have published such an interview in a major technical news site, ever. Ha?? your laptop was malfunctioning? at least deleting the "it's late now, I'll call you tommorrow" part didn't need much editorial expertise, did it?
Can we all agree that this is the worst interview ever posted on OSNews?
I was really looking forward to an interview with the Xouvert guys, but this? Oh' c'mon, give me a break.
This is what happens to OSNews when Eugenia is not here. Sure, we all sometimes bash her, and call her subjective (specially regarding BeOS related issues) and sometimes make fun of her English, and all, but face it, she is the person that has made us all enjoy OSNews so much. Take a look at her review of Apple WWDC, and see the diffreence with David's interview.
Where is Eugenia? I miss her. It's time she comes back from vacaiton. If David posts a couple of other interviews like this, then I guess Eugenia will have a hard time ressurecting OSNews, again.
Finally, they have a commercial version of X-windows.
