The X Attitude

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

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.<p>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.

For more in the same vein, see "the UNIX Handbook" on "the X Windows disaster": <a href="http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf</a>.<p>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.<p>But... what? It works? It is a standard?

&#62; 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.<p>Creativity thrives on constraints. Removing constraints does not usually help creativity, it hinders it.