7 ms·

It's X-Window (System), no S.

by mshook 7y ago

warpech 7y ago
It says it the footnotes that the misspelling is intentional
s_gourichon 7y ago
The text of the article actually has it correct most of the time. The name is just "X". It's a windowing system that happens to be named "X". It's named this way because it is a successor to another windowing system named "W" and "X" comes after "W" in alphabet order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Predecessors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Predecessors
- ptx 7y ago
  Exactly. Many people seem to read it as "the system named X Window", but, as you say, it's actually "the window system named X". The Linux Operating System is an operating system and the X Window System is a window system. Maybe part of the reason is the Title Case convention in English? (And the other part may be the name of Microsoft's window system leading the mind along this path.)
  - sicnus 7y ago
    Oh, I wanna hop in on this train. tell that fool to man X yo. ;) I've been getting pissed about people calling it "X Windows" since 1995 so there.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      You made my day! I'm so delighted to hear you're pissed that people call it X-Windows. ;) Thank you for letting me know my long term project of always calling it X-Windows worked perfectly as planned. I've been systematically calling it X-Windows to piss people off since June 1988, when I read the article "Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’" in my copy of Volume 1 Number 2 of the June 1988 of the “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group” (which I quoted above): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501380 From the end of the X-Windows Disaster article: >Don wrote the chapter on the X-Windows Disaster. (To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title. I started programming X10 in June 1986. Here's my first X10 program, a pie menu test application (I was calling them "theta menus" then): https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/theta.test/ https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/theta.test/ After that I modified the X10 "uwm" window manager to support pie menus, and integrated it with FORTH so I could interactivally program and extend the window manager in FORTH, and use it to implement and perform an experiment comparing pie menus with linear menus. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie-vs-linear-menus-466c6fdbba4b https://medium.com/@donhopkins/an-empirical-comparison-of-pi... Forth pie menu X10 window manager source code (the main FORTH part -- other C and FORTH source code is in the same directory): https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm/fuwm-main.f https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm/fuwm-main.f X10 Pie Menu Window Manager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhvB6kwmog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhvB6kwmog Then I moved on from X10 to NeWS (and from FORTH to PostScript), because NeWS was so much better than X10 or X11, and supported round windows and non-terrible graphics. At Sun in 1991 I helped write an X-Windows ICCCM X11 window manager in PostScript so NeWS could manage X-Windows, which supported non-rectangular tabbed window frames, pie menus in round windows, multiple displays, multiple rooms, scrolling virtual desktops (with an iconic map that let you scroll your view around), and many other nice features that other X window managers couldn't do at the time. Plus it was faster and more efficient than any X window manager because it actually ran in the window server instead of running in a separate process and communicating over the network, so it was able to immediately synchronously handle events, provide feedback, draw rubber-band lines in the overlay, pop up and track menus immediately, perfectly support quick mouse-ahead gestures, move and resize windows instantly, all without context switching or network traffic or grabbing the server or freezing event distribution or lagging behind or missing any events, instead of being asynchronous and laggy and flakey and dropping events like all other outboard networked X11 window managers do by design. (This was extremely important when running on a slow diskless Sun 3/50 paging over the network.) The idea of running something as crucial and interactive as the window manager in a separate process using an asynchronous protocol is quite insane, inefficient, wasteful, and flakey, but that's how X was designed to be. https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/owm.ps.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/owm.ps.txt Demo of the Pie Menu Tab Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 In 1992 I made a pie menu window manager called "piewm" based on "tvtwm", and I also ported SimCity to X11, using TCL/Tk, redesigning it to be a multi player networked game, and encountering and solving all kinds of problems trying to make X11 play a game, support multiple users, do fast shared memory graphical animation, mix sounds with a network audio mixer, and support different types of screens and devices (both black and white and color). Those experiences were what motivated me to write the Unix-Haters Handbook chapter on the X-Windows Disaster, and compare my experiences with NeWS and X-Windows. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/index.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/index.html >The "piewm" X11 window manager with pie menus. When I was a research programmer at CMU, faced with using X11, I realized that I needed pie menus to help me move my windows around, so I went shopping around for a reasonable window manager, and since there weren't any, I choose the least unreasonable one at the time, "tvtwm", and hacked it up with an updated version of the old X10 "uwm" pie menus, and called it "piewm". The source code is available here: piewm.tar.Z. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/piewm.tar.Z http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/piewm.tar.Z >The TCL/Tk pie menu widget. I accidentally ported the HyperLook version of SimCity to X11, making it multi player in the process, using the TCL/Tk toolkit, which was the only X11 toolkit that didn't suck. I needed some fancy looking graphical pie menus, so I made a TCL/Tk pie menu widget, whose window shape could be shrink-wrapped around iconic labels. The source code is available here: tkpie.tar.gz. I recorded an X11 SimCity demo, showing pie menus in action. SimCity for X11 won a "best product of 1992" award from Unix World! http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/tkpie.tar.gz http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/tkpie.tar.gz More stuff about X11 window management and multi player SimCityNet: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.h... http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement... http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcitynet.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcitynet.html X11 SimCity Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux (you can see the date changing so fast it blurs at 1:25): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA Here's how fun it is trying to draw the SimCity map efficiently with X-Windows: if only a few pixels have changed (which is a very common case), instead of sending the entire image, it sorted the changed pixels by color, then used XDrawPoints to draw each batch of different colored pixels that changed. Changing colors is expensive, so if you changed colors for every dot it would be very slow, but X-Windows lets you draw a bunch of dots at any position in the same color efficiently, so SimCity finds the pixels that changed, and if there are few enough of them, it sorts them by color, then goes through setting each color and drawing every pixel that changed to that color with XDrawPoints. If more than max_pix (256) changed, it just sends the whole image. Yes, that was the most efficient way to do it if the server didn't support shared memory or was across the network on a different host, since the X protocol and graphics API is so awkward and inefficient. And even if you have the shared memory extension in your server, X still requires that you ALSO write code to support the case of no shared memory, since it still needs to be able to run over the network. Decades later when I updated the code to support different bit depths than an 8 bit color palette, computers and networks were astronomically faster, and the code was too tricky for its own good, and SimCity on the OLPC was usually running locally with shared memory anyway, so I punted, commented out that code, and just sent the image every time. https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabbc51d5e45dac948d8e40fc53ee/micropolis-activity/src/sim/w_map.c#L466 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... /* * Sending the whole image is 108108 bytes. * Sending points is 4.4 bytes per point. * One image is as big as 24570 points. * But we have to sort these dang things. */ #define MAX_PIX 256 int max_pix = MAX_PIX; [...] /* TODO: Fix this. I disabled this incremental drawing code for now since it seems to be buggy. */ /* Sort the changed pixels by their color */ qsort(pix, different, sizeof (struct Pix), (int (*)())CompareColor); /* Draw the points of each color that have changed */ points = (XPoint *)malloc(sizeof (XPoint) * different); last = 0; pts = 0; for (i = 0; i <= different; i++) { if ((i == different) || (pix[i].color != pix[last].color)) { XSetForeground(view->x->dpy, view->x->gc, pix[last].color); XDrawPoints(view->x->dpy, view->pixmap, view->x->gc, points, pts, CoordModeOrigin); if (i == different) break; pts = 0; last = i; } points[pts].x = pix[i].x; points[pts].y = pix[i].y; pts++; } free(points); The map editor "DrawOverlay" code also has a lot of fun hairy optimizations to draw fast over the network, and it measure how long it takes in different situation and uses the most efficient technique (drawing the lines every time, or caching them in an offscreen pixmap overlay): https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabbc51d5e45dac948d8e40fc53ee/micropolis-activity/src/sim/w_editor.c#L1426 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... When I was timing and optimizing SimCity to make it run as fast as possible on X-Windows, I noticed that when you ran it super-duper flat-out fast, skipping screen updates to run the simulator in a tight loop, a huge amount of time was wasted simply redrawing the date field, since it changed so many times per screen refresh. So I implemented a special custom TCL/Tk widget just for displaying the date, which only lazily updates occasionally at a fixed frequency, and knows how to draw the text in an offscreen pixmap and "fake blur" the parts of the date that are changing quickly by overprinting the letters and digits in gray (you can't easily blur or blend text in X-Windows with an 8 bit color mapped display, so I did the next best thing that was possible and efficient, and it got the point across that time was moving very fast, without slowing the computer down or making it unresponsive). https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabbc51d5e45dac948d8e40fc53ee/micropolis-activity/src/sim/w_date.c#L597 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... More about NeWS in this recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22455722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22455722
      - ptx 7y ago
        > To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title. This seems to imply that the correct name is "X-Windows" without the hyphen and plural, i.e. "X Window", but that's just as wrong (and much uglier) - the actual name of the window system is "X". As a getting-names-right and things-making-sense fanatic, I'm more annoyed by "X Window" than "X-Windows". Maybe that was the point, though....? Meta-trolling by getting people who wanted to use the correct name to apply the reverse transformation and incorrectly call it "X Window"? :)
  - reificator 7y ago
    > The Linux Operating System is an operating system and the X Window System is a window system. You're being pedantic online about software naming and the example you choose is the Linux "operating system"? Good luck.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      So you're saying it's really the "X window system"?
      - reificator 7y ago
        X is a window system, but capitalizing the wrong letters will cause a bit of an argument. Linux is not an operating system, and it doesn't matter how you capitalize it.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        A "Linux distribution" is not a distribution of a kernel.
    - ptx 7y ago
      Feel free to substitute FreeBSD for Linux and reparse the comment. The definition of OS is a different vein of pedantry.
DonHopkins 7y ago
>Don wrote the chapter on the X-Windows Disaster. (To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title. I published a better version on Medium that has a few typos fixed, and includes a flyer that was handed out at the X-Windows conference, and an article I found in my archives from Volume 1 Number 2, of the June 1988 of the “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group”: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39... Official Dangerous Virus Notice Distributed at the X-Windows Conference Official Notice Post Immediately X x X x X x X x X x X x X Dangerous Virus! First, a little history. The X window system escaped from Project Athena at MIT where it was being held in isolation. When notified, MIT stated publicly that “MIT assumes no responsibility…”. This is a very disturbing statement. It then infiltrated Digital Equipment Corporation, where it has since corrupted the technical judgement of this organization. After sabotaging Digital Equipment Corporation, a sinister X consortium was created to find a way to use X as part of a plan to dominate and control interactive window systems. X windows is sometimes distributed by this secret consortium free of charge to unsuspecting victims. The destructive cost of X cannot even be guessed. X is truly obese — whether it’s mutilating your hard disk or actively infesting your system, you can be sure it’s up to no good. Innocent users need to be protected from this dangerous virus. Even as you read this, the X source distribution and the executable environment is being maintained on hundreds of computers, maybe even your own. Digital Equipment Corporation is already shipping machines that carry this dreaded infestation. It must be destroyed. This is what happens when software with good intentions goes bad. It victimizes innocent users by distorting their perception of what is and what is not good software. This malignant window system must be destroyed. Ultimately DEC and MIT must be held accountable for this heinous software crime, brought to justice, and made to pay for a software cleanup. Until DEC and MIT answer to these charges, they both should be assumed to be protecting dangerous software criminals. Don’t be fooled! Just say no to X. X-Windows: …A mistake carried out to perfection. X-Windows: …Dissatisfaction guaranteed. X-Windows: …Don’t get frustrated without it. X-Windows: …Even your dog won’t like it. X-Windows: …Flaky and built to stay that way. X-Windows: …Complex non-solutions to simple non-problems. X-Windows: …Flawed beyond belief. X-Windows: …Form follows malfunction. X-Windows: …Garbage at your fingertips. X-Windows: …Ignorance is our most important resource. X-Windows: …It could be worse, but it’ll take time. X-Windows: …It could happen to you. X-Windows: …Japan’s secret weapon. X-Windows: …Let it get in your way. X-Windows: …Live the nightmare. X-Windows: …More than enough rope. X-Windows: …Never had it, never will. X-Windows: …No hardware is safe. X-Windows: …Power tools for power fools. X-Windows: …Putting new limits on productivity. X-Windows: …Simplicity made complex. X-Windows: …The cutting edge of obsolescence. X-Windows: …The art of incompetence. X-Windows: …The defacto substandard. X-Windows: …The first fully modular software disaster. X-Windows: …The joke that kills. X-Windows: …The problem for your problem. X-Windows: …There’s got to be a better way. X-Windows: …Warn your friends about it. X-Windows: …You’d better sit down. X-Windows: …You’ll envy the dead. ---- Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’ I was digging through some old papers, and ran across a 15 year old “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group”, Volume 1 Number 2, from June 1988. Here’s an article that illustrates how far the usage of the term “X Windows” has evolved over the past 15 years. (Too bad The Window System Improperly Known as X Windows itself hasn’t evolved.) Someone on slashdot asks, “Why is it still called X-Windows?”. Predictably, the first reply says: “It isn’t. It’s called ‘The X Window System.’ Or simply ‘X’. ‘X Windows’ is a misnomer.” He didn’t ask why it is “X-Windows”. He asked why it’s called “X-Windows”. You’re wrong that it isn’t called “X-Windows”. It is! It’s just that it isn’t “X-Windows”. Being something is independent of being called something. The answer to the question ‘Why is it still called X-Windows?’ is: It’s still called X-Windows in order to annoy the X-Windows Fanatics, who take it upon themselves to correct you every time you call it X-Windows. That’s why it’s called X-Windows. The following definitive guide to the consequences of saying “X Windows” is from the June 1988 “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group”, Volume 1 Number 2: Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’ THE OFFICIAL NAMES The official names of the software described herein are: X X Window System X Version 11 X Window System, Version 11 X11 Note that the phrases X.11, X-11, X Windows or any permutation thereof, are explicitly excluded from this list and should not be used to describe the X Window System (window system should be thought of as one word). The above should be enough to scare anyone into using the proper terminology, but sadly enough, it’s not. Recently, certain people, lacking sufficient motivation to change their speech patterns, have fallen victim to various ‘accidents’, or ‘misfortune’. I’ve compiled a short list of happenings, some of which I have witnessed, others which remain heresay. I’m not claiming any direct connection between their speech habits and the reported incidents, but you be the judge… And woe betide any who set the cursed phrase into print! You are forced to explain toolkit programming to X neophytes. Bob Schiefler says, “You should know better than that!” The Power Supply (and unknown boards) on your workstation mysteriously give up the ghost. Ditto for the controller board for the disk on your new Sun. Your hair falls out. xmh refuses to come up in a useful size, no matter what you fiddle. You inexplicitly lose both of your complete Ultrix Doc sets. R2 won’t build. Bob Schiefler says “Type ‘man X’”. Your nifty new X screen saver just won’t go away. The window you’re working in loses input focus. Permanently.

It's X-Window (System), no S.

by mshook 7y ago

It's X-Window (System), no S.

warpech 7y ago

It says it the footnotes that the misspelling is intentional

s_gourichon 7y ago

The text of the article actually has it correct most of the time. The name is just "X". It's a windowing system that happens to be named "X". It's named this way because it is a successor to another windowing system named "W" and "X" comes after "W" in alphabet order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Predecessors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Predecessors

ptx 7y ago
Exactly. Many people seem to read it as "the system named X Window", but, as you say, it's actually "the window system named X". The Linux Operating System is an operating system and the X Window System is a window system. Maybe part of the reason is the Title Case convention in English? (And the other part may be the name of Microsoft's window system leading the mind along this path.)
- sicnus 7y ago
  Oh, I wanna hop in on this train. tell that fool to man X yo. ;) I've been getting pissed about people calling it "X Windows" since 1995 so there.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    You made my day! I'm so delighted to hear you're pissed that people call it X-Windows. ;) Thank you for letting me know my long term project of always calling it X-Windows worked perfectly as planned. I've been systematically calling it X-Windows to piss people off since June 1988, when I read the article "Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’" in my copy of Volume 1 Number 2 of the June 1988 of the “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group” (which I quoted above): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501380 From the end of the X-Windows Disaster article: >Don wrote the chapter on the X-Windows Disaster. (To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title. I started programming X10 in June 1986. Here's my first X10 program, a pie menu test application (I was calling them "theta menus" then): https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/theta.test/ https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/theta.test/ After that I modified the X10 "uwm" window manager to support pie menus, and integrated it with FORTH so I could interactivally program and extend the window manager in FORTH, and use it to implement and perform an experiment comparing pie menus with linear menus. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie-vs-linear-menus-466c6fdbba4b https://medium.com/@donhopkins/an-empirical-comparison-of-pi... Forth pie menu X10 window manager source code (the main FORTH part -- other C and FORTH source code is in the same directory): https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm/fuwm-main.f https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm/fuwm-main.f X10 Pie Menu Window Manager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhvB6kwmog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhvB6kwmog Then I moved on from X10 to NeWS (and from FORTH to PostScript), because NeWS was so much better than X10 or X11, and supported round windows and non-terrible graphics. At Sun in 1991 I helped write an X-Windows ICCCM X11 window manager in PostScript so NeWS could manage X-Windows, which supported non-rectangular tabbed window frames, pie menus in round windows, multiple displays, multiple rooms, scrolling virtual desktops (with an iconic map that let you scroll your view around), and many other nice features that other X window managers couldn't do at the time. Plus it was faster and more efficient than any X window manager because it actually ran in the window server instead of running in a separate process and communicating over the network, so it was able to immediately synchronously handle events, provide feedback, draw rubber-band lines in the overlay, pop up and track menus immediately, perfectly support quick mouse-ahead gestures, move and resize windows instantly, all without context switching or network traffic or grabbing the server or freezing event distribution or lagging behind or missing any events, instead of being asynchronous and laggy and flakey and dropping events like all other outboard networked X11 window managers do by design. (This was extremely important when running on a slow diskless Sun 3/50 paging over the network.) The idea of running something as crucial and interactive as the window manager in a separate process using an asynchronous protocol is quite insane, inefficient, wasteful, and flakey, but that's how X was designed to be. https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/owm.ps.txt https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/owm.ps.txt Demo of the Pie Menu Tab Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 In 1992 I made a pie menu window manager called "piewm" based on "tvtwm", and I also ported SimCity to X11, using TCL/Tk, redesigning it to be a multi player networked game, and encountering and solving all kinds of problems trying to make X11 play a game, support multiple users, do fast shared memory graphical animation, mix sounds with a network audio mixer, and support different types of screens and devices (both black and white and color). Those experiences were what motivated me to write the Unix-Haters Handbook chapter on the X-Windows Disaster, and compare my experiences with NeWS and X-Windows. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/index.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/index.html >The "piewm" X11 window manager with pie menus. When I was a research programmer at CMU, faced with using X11, I realized that I needed pie menus to help me move my windows around, so I went shopping around for a reasonable window manager, and since there weren't any, I choose the least unreasonable one at the time, "tvtwm", and hacked it up with an updated version of the old X10 "uwm" pie menus, and called it "piewm". The source code is available here: piewm.tar.Z. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/piewm.tar.Z http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/piewm.tar.Z >The TCL/Tk pie menu widget. I accidentally ported the HyperLook version of SimCity to X11, making it multi player in the process, using the TCL/Tk toolkit, which was the only X11 toolkit that didn't suck. I needed some fancy looking graphical pie menus, so I made a TCL/Tk pie menu widget, whose window shape could be shrink-wrapped around iconic labels. The source code is available here: tkpie.tar.gz. I recorded an X11 SimCity demo, showing pie menus in action. SimCity for X11 won a "best product of 1992" award from Unix World! http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/tkpie.tar.gz http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/piemenus/tkpie.tar.gz More stuff about X11 window management and multi player SimCityNet: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/i39l.h... http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement... http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcitynet.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcitynet.html X11 SimCity Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux (you can see the date changing so fast it blurs at 1:25): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA Here's how fun it is trying to draw the SimCity map efficiently with X-Windows: if only a few pixels have changed (which is a very common case), instead of sending the entire image, it sorted the changed pixels by color, then used XDrawPoints to draw each batch of different colored pixels that changed. Changing colors is expensive, so if you changed colors for every dot it would be very slow, but X-Windows lets you draw a bunch of dots at any position in the same color efficiently, so SimCity finds the pixels that changed, and if there are few enough of them, it sorts them by color, then goes through setting each color and drawing every pixel that changed to that color with XDrawPoints. If more than max_pix (256) changed, it just sends the whole image. Yes, that was the most efficient way to do it if the server didn't support shared memory or was across the network on a different host, since the X protocol and graphics API is so awkward and inefficient. And even if you have the shared memory extension in your server, X still requires that you ALSO write code to support the case of no shared memory, since it still needs to be able to run over the network. Decades later when I updated the code to support different bit depths than an 8 bit color palette, computers and networks were astronomically faster, and the code was too tricky for its own good, and SimCity on the OLPC was usually running locally with shared memory anyway, so I punted, commented out that code, and just sent the image every time. https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabbc51d5e45dac948d8e40fc53ee/micropolis-activity/src/sim/w_map.c#L466 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... /* * Sending the whole image is 108108 bytes. * Sending points is 4.4 bytes per point. * One image is as big as 24570 points. * But we have to sort these dang things. */ #define MAX_PIX 256 int max_pix = MAX_PIX; [...] /* TODO: Fix this. I disabled this incremental drawing code for now since it seems to be buggy. */ /* Sort the changed pixels by their color */ qsort(pix, different, sizeof (struct Pix), (int (*)())CompareColor); /* Draw the points of each color that have changed */ points = (XPoint *)malloc(sizeof (XPoint) * different); last = 0; pts = 0; for (i = 0; i <= different; i++) { if ((i == different) || (pix[i].color != pix[last].color)) { XSetForeground(view->x->dpy, view->x->gc, pix[last].color); XDrawPoints(view->x->dpy, view->pixmap, view->x->gc, points, pts, CoordModeOrigin); if (i == different) break; pts = 0; last = i; } points[pts].x = pix[i].x; points[pts].y = pix[i].y; pts++; } free(points); The map editor "DrawOverlay" code also has a lot of fun hairy optimizations to draw fast over the network, and it measure how long it takes in different situation and uses the most efficient technique (drawing the lines every time, or caching them in an offscreen pixmap overlay): https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabbc51d5e45dac948d8e40fc53ee/micropolis-activity/src/sim/w_editor.c#L1426 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... When I was timing and optimizing SimCity to make it run as fast as possible on X-Windows, I noticed that when you ran it super-duper flat-out fast, skipping screen updates to run the simulator in a tight loop, a huge amount of time was wasted simply redrawing the date field, since it changed so many times per screen refresh. So I implemented a special custom TCL/Tk widget just for displaying the date, which only lazily updates occasionally at a fixed frequency, and knows how to draw the text in an offscreen pixmap and "fake blur" the parts of the date that are changing quickly by overprinting the letters and digits in gray (you can't easily blur or blend text in X-Windows with an 8 bit color mapped display, so I did the next best thing that was possible and efficient, and it got the point across that time was moving very fast, without slowing the computer down or making it unresponsive). https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabbc51d5e45dac948d8e40fc53ee/micropolis-activity/src/sim/w_date.c#L597 https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/b0c5a3f495ebabb... More about NeWS in this recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22455722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22455722
    - ptx 7y ago
      > To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title. This seems to imply that the correct name is "X-Windows" without the hyphen and plural, i.e. "X Window", but that's just as wrong (and much uglier) - the actual name of the window system is "X". As a getting-names-right and things-making-sense fanatic, I'm more annoyed by "X Window" than "X-Windows". Maybe that was the point, though....? Meta-trolling by getting people who wanted to use the correct name to apply the reverse transformation and incorrectly call it "X Window"? :)
- reificator 7y ago
  > The Linux Operating System is an operating system and the X Window System is a window system. You're being pedantic online about software naming and the example you choose is the Linux "operating system"? Good luck.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    So you're saying it's really the "X window system"?
    - reificator 7y ago
      X is a window system, but capitalizing the wrong letters will cause a bit of an argument. Linux is not an operating system, and it doesn't matter how you capitalize it.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        A "Linux distribution" is not a distribution of a kernel.
  - ptx 7y ago
    Feel free to substitute FreeBSD for Linux and reparse the comment. The definition of OS is a different vein of pedantry.

DonHopkins 7y ago

>Don wrote the chapter on the X-Windows Disaster. (To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title. I published a better version on Medium that has a few typos fixed, and includes a flyer that was handed out at the X-Windows conference, and an article I found in my archives from Volume 1 Number 2, of the June 1988 of the “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group”: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39... Official Dangerous Virus Notice Distributed at the X-Windows Conference Official Notice Post Immediately X x X x X x X x X x X x X Dangerous Virus! First, a little history. The X window system escaped from Project Athena at MIT where it was being held in isolation. When notified, MIT stated publicly that “MIT assumes no responsibility…”. This is a very disturbing statement. It then infiltrated Digital Equipment Corporation, where it has since corrupted the technical judgement of this organization. After sabotaging Digital Equipment Corporation, a sinister X consortium was created to find a way to use X as part of a plan to dominate and control interactive window systems. X windows is sometimes distributed by this secret consortium free of charge to unsuspecting victims. The destructive cost of X cannot even be guessed. X is truly obese — whether it’s mutilating your hard disk or actively infesting your system, you can be sure it’s up to no good. Innocent users need to be protected from this dangerous virus. Even as you read this, the X source distribution and the executable environment is being maintained on hundreds of computers, maybe even your own. Digital Equipment Corporation is already shipping machines that carry this dreaded infestation. It must be destroyed. This is what happens when software with good intentions goes bad. It victimizes innocent users by distorting their perception of what is and what is not good software. This malignant window system must be destroyed. Ultimately DEC and MIT must be held accountable for this heinous software crime, brought to justice, and made to pay for a software cleanup. Until DEC and MIT answer to these charges, they both should be assumed to be protecting dangerous software criminals. Don’t be fooled! Just say no to X. X-Windows: …A mistake carried out to perfection. X-Windows: …Dissatisfaction guaranteed. X-Windows: …Don’t get frustrated without it. X-Windows: …Even your dog won’t like it. X-Windows: …Flaky and built to stay that way. X-Windows: …Complex non-solutions to simple non-problems. X-Windows: …Flawed beyond belief. X-Windows: …Form follows malfunction. X-Windows: …Garbage at your fingertips. X-Windows: …Ignorance is our most important resource. X-Windows: …It could be worse, but it’ll take time. X-Windows: …It could happen to you. X-Windows: …Japan’s secret weapon. X-Windows: …Let it get in your way. X-Windows: …Live the nightmare. X-Windows: …More than enough rope. X-Windows: …Never had it, never will. X-Windows: …No hardware is safe. X-Windows: …Power tools for power fools. X-Windows: …Putting new limits on productivity. X-Windows: …Simplicity made complex. X-Windows: …The cutting edge of obsolescence. X-Windows: …The art of incompetence. X-Windows: …The defacto substandard. X-Windows: …The first fully modular software disaster. X-Windows: …The joke that kills. X-Windows: …The problem for your problem. X-Windows: …There’s got to be a better way. X-Windows: …Warn your friends about it. X-Windows: …You’d better sit down. X-Windows: …You’ll envy the dead. ---- Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’ I was digging through some old papers, and ran across a 15 year old “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group”, Volume 1 Number 2, from June 1988. Here’s an article that illustrates how far the usage of the term “X Windows” has evolved over the past 15 years. (Too bad The Window System Improperly Known as X Windows itself hasn’t evolved.) Someone on slashdot asks, “Why is it still called X-Windows?”. Predictably, the first reply says: “It isn’t. It’s called ‘The X Window System.’ Or simply ‘X’. ‘X Windows’ is a misnomer.” He didn’t ask why it is “X-Windows”. He asked why it’s called “X-Windows”. You’re wrong that it isn’t called “X-Windows”. It is! It’s just that it isn’t “X-Windows”. Being something is independent of being called something. The answer to the question ‘Why is it still called X-Windows?’ is: It’s still called X-Windows in order to annoy the X-Windows Fanatics, who take it upon themselves to correct you every time you call it X-Windows. That’s why it’s called X-Windows. The following definitive guide to the consequences of saying “X Windows” is from the June 1988 “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group”, Volume 1 Number 2: Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’ THE OFFICIAL NAMES The official names of the software described herein are: X X Window System X Version 11 X Window System, Version 11 X11 Note that the phrases X.11, X-11, X Windows or any permutation thereof, are explicitly excluded from this list and should not be used to describe the X Window System (window system should be thought of as one word). The above should be enough to scare anyone into using the proper terminology, but sadly enough, it’s not. Recently, certain people, lacking sufficient motivation to change their speech patterns, have fallen victim to various ‘accidents’, or ‘misfortune’. I’ve compiled a short list of happenings, some of which I have witnessed, others which remain heresay. I’m not claiming any direct connection between their speech habits and the reported incidents, but you be the judge… And woe betide any who set the cursed phrase into print! You are forced to explain toolkit programming to X neophytes. Bob Schiefler says, “You should know better than that!” The Power Supply (and unknown boards) on your workstation mysteriously give up the ghost. Ditto for the controller board for the disk on your new Sun. Your hair falls out. xmh refuses to come up in a useful size, no matter what you fiddle. You inexplicitly lose both of your complete Ultrix Doc sets. R2 won’t build. Bob Schiefler says “Type ‘man X’”. Your nifty new X screen saver just won’t go away. The window you’re working in loses input focus. Permanently.