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From: oster@lapis.berkeley.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Short paper comparing X with NeWS
Message-ID: <2479@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Mon, 9-Feb-87 22:21:18 EST
Article-I.D.: jade.2479
Posted: Mon Feb  9 22:21:18 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Feb-87 07:28:52 EST
References: <4791@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>
Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@lapis.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 30

Take that paper with a boulder of salt. It concluded that X was better
than NEWS using the following (idiotic) argument:

1.) NEWS supports an extensible communications protocol, in which an
application can redefine the protocol it uses to talk to the display
server to make the protocol more tightly tuned to the applications needs.

2.) SInce you CAN do this in NEWS, the author of the paper assumes your
MUST do this.

3.) You cannot do it in X. (The prootocol is low level, and has no
extension language.)

4.) The author shows that there are situations where it is not appropriate
to extend the communications protocol.

5.) The author concludes that NEWS is bad. This conclusion would hold if
(4) were common and (2) were true. Neither is the case.

I'm really excited about using NEWS for dynamic load balancing: a program
can detect the relative speed of the backend processors and the display
processor (which is different each time the program is run because of
multi-tasking load.) and dynamically, during the run, move parts of itself
between the two processors in order to get the best performance. NEWS
can't quite do this, but it is a step closer to having what you need to do
this than X is.

--- David Phillip Oster		-- "The goal of Computer Science is to
Arpa: oster@lapis.berkeley.edu  -- build something that will last at
Uucp: ucbvax!ucblapis!oster     -- least until we've finished building it."