Part of the reason is that there are a whole bunch of people who understand X well but who have a near-total disdain of using it to write end user and vertical market apps. Another part of the reason is that a whole bunch of people who understand Linux well have the same perspective. It's taken 30 years to uninvent the cash register. It may take another 30 years to uninvent the PC - i.e., remove it as a requirement of the experience of interacting with the software and user interfaces that we need and want.

The huge new Plasma, LCD (and soon, SED) TV's that the world is buying like crazy are just very, very dumb terminals, but they work so well because they don't try to be anything more than what they need to be in a very complex scheme. It's the same with a remote X display, except that it's interactive and it delivers GUIs that provide access to software. It works well because it doesn't try to be anything more than what it needs to be in a scheme, a scheme where users don't need PCs. It works because all it needs to be is a touchscreen GUI to the power of the WEB, and beyond that, to the entire Internet itself. Voice command, recognition and synthesis have to enter the GUI picture very soon, too, but the processing of all this will be remote and centralized, not in the device itself, so the question of how much processing power it will take is irrelevant and will not (should not) delay the arrival of this.

Don't listen just to all the X and Linux gurus who know so much about and so totally involved with the lower layers, with the technology for its own sake but who don't have any interest in apps and GUIs. Listen to the people who need apps that are useful and intuitive. If you have, on the one hand, a group of sharpshooters who don't have any interest in understanding where the valuable targets are, and on the other hand, a group of beginning marksmen who know exactly where the valuable targets are, tell me, which group is going to do a better job of scoring a bullseye? I pick door number two.

There are sharks, everywhere, I'd like to remind you. The tech biz is filled with people for whom tech is just a way to make money. These people have no use for it except for its ability to make money and to build their power. They're watching and learning about how to do that even better in the future than they're using tech now. Look what they did with touchscreen voting, for instance. They used the tech to commit what many of us feel are crimes and yet the touchscreen technology itself ended up being painted as the 'villain'. How sick is that?

Tech means different things to different people. There are companies that have acquired patents and 'ownership' of seeds that grow grains, of intuitive hand gestures that make things work, of ideas that explain how things work, of music that we like to make and hear, to profit from the fact that we still want to and have to do the things that people have been doing since before the dawn of time. Now these companies expect that they should be paid money even for how we live our lives. Don't ever forget that, like it or not, tech is in many ways just another warzone. But I digress...