RE: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] 
> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Oliver
> Sent: Friday, March 21, 2003 10:57 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [forum] Some perspective from the cheap seats...
> 
> 
> On Friday 21 March 2003 09:46 am, David Wexelblat wrote:
> ....
> > Yes, I agree. I should have stated my initial point more 
> > clearly. Not that people don't want remote access, but
> > when they do, they want to remote the entire desktop -
> > VNC, Citrix, Windows Terminal Server, etc. The idea of
> > being able to remote individual windows isn't relevent to 
> > the vast majority of desktop users. So the paradigm really 
> > needs to be inverted - direct-rendered desktop, with
> > remotability.
> 
> What does this mean for running remote client windows 
> alongside local Windows or MacOS apps?  In other words:
> 

(specific examples deleted)

Note that I said "the vast majority", not "all". I completely accept that
there are scenarios where users want this current behavior. And I'm saying
to eliminate it.

But I live in the world of consumers and enterprise desktops. Most of them
use a single machine in local mode. If they do remote stuff, in general,
they do it one of two ways:

- Thin client (browser-based)
- Remoting the desktop (VNC, Citrix, etc)

My point is that we've optimized for the outlier case. The basic
architecture should support the predominant usage, in such a fashion that
the exceptions still can be done, but perhaps not optimally.

As to the arguments about local transports being fast enough, I'm not sure I
believe that. Even with a fast transport, you're still doing
double-buffering, often double-resource usage. Unless you're using MIT-SHM,
which is a hack (try getting MIT-SHM to work on a non-UNIX X
implementation), and only addresses part of the issue.


> -Oly
> 
-- 
David Wexelblat, Chief Architect    mailto:[email protected]
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