Re: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

Alan Cox <[email protected]> wrote:

> Let people break stuff, providing you have a good idea what the
> state of things are you can let people fix bugs as they find them.
> In the kernel fixing one card variant often breaks another, and it
> turns up from users testing snapshots not from the developer. 

Yes, I would agree with that. The quality of the Linux kernel as it 
stands today is due to the very large number of people actively testing 
snapshots and finding the stuff that breaks. Even so formalised test 
tools help *immensely* to find this stuff *early*, since you can find out 
with some simple test cases rather than have some user have his kernel 
panic or his XFree86 install crash before you know there is a problem.

> > Yes, I agree entirely with that. Network transparency is nice sometimes, 
> > but not really essential for the day to day use of desktop computing. The 
> 
> Large numbers of my employers customers would disagree with you.
> For some things the desktop approach is right, but for many things
> it is not. The lack of a sane client-server architecture in Windows
> distorted the market heavily. 

I guess it depends whether you are heavily involved in Unix/X or 
Windows/OS2 stuff ;-) But yes, I do agree that network transparency has 
it's place. When I use it, it is a godsend, but I don't use it that often 
(mostly for remote debugging actually).

> I'd ask a different question with my general networking hat on.
> Bandwidth is rising pretty much exponentially to many users.
> Latency is nearly a constant and in some cases (cable/ADSL) has
> increased. On that background the question becomes "Is the X model
> wrong for remote computing due to round trip times". VNC for
> example significantly outperforms X (with compress) for remote use
> of Gnome on 802.11b 

Very good point. The downside of course is the VNC is a 'remote desktop' 
system much like PC Anywhere for Windows machines. You can't run a remote 
VNC application integrated 'seamlessly' into your desktop via VNC (or PC 
Anywhere). But it does solve the remote access problem in a different 
way, and it may well be that for most uses a VNC style approach is 
perfectly suitable. In the old days remote access was nice for network 
servers because you could run GUI tools from the remote machine, but 
these days with stuff like WebMin who needs to run server config stuff 
remotely via X? You can now do everything you need via a neat web 
interface that you can access from any machine.

> > first step IMHO is to simply implement a 2D direct rendering system to 
> > increase performance. Whether X needs to go or whether it can be 
> > reinvented to support 2D direct rendering is a different question.
> 
> DirectFB + XDirectFB ?

I am not family with DirectFB + XDirectFB. I shall take a look ;-)

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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