Re: tlug: VNC for remote viewing

[Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com>]

> X has been able to do this since the 70s... Maybe it's cool in that this
> is the first time you can do it with anything OTHER than X, but... no need
> to do it for X.  Even the X servers for MS Windows can already do that.
Almost. The trick is that their protocol is "stateless", that
means, if you run an application remotely and disconnect the
application just doesn't care a bit, if you reconnect, even from
somewhere else it's just as if you'd have left the terminal and
retured to it. Well, not altogether new either......

On the whole I think that this makes only sense where you have
ample communications bandwidth to burn - in general local
computing and storage power are cheap - and keep becoming
cheaper all the time, quite contrary to communications
bandwidth, where progress is much slower.

So it doesn't make much sense to do remote computing on such a
low level - use your computing power to reduce transfer
bandwidth. It simply is cheaper.

This fact actually is the reason why network computers, "thin
clients" and the like never really caught on - despite a lot of
marketing hyphe.

                               Karl-Max Wagner
                               karlmax@example.com