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Proxy Servers Lighten Up X
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is reporting on a compression and differential proxy scheme for X that makes it practical to xhost rich applications like Mozilla or a whole UNIX desktop over a 9.6Kbps connection (think cell phone with GSM modem). The company developing NX has a neat test drive set up -- and it is way zippier than VNC. There'll be a paper about it at the next LinuxKongress in Saarbrucken, Germany, and a call is out to OSS programmers to build on the GPL'ed NX library."
Yes it is. In fact, X is liked by so many because of its network transparency.
However, the amount of data that a typical "rich" X client sends (e.g., mozilla) is huge.
Rich? I don't really understand why. The mozilla screen I'm looking at is not as complex as say the screen that has my simulations on it.
Many X clients are not optimized in terms of the amount of display information they output (that is, they output a lot of stuff that could probably be optimized away).
I would more say most applications these days are pessimised. Have you seen gtk2 lately? How fscking hard is it to open up a bloody menu? Why does it take 20 round trips?
For many developers, this is within reason since they figure that most of the time the xserver and xclient will be on the same machine (e.g., running mozilla on my box to display on my monitor).
For a lot of people, this has never and will never be the case. That is why we use and like X. I would say the problem comes down more to sheer lazyness of programmers of modern software.
I mean, gtk2 just blows goats balls. I wish programmers would spend more time thinking, instead of waving their dicks around in the air and getting their latest 3GHz dual P4 with 4GB or RAM.
Lazy programmers have always bugged the heck out of me - just think of all those fools who never bother to make sure their arrays are big enough, and keep using strcpy().
Yeah, I know, I get what I pay for.