Gate One Will Support X11: Fast Enough To Run VLC In Your Browser

Riskable writes "Ever seen a remote desktop tool that's fast/efficient enough to play back video? Gate One will soon have that capability via the forthcoming X11 support (as demonstrated in the video). I am posting this to Slashdot looking for suggestions and feedback as to how I should move forward with it before I solidify the architecture, API, and even the business end of it (making money). I'll be watching the thread and replying to comments (as I have time). Also, if you're interested you can sign up to be notified when it's available." We've posted a few stories about Gate One previously.

Comments

Re:The network says no

[MozeeToby]

If you have an otherwise decent connection you should be able to play 1080p just fine. If you can't, your ISP is probably sending the traffic to one of the massively overloaded mirrors they run. You can block them easily by following the directions here for Linix or here for Windows. Or you can apply the same rules at your router to take care of the issue for your whole network.

Re:The network says no

[gstoddart]

I'll worry about that when my data-center is on Mars.

Then, I'm afraid you might not have enough practical experience on the topic.

I've encountered performance issues across an organization, and definitely been able to identify it as network latency.

And when we spoke with the network architects, they essentially told us it could be made no faster because of the distances involved. I'm not talking trans-continental/trans-oceanic links, I'm talking two data centers separated by only about a thousand miles.

And, with the latency issues, we can't make some things responsive enough to interactive users to not be exceedingly painful. A 60-100ms latency is enough to have users screaming at you as everything they do has a long delay in it -- for interactive applications, that's very noticeable.

You don't need to have data centers on Mars to be able to experience latency which is exceedingly painful. Within the last few months I've personally ran up against it in an organization which has offices through North America.

If you're just mirroring data, sure. But running an interactive application over a long-distance link for which latency becomes a factor -- that can be very painful. And even within North America, you can easily get to the point where the latency can't be fixed because the signal can still only travel so fast.

It really doesn't take all that much distance before it becomes observable. And angry/frustrated users don't want to be told about the laws of physics. They want to be able to click a button and not wait several seconds.