Facts of life

Facts of life

Posted Nov 7, 2010 15:35 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: LPC: Life after X by dskoll
Parent article: LPC: Life after X

So it's just bad application design, then.

Sure.

Or if you really want fancy animations, you do as I suggested: Let the server do the fancy effects.

No - because client-side solution is even simpler to implement.

The client sends a little bit of information specifying how to do the animation (start, number of steps, time increment, etc.) and the server handles it.

No again. It's harder then to write the loop in program.

Augmenting X or something similar to do that wouldn't be too hard.

Well - can you do it in such a way as to make that it's easier to use your scheme then the naive animation implementation?

You can not do that. Applications the sole justification for the fancy protocols, kernels and computers. Thus application writers dictate the rules. The only time when you can impose some restrictions is when they are caused by the law of physics. Because it's the only situation where all alternatives will impose the same restrictions so application developers will have no choice: otherwise the solution with the simplest usage from coder POV will always win.

Witness fate of transputers and modern CPUs: today way have 16-way SMP on desktop while transputers offered 32 or 64 twenty years ago. Why we've only switched to SMP on desktop five years ago? Easy: before that it was possible to create more and more powerful UP machines. Only when UP machines hit the hard limit (speed of light, essentially) the direction changed.

The same with animated menus today: application developers do and will continue to do applications which abuse fast CPU<->GPU connection till it works on desktop. They will not change their designs to accommodate "network transparency" - because their users mostly don't care. Thus all these ideas are not worth even talking about. If you can explain why/if they will stop working even on desktop - we can talk about redesign.

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