Bad NIH, good NIH [LWN.net]

Bad NIH, good NIH

Posted Mar 13, 2013 21:46 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Bad NIH, good NIH by HelloWorld
Parent article: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)

So... your 'argument' is that VNC-like stuff is 'good enough', even though it is clearly much worse than glyph-by-glyph stuff for the vast majority of windows that anyone ever opens using any windowing system -- those windows filled with text? (Discounting, for these purposes, games and video playback, which clearly should be local or use a video compression algorithm of some sort.)

Almost every use case (save only the GIMP, Inkscape and their ilk) can be covered by video compression or glyph-by-glyph stuff. VNC is bad for *both* of these. As far as I can tell, VNC is far suboptimal for *everything*.

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Bad NIH, good NIH

Posted Mar 13, 2013 22:51 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

Of course it's suboptimal. It's also easy to implement and doesn't need application or toolkit changes and still works better than X (which is unusable over high-latency links). Again, the question isn't whether it's possible to do better but whether someone can be bothered to invest a significant amount of work in a better solution. Given that remote applications == web applications for 95% of all users, I don't think anybody will.

Bad NIH, good NIH

Posted Mar 13, 2013 23:43 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It doesn't work better than X over even low-latency links the moment you have to scroll. Scrolling a windowful of text using normal VNC is laggy even over a quiet gigabit ethernet link: over anything slower it is hopeless.

Bad NIH, good NIH

Posted Mar 14, 2013 3:10 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

you are so focused on what is the 'norm' today that you are completely blind to the future.

remote display uses that are going to become very common in the near future (especially when connected to mobile devices that do not have the CPU power to render locally, then ship VNC style full-frame images out to the remote display)

1. Google Glasses style head mounted displays.

Google is far from the only company working on this sort of thing. Many of these uses are text or simple geometric objects overlayed on the live video, shipping the video to the phone, doing the overlay, and shipping the result back out is wasting a lot of bandwidth, and battery. Not Going To Happen (at least not for very long). What's going to happen is the video will get shipped to the phone (although not necessarily in full resolution), the phone will craft the overlay, and the overlay will be transmitted back to the headpiece to be combined there with the direct feed from the camera.

2. remote displays (frequently wireless) from mobile devices to large, high-res displays.

Haven't you seen any of the many TV shows or movies recently that show people pulling something up on a phone/tablet and then 'flicking' the window over to the full display? What makes you so sure that this is not going to happen?

There are probably a lot of other examples that people could point out, but just because you don't currently use remote displays doesn't mean that they aren't going to be very popular very soon.