Thread: Thinlinx
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Posts: 192 | Thanked: 5 times | Joined on Nov 2005 @ Eugene, Oregon
#5
Originally Posted by mk500
My apologies.
None needed, really.
Originally Posted by mk500
I think remote X sessions make a lot of sense for all sorts of vertical applications like warehouses and retail stores. It would also be very exciting for normal users who would like to have "one desktop" with centrally located data that they could access from their desktop, or a mobile terminal that they carry with them. We'll need WiMax to get there though, or more free wifi. Hopefully there are ways to compress the X connection also, as my experience with remote X sessions has always been that they are very bandwidth intensive.
You're right to favor scepticism when viewing pics like this, usually. I can't say any more than what is said at my own web site and at thinlinx already but reading between the lines is safe.

It will take the arrival of WiMax to make this all work correctly but that will certainly arrive ready for use by mid 2006.

You've probably never seen an application specific GUI like mine before, one that is rendered natively on the remote display. It's very fast - makes VNC look pathetic, but that's because VNC isn't designed to do what my GUI is. The 770 and the ThinLinx handheld are both great handheld touchscreen X terminals. That's the single thing that makes them such breakthrough devices in my opinion. It seems like such a simple thing to ask of a handheld device, or of Windows, even to offer a built-in X server, but it's been virtually nonexistent. That's what the 770 and ThinLinx offer, a touchscreen X Server. Imagine that!

Let me expound a little bit about my GUI in particular. It's a personalized GUI which offers simultaneous access via remotely rendered touchscreen icons to software all over the LAN & WAN. GUIs until now have only been a window, for the most part, to a given PC, or maybe to a remote file system. That's pretty limited compared to a GUI where each touch icon is network transparent. Of course X has been used to build desktops like KDE & Gnome , but these uses of X make absolutely no use of X as a remote display protocol. I use X to build tools to build all kinds of application specific GUIs that can be used in collaborative contexts over the LAN & WAN.

The most popular GUI is the one with the POS engine. An example of what this allows me to do is that while you are sitting at a table in a restaurant in Texas ordering your appetizer, I'm sitting in my home in Oregon putting a new entree or dessert on the menu you're ordering from. Neither one of us has a computer, though. What we have, because it's all we need, is a touchscreen X terminal, a display that is attached directly to the network and which has a window open on the X client application. It's running on a small supercomputing cluster (using any of the several free software cluster packages) on the net's backbone.

It's trivial to build GUIs for education, entertainment, just about anything with this approach. I say GUI instead of app because an app is, to me, just a GUI that has specific usefulness. If you think you see the value of X on the 770 and the X GUIs that can be built with it, then I think you see the same thing I do that can make the 770 unique. An X-based network GUI reaches into free software components to deliver usefulness and ease of use to people without requiring them to have a PC, or even a very small PC. The promise of this is the ability, finally, to remove the requirement that to use software you have to have a PC. Everything is just a remote service made available by the GUI, and users have complete control of the GUI. That's what the 770 and any wireless touchscreen device with an X server is.

Last edited by Remote User; 2005-12-20 at 10:13. Reason: rewrite