Fwd: RE: Java port to VSTa? -- tangent

ThinkNIC offers a fine system if a small linux box is your goal.

What's next? First it was programming a VCR, now the trend is to put up a masquerading firewall server on the cable-modem. VCR coders came and went.. as T approaches infinity We'll all outlive our current pc's. we're likely to afford hdtv's somewhere along the way and a 266 mhz ia32 will be emulated by awfully compact microdevice(s) in the coming years.

The PC's we're currently outliving already come with 3d accelerators, mpeg/dvd decoders, and digital PCM sound output, and generous helpings of RAM. Linux abides, oblivious.

in the not too different future we'll be plugging our DVD players into systems like these because dolby 5.1 tuners are
about 1000% more expensive than present day audio cards and video adapters. consider how overkill it is to have all this hardware,
a 100mb network pipe, and a desktop display protocol that uses 2% of the bandwidth capacity on 2d widgets and panels with
combinations of bitmap ops and text rendering. firewire provides 4 times this bandwidth. packets are cheap as water.

For my purposes VSTA would serve fine as a high performance remote terminal; the missing components presently are a 3d space
window manager, kernel remote display protocols suitable for high bandwidth or crypto+compression for insecure WAN links, and
perhaps a bit of driver abstraction magic for the various mutlimedia chipsets and op-codes. also missing is the whole paradigm that escapes single-machine thinking. VSTA has (at least once upon a time) exported its namespace items across the network. add to this an elegant scheduler algorithm and the ease with which a linux driver might be hijacked and ported to vsta, its a very tempting platform for bus-intensive remote workstations.

How do you really wish to address hundred of machines you need to operate and access regularly? a scene from Jurrassic park that comes to my mind, unlikely as it sounds, was of the little girl pointing and clicking her way through a 3d fly-through "unix system".

someday sourceforge will acknowledge my project application :-) I will gladly discuss these matters in thier own setting when that happens. I originally started down the path of minimalist javaOS platform; though found it better to strive for a single remote workstation to the dozens of boring machine displays i interact with which run supported jvm's and heaps of horsepower and JIT's on platforms customers are demanding.

> chefren <chefren@pi.net> wrote:
>
> On 9 Feb 01, at 19:52, James Northrup wrote:
>
> > Not to stray the topic at all... but... I have considered vsta
> ripe with
> > opportunity to operate as a dedicated java workstation. My
> experience with
> > low-power old sparcs with fast framebuffers and pathetic cpu's
> has shaped my
> > conception of a vsta NC-like device (or any other platform for
> that
> > matter.).
>
> I would be happy if this hardware platform would be chosen:
>
> http://www.thinknic.com/
>
>
> Simply put, the idea is: CD in the box, boot, and it works.
>
> There is 64MB RAM available, 200MHz CPU and it costs $199.
>
>
> There are a few different efforts for this hardware
> platform. That can all be tried and compared easily. All
> software is open source. People are making webservers with
> it, routers, terminals and so on.
>
> +++chefren
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Mon Feb 12 20:32:04 2001