Notices

The POS app supports several display resolutions, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 & 1600x1200. It will serve up the highest res your display is capable of. The most often used resolution is 1280x1024, followed by 1024x768. Anyone who is an x user should be able to logon with that command. We have narrowed our focus to the openterm program itself. What's odd is that it works on some displays here but not all. It works on all of our customer sites, of course. We'll nail it but we can't work on it except in some infrequent spare moments. When we do I'll notifiy everyone within 5 minutes.

Excellent, I'm looking forward to seeing it in action.

Yeah, was in the process of being transferred from one registrar to another and they messed up on a seamless transfer of the DNS records.

Unfortunately this still isn't working for me. Xeyes works (laggily over broadband, but works), but openterm gets a connection refused:

From a quick look at vt_openterm, this is just because whatever daemon it wants running on localhost:10001 isn't running. Should be trivial to restart, I imagine...

Sorry, so your plan is to access raw X applications over a WAN link? I've never been impressed with home broadband-level speeds for even raw X apps (as Xeyes shows, although constantly updating eye positions is a little hardwork in terms of a test vs. a more suitably-designed applications).

Something like NX, of course, could well be something interesting to play with. I've heard many good things about it but not seen a demo yet.

I'd got the impression your plan was to provide handheld, wireless, X terminals as POS terminals within a larger premises, which hosted the X clients. The former is even more interesting, of course, especially if NX can get the latency down sufficiently for it to be suitable over a GPRS connection.

Cheers,

Andrew

It's the POS program itself that's down then. We'll put a daemon in there to monitor and autostart it on Monday. Users in the normal context have access to an exit and we left this open in the demo. Somebody used it to shut down the program; the daemon with remedy this.
First of all, on the LAN, we've been doing that for over a decade and that works to everyone's satisfaction.

With regard to moving this beyond the LAN, my plan isn't to access any and all X apps, no, but simply to access my own X apps. Any X app written for the desktop by someone who has no interest in or knowledge of leveraging the remote display protocols of X is not going to do an especially adequate job of displaying over the WAN, or even the LAN, any more than John Smith can compete in a Formula Race just because he is allowed to drive a Formula Race car. The X app and network have to be built in such a way as to leverage what X and network technologies offer. If this is done then, yes, the WAN latencies are reduced below the point where you can perceive them - that's all you have to do.

There is a step between the LAN and the WAN, don't forget - the MAN (metropolitan area network). MAN latencies are typically a fraction of the latency experienced on the WWW. And if you use a VPN, (which is free, thanks to projects like openVPN) then you can bypass the WWW and achieve latencies of 9-12 ms. It takes twice as long as that to blink your eye. There is much more to this, including how you render the GUI (because you certainly don't use bitmapped graphics) but I can't put it all here.

The crowd that doubts it can be done has always been large. Nobody who 'knows' it can't be done is going to try to do it, are they? I've done many things that I didn't know could not be done. We're already doing WAN POS, though, without NX, so there's no question of whether it will work. We use it every day. With regard to this test, we're very small and very busy working with our largest client right now on a project (plus, I'm not a programmer myself) so we're setting up and tweaking this test with whatever time I can beg from a new hire during his lunch breaks.

I very much appreciate the tips you've passed on. We'll go back at it sometime on Monday.

Sorry for the terse post, but:

More!

Bueller? Bueller? ... Bueller?

This was such a cool proof of concept, what's going on?

They are still doing tests. I've been helping them run some things offline. No big updates yet but they are actively fixing some stuff. I'll report back soon.

I ordered my 770 a week ago. It hasn't shipped yet. When I get it we'll be able to move forward on this. My hesitation since the 770 was first introduced at the beginning of November is the inability of Nokia to keep the 770 in stock and deliver promptly. My sole reservation about the 770 is that Nokia is still having serious difficulties in February in its fulfillment of orders three months after the 770's introduction. I usually avoid a product like the plague if it's chronically out of stock like the 770 is.

With all the positive reviews and awards that the 770 is getting the demand must be very high and still growing in comparison to the level of demand that Nokia thought they would be dealing with. Three months begins to be a long time for the company to not have been able to increase its production output to meet demand.

At this stage Nokia is the bottleneck of this project.

How are you able to avoid using the WWW, if you are doing something remotely? Isn't that data still going to the WWW at some point in it's life, once you move it beyond a LAN?

Here's some information from Webopedia which will help you to understand the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. I've edited it somewhat.

Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web interchangeably but the Internet and the Web are not interchangeable terms.

The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the Web to share information. The Web also utilizes browsers to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video.

The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging, FTP and even the X Windows System protocol. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.

The X protocol is contained in the Nokia 770, and this is one of the very biggest reasons, in my opinion, why it is a breakthrough device. X is commonly thought of as a way to build pretty desktops for UNIX, Linux, BSD, etc., but it is actually a remote display transparent networking protocol.

In the Point of Sale world it has been a great relief to us all to see the arrival of very small parallel port print servers that attach to the parallel ports of the printers and turn the parallel ports into wireless ethernet ports. It's a big deal when a printer no longer has to be regarded as a peripheral that is plugged into a PC and is, instead, a network resource.

The big deal about X is that if you just had a little X terminal you could attach it to a display's video port and turn it into a network port. If you do this, and if you have apps that are built with X interfaces, then the display itself is no longer regarded as a peripheral that has to be plugged into a PC and is, instead, a network resource.

Yes, that means that the PC can be done away with, if everything that used to plug into the PC can be plugged into the network instead.

Now, find a very small X terminal that attaches to the video port. I've been looking for a long time and finally found one. And the apps built with X interfaces - I have those. I'm dealing right now with the fact that although the Nokia 770 has X, it has a somewhat crippled implementation of X in that many X tools are missing, things like xfontsel.

My X apps use the old style 'X Core' fonts - ie server side
(non TTF) ones like the ones the Nokia uses. The X Server on the 770 is quite stripped down and has had support for core fonts disabled. So I have to change to using the more modern client side TTF font rendering ( Xft ). It involves substituting our Xfont* calls to use XftFont instead. I have to do this at the same time that a lot of other projects are underway, so I can't spend that much time on it.

Back to the original query: Be thankful that the Internet is much, much more than the Web. Be thankful that there are other protocols to make the Internet useful than those which drive the Web. And Be thankful that X, the network transparent display protocol used on the Nokia, is one of them. What does network transparent mean for the Nokia 770? It means that your GUI and apps can make use of not just the World Wide Web but also of the entire Internet, just as easily as your GUI and apps can make use of your individual 770 itself. You'll soon have Icons on your 770 that directly invoke the power and versatility of the entire Internet, not just of the Web, not limited to what browsers can do, which is just the Web.