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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Latency is still a limiting factor is all of these. For some apps it would be ok like Excel but anything requiring precision is going to be a horrible experience. This morning my TWC was delivering data from all sites at 3K/sec.

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Agreed. Numecent is tackling delivering applications in the cloud from a different angle. They have a technology called CloudPaging[0] that breaks an application up into different pages which are requested from the cloud when needed. It loads the initial set of pages needed to start the application and the loads other pages as needed. It's definitely another interesting approach...

[0]http://www.numecent.com/technology/cloudpaging.html

Just an anectote about app/game streaming: I've recently played Orcs Must Die 2 on OnLive, a game-streaming service, and was very much surprised by the responsiveness! I think that probably a lot of apps/games will work just fine.

Yeah I think this type of stuff will depend a lot on buffering/rendering technology. You can imagine that it would be a terrible experience if it literally sent your keypress to the server, registered it in a game & then sent back the screens display pixels.

But I imagine (as with online gaming systems) that the experience is much more like... server loads the necessary rendering resources into the devices RAM/storage and then gameplay occurs the same as if files were loaded from a CD/other media.

I'm sure you could learn more by digging deeper but I imagine it is something more along those lines -- advanced API for a rendering engine.

> You can imagine that it would be a terrible experience if it literally sent your keypress to the server, registered it in a game & then sent back the screens display pixels.

I believe that's exactly how Onlive works.

I doubt this is the case because in order to play a game on any platform you'd first have to account for the different architecture. Furthermore, one of the core reasons this tech was even created was so that people with low power hardware could play the latest and greatest. There's no way a tablet is rendering game instructions to begin with, let alone virtualized instructions.

The truth is I/O is much slower then networking. Many LCD displays do image processing which results in it being several frames behind the one the GPU is currently pushing out. So between your desktop and your monitor could be 70ms of latency. On top of that there's the delay in input devices.

If streamers could maintain 30ms of network latency then it's just a minor difference from the system baseline.

If the streamers are smart they could colocate with the game servers. Then that 30ms of network latency is there regardless, home system or streaming system. It effectively adds no lag for streaming.

John Carmack made a comment that he could send a packet to europe faster then he could send a pixel to a screen: http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fas...

Woah, interesting stuff. thanks

What's a TWC? Where were you?

Time Warner Cable. Probably.

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