I'm less concerned about scaling down to old hardware platforms, since there's a reason why that hardware was replaced to begin with. However, scaling down to embedded and mobile devices is important. I think that bandwidth requirements are probably the biggest restriction on what a mobile device can do, embedded CPUs are getting faster and memory is getting bigger, but in terms of data most cellular connections are like sipping through a straw.
The critical ability here is to negotiate with the server to determine bandwidth requirements, and be able to streamline the exchange so that the lightweight client can directly access the data it wants and not have to wade through kilobytes and megabytes of useless crap. For example, the problem cell phones suck at viewing web pages is partly because they might have to download 50k of HTML before it can boil it down to a format suitable for the small screen. On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 11:55:56PM -0700, S Mattison wrote: > >An unsorted list of all the thing we want Interreality 3D to do. > > One of the things I had always figured I would attempt to include in > my operating system which I had wanted to call VOS, is the capability > to not only downscale to systems which could not support hardware > rendering (less than 8mb video-ram), but to downscale resolution and > videoram requirements even further, so that the graphics engine would > be capable of running on even the earliest pentium1's, and perhaps, > any 486s or 386s people had kicking around in their basements. > > Surely, it is a possibility that people are still running windows 3 > here and there, and there are some who even run DOS with tenacity, (as > they have made DOS software to support ethernet network connections > from DOS to various windows platforms), and such were people I had > wanted to appeal to, by telling them that their hardware is still > capable... As anybody who has run Menuet, QNX, or Linux on a Floppy > could tell you. > > My train of thought crashed something like this: > If their hardware were incapable, why would it have been invented in > the first place? > If hardware today is simply transitional, why did you even buy it? > Why shouldn't a software vendor support plugins for hardware that > people may still be running? > > So I guess my question is, how down-scalable can we make VOS? What are > the minimum system requirements right now, and what lesser hardwares > could we support with relatively little tweaking? > > _______________________________________________ > vos-d mailing list > vos-d@interreality.org > http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d -- [ Peter Amstutz ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] [Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet] [ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ] [ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey: pgpkeys.mit.edu 18C21DF7 ]
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