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Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available
21–30 of 66 posts
Re: Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available
#22There's still large areas just 35 miles from DC that don't have high speed internet. The cloud is STILL just for people who never leave the range of high speed internet.
There are large areas 35 miles from DC that have no public sewer or water either. (My parents’ house, for example, has neither, but does have fiber.) But what percentage of the population does that account for? Around DC, very little. In Akamai’s 2017 report, Maryland’s %-age of connections above 10 mbps (easily enough to do Remote Desktop) was 79%, just below South Korea and above Switzerland. Virginia and the distr…
And, more to the point, some people not having public water and sewerage systems doesn't stop us selling toilets or taps.
Re: Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available
#23There's still large areas just 35 miles from DC that don't have high speed internet. The cloud is STILL just for people who never leave the range of high speed internet.
First of all, offices virtually always do have high speed internet, which is the primary use case here.
But even if you're working from somewhere else, remote desktop doesn't need "high speed" anyways. It sends intercepted OS-level draw commands rather than bitmaps, so as long as you're not doing Photoshop it's closer to terminal bandwidth than YouTube bandwidth.
For the vast majority of business apps over remote desktop, whether your internet is high speed or not is a complete non-issue.
And the basic latency (e.g. for typing text or clicking a menu) is the same as terminal latency too.
Re: Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> people who never leave the range of high speed internet Which is a vast majority of the US population. I agree that it is important to get broadband access for everyone, but asking companies to hold back services and features until that happens makes zero sense.
On top of that, if you want to drive companies to offer broadband everywhere -- having services people want to use everywhere that require broadband is pretty damn important.
It will have the reverse effect of drawing more people to where they can access those services and away from the areas where access to those services are limited due to inadequate internet services which will erode the motivation to provide broadband to those places.
Re: Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available
#25“Generally “ available? So does that mean it’s available sometimes, but not to everyone or not always?
Re: Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available
#26If Stadia and xCloud really do solve the latency issues inherent in client/server computing - and show that it's economical - one could almost imagine Microsoft launching a consumer version of this with a "terminal" that was little more than a screen, keyboard and network connection... Like Sun Microsystems reborn. The whole concept would, of course, enrage certain sections of the populace including most of HN's read…
How do you beat the speed of light? That's ultimately what we're up against here. High-frequency traders lay down special fiber lines between the exchanges to get the absolute fastest possible ping times, at enormous expense[1]. That gets a 13 ms ping time from NYC to Chicago. My experience with a Steam Link, hardwired on a local ethernet makes me skeptical that any of these cloud gaming platforms will really be prac…
If nothing else, those dedicated services are going to have specialized video encoding that is very, very fast, and possibly even integrated into the game render pipeline. Maybe Steam Link is better on a really beefy PC, but I tried the remote play built into my PS4, and it was pretty bad, even over wired LAN.
I have to imagine at that point that at least some of the latency is the cost of encoding the video.
Re: Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available
#27And the cycle restarts as we head back towards thin clients...
Re: Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available
#28“Generally “ available? So does that mean it’s available sometimes, but not to everyone or not always?
"General" availability means available to the general public, basically. as opposed to beta/insiders etc.
Re: Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you beat the speed of light? That's ultimately what we're up against here. High-frequency traders lay down special fiber lines between the exchanges to get the absolute fastest possible ping times, at enormous expense[1]. That gets a 13 ms ping time from NYC to Chicago. My experience with a Steam Link, hardwired on a local ethernet makes me skeptical that any of these cloud gaming platforms will really be prac…
If nothing else, those dedicated services are going to have specialized video encoding that is very, very fast, and possibly even integrated into the game render pipeline. Maybe Steam Link is better on a really beefy PC, but I tried the remote play built into my PS4, and it was pretty bad, even over wired LAN. I have to imagine at that point that at least some of the latency is the cost of encoding the video.
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Re: Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop service is now generally available
#30I have a friend who works at a big Corporation (100k employees) where everyone has a thin dumb client and windows desktop running on a server. It works great, except video stutters if not small sized. Way of the future? Its an efficient way to pool resources, and prevents people physically stealing data.
Been running a setup like that for over 6 years. It’s great. Support is ridiculously easy. Desktop refreshes aren’t bad either and that’s one of the most difficult projects for an IT department to pull off. We’ve done a couple of them now - once to add RAM, disk and CPU and another to change the desktop image. Deployments and big jobs like opening new offices or big moves are simple. The video is easy to fix with a f…
Printing with terminal services still kind of sucks and for large print jobs there's still third party print services, but otherwise I'd agree.