That won't work so well since this doesn't currently support audio. It's in the TODO list though :)

Also, if you're playing back a video you're much better off just playing it directly in the browser. You can even re-encode videos in real-time to be played back with whatever codecs Chromecast supports (if necessary).

I don't know about that. When I think to myself, "What has an imperial fucktonne of exploits?" here's what comes to mind:

* Windows (and Microsoft software in general)
* Java (and especially the use of Java inside browsers)
* Flash
* PDFs
* Loads of other proprietary software/solutions

Exploiting the browser these days is very difficult and browser vendors are doing a really good job with competitions/incentives to uncover vulnerabilities before they become a problem. Using the browser has the distinct advantage of *not* having the same problems of the proprietary products I enumerated above. You get whole new ones! But at least they're manageable and (mostly) predictable.

The more apps that are available in browsers the better. They're as cross-platform as you can get right now and if you host them yourself you can avoid the spying problem.

You're completely missing the point: Video playback over a remote desktop connection is merely an acid test. If it can play back a video that means the rate at which it can capture screenshots and send them to you is reasonably high. It's also an indication of how efficient it is.

Gate One's X11 feature isn't made for video it is merely efficient/fast enough to handle it. If I can open VLC and play back a video in my browser surely I can get reasonable responsiveness from something like a spreadsheet or IDE.

What is the CPU load while watching a video over RDP? I'm genuinely curious.

For reference, the gateone.py process(es) hover around 5% utilization when playing back a video @30fps (~720p resolution). Here's what it's doing while a video is playing back:

1) Capture the screenshot of the changed region on the X11 display. It can do this every 33ms (a capped equivalent to 30fps). It only needs to take screenshots when there's a change but in the case of a video it happens very fast, hence the 33ms cap.
2) Convert the raw captured image to selected format (JPEG for this example). It also makes a hash of the image that's used by both the server and client JS for caching purposes.
3) Transmit the image to the browser. If the image has recently been sent to the client it will be aware of this and will only send the hash. This transmission occurs in binary mode over the WebSocket (it's complicated).

From that point it's up to the client-side JavaScript to handle displaying the raw JPEG data. It is quite CPU-intensive if your hardware doesn't accelerate 2d canvas elements but not too bad (Chrome will hog around 50-80% of a single core while the video plays). Everything will remain responsive regardless.

For reference, I've done extensive benchmarking of the browser-side CPU utilization and Chrome's developer tools will report 81% idle even when the actual CPU consumption of the process is nearing 80%. That means that all the overhead is inside the code that renders canvas elements; which is good because it means my JavaScript is not a bottleneck.

That's what it is right now. Soon it will be so much more.

X11 is just the start. I also have File Transfer and other apps in the works. The File Transfer app will be interesting... It will be more than just an, "SFTP client." It will allow you to fetch a file from just about any URL (back-end is already written and supports ftp:// sftp://, ftps://, magnet://, and even dns://, dict:// and other obscure things which I think makes it all that more interesting/useful) and deliver it to any number of destinations you like. Even if the destination uses a different protocol.

So for example, if you wanted to download a magnet/bittorrent URL and have it automatically delivered to your home theater PC, your phone, and your brother's computer when complete you could do that.

I hear what you're saying and I agree that network latency is one of the biggest problems. Having said that, I have performed testing with my home Comcast Internet connection with Gate One running on a Rackspace cloud instance (512MB). The latency is negligible. My ping time to that server was a pretty steady ~50ms and apps like Chrome (yes, Chrome inside Chrome), LibreOffice (Calc/Writer), Sublime Text 2, kate, etc worked very well.

You're right: It doesn't need any proprietary software or proprietary protocols. It "just works" (in your browser).

I honestly have no idea if it's the fastest protocol. I do know that it's an order of magnitude less bandwidth than noVNC and similar web-based remote desktop products.

Yes, that will work. By default I have the xorg.conf listening only on localhost but you could easily change it. X11 forwarding over SSH also works.

Yes but it depends on the game. I wouldn't play an FPS but an RTS would be fine. I dare say that playing Solitaire would be so good you wouldn't even notice it was a remote desktop :)

Well, up until recently that was pretty much what the Federal government did... It would bundle up the laws and regulations of various states and make them obsolete by passing a universally-agreed-to version of a given law. It used to work fine because lawmakers considered it their jobs to, you know, write laws and resolve differences between the states.

These days lawmakers full-time job is to raise money. The whole "let's work on the laws thing" is just something they do on the side.

Another problem is partisan politics: You'd think that changing a law in regards to the possession of feathers would be a non-partisan thing but this is impossible today. If a bill is introduced by a Democrat--and Republicans were not intimately involved in its writing--it will be immediately opposed by Republicans. This problem works in both directions (Republican introducing a bill will be opposed by Democrats).

This leads to "negotiations" where none are necessary. Also, in order to actually fix laws like this politicians have to essentially bribe "the opposing isle" in order to allow it to be voted on. Absolutely nothing is presented before going through a rigorous process of political bargaining.

A bill could have absolutely no ideological opposition and be non-controversial in any way but will still be blocked unless those putting it forward are willing to trade something for the privilege.

At that point I think most people would just quit their jobs.