re blinking cursor in xterm barmar think com barry margolin writes in article may taylor uucp mark taylor uucp mark a davis writes you are stuck in a distributed system feedback loop what if you are on an xterminal or running xterm over the net to another machine that is when the load problems occur if you had a machine with xterminals attached and they all had blinking cursors in xterm s this could represent a considerable ethernet bandwidth waste ethernet certainly has enough bandwidth for a few blinking cursors my lisp machine blinks the cursor twice a second and updates the time in the status line every second this uses under k bytes second or about of the bandwidth of ethernet a hundred of them on a single ethernet might be a problem but a couple dozen should be fine granted it s nothing to loose sleep over but this is ethernet s tragic flaw the more activity especially lots of tiny activity the more collisions happen and the performance gets exponentially worse i am just now opposing any kind of waste of bandwidth under ethernet although in a polling system it would not be so bad mark a davis lake taylor hospital norfolk va x sys administrator computer services mark taylor mark taylor uucp
