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Microsoft's Vision For Future Operating Systems
Bender writes: "The Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research has a fascinating article that details what sorts of things they believe may be important in Operating Systems of the 21st century."
... so that individual computers, file systems, and networks become unimportant to most computations in the same way that processor registers, disk sectors, and physical pages are today.
... MS must get sick and tired of "borg" references, but this appears a tad too close to the mark.
... (simple if everyone was using a microsoft computer and held a microsoft job).
so they want to turn their entire user-base into an application? (bear with me)
it seems the only way you could have this level of hands-off "use-ability" would be to have complete control of all aspects of the hardware and enviroments your software is running under
this seems like a huge step in the wrong direction. if we move to a level of abstraction devoid of details, how can we possibly innovate and improve?
_f
Its quite rare for the people at Microsoft Research to come up with insightful papers such as this. The authors do address a number of issues on what challenges next generation OSs have to face.
The authors however have conveniently omitted the question of whether the future OSs should be cross-compatible. Since so much fuss is being made about having a distributed OS across heterogeneous networks and heterogeneous machines, wouldn't it be worth an effort to also try incorporating some kind of support for other OSs. For instance, Millennium could implement support for ext2fs by itself to make Linux partitions visible either on the same machine, or across a network. The linux kernel team has already done its bit about compatibility with co-existing operating systems.
What is of need is to have some set of common services that all operating system developers, irrespective of what gods they worship, can pledge to provide.
Is this too much to ask from the M$ guys?