Slashdot Mirror
MIT To Release Next-Generation OS "Cesium"
snowphoton writes: "Slant-Six magazine has an article about Cesium, a fascinating (and soon public) operating system from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. A virtual machine, an object-oriented database-driven filesystem, and a 3D GUI mean that this isn't your father's operating system." This article doesn't address licensing, except to say that it "is due to be released by the end of the year for free," so it will be interesting to see just what "free" means here. Update: Yep, it's a hoax. Fun! Tricks are neat!
I didn't find anything on the web either, although of course project names get changed a whole bunch.
But the article was supposedly written by a
"Harvey M. Dunkirk" who says he's an assistant to one of the lab's directors.
However, no such person appears in the LCS directory--and "Support Staff" is listed for some of the people there.
Mighty fishy--I welcome a clarifying comment from anyone with more first-hand knowledge.
Actually, I think a 3D GUI is a great idea. Consider your existing desktop as it is, but it is being rendered on a flat 3d, plane, exactly in front of you. If the 3d engine is written intelligently, this won't take a whole lot more resouces than you existing desktop does, because it is outputting the same thing to your monitor...the BEAUTY of this system however, is that a programmer has the ability to do incredible things with the GUI, because that 3d functionality is there, at such a low level...things like taking a window and zooming out to infinity on minimalize, or renering it partially transparent when it loses focus...the possibilities are limitless.
OF COURSE things like this would take resources, but you can bet that the MIT guys will think of this, and give you options to balance your GUI kewlness factor against your system resources, like any OS from Windows to Linux does.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.