Operating Systems of the Future

An anonymous reader writes: "'Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration.' Computerworld is predicting that over the next 10 years, operating systems will become highly distributed and 'self-healing,' and they'll collaborate with applications, making application programmers' jobs easier."

Comments

Futurists are stupid

[SirSlud]

I'm so sick and tired of what the next 10 years will bring us. Howabout OSes that dont crash? How about hardware that won't lock up your computer? How about open standards, a generally more cautious approach to computing that will allow us to stabilize the developments that occur? Nah .. of course not. Lets take this overly complicated not-so-realiable thing and throw a transparent layer of 'self-healing' autonomy to it. I know thats what I've been looking for ... yet another reason why I have to explain to my boss that computers ain't perfect. I can hear him now: "But they're supposed to heal themselves! Why didn't the OS dial up our energy provider and ask why the power went out?!"

Re:Futurists are stupid

[SirSlud]

>"For that you need a language that blurs the distinction between data and instructions"

My point was that instructions are data. But I challenge you to illustrate that in order to solve a problem, you can provide data that does not encompas the intrucstions. "My house is on fire" is data that will instruct people to run out of it, but only because they were previously programmed with a 'fire' trigger. Escape it when it's inputted into your system.

So neither english nor C can go outside of it's own contextural setting. English is just so more complicated with so many more possible branches of execution based on data that it's difficult to compare the two without either belittling humanity or getting 1984ish about technology. C /can/ change itself via function pointers and, lets say, random data to throw on the execution stack. But brute force only works when you can test a result within the programattic bounds of the inputted data, including instructions. I mean, really, humans are just wildly complex computers, which is why our data-exchange set is so much more advanced. :)

"Why are we here?" has multiple answers, so you can really only validate successful self-programming if you already think you know what the answer is. And for that, you depend on previous data entry ... etc, etc, etc ..

Scalability problems, anyone?

[mblase]

The target environment for [Microsoft's] Farsite is an organization in 2006 with 100,000 computers, 10 billion files and 10 petabytes (10,000TB) of data.

Surely there will be major scalability problems with something like this, a la Gnutella?

The potential pitfalls of 100,000 computers trying to access each other across the same network gives me headaches just thinking about it.

So what's so special?

[dfenstrate]

Farsite, while ingenious, looks more like a fantastic file storage system than anything else. Is it possible that they've tweaked the UI that most of us are accostomed to the point where any more upgrades are aesthetic, feature or reliability driven, and aren't fundamental improvements on the current desktop analogy?
Will the majority of the computer using populace still be double clicking, dragging and dropping, and 'opening' folders and hard drives 10, 15 years from now?

Could be. Could be.

The future belongs to Plan 9

[kfg]

Don'cha just love it when people "predict" what's already nearly available? And without even mentioning its existence in the article.

And don'cha just love it when MS "predicts" that they'll "inovate" by duplicating it under the MS banner?

Anybody care to "predict" the havoc that might insue when such OS's gain wide public use? I'd be leery of using such even in my isolated from the internet home network until it was proven to be absolutely secure, something today's less interactive computer nets can't even manage.

I'm happy that people are looking forward to, and researching, the future.

Would it hurt if a few people spent a bit more time making the present work worth a shit?

KFG

Beware emergent behaviour

[AJWM]

This OS is based on multiple tiny extremely reliable components

Unfortunately that doesn't necessarily make the OS itself reliable. The emergent behaviour of a system is different from the behaviours of its components.

After all, all software is based on multiple tiny extremely reliable components (F00F and FDIV bugs aside)-- the processors op-codes -- and look how flakey most software is.

Sure, you've got to start with reliable components, but you have to combine them in just the right way, too.

Computers still haven't changed

[pmz]

What was they hype ten years ago? Twenty?? Then, why am I still using UNIX??? And why is UNIX still the most powerful OS commonly used????

I think there hasn't been a new idea widely used in computing since the '70s! What gives?

Re:Computers still haven't changed

[markmoss]

Because Unix wasn't designed as an OS that came with all the functions you would ever need (until next year, when you had to replace it), but rather a framework for adding in whatever turned out to be needed.