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Operating Systems of the Future

Posted by timothy on from the at-last-nirvana dept.

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."

2 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Futurists are stupid by SirSlud · · Score: 2, Redundant

    >computers that will program themselves

    It's called a compiler. You use C/C++, or whatever, to 'tell' the computer what the program it should make will do.

    Computers that can 'program themselves' is simply an extention of that concept to the point where (presumably) you can 'code' in your natural spoken language. A computer shouldn't do anything until you've told it what to do. Currently, we use C, but there really isn't a functional difference between English and C except for the granularity of the specification of the problem and the desired implentation of its solution. For instance, with PHP, I no longer need to tell the computer that the $foobar variable will be an unsigned long ... of course, you'll always give up speed, just as when you tell someone else to do something. The more granular you describe the solution you want, the less time the other person/computer has to spend figuring it out themselves.

    --
    "Old man yells at systemd"
  2. *Cough* ... *cough* ... from Microsoft??? by Seth+Finkelstein · · Score: 2, Redundant
    Farsite is just one of several projects at Microsoft Research and other labs around the world that will render operating systems all but unrecognizable in 10 years.
    Ahem ... ahem ... I feel like I'm karma-whoring here, but ...

    How long has it taken for Microsoft to make an OS that simply DOES NOT CRASH?!

    With around 15 years of work and refinement, they may just about have gotten to that point with Win2000 and WinXP. How much effort did it take them to do long file names, for heaven's sake? Let's not even get into issues about the quality of multitasking.

    I simply can't take a prediction seriously that a (real) Borg Operating System will be a reality in 10 years. Especially coming from Microsoft. Heck, I wouldn't believe such a prediction from an OS company I respect. But from Microsoft??? Consider the source.

    Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)