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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."
Oh, wait...
What happens when some user click on a VBS script ?
I image great horrors as the whole cluster goes down in a mass emailing.
/satterth
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
Tanenbaums Amoeba is way ahead of the game then.
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?!"
"Old man yells at systemd"
IMHO, future operating systems will tend to something like the ErOS operating system . This OS is based on multiple tiny extremely reliable components, within a strong capability model to provide a high level of security.
It's definitely a good approach, although ErOS is still quite experimental yet.
{{.sig}}
Grumble, grumble...
Your digital "rights" managed TrustedPCs will connect to a giant virtual disk array via the network, where what you store will be subject to government and corporate monitoring and removal.
Think this is nuts? Where are the 200GB drives? Why is Intuit pushing us to store tax and financial information on their site? Why does Microsoft want to give us an authentication token that's good for retrieving our information "anywhere, anytime."
Why would anyone (other than a legitimate large corporation) have a need for local storage, once the Internet storage product is fast and cheap? I can only imagine one use for local storage--copyright infringement.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
'Self Healing' scares me. I'm not entirely sure why, but I want to be in control of my computer. I'm afraid that with 'self healing' my computer can install things I don't want installed, uninstall things I do want and send all my information to Big Brother.
Now if it was open source, distributed OS with self healing I might be ok, I guess I just object to giving that much control to a large coorporation whos main concern is profits and not my privacy.
So, Bill is finally going to release a version of windows that will automatically simulate pressing ctrl-alt-delete when it blue screens.
Many people would say it's MS's customers that have been fault tolerant.<rimshot!>
VAX Clusters.
I predict that there will never be a revolutionary new operating system until we break free of the chains imposed by Posix compliance. Until then, we're stuck with files that have to be streams of bytes, ugo-style permissions, non-wandering processes, incompatable RPC calls, &c.
And the real pain is there have been OS'es that have had simple & elegant solutions to problems that are hard under unix (Aegis, Multics, VMS, TOPS, ...) that were pushed aside by the steamroller that is Unix.
But to be fair, many of the forgotten O/S's are now forgotten because they weren't as general purpose as Unix. Unix is the great compromise. But it's hard to strive for the best when you've already accepted compromise.
And get all these ideas implemented in the Linux kernel! Now that we know the future, we can be the first ones there!
But seriously, somehow I don't see this in 10 years.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
MS Notice:t in /MS02-002.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulle
And a thread talking about it on macintouch:
http://www.macintouch.com/officevx3.html#feb08
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.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Looking at the diagram at the bottom of the article, I was reminded of how Freenet works... so at least in that area it looks a bit redundant. The article seems to describe more of a grouping of many ideas which have been out for a while and adding in a bit of marketing hype. Nothing to impressive, but intresting none the less.
Oh great. It's already impossible to find a job with my measly bachelor's degree and now I have self-healing computers to look forward to. I should studied accounting...
I don't need a self-healing computer nearly as much as I need a self-painting house and a self-mowing lawn. And my wife could sure as heck use a self-fueling car.
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
The bad side, which is closer to reality, is that a computer company working in an "extend our existing market" mode will find find it irresistable to tie new things tightly to the innards of what already been deployed. That's a great way to ensure that you inherit security flaws from whatever old model you had, however good the theory of your new system is.
Let me see if I've got this straight:
/. story about Microsoft getting legal permission to take over your computer, as part of a EULA.
1.
2. ComputerWorld story that includes a line about how Microsft sees the computer of the future as one giant logical system with many small partitions.
Is anyone else joining the dots like I am?
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I assume Microsoft will be releasing the source code and freely distributing Farsite so I support this project.
How about getting rid of IRQ's on the PC platform!
How about getting rid of drive letters in Windows/Dos and having mount points!
How about a better drive interface than the stupid IDE interface. (Macs did it right with SCSI, but now to be "cheap" they do it too [sigh])
And for self healing? If Windows is still around and the predominant OS, I'll pass on the "self healing" - it'll be more like "death-without-dignity." Remember NT 4 SP 6? [Shivver] I don't want MS "self-healing" my machine!
In fact, I don't think I want anyone self healing my machine until software is lots more robust than it is now. At least when I apply patches to my machine and notice that something isn't working right, I know I _just_ patched it, so it might be the patch. With someone else applying patches without my knowing, I would be screwed!
Yeah, all those "wonderful things are just around the corner" articles are neat, but I would truly be happy with some "incremental" changes.
Lets forget "visionary" for a while and just fix the crap that's broken right now! Pleeeeease!
Cheers!
Farsite
Butler Lampson, for papers on Byzantine reliability, mostly based on the work of
Leslie Lamport
http://www.computerworld.com/computerworld/records /images/story/Farsite.gif
Was it just me or does the notion of a "Centralized file server" NOT sound like distributed computing to you?
Not being in possesion of any moderator points I am forced to respond to your comment....
If you were to have read the caption on the image, you would see that it says Logically: a centralized file server, but then it goes on to say Physically distributed among clients.
When I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.
For the purposes of mind expansion you could do much worse :-) than lurking on the EROS and E language mailing lists. Decentralization is another good one, though much less focused.
The market for alternative operating systems has completely dried up, so you should really be asking what will be in future versions of Windows and Linux, because unless there is a huge surge in OS research, these are going to be all thats left in ten years.
...operating systems...and they'll collaborate with applications...
Windows Inheritance: "Psst. You crouch behind j.user's legs and I'll give him a push."
Clippy 5000: "OK"
*SHOVE*-splat!
Software: "Have a nice trip? See you next Fall! Muahaha!"
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Gosh, how about Assembly? All the opcodes used by a microprocessor are extremely reliable components. The problem with any language, and any program, is when everything starts to interact. Components begin to be used in conditions the original author didn't intend, people try to hack the system, it all gets more complex...
So while it is certainly a good approach to have very stable base components, it isn't an all-solving approach.
"Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration."
Whoever thought up this pipe dream apparently doesn't understand the Zeroth Law of Network Security: If you want information to be secure, DON'T PUT IT ON THE FUCKING NETWORK!
Seriously! As if most business OSes don't default to the least-secure settings already! Why would you want to run important apps on a system where the default is to share anything and everything with any computer in listening distance?
Weren't there predictions just like this ten years ago?
Lots of small utilites, each with only one function, which it does very well , and can have its output piped to other such utilities or vice versa. Sounds like Unix to me.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
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.
-- Alastair
...there won't be much drastic change from now till the next 18 years. For evidence of this, look at the Apple Lisa. The Lisa had windows, icons, a menubar, a WYSIWYG interface, and a mouse. Today's computers are little more than a glorified Lisa interface, whether they are running Mac OS X or Windows XP (I know because I run both.) Like the Lisa, todays computers still crash and still corrupt themselves. I doubt that this could be easilly changed in the next five, ten, or even fifteen years.
I'll believe the distributed file-storage myth when I see it. To me, it sounds as if it would hog bandwidth, just like gnutella does. I don't see any change coming in the way I store files on my computer. It's fast, effecient, and hasn't needed a change.
SysAdmins need not quit their day-jobs. As long as Microsoft is providing this technology, you can be sure that it will run into snags and security vulnerabilities. Increased complexity = increased vulnerability.
...and that's all I've got to say about that
From what I understand, EROS' key feature is not being built of "tiny reliable components" but fine-grained robust security known as the capability model. You can build a distributed system out of tiny reliable components, but it'd be nice if those components weren't burdended with bad security genes, so to speak.
The target environment for Farsite is an organization in 2006 with 100,000 computers, 10 billion files and 10 petabytes (10,000TB) of data.
...the Farsite project at Microsoft Corp...embodies several characteristics--such as...robust security...
Hmmm...my first thought..."ScanDisk is checking harddrive C..."
Farsite is a serverless, distributed system that doesn't assume mutual trust among its client computers. Although there's no central server machine, the system as a whole looks to users like a single file server.
Cool...Microsoft invents the cluster. I'm sure the folks who created Beowulf clusters stole the idea from them...come to think of it, those Gnutella folks blatantly ripped them off too...
I'd say something mean, but I assume this was meant as a joke...
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Farsite is a serverless, distributed system that doesn't assume mutual trust among its client computers. Although there's no central server machine, the system as a whole looks to users like a single file server. High reliability and security are ensured because each file has one or more encrypted and digitally signed replicas elsewhere in the cluster.
It sounds to me like MS is worried about the future of the file server market. Perhaps they see the writing on the wall... it says LINUX. Who's likely to implement linux servers? Those that can't afford to pay for a Win2K Server license. "But wait, if you upgrade to the new Farsite OS, you don't need a server! So you don't need to use Linux at all! Think of the cost savings when you don't need to buy or maintain a separate server! Think of the savings in administration costs!" Or some hype along those lines. With large corporations, with all that spare hard drive space and idle processors, how many servers could they replace? Have they done the math and come up with figures that spell doom for the file server market?
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Maybe it's just me, but the Farsite diagram at the bottom of the article really reminded me of how I understand Freenet to work...Is MS attempting to create a DRM-enabled variation of this same idea?
I don't imagine that Farsite has the same goals as the Freenet project, but there is enough similar in the underlying technology that I was struck by it. Maybe MS is recognizing the value of the architecture, if not some of it's potential uses?
I find that part about a "self-healing" OS in a fantastically complicated distributed system rather unbelievable. Microsoft has actually been attempting to edge Windows towards self-healing. But that depends on the OS actually being able to identify problems and find the fixes. So far, "self-damaging" seems to be a more accurate assessment of the results -- and this is for an OS residing on a single box. In a distributed system...
Tron references aside, MCP (Master Control Program) actually was the name of the OS (kernel) for Burroughs Large Systems (B6700 et al) back in the early 1970s, and for all I know may still be the name on the A-series.
-- Alastair
That's fine, but what does it look like?
More than anything else, the user cares about the OS interface. How does it work?
The user doesn't give a damn about where a file is stored. He just wants to launch his programs quickly and locate his files fast. Why can't we do some thinking on this basic issue (and not have the end result be some bulky goofy 3-D environment)?
UNIX (or Linux) can be as transparent as you want it, if you want to put lots of intelligence in a storage driver. It wouldn't matter in principle where the data was on tape or disk. You could have just one monster file storage device. In practice large applications want some control to increase efficiency.
Mainframes got very sophisticated in automating this. It was also somewhat difficult to program commands in IBMs or DECs data-definition languages. Much of this was lost in downsizing to personal workstations and is being rediscovered again.
I got as far as distributed storage and stopped. The idea of my files being stored on some Iowa farmhands computer does not sit well with me, regardless of how secure the software is. The only real security is hardware security, which is to say, my files on my machine, your files on your machine, and if I feel like giving you access, fine. If not, oh well.
Why is everyone so hot on distributed computing and storage? Relying on someone else to securely store data is ridiculous because the security model always fails to account for marketers, accountants, and CEOs (or anyone working for them).
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
IBM believes that we are at just such a threshold right now in computing. The millions of businesses, billions of humans that compose them, and trillions of devices that they will depend upon all require the services of the I/T industry to keep them running. And it's not just a matter of numbers. It's the complexity of these systems and the way they work together that is creating a shortage of skilled I/T workers to manage all of the systems. It's a problem that's not going away, but will grow exponentially, just as our dependence on technology has.
From my understanding, autonomic computing and other projects like are going for something much bigger than "lets make our OS smarter." I seriously doubt this is targeted at the consumer, since there are too many privacy issues. The real benefit of "self healing" is in the corporate environment where up time is critical. Autonomic's goal as I read it is about making systems work together seamlessly to improve reliability and scalability. Say a server has some hardware problem or a switch is dying. Things like these could cause real financial losses, so having smart systems that reconfigure/heal itself could reduce the cost of hardware and software failures. How many times have admins had to get up at 3 am to fix the webserver because some log ran amuck and ate up all the HD space. Having a standard system for handling these problems would help make systems more reliable.
Too many reporters are getting way too lazy.
Plus, as these are fortune 1000 companies, what is the bet that they won't even look at this technology for another 10+ years.
Maybe, just maybe, it will be possible (well, it already is, but...) what is the chance of it being really deployed?
Plus, where are the offsite backups going to be done? Does this mean that every workstation has to be left on at all times. How much retraining does this require. Yes, we know that you used to get fired for leaving your machine on, but if you don't from now on, you will be fired!
Methinks that the dream will not match the reality....
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)
Computers will become easier to use.
And as they get easier to use, the number of people who really understand computers will also decrease.
As less and less people need to understand how a computer ticks in order to use it, the current class of knowledgable computer users will become a smaller and smaller subgroup of computer users.
This elite class of computer 'brains' will be increasingly in demand for those cases where VB Programming 101 is not sufficient.
This elite class will be paid vast sums to keep the rest of the computer-using world happy (I can dream can't I? :-) )
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
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?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Futurists are full of crap. They've been predicting a techno utopia where technology actually breaks ahead of itself and solves problems that it created.
Instead what we end up with a distopia that looks more like "Blade Runner" and less like "The Jetsons".
The first statement above makes perfect sense if you consider the second as axiomatic. However, the people working on these types of systems don't accept that axiom. Instead, they believe that cryptography-based security is just as strong as physical security...the odds that someone will factor a couple of hundred-digit numbers (or accomplish some equally difficult mathematical feat) are no higher than that they'll break into your home/office and steal your hardware. If they're right then there should be no problem with storing your files on some Iowa farmhand's computer (so long as you also have other replicas elsewhere for availability purposes), because Iowa Farmboy still can't access or modify your data without the right keys.
That's a big "if" you say. Well, yes it is. But if you want to make an argument that hardware security is the only real security, you'll need to show that cryptographically based systems aren't as secure as skilled and experienced implementors of such systems seem to think. Good luck.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Personally I see it in several of the applications I use regularly. Acdsee Classic? Eudora Mail? Forte Agent? Opera? mIRC? WinAmp? They're almost never updated, the application layer is getting "done". Ok you can add the latest wiz-bang features, and I'd upgrade to it too if it's free but it's not providing any real add-on value.
The only thing left to compete on when the consumer don't need any new features, is cost. Windows apps are getting there, Windows itself isn't there yet, nor is Linux and their apps, but they're getting there and there's no competing with something that's free (BSD free or GNU free, doesn't matter much to the enduser). Look at Win2k (Pro) vs. WinXP Pro. What *good* corporate features are there? Damn close to none, and a whole lot of crap and eyecandy from the home edition that doesn't provide any business value whatsoever.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
ok....this is OT and all, but shouldn't it be "When I want your opinion I'll beat it into you"??
If you had read my sig you would know how I feel about your comments.
;)
Just kidding.
I will take your suggestions under advisement.
When I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.
It may be relatively recent technology, but I wonder if this will happen or not.
Mosix does a pretty good job of balancing processing time, but won't split tasks that require shared memory, sockets, and is not fine grained enough to put threads on different machines. It also requires a simular kernel to run on all of the machines. But I run it now because it is the closest we have. I think it may catch on.
For distributed disk sharing, the closest we could find was Coda, although it has a few disadvantages also. You can't have very large volumes, its difficult to configure, it takes painfuly earned experience to use efficiently.
Mosix has its MFS, which gives everyone a shot at everyone's disk drive. This is an interesting possibility also, however it is not configurable. You can't lay the volumes down where you want them to be. It could be used.
But then, we could partitian available disk space to large network raids with network devices. GFS I believe works along this principle. Lower layered than Coda, but without the caching that I think lets the system work efficiently over the network.
I guess the funny thing is that I use and consider them them inspite of the challenges. Kind of like Linux in the 1.2.13 days. Ahh the good ol' days when "Hey we finaly got X working" would bring a round of congradulations from lab. "Oh no, the mouse doesn't work" would only mean we'd be happy to fumble around for another few hours with faith that it would eventually work, if we changed something somewhere.
Hey wait a minute. You know, maybe linux isn't dead like some have said. Maybe there is still software frontier to cover and being covered that we can download/compile and enjoy....
(Although I have yet to get a workable EROS kernel doing anything useful...)
This kind of thing was being done in 1968 - check out the UC Irvine "Distributed Computing System". If I remember right it went well beyond things like file sharing among relatively autonomous machines, it even had the memory allocator running on different machines than those holding the memory being allocated.
I believe that it also used an intresting mechanism in which resource requests were allocated using an auction like mechanism - if one of the boxes needed to spawn a process it would put out an RFP and machines willing to undertake the job would offer bids with costs. A second committment phase bound the offer to the bid.
All this in the late 1960's.
VMS has been doing all of those things for years. Now can anyone tell me where it is right now?
My strong belief is that the best "predictions" occur when you find something in use today - only too expensive for the home user - and "predict" it will be ubiquitous within a few years. So here are my completely predictable predictions.
Notice how all of my predictions sort-of exist already. This is what makes predictions so easy.
And if you believe this piece of dross, read their predictions from ten years ago.
'Nuff said.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Things have been pretty much the same for the past 20 years so it is time for a small revolution. What will happen in the next couple of years is that the OS (i.e. the kernel + hardware drivers) will become increasingly less relevant. Once .Net, Mono or whatever VM variant really takes off, programs will be OS independent. Of course they will still be API dependent. But likely those API implementations will be portable as well.
That's one trend. The other is that mass produced cheap, networked and mobile computers will be omnipresent. They will all be running some OS (not really relevant which one) and a vm that will make them general purpose. In addition, the network bandwidth will be such that you have easy access to huge amounts of server side storage.
All you need for omnipresent access to all your music is a fat harddrive and a 196 kbps network connection to it. Video requires a bit more but at 1mbps the quality is very acceptable. Mobile networks being capable of this are already planned will very likely be deployed worldwide and widely used in 10 years.
The networks are going to happen, the hardware is happening and the software and most of the concepts needed is already available today. All we need to do is put it together, perfect it a little (remove bugs, improve security, think a little more about privacy).
Jilles
Maybe it will help Amoeba's take off
:-)
My vision is of a client/server network built out of workstations. Take a Beowulf cluster, build it on top of a distributed filesystem, and make each node usable locally. Obviously, you'd want local processes to have priority on local resources, and you'd want a lot of redundancy in your storage, but I don't see why it couldn't be done. Of course, I don't have the knowledge to do it myself (yet), so I could easily be missing something important.
Would it be useful? That's another question. I can certainly envision an environment where it could be. Maybe an engineer or artist or researcher would find it useful to tap into the receptionists spare CPU cycles to give their own apps a little boost. It could probably reduce computing costs for companies doing computationally intensive stuff.
Anyway, the concept is interesting to me, but I personally wouldn't trust MS to do it right. For something like this to be truely useful, I think it would have to be more flexible than MS is inclined to allow.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
EROS is not about the components. EROS is about a solid design model, large parts of which that are mathematically proven secure.
EROS is about the principle of least privelege, performance and simplicity.
Compared with the *nix model, the EROS model is simpler, more flexible (You can have many more types of systems built around it), more powerful (It can do a lot more with a lot less code), more secure (Process-grained capability system security, rather than a lot of cumbersome ACL's attached to thousands and thousands of objects), easier: The system implements a high-performance reliable orthogonal persistency scheme. This means that the system restarts to the last reliable checkpoint (shut it down, restart it, and the cursor is at the same position in your window), and achieves much higher disk performance and greatly simplifies applications that no longer have to persist themselves explicitly.
I've been amazed of the many advantages offered by EROS, it truly seems like it could correct a lot of today's OS problems, if not all of them.
This raises the question of: how do we trust the people implementing the cryptography? Sure, it's possible to implement a heavy-duty cryptography system, but how do we keep the programmers from implementing a backdoor, in a way that is verifiable by a majority of users, without having to teach them a new language?
Open Sourcing the routines is a good idea, until you have to try and explain this to the large mass of users who think an algorithm is something that only women can have.
Frankly, with the way systems are going these days, it's beginning to sound like the dead-tree version of a document is the safest way to store something (at least is verifiably destroyable in a very easy to understand manner).
I think I am about 10 years from becoming a Luddite.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Eros components arent just small and work exactly as documented like your assembly example- that would be enough if every programmer were an anal retentive computer scientist maybe.
in eros everything is orthogonally persistant meaning that every object, without doing anything on its own, has it's state saved by the system.
the other neat feature that makes it more reliable even in the face of bad application level code is that instead of access list based security ala unix, there are fine grained permissions called capabilites that govern what any object may do to any other.
these features coupled with transparent distribution could guarantee that even if the terminal in front of you is struck by lightning you'll be able to move to the nearest working one and pick up *exactly* where you left off!
check it out- there are a lot of kewl os level ideas that could make life better if adopted by more mainstream oses.
So we build a nuclear strike proof network, cluster the nodes on it, make some of those nodes control robots and we end up terraforming the surface of the planet into a mainboard for a giant computer with many sharp/flailing appendages which we can never turn off.
Why is it that every time we get closer to the classic scifi doomsday plot of a giant computer which controls everything with humanity powerless to stop it that we think it's cool?
I think it's foolish.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Wow, I sure want one of those 'self-healing' OS.. perhaps it would:
* remove stupid 'product activation' features
* let me play any DVDs from any region as I should be able to
* erase the Microsoft logo from itself
* uhm.. not crash? And before you say.. XP! I have managed to crash XP several times already.
mogorific carpentry experiments
You sound like someone who didn't get what he wanted for Christmas.
:)
.500 on the first two, at least: Interplanetary Travel and Contraception.
It's very easy to dismiss futurist predictions because we hear about the misses more than the hits disproportionately to their true ratio. And while there are undoubtedly more of the former than the latter, it's a little much to proclaim all of it horseshit. Better to say, sniff carefully because it's *probably* horseshit.
Here's a great site, and a good example of what we're talking about, HEINLEIN'S PREDICTIONS For The Year 2000, in which twenty predictions in 1950 are listed, along with amendations in 1966 and 1980 and other commentary. He bats
Now, as far as your bleak
'All this technolgy only makes it easier to kill each other, steal each other land and money, and pretty much lead more misearble meaningless existences than life was 50 years ago.... '
rant goes, I was going to find a science timeline to refute it with a few choice examples, but I think I'll leave it at one: The Internet, which allows rabble-rousing pedants to blow off steam into the air of a virtual domain rather than taking up valuable public park space with their soapboxes and shrill, infantile proclamations.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
The Geezer remembers a presentation at IBM when it decided to make FS ("Future System)... about 1980...
We were shown slides of how the OS would link multiple machines and faults could be automatically tolerated and hardware hot-swapped for repairs. Plasma panels would provide fully bitmapped presentations. A new language (PLAS) would make bugs a thing of the past. We thought it was pretty cool.
THEN, we were told that this is EXACTLY THE SAME SHOW (slides and all... except for PLAS) as was presented for the System/360... and THAT WAS EXACTLY THE SAME show as presented for the 7090... and THAT WAS EXACTLY THE SAME SHOW... Dumb as we were, we did realize that we hadn't done crap and that all the plans had come to naught.
So... now that it's 2002, where're the flying cars I was promised would be here by 2000!?!?
This kind of thinking always reminds me of an LCD induced haze of the 60s..
"Hey man.. I can see it all now.. Imagine there's no buglists, it's easy if you try.. Oh look, the sky, it's GREEN!"
The largest problem is the lack of practicality and common sense functionality in some of these dreams. Some of the most innovative and venturesome ideas never actually take off, becouse the end user doesn't CARE. They turn it on, type in www.freepornostuff.com, and WHAM, theres the stuff. They dont have the time, patience, nor interest for the computer to do anything but that.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
And by the year 2000, we're going to have flying cars! They told me so!
Hey... wait a minute...
Milalwi
Sure, you've got to start with reliable components, but you have to combine them in just the right way, too.
First off, we should learn a lesson from biology. The bee, for example, has about a million interconnected neurons. Yet the bee's highly sophisticated behavior is extremely robust and efficient. How does nature do it? The answer has to do with parallelism and expectations.
1. Parallel processing insures that signals are not delayed, i.e., their relative arrival times are guaranteed to be consistent.
2. Expectations are assumptions that neurons make about the relative order of signal arrival times.
We can emulate the robustness of nature by first realizing that computing is really a genus of a species known as signal processing. We can obtain very high reliability by emulating the parallelism of nature and enforcing a program's expectations about the temporal order of messages: no signal/message should arrive before its time. The use of stringent timing constraints will ensure that interactions between multiple tiny modules remains consistently robust. Enforcement should be fully automated and an integral part of the OS.
Of course, this is only part of it. The other constraints (e.g., the use of plug-compatible links, strong typing, etc...) are known already. No message should be sent between objects unless first establishing that plugs are connected to compatible sockets, i.e., that they must be of the same type.
The most problematic aspect of computing, IMO, is that it is currently based on the algorithm. Problem is that algorithms wreak havoc in process timing and the end result is unreliability. The algorithm should not be the basis of computing. To ensure reliability, computing should be based on signal processing. Algorithms should only be part of application design, not process design. Just one man's opinion.
The Plan 9 operating system already supports a lot of the concepts quoted in the Slashdot story summary.