Slashdot Mirror
Operating Systems Are Irrelevant
zincks writes "David Gelernter (Yale Professor of Computer Science, and Unabomber target) has a
story in the NY Times which states, (1) Operating systems are relics of the past, (2) We should be able to access data anytime/anywhere, by (3) seeing a stream of 3D documents(?), so (4) he's written such
software, and (5) that's all you should care about so it doesn't matter that it runs under windows.
This is a fantastic (definition: based on fantasy : not real (?)) vision of the future by a premier technologist."
...and now everything looks like a nail. And the things that can't be made to look like nails he sees as unimportant.
It's a common enough malady among geniuses that have been too long surrounded by people telling them how smart they are.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
I knew this sounded familiar, so I did a search for his name on Slashdot. Yup.
Here's a similar article from December 2001.
And another from July 2000.
And I predict another one will be posted in October 2003.
Thank you.
"And like that
Maybe he is being very idealistic. Maybe he is being unrealistic. Maybe this thing will flop and fall into the bunghole of history.
/.) Microsoft squashed a concept for almost a decade. Maybe the hardware wasn't advanced enough yet, maybe it would have been a Newton. But maybe it would have been a Palm. Now we'll never know. What other innovations are we missing until Microsoft deems it 'time'?
But it's still good that he's doing it.
Someone has to question how things can be made better. Perhaps the worst thing about Microsoft is that the Windows desktop has pretty much stopped that questioning. This works in two ways, by Microsoft deliberately squashing competition and by people getting too comfortable inside the MS box. (including GNOME and KDE)
Nor is it an adequate argument that the Windows interface (even as embodied by GNOME and KDE alternatives) is "good enough" just like the steering wheels and clutch/brake/gas pedals of a car.
Back in the early-mid 90's there was a company trying to introduce Pen Computing - flat screens operated by a stylus. (I think the company may have been Go, but I'm not sure.) They were put under by a piece of vaporware called, "Pen for Windows" that never materialized, at least not until that Microsoft Innovation in the past month of Tablet-XP. (or whatever it was reported as on
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Windows is the marketplace victor and has now won a decisive legal imprimatur. There is no technical reason for us to move to Linux; why should we switch? Why should our customers?
Oh, because Microsoft has a Monopoly and we should just accept that because:
Windows is a reliable, solid, reasonably priced, nearly universal platform - and for the software future, "universal" is nonnegotiable. We need to run the system on as many computers as possible and manage the maximum range of electronic documents.
Ah, gotcha, they already have a monopoly, and we all kinda need one anyways because we all need to run the same software so we should all just stop this pointless flame war complaining about lack of choices because choices break apart our vision of a unified digital playground of knowledge. So everyone run Windows because our new visionary software only runs on Windows because:
Windows is a reliable, solid, reasonably priced, nearly universal platform
Although we already said that, but we thought we should say it again because its really important. So is everyone ready to stop wanting choices and merely accept the new hand crafted future built just for us so we can stop working on our own visions because this one is the very bestest and is the one true software we all need because we all need the same software for this to work... blah, blah, blah.
Phew. Ok, breathe... and exhale. Good. We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
You hit the nail on the head, it's Microsofts protecting it's monopoly that's preventing any new model from rising. To protect the Windows OS monopoly and therefore protect their application( MS Office ) monopoly, the OS must be relevant.
Just like C++ and object oriented frameworks threatened Microsoft/MS Windows in the early 1990's by abstracting the OS API's, OpenDoc threatened them in the mid 1990's by abstracting the OS AND greatly reduced the barrier to entry into the application space. The full force of the FUD machine and purchasing power put the cork on those two ideas. Granted, OOP made a decent comeback with Java and Troltech is making a living at a C++ framework but we still require huge applications with redundant features to read/write documents.
I've seen and used OpenDoc and the concept of data-centric computing is smart and far easier to use. The problem persists as to what to do about Microsoft's continued slowing of progress?
BTW, I've helped a few small business's in the early 1990's in streamlining how they used computers( PC's ) and it was the OO desktop that saved the day. Where OS/2 could be installed, it was or else it was HP's NewWave OO desktop manager. In both cases, I implemented data-centric templates of folders and data objects/icons so the use concentrated on the DATA for the task and not what application needed to be started and where that file needed to be saved to, etc. The Data-Centric method worked and worked well.
The browser is kinda like the OpenDoc container but without the Bento filesystem to hold all the different apps(Parts) data. The Inet becomes the replacement for the Bento filesystem. I don't think plug-ins can use other plug-ins in a standard way so that for instance, one spell-checker plug-in could be used in the text/html editor AND email plug-ins...
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
His product is called Scopeware.
I am a beta tester.
It is kinda cool. Basically it turns your personal computer, or all the computers in an enterprise into a searchable internet. It indexes everything -- documents, powerpoints, email, mp3, jpg, etc etc.
You can search once, and it'll bring up all the results in order of time created, or relevance. So, you can see email that are related to documents and powerpoints -- and they are related by the search term.
HOWEVER, the index file takes up to 1/3 of the original filesize!!!
To index my 300 Gig home network could take up to 100 Gig.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
The Registry is a horrid implementation of an *awful* idea.
You want to make a centralized database *cache* a la the MacOS desktop file, go for it. I don't like the idea of having a single, nontransferable crucial chunk of data that's a single point of failure. It's idiotic that you can't simply copy an installed application on Windows to another computer.
May we never see th