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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."
After reading a tribute to Jon Postel yesterday it occurs to me that most progress is a succession of 1) all inclusive religion followed by 2) proprietary balkanization. (I use the term 'religion' in it's strict sense re- and -ligion, or 'tying everything back together again'). That is, you have several vendors competing with the usual lock-in's and proprietary protocols and plug conspiracies, all designed toward profit and revenue, untill a well equipped lab has several islands of technology unable to communicate w/ each other. Along comes someone like Postel (TCP/IP) or Beneres-Lee (http) who create a meta level of interoperativeness so that 'all is one' again, then along comes another wave of Msft's etc who bust in and balkanise and vendor lock-in the next level (think Kerberos or 'Best viewed with IE), etc etc etc.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }