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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."
Hmm, an interface that is completely independant from the underlying OS, network, etc, etc. I think I may have heard of that before. What's that? In 1986??? Oh yeah.
I don't have a sig...Do you??
Access to documents anytime/anywhere?
Even when the OS of the server is taken down by the Slashdot effect?
Microsoft will be subject to careful scrutiny for abusive activity.
It's a joke, isn't it?
PENAROL: Seras eterno como el tiempo y floreceras en cada primavera.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I remember when i first heard about this guy on Big Thinkers. He had some far fetched ideas about completely tossing the desktop out of the window.. I like some of his concepts with desktop management, but at the time of the broadcast of the show, he mentioned tossing the concept of normal *files* and folders too. It seems that might have changed a bit, as it was too radical.
- tristan
Now I'll have a real use for those old Nintendo accessories I've been hanging onto.
You know I own a car. And cars have gotten to the point where when I buy it typically I do not have to consider the road. It is irrellevant...
....
OR, is it relevant after all? Lets see in Germany I would get a sports car, Switzerland big luxury, Canada SUV because of the snow, Southern France Convertible,
My point is that while we do not make a big deal of the road or conditions, it does influence our buying decisions. And saying that it is irrelevant is just a pipedream...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
(1) Operating systems are relics of the past,
[snip]
(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.
So every operating system but Windows is a relic of the past? I'll second the description of this as 'fantasy'.
(The NY Times site seems rather unresponsive at the moment...)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Operating systems are relics of the past
Yes, because who in their right mind would need a system to operate their computer, I mean I read binary like Neo reads The Matrix. Don't you?
Sheesh, just because the guy has a degree he thinks he knows it all....though he must have something going for him if the UnaBomber had his sights on him. He had better hope his idea doesn't catch on or a few more people might have their sights on him too.
-Tolerate my intolerance
If I'm misreading the article, someone please enlighten me, but it sounds like what he's really talking about is a modified file system and new searching methods based on that file system.
If this is the case, then an OS still needs to run off of that file system, so the OS is clearly not dead.
This is what longhorn's filesystem is supposed to do: It's SQL and metadata-based. I don't see how that's making the OS irrelevant. I think the author could have chosen his words a little better.
Okay, that article is just an advertisement. I'm surprised that some editor at the Times let that pass for a column.
Let me summarize for the impatient. "Operating systems are irrelevant, except for Windows, which we should be thankful to Bill for, because it made everything more accessible, and he's oh-so-visionary. Buy my stuff, which is an incarnation of the vision that Bill wants to realize in Longhorn. Also, Linux is irrelevant."
(6) ?????
(7) Profit!
Ka-ching!
This space for rent.
Far-fetched? Think about it: With MySQL, the People's Army will now be able to do multiple queries on their tables of democratic activists in Olog(n) time instead of lengthy searches in card catalogs. The bureaucratic overhead previously allowed activists enough time to flee the country. How about building cheap firewalls so the people can't get the unbiased reporting that CNN provides? Or using Apache to publish lists of Falun Gong people to their police forces instantly? I doubt that never crossed your minds when you were coding away in your parents' basements. Consider putting that little thought in your mental resolv.conf file.
If that does not concern you ( which it probably doesn't, since the lashout.org paradigm is publishing articles about how not to pay for things ), consider something else. When China eventually goes to war with Taiwan, we want to be able turn their command and control facilities into the computing equivalent of a train-wreck. One of the advantages of Windows never mentioned in the article is the ability of Microsoft to remotely deactivate Windows XP in the case of a national emergency. Thanks to GNU/Lunix, Taiwan will be on a collision course with the mainland in the near future.
Which throws into question Mr. Stallman's motives. A known proponent of socialism, the Chinese government and RMS are natural allies. Could it be a back door to Stallman's dream of an über-Socialist United States? We may never know for sure. Next time you consider contributing to an open source project, ask yourself this question: don't you want to make sure your work isn't used for nefarious purposes? Will you risk having blood on your hands?
Best Slashdot Co
Pre-emptive Slashdotting.
The highest karma level is not, as is commonly thougt, 50. Some users have acheived karma scores upwards of 15,000. Once this level is acheived users are so well attuned to slashdot that they can predict the stories that will appear on the frontpage and begin slashdotting.
"hehe, website" - Homer Simpson
This guy can't be real. No-one can be *that* stupid! How does he intend to recieve his 3D files without an OS? Does he know how a computer work? Is he on drugs? What's his "education"? Does he actually get paid for saying these things?
As for publishing links NYT articles here on slashdot, why-o-why is it allowed. I urge the inclusion of a bypass link too, or a link to the article somewhere else!
His name is David GelerNter.
David Gelernter, not David Gelerter.
He is the current Director of Graduate Studies in CS as well....and so a name I am quite familiar with.
And trust me...Arvind Krishnamurthy (do a google..) will still be teaching Operating Systems in the spring. (Ahh Nachos!)
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Professor of Computer Science
B.A., Yale University, 1976Ph.D., The State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1982
Joined Yale Faculty 1982
David Gelernter's research interests include information management, parallel programming, software ensembles and artificial intelligence. The coordination language called "Linda" that he developed with Nicholas Carriero (also of Yale) sees fairly widespread use world-wide for parallel programming.
Gelernter's current interests include adaptive parallelism, programming environments for parallelism, realtime data fusion, expert databases and information-management systems (the Lifestreams system in particular). He is co-author of two textbooks (on programming languages and on parallel programming methods), author of Mirror Worlds (Oxford: 1991), the Muse in the Machine (Free Press: 1994 -- about how thinking works), and a forthcoming book in the "Masterclasses" series about aesthetics and computing. He has published cultural-implications-of-computing-type pieces in many newspapers and magazines, is contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, the National Review and is art critic at the Weekly Standard.
Representative Publications
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
"He had some far fetched ideas about completely tossing the desktop out of the window"
Linux has some far fetched idea about completely tossing Windows out of the desktop.
Funny, eh?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
When can we get this, so RMS can shut up?
I, for one , can't wait.
"They should be called GNU/3d Documents, because if it wasn't for the GNU/Linux OS to become a relic, no one would have thought to make somehting else. It is obvious that this technology only exists because GNU caused the creator to come up with the idea."
Ok, maybe he won't shut up.
And also, he would like a pony.
No, make that two ponies. No, eight. No, a pony should be available wherever he goes at any hour of the day.
------
Today's Top Deals
The whole artical read as a huge advert. /. isn't the only one placing ads as stories...
Guess
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
While I didn't read the article (I see enough NY Post commercials on TV). I assume this guy seems to think the O/S is "all the pretty windows". I think the common person's viewpoint of the O/S is also the same, but when we get down to brass tacks, the O/S is what holds those windows on your desktop. File system access, memory management, task/process management, interfacing drivers to hardware. THIS IS THE O/S!! I doubt seriously that these floating 3-D documents will do little good if you can't even drive signal to your video card.
Perhaps this person should exhalt a new outlook on user interface design (ex: extending Windows, or KDE or Gnome), and not dismiss the O/S.
And for those ready to flame on my inclusion of Windows, Gnome and KDE on the same sentence, realize that these are all essentially window/interface managers, and not operating systems. Yes, MS bundles their manager and O/S in an unpackageable package, but the interface you see in MSWindows is not the MSWindows O/S. That is like saying a BASH shell is the O/S of Linux/UNIX.
Well, he is pretty much thinking along the lines of Microsoft, which is gradually shifting to an OS that really does not exist but gives you the functionality you need based upon the services you require.
.Net wallet has been charged, thank you.
For example, if you need to write a Word Document (yeah yeah XDocs in Office11), you would boot up your computer which basically would make a call to a Web Service that will show you what you call the desktop (i.e. presentation layer) of your OS today e.g WinXP, Win2k, etc.
You need to write a Word Doc? Do you subscribe to the Word Web Service? If so the menu item in the program group will be there (Start-Programs-blah blah), you consumed it when your WebServiceOS came up, because you subscribe to it so you can go ahead and make a word doc. Thus, whatever data you need will be accessible when you want it, for a certain price that is.
Theoretically, this may seem like a great idea, software as a service, revenue for MS, you get only what you want i.e no bundled overpriced office products, but then again...oh nevermind.
And oh yeah, you can get your documents anywhere in the world since your profile will be associated with your ".NET my Services" account, so as long as a computer is using this next OS, which will probably come after longhorn, you have what you need everywhere..all you have to do is Consume and Subscribe! Theoretically although the vendor is Microsoft, is XML over HTTP really Microsoft Windows? No! Lets just call it MSWSVOS (Microsoft Web Service Virtual Operating System)...your
Solid!
First we had "Luke, I am your father".
Next came "Resistance is futile".
Then "All your base are belong to us".
and now....
"Operating Systems are Irrelevant"
Where will the madness end?
Whoa, there. Was this guy watching Johnny Mnemonic while drugged up beyond belief? His drivel about being able to "see a stream of 3D documents" reminds me of the virtual surreality user interfaces in that movie. I wouldn't be surprised if he started spouting off unintelligible mutterings about "hacking the Gibson" and "finding the garbage file", too.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
"(1) Operating systems are relics of the past...(3) seeing a stream of 3D documents(?), so (4) he's written such software"
Okay, I disagree with the above items. Lets start in reverse order. (4), he created software. All I can say congrad-u-fucking-lations. Unless I see it running of my machine or another machine, it is just theory. (3), to my knowledge, documents are just text (not going to think about 3d images that are attached to some). What the hell he expect us to do; to see text charators in 3D? So we can look at the maybe fromt he side or from the back? WTF! (1), how can operating systems be relics? They are required to give other software applications access to the hardware. Without an OS, each applicatin woudl require the knowledge how to access the hardware and use it properly. This will only create more bugs in people codes and staility issues.
Personally, I think this guy is from the 60's and is still tripping. People like that I love to give them a swift kick in the nads with my size 15.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Those of us who've grown up on Wintel might relate. I got to spend about an hour working on some Macs yesterday, a mix of OS 9 iMacs and new ones running OS X. For anyone who's grown up on Windows, this is a refreshing change of perspective. I never did find any sort of command line, even when I briefly needed one, but the machine just "worked". Everything was responsive and fast and gorgeous and simple. When I have my own Linux box really tweaked out the way I like it -- WM with the genmenu menu structure -- it just runs like a deer.
You reach a point in any well-designed system where you don't interact with the system itself anymore. For example, I've got a site I frequent with a login and the "submit" button drawn in JavaScript instead of as an HTML button. ie lets me just hit "Enter", but Mozilla requires that I mouse-click "Submit". That's a Mozilla problem. Windows XP allows you to burn cds and read zips right in the filesystem browser, which is a good thing. KDE used to have some five different apps under "Text Editors", which is just not useful. That WM menu I had was easy to customize and had only the one or two that I used. These are issues of system design, not program functionality.
I'm looking forward to the day I don't have to worry about how the system runs and whether it will continue to run. I'm not far from that with a Linux+WindowMaker desktop of my own design, but even then I have to struggle with issues like printing and file format compatibility and fonts. I guess there are people in corporate, standardized environments that have Microsoft SMS running and the whole MS Office suite customized and installed who probably feel their work is pretty transparent. I haven't yet SEEN one personally, but they probably exist.
-j
...a while back, and concluded that: (a) Gelertner's concept of an information stream is simplistic, vague and Windows-based, and (b) Gelertner really likes himself, and thinks his ideas are the tops, and goes around telling everyone so on his ugly, confusing Website about how computers shouldn't be ugly and confusing.
I mean, how can anyone take seriously a 'visionary' that develops for Windows and can't make a goddamn clean Web page. Hrmph!
And...
Each [of linux and Windows] is nonetheless still solid enough to be a good, steady platform for the next step in software.
This does not indicate a future in which operating systems are really irrelevant. In fact, it would appear to be the opposite. Now, the operating system may appear to be invisible to the end user, but that isn't the same thing. People like Alan Cooper have been pushing for this kind of computing interface for ages.
The underlying operating system must be transparent, and rock-solid, fast, correct, and efficient.
Again, from the article:
nearly universal platform - and for the software future, "universal" is nonnegotiable.
Why does the OS have to be universal? The operating system may become invisible, but a properly written interface will be portable. No one will have to know how to use the "operating system" that powers their hardware, but they may figure out that some are more reliable at running their Interface Of The Future (TM) than others.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
1) Operating systems are relics of the past.
They are also relics of the future. FWIW.
2) I should be able to access data anywhere, agreed.
They problem is convincing the rest of the world that
my data needs are more important than their feature
and special formatting needs.
3) I understand where he is trying to go, but he
still misses the point, my data should come to
me in any form I darn well please. Making it
"easier for the masses" does not neccesarily make
it easier for the individual.
4) I can't seem to get to the scopeware site at the moment.
Otherwise I would like to see what he has come up with
5) I shouldn't care that it requires a relic of the past to
work, what I should care more about is its portability and
usability on and with the other relics I have accumulated.
Even in our modern age of end-user focused computing, new
technology is still best adopted first by the enthusiasts;
because they are usually the ones explaining to everyone else
why such technology is worth changing over to.
(See the recent Tivo thread).
Mr. Gelertner was presented on a the TechTV (cable network) show
"Big Thinkers" a while back (they do repeast occasionally).
And the show did look a bit into the work that I presume has
led up to scopeware. He seemed in his own way as knowledgeable
perceptive and opinionated as most people see as traits of RMS;
take that as you will.
Operating systems will be irrelevant the day that I can take any file, any application and simply use it, read it, execute it on every platform out there.
They will be irrelevant they day that most inferior ones are indistingishable from the superior ones for every task.
This is so over simplified that is is amazing. Operating systems follow the same simple rules as all other tools. The right OS for the right job.
Would you run an incredibly large enterprise data warehouse on Windows or Mac OS 9? Would you give your kid a AIX or OS/390 box to play games on? Hell no. Would you put a non-realtime OS in a medical device? Hell no.
This article is either FUD or was posted here just to stir up controversy. This guy has to be kidding.
They are? Uh oh..
WIOj23 902*@+++
NO CARRIER
Trolling is a art,
Or perhaps . . . just perhaps . . . he's more concerned with making this product available to the biggest market share. Not really so much concerned with advancing computer science, as with making money? Maybe?
The New York Times: Free advertising space for anyone with a PhD.
Would you talk a bit about your development of Lifestreams, your candidate for a new information-control interface? How does elegance figure into it?
DavidGelernter:Originated in my unhappiness, bordering on disgust, with every operating system on the market, the Mac desktop was revolutionary in the 1970's, and was beautiful in the early 1980's, but in the late 1980's, it was getting old, and today it's pathetically obsolete, whether you buy it from Mac or in the form of Windows. After all, it comes out from an obsolete, long ago, technology era that doesn't match today's computing environment at all. Matches it so badly that it's an intolerable pain to deal with. So that for example, the system was designed when the Internet was not the internet, email was unimportant, very few people used it at all, computing cycles were scarce & expensive, memory was expensive, and just as important, or more important, all computer users were new users. So in the 1980's, people didn't have many files, many directories, because they hadn't been online for very long. But today, when compute cycles and memories are cheap, and the problem isn't how to conserve those resources, but how to squander them reasonably, and the internet is bigger than ever. So many people use their computers as text managers exclusively. The operating system designed long ago for radically different computers doesn't work anymore. For that matter, the whole underlying thesis of an operating system is obsolete. There is absolutely no reason that I should ever have to think about where I have a file, what machine I'm on, what my files are named, what directory I stuck something in. What I want is to be able to walk up to a computer anywhere, and tune in my electronic life. I don't care if it's a Mac or PC just as I don't care if, when I tune in CNN on TV, I don't care if it's a Toshiba TV or a Hitachi TV. In short, for all these reasons I've sort of hinted at, I found myself so disgusted with what was available, I figured there had to be something better. Although the research I had been doing on software in the 80's was fairly esoteric stuff having to do with programming & distributed systems and artificial intelligence, I had to turn my attention to everyday computing needs because the situation was, in software terms, so incredibly awful.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
This article is a joke. This guy seems to know very little about nothing.
THE end of the Microsoft trial is great news whatever you think of the defendant - because the trial was all about the past, and we in the technology world have no more time to waste on that topic.
The past? Idiot. Idiot! Fool. If we don't look at our past and learn from it, we are gonna repeat it, and make the same damn mistakes in the future. What MS did only affects everyone in computerdom out there. Ask Be Inc, or Netscape, OS/2 or Linux companies what they think of about this being something we should forget about? No, it was about our present, and future. XP wouldn't be the POS it is if there was more competition.
Meanwhile, operating systems are lapsing into senile irrelevance. An operating system connects the user (and the user's software) to the ensemble of machines we call a computer. But nowadays users no longer want to be connected to computers. They want to be connected to information, a claim that sounds vague but is clear and specific.
But wasn't that the goal of computers from the beginning? To enable a 'paperless world' where we could input and receive information from a centralized location. Um, mainframe, anyone? And how is the OS irrelevant? Maybe to him it is, and to the home user, but to developers, hardware makers, and administrators, the OS is very much the heart and soul of the computer. It determines whether the software will run- the software that obtains the information you demand.
This kind of information management is simpler, more powerful and more natural than the Steelcase-inspired software we've got today - the files, the folders, the desktops and all those other high-tech office accessories straight out of 1946.
You know, I still use a file cabinet. As far as I know, they are a great resource when the network goes down, or a hdd crashes. I support large companies that still use them. Just because it is old, does not mean it is no longer needed, wanted, or relevant.
We built our system on Microsoft Windows because Windows is a reliable, solid, reasonably priced, nearly universal platform....
Well, one out of 3 ain't bad. No comment on what everyone else will point out here.
Of course, another operating system, Linux, is also clamoring for attention. Linux and Windows are both children of the 70's: Linux grew out of Unix, invented by AT Windows is based on the revolutionary work of Xerox research. In technology years, these loyal and devoted operating systems are each approximately 4,820 years old. (Technology years are like dog years, only shorter.)
Anyone know what he is talking about here? So, Windows and Unix are almost 5000 dog years old. How is this little piece of info helping his argument. Can anyone help me out here. I don't see it. I think he is trying to make linux look like the old beast of the ancients, when it is actually newer than Windows is. I mean, Windows the OS didn't happen till 1993 with NT 3.1- linux was 'born' in 1990. Prior to 93, windows was an OE.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
Sure we should agree that there are much better ways to present higher level abstractions such as presentation and storage of informatio, however in the end it must sit on an OS.
As to which OS, perhaps users shoudn't care if each system was able to provide a similar set of services, however in relity operating systms tend to specialise somewhat. For example the Win speciality is the BSOD!!!!
No seriously, there are two questions to be asked here:
Whith specialised system like the engine management system in a car, I as a user don't give a damn. The only interface is presented by the application (throttle, etc). With a general purpose system like a PC, the user is exposed to the system in a number of ways, indeed Linux (and other Unixes) are slightly better in this respect because at least the GUI and the desktop are not integrated into the OS.
Actually, quite a bit of headway has been made in replacing the folder model with a database model. Products such as DOCsOpen (company called Hummingbird) and iManage, as well as Tahoe (MS) and the BeOS have made great pushes in either popping down the files anywhere, or at least giving the end user a layer of abstraction that uses a DB to access the data/files, rather than the "folder within a folder" thing.
Also, thinkers like Alan Kay have been pushing for the death of the "Desktop" metaphor for well over a decade. It had its purpose in the start, but now it's just tired and irrelevant.
Microsoft, people say, has driven up prices and suppressed innovation. But this is a ticklish argument at best: after all, over the decade of Microsoft's hegemony, computing power has grown cheaper and cheaper. Innovation has thrived.
He's comparing apples to oranges...Microsoft is software based, they haven't designed any hardware (joysticks and future DRM technology not-withstanding). If you look at software, it HAS been stifled a bit...there are very few innovations in the OS market over the past decade. Windows has, just recently, incorporated functionality that Unix had 20 years ago.
Hardware has been where innovation has taken place. More transistors on a wafer, faster memory seek times, faster hard drive rotation, larger hard drive capacity. These are the big changes in computers, not the software.
--trb
Great idea, but instead of just software, I need a datajack implanted into my skull and a cyberdeck. That way, not only is everything rendered in 3D, but if I get pissed off at that stupid paperclip, I can engage it in combat in the Matrix.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
So based on what he said the UI displaded in Jurasic Park I was almost correct.
It did have an operating system("Hey this is Unix, I know this.") however the OS was irrelavent, but it allowed anyone to access the system(just reboot the system and you had full access), it had this stream of 3D document, and they had the software.
"We need Microsoft itself to be the universal stepladder that lets us climb out of our hole and smell the roses"
So, what are they now ? Universal snake that eats all of us down to the basement ?
getSexySig();
The thing about his style is that he seems to believe that the way to get people to listen to him is to say something radical that can be wildly misinterpreted, and then get on the soapbox. He's also well known for saying things like the entire educational system in this country sucks and has to be rebuilt from scratch. So it's no surprise to me that he says the OS is irrelevant. In theory it's his way of getting people to at least look at their assumptions and question them. I mean, come on, how many people do you run into every day that tell you "Yes, I agree, Windows sucks, but why fight it?" WHY FIGHT IT? Because it sucks. Gelernter's point is that you should always be on the quest for the "powerful yet simple" solution to the problem.
In a rather interesting chapter of the book, he offers a variety of drawings for new desks. After all, who said that the traditional setup is the best one? So he creates a variety of stacks, slants, and other combinations that might work better for people.
I think the OS *should* be irrelevant. Awareness of it makes things complicated. Imagine if the rules of a Turing machine were different depending on what computer you ran it on, and on some computers its rules just didn't hold at all. Computers will be simpler when somebody can just say "Email" and not have to worry about Outlook, or POP, or any of that nonsense. That's my two bits.
duane, listening to old dr. dobbs mp3's he found referenced on slashdot last week
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Yes, from one perspective, you could say operating systems are irrelevent.
That's presupposing that whatever operating system is in place provides the needed infrastructure for managing processes and scheduling hardware access in a reasonable way. Doesn't matter whether it's Windows, MacOS, Linux or OS/2.
By the same token, my travels from home to work depend on my car, not on the roads.
And it's true that what my body contacts is the car, not the road (motorcyclists sometimes have it rougher, I suppose).
If the roads are well-maintained, plowed in the winter and other cars obey the traffic laws, I'd almost begin to believe that cars were more important and roads were irrelevant.
But if my super highway developed a large pothole, that illusion would disappear quickly.
Likewise, if the owner of the road decided to erect a toll booth and exact some money from me for use of the road, I'd begin to appreciate the importance of roads.
Operating systems: only when they work right do you not notice them.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
An interface that is completely independant from the underlying OS?
HTML? VRML? PDF? XML? JAVA?
These all seem to be what this guy is calling for.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Gelertner wrote all about this in his book, Machine Beauty, from 1999. This is OLD news, some poor reporter just got sucked in. And from reading his book, and playing with the demos he has, I would not be able to stand using his software... Seems like a good idea, but somehow, the implementation feels just lousy.
-- John
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); }
Do we have to freak out anytime some crack makes outrageous claims. I haven't looked at his software (because is OS and WebServer are not irrelevant), but doesn't his software sound a ton like the software that the young girl in the original Jurassic Park used to safely lock our heroes into the control room? How old is that movie, now?
Operating Systems will be irrelevant when people stop wanting more power from the computers. Has this even begun to happen? The features that people care about most that get into the Linux kernel are the ones with comments like, "performance increased by x%" (could be just me). Microsoft still uses generic features, like "runs programs faster". So even the non-techies at which Dr. G's article was targeted care about the OS even if they don't realize it.
So, not an original idea.
And, operating systems are not irrelevant and may never be.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
then along came the micros like the altair8800. With these there was no operating system per se. Usually you just loaded interpeted basic from a bootloader and then managed your disk or tape using program you wrote in basic. For example PIP was the name of a program for reading files on a floppy. you loaded pip off tape and then you could access the floppy. when you were done you got rid of PIP. there was no OS only indiviual ad hoc programs. You could say the programming envionment was the OS but givine that your programs were doing peek and poke instructions instead of using an API i'd say there was no OS.
then with the rise of more memory and disks, apple, commodor, trs-80, and IBM started to emulate the mini-computers which had those VMS/CPM/DOS operating systems. then we graduated to Windows and macOS with real APIs.
then what, well along came the Browser, and the idea that one could replace the OS and APIs with a new sort of middleware that would be platform independent. Mosiac and netscape could open text files, and even do many operatiung system inteaction functions like telnet. (KDE extends the metafore to launching programs from a browser inteface).
the other fork was java, which combined a programming language with all the high level functions needed to act like an OS. in other words it was both a language and an API rolled into one. Sun began to talk about how JAVA was really a new kind of OS. you no longer needed to worry about what the computer or OS running underneat was. JAVA was you environment.
so now someone is saying OSs are dead. whoopee. I've seen it before.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
We have the space shuttle but we still use trains. We have the internet but we still use the phone. When a technology gets adopted it takes looooong for it to be dropped for good. There is a lot of inertia, people keep using it.
Now operating systems are dead ? Sure, anytime. Now, how the hell is this smart new shinny cell phone/PDA running ?. Oh, it does have an OS. And how is this new network-enabled video camera running ?. Oh, an OS. As somebody else already pointed out, how the hell do you talk to your hardware without an OS ?
And best of all, the guy seems to be selling (I couldn't load his dead webpage) some GUI software, and he tells you "OS don't matter, just run my little app under windows". Yeah, sure, where is my wallet ?
It's been something like 8 years since OpenDoc's component based applications it the net and I think it is the concept this guy speaks of( can't get to the article ). The idea was that you had a file format which allowed application data to be stored together with many applications all in one file. The applications were small, specific apps which were more like plug-ins for a "container" application.
The whole idea behind OpenDoc was that your data was what was important and YOU, the user, could mix and match small lightweight applications to create your own "super" document. The application or "Parts" developers would have to provide a free viewer for their data format so that you could email your "super" document to someone else and they could read it's contents by downloading the viewers.
The concept of document-centric, also called data-centric computing isn't new it's just the one very large monopolist must protect their operating system and make sure the "application" remains relevant. Document-centric computing abstracts the applications, greatly reduces the application size since they are now made of many smaller plug-ins, and most importantly, it reduces the barrier to entry into the market. Two or three coders could whip up a pretty good spell-checker Part or html editor Part as opposed to a full blown application containing the spell-checker, graphics editor, text editor, etc, etc.
This kind of stuff won't show up until Microsoft is gone or irrelevant. IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The "memory enhancement" experts going all the way back to ancient Greece have long known that spatial cues are a powerful way of organizing human memory (especially in males). So any information organization metaphor that is spatial or geometrical would exploit this principle. That would mean the "desktop" or "office" isnt that bad, though there might be better ones. Perhaps rooms in a house or streets of a city (geocities@yahoo) might be more tangible than a desktop, but probably not worth the change involved.
Having worked with Big Iron before, I can safely say that you're wrong about there not being an OS in them.
The OS is much closer to what one -should- be, though, and is quite unobtrusive.
As for the cell phones and PDA's (the PDA's in particular) -do- have an OS.
I mean, christ. the Palm and Visor run the -PalmOS- for crying out loud!! All those cellphones that have the games and crap on them now? there's an OS there, too.
Just because it's unobtrusive, and does what a good OS should, doesn't mean that it's not there.
...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
Yeah. Only Slashdot is supposed to post advertisements as stories.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
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.
Nice article, but the guy has a bit of a people-centric view. OS's are not only important to people, but machines are communicating as well. Think of computers communicating, but also networking hardware, machinery in processing plants, equipment in planes, trains & automobiles, ships, telephone systems etc.. There things are dependant on timing, realtime processes etc. A nice 3-d data view is completely irrelevant. The OS becomes even more important
In a way he has a point; the www has already decreased the relevance of operating systems. On the other hand, the OS is what makes your computer tick - or crash (tick first, then explode?). Software is still tied to the OS in some way. Source code that works on one platform doesn't necessarily work on other platforms, for binaries it's even worse. This applies even to Java, thanks to MicroSoft's horrible virtual machine. Even if all operating systems could run all software, they would still matter, simply because some are better than others (no OS war, please). Or am I missing something?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
As I take it, his basic point seems to be that both Windows and Linux are based on OS concepts developed at least 30 years ago:
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Completely disregarding his statements regarding the OS being irrelevant, and such, this 'totally-3D' thing is rediculous. Personally, I do 3D work along with 2D media (images, video). These tasks are all very CPU, memory, and video card intensive. So now if I was working on modelling a character, and had to interact with the system, the whole thing would crawl to a halt since it has to draw all its pretty 3D effects and what not. No thanks, I'll stick with my little 2D based window managers since they do their job and do not rape system resources at the same time. This 3D-interface stuff is straight out of the movies and will not be a reality until our hardware (esp videocards) gets a serious upgrade to be able to handle that plus our main applications. And quite frankly, whats so great about a 'stream of 3D documents'? Seems like meaningless fluff just to make the idea sound futuristic and sleek.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
After reading the NYT article, I feel like having a good, loud BURP from the Pepsi-like nutritional value this guy's ideas are worth. What a load of pie-in-the-sky thinking. OK, yes, it would be very nice to work with one interface that allows me to store and retrieve all the assorted bits and bytes of my life. But no matter what that eventual piece of hardware looks like, it's still going to require some sort of OS to manage how it connects, how the HMI (Human Machine Interface) communicates with the entire information infrastructure behind it.
I've worked in IT for 10 years now, and this guy is as close to the "Useless White Guy" I see playing CEO's and CTOs on HP, IBM, Sun and M$oft commercials everyday. For a compsci guy, this guy is clueless about the infrastructure and hardware and how to get it to work properly to make his 'ideas' work in the real world.
I guess my 'realist' side is crying out to be heard today.
I can no longer read Dilbert. It's too depressing, because it is too real. -- Hyperhaplo
About 18 years ago Jeff Raskin and Canon Inc. built a computer called the Canon Cat based on some of these principles. The Cat memory was basically one massive flat file you could search, order, compute, or edit with a few simple universal commands. (I thought it was too massive for my limited brain.) The architect Jeff Raskin has a footnote in P.C. history as the guy and computer project who Steve Jobs took over when Steve was trying to regain power at Apple after the Apple III and Lisa diappointments.
He's basically saying "Microsoft was found to be a monopoly that abused its power, so we should all switch to it, becuase my software that will make OS's irrelevant only works on one OS." (because he doesn't know enough about OS's to make it work on more than one, perhaps? Haven't these problems been solved already, a long time ago?)
Question: if we're all using Windows as he dreams, and there ARE no other OS's because they're all "irrelevant", then what do we need his OS-independence software for? It's like handing out keys when there's no cell to escape from.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Doesn't it?
Yup. Sure sounds like paper to me. Simple to describe. Locate anywhere. Interpret it how I want. Render whatever's on it.
Plus, there's almost no smell as comforting to the soul as the smell of an old book.
Isn't it amazing how "Unabomber target" has come to imply a certain level of prestige?
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
I was thinking it was a evolution... not a regression... [makes me thinking of machines without OS... like Amstrad PCW... the television... the fridge...]
Cheers...
Host:If you could do anything to save the world, what would it be?
Contestant 1: I would make world peace, and we can all frolic like little bunnies and everyone will be happy!
Host:What a great a great answer! Contestant 2, what would you do?
Contestant 2, who looks surprisingly like David Gelernter:I would make an OS, except it's not an OS, it's a magical OS that runs the same everywhere, and can read all data, and somehow convinces asshole companies to do away with proprietary file formats. So it's like Java, and XML all together, and kind of like that browser OS based on Mozilla too. Oh, and it won't be slower than dookie. I promise.
Host:Christ, and I thought "World Peace" was a dipshit answer.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
His point is to slap some real useable software on top of any OS
didn't microsoft try this already? Remember MS Bob, oh man if you though windows was lame, just re-live that failed front end.
I am sure whatever this guy is trying will probably be better, but I don't know how well it will catch on...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
As I take it, his basic point seems to be that both Windows and Linux are based on OS concepts developed at least 30 years ago:
To put what Gelernter is talking about in more clear terms, ask this question; "what if a network connected computer could somehow be the shape of a newspaper?" You could turn its pages, like an old newspaper, but its actual scope would be the size of the internet.
Since its "printed" cheaply like paper, you can almost give them away, like the UK tabloids that are printed in thier millions every day, and sold for 10p.
No one has to learn how to operate them; you just "use it". This is what this and the other futurists are talking about; the elimination of all traces of boxes, keyboards, mice, whirring fans & suchlike.
True, it soulds like science fiction (much like the book in David Lynches version of Dune) but certainly, it would be at the least, surprising if the current shape of computing lasts another 30 years in its present form, and the only way things will change is if people say "outrageous" things like "operatings systems dont matter".
Oh, and write some software maybe.
And design some printable super thin smart ink based computers.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
I've had a chance to talk to some of these guys last year, and I've used the system a bit. We also talked about some of this in a UI design class I took.
Scopeware (the system he built) is actually pretty interesting. The premise (or part of it) is that people aren't good at filing things in a hierarchical filesystem. Instead, the system simply keeps everything in one long hierarchical sequence, and tries to provide more intuitive ways of searching it.
Specifically, it tries to emulate piles of papers on a desk. New stuff is at the top, but you can kinda scan the edges of a lot of the documents at once. If you need to find something specific, youo can "flip through" the pile until you find it. I believe that you can define criteria such that different piles are built automatically from the same set of documents. In a sense, this is similar to Evolution's VFolders - you don't move emails from your inbox to another folder, but set up virtual folders based on predefined searches.
In this sense, the OS and filesystem are irrelevant, just like the OS is irrelevant to (pure) Java programs, and just like the filesystem is irrelevant in most email programs (Evolution, Kmail, Outlook). Of course, the data is stored in files within directories on a disk managed by an OS, but given that there is a completely different method of accessing that data, who cares?
In a sense, this is actually similar to Unix's "everything is a file philosophy", except that here it would be expressed as "everything that's important is a document.
Scopeware itself is a server that stores all documents, emails, etc. for a group of people. It then manages access to them, and sets up these "piles" for everyone who runs a scopeware client.
Solution to blink tags: wrap them in another blink tag, with a javascript delay loop, so they cancel each other out
With all due respect to the good (and smart!) professor, people have been singing this tune for years now. Oracle was gonna make OS's irrelevant. Then Sun was. Blah blah blah.
.WAV files played when email arrives, many (not all, but many) people project into their computers their own vision of what it should look like, sound like, behave like.
What the nerdish community (I am including myself in this) fails to realize is that a lot of people (and not just geeks!) like they do their cars and their office cubicles: they personalize the hell out of them. From soul-crushing cute-and-fuzzy-bunny stickers to desktop pictures to skins to gut-wrenching
The OS-agnostic, computer-as-information-portal idea is a grand one and might work for business travellers hitting kiosks and library users, etc. However, until a rich, customizable environment gives this "personalization community" the same ability to turn their desktop into a fairy princess or a NASCAR cockpit or what have you, OS's will continue to rule.
My two cents: keep the change.
"Don't matter how New Age you get, old age is gonna kick your ass." - Utah Phillips
I never did write that example, but I looked into Lifestreams enough to think that it is a very valid metaphor for accessing information.
Lifestreams orders information by date - imagine that you remember writing a memo just before Easter vacation this year. Then, you would scan documents created around that time period, and hopefully find it in a few seconds.
Obviously, in this example, you could just sort old email, word processing documents, etc. by date using Konquerer, Mac Finder, Windows Explorer, whatever, but Lifestreams understands many file formats and unifies this entire process.
-Mark
Back in '96, Apple introduced a similar concept. They called it Project X, then renamed HotSauce. I remember it being a browser plugin that allowed you to fly through space, seeing documents and websites as 3d objects. Here's a google search that turns up more info.
Someone, please shake me from this wide-awake nightmare.
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.
over the decade of Microsoft's hegemony, computing power has grown cheaper and cheaper.
I've heard this before, and I will agree. See In the beginning was the command line. The point is, MS made it possible for computers to become cheap and commonplace. But now that they've done that, there is no further benefit from them maintaining a monopoly. The idiot who wrote this article doesn't seem to understand that much, and is still narrow-mindedly believing that they can do no wrong.
It boils down to ``OS doesn't matter - you need windows'' - in other words, a blatant bit of technically inaccurate flamebait. (And very good flamebait too - I've bitten...) Unfortunately, there's still idiots out there who believe what he's saying, and will think ``if even the experts say the OS is irrelevant and we should all buy Windows, then I will''.
We need Microsoft itself to be the universal stepladder that lets us climb out of our hole and smell the roses. ... euch. Troll just isn't a good enough word for it. Pass the 2x4x24.
From the article:
/ html-companyprofile.asp?userID=joudanx&h=wN4ACUl7v AGkVfP6DnQWcA&symb=SCS>the Steelcase company..
"And so the organization of your digital information reflects the shape of your life, not the shape of a 1940's Steelcase file cabinet".
Only, in the article, the word "Steelcase" is a link to the financial information for a href=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com
Just another, sad case of so-called "smart" links on crack, I guess...
These great ideas are hindered by one thing. Reality. It would be great if cars didn'pollute, roads and bridges didn't deteriorate, and everything we wanted could just appear in front of us.
This article is almost insulting to all the programmers and developers who have been trying to do just this thing for decades. Many of the issues he'd like resolved are actually being worked on by real people right now as we speak.
I've got good ideas too on lots of things, but I always thought I'd have to actually demonstrate how they'd be done to be considered an authority.
The link given, says everything we need to know about how irrelevent operating systems are: No web site is configured at this address.
Believe in things of which no person has ever learned
We rely on the courts and antitrust laws to keep Microsoft from abusing its enormous power. We need Microsoft itself to be the universal stepladder that lets us climb out of our hole and smell the roses.
So everything will be grand if only we put Microsoft between us and our hardware? Please. Making a Microsoft operating system into a 'universal stepladder' will only tempt them to abuse this power further. Let's not turn this guy's vision into an us-against-them issue. This vision (and its implementation) is long overdue.
It's interesting that this guy is flag-waving for Microsoft in the first place. After all, he is competing against Microsoft's own 'window manager', which will become moot if his vision comes to fruition. If what he says is true, in two years he will then compete directly with Longhorn's UI.
Each is nonetheless still solid enough to be a good, steady platform for the next step in software. But 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?
What is really needed is a nice OS layer that gives support to these new user interfaces (that replace windows managers). Linux is a nice open solution to this problem. What happens to this guy when Microsoft comes out with their own new-and-improved GUI for Longhorn? Microsoft closes their OS (not window manager) API and its game over.
Who knows, maybe he's just trying to get a job on the Longhorn project. But if he's going to try to compete directly against Microsoft, I don't see how he can possibly win. He'll find out first hand how powerful Microsoft really is. He would be wiser to develop for an open platform, and beat Microsoft from the side instead of from the top.
----- rL
The main point is not that there is no need for OS's, only that his UI will be abstract enough to where you don't need to know the desktop metaphor to use the computer. He believes that organizing information according to the 3 dimensions of time (past/present/future) are the most "intuitive". Where I disagree is that people don't always look at the world in terms of time's dimensions, but in terms of essences. For example, we all supposedly believe that we are the same particular person throughout time (I'm still me, just like I was yesterday), so time is irrelevant in that context/sense. If I'm typing a paper, I don't want to have to look at the "story" of how it was 2 days ago, I want it to be permanently changed by saving my modifications. If I want to know how it was 2 days ago, I would back it up. The desktop metaphor doesn't have to be dead just because it's not a brand-spanking new fad. Most problems with the metaphor come from not being consistent with the metaphor: since when do I have to throw a book into the trash before I can take it off my desktop? (hint, hint, MacOS!)
P.S. Linux rules ya mutha! (sorry, couldn't help myself...)
Bill Gates from the article, "Why are my document files stored one way, my contacts another way and my e-mail and instant-messaging buddy list still another, and why aren't they related to my calendar or to one another, and easy to search en masse?"
...
Hmm, let's see
Because your documents are different than your contacts which are in turn fundamentally different than your email which are in turn fundamentally different than your buddy lists. Yes, they are all data. So are books, CD's, audio-tapes, which are all quite different. Both in terms of media and interaction. This is such a silly question. Why on earth would you want a 'Universal' viewer for your data...?! This would necessarily lower it to the common denominator, but then it is the differences that make these kinds of data useful.
What he is talking about how we will turn a computer and the functions of a computer in to a DVD player. Do you care what OS a DVD player is using? No, we care that it will support and do what is asked of it. I also saw the Big Thinker show and think this guy is lost his marbles. Also he appears to be thinking out loud. Wait did I say that! I am waiting for the day when I can be paid to think up new crap all day and get paid for it!
Are computers really going to change that much in the future? Any technology goes through an s-curve of innovation.. Then it levels off. How different is you car now than from 50 years ago? Although there are changes/improvements in ergonomics/pollution/reliability, the format is the same.
Do we really need a change in the basic desktop format? Why would I want a 3-d desktop? The fact of the matter is what is now available enables 99% of the users to do what they want to get done. The problem with computers is finding problems to solve that fit the computing parigdigm.
love is just extroverted narcissism
He's looking a whole 20 seconds into the future. I'm hoping computer interaction as we know it is redefined, and I dont mean with wearing a clunky VR helmet and wearing a PowerGlove. Those are 80s expectations of future computing for the 90s. We want ubiquitous computing! Neural Interaction! Access information and communicate anywhere as naturally as you talk or think.
I think that, AI and - maybe later on - mind uploads are a better future that silly 3D desktops (been there, done that)
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
The alternative would be that we'd just have a different 800 lb. gorilla dominating the market.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I've actually seen variants of this argument proposed as serious - heck, the US government supports a variant of this argument itself: it is illegal for anyone in a bunch of countries the US has decreed sufficiently bad (North Korea, Iraq, Iran, etc.) to download linux off a US server. Or indeed, for a US citizen to send software of any kind to those regimes or to give it to a citizen of one of those countries.
I sometimes wonder if it would be against the law for me to fix a bug in one of my debian packages reported by a citizen of one of those countries (considering the number of Iranian citizens in the US, not impossible), since at that point I would have direct knowledge that they were using my packages and very likely would gain some material benefit from my fixing the bug. I don't think that's ever come up, but I only maintain a few relatively unused packages.
From the article:
"We built our system on Microsoft Windows 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.
Each is nonetheless still solid enough to be a good, steady platform for the next step in software. But 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?"
I think it is amusing that David Gelernter, the author, is clamoring for a new paradigm in the way that we look at information yet buttresses his argument for using Windows as a platform by saying Windows is the old paradigm. I guess my best answer to Mr. Gelernter as to why he should port to Linux is "don't." If it is a good idea, we will. And if the information is really entirely removed from the operating system with which it is stored, then this is merely a matter of implementation. If it isn't, and we can't, then you really haven't done what you've set out to do, have you?
My
Limekiller
Why does the OS have to be universal?
Probably because the author is in bed with Microsoft, and knows that the operating system isn't as irrelevant as he would have us believe. The whole piece is a classical example of intellectual dishonesty and little more than an advertisment for his product, and the microsoft operating system it runs on (and is laced with all kinds of false claims as to stability, etc. of that operating system).
The operating system may become invisible, but a properly written interface will be portable. No one will have to know how to use the "operating system" that powers their hardware, but they may figure out that some are more reliable at running their Interface Of The Future (TM) than others.
You are absolutely, 100% correct. What you are describing is a world of open standards to which everyone can read and write, the foundation of the internet, and a prerequisite to any sort of open computing.
Unfortunately, the now unfettered Microsoft Monopoly has a vested interest in closed computing, as do the copyright and media cartels with whom they are colluding to bring us 'trusted' computing, in which the word trust is ironically well suited, though not in the way their marketing department would have us think.
The Microsoft/Hollywood Trust, which seeks to impose 'trust'ed computing upon us through palladium, DRM, and Fritz "Disney" Hollings-style legislation, is all about closed computing, and to them, in order to impose their draconian vision upon our digital future, the operating system is not only not irrelevent, it is critical to imposing the restrictions upon the users they wish to impose.
Which means our choice in operating systems is very critical to us as users, and will likely define what freedoms we enjoy and are denied, irrespective of whether or not we use old fashioned GUI or CL interfaces, or some fancy "3d streaming files" or whatever other nonsense this particular individual envisions.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
paraphrase "Os is yesterday. Longhorn won't be out for two years and we need this software yesterday. My company has this today"
;)
So you're already behind schedule?
This is just flap for marketing drones. I think his pro-windows stance is actually a good thing for the slashdot community to read, not becuase it will rile up the zealots, but to give them a perspective of how the rest of the world sees them.
Lets be honest, his "the os is the moldy basement" analogy doesn't work: with linux (or freeBSD or whatever) We've been remodelling this basement. Check out the pool table and the sauna
But this is CRAP. CRAP CRAP CRAP. I expect this kind of writing from humanities majors who have just read Tony Robbins (or some other new age empowering motivational speaker) not from a man of science and logic.
Hang up your PhD, you don't deserve it.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
You've just argued the point of the article.
Everyone seems to be reading too much into the word "irrelevant".
Irrelevant does not mean unnecessary. They will always be necessary. The word "irrelevant" was directed toward end users. Your last paragraph sums that up exactly. To the end user, the actuall OS the computer is running should be irrelevant. The interface should be instead centered around the user and the desired information.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
First of all, I don't think you can lump everyone together. If you are talking about the end-user of something, the OS shouldn't be a big deal. Think of PDAs or cell-phones. But to people who work on those things, the OS is very important. You can't just ignore it.
I think a lot of people consider a complex interface to be the same thing as a complicated one. Come on, people are complex creatures. It is a matter of education. 30 years ago, a computer mouse would have been considered complex to most people, as evidenced by some people who still have trouble using them, and have to look down at their hand sometimes. (I have seen several older people do this, who haven't used a computer much at all). But kids can figure out how to use it quickly. Typing is a skill that people didn't used to have, but nowadays kids are learning it young. Saying something is "complicated" is relative. An activity can be complex, but once you learn it it is quite easy. I personally don't think that interfaces to computers should be simple. They are complex machines. Now if you are talking about a single-purpose thing, then the interface can be made simple. For complex machines, I don't think you'll get there. You will still need something to interface to the OS, so you'll need something to translate complex -> simple (or maybe vice-versa).
Imagine if the rules of a Turing machine were different depending on what computer you ran it on, and on some computers its rules just didn't hold at all.
The rules of interfacing to the Turing machine are simple, but the logic behind it is not. I don't think you can just lump and OS and applications that run on it together.
Computers will be simpler when somebody can just say "Email" and not have to worry about Outlook, or POP, or any of that nonsense. That's my two bits.
Nonsense? How do you think email works? What you are describing is the interface to email. Are you suggesting a universal email program? Not everybody wants the same thing in email. I still use Pine for crying out loud. Again, computers are complex machines, and are configurable. There is a reason there are many variations of programs out there, because none of them satisfy everyone's requirements. I think THAT is the beauty of computers, they are so complex and configurable. Why would you want everything to be the same? Utopia? Hardly.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Actually, it's how the AS/400 was designed back in the 80's. In the AS/400, things just reside in a database. Everything is VM. There are no files / folders except as an abstraction on top of the underlying OS.
You can learn more about the AS/400 here.
What makes you think that any significant cycles are being "wasted" on the OS? An OS, for the most part is just supposed to give you access and get out of your way. No alternative method for organizing your data, or accessing your hardware is doing to be able to get away with doing any less than what an OS does. Infact, what data management systems that try to make the OS obsolete merely end up performaing OS tasks within the application.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
In order to present less OS to the consumer, their must be MORE OS behind it. Then less the consumer sees, the MORE that has been done behind the scenes.
;)
Take the Virtual Machine for instanse. The VM is another OS that makes the underlying OS less restrictive.
So to 'eliminate' the OS one must embrace it
What he really wants is ultimate coordination of information via the super human intellect. The OS is just and OS. It is typically always transparent. I never see my OS actually writing files, managing memory, other than through the basic application management interface that allows me to install/remove applications. The applications themselves are what matter. (Otherwise the copying of files continually from one directory to another would be fun and using more memory is fun... yay.... i... *DONT* think so).
Our current society is based upon the capitalistic market forces to solve supply and demand decisions because the socialistic models do not work. (Well, thats debatable. The socialistic models under a massive oppresive soviet system doesnt work, but I believe in some european countries it works?).
Typically, this capitalism vs socialism brings up many fears of the coldwar when one tries to migrate towards socialism. There is inherintly nothing wrong with the socialism paradigm. The fundermental flaw lies in the inability for the human mind to organise and coordinate on such a massively perfect scale the logistics behind a truely utopian socialistic society.
Bringing this into relevance, one must consider the perfectly centralized vs haphazardly distributed nature of information.
It is obvious that if all human information stored by companies, governments, scientific, personel information, etc, were to be stored in a single storage system, then it could be perfectly sorted, arranged and the searching of the information would be maximal and perfect.
This provides two problems:
Who is going to search, store and coordinate said massive volumes of information? (Future AI)
Ethicly, do you want your entire personal details and history to be stored in one accessable place. This opens up abuse by authorities (Q:Why would authorities want to abuse others in utopia?). There is a fundamental loss of freedom in the contiual tracking of every move of individuals within society. How do you know your location is being constantly tracked.
Information is currently decentralized across the many industries. The information revolution started to occur with the internet and search engines. The next information revolution will occur with the perfect coordination of information but will society accept it?
-Tim
The real things are pretty much 2D. I guess someone needed to publish or perish.
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
He's trying to build a house for everyone based on his preferences and with no attention to the foundation.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
It seems pretty clear after reading the article that he is talking about a file system (perhaps directory system aware of content formats) that would be interesting if it could work. Want to find a document? Type in some key words and there it is. This is certainly an improvement over Explorer, and a definite improvement over *nix search methods.
Bringing some automagic searching capabilities to my desktop would be a good thing. Trouble is, to get his article published he had to color it with grounded opinions on the anti-trust trial and Linux, which it appears some on
Because of this, his ideas have to be attacked, but they seem worthy of an attempt and relevent.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
The OS becomes VERY relevant when the interface du jour doesn't even run on Macintosh. This guy appears to simply have blinders on. He can't depend on one OS to do his coding and still think that platform specific OS-isms won't creep into his end result.
One of the nice side effects of making sure that your product runs on multiple platforms is that you are forced to deal with out proprietary elements of your system.
Before this guy can be allowed to bore the rest of us, he should at least find a system that is the polar opposite of WinDOS and code his little toy for that too.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Lets see, to access my data anywhere i should use what really sounds like....net!
Oh what a surprise this was, not.
I can imagine why the unabomber used him for target practice.
HTTP/1.1 400
Don't get too hung up on "OS vs. desktop". Clearly there's a distinction, but he can't make that distinction for NYTimes readers and hope their miniscule attention spans will be able to follow.
D.G. has been working on this stream stuff for a long time. Now that Microsoft has a similar product in the pipeline, he only has a couple of years to profit from his work before time passes him. His strategy appears to be 1) sell as many copies of his software ahead of Longhorn as possible, and 2) keep a good relationship w/ Microsoft in case a buyout is an option.
Now, open source advocates don't cry when someone gets an interesting idea and tries to sell it commercially (well ok, some do). Instead, they write a free knockoff and often add their own improvements. I wouldn't be surprised if we that happen here, too.
One of the secrets to Microsoft's success was to de-commoditize the OS; remember the hoopla surrounding Windows 95, the songs, the celebrities, the massive lines outside of Fry's? They turned the win32 api into a gala multimedia event. It was so successful, that it took this Gelernter chap to remind us that all an OS is is a hardware abstraction layer.
;)
Point being, the OS is *supposed* to be invisible to the user, and nearly irrelevant.
This is why Netscape had to be crushed -- they wanted to make the browser the platform.
This is why Java had to be crushed -- they wanted to implement "write-once-run-anywhere". (There is a whole career-field of experts dedicated to figuring out why a HARDWARE VENDOR like Sun would push this, but that's a different post
I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that the Be OS idea was right... store everything in a database, potentially allowing any number of front-ends. Let's separate data from the display layer, and let people run their "Windows skin" or "Unix skin". Why not?
I'd like to see an ANSI standard Operating System. Hmm...
Final disclaimer: These are my silly ideas. Please treat them gently, as they are only half-baked.
That was great, but it would've been just as funny if you cut it all down to one line:
so the people can't get the unbiased reporting that CNN provides?
HAH!
(RANT) I'm completely convinced that there is no unbiased reporting in america. The journalists/producers/editors in america all bow down to the white house when instructed to. As far as I can tell the only unencumbered television news agencies are the BBC and (believe it or not) Al-Jazeera. (/RANT)
well, that's OT, huh? -1 Offtopic
put the what in the where?
Yes! for the love of God yes! Exactly what i mean. I'm glad you didn't relate it to sql and what not.
If this has a search mechanism that is english like (think star trek), kill off the visual representation of links, i think it'd be less intimidating. You could link documents etc...
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
There's no such thing. Trolling is not admirable. Satire, on the other hand is, but trolling isn't the same thing as satire. The key difference is intent. A satirist WANTS to have people realize his post was meant to ridicule the opposing view, and not meant to be his honest heartfelt opinion. A troll, on the other hand doesn't. He wants to have his post mistaken for the real thing, because he enjoys the flamewar.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Okay, it's been tried before. Alternate metaphorical constructs for navigating the computer have a long history (an old one I can think of is the Adventure Shell). My (obnoxious) question is, what makes him think he's got the magic bullet?
Apparently, from what I can interpret, he's using Windows as a foundation on which to build his alternate metaphoric, semantic, and rhetorical construction, which kind of strikes me as mixing metaphors in the worst (and least abstract) way possible!
For more insight into the kinds of things this guy's dabbling in, check out:
Mark Turner's The Literary Mind
Neil Randall's paper "Interface as Speech Act"
a paper by Joseph Goguen in the Advanced Lectures in Computer Science series (sorry, don't have the cite on me),
William Hart-Davidson's paper "Modelling Document-Mediated Interaction," from the 2002 SIGDOC proceedings,
and similar stuff. You might also want to check out Ortony's classic anthology on metaphorics for the background.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Locutus guessed,
No, what Gelernter is talking about is actually an alternative metaphor for document management. Files, he says, are soooooo 1946. So what he proposes is an Internet-accessible "information structure" that is visual, three-dimensional, and based on time. Instead of the filing cabinet metaphor, what you would have as a method of organizing and retrieving data would be a "3-D stream of electronic documents flowing through time." So, apparently there are still discrete units in this proposal, but they are organised by date and time.
David Gelertner doesn't know what the hell he is talking about.
I had him for a class at Yale (got an A, so I'm not bitter). He was going off about his journaling os or whatever the hell it was (sorry, it's been several years). It was SUCH bullshit. Everybody in the class basically signed up to see this semi-celebrity professor, and everybody more or less had the same impression. The guy is a complete fraud.
Look, I don't mean to sound insensitive, but the Unabomber thing was probably the best thing that happened to his career. I mean, he sits there making pie in the sky os predictions not more complicated than any first year cs student could make and acts like the sun shines out of his ass for it.
I don't dislike the guy personally. He's a bit of a slob, but he's ok. it's his really bad academic work that I take issue with.
The hard part (and the useful part) is making the "related document" finding work. The presentation isn't the big issue. There have been visual front ends to search engines before, but nobody uses them.
You don't really want to manipulate text in a 3D world. I've tried six of the "gloves and goggles" VR systems. The only thing that really works in such a world is shooting, which is why gamers use that interface and nobody else does.
Okay, so we pretty much realize that the Grand Revelation(tm) of the article is basically bullshit. Any number of technologies work to accomplish what he's describing, including document management, XML, and web search engines.
The one shred of useable insight that I believe this whole situation gets across is that what is required to make information more useable is not a change in the way of conceptualizing it, but a change in the way of controlling it.
Case 1 - web design. The HTML standard is supposed to divorce document content from document presentation. Commercial web site developers, however, do everything they can to prevent this. They want to force people to see their site in exactly the way they want. If you don't believe me, see this or try running junkbuster and visiting intellicast.com. Content providers are militantly opposed to you using content other than the way they exactly specify, a reality which is well known to transcend Internet technology.
Case 2 - deliberate incompatibility. You can't import e-mail from Kmail to Evolution or vice versa. Both packages are open source projects. Is there any possible excuse or reason why this condition exists other than a ridiculous pissing match? Now, I certainly understand that Microsoft has elevated the art of breaking other people's stuff to a high art, but I raised this particular example because it IS true and money is not (ostensibly) behind it. In the case of Gnome vs. KDE, it's a simple matter of control for the sake of control. Point - the problem is not an organization, institution, or social ideology. It is human nature.
My point is this. We have moved beyond the moment where a change in the way we communicate revolutionized how, when, and were we exchange ideas. The question now is not how we organize those ideas, but if we are going to fight to protect our right to share them. As long as the shit I've described keeps happening, you can have all the 3D documents you want - it won't ultimately matter to our level of slavery to those who control information.
God. I thought that said "the university of Windows" at first.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
From the way this sounds, this guy wants to design Longhorn's UI, not compete with it.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I couldn't get to the NYT article, but I think I have a reasonable idea what it's about based on the excerpts I've read in various /. comments.
My understanding is that Gelernter had devised some kind of spiffy interface, sort of a post-GUI thingie, which might be cool in and of itself, except that Proffessor G. goes on to make utterly absurd claims about op systems being irrelevant.
Point One: when developing any kind of spiffy innovation (such as, to plug one of my own ideas, a Voice/Hand Motion Interface), the quality of the development environment is itself a crucial issue. Maybe some people like Visual Studio better than development facilities on the Mac or on Linux, but the issue is definately NOT "irrelevant."
Point Two: A truly innovative, order of magnitude better, ordinary-user oriented interface could easily have "killer ap" or "tipping point" type effects. Thus, if first implemented on a non-MS op system, it could be the lance that knocks Bill Gates off his horse.
----------
Manifesto for the Peoples of the Third Millennium
Linux (and Unix) is invisible to the user. My users don't even know Unix exists. They run "Southware", a Unix application. You can do the same.
This is why Netscape had to be crushed -- they wanted to make the browser the platform.
This is why Java had to be crushed -- they wanted to implement "write-once-run-anywhere". (There is a whole career-field of experts dedicated to figuring out why a HARDWARE VENDOR like Sun would push this, but that's a different post
That sounds an awful lot like what this guy is trying to do. Had either one of these companies succeeded, or been more open in their approach, they would have made the OS irrelevant.
I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that the Be OS idea was right... store everything in a database, potentially allowing any number of front-ends. Let's separate data from the display layer, and let people run their "Windows skin" or "Unix skin". Why not?
Unix is not a "skin". I'm not going to buy a P4 to run a Unix shell on top of a bloated OS so that the Windows idiots can have a dumbed-down "gooey" interface.
I'd like to see an ANSI standard Operating System. Hmm...
I would too. I wouldn't like it to be Windows.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I second the parent post. One really neat thing about the Canon Cat was that you type in the word processor:
5
6
highlight them and (I think) hit the 'add' key and on the next line you would get the number
11
No "Calculator" application necessary. If you were a 1337 Cat user, you'd type in something like "forth", highlight it, hit some weird key, and you'd have access to the forth interpreter. The Cat software was written in Forth, so it kind of makes sense when you think about it. From what I've heard (never tried it myself), you could type forth commands into the word processor and execute them.
The entire state of Cat memory (as mentioned by the poster) was stored on a floppy disk. You'd put the floppy in the Cat, turn it on, and it would boot in less than 10 seconds. During the bootup, you would actually see a screenshot bitmap of the last state of the computer before it was turned off. You'd turn the damn thing on and immediately you'd see the bitmap of what you were last working on (as opposed to the splashscreens/diagnostic messages of today's os'es), and in 7-8 seconds you could start working. Sort of like Xsession except it doesn't suck.
Jef Raskin has started an open source project that aims to take the best ideas of the Cat and re-write them in python for a variety of platforms. You can find out more about this project at Jef's Humane Environment Sourceforge page.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
You tried to write a book called "Java Programming for Windows"?
That's the strangest thing I've heard all day.
Microsoft is WAY too smart to hire this joker :)
But to respond to your comment, the Chinese and Soviet-era Russian people were never our enemies. However, the vast majority of them have absolutely no say in the conduct of their governments. Only a small handful of ruling elites control all the power.
Besides, the Chinese government is largely switching to Linux. It's been covered several times before on
I'm EXTREMELY allergic to the spores of the fungus that eats old dry paper and bookbinder's paste. In my case, your argument sounds like "there's almost no smell as comforting to the soul as the smell of an impending asthma attack."
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
This sounds like Google and their Page Ranking for search results.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Well, is it, really? It looks to me like the Scopeware product basically is bolted onto Windows and Office and uses the same computing and user interaction paradigms. It's the same kind of incrementalism people have been trying for the past 20 years. Scopeware doesn't address the problems that make computers hard to use.
Is Linux any better? Out of the box, it isn't. Gtk+ and KDE emulate Windows and Macintosh interaction styles nearly perfectly (they do clean up some messes in the process, but not much).
But the difference between Windows and Linux is that with Linux, the kernel and graphics can indeed be relegated to the moldy basement. The open source nature and the fact that there is no single company that controls it mean that I can pick apart Linux the way I want to and put it back together again. With Windows, the moldy smell gets all the way into the living room: Microsoft decides the interaction paradigms, toolkits, document formats, and other standards you are going to use, based on their economic interests only, and they are charging a premium for that.
Gelernter is fooling himself if he thinks there will ever be a "universal platform". Central planning seems like a nifty idea and works for a few years, but as the Soviet Union and other communist nations discovered, it breaks down. Innovation and software, like life, thrives on variation and diversity.
Emacs.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Lifestreams orders information by date - imagine that you remember writing a memo just before Easter vacation this year. Then, you would scan documents created around that time period, and hopefully find it in a few seconds
If I really want to, I can already do that. Sure it's not as easy, but that's not how I normally find things anyway. It's much more likely that I'll want a document about taxes, filed under a tax directory, or a personal letter, filed under somthing similarly appropriate.
That's generally how it works in the off line world as well; we sort things, compartmentalize them, etc. I look for food in the pantry; I don't just sniff and walk around. Searching is a great backup, but it makes a silly primary mechanism.
...and about the fact that code is law.
The distinction between browsers and OSes is pointless, technologically speaking? Do you have any idea what you're talking about? The key to stable, maintainable code is enforcing layers (especially in this kind of case). Bundling is fine, but integrating was a technological solution to a marketing problem not a user's problem. It was needed for world domination, nothing else.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
I'm using Scopeware Vision Beta 1 right now. It's total crap. The interface looks thrown together and amateurish, and the 'Vision Activity Console' (whatever that means) is sitting here practically hung while it is 'Waiting to Index' my files. It's been like this for fifteen minutes.
w00t. I can feel the Information Superhighway blowing my hair back. What a crock.
It sounds as if someone stumbled across one or two mildly interesting ways of sorting through W2K/WXP's Indexing Service, threw some college-level 3D graphics at it, then used so many buzzwords to get himself into the New York Times that it would make a Microsoft salesman blush.
And just what the hell is a "3D document" anyway? Even RL documents are 2D, more or less. What does a business letter gain from a fancy-assed display paradigm?
To make the point less crudely: Gelertner must never have worked in an office. The "Steelcase" model for filing he denigrates was invented for a reason: it's a very efficient way of organizing information. Likewise the "Rolodex" model for organizing contacts. As another poster pointed out, these are fundamentally different kinds of information that cannot be efficiently organized in the same way, and therefore it doesn't do us much good to try. I assure you that every office in the world that has a Rolodex also stored documents in filing cabinets, and could just have easily put their contact information into a cabinet as well. Why didn't they? Because it's less useful and less accessible there!
Information on comupters was organized following these models because they're what people are used to and because they work. This is not to say that some new schemes might someday come along to replace them; they certainly will. But I'd be willing to bet they'll not call for mashing everything together into a "stream" comprising a "story"! I already know my story. But I still want that address.
And never mind is pro-Microsoft drumbeating. Did he just get a humongous grant from them or something?
And the brethren went away edified.
IBM had a handwriting enabled DOS called PenDOS which ran on this machine too, I think, but I've never seen it.
Go was the company that made software for that HP PDA, wasn't it? I remember that. It was around the same time as the 100lx, 200lx etc. and those were more popular.
Then there's the Newton. Wasn't "digital ink" invented there? As far as I know the Newton had no real faults, it was just too expensive, and that bastard Jobs killed it before the economies of scale could make it cheap enough like Palms. I sure never managed to get one when they were hip, but I could probably afford it now that they are getting cheap on ebay, and see what all the fuss is about.
And most of today's PDAs use a form of pen computing. Just that using a Grafitti pad is much more restrictive than in-place handwriting recognition, or being able to choose to keep and show it in "digital ink" form rather than in styled text.
You can find a lot of old pen-based Windows systems on ebay, such as the Dauphins, the Concerto, the IBM 730T (I have one of those too), the GRiD machines (such as the 2260 and 2270 - I have some of those too) etc.
Anyway the point is Pen Computing is not new, nor is it vaporware; but I find that it's awkward - I'd much rather type than write. I hated writing so much in school that being a geek is such an escape for me... I don't use pens much anymore for the most part. Using a pen with a computer, for text input, is the last thing I want, especially as many mistakes as handwriting recognition usually entails. But using it for drawing is the intriguing part, I think. Software which combines that with a more efficient way to enter text will be very cool, but I don't think we have found the right combination of ideas yet. Most likely this new Tablet PC movement is just another round of the same old thing, improved and better integrated (like using digital ink everywhere, not just in a standalone Microsoft Notebook application), but still using a pen for input is not ideal for all situations and never will be. If it's to be portable for quick-and-dirty everyday small stuff, a Newton has a better form factor; and for real work, I cannot do without a keyboard until something equally efficient is invented, and handwriting ain't it.
I don't think you can completely achieve his vision as just a pretty face on top of a conventional OS. (Oddly he seems to think he can...) You need something to replace the filesystem.
As a start, imagine ReiserFS could be accessed in multiple ways with multiple "views". One view is hierarchical, one is chronological. The chronological view can show you every file, recursively and without regard for folder structure, in order of last modification. Now that would be useful wouldn't it? It's practically a log of what things you did in what order, and requires no separate information store to achieve... the required metadata is already there in a conventional filesystem. You could achieve it with "find" plus some kind of sort-by-date, but that wouldn't be efficient; better to have a by-date index built into the filesystem, and new system calls to acccess it.
But that's just one example. Such a filesystem still doesn't have built-in version control, like say VMS, or like Xanadu. Nor does it have relational features like BeOS or the AS/400, nor a resource fork like the old MacOS filesystem. (But maybe those could be alternate views, if a filesystem can have "n" views of different kinds with different possible operations in each.) And the usual paradigm in most OSes assumes that the hierarchy of directories is the bottom-level, barebones, required way of organizing everything. If you want a relational database, you can do it but the whole thing will consist of files on top of the filesystem. An object database can be built but it will be stored in one or more files too. Organizing MP3s is so hard that most jukeboxes use relational databases to keep track of the metadata that isn't in the MP3s themselves, or that is too slow to search by reading the ID tags on each file one by one. This all seems pathetic to me; and it's so arbitrary that hierarchy should be king. Why are humans so comfortable with needing a tree, that they can't think of other ways as being equally valid rather than afterthought add-ons? And really, I think chronological organization should definitely be right up there with hierarchy, and you need a way to do intersections: find me the objects which were modified during this time period, in this folder and its descendants, which have relationships with such-and-such person or project, or something like that. If such methods of finding things were sufficiently efficient and powerful, maybe we wouldn't need the plain old tree at all anymore. It's just hard to come up with an alternative solution which fits all situations. Perhaps Xanadu comes closest to being universal but it's still mostly vaporware, and its chronological organization abilities also need improvement.
Here is the only question that matters to me:
How does a lousy startup company dreaming of being the next Microsoft of Bullshit software gets to publish such blatant advertising in the NYT, disguised as an "essay". Can the NYT editors be bribed or is it just personnal connections ?
Has anyone seen Sony's visual flow?
this seems simialr but with indexing and not as a refined interface.
Long posts everywhere, mostly dissing this guys choice of words/misquotation.
Nowadays, the layering is thus:
hardware->OS+applications.
His revolutionary idea is that he wants to add a layer:
hardware->OS->"infosphere"+applications.
He just wants to add a layer of abstraction, like the HAL, only now for the information your OS works with. So instead of applications working on the filesystem, they'd work on the information contained therein.
It's a very powerfull idea. So powerfull that I'll make this prediction: the next multibillion dollar company will be one which develops this idea. Much as MS grew out of it's OS, the next MS is going to grow out of the infosphere/datasphere (or however you want to call that collection of information which a brain can instantly access, but is cumbersome on a computer).
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Our computers are:
- deaf (except using very specific software for very specific purposes,)
- dumb (text-to-speech still sucks bad enough to be funny and instantly recognizable when we hear it,)
- blind, (the good shit with image interpretation and understanding is still way classified,)
- flat (we scroll a mouse icon on phosphor and fool ourselves into thinking that its pointing at something. Ask a kid to point at a leaf on a tree and you'll see some real-time, real-world pointing,)
- stupid,
- spoofable,
- trusting to levels approaching imbecility.
And this bozo thinks, ah never mind. He wouldn't see the point.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Where does it take me? To URL not found.
OK, I've had enough. This fellow might develop some interesting replacement for Clippy, but it looks like hype hype hype from 1992 thus far. Dave's paranoia would do him some good when dealing with M$.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Most bungholes have things fall out not in.
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.
OK, now this is starting to smell like something that fell out of a bunghole. You did read the article, right? Did you miss the silly part about how the author thinks Windows is a good enough platform to run his program? I didn't.
The whole article looked like hype for M$. From the opening line celebrating Microsoft getting away with it's predatory practices to last line where he claims that Longhorn and his program will make all current software look like 5,000 year old mould. Yeah, right.
If he really does have a useful idea, it's a shame he is devoting his energies toward a closed OS owned by a company that has screwed every other software maker in the world. You would think that people would know better by now. Must be something about cutting through the fog of the bunghole of history. Yeah, that's it, that's the vapor, Bunghole fog.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
'Universal Metaphor' - it doesn't sound like X. It's deeper than that.
It sounds like Esperanto... and we know where that ended up: a movie starring William Shatner yelling in pig latin. (And I don't mean Star Trek: The Motion Picture).
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Lifestreams which I tried a few years ago was extremely interesting although pretty darn slow, it organized docs in windows and seemed to be a java based daemon which you could access through the web. It appears that was the beginning of Scopeware. You can see an article he did in Wired magazine in 1997 here.
Too bad 98% of the posts on Slashdot are so idiotic and conceited. Think about it. The most hyped company for UI on linux fails, the most celebrated UI ideas in Linux are motif, Windows look-alikes and "themes" (spare me), and a guy who has some of the most interesting ideas, plus experience, plus working code, plus what seems like a real strategy or something, gets clobbered.
How many posters actually tried the code before reacting and saying how full of shit he is etc., or is everyone so sure they would do better in an NYT interview? I'm going to install this thing, though I might have to buy a hard disk first..
Anyway consider this little fact. BeOS had some fantastic search capabilities with its queries (automatically updated search results running fast, in real time) but they are toast (well I hope the technology is revived, I need it). Unless you maybe have google for intranet or altavista on your machine, you don't have as usable a search facility probably. Windows searching is terribly slow and dumb. And most of my own efforts and disk space is always spent trying to ensure the longevity of work and files across multiple computer systems, across years of evolving systems.
This guy has a point and even if it isn't the be all and end all we need to help him and other scientists try and solve the problems before Microsoft does. I am no M$ fan but didn't you notice Windows looks nicer than it used to? My hope is Apple liscenses something like Scopeware and this sort of idea sees a lot of work and home desktops. I hope he gets rich!
You're confusing three (at least) different things. The nondocumentation of security fixes has to do with the DMCA, which behemoth I'm not even going to get into. Nor was I talking about the encryption export controls.
What I was talking about was the implications of the general US economic embargoes against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria, and Libya. Even with the relaxation of encryption regulations, you still need to watch what gets sent to those countries.
Now, I hate to spoil a good session of "you're wrong" / "No, you're wrong" with actual references, but here goes:
In the general export FAQ there's a question about whether certain embargoes (against Iran, Syria, and the Sudan) have been lifted. (Short answer: they haven't been)
In the Encryption export FAQ, several questions specifically mention how you're allowed to export encryption under various conditions unless it's going to one of those countries I named above.
Now, to show that my speculation about "reason to believe that a piece of software was going to Iran" bit in my initial post wasn't baseless paranoia, here's a quote from an informational memo from the Office of Foreign Assets Control about exports to Iran:
In general, a person may not export from the U.S. any goods,
technology or services, if that person knows or has reason to know
such items are intended specifically for supply, transshipment or
reexportation to Iran. Further, such exportation is prohibited if
the exporter knows or has reason to know the U.S. items are
intended specifically for use in the production of, for commingling
with, or for incorporation into goods, technology or services to be
directly or indirectly supplied, transshipped or reexported
exclusively or predominately to Iran or the Government of Iran.
Now, that entire document does seem to apply very specifically to people actually in Iran or agents of the Iranian government, so I'd presumably be off the hook in the scenario I initially considered. However, what happens when someone inside Iran submits a bug report?
The next time you are installing some piece of commercial software that comes with a big old lawyerese EULA, search it for references to these countries. I seem to remember that Netscape's old license even made it illegal for any citizen of these countries to ever install or use their software.
No, it is you that is the moron.
A modern OS with all of the necessary features you mention (sans GUI) can run on an 8086 with 1M of RAM. A user desktop including X and bloatware like Netscape can easily fit onto a 486 with 32M. If you have no interest or need for this weeks excuse for a faster consumer PC, the overhead of the operating system is actually quite miniscule.
Computational servers don't need the eye candy that seems to fascinate amateur hobbyists such as yourself. Take that away and there's really not that much left in the OS to get in the way of applications.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Canada SUV because of the snow
You don't need an SUV, you just need good snow tires and to know how to drive. People around where I've lived drive F150s just as much as Geo Metros as far as weather's concerned.
On the other hand, you don't want to get a convertable because of the cold (unless you're in BC), or a sports car because of the low clearance (after a fresh snow you end up like a snowplow, then you end up with a snowbank on your hood; again, unless in BC).
--Dan
...but efficiency and clarity, rather. If you're going to spout on about a better way to view and access information, you better practice what you preach.