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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.
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
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
The OS isn't dead per se, but, like he said, irrelevant. Ask the average Joe what OS they run. First off, they won't know what OS means. Then, if you ask 'em what kind of Windows they have, most of 'em still won't know. People have long since using computers for the sake of the OS (well, except for OSS zealots). His point is to slap some real useable software on top of any OS and live there, not at the OS level with files, folders, permissions, etc.
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
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.
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?"
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
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
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
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
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.
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
...and now everything looks like a nail. And the things that can't be made to look like nails he sees as unimportant.
It's a common enough malady among geniuses that have been too long surrounded by people telling them how smart they are.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
I knew this sounded familiar, so I did a search for his name on Slashdot. Yup.
Here's a similar article from December 2001.
And another from July 2000.
And I predict another one will be posted in October 2003.
Thank you.
"And like that
Maybe he is being very idealistic. Maybe he is being unrealistic. Maybe this thing will flop and fall into the bunghole of history.
/.) Microsoft squashed a concept for almost a decade. Maybe the hardware wasn't advanced enough yet, maybe it would have been a Newton. But maybe it would have been a Palm. Now we'll never know. What other innovations are we missing until Microsoft deems it 'time'?
But it's still good that he's doing it.
Someone has to question how things can be made better. Perhaps the worst thing about Microsoft is that the Windows desktop has pretty much stopped that questioning. This works in two ways, by Microsoft deliberately squashing competition and by people getting too comfortable inside the MS box. (including GNOME and KDE)
Nor is it an adequate argument that the Windows interface (even as embodied by GNOME and KDE alternatives) is "good enough" just like the steering wheels and clutch/brake/gas pedals of a car.
Back in the early-mid 90's there was a company trying to introduce Pen Computing - flat screens operated by a stylus. (I think the company may have been Go, but I'm not sure.) They were put under by a piece of vaporware called, "Pen for Windows" that never materialized, at least not until that Microsoft Innovation in the past month of Tablet-XP. (or whatever it was reported as on
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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"
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.