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The Role of the Operating System In the Future
liteswap writes "Linux geeks love Linux and Windows mavens won't quit Microsoft -- but will we really care that much whether a machine is running Linux or Windows in future?
As Sun announces Solaris support for Red Hat Linux applications, the need to specify the OS for a particular application will fade away, and the application and the x86 platform become the critical things -- at least that's what this Techworld feature argues..." Maybe a long time from now this will happen - but I don't see it happening RSN.
The only development software that has come close to giving us platform independence are interpretative languages like Perl and Java, but that promise is still elusive. Java still seems to have stalled, and with projects like Mono, it almost seems like Microsoft may ultimately, though possibly unwillingly, get the upper hand.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've heard about Solaris to Linux ABI for years. I dug this up from 2 years ago: http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/support _for_x86.html.
So is this something new or something that now works now that the Linux ABI has stabilized? Or is this easier now that Sun is shipping x86 systems or what?
Inquiring geeks want to know the point of running Linux apps on their Sun boxes.
The next step, I believe, is creating a more realistic "standard" emulation structure for software.
Like Java? It's standard, it's cross platform, and it's already in widespread use. Plus performance has already been tuned to extremes, not to mention the sheer number of Desktop and non-desktop libraries available for it. Thanks to its popularity, you can use Swing, SWT, wxWindows, GTK, QT, or any of your other favorite crossplatform front-ends for your Java apps.
Now that processors are incredibly fast, we're likely to see little performance increases in the tasks that 90% of the world uses PCs for:
Unfortunately, this is a falsifyable statement. As much as we'd like emulation to keep pace with technology, even the fastest processors today have a hard time emulating something as "simple" as a 286 or 386 from days gone by. This has been extremely frustrating for those of us who remember old games but can't get enough performance to actually make them work well. Research is still underway, but don't expect miracles from emulation technology. The really fast stuff (e.g. VMWare) actually only virtualizes the hardware, but lets the instruction set run on the real processor.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
For the those clueless people, like myself, RSN does not stand for the "Royal Singapore Navy" or the Religious Science of Nashville but for "Real, Soon now" which to the initiate could alternately mean "Real Soon, Possibly Never".
I guess you need to be a science fiction fanzine fanboy or a regular reader of "Chaos Manor" to know this. Tribal Knowledge...
Look at the as/400 (now iseries) platform - granted it is not really a common dektop OS but it runs a really nice HAL on top of the hardware and have been through 3 (4?) major hardware platform updates without needing to do anyting than move your apps to your new shiny 64-bit power5, and it automagicly runs everything as it did before before...
Thats exactly what Inferno (a plan 9 derived OS) does already.
Limbo code is compiled into architecture independent byte code which is then interpreted (or compiled on the fly) on the target processor. This means that any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms.
failed? how so, it's everywhere, from browsers to enterprise multi-tier architectures. sales of java-based application server infrastructure (weblogic, websphere, etc.) is growing at triple-digit rates each year. Of course, it's not the single one world standard Sun hoped for, but its sure not dying or stagnating. Sure, in the small and mid range scripting langauges are popular as a simpler way to get stuff done, and I hope that new virtual machines for these langauges in the future pose a real threat to java/j2ee. What else is there, CORBA (stagnating and dying for sure)? dot-net ?
You are wrong. While basic console applications may run with little or no modification on one or the other (those same applications, incidentally, should run fine on Windows, either using MS's Services for Unix or Cygwin--NT has POSIX-standard syscalls, I believe) but anything more complex (threads, GUI applications, etc) may not.
Namely, a lot of obscure syscalls on Solaris, BSD, and Linux are OS-specific and incompatible, and at least OSX uses an entirely different (and almost entirely incompatible) GUI (Cocoa applications can perhaps be ported to OpenSTEP, but they're hardly "happily" shared to those other OSes) as well as a number of other OS-specific libraries (CoreData, CoreVideo, CoreAudio...). Essentially, OSX-native code will not run on Linux or BSD any more than Windows-native code will.
Read ALL of the first page of links
http://www.google.com/search?&q=what+is+the+diffe
please.
Java has nothing to do with JavaScript ant the J in AJAX is JavaScript
--meh--
The Jargon File explains many of these terms, has some interesting notes on hacker culture, and is sometimes plain funny.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Yes, Java-the-platform is in a way its own OS, but on the other hand, Java sits on top of whatever native OS. How about thinking about it this way: I don't have to clean format my hard disk and get all new apps if I install Java. Java may be its own API on top of an OS, but not only is it not tied to a particular native OS, it doesn't whine, fret, or threaten if it is not your exclusive API, and it plays with the other kids.
I can have Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, and even Mono coexisting in the same partition on top of the same OS. They can interoperate through files. While this is not always politically correct from SUN's way of thinking, I can also interoperate Java and C++ in both direction (Java calls C++ or C++ calls Java) using the JNI. I can interoperate Python and C/C++ and on Windows I have Python hosting ActiveX controls to do visuals which in turn can call Java signal processing plug-ins -- it is sort of like the Far Side Cartoon of the cops who find a man swallowed by a crocodile in turn being squeezed by a boa (perhaps a python?) and are required to sort that mess out.
While there is a thing such as "Internet time", I think there is a 10-year rule in effect for the maturation of major pieces of software. From the time of Windows introduction in the mid 1980's to the time of Windows 95, COM, and ActiveX, when Windows acquired the features that made it what it is today was about 10 years. Java is around its 10th anniversary in 2005. Maybe Java/Swing has acquired enough features and enough performance enhancements to be taken really seriously.
JCP isn't a standard. It's merely a consortium.
.Net! Wow! That's freedom man!
I'm sorry, what are most Standards Committees again? Someone had better tell the "World Wide Web Consortium" that they're no longer allowed to dictate standards. And we'd better revoke all those Internic RFCs. Ooo, not to mention Unicode. Disbanding that Consortium is gonna hurt.
But none of those are the almighty ISO, are they? So, we had better change the following paragraph on Wikipedia, before someone gets the (correct) idea that ISO acts as a Consortium in practice:
While the ISO defines itself as a non-governmental organization, its ability to set standards which often become law through treaties or national standards makes it more powerful than most NGOs, and in practice it acts as a consortium with strong links to governments. Participants include one standards body from each member country and major corporations.
As for your calling Mono a "minimalist" implementation, that's bullshit. With the exception of the Windows/MS specific libraries
Oh, so it's not minimalist, it just doesn't implement important APIs.
Did I mention that ALL of the Java APIs are part of the standard? Every one. Nothing left to chance. All of them. Swing, Collections, JSF, Servlets, J2EE, AWT, RMI, CORBA, XML, etc, etc, etc. All of them. Period, end of story. There are no "except"s in the Java standardization.
They own the ".NET" trademark of course, but to build a "CLR implementation" and call it whatever you want is perfectly safe, forever.
Whoo hoo! Sound the trumpets! I can build something that's only partly compatible with the most popular implementation, and never be able to call it
Give it up. Microsoft duped you, and duped many others. They're leading your around by the nose while they get to define the real standard. As I said, at least the JCP can be entered by anyone who wants to make a difference.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade