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.

Comments

Standard emulation/abstraction platform?

[dada21]

I've been contemplating the OS situation for years (ever since I first tried to run a multinode BBS under DOS' DesqView) and only recently has a possible endgame become visible to me: emulation.

Software needs an OS layer, the OS layer needs an abstraction layer to hardware, and the hardware needs a communication layer to all the various mechanisms (drivers, BIOS, interface protocols, whatever). It isn't just a simple 16-bit .SYS driver like we had in the DOS days that basically handled everything.

We've seen so many emulators (Macs running Windows emulators running Mac emulators) on so many platforms, but what has allowed so many to come to the market in such a short period of time? Processor speed, I'd say.

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: displaying text on a screen, inputting text into a form, and sending that text to a printer. Sure, Vista will incorporate a new video structure and 3D-gaming and heavy-use databases will always need faster processors, but MOST users are still just text viewers.

The next step, I believe, is creating a more realistic "standard" emulation structure for software. I think the F/OSS market is awesome because you can generally cross-compile a lot of code on various operating systems, but they still need modifications to the specifics of the OS or the hardware you're running on. What I really think will be the next big thing will be a TRUE hardware abstraction layer in the OSes (H.A.L.I.T.O.S.es?). Is it possible? I'm not sure, but it makes me wonder.

Why do people bust their asses constantly updating WINE when the OSS community can work towards a more amazing result: a standardized implementation structure that lets you write software once, and have it run on any OS that has a HAL to translate that implementation structure to what the hardware requires.

I know -- that's what the OS is supposed to do, but it fails. Yet do MOST applications really need the extreme features we have in customization (different video cards, hard drive controllers, network interfaces, etc)? Or would MOST applications run just fine (on high end processors) if they can say "Write pixel at X,Y" or "send data chunk to IP address" or "Write this data to this store" etc?

Maybe I'm talking out of my ass (I haven't programmed anything significant since MajorBBS mods in C over 15 years ago), but it seems like that is where software has to head. A completely transparent "mini-OS" that offers all software written for it a very standard set of instructions for the most popular functions. You're not going to write 3D games in it, but that's not the target market. 3D games will always push the envelope and come BEFORE the hardware can handle it. We're talking about basic implementation of basic software, yet it is this basic software that we waste billions of man-hours of labor on trying to get working on various OSes and hardware combos.

Now that I think about it, wasn't NT supposed to be the magic system? What exactly happened there? (Don't just say "Microsoft.")

Re:Standard emulation/abstraction platform?

[MightyMartian]

You are right that the speed of processors has changed things. With fast processors emulating hardware in a reasonably responsive fashion becomes possible. I view emulation, however, to be to platform indpendence as NAT is IPv4 address exhaustion. They both paper over the fundemental problem rather than dealing with it.

Re:Standard emulation/abstraction platform?

[AKAImBatman]

Can you find a Java standard anywhere? A JVM standard?

Yes indeedy, do. Mr. PsychicX, I would like to introduce you to the Java Community Process, a full up standards committee encompassing pretty much all the major technology companies in the industry. Java and its extensions all go through this process before being considered final.

Whether you as a developer want to acknowledge the JCP or not is irrelevant. It has been acknowledged by pretty much everyone who does matter, making it a true force in the industry.

Even if you don't like MS, you've gotta admit that from a freedom point of view, .NET beats the crap out of Java.

I admit no such thing. Microsoft has released only the core of the system into the standards committee, and has made no real promise not to enforce patents that would allow them to crush an actual implementation of the .Net system. (As opposed to a "feel good", minimalist implementation that's mostly incompatible with Microsoft's version.)

Under the JCP, ALL APIs in the Java library, ALL bytecode requirements, and ALL Language requirements are published for anyone to implement. The only real power Sun weilds over anyone's head is the ability to deny the use of the "Java" name if they can't live up to the specs.

Sorry dude, but you've been seriously duped.

I think it's pretty damn obvious which runtime system I'm a fan of.

Yes, you're a fan of Microsoft. aka "The Bad Guys". Simply because you fell for a "feel-good" trick of theirs. Nice going.

P.S. Here's the spec for 1.4, the spec for 1.5, and the working group for 1.6. You can join the committee and have your say in the design of 1.6, if you'd like. Now that's a real standard!

Re:Standard emulation/abstraction platform?

[bogado]

I don't feel good about either. I would rather have a true open bytecode, started from 0 open and free (parrot?). Both sun and MS have their ace under their sleeves waiting to played and bot have been some what open and third party implementations friendly, but I don't trut either to keep like that when their system get's the majority of people working with them.

A Nice Dream

[MightyMartian]

The idea of removing the operating system as a major stumbling block to software development and distribution is nearly four decades old. I mean, the whole purpose behind Unix was to create a consistent platform that would make porting easy, and while the various distaff Unix and Unix-like operating systems certainly are more friendly towards porting than the older systems, for complex software it's still a difficult and time-consuming process.

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.

Re:A Nice Dream

[xilmaril]

that's still having an OS. what you're describing is just a future in which the OS truely doesn't matter. of course, if the "browser is the OS", than it's all about what browser you're running instead.

it'll be great.

the Safai users will be elitist snobs with a prettier, more efficient browser-OS.

the internet explorer users will be clueless noobs constantly suffering from viruses, worms, and broken adware.

the firefox users will be... I can't describe them, because I am one, but you get where I'm going with this.

everything would be exactly the same in your future. exactly the same! AAAAGH!

Of course the OS matters

[Gothmolly]

Leaving abstractions aside, of course the choice of Windows or *nix matters. Because of Windows' layout and the way that certain applications are built into it (IE, Windows Help, etc) there are reliability issues that cause many more maintenance-related reboots than on Unix. When was the last time you rebooted a Linux machine because the Help system in KDE needed updating?

Also, there are certain OS-specific things which usually cannot be solved in hardware (assuming you're running on the best you can afford). Need an FS that handles massive sparse files correctly? Maybe that means you need Reiser on Linux, or ZFS on Sun... (I have no idea if this is true). Maybe Windows just CANT do this well, regardless of CPU power. Do you need to hot-swap NICs, CPUs, and add/remove memory and CPU power on the fly? You probably have to go to AIX then. Didn't we just read an article about how Windows takes 5x the number of CPU cycles to start a process?

If you consider the OS tightly coupled to the app, or the app requires specific capabilities from its OS, then app concerns will dictate the OS.

Re:Of course the OS matters

[TheRaven64]

THe article misses something very important. Solaris and Linux are both the same fundamental design, so emulating one with the other is easy. Now throw in something like QNX. Where Linux/Solaris/J Random UNIX is based on a synchronous function call model, QNX is based on an asynchronous message passing model - very different. You can emulate one on the other, but you take a huge performance hit. Now, at the moment most people use the synchonous model, but in the future the asynchronous one is going to be more important for two reasons:

1. It handles latency much better - send a message, do something else for a bit, wait for reply - and so is better in a high-latency (read: network) environment.
2. It scales better. On an n-core system, you are going to be able to have one core for every busy thread you have. You are not going to want to do two context switches every time you do a system call. Instead, you will write some data to a shared memory segment and carry on - signalling the OS if you have run out of things to do. The OS will periodically (or when kicked) read the waiting messages and send them to other processes. On a system that supports SMT you will probably have one OS message-dispatcing thread per core.

Emulating a well designed, scalable, message passing OS on UNIX is a lot more complicated than just providing a different set of system call vectors.

P.S. QNX can run POSIX apps if they are recompiled, but they are much slower than asynchronous apps doing the same thing.

Market

[umbrellasd]

Just because an OS has market share and it is lucrative to port to it, does not mean that it is preferable or enjoyable or even in the long-term best interest of the world to support that OS. What if one of your target OS alternatives is proprietary, controlled by a monopolistic company, and is very expensive to license (nevermind support)?

Yes, I really think it does matter which operating system is used, and it should matter to everyone: developers, purchasers, and--unless they are very short-sighted--end users.

Is this new?

[hackstraw]

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.

Platform independent software

[kevin_conaway]

I think the role of languages that don't rely on a specific platform will become much more important in the future. I write my software in Python and it works wherever Python works (well, not really thanks to GTK+, but its getting there!). As these languages and toolkits mature, I think we'll start to see less of a dependence on the OS

Linux Torvalds on x86

[Teckla]

Right around the time Linus Torvalds announced his employment with Transmeta, he said something to the effect that the world already had a portable byte code, and that byte code was x86.

In the future...

[pmike_bauer]

...will we really care about proof-reading?

...will we really care that much whether a machine is running Linux or Windows in future in future?*

*'in future' repeated for emphasis

Java?

[jbolden]

How is what you are describing not the Java -- bytecode, JVM model?

It'd be great...

[Austerity Empowers]

but the programming world has a serious lack of portability. Programmers refuse to attempt to write portable code, and they cite (with justification) the lack of any libraries which allow them to do so with ease. Microsoft, Apple and Unix have three very different programming APIs, and Microsoft + Apple continue to try to make sure their APIs diverge from each other. MS being the worst...they "invent" a new language all their own and encourage the use of it by mob force.

The nuts and bolts of the world are still in C/C++, and will be for the foreseeable future. C/C++ still lack any standardized support for GUIs and threads. C/C++ are still the most flexible languages (in a non-CS professor approved sort of way).(This is not a "my language is better than yours post")

For a long time we're going to care about our OS because our programs will only run on one certain one, even if we don't really care what OS we use.

Noooo....

[LWATCDR]

"x86 platform become the critical things"
Why? If you are going to abstract the OS why not the ISA?
IBM actually has been doing this for years with the System38/AS400.
The came up with a "prefect" ISA. When a program is installed it is converted to the actual ISA of the machine it is running on. IBM went from a CISC to the Power ISA without a hiccup.
I have wondered why Linux hasn't come up with a similar system. When you install and RPM or some other style of package the system could "translate" from a perfect ISA to the native ISA of the system you are running on.
Sort of like Transmeta did but do it at install instead of runtime.
Think of it as a just at install compiler vs a just at runtime compiler.

RSN - Red Sox Nation?

[truckaxle]

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...

If every application runs on any OS

[jurt1235]

They will most likely suffer all from the same (protocol) bugs, be vulnerable for the same attacks and ultimately be virus compatible. Diversity is good. Lets just have two or three major operating systems in the future, probably running the same applications, but not on exactly the same code base on a nice interactivity layer.

Re:layers...

[damiceious]

Yeah... I think maybe you're wrong. When an OS uses device drivers, it's essentially creating a Hardware Abstraction Layer... and All software, and programming languages are moving towards more abstraction. The idea that a program will run across multiple platforms is a testament to the abstraction of the hardware, and the generic features of the OS (threading, file system, etc). Maybe the point is the UI of the OS is going to become more important, as we run out of features to abstract. Heaven knows we programmers wouldn't mind some things being simplified... (Asynchronous sockets anyone?) Don't get me wrong, I love c++, but the OS is getting abstracted away, and that's okay.

Re:welcome to 1999

[KrispyKringle]

First, Java, while not as successful as Sun hoped (what is?) hardly "failed miserably." Prior to C#, what other options were there for object oriented, garbage collected high level languages? People used C++, which, while in some ways stronger than Java, is hardly comparable. Java (partly) filled a void that, hopefully, C# will fill in an even more convincing way.

Second, machine independent bytecode isn't really the crux of the issue, I don't think. I say this for two reasons; first, x86 is pretty much the standard at this point (I say this from a G4 Powerbook, but with Apple and Sun shipping x86 machines, the desktop, workstation, and much of the server market seems to be going x86); second, any language with cross platform libraries and compilers is "write once, run anywhere;" VMs are only interesting (in the context of compatibility) insofar as they are "compile once, run anywhere."

The OS is already a hardware abstraction layer; it allows you to ignore what kind of I/O devices someone has, what size their disk is, how much RAM they have, and so forth. The technology to write code that works across multiple platforms was realized decades ago, and we use it daily. The only reason we're still talking about this is essentially an economic one--while each OS is an implementation of a standardized hardware abstraction layer, there are simply multiple OSes, which means multiple standards. The obvious solution to this is to be able to a) run multiple standards on one machine (either by running multiple OSes or by an OS that is compatible with, or emulates, the syscalls and libraries of another OS) or b) use a higher level language (like Java) that has its own standard and its own abstraction layer for each OS it is compatible with.

In other words, standardizing platforms is easy; getting people to agree on a given standard is hard. Being compatible with multiple standards is a good bit less hard, and we've been doing that for at least a decade as well.

Hmmm, it certainly suggests something...

[Hosiah]

Let's see, we have Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X, BeOS...all good little operating systems that play nice together...Come to that, I really don't see where there's that much difference between them all that if I went from one to the other, I would experience problems. Correct me if I'm wrong (like I have to ask for THAT on Slashdot!), but won't most of the programs from one run on another, with little to no modification? I know I can use BSD and Unix utilities on Linux with darn near impunity. Do they not all share their toys (source code) and happily borrow from each other?

Then over here, we have the one bad, sulky operating system. Who is this making these horrible noises and faces at everybody else over here in this dark corner? Why, my goodness, it's Microsoft! What's the matter, Softie, don't you want to play nice with the other systems? Oh, I see, you want all the other systems to *DIE* so you can be all by yourself. OK, I guess that's a "no". Well we're going to go on having our little party together and maybe you'll get the hint and just go away...

But I still don't see it real soon, even if MS suddenly does a Grinch and grows it's heart three sizes bigger and decides it's going to play nice after all. Witness the fragmentation even within an OS's community (distro vs distro, desktop vs desktop, editor vs editor), and I don't think you'll get the vi/Gnome/Debian bigot and the Emacs/Fluxbox/Slackware bigot to say "Eeeeeh...what's the difference?" But then again, my crystal ball *is* due for a polishing...

Walk, then run

[LaughingCoder]

It seems to me that, until we can make document file formats (think MSOffice versus OpenDoc) not matter, talking about the whole OS not mattering is a bit premature. We live in a time when we discuss at great length file formats and the future readability of Word documents. Solving *that* problem (any word processor can figure out any other word processor's file format) would appear to be a much simpler problem than abstracting the OS. Walk, then run.

Re:welcome to 1999

[Billly Gates]

I just purchased a nice cs101 book for java 5.0.

Why?

Because my computer science department wants to standardize on java in addition to c++. Why standardize on Java? Because its the most sought after language in business.

Don't believe me? Go to www.monsterboard.com or some job site and look at jobs in your area. Java is the most sought after language with c/c++ second, and perl third.

Java is essential for any big ecommerce servlet. Php is not there yet and neither is c#.net in terms of scalability and maturity.

Java is a success.

OS Matters, and MS is in the lead.

[CDPatten]

The OS matters and MS is making big headway in that front. They are doing it right in the face of all their naysayer's, and the irony is those self-proclaimed geniuses are missing what's happening right in front of their face.

For example, the Apple crew touts being first to market with features like indexed searching as reasons why they will beat MS. All the while MS is quietly getting XP Embedded in ATMs and Cars. MS can ad a search in an update (e.g. Vista), but Apple isn't going to power any BMWs with OSX 10.5, but MS already does with XP Embedded.

MS is diligently working with GE (one of the worlds largest companies, 1st or 2nd place) to advance home automation, and integrate with household appliances. Home automation is the FUTURE of computing, period. MS is working hard to penetrate the Home Media market (media center, Xbox, IPTV, etc.), the phone market, and many other fronts. You can say they won't make it, but they are doing a hell of a job to date. Look at the next generation of television, IPTV. MS is starting to get so far ahead of everyone else it's getting sad. Take some time and watch the demos, they are very impressive. The zealots keep saying it isn't true, but they have been saying this since Windows 95. They were wrong then, and are wrong now. Apple and RedHat don't have any big exclusive deals with Verizon or SBC to power IPTV, but MS does. Those deals are getting fiber brought to everyone's doorstep. IPods are cool, but they are a novelty device and they aren't going to power the home of the future, but at the current rate, MS will.

Phones: Mobile 5 blows the doors off of all business class phones today with the exception of RIM's. With the exchange integration, RIM won't be able to compete... MS phones will support Push with more then a 100,000,000 people overnight. RIM is struggling to top 5,000,000. Linux phones are a nice idea, but they don't offer push, and the ones at present can't hold a candle to Mobile 5. Then there are PDAs. MS has crushed Palm, and Nokia's hail marry is neat, but won't beat Mobile 5.

The bottom line is if you like MS or not, they are growing in many areas that aren't being publicized. The naysayers are a sleep at the wheel. The platform of the future isn't going to come from Google, Sun, and certainly not Apple. MS is getting in at the ground floor of these industries and they have far more money to fight off the others.

The platform matters. I know so many of you are out of your mind pissed at me for writing this. I'm sure some of you will have some wiki-pedia posts to try and make your case, or some blog of an anti-ms zealot. And to you I say; it doesn't matter if you use a Windows computer for surfing the web or not, you aren't going to be escaping MS powered operating systems anytime soon. History will prove me right.

Re:OS Matters, and MS is in the lead.

[CDPatten]

no innovation? Hmm... Maybe you should start to research home automation; quite a large chunk of my little "spiel" was about that. Take a look at what MS and GE are doing with that... no innovation huh? Umm... I don't see linux or osx powering any cars other then some freak project by college students. BMW is a major premium brand using XP. But hey, that's not your kind of innovation. Shadows under desktop icons are.

I have lots to say, but I fear its lost on a zealot like yourself. I'll try to be brief. You are just so blinded with hatred you have started to believe you own rhetoric. The problem is that's all it is, rhetoric. OSX has had 4 paid upgrades to Windows XP. Annual OS upgrades are a nightmare for IT departments, bad for a company's balance sheet, and an irritation for end-users. Each version costs about $150 x 4 = $600. MS XP is $300. If you kept up with Apple, you spent double then going with XP. Never mind all the programs that break with the upgrades.

MS didn't abuse any monopoly power to make Office number one. They didn't abuse or break the law to beat Palm. They didn't abuse anyone to make Server 2k3 grow by leaps and bounds, faster then any other server platform this year. They didn't abuse anyone to sell 20 million Xboxes, and didn't abuse anyone to get a 1 year jump start on the PS3. Xbox Live... no innovation? They have taken online game play to a whole new level. Their IPTV stuff is amazing, and that is why Verizon and SBC were so willing to lock themselves into using it for years... its just light years ahead of all the other platforms. They don't abuse anyone to be ranked almost double Google in web traffic, only behind AOL and Yahoo. Why don't you check out the ground breaking work they do in speech recognition. I could go on, but again it's lost on a zealot.

See the thing is, is that you are so busy saying they suck and are evil they have just passed you by. You are still living in the 90s. They do innovate, often. In fact they spend more money on R&D then Google grosses in a year, more then double actually! They hire some of the greatest minds in the world, and you are stupid enough to think that because they are under the MS name they don't innovate. This is a perfect example of how you are blinded by hate and rhetoric. Maybe just uninformed. Like I said in my first post, you guys think indexed search is incredible innovation (even though MS demoed it working in 2003 longhorn, two OSX versions before they made it to market) you overlook the truly ground breaking innovations and success.

Unfortunately for your side people have heard you, and they don't agree. When you say Windows is horrible they hear you, but think "well it does what I need it to". Your message does get out. The media is almost 95% Apple users; trust me your view gets out. When a user tries Linux they can't get software installed... try Apple and no software is available for what they needed to do. Windows market share is not losing to Linux or Apple despite your rhetoric. And its not because people aren't as smart as YOU!

The cold hard truth is MS is a business. They are no more ruthless then Steve Jobs and Apple or Larry Ellison at Oracle. Your other notion that MS is number one because of good marketing is absurd. Do you really think they are better marketers then Apple? Office isn't number 1 because of those stupid commercials MS runs saying "our potential is their passion". Either you are intellectually dishonest or a complete idiot. For your sake lets just hope you are a delusional liar.

"Maybe soon every home will come with an MS OS installed to control the lights and entertainment center, it will still suck and cause more frustration and problems and basically make the world a worse place to live in and it will partially be because of people like you."

Yes. Everyone is too stupid to know what they want. It only we were all as smart as you are.

What an arrogant ass!

Re:OS Matters, and MS is in the lead.

[idsofmarch]

Your post is really interesting, and there are a few things I'd like to counter. no innovation? Hmm... Maybe you should start to research home automation; quite a large chunk of my little "spiel" was about that. Take a look at what MS and GE are doing with that... no innovation huh? Umm... I don't see linux or osx powering any cars other then some freak project by college students. BMW is a major premium brand using XP. But hey, that's not your kind of innovation. Shadows under desktop icons are. MS and GE are doing a corporate equivalent 'freak project.' Quit being so judgmental; Microsoft itself was once a student project. I see the point you're trying to make, but Windows XP is running the entertainment system, not 'powering' the automobile--that's for embedded systems, some of which run Linux. Shadows under desktop icons can be innovations for human-interface, which is actually really important even if Microsoft treats it like an afterthought. I have lots to say, but I fear its lost on a zealot like yourself. I'll try to be brief. You are just so blinded with hatred you have started to believe you own rhetoric. The problem is that's all it is, rhetoric.... Unfortunately for your side people have heard you, and they don't agree. When you say Windows is horrible they hear you, but think "well it does what I need it to". Your message does get out. The media is almost 95% Apple users; trust me your view gets out. When a user tries Linux they can't get software installed... try Apple and no software is available for what they needed to do. Windows market share is not losing to Linux or Apple despite your rhetoric. And its not because people aren't as smart as YOU! Rhetoric is rhetoric; Microsoft has plenty of paid shills and corporate pushers. Many in the media use Macs, many in the accounting business use Windows. What does this tell us? Not much, what's more interesting is how the virus/spyware/malware stories hit. Was it because the media is a bunch of biased-Mac users or is it because it became such a problem that the media--in their bondi blue towers--didn't notice until later? The idea that the media uses Macs can cut both ways.
Attacks on Windows are a real problem that needs to be solved by Microsoft, and I think many people would prefer they do that rather than jamming Windows Media Player into a BMW. Not that this isn't an interesting development, but many feel that Microsoft should solve problems they had a hand in creating. The desktop monoculture is their fault.
Furthermore, a recent study indicated that one million people switched from Windows to Mac OSX this year alone. It's a drop in the bucket, but between that and Firefox grabbing 10% of the browser market in under a year, we can see that Microsoft is mortal. Dying? No, but they're certainly mortal. OSX has had 4 paid upgrades to Windows XP. Annual OS upgrades are a nightmare for IT departments, bad for a company's balance sheet, and an irritation for end-users. Each version costs about $150 x 4 = $600. MS XP is $300. If you kept up with Apple, you spent double then going with XP. Never mind all the programs that break with the upgrades. OSX's upgrade cycle works on a different paradigm than Windows XP. Each 10.x has constituted a new OS with so many under-the-hood changes as to be equivalent to Windows 2K, Windows XP, etc. And, only in some cases did a 10.x break applications--we won't mention XP SP2, which broke lots of applications as well. But, this I think is tangential to the main thrust of your argument. MS didn't abuse any monopoly power to make Office number one. They didn't abuse or break the law to beat Palm. They didn't abuse anyone to make Server 2k3 grow by leaps and bounds, faster then any other server platform this year. They didn't abuse anyone to sell 20 million Xboxes, and didn't abuse anyone to get a 1 year jump start on the PS3. Xbox Live... no innovation? They have taken online game play to a whole new level. Their IPTV stuff is amazing, and that is why Verizon and SBC were so willing to lock

Re:I don't care what OS I'm running

[cyberscan]

What is wrong with the fifteen yoears old kids in the forum? If they know what they are talking about, their age does not matter. I have helped and have been helped by many 15 years old kids. By the way, I'm 37.

As far as support goes, I guess that you haven't had to call Micro$oft regarding an installation issue. I could not find a telephone number on the Win2k package. I finally found a number in the accompanying booklet. After calling this number (toll call) and waiting about 15 minutes, the only thing I got was a prompt for my credit card number!!! Many distributions of Linux provide better support than that.

Linux handles just about all of the programs that I need in order to do business without all of the seecurity issues. The only program that does not work in WINSAP 2000, but that is because Florida Medicaid will not release the information in order to write a Linux version. As is the case with most U.S. State governments, Florida forces people to run Windows. I guess with wealth comes privileges.

The Jargon File

[RAMMS EIN]

The Jargon File explains many of these terms, has some interesting notes on hacker culture, and is sometimes plain funny.

Re:I don't care what OS I'm running

[killjoe]

You are confusing easy to use with easy to learn. Windows may be easier to learn (debtable really) but it's not easy to use. Once you learn it linux is supremely easy to use. It never gets in your way unlike windows. In linux I can recurse through a mail directory forwarding every single mail meets any arbitratry criterea to my gmail account with one line of typing. I can't even try to attempt that with windows.

As for support I don't know what age the support people who work at MS are but they sure are some of the most useless people on the planet. Whenever you call MS you spend the first three days trying to convince them that you are actually having a problem with one of their products. The fuckers want to blame everything else except their product. Are you having a problem with access? Oh that's because you installed firefox!.

I have always had fantastic support for my linux apps. In the majority of the cases where I needed help I was able to contact the developers themselves. Frequently my problems get solved by IRC in less time then I would have spent on hold while calling MS.

Already happening

[Junks Jerzey]

Slashdot is clearly behind the curve on this one.

Point #1: Embedded devices

Do you know what "OS" is running in your digital camera? Your DVD player? Your MP3 player? Your GPS system? In the majority of cases, the answer is no.

Point #2: Web applications

Google search, Google reader, gmail, Flickr, etc. They look the same to me whether I'm running Linux, Unix, OS X, BSD, etc.

Point #3: Cross platform apps

Python coding and development feels the same on Windows, Linux, and OS X. Makes no difference to me. Ditto for editing with vim. Quite a few other languages and applications are identical, too: Inkscape, The Gimp, etc.

The Utopians Are Out in Force

[Arandir]

This is a pipe dream. The OS will continue to matter as long as there is money to be had by locking customers into a specific platform. As odd as it sounds, many customers WANT to be locked in to a specific vendor.

Platforms will matter because your applications will remain platform specific. The big push in corporations right now is to migrate everything to .NET. Despite the propaganda from Mono, .NET is a Windows-only platform, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Mono is merely the Wine of the .NET world: you'll hear stories about .NET apps that will run on it, but try as you might you can't get any of the ones you need to run under it. What good is a crossplatform backend when the front end GUI is still inextricably tied to one OS?

If major web sites and applications are still coding for specific browsers, my hopes for a cross-platform world where OS doesn't matter are very very slim.