Slashdot Mirror
Windows, Linux 25 Year Old "Clunkers"?
Phil817 writes to tell us that Bob Metcalfe recently gave a TV interview in which he stated that current operating systems (Windows and Linux) are outdated clunkers that wont be able to adequately handle the coming of "video internet" and suggests that new operating systems need to be developed to take hold in a few years. Also, when asked if current deals in the works like eBay's purchase of Skype were an indication of more investment hype he replied with "I'm looking forward to the next Internet bubble. I don't know what everyone's so negative about. The last bubble was lots of fun.". Let us at least hope we learned a few things from the last bubble.
To say that the post was lacking substance would be an understatement.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
"The last bubble was lots of fun"
tell that to the people that have lost their jobs.
This sig contains repetition and redundancy.
Apart from the "no link" stuff, I don't see what the fuss is all about. An OS is an OS, its role is to provide user applications with an access to the underlying hardware.
In that sense, I don't see anywhere that Linux/Windows/*BSD/whatever will not be up to the task.
Video internet, whatever that is, is bandwidth limited. The OS of the systems on each end of the cable makes virtually no difference to the deliverable bandwidth.
What does this guy know? If you want an OS to stream video, then what does it better than a *BSD? If you want to watch streaming video then surely that is an application issue?
I'd rather serve or recieve anything using an OS with 20 years debugging than an untried untested product of an Internet bubble.
However, if anyone wants to buy shares in my new dot-com, then email me at "mailto:investments@pop.rip-off.scam"
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Weird, Windows and Linux seem to handle pretty much any task I need handled. Not bad for a couple of clunkers.
Who knows? Maybe he's right. Personally, I think the concept of television networks is a clunker of an idea waaay past its time. I suggest that in this age of the Internet, we should all be watching on-demand content provided directly by the content makers that's financed by micropayments paid by the consumers, and we receive our "signal" via high-speed Internet connections to the content providers.
Boy, it sure is easy for me to sit back and say that. But where the rubber meets the road—actually making these brave new ideas come to pass... Well, that's the challenge, isn't it? Until someone can cough up the resources to invest into creating, distributing, and marketing BobOS and my IP television studios, I guess we'll just have to keep talking about how nice it would be, and make the best of the clunkers that I suppose are working well enough for now.
But seriously, if you want to invest in my IP television studio, let me know...
There really should be a threshold to what kind of articles one could see, like there is for replies.
So here we have yet another article about somebody's narrowminded concept of what the future is going to be like. Who bloody cares about 'video internet'? Yes, the big Hollywood factories that produce entertainment on assembly lines are keen to have all that on the internet so they can roll out their anal-retentive DRM and pay=per-view schemes, and that's all. We on the consumer side will get no real benefits from this 'video internet', on the contrary.
No Sympathy here. Whoever buys into a scheme that is supposed to double/tripe/quadruple their money overnight deserves the "Experience" they get. Playing the stock market is like every other form of gambling: The house always wins. You lose.
And by the way: this wonderful "Video Internet" Mr. Metcalfe is fantasizing about ... Who needs it? the consumers? Or could it be ... Who else would be interested in a broad roll-out of DRM-locked viewers?
Expect a flurry of new, draconian laws protecting "Content Ownership" to be written and enacted during the boom phase. And we'll be stuck with these laws, even after this particular bubble bursts.
I think we should be allowed to mod the stories as well as the comments. This way we could get rid of both the dupes and the trolls like the current story.
It's hard to take seriously a sob story involving stock options and Hummers. Anyone who makes a few bucks and decides that the first thing they need is a military vehicle for the commute to work can go fuck themselves.
Innovation in operating systems is pretty much at a standstill outside the academic environment. Current operating systems cannot leverage parralelism very well for anything but hyper-specialized applications. Current operating systems have user environments that are crummy at managing massive amounts of data crammed into cavernous storage systems. Current operating systems are rotten at deploying your data across networked devices like cell phones and MP3 players and DVRs without a crapload of work.
You going into marketing? You seem to have the lingo down. That being said, you freaking don't know what you are talking about. Windows and Linux are both multi-threaded operating systems. My copy of Windows XP 'leverages' paralellism just fine, as my CPU is dual core. The OS gets both CPUs working, all the time. You want to see some real improvements, talk to the application coders and try to get them to 'leverage paralellism' in their applications by making them multi-threaded.
There are acres of room for improvement, but the current paradigms aren't keeping up. Part of the problem is the PC architecture... it's not well suited for anything but a workstation or server, and even then, it's not all that well suited. It's shackling the industry to a very limiting hardware model, trading innovation in effciency and effectiveness for better benchmarks at the same old stuff.
What the hell are you talking about? Care to offer some specifics? "it's not well suited for anything but a workstation or server, and even then, it's not all that well suited" - what exactly does that little gem mean? My latest motherboard has an extremely high bandwidth I/O architecture, built in from the ground up. I have memory bandwidth that was unheard of just 3 years ago. The damned thing burns through just about every task I throw at it.
Someone's going to need to design and market a new platform... OS and Hardware, that manages your data better with less effort across more devices, before we can get things moving again.
Wait, I thought the problem was with the PC architecture - now it's data management? Moving data between various devices is the job of applications. If the applications aren't written to interoperate and share data intelligently, there's nothing the OS can do to fix that.