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.

Comments

Wait, who said

[zegebbers]

I couldn't watch video ?

Re:Wait, who said

[bre]

Wow. Nowadays I need a plugin to view ASCII in my browser.

Re:Wait, who said

[xs650]

"I couldn't watch video ?"

That's because you're using a clunker operating system.

Re:Wait, who said

[tigersha]

And for once there will be a woman you can literally read like a book!

Where are the links?

[Werrismys]

To say that the post was lacking substance would be an understatement.

Re:Where are the links?

[CortoMaltese]

To say that the post was lacking substance would be an understatement.

You see, Bob said all this and more in a TV interview, which, according to the interview, can't be viewed because your favourite OS is an outdated clunker that won't be able to adequately handle the coming of "video internet".

Maybe the interview is available for download in a few years when the new video oriented operating systems he mentions have taken hold.

Re:Where are the links?

[Mr. Moose]

Take it easy, hopefully the /. editors will include a link, next time they post the story.

Re:Where are the links?

[Karma Farmer]

Well, just check the "related links" section. That's where the editors put the links related to the story that don't belong in the body text itself. There's plenty for this story:

• Download Apache Geronimo Software
• Compare Prices on Windows Software
• Compare Prices on Linux Software
• Compare Prices
• HP Sponsered Solutions
• IBM Sponsored Solutions

That box is there for a reason. If you study those links, you'll know everything you need to know about this story, including why Slashdot chose to post it.

Re:Where are the links?

[PapaZit]

Maybe the interview is available for download in a few years when the new video oriented operating systems he mentions have taken hold.

Operating systems like... BeOS?

On the OS front, we have a situation where "good" is the enemy of "great". Windows has succeeded because it's good enough and it's a stable, constant platform. For people who care (i.e. many slashdot readers), it's not quite good enough, so they turn to a unix variant. More stable, but less of a consistent platform (Do you write for Linux or Solaris or AIX or NetBSD or...?). Fortunately, the variants are close enough that, so long as you have the source, you can probably port your app (or find somebody else who has already ported the app) to your OS.

There have been (and still are) some really great alternative operating systems out there (AtheOS, Archy, Plan 9, Inferno, 2K... the list goes on and on), but nobody uses 'em because they don't have all of the essential apps. We use applications, not operating systems. The "right" OS is the one that runs the programs that you want to run. Until a killer app comes out that ONLY runs on a Video-based OS, nobody'll switch.

Re:Where are the links?

[morgan_greywolf]

Until a killer app comes out that ONLY runs on a Video-based OS, nobody'll switch. One word: pr0n.

Re:Where are the links?

[Sax Maniac]

Nah, the editors have just realized that since we don't read the linked articles anyway, they can just omit them. After all, we prefer to talk about stuff we don't know about here.

Re:Where are the links?

[prichardson]

Last time I checked, porn didn't require a special OS, or even a computer. Have you forgotten DVDs? Magazines?

Even so, any OS worth anything can play video. It's not hard. There's nothing special about OSes that do.

Re:Where are the links?

[amightywind]

More stable, but less of a consistent platform (Do you write for Linux or Solaris or AIX or NetBSD or...?).

GNU/Autoconf/Automake have provided a great *nix portability solution since the early 1990's. Almost all GNU/Linux packages use it to great effect even on Cywin/Win32 systems. Writing for Windows only nowadays is truly inexplicable.

Re:Where are the links?

[starfishsystems]

Let's think about portability and functionality for a second.

The Unix variants make an attractive development target in part because they deliberately embody many common concepts and interfaces. The effect is not perfect, but it's far and away the best thing going.

Why is this important? Because it takes extra effort to write portable code, you want to target an environment that will minimize that effort and maximize the various benefits, all of which happen to be indirect. You will have to design and implement more abstractly, you will have to test more extensively, and yet the result will be functionally no different than nonportable code.

One superficial benefit to portability is to reach a broader market, but the real benefit that it encourages thoughtful design. That should lead to software which is easier to maintain and extend, and which uses system capabilities very deliberately, not just because some developer wanted to play with them. So I'm arguing that the net effect of writing for Unix is to make your applications at least partially future-proof. If new operating system cababilities were to emerge, your software would be in a good position to exploit them.

That said, all this talk about "video-based OS" seems a bit strange to me. Do people imagine there's some kind of magic required to process video, something that requires a complete architectural rethink? It's just data. Its realtime processing requirements are qualitatively no different than audio, or banking transactions for that matter. It basically depends on having sufficiently fast hardware, and an operating system that can efficiently support realtime events.

This is hardly new ground. Unix lends itself to be extended in this way. The Solaris kernel had realtime scheduling ten years ago. Today you can go out and add realtime video to your Linux system for a hundred bucks. Your current hardware isn't fast enough to do a lot of realtime image processing such as edge detection, but that's not because anything is fundamentally missing from the operating system.

Re:Where are the links?

[MightyMartian]

I'm not even sure what the f*** he's talking about. Unix was developed in the olden days when teletypes and dumb terminals ruled the world, and yet X was developed to run on top of it. Windows and *nix have both adapted to the new ways in which computers are used; embedded systems, graphics workstations, video game systems, and so on, often running variants of long-standing operating systems. What counts is the hardware and a driver/kernel model that makes communication between various parts of the system as efficient as possible. Why would you need to write an entirely new operating system, and what precisely would you put into this operating system that couldn't be found in Windows or *nix?

It really gets on my nerves that some idiot know-it-all who thinks because he can use big words that he must have something meaningful to say will come up with this nonsense. It suggests, underneath it all, a pretty large degree of ignorance of what operating systems do.

I find the lack of hosts to /.

[Polarism]

disturbing...

The coming of "video internet?"

[Phariom]

So...this article is basically stating is that we need to build an entirely new O/S to streamline our viewing of pr0n?

Cool.

I, for one, welcome our new video internet overvixens.

fun?

[LiquidMind]

"The last bubble was lots of fun"

tell that to the people that have lost their jobs.

Re:fun?

[Ceribia]

"tell that to the people that have lost their jobs." Jobs that wouldn't have exsisted with out the bubble. Welcome to the boom bust market.

Re:fun?

[kfg]

No, not the people who lost their jobs, but the people who lost their investments. The people who payed for all the fun the jobs were and got nothing back out of it.

KFG

Re:fun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and my "SUV" can drive through your river.

Useful indeed. Personally, I use the bridges.
And I don't consider my car as my penis extension though.

And Sara McDonald didn't like DOS either

[gtoomey]

Talk about a story with no content.

Re:And Sara McDonald didn't like DOS either

[ceeam]

You just cannot see it because you are using an obsolete OS.

An OS is an OS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:An OS is an OS

[jurt1235]

Out of the list above, Linux & Windows don't do many of those things amazingly well (Although both of them offer async I/O)

That is why you can choose between using different schedulers, creating an OS like real time linux for telephone applications. I don't know if Microsoft altered schedulers in the media centric releases of Windows.
All OSs are still developping the mentioned features. At this moment however systems are fast enough to process current video data faster than realtime. The current OSs I think is also capable of handling HDTV, the limitation for that is in the hardware which just gets to costly.
In the end the names will stay. That the content will be different (Windows HastaLaVista 95, or Linux kernel 3.0) is pretty much logical anyway with progress in OS engineering.

Re:An OS is an OS

[should_be_linear]

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about this guy:

Neophilia is defined as a love of novelty and new things. A neophile is an individual who is unusually accepting of new things and excited by novelty.
The word has particular significance in Internet and hacker culture. The New Hacker's Dictionary gave the following definition to neophilia -

The trait of being excited and pleased by novelty. Common among most hackers, SF fans, and members of several other connected leading-edge subcultures, including the pro-technology 'Whole Earth' wing of the ecology movement, space activists, many members of Mensa, and the Discordian/neo-pagan underground (see geek). All these groups overlap heavily and (where evidence is available) seem to share characteristic hacker tropisms for science fiction, music, and oriental food.

Re:An OS is an OS

[jedidiah]

Sounds suspiciously like any other high volume data intensive
application that has been run on Unix or mainframes since the
dawn of time. This is simply yet someone else failing to grok
the basic essense of "multimedia": it's all just bits.

        These are old boring problems solved likely before you
were even born.

Wrong end of stick

[ishmaelflood]

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.

Re:Wrong end of stick

[Detritus]

Your numbers are off by a substantial amount. The Shuttle's AP-101S has 256kW (256K x 32) of RAM. The Apollo Guidance Computer had 36kW (36K x 16) of memory.

The Shuttle's software is broken up into multiple software loads, launch prep, ascent/entry, in-orbit, etc. for reasons of size and configuration control. It is written in a high-level language (HAL/S), although a strange one.

One of the problems with modern computers is that their timing is not deterministic. They have very complex CPU implementations, many levels of cache, interrupts and VM. Timing is probabilistic. Most operating systems can offer no guarantees to applications software.

OS - Video - WTF?

[Anne Thwacks]

If Linux and WIndows are "old clunkers" then presumably the *BSDs are not just dead, but rotting in hell with all those demons!

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"

Re:OS - Video - WTF?

[Sique]

The main problem is that today's mainstream operating systems are not 'stream' OSes ;). They don't think of data as a stream with certain properties. They just have input and output devices, and what happens inbetween is just a matter of how to couple them together.

Networks like ATM and TENET have special layers to define the properties of a data stream independently from the source and the sink. There is no equivalence in Windows or UNIX for those. There are some tacked on QoS-parameters for certain network devices (to handle the QoS of the networks connected), but this is not a design principle for all the not networked devices.

Current OSes thus have a simple solution to QoS: Throw enough resources at the problem, and it will work for the lower bandwidths. For higher bandwidths just wait for the next generation. But in theory the hardware today should handle the higher bandwidths today fine, if the schedulers and the definitions of what has to be scheduled were better supported inside the operating systems. So you can have at maximum one data stream with QoS-warranties on your computer at any given moment.

Computers used for data stream switching often have a subsystem that runs at highest priority on the host operating system and provides those streaming facilities without the host OS getting in the way too much. Futural operating systems should be able to handle the scheduling problems of several datastreams at the same time natively.

Re:OS - Video - WTF?

[tacocat]

Yes, this is a picture of what you are doing with streaming data and a possible approach to handling the stream, by reprioritizing everything on the system to deal with it. But I don't necessarily agree that this is the best approach or the realistic approach.

If we have to address the video streaming capabilities of a high bandwidth internet then that's fine. I'm really not worried about the current OSes. As a benchmark I have routinely watched full screen (21-inch) video over NFS mounted hard drives across my fast ethernet home network. This has proved to be good enough bandwidth that the movies are clean and the network can still do other functions (macromedia flash gaming is one high bandwidth example). Granted this is pretty much one user, but it's a benchmark.

Now it is arguable that NFS is not the best solution to video streaming, but it's one that I have readily available.

I would have assumed the best approach would be a two part application; the first part caching the stream and buffering the data so that latency interruptions can be handled more gracefully, and the second part to read off the buffer (memory or disk) and present the video.

I don't know of any one who believes that even a terabit network can do realtime streaming of hi definition video with zero risk of latency interruptions so I just can imagine anything with that model in mind as being anything less than marketing hype.

Re:OS - Video - WTF?

[TallMatthew]

Networks like ATM and TENET have special layers to define the properties of a data stream independently from the source and the sink. There is no equivalence in Windows or UNIX for those. There are some tacked on QoS-parameters for certain network devices (to handle the QoS of the networks connected), but this is not a design principle for all the not networked devices.

Beh. ATM was a dog. It was supposed to be this voice/data/video panacea but all it ended up being was an incredibly inefficient way to pass data around. Defining class of service on a cell/packet is one of those ideas that makes sense, but is ultimately meaningless based on the nature of data transmission.

QOS prioritizes packets, that's it. It has no effect except during congestion. It will not "create" bandwidth. If you're a carrier and your backbone is clogged, QOS isn't going to help you very much because the buffers on your routers can only store so much. You're going to start dropping packets all over the place and your customers will be most displeased. That's why carriers overprovision backbones.

If you're a customer and you don't have enough pipe to your house to really support a video stream (which with modern-day streaming technology isn't very much), Linux/Windows won't be the problem. You won't be able to prevent your downloads from interrupting your video stream with prioritization, as that would have to occur at the carrier side before the packets crossed the wire. And why would the carrier do that for you? Buy a fat pipe, they'll suggest. After all that's what they had to do.

Cable companies and telecoms have been grappling with this for years. Ultimately they've found the only tenable solution is capacity.

Re:OS - Video - WTF?

[Sique]

Your argumentation holds very well as long as it is only one datastream we are talking about, or only one pipe it can go through. As soon as you have several of them, starting and ending at different times and going different ways, you should be able to schedule streaming resources: Postpone one that doesn't fit into the sum of all bandwith you get for instance, or reroute it through different pipes that are not fully used.

Currently we still use benchmarks to tell us, how much bandwidth we can really muster for different tasks on a computer. A streaming OS would have to have an operating system function, where you can actually ask it, how much bandwidth you get if you want to pipe a data stream from point A to point B at a predefined time, and then you should be able to reserve the bandwidth, so no other application starting later can eat into this bandwidth, the same way today it can't write into the memory an other application is using.

Currently you can separate application only in a way that they don't use the same resources at the same time, which is a very discrete schedule. For actually switching data streams (which is different from having one datastream uninterupted), you should also schedule the access continously. Imagine it like a big railway station. Today's operating systems are able to make sure that every single track and railswitch is protected and can only be used by a single train at a time. For actual operation of the railway station you need the full way from the starting rail across the station to the leaving rail protected (and freed after the train went through). With todays operating systems you just hold all trains and have only a single one moving. With actuall streaming operating systems you should be able to let several trains run at the same time as long as their ways don't cross. (The analogy doesn't hold completely, because on a railway only one train can use one rail at a time. Streaming data of different streams could use the same path through the operating system at the same time as long as they don't exceed the bandwidth limit).

Re:OS - Video - WTF?

[cgenman]

If Linux and WIndows are "old clunkers" then presumably the *BSDs are not just dead, but rotting in hell with all those demons!

Have you tried to get a newbie up to speed on an OS recently? Windows and Linux are old clunkers. Specifically about video, I've sent people video and had to iterate through several different codec downloads and lots of software installs before they hit something that worked. And that's on Windows. How is downloading streaming video from arbitrary sites like CNN going on Linux? With the forced commercials and separation of stream types, etc, it can be a nightmare and it isn't going to get any better. Even skilled people give up.

And beyond that, the interface in both is terrible. Is the data I'm looking for in /usr/bin/run? C:/documents and settings/Default User/Application Data/? Or one of a million other places? Is my dependency tree resolved properly? Hell, deleting an application in the two major operating systems is 1000x more hassle and failure-prone than throwing out a binder at work. And once a system is up and running don't move anything or everything breaks. Don't rename anything or everything breaks. Ever have the fun of trying to walk a new person through a registry fix over the phone? Or, well, any sort of Linux support over the phone to somebody who wasn't a hardcore linux person?

Browser applications are also a miserable failure, because they're tacked onto a system designed to do something completely different. The browser window itself can't update, so you need to run in Flash, ActiveX, or Java, none of which are particularly good at full scale applications. Flash is too animation-centric for persistent data like that, Java never hit its stride (see the WordPerfect in Browser in Java debacle), and ActiveX is ActiveX. Comparing the elegance of remote Xwindows or straight SSH to browser applications shows just how far behind we are.

Sure, 20 years of debugging goes a long way, and the *nix's are more than competent in serving content, but for the average user OS's are still foriegn, behave strangely, require a high learning curve, and don't adapt well to the way the user wants to work.

Re:OS - Video - WTF?

[bhmit1]

And beyond that, the interface in both is terrible. Is the data I'm looking for in /usr/bin/run? C:/documents and settings/Default User/Application Data/? Or one of a million other places? Is my dependency tree resolved properly?

First off, you seem upset with user interfaces, lack of video standards, and lack of quality applications, not the OS itself. We could build a new OS and still have all these problems. Fixing the OS we have would seem to be a more efficient solution. Also, just because something is complex doesn't mean it won't stick around. I don't think people consider Tivo complicated because the UI hides everything under the covers.

And on the flip side, you don't hear a lot of people complaining about what a PITA it was to change the water pump in their car, because they get a mechanic to do that. And yet cars are still around despite the fact that you need to learn how to drive and get a license before you're allowed to use one. There's probably more than one thing the computer industry could learn from the automotive industry, they've been doing it for longer. OS's are still a ways away from needing to make our own gas to electric conversion.

Re:OS - Video - WTF?

[Sique]

The issue is not, as you are all somehow seem to believe, that there are limits of bandwidth. The issue is that the operating system can't tell you what they are. A streaming capable operating system should tell you when starting a certain stream would be unwise because the bandwidth is not there to serve it, as a file system is telling you that you can't save any more data because the disk is full. Currently you either have hard limits with some PC based DVRs or similar equipment, which are found out by benchmarking and testing, or you just start the streams and hope they will run rather smoothly.

Stream aware operating systems should always KNOW where the limits are, and if certain streams with certain properties still fit into the bandwidth limits, whatever causes the limitations.

Re:OS - Video - WTF?

[Sique]

You just hit the nail on the head. Exactly that is the problem. Current operating systems are not deterministic enough for data stream switching. To many not controllable input devices for instance. To many unknown programs whose resource demand is not foreseable.

A program in a data stream oriented system should make a prediction how much resources it will use and have some kind of contract with the operating system about those resources. As soon as it overuses them it should be terminated (as it would be today if it tries to use resources that are allocated to other processes or tries to use resources in an inapprobriate way like misaligned adressing or writing to read only devices etc.pp.).

It's true!

[MaestroSartori]

My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Linux and Windows pass out at 31 Flavors last night! So I guess it must be pretty serious...

Netcraft confirms it...er...

[Polarism]

http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=nothing&positi on=limited

Educated guess anyway.

A link, for those who read articles.

[oneiros27]

Obviously, the editors don't care, but for those of us who actually try to read the article, I found the following, so others don't have to waste their time, as well:

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=86 214&WT.svl=news2_1

(and it's probably redundant by now, but this would be the creator of Ethernet, for those who didn't know who Bob Metcalfe is)

Re:A link, for those who read articles.

[PhilHibbs]

You're calling this guy out because something he designed THIRTY YEARS AGO - a computing technology that is STILL IN USE TODAY - wasn't optimised for streaming video?

Re:A link, for those who read articles.

[Bogtha]

this would be the creator of Ethernet, for those who didn't know who Bob Metcalfe is

This would also be one of the people childish enough to popularise the term Open Sores Software. Sure, he developed Ethernet, but what has he done in the last thirty years, except devolve into a troll?

Weird, they work for me...

[KingSkippus]

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...

Re:Weird, they work for me...

[DaveV1.0]

Weird, Windows and Linux seem to handle pretty much any task I need handled. Not bad for a couple of clunkers.

While this may be true, not to long ago there was an article about load times. It seems the time it takes to load a particular class of program (say a word process, spreadsheet,etc) has stayed the same for the last 20 or so years. It actually takes longer to load the OS now than it did 20 years ago. Yet, look at the increase in processesing power between then and now.

Why is it that the capabilities of the machine have increased by 4 (or more) orders of magnitude, yet the software still takes as long to load and doesn't really do more except look pretty? And, no I am not talking about the high end 3D games. I am talking about the average business programs.

Re:Weird, they work for me...

[DaveV1.0]

See, that is the thrust of my argument. I really don't think the software side has improved at anywhere near the rate of hardware. I feel that most of the "improvements" we see are really just feature creep and flash. Very little substance.

Below the threshold

[jandersen]

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.

The last bubble squandered a fortune

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

What an idiot. Look at the carnage afterwards. Nevermind the few people that lost their jobs, tragic as that is, the real damage is the money from pension and investment funds that was squandered. That is people having their entire retirement thrown away.

Re:The last bubble squandered a fortune

[tverbeek]

What an idiot. Look at the carnage afterwards. Nevermind the few people that lost their jobs, tragic as that is, the real damage is the money from pension and investment funds that was squandered. That is people having their entire retirement thrown away.

That's just how The Market works. It runs in cycles of boom and bust. It uses the irrational activity of the investment market to tear down old economic structures so that they can be replaced with more efficient ones.

Which is of course why those who hold The Market up as if were the sacrosanct invisible hand of God ought to be taken out and shot. It demotes human society to barbarism, with no regard for the better aspects of human nature: the capacity for compassion, cooperation, and reason. I'm not advocating communism, because that has its own problems, but deifying The Market to justify whatever it does is definitely not the answer.

I don't get it

[demon_2k]

What's wrong with the internet as it is now?
Video, for what reqason? Do they mean more like flash?
With interactive animations, or something different?

What i can see happening is animated or even worse, video adds.
And I'll tell all of you, i'm not looking foreward to that.
I think that's a reason enough to be negative.
Wasting bandwidth for damn stupids adds.

I guess it wouldn't bother me so much if we still had unlimited cable. This "unlimited" cable shits me, all because internet service providers want to promote their own content delivery.

Re:Sorry?

[kfg]

What exactly does he mean by video internet?

"Give me free money."

KFG

More like Ethernet is the clunker!

[Anonymous Coward]

"There'll be new operating systems required; the clunkers we have, you know Windows and Linux, are 25 years old -- they're going to need updating to adequately carry video," Metcalfe says. "What they're doing now is lame."

If video is the future, then I'm afraid that it's Ethernet that's going to be the clunker - not our operating systems. We need the mass deployment of protocols that give us QoS guarantees (e.g. ATM).

Will someone think of the kittens?!?!?

[l0ungeb0y]

Everytime someone talks about video internet, God kills a kitten.
See?!?! You made me make God kill a kitten just now by talking about video interne... damn!

And you know what? By the time this thread is done with, tens of thousands of kittens will have died. How many at the hands of "In Soviet Russia" jokes alone, I do not know, but I shudder to think.

Frankly, I am saddend at the massive loss of furry lifeforms about to take place, all for the sake of a mental circlejerk about "all porn all the time all online". You're all just sick.

25 years?

[dabadab]

The only specific thing he mentions is that both Windows and Linux are 25 year old... let me see:
Windows NT (which is the base for all the current Windowses) was first released in 1993. (Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, but that was not 25 years ago and has little to do with current ones (like, a copletely different codebase and technology))
Linux began in 1991, but if you really want to dig to the roots, UNIX was created in 1969.
and, of course, the problems "video internet" has (though these are not critical, as demonstrated by porn sites) these are related to the network, not to the OSes.

So, Metcalfe is talking BS as usually.

Re:I don't get it...

[TallMatthew]

If you need a hookup, I've got 1,039 contacts.

I think...

[isecore]

"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."

Possibly he's of this opinion since he was one of the very few who didn't get burned by it? I know several people who got really badly burnt when the bubble popped.

"In the year 2000... In the year 2000!"

[croddy]

And how!

My future-viewing terminal informs me that that the Video Internet will be deployed just a few years after the widespread availablility of wall-mounted Video Telephones, but just before Honda release their premiere Flying Automobile.

I can only hope that our spinlock model is flexible enough for these paradigm-shattering technological earthquakes!

Misleading summary

[oneandoneis2]

The actual quote is Windows and Linux, are 25 years old -- they're going to need updating to adequately carry video - so he's not really implying "They're dinosaurs and need to die out & be replaced", more "They're not yet ready for future demands" - which is pretty much a given: How can you create functionality for something that doesn't exist yet?

Video Internet?

[The NPS]

I thought we already had video internet, and it was called TV. Honestly, video content is worthless. Sure, it'd be kind of fun to watch the numa numa kid in high definition with no buffering, but does it really matter? No. Is there any substance to that? Hell no. If TV is even a tiny implication of what more video content would mean, then the last thing I want is more video content in the net.

In january 1995 Bob Metcalfe predicted

[lord_rob the only on]

"The internet will soon go spectaculary supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse"
He promised to "eat his words" if he was wrong
So, in early 1997, at a technical conference he ate
(from "Computer Networks" by Tanenbaum)

Re:fun? .. Video Internet = Mandatory DRM

[Savage650]

... commiserating with The people who payed for all the fun the jobs were and got nothing back out of it.

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.

Clunkers.

[SoupIsGood Food]

Well, he's right. Windows is based, more or less, on the old VAX/VMS model. Linux is a modern OS kernel, but it's designed to run a variant of the Unix operating system, which was shiny and new before the Star Trek with Captain Kirk went into syndication.

The same can be said for MacOS X and the BSD's... hell, for pretty much every OS under the sun. BeOS and Plan 9 were the last attempts at someone trying something new with any technical success, and their lessons were largely lost on the industry.

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.

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.

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.

Otherwise I foresee more of the same... computers completing benchmarks faster, but not doing anything new and innovative.

Linux is a very nice unix, perhaps the pinnacle of achievement for the Unix Way, but the Unix Way isn't all that special anymore, and is really showing its age. Windows is an order of magnitude in worse shape. It's just that no-one with an industry presence is willing to try anything new anymore, and companies like SGI and HP are going broke sticking to the old model long after it's stopped working for them.

SoupIsGood Food

Re:Clunkers.

[SirCyn]

Architecture has less to do with the ease of movement than DRM, and the general stigma that has penetrated the media industry. We'll need an intellectual revolution before any of this technological revolution can take place.

Re:Clunkers.

[joshv]

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.

Re:Clunkers.

[SoupIsGood Food]

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.

Dumping the problem into the lap of the application programmers isn't leveraging anything very effectively.

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.

Congratulations! You've just discovered Moore's Law. You should write a paper or something.

Now, take just enough of your PC so it fits into your pocket and doubles as a cell-phone, letting you still use the part you left on your desk while you ride the bus to work. Oops! You can't!

This is a very simple paradigm shift, and can almost emulated by VNC on your smartphone, but not satisfactorily, and not easily, as the OS doesn't understand it has to handle the UI for both the cell phone and the 30" flat panel monitor in the same application. This is because that mobo is essentially the same computer, only faster, that the mobo vendors were selling in '01. The OS projects and vendors can't see past the plain ol' whitebox PC.

Big paradigm shifts that would completely re-orient computing are impossible in the current market.

Wait, I thought the problem was with the PC architecture

This is because you are inattentive, and don't like to read.

- now it's data management?

Data management is what computers do, sport. Better, faster and more convenient data management is why there's a computer industry at all. Wake up.

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.

Nothing... except create better ways for applications to interoperate with other applications and with local and networked peripherals. Sort of the definition of an operating system, ya know? In the modern day (since 1988 or so), the OS takes responsibility for the entire operating environment, with all the attendant APIs and utilities.

Dumping the problem into the application developer's lap was how MS-DOS did it, not how modern operating systems do it, and certainly not how next generation OS projects will do it.

SoupIsGood Food

Re:Clunkers.

[Hosiah]

Unfortunately, your insight has a devolved reciprocal capability to impact the paradigm metaphor. A compatible maximized GUI would be dependent on synchronised discrete middleware and a business-focused mobile protocol. Focused human-resource groupware isn't up to proactive uniform superstructure in a networked clear-thinking inheritance capacity situation.

A multi-phase strategic alliance would be required to address the market maximization retail potential of Generation D. And the syngergistic coherent intranet with fundamental well-modulated flexibility in a team-oriented client-server model paradigm functionality would be negatively combined with the polarised holistic flexibility contained within the progressive even-keeled structure.

Ah, I see my frappaccinno's ready. Ta-ta!

-1 Troll

[obender]

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.

Re:fun? .. Video Internet = Mandatory DRM

[cnelzie]

Playing the stock market is like every other form of gambling: The house always wins. You lose.

    I do not believe that I have seen such a completely misleading and or misinformed statement in a very long time. If you have no idea what you are doing, yeah, you could get burned. If you are smart, do your research and invest wisely, such as by diversifying, you can come out pretty darn well.

Video Internet

[f0rtytw0]

I don't know if the world is ready for video internet or television as some scientists call it.

Umm, mod parent up. Mod grandparent hilarious.

[Corngood]

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.

New Operating systems and Ego Screens

[john666seven]

There are many POTENTIAL operating systems out there, including modular ones (my favorite, does not waste resources with what you don't need), the undeveloped Sphere OS (Modular in a VMWare sort of way), Forth OS (It's a start), eye-candy Zeta. Of course, while we're at at, let's entirely re-think the clunky Graphical User Interface. The GUI really has not improved since the early Mac Days. We could work on that too. Ideas? Could we do away with the seperate programs to the end-user idea and the big-ego screens? john666seven@yahoo.com

Re:fun? .. Video Internet = Mandatory DRM

[Overzeetop]

No Sympathy here. Whoever buys into a scheme where you get offered an overpaid, underworked job and expects it to last forever deserves the "Experience" they get.

I'll agree with you on the "video-internet". Mr. Metcalf seems to have confused the computer with consumer electronics. Sure, the former can do the latter, but that's not it's strong suit. Computational efficiency for doing work just happens to work well with compressed digital video. Coincidence, not purpose.

Fools! Hurd is the Kernel of the Future!

[porkchop_d_clown]

And it always will be...

WTF is the video internet?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Don't please tell me that slashdot is going to be a video blog. This sounds as wrong as voice communication in games. I DO NOT WANT TO SEE YOU and I am sure the feeling is mutual.

Sure current OS'es are crap at handling large data files that essentlially just have to be passed through, I got a linux machine that seems to love eating up all the available memory and my windows machine can never seem to grasp the concept of giving the video app priority to the HD.

So when I recently downloaded my first high def video clip (interlaced) I had a severe problem playing it. The dual P3 Linux had problems as it was an offbeat codec and could not handle it at full speed.

Windows P4 HT 2.8ghz didn't fare much better. Despite that fact that it had double the memory, less crap in the background and fewer active filters and had a cpu 3-4 times faster it could barely keep up. As soon as I tried to deinterlace it it started to get choppy with random freezing as MS could apperantly not supply the data fast enough.

No I don't have virusses or trojans and the hardware on both platforms is pretty decent.

The answer is really simple both OS'es at the core were never designed for this task. For that matter the hardware isn't either. Almost everything in the design is geared towards multitasking.

It reminds me of the days when side scrolling games were still available and how badly the PC would always struggle with them even when it was clear that in pure crunching power the PC beat the pants of the consoles. Wich was very clear when consoles tried to do 3D (ala doom1) wich was the strong horse of the PC.

I don't think there is any clear mechanism at the moment where you can easily dictate wich application gets priority access to the resources available. This would be far more then "nice". After all video device that gets super high priority would then falter because "system" wich does the reading from HD does not get enough cpu time.

Perhaps the move to multicore pc's will solve some of this. My P3 despite being only 800mhz can still keep up aminzgly well considering a p4 2.8 fails as well.

What I don't see however is how a new OS is going to solve this. Sure it is easy to make a new OS that does just video. They already exist, inside your stand alone dvd player. For that matter inside the iPod and similar devices. The consoles are an other example. Yes they do a lot better performance wise in displaying video then their PC counterparts. So?

One of the things I noticed is that USB is a bitch for cpu whoring. Joysticks especially can cost you more frames then switching all the options on. Perhaps I just got the wrong sticks but I have noticed this for several years with different makes.

A PC can do a dozen tasks, that makes it slow but it also is what makes it so fucking usefull. Most users do not want to watch just 1 video. They want their RSS streams and check their email and be safe from virusses and be chatting with their mates etc etc etc.

Saying the Windows/Linux are old clunkers and that you could make a faster video OS is like saying that Volvo's are clunkers and you could make a faster race car. Well yeah. F1 cars are very very fast. I just wouldn't like to take one on a trip. A recent promo in Amsterdam had a F1 car driving through the city streets. Very exciting but it was very clear the car was barely under control and totally useless as a form of transport.

The device that does it all will never be able to compete directly with a single purpose device. The PC is as multi purpose as it can be and for the last few decades has defeated all new comers. I don't see this going to change.

Oh and didn't we have this whole video internet before? The constant dream that people will next year have fat pipes to their doorsteps at cheap prices? I have heard that dream for over a decade and still download at a trickle. Current internet would be hardpushed to saturate a iPod. My half a decade old machine can easily deal with internet streaming. It ain't the OS, it is the net, fix that and the OS will follow.

Todays O/S for Tomorrow

[gone.fishing]

Windows and Linux are today's operating systems. Who knows what will come along tomorrow. Look at the differences in Windows and Linux from five or ten years ago. They are entirely different than when they first cam on market! The trouble is that they are added on to and asked to do things that were not originally envisioned when they were first developed. The fact that they are doing what they are doing today is a testament to their versatility (and, their good foundation).

There will come a time when something else will come along - the evolution will happen like it has happened in every other industry. Ford quit making Model T's a long time ago and some day, Windows and Linux will be seen as out-dated operating systems that was loaded into primitive personal computers. In my mind's eye, I can see a computing future where computers interact with us in everyday life helping us with almost every task we do. Do any of us doubt that this marriage of technology and life won't continue to grow?

Look how far we have gone in the past few years and think of what could be done in the next ten or twenty and you can start to understand why someone would think that these operating systems may begin to sag under the weight of new and additional features. In a sense, the operating system is middleware. It sits between hardware and applications. Both sides aren't remaining static, the hardware gets new features and is faster and more powerful, the applications do more, do new and sometimes unthought of things. The o/s is in a tug-of-war between these two entities and tries very hard to make everything work. When the current part of the operating system that handles say video is being stretched to its limit by the demands of either the hardware or the software it is either patched or replaced. Over time, these fixes make the operating system like a house that has been remodeled too many times. It may become inefficient although it remains functional - when this happens, it may be best to tear the whole thing down and start all over again.

Please note that I am not saying that either Windows or Linux have reached the point where they ought to be scrapped but a realistic look forward has to consider that as a possibility. Tomorrow's hardware and tomorrow's applications are bound to place heavy demands on whatever operating system there is. We live in interesting times and it is hard to predict what the future will look like ten years from now. Are we going to have windowed interfaces or is something else going to come along? Where will speech recognition be? Will the keyboard continue to exist? Part of me wants to think that at some point we will communicate with our digital servants almost like we communicate with our human counterparts, through speech, body movements, and eye contact. But like the rocket-cars envisioned in the fifties, that may be a long way off track because I do not have a crystal ball that works.

overvixens

[vieux schnock]

overvixens ....
That's a catchy name. I did a search on Google and didn't find any match (in plural) except for an Overvixen as a kick . You might have cornerned a nice new "hip" word for our age. ;-)

We DO need a new OS

[sweetnjguy29]

IMHO, we do need a new OS paradigm. Linux, BSD, Windows....they all suck. They are useful, sure, but god-damn, they all do have problems. I'm not going to even list examples....I am sure you can all think of at least 10 problems with each OS. We need to fundementally change the way in which we interact with computers. Like Scotty said, "a keyboard...how quaint". I mean, good grief, I haven't even seen a consumer level touch screen for a computer.

oh... and one more thing

[smash]

... to those who are crapping on about needing new ways of interacting with computers, etc - fine.

That's still not going to make current operating systems obsolete. You're in the Microsoft way of thinking that a new shell and a few drivers is a new O/S (eg, windows 2000 vs XP). At the end of the day, it's still basic I/O once you write a driver for it.

I'd even wager that it's quite probable that any new input method you care to name (or invent) could simply be added as a kernel module to kernel 2.6 (or 2.4, 2.0, etc) - and that's only if it couldn't be done in user-space :)

smash.

Re:fun? .. Video Internet = Mandatory DRM

[lowrydr310]

Do professional investors really give out good advice, or are they trying to get other people to make bad financial decisions for their own personal gain?

I hear real estate agents all over the place saying "now is an excellent time to buy real estate because interest rates are still historically low, and housing isn't like the stock market where people can quickly sell off." Of course it's an excellent time for someone to buy an overpriced house when you're the one selling it to them, especially considering the 6% commission you get.

I'm having a hard time understanding how 'average' people afford homes in hot markets. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the average home price is around $750,000. What's the average salary? Google and Yahoo pay well but not enough to afford a $750,000 house, even if there are two people in a household earning the same salary. I heard a general guideline that your house should be no more than two and a half times your gross salary. That means that you'd need roughly $300,000 a year to buy an average house. Do most households in the Bay Area make that kind of money? I think I'm doing fairly well, but I couldn't afford something like that. Am I just grossly underpaid, or are people crazy?

Are we going to see a lot of defaulting mortgages in 3-5 years when these silly interest-only periods expire and principal has to be repaid?

Re:Sorry?

[plantman-the-womb-st]

As far as I can tell, he's talking about turning the internet into TV. These new systems would be able to view many "sites" (stations) at once, while the "user" (viewer) would be able to interact with the "sites content" (show) by clicking on keywords, image intense borders or even on the products in the video itself. It would be a "push" (broadcast) technology instead of a pull, so that instead of content being viewed whenever the user wants, as many times as they want, the content provider could set a schedule of when what content was available to maximize ad revenue. Since this new wonder OS would make rendering content streams a priority, the content provider would always be sure they have an open and readable stream to get content to the user.

This will, of course, be part of the premium internet service.

Re:fun? .. Video Internet = Mandatory DRM

[dubl-u]

Playing the stock market is like every other form of gambling: The house always wins. You lose.

I do not believe that I have seen such a completely misleading and or misinformed statement in a very long time. If you have no idea what you are doing, yeah, you could get burned. If you are smart, do your research and invest wisely, such as by diversifying, you can come out pretty darn well.

Investing is entirely different than "playing the stock market". You guys are both right. You can use your brokerage account to invest or to gamble. During the internet boom, most of the tech investors and day traders were gambling, not investing.

Finally!

[TheQuantumShift]

"the clunkers we have, you know Windows and Linux, are 25 years old "

Finally, I woke up this morning, mysteriously transported to the year 2016. Does this mean I can start wearing my jeans inside out? Or was that so last year?

Re:fun? .. Video Internet = Mandatory DRM

[cnelzie]

Are we going to see a lot of defaulting mortgages in 3-5 years when these silly interest-only periods expire and principal has to be repaid?

I most certainly hope not. Can you imagine what would happen to the economy if a large percentage of the home owning populace defaults on their mortgages?

It could very likely create a rush on the banks the likes of which haven't been seen since just prior to The Great Depression.