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Slate Speculates on Internet Operating Systems
Slate features a discussion of possible internet operating systems, a Google OS foremost among the potential contenders. The author views the fledgling YouOS as a proof-of-concept that an Internet OS is feasible. He dismisses the idea of a Google-built thin client, arguing that Google would rather build a service available from any Internet-capable device. Google's already-fast service would theoretically translate easily to other web-based applications. From the article: Dollar for dollar, network-based computers are faster. Unless you're playing Grand Theft Auto or watching HDTV, your network isn't the slowest part of your setup. It's the consumer-grade Pentium and disk drive on your Dell, and the wimpy home data bus that connects them. Home computers are marketed with slogans like "Ultimate Performance," but the truth is they're engineered to run cool, quiet, and slow compared to commercial servers. The author compares Eric Schmidt's denials of a Google OS to Steve Jobs's denials of a video iPod. However, he notes that potential obstacles to a Google OS adoption include: the desire to own things; the requirement for fast, flawless networks; and, the trust-deficit when putting personal information on web-based applications.
This is utter crap. It sounds like Google planted hype to try to push the idea of "software as a service", Which is a stupid, unworkable and untrustworthy way of computing.
So the guys at Slate thinks that the combined computing power of Google's umpteen million users is less than the power of their server farm? Unlikely, even for Google's impressive data centers. If its the case that as a general rule commercial servers were more powerful than the sum of their users' machines, we could do away with all those supposedly obsolete distributed computing efforts.
Home PCs are far more powerful than the average user needs. This has been the case for a long, long time. Even Microsoft is having trouble saturating medium end computers that dell sells for the $900US mark. 2.5ghz with 1gb RAM, and you're trying to tell me that my broadband link can deliver application with faster response? I think not. And I like the way they FUDify the "cool n quiet" marketing campaign as well, utterly misdirecting its purpose.
I'm getting really sick of this "software as a service" crud, but at the same time, I'm also getting scared that companies might actually convince the mainsteam to use it. It would spell the end of privacy and anonymity for users and massively increase the power of already too powerful corporations and governments. "Software as a service" is the ultimate spyware. Today we complain that Sony puts rootkits on their CDs, yet there's no real complaint that our entire OS can not only report to base, but runs from there entirely. Forget keyloggers, this thing will record your keys, mouseclicks and input from webcams, scanners and microphones in realtime.
I sincerely hope that the tool that is the personal computer doesn't get taken away from the masses and replaced with drone terminals that could only be used in the way proscribed by our corporate rulers, and observed by their minions in dark rooms.
Oh yea, feel free to call me a tinfoil hat wearing Google hater, because I am.
I hate printers.
YouOS is just sounds like a rip off of eyeOS.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Am I the only one who doesn't understand what an Internet OS is supposed to be? I mean, you've got to have an OS to connect to the Internet in the first place...
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I want one of those? Where are they?
factor 966971: 966971
I think a lot of people don't trust the internet enough to put their entire computing lives on somebody else's server. People like knowing, even if they don't understand the technology, their files are in that box somewhere. It's a privacy issue to. I still know a lot of people who won't use Gmail because they don't trust Google to read their messages. And what about copyright issues?
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
The only thing that I would like in this genre is if Google provided an official file storage service. I have my important stuff backed up on GMail, but the front end is a bit lacking.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
An internet operating system may be possible... but do we need it? The last thing I want is "503: Service Unavailable" when trying to print a document for a deadline. They may well have backups, but what use is that when I need it *now*.
An internet linked desktop environment has all the advantages of the internet - updates, blogging, social stuff - with the advantages of a more traditional system - you actually have your documents stored locally, you're not subject to some company suddenly suspending your service and deleting your account (WGA is another matter...), and things load up quickly and run fast.
Even Microsoft is having trouble saturating medium end computers that dell sells for the $900US mark.
Despite the fact that they haven't released a new OS in 5 years, they aren't doing too badly in terms of saturating computing power. They preempted the market, so they actually aren't lagging behind as much as you would expect.
Don't worry though, with the impending Vista release all your available system resources will be put to use for many years to come.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
YouOS
:P
Too Many Users Online
I just experienced a good reason why it won't work
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
You have some good points regarding privacy of data, but I disagree that "software as service is crud." There are a number of pro's to software as a service, here are a few:
1) No need to install, low end user maintenance. This is important for businesses.
2) Access to applications and your own data whether at your own PC, in the library or at the airport across the country, without carrying around a laptop.
3) Increased ability for software to offer interaction with other services.
What's happening is exactly the same process which made factories economically viable during the industrial revolution... That, is the bandwidth of the transport system. We're at the point where it's far far cheaper to have the computing in a BFO data centre and decent bandwidth to the home.
How many weavers, potters, carpenters do you know? Well, today's equivalents are programmers, system administrators etc.
Things like VNC just make it easy.
Deleted
Alright, so thin clients are nothing new. Let the server do the work. Save money on the desktop.
Across my infrastructure, which typically has a gig fibre backbone, and 100mb at the desktop, this isn't a mean feat. Hell, I've got it running across the wireless as well.
But to run this across the internet? Gimmie a break. To support my 450+ machines, I would need a rather serious pipe. Which will have a serious cost attached.
Maybe there is a market for home users doing this, but the scalability is going to kill large scale adoption. And since people use (I generalise here, true) Microsoft at work, are they going to learn a new OS at home? Considering the market penetration of the other free OS', I doubt it.
Apologies for sounding negative, but I don't think we'll see this for a while yet.
From Wikipedia:
An operating system is a software program that manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. The OS performs basic tasks, such as controlling and allocating memory, prioritizing the processing of instructions, controlling input and output devices, facilitating networking, and managing files.
This is a bunch of web based applications with a slick interface and some persistant storage.
But the network is the slowest part of home computing. The data bus is orders of magnitude faster than the internet connection (or even intranet connection) in nearly every circumstance. This doesn't make thin clients a bad idea necessarily—there are substantial advantages to having the equivalent of a system admin in every home—but performance isn't one of them.
And how long would an OS from Google take to get out of Beta? I don't think I'm gonna live that long.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
RDP is hardly the only way to do remote access, and it's true that most Windows-functional solutions (WebEx, PCAnywhere, ThinAnywhere, VNC, etc.) stink, from at least a performance standpoint.
But those aren't really thin clients; they're really remote access sessions to a thick client running over a network.
A real thin-client package does the computing locally, as well as the display. It just uses storage and some heavy features on the back-end.
1) The thing slowing down the PC isn't the local hardware.
2) The network pipe has to be well in excess of a gigabit per second to be faster than the hardware.
3) The author has NO clue about what he's really on about.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
"your network isn't the slowest part of your setup. It's the consumer-grade Pentium and disk drive on your Dell, and the wimpy home data bus that connects them"
Speak for yourself, mister.
My Verizon DSL 768 Kbps/128Kbps service is a lot slower than my mighty 2.5" 5400 RPM Seagate ST9100823A (sustained transfer rate 38 MB/sec). Approximately fifty times slower "reading" (downloading), 300 times slower "writing" (uploading). No, wait... the DSL speed is in bits, the disk speed is in bytes. Make that 400 times slower "reading" and 2400 times slower "writing."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Put something that boots fast like Damn Small Linus on a USB key, and do web-restores and internet-apps and voila you have a practical portable OS.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The author is wrong. YouOS is not an “Internet operating system”, it the functional equivlent of Windows prior to NT: an environment which runs on your existing platform. The client still does the heavy lifting and it will never be portable enough to run on anything with a “keyboard and a screen.” If Google were to go this route, they would provide VNC-like access to big iron on their end.
Join Tor today!
>your network isn't the slowest part of your setup.
The only things on my computer slower than my DSL line are the legacy serial and parallel ports. To match the PCI bus I'd need an OC-24.
>Home computers are marketed with slogans like "Ultimate Performance," but the truth is they're engineered to run cool, quiet, and slow compared to commercial servers.
Last I heard, the Googleplex was running on dirt-cheap commodity boxes, with IDE drives even. A GoogleOS probably won't be running on heavy Sun iron.
I'll try and bypass all the "Linux is not an OS" stuff and move on to the meat of this discussion: Linux is still immature in some areas, particularly printing and wifi support. (Whether it's Linux's fault is not significant to this discussion.) I'd argue that it wasn't until right around now that Linux is really desktop-ready, and even now there are sometimes serious hitches - but just about any Linux distribution will work great on almost any new computer these days.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" -- Kurt Vonnegut
OK, a couple gigabytes of email storage is probably OK (for now). But I've got maybe 500 GB of other data here... I don't know who would offer to store that for free. And even if they did, it would take me, what, 385 days to upload it at 15 Kbytes/sec?
And I'd still want to back it up in case the company holding my data went out of business. Well, OK, Google will probably still be around in 10 years, but YouOS? Right.
I just don't understand the logic.
Pffffft, yeah, right.
Until the big telcos are going to make good on their 6 year old promise of 45+ M/bit sync fiber connection; this idea won't even get off the ground. The thin client idea may be good for some, but not all people. I prefer running server grade hardware, not the consumer grade POS stuff you can buy at Frys. I want my power and files at home, not someone else's server.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
But this is one of the fundamental problems, people don't understand what an operating system actually is.
There have been many debates between geeks about what an operating system actually is, and obviously people writing about these "Internet" operating systems, and the ones creating them, don't have a clue as to what they truly are.
An operating system isn't just a file manager, its a layer of software that allows you to interface with hardware, manage data, and control devices. By its very definition, and "Internet" based OS cannot exist, as it requires SOME form of operating system in order to run. You NEED an OS first in order to access the Internet and manage the network protocols and access network hardware. You NEED an OS first in order to run the web browser to access the Internet. you need an OS first in order to access the application data stored on disk and loaded in memory before you can even launch an "Internet" OS.
Instead, what these people are actually creating is just an online file manager, A SHELL.
Sorry, I just can't tolerate a blatant misrepresentation of terminology in this case. When people start talking about a Google OS as an online service, it is just irritating that there is so much ignorance, especially coming from a supposedly technologically literate community.
I am not saying the concept of an online SHELL isn't valid. Having the ability to create and store and share files online, without worrying about losing data locally if your local hardware fails is a sound idea and I welcome it. Just don't confuse a glorified AJAX P2P front end as being an operating system.
Even in the case if we move to a purely online services based market where you use a thin client to access the internet, you still need an OS before you can access the internet.
Call it what it is, and Online File Manager. An AJAX based P2P front end. An online portal. Just stop calling it an operating system, its not and never CAN be.
It is also a brilliantly f*cking stupid idea to have an embedded web browser within a web environment? I mean, I need a browser to access this service, duh? What makes an AJAX based web browser better then one running natively on your system?
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Ahh, the annual discussion of Thin Clients again. Every year some company gets a hare-brained scheme to reintroduce some variation of thin clients. You can almost set your watch by it. The average buyer can pick up a barebones XP machine for a couple hundred bucks at their local big box electronics store. Who is demanding "Internet Operating Systems"? What's the draw? What can they do that a PC running a web browser can't?
Authors like this fail to appreciate the actual nature of an OS, the Internet, and hardware. I get the impression from reading pablum like this that people see the web browser as some fundamental new technology, above the scope of desktop apps, simply because they use the Internet. Your average user wouldn't know that essentially any app could be written to use the Internet to transfer data, or that the Internet is simply a mindless mechanism for moving data. It's this tunnel vision of "the browser as the Internet" that has really limited development of better Internet technologies. Things like Flash or Java apps can run on their own, but they're always embedded in a browser, leading people to assume the primacy of the browser. I was really kind of surprised over the years to see that Java apps never caught on, while browsers, nonstandard and programmatically inelegant, became the norm. Maybe the new WPF model will garner a bigger following. It'd be nice to have a sane programming model instead of the freakish raft of Javascript/PHP/ASP/CSS/DOM hacks I currently have to deal with, and I know, I know... Microsoft is evil, monopoly, blah blah, but come on! Javascript is too slow to be of any use beyond manipulating the DOM, so you can't write any real programs in it. Even as a display mechanism browsers suck. I can't overlay a div on a video? A dropdown list? It's just sorry.
Operating System == Software that manages the machine's resources like CPU time, memory and storage, and makes them available to applications in a controlled way. At least that's how I learned it.
Maybe I'm getting old... Has the definition of OS changed all of a sudden??? Aren't they rather talking about an Internet-based application suite?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Ahhhhhhhh, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
For anybody who hasn't used Slax, they give you an option to upload personal data (passworded, of course), making it a very good live CD in that you can travel anywhere and are still able to access your personal data provided there is an internet connection. Perhaps an Internet OS could take a route similar to this?
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
It's probably never going to be a replacement for those of us who do gaming, or photo/video editing etc. But think of how many people you know who basically have a computer for email and IM. Pretty much any PC on market these days is overkill for these people, and it's definitely not worth paying for windows. Anyone can install some flavour of Linux and at least get a browser working, but a lot of the software they want is either unavailable or lacking in its Linux incarnation. So what if all you needed was that working browser.
WebOS is the future ... but not for the reasons listed here. Portability, i.e. being able to access your files and programs from any computer, is nice, but not a killer feature. It's ridiculous to claim that most people's computers are too slow, when in fact they are more than adequate. That's why PC sales stopped seeing such growth after 2000. Most people who could afford a computer had one that could do everything they needed. Hence prices have dropped while computing power has continued to increase.
No, the reason a WebOS (err WebOSses hopefully) will come about is because computing needs have changed. Look at today's teenagers. Most of what they do with a computer is online. If you took their computer, and disconnected it from the internet, it would be practically useless to them.
There are a few exceptions. They still use the computer to transfer pictures from their digital camera to an online service, like Photobucket or Flickr. They still use the computer to transfer music to their iPods. The computer is just an intermediary in these cases, and it's not hard to imagine these things being done without it -- just add WiFi. Then their camera could upload their photos directly to Photobucket, and their iPod could download songs and videos from iTunes and YouTube.
Of course there is the need for office type apps, like word processing and spreadsheets. These things can also be handled online pretty easily. In the future they will be handled online not because it's better, but just because everything else is online. Right now these things listed so far: photo managment, music management, word processing, are small things to most young people. The big things are instant messaging, email, social networking, etc. The big things are online. The small things will follow.
And that's why WebOS will come about. It will not be an OS in the traditional sense. Traditional OSses were about providing the infrastructure for applications to run on a computer. The point of the computer was the applications, but you needed an OS to make the applications possible. Thus the OS had to manage memory allocation, device management, user input/output, etc. The point was still the apps. The apps are online now, and new infrastructure is needed for them. That's where WebOS comes in. That's what WebOS must be. It must provide the infrastructure for applications and allow these applications to interoperate.
Right now if I'm a developer writing a Windows-based application, I don't have to worry about low level machine code for writing bits to disk, but if I'm writing an application for the web, chances are that I have to worry about creating database connections and issuing SQL in some form to read/write data. A WebOS will eliminate the need for this. If I'm writing a Windows app, I don't have to worry about peeking and poking pixels to draw things on the screen. However, if I'm writing a web app, I have to not only know about HTML and JavaScript, but the quirks of how different browsers render different things (CSS box model for example.) A WebOS should eliminate the need for such arcane knowledge.
In terms of kernel level stuff - there aren't many changes because the vast majority of work is done. We have a kernel that works, in a productive way, it's pretty much now a case of maintaining it with new features.
In terms of what I would call "userlevel" we've been done a long time. The shell and commandline utilities have been nearly done, or entirely useful for a decade.
However, in terms of graphical user enviroment, we still need high level GUI stuff (the kind of thing that grandma interacts with). Windows is pretty good at this part (though, in my opinion, it isn't nearly good enough). Free Software is mediocre at this. Some things are easy to do, some aren't. We're at a reasonably workable standard nowadays, but we need improvement in order to gain acceptance. This doesn't mean copying a Start Menu; this means figuring out ways to bring out GUI to a level where it is as-good-as Windows and OSX, and then being better.