A New Kind of OS

trader writes "OSWeekly.com discusses a possibility of futuristic OSes with both negatives and positives. From the article: 'Imagine if you will, a world where your ideas and perhaps, even your own creative works became part of the OS of tomorrow. Consider the obvious advantages to an operating system that actually morphed and adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around. Not only is there no such OS like this, the very idea goes against much of what we are currently seeing in the current OS options in the market.'"

Comments

It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux

[ackthpt]

Consider the obvious advantages to an operating system that actually morphed and adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around. Not only is there no such OS like this, the very idea goes against much of what we are currently seeing in the current OS options in the market.

I don't know about the parent, but when I build a kernel I don't just default to everything. I build for what I'll need. If that changes significantly then I'll do another with different options and settings.

While it may seem novel to "morph" to what's currently needed, it's not really so revolutionary an idea. It once was that operating systems cleared out unused libraries from memory (rather unlike the way Windows behaves, by loading 385 MB of junk you just might need during a session) and dynamically adjust the amount of processor priority and time (Priority and Run Burst) each task is assigned as needed depending upon system load, etc. Some things appear to have gone backward as we've got more dependent on ooh, shiny! features, whistles and bells.

Maybe like NASA digging up how they once did the Apollo Moon missions, to relearn, it's time for some of the people who do operating systems today to look back at how we did things 20-30 years ago.

Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux

[radarsat1]

Normal people can't do that. I can't program worth shit, and I don't even know how to mess with the Kernal. They mean an OS that changes with you, without you having to do it with coding. If Linux could do that, it would be MUCH better.

You know, as a programmer, I get really tired of people suggesting ways to program computers "without doing any coding". That's where BAD things come from. That's where "dynamically hiding menu items" come from, so you never know where things are. That's where "visual programming" comes from, so you're staring at a screen full of boxes and lines with little to no organizational structure.

No. If you're gonna program a computer, learn how to program. The CS field as a whole apologizes for the fact that computers are hard. They are complex machines. Unfortunately it is not always easy to get them to work they way they should, or the way you want them to. But that's life. If you're not willing to learn how to program, you should be willing to learn how to use what other people have programmed, or learn how to write specs and make intelligent suggestions to the community. But this bullshit about "intelligently adapting the OS to a user's needs" is just asking for trouble. It's asking for "programming" without actually asking for any "design" or "specifications". It will end up being crap.

The fact is, making something "user friendly" means making the front-end more simple -- and thus making the back-end more complicated. But this complexity always eventually compounds and compounds until the end user can't understand what's happening and gets confused. In the end, we learn that computers are easier to use if you understand the back-end, and that can only happen if you use a minimum of metaphor. That is-- a straight-forward system that is obvious and transparent.

The mistake that Windows and many GUI systems have made is in trying to HIDE the system in metaphor. It always backfires, because although a transparent system may be harder to learn, it is far, far easier to deal with once the learning curve has been climbed. And since we've discovered that even the simplest metaphoric GUI requires "training", well.. you may as well train the end user how it actually WORKS instead of trying to hide it from them in a bubble of "interface".

Of course, that's just MHO. Though I believe Neal Stephenson agrees with me.

(My apologies to the parent. My comments aren't really directed at you, per se, I just get tired of people suggesting that computer programming should be effortless. Computer using should be easy, but programming is programming, if you know what I mean.)

Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux

[ScuzzMonkey]

I don't disagree with you entirely, but you can certainly understand that the line between using and programming has become blurred over the years, and not always with such negative outcomes. After all, in the beginning, everything was programming. Your argument could have been applied to someone just wanting a simple word processor back in the punch-card and teletype days.

Things have obviously changed quite a bit; you don't have to be a programmer to get WYSIWYG editing and print output anymore. It may not seem like it from here, but there are probably a lot of functions that most people consider "programming" that will fall into the same category at some unspecified point in the future. All that programming does is simply interface with the machine at a slightly more complex level than the average user. We're just talking about improving the interface to the point where some things, which now require "programming", will simply be "using" instead... and programmers will move on to more complicated arenas.

Macros or mail filters or Netflix's recommendation system are all ways that average users basically program computers today without any hardcore CS education. Ten or twenty years ago, they would have required such a background to accomplish the same tasks, but no one really considers it "programming" today; there is no reason that many other functions that we currently think of as programming won't become similarly easy or transparent.

There will always be the wizards responsible for writing the code that puts those things into place, and so that's where I agree with you--if you want to be a coder, go learn to code. In that sense, programming will always be programming, but I think the common definition of the word is a necessarily moving target.

Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux

[Jeremi]

The central problem I see with this adaptable OS concept is the fact that those who are programming the adaptability will not have any idea what the average person considers intuitive, or what the average user truly wants from their OS. One of my major gripes with Micro$oft is that their products always seem to think they know what you want better than you yourself do.

Indeed. In fact, Microsoft developed the very feature this article is describing, and they named it 'Clippy'. The rest, as they say, is history :^)

It's been done (sort of)

[TimmyDee]

This sort of "adaptive learning" for applications has already been done, albeit in a limited and utterly frustrating way courtesy of MS Office and their magical hiding menus.

As a Mac user who has to interact with PCs quite often at work, I find this not only not helpful, but completely obnoxious. I realize this is probably due to MS's fairly awful learning algorithm, but I think the lesson here is that it's going to take a long, long, long time before anything like this can make its way to the desktop without pissing off 50% of the users. Or more.

Tedious...

[applix7]

The OS is just a hardware multiplexer. Anything above that level is called an application.

Good ideas

[ThousandStars]

The problem with articles like this is that they're filled with highfalutin and banal platitudes but low on nitty-gritty details about how one could actually construct the OS of the future. Look, I'd like "an operating system that actually morphed and adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around," but what the hell does that mean, exactly? And, once you've decided how it means, how are you going to implement it?

If those questions had answers, someone would already be writing the "OS of the future." Sadly, at least in present and near-future technological terms, those questions don't have answers, and so they'll remain in the world of hand waving prognostications about some techno-utopia.

Nothing to see here, move along.

[4D6963]

This article sounds like articles from 1990 about the house of 2015, you know, the ones talking about how saying "light" will turn light on, how you will check and reply to your video e-mails from your living room big screen TV well you know.. just like Back To the Future II.

My point is, I don't think you'll really see or even want a self deciding or modifying OS, even if the idea sounds cool. Mod me down for this if you want, but I think this whole article is just some nearly-worthless futuristic rambling, even if it's got some interesting ideas, don't pay attention.

What hogwash

[ClosedSource]

A CLI is no more "the system" than a GUI, it's just another abstraction. Most black-and-white movies were made that way because it was the best that could be done, not because the filmmaker thought it was more artistic. In a like manner, most OS's of the 70's used a CLI not because it was a "minimum metaphor", but because it was the only practical option at the time.

Re:What hogwash

[radarsat1]

I'm sorry, what? Where did I mention anything about the CLI?
I certainly did not mean to imply that there's anything wrong with a GUI. But there IS something wrong with dynamically hiding parts of a GUI based on some unspecified learning algorithm.
Do you understand what I mean?
Computers should be transparent and obvious, THAT is what makes them easier to use, not artificially messing with the interface to pretend the "hard parts" don't exist. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to use the mouse to interact with them. It just has to be designed well -- meaning everything accessible in a logical manner, whether it is through the keyboard or the mouse.

Here's How That Works

[Greyfox]

First you find a person who can program the computer. You tell him what you want in English and give him a bucket of cash. Then you cross your fingers and hope that he was worth a bucket of cash. He goes off and writes a program based on what you told him. If neither you nor he were on crack at the time, you might get a system that approximates what you wanted it to do. You then use what he made for you to make two buckets of cash, at which point you can get two more programmers to make a computer do something else that you want it to. It's a very user friendly system, really...

Re:Other users?

[admactanium]

My major concern with such a system (besides the obvious privacy ones touched on in the article) is what happens when some other user sits at my comptuter uses it for a while. Would the "adaptive engine" or whatever be smart enough to figure out that there was someone else there or would I have to reset my settings and have it relearn everything?

sort of how your tivo starts to think you're gay because you're girlfriend keeps recording oprah?

TFA was completely worthless. besides the whole "big brother" strawman the author sets up, there are so many other issues that are simply not addressed. he uses a silly example of having the computer learn that you don't like to be bothered with emails while working on a video editing project except for "critical emails". well, how does the computer "learn" this behavior? if you don't check your mail when you edit video, you're not likely to find the "critical" email. thus, the computer doesn't understand that an email from "bob my client" is somehow more important than an email from "my nigerian ancestor who is also a prince." if you DO check your email during your video editing session, i suppose the computer would think that you like to be bothered with your emails while you're working on video.

then you have to factor in the complexities of whether or not editing video is in the same importance category as photo retouching. and is that also as important was writing a letter? i think i'd rather my computer let me be the judge of whether or not an email is important to me and when. besides, there's no easy way for the computer to know if i'm doing "entertainment work" (in my case, farking a photo) or "work work" (retouching photographs for publication).

also, as anyone who's used any sort of "learning technology" like voice recognition or hwr, we all know there's a long and frustrating process to getting the software to work even passably well. so i guess the first six months or so of your new system you'll have your computer making all sort of bad assumptions about your workflow and deciding to hide or highlight certain functions in your apps. while working within a tradition WIMP methaphor might not be the theoretically most efficient way to get work done, it's at least generally consistent. which, in turn, probably makes it the most efficient.

if i need a tool, i want it to be where i left it. i don't need my full set of hex keys as often as i need my cordless drill, but i sure don't need any magic gnomes running hiding all my hex keys and replacing them with my drill (which i already have a place for).