Slashdot Mirror
The State of the Internet Operating System
macslocum writes "Tim O'Reilly: 'I've been talking for years about "the internet operating system," but I realized I've never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post. Here you will see the underlying beliefs about the future that are guiding my publishing program as well as the rationale behind conferences I organize.'"
...people still pay to go to this guys seminars?
regards, the_leander
I did not know that.
That article isn't exactly cromulent. Is there a daily prize for obviousness?
This whole "Internet OS" thing reminds me of the periodic resurgences of the dumb terminal/thin client idea that goes back to the mainframe days. It seems like every ten years or so, everyone is talking about thin clients in every office, with the OS and apps running on some offsite server somewhere (now with the added twist of multiple servers over the internet). Ostensibly this is seen as a good way to save IT money and overhead. But in every actual deployment I've seen, it only causes hassles, additional expense, and headaches.
Back in the 90's we tried this at my old university. We networked all our computers and put all our apps on a central server. Even though this was all done on a local network (much more reliable in those days than the internet), it was still a complete disaster. Every time there was a glitch in the network; every student, professor, and staff member at the university lost the ability to do anything on their computer--they couldn't so much as type a Word document. Now, with little network downtime, you would think this wouldn't be so much of a problem--but when you're talking about thousands of people who live and die by the written word, and who are often working on class deadlines, you can imagine that even 30 minutes of downtime was a nightmare. I was skeptical of this system from the get-go, but got overruled by some "visionaries" who had bought into the whole thin client argument with a religious fervor. Of course, long story short, we ended up scrapping the system after a year and going back to the old system (with a significant cost to the state and university for our folly).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It seems the hardest and most time-consuming problem with Internet operating systems is figuring out how to work offline.
And the easiest solution, which seems to escape almost everybody, is "don't work online in the first place".
undo
If were a living thing, it would have cancer, several kinds of it, spread all around the body. Botnets, zombies armies, spam, malware sites... a good percent of it is just badly sick. It have several brains too, some of them playing against the health of the whole body by not letting the "blood" flow freely all around, as some governments censoring it because political reasons or lobbying ones.
It have its strengths too, is maturing (hopely), have a good defense system so the sickness spread around don't infect everything, and it evolves fast (even if limited by laws, patents, trolls, etc), getting more personal and localized.
With a bit of luck people, institutions and governments starts to worry about its health, the ecosystem that it is and start working on preserving it as much as the planet we live.
"always-on future", frequent use of the word "massive", "the internet operating system is an information operating system" etc. etc. etc. Besides the article a big colored blotch blares something about some "web2.0 expo" - whatever that may be. Brief: are there people actually listening to / reading this guy and his baked air ? What a bunch of meaningless cr*p !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I think that's where old-school software download sites shine again. They are basically app stores for free/shareware apps; and they've been around for decades.
With the advent of Google-level search engines, they became a lot less relevant. Now that Google & co are spammed to death, they regain part of their old glory.
It's not all black and white though. App-stores suffer from fraudulent entries that try to game the system, too. I've followed the reports of various Apple App Store developers for a while and even though Apple is tough, a lot of dubious crap falls through the cracks. On the other hand, Google tries to combat sites that try to game their ranking algorithm (and fails miserably).
So where is the quote of the hour coming from? Sheep hearders?
O'rielly is pointing out the same dangers of the Cloud as Stallman, but in a reasonable voice. The question is how to preserve the DIY environment when hardware is sealed (see iPad) and software is ran on corporate computers. Will innovation be constrained or will the cloud be open enough to allow people to change vendors easily without total reworks?
It does sound like everything Plan 9 was trying to solve and did solve to a certain extent.
The trouble is plan 9 was too early for its time and it still is.
There is a larger problem too. Ownership. It is clear who owns and responsible for
individual machines. But who owns the mystical "between the machines space".
Google? Government? United Nations? Can't pick which is worse.
that would be IOS right :-)
ps for non networking types IOS is Ciscos OS
"..Along came Microsoft with an offer that was difficult to refuse: We'll manage the drivers; all application developers have to do is write software that uses the Win32 APIs, and all of the complexity will be abstracted away. "
In which universe did Microsoft first come up with the concept of driver management and a standardized API?
Sounds more like he's summarizing the most popular services of the World Wide Web today, and calling all that the Information Operating System. We've heard allegations of the WWW being an OS before.
Don't be fooled by absolute measures like MB/s. The ratios of CPU/RAM/IO/network speeds are more informative, and they keep expanding. I could just as easily argue that independent app hosts are the obvious future, because cell phones and iPods now have more powerful processors, larger RAM, and larger tertiary storage than what many PCs had in the 1990s. Why use costly or unreliable networks when you can process locally? Neither argument actually holds water, as the choice depends on the application requirements and human factors.
We've already seen many iterations of this cycle. Teletypes replaced with video terminals, remote tty-based mainframe apps replaced with early PCs with their own video terminals (CP/M era), video terminals replaced with onboard video cards (IBM AT and Apple era), minicomputers replaced with Unix workstations, workstations replaced with X Terminals, X Terminals replaced with Unix PCs, etc. In most of these cycles, the "thin" terminals have been embedded appliances which boasted processing and memory almost equivalent to the standalone computers of the same era. My CP/M desktop and its video terminal both had about the same type of CPU, similar amounts of RAM, and similar serial port IO capability.
What I expect is that the market speeds up and keeps getting more turbulent, so this psychologically driven cycle or market pulse will break down. At any one point in time, we'll just see a broader mixture of differently tuned device designs all proceeding in the market together with sufficient consumers to fund development. Their constituent parts are the real driving commodities: CPU, RAM, HDD, SDD, GPU, LCDs, wireless chipsets, etc. The printed circuitboard, power supply, and case form factor are more easily adapted for low-to-medium markets, so different combinations can be brought to market without too much overhead, unlike the individual integrated circuits coming from the chip fabs.
I like a hybrid approach.
Our Enterprise accounting system is on the server, but office apps are local. Daily workflow seems to produce a lot of "debris", which conveniently forms little digital compost heaps on people's local machines. (With a little nudging) if there's a document that's usefully finalized, post that version to the server folder.
MS Office Basic is "essentially almost-free" for OEM hardware purchases, so why put Word and Excel on a server?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
After the mess with ubisoft's god awful DRM, why do people think having a cloud based operating system is a good idea? And if it can survive a disconnection and thus doesn't need the net at that point, what's the point in having it in the cloud at all?
There are too many potential problems for cloud based OSs, such as a company owning your data instead of you, potential for their servers to be hacked, net disconnection, etc, all for the advantage of slightly cheaper hardware for you. I want to own the data on my hard drive while it's not connected to the net.
Crappy trade off in my opinion.
There's no reason why we can't have both - data backed up/synchronized to the "cloud", and applications that can continue to run on locally cached data when the network is unavailable for whatever reason. There are still some cases where this is problematic - e.g. my iPhone Google Maps application really doesn't work in the hinterlands, as the phone won't have the maps locally stored - but this is really just a problem of caches not being big enough or smart enough to do what we need. The problem will be partly solved by brute force - it looks like flash memory will continue to get more dense for a while - and partly by increased intelligence from the applications themselves. In the case of the maps application, it's easy to envision a more evolved version of Google maps realizing that I'm about to leave a cell phone coverage area, and in the background, downloading maps I'm likely to need before it's too late to get them.
I think this is really what TFA is trying to point out, but now I'm probably in contention for the Captain Obvious prize myself.
I think a better version of the future is to secure the PC using sandboxing and capabilities to limit the side effects of applications. This then allows you to download and run apps on your PC, without the need to trust them. You could then have redundant copies of your stuff spread across your various devices. Your stuff includes photos, videos, documents, and the code to manipulate them.
The focus on services is a result of the distortions caused by the lack of a good security model on the PC. Once that gets fixed, a lot of thing work better.
You've got to be kidding that I'm channelling Stallman. He's finally waking up to an issue that I put in front of him all the way back in 1999. At the time, he said "It didn't matter." See for yourself, in the transcript of our interchange at the 1999 Wizards of OS conference in Berlin. They are a fair way through the PDF of the transcript, so read on down: http://tim.oreilly.com/archives/mikro_discussion.pdf
At the time I was talking about "infoware" rather than "Web 2.0" but the concepts I was working with were in the same direction.
But in case you don't want to go through all that, here's the relevant bit:
Richard Stallman:
I came up to the mike again because I wanted to address
the topic that Tim O'Reilly raised. Some of you might know about our major
disagreements on other issues, but that's not what he spoke about. And I think that
this distinction between hardware and software and infoware is an interesting one
and that you addressed it very well from the open source point of view. That being
a matter of looking for a development methodology of making things that work and
judging success to a large extent in the same concept of market share or number of
users that is used as a criterion by the proprietary software developers. Now,
looking at that same concept, that same situation from the Free Software point of
view, I bring to this a different idea of goals and a different idea of a criterion.
The goal in the Free Software movement is to extend our freedom. 'Ours' meaning
that of whoever wants freedom to work together so that freedom spreads over a
wider range of activities. And so our criterion isn't really about market share, ever
and it's only secondarily about 'Do we have good technology, does the program
work reliably?' Obviously if it works badly enough it won't be useful, but otherwise
we can fix it, so that's just a side issue. The important thing is: How many activities
can we do without giving up our freedom? What is the range of things that we can
do on a computer which has just free software on it, where we don't have to
compromise our freedom to do any of those things?
Now when you apply this criterion to things like web servers that answer certain
kinds of questions for you, that communicate with you, you find an interesting
thing: a proprietary program on a web server that somebody else is running limits
his freedom perhaps, but it doesn't limit your freedom or my freedom. We don't
have that program on our computers at all, and in fact the issue of free software
versus proprietary arises for software that we're going to have on our computers and
run on our computers. We're gonna have copies and the question is, what are we
allowed to do with those copies? Are we just allowed to run them or are we allowed
to do the other useful things that you can do with a program? If the program is
running on somebody else's computer, the issue doesn't arise. Am I allowed to copy
the program that Amazon has on it's computer? Well, I can't, I don't have that
program at all, so it doesn't put me in a morally compromised position, the way I
would be if I were supposed to have a program on my computer and the law says I
can't give you a copy when you come visit me. That really puts me on the spot
morally. If a proprietary program is on Amazon's computer, that's Amazon's
conscience. Now I would like them to have freedom too. I hope they will want
freedom, and they will work with me so that we all get freedom, but it's not directly
an attack on you and me if Amazon has a proprietary program on their computer.
It's not crucially important to you and me whether Amazon uses a free operating
system like GNU plus Linux, or a free web server like Apache. I mean I hope they
will, I hope free software will be popular, but if they give up their freedom, that's
just a shame it's not a danger to us who want free
Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 http://www.oreilly.com