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.'"

Other users?

[PacketCollision]

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?

Another interesting aspect would be as a constant check to make sure the allowed user is the one at tthe keyboard. Different enough input stats and the password box pops up.

This is what I want in a future OS

[Travoltus]

More control of my computer by me, instead of by someone else.

I keep hearing about stuff like "all your base are belong to thin clients and remote servers" whenever someone mentions the future of OSes and that deeply disturbs me, especially the part about remote storage of data and subscription based access to remotely hosted apps. Forget morphing; I would prefer changing my OS settings as I please. In fact, give me OS the option where I can save my settings to a profile and then load up a profile to fit what I'm doing.

I'll pay more for having everything on my hard drive, under my control, without any need to phone home to authorize further usage of my media, software or OS. Unfortunately we the sheeple are being herded towards the digital corporate nanny state where the corporations decide what we'll get and these little heuristic tricks the OS of tomorrow will do for us, will give us the illusion that we have control.

Funny how it is that to get the kind of extra value I desire, I need to actually pay [redhat.com] less [debian.org]. Ok, so I'll purchase a support contract, does that count as "paying more"?

Hate them! Hate them! Hate them!

[khasim]

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.

Yes! And I am somewhat annoyed with them.

One of the FIRST things I do is go and turn of "Use personalized menues".

Hunting for the widget the FIRST time was annoying enough. Why would I want to hunt for it a SECOND time? I have already learned where it is the first time.

Not to mention that I'm usually doing at least 3 different tasks at once.

If you want to improve the OS "of the future", then START with a reduced set of commands and allow the user to choose what level s/he is comfortable with. Do NOT move items once they've been learned.

I think we'll see more specialized OSs

[PIPBoy3000]

For example, users will see flavors of the OS that are secure, fast, web-based, all-inclusive, or geared towards some specialized function such as controlling a robot or doing scientific calculations. Already you see Linux forks all over the place, just for this reason. I think the trend will continue down that path - an OS for every need.

Not too exciting.

[aardvarkjoe]

For the lazy, here's the description from the article about how the futuristic OS is going to work:

Here's an example for you: imagine you are sitting there working away on a video project. After stopping for a break, your OS pops up with a small alert box asking you if you'd like the PC to roll into adaptive mode. You select yes and the OS begins to learn, as you work, what your needs are.

You go to open your video project again after lunch and almost immediately, you find that the program feels more in tune and responsive to your needs. On the second monitor, you discover a virtual palette of all the editing tools you use the most. No longer are you being forced to locate the editing tools you need from some arcane menu. No, instead your PC has done the work for you with no interaction on your part whatsoever. Sounds interesting? Just wait, it gets weirder...

During the course of your editing work, your PC has already learned from previous experiences that you do not like to be bothered with e-mail alerts when working on specific projects. It's not so much the software being used mind you, rather the type of "work" being done at the time.

An important e-mail from your client comes rolling in along with a number of less important messages. Thanks to Brand X OS' new probability engine, the only e-mail you are alerted to is the one the OS knows will be critical. Even though the other less important e-mails are coming from the same person, your OS understands how to handle this just the way you prefer.

Now, I don't know about anybody else, but I would kind of expect that the video editing program would make the tools easily accessible the first time I use it, rather than waiting until I've spent a couple hours hunting through menus before doing so. And my e-mail program already has an option controlling whether it notifies me of new messages or not.

In a general sense, the idea of an adaptive OS sounds nice, but the author sure didn't come up with any examples that sound particularly compelling -- or even interesting -- to me. The hard part of coming up with a next-generation OS isn't in programming new features; it's actually inventing or designing something that people will find useful.

Turning the computer inside out

[caseih]

Almost since the inception of computers and then later modern OS design we've been trapped in a paradigm that although mirroring some aspects of the real world (the desktop, tools, etc), is quite backwards from other aspects. I think it is time we ditched some of these decades old concepts. For one the concept of an "application" has to go. It's an outdated and locks us down and restricts what we can do. See it's not about the applications; it's about the data. The data is the most important thing. Data should not be imprisoned in an application or even a series of compatible applications. Rather than the application being the focus of our OS and UIs, we should make the data, or the "document" be the focus. Instead of applications we have smaller, simpler, tools that can be applied to the documents (data objects or whatever). Common tools can work equally well on like data objects no matter where they reside. A spell checker would spell check anything that is text. A pen could draw on anything that is a drawable (a surface of some kind). If you needed a better pen, you'd buy a better pen that would work on the same surfaces as the old one (but in a better way perhaps). Everything would be document-centric with the concept of, perhaps, tool palettes or something. But it would be very modular and loosely coupled. The irony of loose coupling is that it could lead to the integration of widely differing sets of tools. For years Microsoft has tought us that to have good integration between the various tasks (word processing, spreadsheets, etc) we need a tightly intergrated application. This is false. We really need just open document objects that can support a variety of types of data and the tools to work on them. The OS becomes the app and *everything* is then integrated, but in a more open and extensible way. Of course this dramatic shift would lead to the demise of many major software houses until they can learn to adapt to the new way of doing things. But in the end the OS gets out of the way and lets us *work*.

If some of these concepts sound familiar, it is because they are not new. Apple and IBM once talked about this in their Taliget (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent) project which died. Unfortunately while we talk about technologies like OOP, they really haven't moved very much beyond languages. OSs are modular and even object-oriented to a degree, but they haven't quite arrived at the things I describe yet. Having the KDE libraries being object-oriented and manipulatable over RPC and DCOP is a step towards a possible document-centric future.

The Future OS isn't an OS, really...

[rickb928]

It's a Hypervisor.

Your applications provide (or are provided with) enough OS foundation to function in the limited virtual machine they live in.

The Hypervisor manages the hardware, inter-application communication, networking for each, and of course picking up the trash and keeping everything polite.

Apps only see the shared resources the Hypervisor permits.

But most important, two features:

  - Each app gets the OS features it needs. My word processor may not need the same things the database needs, nor the e-mail app, nor the music player. So the OS for each app is lighter and nimbler.

- Each app is restricted in how it interacts with other apps. No more OLE, DDE, much less opportunity for the backdoor/under the hood shenanigans we call worms, viruses, trojans, and 'badware' (ick, stupid name).

I saw an article describing this and promptly lost any way to find the FRAKKING ARTICLE! Did anyone else, and where the heck is it? I thought it was *here*, on /.

Grrrrr....

But I love the idea. It ain't really new, but it's clever.

rick

What I would like out of an OS...

[NerveGas]

1. Non-intrusive.
2. Stable.
3. Efficient.
4. Intuitive.

    Some time ago, I worked on a friend's computer that was running Windows 95 on a Pentium 166. I was astounded at how fast and responsive it was. Windows XP on an A64/P4 barely keeps up, yet offers very little more to me in terms of usefulness. Neither Windows, MacOS, nor XWindows particularly fits #4, at least not for me.

    I will say, in terms of scalability, XWindows is a *real* screamer on a quad-Opteron with 8 gigs of RAM and a nice, fast SCSI array.

steve

Kai Krause tried this once

[Animats]

Kai Krause [wikipedia.org] tried something like that once, in "Kai's Power Tools". The interface started out simple, and as you used it, when the software decided you were good enough, you advanced to the next level and more tools appeared. This was one of the first programs to have really cool functional widgets, like draggable on-screen trackballs and joysticks.

Users hated it. The cool user interface just got in the way of getting work done. At one point, a rumor started that Kai was going to redesign Photoshop's interface, and there were organized protests to Adobe.

But his programs looked so cool.

Part of the problem was that Kai was addressing a very hard problem - the user interface for a drawing program. The MacOS X toolbar looks like a Kai interface. But that tool bar is really just a menu. Serious drawing programs, from AutoCAD to Maya, have to offer so many different yet interacting capabilities to the user that they're terrifyingly hard. A full-scale 3D animation program is about as hard as an interface gets. There before you is the ability to create a synthetic world. Animation programs struggle to provide all the needed tools without overwhelming the user.

There's also the issue in that world that working artists want quite a different set of capabilities than amateurs do. Artists seldom edit freehand-drawn lines. They delete them and sketch new ones; they don't drag spline control points. An experienced animator creating a human head in a 3D animation system won't build it up one polygon at a time, or start pulling on an ellipsoid. They may draw a series of cross-sections and skin them. I've seen this done in less than a minute. So the needed tools may be quire different from what a programmer would imagine.

Re:What I would like out of an OS...

[Anonymous Coward]

The X Window System is (a) not an OS, and (b) not called XWindows.

Re:What hogwash

[jpardey]

Actually, it is more of the system than a GUI, in most cases. It is closer to the lowest common denomiator than a gui is. To make a flexible CLI program is easier than making a flexible GUI program, simply because the GUI gets exponentionally more complex the more you try to do with it. So technically they are the same, but practically the CLI will win.

Re:What hogwash

[ClosedSource]

"But you know what? When you're working that closely with a system, you learn it better! No, typing "mv *.txt ../textDocuments" won't teach you a wit about x86 assembly, but it will get you thinking about directory structure in a way that explorer.exe prevents one from doing."

Well, that different way of thinking doesn't provide any additional insights into the directory structure. "../textDocuments" is just a crude way of representing part a tree abstration that tools like explorer make obvious. But the tree itself is just an abstraction anyway and has little do do with bits in hardware.

A CLI is sometimes more efficient but CLI commands don't teach any more about the sytem than pointing in clicking in a GUI do.

Re:What hogwash

[dbIII]

I think he is bashing bad GUIs - the ones we see all the way from crap shareware produced in five minutes by newbies to menu entries sorted by the time the program was last accessed and other inconsistant behaviour. There are many times when I have had to edit config files in MS Windows when the GUI front end is badly broken - a HP network scanner driver was the worst, greyed out menu entries would not let you complete the standard install.

The real problem comes when you take metaphors too far and they impede operation - machines that are short of resources should not be using CPU cycles to animate images of paper being thrown into a wastepaper basket while the user fumes at their unresponsive mouse pointer.

As for alternatives to a GUI that are not the CLI - scripts are one obvious answer. I used a machine with purely a GUI interface in the past, the Atari ST, and found I could do a lot more with it once I had a program that would let me run batch files.

Re:What hogwash

[ClosedSource]

He said: "even the simplest metaphoric GUI.." so it's pretty clear he was bashing GUI's as a class not just some GUI's.

I wasn't really looking for alernatives to GUI's and CLI's, I was just calling him out on his claim that he wasn't talking about CLI's.

I don't really see scripting as playing the same role as a CLI or GUI unless you can program one without a CLI or GUI. Perhaps paper tape or punched card systems would qualify.

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

[SP33doh]

agreed. i want me to decide what I want. i don't want microsoft telling me what I want.