A New Kind of OS 393
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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! (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Not too exciting. (Score:4, Interesting)
For the lazy, here's the description from the article about how the futuristic OS is going to work:
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:4, Interesting)
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... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What hogwash (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What hogwash (Score:2, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)