Phantom OS, the 21st Century OS?

jonr writes "Phantom OS doesn't have files. Well, there are no files in the sense that a developer opens a file handle, writes to it, and closes the file handle. From the user's perspective, things still look familiar — a desktop, directories, and file icons. But a file in Phantom is simply an object whose state is persisted. You don't have to explicitly open it. As long as your program has some kind of reference to that object, all you need to do is call methods on it, and the data is there as you would expect."

Re:Doubt it.

[should_be_linear]

Also, how they send something via e-mail? Is FedEx involved in process?

OMG POINTERS!

[scubamage]

POINTERS! POINTERS EVERYWHERE! OH MY GOD POINTERS! *runs around like a lunatic*POINGERSPOINTERSPOINTERSPOINTERSPOINTERS *head explodey*

Yeah, I think the development will go something along those lines.

Re:It know what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

[zappepcs]

If you open the CD case and your OS comes out and sees it's shadow, it means 6 more years of Linux.

Re:Doubt it.

[Anonymous Coward]

How does it handle locking conflicts? Well, think about it, how do you handle locking conflicts in your program? That is your answer.

You try, fail, and your program crashes.

At least, that's how most programmers handle anything to do with locking.

Time to play Spin The Wheel, Techie edition...

[girlintraining]

Oh gee, look... Someone has changed the description of something and now it's completely new. It's not a file anymore, it's a persistent object. You know, I remember the day when they just called them files. Nice, simple. You could almost visualize it in your head. Files, you know, like what you put in cabinets. And there were folders too, and it made sense. Then Macintosh came along and, in order to make their mark in the world, we stopped talking about files and started talking about Resources. Well, they've added four more letters, bit harder to understand, a few more tech support calls to explain it. And then along comes the next iteration of this naming game, a persistent object. Now we're at five constants, we've added seven more letters, tech support can't explain it, and although everything looks the same, by golly it isn't. Next they'll be calling it a post-operation management data structure.

See, here's a problem in our community in plain sight but nobody's going to talk about it, and it's this: We make things unnecessarily complicated. And we buy into these complications, because we want to impress our other geek friends and cohorts with our impressive cutting-edge knowledge. So companies sell us an ever-enlarging and increasingly dense lexicon to obscure what are really simple, fundamental concepts. You know, it has taken me decades to learn even a tenth of what computers can really do. It's what has drawn me to them my whole life -- they are based on such amazingly simple principles but yet can so such incredibly complex things. Learning information technology is like peeling an onion. I never finish. And you know, truth be told I like the challenge.

But what I don't like is having to learn an ever-changing lexicon just to have a conversation with someone, when we both understand the concepts and principles already. Why should we, as a community, constantly have to re-learn the same things over and over and over again? We need to stop doing this. We are wasting more and more of our time just trying to keep up with the language, instead of actually working the problems. And before I get the petty intellectuals to jump on my case for "dumbing things down", I'd just like to say anyone can make things more complicated but it takes true genius to make things simple. So there, I've said my peace. Bring on the rebuttals.

Re:Hmm...

[denis-The-menace]

You probably have "phantom" ownership of the OS so I would assume you can just get a license. ;)

Re:Doubt it.

[interkin3tic]

In short, the Phantom OS sounds more like the Phantom game console than anything I'd want to run on my computer.

I was also wondering about the choice of names there. I did some research and found that actually they made the right choice given the options. Some of the other names they were considering:

- Edsel OS
- New Coke OS
- Delorean OS
- Betamax OS
- Cold fusion OS
- Cure for the common cold OS
- Esperanto OS
- Zune OS
- This OS will totally break your computer OS
- Enron OS
- weloveventurecapital OS
- Dreamcast OS
- Y2K bug OS
- Completehoax OS
- Flyingcar OS
- Windows Vista OS

Re:Oh really?

[noidentity]

You don't have to explicitly open it. As long as your program has some kind of reference to that object, all you need to do is call methods on it, and the data is there as you would expect.

So in other words...

#ifndef PHANTOM_H
#define PHANTOM_H

#include <stdio.h>

typedef FILE* phantom_ref;

inline phantom_ref phantom_get_ref ( const char name [] ) { return fopen( name ); }
inline void phantom_read ( phantom_ref r, void* out, size_t len ) { fread( out, len, 1, r );
inline void phantom_write ( phantom_ref r, void const* in, size_t len ) { fwrite( out, len, 1, r );
inline void phantom_release_ref( phantom_ref r ) { fclose( r ); }

#endif

Re:Hmm...

[Xtravar]

How is it licenced?

It's not called a license anymore. Licenses are a thing of the past! It's called a "contractual object". And they're not written by lawyers, but "documentary artisans".

Re:Doubt it.

[mustafap]

>You try, fail, and your program crashes.

You try, it works, you sell, one year later it fails, and your program crashes, and the customer sues.

There, fixed that for you

Re:the idea's worked in practice before

[Bearhouse]

I worked on the S/38 - fantastic...really.
But there's a reason for nearly all the advanced features of Pacific disappearing through the generations of AS/400 and now IBM i.

Much to learn, you have, young Jedi...and answers all you will not find on Wikipedia.

Re:the idea's worked in practice before

[Shin-LaC]

I think there was a connection problem when your message was posted. It seems to have been truncated right before the part where you disclose the arcane mysteries you were hinting at.

Re:It's just a game of names

[93 Escort Wagon]

From what I read, these "objects" are nothing but a fancy new name for files. For instance, if you are writing a program in Python you don't save a file, you pickle an object. Oh, wait, that's exactly what Python is able to do right now, in any OS that implements Python! Doh....

Python is rather archaic. This new OS features a brand-new scripting language called Poodle. It is designed to be forward and backward compatible with Python, both current and future versions. This means Poodle scripts and programs don't need a separate interpreter - they can use the existing Python framework you have installed. To facilitate this, the Phantom OS developer suggests you use the file extension '.py' for Poodle code.

Re:Doubt it.

[Chuck Chunder]

You try, it works, you sell, one year later it fails, and your program crashes, and the customer sues.

You try, it works, you sell, one year later it fails, and your program crashes, and the customer thinks this is normal.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Read About Face...

[pintpusher]

Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as versioning, snapshots, backups, an almost fanatical devotion to the pope, and nice red uniforms - oh damn!