Where Are Operating Systems Headed? 278
An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Dobb's Michael Swaine breaks down the question of where operating systems are headed. Among his teasers: Is Vista the last version of desktop Windows? (Counterintuitively, he says no.); Did Linux miss its window on the desktop? (Maybe.) And, most interestingly, are OSes at this point no longer necessary? He calls out the Symbian smartphone OS as something to keep an eye on, and reassures us that Hollywood-style OSes are not in our short-term future. Where do you weigh in on the future of operating systems? In ten years will we all be running applications via the internet?"
Article author is displaying some confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider for a moment: What is Debian on FreeBSD? [debian.org] Is it a FreeBSD operating system or a Linux operating system? Or is it a Frankenstein kitbash of both? The answer is, neither answer is correct. It is the FreeBSD kernel combined with the GNU Platform.
Separating the task of operating the hardware (traditionally the job of the kernel) from the higher level "platform" has a variety of implications. The most important implication is that the software is as portable as the platform is. It doesn't matter if the underlying kernel is FreeBSD, Linux, or Windows NT. If you software targets the GNU platform, it is portable across all those systems. At least at a source level, though binary compatibility is ideal.
Thus when programmers make the comment that Java "is like an Operating System", what they mean is that the Java Platform is sufficient to replace the platform that shipped with your operating system. While the focus is currently on integrating the disparate platforms, what you're starting to see is that the OS is taking a back seat to the platform. Programmers want portability across devices, and Information Technology wants more flexible deployment solutions. Combined, these two needs add up to a drive for further portability of platforms with an eye toward using the right kernel for the right deployment solution.
That is where "Operating Systems" are headed. Not the monoliths of yesteryear, but the flexibility to provide familiar functionality where you need it and when you need it.
My definition of an OS (Score:5, Interesting)
An OS is a collection of code that is used by software to manage access to system hardware via a well defined API, along with a collection of standardized utilities that provide for user access and management of system hardware and data structures and data streams associated with that hardware.
So, under this definition, the kernel is a peice of the OS, disk access utilities are part of the OS, but applets such as a mini word processor and paint program are mearly bundled utilities.
Re:My definition of an OS (Score:5, Interesting)
Programmers think of them individually as APIs. Collectively, however, they add up to the platform the software targets. As long as that platform is available, the software is portable.
They are a new platform (Score:5, Informative)
A typical PC:
CPU and other hardware, BIOS, OS kernel including kernel-level library routines and virtual-machine subsystems, OS-supplied and 3rd-party library routines including OpenGL and non-kernel virtual machines, and applications. For the sake of simplicity I'm ignoring complex scenarios like OSes running in a VM that's running in an OS that's running in a VM.
In principle, applications can "call" functions at any level in the stack, although in modern OSes the kernel blocks direct access to the BIOS and some other hardware and the chip itself blocks access to privileged instructions by unprivileged applications.
Re:They are a new platform (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They are a new platform (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My definition of an OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Libraries.
There's no point in getting too pedantic about terms like "operating system" that don't actually have widely-established meanings. There can be absolutely no doubt about what code belongs to the kernel and what code belongs to userspace and what difference that makes. Library vs. application code is pretty clear, too, though at run-time much of that distinction is lost (or even after link-time in the case of static libraries). So now that we've defined what they are in terms of words with actual meanings, who cares whether it's part of the operating system or not?
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
I prefer to define an OS as the code that controls the local hardware.
If the OS allows some other app to control the local hardware then that OS has a "vulnerability" and is not "secure". There are lots of examples of that in history.
Apps run on the OS. And app can be something such as Java which can run apps itself. But Java should never be touching the local hardware.
When I first heard about the Java OS (Score:5, Informative)
Unix has this to some degree, partially by virtue of it being old, but there exists no structured management system for the packages at this basic level (that I'm aware of). And while I grant that one isn't necessary (the shell/filesystem combination is fine for package management), the lack of one tends to complicate things from a user perspective. Linux has made great progress over the years in achieving high-level usability, but many low-level tasks still require a good bit of domain knowledge and thought, largely because of the filesystem/shell nature of how these tasks are typically performed. If this process could be simplified and in turn made more reliable (it's a bad example, but compare installing an application on MacOS compared to any other operating system), then I think things would be moving in the right direction. This isn't to say that being able to mess with the core of things is bad, but it should be an option, not a requirement.
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Also, how has Linux missed the boat? Linux is WAY behind on desktop usability features (from a typical end-user POV), but there are thousands of developers working to improve it.
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I have yet to read the article so my
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I think your own post shows far more pretentiousness than mine does. I have the highest respect for Mr. Swaine, and the work he has done in the field of computer journalism. But that doesn't mean that everyone always expresses themselves clearly, or even have a solid enough concept of what they wish to communicate on paper. (As a fellow author - no, I'm not talking about blogging - I can identify.)
Fundamentally, I'm not disa
A bit obvious... (Score:2, Funny)
What's the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of Internet applications (Score:3, Interesting)
My ISP offers webmail. If I use it instead of POP, I can read my mail anywhere, anytime. In exchange, I lose the privacy that comes with keeping my data local. I also lose the ability to read my mail when the ISP has a hiccup.
Google offers maps. In most cases Google Maps is a lot more convenient than firing up my local street-maps program. It's also "run anywhere."
On the other hand, I don't think I'd wa
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Try a service that has IMAP. Or have POP leave a copy on the server (though not as good as IMAP). One big problem with relying on webmail is that you can't easily integrate multiple accounts into one interface. Most webmail services are designed to access that service only (although
The future is ten tons of spaghetti. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm worried that we're going to keep building on top of the macrokernels we already have, without cleaning up and simplifying things as we go. I'm worried that the future will be as presented in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, where everyone runs an operating system too large, un-modular, and spaghetti-like for anyone to understand, much less debug. Hurry with The Hurd, RMS!
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Some cleanup happens (Score:3, Interesting)
It may still be there but it's not used outside special-purpose environment.
Likewise, until recently people tried to cram almost every filesystem and pseudo-filesystem under the sun into the Linux kernel. With the advent of FUSE, future pseudo-filesystems and even real ones will be in userland. Sure they won't perform as well but at least they won't kill the kernel when they bug out.
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If you were to look at the history of the linux kernel, you'd see that this happens naturally. New APIs come in, old ones get deprecated and eventually removed.
Look at dnotify->inotify, devfs->udev, initrd->initramfs, VM changes, module loading, ppc/ppc64 convergence, etc.
One of the things that maintainers of outside-the-tree code complain about is the amount of churn in in-kernel APIs. This churn is due to exactly the "cleaning up and simplifying" that you mention (as well as adding new features
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I'm not sure if minix3 will be the future, but I do think it's a peek at a direction that would work well.
Out the Windows? (Score:2)
Thank you, I'll be here all night...TRY THE VEAL!
10 years? how about right now? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Consumer devices (Score:5, Interesting)
Two words: Consumer devices.
I think Steve Jobs has seen the future, and realised that the PC won't be so important, the action is all going to move to various types of devices aimed at consumers. So, he started with music players, is moving into portable video/gaming and now of course telephones, and has made the first steps towards TV. Television is the biggie of course, and I believe Jobs is being deliberately low key about his intentions there - with the low key announcement of the Apple TV box, for instance.
Here's a prediction, in the next few years Steve Jobs is going to make a presentation where he says something like "First we revolutionised the personal computer, then the music player and the telephone. Now we're going to revolutionise television..."
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That Mac looks pretty important to me.
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I don't think they are designed that way, I bet future iPods will have a direct link to the iTunes store and you'll be able to purchase music directly. And I'm not sure why you think the iPhone needs a Mac, it looks like a pretty standalone device from what I've seen. Finally, the box that they currently call the AppleTV I believe is not the final product - that will come in the nex
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It's not that the consumer devices that are becoming important in themselves, what's important is that they are becoming interoperable. This is what Apple is doing with the iTV, iPhone, and the iPod, and if anything the PC (Mac) becomes more important because it ties all the consumer devices together.
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Yes, and they did phones sooner, and I believe they had PDAs that play music before the iPod.
The difference is that Jobs has a very clear idea of what consumers want. My old mum isn't going to buy an XBox360 to watch TV on it. Nor am I for that matter.
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Actually she might. She loves her Mac Mini.
Both Apple and MS are trying to get to the same point, but I believe MS will make it there first.
And then Apple will come along and do it right...
Compare the iPod and the Zune and tell me which company understands the consumer better.
Microsoft are stuck in a quagmire of their own making at the moment. Still the large majority of their revenue come from two products - their operating system and their office suite
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That's kind of what I'm referring to in the parent post - the question was "were are operating systems headed?"
Symbian? (Score:5, Insightful)
He definitely never looked at it or never tried to develop something on it.
If Symbian is your answer, you've got the wrong question.
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Counterintuitively? (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this counterintuitive? Of course Vista is not the last version of desktop Windows. You don't think Microsoft will want to retain their revenue stream in 5 years? Plus with China growing economically there will still be much demand for new computers with new OSs for many years.
In ten years will we all be running applications via the internet?
Maybe, but that doesn't mean there will be no OS. Even thin clients need some form of OS. Your web browser has run on hardware somehow.
The last OS that won't install direct to our BRAIN (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're a M$ hater, just wait until "sap and impurify your precious bodily fluids" is a system requirement.
Among other nanotechnological breakthroughs, Kurzweil says it will be possible to inject robotic blood cells that will enable you to "sit at the bottom of a swimming pool for 4 hours."
OK, for now I'll settle for Fedora Core 42 and nano-robots that will let me drink as much red wine as I want without getting a headache.
Re:The last OS that won't install direct to BRAIN (Score:4, Funny)
Big Deal. I can do that NOW, without any nano-anything. Heck, I bet YOU can, too!
Now, if you insist on filling the pool with water... <grin>
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I wonder what those "blood cells" are going to do with all that HCO3-? Lung physiology doesn't simply consist in oxygenating the blood. The lung also has to get rid of that excess CO2 (dissolved in the blood as HC03-), otherwise the blood pH will decrease very quickly leading to respiratory acidosis and death. I'm not sure how you can breathe out without breathing in, though...
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No, but my doctorate does make me more of an expert than him, especially when we talk about something in my field - the human body.
Wouldn't they fill with water rather than gas at the bottom of a pool
I was imagining someone holding their breath for 4 hours - theoretically possible if someone is balancing the CO2 and O2 levels in the blood, since changes in these concentrations ar
The Singularity is REAL (Score:2)
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The need for OSes or the lack thereof (Score:4, Interesting)
Everything in between is there as a convenience.
Whether it's convenience library routines like math libraries, a hardware-abstraction or -virtualization layer, or things that let more than one application coexist and even communicate, or whatever, OSes and other "in between" parts of a computer are there to make the application more useful, easier to write and maintain, or both.
We will always have these in-between layers. Whether the "in between" layers of the 22nd century are anything like today's OSes only time will tell.
Personally, I think 10 years from now you will see just about every application running in an isolated environment, possibly a VM of sorts. In particular, applications which access machines or applications that are not "trusted" will be run isolated from other applications on the system. They will be able to save files to a scratchpad area and send events to certain other applications such as a printing subsystem, but that's about it. Applications will communicate with other applications on the same PC in much the same way distributed applications, such as a web application, communicate today.
By 2017, I also see most applications using virtually no local storage except security credentials and cached data. All "real data" will be stored on "the big server in the sky" or "the big server run by the IT department." The exceptions will be applications demanding extreme privacy, such as diaries and non-networked dayplanners, applications demanding offline use, such as cellphone notepads, and "convenience applications" like calculators and non-networked games.
By the time our Kindergarteners reach High School, the distinction between wristwatch, cellphone/PDA, and laptop/desktop/home-entertainment-center will be one of scale and purpose, not architecture or raw capability.
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I'll use a pad and paper before I'll go back to dinosaur computing.... I don't have to be connected to the internet to use my computer/game console/phone... But it does add convenience... I don't know if I want to trade autonomy and 100% control of my computing devices for the ubiquity of "scaling purpose". Tha
MS's Way or the Highway? (Score:2)
Sadly I fear OS's of the future will be much like OS's of today, at least for the common man. MS still has no incentive to really make OS's better for consumers instead of better for MS and a lot of incentive to make their Windows OS's more and more restrictive. They know their model is slowly being undermined, but they plan to use .Net to effectively create the internet equivalent and lock everyone into one online platform instead. Other companies still have little motivation to invest in the desktop OS ma
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Your rant is pointless. No one besides Microsoft, even Apple, has figured out how to render fonts properly.
It's funny because I know two people who cited better looking fonts as one reason they switched away from Windows. I actually have both IE+WinXP and Safari+OS X running on this same monitor and I prefer the look of the fonts in OS X. Maybe you need to look at your font settings if you're having problems.
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Vista is essentially a shinier piece of crap. Microsoft has pretty much ceased innovating.
I think there are real improvements in Vista, although there are many technologies added to benefit MS and disadvantage customers as well. Indexed searching is not really that innovative, but it is an improvement. Fewer default privileges for standard users is a plus.
If MS stop
O/Ss are glue + abstraction, they have long future (Score:5, Interesting)
And the reason is simply that this is the primary role of an O/S: to glue together many rather dumb components (some virtual, some non-local), and to provide a standard abstraction for them, so that applications can be programmed with a degree of sanity. Everything that O/Ss do can be considered in those terms.
Host operating systems will disappear when they are no longer needed. And *that* will happen only when/if their key functions have migrated into the hardware, so it's a defensible argument to say that actually they will never really disappear, but transform.
My utopian vision (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok, Apple will keep it's fiefdom - but there's really nothing in that world I'd miss.
I would love to see some sort of unified driver type - your driver and hardware not tied to an OS, but that's unlikely.
Prehaps not correct about Symbian (Score:3, Interesting)
While the author correctly identifies a huge potential market for smartphones in the coming years, maybe his assumptions about Symbian are a little naive.
These smartphones are becoming popular because they are becoming more and more like a standard PC every day. The only exception being the user interface (if anyone has an idea how to fix this, give me a call ! I promise to share in the huge profits ! ).
This is facilitated by the increasing processor power that these phones have available to them. Symbian was designed for small memory, low performance processors which incredibly strict power consumption requirements and limited connectivity running in a highly controlled environment (i.e. software environment).
The cost of developing drivers for Symbian (with all its quirks) is enormous. At the moment, the semiconductor companies are getting hit with the cost of this development. This will not last forever, they will always strive for the cheapest possible solution - and this helps explain Linux large penetration in this market.
The company that holds the best cards in this field is Apple. They have waited until mobile devices have become powerful enough to run (only slightly modified) standard PC kernels (XNU). This is going to save them a fortune in the years to come. Microsoft has missed this boat - they are trying to split their OS into as many different branches/versions/flavours as possible, while neglecting the requirement to try and maintain a common "brand" across all devices.
That Gartner report is worthless... (Score:3, Insightful)
platforms (Score:4, Insightful)
"Operating system" is a pretty old paradigm... (Score:5, Insightful)
People have forgotten that the original goal of the "operating system" was nothing other than to automate the function of the "operator," reducing personnel costs and making sure that the computer wasn't sitting around at $200 an hour waiting for someone to square up the next deck of cards and load them into the hopper.
The only people who think they can tell you what an OS really is are the students who have recently memorized some textbook definition. An OS is an intertwingled hairball of utterly arbitrary functionality. It has evolved from competitors copying whatever it is that another competitor did, messing some things up, adding some cool stuff, and doing random things dictated by marketing strategy.
Want to bundle HyperCard, but you promised the database vendors you wouldn't compete with them? Easy, don't call HyperCard a database, call it part of the "system software." Want to hide the fact that your graphical shell could run on a competitor's operating system? Easy, just say Windows is part of--no, wait, IS--the operating system. And so it goes.
It is quite possible to use a computer without an operating system. I'm not saying any of these are viable paradigms for today, but none of the original versions of BASIC required an operating system. MUMPS is largely self-contained, no OS needed.
There is an opportunity for some kind of brand-new conceptualization. No, I don't know what it is. If I did, I'd promoting on it. But, yes, I think it's very likely that twenty years from now the idea of an operating system will seem as quaint as the idea of a front panel with lights and switches on it. There was a time when nobody believed you could run a computer without _that_, either.
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It is quite possible to use a computer without an operating system. I'm not saying any of these are viable paradigms for today, but none of the original versions of BASIC required an operating system. MUMPS is largely self-contained, no OS needed.
I'm curious. Are you saying that the original BASIC didn't need an operating system, or you didn't need to interact directly with the operating system when you used BASIC? I'm pretty sure the latter is true. Either BASIC interacted with the OS itself, or it WAS
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As appalling as it might seem, this is actually quite true with MS Windows. The GUI code is actually in the kernel itself.
Freedom and Technology (Score:3, Informative)
Ubiquitous Computing (Score:2, Insightful)
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The PC does the same thnig now as it did then, only faster.
Tne operating system is irrelevant? I wonder what runs all of googles boxes then? magic pixies?
The OS is relevent, it's just they it is very difficult to compete against a market leader no matter how much better your's is. It might be better to say that the OS is pretty much a commoditey.
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Because in twenty years (or more likely five to ten) you can have all the computing power and application/data storage you want in a device the size of your.. phone. People are already use their phones for one or more of playing music, taking pictures, reading e-mail and web browsing. The missing link are the peripherals, but as soon as we can cradle our phones into a home/office or laptop-like cradle to have a proper screen and
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I could have sworn it was hamsters in hamster wheels. But magic pixies could be an improvement, they don't seem to wear out or, you know, die as fast.
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The PC does the same thnig now as it did then, only faster.
20 years... let's see, 1986. I remember 1986. We had just traded our PC XT for a PC AT, at a whopping 4MHz clock speed and a whole 1024bytes of RAM. A year after I even got a VGA card for it... I had 2 20MB hard drives as well.
But my PC back then didn't: play music and movies, display more than 256 colours, multitask, help me ta
Wish List (Score:2)
There is a lot of discussion about various parts of OS's, but here is something. This is my wish list of what I'd like to see i the ideal OS released in 3 years:
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Symbian Smart Phone? (Score:2, Funny)
You should see her. Sometimes she's moaning so loud I expect her head to start spinning 360*.
But phone?
It's got attachments, and I admit I'm a bit confused by it sometimes, but I'm pretty sure it DOESNT have a mouthpiece.
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My 2 Cyberbucks Worth (Score:2)
Linux still has a good opportunity for the desktop market.
Microsoft will make another Windows operating system. The money is there, and so long as the money is there, Microsoft will be too.
Internet applications aren't going to take over just yet. Not as long as there's still a good number of people on dial-up (without even the option of broadband). And those of us who do have broadband have fairly shoddy connections, at least as far as running internet-direct applications would be concerned. Network
The future is virtual (Score:2)
Gee, this is news to me. (Score:2)
Gee, you mean you couldn't run [penguinppc.org] Linux [terrasoftsolutions.com] on [debian.org] Macs [desertsol.com] before [sourceforge.net]?
I am building a next-gen OS (Score:2)
"Hollywood-style OSs" (Score:2)
I, for one, am really glad to hear that "Hollywood-style" operating sysytems are NOT the future. They seem to be so easy to break into.
The network is the computer. (Score:2)
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BEGIN RANT
Isolated processes, running on hardware or VMs, or as processes under an OS. Using network semantics to communicate. A simple model -- forget about threads and the attendant semantic issues. The model is already supported, and even "Windows" can participate (although that locks us into the SOCKETS API). On top of that we can have RPC, shared storage, time and identification services, etc.
Works wonders, and it has brought us to where we are today. The model can continue growing. Exc
So many devices! (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux: most portable kernel for talking to the hardware.
GNU: most portable userspace.
JVM: most portable VM for taking to userspace and scripting languages.
Mozilla: most portable platform for web collaboration, especially if Firefox 3 goes forward with the "information broker" role it wants to fulfill.
These four levels give us a good solid platform for the shifting hardware landscape. Because no matter what, everything always comes back to physical devices, physical presence of some kind.
Hell In a Handbasket... (Score:2)
It's the nature of the beast.
FutureOS might make computers more responsive (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you know that today's computers are really fast? I mean, those GHz processors are incredibly fast, it is unbelievable what they are able to do in a second. But you might not know it from just using a computer.
In my daily work I often receive very slow responses from both Windows and Linux machines. I often have to wait seconds for things that should (and could) be instant. I mean after the screen saver on my desktop machine locks the screen, the next user request invariably will be to unlock it. The OS should know that. And it should sit there waiting for any sign that its master wants to work again and then it should instantly present the password dialog.
Or what about those apps where I have to look for seconds at animated splash screens saying that they load this or that module or plugin. Why can't the OS provide means for loading pre-initialized applications (some folks might remember the undump utility).
There are possible performance improvements all over the place, which could be achieved by using techniques like caching or using database technology or being able to hint to the operating system which ressources might be needed next. Together with maybe a little more RAM this could create a really reactive user experience.
I often wonder how you can spend so much money for creating software and come up with such bad and slow design :-).
C and the user/kernel mode will not survive (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, the C model has been proven to cause more problems than benefits. The C model is defined as the model where native code is executed directly by the hardware, absolute barriers exist between programs, the kernel routines live in a different universe than the programs etc.
There are great problems with this model:
1) co-operation between programs proves very difficult both for the O/S designer and the programmer. Very specialized mechanisms are required for programs to communicate: pipes, sockets, shared memory, etc. Those things work nicely, no doubt about that. But to code an API on top of them is not straightforward and it takes time.
2) viewing a process as a giant array of bytes resulted in billions of dollars of damage in buffer overflow exploits, null & wild pointers, etc.
My prediction is that at some point in time, someone will come out with an O/S that is not based on C, but on a more advanced programming language, like Java, Smalltalk, Erlang or Haskell. And those O/Ses will prove that APIs are more important than O/Ses, and that modules are better than processes.
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Oh wait, this is Slashdot. What am I thinking?
Re:Linux is headed to the landfill (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux has had a huge positive effect. For one thing, it gave the GNU project a serious kick-start. Sure it was possible to run GNU on a BSD kernel before Linux came along; but next to nobody actually did. Anyway, BSD had its own set of Open Source userland utilities, and still hardly anybody used it. Suddenly Linux came along, and Open Source was trendy. Linux had its limitations, for sure; and some of the people who tried Linux moved over to BSD for what at the time were valid reasons. Some of them moved back when Linux cleaned its act up. These peole might never have tried a free OS, if it had not been for some young upstart Finn with a bee in his bonnet about performance of monolithic vs. microkernels.
Do you think Solaris would have been open-sourced -- possibly even under GPLv3! -- if it hadn't been for the fact that GNU/Linux posed a credible threat to it?
If anything is "headed to the landfill", it's the whole Closed Source model -- or more strictly, the egregious idea of keeping the Source Code of a program secret from its own users. The extent of the damage that this has done is just beginning to sink in, ever so slowly. Within a generation, there will be more than one country in the world where it will be illegal not to supply Source Code with software, even if you are not allowed to give out copies of it.
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As long as your biggest market is people who want it done for them, and as long as it's affordable, the OS will continue to drop into their hands. The price increase for the various iterations of Vista show that Microsoft is at least aware of Windows' continuing strength.
If you want OSS to blossom, it has got to become sexy and work with much less nerd/geek presence. Symbian happens to power smart phones,
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This is very true. Not to mention if 'Linux' dies it will just be the kernel. there is so much more to a linux distro/application stack than just the kernel.
If anything is "headed to the landfill", it's the whole Closed Source model -- or more strictly, the egregious idea of keeping the Source Code of a program secret from its own users.
This is the key statement. Do you think people these days would be buying Dells and running Sola
Re:Linux is headed to the landfill (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly.
Not many people who have gone to the trouble of owning a cow and stuck at it for awhile are going to go back to buying milk and cheese from the supermarket. The big dairies will try to make out that milking a cow is too difficult for ordinary people to manage. Some will believe them, but others will have a go and some of them will succeed. And just because people aren't buying prepackaged milk anymore, doesn't mean they won't be needing other things. The smart investor would be thinking in terms of cow food, churns and maybe fancy gadgets like fully-automatic electric cheesemakers and home semi-skimmers, which cow owners will need if they don't want to go back to Tesco.
Microsoft are getting too big for their boots. One day now, they'll mess with the wrong people, and be told to go forth and multiply. That will make a lot of people wonder why they didn't have the cojones to blow Microsoft off sooner. Some will give it a try. Remember also that interoperability is improving all the time. Microsoft can't change their proprietary protocols too quickly, for fear of breaking everything. If they introduce a new server protocol, everything still has to be able to speak the old one for awhile. Open Source is behind now; but if Microsoft stall, it'll catch up quickly.
And there's always this sort of scenario;
Once Open Source deployment -- whether that's Linux, BSD, Solaris or something else altogether -- reaches a certain critical mass, it will automatically and suddenl
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During the same time, I've seen the linux desktop evolve - well none. OpenOffice works, but it just feels clunky - it feels like the versino of word I used on w
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I am unable to see the stats on solaris x86 overtaking linux on the server.
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Seriously?
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IMO, the Kernel is turning to crap when script-kiddies from Turkey are using 0-days weekly and the subjugated server count increases by the thousands daily
You don't appear to know what you're talking about. Most server exploits, on any platform, rarely involve the kernel, and I can't find any reported vulnerabilities for 2.6 in Secunia that result in the system being compromised by a remote attacker. The worst I found was a vulnerability on PPC architectures that had the potential for an attacker to read kernel memory locations.
If you do know what you're talking about, you'll be able to provide an extensive list of documented vulnerabilities in the Linux ker
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Here you go. Feel free to scan the hosts in that list to see what OS/Version they are running.
Correlation does not imply causation. There isn't enough information to come to any conclusions about the cause of the vulnerabilities. One would have to perform scans on a suitably large random sample and come up with some strong statistical data that demonstrates it is the kernel at fault, and not a vulnerability in user-space applications. Until you do this, it's just uninformed speculation. There are any number of more likely explanations, given the available data.
is absurd. I specifically said 0-day, which implies NO documentation as of yet.
You seem to be claiming that these ze
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Why should we be kind when you dump marketing nonsense like "Enterprise Edition" into your post? Do you really think we're going to believe that the Enterprise Edition kernel is more stable than the regular kernel? Why shouldn't we begin to suspect that your definition of a "reliable" OS is one that says "Enterprise" on the box? Are you even aware that 0-day exploits from Turkey are rarely caused by kernel code?
Really, most people find that Linux on server
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Not in the kernel.
failover
Not in the kernel.
federated directory services
Not in the kernel.
larger addressable memory space.
Wow, a kernel feature! See, your credibility problem is that you come in here and praise the likes of OpenBSD, which is an extremely minimal kernel shipped with extremely minimal supporting software, and criticize Linux for kernel problems, and then talk about a bunch of non-kernel features in a specific edition of Windows. OpenBSD doesn't have any of t
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Re:who fucking cares ? (Score:4, Funny)
Now that sounds like an OS full of gaping holes.
Terrible security, that.
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Don't forget the Bandwidth (Score:2)