What would you like to see in an OS?
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Wow. Admitting to software piracy on a software development message board. There's more than a few people who use this site who make their living from software, you realise?
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I want less! I just want an updated Windows 3.11! I want to be able to boot to the command prompt with drivers installed (Mouse, Network, CD, USB, Sound, Printer, etc.) And then only start the GUI if I choose to. I spend most of my day (when not here) working in a DOS box; I don't need the GUI. I don't want file names to contain SPACEs. I don't want the system to overwrite my settings: if I say I don't want a bunch of "templates" on the context menu, then I don't flipping want a bunch of templates on the context menu! If I say I don't want an IE icon on my desktop, then I don't flipping want an IE icon on my desktop! When Windows starts I don't want the login screen until the system is fully ready. :mad: I'm severely peeved about this this week; I log in and try to start an app and it's a long time before the app starts, or I could wait that time and then when I start the app it starts right up. It's worse when my wife tries it; she's not as patient and understanding and starts clicking the icon several times. :sigh:
Rocky Moore wrote:
within the next 5-7 years the desktop OS will no longer exist.
I expect I'll still be running XP.
Those are some of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Honestly. People talk about the 80s and early 90s as the glory days of computing. I remember those days too; they friggin' sucked. We take for granted that we don't have to fiddle with hardware IRQ resources before installing software or playing games. X|
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
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Rocky Moore wrote:
I am thinking that within the next 5-7 years the desktop OS will no longer exist.
I've spent most of my professional life working on systems hosted on desktop operating systems that aren't capable of being run in a web environment. These are process control systems that use real-time and near real-time methods for dealing with physical phenomena that can't wait for a response from a server that may never arrive. At that, we're ignoring data rates that would make the pipes coming out of Google rupture from the strain. Given how more and more processes are being automated and integrated into the business infrastructure, I can't see 'Big Iron' operating systems going away any time soon. Even if we change the name to a 'real-time programming environment' or somesuch, the features required will still be there. We still need a robust system to manage processes/tasks/threads, a file system, devices, and a user interface, all of which don't rely on a remote server.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^]Actually, I am referrring to the client OS, the front side. There will always be some that require so much heavy lifting that it will have a dedicated OS, but for the masses it appears to be changing.
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
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Graham Bradshaw wrote:
Isn't that just the hibernate / restore that's been present since XP?
Yeah, but it doesn't persist between power cycles. If you turn your box off, it doesn't restore to the last powered-on state (with all of your applications running and at the same place they were when you powered off).
Graham Bradshaw wrote:
Under the Windows security model, individual services are securable objects. It isn't defined as a standard "out of the box" OS group, but you could certainly create one.
I *know* you can create one (or at least something close), but IT people (you know, the guys that don't want ANYONE to have local admin rights on their own box) are much more acquiescent of allowing a role if it's pre-defined by the OS.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
Yeah, but it doesn't persist between power cycles. If you turn your box off, it doesn't restore to the last powered-on state (with all of your applications running and at the same place they were when you powered off).
Maybe you are thinking of "Sleep" mode. Hibernate mode does, save all your state to HD so that you power up and are exactly where you were before. I had a few issues years ago with this in XP but it has been quite reliable in Vista, I only have had it mess up once that I know of due to other issues, but there might have been one more time. Overall, I do not bother shutting down a system, only hit that key on my keyboard to hibernate. Also have set the power button in BIOS (IIRC), to issue a hibernate so that if anyone messes with it, the system hibernates instead of powering down ;)
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
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Remote resources are too unreliable. Your ADSL plays up, your PC is dead X|
Visit http://www.notreadytogiveup.com/[^] and do something special today.
I agree, you cannot count on a connection, but much of the web OS is moving to allow a disconnected state where you have the ability to work and then sync upon reconnecting. This will probably be a major component in a base of a web OS.
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
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Cloud computing, SAAS and all the other dumb buzzwords for "let me rent you that on a remote box" are a bad ideas promulgated by greedy marketing departments looking for a new and better way to squeeze more money out of customers while delivering less. Security issues alone will cause it to be stillborn. The desktop OS is hear to stay, in one form or another.
Rob Graham wrote:
The desktop OS is hear to stay, in one form or another.
Here, but maybe of no real importance. That is, it seems that not long from now it will not matter what OS you run, the OS will at core be like a VM providing hosting of a Web OS providing most of the functionality. Of course, it is all speculation :)
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
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Those are some of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Honestly. People talk about the 80s and early 90s as the glory days of computing. I remember those days too; they friggin' sucked. We take for granted that we don't have to fiddle with hardware IRQ resources before installing software or playing games. X|
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
I remember the earlier DOS days with the beloved (not!) TSR apps, that is "Terminate but Stay Resident", our form, back in the day, of running more than one app at a time.. It was a simple world back then but boy the amount of work you had to do just for something simple ;)
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
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Actually, I am referrring to the client OS, the front side. There will always be some that require so much heavy lifting that it will have a dedicated OS, but for the masses it appears to be changing.
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
Our 'front side' is basically the user interface, while the 'back side' consists of the services that actually manage the process being controlled. I can see us using web-style user interfaces for some things, since it's a fair bet that most users will know how to navigate them. Our basic operator controls still resemble the control panel for a machine, however. I'm not sure the web technologies are up to the task for the kinds of things we render for the user. The back side stuff really doesn't care what it's running under. Our architecture doesn't even require that it run on the same box as the front side, so that fits your scenario fairly well. My point was that folks have been predicting the demise of the desktop application for some time now, and yet there are still lots of them out there. Contrary to what Microsoft and Google would like you to believe, the only thing that's clouded is their thinking in this regard.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^] -
I remember the earlier DOS days with the beloved (not!) TSR apps, that is "Terminate but Stay Resident", our form, back in the day, of running more than one app at a time.. It was a simple world back then but boy the amount of work you had to do just for something simple ;)
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
A four-letter word: DPMI, the DOS Protected Mode Interface :shudder:. I have one claim to fame from that era: I wrote a rather large application that ran under the same DOS extender used by the original DOOM (DOS4GW).
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^] -
I like to have control over my personal workspace, cluttered as it is, and would never willingly give control to any outside agency. The entire concept of cloud computing, rented application time, SAAS, etc is anathema to me. No one decides what I need, or how long I need to keep anything except me, and I refuse to give up my desktop environment. As to operating systems, I'll settle for one that just works. The last one I had was CP/M. Things have gone into a bit of a decline since then in terms of reliability. I'd like to see upward and downward compatibility as the OS evolves, but I realize there comes a time when Space Invaders is no longer practical to support. Still, it's obscene that anyone could imagine that we'd all jump on a bandwagon for a product that requires us to abandon all of the apps we're used to. The trend toward warm, fuzzy GUIs is disturbing, too. We don't need no stinkin' round corners on our dialog boxes, we just need boxes that pop up, do their jobs, and go away - reliably. We love Microsoft here, but it's a tough love. They have a lot of stupid ideas, interleaved with occasional bursts of brilliance. We have to keep in mind that MS's primary goal is to generate profits, not make life easier for their developers or customers, and to choose our tools and products accordingly.
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
Roger Wright wrote:
I refuse to give up my desktop environment
It is not so much as giving up as being outdated. When everyone moves on, there is not much left.
Roger Wright wrote:
The last one I had was CP/M.
Yeah, it was really easy to handle a texted based OS with the vast amounts of RAM such as 64K or on some later systems 128K. But when people decided they needed more functionality, then comes greater resources. The demands keep growing and so do the complexities along with everyone wanting it NOW so code is not keep as clean as it should and move bugs creep in and we all know how it is, waiting for the next version to get the bugs fixed that should have been fixed three versions ago. I think the scary part is "control". At this point you can boot up Windows 3.1 if you so desire and dink around however you wish. In the Web OS world though, updates will be instant and past versions no were around, your only option will be forward not matter if you want to or not. But, with most people that does not matter so they will embrace all of it. In Corporate world though, on intranets, this will be wonderful as deployment will be thing of the past and control is brought back to the management. Much of it is about control.
Roger Wright wrote:
We love Microsoft here, but it's a tough love.
Some, but there is a LOT of that lemmings based anti-Microsoft dripple. Just wait, it is all coming... With Windows 7 coming out in beta, it will be one thing after another....
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
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Our 'front side' is basically the user interface, while the 'back side' consists of the services that actually manage the process being controlled. I can see us using web-style user interfaces for some things, since it's a fair bet that most users will know how to navigate them. Our basic operator controls still resemble the control panel for a machine, however. I'm not sure the web technologies are up to the task for the kinds of things we render for the user. The back side stuff really doesn't care what it's running under. Our architecture doesn't even require that it run on the same box as the front side, so that fits your scenario fairly well. My point was that folks have been predicting the demise of the desktop application for some time now, and yet there are still lots of them out there. Contrary to what Microsoft and Google would like you to believe, the only thing that's clouded is their thinking in this regard.
Software Zen:
delete this;
Fold With Us![^]Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
I'm not sure the web technologies are up to the task for the kinds of things we render for the user.
Perhaps not at this time, but soon I think it will get there. While I do not think the desktop OS will "Completely" go away, I think its focus will change to be a host, more like a VM Host, to a web OS. Although I use the term web OS, it really will just be a VM that provideds a given rich ability that has in the past been equated to a desktop OS, but one that is network centric in deployment of apps. Maybe on the surface it will look like a desktop OS. Bringing control to a central is are will be the focus where machines are nothing more than that. You simple plug one in, hit a button and everything is brought in by the central server and they machine is all ready for you just like the old one. Drop in replacements because important settings, data and configurations are all on the central systems along with all the applications.
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
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I agree, you cannot count on a connection, but much of the web OS is moving to allow a disconnected state where you have the ability to work and then sync upon reconnecting. This will probably be a major component in a base of a web OS.
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
Rocky Moore wrote:
allow a disconnected state where you have the ability to work
And the "thing" that allows you to work effectively while disconnected will look like.... ...a regular PC.
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Those are some of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Honestly. People talk about the 80s and early 90s as the glory days of computing. I remember those days too; they friggin' sucked. We take for granted that we don't have to fiddle with hardware IRQ resources before installing software or playing games. X|
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit. The apostle Paul, modernly speaking: Epistles of Paul Judah Himango
I said "updated"; if I wanted it the way it was I'd still be running it.
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A free version...
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.(John 3:16) :badger:
An Express version?
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Yes! Bring back the VMS file system with user settable versioning. It wasn't on a file by file basis, as I recall, but you could set the number of versions to keep, and could always manually purge old versions. No fancy version tree required, just file.ext;version.
Yes, it can be file-by-file:
File attributes: Allocation: 9, Extend: 0, Global buffer count: 0, **Version limit: 4** -
OpenVMS's ODS-5[^] is your friend - checkout the versioning system it's had for almost 20 years!
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I use ODS-2 on my Alphas, apparently that goes back to 1977.
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An Express version?
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With all the Lemmings that follow whatever the current mood is, I am sure we will hear a lot of anti Windows 7 stuff here soon since so many people on this Microsoft side of CP are anti-Microsoft (in what galaxy does that make sense?). Before that flood of dibble really gets going, for those that have any serious desires out of an OS, let me ask you all a question: Being developers, what would you like to see in an OS that is currently not there? With many things moving to a web world and the expansion of Web OSes, are there still things that would really make a major difference in a desktop OS? Maybe I have just been looked on the web world too long, but the desktop arena seems to be dying at a fast rate and they only thing that is really needed anymore is a host for a web OS. I am thinking that within the next 5-7 years the desktop OS will no longer exist. Thoughts?
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
Just one like, or similar to, XP that works reliably. I have had to debug Windows Update issues on two separate PCs in the last 24 hours. That should never happen. That is pure MS stuff and should fix itself if broken. There are at least a few thousand other similar examples... Ed
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With all the Lemmings that follow whatever the current mood is, I am sure we will hear a lot of anti Windows 7 stuff here soon since so many people on this Microsoft side of CP are anti-Microsoft (in what galaxy does that make sense?). Before that flood of dibble really gets going, for those that have any serious desires out of an OS, let me ask you all a question: Being developers, what would you like to see in an OS that is currently not there? With many things moving to a web world and the expansion of Web OSes, are there still things that would really make a major difference in a desktop OS? Maybe I have just been looked on the web world too long, but the desktop arena seems to be dying at a fast rate and they only thing that is really needed anymore is a host for a web OS. I am thinking that within the next 5-7 years the desktop OS will no longer exist. Thoughts?
Rocky <>< Recent Blog Post: Netflix coming straight to HDTV! Thinking about Silverlight? www.SilverlightCity.com
I think the web OS, if you want to call it that, I wouldn't, and the desktop OS will be side by side. Used for completetly different things. On the server side we will always need a good OS, this is bascally the same OS as the desktop OS. Many people prefer (and should rightfully prefer) to run their apps locally, with only the services in the "cloud". This can be done nicely today, what is lacking is a good way to distribute processing when needed and make that easy and secure. I don't think the desktop OS will go anywhere in a long time, and I really despise using web applications today, they are slow, usually with a very bad UI and are totally dependent on having a connection. I mean just a simple data management UI on the web where you want drag and drop really looks like something from the 80:ies UI experience wise. (Yes you can make it looks nicer through silverlight/flash/javafx/javascript, but guess what, that's local computation..) Even the new mesh technology uses a "local" only story for development. That is you have your web runtime locally in your desktop OS, which handles all the fuzz with the "cloud" for you (well, that is the idea at least, it is still in tech preview so I hope they will get it right). I really hope the trend will turn towards rich local applications that can use cloud based states and data through synchronization. That way all processing is done locally but the data and state is manage centrally. To centralize things is usually a really bad idea and mostly only appeals to IT admins because of the ease of maintanance. It is also a hard problem to solve instead of distributing the computation power to where it makes sense. Also running a web host is not such a simple thing. An OS's main responsibility is to abstract and provide access to the hardware, may it be a camera, harddrive or a graphics card and any other peripheral device. That's the IO part, the other important responsibility is to schedule tasks and provide a way to switch between them. Today we have also added a networking responsibility to it compared to 10 years ago. What in this abstraction could the web OS do without? As I see it none, thus a desktop OS will be there, but the apps might work more fluently and hopefully will migrate its state (in a user controlled fashion) between the machines the user wants to use. Cheers, Niclas
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A "source-safe-filesystem"! It'd be real sweet if I could 'mark' files to be saved with version-history. Meaning, the FS won't actually delete the file, but make a new one (transparent). Tortoise-SVN as an integral part of the OS, so to speak :)
I are troll :)
