“Operating systems will become highly distributed and self-healing and will collaborate with applications. Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration. But the machines providing this pool of virtual storage dare not trust one another completely. Indeed, a hacker takes over one of them and ruthlessly begins attacking others in the group.” Read the rest of the story at ComputerWorld.
A Look at the Future of Operating Systems
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
If microsoft remains in control of the OS sector then the future OS will do little more than those of today and with frequent system crashes.
I know I have to resist answering those kind of stupid posts, but sometime…
Ok guy, put your head off the sand, and think about the important innovations other majors OS made in the past years, and compare to those of Windows (except, for sure, MacOS). I mean *REAL* innovations that changed the way we use computer. Without Microsoft & MacOS there will be almost NO evolution at all.
And pleeeeze stop that crappy old song “windows frequently crashes” .. pleeeaaaze… One who can crash frequently Windows 2K or Windows XP is just plain moron.
steve, are you the one that send the 7000 pro M$ email to the DoJ
“steve, are you the one that send the 7000 pro M$ email to the DoJ
”
LOL ! Actually it was 9000$ 🙂
Seriously, it’s not that I’m a pro M$, it’s just that actually if I want a job done, fast, reliably and easily, I have to go with MS products. I *really* hope there will be an other OS in which I can execute my work. I’m a big OS lover, and constantly boot between QNX/RTP, FreeBSD, BeOS, AtheOS and even an old emulator for the EPOCH16 of the Psion S3 antiquities that I love to play with. (Sadly I don’t have enough cash to buy a complete Mac system, but you can be sure I dream to !)
All those OS I just mentionned are great to play with, geek with, program for, etc.
But when I really need to do a serious job done or play a top-notch game, I boot my WinXP. This OS is VERY stable, and very intuitive to use.
So at the end, I totally *hate* reading gratuitous (and unfounded) attacks on Microsoft products on the sole basis that… well… it’s the evil Microsoft and the machiavelic Bill behind that.
The day an OS really kick Windows ass as a desktop OS, I’ll be the first to jump in the boat and leave M$.
Sadly, it’s just not yet the week. 🙂
[WinXP] is VERY stable, and very intuitive to use.
i’ll agree microsoft have made amazing steps in increasing their stability and hopefully now theyll fix some security holes too, but i wouldnt call it stable… sure, compared to ’95 its stable!
and its only intuitive because you’ve been using that interface since you first used a GUI. its the same on every platform, given minor differences. its really time we had some new concepts in OSses, UIs and computing generally.
theres lots of lovely research going on *in* microsoft… but i wanna see it before i die (longhorn). so i’m looking to the embedded/games sector for innovation…
PS: isn’t this microsoft idea just freenet, but EEE’d?
All this that Microsoft has innovated in this all-new, all-singing, all-dancing Farsite project has been around for ages. Read Tanenbaum for distributed systems, and there’s Plan 9, and openMosix, and much, much else.
Gee, without Microsoft to innovate so selflessly for us, we’d never get anywhere, would we now?
OSNews has a responsibility to report in a fair and unbiased manner. It bothers me greatly to see our readers bash Microsoft so blissfully ignorant of the strides it has made in OS design. I believe Windows has come a lot further in the last two years than Linux or BeOS or QNX or Solaris or IRIX! Windows XP is simply an excellent product. Yes, there are MANY downsides – the politics of the company suck, they are anti-competitive, the integrated messenger is watching you, hidden settings are recording your actions, and the system steals your bandwidth for its own use, but it’s still a better desktop than anything else on the market (OS X is coming very close though). When you use the term “M$” you look ignorant of the facts. Accept Microsoft for what it is. If you don’t like it, don’t use the products, write to your congressman, tell your friends, but please don’t come to this site and tell other people they are stupid for liking Microsoft or even recognizing Microsoft’s contributions to the IT world.
That’s kind of a weird header I have for this post. My point is, I hear a lot of people yak about how awful Windows OSes are. Then I hear another lot of people yak about how stable their computers are and those who are having stability issues are “just plain moron”. I’m the kind of person that likes to stand in the middle and get fired at by both sides, and I fight both fronts. Whether you agree or disagree, Windows OSes just plain suck.
1) I acknowledge that Win2K and higher are much more stable than the older versions. However, stability is in jeopardy when you go and build your own computer. I’ve seen many OEM and store bought systems that work fine, just like how everyone who support Windows says. But I always hear people in trouble when they build their own computers and load any version of windows on it. I myself have the same issues. Now, you can’t tell a computer junkie “you should buy computers and not build them”. One of the reasons for building our own systems is to save money, can’t beat that. Before you go off and insult me by saying I don’t know how to build computers, let me just say I’ve installed half a dozen other operating systems (non Windows) and they all work fine and run for weeks at a time. Every single windows installation I ever put on the same machine will start to go bad within 3 days. I actually bought a legal Windows 2000 CD-ROM, so I’m not using dangerous pirated software.
2) There’s no denying it. Windows is probably the most unsecure OS in use today. Microsoft IS an innovator. The innovate tiny little features that can be reused in other things and they’re aim is to make things easier to do for the user. On paper that’s a good idea, but when it’s out in the wild, hackers have a ball exploiting all the holes created by new features put out by MS programmers. The easiest way to fix a security hole without downloading a patch is to simply disable or remove that feature that causes the vulnerbility. But this is my biggest complaint: Internet Explorer is reused over and over again throughout the OS, and in other applications, so if IE has a security hole, all the other applications that make use of it inherit that flaw as well. Some of you may have heard of the recent vulnerbility in MSN Messenger. That flaw was inherited from IE. Perfect example.
To me, Microsoft always seems to be taking the next step before finishing the last, and they always end up tripping over themselves. They just recently halted most of their programming operations to spend a month reviewing their code and looking for bugs and security holes. This is something they should have done a long time ago and many more times after that, and after this event I hope they continue this practice.
Sorry for the long post, I just had to vent.
You can’t blame Microsoft for being smart. That’s the weird kind of header *I* have for this post. As techie people, we now better, and that’s why many of us are using BeOS and Linux. As a general population, people want usability. And that’s why Microsoft platforms are insecure. If security were an issue in 1994, that’s when we would’ve seen the push. But they know their market, and they rush hot new features and modern looking interfaces and leading edge drivers into their OS and people LIKE that.
The problem with most geeks, and you see it frequently on OSnews and slashdot, is that they believe that most people care or should care about what *they* think is important. The general population doesn’t give a rat’s ass about multi-threading, a pre-emptive kernel, or the control text files vs. the Windows registry gives you. They just want something that works brainlessly, and that’s why Windows is a success, even if you must reboot the system every few hours. Don’t get me wrong, I really do care about those things above, but I know my Mom doesn’t, and that’s why she runs Windows 2000.
Microsoft targets a specific audience and they do it well. You can deny it all you want, but they have a decent product and it sells because people still want it.
This is a myth that pops up every now and again. A computer can be made secure without reducing usability in most cases and in other cases surely it is worth sacrificing a little to gain peace of mind. Do activeX and Visual Basic scripts really add that much to usability that they have to be enabled for all the world to exploit?
Contrary to popular opinion, NT/2K (don’t know about XP) are stable enough for their intended purpose.
To put things into perspective, I’m a professional Unix administrator (have been for many years, worked for major – and I mean MAJOR – companies), not just an enthusiast or a geek… (operative word here being “just”). I’ve used pretty much every OS there is (started at the age of 5 when my father was teaching me MVS, wonder who I wanted to be like…)
To put things into another perspective, when MS hired Dave Cutler (the dude in the design team for VMS, another OS I like and if you want to study truly proper OS design take a look at VMS), the initial design requirements were for a stable, 32-bit workstation/workgroup server OS.
If you look at NT/2K (haven’t really USED XP, just played a bit with it) they are fine for their intended role.
They have a decent journaling FS (NTFS is actually OK folks, why don’t all the zealots read a bit more?) and when patched properly they work fine.
If you have NT and you don’t want to do real clustering, you can download for free from MS their load-balancing package which works EASILY, compared to all the nonsense I see in other OSes from time to time.
Yes, there is huge code bloat, tremendous insecurity out of the box etc. etc. but if you install for example a Solaris box and connect it to the internet and don’t patch it or try to secure it after installation, I guarantee you someone will become root in a matter of minutes. The BSDs are way better, and Linux is catching up in that area.
MY problem is that MS now wants the NT codebase to become the be-all and end-all OS, something that quite frankly it’s not ready to be yet.
Given the amount of cash and manpower they pump into it they WILL progress a lot, whether the zealots like it or not. Witness the improvement from NT to W2K Server.
My take is, put a Unix OS as your server and W2K as your clients (cost permitting, otherwise XP) and you’re fine. I’ve used pretty much every single Linux distro for a workstation environment and there’s always something wrong, it’s all pretty much a work in progress. Witness the recent hubbub with all the various Linux VM algorithms, schedulers, FS corruption bugs etc. etc. NOT to mention the UI wars and the FS wars. Oh well, choice is nice I guess, but stability is NICER.
I’ve had WAY more crashes with Linux than with W2K. Plus the stupid swap storms with various kernels… talk about unresponsive…
In all honesty, the most stable OS I’ve used in the recent years is Solaris. Sadly they’re abandoning x86 but large corporations don’t care.
Don’t get me wrong, Linux is fine for the enthusiast but a large corporation sees things differently. In a few years though I think Linux will be ready for prime time. When I say ready, I mean ready as a truly easy to use, stable, well-thought-out OS with a nice UI.
Until then, most people will be running MS OSes, simply because they’re good enough for MOST people, have the most apps, most games, etc. etc.
I use unix all day at work but at home I use only MS products, simply because I like to use 3DS Max and Lightwave, I like photoshop, I like cakewalk, and I like the VAST selection of games.
And those apps, my friends, are what make or break an OS, NOT the fancy UI, NOT the use of balanced trees and tail packing, kernel preemption, fancy firewalls and all that good stuff.
People at work want to use (for better or worse but you can’t argue with the power of Excel) their Office apps, they want Outlook, their want their Internet Exploder and File Manglers. They don’t want the Office helpers but you can disable those anyway…
I just hope Apple get their act together and do something innovative because, no matter how much I like the new Macs and OS X, it still suffers from lack of apps plus it’s crippled at a low level in various ways. Even so, OS X is the only TRULY MASS MARKET Unix OS, whose example Linux should try to mimic.
It’s funny, Apple will soon be the world’s largest Unix vendor… (if it’s not already).
Peace
D
“its really time we had some new concepts in OSses, UIs and computing generally. ”
Totally agree. I would love to see a real innovation in desktop part, from any OS. Something very new and revolutionnary. I think Microsoft tried something whole new few years ago, but that was a big failure. I hope they’ll continue financing research, and that open source community will continue too.
It’s time for new ideas !
Security is not personnaly the most important feature I search for. But under XP, I always use a third party very good firewall and a strong anti-virus that cover security leaks troughout the OS ans the apps.
Just with that, I don’t feel really insecure.
This idea about a distributed OS sounds like the philosophy behind GNU HURD. Provided that it reaches a usable state within the next few years (it’s been in development for over 10 years already), the free software community will already have a next generation OS ahead of everyone else.
For a system to be truly secure, it needs to be written that way from the ground-up. Windows was never written to be secure, and neither have its applications. You can put all the firewalls you want on top of Windows, but that won’t make it a secure OS.
I’m sure that the idea of “Trustworthy Computing” is a marketing ploy, because Windows has gotten to a stage where it cannot be made secure without a major overhaul. The Gartner Group (which have been pro-MS in the past) has recommended that people not use IIS until it is http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/21853.html“>”completely , and they discourage the use of .NET products.
Similarly, the idea of MS taking a month off coding to concentrate on security issues is ridiculous. Does anyone really think that MS can adequately audit the many millions of lines of code that exist in their products, and then fix the holes, all within a month??? The best they can do is to apply a few band-aids. The underlying problem — that the programmes have been coded insecurely in the first place, will be ignored. A true security audit, like what the OpenBSD folks did some years ago, involves years of painful searching and fixing, without fear of rewriting something if really necessary.
“Windows was never written to be secure,”
True for the dos/9x kernel. And false for NT kernel. And now that all recent windows (2K & XP) use the NT kernel, the secuiry is integrated in the root of the OS. Doesn’t mean it’s perfect (WAY from that), but I think coupled with a good firewall/antivirus to patch many of the holes, the OS is pretty decent (not perfect, decent).
One thing that play against Windows, IMHO, is that majority of hackers who like to break security and pass trough, are naturally aiming at Windows most than any other OS out there.
Pseudo OS engineers… argh!
Before you people start to bitch over the WindowsNT kernel, I’d suggest to learn more about it’s internals. Same goes to the Linux kernel.
I always see Linux people bitch over Windows, and Windows people bitch over Linux. And mostly NONE of them has any real knowledge about the internas of EACH of the kernels. Yea, they pretend to have, but if it comes hard, you see they’re all just tossers.
And frankly, these MS vs. Linux/UNIX discussions lead to nothing. People just bitch at each other… over and over.
” Pseudo OS engineers… argh! Before you people start to bitch over the WindowsNT kernel, I’d suggest to learn more about it’s internals. Same goes to the Linux kernel. ”
Hope you don’t talk about me, I’m an OS engineer (kinda) 🙂
As regarding Linux/Windows holy war, it’s plagued to be a war without end. As we say, to avoid big fights in a family, NEVER talk wbout the three most dangerous topics: Religion, Sport, Politic. Now I think it’s time to update that, by adding a fourth topic, probably the most dangerous one: OS.
Oh and BTW, this is a forum. Like in “place to debate”.
🙂