Bryan Moss wrote:
> Do we really want the whole world using UNIX? I'll answer
> that question for you - no!
It would be a huge improvement over the whole world using Windows.
It's not clear whether you feel that Unix is architecturally
insufficient for future needs (perhaps, though being well understood
and having decades of field testing are huge advantages) or that the
currently available UIs are no good (Irrelevant, you can put any UI on
top of Unix you want. Hopefully soon open source UIs will achieve ease
of use parity with Windows (e.g., <http://www.eazel.com/>) and some
developers will move on to more radical interfaces.)
> But here's the trillion dollar
> question, what OS will we be running in the near future if
> not Windows? Mac OS? BeOS? OS/2 Warp? Anyone know of any
> promising non-UNIX open source projects?
Look around at
<http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Open_Source/>.
EROS <http://www.eros-os.org/> looks very interesting and GNU/Hurd
<http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html> continues to make slow
progress.
I don't expect any of these to be running on many comuters anytime
soon.
> I recently read an article in which a journalist claimed
> that because of the Web, it doesn't matter what OS you're
> using as long as it can run a browser. I've seen other
> journalists claim similar things. When people genuinely
> believe bastardised hypertext is the pinnacle of human
> achievement it's time to innovate, and fast!
Who is claiming that HTML/HTTP is the pinnacle of human achievement?
The journalists you mention have a very valid point. In the past the
most used applications were word processors and spreadsheets, all of
which used closed data formats and tied users to a single platform.
Office applications are changing very slowly, but now the most
frequently used applications are the web and email. For the most part
it really doesn't matter what platform you use for these applications.
I don't see this changing anytime soon. I expect that the vast
majority new applications rolled out in the near future will reuse
parts of the existing XML/HTTP infrastructure and be platform neutral.
Some will even be truly innovative.
> Sometimes I wonder if the current dot-com madness, which
> places the emphasis not on technology but on some vague idea
> of a future business model, is simply due to a lull in
> software development due to our underestimating the
> complexity of voice interfaces and other exotica. Is there
> room for something new or should we wait until there's
> enough hardware to do more exotic forms of human-computer
> interaction, or perhaps even remove the human altogether?
I don't see voice or even near-term VR interfaces as revolutionary.
They just provide more ways for a single human to interact with a
computer. Some people will prefer them to typing and clicking, some
won't.
The net and technologies build on top of it were truly revolutionary.
They turned glorified filing cabinets and calculators into
communication enablers. It isn't surprising that years and $billions
of new business models have arisen from this revolution.
I'm no visionary, so the near future looks to me like the recent past++
(more bandiwdth and more ubiquity). More value-producing
communications not involving humans at all could be revolutionary. Of
course people have been talking about agents for a long time. I want
my distributed AI!
BTW anyone know anything about or have an opinion of
<http://www.processtree.com/>? They claim to be building
infrastructure for a for-pay distributed processing network (and
are collecting email addresses in a multilevel fashion) but
don't make available any substantial information about their
technology or who they are.
BTW2 the subject of this thread may be a bogus rumor generated by the
infamous Corel CEO's big mouth. See
<http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/000309/corel_1.html>. Can't complain too much
though, I bought into CORL when it first got involved in Linux and was
practically worthless.
Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:47 MDT