I couldn't watch video [asciimation.co.nz] ?

To say that the post was lacking substance would be an understatement.

disturbing...

So...this article is basically stating is that we need to build an entirely new O/S to streamline our viewing of pr0n?

Cool.

I, for one, welcome our new video internet overvixens.

"The last bubble was lots of fun"

tell that to the people that have lost their jobs.

Talk about a story with no content.

Apart from the "no link" stuff, I don't see what the fuss is all about. An OS is an OS, its role is to provide user applications with an access to the underlying hardware.

In that sense, I don't see anywhere that Linux/Windows/*BSD/whatever will not be up to the task.

Video internet, whatever that is, is bandwidth limited. The OS of the systems on each end of the cable makes virtually no difference to the deliverable bandwidth.

If Linux and WIndows are "old clunkers" then presumably the *BSDs are not just dead, but rotting in hell with all those demons!

What does this guy know? If you want an OS to stream video, then what does it better than a *BSD? If you want to watch streaming video then surely that is an application issue?

I'd rather serve or recieve anything using an OS with 20 years debugging than an untried untested product of an Internet bubble.

However, if anyone wants to buy shares in my new dot-com, then email me at "mailto:investments@pop.rip-off.scam"

My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Linux and Windows pass out at 31 Flavors last night! So I guess it must be pretty serious...

http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=nothing&positi on=limited [netcraft.com]

Educated guess anyway.

Obviously, the editors don't care, but for those of us who actually try to read the article, I found the following, so others don't have to waste their time, as well:

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=86 214&WT.svl=news2_1 [lightreading.com]

(and it's probably redundant by now, but this would be the creator of Ethernet, for those who didn't know who Bob Metcalfe is)

Weird, Windows and Linux seem to handle pretty much any task I need handled. Not bad for a couple of clunkers.

Who knows? Maybe he's right. Personally, I think the concept of television networks is a clunker of an idea waaay past its time. I suggest that in this age of the Internet, we should all be watching on-demand content provided directly by the content makers that's financed by micropayments paid by the consumers, and we receive our "signal" via high-speed Internet connections to the content providers.

Boy, it sure is easy for me to sit back and say that. But where the rubber meets the road—actually making these brave new ideas come to pass... Well, that's the challenge, isn't it? Until someone can cough up the resources to invest into creating, distributing, and marketing BobOS and my IP television studios, I guess we'll just have to keep talking about how nice it would be, and make the best of the clunkers that I suppose are working well enough for now.

But seriously, if you want to invest in my IP television studio, let me know...

There really should be a threshold to what kind of articles one could see, like there is for replies.

So here we have yet another article about somebody's narrowminded concept of what the future is going to be like. Who bloody cares about 'video internet'? Yes, the big Hollywood factories that produce entertainment on assembly lines are keen to have all that on the internet so they can roll out their anal-retentive DRM and pay=per-view schemes, and that's all. We on the consumer side will get no real benefits from this 'video internet', on the contrary.

What's wrong with the internet as it is now?
Video, for what reqason? Do they mean more like flash?
With interactive animations, or something different?

What i can see happening is animated or even worse, video adds.
And I'll tell all of you, i'm not looking foreward to that.
I think that's a reason enough to be negative.
Wasting bandwidth for damn stupids adds.

I guess it wouldn't bother me so much if we still had unlimited cable. This "unlimited" cable shits me, all because internet service providers want to promote their own content delivery.

Everytime someone talks about video internet, God kills a kitten.
See?!?! You made me make God kill a kitten just now by talking about video interne... damn!

And you know what? By the time this thread is done with, tens of thousands of kittens will have died. How many at the hands of "In Soviet Russia" jokes alone, I do not know, but I shudder to think.

Frankly, I am saddend at the massive loss of furry lifeforms about to take place, all for the sake of a mental circlejerk about "all porn all the time all online". You're all just sick.

The only specific thing he mentions is that both Windows and Linux are 25 year old... let me see:
Windows NT (which is the base for all the current Windowses) was first released in 1993. (Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, but that was not 25 years ago and has little to do with current ones (like, a copletely different codebase and technology))
Linux began in 1991, but if you really want to dig to the roots, UNIX was created in 1969.
and, of course, the problems "video internet" has (though these are not critical, as demonstrated by porn sites) these are related to the network, not to the OSes.

So, Metcalfe is talking BS as usually.

The actual quote is Windows and Linux, are 25 years old -- they're going to need updating to adequately carry video - so he's not really implying "They're dinosaurs and need to die out & be replaced", more "They're not yet ready for future demands" - which is pretty much a given: How can you create functionality for something that doesn't exist yet?

I thought we already had video internet, and it was called TV. Honestly, video content is worthless. Sure, it'd be kind of fun to watch the numa numa kid in high definition with no buffering, but does it really matter? No. Is there any substance to that? Hell no. If TV is even a tiny implication of what more video content would mean, then the last thing I want is more video content in the net.

"The internet will soon go spectaculary supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse"
He promised to "eat his words" if he was wrong
So, in early 1997, at a technical conference he ate
(from "Computer Networks" by Tanenbaum)

Well, he's right. Windows is based, more or less, on the old VAX/VMS model. Linux is a modern OS kernel, but it's designed to run a variant of the Unix operating system, which was shiny and new before the Star Trek with Captain Kirk went into syndication.

The same can be said for MacOS X and the BSD's... hell, for pretty much every OS under the sun. BeOS and Plan 9 were the last attempts at someone trying something new with any technical success, and their lessons were largely lost on the industry.

Innovation in operating systems is pretty much at a standstill outside the academic environment. Current operating systems cannot leverage parralelism very well for anything but hyper-specialized applications. Current operating systems have user environments that are crummy at managing massive amounts of data crammed into cavernous storage systems. Current operating systems are rotten at deploying your data across networked devices like cell phones and MP3 players and DVRs without a crapload of work.

There are acres of room for improvement, but the current paradigms aren't keeping up. Part of the problem is the PC architecture... it's not well suited for anything but a workstation or server, and even then, it's not all that well suited. It's shackling the industry to a very limiting hardware model, trading innovation in effciency and effectiveness for better benchmarks at the same old stuff.

Someone's going to need to design and market a new platform... OS and Hardware, that manages your data better with less effort across more devices, before we can get things moving again.

Otherwise I foresee more of the same... computers completing benchmarks faster, but not doing anything new and innovative.

Linux is a very nice unix, perhaps the pinnacle of achievement for the Unix Way, but the Unix Way isn't all that special anymore, and is really showing its age. Windows is an order of magnitude in worse shape. It's just that no-one with an industry presence is willing to try anything new anymore, and companies like SGI and HP are going broke sticking to the old model long after it's stopped working for them.

SoupIsGood Food

I think we should be allowed to mod the stories as well as the comments. This way we could get rid of both the dupes and the trolls like the current story.

Don't please tell me that slashdot is going to be a video blog. This sounds as wrong as voice communication in games. I DO NOT WANT TO SEE YOU and I am sure the feeling is mutual.

Sure current OS'es are crap at handling large data files that essentlially just have to be passed through, I got a linux machine that seems to love eating up all the available memory and my windows machine can never seem to grasp the concept of giving the video app priority to the HD.

So when I recently downloaded my first high def video clip (interlaced) I had a severe problem playing it. The dual P3 Linux had problems as it was an offbeat codec and could not handle it at full speed.

Windows P4 HT 2.8ghz didn't fare much better. Despite that fact that it had double the memory, less crap in the background and fewer active filters and had a cpu 3-4 times faster it could barely keep up. As soon as I tried to deinterlace it it started to get choppy with random freezing as MS could apperantly not supply the data fast enough.

No I don't have virusses or trojans and the hardware on both platforms is pretty decent.

The answer is really simple both OS'es at the core were never designed for this task. For that matter the hardware isn't either. Almost everything in the design is geared towards multitasking.

It reminds me of the days when side scrolling games were still available and how badly the PC would always struggle with them even when it was clear that in pure crunching power the PC beat the pants of the consoles. Wich was very clear when consoles tried to do 3D (ala doom1) wich was the strong horse of the PC.

I don't think there is any clear mechanism at the moment where you can easily dictate wich application gets priority access to the resources available. This would be far more then "nice". After all video device that gets super high priority would then falter because "system" wich does the reading from HD does not get enough cpu time.

Perhaps the move to multicore pc's will solve some of this. My P3 despite being only 800mhz can still keep up aminzgly well considering a p4 2.8 fails as well.

What I don't see however is how a new OS is going to solve this. Sure it is easy to make a new OS that does just video. They already exist, inside your stand alone dvd player. For that matter inside the iPod and similar devices. The consoles are an other example. Yes they do a lot better performance wise in displaying video then their PC counterparts. So?

One of the things I noticed is that USB is a bitch for cpu whoring. Joysticks especially can cost you more frames then switching all the options on. Perhaps I just got the wrong sticks but I have noticed this for several years with different makes.

A PC can do a dozen tasks, that makes it slow but it also is what makes it so fucking usefull. Most users do not want to watch just 1 video. They want their RSS streams and check their email and be safe from virusses and be chatting with their mates etc etc etc.

Saying the Windows/Linux are old clunkers and that you could make a faster video OS is like saying that Volvo's are clunkers and you could make a faster race car. Well yeah. F1 cars are very very fast. I just wouldn't like to take one on a trip. A recent promo in Amsterdam had a F1 car driving through the city streets. Very exciting but it was very clear the car was barely under control and totally useless as a form of transport.

The device that does it all will never be able to compete directly with a single purpose device. The PC is as multi purpose as it can be and for the last few decades has defeated all new comers. I don't see this going to change.

Oh and didn't we have this whole video internet before? The constant dream that people will next year have fat pipes to their doorsteps at cheap prices? I have heard that dream for over a decade and still download at a trickle. Current internet would be hardpushed to saturate a iPod. My half a decade old machine can easily deal with internet streaming. It ain't the OS, it is the net, fix that and the OS will follow.

Windows and Linux are today's operating systems. Who knows what will come along tomorrow. Look at the differences in Windows and Linux from five or ten years ago. They are entirely different than when they first cam on market! The trouble is that they are added on to and asked to do things that were not originally envisioned when they were first developed. The fact that they are doing what they are doing today is a testament to their versatility (and, their good foundation).

There will come a time when something else will come along - the evolution will happen like it has happened in every other industry. Ford quit making Model T's a long time ago and some day, Windows and Linux will be seen as out-dated operating systems that was loaded into primitive personal computers. In my mind's eye, I can see a computing future where computers interact with us in everyday life helping us with almost every task we do. Do any of us doubt that this marriage of technology and life won't continue to grow?

Look how far we have gone in the past few years and think of what could be done in the next ten or twenty and you can start to understand why someone would think that these operating systems may begin to sag under the weight of new and additional features. In a sense, the operating system is middleware. It sits between hardware and applications. Both sides aren't remaining static, the hardware gets new features and is faster and more powerful, the applications do more, do new and sometimes unthought of things. The o/s is in a tug-of-war between these two entities and tries very hard to make everything work. When the current part of the operating system that handles say video is being stretched to its limit by the demands of either the hardware or the software it is either patched or replaced. Over time, these fixes make the operating system like a house that has been remodeled too many times. It may become inefficient although it remains functional - when this happens, it may be best to tear the whole thing down and start all over again.

Please note that I am not saying that either Windows or Linux have reached the point where they ought to be scrapped but a realistic look forward has to consider that as a possibility. Tomorrow's hardware and tomorrow's applications are bound to place heavy demands on whatever operating system there is. We live in interesting times and it is hard to predict what the future will look like ten years from now. Are we going to have windowed interfaces or is something else going to come along? Where will speech recognition be? Will the keyboard continue to exist? Part of me wants to think that at some point we will communicate with our digital servants almost like we communicate with our human counterparts, through speech, body movements, and eye contact. But like the rocket-cars envisioned in the fifties, that may be a long way off track because I do not have a crystal ball that works.

IMHO, we do need a new OS paradigm. Linux, BSD, Windows....they all suck. They are useful, sure, but god-damn, they all do have problems. I'm not going to even list examples....I am sure you can all think of at least 10 problems with each OS. We need to fundementally change the way in which we interact with computers. Like Scotty said, "a keyboard...how quaint". I mean, good grief, I haven't even seen a consumer level touch screen for a computer.

... to those who are crapping on about needing new ways of interacting with computers, etc - fine.

That's still not going to make current operating systems obsolete. You're in the Microsoft way of thinking that a new shell and a few drivers is a new O/S (eg, windows 2000 vs XP). At the end of the day, it's still basic I/O once you write a driver for it.

I'd even wager that it's quite probable that any new input method you care to name (or invent) could simply be added as a kernel module to kernel 2.6 (or 2.4, 2.0, etc) - and that's only if it couldn't be done in user-space :)

smash.

"the clunkers we have, you know Windows and Linux, are 25 years old "

Finally, I woke up this morning, mysteriously transported to the year 2016. Does this mean I can start wearing my jeans inside out? Or was that so last year?