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No mention of Google or Android in an article about the future of operating systems? It seems to me that a current big shakeup on the OS market is actually bein

by cryptoz 16y ago

No mention of Google or Android in an article about the future of operating systems? It seems to me that a current big shakeup on the OS market is actually being led by Google and that Android represents quite a bit of the future of "alternative" OSs.

dman 16y ago
That might actually be a compliment to Android's success in the marketplace. The article is about Alternative Operating systems, likely the ones less explored.
oakenshield 16y ago
IMO, Android isn't generally applicable. The reason Android works is because you have a (fairly) limited set of devices with more or less the same hardware and capabilities (e.g., touchscreen, GPS, radios, gyroscope etc.) So application writers have a fixed number of events they need to access, and a VM + software stack would be able to provide that while making development and security relatively easier. Real operating systems have to run on a myriad of hardware and potentially interface with tons of devices and protocols, so you would need to allow programmers to go to the hardware level and read and write bytes by hand.
- derleth 16y ago
  > Real operating systems have to run on a myriad of hardware Historically untrue, and still not true for OSes like Windows NT (modern versions x86 and Itanium only), MVS (z Series only), and, of course, Mac OS X. Historically, I think Unix was the first OS to run on multiple different kinds of hardware, as opposed to running on multiple variants of the same architecture.
  - Pooter 16y ago
    >Historically untrue, and still not true for OSes like Windows NT (modern versions x86 and Itanium only), MVS (z Series only), and, of course, Mac OS X. It's nitpicking, but MVS was developed in the mid-70s to run on the s/370, before the zArchitecture was developed.
- bad_user 16y ago
  Real operating systems I guess the real operating systems you're referring to are written in real programming languages by real Scotsmen.
- mbrubeck 16y ago
  This is a strange requirement, which would make Mac OS (for example) even less of a "real OS" than Android since it runs on even fewer devices.
nickbp 16y ago
Android is effectively a modified Linux kernel with a custom userspace environment.
lukeschlather 16y ago
Android, ChromeOS, and Google's internal Linux variants are all unremarkable, fairly conservative updates to Linux. The article is talking about things that are not simply evolutions of existing technologies, but outright reinventions that show promise.

by cryptoz 16y ago

dman 16y ago

That might actually be a compliment to Android's success in the marketplace. The article is about Alternative Operating systems, likely the ones less explored.

oakenshield 16y ago

IMO, Android isn't generally applicable. The reason Android works is because you have a (fairly) limited set of devices with more or less the same hardware and capabilities (e.g., touchscreen, GPS, radios, gyroscope etc.) So application writers have a fixed number of events they need to access, and a VM + software stack would be able to provide that while making development and security relatively easier. Real operating systems have to run on a myriad of hardware and potentially interface with tons of devices and protocols, so you would need to allow programmers to go to the hardware level and read and write bytes by hand.

derleth 16y ago
> Real operating systems have to run on a myriad of hardware Historically untrue, and still not true for OSes like Windows NT (modern versions x86 and Itanium only), MVS (z Series only), and, of course, Mac OS X. Historically, I think Unix was the first OS to run on multiple different kinds of hardware, as opposed to running on multiple variants of the same architecture.
- Pooter 16y ago
  >Historically untrue, and still not true for OSes like Windows NT (modern versions x86 and Itanium only), MVS (z Series only), and, of course, Mac OS X. It's nitpicking, but MVS was developed in the mid-70s to run on the s/370, before the zArchitecture was developed.
bad_user 16y ago
Real operating systems I guess the real operating systems you're referring to are written in real programming languages by real Scotsmen.
mbrubeck 16y ago
This is a strange requirement, which would make Mac OS (for example) even less of a "real OS" than Android since it runs on even fewer devices.

nickbp 16y ago

Android is effectively a modified Linux kernel with a custom userspace environment.

lukeschlather 16y ago

Android, ChromeOS, and Google's internal Linux variants are all unremarkable, fairly conservative updates to Linux. The article is talking about things that are not simply evolutions of existing technologies, but outright reinventions that show promise.