

Jeremy Zawodny: There is no Web Operating System (or WebOS) - toffer
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/009417.html

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justinsb
I agree that a 'WebOS' is slightly silly, but I believe it to be a marketing
name for a much stronger concept - the 'InternetOS'. Today's OSes were largely
built for a disconnected world - the 'my machine is an island' scenario -
which isn't necessarily the case today.

The pertinent question is: where do today's systems fail us in an always or
often-connected world? Maybe you'd work on the networking stack, providing
services that made transferring between connections as seamless as possible
(hopping from public wi-fi to 3G to WiMax, and prioritizing traffic based on
network bandwidth and costs). Maybe we change filesystems to better support
synchronization - for example, build in better change tracking so that we can
synchronize using the minimum amount of bandwidth. Maybe you'd look for ways
to be able to transfer the state of your applications, so you can work on one
machine, and then continue working on your phone, then on your hotel TV, then
back to the original machine. What about collaboration and communication? How
can we build applications that seamlessly combine web information with local
information (maybe even blurring the difference)? Not everything belongs in
the OS, but the supporting functionality certainly does.

None of these ideas are particularly new, but today's software stack is in
need of some pretty serious evolution to get the most out of the promise of a
connected world. Javascript based desktops are an interesting prototype -
maybe Javascript & HTML would be a good technology for portable applications.
I'm not going to dismiss the bigger need because today's 'WebOS' systems are
little more than toys...

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jsnx
Why can't we just have an internet _FS_? Compile all the apps down to a few
common byte code formats and allow for namespace control via chrooting and
similar mechanisms. No more web browser! We'd need to make symlinks more
powerful, to enable opening a connection -- but there'd be little in the way
of special UI required.

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dfranke
The technology for that is already there with S3 if you take full advantage of
ACLs. It would just be a matter of agreeing on a standard for shared access.

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vikram
I think as there are no examples of a unique type of application on these
platforms, it's hard to see what the point of them is.

More over developing apps is still left to programmers (and a select group of
them who are always interested in learning any new platform/language), it
doesn't make it easier for Joe Average to do any sort of involved tasks.

Specifically with YouOS (the only one I tried), why do I need to understand
applications and installation?

People want to ability to control their computers, not just use them. As
Hamming said the purpose of computing is insight. If all you can do is install
a new calculator, I don't think I can be bothered. I've got one which works
just fine.

Just moving the desktop to the browser isn't enough of a differentiator.

Maybe this model might work for mobile phones, which is unlikely to have the
full range of apps that a desktop has.

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drm237
"But nobody ever talks about a "Wall Street Operating System" or a "Small
Business Operating System" do they?"

Microsoft Small Business Server? -
<http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs> (I know, I'm missing the
point...)

I do agree that it's a web desktop, not a complete OS, but his reasoning seems
a little off...

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pg
I disagree with this. An OS is whatever apps run on, and you could write
things that most of the next generation of web apps would run on. I believe
Parakey was (and perhaps still is) intended to be such a platform.

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brlewis
I think the author is referring to the OS role of controlling applications
centrally, the way the f8 platform controls facebook apps. Something that a
lot of decentralized web apps run on is not the kind of OS the author is
talking about.

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karthikv
Maybe we should start calling these services as "Web Desktop" instead of
WebOS. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_desktop>

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greendestiny
Does anyone use any of these services? I've always thought it was best to let
the underlying real operating system take care of windowing and let each URL
be one application.

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kevinl
I have same feeling. Youos is wonderful but I always feel it waste too much
screen space. On the other hand current browser is not very suitable for
running multiple web apps also. Maybe we need a better container...

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pretzel
What we need is the desktop as the container...

But really, what we are talking about is just a resurgence of thin clients.
And why not? They make sense. No updating software, all your files are there
for you whereever you go and today we have the bandwidth to handle it (we do
vid downloads without batting an eyelid!).

Especially with Google's gears coming along, it will mean we can do everything
offline. It's getting close to CMS your home dir and apps.

When I was in high school (15 years ago or so) I said the perfect computer app
would be one where you didn't know it was there and just used it to do what
ever you wanted, like in TNG. This is getting close!

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hello_moto
1\. Privacy (and don't tell me it is overrated, it's not) 2\. Reliability
(yes, I do understand my hard drive can fail, but my OS doesn't delete my
e-mail just as GMail did) 3\. And the fact that I have to go online to fetch
my file

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pretzel
1\. Encryption

2\. Local storage

3\. Local storage

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7media
<http://www.irintech.com/x1/blogarchive.php?id=1439>

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jgamman
context? reason for linking? random keyboard error? please be constructive.

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jsnx
An operating system is a lot of things -- it would be more precise to talk
about a "web userland".

