Editorial Archive

There were an amazing number of people (around 300,000) who visited OSAlert recently to read Scot Hacker's article on MacOSX. As part of the camp of BeOS refugees, I have been searching for some time for a suitable replacement. Many come close - FreeBSD is fantastic, but still complicated, the new school of Linuxes are very close to ready for me, even Windows XP has come a long way. My x86 machine is pretty fun - it gets a new OS every two weeks or so. But what does that say - that I like variety or that I can't find what I want? I'd suggest most of us still feel that we're missing something - otherwise, why read osnews.com?

"Cocktail parties and relating to the opposite sex are two very human activities that preoccupy many during the holiday season. Computers are notoriously poor at both: artificial intelligence researchers have long envied the human abilities to assign gender to faces and pick voices out of a noisy babble. Now San Diego company HNC Software has taught personal computers equivalent feats of recognition, and claims that the technique is a significant advance for AI, both theoretically and for building practical applications." Get the rest of the story at ZDNews. Our Take: Last February I wrote an editorial on Artificial Intelligence and how this can change the way we are using computers or the way operating system's... actually operate.

From the latest Open BeOS Newsletter: "Imagine this. GUIs designed completely outside of the realm of the application. Something like, say, SoundPlayer, coming with a default interface. You can do more than "make a skin", you can redesign the whole UI, so long as you send the right messages. Applications basically become servers. The GUI becomes a client. It shouldn't be too hard to make an add-on to a web browser that could display this hypothetical solution. And, if BMessages could be sent across a network, one could run their apps from anywhere in the world. Imagine that." What are your throughts on the subject? Discuss.

"It is becoming increasingly clear that we are heading for a world in which there are only two operating systems Windows and Linux. Within 10 years virtually all computers, from the smallest wristwatch (don't laugh) to the largest mainframe (they will never die), will run one of these two operating systems. All others are headed for extinction." Maybe true, maybe not. Get the rest of the story at It.MyCareer.

Descriptive quote from the OSOpinion editorial: "Linux has not aggressively exploited the nearly two-year gap between the release of Windows 2000 and the release of Windows XP. With the Home Edition of XP now the standard operating system shipped with most PCs, Linux advocates can no longer use the instability of Windows 95/98/Me as an argument for Linux. Linux advocates missed a golden opportunity to evangelize their platform to these third-party hardware and software companies. Instead, they spent their time arguing over issues like whether KDE or Gnome was a better desktop environment, ignoring how confusing that topic was to other developers." Our Take: I agree that XP is the best offering overall in the OS world today. Faster, much more solid, lots of advances both in the backend in the front end. Life goes on in the Linux camp though, and kernel 2.4.11 was released yesterday. Changelog here.

This commentary on ZDNews talks about the need of the Linux development community to build something new and revolutionary, something that Microsoft has not offered to its customers, instead of trying to recreate Ms Office as the main "killer application" that Linux needs in order to go mainstream. One day after the above commentary went live, there is already an answer to it made by the C|Net News.com editorial stuff here. Both editorials are a good read. Our Take: I wrote a similar editorial once, called "The Killer Application Concept", about what BeOS needs to make it through and become mainstream, and I still stand in this opinion and I believe it applies for the Linux situation as well. To summarize: The OS doors are closed, except you do create a real (r)evolution.