The Next Computer OS… NOT December 6, 2007
Posted by gordonwatts in computers, life, Marseille.trackback
While waiting my turn in a police station to report our robbery, I was reading a City Magazine, A Nous. I found the following:
C’est cette ubiquite et flexibilite qui font que certains ont deja declare que Facebook serait le future systeme d’operation – le Windows, si vous voulez – de tous nos ordinateurs de surcoit en ligne.
I’m not 100% positive of the translation, but I’ll take a stab here:
This flexibility and ubiquity is what has cause certain people to declare that Facebook will be the future operation system — the Windows if you will — of all online computers.
Even if I got the words wrong, I don’t think I’ve gotten the sense wrong.
Think about what this is saying: a social networking application will be the next bit OS. We will live in Facebook. The first thing you do when you log in will be to bring up Facebook. And you will then spend most of your time there, and then you will switch off your computer when you are done.
I’ve seen lots of comments to this effect around the web. It was Google a while back, and before that it was the web browser as an OS.
This boggles my mind. I think it would be horrible if we spent all our time confined in one of these walls. Won’t anyone spend anytime creating anything new? New tools and toys either on the web or local to your computer? I can’t imagine my life without doing that. We will never see the end of Windows, Linux, or even the Mac – the general purpose operating system. If all you want to do is read email and surf the web, sure. But, seriously folks, can you imagine the generation coming up now – who have computers in their blood – being content to be just users? I hope not, or we are in trouble!
I agree, but you know what is weird? I think you can actually develop for Facebook. There are lots of “applications” now that can do all sorts of things. I’ve never used the ROOT of which you often write, but maybe a Facebook front end to ROOT is in the near future!
You could run a work up of some data and compare it to someone else’s and see if you’re compatible!
It’s too bad they didn’t use the more correct French term: “système d’exploitation”. It makes Windows sound much more like what it really is.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Système_d'exploitation
I would be seriously happy if they did develop for FaceBook — according to the blogs it provides a pretty rich development environment — but you can’t do it in FaceBook. You have to do it in one of these general purpose operating systems — like Windows or anything else.
systeme d’exploitation — nice pun. I of these (except Linux, which is probably part o the reason it hasn’t made it to the desktop yet) want you to pay money to do use them. In that sense I think only Linux stands apart. But we all choose our poison!
And you are right about ROOT — it is a chicken sink. On the other hand, I find that we can’t really live _in it_ — too buggy. We tend to write programs that use it, and then get out as fast as possible. If you look at the ROOT API, however, you might be forgiven for thinking it was an OS.🙂
ya ! the facebook , is really making the miracles !