In Brookshear’s book, the definition of an operating system is “software that controls the overall operation of a computer” (Brookshear, 2008, p.122).If we strictly follow this definition, we cannot simply agree on the “Super Net OS”. But from a different perspective, I will consider the internet itself as an operating system which provides the operations to data and services via the internet. The “Super OS” is the combination of internet and its infrastructure, protocols, web, server, client, and other technologies.

Firstly, the major job of a computer system is 1) storing information/data (data storage), and 2) processing information/data (data manipulation). The current internet has websites from everywhere (individual person and business/education/government organizations), search engines, emails, social network, web services and lots of other online services. All of these online services can be considered as data storage and manipulation. The data are no longer limited and stored in individual’s computer. A typical instance, via the online services like Apple’s iTurns or Microsoft’s Zune, you can enjoy the music and movies online, or download and share in different computers with different operating systems. Online Office service like Google Doc or Microsoft Office Live is also becoming an alternative of the client office software.

The “Super OS” is independent with its nodes’ operating systems, no matter whether the systems are for nodes as server, client or network equipment. Like if a user wants to make a search query from Google.com, he can use a web browser on any operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac OS, mobile operating systems, etc.) or can even program against Google’s API to make the search query. Moreover, most of network/internet protocols, web standards and development platforms are operating system independent. This independency enables the integration of all different type nodes into this “Super OS”.

The management of this “Super OS” is coming from a joint-effort by different organizations that provide online services, the protocols and fundamental infrastructure. W3C, for instance, is developing general web standards (Brookshear, 2008, p. 172). Also ICANN is managing the domains and IP addresses.  The website or online service is managed by the provider.  Individual PC user also participates in the management of this “Super OS”, like user generated content (blog, text, multi-media, social network, etc.). Besides, technology like Grid Computing can also enable individual user to contribute to the complex computation (Wikipedia, n.d., b).

The traditional PC operating system is fading from normal user’s daily use and becoming more transparent to end users. It’s still there, but users are more likely to use it to connect the internet to consume the data and services from this “Super OS”. The data from Internet World Statistic shows the internet user has almost reached 2 billion worldwide. Based on this trend, Google is even providing an operation system only provides a browser experience called Chrome OS (Google, n.d.). The popularity of the smartphone nowadays is also accelerating the application of internet/online services. In 2010, there are totally 302.6 million smartphones shipped from the phone manufacturers (IDC, 2011).

This “Super OS” is still evolving, like the inventor of World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, he’s working on promoting semantic web to reorganize the web content in a better approach (Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila, 2001). Like the search engines are providing more and more functions and better accuracy. The potential of “Super OS” is unlimited.

Thanks,
Binzy

Reference list:
Brookshear, J. G. (2008) ‘Computer Science, an overview’, 10th ed. Boston: Addison-Wesley. pp.122, 172.
Wikipedia (n.d.) b, ‘Grid computing’ [online]. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing (Accessed: 16 April 2011).
Internet World Statistic (n.d.), ‘INTERNET USAGE STATISTICS’ [online]. Available from: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm (Accessed: 16 April 2011)
Google (n.d.), ‘Home – Chrome OS’ [online]. Available from: http://www.google.com/chromeos/index.html (Accessed: 16 April 2011).
IDC (2011), ‘Android Rises, Symbian^3 and Windows Phone 7 Launch as Worldwide Smartphone Shipments Increase 87.2% Year Over Year, According to IDC’ [online]. Available from: http://www.idc.com/about/viewpressrelease.jsp?containerId=prUS22689111&sectionId=null&elementId=null&pageType=SYNOPSIS (Accessed: 16 April 2011).
Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila  (2001), ‘The Semantic Web’ [online]. Available from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web (Accessed: 16 April 2011).

2. I’m living in China within the famous GFW, and I’m using a twitter proxy site to tweet when I’m at home or using mobile phone.   So there is a problem to me, the http://bit.ly is almost the most popular short url service on twitter which is also blocked by GFW…

3. There are some short url expanding service sites, like http://longurl.org, but they were blocked sometime…

I decided to create a simple function with google app engine after dinner. So that I can continue to learn some of python and also know a little of google’s cloud stuff.

Then here you go the app: http://yatlongurl.appspot.com/ and the source code here. Really quite fun to write code with python. But it looks the app will be intermittently unavailable. And apparently, I did not use any of real functionalities of google’s app engine. Possibly I will add support to automatically retweet or delicious the useful link while expanding it .

WUA: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949104