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).

We restarted (or I can say started…) the development work from this Monday and things are in good progress. In the meantime, I would like to share what we’ve experienced during development and I hope this can help you if you are thinking to develop your own client on Windows Phone 7 or Silverlight for Sina Weibo. So this first entry is about getting OAuth access token for Sina Weibo via Hammock. Hammock is a great lib for you to consume and wrap RESTful services and it supports OAuth and XAuth.

Step 1 register your app.
Sure, you need to apply/register an application on http://open.t.sina.com.cn/. You will then get your app key and secret (which is actually consumer key and secret).

Step 2 authentication.
OAuth is quite simple and straightforward. In summary, you need to pass your consumer key and secret to get the request token, like this,

void OAuthTest()
{
    RestClient c = new RestClient()
    {
        Authority = "http://api.t.sina.com.cn/",
        HasElevatedPermissions = true,
        Credentials = new OAuthCredentials()
        {
            ConsumerKey = "your appkey",
            ConsumerSecret = "your appsecret",
            SignatureMethod = OAuthSignatureMethod.HmacSha1,
            ParameterHandling = 
OAuthParameterHandling.HttpAuthorizationHeader,
            Version = "1.0"
        }
    };

    RestRequest r = new RestRequest()
    {
        Path = "oauth/request_token",

    };

    c.BeginRequest(r, new RestCallback(Callback));

}

void Callback(RestRequest request, RestResponse response, 
object userState)
{
    Regex r = 
new Regex("oauth_token=([^&.]*)&oauth_token_secret=([^&.]*)");
    var match = r.Match(response.Content);
    token = match.Groups[1].Value;
    tokensecret = match.Groups[2].Value;
}

RestClient c = new RestClient()
{
    Authority = "http://api.t.sina.com.cn/",
};

RestRequest req = new RestRequest()
{
    Path = string.Format("oauth/authorize?{0}&oauth_callback=xml
&userId={1}&passwd={2}", response.Content, "user", "password")
};

c.BeginRequest(req, new RestCallback(Callback2));        

void Callback2(RestRequest request, RestResponse response,
 object userState)
{
    Regex r = new Regex("<oauth_token>(.*?)</oauth_token>
<oauth_verifier>(.*?)</oauth_verifier>");
    var match = r.Match(response.Content);
}

RestClient c = new RestClient()
{
    Authority = "http://api.t.sina.com.cn/",
    HasElevatedPermissions = true,
    Credentials = new OAuthCredentials()
    {
        ConsumerKey = "your appkey",
        ConsumerSecret = "your appsecret",
        Token = "request token",
        TokenSecret = "request tokensecret",
        Verifier = "your oauth verifier from last step",
        SignatureMethod = OAuthSignatureMethod.HmacSha1,
        ParameterHandling = OAuthParameterHandling.HttpAuthorizationHeader,
        Type = OAuthType.AccessToken,
        Version = "1.0"
    }
};

RestRequest r2 = new RestRequest()
{
    Path = "oauth/access_token",

};

c.BeginRequest(r2, new RestCallback(Callback3));

public void Callback3(RestRequest request, RestResponse response, 
object userState)
{
    // you will get format like this and that's your access
 token: oauth_token=token&oauth_token_secret=secret&user_id=id
    var s = response.Content;
}

        private void Test()
        {
            RestClient c = new RestClient()
            {
                Authority = "http://api.t.sina.com.cn/",
                HasElevatedPermissions = true,
                Credentials = new OAuthCredentials()
                {
                    ConsumerKey = "your appkey",
                    ConsumerSecret = "your appsecret",
                    Token = "your access token",
                    TokenSecret = "your access tokensecret",
                    SignatureMethod = OAuthSignatureMethod.HmacSha1,
                    ParameterHandling = OAuthParameterHandling.HttpAuthorizationHeader,
                    Type = OAuthType.ProtectedResource,
                    Version = "1.0"
                }
            };

            RestRequest r2 = new RestRequest()
            {
                Path = "statuses/update.xml"
            };

            r2.AddParameter("status", "hello world");
            r2.Method = WebMethod.Post;
            c.BeginRequest(r2, new RestCallback(Callback));

        }

        void Callback(RestRequest request, RestResponse response,
 object userState)
        {
            // check wheather post is successful
        }

references:
OAuth: http://oauth.net
Sina Weibo API: http://open.t.sina.com.cn/
Hammock: http://hammock.codeplex.com

So how about contact info? I tried to add my twitter link to the app, and it just works. From some internal discussion, I would think following information will be OK (not guaranteed…) since in basic, it just requires you to provide a contact approach for end user to contact/feedback to you.

• twitter link
• a webpage/website
• embedded contact form page
• email
• anything else can find you…

Hope this helps…

1. Small/Micro kernel.
2. Powerful UI.
3. Simple Application development.

And what I can see now is it really has an innovative UI and I like it. The kernel should be neat althought it definitely should be based on Win CE (guess). So what I really want to know is how to develop app based on this new UI. It should bring a tough switch… But let’s check it out on MIX10…

download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=043c49db-e33b-4603-a699-9f1fba8e9245

Normally you only can develop application for windows mobile via C/C++ or .Net CF. But as to me, I pretty hope to use more simple stuff to build app, like html and javascript, which means widget: http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/. Like Opera widget, provides this dev feature, but it’s not Windows Mobile nature…

Great thing is coming, Windows Mobile 6.5 now supports the widget although I’m still hoping a better app list interface! Check out this about building widget on WM6.5, http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2009/06/04/getting-started-with-widgets-on-windows-mobile-6-5.aspx. Going to try creating something.

So looks the war comes back, windows vs linux vs unix. Does Windows mobile possibly win?

I’m expecting new and fast kernel, simple and powerful UI, easy to dev app…  Seems Android is what I expect?