What Tunes will do for you
This page ought to contain examples and wishes about what
Tunes should actually do as a better computing system.
It's a new page in there, so please do fill in your wish.
Examples should be as realistic and precise as possible.
General design
Fine Grain
- Tunes will be a
fine-grained
system.
- Imagine you have a beautiful, perfect, database, but you're using
text with a non-standard encoding (specialized ASCII extension, with
specialized fonts).
On existing systems, you're stuck, because the
database will get mixed-up between ASCII control characters and your
encoding, and even if your encoding doesn't use these, you won't be
able to sort your entries according to the usual order from your
encoding. Input and output will be a pain, and mixing ASCII and your
encoding in data fields will be impossible.
Using TUNES, it's not a whole monolithic database application being
provided (sold/given/whatever) to you, but a set generic database object,
that manage the database-specific stuff, but are completely parametrizable
as for the kind of managed data. Thus, you can manage usual ASCII text as
data, but also any kind of raw data with any kind of manipulation properties,
any kind of sorting orders on it, etc. Standard multiplexers will allow
you to mix different kind of data in one data field, etc.
- Imagine that you've just made your own data-acquisition hardware for some
specific job you're doing.
On existing OSes, you'll have to also rewrite
all the software from scratch, or pay very expensively some company to
integrate support for your hardware in their software product; in any case
it'll cost you lots of time and money, and you'll be stuck to the specific
package you choose, unless you're ready to pay again the same large
investment all again.
In TUNES, you'd just write just a generic driver, that would run on just any
software package you'll ever have, because they are generic, and really take
as an input any module that provides the good basic operations.
- All that is possible because TUNES allow fine-grained modules
to be delivered, not huge "applications".
decentralized
and
distributed,
persistent
system, that would allow dynamic interaction in a
unified
way. Of course, it will also be
secure
and
resilient
to network failures.
The entire world may be virtually running the system
with mostly isolated computers being considered
as having very slow and unreliable network links.
The project will freely distribute all its code over this
world, and offer (non-free) support for it. Code will be
copyrighted so that it will stay freely distributable,
but the project will still control commercial use,
distribution, and support of any code produced.
Complete examples
A compact disk database
To Do on this page
Add a table of contents (TOC)
Add lots and lots of examples
Add pointers to other example pages
Find a suitable format for OS comparisons
translate my existing examples from French to English...
Back to the
Tunes Home page.
Page Maintainer:
Faré
-- rideau@clipper.ens.fr