Having not the slightest interest in getting into the "truth
in advertising" discussion, I will note that there are degrees
of distribution in OSes, as well as in other things. For example,
an OS that offers file services across multiple nodes, but otherwise
has no distributed memory or process execution facilities is
"less" distributed than an OS that has such facilities.
Hence, a designer claiming that his/her system was "truly" distributed
could be, fairly, contrasting its highly decentralized architecture
(lookup services, persistence, memory, process migration, etc.)
against systems that had only some, but not all, of these features.
I.e., the opposite of "truly distributed", in this context, doesn't
necessarily have to be "falsely distributed".
(This FoRKpost, of course, is merely a pretext for including the
advert-sig below :-)
Ron
---Ron Resnick Senior Consulting Engineer DiaLogos Incorporated http://www.dialogosweb.com
FLASH! NEW Distributed Java Survey course being offered starting in Nov 1998 provides in-depth hands-on training with RMI, CORBA, ObjectSpace Voyager (TM) and SoftWired iBus (TM). Check http://www.dialogosweb.com/javasurvey.html for details.