It's The End Of The Be As We Know It 216
JRAC writes "Be Inc. has replaced their web site's entire contents with information on the sale of Be to Palm.
Stock holders can find all relevant info on the Stock Information page.
BeOS 5 Personal Edition is no longer available from the site. Looks like it's time to hit the mirrors. Try ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/beos for files.
" The official sale was approved just over a month ago.
Black armband (Score:5, Informative)
AAARGH! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Black armband (Score:3, Informative)
Not done yet... (Score:2, Informative)
Even if the source isn't released, any work that is done commercially to keep the code alive is better than what has happened to date.
BeUnited.org and lots of other great sites... (Score:2, Informative)
If they can be successful in licensing the OS from Palm, then the BeOS can continue. They currently have 136 new products or projects in their developer survey. Head over to the site to see how you can help!
Also, for those that don't know, there are several other really good sites dedicated to the BeOS:
The "sourceForge" of the BeOS: BeBits.com [bebits.com].
News and a discussion forum: BeGroovy.com [begroovy.com].
Another news site: BeNews.com [benews.com].
And, of course, the site that sells BeOS 5 Pro, and the Office Suite (available for Windows, too!) that goes along with it: Gobe.com [gobe.com].
This is all Jean-Louis' fault! (Score:5, Informative)
While talking about alternative futures it's interesting to think about what would have happened had Apple used the NT kernel instead of NeXT or Be. According to Gil Amelio, Gates was on the phone almost every day trying to convince him that NT was the best route. Amelio's book [amazon.com] is an interesting read for this very subject and gives some insight as to why Apple went with NeXT instead of Be or Microsoft.
Re:OSX Performance (Score:3, Informative)
>>>>>
You miss an important distinction. OSX is based on old code. Mach was never very good as a microkernel to begin with, and it hasn't been heavily updated in years. FreeBSD on the other hand, is very mature, just like Mach, but has had the benifet of years of massaging in the intervening years. Apple really was out to lunch when it decided to use a Mach/BSD combo. First, it has no real benifets, since the monolithic system server eats any potential gains in stability. Worse, it loses performance for being based on a microkernel. What would have made much more sense for Apple would have been to base OS-X on top of FreeBSD. They would have gotten a much better core OS, the FreeBSD guys would have gotten access to nifty things like XML configuration, and Apple wouldn't have to be in the core OS business.
Here we go again.... (Score:1, Informative)
So R.I.P BeOS, the only operating system that was ever a joy to use. I would pay serious money for any linux distro that could still run smoothly while playing 4 videos, a music CD, and rip a track from that CD at the same time while compiling the latest BeShare source with mods in the background. Alas....my mandrake partition still has problems crashing when I try to play solitaire.
One thing is for sure.. (Score:2, Informative)
No matter how good another OS is, now matter how outdated BeOS will become, to me nothing will ever Be as good. No OS will ever Be as sexy, as much fun to use. (I'm sorry is all this writing Be with a capital letter becoming annoying?). I guess I'm a zealot.
Linux lacks any trace of cohesion and X is too slow, especially after Be's mega-responsive-fully-multithreaded goodness. I simply can't stand KDE and Gnome, not after using Be's oh-so-close-to-perfection GUI. Windows is too slow, bloated and insecure. Moreover, I oppose Microsoft on principle grounds. Mac hardware is too expensive and OSX probably too slow.
..Will I ever fall in love again?
Mirrors (Score:4, Informative)
http://ftp.pcworld.com/pub/system/other/beospe.ex
ftp://ftp.kando.hu/.3/beos/beos/BeOS5-PersonalEdi
Re:OSX Performance (Score:3, Informative)
Would you care to quantify that statement? I know that it's quite fashionable in this forum to parrot Linus Torvalds' blithe dismissal of Mach, but nobody ever seems interested in backing it up with any hard data.
and it hasn't been heavily updated in years. FreeBSD on the other hand, is very mature, just like Mach, but has had the benifet of years of massaging in the intervening years.
What an odd and incorrect statement. I don't really know where to begin. Do you really think that during the entire time that Mach was being used as the core of various incarnations of NeXTstep (on both 680x0 and ia32), MkLinux (on PPC, ia32 and PA-RISC) and MacOS X, not to mention countless other projects, that it was not "massaged" and updated significantly?
Apple really was out to lunch when it decided to use a Mach/BSD combo
You dance with who brought you. OSX is based on NeXTstep, and NeXTstep was built on the Mach/BSD core. That codebase was stable, mature, and proven to be portable. They had, and have, no sane reason to rip it out.
First, it has no real benifets, since the monolithic system server eats any potential gains in stability.
More mindless parroting of the party line. Mach/BSD is in no way unstable, and stability is not the only benefit. Think "portability, modularity, features and elegance."
Worse, it loses performance for being based on a microkernel.
So everyone keeps saying, but nobody seems willing to actually back up that assertion with anything other than vague handwaving. (Please, don't waste anybody's time by reminding us how much faster BeOS could draw windows on the screen. We know Quartz is slow. It's just not relevant to this discussion.)
hat would have made much more sense for Apple would have been to base OS-X on top of FreeBSD.
Apple had a deadline to meet for transmuting NeXTstep into OSX, and a market requirement to support their own SMP systems. Attempting to backport the entirety of OpenStep onto FreeBSD would have actively hindered both of those goals, while offering few tangible benefits in return. (Nevermind the unanswered question of just how long a port of FreeBSD to the Mac/PPC platform would take.)
Instead, they did the smart thing: they hired Jordan Hubbard, and ported many of FreeBSD's userland improvements back to the Mach/BSD codebase, and re-released that as Darwin. Everybody won.
and Apple wouldn't have to be in the core OS business.
Why on earth wouldn't they want to be?
Re:Opening Be wouldn't really matter anymore... (Score:3, Informative)
Depth perception. You look at your current desktop, and everything is using a "pieces of paper" paradigm. This is an easy to understand paradigm, and there's a reason; your brain can easily perceive and interpret it. Everything that you see can easily be transformed into a 2D image, which is how the brain processes everything it sees.
3D screws this up, because now you have to worry about depth as well; is something hiding under that pile? How big is it? Is it far away or close-up? This is hard to tell, from your brain's point of view, without further clues. To give these 3D depth cues, your brain needs a different image for each eye.
So fine, let's imagine that 3D display surfaces are ubiquitous, so we can rely on these depth queues. Now we have a new problem; visual distraction. Do an experiment for me. Sit down at your desk, and carefully place a piece of paper on the desk vertically in front of you. This is now the document you'll be working on. Now try and sit in such a way that you can see all of the paper, read it, be able to work on it, and still not be distracted by the depth of the desk around you, the wall in front of you, etc. (If you have your desk against a wall, this probably isn't too hard, because the wall isn't very far away; you'll have to pick a place with a far depth behind it.)
What you'll find is you're tending to lean in closer to the paper so you don't see as much of what's around you. This suggests that this is the best way to keep from being distracted in this manner.. but this is essentially the same as a maximized window, correct? So what added benefit does our 3D give us?
Now lets say you want to jump to another window quickly; how would you do this? Well, we'd like to take the visual hint from the Windows taskbar here, to create some sort of list of stuff opened. How would this be represented? What we want; all apps to be visible all the time (otherwise it's no better than the win 3.1 alt-tab screen) and a quick way of accessing them.
Now let's get back to the desktop paradigm. Simply put, there are two ways you could set this up; a room paradigm, where you move around and look at/interact with stuff, or a box/pit paradigm.
The room paradigm is nice, because you can make your desktop as big as you want and then wander around it. The downside, though, is that you've again increased the complexity, adding "travel time" to get from one place to another. Of course, one could always bookmark certain 3D locations, but I'd consider this to be a bit of a kludge; I shouldn't need to bookmark common locations in my desktop just to get work done.
The box/pit idea's a bit cleaner, in that it's a lot easier to understand for someone just getting started. You don't need to worry about moving around; you're staring into your monitor, and it's kind of like a pit that goes in from the screen. You can use a 3D pointing device to move around stuff inside the pit, and pull it to the front. The downside to this is that you're essentially
The last big strike against a 3D desktop is the input device. The mouse is a great input device for moving around in 2D, but once we hit 3D, we have problems. For instance, take the case of moving something, using the room paradigm. How do we grab stuff and move it? Well, we could take a page from System Shock, and have an inventory, and grab stuff, move to destination, and drop it. But does this seem quicker to you than *click* drag and *unclick* drop? Plus the additionaly requirement of people needing to know how to play a 3D shooter to be able to get around..
Likewise, with the pit paradigm, we're faced with another task; we can see everywhere in the pit, but how do we specify how deep to put something? We find that we can no longer do this easily with a mouse, unless we use the wheel for depth. (And we all know how precise the mouse wheel is.) We can also rule out 3D position-based input devices; can you imagine holding your hands steady for hours without support, while working at your computer? (Talk about unergonomic.)
Anyways, you can see why I'm saying true 3D desktops are unfeasible. Sure, they look nice and everything, but where's the speed advantage? How do they make the user's life easier? The only 3D interfaces I've seen are ButtonFly [fsu.edu] and the one from Jurassic Park. In the former, the menus look cool, but they don't provide any speed advantage. Likewise in the latter example; the cast in the movie almost get eaten by the raptors 'cause the interface impeded their ability to easily/quickly find and activate the locks. Do you want to be eaten by raptors? ; )
Yes, 3D is cool, but I don't think I'd want it for my desktop. Now if the 3D were only being used for the hardware acceleration of the resizing, etc., that I can understand. But as a native environment for the desktop... no, I wouldn't like that one bit.