Slashdot Mirror

Modded down because I acknowledge there are some rather nice non-Linux solutions?

Pussy.

BeIA
Real Audio, MP3, SSL, CCS, PersonalJava, Javascript, email client and much more in 6 meg.

QNX
Just a damn fast browser. Alebit lacking a few features.

The Linux Internet Appliances seem to take longer to bring to market than the other solutions, at least that is the case with QuBit and a few others. The Linux version will follow the BeIA version by some nine months, I hear.

Information Appliance Comparison by Be, Inc.

Like Gortician gives a fuck.

Modded down because I acknowledge there are some rather nice non-Linux solutions?

Pussy.

BeIA
Real Audio, MP3, SSL, CCS, PersonalJava, Javascript, email client and much more in 6 meg.

QNX
Just a damn fast browser. Alebit lacking a few features.

The Linux Internet Appliances seem to take longer to bring to market than the other solutions, at least that is the case with QuBit and a few others. The Linux version will follow the BeIA version by some nine months, I hear.

Information Appliance Comparison by Be, Inc.

Like Gortician gives a fuck.

Distribute a REAL(TM) Workstation
Provide a secure by default install
Polish up the Desktop

You've just described BeOS. And look where all that got them.

--

Apparently Be Inc., maker of BeOS and BeIA, sued eBay for the ebay.com domain.

The result is that it is very difficult for the developer to bring the product out on a competing platform, and it discourages users from moving to a different OS when they feel the vendor isn't serving their needs (because they can't get the solutions to their problems).

If the developer doesn't want to deal with the OS vendor anymore, he's really got a problem - either suffer under the vendor's thumb, or make a great deal of personal sacrifice to move to a different operating system.

I was sick of Apple so I wrote I'm worried about my future. That's why I'm a Be developer.

And in fact I shipped (and still do support) on of the first commercial applications for the BeOS, Spellswell from Working Software.

Nothing Be ever did made any sense, and while there are individuals at the company that I regard highly, on the whole I felt the company to be uniquely unresponsive and incompetent.

And just when they were showing some promise of shipping enough BeOS installations that I had some hope of making more than the measly couple hundred bucks I'd earned in royalties in the three years I'd been working on Spellswell, they announced a "change in focus" and said they weren't going to support the desktop anymore, except for the extent necessary to use it as a development platform for their new Strategy Du Jour, Internet Appliances.

After I posted on BeDevTalk that Some of Us Work for a Living, the moderator told me he was fed up with a developer who was trying to discuss business issues of concern to Be's third-party developers on Be's third-party developer mailing list. That was my last message to bedevtalk - he unsubscribed me.

I've been working on a really challenging C++ application for a few months, and after reading C++ Answers with Bjarne Stoustrup I got excited about really digging into the basics of programming - but from the perspective of a developer with 13 years of work experience and a lot of shipping products.

I bought a few books, mostly on C++ and also hit some websites and newsgroups, and I became a much better programmer as a result. And I really felt that I did better to spend my time on core architectural and language issues rather than dealing with OS-specific nits or tool issues. And so I wrote Study Fundamentals, Not APIs, Tools or OSes.

So this brings me back to being used by operating systems vendors to serve their material needs at my expense and the cost of much personal pain. If you become a better programmer by learning the basics better, to can fluidly go from OS to OS without much of a learning curve.

But there's the problem that you have to use some API to code your application to, and while Java claims to be "platform-independent" it is really a proprietary platform in itself - just try making use of platform-specific code in a Java application, yes you can do it with the Java Native Interface but it is difficult and an assault on the Java developer's senses to write a dll in C or C++ to load into the runtime.

So what you really need is a cross-platform application framework that you can write in with a language such as C++, that comes preconfigured with easy-to-use preprocessor symbols so you can drop into OS-specific code at your whim, and will compile from a single sourcebase to native machine code for multiple operating systems.

Funny that, since December '99 I've been writing a multithreaded special-purpose graphics editor that is also an HTTP client with just such a cross-platform application framework. I can develop on Mac or Windows as the need suits me and switch back and forth at a moments notice (especially now that I've got filesharing between my machines). My client only asked for Mac and Windows versions but I could port to BeOS or Linux in a few days. The framework is called ZooLib.

It was written by my friend Andrew Green of The Electric Magic Company, originally to insulate himself from Apple's API nonsense. (Do you remember when all progress on developer tools at Apple and Symantec stopped while they went off into the sunset to develop Bedrock, itself a cross-platform application framework and an immense investment of time and money - and then abandoned it? If it hadn't been for then-tiny Metrowerks Apple would have gone out of business after shipping the first PowerPC Macs, because there would have been no native PPC compilers.)

He felt that if he could code to his own layer and Apple changed their API, he'd just have to reimplement the OS-specific layer and he'd be working again. But then a little more work and he'd be cross-platform...

If you click that link today you'll just get a placeholder page. But just wait a few days...

(For practical reasons the source itself, mailing lists and so on will be provided at http://zoolib.sourceforge.net/ once it's released.)

While ZooLib is to be newly released to the public it is not new code. It has been in use in commercial products for about five years - and in development in my own since last December. Part of why Andy gave me the code and I've been working with it is to give him meaningful architectural feedback and detailed bug reports so he can prepare it for public release.

I've been urging Andy to release the source as-is for a couple of years but his standards are incredibly high for a programmer. Andy's code doesn't just work, it is correct.

Andy spares no effort or time to fix the smallest problems (this is especially important in multithreaded code - think about reference counted smart pointers that are operated on by different threads, as you can do with Zoolib), and part of why he's been delaying the release is to improve the overall architecture.

For more details, including relevant quotes from Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's Findings of Fact and Final Judgement discussing why Microsoft felt it was more important than anything to suppress cross-platform API's, such as Netscape plug-ins, Java, Intel Native Signal Processing, Lotus Notes, Apple Quicktime (runs on Windows too!) and RealNetworks' multimedia technology, please read my early draft of:

The Cross-Platform Manifesto

Thank you for your attention.

Regards,

Whenever anyone asks me for a hosting recommendation, I always recommend Seagull.

No, Seagull is not an ISP. While it would be nice to have a secure ISP, you're better off using any random joker for your ISP, owning your own domain name so you can relocate it in the event your service tanks (I discuss this in Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants) and accessing the hosting service via SSH and SCP (secure copy). Note that it does no good to only use SSH - you have to use SCP as well.

Here's a sample SCP command line, in case you can't figure it out, it's very simple but I had a hard time from the man page:

scp foo.bar crawford@www.goingware.com:.

The above places file foo.bar in the home directory of user crawford on www.goingware.com.

scp crawford@www.goingware.com:web/index.html stash

This copies index.html from directory "web" on www.goingware.com and places it in directory "stash" on the local machine.

Please read my web page on Why You Should Use Encryption

Besides being a good service, it's a small enough company to offer personal service. I've sent support email to the webmaster at 2am his time and had the problem fixed and the mail answered within the hour.

But even though it's a small service, it's not a low-quality service. They have high-performance machines, they are in a good colo facility with a high-speed connection to the backbone, they upgrade their service regularly and the webmaster, Paul Celestin, is just a damn nice guy.

I'm not sure if he still publishes it but Celestin used to produce a CDROM full of useful free source code for the Macintosh. Some of my own Mac open-source programs were on it.

These are the sites I personally have located there:

• http://www.goingware.com/ - My consulting company, GoingWare Inc. My livelihood depends on the reliability of this site.
• http://www.wordservices.org/ - Seagull hosts this public-service site for free in exchange for me placing a small banner ad on some of the pages
• http://www.geometricvisions.com/

I have a couple tips for you on checking email. I use PGP when I'm trying to be secure, but it's really not that much that I really care for complete security. But I just don't like people snooping on me, mostly I think it's none of their damn business what's in my mailbox even if it's spam.

So mostly I read my email at seagull using elm while logged in via SSH, and when my mailbox gets big, I move it to my home directory and copy it to my home machine via SCP:

goingware$ cp /usr/spool/mail/crawford ~

goingware$ echo "" /usr/spool/mail/crawford

back on my home machine:

C> pscp crawford@www.goingware.com:crawford .

It is also possible to download your email via POP with SSH via port forwarding. I describe this on the BeOS Tip Server. It doesn't seem to be responding right now but if you go to its search and enter "ssh" you'll find the tip I submitted called something like "Secure email download via ssh". The instructions have some BeOS specific items but most of what's there will work on any systems.

Don't have SSH? Try one of these:

• Nifty Telnet/SSH for Macintosh - includes a graphical SCP client!
• putty for Windows (also supports NT/Alpha) and pscp for secure copy
• CygWin - a GNU environment for Win32 - use bash, compile with GCC, a lot of linux code builds right out of the box in Cygwin
• The Secure Shell Community Site
• SSH Communications Security (commercial)

At home, I use NetPositive.

No, I hadn't, but it sounds fascinating. (especially check out the datasheet)

It sounds like a lean, mean, stripped-down version of BeOS, perhaps more appropriate for web kiosks at first glance, but who knows? Use it for web pads, or maybe in a car (play mp3's and use MapQuest--sounds like a killer app to me! :), and whatever else they can get their hands on.

In any case, I'd be very happy if BeOS found its niche; it looks like a very good system, and I'd give it yet another try if I had another processor in my box. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I don't know where you get your ideas about BeOS, but you can download both the BeOS and the dev tools for free.

I don't know where you get your ideas about BeOS, but you can download both the BeOS and the dev tools for free.

BeOS has creator types (except they're called something like "preferred applications"). Now that I think about it, BeOS probably also uses BFS indices to find an app given its signature; this is cool because the filesystem's indices never get out of sync like the Finder's desktop database can.

See BRoster::FindApp() for some details.

Anyways, back to your comments... The Radeon has been quite surprising to the industry. It came in just behind all of the GeForce-2 cards in Sharky's benchmarks and well above the Voodoo5. My point of contention with them is that their tests seem to be limited to 16-bit color-depth.

As for the stability of their drivers, I don't know where you're coming from. I've personally had no problems with their drivers. Hanging out in comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video, I've seen an pretty-much uniform distribution of complaints for all card manufacturers.

Finally, as I'm not a Linux user, so I can't comment on the drivers available for Linux. I've found limited BeOS drivers available, though, and they're stable. Perhaps by your logic BeOS developers are better than Linux developers? Perhaps ATI doesn't forecast enough profit in the Linux sector to justify making in-house drivers? This is spawns a whole 'nother can of worms.

Have you checked out BeOS yet?

--

Mmmmm, BeOS

Or take a cheaper route - BeOS! Runs on x86, SMP, protected memory, multithreaded, scalable. For server side stuff I'd say stick to Linux/BSD.

For a free download check out

mtool's mdir command can emulate MS-DOS's dir command.

I'm going home and painting those crash test dummies' stickers on my clothes and order the Mac OS X Beta that's going to change the world - again!!!
You must be kidding me right?

Here are the some 'revelations' -

1. Get Steve Jobs over to Debian/SuSE/Mandrake/RedHat - the man can sell a beta, surely finished, robust and free OS+Apps has to be easier.

2. Umm how about post beta, finished, free - consumer 'just works' OS - BeOS 5 PE, they have perl, python, bash, /bin/*, /usr/bin/*, gcc - 'nuff said.

-G

Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing

The last machine I saw with dual PPCs had no problems with overheating...

> Waiting for something better...

Be OS

I think it's a pitty mac os X will never run on intel. I'm unhappy with both linux (no decent UI) and windows (decent UI but unstable).

<cheesy advertisement>

Give BeOS a try. If it works with your hardware, you'll likely be impressed. It has my favorite aspects of MacOS (pretty, responsive UI) and Linux (stable, has the bash shell). It comes bundled with a decent web browser, too.

I just gave it a try this past weekend and I know I'm hooked. BeOS Personal Edition

</cheesy advertisement>

Oh, and it runs on Intel AND PowerPC already.

> No GUI currently comes close to the elegance of the Mac GUI in terms of how you can use it.

You haven't tried BeOS yet, have you?

BeOS just blows MacOS completely right out of the water.

They should offer a choice of several development environments (on a Pentium box, you could use Codewarrior, Microsoft Visual C++, Borland, gcc under Windows with Cygwin or under Linux or BSD, or Solaris with the Sun C++ compiler).

The best thing would be to have machines that have multiple operating systems installed mounting your home directory off a server so you can reboot and try a different compiler.

Not only is it educational to compile under different environments, it helps to keep you from using compiler-specific features that lock your code into a specific platform (you use the pedantic option on gcc and don't use the gcc extensions, do you), but also building your code under multiple compilers will find bugs in syntactically incorrect code that won't compile in one compiler but will compile and run and do who-knows-what under another.

(This is one of the reasons Be, Inc. still supports the BeOS under PowerPC even though Pentium has an overwhelmingly larger customer base - it helps them to validate their code and keeps their code portable. They found lots of bugs when they moved from Codewarrior to gcc on their Pentium version, and so did I in my BeOS products.)

For example, I recently found that using auto_ptr< char > on a character array seems to work just fine under Codewarrior for Windows.

(I use it because I like the IDE's UI and it's great for cross-platform development - it also works with any text file format (MacOS CR, Unix LF, or or DOS CRLF) so you can easily share source files between any kind of machine, unlike gcc which only accepts Unix newlines).

It is not correct to use auto_ptr on an array because it deletes the pointer it holds with delete, rather than delete [] which is the required operator to delete arrays (this is needed so you can call the destructor separately on each element of the array; it doesn't hurt to fail to call char's destructor because it doesn't have one, but the memory allocation format for an array in C++ is different than in C because the number of elements has to be stored somewhere).

It is no real fault of Codewarrior that it works but I wouldn't expect my code to work if I moved it to a different platform - or worse, got into the habit of managing array pointers this way and maybe wrote a big library full of auto_ptr's of arrays. It would be perfectly within reason for a different development environment to cause my code to crash if I did this.

Take my word for it, I am a professional cross-platform developer with with extensive experience shipping on a variety of platforms including my current project which builds from the same C++ source base for MacOS and Windows.

(My friend Andy Green wrote the cross-platform application framework I'm using, which will be released under the BSD license soon. It also works under BeOS and XWindows/Posix, including Linux).

If you or your TA's wish to discuss this directly with me feel free to email me at crawford@goingware.com

They should offer a choice of several development environments (on a Pentium box, you could use Codewarrior, Microsoft Visual C++, Borland, gcc under Windows with Cygwin or under Linux or BSD, or Solaris with the Sun C++ compiler).

The best thing would be to have machines that have multiple operating systems installed mounting your home directory off a server so you can reboot and try a different compiler.

Not only is it educational to compile under different environments, it helps to keep you from using compiler-specific features that lock your code into a specific platform (you use the pedantic option on gcc and don't use the gcc extensions, do you), but also building your code under multiple compilers will find bugs in syntactically incorrect code that won't compile in one compiler but will compile and run and do who-knows-what under another.

(This is one of the reasons Be, Inc. still supports the BeOS under PowerPC even though Pentium has an overwhelmingly larger customer base - it helps them to validate their code and keeps their code portable. They found lots of bugs when they moved from Codewarrior to gcc on their Pentium version, and so did I in my BeOS products.)

For example, I recently found that using auto_ptr< char > on a character array seems to work just fine under Codewarrior for Windows.

(I use it because I like the IDE's UI and it's great for cross-platform development - it also works with any text file format (MacOS CR, Unix LF, or or DOS CRLF) so you can easily share source files between any kind of machine, unlike gcc which only accepts Unix newlines).

It is not correct to use auto_ptr on an array because it deletes the pointer it holds with delete, rather than delete [] which is the required operator to delete arrays (this is needed so you can call the destructor separately on each element of the array; it doesn't hurt to fail to call char's destructor because it doesn't have one, but the memory allocation format for an array in C++ is different than in C because the number of elements has to be stored somewhere).

It is no real fault of Codewarrior that it works but I wouldn't expect my code to work if I moved it to a different platform - or worse, got into the habit of managing array pointers this way and maybe wrote a big library full of auto_ptr's of arrays. It would be perfectly within reason for a different development environment to cause my code to crash if I did this.

Take my word for it, I am a professional cross-platform developer with with extensive experience shipping on a variety of platforms including my current project which builds from the same C++ source base for MacOS and Windows.

(My friend Andy Green wrote the cross-platform application framework I'm using, which will be released under the BSD license soon. It also works under BeOS and XWindows/Posix, including Linux).

If you or your TA's wish to discuss this directly with me feel free to email me at crawford@goingware.com

when i saw the title on the frontpage i thought it was about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons!!!
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

Be Inc. ported BeOS from PPC to x86 in a few months, kernel had to be rewrite, but all others apps onlt recompile. They even go from CodeWarrior in the R3 x86 release to elf GNU-C in R4 release, so i think their code is portable! You know, it's like QNX/NTO, it's "closed" but one QSSL engineer port NTO to the iMac in one week of spare time. This has nothing to do with open source.
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

is a 66MHz 32 Bit NEC VR4181 MIPS, so i cannot run BeOS/BeIA on this thing :-(
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

While they probably have hardware compressors and fancy algorithms, if you can use any PC you can use a public open-source compressor and just get a bigger hard drive.

It really wouldn't be that hard.

You'd probably get better realtime media streaming performance in the BeOS but then there'd be a chokepoint and I don't think the company is deserving of support by third party developers anymore.

Better to give people yet another reason to use Linux.

Are there any readily available hardware video compressor boards that aren't too expensive and have open source linux drivers?

And I mean this not just in regard to installers and packages, but everything.

And no, I'm not proposing that what we need to do is make Linux look more like Windows or the MacOS.

But there are problems that others have solved and we can draw on their solutions, even if we can't use their source code.

(Even when I was working at Apple I would tell people about stuff from SunOS or Linux that I thought would go good in the Mac - they wouldn't hear of it).

I think an indicator of the problem we face in trying to bring Linux to the desktop was when I was corresponding with RMS about things I thought would be helpful to the users and I suggested an installer. He replied "What's an installer?"

The best installer I've ever come across on any platform, both to create packages with and for the user to install products with is Mindvision Vise.

It would be worthwhile to find a friend with a Mac and download it, and make a little toy installer that installs SimpleText and a readme file to try it out (you can download it for free - the installers created with it complain that you've lifted it until you get a valid serial number. It is possible to get a serial for free for installers for freeware).

It beats the living hell out of anything I've seen for Linux.

BTW - if you want to see an installer that really blows, check out PackageBuilder/Software Valet for the BeOS. The thing drove me to distraction. It wasn't just the way it would corrupt the data in my archives or crash while users were installing my software with it.

What really drove me nuts is that it had no concept of updating an installer when I had built new software to go in it.

With vise you just drop your new files in the folder next to your installer project and tell it to update. It gives you a list of files that have changed and you can approve or disapprove of updating them (or deleting the ones that are now missing).

PackageBuilder requires you to delete the old file from the installer project, which loses its settings, then you have to go and add your file back in and reset your settings. This is probably the number one reason for every time I've been reluctant to release a new version of my software on the BeOS - I enjoy programming it but I hate the damn installer.

Pulling for BeUnited (be-fan, where are you?)

I couldn't afford to not work for such long times so we bought an inverter at Canadian Tire and I plugged my laptop into the car cigarrette lighter.

And damned if I didn't get more work done on the road with my wife driving that at any other time.

I'm writing a cross-platform product right now and have a choice to program on a Mac desktop or my windows laptop (it also runs Slackware Linux and BeOS). Sometimes my wife borrows the laptop to browse the web and - zing! - I get a lot of work done.

The problem was that I'd leave elm open in a terminal window and a web page open on slashdot and hit reload whenever I was running a long compile or something.

So recently I made the choice to turn off my laptop when I've set into my work, or give it to my wife. It's greatly improved my productivity.

(I only paid for one computer on my cable modem, and haven't figured out IP Masquerading yet, so my mac can't hook to the internet. Modems are interchangeable but the DHCP for the cable modem is keyed off of your physical ethernet address so unless you cough up for the second connection or use masquerading you can't use a second machine).

I don't think she would have understood if I told her I'd been featured on Slashdot and had to take breaks from her to go post...

I did read through some of the comments here earlier this evening and I must say that this has been an excellent discussion. The sheer number of comments posted shows I must have struck a chord with the community - and my experience with other programmers shows that this is a common problem with others.

I'll post tomorrow what the folks on comp.lang.c++ and comp.sys.mac.programmer.misc had to say but they were in general along the same lines as what was posted here:

• Take a break
• Get a life
• Do something fun that doesn't involve computers
• Engage in vigorous physical exercise
• associate with the attractive sex
• Step back from low-level coding and do other software-oriented things like design, discussions with a coworker or documentation

I did in particular step back to think about software from a different level than coding, but I didn't actually do design work. Instead, I just cracked open some good programming texts. If you haven't read much lately there's probably a lot of good stuff that will stimulate you and improve the effectiveness of your work - check the book reviews online at The Association of C and C++ Users (and consider joining it - I did, a couple months ago).

One thing I consider important in the reading I did was that I wasn't looking for solutions to the problem at hand. Rather, I was trying to get back to something I'd been missing for a long time and wanted to indulge in - the sheer joy of learning for its own sake.

It was the case that the books I was reading were pertinent to my work but I wasn't searching them for solutions. I was just reading and flipping through them as my curiousity led me. And when solutions to my problem would occur to me, I'd put them out of my mind until the time I'd decided ahead of time would be my time to resume work.

What actually got me going again was that I had such a flood of ideas and they had crystallized so clearly I was able to sit down and implement my solution in a day and it worked just fine - still does.

Something else that helped stimulate me was the website on Extreme Programming.

A lot of the approaches there really appeal to me. Particularly I like the ideas they have that could be generally expressed as "design by coding" and are mentioned I think by Stroustrup in the intro to More C++ Gems as "expressing designs in the code".

That is, rather than doing a bunch of up-front modeling using diagrams like OMT or UML or what have you, you just write code - but you are designing in the code, so they emphasize in extreme programming that you constantly rewrite the code as designs gel.

One thing that saddnes me though is that Extreme Programming also suggests programming in pairs. This is something I used to do with Dave Johnson when we were at Working Software together. We'd help each other through hard spots and just rap about politics and stuff and go have coffee or a beer and get a lot of work done.

Now I live at the End of the Internet and I'm working for myself as a one-man consultant shop. It has its advantages (I can work at home and set my own hours) but one big disadvantage is that I work very much alone and there's no one around to bounce ideas off of.

I have other programmer friends and I do call them up but they all have their own gigs - it's not the same.

On another important note, several people both here, privately via email and in the newsgroups raised the possibility of this being clinical depression.

Well that is something I was well aware of and had been considering. Depression is something I have been dealing with all my life, as you will see in another slashdot article I posted:

Manic Depressive Geeks

I didn't used to be (woefully so) but now I'm very introspective about my mental and emotional state. I have to be. I didn't used to be but now I just won't tolerate the depths of misery that I just thought were part of the normal human condition.

But I don't think that what was happening to me was the sort of depression that I usually consider. There are "endogenous" and "reactive" depressions. Endogenous depression just happens to you and is usually caused by chemical imbalances in the brain (shortages of serotonin or norepinephrine) and is what's usually experienced with Manic Depression, while reactive depression is (naturally) a reaction to external events, like a personal tragedy.

Life has been really hectic for me for a long time, with the turbulence of my consulting business, falling in love with a woman from another country, planning a wedding, moving to Canada, and just trying to keep it all together. Maybe if all that hadn't been going on, I wouldn't have gotten stuck. But basically, I just got stuck.

Robert Pirsig talks about stuckness and ways to overcome it extensively in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I recommend highly (and probably ought to reread). And I really was suffering the kind of stuckness he described, the stuckness that occurs when you just want to get your bike fixed and you break the head off a crucial screw...

(Robert Pirsig went nuts while a grad student in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He had shock treatment back when it wasn't very carefully administered and lost nearly all his memories. The book is about his motorcycle trip across to some of the places he used to live to visit old friends he hardly remembered, along with an amazingly enlightening discussion of what he'd been so obsessed about that it drove him crazy - what is Quality?)

Someone mentioned meditation in the discussion. I had found reading about Zen and doing meditation on my own was of profound help in overcoming my mental illness back in the really dark days. But as things got better and my career got in shape and I stopped seeking so much and concentrated on learning to program and making a place in the world for myself I drifted away from that, something that I think is really wrong.

During my time off my then-fiance lent me her copy of Chogram Trungpa's The Path is the Goal, A basic handbook of buddhist meditation. It is published by Shambhala Publications

I'm afraid I read a little bit of it then when my time off came to an end I set it aside and started thinking again.

One of the little traps our mind has for us is thinking. I like to think, and I'm particularly well-developed at it. But my wife tell me that we are not our thoughts, and actually our thoughts can lead us astray. And when I was getting so stuck on my programming problem I was thinking really hard and trying to solve my problem by thinking harder.

One thing you do in meditation is to stop thinking. Hardened programmers might find that a frightening concept. And you can't really try to stop thinking - you just sit, and look, but not too hard, and experience

You cannot experience your world as it really is and be thinking.

One thing that Pirsig discusses in his book is how to bring the wisdom attained at the rarified mountain peaks of meditation down to practical value in everyday experience. He uses fixing a motorcycle as an illustrative example but when I read the book I found that I was able to program better because I could "become one with the machine".

My wife doesn't really believe this is possible but I think it is, that one can meditate while carrying out an intellectual activity like computer programming. That's something that I seem to have lost long ago, that I had years ago when I was not nearly so knowledgeable but I did have the ability to really lose myself in the machine all day long without distraction - and without getting tired or worn out.

Don't forget:

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

But you overlook one little thing:

That Other System is run by about 95% of the rest of the world.

I don't much like Windows either, guys -- I agree that there are much better desktop operating systems. But the sheer size of Windows is a card it can play against all others. If someone managed to come up with a decent clone of it, and one that was reasonably stable and fast, then as an aside -- with no work on their part -- they'd also get a universe of applications to run on it, and hundreds of millions of users that already know how to use it.

Would it be sub-optimal? Sure. Would hardcore geeks like us prefer it to Linux? Doubtful -- maybe as a games platform or as something to make the Gnu/Linux weenies happy ;) -- but it's something those hundreds of millions of others might appreciate way more than Linux.

Further, I thought one of the better possible outcomes of the anti-trust trial would be an open API and possible clones. Hey presto, looks like people have gotten started already. Why do you have a problem with that? Even if it can't make a perfect & enhanced & stabilized version of Windows -- which, I admit, is a long shot -- it would have a possibly much greater side effect: it would be competition for Microsoft . Isn't that supposed to be a good thing? What are you all complaining about, anyway?

The basic POSIX underpinnings of BeOS mean that the cost of porting the new platform is fairly low, so ports have been both rapid and widespread. All of the same applies to MacOS X.

Aah... but if there were not a whole network infrastructure, I *could* probably say the ethernet sucked. X sucks because it tries to be more than it is. Miguel thinks UNIX sucks (and LWN trollishly rephrased him on this - note that LWN is now Tucows!!!) because it doesn't provide the application framework, and as a result fails miserably at providing a rich desktop environment.

If you can spare the bandwidth for a 50mb download, go check it out... It hauls.

http://free.be.com/

propane is heavier than normal air, so instead of going into the air in case of accident, it goes on the ground, and in town, it can be dangerous
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

no, LPG is LIQUEFIED PETROLEUM GAS
ref from Wipo
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

I read an article in a local newspaper this week, saying that price of natural gaz has doubled here in Québec/Canada... so i don't know if it's less expensive to use gaz instead of gasoline... I don't know Canadian gas company selling "GPL" (Gaz de Pétrole Liquéfié=Liquified Petrol Gas?) like in France, where there's bi-mode car that can run on GPL and normal gas.
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

I have used any kind of browser on a lot of platform for years, from Mosaic to N+. A lot of people here are right that IE5 is more stable and very very faster than Netscape to render page in windows, and it's sad but a lot of website actually looks better with IE, even those W3C compliant!
And of course a lot of linux people says "microshit" IE is shit etc etc etc. but a lot never used it, they are just the "linux rulez, M$ suckz" community. But let me tell you that if IE were available for Linux/X11 like it is available for Solaris and HPUX iirc, maybe 86% of linux users would use it! it's not flamebait, it's just a truth... i use N+ under BeOS, Voyager2 under QNX, IE/Netscape/Opera in windows. And the best is IE period.
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

Technology does breed advances in productivity - but those advances get fed right back into the technologial loop. Indeed, at this time advances in productivity are not enough at this time to sustain the required exponentail growth curve. W need productivity-enhancing technologies that enable us to increase our prodictivity to the point where we actually work smarter, not harder.

Some of those technologies are appearing today, here and here, but it will take a while before they actually get implemented in the marketplace. In the meantime, expect people to work longer hours trying to sustain the exponential growth curve that is the foundation of our booming economy.

BeOS is far better than the latest MacOs X, and what about the file system? BFS used by BeOS is incredible, attributes of files can be of any types and size, you can add an attribute to a file which is an image for example, or text, or configuration. And you can queries attributes at the speed of light :)
This guy does not know BeOS and should d/l the free R5 to test it.
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

Cool ear/eye/face thingy now... (and the BeOS itself has a seperate logo too)

Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing
Long Live Be!

Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing

[Begin usual rant]
Until linux makes some major changes, you won't get many average people converting. Its just too damn hard to setup when you have stuff like BeOS and [shudder] windows which sets everything up itself. Prime example is my computer. I've been building my own computers since 8th grade, so I like to think I know something about them. I have all mainstream components in the beforementioned computer. Everything works great in BeOS (my OS of choice if you haven't been able to figure it out), I've changed hardware and upon the next boot, it automatically configured everything (I won't mention boot times or stability in this post).

But alas, poor *nix. I've tried three different Linux distros and various versions of FreeBSD as well. And not with one could I get everything configured and working properly. Not even the damn NIC in some linuxes. I mean, come on! This is a 3com NIC here, nothing unusal. I've spent more than a week on linux, trying to configure things, following every instruction I could find to the letter. But nothing worked. Now, if a relatively advanced user can't set something up, and the vast majority of companies only sell Microsoft preinstalled to the end users, what makes anybody think Linux can gain a toehold in the consumer arena?

P.S. I am well aware that BeOS has only a slightly better chance than Linux to make a dent in the Gorilla's market share. M$ is just too big to challenge significantly any time soon. But, if for some reason the gorilla should fall, I think BeOS has a better chance than Linux, because its infinetely easier to setup. End users don't care if its open source. They don't care its "Linux!" They just want the gosh-darned thing to work.

Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing.
Long Live Be!

Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing

--I've stopped caring about people killing my karma. I've attacked Linux on /. . My karma was doomed before it lived =P
Long Live Be!

Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing

http://www.wordservices.org

Word Services allows any application to link to a speller, grammar checker or other text service as if it is built-in.

It's a huge advantage to the user because a single GUI spellchecker can be shared between all their applications. Also once a program that uses text is Word Services-enabled, the user can add new text services as they are produced without any further effort on the part of the original application programmer.

It is a public protocol. No license fee or nondisclosure is required to use it. There is a free developer kit for the systems that currently support it.

It was originally written on the MacOS, where it used Apple Events and the Apple Object Model (which is also the basis for Apple Script). It was later implemented on the BeOS BeOS where it uses BMessages and the BeOS scripting API which is implemented in the BeOS Application Kit.

I have it in mind to implement it in XWindows on top of the CORBA interface that is used for scripting in Gnome.

I haven't had time to work on a Gnome version yet but if someone else wants to play with this email me at crawford@goingware.com and we can discuss how it could be done.

I've stopped caring about linux now. I think Open source is a great thing. I like CLI's, so naturally I like the unix idea. But until something major changes, I don't think Linux will take over from microsoft in the consumer-arena. Why you ask? Because
1) Its very difficult to configure. I have very mainstream hardware. Nothing funky on the motherboard, 3com NIC, graphics card from Diamond, SB soundcard, etc. But I could never get everything to work at once. Keep in mind I'm fairly computer literate (I 've only built my own computers since I was in 8th grade.... ) and I know what I'm doing. But I could never get everything to work together, and this is with three different distros keep in mind. If someone like myself, who knows about computers, can't get the damn thing working what makes people thing that average joe-consumer and idiot-boss will be able to make it work on their computer? And that's not even getting into installing software ("make install" my ass, there's better ways to do things if you want it made easy). "Well, just buy it pre-installed then!" you might say, which brings up
2) A Micro$oft OS is pre-installed on almost every computer on the planet. "But dell has linux preinstalled on some laptops!" If they do, they're not making it very visible, a search a couple weeks ago in their home-user laptop section turned up nothing with linux. ditto for small-business section. Which leaves the average joe to install it himself. Refer to 1) for the impossibilities of that happening.

Now, you're probably wondering why I said "Be zealots" up there, right? Well, that's my solution. I think with the right pushing that Be actually has a chance against the gorilla. Unfortunetely, it dosen't look like that's going to happen, it looks like another OS/2 (that was a fun one to play with, btw). Coulda, shoulda, but didn't because of piss-poor advertising. Make no mistake, I think Be is great, I use it as often as I can. Its easier than anything to setup (just install it) and it works great out of the box. I urge everyone to try it. Hell, its even free. And parts of it have been open sourced.

My rant is done. I guess I could sum it up by saying " We're screwed, the good stuff always gets squashed by the gorilla ". Have a nice day :)

Predictions for the moderation: Troll, Offtopic, Flamebait. Lets see how close I get.

Linux is only Free if your time is worth Nothing

i did some camping in Milau, it's a great place, warm weather, very neat, and me too i don't want to see a mcdo there! when mcdo will open a "restaurant" on the artic continent? or on the moon?
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

Moderators, please forgive me for veering offtopic, but this lad needs to be enlightened.

There are several alternative browsers on the market. They're all maturing slowly and some have even got features that Exploder doesn't already, despite Micro$oft's corporate feature bloating.

Konquerer, part of the KDE Project, is another good example of an underdog browser that's starting to take hold in the market. It's support for standards which make a viable browser are almost unmatched at the moment (in the alternative browser market).

Xemacs has a Browser called W3. It supports the majority of standards that make a viable Browser, and is written in Elisp, thus compatible with the Xemacs editor.

Of course, we can't forget Mozilla. It's the open-source version of Netscape 5. Probably the best browser out at the moment aside from Exploder/Win32, it runs on many platforms and is the most likely browser to take over the Exploder market share. It already enjoys a large market share in the UNIX world, just under that of Netscape 4.x. This thing supports nearly everything, including Alpha channels. Watch out for it.