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It's dead. Sad, but true.
be.com

The thing is, 10 years ago there were stable, secure and low-cruft operating systems. Unfortunately a certain monopoly made it impossible for these companies to exist, and now we have far fewer OSs to choose from.

could we please stop this needless bashing of MS

MS should be bashed...it's like the diner that tries to sell rancid water and stale bread for $100(us). They use whatever means necessary to beat down their competition, so almost all of the other diners (or food producers) have gone out of business or are struggling. You can get better food from homeless shelters for free.

If you want to make a better comparison of MS vs open source then take 80-90% of _all_ open source programs and compare the number of flaws to MS' flaws.

Probably 80-90% of all open source programs are made by one or more of: script kiddies, teenagers playing around, hobbists, power users, people that bought "Learn to Program C in 21 Days" who now think they are "experts", and the people can't program so they start a project on SourceForge with a basic description and hope someone bites. None of these people should be expected to create a decent, bug-free program. For you to even think MS needs to be compared with them shows how backwards your position is.

Anyone and their cat can start an open source project in their garage. It doesn't mean anyone will use these programs, and it is absurd to compare those projects with a funded company that has paid professional programmers. However, from what I've seen, Microsoft would barely scratch by with even this test. If compared with the commonly used (and made by real programmers) Open Source projects, Microsoft wouldn't even have a chance.

Take a simple program like "BitchX," an IRC client.

I've used it before. Not to dis the guy who made it (BitchX isn't too bad an effort), but it does seem a bit script kiddie-like. In fact only a script kiddie would choose such a name. ;-) In fact read their page: "BitchX was started by Trench and HappyCrappy as a script for the ircII client."

It has had countless security issues, and IRC has been around since '89 or so.

Why don't you compare BitchX with Microsoft's IRC client--assuming they still have one. All I remember about it was almost no features and stupid cartoons. BitchX has lots of features. Not that I'm saying they should be compared, BitchX is made by script kiddies after all--in fact they seem to want to be known as script kiddies--just look at their page!

We like to conveniently forget about sendmail and bind

What kind of dumbfuck would use sendmail or bind on their servers??? There are plenty of alternatives to those programs...

there is no equal or objective comparison between MS and "Linux" (or whatever you want to define as the yardstick of security.. which is typically "Linux" on /.) in terms of security.

There is no equal or objective comparison between the two because MS doesn't care about security or bugs! Whatever Linus would call a "Brown Paper Bag Bug", Bill calls a "feature". ...and I don't think most slashdot readers define Linux as a "yardstick of security". That would be something more like OpenBSD, who kick the hell out of Microsoft in terms of paranoia and therefore security. Numbers from bug reports aren't a good comparison between them either--the OpenBSD people seem to raise hell when they find the tiniest potential exploit, while Microsoft won't even acknowledge the most horrid of bugs/exploits and will only release a patch if they are embarrassed into it.

BSD is great!

There are so many to choose from!

This would be a great time for someone to sweep it(Be.com) up. ;) *cough*OpenBeOS*cough*"

Are you offering to use your OSDN connections to pay for it?

BeGroovy looked into buying the domain.

From their forum:
"Having had a response from Dan Johnston at Be Inc (or what remains of Be Inc), I hold out *no* hope that the Be community can afford to buy the be.com domain. I was a great supporter of the idea until I found out that the asking price is a few orders of magnitude greater than I had hoped"

So yes Tim, your OSDN friends will be handy.

This one? Somehow I don't think they're going to spend much time in court upholding patents.

It says on home.com :

Excite@Home
The Leader in Broadband

Then right below that it says:

Excite@Home Reduces workforce as operations wind down.

Now this is a company with some intelligence! Maybe they should instead put up a black band (of mourning) like on be.com...

I completed high school just over a year ago in Victoria, the other major Australian state.

This is nothing new in Victoria. New South Wales is just catching up.

The IT teacher used to gloat about being "god" and how she could (and did) read any e-mail, and about the filters setup so anything with swearing would be blocked and redirected to her. High school age kids throw words like "shit" and "fuck" around like nothing, so this was a little unfair, especially considering it wasn't documented until a year later.

The web access was worse. They had this state-wide thing called EduCache. It was just a great big filter, allowing only officially checked websites in. It was at the school's discression to activate it; you can guess our school had it on. (I also won't mention how this made the web virtually useless for most students, and I spent half a year teaching people how to change their proxy settings to bypass it. But I digress.)

Students could submit sites to this cache. I requested many tech sites, from here at Slashdot, to Be Inc, to Enlightenment, just to name the ones I remember. I also tried to add The Sync, just for Geeks in Space. It was rejected. Probably something to do with JenniCam...

Look, these schools don't care about privacy. Eventually, they made students sign sheets saying they wouldn't do bad things. Bad things like look up porn or submit anything anonymously to the net. By this stage, I had 12 months left at the school, and refused to sign. Didn't use a school computer for a year (well, not with my own account at least...)

Oh, and before you think I was some rebel kid hacking the school network; I wasn't. I was one of 3 students that sat in on the IT committee meetings. They were all just too busy bickering about their different areas of education to do anything constructive.

Sorry, ranting. Probably bad grammar from the rush. I just don't seen this as a surprise.

(I'll leave the 'My IT teacher called a mouse a GUI' and the I got in trouble for opening a command prompt in NT, because I was "accessing DOS"' rants for another day.)

Since you can now pick up old Compaq Internet Appliances for as little as $39 dollars (233/266mhz, 32MB RAM, 32MB Flash, 800x600 TFT screen), I'm sure QNX could be hacked into one of these to make a very usable and cool looking little browser/terminal! I believe it was also used in the original iopener devices, which had similar specs.

It's a pity Be crashed out of the embedded market really; their BeIA operating system was amazingly efficient. We were developing a system using the Compaq devices as shop terminals, (the versions we had included ethernet ports) and even when running telnetd, ftpd, the desktop (tracker) and the Opera browser, they were using like 18-20MB of their 32MB RAM! Pretty fast too, they could play Flash 4 animations at a decent speed even with pretty slow processors. An interesting thing about the Opera browser on the BeIA platform was that it gradually leaked memory, losing a little every time a new page was loaded. Once the device was over 90-92% memory usage, the browser was killed, and respawned. However, the user wouldn't notice this, as when the browser was killed, it left its image on the screen, then reloaded the last page visited so it was just a slight delay!

I'm sure www.be.com is worth some dough!

Sounds good, but if you don't like the OS...

Install:
OS X(BSD variant)
BeOS (nearly extinct, but runs on PPC with EXCELLENT video editing, check out BeBits, the source for all things BeOS.)
MandrakePPC (I'm sure this is a good option. There are other distros for the PPC too! Look around.)

A hotel may not necessarily BE an ISP.

BE was sold to Palm recently. Where have you been? Where do you want to go today?

A few days ago I went to Be's site to check out BeOS (as I had been meaning to for some time now).

My machine doesn't quite cut it for running Be (which is kinda sad), but it's bizzarre how the site barely seems to acknowledge that such an OS exists (they at least mention it once in their legal page)

Yes, the old logo is here

BeOS 5 was released in two forms a PRO version and a Personal version. The personal version was available in 'Free' as in cost at http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/ and is still available on many mirrors, linked to from that page. If you have never tried it, give Be a try. It's quite nice, and different than everything else out there. Hopefully it won't die off completely.
-OctaneZ

On the plus side of things, having to log in as root to make important changes reminds users to pay more careful attention. Having the ability to run programs under dummy accounts like 'web' firewalls the rest of the system from potential damage from malfunction. One can't set up a chroot jail in a Windows environment AFAIK, but you can run programs that must run as root in their own little sandbox in most (all?) Unix environments to prevent useful exploitation of remote-accessible security flaws that might be discovered later. Even desktop systems will probably end up running servers or daemons that benefit from user-level security features, such as IRC bots, game servers, Gnutella clients, DHCP clients, FTP servers, Samba, or NTP (network time protocol) synchronizers. It's one more layer available to protect the system from things going horribly wrong.

I used BeOS for a while. It felt more-or-less like a single-user always-root Unix system. I can't say that it seemed any more friendly because of this, but I did miss being able to lock down a server application from time to time. I think that a free-as-in-beer version is still available on Be's site for download if you want to try it out. There are other parts in a Linux/*BSD-based system that could be improved on to make the desktop experience more enjoyable and seamless, such as a concentrated effort to make interfaces more consistent across applications yet themeable by the user or encouraging a compatible configuration template for applications that could be fed into a GUI form to make it easier for new users to configure their system and again make things more consistent yet still permit easy editing from a command line. Current window managers seem to be making progress in both areas, though apparently not always in ways compatible with each other... which kind of defeats the purpose.

This isn't a troll, I'm just trying to get a handle on why exactly the HURD exists.

1) Is it because its all GPL?

2) Is it because its a microkernel?

3) Maybe a new, improved microkernel? Not MACH.

4) Security?

5) Performance? Yea right.

6) Ease of use? Isn't that up to KDE and GNOME?

7) Translators, Namespace unification, RPC? Been there, done that.

So, exactly why does HURD exist? What does it bring to the table that hasn't been seen dozens of times before? (Besides allowing non-root users to mount partitions!)

I prefer the interface of KDE by far, I mean WinXP copied KDEs ideas, the taskbar grouping, they stole that

Yeah, hmmm... I wonder where KDE got that idea from... seems familiar!

"Microsoft refused to go into the hardware business, insisted on making its software run on hardware that anyone could build, and thereby created the market conditions that allowed hardware prices to plummet. In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not to a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist. "

I wonder if the purchase of Be will make a difference to this market. Presumably palm are hoping to jump to that operating system (if it's possible) sometime soon from their older OS, which hasn't seen significant changes in years. Otherwise I don't see what sense their purchase of Be made. Presumably that would mean a much faster/bigger/more expensive processor and more memory though. I still think we're on the iteration before these devices with aspirations to being more than a pda will become truly useful. Just wish Palm would *do* something truly new.

Funny you should mention making money... my favorite company went IPO a while back, and the main effect was that they started making really stupid decisions and now they are more or less out of business. So it's not clear to me how turning over control of your business to a bunch of people out to make a quick buck will help your business any.

Errr, QNX hard to install?

Hahahaha!

In other news: BeOS 5 Personal Edition is hard to install...

*giggle*

I bet you struggled opening the box your iMac came in...

I use both command line tools and GUI equivalents. I think GUI can help a lot, providing graphical tools for designing (UML modeler, inheritance charts, etc.) and for coding (words completion, syntax highlightning, inline error checking, etc.). However, command line tools are often more flexible. I would say it depends on the target's environment: if you're developping a server for some *n*x platform then command line tools may be more efficient (vim has syntax highlightning, after all :p), but if you're targeting a Win32 platform with hundreds of resources files, etc. Visual Studio stays the best choice. I've never used KDevelop nor CodeWarrior (except on BeOS, but it was just a poor shitty IDE with not so much features), but I don't see anything valuable currently in unix IDEs that are more source editors than true design platforms. Julien.

Palm has no plan to continue development of BeIA as reported by cnet

I don't know how much of a problem FBC is. GCC changes the C++ ABI often enough to make FBC a non-issue...

BeOS uses something of a hack, (and I presume AtheOS does something similar). There are some virtual functions that are left unused and all objects have some padding in them. Thus the structure of the object can change a little bit without breaking compatibility. There is an article on the Be solution that's pretty informative: here.

...sucks. It is an insult.
Read this instead.

enjoy here

What are BeIA's hardware requirements?
We draw from the "PC clone organ bank." BeIA runs on x86 architecture (Intel, National Semiconductor, AMD) and Power PC processors. Device vendors can choose from a number of systems with a variety of add-ons. BeIA requires a minimum of 8MB of persistent storage (such as CompactFlash) and 32 MB RAM on a single-processor machine like the National Semiconductor Geode GXM chip, and can run on multiprocessor systems with hard disks and Open GL acceleration with a multichannel audio card.

ObBeSlap: anyone notice that the 'Product' button on the Be site navbar doesn't do anything?

Doubtless Palm was after not the desktop BeOS, but the BeIA internet appliance operating system. BeIA has, to date, only been sold to Sony for the eVilla gizmo, but that probably won't earn Sony much money. But if Palm can combine BeIA with their own PalmOS, they could really give PocketPC a run for the market.

Ofcourse its all in the definition or "original" but I think BeOS (its free and 50MB, or 1 cd for a couple of bucks with load of apps). Sure its has a hiarchical filesystem and a gnu cli just like a unix [look/feel/taste/smell]-alike but the database likeness with and mime filteype of this journaling filesystem and the relation of the cli to the gui ( scripting with hey ) and just the really fast gui with a nice look and feel may all be microsoftishly "inovated" from others but there is no way you can use this combination without this little voice in your head whispering "I have never seen such a cool os before, it must be new"
which makes me believe :

Yes BeOS is a new os

Ofcourse its all in the definition or "original" but I think BeOS (its free and 50MB, or 1 cd for a couple of bucks with load of apps). Sure its has a hiarchical filesystem and a gnu cli just like a unix [look/feel/taste/smell]-alike but the database likeness with and mime filteype of this journaling filesystem and the relation of the cli to the gui ( scripting with hey ) and just the really fast gui with a nice look and feel may all be microsoftishly "inovated" from others but there is no way you can use this combination without this little voice in your head whispering "I have never seen such a cool os before, it must be new"
which makes me believe :

Yes BeOS is a new os

Haha funny post man. - r00tman "To Be or not to Be, Be."

i think the gnome folks would do well to learn a few lessons from it.

it can mount ntfs partitions with two or three clicks, which linux couldn't the last time i tried (albeit a long time ago). (mount + shell need not apply)

it would be a loss if it were to be pulled.

Meanwhile, *checks* yes, Be's own press page hasn't been updated since May 17. No help there...

It would help if you were on the right page (the press release page, not the "Be in the news" page), which was updated a few days ago with the employee news:
http://www.be.com/press/pressreleases/

Be's recent financial reports indicate that revenues are up over 600 percent. Thus proving that 600% of nothing is still, well, nothing.

In light of this recent discovery, I say we tell Sony/AOL/Palm that Be's profits soared 50,000% in the past year!

"They didn't fail because of Microsoft . . ."

JLG would strongly disagree with that statement. Dual-boot systems with BeOS installed were shipping in Japan, but the presence of Be was unknown to users because of M$'s licensing terms, i.e., you can only use a microsoft boot manager to boot windows, and that boot manager won't show any other OS.

This is the only reference by JLG that I could find with a quick search, but he's addressed it in greater depth elsewhere. I believe this may have been a part of the DOJ lawsuit as well.

Be hasn't failed entirely because of Microsoft, but they did have a significant hand in it.

Apple: Proudly going out of business for over 25 years.

2) They were planning to be "the Apple of multimedia production". Neat but maybe you should support more than 1 sound card (SB AWE32), humm?

Sound cards supported by BeOS

3) For 6 month, BeOS didn't have an architecture to run on, while switching from the Apple architecture to the PC...

Did their PPC version magically stop working?

4) They just didn't listen to developers...

Neither does Microsoft

5) It was a single-user system...

With Mutli-user job services and plans to move to a log in screen....

6) Open Source would have been a good idea, two years ago, when they begun to run into serious troubles.

I don't see what OS could have done for them, since they had a robust, fast, OS that they could not even GIVE away. All OS would do is guarantee that MUST give it away.

They didn't fail because of Microsoft, stupid users, the dot-com bubble burst or anything. They failed because they made stupid strategic decisions.

This reasoning I fail to see. This has been addressed time and time again. It was adressed in MS's trial and agreed to by Judge Jackson and the Appealate court. The Network Effect. Not only that, but MS uses value customer licensing to keep vendors from doing things it doesn't like. The more you suck up to MS, the less you pay for Windows, this includes not shipping an alternate OS. This was all covered in the trial.

So you tell me, who was Be going to sell their desktop OS to?

• Though people ask for it continually, people in the know, such as _BeOS Bible_ author Scot Hacker, have repeatedly said that an open source version of BeOS will basically never happen. The system depends on licensed code that Be apparently couldn't give away even if they wanted to. I'd like to see this happen as much as everyone else, but don't count on it ever happening.
• New math department: according to The Register, Be's recent financial reports indicate that revenues are up over 600 percent. Thus proving that 600% of nothing is still, well, nothing.
• Supposedly, somewhere on beosradio.com, a ready to ship copy of BeOS r6 has been presented to CEO Jean Louis Gasseee. Various interesting takes on this one. Supposedly development on the desktop OS had basically halted, with all effort going into the IA version, so it would seem that there isn't enough code to be worth releasing a new version of the desktop OS. This is a shame, because a couple of useful components -- BONE networking, OpenGL graphics, etc -- were apparently under development before the switch to the IA focus, and it isn't clear if these components were then or are now ready for prime time. It could be a move to just get out one last version in whatever state it may be in, or there could actually be some new developments that haven't been publicized.
• Discussion at BeGroovy suggests that, among other things, this Palm press release would indicate that they're the likely buyed, while another commenter suggests, supposedly on good authority, that Sony is the likely buyer and they're already feeling out where they would want to go with Be & its technology. Then again, a a followup to that said that, at least as far as releasing BeOS6, he was full of it, and that the only developer working on BONE has been on an extended vacation anyway. Finally, one commenter noted that the final issue of BeDope ["Be's own Onion" --me.] had anticipated all of this months ago. Hrm....
• Over at BeNews, there was yet another link to the Reg article and a whole lot of discussion, generally going nowhere as these forums are wont to do, throwing out speculation that the buyer -- if there even is one, don't forget that this is still just a rumor -- could be any of Palm (they seem to like that idea; I'm not sure I see it but hey whatever), Gobe (developer of Be software -- seen as unlikely as they probably don't have much more cash than Be does), AOL, Compaq, Sun (now *that* would be a nice Network Computer...), Symbian, QNX (why?), Apple (doubt it), Microsoft (pretty sure that was a joke...) (too bad...), Amiga (ok that was definitely a joke), IBM, Hitachi, Samsung, Nokia, Transmeta, Intel, Red Hat (we're pretty safely into wild speculation territory at this point), SGI (see? completely off the wall, these people have no idea what they're talking about), QSSL (bonkers), DoCoMo (two unprofitable ideas that lose money together!), Wind River (who?), Ericsson, etc. Mostly this is all silliness. Towards the end of the conversation, a commenter notes that over on Yahoo's forums, the rumor has been confirmed (by who?), that the stock price is expected to shoot up (whoa, a whole dollar! golly!), and there will be an after hours announcement. Keep in mind however that, not so long ago, a 15 year old kid had such financial forums in the palm of his hand with his "expert" advice, so take that with the appropriate amount of salt. Still, something to watch for anyway.
• Meanwhile, *checks* yes, Be's own press page hasn't been updated since May 17. No help there...

Hopefully all those links work, if not I apologize. I'm just summarizing the various pages that I've skimmed over the course of today. If there's any truth to the Yahoo rumors, there could be confirmation of this as soon as tonight. Though it would be sad to see the company shut down or swallowed whole, a lot of people have seen this coming for a long time, and it would be nice to have some resolution of the situation. BeOS is some great consumer computing technology, and I hope very much that it has a future. Perhaps we're about to find out if that is the case...

That is, if they've had any time left-over from putting the eVilla together in which to work on it.

At this stage of the game, any action Be takes will have to be directly supported (or even initiated) by an acquiring company. (Probable case in point.) So if we see an R6, it will be because the new management wants us to see it. (Even more so for any possible open-sourcery.)

Here's a small excerpt (Formatting is a bit cruddy):

You are in a cube. In front of you is a 16" (visible) Sony monitor. In front of that is a Mitsumi keyboard and an unbranded mouse. Just to the right is a 266 MHz PC clone. The system is running a development version of BeOS R4.
There is a graphics card here.
There is a floppy disk here.
There is a note from your boss here.
There is a Hoberman sphere here.
> INVENTORY
You have a well-used satchel. Inside it are

• A set of screwdrivers
• A small telescope
• A 16M laptop RAM module
• A book on decorative knots
• A PCMCIA Ethernet card
• Last year's tax return
• A 166 MHz Pentium laptop computer
• A bottle of echinacea capsules
• Hair sticks

What about QNX or BeOS? Maybe BeOS is a bit dead in the water, but QNX is a solid and ultra fast OS that does multimedia quite well. I think that Linux is possibly a bit too fragmented with far too many different standards for sound drivers and stuff like that to be that useful. Yes, to anybody who asks, I have used some of these pieces of software under Linux.

What about QNX or BeOS? Maybe BeOS is a bit dead in the water, but QNX is a solid and ultra fast OS that does multimedia quite well. I think that Linux is possibly a bit too fragmented with far too many different standards for sound drivers and stuff like that to be that useful. Yes, to anybody who asks, I have used some of these pieces of software under Linux.

Who ARE Apple's competitors? We always talk about "their competition" -- and there's plenty of O/S competition, hardware competition, et al, but no one offers what they do in one compete package -- so I guess there's no business competition :)

The only ones I can think of would be these guys. Even used to make their own custom hardware to go with their "digital media" operating system, if anyone else remembers that.

Yes, that's the guy. It's the infamous dbg (Dominic however-the-hell-you-spell-his-lastname). He left SGI about 6-or-7 years back, and went onto Be Inc. (BeOS), where he designed BFS (the Be File System). For a couple of years he had his page up at http://www2.be.com/~dbg/, but it's no longer there.

That
would
be
rediculous
!


-Spackler

If anyone on slashdot hasn't read this, they probably should:

In the beginning was the command line:
http://www-classic.be.com/users/cryptonomicon/begi nning_print.html

It's an interesting look at computers and their users. It goes along with what you say, in general, and elaborates on your statements even more.

Dominic is the designer and implementor of the BeOS BFS filesystem, a multithreaded journaled 64-bit filesystem that supports indexed file attributes.

In the beginning of the book there is some good discussion comparing and contrasting various filesystems, including what is publicly known about NTFS. Other filesystems discussed include BSD's FFS, Linux ext2, Mac OS HFS and Silicon Graphics XFS. He also discusses some of the basics of designing any filesystem, the general approaches taken towards filesystem design, and discusses the BFS in depth. It discusses much more modern and advanced topics in filesystem design than are covered in most operating system texts, like journaling and accessing the filesystem from a multithreaded kernel.

By "attributes" I mean extra chunks of data that live outside the main data sequence, and are used for such things as denoting the MIME-type of the file in the filesystem. By "indexed" I mean that an application can tell the OS that it wants indices created for particular attributes, and then applications can do boolean queries on the attributes and get the responses quickly.

There is a linux version of the BFS filesystem available as a patch - it is not yet in the main kernel tree, and I believe it is read-only. It is complicated to make it writeable because it is a journaled filesystem. You can get it here.

To try out the Be filesystem fully, get the free-as-in beer version of the BeOS from http://free.be.com/ to install under Windows or ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/beos/ to get the version you can install under Linux. The BeOS personal edition creates a virtual filesystem within a regular file on FAT or ext2.

If you have a partition to spare, much recommended is BeOS 5 Pro which you can inexpensively purchase from Gobe Software. The Pro version can also do symmetric multiprocessing.

Mike

Mike

Dominic is the designer and implementor of the BeOS BFS filesystem, a multithreaded journaled 64-bit filesystem that supports indexed file attributes.

In the beginning of the book there is some good discussion comparing and contrasting various filesystems, including what is publicly known about NTFS. Other filesystems discussed include BSD's FFS, Linux ext2, Mac OS HFS and Silicon Graphics XFS. He also discusses some of the basics of designing any filesystem, the general approaches taken towards filesystem design, and discusses the BFS in depth. It discusses much more modern and advanced topics in filesystem design than are covered in most operating system texts, like journaling and accessing the filesystem from a multithreaded kernel.

By "attributes" I mean extra chunks of data that live outside the main data sequence, and are used for such things as denoting the MIME-type of the file in the filesystem. By "indexed" I mean that an application can tell the OS that it wants indices created for particular attributes, and then applications can do boolean queries on the attributes and get the responses quickly.

There is a linux version of the BFS filesystem available as a patch - it is not yet in the main kernel tree, and I believe it is read-only. It is complicated to make it writeable because it is a journaled filesystem. You can get it here.

To try out the Be filesystem fully, get the free-as-in beer version of the BeOS from http://free.be.com/ to install under Windows or ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/beos/ to get the version you can install under Linux. The BeOS personal edition creates a virtual filesystem within a regular file on FAT or ext2.

If you have a partition to spare, much recommended is BeOS 5 Pro which you can inexpensively purchase from Gobe Software. The Pro version can also do symmetric multiprocessing.

Mike

Mike

Funny everyone mentions "closed hardware." HTH does Linux/NetBSD manage to run on modern Macs if they're "closed?"

True, but try passing that line around Be and see how far you'll go before being smacked.

In the world of open source software, bug reports are useful information. Making them public is a service to other users, and improves the OS. Making them public systematically is so important that highly intelligent people voluntarily put time and money into running bug databases. In the commercial OS world, however, reporting a bug is a privilege that you have to pay lots of money for. But if you pay for it, it follows that the bug report must be kept confidential--otherwise anyone could get the benefit of your ninety-five bucks! And yet nothing prevents NT users from setting up their own public bug database.

This is, in other words, another feature of the OS market that simply makes no sense unless you view it in the context of culture. What Microsoft is selling through Pay Per Incident isn't technical support so much as the continued illusion that its customers are engaging in some kind of rational business transaction. It is a sort of routine maintenance fee for the upkeep of the fantasy. If people really wanted a solid OS they would use Linux, and if they really wanted tech support they would find a way to get it; Microsoft's customers want something else.

Well, click here to check out the BeOS hardware compatability list for X86 platforms. The Symbios 53c8xx SCSI chipset is listed as supported. As for RAID, here is what I found at Be's web site:

So, the answer depends upon your hardware config. For setups that don't use RAID, like the one in my office, you'd be good to go :)