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> how 90% of the Windows desktop real estate could be put to better use.

That's easy ...

1. Stop having a window title bar take the FULL width. The window title bar should be a slidable tab as in BeOS.

2. The window border should be (user customizable) allowed to be ZERO pixels like it was in Windows XP. The window border in Windows 8 are FAT and UGLY. I used to use a 1 pixel border on WinXP -- it was fantastic.

3. The window border should let the user decide if they auto-hide or not. Most of the time you don't resize a window -- why does the window border clutter up the screen?

4. The 'X' close button, should be on the OTHER side away from the '_' Minimize button, and the '[]' Maximize button.

5. There should be an option to have a global menu bar instead of EACH app wasting yet another row for its menu bar.

6. Allow the UI scaling to go BELOW 100%. Who was the idiot that decided the UI text scaling choices should only be 100%, 125%, and 150% ??

Microsoft doesn't understand the first thing about UI design: Signal-to-Noise.

Disclaimer: I am an OpenGL + UI + graphics expert. I am biased.

Don't forget that Haiku/BeOS are *single user* operating systems. There are no file permissions.

That all by itself makes it a joke, honestly.

It does have file permissions, and there are utilities to set them. My understanding is that it is single user in the way the original Windows was, i.e. one user logged on at a time and all processes running as either user or system. However if a different user logs on you can protect files from them.

Disclaimer: my understanding may be wrong, it comes from a brief look at BeOs some years back.

One killer feature I miss from BeOS is the fact that the window title bar didn't take up the whole honkin window width. It actually looked like a tab. One that was able to slide across the "top" of the window. Proper tabbed windows may have killed the sliding aspect, but damit, I want my screen real estate back !!!

i.e. See how "Home" takes up the minimal amount of space ?
http://betips.net/wp-content/uploads/images/239.window.decor.jpg

BeOS and Naiku have a history. If you used BeOS back in the day, you'll remember that there were several hundred Haikus, some about BeOS, many about JLG himself, that were messages within the OS itself.

Here is a ton of them
and here is more info.

First three to respond to this (with e-mail addresses!) get gmail invites (if they want).

When will you guys learn? The BeOS has done this for years! NetPositive filters ads by text matching, not by domain.

And BeOS is not dead!!

Hot swap laptop IDE drives from the BeOS Tip Server

Hot swap laptop IDE drives from the BeOS Tip Server

This link shows you how to install Be Personal Edition on its own partition.
http://www.betips.net/chunga.php?ID=495

Orange

"also was available in a cut-down form for free on the web, but they've now removed that"

You can still get it at mirrors and it was recently uploaded to bebits(BeOS's freshmeat). You can get both the windows and linux version here.
You check as well how to install the personal edition in a proper partition or make the original virtual partition bigger

"also was available in a cut-down form for free on the web, but they've now removed that"

You can still get it at mirrors and it was recently uploaded to bebits(BeOS's freshmeat). You can get both the windows and linux version here.
You check as well how to install the personal edition in a proper partition or make the original virtual partition bigger

Here is how to make a BeOS install CD from a BeOS Personal Edition install.

Here is how to perform a bootstrap installation of BeOS Personal Edition onto a separate partition by using an intermediate BeOS Personal Edition installation on an existing FAT partition.

These tips come from the Miscellaneous BeOS tips category, which can be found here
.

Here is how to make a BeOS install CD from a BeOS Personal Edition install.

Here is how to perform a bootstrap installation of BeOS Personal Edition onto a separate partition by using an intermediate BeOS Personal Edition installation on an existing FAT partition.

These tips come from the Miscellaneous BeOS tips category, which can be found here
.

Here is how to make a BeOS install CD from a BeOS Personal Edition install.

Here is how to perform a bootstrap installation of BeOS Personal Edition onto a separate partition by using an intermediate BeOS Personal Edition installation on an existing FAT partition.

These tips come from the Miscellaneous BeOS tips category, which can be found here
.

I read his book, read more than one of his articles, and actually talked with the man myself. He is a great guy. His work at BeTips was an invaluable service to the BeOS community. He's been a central figure in the BeOS community for years.

Most of what Scot talks about in this article is not unfamiliar to the BeOS community. Nearly all of it was slowly leaked by Be employees and then later directly confirmed by Gassee. I suppose if you don't trust Be or Gassee to be honest about their negotiations, Scot's article could be seen as dubious. Truly, nearly all of it comes from Be. However, Scot openly acknowledges this and makes no bones about his own speculation.

This isn't a news article. It's an editorial in which he offers his own opinion and explanation as to the downfall of Be and the severe lack of major OEMs shipping dual boot systems. To support this, he offers information from Be and Gassee, as well as public information from the Microsoft trial. No, he didn't get an exclusive interview from Gates. No, he doesn't have absolute support for some of his conclusions, but it's your job to evaluate those conclusions for yourself.

Use CL-Amp for the tunes, go and grab an IRMan and BeInControl for the remote control, and you're set. CL-Amp also has a bunch of plug-ins that support LCD displays, monitors, etc... check BeBits

The only downsides are that BeOS can be a little fussy about hardware (/me = Asus P2B-S, SB-Live Value), and that Samba support is, erm... well, it's there, but it didn't work for me; but BeOS can happily mount your CIFS shares (or ftp in/out, or telnet in/out, ...)

FWIW, I just used a standard Abit desktop case (hidden, quiet fan), with only the IRMan exposed...

One word: BeOS

I use BeOS to manage my growing collection of MP3s. With BeOS, you do not need to run a separate database to keep track of your files. Be's file system (BFS) actually works like a live database. You can add all sorts of indexable attributes to any type of file. Searching for files in BeOS looks just like a database query. Wrt MP3's, all the info you find in ID3 tags can be stored as file attributes. When you search for songs based on any combination of attributes, you get the results almost instantaneously. The best part is that in most cases, no manual entry is required for anything, including manipulation of filenames and ID3 data!

There are a number of ways to manage MP3 meta data. If you want to take advantage of CDDB or FreeDB in the ripping process, then Scot Hacker's RipEnc is the way to go. Pop in a CD, it will get recognized from a CDDB/FreeDB lookup. Then, just tell RipEnc the genre and year of the album. RipEnc will rip the CD for you and add the CDDB, year and genre info to each song's ID3 tags and filesystem attributes. Of course, you'll have complete control over bitrate, frequency, name format, the whole shebang. For convenience, songs get stored under a directory heirarchy like this: ~/mp3/artist/album

If you have a bunch of MP3s already on your HD and you want to change around the ID3 info and/or standardize on filename structure, then ArmyKnife will do it all for you. Here is a description of ArmyKnife, shamelessly plagarized from www.bebits.com:

When you're ready to serve out your MP3's under BeOS, you'll have at least two methods available. The RobinHood web server has a plugin to let you stream songs over your network. However, the easiest (and possibly most flexible) way of serving out MP3's is to use Stephen van Egmond's Be In Your Stereo. Again, I shall shamelessly plagarize the description from BeBits:

Finally, Scot Hacker has lots of great information on using BeOS for a headless networked MP3 jukebox. You can read more about it here. Btw, please check out the screenshots of the above programs at the links I provided; they'll do more justice than I can with my descriptions!

http://www.betips.net/cgi-bin/chunga.pl?ID=tip531 and http://www.betips.net/cgi-bin/chunga.pl?ID=tip528 will give you all the information you need.

http://www.betips.net/cgi-bin/chunga.pl?ID=tip531 and http://www.betips.net/cgi-bin/chunga.pl?ID=tip528 will give you all the information you need.

The BeOS Tip Server page on doing POP with SSH is at Secure Email Download with SSH. Note that POP exposes your password unless you use port forwarding with SSH as I describe (or some more advanced download method). Don't think you're super-cool if you SSH to do your shell access but then download your mail with plaintext POP!

Finally, seagull allows you to install your own CGI's that you can get wherever you want or you can write them yourself with the full set of Linux developer tools they have on the servers - so you can write CGI's in C++ rather than Perl, if you'd like.

Also, I just have their "Lieutenant" hosting for $20/month, they have other options for higher prices such as root FTP server and SSL web page service as well as paying for high traffic so you can run a commercial site there.

The BeOS Tip Server page on doing POP with SSH is at Secure Email Download with SSH. Note that POP exposes your password unless you use port forwarding with SSH as I describe (or some more advanced download method). Don't think you're super-cool if you SSH to do your shell access but then download your mail with plaintext POP!

Finally, seagull allows you to install your own CGI's that you can get wherever you want or you can write them yourself with the full set of Linux developer tools they have on the servers - so you can write CGI's in C++ rather than Perl, if you'd like.

Also, I just have their "Lieutenant" hosting for $20/month, they have other options for higher prices such as root FTP server and SSL web page service as well as paying for high traffic so you can run a commercial site there.

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)

No, it's something designed to work with multimedia. Who in their right mind would use it for a webserver?

The Anti-Mac interface reminds me a lot of the current BeOS interface, though with obvious differences. BeOS isn't there yet, but it's on its way. Point by point:

Central role of language: Right now BeOS has a POSIX-compliant underbelly, which gives you the flexibility of a command-line interface alongside the normal GUI interface. The two are intermeshed practically seamlessly. While it doesn't have the fancy "interpreter" capabilities the Anti-Mac ideal proposes (like a spell-checker, which isn't such a bad idea) it IS a working CLI, so you have the strength of language alongside the ease of a GUI.

A richer internal representation of objects: All files in the BeOS have what's called "attributes", which are little bits of meta data stuck onto each file. This means that while your MP3 collection has the usual name, size, modification date, etc., it can also have attributes of title, band, album, bitrate, length, etc. These attributes can be on any file, and are easy to impliment, so you can make a special type of text file complete with author, chapter, and page attributes, all of which can be utilized in queries and so forth.

A more expressive interface: I'm still not entirely sure what this point means, but the BeOS has several key visual features, like distinguishable icons for folders (so your /mail/ and /people/ folders both look like folders, but you can tell which is which without even looking at the name). Little things like this make files easier to distinguish.

Expert users: Again, the GUI is there (and is much, much nicer to use than any other GUI I've used) but the power of a POSIX shell is underneath it. You can get a lot done the simple way, or if you're willing to learn a little scripting or some tricks (BeOS Tip Server is full of them) you can get a lot more done a lot faster.

Shared control: The BeOS isn't multiuser quite yet (should be with the addition og BONE in the near future) it's designed to be that way, in a typical UNIX style. Permissions, separate user directories, et. al.

The BeOS isn't nearly the Anti-Mac interface, but it's the closest I've seen since 1996. Hopefully the key principles will be kept in future development.
---

Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption.

If you get your mail from and put web pages on a hosting service, then at a minimum you should use one that provides secure shell (ssh) and secure copy (scp) access. One such hosting service that does is Seagull Networks. Does anyone know any others?

When you retrieve your email via POP or load a web page via FTP your password is being transmitted in the clear. You have no control over which routers and cables it passes through in the process, so you have no way of knowing if someone's running a sniffer on a compromised host. Usually you have no knowledge even of the route, unless you go to the trouble to run traceroute regularly.

You can download your email via an encrypted channel with ssh port forwarding if your mail host provides ssh. The instructions given are oriented to the BeOS but apply in general to any OS for which an SSH client exists.

If you run a website that uses passwords please consider allowing the users to enter their passwords via SSL (https).

If you use websites that require passwords, please use a different password for each site. At the very least, use a unique password for your important sites, like your email, web pages and financial sites. If you keep the passwords in a file (which you may have to do because there are so many sites that take passwords), encrypt the file.

Be aware that most sites that have passwords do not encrypt them, otherwise they wouldn't be able to send you your password reminder in clear text. I've even used sites that mailed out password reminders in the clear every couple months just to prompt me to use the service. Note that anyone at the site who has root access, anyone who compromises the site or anyone running a sniffer on or near the site will be able to catch your passwords.

Also I think it is very likely that many websites are provided for no other purpose than to collect passwords for later use by crackers - beware of that free trial and use a unique password if you must accept the offer!

Use the anonymizer or, if you have Windows 95 or 98, Freedom to protect your privacy while you web surf.

Finally, do you use a laptop computer? Do you have files on it that you don't wish to share with the random stranger who might steal it someday? How about your competitors? A thief won't likely be in the direct employ of your competitors but they may recognize the value of the information and sell it to them, or even post it on the net for fun.

And remember in this information age the information on our computers is more valuable than the hardware itself, and unlike car stereos can continue providing value to a thief because, once it is fenced, it is still available to be fenced again.

Depending on your OS, you should use PGPDisk or the Linux encrypting kernel on your laptop.

Consider encrypting important information on your desktop too. A friend of mine who is a software developer lost every machine in his company in a robbery - source code, strategic plans, and the customer database.

I know of two cases where laptops were stolen from intelligence agents, once during the Gulf war, and once from an MI5 agent while he'd set it between his legs at a train station. Good thing they used encryption!

Finally, read the Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems available on the Usenet News as comp.risks and on the web at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

On a more relevant note, the mp3asm tool availble from the MPG123 web site is a really neat tool to look at the source to - it'll show you the specs of the MP3 format right there. If you're at all interested in the down-and-dirty of dealing with MP3 format files, that source is a great starting point.

Also read my note Secure Email Download with SSH on the Be Tip Server. While the tip is BeOS specific, the basic ideas work fine on other operating systems.

Of course, to download your mail via SSH, you'll need a hosting service that provides it at their end, which is why I recommend Seagull Networks. Note that if you upload content to your website with FTP, you're exposing your password to network sniffers. Seagull Networks allows you to use secure copy (scp) for this so your password remains secure.

Finally, I use the Linux Encrypting Kernel under Linux and PGPDisk under Windows to keep important personal info like my Quicken checkbook, and confidential business information like the source code I'm writing for my clients encrypted on my laptop so the theives won't have them if my computer is stolen.

With either one you can create a big file that when mounted with a passphrase is accessible like any ordinary filesystem. I have even found that I can run MPEG movies off a PGPDisks with no loss in playback quality on my laptop which has a 450 MHz Pentium III.

Finally read the Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems for significant discussions on privacy issues. It is available as comp.risks on the Usenet News and on the web at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/.

Do you think Microsoft takes care to protect your privacy when designing its products? Guess again.

The scary MSWord residue feature

I recently received a legal document as part of a personal negotiation that I am doing. The document was e-mailed to me in MSWord format. As I was showing it to my lawyer (who happens to be my wife), we decided to put our thoughts inline using the track changes feature of word. After selecting Tools, and Track Changes, we clicked on "Highlight changes in document" and voila, suddenly a whole bunch of red appeared on the screen. We looked at it closely and realized that everything in red represented changes in the document that my counterpart's lawyer had written. We got a good look at the previous version of the contract, as well as a bunch of comments and justifications that the lawyer wrote to his client. It was an eye opening experience.

It appears that instead of selecting "Accept all changes" before sending it to me, the other party to the contract simply turned off the highlighting to the track changes feature.

This is obviously a case of an unsophisticated person misusing a feature. However, it is very dangerous. Lawyers send word documents around all the time, and many of them do not really understand all the features that they use, nor should they have to. I imagine that I was not the first person to see some behind the scenes conversation in an important word document, that I was never intended to see.

• Use a BeOS boot diskette
• Make sure PnP OS is disabled in BIOS
• Avoid USB mice... they generally work with BeOS, but not always. Serial and PS/2 are good bets.

Posted by 11223:

However, BeTips is running Robin Hood with BONE, the BeOS Networking Environment. It's Scot Hacker's personal machine, too. Be, Inc. themselves run FreeBSD.

Posted by 11223:

Because the site is slashdotted, I'll tell you about the other neat issue with BeOS performance. BeTips has been running under BONE (the BeOS Networking Environment) for the past few days, and has seen great performance increases in networking. This machine also serves as Scot Hacker's personal computer and is used for playing MP3's, rendering personalStudio videos, etc. The performance of BONE is in the same league as Linux and NetBSD now, and it's design was modeled on the excellent BSD TCP/IP stack.

I'd like to see Slashdot, for example, have the option of being served up on 128-bit SSL. I mean all the pages on the site. It would probably be best for the slashdot folks if this were done with hardware encryption support.

For one thing, encrypting all one's casual traffic helps to provide cover for people who really do have something to hide.

I recommend using a web hosting service which provides secure shell login access. One such web hosting service is Seagull Networks. Here is how I retrieve my POP mail through SSH port forwarding. The tip entry gives BeOS specific instructions but the basic idea should work on any platform for which SSH is available.

And yes I know my email is sent to seagull in the clear, but what this does is generate encrypted traffic (generally a good thing) and also prevents my ISP from snooping on me unless they hack into my hosting service.

If you work in a company and are concerned that your employer may be snooping on your personal email (you're not mailing out your resume are you? Know how an ethernet sniffer works?) then you should definitely use SSH for your mail.

Also on my laptop I use PGPDisk to encrypt my Quicken Checkbook and source code on NT, and the Linux Encrypting Kernel to encrypt source code on Linux. If someone steals my laptop, my clients won't have all their trade secrets stolen too.

Mike

If you decide you need more space for BeOS, or you get tired of loading Windows first, you can install BeOS onto its own partition (I believe that The BeTips Server has information on how to do this, and boot into it directly. There are two ways of doing this:

• Use LILO on the MBR and add an entry for the BeOS partition
  
• Use BeOS's bootloader, bootman, on the MBR and install LILO on the Linux partition

Provided you know how to make a partition, etc. neither of these methods should result in lose of data either. I use bootman as my main bootloader, and it works fine for loading Windows, Linux, OpenBSD, and BeOS. I installed BeOS after the other three OSes, and I had no problems with lose of bootloaders for anything. Of course, LILO also works at doing all of these (if I select Linux, it loads LILO where I can select any of the others instead of Linux again if I want to).

If you have important information on your Windows partition, you should A) back it up, and B) make a rescue disk. If you accidently wipe the MBR somehow and *NEED* to get to your work, you can always do an "disk /mbr" on your Windows partition, and that should allow your computer to boot straight into Windows. With Linux, you can always boot off of a resuce floppy (usually, at the LILO prompt, you type the kernel name, ie "vmlinuz" and then "root=/dev/hdwhatever drive and partition") and just re-run LILO to return the MBR to its previous state of Linux and Windows co-operation.

There is a post over at BeTips that explains how to create more space for BeOS 5 PE. I think the post is in the Misc. category.

http://www.betips.net/cgi-bin/chu nga.pl?ID=tip526

Ha. That's one way to avoid bad press--threaten everyone. I suggest that someone out there take this challenge and find out once and for all just how ready Linux is for the Desktop.