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BeOS for the Internet: BeIA
askwar writes "Heise reports in this article that Be Inc. is to debut their BeIA dubbed operating system for Internet Appliances today at the DEMO 2000 in California. According to Heise, BeIA will support Real's G2 and Macromedia's Flash. Another nice thing is the file system of BeIA, which will be database like, and allows the users to create their own file types with special attributes. This, and the ability to search for specifically search for these attributes, the system will be suited very well for technical/scientifical applications, says Heise. The article on Heise is in German, so you either have to learn it :-], or go to the Babelfish. "
I have no personal feelings about Be, but I'd just like to ask, where has Be been? I've driven by their offices many times and browsed their webpage but that's the only exposure I've had with them :) Be really sounds like a NeXT clone:
Senior exec at apple.
Senior exec leaves apple.
Senior exec starts company to create a media platform, a new OS.
Senior execs has many critics that his company will fail.
We see what happened to NeXT, is Be the next takeover target of Apple? I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has any inside information on the relationship between Jobs and Jean-Louis Gasse' (founder of Be).
But back to the original point of my post, where has Be been? Can anyone name a Fortune 500 company using them? To me, as a professional in the industry, I would discount Be pretty quickly. It's too propietary, not well known and there are plenty of operating systems that could do the same thing. Hell Linux is free. I'm not meaning to bash Be, but someone tell me some good experiences with it.
That sounds somewhat like BFS, the BeOS file system, as described in Practical File System Design with the Be File System. The BeIA file system may be BFS, or a variant thereof (the Be press release says "At the foundation of BeIA are a core set of system functions, leveraged from BeOS, which talk directly to the individual hardware designs.")
Section 4.8 "Attributes" of that book says that a file (or can have) associated with it a directory (not part of the normal directory hierarchy; the only reference to it is, presumably, via the file's inode), and in that directory are files that correspond to the file's attributes, with the name of the attribute being the name of the file and the value of the attribute being the contents of the file. They later added a mechanism to store small attributes in the inode itself.
(ReiserFS might obviate the need for such a mechanism, although, from the stuff on ReiserFS, having a separate name space for attributes might be considered an anathema.)
BFS also supports indices of attributes, allowing searches for files with particular attributes.
Here's the press release from Be themselves (in English): Press Release
It's great to see Be branching out, but is this Good or Bad?
They are branching out and creating more versitile systems for muliple uses... yet their main product still needs some support, help, and effort behind it. The upcoming free BeOS 5 will help them, but does this move stregnthen or dilute them? I don't know...
nope, don't chell speck.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
Electronic organizers have been around for decades, but they didn't really come into wide use until palm computing, where you could actually do something with them beyond what the designers envisioned.
That's interesting. At least where I am (Rio de Janeiro), quite a few people have organisers (I do as well, but I don't like to use; it's to intrusive), whereas very few people own palmtops. Both cost (at least R$700 = +- US$350 for the cheapest PDAs) and the novelty factor (they haven't been around for very long here) are relevant, I guess.
Regarding flexibility: as someone on Slashdot has recently reminded me, computers are tools that should work according to the needs of the owner. And amongst these owners, few need anything too sophisticated out of a computing environment; our class is amongst the few who require a rich and wildly-customizable system. Comparatively, many more people need exactly that: an appliance; anything over and above is just wasted on them. (That's not to say that they shouldn't be flexible, in the sense that they should be able to accomplish a wide variety of tasks, within the constrains imposed by size, speed and the purpose of the appliance. But that's another matter.)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
It might help a little that Be users don't put up a big stink about binary-only releases.
Besides, RealPlayer final code is still sh!tty, so don't feel too bad...
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E2 IN2 IE?
I'm inclined not to automatically assume people will do what one might assume to be the obvious thing; having not seen any explicit statement that it was BFS, I wasn't about to assume it must be BFS, even though I figured it was probably BFS.
I strongly disagree with "banning" anything, but there's only so much space with with to say anything when you've got a long URL to link to. A SYMBOL OF OPPRESSION SHOULD NOT BE FLOWN OVER EVERY COURTHOUSE IN THE STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA!
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E2 IN2 IE?
don't burn books, burn Nazis.
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E2 IN2 IE?
Of course the Confederates couldn't hang on for that long -- they were too stupid for that.
They just happened to have enslaved my people for 200 years, and the flag is a symbol of everything leading up to that.
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E2 IN2 IE?
Did I ever say anything about the American flag being a symbol of something good? Does the Confederate flag have any symbolism other than anti-federalism for the purpose of maintaining slavery (and possibly making inbred marriages legal)? FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE.
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E2 IN2 IE?
CDs are played by the drive, and audio piped directly out the card. A CD playing when NT BSOD's will keep playing...
I know the point you're trying to make ... just that this element wasn't part of that :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
BeOS does not play CDs that way. It doesn't use the audio cable at all. This allows all kinds of digital manipulations of the cd audio signal in real time. In fact, one thing they like to demo is the ability to play CDs at variable speeds, including backwards :-)
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grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Sorry, Net+ chokes on some /. urls, so I'm posting this again in the right place.
:-)
BeOS does not play CDs that way. It doesn't use the audio cable at all. This allows all kinds of digital manipulations of the cd audio signal in real time. In fact, one thing they like to demo is the ability to play CDs at variable speeds, including backwards
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grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The moment you 'ban' any symbol, you may as well be burning books alongside those Nazis you reference.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Then let the people of that state decide.
...some would say that the US flag is a symbol of oppression as well. Native americans comes to mind... Should we get rid of it as well?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Hello folks,
You can find screenshots of BeIA under here. Note that these files are huge. Look at the dates and download.
Enjoy
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Be is looking to create an operating system that is attractive to internet users. While their current model is very web-based, by opening their source, it would allow programmers to toy with BeOS, and give it the kind of functionality they want out of it. It would also give the OSS crowd a look at a non-UNIX OS.
For those people that wish to have a more multimedia based OS, but also want open sourced code for their OS, an open source BeOS would be very attractive.
In return, BeOS would enjoy the benefits that other open source projects have enjoyed. Namely, many people discovering bugs and reporting them to be fixed.
Be is already planning on releasing their OS free of charge for non-commercial use anyway. I see no reason they wouldn't want to enjoy the benefits of opening their source as well. Apple is toying with the idea as well with MacOS X.
"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Actually, any app can handle a file up to 18 petabytes in size. It is because of the design of the filesystem. It is not an application based distinction.
That said, there obviously isnt a file that big in the world, nor a drive (or drive array) to store it on. It's purely theoretical.
I understand what you mean by BeOS being closed source and thus "trapped" - after last months "Focus Shift" I felt the same way. It IS rather scary to think that it could die. But I think that Be will release the source if and when they die, or can't keep updating the desktop.
I don't think they will let it die. If they do, then I may bother trying to figure out Linux... right now it just doesn't hold a candle to BeOS (IMHO as someone who couldnt care less about having the code - I am purely interested in functionality, features, and ease of use)
Um, we have both.
At least they are both on my computer. Granted, G2 is a crappy alpha version and Flash doesn't work as well as I would like.
It is there, though.
You can also find more at http://www.pcworld.com/pcwtoday/article/0,1510,151 34,00.html Am I the only one who is a little uncomfortable with this whole anticipated move towards web appliances? Seems to take away the greatest strengths of PCs, like flexibility. What's the point of buying a computing device if you can't customize it? Electronic organizers have been around for decades, but they didn't really come into wide use until palm computing, where you could actually do something with them beyond what the designers envisioned. Or look at TV design; hasn't changed much in 50 years; without flexibility there's little impetus to improve these kinds of things...
Give me one good reason why Be should open their source. And "because Linux geeks will use it" is not a good reason.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I've been waiting for Be to come out with something like this. Dispite what all the hardcore (downloaded Redhat 3 months ago and think they're l33t now) Linux guys have to say about it, BeOS rocks bunnies. It was inevitable the system would end up on internet appliances. Besides the really nice kernel design and programming environment the GUI is really nicely designed. Look at the other desktops you have to choose from, Windows has a taskbar that takes up a nice little portion of the screen and lots of wasted space in the typical app window. MacOS has a similar problem but has a little less clutter inside the window itself. Be on the otherhand is like using X with a WM without a DE, which is the way I like to work in X. There's a minimal amount of clutter which would lend itself to working on smaller LCD screens well. The most important part of an internet appliance isn't processing power or the size of the files it can handle, it's the ease of use and neatness of the GUI. Look at Win CE on handheld devices like the Cassiopea (sp?). The GUI is a major drawback to the usability of them because M$ tried to squeeze Explorer onto a tiny screen. CE doesn't look too bad on things like the Jornada but it could still use some work. Be has an innovative interface while still being familiar to Windows and Mac users and would look nice on the lower resolutions (640x480, 800x600) of many internet appliances. If the desktop people like K and GNOME want to make their stuff really user friendly they will scrap together 80$ for a copy of BeOS and play around on it a bit.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Now we know that BeOS is a major player in the OS market--they have a product with a useless two-letter acronym in the title! While Microsoft has long had "NT", BeOS is competing with "IA", sure to sow confusion due to Intel's forthcoming "IA64" chipset. (As in, "When are they porting BeIA to the IA64?")
As usual, Linux and Unix still have to play catch-up to be a major player. The Linux Zealots claim that three-letter recursive acronyms like "GNU" are superior acronym technology. We here at FUD-Net think they said the same thing about three-button mice, and let's face it, that's just *way* too complicated for us.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. A database-like file system, support attribute-rich data. I mentioned this a while back on another article. I have got to get a copy of Be and stick it on a partition. I think BeOS is the hottest thing since grits-down-your-pants...I gotta stop being lazy and look into it. The developement environment/API sounds heavenly too.
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