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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. "
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
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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