Beta BeOS R5 OpenGL Benchmarks Smoke Linux and Win

BigZaphod writes: "BeNews has a story up that compares GLQuake and Quake2(GL) on BeOS R5 to Windows and Linux (Corel). They compare stats using a Voodoo2, Voodoo3, and a Matrox G200. BeOS wins almost every round -- sometimes by huge margins." Update: 06/19 09:06 by CT : several people pointed out that they did the tests under XF86 3.3 which of course is not an even remotely fast 3D platform. Restesting at the very least under XF86 4 w/ DRI would be necessary to get a fair comparison.

Comments

Re:youth

[tpv]

The GL driver for Be was written to optimize speed over visual quality,

Do you have something to back that up? Or are just spewing it out your arse?

--

You still don't get it

[kelzer]

If you have a shitty soundcard, you're not going to care about doing those things.

But with BeOS, you can't tell you have a shitty soundcard! As long as your card produces good sound, it doesn't need any bells and whistles, because BeOS is quite capable of providing those.

$45 for an MX300 shipped, jesus..

Yeah, and then you discover a hardware limitation of the soundcard, and you're screwed. So if there's a type of sound processing you desire and your MX300 doesn't support it, you throw it out and buy another sound card. Then you find something you want to do that the new card doesn't support, and you're screwed again.

Whereas with BeOS, everything's done in software, so if you want to create a filter that does real time sound processing, you just do it. If you want to take two incoming streams and merge them, then split the result 3 ways, sending one directly to disk, another through a filter and then to disk, and still another through a series of filters and then out to speakers, you can do that.

It doesn't have to be supported by the sound card. You don't need any special sound hardware, and you don't need any special drivers.

Admitedly, this moves a lot of the processing load off of the sound card and onto the CPU. Luckily, BeOS is very efficient, and scales to multiple CPUs very well.

Re:Why would anybody care?

[kelzer]

Quake runs plenty fast on Windows and Linux as well. IMHO, Quake could never run too fast.

Now, if BeOS were open <snip> maybe it would be more interesting.

Yeah, I have to agree here. I really would have liked to see Be take a different approach - give away the OS as open source, and then develop and sell applications for it.

Now, if BeOS <snip> had some compelling technical features, maybe it would be more interesting.

Huh? Have you ever used BeOS? Have you ever even seen it? Sure doesn't sound like you have. I've never seen Windows or Linux map live video to an animated surface in real time. I first saw BeOS do it over 3 years ago - back when the average Windows PC couldn't even play a single AVI at a decent frame rate. In the demo I saw, the guy dragged several video clips to faces of a cube, and then rotated the cube while the videos played smoothly. And there was no 3D card helping - the OS was doing all the work.

But merely doing what everybody else is doing a little faster and more cleanly isn't good enough for me.

Maybe you should do a little more research on BeOS's capabilities. I think if you saw what it can do, you'd change your mind.

Re:Not benchmarketing.

[be-fan]

It has a big effect on stuff like audo composition, especially midi effects. If your system is fast enough to respond to sound events quickly, (especially MIDI sound events, since they aren't really streams of data) then you can mix more tracks of audio while still staying real time. Also, you can add more advanced filters and stuff and know that the system won't hold up the data and keep the tracks from playing in real time. Ff you've ever seen BeOS play two dozen MP3s, you'll know why audio latency matters.

Re:BeOS..

[be-fan]

Just so you know, the development tools are a free download from Be's website. They did'nt put them in the main download because it's about a 20 meg zip file.

Re:Nice

[jpowers]

It is purty. I liked the BeExistential icon set. Hmmm... can't seem to find the link...

-jpowers

Embedded games with NetBSD -- no thanks.

[Daltorak]

Quoted from original post: "Only NetBSD can take advantage of high-quality Open Source OpenGL hard acceleration for a truly embedded gaming experience. Because of the BSD licence, game companies can embed NetBSD into their games to produce a bootable gaming disc. Put the disc in, reboot, and you're playing the game!" Don't get me wrong here, I have nothing against NetBSD, but there are several significant reasons why this is a bad idea. You can't patch or upgrade the game via the Internet -- If the company that made the game wanted to fix some bugs, or add new features, they can't. It'd be very slow -- games these days are big. Hundreds of megabytes is typical for an installation of any reasonably complex game. The files are copied to the hard-drive during installation simply because it'd be unbearably slow to repeatedly access the CD-ROM. Can't save or load games -- Unless you're proposing a file system, too... or maybe the CD should come packaged with support for several common filesystems? Then it becomes the game's responsibility to figure out where to put the flies -- and how the heck do you do that on a Linux- or Windows NT-based system, where you need to identify yourself prior to gaining access to parts of the system? Newer video/audio hardware may not be supported -- the only video and audio cards that would be supported would have to have all their support code on the CD, thus taking a lot of space away from the game itself. Card manufacturers provide drivers for major operating systems already, and update them for years after the card is first released to the public. Forget networked games -- Unless you're suggesting that traditional and WinModem drivers, LAN, ISDN, etc. card drivers, a TCP/IP (and IPX) stack should all be packed onto the CD, too. Even then, if you're arranging to play a multiplayer game with some other people, you'd probably arrange it ahead of time via ICQ or what-not. Many older machines can't boot CD-ROMs -- Oh yeah, that too, eh? Doesn't actually solve any problems -- The current system of writing, compiling, executing games on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems works fairly well. Bottlenecks aren't in the OS so much as they are in the architecture of the hardware you're using. There's no sense in reinventing the wheel all over again for the sake of less than one frame per second in Quake 3 Arena. If you want embedded gaming, use a console platform. There are several, and none of the above issues apply, since you're dealing with a single hardware spec. PC's are simply not suited. Daltorak

Re:Embedded games with NetBSD -- no thanks.

[cronio]

Another thing...they used to do this. Remember, in the old days when Win3.1 was still the norm, where if your machine wouldn't run a game fast, you would use a boot disk, so none of the drivers or anything would load, and you'd have extra memory? How annoying is it to reboot your machine just to play a game? And then have to reboot again if you want to do anything else? (I know, this is like booting from Linux/BeOS to Windows, but you can still DO things from windows...like play a different game, or surf the web, or...etc etc etc)


One Microsoft Way

Re:BE's lack of stability

[Fred Ferrigno]

R5 Pro was always stable for me, and 5.0.1 seems to fix a number of problems.

Huge MPG files are not a good idea BeOS, as the MediaPlayer tries to cache the entire file in memory before playing, so unless you've got gobs of RAM it won't play well. If you don't have enough RAM, it'll try to fit it all into virtual memory, which slows down playback incredibly.

It makes for faster and smoother playback of small files but absolutely horrid playback of large ones. I'm guessing what happened to you was related to a lack of available memory.

BeOS always has been good for what I use it for, and I rarely run into any problems, the most major of which can usually be ignored while you save your work and shut down the system. The big "white-screen-of-death" bugs usually come as a result of unsupported hardware.

Re:Open source

[VAXman]

If you refuse to use non open source OS'es, what did you use before about 10 years ago (when there were NO open source OS'es)? Or did you just recently jump on the bandwagon so you can be trendy and fashionable?

They're asking for it

[nd]

I really don't know why they would post an article like that right now. It's just begging for an outrage and criticism.

I admit, no benchmark is perfect, but when you're blatantly touting that BeOS smokes Windows and Linux, you need to give more information. Am I correct in that the implementation they tested with isn't even available yet? The driver details were sketchy for Linux (did they even use agpgart?!), and of course there's the possibility of quality-loss that someone else pointed out.

The bottom line is that they shouldn't be posting stuff like this without others being able to verify their results. I suspect in the end, this will be shredded to pieces and they'll regret ever posting it.

Of course, it's possible that these benchmarks are 100% valid and BeOS is really great (I hope this is the case), but it really probably isn't considering the maturity of the video drivers on Be.

Re:They're asking for it

[be-fan]

Yes, the article is a simple test given to the BeOS community about the results of the OpenGL beta testing. It was not meant to say BeOS smokes Linux, the conclusion doesn't even use the word "smokes!" they don't even use a superlative, simply saying that 'it is clear BeOS has made a very good OpenGL implementation' (paraphrased.) It was never meant to be a declartion of superiority by the BeOS community. It was simply a status report to BeOS people. If Slashdot escalated it such, then it's /.'s fault, not BeNew's.

Re:They're asking for it

[nd]

hmm, actually I think they _did_ use the word "smokes" in the article, which they should probably change so people don't get the wrong idea.

Re:They're asking for it

[swdunlop]

The comparison was between a stock Linux, Corel, and BeOS R5 running the new OpenGL.. The idea is to compare a couple showroom cars with the new car that will be coming out soon, not to compare jacked up, hotrodded and nitro'd versions of each car with each other.

We all know Linux can get better OpenGL performance in the hands of someone willing to spend hours tuning it. That's Linux's great strength, and the biggest reason it drives Joe User to the brink of madness, trying to figure out the documentation. BeOS's big strength is that it comes out of the box, running near optimally, and you don't /need/ to recompile a new X server, a new kernel module, then hack a few startup scripts, reading six different docs along the way, two of them outdated and the third not even focussed on what Joe is trying to do.

And I don't think BeNews is claiming this is an end-all, be-all benchmark. They're just commenting that the new OpenGL implementation has come along quite nicely. Take a breath, swallow your meds, and just settle down. This goes for my fellow BeOS zealots, too.. Calm down, guys, you're starting to look like Linux geeks. ;)

Re:They're asking for it

[be-fan]

I'm still right. I'm saying that they didn't use it in the conclusion. That means a lot, because the "smokes" part is probably where BeOS outperformed Linux and Windows by 50% on Crusher. And what's to get wrong? The fact is, that for Quake II on Voodoo2, BeOS smokes Linux and even Windows. That's the right idea!

Re:An objective benchmark.

[MSG]

XFree86 only has hardware acceleration for ONE chipset. Of course they used 3.3.6.

Re:TROLL ASSHOLE ALERT

[VaporX]

Maybe you can give me a list of open-source operating systems as good as BeOS that were developed from scratch, and not just cheap Unix imitations.

BTW, your "for" loop is an infinite loop. Way to go open-source!

Re:Wow, how very up-to-date...

[be-fan]

Sorry, wrong again. The QuakeII port has been around since the 4.x days, when OpenGL on BeOS wasn't really that good.

Re:/. Negativity as usual.

[dsaint]

I think a lot of slashdotters and Linux fanatics lost site of what they were doing. They no longer want better software, they just want it to be free. They have perverted the definition of better software to mean "free" rather than "bug free", "faster", or "functional." Open Source is very cool, and it has done a great job of upping the ante for folks like Microsoft and Be to try and make better software. However, it is not the end all of software development. It's just another idea about how to build software. Anyone that thinks they have all the answers about the best way to do things has stopped asking questions long ago. Open Source, Be, Microsoft, and any other people making software have to keep in mind the goal is better stuff. It's not about the capitalist or socialist dogma spewed from the Microsoft or Open Source camps.

Re:/. Negativity as usual.

[be-fan]

Are you kidding? BeOS's GL output looks slightly better than Win98's GL output! And how is this bench marketing? Just because it's by BeNews? I got news for you, nVidia's OpenGL drivers were tested by 3DLinux. How's that for bench marketing? The tests were similar except one ran QuakeII, and the Linux guys ran Quake III.

Re:These benchmarks are incredibly low

[Matt Ownby]

Yes I read the article. As far as I can tell, they used dual Celeron 433's and a 12 meg Voodoo2. I used to play Quake 2 on an overclocked 300A (450) using a 12 meg Canopus voodoo2 so I know what the voodoo2 is capable of, and it is a lot more than 22 fps on crusher with that kind of CPU power. Before I left the 3dfx world I made extensive benchmarks of what my system was capable of and I documented them here: http://www.xmission.com/~redflame/v3_vs_tnt2.html Notice my Voodoo3 on my 450A was producing 51.1 FPS under Crusher at 640x480. Are you going to argue that a Voodoo2 on a Celeron 433 is getting 22 FPS while a V3 on a 450 is getting 51.1 ??? That is a major leap--too big of a leap in fact. There is no way a V3 is twice as fast as a V2 (and the cpu difference is quite small). So now that you have seen my evidence, I say to you again, the Quake 2 crusher benchmarks done by the benews site look like BS to me. I think after you examine my benchmarks on the aforementioned page you will see why. Oh and take note of my Quake 1 benchmarks too. And I have nothing against BeOS blowing away the competition, I think it's cool. I just think the guys running these benchmarks don't seem to know what they are doing.

Re:BE's lack of stability

[.pentai.]

I don't know how you managed that, but I have never had Be freeze up on me...granted every part of my machine is supported by Be, since I've been running it since R3

Re:Please Moderate Down

[be-fan]

Read the whole thing. It says that turning off the procs yeilds a .6fps loss. However, the fact that the OpenGL on BeOS is multithreaded should mean big gains for apps that use OpenGL more extensively (other than just a simple rendering engine like Quake does), as they could leverage multiple procs automatically. Be's OpenGl also takes good advantage of SIMD, so stuff that uses the OpenGL geometry pipe should perform even better than Quake!

Re:Wow

[Andrew Cady]

If that's true, then no, it's not so impressive. *shrug*

Re:Corrections

[be-fan]

Sorry about that. I've been paying too much attention to GeForce 2.

Re:BE's lack of stability

[FreeUser]

I don't really know why this is so, but I've seen it on _many_ systems. Just try reseting your clocks to normal and see what happens.

Alas, I am not overclocking the CPU. It is a dual Pentium III/550 with 256 MB of RAM, so I haven't really felt the need to overclock.

A colleague of mine, running a single Pentium III/600 has the same problem. We are both using the firewire card sold with the Adamation Personal Studio product and bundled with BeOS 5, so I don't think it is our hardware.

Re:Dodge this...

[blaine]

A few things:

First, as I said, I'm not saying Be might not have found a new way to do things that has resulted in a vast improvement. If they have, great for them. But right now, the only "proof" is a set of benchmarks on a Be related site.

Second, how many people do you think there are on Slashdot who impersonate others? The number is pretty high. You'll notice all the time people with names like 'Bruce Perens.' or 'John Carmack.' and such. Just because his name appears on the Be Team list doesn't necessarily mean he is who he purports to be. And I'm not saying it is impossible. It is entirely possible he is. If you claim he is, fine, I'll believe you. I'm just pointing out that blindly accepting the word of anyone on Slashdot is a bad idea. In addition to this, the moderating down of one post, which has information that cannot be verified, based on the information in another post, which also cannot be verified, is a Bad Thing (tm).

Also, I find it just a childish whenever anybody else on slashdot talks about "microsloth" or "winblowz" or any other derogatory term. It is childish name-calling. If you have a problem with MS [as many do], back it up with reasons and facts. Don't be angry at MS because it is 'hip' or 'cool' to be so. This is what Mr. Ewhac is doing. He isn't giving reasons, he is just being derogatory so that he sounds 'cool'.

The problem I see with what has gone down in this thread is that people are blindly taking one side or another. Realize that I'm NOT saying that either person is right. I'm just saying that , seeing as neither set of information is verifiable, it seems silly to be moderating based on either of them. Whether the first should've been moderated up is questionable, but at the same time, whether it should've been moderated down at the whim of someone else who is also unverifiable is just as bad.

And as for your audio compression analogy: no, people would NOT clap you on the back. People like LOSSLESS compression methods. Lossy methods suck. If you look around, for example, at different mp3 encoders, you'll find that some drop noise that is supposedly out of the range of human hearing to help compression. You'll also notice that most people are AGAINST this, as you can often tell the difference. The song just doesn't sound right when you do this.

Anyways, don't mistake me here. I like Be. I think it has a lot of potential. If it had more apps and games, I'd probably use it along with Linux. I messed around with R4 and R4.5 some, and found it pretty nice, although a few things were a bit weird, but what OS is perfect? I'm not here trying to bash Be.

Just more thoughts.

Re:Please moderate back up

[blaine]

Did I once mention Linux in my posts? I didn't think so.

Nice try, though.

Interesting...

[MistaCool]

It's interesting... Be benchmarked the Voodoo2, Voodoo3, and Matrox G200, but they didn't test the newer Nvidia GeForce or Voodoo5 cards. Reason? They can't. BeOS doesn't have support for the newer graphics cards, so they only have older ones available to them to test. It may be well and good that they optimized the older cards, but I think they should work on compatibility before speed. Just my $0.02. --MistaCool

Beatware

[Watts Martin]

While I agree with some of your comments and feelings, Mike, Beatware is not a great example to use. They changed their focus as often as Be did. First they were going to be a productivity company, with BeBasics (Sum-It and Beatware Writer) and BeStudio. They never delivered BeStudio for the Intel platform, then dropped both it and BeBasics and proclaimed they were an Internet applications company, with development work of e-Picture going on as a "web graphics" program.

Then they delivered e-Picture, which was obviously a bet-the-farm kind of operation; as cool as e-Picture is in concept, the fact is that in practice the BeOS release was buggier than a South American jungle. I'd been saving up to buy it on the assumption that the final release would fix the bugs in the preview releases. No such luck. It didn't help things that e-Picture was more expensive than any other BeOS program--to me that wasn't a big issue, but the crashing was. The BeOS release was unusable.

And what was Beatware's response? Not a single bugfix.

All the resources at Beatware have been devoted to the Mac release. From a pragmatic standpoint, that's wise; Mac users consider a $150 vector-based graphics program a bargain, while Be users seemed to be looking for reasons to dismiss it as a "GIF animator". (Beatware's insistence on marketing it as, well, a GIF animator rather than a vector-based graphics program didn't help, of course.) But anyone who was thinking of buying the Be release when it was bug-free was left out in the cold.

This is essentially the same argument I made through the middle of last year about Adamation's ImageElements and AudioElements. There may be a host of good reasons they haven't delivered them on the Intel platform yet, but the cold hard truth is that if the program isn't available nobody's going to buy it. Nearly the same thing is true with Pe for Intel. Maarten Hekkelman could hardly have worked less at promoting the damn thing; he didn't even upload the demo to BeBits until last month--after he'd already announced he didn't see enough demand for it to continue development. (Gosh, Maarten, if people didn't have to already know it existed to go hunting for it, d'ya think there might have been a little demand? Possibly?)

As for Spellswell--hey. I'm very impressed by Word Services and if I was implementing an editor, I'd have used it. But virtually nobody else has. That reduces its value. You needed a network effect for it to take off, and the network effect never happened. Standalone spelling/grammar checkers are a tough sell these days. I worked very briefly at RightSoft, the makers of RightWriter (the only useful grammar checker I've ever seen); they shut down when WordPerfect chose to buy Grammatik as their built-in grammar checker. There was no market for them. Even on the Mac, where Word Services has been successful, it's difficult to find a word processor that doesn't have a spelling checker built into it.

I'm not convinced the BeOS commercial software market is ever going to exist, and I think some of the fault does lie with Be. But I'm not convinced they're alone. There are better and worse choices to make for a program in that market. A low-cost MIDI sequencer might be a good choice; an office package was obviously a good choice for Gobe. But, say, porting a high-end SQL database server to BeOS is painting a big fat target on your ass, because all you can do is hope a handful of developers will want to develop front ends for it (or add front-end capability to their existing products)--if you're really lucky, this gives you a total market of, oh, two or three until (and if) their client software comes out. A stand-alone spelling checker with an API people need to explicitly support (albeit a simple one) may be less of a gamble, but it's still a relatively high-risk product--like the SQL database, it's entirely dependent on the "market leaders" deigning to offer support.

Good luck with your future endeavors, wherever they end up taking you.

Contrived test

[tc]

They test on a dual processor system, but then test versus Windows 95 which, as we all know, doesn't support multiple processors. A fairer test would be to either test on a single CPU machine, or versus NT/Windows 2000.

Re:Not benchmarketing.

[be-fan]

MP3s do play in a continuous stream, but remember, you're running 24 of them at a time through filters. Because the OS has to manage so many buffers, and the fact that the filters are constantly accessing the stream, the latency to audio calls is important. And of course RT Linux can do that, but so can most other real time OSs. BeOS so far has the lowest audio latency available on a normal (ie. not real time) OS.

Please Moderate Down

[ewhac]

The above poster is either aggressively misinformed, or is deliberately attempting to misinform.

We do not drop triangles. If we do, it is a bug and we'd like to know about it.

Unlike Micros~1, we are not interested in cheating and fudging benchmarks and issuing misleading press releases and pre-announcing non-existent products. We are trying to beat the crap out of Windoze by simply being better than Windoze. With the amazing OpenGL work Jason has done, we're getting closer...

Schwab
Be, Inc.
Currently working on Intel 810 OpenGL driver

Re:Please Moderate Down

[Reality Master 101]

No, I like factual criticism of Microsoft, not childish name-calling, particularly when Microsoft had nothing to do with the discussion.

I guess I am just tired of fools who mindlessly bash in order to raise themselves up. It wasn't enough for him to simply make his point, he had to drag Microsoft into it as if that makes his point more solid. It's just lazy thinking.

--

Re:Please Moderate Down

[TheReverand]

Hey serious question here. On the Vodoo page it says you used a BP6 with dual celerons. Does processor speed affect OpenGL? Because if so that would seem rather unfair to windoze. If it doesn't affect it then I'll shut up.
I love Be by the way just give me some damn GeForce support.
Marc

Re:Please Moderate Down

[Reality Master 101]

Could you please cite references when Microsoft "cheated" and fudged benchmarks? Of course, Be has never preannounced any products.

Of course, your credibility is only strengthened by using "Micros~1" and "Windoze".

With people like you at Be, and with those sort of attitudes, it's no wonder it's been such a failure (choose your measurement), and hasn't been able to capture any significant amount of the developer market. Who wants to work with a bunch of zealots who clearly can't see the industry with any sort of objectivity? Yes, the childish name-calling was a dead giveaway.

Thank you for confirming my suspicians regarding Be. What a great rep you are for your company.

--

Re:BE's lack of stability

[be-fan]

Have you ever considered that it is just your hardware? Video works great for loads of other people, and even for me (who does graphics programming and BDirectWindow stuff, apps which tend to crash 50,000 times during their development) R5 hasn't crashed yet.

Re:BeOS..

[Montressor]

Yeah? Show me the benchmarks comparing it to ReiserFS, and then we can see. I don't mean to get pissy, but you've posted about 20 messages on this news article, many of them blindly pro-Be. I agree that Be is a great OS, but you go to the same extremity many Linux advocates go to. The numbers are not 'hard numbers', btw - as you said above - Benchmarks are an art. These benchmarks were skewed towards Be and Windows and against Linux - hence the lack of up-to-date technologies used in the tests. Not only that, but these benchmarks reveal very little - for all we know, these are just differences in the Voodoo driver implementations, and not in the architecture. Until we see more graphics cards tested, we cannot reach a conclusion either way.

Be-ware: Be-Fan

[nagora]

Would anyone else here other than Be-Fan like to stand up for BeOS; (s)he's got to be getting a bit tired with all this typing.

Where's the karma coming from, that's what I'd like to know.

TWW

Re:Be-ware: Be-Fan

[babbitt]

I'm a big fan of BeOS....just more conservative where I post/when I post. I also don't know where the Karma is coming from :)

--Ben

My thoughts on Beat BeOS R5 OpenGL

[faeryman]

THE JENNY JONES SHOW
"I have a perverse sexual fetish"

Jenny: Hi, and welcome to today's show - "I have a perverse sexual fetish." Let me warn you, today's topic is on the distrubing side. We will meet three men who at first glance appear to be normal, sane, and well-educated but thier deviant addiction to the popular Internet website Slashdot.org and individual sexual perversions set them apart from you and I.

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Jenny: That's understandable

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(Harry pauses.)

Harry (head in hands): I like to pour hot grits down my pants.

Audience: EWWWWW!

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(Signal 11, posterboy karma whore of Slashdot, is escorted from the backstage area. He sits, legs crossed, in a chair next to Harry Knowles.)

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Jenny: Hello Signal 11.

Signal 11: Hello Jenny. I am pleased to be here. Perhaps after the show we can go orchestrate e-commerce applications?

Jenny: Uhhhh....anyway, what is your sexual perversion?

Signal 11: It all stems from my inability to syndicate interactive communities properly, embrace strategic supply-chains in the correct vortals....and that I have only one testicle.

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Audience: mmmmgrgppgh

Jenny: You...you...you're a karma whore!

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(Signal 11 and his moderators get up and rush backstage. Before they are out of earshot though, one moderator is heard saying "Hey bojay, I gots sum cheap 3 dolla crack dog. You wants some too?")

Jenny: You have entered into the conversation. All you previous moderations are undone, and Signal 11 now has no more whored karma.

(Signal 11 begins to cry as the bulge in his pants fades away. He hides his head in shame and runs off. Sadly, the audience has not had time to email pater and is still bitchslapped.)

Jenny: Well. With that out of the way, let's meet our third guest - OSM!

Audience (delighted): mmmmgrgppgh

(OSM, the sole source of truth on Slashdot, is escorted from the backstage area by what appears to be a being of pure energy. They sit, together, on a couch.)

Jenny: Welcome sir! I must ask, is that an escaped Drej from JonKatz's trollis h article on Titan A.E. ?

OSM: Oh no, this is much more pure and supple. This...this is Natalie Portman!

(The light shining from Natalie Portman cuts out so everyone can see her beautiful teen radiance. The mere sight of her firm breasts is enough to undo the bitchslapping. She and OSM warmly embrace.)

Audience: WOOOOO! NATALIE PORTMAN!

Jenny: Loving Natalie Portman is not a sexual perversion. It is a normal and healty sexual outlet with the most beautiful gift on this Earth. If only we could all be as fortunate as you. If I could only have a lesbian relationship with her, however so fleeting. Ahhhhhh....

OSM: Can't talk. Must kiss.

Natalie Portman: Yes. Kiss me, kiss me and let us be as one. You are my soul-twin.

(The pair embrace again and kiss. After 15 minutes, OSM picks Natalie up and walks away with her - still kissing. The audience is forever touched by such a kind and beautiful sight as Natalie Portman, and goes about the world to do good deeds and troll Slashdot.)

EL FIN!

Re:My thoughts on Beat BeOS R5 OpenGL

[aphr0]

You, my good man, are one damn fine troll.

Re:Be--WHat it takes to compete

[be-fan]

Actually, I have version 1, and it doesn't contain GIMP. I know, though, that it uses the GIMP filters. The GIMP project on BeOS is still alpha (as is the GTK+ port) but is progressing nicely.

Re:TROLL ASSHOLE ALERT

[aphr0]

If "windoze" is such an unusable and counter-intuitive piece of dog shit, why do the linuxites emulate it in so many ways? Show me a popular distro that doesn't include kde or gnome or some other windows-looking window manager.

BeOS..

[Defiler]

BeOS is looking better every day. I'll definitely give it a shot as soon as there is a working GeForce driver. Those Crusher scores in particular are a huge improvement..
If only BeOS was a VMWare platform, you'd have an extremely wide software base to choose from.

Re:BeOS..

[be-fan]

It just pisses me off that so many /. readers are misinformed about BeOS. Like the guys who don't read the entire articles and miss little things like QuakeII is not SMP aware, so they go out and blaber on /. about bad testing methods. Then there are the guys who don't even research the fact that Voodoo is slower under X4.0 and complain that an older version of X was used on the tests. Under a Linux againt Microsoft story where Linux won, any errors pro-Microsofties made would be quickly pointed out. In the case of BeOS, /. tends to let these things slide. There are a great many people on /. who have no clue about BeOS, much less have used it, but still feel that they should post potentially false information.

Re:BeOS..

[be-fan]

I am not blindly pro Be. I acknoledge their weaknesses, like there lack of a deep UI and the fact that networking sucks. The simple fact is that these benchmarks are not skewed. Think about it, Voodoo so far is about the best Linux 3D driver. 3DFx has poured an enormous amount of energy into it. 3DFx is also the fastest BeOS driver at this time. The use of "outdated" hardware, is a no brainer in this case, because it is the only driver that works well in this beta! release. This is not a guantlet to Linux users everywhere that Be is king. It is simply a status test. As such, it is not designed to be the perfect test, merely the best that can be achieved under the circumstances.

Re:BeOS..

[Montressor]

Voodoo is /not/ the best Linux 3d driver. Analysis of Windows/Linux drivers showed that 3dfx performs at 70% of Windows on Linux, while nVidia cards perform at up to 100% of Windows performance. Outdated is not the problem - benchmarks work on old or new. The question is the effort they put into configuring Linux properly. (Which, of course, is still a Linux flaw)

Re:BeOS..

[j_d]

All I have is anectdotal experience, but BeOS is slick slick McSlick. Unfortunately, I got stuck with a Viper iii video card, which isn't supported by Be directly, but I can run it in VESA compat mode, and it was still remarkably smooth. It can reach out and touch the winmodem, and can mount all of my dos partitions, etc. etc. Unfortunatly, I d/l'd the personal version, so I didn't get a chance to play with a lot of the development stuff, but for a user experience, Be is rocking.

Re:BeOS..

[C.Lee]

>So why is the slashdot crowd hurting so much now that linux has been
>proven to suck really bad at OpenGL? First they whine and bitch until
>they have Quake for linux. Then they whine and bitch because it's
>slower than everything else. Pathetic bunch you are...

Who's whining and bitching about anything other than the BE/Multimedia bunch? It's not exactly a big secret that there's a whole lot people who hang out on Slashdot who just don't care about the kind of gamer/multimedia issues the Be,Amiga and gamer crowd seem to get so uptight about.

Re:BeOS..

[mparcens]

As uninformed as I am about BeOS, I thought the whole idea was that it was designed to be fast with audio and video media. If so, then these benchmarks should be of no surprise.

I'd be more impressed if it was at least comparablly fast in other OS benchmark tests (file access, mem. management)

_________________
JavaScript Error: http://www.windows2000test.com/default.htm, line 91:

Re:BeOS..

[C.Lee]

>Gamers don't care. They just see that linux is way behind in the
>framerate department. People buy expensive coolors so they can
>overclock their machines to the max,

And most of the Linux/Unix/BSD userbase don't tend to care all that much about the gamer crowd, so what's your point?

Re:BeOS..

[be-fan]

The BeOS filesystem is a hideosly fast journaling implementation called bfs. It IS faster than anything available on Linux. Messaging speed is also top notch. I don't know how you benchmark mem. management, but BeOS has good memory protection and uses about half the memory of Linux/GNOME on the same machine.

Re:BeOS..

[Vaz]

Then why Linux crowd always moan for lack of games on that OS?! Linux is not everything. Sheesh!

Re:BeOS..

[C.Lee]

>You wouldn't be saying that if your soundcard and/or display adapter
>didn't function correctly under Linux.

Wrong. The mistake the Be/Amiga/gamer crowd have always made is in thinking that everbody in the Linux/Unix/BSD world share their opinion on things. You see it in the Be/Amiga/gamer rants concering the use of the CLI over a GUI. You see it on their rants over PC gaming vs the Sony,Sega and Nintendo machines and so on and so forth.

Re:BeOS..

[j_d]

You've posted 36 comments on this story alone! out of 563 (as I write) comments total, that's about 6 percent of the discussion. Good lord, man.

Wow, how very up-to-date...

[darkith]

GLQuake and Quake 2? Jeez. How about something more recent, like Quake III or UT? I'm assuming that this has been ported, etc...and I'm wondering how modd'ed it has been to work on Be. If somebody wanted to, I'm sure they could go back and tweak Quake II's code using new algorithms/driver routines that would speed it up...which pretty much invalidates the comparison. IMHO.

Re:Wow, how very up-to-date...

[darkith]

1. Yes I know Q3 and UT aren't available for BeOS...

2. The point I'm making, is that the age of Quake II might actually have an impact. Since it's probably been recently ported, they've had the opportunity to use newer/cleaner/faster API calls, wheras the un-ported code on other platforms would be using whatever API calls were cut/bleed-ing edge then. I don't think it's a valid comparison unless both versions have the same genetics/optimization. In other words, it might not be a valid comparison between OSes, it might be faster because it's using more optimized GL calls.
Yeah, I'm probably griping a bit, it's technically impossible to come up with a valid comparison, but I bet that somebody could port Wolfenstein to BeOS, and in doing so put Dos to shame. :)

Re:Wow, how very up-to-date...

[be-fan]

Not really. Quake II for BeOS has been available since October of 1998. That's a year and 9 months. BeOS 4.0 was released nearly two years ago. Also, it was ported to the old OpenGL implementation when it was quite immature (and BeOS 4.5 was still called BeOS 4.1)

Re:Wow, how very up-to-date...

[Defiler]

You assume wrong.. Quake3 and UT aren't available for BeOS yet.. They tested using the most recent games they had available.. I do think that Voodoo2s are too old-school to be worth testing, though.

Re:Wow, how very up-to-date...

[Tower]

Think of it like this... mature hardware should imply mature drivers - everybody should be up to snuff by now. So, a slightly older game with slightly older hardware on the new OS gives you a lot less variability for the tests... Even if the older games are the newest available. True, you can't see how the drivers react to the ever growing fill rates of the GeForces and Voodoo3+ series, but it should give a pretty good representation. The test isn't the card, as much as the layers in between the hardware and the GL APIs.

Re:Wow, how very up-to-date...

[The OPTiCIAN]

Not really. Quake II for BeOS has been available since October of 1998.

I'm pretty sure this is wrong. I got in to Be in October 1998, and there was no Quake II port. I upgraded to R4 on Christmas day 1998, and I know there was no Quake II port because I'd been keeping up with all the games sites and having an argument with the person who chaged shift with me about how 'Be was useless because you couldn't get Quake II for it' (yes, I believe he's a slashdot reader). From my recollection, Quake II/Be came out around March 1999 - I had jostgot it for a LAN party we had then and was trying to get Action to work on it :) :)

Re:Wow, how very up-to-date...

[Richard Shepherd]

No NEW OpenGL optimizations were used for the GLQuake testing. Believe me I wrote it :) In fact the BeOS port had added code which improved the animation and made it slower than the original id code. All the OpenGL calls are the same. The AI and engine code is the same. Everything is the same except for the platform specific window handling. The argument is that the same OpenGL code in BeOS runs faster than linux (X3) and Windows9x with the same hardware. I think the numbers speak for themselves.

I'd probably use BeOS as #1 OS if it got GPL'd

[Dannimac]

The benchmarks look pretty promising, but is BeOS going to get ports of big games like Linux? What they really need to do to steal the 'new gaming OS' crown from Linux is open source the OS. I'd love to finally be able to run BeOS 5 on my iMac as well as my PC. After some QUALITY MP3s? Check out EleMenT 's homepage. Six songs are freely available, and they won't be released anywhere else. Fortunately, they don't sound like any other band at the moment, but have been compared to such a diverse range of artists as Aphex Twin, Captain Beefheart, Kraftwerk, Pavement and the early Pink Floyd. There album was released last week- give it a listen- you WON'T be disappointed!

riiiiiiight

[AntiTuX]

jesus.. this is all we need, more BE flames..

Re:Be--WHat it takes to compete

[evan1l38]

There is a group working on VMWare like software, search for BeUnited, which is coordinating the work of several groups. BeOS is free. The idea was for software companies to distribute it with their software, which is starting to happen. Gobe (www.gobe.com) has a complete MSOffice replacement package, that can read from and write to office formats. You can get it, bundled with BeOS, for $70 - less than your requested price! It's pretty small and quick, as well. Gobe already ported Gimp - it was included in their version 1, but to be honest I didn't look to see if it was in version 2. So go to www.be.com, get Be for free, get an eval version of Gobe for free, and try it! You can install it onto your system as a regular windows app, no partitioning needed - just about 500 megs so it can create it's own file space - and if you don't like it, just uninstall it from your Windows control panel. If you do like it, you can just launch it from a desktop icon. It boots windows out of memory, and loads Be. It's a beauty. Evan Reynolds evan@evan.org

Evan Reynolds evanthx@hotmail.com

what do you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's designed to be a multimedia os.

Re:what do you expect?

[theseum]

It was also designed to take full advantage of SMP, especially the inherent parallelness of Mulitmedia... meaning that it's greatest stregnth was running multimedia on an SMP box (like the BeBox.)

Re:what do you expect?

[__aaedhn419]

If good at multimedia, how well will the word processor run?

Re:what do you expect?

[Spyky]

True, the theory of thread (or process) scheduling is the same no matter what OS you are talking about. There is little difference between scheduling performance between modern operating systems, they all make tradeoffs here and there and come out about the same. The difference between BeOS and NT and Linux lies in how much of the operating system services are written to be "threaded" or scalable across multiple processors. When one says BeOS is a better SMP OS it is not referring to its ability to schedule threads across multiple processors (which NT and Linux, among others, can do) but rather it refers to other services the OS provides which take advantage of threaded systems. Linux (and NT), from what I understand, is not as capable in this regard as BeOS.

Spyky

BTW, win32 alone doesn't include SMP support, only Windows NT can schedule multiple processors, Win95 and Win98 ignore other processors but provide most of the "win32" APIs.

Re:what do you expect?

[blanu]

I think what you mean when you say that an Open Source project could not have produced something like BeOS you really mean that a poorly funded, volunteer-run, design-by-committee project couldn't have made something like BeOS.

There are well funded, tyranically controlled Open Source projects, too.

Re:what do you expect?

[Spyky]

Actually, its designed as a good OS. Multimedia OS is just something the marketing droids call it because it sounds cool, and its a good niche for a wonderful operating system.
BeOS is from the ground up, a beautifully thought out and put-together operating system. I don't believe an open source development process could have created such a result. I also don't believe Micro$oft will ever catch up without completely ditching their entire codebase and starting fresh. Hey they tried to do just that thing with NT (in collaboration with IBM), but we can all see how well that turned out.
I don't mean to this to sound like flamebait, so I apologize. I just want to make the point that BeOS is designed as a single user desktop OS with a first rate filing system, process and memory management and a clean interface to boot. That makes it great for writing music or working with graphics or whatever simply because they tax the parts of an OS which BeOS is particularly well designed. BeOS capabilities with different types of media is a result of its design, not the other way around.

Spyky

Re:Not benchmarketing.

[be-fan]

Great. BeOS has suberb midi handling capabilities too. (Read up on ObjektSynth, a software midi synth with hardware-like resonse times.)

Re:Quake benchmark, not OpenGL benchmark

[be-fan]

You kidding? Blender has an interface from hell. Also, it doesn't run on BeOS very well because it seems to render the whole preview to a bitmap first them blit that to the screen. (God knows why!)

Re:Corrections

[be-fan]

Have you seen the benchmarks? GeForce2 blows away Voodoo5. As for antialiasing, GeForce2 does its antialiasing just about as fast as Voodoo5 4x mode. Plus, GeForce2 has cool lighting and rasterizer effects like per-pixel lighting, bumpmapping, etc, all applied in ONE PASS!

Re:Every benchmark is flawed/biased...

[Cedric Adjih]

SpecMark is biased in favor of intel

Why is SPEC biased in favor of Intel ? SPEC95 includes 2 programs which I frequently use, Perl and gcc, (not to mention compress and ijpeg, which are not an irrealistic type of programs). SPEC2000 even includes gcc, perl, crafty, gzip, bzip2 and mesa.

Re:Every item you mentioned works in 4.5.2

[Sponge]

> that'd clearly take many hours

It will take a couple hours, if you have to download over a 56k modem (12MB or so for the .bz2 tarball of the kernel sources) and then compile on an older machine (depending on how many modules are enabled - the default settings enable a LOT of modules you don't really need and it takes a while) And that's if you know where to find everything on the net, have ever rebuilt a kernel, and everything works. Good luck if something goes wrong - like, oops, make clean doesn't clean up the modules, find & read docs, aka track down the local linux guru, better do make mrproper... another couple of hours if you didn't do that the first time around (which, following your directions, would happen, at least with the last kernel I tried to compile (2.2.15?)).

Sorry for the run-on sentence. :)

Sponge

Re:Does the name "mindcraft" ring a bell???

[MrEd]

Hehe... No rebuttal surfacing for that one... :)

Re:heh

[talesout]

Oh dude, you rock! I needed a laugh. And I'm just punchy enough this afternoon that this one sent me to the floor laughing.

BTW, have you heard how fucking KOOL macos x is?

(sorry, couldn't resist)

Going too far?

[ACorvus]

Ok everybody, I'm a new user to /., so I expect a lot of flame mail and negative moderation. However, I have to agree that the flamewars are getting out of hand re: OSS/Desktop pervasion. I have used Linux for more than 3 years (Slackware in '96, SuSE, RedHat and now Mandrake) and I've loved every single minute of it. However, I will freely admit that Be is an *amazing* MM and gaming OS. It is blindingly fast even on crappy platforms, has great stability and manufacturer backing (apart from NVidia, with all the other issues I feel like dumping my GeForce). They are announcing because it is simply good for their business - looking at the XBox and the PS/2, we are talking about a serious competitor here - bugger Indrema, this could crack it with that kind of performance - and with the BeIA version set-top boxes could really become the basis of blow-you-away entertainment systems. The Linux community really just has to stand up, take the flak and say "OK, they creamed us - now we'll get to work and fix it." Criticism is the only thing that gets what people, and yes, even 'lusers' want. Pointless flames and reactionary attitudes only reduce the Linux community's acceptability. My business runs it in increasingly mission-critical applications, but we don't need our MD finding out too much of the 'zealot stuff'. OK, personally my NT4 desktop at work makes me physically ill, but I can turn around and enjoy the aesthetics and warmth of e... Lets just all take it in the way it's meant and start pushing and coding (I'm just learning C and perl, and the kernel essentials now) for a better Linux - I'm talking about making Linux easy to set up/download/install specifically for either games/development or a business desktop - and in the end, who knows - we might get the best of all worlds, and be able to share it - without the dreaded spectre of 'fragmentation'. my £0.02

Re:youth

[Gregg M]

When NT was written it was by Digital engineers, so the first thing to come out of Gate's mouth would have been irrelevent. The Microsoft 'aquisition' and all of its intriguing legal footwork ...

Cutler worked on an OS of his own creation called Mica. Digital canceled Mica. The Mica team worked at a Seattle-based location called DECwest, an office started by Cutler in the early 80s when he was working on Digital's MicroVAX I project. Cutler ran the shop with autonomy, until Digital killed it. Cutler was pissed. Cutler left Digital. Cutler joined Microsoft. Now if you work for Microsoft your not a Digital engineer.

Still Windows NT 3.5 supported legacy tech like DOS and Windows 3.1 programs. That takes a lot of work. Did Culter make this happen or did Bill Gates?

Free Be (Sorry RMS)

[theseum]

BeOS IS free. The only difference between the free and non-free versions of Be are that the proprietary stuff that Be had to pay for (the BinkJet drivers, the MP3 codec, the 128-bit SSL liscence) have been removed. Other than that, it is the exact same OS, bundled with the utilities to run it from a file on a FAT32 partition.

Re:Free Be (Sorry RMS)

[FnordX]

>No, we are trying to get away from closed source OSes.
>
>Fact.

Who is this 'We'? Why did I not get the memo? I personally don't care if an OS is open-sourced or closed-sourced, what I care about is ease-of-use, speed, and that I don't have to fight with my system for 7 days just to get it to boot. So, I don't know who this 'We' to whom you refer to, but it does not include me. Ergo, your so called 'Fact' is proved false.

Please try to not speak for all of humanity. It does nothing but make the sheep nervious.

Re:Free Be (Sorry RMS)

[theseum]

There is a Linux version, and it is trivial to set it up in its own partition (just create the partition, run FreeBe, and use the built-in "installer" program. If you happen to have version 4.5 on CD, you can use Partition Magic Be Edition.) But my point was that the actual OS is the same, regardless of how it installs itself.

Re:Free Be (Sorry RMS)

[theseum]

The Personal edition _IS_ the "real deal!" The Pro edition just has some extra stuff bundled! I don't see LINUX including any proprietary codec's with it's free distros either! Or with the commercial distros, for that matter! Why? Because they cost _money_ for the company to liscence, and it would be illegal to give them away for free without paying Fraunhoffer or whoever the liscence fees. Unfourtunately, Be probably will never open source the OS until they run out of money and die. I personally am not trying to get away from closed source OS's, I am trying to get away from Crappy OS's (like windows.) This has lead me to Linux, but I prefer Be and OpenBSD.

Re:Voodoo 2?

[be-fan]

Sorry, it's been a long time since I had a look at Tom's Hardware. However, 3D Voodoo5 is in the pipeline for a patch to the R5 release. I assume it should be out before the fall. (Look on benews about articles about the new OpenGL implementation. I seem to remember something about Voodoo5 being there.) Also, 3DFx has already pleged BeOS support, so I'd wouldn't be suprised if the driver was available with the OpenGL release.

Re:youth, NO, I don't think so

[jarek]

On x86 hardware the linux kernel enters 100 times per second. We have direct access to the hardware and can set up DMA for data and commands to the card. The time spend in the kernel is negligible. Context switching is of the order of micro second(s) for PIII's.

My guess would be that, at best, BE somehow can get out of the way for smart optimizations. They mention SIMD use in PIII but I don't understand why that wouldn't be used in linux or windows to the same extent.

Re:Not benchmarketing.

[dickens]

also if you're recording audio while monitoring (listening to) audio already recorded ,iow multitracking, 2ms latency is acceptable, and 50ms is unusable.

Re:BE's lack of stability

[FreeUser]

R5PE does seem to have slight stability problems.

I would characterize the stability problems as "slight." I have Be R5 and have tried running it with Adamation Personal Studio, using both an analog Hauppauge card as well as a IEEE 1394 card (which came with the product). I can consistently crash the system and corrupt my video data by trying any number of things, the simplest being to attempt capturing more than 8 minutes of (digital) video source to a (SCSI) hard drive, or more than 25 minutes of analog source.

It is unusable for the one application I purchased it for: non-linear video editing.

As another pointed out, even windows, as crappy as it is, stays up longer. The Linux multi-media is progressing rapidly and becoming very exciting, but it isn't quite there yet. Once it is, I won't look back to either Windows or BeOS.

Re:my god man!!...

[Defiler]

I've just read it again.. There is another way to interpret it, but the whole sentence structure is really ambiguous.. He switches subjects like three times in one post.. I read it to mean "Quake3/UT, assuming these have been ported (to BeOS)..." not "Quake3/UT, (oh, switch back to Quake2 as the topic), assuming these (two older games) have been ported (obvious, since this is a different OS from what they were developed on..).."
Anyway, I don't think I "missed the point.." I just think the original poster didn't express him/herself very well..

Re:youth

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not Be's youth or code.

The GL driver for Be was written to optimize speed over visual quality, presumably at the request of the marketing department.

Its a classic speed vs. image quality trade off.

Beos on Seti

[HiyaPower]

Be is an interesting OS. I can perhaps understand a "multi-media" OS beating a "GP" Os on multi-media. What I would like someone to explain to be is why the same machine (a 333 P2) takes 16 hours to do a Seti work unit under Windoze 98 and 12 hours to do it under Beos. Doubt the compilers are all that different.The 16 hour figure is in line with a 6 hour figure on a 933 P3 with Rambust memory scaled by clock speed quoted recently by The Register, so I doubt its the machine or a bad OS setup. Can it be that there is a 33% "bloat penalty" to compute bound tasks under Windoze?

Re:Slashdotting for NetBSD!

[Defiler]

So, you want me to reboot whenever I want to switch games? That sucks. :)

correction

[FreeUser]

ARGH!! How could I miss this in proof reading.

I would characterize ...

should, of course, read I wouldn't characterize the stability problems as "slight."

Re:Nice

[^_^x]

Hey! Why was this modded down? It's on topic. It's not flamebait or trolling, it's an opinion. Oh wait, it's against Linux... blasphemy!

BTW, I'm not at all surprised that BeOS beat both Windows and Linux. For one thing, it's been proven again and again that Windows outdoes Linux for gaming performance. (...and are you surprised? They probably loaded millions of dollars into DirectX, not to mention parts of the LithTech 3d engine, as I've heard.) Win may have outscored Linux due to an unfair advantage, but it was done nonetheless.

BeOS on the other hand... Well, being closed source, they have much less driver support, but of course it'll beat the other 2 OSes... it was built to be a lean, fast, multimedia OS. Not to run webservers, check mail, etc... Not to be backwards compatible 20 years or more. Even though the BeOS demo doesn't support my 3dfx card, it does software OpenGL rendering so smoothly while playing 6-8 mp3s at once. (Useless, but fun to show off.)

So remind me again... exactly WHY did Bruce get modded to -1? There may be a definite Linux slant for the readers here, but look at the /. title. It's not "News for Linux. Linux that matters."

C:\>_

BeOS isn't exactly young...

[GandalfGreyhame]

Be, Inc. was incorporated, if memory serves right, in 1990. That's 10 years ago, when BeOS was born on the BeBox. I remember reading about it in a PC Computing or something similar way back then. So, 10 years isn't exactly young.

They've just made a very smart OS.... not alot of bloat.

Long Live Be!

Re:BeOS isn't exactly young...

[GandalfGreyhame]

And so UNIX is running on the exact same hardware that it was when it was released? I think not.

When Be ported over to x86, they kept as much of the code as they could. And Microsoft could have killed all of the legacy code, perhaps not in 95 but certianly in 98. I don't know anyone still using 16-bit apps. Just my thoughts on it.

BTW, 10 years is a long time in computing. I doubt you'd want to use the same processor or modem or any hardware at all (except perhaps a keyboard) that you were using 10 years ago. I certianly don't want to go back to 2400 baud modems and 25 Mhz chips w/o math coprocessors.

Re:BeOS isn't exactly young...

[.pentai.]

right...10 years old.
When was DOS released?
How about unix, or even linux?

Be IS young

Re:BeOS isn't exactly young...

[SciBoy]

What's funny to me is that they didn't just write a completely new OS and proceeded just to write an emulator for that OS that emulates old Windows. That way stupid people can run old stupid 16-bit apps in their sparkling new OS and us performance freaks can get our wishes come true too.

Guess it's easy to be smart after the fact, even though I hardly think this is a revolutionary way of thinking. (Is it in essence what NT is doing already? Well, either way, NT is hardly very fast. It's HUGE and pretty stable, but definately not lean or mean).

Re:BeOS isn't exactly young...

[JonK]

NTVDM.EXE is NT's Virtual DOS Machine. From the Resource Kit:

"In Windows NT, each application written for MS-DOS runs in its own NTVDM process.

"Windows NT runs the application by using a NTVDM and VDDs. This process is called WOW, for Win16-on-Win32. Using a 16-bit NTVDM, Windows NT translates Windows 3.1-based application calls in Enhanced mode on all Intel-based and RISC-based computers.

"16-bit Windows applications also run in an NTVDM. An Intel 486 emulator in Windows NT enables16-bit Windows applications to run on RISC computers, too.

"Windows NT 4.0 runs 16-bit Windows applications as separate threads in a single NTVDM process with a shared address space. This differs from MS-DOS applications which each run in a separate NTVDM process. The Win16 NTVDM is also known as WOW (for Win16-on-Win32). The Win16 NTVDM can also run 16-bit applications On RISC processors, NTVDM emulates all Intel x86 instructions in addition to providing a virtual hardware environment.

"The Win16 NTVDM is a multithreaded process wherein each of the threads is a different 16-bit Windows application. This single process is multitasking - that is, on a multiprocessor computer, one of the 16-bit processes in the NTVDM can run at the same time as threads of other processes. However, only one 16-bit Windows application thread in an NTVDM can run at a time; all other threads of that NTVDM process are blocked. If a Win16 NTVDM thread is preempted (interrupted by a higher priority thread), the microkernel always resumes with the thread that was preempted.

"Every Win16 NTVDM includes two system threads: a Wowexec.exe thread which starts Win16 applications, and a heartbeat thread which simulates timer interrupts to the application. In addition, there is a thread for each Win16 application running in the process. Windows NT 4.0 includes an option to run a 16-bit Windows application in its own separate NTVDM process with its own address space. This allows 16-bit Windows applications to be fully preemptible and multitasking.

"The Windows NT 4.0 NTVDM provides stubs for Windows 3.1 dynamic-link libraries and drivers, and it automatically handles translation of 16-bit Windows APIs and messages."
--
Cheers

solution: don't use shit hardware.

[Wakko Warner]

Sorry, but people that complain about lack of support for a given OS are usually using the cheapest, nastiest hardware available. No-name NE2K clones, piece-of-garbage motherboards, etc. The money and time invested by Be (or even the Linux developers) to bring support for Bob's Crap Sound Card Model XYZ to the OS probably won't offset the money they'd recoup from increased sales.

Buy good hardware and be happy when everything just works.

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Re:solution: don't use shit hardware.

[baglunch]

You should have send an email to the BeUserTalk email list. This particular problem happens sometimes and there's several ways to get your mouse working. Some I remember:

• 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.

I'm sure there are other things to try if none of these suggestions work (that is... if you are still interested in trying these suggestions out). For more help, check out the BeTips site.

Re:solution: don't use shit hardware.

[AutonomousHoward]

Or, interestingly enough, real top-of-the-line, professional quality hardware. I've had to pass on two soundcards (AdbDigital MultiWav! and TurtleBeach Tahiti) whose combined retail cost was over $600 to a friend because they won't work with either BeOS or Linux, and I don't use win98 anymore. (Actually, I got the Tahiti to playback in Linux, but not to record)

Re:solution: don't use shit hardware.

[smacks]

I'm not saying that it should support every driver for shit back to 386's, I'm just saying there isn't enough support, for god's sake when I installed beos, I was using an asus motherboard with intel chipset and there was no mouse support for it at all. oh yeah that's another thing that isn't good about beos, without a mouse you can do almost nothing. heh
----

Re:solution: don't use shit hardware.

[AutonomousHoward]

SB Live! - any support yet?

Yes. My card works under both BeOS and Linux.(although I heven't hooked up the digital out yet)

It's also the first card Creative has made that I would consider using for real audio recording.

Re:Non-3rd party benchmarking must be ignored

[keaaw]

You are correct, the blanket statement of "Linux OGL is better than Windows OGL" should be viewed with some skepticism because it's so broad, and certainly should be scrutinized if the origin of the tests is a party that has a stake (personal, financial, ego, whatever) in the outcome.

I'm not saying that benchmarking is useless -- if I want to play the SpaceQuakeBlastemUp game, and a good apples/apples review of currently available versions of drivers/hardware is done, then I get useful information about that game run on those platforms at the time of testing .

However, making the leap from that very specific result to very general ones, which just about every benchmarking article does, is almost always irresponsible and/or misleading.

The one nice thing (well, it cut both ways, but it had good sides) about the PC 3d graphics world is ZD 3dwinbench. Yes, there are numerous flaws and political undertones with it, but at least it's an effort to compare multiple products on the same content and to do cheat detection to keep the vendors honest. Some sort of OGL cheat detection / conformance test for Linux, etc. would be a welcome addition to the benchmarking quagmire.

Re:Open source

[SnapperHead]

No, I have been using Linux for 4 years, thank you.

JDK 1.2+?!

[harmonica]

Will it ever be available?! To everyone, not just some selected beta testers?

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[Junks Jerzey]

Oh, stop it already. Your rant comes down to "BeOS is easy to use and we don't want Linux to be easy to use, because easy to use systems are for FaGz, and Linux is for E/_/t3 ha>0rz.

Maybe, just maybe, Linux isn't all that easy to use for some intelligent tech-heads, too.

Re:Non-3rd party benchmarking must be ignored

[Delphis]

Then what's all this 'Who rocks OpenGL? BeOS rocks OpenGL. Go see at BeNews' bollocks in your .sig then? ... you seem to be pretty hyper-active on this thread jumping up and down about how wonderful BeOS is if this 'isn't a rigorous evaluation' ..

Face it, everyone plays the spin game when it suits them. I agree wholeheartedly with keaaw that these benchmark things unless performed at your mates house with *known* hardware and software should be taken with a large pile of salt.

--

Re:These benchmarks are incredibly low

[be-fan]

I looked at your bencmarking setup and would like to point out a few things.
A) Driver differences count. Your using the Window V3 drivers, and 3DFx made a lot of progress in the OpenGL support of the V3. (IE. V3 miniGL is a lot faster than V2 miniGL)
B) The V3 has nearly double the clock speed, and a more optimized pipeline.
C) You ran with stuff like sound off. The BeNews guys ran it with everything at default.
Add all these factors together with the 17MHz difference, and the results are quite plausible. Also, you seem to have a histroy of conspiracy theories, saying that Tom's Hardware is biased. This probably dates back to the fact that Tom hand a nVidia approved logo on his site during the TNT vs. V3 wars. That was simply an acknowledgement of the fact that nVidia thought that Tom's methods were sound. Also, V3 was never as fast as TNT2. That fact is acknowledged by every major game rag, so I don't really get your viewpoint.

Re:heh

[shacker]

That's www.betips.net. Information about the public BONE testing going on there can be read at:

http://www.benews.com/story/3264.1.html

Yes, BONE is young and I've had some problems, but the performance is leagues beyond what I was getting under the old net_server.

Not benchmarketing.

[be-fan]

Did you guys even read the whole article? How, exactly, is this benchmarketing? The guys put up a test between 3 OSs running an industry standard 3D test, namely Quake. Everyone and their mother has used Quake to test 3D cards and OpenGL. Hell, 3DLinux used Quake to test the nVidia Linux drivers. The tests showed that BeOS was faster in most cases, especially windowed operations. Is it benchmarketing simply because Linux didn't win? BeOS has shown this kind of amazing performance in other fields too, like audio latency around 2 or 3 millseconds opposed to around 50ms in Windows. Is there something wrong with the testing method? True, the machine used was SMP, but if you read the whole article, the BeNews guys said that SMP only lowered the score by about .6fps. Okay, so now it is 72.6 to 77.8 instead of 78.4! It isn't like this is a synthetic benchmark, it was Quake. If Be did something to cheat Quake benchmarks, then good for them. That means that any game that is Quake-like in terms of 3D use (ie. all of them) will run faster. If you're complaining about the narrow scope of the test, remember that Voodoo2's are the most stable cards available on BeOS, and that QuakeII is the only major 3D application. So what's the beef? A lot of people have tossed around the term benchmarketing, but if anyone can give me a specific example, then I'd be glad to listen.

Re:Not benchmarketing.

[cronio]

This is NOT benchmarking. Quake uses a very small amount of the OpenGL functions, meaning this is only testing which driver has been best optimized for quake (know "MiniGL" that used to come with 3d cards instead of OpenGL? That's a stripped down version of OpenGL, containing only the parts of OpenGL that quake/quake2 needed, and heavily optimized for both of them). In order to do a true benchmark, it would need to be a program that tests ALL of OpenGL's functionality, instead of a minority of it.


One Microsoft Way

Re:Not benchmarketing.

[jovlinger]

2ms might be too much for monitoring, but...

it kicks ass for scratching.

D'yall remember that slashdot article about a year ago where these guys were selling vinyls with nothing but timing information on them. You hooked up the turntables to the soundcard, which then scratched mp3s (or whatever) controlled by how you were scratching the vinyl. No more lugging crateloads of discs to parties...

Now that's what you need low latency for.

Does anyone know what happened to them?

Re:Not benchmarketing.

[mikpos]

This is false. MP3s are a continuous stream, so latency doesn't factor in at all. Here's an experiment: immediately start playing a sound that won't start playing for another 10 seconds (it has a latency of ten seconds); now try waiting ten seconds, then play a sound that will start playing immediately (it has no latency whatsoever). There will not be any difference.

The only place where latency will come into effect is when an unexpected sound is to be injected into the audio stream, a common example of which is sound effects in games. If I can predict when a sound is going to played in advance (i.e. "beat the latency"), then latency will have no effect whatsoever on the output, and in fact will improve performance.

Re:Not benchmarketing.

[jovlinger]

:-(

I thought it was a nifty idea.

but 1.2 ms is too much !?! How do you even measure that? 1.2ms is what, 800 bps?

Re:Not benchmarketing.

[Valdrax]

BeOS has shown this kind of amazing performance in other fields too, like audio latency around 2 or 3 millseconds opposed to around 50ms in Windows.

Okay. Now you've piqued my interest. What exactly does this mean? I'm not familiar with the terminology nor exactly what kind of effect this has on your sound quality.

Re:Nice

[shacker]

You can get the Jean-Paul Sartre Existential Icon Action Pack here:

http://www.benews.com/mc/icons.php

What advantage to you would open-source be?

[theseum]

This is not trying to sound like flamebait, but have you ever actually modified the Linux kernel? Have you even compiled it, or do you use whatever was given to you by your installer? Though the open source development model has some good advantages, which you mentioned (ie more ports, a million bug-spotting coders) for most people, it is only a means to an end, and if that end is achieved by other means, why should you care? I'm not saying you don't have good reasons for wanting OSS, I'm just asking to hear what those reasons are.

Flawed Benchmark!

[matticus]

Did you notice how the test systems were Dual P3s and the tests were run against Win98 and Linux? the Linux ports of the Quakes are not SMP-optimized, and Win98 can't use the other processor at all. A bit unfair? Definitely!

it is cool that there is no frame loss when switching to windowed mode...

Re:Flawed Benchmark!

[.pentai.]

So what does this tell me?
Well it tells me that the better version is on Be - which is a reason to use BeOS, not a reason not to.

Re:Flawed Benchmark!

[be-fan]

Flawed reasoning! The system, first of all, was dual P3. Since you didn't catch that, you probably didn't catch the fact that they DID test without SMP, and the numbers were only .6fps lower, since QuakeII is not SMP.

Why BeOS doesn't go open source

[Fred Ferrigno]

Be is afraid of a few things:

• that the more attractive parts of BeOS will be merely copied to more popular operating systems (your cultural and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own),
  
• that the open source BeOS will be fragmented and refuse to move in any one direction, and, ultimately,
  
• that Be won't be able to sustain itself on an open source business model.

If you look at the OpenTracker project, Be's foret into open source, you can see the kind of controls Be has put in place to prevent these things from happening.

Be has said in the past that if it were to their advantage, they would consider licensing or opening the source to most of the BeOS. Under no circumstances, said Be, would the source to the app_server or kernel be released, tying the rest of the code to Be.

Re:Why BeOS doesn't go open source

[Shadowlion]

you can see the kind of controls Be has put in place to prevent these things from happening.

Yes, they maintain such strict control. After all, OpenTracker is licensed under the BSD license - and we all know how controlling and restrictive that is.

Re:Why BeOS doesn't go open source

[Fred Ferrigno]

It's not in the license as such.
The controls are more like if we don't like it, it doesn't touch the "official" codebase. These rules even apply to indenting and commenting. They're neither strict nor intrusive, but they do insure that things get done the way Be wants them done.

Yeah you can take the source and do what you would with it, but you'd have to maintain all of it yourself, convince BeOS users everywhere to use it instead of the Be-sanctioned option, and go without any support from Be. Instead of "do it our way or we'll sue you," it's "do it our way or we won't help you and neither will anyone else."

Re:Why BeOS doesn't go open source

[Fred Ferrigno]

"Like any open source project, if you choose to operate outside of the mainstream, it's not up to the mainstream to validate and support your particular fork."

Isn't that what I said? I didn't say it was a bad thing, nor did I say it was a problem, merely that in this case, Be is the mainstream.

Re:Why BeOS doesn't go open source

[Shadowlion]

The controls are more like if we don't like it, it doesn't touch the "official" codebase. These rules even apply to indenting and commenting. They're neither strict nor intrusive, but they do insure that things get done the way Be wants them done.

Why is that a problem?

Any large project requires guidelines for the way things are done, and formatting rules are important - nay, necessary - to keep a project coherent. It's the same reason why, on large projects, you agree on variable naming schemes - so that the code remains consistent throughout. It's difficult to read through code that looks like:

void OnFunctionFubar (int nParam1, int nParam2)
{
DoSomething (nParam1, nParam2);
}

VOID
on_Func_Do_This
(int intParOne, int intParTwo) {
do_SomethingElse (intParam1,
intParam2);
}

Insisting on a standard naming and formatting scheme is essential for keeping the OpenTracker code in understandable order. The particular naming and formatting schemes may be arbitrary, or not to your particular taste (for example, I detest K&R open-bracket formatting), but they are there for an important reason.

Yeah you can take the source and do what you would with it, but you'd have to maintain all of it yourself, convince BeOS users everywhere to use it instead of the Be-sanctioned option, and go without any support from Be. Instead of "do it our way or we'll sue you," it's "do it our way or we won't help you and neither will anyone else."

Now you're just being silly. You're trying to claim that Be/OpenTracker should somehow be responsible for forked projects.

If you decide to take the Linux kernel and replace the virtual memory system, and Torvalds rejects the patch, does he (or any other kernel hacker, for that matter) have an obligation to support your modifications? Of course not. To paraphrase your own words, "Yeah, you can take the source and do what you would with it, but you'd have to maintain all of it yourself, convince Linux users everywhere to use it instead of the Torvalds-sanctioned option, and go without any support from the Linux kernel hackers."

If you value your modifications, you have two choices: either adjust your code so that it is accepted by the project leader, or maintain a separate, forked project outside of the main code base. If you choose the latter, you are responsible for keeping your code base in sync with the main code base, not the other way around. You have some support, in the sense that you can still integrate changes from the main code into your forked version, but as a forked project it's your responsibility to integrate them.

Like any open source project, if you choose to operate outside of the mainstream, it's not up to the mainstream to validate and support your particular fork.

Re:TROLL ASSHOLE ALERT

[alt3r3go]

The number of hours spent accumulates linearly, quite obviously. The amount of good code written does not accumulate linearly, but that's (rather obviously) a much different metric.

HTML formatting cut out my < in the for loop. oops...

alterego

Re:Don't you mean www.betips.net

[Strog]

instead of www.betips.com???

Re:Don't forget to mention

[Defiler]

So, you play a lot of multi-user Quake2 on your box? SSH in over the serial port and start circle-strafing?

Re:Be--WHat it takes to compete

[peteshaw]

Wow. Well, I *thought* I had a good point, but it seems instead that I was merely filling in white spaces with characters. I should be more aware of the facts when I post. My apologies. --Peteman

Re:heh

[Cool Man]

this may be sick, but I fuckin cracked up when I read this. I choked up good

takin back the 'net since '94

Be Inc. Screwed its Developers

[goingware]

I am a long-time BeOS developer and until recently I was a very active member of the bedevtalk@be.com developer mailing list.

I am one of the few developers to actually ship a commercial application, Spellswell from Working Software. I've kept Spellswell actively maintained over a couple of years, it is now at version 1.0.5.

So I didn't appreciate it when Be announced it was dropping active support for the desktop and "refocusing" on Internet Appliances.

Now promoting the system for Internet appliances is fine, but Be had spent years promoting its system as a platform for multimedia content creation, and in my view it is the best platform for desktop software. Check out, for instance, Gobe Software's Gobe Productive, one of the best integrated applications available.

While Be still has a desktop operating system and gives it away for free, it has made it clear that there will be no further desktop-specific development for the operating system; if a feature or bug-fix makes it into the system it will be because it is needed for Internet Appliances, and not because it is needed for the desktop.

I repeatedly tried to bring this failure to live up to its commitments on bedevtalk and beusertalk and while other professional developers supported my position, I was constantly shot down by the hobbyists and Be's own employees.

Finally I tried to point out the error of their ways in some detail by posting this to bedevtalk:

Some of Use Work For a Living

in which I pointed out that the appropriate response to criticism from developers like me would be for Be employees who subscribe to the list to communicate our concerns to senior management.

How did Be respond?

Tom Maddox, listmaster@be.com, unsubscribed me and asked the list if they'd prefer to have the entire list moderated.

Before you decide to devote time and energy to developing BeOS software, I ask you to consider whether you wish to take the risk to invest your time and money in a system that is only available from a company that has not only proved it cannot keep its commitments, it has stated repeatedly it does not want its dishonesty pointed out to it and will actively work to censor those who would work to correct its behaviour.

One of the reasons I am working to reorient my consulting business to take primarily Linux work is that I feel it is a mistake for any third party software developer to depend on any API, particularly an operating system, that they do not have the source code to.

If you feel you must support a closed-source operating system or API, I urge you to require the API vendor to sign a contract guaranteeing they will support the API forever - both in terms of maintainence and marketing - or else they will reimburse you for your lost revenue and opportunity cost if they fail to live up to their commitments.

I had much the same experience with Apple Computer which is why I became a BeOS developer.

BTW - My fiance told me that being unsubscribed from bedevtalk is like being kicked off the design committee for the Edsel. It's a beautiful OS and the engineering quality is excellent, but the sales prevention team there, uh, I mean the management, is determined to do everything they can to prevent the business from succeeding.

Perhaps Internet Appliances are a good idea, but after the galling lack of marketing cluefulness shown when they were on the desktop I seriously doubt they can get it together to succeed in the Internet Appliance arena either.

If you are an Internet Appliance manufacturer, think about whether you want to make your livelihood dependent on a company with a proven track record of failing to live up to its commitments. Consider that in many was QNX is a better OS for appliance and you can get a developer kit for free.

I don't think Linux is a very good platform either for the desktop or Internet Appliances but because it is free software that problem is capable of being addressed.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Re:Be Inc. Screwed its Developers

[Error27]

It definately looks to me like BeOS screwed him over.

They said that they were developing a desktop OS and then after he had spent months working on a program that was likely to be used on a desktop OS but not on an internet appliance they say that they've switched their goals on him.

So he has basically wasted those months.

Sure Be can and has to do what ever they must to be profitable. I wouldn't hold it against them if they decided that they weren't making any money with the desktop and discontinued it. That's their decision.

Unless they had publically said that they were developing a desktop OS and I had spent months working on a desktop app. Then I might hold it against them.

All the replies to his email shared the same message. "No one was forcing you." This isn't a good answer. That's the same thing as saying, "No one told you to trust us."

I'm not going to say that BeOS was wrong to do what they did. OTher developers feel they are going to benifit from the change of focus, no doubt. I will say that he has the right to be be pissed and that BeOS should recognize and respect his right to be pissed.

This also illustrates the problem of developing software for an operating system that is controlled by a single company. It may be ok for a few years. But don't plan on it for the long term. Operatings system companies go broke, get bought, change focus, become competitors with their independent application writers. When that happens there is always someone who gets screwed.

This is why Linux is the operating sytem of the future even though it sucks at graphics and sound.

Re:Be Inc. Screwed its Developers

[fizzboy]

Finally I tried to point out the error of their ways in some detail by posting this to bedevtalk:

[snip]

How did Be respond?

Tom Maddox, listmaster@be.com, unsubscribed me and asked the list if they'd prefer to have the entire list moderated.

No. Quite a few list members (normal ones, not just Be engineers) refuted your arguments and asked you to stop since you were essentially just rehashing the same old issues over and over again and accomplishing nothing but filling our mailboxes with spiteful remarks. You did not stop and so some of us asked the listmaster to intervene.

I'm sorry that you see it otherwise but don't go blaming other people (the listmaster in particular) for just doing what they need to do. You obviously weren't happy developing for the BeOS. If you were so unhappy, why continue? It just isn't healthy. Neither is screaming at a bunch of other people for not totally agreeing with your opinions.

sigh

Re:Be Inc. Screwed its Developers

[goingware]

I'm quite happy developing for the BeOS. What disgusts me are the lack of sales for my existing product, Spellswell, because Be never lived up to its commitment to provide adequate marketing for its own product.

My monthly royalties from Spellswell just about buy dinner for me and my fiance. One dinner. In recent months it wouldn't include a bottle of wine with that dinner.

Re:Be Inc. Screwed its Developers

[fonky]

time to bail and refine your parameters for finding a platfrom that'll have long term commitment, be it through an open source community or the economics of a large customer base for a commercial OS.

personally, i'd go for the OS one.

Re:Be Inc. Screwed its Developers

[goingware]

Spellswell is an always has been a profitable product on the MacOS, and one Windows where it is available as an OEM spellchecker.

Even at the lowest point of Apple's difficulties, the MacOS spellswell brought in substantially more revenue than BeOS Spellswell ever did.

The core dictionary engine is the same, only the UI is different between the two products. While the Word Services protocol is different between the two platforms, they work in an analogous way.

A big difference between me and Gobe is that they had funding for marketing and I had no funding at all. The only investment I was able to make on my own was my time. The whole time I was shipping Spellswell I expected Be to get started and get serious about marketing its own product soon. That day never came.

The best thing they did for me was give the OS away for free. But at the same time they stopped development of the desktop OS and made it clear they weren't going to support desktop developers anymore. We don't even get BeOS 5 Pro for free as part of our developer program membership. They shut down the BeWare online software catalog.

Very early on Be promised to make things better for developers in the market by fashioning itself as an Internet company which would promote products online. We wouldn't have to deal with distribution channels anymore but just sell our products through BeDepot. I think that was an excellent idea but their actual execution of it was amazingly incompetent.

Re:Be Inc. Screwed its Developers

[.pentai.]

They ARE making a desktop OS. It's not their only product now, but they're still developing for it. I've talked with people from Be (actually they've contacted me) and they've assured me that work on BeOS is in no way being stopped. Granted this is all on the word of PR peoples...

Re:Be Inc. Screwed its Developers

[Lockle]

How interesting. You developed Spellswell for BeOS becuase you assumed that Be would continue to focus on the desktop version and not stop development. Well, I bought a copy of spelswell from you because I assumed that it would continue to be developed. What good is a dictionary when it's never updated? Besides, when it finds a word that is not in the dictionary and I click "add" it does not add it. So, since you are dropping development of Spellswell, then you are doing the same thing Be did? I can't help but notice that I have v1.0.5, your 'newest' version. Howcome the copyright in the info box says 1997-1998? [sarcasm] yeah, it sounds like you have been slaving over code lately [/sarcasm]

Re:Be--WHat it takes to compete

[51M02]

Yeah me neither... I heard it's slow and painfull to use... Simon Huet

Disclaimer: "These opinions are my own, though for a small fee they be yours too"

These test crack me up

[MrJerryNormandinSir]

Everyone knows Linux by default ships with Apache, INN, Squid, LinuxConf, And slew of other applications enabled by default. I bet the test Corel Linux box was running MANY applications besides GLQuake. Give me a break. Beos loads up with no daemons running. I'd like to see a true benchmark done.

Re:These test crack me up

[be-fan]

Corel Linux doesn't even ship with server stuff, much less enable them by default.

Re:FUD

[lambda]

A good OS should try to stop the programs from pushing the computer into a crash.

Re:BE's lack of stability

[ozbird]

Have you applied the recent 5.01 patch? It has a replacement media player amongst other things that may help. (I don't have an SMP box to confirm this, but if someone would like to send me one... :-)

Sadly, it hasn't fixed the poor OpenGL framerate on my TNT2 Ultra; this was apparently broken in 5.0 - 4.5 was apparently much faster.

Re:Non-3rd party benchmarking must be ignored

[be-fan]

Okay, so now we can say that Linux nVidia drivers don't really perform as well as Windows because the test was flawed since it was run by a Linux website?

These benchmarks are incredibly low

[Matt Ownby]

I just ran a quick Crusher benchmark myself and I got 57.0 FPS (Athlon 500, TNT2 ultra, Win98, 640x480x16, NO TWEAKS). I don't know what stone-age architecture benews.com was using to do their Quake 2 benchmarks, but I find their numbers to be highly questionable and this throws their credibility in doubt. 22.3 FPS under windows? Please. I want to see benchmarks that relate to MY hardware, not to a Pentium 200 MMX or whatever they used.

Re:These benchmarks are incredibly low

[be-fan]

Did you even read the freaking article? They used a freaking Voodoo2 running on Celerons! The sheer fact that their numbers are even near half yours is a miracle! And BeNews is not a huge operation. They used an SMP Celeron because that's what they had, and they used a Voodoo2 because that's what ran well.

Re:These benchmarks are incredibly low

[DarthBobo]

Great. Send them your machine or run the benchmakrs yourself.

The benchmarks appear to be internally valid - how extrapolate them to the millions of possible configurations in the PC universe is your problem.

Re:Non-3rd party benchmarking must be ignored

[be-fan]

This isn't a rigorous evaluation. It isn't even a final word. It is just some preliminary benchmarks about the OpenGL beta meant as a status report.

Seems like you answered your own question

[Dannimac]

As you say, I'd be able to run BeOS on ALL my machines, not just the PC, and the OS itself would have bugs in it killed quicker and new features added easier because it is Open. Why should ANYONE (except a selfish company/ person) NOT want a computer program to be Open Sourced, if the consequence of it being developed in such a fashion leads to a better program/ OS.

Re:Seems like you answered your own question

[theseum]

These are advantages, but to me, with the exception of the lack of an iMac port, Be has more compelling advantages. What I'm saying is that, based on your subject title, you came off sounding like a "if it ain't open source, I won't run it" zealot, whereas I prefer to run software based on the product, not the development model.

Corel the de facto distro? Uh-oh.

[Cardinal]

Already we've seen C-Net and BeNews use CorelLinux to represent Linux in general. This disturbs and worries me, and it should do the same to you too.

CorelLinx is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good representation of Linux as an OS. I barely consider it a good representation of Linux as a desktop, but that's another matter. CorelLinux is based on a version of Debian. Of course, Debian is a superb distro, and my personal favorite, but the fact remains that Debian 2.1 was years old when CorelLinux came out. As just one result, we see them (CorelLinux and BeNews) using XFree86 3.3.

While it could be argued that CorelLinux may be, or may become, the most common 'desktop' Linux OS on the market, this is a remote possibility at this point, IMNSHO, and even if it were argued, I would tend to dismiss that argument as relying on baseless marketspeak. I see nothing good coming from a general trend of using CorelLinux in OS comparisons, benchmarks, or comparisons/benchmarks of applications they run.

Re:be-fan

[Delphis]

Yea.. 34 comments in this thread alone within 1hr 47mins or so .. that's one every 3 minutes (less than 3 minutes actually)! .. crazy if it's just one person!

They seem to write the same style, which suggests it IS one person... jeez..

Maybe there's only one person that has anything to say about BeOS ..

--

Re:Slashdotting for NetBSD!

[KarmaHo]

Compared to the time it takes to load a typical modern game, power-cycling a machine and loading a minimal kernel takes no time at all. Consider the potential benefits: custom filesystem optimized for gaming, custom tcp stack optimized for gaming, the possibilities are numerous. It's no big secret that current tcp implementations are not optimized for sending a large number of relativly small udp packets to a single host.

Re:Does the name "mindcraft" ring a bell???

[Reality Master 101]

First of all, they didn't install an "old version", they installed a current version. Second of all, they specifically cited the lack of Linux tuning documentation (which is true). Third, it seems funny that people would complain that Apache is brain damaged in the default configuration. And finally, IIS was not tuned all that much, if you actually read the study rather than taking the average Slashdotter's brainless word for it.

But then I seem to recall that it was rerun with the help of some Linux people, and the result was pretty close to the same. But I'm sure you'll poo-poo that one, also.

I could also point out that no where did anyone state that Linux was a "worthless piece of crap". It clearly can do the job, but runs out of gas when you get to larger configurations (particularly multi-processor). Most objective people recognize this.

--

Why would anybody care?

[jetson123]

Quake runs plenty fast on Windows and Linux as well.

Now, if BeOS were open and had some compelling technical features, maybe it would be more interesting. But merely doing what everybody else is doing a little faster and more cleanly isn't good enough for me.

Re:Non-3rd party benchmarking must be ignored

[keaaw]

Is self-replying bad for karma? Anyway, here's an OSS positive comment: what a perfect reason for open source! Cheat detection becomes truly possible when you can compile the driver yourself! You could then sign a particular driver distribution and build up a web of trust of the "goodness" of a driver. Of course not everybody will want to or be able to inspect the source, but via the OSS rule of an "infinite" supply of contributors, someone will want to/enjoy doing this verification, which would be a valuable service to the community.

youth

[SirSlud]

Stuff like this makes me wonder how much of Be's youth has to do with it.

Younger, leaner code, et al ... anyone have any similar thoughts?

I do remember using a preview copy of Be 1 and trying out that terrain demo on a PowerPC. Seeing a mac render so many polygons at one time at full 35fps almost gave me a heart attack. I dont know the details of why Be is so good on the graphics side, but it looks like its still the same way ..

Re:youth

[PraveenS]

NT, when it was first started, was a similar example of younger, leaner code, the whole ground up approach :-)

Re:youth

[Tower]

That is sort of it... Linux was a kernel (project), which grew, and eventually people decided they wanted more of a graphical interface, so X entered into the distros. There we are, years later.

Be started with more of a graphical focus, and has always had better capabilities there. Not as much of a standard windowing system on top of a standard Unixyish enviornment... but more of a multimedia platform all the way. Proper starting architecture goes a long way.

Re:youth

[Phroggy]

I do remember using a preview copy of Be 1 and trying out that terrain demo on a PowerPC. Seeing a mac render so many polygons at one time at full 35fps almost gave me a heart attack. I dont know the details of why Be is so good on the graphics side, but it looks like its still the same way ..

The PowerPC is generally a better platform than x86 for such things. The Mac OS is old and tired and tends to bog it down; hopefully Mac OS X will fix that.

--

Re:youth

[T-Ranger]

Younger, leaner code with the requirement of backwards compatable with old, broken code - to the extent of being 'compatable' with bugs. Faster at being bad, but still bad.

BeOS, on the other hand has always had the design goal of being good... In fact beteween two major versions, enough changed that stuff writen/compiled for the old version diddnt run. Backwards compatability has been at the bottom of the list of goals.

disclamer: I dont run beos, but have been curious in it, and have a friend who does run it (in addition to linux..)

Re:youth

[Gregg M]

Sorry But did you read that or make it up? LEAN code in NT!

When NT was written, backward compatibility was the first thing out of Bill Gates mouth. Why support DOS and Win16 on a NEW TECHNOLOGY OS? To cover all of the bases. Look what having no legacy at all is doing to BeOS.

PS Read it in a book called Show-stopper. The book is about Dave Cutler and the Microsofties writing NT.

Re:youth

[The OPTiCIAN]

When NT was written, backward compatibility was the first thing out of Bill Gates mouth.

When NT was written it was by Digital engineers, so the first thing to come out of Gate's mouth would have been irrelevent. The Microsoft 'aquisition' and all of its intriguing legal footwork (all over Digital's foot) has seen a gradual change in the nature of the NT kernel so that now 2000 is bloat city baby.

Re:youth

[gtada]

"No legacy code" is the whole idea behind BeOS. Be doesn't pull any punches about it; BeOS is built fresh without the burden of outdated functionality. Look at how most of the OSes in use today are built on top of really old OSes (Windows on DOS, Unix on top of, well, Unix, etc.).

Re:The Linux community

[HeUnique]

Well, I won't justify all the attacks here, but if you're going to compare performance - then at least tune the damn drivers and get the latest first!!

This is just like comparing BeOS version 4 vs. 5 - I mean - come on!

Re:If only...

[brank]

Parts of it are. The Tracker (like MacOS Finder), for instance, is avalible as source.

My audio playback comparison of BeOS, Mac and Win

[goingware]

I didn't try Linux when I wrote this comparison of the audio performance of MacOS, Windows and BeOS, but I don't think Linux would have fared much better than Mac or Windows:

The Battle of the Bands

I was able to play nine uncompressed CD quality audio files simultaneously and independently vary the volume on each on the BeOS. I was never able to play more than one on the other operating systems I tried. I could play up to two tracks simultaneously from an ISO 9660 CD before the seek time of the head broke up the sound.

I've found in the 2.4.0-test1-acX kernels that audio streams will just plain stop until I click on or drag around an XWindow. Posts I've seen on the Linux kernel mailing list suggest that X is failing to yield the PCI bus at times.

I'm not suggesting though that you should all go use BeOS for your sound. What I do suggest is improving the multimedia architecture of Linux until it can match the BeOS.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

No wonder

[Raistlin99]

The BeOS was designed for the graphics market. I'm not surprised that it trounces Linux and Win in opengl. The graphics designers in my business place are starting to use BeOS over our Win machines.

BeOs/Windows/Linux and Mac too!

[RestiffBard]

I just thought that I might take the time now to mention that this is another reason why the OS wars need to die a quick and painful death. Why on earth do we have to pick one over the other? I like Windows. (There goes my Karma) I also like Linux. (again my karma jumps all over the place) I like Be too. And for that matter Mac, someday I'll even be able to afford one. Why not just say I like this and I like that and I use them all? And don't say it has anything to do with price or philosophy. it doesn't. you're lying to yourself if you think that those are the reasons you use OS*whatever. linux users use linux cause they like to be edgy, cause in the real world they are the guy that doesn't get the girl. Windows is for people that just don't care. Be is for PC users that wish they had a mac. and mac is for people that can't imagine what a second mouse button would be good for. Why not just love them all and end the wars. Call me a social butterfly of the OS world if you will. I just love having different OSs that do different things. I think alot of us dislike MS cause thats all most of us get to see. I personally miss the command line. Linux and Be look different and do things different. thats what gets our collective juices going. but if you think that will in any way sway a newbie, you're nuts. They know microsoft and monopoly or not they are gonna use it, and screw those nuts in the open world. Its just looks like the OS world is breaking down like a high school cafeteria... geeks in one corner (linux) jocks in another (windows) and the artsy goth people over there (BeOS and Mac). please no touching.

Re:BeOs/Windows/Linux and Mac too!

[Cool Man]

dumbass...

I am a huge pimp, and I use linux? WTF are you on? biatchh....

takin back the 'net since '94

Re:BeOs/Windows/Linux and Mac too!

[RestiffBard]

what?

BeNews is a happy Server

[x-empt]

I got a neat error for benews.com!




Database Connection Error
The database appears to have died or is experiencing critical loads, please reload this page in a few minutes (it will auto-reload in 2 minutes).


We are sorry for any inconvienience this may cause.
BeNews Team

Image included in page: (funny) http://inside.benews.com/img/914.mounted.jpg
Free Porn! or Laugh

Re:Corrections

[swdunlop]

Mmmm.. I'm not too impressed by either.. V5 and GF2 are both just more of the same technology. V5 has more units, GF2 has a faster clock, and looks like it's going to come out on top between the two.

There's just no spark in the Video Card field anymore.

Re:Flawed Benchmark, seemingly

[styopa]

Most benchmarks, if not all benchmarks, are flawed anyway. Whether someone optimized one thing or didn't optimize another, or something else.

The point here was not to put a bad spin on Linux, and its ability to do 3D graphics, but to try and sell their product. If they felt that using Corel Linux as the comparison was going to accomplish that, well, that's their choice. I think that they were mostly trying to show that they would be a better gaming and graphics machine than Windows, which they did.

Sure, the results from the Linux Games article reflected the differences between up to date Linux and Windows better, but what can you expect. Anyone who is going to the site to look at the results is more likely to compare Be to its competitors rather than its competitors to each other, there are other sites to do that.

Frankly, they were probably just testing out of the box installations anyway. Although most of the other distros of Linux have more up to date stuff than Corel, it is perfectly legitimet to use it over (pick your favorite distro).

Anyway, just my two cents.

even easier...

[jslag]

telnet to port 80 of the server in question, and type

HEAD / http/1.0

(followed by 2 carriage returns)

----------------

BFS vs XFS vs ReiserFS

[theseum]

I haven't actually seen the numbers, but BFS was designed by an ex-sgi employee who worked on XFS... Without a doubt be "feels" faster, but that is only because it is a clean and efficient GUI (which linux doesn't have yet... at least not one as fast as Be's.) Be also is about to get a network re-write that should put it on level ground with Linux as far as that is concerned... Linux has a performence advantage over Be in that it is written in C, not C++, it is highly compiler-optimized, and it is a monolithic kernel. However, this means that Be's code is simpler to understand and especially to port. (I would think... I have never actually seen Be's source, of course.)

Re:BFS vs XFS vs ReiserFS

[teeko]

>Linux has a performence advantage over Be in that it is written in C, not C++

Actually I don't think the Be Kernel is written in C++ at all, quite the contrary ... from what I've gathered it looks like C, C, C!!

Admittedly the GUI stuff is all C++ but you can't have everything :)

Re:BFS vs XFS vs ReiserFS

[dbg]

I wrote BFS and am an ex-sgi employee. I did
not however work on XFS at all. I knew some
people that did though. And once I talked to
Adam Sweeney (one of the principal architects
of XFS).

BTW, when you state "Linux has a performance
advantage because it is written in C not C++"
you ought to back that up with numbers. C++
is not inherently slower. And besides, the
BeOS kernel is pure C.

Re:BFS vs XFS vs ReiserFS

[theseum]

The file system does not "feel faster" than it's competition. The OS in general does. I thought I had explained that in my post. If someone would post benchmarks, as you suggested, that would clarify a lot in this discussion.

Re:BFS vs XFS vs ReiserFS

[Beatles]

If you could read, you'd see that it clearly says that Be is written in C, "not C++." Thus, your criticism was pointless/wrong.

Re:heh

[Anonymous Coward]

www.benews.com is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) mod_perl/1.21 PHP/3.0.12 on Linux

Re:Shouldn't they have tested against XFree86 4.0?

[be-fan]

Hmm, it occurs to me that they had better tested against XFree86 4.0 since that's a big step towards hardware acceleration support.
>>>>>>>.
They used a voodoo 2. Those perform better under 3.3.6. If they'd used 4.0, then you COULD have rightfully ripped them to shreds for not portraying Linux in the best light.

For the right graphics boards the Linux numbers should have been a lot more like the W98 numbers (extrapolating from Q3A
>>>>>
Voodoo2 is a good graphics board for both BeOS and Linux, and that's why it was used. Also, Q3A doesn't run on BeOS.

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[be-fan]

It probably never will. However, not only is POSIX supported, but most of the standard configuration methods in /etc, and all the cool development like gcc, cvs, etc, are there.

somewhat confused, yes

[jslag]

Well, telnetting to port 80 of vector.mnc.co.za produces

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 19:38:10 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Win32)
Location: /synergy/index.cfm
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

which corroborates at least the apache / win32 part, but would suggest Cold Fusion rather than php/mod_perl/liunx-mandrake

----------------

Re:somewhat confused, yes

[jslag]

yeah, the page produced does seem to indicate that it's running on linux. Odd that apache would be using a .cfm extension, and identifying itself as Win32 - I guess I could see the latter coming from some old config file or something. And url extensions can be anything you want them to be... just because it says .cfm doesn't necessarily mean that cold fusion's running... what I'm getting at, is that this is a confused enough webserver, that I can see how netcraft would return strange results.

----------------

Re:Non-3rd party benchmarking must be ignored

[be-fan]

This has nothing to do about me. If you read the official response of the guys who tested this, that's their response. I for one, am ecstatically happy! IE. My words and actions in now way represent BeNews. Also, notice I rarely brought up the subject that BeOS trounced Linux. 90% of my posts are merely to correct /. dumbasses who don't read the article, yet still feel they can post.

Of course!

[brank]

This is what Be is focusing on: multimedia. Performance on all kinds of graphics, sound, and other media-related things is going to be higher. Most every other OS could stand to learn a few things from the threading model of the BeOS. This is the kind of thing that the product was optimized for, so this is what it is going to be best at. Every OS has strengths.

Voodoo 2?

[Ka0s64]

I dont know about other people, but I personally am not interested in what has the best performance on the Voodoo2, seeing as 3dFx now has the Voodoo5, and most people serious about their video cards have at least a Voodoo3 or better. Plus I think a better challenge would be running Quake III. No matter what, the Voodoo5 is awesome

Re:Voodoo 2?

[Richard Shepherd]

Voodoo 4 and 5 drivers will be included in the OpenGL update according to the release made by R.Jason Sams on BeNews (and the beta drivers on my drive)

Re:Voodoo 2?

[be-fan]

Voodoo5 will be supported by 3DFx themselves, who have commited to write BeOS drivers. Also, since Voodoo5 is not out yet, they couldn't test it. In addition, the QuakeIII port is incomplete/immature as it is waiting for the OpenGL implementation to come out.

Re:the "Happy server" is dead

[Archangel Michael]

It has been slashdoted!

Fanaticism and beyond...

[Default User]

First, allow me to proclaim my loyalties: I run Slack 7, thanks.


I also run BeOS R5, and WindowsMe. (Er... I'm an MS Beta tester, this copy is legit.. I swear!)


-Why- do I run three operating systems? I run Linux because I like to tinker. It's my post-youth toy, if you will. I run BeOS, because it's insanely responsive, there is no better operating environment for my ameteur music hobby. I run Windows because, let's face it... we need games.


It's wonderful to see so many of you doing your own research, and questioning-- There's no other way to do things. But I wonder of your motives. Many of you came to Linux's defense with such profound comments as "Be Cheats," or "They didn't use Linux-optimized components." Noble arguments, I'm sure, but why should they have had to cater the benchmark to Linux? Aren't benchmarks supposed to reflect real-world conditions? Should not, by that logic, BeOS and Windows be optimized with the proper hardware?


Others pointed out the quite obvious deficiency in the use of one dead-horse version of XFree86. I agree. Still, you know well-enough that the Linux horse would finish last in this race. Linux is a networking operating environment, and we've all known that. Massive operations to mold it into a contender in the media sector not-withstanding, it's still UNIX. Windows is designed for the idiot. What does the idiot do? Play games, watch DVDs, and get their RDA of multimedia. BeOS is designed solely for the media experience. Sound, graphics, you name it. That's just a niche it was built to fill.


Defending your choices is noble, but some of this looks like fanaticism, or blind following. Most of us believe in Linux, and the open source way of doing things-- so just who are you trying to prove it to? Maybe, just maybe... yourselves. It probably wouldn't break any souls to just accept that Linux is not up to par with BeOS and Windows in certain fields. Likewise, Linux outshines the two in many other fields.


Rooting for your team is good support. Killing opposing fans or launching insults is just heathenism. Sometimes I'm ashamed to be associated with it. .Default User The evolution of emoticons :-) | :) | =) | o_0 | #@$!%$

be-fan

[electricmonk]

Ummm... so, how many people do you think be-fan is? Notice the number of posts and the time between them.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, be-fan, it's just a little odd.

Slashdotting for NetBSD!

[gavinhall]

Posted by 11223:

The problem with this is that BeOS hard acceleration only exists on Intel. What about the lonely other platforms? With NetBSD, you can get pure Open Source hard acceleration on any of NetBSD's ports. Intel not good enough for you? Hard acceleration rocks on an Alpha. Want some Apple-quality OpenGL goodness? Run it on macppc! Furthermore, tying OpenGL to a specific processor for performace with SIMD is silly. Why not give your software to all architectures? NetBSD is the solution.

Only NetBSD can take advantage of high-quality Open Source OpenGL hard acceleration for a truly embedded gaming experience. Because of the BSD licence, game companies can embed NetBSD into their games to produce a bootable gaming disc. Put the disc in, reboot, and you're playing the game!

Re:Slashdotting for NetBSD!

[Phroggy]

OK, I have to ask, what hardware platform are you running on, right now?

--

Re:Slashdotting for NetBSD!

[gavinhall]

Posted by 11223:

Sparc. Ha!

Re:Slashdotting for NetBSD!

[Phroggy]

Just checking.

--

Re:Slashdotting for NetBSD!

[KarmaHo]

Because of the BSD licence, game companies can embed NetBSD into their games to produce a bootable gaming disc. Put the disc in, reboot, and you're playing the game!

That is a damn fine idea. NetBSD doesn't get 1/10th of the respect it deserves.

Re:Slashdotting for NetBSD!

[be-fan]

OpenGL is not tied to SIMD processors. It simply takes good advantage of them. The reason they don't port it to PPC is because the PPC port is dying, and Be only has about 100 engineers to go around. As for NetBSD, when it performs like this, then you can speak.

Why did they not use a different vid card?

[theseum]

The reason the hardware that was used was used, was because the person doing the benchmarking at BeNews has nothing better. If anyone wants tests done with other hardware, then send your nVidia card to BeNews!

Re:Why did they not use a different vid card?

[The OPTiCIAN]

If anyone wants tests done with other hardware, then send your nVidia card to BeNews!

I thought it had more to do with available 3d drivers. Nvidia are being tight with their driver support and their spec, ths there s no 3d support for Be. Which pisses me off becaues I've got a M64, and about 50% of Be owners (apparently) use TNTs.

Read the effin ARTICLE!

[FatSean]

Dumbass.

C++ vs. C

[Rubel]

It's about using the right tool for the right job... C and assembler for kernel and driver work, and C++ for an API that allows you to easily develop apps. seems perfect to me.

I'm Not Surprised

[LaNMaN2000]

BeOS was designed from the ground up to be a multimedia OS. Linux added OpenGL support seemingly as an afterthought and Windows OpenGL performance is pitiful (possibly because MS wants to promote the use of DirectX on Windows platforms).

It would be interesting to see how Be's and SGI's implementations of OpenGL are different from Windows' and Linux's. I'm also curious as to how extensive Be's graphics card driver support is and the quality of the drivers used. I'm sure tha part of the blame rests with the graphics card manufacturers for writing poor OpenGL drivers. Naturally those included with an OS that is designed for 3D/Multimedia would be superior to the manufacturer's "we cannot ship without drivers" variety.

Re:I'm Not Surprised

[gavinhall]

Posted by 11223:

The current list of drivers is for Voodoo cards and Matrox cards, both of which also have Open Source drivers for OS's like NetBSD. ATI won't support Be because they are devoting their attention to Open Source drivers. nVidia support hasn't been determined yet.

Re:I'm Not Surprised

[be-fan]

MS OpenGL is not pitiful. If it is, then Linux OpenGL is down-right skanky. Be has pretty good graphics card support, and for mainstream stuff like TNT, they are high quality and take advantage of a lot of acceleration. Also, 3D card manufacturers don't write crappy drivers. In fact, nVidia's GL drivers on Windows are probably as high quality as SGI's on IRIX. (Not anywhere near same absolute performance, but close relative to the hardware.)

why they didn't use DRI for voodoo testing..

[log0n]

The DRI drivers for the Voodoo series are *much* slower than the 3.3.x GLX drivers. One of the linuxgames sites (linuxgames.com I think) pointed this out when they were benchmarking/comparing the new nvidia closed-source DRI drivers with the open-source 3dfx drivers.

I get comparable frame rates on my voodoo2...

[Primer]

I get comparable frame rates on my dual pII 450 and my voodoo2 in quake/2/3 in both windows and Linux. Some times it's faster in windows, some times it's faster in Linux.

It seems to me that they did not use the voodoo2 environment variables. Since the windows driver sets these up automatically, I wonder if they presumed the Linux drivers would do the same (Or are even aware of the existence of these variables). I'd like to see these tests redone with the voodoo environment variables in place...I still don't think Linux would win, but at least it wouldn't look so bad...

An objective benchmark.

[GeZ117]

BeNews says that BeOS rocks. How strange. And on Windowsthingamajig, they says W2K beats everything. Sure yeah.

For example, I don't have seen mentionned what version of X-Free they use for their Linux test. If it's not the 4, Linux is screwed, because of OpenGL.

Re:An objective benchmark.

[cronio]

But see, 4 is not yet as optimized as 3 for OpenGL. If you benchmark xf86 3.3.6 vs 4 with a 3dfx card, you'd find either virtually no difference, or you'd find that 3.3.6 is actually faster right now (even if it still has bugs, it's still as fast or faster, because the 4 driver right now hasn't been optimized any more than the 3 one has.)


One Microsoft Way

Re:An objective benchmark.

[nd]

They used XF86 3.3.6

Re:XFree86 4.0

[be-fan]

Except Voodoo2 support on XFree4 is slower than in XFree 3.x.

BeOS was very stable for me

[xeos]

I only crashed it twice in about 3 months of use, and one of those times I was messing with hardware setup. I used 4.5, though, so I cannot speak for 5.0. Feel free to flame me though, as I now use Win2k instead (more apps, you know). Which has yet to crash even once in almost 6 months of use (I'm amazed at this, as I hate MS as much as anybody).

Peace in our time

[jacks0n]

I don't think a saint with a semi full of moderator points and Signal 11's karma could rectify all that is wrong with this fucked up thread. That said, This is cause for celebration. BeOS is a great OS, at the top of its form, kicking some serious ass. Yeah, Its a Cathedral, not a Bazaar, but I like both. I just prefer to work in a Bazaar. So lets get down to the serious questions: What tradeoffs has BeOS made to get where it is? (ie. network X server, direct access to hardware in MU OS) Are these tradeoffs worth making in Linux? Can we have our cake and eat it too? Where does X 4.0 get linux in this benchmark? BTW I saw my first boxed BeOS5 boxed set in Borders this weekend (distributed by gobe). I think the proliferation of Linux boxes has made it easier for other Alternate OS's to get on the shelf. The world is a better place every day. (he said as he posted from a windows box using IE5)

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[Rumble]

Sorry for my ignorance, but doesn't full POSIX support sort of imply that the OS must be multiuser capable? As an example, the IEEE 1003 standards specify several identifiers specifically relating to user/group information management. Is this just sort of fudged in Be or what? Stuff like chown, for example. I realize that in the full scope of things, this might seem pretty trivial, but I'm still interested in how Be can be (if it indeed is) fully POSIX compliant in a single user situation.

And just to clarify, I'm not debating the fact that Be is/is not/will be/will not be a multi user OS.

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[deKernel]

You need to remember one thing. Be was meant to be a _WORKSTATION_ and not a server. I don't care what anybody says, but how many different people use a workstation. Sorry, but the typical number these days is ONE.
Multiuse is essential on a server, but on a workstation? I would have to say not.

An easy feat considering the HCL

[BluedemonX]

can be printed in its entirety within one page. How many graphics cards does Be support? Four? I've tried installing it on several machines, and the range of things it supports is EXTREMELY limited...

Re:An easy feat considering the HCL

[BluedemonX]

I was exaggerating to make a point

My perspective

[otomo_1001]

Disclaimer: these are my OPINIONS, if you don't like them, continue on reading, OS flamewars are pointless. I use all the os's mentioned in the article, they each have uses. A comparison of something similar between all of them is just what this industry needs.

Now while I absolutely love BeOS, I would prefer a outside source benchmark this stuff soon *cough*ArsTechnica*cough* or when the drivers are out and non-beta. If only to provide a very good third party view of drivers, os, performance differences, etc..

It's important to note that Benews IS a BeOS news site, not a Linux site. Therefore there should be zero surprise that the benchmarks are high for BeOS. And while benchmarks never satisfy everyone, I think it's hard to dispute that the figures look good so far.

But I would like a VERY comprehensive review of all three os's running the same app on the same hardware. And with varying hardware that had daemons running, a stripped down configuration built specifically for running games, bleeding edge drivers, stable drivers, etc.. Then repeat for windows, and then run the same tests on Be with the same variances. Basically just be fair about all of the tests, and then draw a unbiased conclusion based on those tests.

If linux does better than Be, GREAT! It will give more people a reason to get rid of windows, which is what everyone wants, right? If Be does better, then it gives more people a reason to dump windows, which is also good.

*begin off-topic stuff*
Now if all you linux users/coders want to impress everyone show us the power of open source and get those figures up to snuff. I thought open source was all about choice, not whose os is better. I wouldn't want anyone using ANY os for the wrong reasons. And if that os doesn't do the job better, what was the point in the switch? If i am wrong on these points, please correct me.
*end off-topic stuff*

Anyway, just read it for what it is, a news blurb, and go about your day like I will now.

Fake Bruce

[peter]

I personally would pick Linux for my desktop, since I know how to use it really well. Other than that, I agree with you. Get a new account so the sensible stuff you have to say isn't posted at -1.
#define X(x,y) x##y

Re:Fake Bruce

[peter]

(I should check users.pl for replies more often. I didn't realize that you'd already replied to me on the same topic in another story, or that I'd bugged you about it so recently!)

If you post as Foogle, apparently it is possible to turn off the default score=2 bit. (I don't have that much karma, but that's what I hear.)

I think it would be more entertaining if you made your sig say "Fake Bruce" or something. I just don't like the idea of trying to fool people into thinking you're someone you're not. If you think Real Bruce sucks, why would you want to raise people's opinions of him?

Oh well, I suppose everyone has their little schemes and weirdnesses.

Happy hacking :)
#define X(x,y) x##y

Re:heh

[larkost]

Maybe because Apple does not (and does not want to) compete in the Enterprise Class Server Market. Applt.com gets a enourmous load on it all the time, desktop machines are simply not up to the task. I run a coupple of MacOS X Server boxes, and they are wonderfull for the workgroup serving that they do, and the small web sites that they host, but would die under the loads above 1000 hits a minute. Considering that Apple.com is probably getting 10,000 hits a second, this is not even an option.

all you need is compatability

[smacks]

too bad it can't use half of the hardware built in the last 10 years. bleh ---- http://www.phatmax.net the pr0n-o-matic
----

Re:If only...

[eggnet]

Well, you can already get BeOS for free, no?

Re:Please moderate back up

[blaine]

I have to agree with this. Looking at the results of the test, I'm a bit skeptical. I'm not saying it is impossible that Be managed to pull it off. However, some of the differences are rather large. Most of the work is done by the video card, and no OS is going to magically force your video card to work 1.75 times faster.

Add that to the fact that the only person refuting the original poster is (possibly) a Be employee who (quite obviously) has some problems with Microsoft, as well as acts rather unprofessional, and I'd say that you have to be a little suspicious. Do we even have confirmation that he works at Be? I didn't think so.

But hey, thats how the moderation system fucks up I guess.

Everyone has to be a Be fan at heart

[supruzr]

Amen my brutha.

Now if only there was independent software made
for Be....hmmmm...*calls major software companies*

"Being a hacker means thinking differently..
it's the difference between taking 6 years
to solve a Rubik's Cube or spending 10 minutes
popping the little squares out and putting them
back in the right order, either way people
think you're a genius."
-The Book of Phar

Re:Everyone has to be a Be fan at heart

[grappler]

supruzr, you are evil ;-)

no, seriously... Be rules. I really hope it catches on. I use it most of the time - does everything I need my computer to do, and does it damn well.

--
grappler

Re:TROLL ASSHOLE ALERT

[Pig Bodine]

You do if you need real applications. Right now, about all you can do is gimp and code. Oh boy. Putz dorks like you sitting in thier underwear thinking how superior they are. I bet you have an AOL account.

Or write using a word processor, or run a spreadsheet, or go out on the web. In fact, the most common uses of windows can be done under Linux as well. What is missing is an array of more specialized applications. And even there, Linux is pretty strong in scientific and mathematical applications.

Regarding the "Why do Linux users emulate the windows interface" troll, I think that views on the Windows interface are rather mixed among Linuxers. Everyone who has used a variety of computers is going to have something to gripe about in just about any interface. But I personally don't think the interface is the big problem with Windows; what I hate is lack of stability, settings that automagically change themselves, relative lack of configurability, closed proprietary file formats that would make exchange of documents with scientific colleagues or journals impossible for me and the business practices of Microsoft. So KDE and Gnome borrowed some ideas from Windows, OS/2, Mac, etc. Big fucking deal. It may not be the latest and greatest in UI design, but it works and it's familiar to most people. IMO an advance in a UI has to be of major importance before it justifies abandoning what's familiar to most people. YMMV.

Be vs X

[theseum]

It is important to remember that XFree86 is not the only X server available. I have never used any of the proprietary accelerated X servers, but they may offer performence that is significantly better (anyone use them? wanna comment?)

Re:BE's lack of stability

[cosmicaug]

Sadly, it hasn't fixed the poor OpenGL framerate on my TNT2 Ultra; this was apparently broken in 5.0 - 4.5 was apparently much faster.

Poor OpenGL framerate is because Be 5.0 has no hardware support pending a later patch (read the article, this forthcoming patch is what it's all about). 4.5 frame rates should have been fairly poor also on a TNT2 since, though it had experimental hardware OpenGL support, IIRC it was restricted to voodoo chipsets.

Re:My audio playback comparison of BeOS, Mac and W

[BJH]

The problem is not that X is failing to yield the PCI bus, but rather that the the requests to the card are being stacked and sent in a burst. (This is why the problem doesn't occur on some slower machines that don't have this feature, paradoxically.) It's not X, but rather the chipset itself that causes the problem.
As for playing multiple sound streams at a time, try doing this: "while true;do esdplay (your sound file here);done". By my calculations, my machine is sending around 10 streams per second to the sound card, and the main limit seems to be the speed at which the kernel can execute new processes (rather than the actual audio streams themselves.) This is on 2.2.13 on a PII@400MHz with a Creative AME64 on an ISA bus. I'd expect PCI soundcards to do better than this.

Re:The Linux community

[Bandazaar]

I don't see a problem here. BeOS version 5 is out of the box, untweaked, as is the Corel Linux version. So this shows one thing :
LINUX DISTROS NEED SOME WORK DONE ON THE TWEAKING PART !!!

I mean not every Linux user has the time and knowledge to tweak their system to the best available. So out-of-the-box seems fair to me.

Flame responsible, Flaming and driving prohibited in certain states!

SMP made no diff. (Or: Read the article!)

[mjwise]

As stated by Eugenia Loli herself, disabling SMP in BeOS (which is just a matter of starting the Pulse app and clicking a button to turn a CPU off) made a whole 0.6 fps difference. And SMP was enabled in Linux as well, though she did not recompile the kernel to test it with it off. The SMP argument does not wash one tiny little bit. And the 'turn things off to optimize' argument doesn't make sense either unless you provide the same courtesy to Windows and BeOS as well.

Secondly, I've not experienced this myself, but from many reliable sources I've heard that the Voodoo-series acceleration is actually better with 3.3.6 GLX drivers than with the 4.0 DRI drivers at the present time.

Third, this wasn't expected to be posted all over for people to see. It was just a tasty tidbit to tantalize the BeOS users who have been waiting for this, so don't get your underwear in a knot if this isn't something straight out of a scientific journal. Sheesh!

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[Nick Mitchell]

Thanks for the info. I personally think that's a silly move on Be's part. (and I also think their claiming "that's not what we're geared towards" is just interference.) Does Be have any notion of security? E.g. how would you prevent mobile agents from executing (as root) on your machine?

Re:Every benchmark is flawed/biased...

[sugarman]

Quake FPS is biased in favor of OpenGL

They were testing for OpenGL performance. They used Quake. Shouldn't this level the playing field as much as possible?

BTW, I understand your point, that there is a bias in every test. But if you use the test of choice and for your particular area, and win, then is this not proof enough?

Flawed Benchmark, seemingly

[Montressor]

Although I agree that BeOS has a screaming advantage over Windows or Linux, it's the Windows/Linux difference that disturbs me.
Seeing as they used Corel Linux, they probably did not bother getting any real hardware state-of-the-art Linux drivers. The reason for this is not just Linux-trolling!
The Linux Games article compared Linux and Windows performance, and got much better results for Windows vs. Linux.

Dodge this...

[Kohntarkosz]

I've read your original comment, and your attacks against ewhac, and wish to say the following:

• Without purporting to speak for Be, Inc., yet in an attempt to obviate the need for you to undertake the strenous research that would make the following statement painfully obvious for even the most discerning waterborne marsupial, I will vouchsafe for "Bols Ewhac", that he is who he says he is, and that he is, in fact, an employee of Be. If you want more proof, see The Be Team, and connect the dots. (Of course, I won't tell you who I am though. Life isn't fair sometimes.)
• Further, I hope that you'll agree that his prior contributions to Slashdot are sufficient to prove his integrity.
• Finally, I disagree with your comment that what ewhac said is "childish and unprofessional." Many professional experts and Slashdot gurus say far worse of Microsoft or other benchmark-stuffers than what ewhac has said, and with far less justification or wit. And they weren't speaking on their own time with their own voice, defending the integrity of their work, as ewhac is.

To answer your original comment about what is worth moderating up, healthy skepticism of any benchmark is fully warranted. Now, you may feel that completely unsupported accusations and groundless rumormongering constitute good entertainment value -- and it seems, from my experience, that the majority of Americans, at least, would agree with you :-). They certainly do not, however, constitute healthy skepticism, and are the last thing I want to see encouraged on Slashdot. That is the reason the post in question should be moderated into oblivion, not because The Man, who happens to be wearing a Be cap over his long hair, tells you to. I can't speak for you, but I would vastly prefer to see hard evidence or reason backing up a piece of juicy criticism before said criticism gets spewed into the net, not after. Perhaps I differ from some of my Slashdot colleagues, however, in this admittedly farfetched belief.

As far as bottlenecks go, Jason Sams and the other 3D god{esse}?s in these parts are the ultimate authority, but I could think of several places besides the hardware where the performance of OpenGL would be affected. Anything to shorten or optimize the rendering pipeline in software (using SIMD, dynamic generation of the pipeline for critical sections, native OpenGL vs. Glide support in the driver, etc.) is going to make a big difference for most interesting OpenGL work, and no, not every implementation of OpenGL has all of these software issues sorted out. So perhaps these numbers are not as thin-air as you think.

On a different tack, if you did do the equivalent of dropping "triangles" in the audio world, and could do it without anybody noticing, it would be heralded as "next-generation compression based on psychoacoustic perception heuristics," and the computing community would clap you on the back. Perhaps Be does have something up their sleeve after all! ( Now now, that's of course a groundless rumor, and I shouldn't have said it. Please don't take it seriously. :-P )

An Apology

[ewhac]

*sigh* You'd think with all my years experience on USENET, I'd know better.

Okay, the slam against Microsoft was gratuitous and unecessary, and for that I apologize.

As for the rest of it, I've scanned my personal archive of our internal OpenGL beta mailing list, and I can find no mention of problems with dropped triangles, nor any mention of attempts to run SGI's flying paper airplane example (where the missing triangles are allegedly visible). I've also searched our bug database; same result. This /. post is the first I have heard of any such problem.

Speaking entirely personally, it is much easier to help people having trouble with BeOS if they address their issues through the channels we've set up or our mailing lists -- not just OpenGL issues, but any issues at all. There are precious few of us here, so we can't respond to everyone individually, but everything does get logged and reviewed. We really do want to make BeOS amazingly great. And, if nothing else, going through channels helps prevent easily excitable people like me from committing social gaffes.

My apologies,
Schwab

Re:An Apology

[Black Parrot]

Not all of us hate you.

I would like to ask, however, whether you have any theories that explain the results vis a vis Linux?

Also, is Be integrating multimedia into the kernel (or whatever you have) in order to acheive speed? (I personally would like to have a layered design, even if it sacrificed a fair amount of speed. Of course, other people will feel otherwise. But I would like to know whether something like that is influencing the benchmark.)

--

Open source

[SnapperHead]

I think BEos is kind of cool. I took a look at it a long time ago. But, I will not use it becuase it is closed source. If they opened the source, I would install it. But, I am not saying that I would use it full time. I would have to be pretty f**cking impressed to move away from Linux. Maybe one day, but, I do not see that happening any time soon.

Re:Open source

[Panaflex]

"If you refuse to use non open source OS'es, what did you use before about 10 years ago (when there were NO open source OS'es)? Or did you just recently jump on the bandwagon so you can be trendy and fashionable?", VAXman

And besides being an asshole, what is your point? I was writing my own operations system (Called Zeus.. it was "open sourcish..") It was a graphics bases operating system.. then I found minix and started tannenbaum's code.

Then I found this linux thing. (BSD wasn't alive on x86).

Life is beautiful.
Pan

Re:Please moderate back up

[adamk]

So you're going to believe one faceless, and nameless, anonymous poster who claims to have some inside knowledge over a Be developer?

Adam

Higher Speed through lower Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

It's real easy to double the speed of your opengl implimentation. Drop triangles. Usually the effect isn't very noticible if you are smart about it.

The Be OGL implimentation is the most agressive triangle dropper I've ever seen while all of the Linux stuff (the Mesa based at least) tries hard for pixel perfect output.

It's not really a fair comparison.

(Anonymous due to NDA)

Re:Higher Speed through lower Quality

[gavinhall]

Posted by 11223:

Couple of guesses here...
Scot?
Eugenia?
Oliver?
Can you tell me if I got at least one right?

Voodoo 3 tested under Win95

[doorbot.com]

That's odd. Why was the Voodoo 2 tested under 98, but the V3 tested under 95?

And strange that the Matrox tests weren't even tested against Linux or Windows at all.

Hrmm.

[mindstrm]

It would be nice to have the openness of linux, the speed and simplicity of BE, the guts of plan9, and a gui with the portability of X, as well as a remote-terminal systme a-la sun's sunray setup.....
and all open-source.
THEN we would have an OS.

BE's lack of stability

[larz]

BE maybe fast, but I tried the supposedly "free" BeOS and it locked up with a kernel fault or whatever they call it in less than 10 minutes when i asked it to play two 600 meg mpeg-1 videos at once on my dual p2 400. Geez, even windows can last longer than that. Faster opengl means diddly squat if it can't stay running without a kernel fault for more than 10 minutes. Imagine trying to frag your buddies on quake and having to reboot every 10 minutes, not a good way to win. Stability wins over speed everyday of the week.

Re:BE's lack of stability

[Fred Ferrigno]

I haven't seen a single MPG file over 50mb play well under MediaPlayer, so it must be doing something wrong.

Re:BE's lack of stability

[full_tide]

By any chance, are you processors overclocked? For whatever reason, BeOS seems hang on OC'd systems much more than windows, etc.

I don't really know why this is so, but I've seen it on _many_ systems. Just try reseting your clocks to normal and see what happens.

~tide~
"Linux is only free if your time has no value."

Re:BE's lack of stability

[Dr. Sp0ng]

I've noticed that BeOS R5 is much less stable than R4.5. I still have the R4.5 CD floating around my room somewhere, maybe I'll rip apart my room and find it and then install that instead. I've had several OS crashes in R5 in less than a month of running it, and never had a single one in R4.5 after running it for 6 months.
--

Re:BE's lack of stability

[babbitt]

R5PE does seem to have slight stability problems. I have been running it since it's release and had a few minor errors (requiring server restarts) and only one crash that actually required a full system reboot. I have only had the kernal dump on me once, and that was w/R4.5.2.

--Ben

Every benchmark is flawed/biased...

[SvnLyrBrto]

It doesn't matter what you're testing. There's no cross-platform benchmark that will be accepted by EVERYONE. The loser will invariably (and sometimes justifiably, sometimes not) whine about how the benchmark is unfair, or unoptomised or whatever.

Witness:

ByteMark is biased in favor of PPC
SpecMark is biased in favor of intel
Unreal FPS is biased in favor of Glide
Quake FPS is biased in favor of OpenGL
Office benchmarks are biased in favor of windoze
Photoshop benchmarks are biased in favor of MacOS

Mindcraft benchmarks are.... well, I won't even go there.

But you get the point?

All of the above have been used, at one point or another (again, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not), by the side that came out behind in an attempt to invalidate the test that showed their OS / CPU / video card / FPS game / etc. to be inferior.

john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!

Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if

Please moderate back up

[Reality Master 101]

I don't think we should be censoring posts based only on one faceless Be representative.

After all, there is a reason it's so much faster, and it's very suspicious when the card does most of the work.

I think this AC had a valid point, and at least to my eyes, it doesn't read like a troll. If someone wants to refute it with real facts/measurements, then that's OK. But we shouldn't assume it's a troll just because someone with a very significant interest says so.

Please moderate this up.

--

Re:Please moderate back up

[blaine]

Read my original comment again.

As I said:

a. We don't know that he works at Be. He claims to. Do we have any proof? No.

b. Regardless, he is acting childish and unprofessional

And furthur:

c. The benchmarks as suspect. Either the original benchmarks were tampered with, or Be is doing SOMETHING [such as dropping triangles] to speed it up, OR Be has discovered a new way around some bottleneck that is slowing down all other OGL implementations.

I find it hard to believe that ANY OS is going to be 1.75 times faster than another in OGL, especially when the losing OS was Windows. I don't like Windows, but the fact of the matter is, the OpenGL implementations for Windows are generally fast, as they've had a lot of development money put into them.

Anyways, I'm just pointing out that the original post shouldn't be moderated down just because some guy on slashdot claims he works for Be and that he has the answers. If Be wants to put up an official statement on the matter, they can put it up on their website. Until then, I have no way of identifying this guy as a true Be employee.

Do I have a way of identifying the original poster as somebody who has had access to the beta OGL from Be? Nope. But his explanation sounds like it might be plausible, and if nothing else, is no less plausible than the guy claiming to work for Be.

Re:Please moderate back up

[Fist Prost]

Believe what you want, but I'm also suspicious about believing a "magic" operating system can make video cards that much faster.

Okay, so the idea here is that Be developers sign an NDA, come up with better drivers than the video card companies themselves produce for Windows. Let's see how long *that* lasts. No really, after all the fact is that if the Video card companies were squeezing as much performance as was possible out of their cards then people would not be as quick to go out and buy the next one. There is no doubt that if the card manufacturers would just release the data, then it would be a win-win-win situation all around. Everyone *could* have better drivers, depending on how much interest there was and how many folks wanted to sit down and hack on it.

If there's anything I take away from the facts(?) in this thread it is the following;

1. Card manu's drivers okay.
2. Committed and NDA'd developers' drivers appear better.
3. People should pressure the cardmakers to release their specs, and reward those that do with sales, rather than endlessly flaming Be based on the fact that they do okay in benchmarks.

f someone from Microsoft posted that an anti-Microsoft post should be moderated down would you support that too?

Only if they are astroturfing. I personally would be much more inclined to have Be get a spot on my HD if I could see the source (read that as have others be able to look at/improve/fix the source), but I'm not going to go instantly believing anything anyone says around here, so I find that moderating those sort of posts down to be very patronizing to me as a reader (I hope we're referring to the same post here, I just got lost in a maze of "nested" where the comments don't slide all the way to the right like they used to. Rob, make it like the old way again please?)

Re:Sorry, but I don't consider my GeForce shitware

[__aaedhn419]

The problem is not Be but nVidia. If nVidia was more open and considerate of developers, it would be good. But nVidia is careless (remember the GPL problems?) and adamant about ignoring other than Windows OS's.

Every item you mentioned works in 4.5.2

[cide1]

Before you are a smartass, and go around knocking an incredible product, check your sources. I have successfully installed BeOS r4.5.2 on a machine with a TNT2, a Promise Ultra66 and Soundblaster Live!. The beautiful thing was that it was all autodetected. Why dont you try looking at the updates section every now and then 4.5.2 is stable, fast, and functional with a wide variety of hardware. You ever try to get those pieces of hardware you mentioned to work in linux. Hours of patching, editing configs, and recompiling shit, especially Promise Ultra66.

Re:the site runs linux

[Icebox]

BeOS smokes the GPS display unit in my truck when benckmarked for 3D performance.

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[Nick Mitchell]

But does Be support multiple users, in the sense of multiple UIDs? Sure, it might be the case that only one person is sitting in front of a workstation at a time, but what about sharing a computer with someone (roommate, SO, brother, cat, whatever). I don't necessarily want them mucking with my files. Does Be support that? thanks.

Re:Quake benchmark, not OpenGL benchmark

[drix]

True, but be honest here - probably more people are going to play Quake or its ilk than utilize the full set of OpenGL extensions available to them. For the average user, this says that BeOS has better 3D performance (way better) than two other very popular operating systems. That is big news, although I think testing X 3.3 instead of 4.0 obviously jilted the scores by a lot.

--

Re:heh

[passion]

Yeah - and I see a sun SparcStation in this image too...

http://inside.benews.com/img/914.mounted.jpg

Re:If only...

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

"Look how far EVERY closed-source OS has come without the help of the open-source community.

I wish I could. Unfortunately the source is, as was mentined, closed. So how am I supposed to see "how far they've come" in fields like security and good design?

In any case, free software (unlike open source software) isn't about features. It's about freedom. The "good it would do me" to have BeOS open is that I could take some of their alleged rockin' code and put it into my own programs.
--
Compaq dropping MAILWorks?

I think you made his point for him

[kelzer]

The point is that BeOS could do those things even if you have a shitty sound card.

Re:I think you made his point for him

[iCEBaLM]

The point is that BeOS could do those things even if you have a shitty sound card.

If you have a shitty soundcard, you're not going to care about doing those things.

$45 for an MX300 shipped, jesus..

-- iCEBaLM

Re:heh

[babbitt]

Don't slam BeNews for not running BeOS. BeOS is a /multimedia/ platform and wasn't originally designed to even serve web pages. MS doesn't run it's web servers on windows 98, do they? Linux is a very good server OS, thus it was the choice for the Be news team.

Ben

Huzzah!

[David P]

Funny shit, faeryman! We need more Slashdot Theatre around here.

---------------

Only using open vendors

[sugarman]

Well, it looks like you guys have crushed their poor little server. Nasty, nasty Slashdotters! It does have one of the cuter "can not connect" errors I've seen though.

On topic though, I think this is sweet. It definetly will make it worth the wait. I do find it interesting that the cards that they are using for this demo are also the ones that are most accessible to the Open-Source community in general: 3dFX and Matrox.

These are the vendors that have gone the furthest in allowing access to their products, and this has allowed a company with a limited budget to show what some of those cards are really capable in. Good for Be. Good for 3dFX and Matrox. Good for the consumers. Win-win-win.

Black & White will be one of the first titles to come directly to BeOS too. I'm damn sure gonna get the Be version now.

Sorry, but I don't consider my GeForce shitware...

[Upsilon]

...considering how it was the fastest card on the market when it was released and is still a pretty damn good contendor. Unfortunately, when I tried out BeOS I found that I could only run in it grayscale mode! Forget about hardware acceleration.

Don't get me wrong. I think BeOS is certainly a good OS in many ways, but you can't claim with a straight face that it doesn't have compatability problems. There is a ton of hardware out there it won't work with at all and even more it has mediorce support for. I think it would be great if BeOS got better support, but it just isn't going to happen.

Re:heh

[Phroggy]

Quite correct. Also:

www.be.com is running Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) PHP/3.0.12 on FreeBSD

While we're on the subject:

www.apple.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris

--

Re:You'd realize why if you tried it

[Muzzarelli]

This actually *does* have an application.... radio station automation software does exactly that when X-fading between to songs or two songs and a voice break in between. Generally they do it in hardware thou..... I worked on an application a few years ago that did this, managed to get up to 6 near CD quality (not important for radio) tracks decompressing and playing simultaneously on a P266 under OS/2 (whilstful sigh).

Re:Does the name "mindcraft" ring a bell???

[Black Parrot]

> But then I seem to recall that it was rerun with the help of some Linux people, and the result was pretty close to the same. But I'm sure you'll poo-poo that one, also.

And indeed I do. It was a single benchmark for doing an unrealistic job on an unrealistic hardware configuration. It stinks all over of "Hey - here's one we can win!"

If they want to convince anyone, they need to do a broad suite of realistic benchmarks like c't did. And guess what? Linux beat NT there, but only by a small margin, and not on every single test. Pretty much what you would expect from two different operating systems on the same hardware.

Unfortunately, c't doesn't get splattered all over the US media the same way Microsoft does every time Bill farts. So lots of PHBs saw the unrepresentative Mindcraft results, and few saw the more nearly representative c't results. That's why we call it "benchmarketing".

IMO, Red Hat made a serious mistake by offering to help with Mindcraft II (and indeed, I said that before the MII results were in). By doing so they gave the appearance of realness to a very fake benchmark.

--

Re:And if Be had parts of Linux... wait! It does!

[baglunch]

Hmmm, are you subscribed to any BeOS email lists? Do you regularly visit any BeOS websites? Do you know anything about BeOS beyond what you read in the /. comments? Don't answer that, I think I know the answer.

The things the post you replied to addressed are common-knowledge to the BeOS community.

Wow

[Andrew Cady]

Those Crusher benchmarks are incredible. BeOS R5 is doing in crusher with a single Voodoo2 more than what I do in GNU/Linux with SLI (dual) Voodoo2 cards, and a comparable system otherwise. It's an unimaginable shame that these drivers will not be available to the free software community. I was skeptical at first, but assuming this isn't an outright forgery, it's obvious that these really are top quality drivers. There are slight flaws in the test (leaving sound on, vsync on for some of the tests, using beta BeOS drivers but a stable Xfree version), but those could not be enough to explain the large differences here. Truly a shame.

Of course, these differences aren't nearly enough for anyone but the most hardcore of gamers to actually switch from Windows. But it's still impressive.

Re:Wow

[Andrew Cady]

XF4 is totally rewritten from XF3, but they were not actually using XF3 to display 3d graphics -- they were using the id MiniGL drivers -- that is how Quake2 (usually) works. If they actually used XF3 for the 3d graphics, the framerates would be much lower.

The article said that, in Linux, "Q2 uses lib3dfxgl.so, XFree 3.3.6, SMP enabled - GLQuake uses 3DFX Mesa 3.0 driver". lib3dfxgl.so is not an XF3 driver; it bypasses XF, and in fact can be used from the console without even having X installed (as it uses SVGAlib for input). (Q3 actually uses the same mechanism for display, but because it uses X for input it can't be run from the console). Q1 can also work like this with the Mesa drivers. ref_glx.so and ref_softx.so are the Q2 drivers for XF3, and those weren't the ones they used.

Notice that they specifically did *NOT* run the Linux benchmarks with Q2 in a window -- that is not because Linux cannot do this, but because doing so would require using XFree to display the graphics, giving a horrible performance with the latest stable version of XFree.

Now, it may be that XF4 is faster than lib3dfxgl.so. It is, after all, newer. But the difference between XF4 and XF3 is *NOT* the same as the difference between XF3 and lib3dfxgl.so. XF4 is only a major improvement over XF3, not over lib3dfxgl.so. It's probably only a slight improvement over lib3dfxgl.so.

(Also, go see the linuxgames benchmarks with XF4 vs Windows. XF4 varied from much slower than Windows to slightly slower than Windows. BeOS slaughtered Windows, so if we assume the linuxgames benchmarks to be accurate of general performance, we can assume it would have slaughtered XF4 too.)

Re:Be--WHat it takes to compete

[babbitt]

BeOS does have an x86 emulator. It's called BeBochs and is a port of the Bochs emulator. (disclaimer: I have never tried this).

--Ben

An un-NetBSD-related comment

[gavinhall]

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.

Re:Typical leftist media smokescreen

[aaronwald]

lass crack... more bran

Re:heh

[blueg3]

Actually, I'm surprised that Apple isn't running Apache under Mac OS X Server on a couple of G4 machines or something, as much as they've touted their system as a being a capable server. The Be doesn't surprise me at all, though. Be is, after all, for multimedia (as is shown by the graphics tests).

Re:If only...

[BalkanBoy]

>I'd rather have BeOS being developed by paid
>professionals than by a bunch of whining
> open-sourcers

Who is whining in the open source community? Linus? Or some of the other Linux core/Opensource developers? Do you suppose any one of them is "less qualified" to get on the BeOS team and develop their OS perhaps even in a better manner than the BeOS people themselves? You think Opensource programmers are uneducated morons who don't know shit? Can you not imagine an "opensourcer" in a professional setting?

>It's pretty arrogant to think that the hour you
>spend programming at night is going to improve
>the OS...

How much time do you think a professional programmer spends writing virtually all new code in one day? The tops I've seen is 1000-1500 lines. Now granted, that code was a lot of semantically similar SQL transactions in C++ using roguewave, so the functions could be copied/pasted, and modified slightly to match the semantics. So the infrastructure of each function repeated throughout the code (all 1500 lines)... which is a consequence of good design. No one function was longer than a pagefull in an X term window.

Now, that's a mf-ing top notch programmer, peaking out. Most programmers don't do over 150-250 lines a day, peak... (my estimation, including all testing/debugging/integration/etc).

And what exactly do you mean by an "hour every night"? Any opensource programmer that works on Linux (i.e.) works on a small peculiar piece of the entire source tree. I take it, conceptually, whoever decides to write code for Linux, is very familiar on the topic of writing drivers (i.e.) and has prior experience in it, otherwise it'd be freekin stupid to undertake such a feat. Every 'hour' that each of these programmers spend every night on a very tight area of the Linux source(i.e.) is the same kind of division of labor that you would have if every professional programmer in a huge company spent one hour a day at work coding, and the rest of the day jackin off to Internet porn ;-). And "one hour" was a figure of speech, most people spend more than an hour a day of coding time....

So what makes you think, given that all the people in the Opensource community have as good a level of understanding about OS programming (Linux, i.e.) or apps programming as anyone else professional, academic or what not, that an hour of a paid professional's time is of higher quality than an Opensourcer's? You are accusing, you should provide proof that these "Opensource jagoffs" don't know jack, as you imply....


> Look how far it's come as a CLOSED-source
> product. Look how far EVERY closed-source OS has
> come without the help of the open-source
> community.

Oh, you mean the shell we called MS-DOS, the newer front-end to MS-DOS called Windows 3.1/95/98, and the in-bred of VMS/Windows/MSDOS called Windows NT, which happen to be closed-source and a prevailing monopolistic trend, have actually gotten _real_ far? :-)


> Do you really give a shit about seeing and
> understanding the source code, or do
> you just want to get BeOS for free?

Yes, I would truly give a shit about understanding the source code to BeOS. I hear it's pure OO code, with a documented design, full OMT(or UML, not sure) notation of every piece, clean crisp unambiguous relationships, virtually a masterpiece of OO... At least, so I heard, I'm not sure how much of that is true. I'd definitely love to get my head under it, and perhaps learn/borrow whatever is good, so that my coding improves, and my company is happier that they've hired a better, ever-learning professional who doesn't go stale and only bitch about how lame open/closed source code is, rather than doing something more constructive with his time.

Do you really think BeOS invented the god damn OS paradigm and their designs are so impeccable? Bulls**t... It's a company who has learned from other people's mistakes... and with a bad marketing plan I might add :-).

L8r.

Re:Be vs X(LocalX idea)

[Panaflex]

Nonono...

Take X core and stick it in a kernel module. That's what BE, NT, etc are doing.

Also, they should of had toolkits (GTK, Motif, etc). executable by the X server instead of the application. (Atlease make it an option.. jeez)

Incedentally, that's what I am doing to X.. heheh
;-)

Pan

Does the name "mindcraft" ring a bell???

[SvnLyrBrto]

>Could you please cite references when
>Microsoft "cheated" and fudged benchmarks?

That's the most obvious one off the top of my head. The story is archived on slashdot I'm sure.... not too sure just when gates was caught THIS time, but you should find the story with a simple search.

The short version is that gates wanted to "proove" that Linux is an inferior POS. Microsoft, therefore, PAYED mindcraft to go to redmond and do a series of "independant" benchmarks comparing server performance between NT/IIS and Linux/Apache. Gates then had a hoarde of his MCSE drones set up NT/IIS in the ideal configuration and optimise it in every way they could think of. And for the Linux side, they just installed an old version of Red Hat/Apache in the default configuration WITH NO OPTIMISATION WHATSOEVER!!!

And when NT beat Linux, gates trumpeded it all over the press that an "independent" benchmark by mindcraft "prooved" that NT is the server OS uber alles; and that Linux is a worthless piece of crap.

Sure seems to meet the definition of a "cheated and fudged benchmark" to me.

john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!

Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if

Re:Does the name "mindcraft" ring a bell???

[Reality Master 101]

And indeed I do. It was a single benchmark for doing an unrealistic job on an unrealistic hardware configuration. It stinks all over of "Hey - here's one we can win!"

A benchmark means what it means. It was a test for a large-scale site. YMMV, as they say. I don't understand why you think this is so fake. Granted, it's one case out of a lot of possible cases, but it meant something for that one case.

All benchmarks are misleading, if you compare it to what you want to do. Like this BeOS benchmark, for example. People rightly point out that it's only one program in a very limited set of circumstances. But it shows at least something. That doesn't mean that no other benchmarks can ever, or will ever be done.

--

Re:Does the name "mindcraft" ring a bell???

[Black Parrot]

> It was a test for a large-scale site. YMMV, as they say. I don't understand why you think this is so fake.

And how many Web sites do you know of that use four (4) NICs on an x86 machine? To download static Web pages in huge packets?

I could deal with "a test for a large-scale site" if it was configured like a real large-scale site. But it wasn't. It was fraud, pure and simple.

--

Re:heh

[Antipop]

How do you find that stuff out?
-Antipop

For what it's worth...

[imac.usr]

if anybody is still reading this thread...I just downloaded GLQuake for the Mac and ran it on a standard iMac DV (a 400 MHz PowerPC G3, an 8MB Rage 128VR 2xAGP, but with 128 MB of RAM instead of 64 MB). I managed to eke out 38.7 fps running in 800x600 in 16-bit color. The rate dropped to around 22 fps when running in 32-bit color.

These tests were run under Mac OS 9.0.4 with Apple's newest OpenGL drivers, and with virtual memory turned on (plus a standard complement of Mac OS system extensions).

I would hope that a properly configured Power Mac G4 running Mac OS X final will be competetive with the BeOS results. In any case, perhaps the Mac isn't such a worthless platform for gaming after all....

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[Honclfibr]

Actually, that's not what I meant at all. I meant that Be goes to great lengths to hide the complex details of system configuration from the user (go into networking setup in Be and you'll see what I mean) which has a two-fold effect of making it difficult for the user to damage his/her configuration and also for him/her to make "tweaks" to better suit their needs. I see this as a tradeoff - one that the target Be audience is willing to make, and one that the Linux community is not. I approve very much of the ease-of-use features rapidly being implemented in Linux, but I know that while Linux might give you the *option* of doing it the easy way, it will always let you screw things up if that's your choice. Whereas I see the MacOS/BeOS philosophy more like "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, we'll manage your OS, here's a web browser, go start your own E-Business or somethin". Different alternatives catering to different demographics. That's all I was trying to say.

Re:Suck it up?

[goingware]

It has a lot to do with Be's failure to adopt the Word Services Suite, which is the interapplication communication protocol based on BMessages that enables Spellswell to communicate with other applications.

Rather than take advantage of my work to bring this protocol to the BeOS - it is an open protocol and allows any text service to be linked to an email client, not just spellchecking - Be instead wrote their own spellchecker for email.

The only other email client to implement Word Services on the BeOS, Mail-It from BeatWare became a free product after BeatWare abandoned the BeOS market and ported their ePicture graphics editor to Mac and Windows where it is selling very well.

If you don't think I have good reason to be pissed at Be, why don't you ask Marc Verstaen, the President of Beatware, what he thinks of Be after he and a group of investors wasted several million dollars developing desktop software for the BeOS?

There were only a few substantial commercial companies solely devoted to BeOS development and Beatware was one of the best. Now they are a Mac and Windows shop.

Re:Be--WHat it takes to compete

[be-fan]

Its not about software is it? It's about OpenGL performance. Also, Gimp is already almost ported, and the GTK+/GDK port is nearly complete. True MS Office is not there yet, but its isn't there on Linux either. Wine is being ported, and an X11 port is already complete. FreeMWare is being ported too. And it's free. Aside from the Office thing, what's your beef?

Quake benchmark, not OpenGL benchmark

[Stiletto]

Just a nit-pick:

If they are only comparing Quake speeds, you can hardly call it a comparison of OpenGL implementations. Quake and Quake-based games use a relatively TINY portion of the OpenGL API.

If run at high resolutions, the tests are basically testing the hardware's fill rate, and at lower resolutions, they are testing the drivers' geometry rates--definitely nowhere near a comprehensive "OpenGL benchmark".

Perhaps the headline, "Quake faster on BeOS" would be more appropriate...

Re:Quake benchmark, not OpenGL benchmark

[be-fan]

True, but what did 3D Linux use to test nVidia support? Hmm, I don't know, Quake? The truth is that there are no professional calibar 3D programs available on BeOS (and Linux for that matter.) This should change with the introduction of Maxon'x 3D modeler and the ports of Maya to Linux. Also, 3D apps don't really use OpenGL for more than previewing so it doesn't matter. What I want to see, though, is some viewperf scores.

Re:Quake benchmark, not OpenGL benchmark

[ictatha]

Don't forget about Blender for BeOS (amongst several others)! This is a great professional quality modeller/renderer/sequencer. And on June 21st, it goes completely free (no source code, but come on... it is awesome). And Blender 2.0 (a.k.a. GameBlender) coming out at SIGGRAPH time next month, as far as I know NaN is probably going to continue to port Blender to BeOS. I'll have to check with them to confirm that though. -ictatha

Re:My audio playback comparison of BeOS, Mac and W

[iCEBaLM]

I was able to play nine uncompressed CD quality audio files simultaneously and independently vary the volume on each on the BeOS. I was never able to play more than one on the other operating systems I tried.

Strange, with my nifty Diamond Monster MX300 soundcard in windows I have played 8 mp3's at once, 10 CD quality wav's at once (these were uncompressed cd ripped 1 minute samples), and tried both of those while recording even, and it worked fine. In Linux I can play 96 audio streams at a time if I was so inclined, but I've only made device files enough for 15 :), so I dunno where all this "can't do it in windows/linux" stuff comes from, maybe you just have a shitty soundcard.

-- iCEBaLM

TROLL ASSHOLE ALERT

[alt3r3go]

I need to vent, I'll reply anyway...


I'd rather have BeOS being developed by paid professionals than by a bunch of whining open-sourcers.

Sounds like someone's awful frightened about job security...

Look how far EVERY closed-source OS has come without the help of the open-source community.

Yeah. Windoze. Hooooo-wie! What an OS! Thank god those "whining open sourcers" didn't get their hands on it, think how unstable, unusable, and counter-intuitive it would be then!

Do you really give a shit about seeing
and understanding the source code, or do you just want to get BeOS for free?

Personally, both. Be's API is fscking beautiful, I'd love to get my hands under the hood. Furthermore, give it to me for free god damn it, throw in a car too. You know us open-sourcers are just freeloading whippersnappers looking for a free ride (or beer). We're not in it for anything else but a handout.

It's pretty arrogant to think that the hour you spend programming at night is going to improve the OS...

Let's see:

for(i=0;iMAXCODERS;i++){
hoursSpent+=1;
}

hmmm.....

alterego
(I got bored with the 82 karma account...)

Re:heh

[be-fan]

Yes, Be doesn't smoke in this area. However, as the other guy said, BeNews IS running RedHat Linux, so I wouldn't be talking. Be is coming up with a new networking architecture called BONE which should remedy most of that. Try it out at www.betips.com

Bah!

[SciBoy]

"...as in in, 'we..."

You should check your submissions for this kind of error before sending them in. I'm also sure I never wrote "it's." anywhere in my post, since "it's." is hardly a good way to end a sentence. See to it that you quote me right next time.

I would also like to point out that I am Swedish, so if I do not discover my errors by myself, I think I can be excused. Why you feel that you have some kind of right to correct me out of nowhere, I'll never know.

Re:Better Sig

[SnapperHead]

I think the whole try { } adds to it...

Re:/. Negativity as usual.

[Robert S Gormley]

"The OS movement"? Never heard of it. Maybe a Free OS Movement, but Be never claimed to be free.

Re:youth, NO, I don't think so

[adamsc]

My guess would be that, at best, BE somehow can get out of the way for smart optimizations. They mention SIMD use in PIII but I don't understand why that wouldn't be used in linux or windows to the same extent

Some of the Be developer newsletters hinted that they were doing some interesting dynamic code-rewriting features. I'm not sure how much is possible on that front, but it certainly would seem like an excellent way to improve performance - trimming a few instructions here and there (based on the host CPU & video card) based on real-time profiling would really benefit graphics routines that are being called a few trillion times over the life of the program.
__

My thoughts on BeOS

[Honclfibr]

On a whim, I downloaded the personal edition of BeOS over this last weekend. Mostly on a whim - I'd heard about it but had never had the time to give it a runthrough before. My initial impression of it from about 3 or 4 hours of use is this: BeOS is everything that Windows 98 should be and that Linux, regardless of what you might think, doesn't want to be. By that, I mean that it is suitable for the 99% of the world's population that wants a lightweight, easy to use desktop operating system that is allows them to access the "new technologies" they've heard of (you know, this email stuff and the world wide wait?) with a minimum of intervention or knowledge on their part. Those of us who enjoy the power and configurability of linux should really stop trying to jam it down the throats of the average consumer - we like our operating system powerful and configurable, but the average consumer does not agree with us. Oh sure, we say "look, it's got a GUI, and an installer, it's waay easy, check out RPM, a monkey could install Linux". But we forget that the average monkey, apart from eating bananas and scratching their butt, has very little else to do and could spend the next week or so finding the proper drivers and poking through configuration scripts. Joe Consumer sees his computer and thinks TeeVee and he wants to be able to boot up his computer and have everything set up and clean with no "do not touch this" buttons that could potentially ruin everything. This is why the "non user serviceable" parts to a TeeVee (ie the syncs and other such adjustments)are hidden away from view. As they are with BeOS. Linux, OTOH, is like a TeeVee with the back cover removed - it's suitable for those who like to fiddle and know enough not to touch the toroid. Anyway, just thought I'd mention that - I do hope that linux continues to gain support and popularity, but if you're looking for something that's going to replace Windows for the majority of home users, I'd say look no further than Be.

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[msoellner]

It has the GID/UID permissions setup but not enabled (like all of Be's multiple user capabilities -- they are simply not enabled as that is not the direction Be, Inc wants to go with BeOS). There is no iser login and being secure, you wouldn't want to use BeOS in any sort of multiuser environment.

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[deKernel]

But what about the system as a whole? Sorry, but I have seen way to many tweaks like that just crush the overall usabily of the system.

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[Montressor]

You are quite wrong about Linux not wanting to be like BeOS. The differences you point out are entirely GUI-based - a small subsegment of the OS. Linux does want the ultra-low latency of BeOS. Linux does want a unified and integrated architecture for multimedia (though one should not be required to /have/ those devices to run, they should be seamlessly integrated if they are there)
The Be kernel is by far one of the best in the world of operating systems. In terms of real-time performance, no OS comes close. Linux can get some degree of garaunteed latency, Windows can't get that at all, but Be - well, it's as close to an RT kernel without actually being one that anybody's gotten. (Of course, there's always RT-linux, but that's for a different set of applications)
If Linux could borrow some of the undoubtedly killer code from the BE VM and multimedia subsystems it would be a lot better.

Re:My thoughts on BeOS

[be-fan]

I do think, however, that you're analogy is a bit wrong. Be has most of the cool UNIX stuff you like in Linux, but its hidden away under the / directory. (For you non Be users, the GUI has /boot as the reference so stuff like /bin, /lib, and /etc are never seen by the user.) It's more like a TV with an easily removed cover, wheras Win98 is like a TV with the cover welded shut. (For good reason, people would puke if they ever say what was in there!)

Re:/. Negativity as usual.

[FnordX]

We're negative because Be is greedy and the OS supports greed, expensive software and doesn't support the OS movement.

Oh, I see. And we should really stop that closed-source restaurant down the road, because they're greedy, and they don't open-source their food!

Look, a business is a business. People work for money. Now, I'm sure you're such a wonderful proponent of the Open-Sourced movement, if your boss came in tomorrow and said that they were going to stop paying you for what you did, open source the business model, and work out of the kindness of your hearts that you would be fine.

The rest of us, however, would starve.

Re:Open source /Closed mind

[jonr]

Business as usual here at Linux HQ...
:>
J.

huh?

[RelliK]

I don't get it. Why would you *want* to play 9 files at a time? You can't possibly listen to more than one at a time. I can only imagine what the noise was like.
___

Re:Be--WHat it takes to compete

[gavinhall]

Posted by 11223:

Joe Unix is already using BeOS, because it provides an honest-to-goodness POSIX environment. The only problem for Joe Unix is that BeOS isn't multiuser like the other Unix-like platforms (such as NetBSD)

Re:Typical leftist media smokescreen

[nd]

hahahah... great troll.

this really puts things into perspective.

why use a Multi cpu board if win98 cant' use it ?

[Brigadier]

PC used for the above benchmarks:
I just noticed for the Voodoo2 test they used a bp6 board dual celeron. assuming Be can utalize this (not sure) why use 98, and not NT, since 98 cant' take advantage of it.

Spec below-
Abit BP6 m/t, dual Celeron 433 Mhz, TNT2 Ultra AGP 32 MB, Creative Voodoo2 PCI 12 MB, SBLive Value, 192 MB RAM, 3 IDE Fujitsu HDDs, Bt848 TVCard.
OSes used: Windows 98 (DX7.0a, driver v3.02.02, VSync OFF, MiniGL), BeOS R4.5.2, BeOS R5 PE, Corel Linux 1.0 (Q2 uses lib3dfxgl.so, XFree 3.3.6, SMP enabled - GLQuake uses 3DFX Mesa 3.0 driver).

It's pretty interesting to me.

[nexxed]

I must admit, despite being a BeOS fan, I was rather surprised when I saw those numbers. Granted, it's only on three (well, two) cards and only on old games, but even so...
The problem is, while I have great faith in Be's engineers, I've been getting a bit tired of waiting for these things to be used to their full potential. I'd love to have those sorts of speed boosts for the games I play simply for using an OS that I like more (I personally love most of the BeOS' UI).
I will say this... the post didn't mention it, but this speed increase is from a rewrite of the BeOS' OpenGL code... it gives me a lot of hope for BONE (a rewrite of it's networking code).

Shouldn't they have tested against XFree86 4.0?

[gotan]

Hmm, it occurs to me that they had better tested against XFree86 4.0 since that's a big step towards hardware acceleration support. For the right graphics boards the Linux numbers should have been a lot more like the W98 numbers (extrapolating from Q3A) as can be seen here though it seems the Voodoo fares better under 3.3.6 for now but the latter article also hints at how much can still be done for Voodoo support under linux.

What amazes me most in the article is how BeOS compares very well against windows. I'm really looking forward to a Q3A comparison of BeOS, Linux/XFree86 4.0 and W98 in a few months (best by some neutral agency) when Q3A is there for BeOS, more graphic cards are supported and XFree86 4.X has shed some bugs.

Experiment before you blab!

[dh003i]

It's simple as this: you need to try it out yourselves. Its really quite easy -- Linux is free, BeOS5 is free. What's so hard about getting BeOS5 and a good version of Linux speedwiae(i.e., Slackware, or Stampede) and comparing for yourself? Your personal comparison certainly won't be worthy of any generalization, but it will apply aptly to you. Now, as far as I'm concerned, the only games that are important are Descent(I, II, and III) and Tomb Raider(I, II, III, and IV); everything else is garbage. Now, once you try for yourselves, you don't have anything to complain or gripe about. If Be runs Descent3 better, then you play it on Be; and if Linux runs TombRaider better, then you play Tomb Raider on Linux. Big deal. So you have to use two OS'. That too much for your intellect? Challenge your simplistic views? Now, regarding all this bullshit that everyone's saying about Windows being a better games platform than Linux; in a word, no. It *runs* some games marginally better, under 'fair' comparisons; this is only becuase every game is developed from its infancy to be run under windows -- the way it manages data, I/O, etc etc, is all optimized for the bloated Windows code. The Linux versions of games are 'afterthoughts.' Ask Outrage to develop Descent4 on Stampede Linux, and you'll see how good gaming can be on Linux. Now, since we're all talking about the BeOS hype, I'll say from what I've seen its very good. It is worth a try, and should not be mindlessly put down by many *nix fanatics as it is being done; I suppose, however, this hostility can be expected, since the Linux community is so divided and so hostile that a disagreement on a distribution -- i.e., if you like Slackware or Debian -- can become a holy crusade. But, back to the point, BeOS seems to be very good from what I've read. It's gotten rave reviews from independant sources such as ZDnet. This is nothing for *nix ppl to be worried about; why? Well, I can answer that in one question: How many reviews of *any* noteoworthy *nix distribution(i.e., xBSD, IRIX, Linux and all its distros) have you read that don't praise *nix? Now, I've read a lot about a great many OS', and when I eliminate the information that was basically useless to me -- i.e., the ultra technical aspects of the OS -- all I'm left with is advertising -- mindless, fanatical, advertising. If you want to use the internet to determine anything about an OS, use it to determine which OS has the most fanatical and devote followers; this is somewhat of a plus for an OS, since it has to be good to have fanats. But, for everything else, internet sources seem to be useless. So, do you know what you do? You look at everything, you e-mail some professors, and you try the shit out yourself. A fine example is the ?war? between Linux and *BSD. Well, how the fuck are you to know the difference between clams and oysters if you've only had clams? As long as we're talking about BeOS' multimedia superiority, it would be wholly unfair to say that *nix is an unknown in the multimedia category. Linux was used to develop the movie Titanic -- that is certainly high praise. Also, need I say anything other than IRIX? It's multimedia is legendary. P.S. -- I'm really anxious to see how well Linux performs in multimedia with Amiga running atop it; as Amiga's so legendary in multimedia, it should offer dramatic improvements. P.P.S. -- as long as we're flame-baiting about different OS', I might as well mention a virtual unknown -- V2 OS. It doesn't come with a zillion features, but it gets the job done and its the most efficient OS ever programmed, also the fastest -- period; written in C/C++, and compiled excellently, and then tweaked and perfected line-by-line in asm(assembly). It doesn't get much better than that concerning a job well done. Personally, I think every program, and every OS, should be hand tweaked -- post compilation -- by a programmer to make it faster. For info on V2_OS, see http://www.v2os.com

Re:Let's work this out slowly.

[nagora]

Everybody who's actually tried Quake on linux knows that Windows outperforms it. And now BeOS outperforms Windows.

I don't think the real issure for Linux users is the fact of Windows/BeOS being faster but the amount faster. As the poster implied, quantum leaps need more evidence than gradual steps.

Frankly, anyone that plays games under any of these systems is a mug, consoles are far better value for money while PC-based games just suck the user into a hardware arms race against themselves.

TWW

You'd realize why if you tried it

[goingware]

One of the whole points about multitasking operating systems is that you can do more than one thing at once.

For example, you could have a web browser, email client and streaming audio show going on at the same time in most OSes.

But in the BeOS, all of these different programs could be individually making audio and they'd be mixed together.

It happened that the test I did sounded really cool. If they were all at high volume there was a cacophonous roar. At low volume it sounded like a crowded subway station, and as you varied the volume of each song it would be as if you were walking among the crowd and approaching people carrying radios, then they'd recede.

I've tried to play sound files on windows NT while I had realaudio going, and I got a rude alert saying the device was busy. After all these years I'd spent working with the BeOS, I thought that was really lame. Isn't NT supposed to have architecture?

The fact is the human ear can pick out individual conversations from a crowded room (most people can, I can do it well even though my hearing is damaged by my fiance can't). With multiple audio streams (BeOS can do multiple video streams too) all of your programs can be making sound and you can just tune into the one you want to listen to, or raise the volume on the one you were interested in.

Re:heh

[gavinhall]

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.

Re:heh

[Phroggy]

They actually did switch to Mac OS X Server in February or March, but then switched back. I'm sure they'll migrate to Mac OS X within a year, though.

--

Re:heh

[michael.creasy]

You use the service at netcraft.com

Non-3rd party benchmarking must be ignored

[keaaw]

Any benchmark run by an interested party has to be ignored as biased. I've been on the inside of graphics h/w companies (engineering, both UNIX and PC-based) for 10 years, and have seen time and time again the games vendors play to make themselves look good. The schemes used run from simple to very complex. The simplest method is just to not do apples/apples: manipulate/choose the tests so that the competition goes down the slow path. The more complex ones involve what most people would call "cheating" to increase your scores. Someone already mentioned dropping triangles as one such cheat. Dropping tris that don't light pixels is fine, since they don't change anything, but dropping triangles that light pixels doesn't produce the right picture and is a cheat. The thing is that it's *hard* to determine whether or not a small area triangle (other than zero area) actually lights a pixel, so vendors who do this cheat usually just say that all triangles with area below a particular threshold value are culled. There are infinitely many ways to cheat, and any benchmark, to be taken seriously, must be run by a 3rd, uninterested party, and whatever platform you're running on should have conformance/correction/cheat detection tests. This task becomes even harder when you consider that multiple platforms are involved here.

In conclusion, all that can be gleaned from this benchmark (assuming no intentional cheating is involved) is that the particular versions of the software used on the particular platforms at the time of the testing had the resulting performance. Unless a rigorous and lengthy evaluation process was used to insure that ALL the same level of acceleration was running on ALL the same platforms, these results in terms of comparing the "multimedia performance" of these systems is meaningless.

Re:why use a Multi cpu board if win98 cant' use it

[be-fan]

The main reason is that Quake isn't SMP enabled. If you'd read the article, they say that disabling SMP only lowered the score by .6fps, and the SMP machine was the only one available at the time.

Re:why use a Multi cpu board if win98 cant' use it

[shacker]

You need to read a little more carefully -- in one part of the review, Eugenia states that disabling the 2nd processor in BeOS resulted in only a .6 fps drop in performance. This is because Quake II is not multithreaded. So the "unfair hardware advantage" doesn't wash.

Why Open Source?

[Cinquain]

I'm new to Linux. I was attracted because I was tired of having to upgrade my OS every year to get functionality (or fixes) and then discovering applications that I had would no longer run. Worse yet, clients were forced into the same rut and lazy me had to rewrite my apps. I don't care so much about the price, but stability and continuity is important to me. When I worked for a big software company I saw the same requirements and concerns. Not everyone interested in Linux wants to bit twiddle. I don't work on my own car any more, but I sure as hell want to drive the same one for 10 years or want the guy down the street - who I trust - to fix it when it's broke. My car may not be the fastest, but it runs good and I can afford it and hey - I don't have to think about it in the middle of the night.

BeNews response to Linux issues.

[geon]

look here: http://www.benews.com/story/3270.7.html

Re:Suck it up?

[.pentai.]

Not trying to sound like a prick, but you're blaiming and insulting Be for making their own spellchecker...I mean sure you're pissed that they didn't use your protocol (atleast I gathered it was yours from what I read, I may stand corrected). It's their product why should they conform to others' standards? I've been a Be developer of sorts for a while and while I haven't shipped anything yet I've been happy with their support. Be is the only company that has actually taken their time to contact me about what I'm working on and offering any assistance (which they followed through with).

But then, I'm a game guy, so maybe that explains it?

Let's work this out slowly.

[Courier]

First of all no suprise at windows being beaten. It's know to be bloated by most people here. However, what really annonys me is all the BeOS fans here automatically going into OS shark mode. It's not really that important guys. Also note that there wasn't alot of imformation given by the benchmarker. If any of you read sites like anandtech, Tom's or any of the mainstream gaming site you'll know what level of deatails goes into writing up their benchmarks. Getting annonyed at the "How we tested" bit is very common for me.
Now on to the concerns of other people speaking here... For me what I think causes this large jump between BeOS and other OS here is SMP. Think about it. Although the game itself being tested wasn't SMP enabled the drivers and layers of BeOS are. So a certain level of performance increase can be expected especially when dealing with the crusher demo (which incidentally gave a very big lead to windows). This about this guys... SMP is not enabled in quake but smp is enabled in other parts of the OS now if the OS is smart and the game needs a lot of CPU what do you do? You Shove every thing to one cpu and let the game run on the other. For crusher there are alot of rockets exploding and particals flying these are not tests of the 3d card nor it's drivers it is a test of the CPU. This isn't just something i made up overnight read gaming sites it's very well documented. In this benchmark Linux is definatly running at a disadventage. First off not XF4, second no optimization (as in stoping un-needed proccesses) and thrid running off a stock install of corel and finially it wasn't runing off proper OpenGL it was running MESA which is good but how good?

Of course i do know linux isn't near the same level as windows with gaming and multimedia support. And I know BeOS is quite good but I have lived on this earth for quite a while and quatum leap of performance just don't appear ouf of the blue because someone programs better.

Re:If only...

[Beatles]

jesus moderators, this should be marked FUNNY not TROLL. This just proves HOW FUCKING STUPID THE MODERATORS ARE.

Now they will no doubt waste time and points moderating me down....

Re:Sorry, but I don't consider my GeForce shitware

[adamk]

May I suggest you contact nVidia about this? They have been very uncooperative towards Be when it comes to releasing the necessary info to write drivers.

Adam

Re:heh

[pldms]

I think Apple use a combination of Netscape/Solaris & MacOS X. They used the former for ages, but are gradually switching over to the latter (at least, that's what they _say_). They do use Web Objects to power their store (and, my, aren't those URLs big ;-), so there's one thing in their defence. -- Your mother's a tracer!

free speech

[aphr0]

No mods = setting your threshold to -1. That way, you'll never have to care about moderation again.

Corrections

[swdunlop]

1) 2D V5 support is available in the newest patch for R5. The OpenGL support will probably follow soon after.

2) V5 has been released. It's even on the shelves of CompUSA.

Have a nice day!

Conspiracy.

[be-fan]

I haven't seen the Be logo in so long I forgot what it looked like. Why the hell was this posted under graphics? Any OpenGL news about Linux is always posted under the penguin, especially the nVidia driver stuff, since that is about the same case as this. Or was the author just aware of the fact that anything having Be as the topic is automatically forwared to /dev/null?

he wasnt

[para_droid]

he wasnt modded down, -1 is his default posting level. maybe that is because of that 'bitchslap' thing i hear so much about. shame really, he did a lot of good work on the debian project. maybe the bitchslap was for deserting RMS and going over to the evil of ESR and his 'open source' crap.

Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is

Re:the site runs linux

[Dr. Sp0ng]

Hmmm, if BeOS is so great I wonder why www.benews.com is running Linux....

Ok, I'll bite the troll... BeOS is meant to be a desktop OS, not a server OS. Apache 2.0 has been ported to BeOS though.
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