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MacOSX Vs BeOS ShootOut
Jolie writes: "After Palm purchased Be's assets, the future of BeOS became uncertain and a lot of users have left the platform. One of these users was Scot Hacker, mostly known for his 'BeOS Bible' book among other things. Scot tried to stick to Windows, then to Linux but he ended up with MacOSX. He has written a long and detailed article comparing, from the user's point of view, his beloved BeOS to his new favorite, MacOSX."
With a little more polish (multi-user, better networking) it coulda been a contender. You can still get it at http://free.be.com, the free version. I think that Palm should open-source it; because it has some nice features (multi-thread apps, REALLY nice interface). Alas, it seems it is doomed.
Everything is mainstream now.
For those who don't like to click all day long- Here
BeOS 5 was released in two forms a PRO version and a Personal version. The personal version was available in 'Free' as in cost at http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/ and is still available on many mirrors, linked to from that page. If you have never tried it, give Be a try. It's quite nice, and different than everything else out there. Hopefully it won't die off completely.
-OctaneZ
No, actually that's his real name. He must have had very cool parents :)
Scott's essay says: I don't mind AppleScript. I wish the system were open to other languages
Actually, the system is open to other languages, although I don't know how many of them have OS X ports. MacOS uses Open Scripting Architecture, which means that pretty much any scripting language can operate your Mac, given an appropriate OSAX plugin.
I've toyed with the ones for JavaScript, Perl, and Python, but decided to stick with AppleScript since I already know (some of) the syntax.
Troll alert!
I know I shouldn't be resoponding but I can't pass up a chane to prove an idiot wrong.
You may be right about the number of BeOS jobs (unless Palm decides to do something with it), but you are definitly wrong about the number of OSX jobs. Not counting the hundreds of people at Apple working on OSX itself, the following vendors all have OS X programmers:
Microsoft's Mac Business Unit
Intuit
Adobe
Macromedia
Qualcomm
This isn't even counting the small companies such as Thursby, Barebones, Omnigroup, etc. I myself work for a small company writing OS X software.
You should follow an old addage updated for slashdot; Think before you post.
The Personal Edition of BeOS, given away for free, can be turned into a full installation very easily. Check betips.net for details.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Well, sure it is. Being a mac and windows person, I'm trying to learn linux, using yellowdog on some apple hardware. Half the basic programs refuse to run (such as shutdown, even. I have to use reboot). Consistancey of such basic things is really an impediment to using and learning linux. When man pages reference commands that don't exist on your system, also, an impediment to learning.
Mod point free since 2001
The one thing that surprises me is that the speed didn't bother him more. The biggest thing BeOS had going for it, besides that file system, was blazing, silky-smooth speed, whereas all the OS X systems I've seen dragged their butts. (Admittedly, I haven't used 10.1.)
That's what you're missing, then: the speed jump from 10.0 to 10.1 is massive, even on what now amounts to "lower-end" machines.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
And, for the record, the two main beos projects by lost souls are BlueOS and OpenBeOS.
New BeOS software appears consistently at http://www.bebits.com/
Also, a quite large group of people are working in OpenBeOS http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/ and after it matches functionality of BeOS5, it will be further extended. Development is early, but you can't help but take notice at the healthy amount of activity (I keep my eye on the project).
Hunh? I spent quite a bit of time - a couple of pages - talking about how painful the speed difference was. I also noted that i'm not sitting on my thumbs waiting for OSX, but that multitasking compared to BeOS is abysmal.
"Freeware just isn't a part of the OS X culture, and shareware apps cost about 50% more on average than equivalent BeOS shareware apps."
There's plenty of Mac OS X freeware and shareware available, particularly for developers. You can find it at www.stepwise.com/softrak.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Either way, the thing many people seem to be missing in this debate is that metadata and resource forks have not be removed from OSX so much as they've been deprecated - code that uses these apsects of the filesystem still compiles and runs just fine. It's really more of a change in Apple's recommendations and documenation than any technical difference. If you work at it, you can even get the Finder to open files using the old type/creator heuristic (more or less).
While I'll agree that BFS definitely had some far more interesting applications than HFS does, don't sell HFS short - it still beats the pants off FAT.
It's a common misconception, but filesystem metadata has nothing to do with Mac resource forks; metadata is not and never was stored in resource forks. The concepts are completely orthogonal; you can have either one without the other. Resource forks are deprecated in Mac OS X (replaced by bundles), and both the pro and anti-metadata factions support this.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
They have learned. The Trash icon on the dock is only the Trash icon for files. Grab a volume (CD, Zip disk, external hard drive, NFS mount, whatever), and it turns into an Eject icon. Grab a volume you created to burn and the Trash changes to a Burn icon. Drag, drop, and it does just what it said it would do. Very useful...
Oh yeah, I'd LOVE to see a command line only Photoshop. I bet that'd just be GREAT. Or how about commandline only games? THose are the nest. See what people like you amazingle fail to realise over and over again is that a lot of us actually use our computers to do things. Not just ftp files around and write scripts to ftp files around. We create CG, we create music, we do all kinds of things that require software that IS NOT COMMAND LINE BASED.
Different people need different things from their machines. For a lot of us the CL is completely unnessesary, even useless. For others it's indespensible. But if it's indespensible for YOU, don't try to tell me it's indespensible for ME becuase it's just not so.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Looks like osnews is getting bogged in the traffic. I'll try and get a mirror of the article online soon.
That was your entire post and it got modded '+5 Informative'!?! Feh - real fuckin informative.
The original idea when Apple went with NeXT was that Apple would ship essentially OPENSTEP/Mach for PowerPC. The early Rhapsody Developer Previews were essentially that, and were available pretty quickly. Apple had to dust off the old NeXT PowerPC port and bring it up to speed and port it to Mac hardware, as it was originally written for the NeXT RISC Workstation that never shipped (I've seen a prototype of the m88k version, but I haven't the PPC version).
The problem with that strategy was that the major ISV's balked at the idea of porting to OPENSTEP API's. They saw it as a lot of time and expense for a platform that might not last out the year. It would not have required a total re-write as some people have suggested, but certainly it would have been a major effort. (I would personally argue that going the Carbon route was also painful and going the Cocoa route would have resulting in a better product). Plus, these ISV's would have to then maintain separate ports for Mac OS X and Mac OS X, and they weren't willing to do that - many of them had already cut out ports to anything but Windows and Mac, and were probably considering dropping the Mac anyways.
So the Rhaspody strategy was abandoned, Steve Jobs took over, Apple re-invested in the traditional Mac OS and got some good releases out the door. They also came up with Carbon, which is a re-tooled Mac Toolbox API that sits native inside of Mac OS X. In doing so, they also re-wrote the graphics layer, removing Display Postscript and replaced it with brand new code called Quartz which is based on PDF. That means re-writing the window manager as well so that it supports simultaneous display of Quicktime, OpenGL, Java2D, QuickDraw, and so on including using underlying hardware support. They also re-wrote the DriverKit layer, replacing it with IOKit which is embedded C++ based and has much broader support. The print system was replaced, the Workspace Manager was tossed and the Finder was re-written in Carbon (IMHO one of the worst parts of the current Mac OS X). Lots and lots of utilities were re-written, the BSD layer was upgraded from BSD 4.3, the kernel was moved from Mach 2.0++ (2.5 and some 3.0 extensions) to Mach 3.0++. The Classic layer was also added so that it can mingle with native apps, Java was added, Mail.app was re-written, and so on and so on. There was a lot of work put into this operating system since OPENSTEP 4.2 for Mach, which basically remained stagnant for years.
In the meantime, Rhapsody did essentially ship as Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999. It was basically OPENSTEP 5.5/5.6 with a menu layout that was Mac OS Classic-ish but pretty much everything else was straight from OPENSTEP/Mach.
So... any operating system that Apple might have chosen at the time would have had to go through the wringer in order to get it to support Apple's technologies and what Apple perceives as what their customers require. It would have taken a long time, and BeOS would have been a worst choice in terms of both adapting the technology and the personnel. I think that going with BeOS and C++ would have led back to the Copland and Taligent quicksand pit. As for personnel, if Steve Jobs didn't come back to lead Apple, I'm not sure Apple would have had this resurgence.