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Be Liquidation Sale
Anonymous Squonk writes: "Be's homepage has a message stating some of the details of their impending dissolution. One little item of note mentioned was 'Public Liquidation Auction January 16 (details to follow)' Who knows what kind of geek goodies might be available at rock bottom prices? Perhaps this could be our last chance to get our hands on a BeBox!" How about some of those nice LED CPU meters?
I want the minutes of the board meeting where Jean said "screw apple. we're intuitively obviously worth so much more than that."
Heck, that memo would probably raise more on Ebay than what they got from Palm..
How about some of those nice LED CPU meters?
FYI, these come automatically with many high end non-Linux servers including HPs, SGIs and DECs.
*sniff* =[
Sorry to see you go. You did some good work.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
To be or not to be...
I guesse now we know the answer to the question.
It's too bad because BeOS could have been a great os for media production had more companies adopted it. Before they began developing the music production version of debian I don't there were any OS's that could match be's great audio latency.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Oh yeah, I'm sure you'll be able to get stuff real cheap now that this has made it to slashdot. Should have kept it to yourself. On a side note, if you want real cheap hardware checkout your local university surplus store, they usually have some real nifty things at reasonable prices.
Is this a typo? Isn't this supposed to say 3COM or is there a 3Comm?
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
It's possible to make your own CPU-meter with a few simple electronic components available at your favorite electronics retailer. I wouldn't be suprised of a custom LED CPU meter is at least half the price of prebuilt ones.
What do you think of MusicCity now?
Well, as much fun as a liquidation sale will be, it is a sad, sad time in our economy... They will be missed... Of course, I think I want my own BeBox as a... momento... just for sentimental reasons of course ;)
why don't they just auction off their remaining surplus... or something in that sense...
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
>I don't there were any OS's that could match be's great audio latency.
Mac OS X's CoreAudio architecture is delivering end-to-end latency of 1 Millisecond. Was BeOs better than that?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Long Live OpenBeOS!!!
It is a nice operating system. You can get a free personal version from www.bebits.com or you can buy a more deluxe version from www.gobe.com -- oddly enough, I don't think you can get it from Palm.
BeOS was/is a commercial OS, based on a microkernel, and POSIX-compliant enough that you could compile and run more than a few UNIX console apps on it. It was one of the first OSes to use a journaling filesystem as the default FS, but could read a pretty wide variety of other filesystems, including FAT/NTFS, ext2fs iirc, Mac drives, and a few others. It was marketed as a multimedia-oriented OS, and that was certainly true: it was rock stable, booted fast, had a solid integrated video system and OpenGL support built into the OS, had good filesystem performance and decent network drivers.
It also was available in a cut-down form for free on the web, but they've now removed that. (I luckily burnt it on one of my backup CDs a year ago.) The main limitation was that it had one 512MB partition that was created as a file on an existing FAT or NTFS fs, but once it was running, you could copy it over to a spacier install.
However, there weren't nearly enough drivers, and not enough freeware developer support, so it stayed a niche operating system until the end. Although I know some composers (live AND tracker) that still do their editing work with a Be-based PC on one side and a Mac on the other.
From what I hear from friends at BE they auction is going to be like a tech garage sale. They will be auctioning off computers, desks, lamps, chairs, servers, racks and lots of extra parts. I may call up my friends and have them pick me up some servers and racks cheap.
To Be or Not to Be. That is the question!!!! They should just auction everything off on eBay... I could use a brand new BeBox for like $10.
I've been to a couple of dot com auctions hoping to pick up hardware at great prices. Unfortunately idiots with their company check books stood by purchasing as much as they could without regard for price. People were paying the same price for two totally different machines!
Long Live OpenBeOS!!!
You forgot to mention that it used a snappy multi-threaded windowing/GUI system and had probably the best SMP support of any OS to date.
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
are they going to hang out a Be For Sale sign? is that some fighting-terrorism-with-zen thing?
maybe now there'll be some more BeBoxes for sale...
FreeBSD for the impatient.
In answer to your question, Be is an outstanding operating system, with great technical proficiency. Almost every (recent) os multitasks and SMP's, but Be does it with mind-boggling smoothness and low-latency. Even on old hardware, it was possible to, for example, run several quicktime movies without dropping frames on any of them. Also it had a noteworthy filesystem, with a powerful ability to extend any file with arbitrary tags and so on. Also it was a 64-bit journaling filesystem. It was originally designed to handle complex multi-media tasks which might require large files, and extremely fast response times.
It was proprietary and ran on the PowerPC (and eventually both PowerPC and Intel chips).
Erik
Between all the kids yelling "FIRST BID! FB!!!!" and the people holding up big pictures of a guy spreading his backside, nothing's gonna get sold.
The Amiga is still around :)
Ive lost count how many times they've been sold now.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
I fart on thee, Be. Every inch of my body is full of flatulence waiting to be unleased onto you. The vicious scent encapsulated in these complimentary generosities is a token of my genuine and extreme gratitude, gratitude that is full of hate, recurring illnesses and chronic depression.
Seek not the deceiving roses! Seek not the devil! Seek only the precious nasal delights emanating from by flapping buttox!
linkin park? what the hell? its kinda sad that anuva good alternative OS company's gone under...
Nice that *everything* ties back to Linux somehow on /. Or nauseating, rather. What's that, your dog died? Well, how will that affect Linux desktop adoption is what I wanna know.
There are other open platforms out there BEsides Linux, you know. Get outta your server room more often.
"also was available in a cut-down form for free on the web, but they've now removed that"
You can still get it at mirrors and it was recently uploaded to bebits(BeOS's freshmeat). You can get both the windows and linux version here.
You check as well how to install the personal edition in a proper partition or make the original virtual partition bigger
Thanks for the ride, Be, it was a great one. You will be missed.
*walks out grumbling a crude statement involving Palm*
Old massively parallel mainframe. Equivalent to a cluster of like 500 486's<SMALL>**</SMALL> or one Pentium 3. Get it now for only $500.
<P><P><P><P>
<small>**This would not be an effective way to heat your home.</small>
Much of the good stuff is pretty scarce by the time you get to these auctions. If any employees didn't get paid you can rest assured that they grabbed some goodies to make up for it. A shirt and maybe a decent office chair would be all I could hope for.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...any monitors from Be.
Remember how they treat their equipment?
They drop it off the roof then videotape it from two perspectives, coming & going. Makes for an impressive MM demo, but somehow it doesn't rival the descent of their stock price in the final days (ouch!)
Be RIP
haven't i seen a post that's almost exactly like this one (many phrases/sentences, and the obvious "dead" ending) for FreeBSD some time ago ?
Is this some Microsoft-spawned FUDBOT ?
Nvidia has AGP drivers for the TNT cards last time I checked their website. I'll assume you were refering to Palm's handheld AGP support. Wow I wasn't aware they had AGP on those things. A little bit of reseach before you post something will keep the flock in check. peace
I'm needing a replacement for my single-CPU doorstop. Two screamin' 66 MHz PowerPCs ought to hold my office door open twice as well as the PowerComputing Mac clone does now.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I visited Be summer of 2000 because I knew one of the former employees there. He hooked me up with a BeBox that was headed for the dumpster. They didn't have many BeBoxes still in use there. I mean, the QA lab had a good number, but Intel boxes were the dominant machine in use there. Most of the last BeBoxes had been claimed. If you find one, congrats. The one I got from their office in Menlo Park last year was without the LEDs, but I can't complain...it is a working dual 133MHz BeBox with SCSI equipment. Runs 5.0 Pro just fine.
-David
david@cc.gatech.edu
But since a BeBox was based on PPC,
Could it run MacOS? Or are the machines not interchangeable?
And, are there and DVD programs for BEOS? Cause if it can play 3 mp3s at the same time on my p120, I'm sure a DVD would kick butt on my p2 400.
I recently sold for $1119.00 the BeBox that I bought my freshman year for $600 used. This marked first time I've ever bought a computer and it increased in value. Here's the eBay auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem& item=1302540562
Though this auction could be nifty, I don't think you're going to find any BeBoxes laying around Be Inc. mainly due to this little tidbit: Interesting history: David [Cantrell] obtained this BeBox from Be's offices in Menlo Park, CA. It was being discarded and he "rescued" it from the trash heap with the help of a former Be employee. It lacks the CPU load LEDs on the front, but other than that, it's still in great shape.
http://www.bebox.nu/beboxnames.php and scroll down to see the original post.
You did good work with BeOS and will be missed by many.
Be, Inc. has announced that it will be changing its name to Was Incorporated shortly after liquidating all of its assets.
When I worked at Georgia Tech, I had enough money in a project that I decided to buy some multiprocessor boxes to test out their capabilities as a real-time data acquisition box. I bought two boxes: a BeBox and an OS/2 box from Indelible Blue.
I was on vacation when the BeBox arrived so two co-op students unpacked it and decided to give it a whirl. Just for grins, they opened it up to look at it before powering it up. What a lucky break. They had a lot of trouble sliding the case off and couldn't figure it out. Then one of them noticed a metal bar wedged between the frame and the shell. They gingerly removed a foot long metal bar that was about 1/4" square in cross-section that had what looked like paint covering about 4" of one end. It looked like something that was used to stir some paint or resin. It was laying across the back of the motherboard.
Needless to say had they powered the box up, the bar would have shorted out a lot of the conductors. We would have loved to know how it got there. It certainly didn't look to be any part of the box that had simply come loose.
Aside from that the BeBox was fun to play around with. I think it still is serving MP3s in another lab.
-tim
BeOS ... will they be selling that as well ? I am not talking about the boxed version of a product no longer produced or supported. I mean the rights to it and the source code. I wonder if a company like IBM would come along, buy it and GPL it. It has a pretty quick, nice gui. XFree86 is seems like its getting slower and slower these days.
I think what would be really cool is that everyone who goes to the auction protests the DMCA and constantly shouts out that Be has to Open Source it's abandonware.
Speaking of abandonware, this now means it's 100% legal for me to download BeOS for free off Kazaa. Go open source!
Doesn't this story look familiar?
You wont be getting any BeBox parts, I can almost guarantee you that. I had a BeBox back in '98 that was missing the plastic "diffuser cover" from one of the LED CPU meters, and *nobody* (not even
people @ Be, who were very helpful in looking) had spare parts. Emails from people @Be indicated that most all of their people had switched to BeOS/Intel, and there were no spare parts for the BeBoxen left - and this was 1998.
debian dist geared toward multimedia production.
ska
I think Christian Bauer made a PowerMac emulator for BeOS PPC, called "SheepShaver" or something like that.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Palm bought it to get an advanced OS that they could put in super PDAs and WebPad type systems (supposedly...). Why else would Palm buy the company- to gut it a loss?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
With less than 2000 ever made (roughly 1200 66mhz and 400+ 133mhz machines, I believe), you're last realistic chance of getting one for less than the price of used car was several years ago. I have no doubt that up to 2 or 3 dozen machines will be available at this auction, but the faact that it's been posted on slashdot has surrely locked in the prices at something above $2500 per. Besides, you'd prolly just try to install linux on them.
Heh, reminds me of the guy running fifty Star Wars 1 trailers at same time on low-end pc. To bad bedope.com closed and no longer has that image.
:)
(It's almost as good as the one where the BFS-guy xeroxes his butt.
in theory you could install linux on the bebox and then install MacOS using Mac-on-Linux but I have no idea whether it would work. It would also probably violate the MacOS EULA, if you care.
Doorstops, I wanted to get a Mac Cube for that...
Ahh well.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Anyone want to make me an offer? Almost mint condition, only the gray pegs on top are broken off (stupid design) otherwise many PC manufactures could learn from this box; The HD are mounted SIDEWAYS, so you dont bleed all over the box when trying to plug in the drive cables, and it got plenty of space, maybe I'll fit it with an ATX MB someday, which of course will be dual CPU. :)
Thank you mr. Gassee, it was fun, shame to see you go. Now, can I bid for the be.com domain?
J.
No, I don't work for DoveBid nor do I have any interest in them. Just something I stumbled onto awhile back.
"Due to the circumstances, the web site has been reduced to the links that appear on the left. "
maybe I should do that to my website, you think I could get $11M out of it?
-shadoelord
this is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
I auction therefore I am
Seriously this is just another case of really sharp guys who intentionally forgot or ignored the fact that great technology does not a great company make. How must it have been to be a mid level techie there knowing that no matter how great Be technology was the company was going to screw itself into the ground because the people at the top simply could not understand the world as anything other than a reflection of their own brilliance.
Taliban.
I used to work at Be, and I doubt there will be any BeBoxes at this auction. There were very few BeBoxes still in the possession of Be, Inc early in 2001, and I bet that the former employees of Be have taken any functioning BeBoxes that were left. There were a few BeBoxes in the QA lab that were being used to capture serial debugging output from other machines (BeBoxes have 4 serial ports) so perhaps those machines might be available at auction, but I really doubt it.
What you're more likely to find at the auction are a whole bunch of cheesy PCs.
Hmmmm.... since they're auctioning, did anyone else notice that eBay in pig-latin is "Be"?
Hmmmmm.....
--jw
I was just feeling like a smartass that day. hahaha