Slashdot Mirror
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.
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..."
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.
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
I'm fairly sure you just clicked on over to google to find that link. There are no actual instructions on how to build a LED CPU meter or what the program code is for it, or how to assemble it, or anything. Please stop karma whoring and check your links first.
~z
sig?
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
"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
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?"
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
This is about as DYI as going to Microsoft's website and trying to write your Own os from there.
where's the schematics, parts list, Howto, faq?
showing a bunch of pictures that are horribly blurry (if it's a digital camera, no excuse, retake until it's clear, oh and USE A FLASH!)
This is not DYI this is a "lookie what I did! no I wont tell you how I did it, but Lookie!" These type of websites are worthless and should be removed from the net.
Doesn't this story look familiar?
"I wouldn't be suprised of a custom LED CPU meter is at least half the price of prebuilt ones."
I would't be surprised, either, since if the cost is anywhere from 50% of the price, to infinity, it satisfies your statement. Perhaps you meant to say you wouldn't be surprised if it was no more than or, even better less than half the price?
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.
had one years ago..
l ed -stat.txt
schemetics
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/status/
.
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.
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.
If they couldn't keep up with a bunch of hobbyist volunteers, they really had the fanboy feeding frenzy coming to them.
...and just what compelling reason would there for abandonware NOT to be forced into the public domain?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Taliban.
Hmmmm.... since they're auctioning, did anyone else notice that eBay in pig-latin is "Be"?
Hmmmmm.....
--jw
(off topic)
hey zerocool^,
wanted to ask you a question about these $400 rebates on hp dvd (I'm on that site now and don't see them....)
but I don't see any direct way to contact you...
you can email me at valenti at msu.edu
I was just feeling like a smartass that day. hahaha