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.
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..."
>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."
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!!!
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.
"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
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 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.
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
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.
A great ride? Man, I rode it from $6 a share to $3 a share. Wasn't so great for me! :)
At least I knew when to fold it, and didn't get stuck holding the bag at 10 cents a share. (My friend who was investing with me wanted to keep holding, I held his portion until they hit $2 then sold his share anyway, I told him it was for his own good.)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
I think maybe you mean "Be" in pig latin is "ebay".
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.