Slashdot Mirror
Be Gear Up For Auction
Well, if you live near the Menlo Park, CA area you should join what's evidently a number of slashdot readers at the Be, Co. auction. With the merger and dissolution of Be, all of their remaining hardware/furniture will be up for auction.
... at these things? I keep reading stories about people paying a zillion $$$ for a PII desktop.
Any good deals on BeBoxes?
Having been to a number of these in my local area (nyc), I can say it is an excellent place to pick up hardcore geek toys that you would not otherwise be able to afford (cheap servers anyone?).
But for Be, there might be an added sentimental value to items. Pick up the box that you once downloaded your favorite os from, that type of thing.
Either way, its a sad day that we have to witness a Be firesale.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
It's a sad comment that even at Be, Inc., they only had 20 BeBoxen left to auction off. I used to lust after those things. I wish they'd taken off. If I was in the US, I'd seriously consider trying to snap one up at the auction.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Bill dartboards
star trek desk calendars
paper clip art
nerf guns
frisbees
etc.
lysergically yours
Just put "FP" next time. Honestly before everything !
Palm Be Apple Triple Merger?
How to Download YouTube Videos
damn...i was hoping to pick up a good foosball table...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Are they also auctioning off the copyright to the code?
here although this new link has the location and some of the items for sale.
Some of the pics have an interesting backdrop I wonder what trade secrets the chair hides.. LOL
If anyone can get me a Aeron chair for under $100, I'll give'm $150 for one!
Dotcom bust has really helped the Herman Miller company....
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Forget the furniture, I want to buy the whole place! :)
yeah, they'd probably get a hellufalot more money auctioning the goods online.
Perhaps these arpagan.com people should consider bidding on a better web server.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Bringing Linux or NetBSD up on a Be would be a step cooler* than running on NeXT or tricked out Amiga hardware.
* yes, cooler is entirely subjective, insert comments about having a life, etc... But tell me you wouldn't want to at least test-drive a BeUNIX Beastie.
Not much of a dot com auction then.
sulli
RTFJ.
Be Gone!
At the special meeting of it stockholders, held on November 12, 2001, Be's stockholders approved the sale of substantially all of its intellectual property and other technology assets to Palm, Inc. and the dissolution of Be through the adoption of a plan of dissolution.
Gee, thanks for posting this on Slashdot. There goes any chance of getting something at a reasonable price.
When I first read the subject, my first thought was a badly phased title written in ebonics.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
nothing will go on the cheap.
/.ed as the site.
I wonder if the auction itself is going to be as
Unfortunately, most of the stuff is just nothing-fancy standard office equipment. Be wasn't living the hi-life like the dotcoms. It's too bad they didn't make it.
An annonymous coward tells us that if your on the internet a huge auction is on right now at ebay. Get there quick to avoid disappointment. Update: Readers have pointed out that as ebay don't run linux on their web servers this isn't really news. Sorry for wasting your time with non linux/unix news items.
A friend of mine worked for a company who went bankrupt and had an auction of their remaining assets. Strangely, alot of the really cool stuff seemed to just disappear before the auction could take place, presumably stolen by the owners, employees, or friends of each, I don't know. Certainly this was illegal and if the creditors found out there could have been a lawsuit I suppose.
Who's job is it to make sure the remaining assets of the company make it to the auction? Ultimately the creditors are to lose (more).
I Heart Sorting Networks
But really, why didn't Beos ever really catch on? Das blinken lights? But even Madonna used it on tour, I used it on my laptop, it had great multimedia infections.
Maybe they needed a cuter animal to mascot for them.
Here is how they looked in 1998, when hope was dawning. http://web.archive.org/web/19980101-19981231re_/ht tp://be.com
...according to the auction page, there aren't any.
But you can get an almost-as-ancient Apple "Proforma" computer, and a Laserwriter II!
- 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 picked up two very nice chairs from Sam Clar -- almost unused, full warrantee, half price. Seems they used to have a nice business renting furniture to dot-coms. Now they have a lot of chairs in inventory that local store managers are instructed to move out at what they can get for them. Notice how sitting is this chair help speling and gramaticly correctly my slash dot postings. Comfy, though.
With connectors galor on the back, many more than a ATX PC. Heaps of different Audio ports, multiple MIDI ports & of course the famouse BeBox 'Geek Port'.
Really it had 1st class hardware for its day.
Well a summary anyway, at "the Linux for BeBox website".
Here's a quote...
"...Be only made about 1,800 BeBoxes, I believe, and they are rapidly becoming collector's items, so you'll have to move fast. Be produced two models, which were identical in all but the processors. The first model was the Dual603-66, which was powered by two PowerPC 603 CPUs, each operating at 66Mhz. The second model was the Dual603-133, which had two PowerPC 603e CPUs. Each of these ran at 133Mhz, and in addition had twice the level 1 cache size of the CPUs in the Dual603-66. Both models of BeBox have been criticised for the lack of a level 2 cache, but it was a simple engineering choice: the MPC105 (the memory controller, bus arbitrator and PCI bridge) could either support a single CPU and a level 2 cache, or two CPUs. The performance gains due to a level 2 cache were vastly outweighed by the performance boost from a second CPU. The CPUs are soldered directly to the motherboard; one cannot swap them for faster (or, if you were perverse enough) slower processors.
The BeBox has some amazing features. Firstly, it has both the ISA and PCI busses which are so common in the x86 PC world. This means that one can plug any standard PC peripheral into it. It also has both ATA (IDE) and SCSI 2 disk interfaces, with an external SCSI 2 port. It has a standard AT keyboard interface, a standard PS/2 mouse port, four standard 9-pin RS232 serial ports, four MIDI ports (two in and two out, for two channels), two standard PC joystick ports and 16 bit sound line in and out through RCA phono plugs and stereo minijacks for a microphone and headphones. It also has some more strange IO abilities; three InfraRed ports (for IR device control, not IrDA) and something known as the "GeekPort".
Plus, the BeBox has one amazingly impressive feature that no other machine in the world has. On the front bezel of the BeBox, there are two bar graphs made of green lights. Each graph represents the amount of work each CPU is doing - you can tell at a glance whether the application you're running is taxing the machine's processors or not. As they say, "We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand the hardware, but we can see the blinking lights!"..."
What is the fasicnation with this stuff anyway? For the love of God, stop!
i thought they had about 1800
If you want an answer to this, go to ebay or Ubid or any other number of auction sites. The stuff usually gies for OUTRAGEOUS prices. Frankly, I find much better deals in the want ads...or at swap meets or even yard sales. I have no idea what it is about auctions that make so many ppl overbid. Just for the hell of it, I put in a bunch of what I thought to be reasonable bids at ebay. I didn'twin a single thing..and many items went for over twice what I bid...some even for more then you could buy them for new. THEN add shipping & handling in...
Anyway, I can't figure the attraction out....
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/26/052721 3&mode=thread
Yes.
really? than what is this?p ag es/500_%20Be%20Box.htm
http://www.arpagan.com/auctions/2002Jan16/pics/
Go to MacMinute.com, it's still more or less up and running.
D
This goes back a ways, but I remember meeting one of the owners of a small ISP called "Thoughtport", that ran from Columbia, Missouri. He ran the whole ISP on BeBoxes. I think he may have been the only ISP in the U.S. to do such a thing.
I wonder what ever happened to all of his stuff?
I know the ISP went out of business years ago - but he had a nice collection of Be equipment there.
I've been to Be a few times, and there were defininately no Aeron chairs or other fancy stuff that I noticed. It was more government issue type desks etc. It would be like liquidating a bus station.
We have an original BeBox in the lab. Since it is very unlikely that any newer version of BeOS will be available for it in the future, we are looking for a copy of the last released version of the OS that will run on a BeBox. Can anyone out there help?
While I hope that some people get some good deals on the remainder of Be's assets, it's still a darn shame. Be was an elegant OS that really showed how much CPU horsepower Windows was wasting. And it was not a rehashed version of some OS from the 1970s with a hundred layers of legacy code piled on it.
;-) probably had little desire to be allied with a company as fickle as Be.
I think that much of Be's failure can be traced to their lack of loyalty to their customers. They abandoned customers that bought the BeBox, orphaning it with no support. They abandoned users who ran Be on Mac hardware. They abandoned people who purchased BeOS for the PC. Their web pages urged people to check back often for updates to BeOS 5, yet they made none for over a year. They even abandoned the developers that were making commercial and non-commercial software for BeOS, switching to an exorbitant pay-for-support arrangement that pretty much killed development.
When they announced that they were going into the Internet appliance market, that was the end for them. After abandoning every customer that they had ever had, they wondered why Internet appliance makers didn't flock to them. A major player in that industry (when it existed
let alone a Palm acquisition announcement.
I'm sure www.be.com is worth some dough!
http://www.arpagan.com/auctions/2002Jan16/pics/ind ex.htm
PS: if the link doesnt work then your browser isnt standards compliant.
My old alma mater has auctions every month, I saw a guy go home with 50 NeXt systems for $400 and another guy get a whole slew of mixed laser printers for $1 a piece. My own personal pride is the IMB 8086 portable, not laptop but portable, weighs a ton but it works. Got it for $.50. Bought all sorts of other equipment really cheap as well.
Who cares about the BeBox - What about the fog machine and disco ball in the server room? Howabout that row of macintoshes 'dressed' as simpsons characters?
There's nothing quite like an auction to parcel off someones hopes and dreams OT I know but I'm going to miss Be
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these /. readers.
usually ends up with a "-1 Offtopic"...
The editor's provinsialismus this time beats that. How utterly uninteresting for more than 96.7% of the
BTW, I saw there is a sales on used Commodore books at Carnaby Street. If you hurry you might get some. The line wasn't to long when I left.
Yesterday, booted into BeOS for the first time in over a year.
Such a snappy OS. Everything is so amazingly responsive.
Then, I opened up a project I had been working on, an SNMP console. The APIs to the system were such a pleasure to use. Everything was an object, and every window ran in its own thread. Just from building the basic app template, you gained services and abilities that Mac, Windows, and Linux still don't have without a lot of inelegant effort.
If you love software development, as I do, the BeOS was a technological masterpiece in a world of mediocrity. Learning to develop for it was truly a joy that you'd have to experience to appreciate.
It really made me sad to think that all of that is now gone.
I played around with the interface one last time, then I rebooted into windows and wiped my BeOS partitions.
Very very sad.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I'm from Columbia, MO - wasn't aware that Thoughtport was running Be, and I'd think that I'd have heard about it if they were 100%. It's likely that they had several there, but I doubt it was a situation where EVERYTHING ran Be.
The most significant thing I remember about Thoughtport? They sucked ass.
Oh, and if anyone's going to this auction and wants to grab one of the BeBoxes for me, shoot me an email:
johnthorensenATcfswebmail.com
-John
"Certainly this was illegal...", well duh. Naturally, the possibility that at least the employees may not have been paid in a while doesn't end up on a legal pad. The last few months of almost any firm headed for liquidation frequently features a measure of sharp dealings by all involved. So, don't moan just because some half-broke hotdesked schmoh folded up his workstation and walked before you could bid $50 for it.
Luke, help me take this mask off
That's just great. You just slashdotted an auction.
I mean, beside the fact that everything will be more expensive now because of the many bids, as other readers, have pointed out, just imagine an auction, SLASHDOTTED.
The auction room packed with people, people waiting outside, people making constant HTTP GETs, sorry, that's requests for getting in, the auction becoming not so responsive etc.
Mirrors anyone?
can you PLEASE do something about this bug that lets people lenghthen threads, as much as I could just put these people in 'foe' mode I'd appreciate it if you did your job and cleaned up your code.
The Slashdot Effect: A new for
Auction psychology 101: People are convinced that if they buy something at an auction, they'll get a bargain, so they spend a fortune on getting their 'bargain'.
My God! Look at this:
p ag es/492_%20Routers%20Network%20Servers.htm
http://www.arpagan.com/auctions/2002Jan16/pics/
Its absolutly awful!
Bill dartboards
star trek desk calendars
paper clip art
One underappreciated O/S, incl. source.
nerf guns
frisbees
etc.
The SGI Origin2K and Onyx2 Racks took it even longer, They had a systemcontroller (mmsc) with its own display, where you started and stopped the machine. It was nice looking at 64 CPU load bars in color. separating system,interrupt,user etc. SGI made a cheaper black and white mmsc for the origin/onyx 3000 series, so they was obviously too expensive, but cool.
We can also help you get a clean image of the internal SanDisk.
Thanks,
Chase
-==-
That's quite amusing, considering that egg and WIPO were the same person.
First, I'd like to thank the Slashdot editors for publicizing this auction, thereby assuring that every item will be bid up well over retail by over-enthusiastic tourists, shutting out budget-minded unemployed guys like me. *sigh*
Oh well, there's probably a few things you should know about the stuff up for auction. First off is that Gassée ran a tight fiscal ship. As such, you aren't going to find Aeron chairs or 26" flat panel displays everywhere. Fact is, the standard developer workstation was a single processor Frankenbox in a generic beige ATX minitower, with a 16" (nominal) monitor and $5 keyboard. A typical RAM installation was 128M, with 64M also being common. So you're not going to see 21" Viewsonics in great numbers. Nor are you going to see 1.4GHz Athlon machines; just about everyone used 266-700MHz Pentium machines. The sound card of choice, when there was one at all, was an ISA-based Soundblaster descendant.
Second, towards the end, there were virtually no functional BeBoxes left. Even the internal build machine was decommissioned when PowerPC BeOS was internally deprecated, around the middle of 2001. Those that were left were used primarily as serial debugging terminals.
Third, there is a ton of junk at Be. Dead monitors, dead motherboards, dead hard drives, dead PCI cards, bad RAM, etc. We ran sutff into the ground there. At one point we had 18 dead monitors lined up in the hall (which were slated for a massive roof disposal, but I convinced management to have them recycled instead). We knew where all those piles of crud were, and to avoid them. If the last of the Be people didn't throw it out, I'm sure the auction people can't tell the difference, and will try and sell paperweights alongside the good stuff.
And fourth, the former employees got first crack at all the good stuff.
What all this basically means is that you can be sure that all the BeBoxes that are left are either broken or incomplete (or, in some instances, empty cases being used to hold up bookshelves).
As for the good stuff that remains, I call dibs on the 'scope and logic analyzer :-).
Schwab
Former employee of Be, Inc.
P.S: Whoever ends up with the espresso machine better take damn good care of it, or I'll come after your ass.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
"This is the very chair, the very desk, and the very phone used by Jean Louis G-ass-e when he told Apple he was worth $400 million and they could piss off... and I got it for twenty bucks, slightly less than what Palm paid for Be"
I wish I had a Be Pocket Protector.
I've got more junk in my apartment... I've got 2 Dell Poweredge 6400 (yeah the big fuckers) sitting in my bed room running linux doing pretty much nothing else... oh acting as a firewall... servering up my haiku page... oh and here in cleveland... heading my fucking apartment.
this cube has the rummored copy of BeOS r5 for G based PPC's on?
However buys it (or the iMac), please replay...
I wish I have the cash for a BeBox.
mlk
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Wow, someone else out there does know what I'm talking about. Gotta love Slashdot... even the most obscure reference gets a reply!
But yeah, I think the guy I met was named Leo. I only talked with him one time, because he was an acquaintance of a good friend of mine who was going to Mizzou.
Anyway, I didn't hear a whole lot positive about ThoughtPort - but I did get to tour his "facility". As I recall, it was all set up in some sort of mobile home/trailer home type of thing. It may not have been 100% Be, but it was pretty darn close. I think he had some sort of web camera pointed at a fish tank in the place, and that may have been a Windows-based Intel box. I'm almost positive he had web, news, and email running on all Be Boxes though. I'd never seen so much Be stuff in one place before, or after that.
I wonder if the e-villa's and various other IA's are production level equipment or if they have cool stuff on them..
Hopefully someone will buy a couple of the desktop pc's and find out that they have tons of sourcecode to BeOS.. hehe.. I wish..
Click here
http://www.arpagan.com/auctions/2002Jan16/pics/pa
This is obviously why they failed.
Believe it or not, I actually thought about doing it that way.
Then I looked at the array of monitors lining the hall, and imagined the huge pile of shattered plastic and glass they would become post-roof disposal. Cleaning up just four monitors was a real hassle. Cleaning up 18 would have taken hours. Plus, there was a significant probability that, as the impact zone became a non-flat heap of monitor debris, one of them would have taken a bad bounce and gone sailing through the windows of the Chuck E. Schwab office on the ground floor.
Further, recycling a monitor isn't as simple as recycling an aluminium can. Careful disassembly is required. Sometimes the monitor can be brought back to life by replacing a bad component (in which case, roof-disposing it was a horrible waste).
So, while it would have been a magnificent sight -- and, honestly, if David Letterman had asked us to do it, I would have agreed -- I just couldn't see releasing that much toxic material into the local environment. I knew I sure as hell didn't want to clean it up.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Notice 'Here's a quote... ', & then the quotation marks "...the quote..."