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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.
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
Palm Be Apple Triple Merger?
How to Download YouTube Videos
Are they also auctioning off the copyright to the code?
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.
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
Actually, I'm not sure of that. All these chairs are all chairs that Herman miller has already sold. They aren't getting anymore $$$ from the auction of these.
Besides, doesn't change of ownership void any warrenty they have?
Do you Gentoo!?
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
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.
"I wonder what trade secrets the chair hides.. "
Whichever ones happened to be specifically blown right out their asses would be my guess.
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!"..."
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.
> Dotcom bust has really helped the Herman Miller company.... Yeah, they had to start laying people off when all the companies that had bought two Aerons per employee started going under.
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
I'm sure www.be.com is worth some dough!
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?
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'.
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
Well, if I was due my back pay, I'd sure as hell walk off with whatever I could. Be happy to give it back, but it'll cost the exact amount of back pay I'm due.
It all depends on how much the information is worth...
This is NOT something I'd be recommending. I worked at a dotcom that folded in late '99, and since there was a big question about our final paychecks, a number of employees decided to walk out with hardware in lieu of cash. Since management didn't seem to care, and since nobody was going to be employed later on anyway, then nobody gets hurt, right? Wrong!
What happened? Well, the liquidation company (employed by the court) realized that there was missing equipment right away. They rewound the security videotape for the building and ID'd the employees who'd walked out with equipment. The next day they called the police and had most of them arrested. IIRC, eleven of them were charged with felony grand theft, and quite a few more were charged with simple theft and burglary (a couple IT guys with keys came back the next day). Without fail, ALL of them offered to return the equipment, but they liquidator refused to drop the charges and everyone eventually plead no contest. Most of the employees were given fines and restitution FAR larger than the value of the equipment they took, a handful of the employees were put on probation, and two of the employees who re-entered the building were actually given brief jail stays (14 days IIRC).
All of the employees learned an unfortunate lesson about property rights and bankruptcy. You see, the moment the judge OK'd the bankruptcy and liquidation, the equipment became the legal property of the COURT with controllership assigned to the liquidator. The employees had an honest grievance with Company X, but they avenged that grievance by stealing from an entity that wasn't involved in it. Legally, it's the equivalent to stealing your neighbors TV because the guy down the street took $500 from your living room. There are legal ways to deal with the guy down the street, but you have no right to steal from someone else in return.
The ironic thing was that we were all paid within two weeks anyway, with a two month severance bonus to boot!
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
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..
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..."