Slashdot Mirror
The Be Lives!
An anonymous reader submits: "As reported on the OS News:
BeOS 5 PE Max Edition is based on the original BeOS 5 PE with an additional number of drivers, add-ons, AthlonXP/Pentium4 patches and more software. It includes new development tools from the OpenBeOS team but you will also be able to select the old tools. This is an ideal way to install BeOS 5 off a bootable CD image, for all those who wanted to try out BeOS but they were unable to do so because of the bugs/drivers and patches BeOS 5 PE needs to have applied into it before it successfully run on or support most modern PCs. BeBits has an overview of the files included in the package, and downloads for the Be Max in parts or as a whole (all 213MB). Enjoy!"
Why the fuck is this in the BSD section? BSD is only dying, it's not totally dead like BeOS is.
Now, if I'm lucky, I can get half the hardware on my machine working under BeOS and enjoy the dozens of applications available for it! I cannot express the sheer joy of being able to use something considerably less functional than even Linux.
--sdem
who should be more offended, BeOS zealots, or BSD zealots?
Why not fork?
God, I feel like a complete idiot. All this time I thought this was the "BSD" section, not the "BeSD" section.
(-1, redundant, offtopic, whatever, whatever)
I write in my journal
Who is making releases anyway? Who has their paws on the source? Surely not Palm?
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
If someone posted this in the Slashdot Linux section (if it had one -- it doesn't need one, for reasons that are pretty obvious to all), we'd be virtually buried under a blizzard of "Be isn't Free Software/Be isn't Linux/How dare you compare Be with Linux" postings. Think about it& -- you know it's true. Of course, I'm going to get hammered with negative moderations for suggesting that Slashdot itself has joined with the BSD Is Dying troll in wanton BSD-bashing, but how else can we interpret this?
I try to be impartial; hell, I've run Linux since Yggsadril, and the computer nearest my left foot is running RedHat 7.2 (plus a customized kernel and security patches) while the one nearest my right foot runs FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE. I read the LKML and a few freebsd-* mailing lists. My Alpha runs Linux, since Linux supports it better than any flavor of BSD. And I firmly believe that Linux is the best shot the free software community has against Microsoft. And, of course, Linux != Slashdot, so I'll continue to use and support it as much as I always have.
But now I have to say that the anti-BSD bias on Slashdot, which has been strongly hinted at before, has become starkly obvious. The mentality of many Slashdotters -- that Linux and BSD are somehow in competition rather than allies in the battle against Redmond -- seems to be infiltrating Slashdot itself. It's been subtle in the past, evidenced when major BSD events are simply ignored while random fluff gets reported. Now, it comes right out in the open.
I guess I've been in denial.
None of this is to be taken as slander against Be, which is about as fine a closed-source, not-really-free product as I've ever seen. It doesn't belong in the BSD section, however, and putting it here should be as much an insult against Be as it is against BSD.