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BeOS Ready for a Comeback as Zeta OS
Anil Kandangath writes "BeOS, the operating system that could have been the foundation for Mac OS X, but almost died, instead has returned as Zeta OS -- which is supposed to be fast, stable, media centric and boot within 15 seconds. Zeta is being released by yellowTAB of Germany and has applications such as an office suite and the Firefox browser bundled with it. Most BeOS applications will also run as-is. Screenshots are available." According to the NewsForge story linked there, the release could be as soon as next month.
Which would have been technically better as Apple's new OS - the nextstep based OSX, or a BeOS based OS?
One of the most appealing facets of BeOS, IIRC, is the fact that it was FREE. At ~$100+tax, I don't see this flying off store shelves. Furthermore, I didn't read anything about it supporting RISC architecture (did I miss it)?
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
It was back in 2002 at the CeBIT show in Germany that the people from YellowTAB gave me a "late beta" of Zeta for reviewing purposes. "Only a few problems left to fix", they said.
Turned out the entire GUI crashed all the time and tons of drivers where missing. Then came a big upgrade, then another beta and then... nothing.
Now it's 2005, and it's now "ready for a release next month". I suggest they bury it instead. For good, or turn the whole thing over to the OpenBeOS people.
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
I do work for a small German company called "zeta software".
Currently, yellowTab is selling the ZetaOS through multiple German home-order-TV shows to computer-illiterate persons. Of course most of them fail to successfully install ZetaOS on their supermarket-bought PCs.
A daily average of two or there of them call us (not yellowTab!) and ask what they can do, now that they crashed both their Windows installation and their ZetaOS.
Even the hints beside every phone number on our website that we have absolutely nothing to do with that ZetaOS did not help much.
yellowTab seems to be aware of the problem that many many customers seems to be very discontented with ZetaOS and additionally call all companies that seem to have the Word "zeta" in their name (which are quite a few), because yellowTab hired a marketing agency (or how you call that in English) that called us some time ago on the phone.
This agency seemed to have the task to call all those zeta-named companies and apologize for the "idiots" (= ZetaOS customers) calling them. The agency further asked us what the average questions of the ZetaOS customers was. You could call that "Indirect surveying" ;-).
I really whish myself and all zeta-named companies that yellowTab runs out of venture-capital really soon and that they disappear and never ever return again *sigh*.
-- Watch me working: www.magerquark.de
I concur, and therefore propose a new and relevent benchmark for system boot time called BMPY or Boot Minutes Per Year. This will measure the amount of time (a 24/7 machine) spends per-year in a booting state. for instance imagine you can boot Zeta in 15 seconds but you need to reboot every three days (this is a hypothetical example I have no idea how often it will need to be rebooted) then you have 365/3 boots per year or 122 total boots for a total boot time of 1830 seconds or 30.5 BMPY. Now take another system for example linux that takes 1.5min (a conservative estimate, my system with no optimization takes slightly less) too boot but needs to be rebooted only once a month (again conservative as sometimes I only reboot at major kernel releases) for a total of 90*12 or 1,080 seconds, which comes to 18 BMPY. So in this case although it takes the linux system longer to boot, it actually spends 12.5 minutes less per year booting up. I hope someone will take this idea into serious consideration and maybe create a standard benchmark.
-kaplanfx
Visualize Whirled Peas
I call this the Disney effect. If you've ever been to a Disney theme park you typically wait about 20 minutes to get on a ride (excluding the "mountains") however they break the line up and never let you see the whole thing as well as have little pitstops of entertainment before you get on the actual ride.
I've always thought it was brilliant and was reminded of it the first time I saw Windows 2000 boot (it goes through 3 stages, NT text, then the splash, then the screen before login).
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
no, i do understand.
the problem of storing metadata that way is that its non portable. it's exactly the same problem that plagued macos classic. great when you only deal with macs but bad when the internet comes around and suddenly you have no simple way to transport files around.
also bad when you need to talk eg nfs or smb.
storing metadata in bundles and the whole bundle system allows macos to be transparenly "native" on just about any filesystem.
linux and nt have the ability to attach metadata to files, but nobody uses it. it would be a huge pain if anyone did start, because it would then suffer from again being non portable.
osx bundles are a sort of compromise between having metadata available, but in a way thats portable. its a bit ugly, but it works.
its also all xml, woo woo.
BeOS was insanely great, with some innovations that were entirely ahead of its time. But do they really have that much going for them now? Microsoft, Apple and several Linux groups already have highly GPU-integrated window managers going, for example, and work's being done on more metadata-rich filesystem-based platforms - WinFS and Spotlight both sit on top of NTFS and HFS+ respectively.
I wouldn't be surprised if it'd take them a few months or years to catch up to the current state of technology, because it's been maintained by enthusiasts ever since the company maintaining it dropped it. Even for something that was ahead of its time, it has catching up to do, both when it comes to technology and killer apps, and I guess what I'm asking is... is it worth it?