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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.
[Sorry, I reposted this with proper formatting.] Here's your answer: Nothing, absolutely nothing. BeOS proponents and their marketing team make lots of claims, NONE of which have been substantiated. The multimedia support is complete bunk. It takes an army of developers to keep up good multimedia support for all the graphics cards and nothing comes close to touching Windows in that regard since vendors write their own drivers. FACT: BeOS sucks for multimedia support. Its driver support is very limited. I've actually tried running multimedia software on it and it performed WORSE than on windows and linux significantly. Are we to believe that the BeOS dvelopers managed to surpass every single expert in the entire world and developer SUPER SECRET ULTRA-FAST audio/mpeg decoding algorithms that are orders of magnitude faster than existing ones? FACT: BeOS only boots faster because it has a lot of basic stuff taken out. One can easily trim down windows or linux to make it boot just as fast or faster, but that means removing a lot of functionality. FACT: BeOS is behind the times in the OS world. Are we to honestly believe that a small team of developers has managed to create a revolutionary OS that's beat out what numerous developers on Windows, Linux and many other OSes have created and spent many many more man hours on? Of course not. Their file system is utter crap. They have a 1GB memory limitation that was just recently fixed. Talk about poor design. All the "graet new features" that it actually has are features that major OSes have had for many years now. BeOS is VERY inferior and is barely catching up. Conclusion: It's all completely unsubstantiated snake oil. Notice how BeOS relies 100% on anecdotal evidence and unbiased persons who use the OS manage to remain totally unimpressed. Why do you think there are ZERO benchmarks for BeOS? Why do you think they don't list all the UNSUPPORTED hardware on their site? Because their OS truly does suck.
"Steinberg ported Nuendo to BeOS. You'll notice that it could process 96 media tracks simultaneously. Why is this significant? Because on the same hardware the NT version could only do 48 tracks."
Steinberg struggled valiantly but were ultimately unable to overcome the limitations of BeOS and gave up without ever shipping Nuendo. Only people who've tried to write a large application for Be's GUI or Media kits can know the horror that these poor developers experienced, I hope they were well paid since no-one really ever got to see their work.
ASIO is/ was limited to 48 simultaneous channels, a value which could probably be increased and is not related to any OS design problem in NT or other Windows family operating systems.
There simply aren't any decent pro-audio cards properly support in BeOS. So Steinberg never saw Nuendo run with 96 or even 48 simultaneous hardware I/Os, that was just what Be Inc's specifications said on paper.
And the whole point of this thread is that Be's on-paper specifications for BeOS were wishful thinking. The "white paper" that is the source of many claims about BeOS isn't actually written about BeOS R5, it's about JLG's vision of a hypothetical media OS that doesn't exist. The oft-quoted statistics about audio latency are from an informal test of the raw driver framework - Be's Media Kit (which is slow, and worse, asynchronous) is left out of the picture. But without the Media Kit a tool like Nuendo is unwieldy at best.
Be's hype-artists really knew their stuff. Example: With a brief exception of BeOS R4x on a minority of cards, BeOS used only software GL. That's not great for throwing lots of polygons around, but it does mean you can afford to render textures that are also touched by the main CPU very cheaply. Hence, a 3D cube with movies playing on the sides. Quite hard with a 1998 3D card, but pretty easy in 2D mode with a little bit of hand-coded assembler.
Oh, and quite useless. One of the most striking things in retrospect about BeOS demos is that they're all so useless. At least yellowTAB's Bernd shows BeOS cutting and pasting frames from a movie into a presentation, something you can imagine doing, unlike playing movies on the side of a rotating cube.
You should say "imagine that everybody switched off lights..."
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, still exists.