Slashdot Mirror
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.
Windows boots in 15 seconds, too, on a supercomputer.
Which would have been technically better as Apple's new OS - the nextstep based OSX, or a BeOS based OS?
Shouldn't that be ZomBe OS?
Starsucks
I had a friend about a month ago who told me he was learning C.
Why was he learning C? Because BeOS was coming back, and they were gonna need people to port applications. And porting was easier if you knew C. And BeOS was gonna be the next big thing so they needed to have lots of apps ported to it.
...and that's all there is to it.
You can get BeOS 5 Max free. It's moderately recent, and it's a nice way to take a look at what BeOS is all about if you aren't in the loop. It even boots as a Live CD if you're so inclined, although you can't do much besides click on stuff if you boot it that way.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
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?
I looked over their site and couldn't find hardware requirements documented.
One thing I love about open source operating systems is that the system requirements are right there, up front -- or at least you don't have to look hard to find them.
It claims to boot in 15 seconds, which I don't doubt. It would be great to use on a laptop for that very reason. However, will my poor little laptop be able to handle it? I'd love to know before I get my hopes up.
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
Seems like the Unix base for OS X worked out pretty damn well for them... I don't think the boom Apple is going through right now could have been any more significant with a BeOS-based OS.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
BeOS was considered very strongly as a foundation for what would become OS X instead of NeXT - see the What is OS X? guide.
To BeOS, or not to BeOS: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
This looks like a copy of OS X that's been brainwashed by pre-XP Windows. Or maybe just fell into a bad crowd.
Zeta OS? Now what are they going to call the next version? It's like Apple calling their OS, OS Infinity.
Apparently you were never in grade school. The next version would be "Infinity plus one and no returns."
No, it is like Apple calling their OS "MacOS", and having the versions increment by 1 every time, for example, it was MacOS 9, and now Mac OS X, and the next one will be MacOS 11 or MacOS XI. Think induction.
The business model of Be was never to be an independent OS. All the main Be people were ex-Apple, and the the idea was to be purchased out by Apple. Be wasn't originally an Intel-based OS -- it was originally a PowerPC OS. Of course, this was before Jobs was brought back. After that happened, Be tried to reinvent itself as an alternative OS for Intel, and failed.
Plus, after Zeta, there are still eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, and omega.
Hmm, they seem to be using a fair bit of GNU in there. Better make it GNU/Zeta.
Or, if it's meant for novices, GNU/Be.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Well sure, if you hate Apple and wished it had dropped off the face of the earth in the late 90s, picking BeOS would be the way to go.
Without Jobs Apple would be worse off and near death, and this project would not exist?
Simple logic here folks, if I can get to work driving my car, why should I ride the bus which is more environmental friendly when it only goes half way to my destination?
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
The world seems pretty happy with iTunes, the colored iMac, the iPod, and the iPod mini.
How would the world be better off if Apple chose BeOS over Jobs? It's not immediately obvious to me.
GPL Deconstructed
To quote "Apple had been desperately seeking to create an operating system that could compete with the onslaught from Microsoft... "
"At this point Apple became interested in buying Be, a company that was becoming popular as the maker of the BeBox, running the BeOS. The deal between Apple's Gil Amelio and Be's Gassée never materialized - it has been often reported that Apple offered $125 million while Be wanted an "outrageous" $200 million plus."
When Apple's Copland plans failed, they looked for outside help. Jean-Louis Gassée's Be Inc. was one of those possible sources. Steve Jobs was the one they eventually chose.
BeOS would have been more lightweight and probably more efficient, but OS X is maturing into something quite useable. The UNIX roots of OS X have helped lure new developers and new types of users to the platform. Having more developers is never a bad thing.
BeOS would also have been a cleaner start. It's difficult to say how much (or if) UNIX is holding back MacOS X. I find OS X somewhat bloated, especially in terms of the number of files that it is comprised of. I wish it took less time to make a backup.
BeOS is/was also advanced in terms of file meta data. That situation is still quite messy in MacOS X.
What can I do with it that I can't do with a free Linux distro, or the Windows that I already have? Tell me why I should drop $100 on this.
When Apple realized that their own efforts (Taligent/Pink/Copland/Rhapsody/Whatever) to create a next-generation (pardon the pun) OS had failed, they started looking for another OS to purchase to use as a base for their next one.
Before Steve Jobs came along in a package deal with his new company NeXT, Apple was looking at Be as a potential aquisition:
"Despite interest from Apple to replace the Mac OS with BeOS, the system did not achieve a significant marketshare." (Wikipedia: BeOS)
Is Zeta based on BeOS code? Last I heard, BeOS was owned by Palm, and they had no plans to license it. Or is this a reverse engineered clone?
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
There wasn't really a proper Windows back in 1985 when AmigaOS hit the market. :-)
-Jope
It took me a second to get the subtle GNU/Ance of this post.
Now what are they going to call the next version?
OS Aleph Null
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I used to play with the system, but gave up due to lack of drivers, software etc. The advantages over Windows and MacOS was that BeOS just seemed so much more responsive. But in part that was because the underlying systems were simpler. While I never got around to writing non-trivial programs on the system, I suspect that simplicity meant that the programmer had fewer toys at the API level to play with than with other systems. Whether that would have impeded iTunes is an open question.
Editors: dost thou have no mercy? From the depths of hell, the server stabs at thee!
I'm bored, waiting for the DST to kick in.. ;-)
It took me a second to get the subtle GNU/Ance of this post.
Even if the puns are GNU, it's just a small step from GNU/Ance to GNU/Sance.
this crap about beOS coming back is all FUD, it doesn't support jack shit hardware.
Do you actually know this or are you just another worthless troll?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
>> That's pretty good. Does anyone else know of a fast booting OS? I personally hate waiting for my PC to boot up.
Most of the time my "boot up" is waiting 3 seconds for the monitor to warm up. I don't shut of the PC, just the monitor.
If you want a fast boot time, run linux and leave it running...
http://request-header.info
and was on it's 4th revision by the time it was shopped around to Apple.
IIRC, BeOS didn't have printing abilities at that time...
Either way, both OS's were leaps beyond Classic (System 7-based) MacOS. That's all that mattered to Apple at the time..
Apple didn't acquire NeXT/Jobs until after Be's founder got greedy and priced himself out of a future.
retard... Be and NeXT were up for the same buy out. Amelieo was the CEO of Apple at the time of the buy out... Buying Jobs was the best thing that guy did for Apple.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Yes, we know you are a dick.
It's hard to be the next OS for the Mac when Apple's CEO actually owns the other major contender.
At the time the decision was made Steve Jobs was not the CEO of Apple, nor was he employed by Apple and I believe he only owned 1 share of Apple stock.
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 --
IMHO the hardware was always more interesting. I really wish their hacker-oriented hardware caught on, but I'm sure content to see the OS die.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
My Windows XP SP2 box takes about 25 seconds from boot to login screen.
:)
(it only uses about 60 megs of RAM after logging on, as opposed to the 150+ after a fresh install)
Then again, I removed alot of the junk that comes with XP, and disabled 90% of the unnecessary services that default to running.
"BeOS is/was also advanced in terms of file meta data. That situation is still quite messy in MacOS X."
Apologies in advance for being ignorant, but what is file meta data and how is OSX messy with it?
"Derp de derp."
And you would know this offhand how?
I was in business school and can top that: "infinity plus two after rebate".
home
I'm in a subculture that has some membership overlap with zoophiles.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Riemann-zeta what.....
Ah, a furry, then?
Ah, I stand corrected then.
To clarify, Jobs has received a significant amount of Apple stock as part of the acquisition of NeXT. Jobs sold all of the stock (when it was trading around $14 a share.......... I think he sold it for around $120 million), except for one share, which he kept. This was a while ago though, and was in between the time that Apple acquired NeXT, and when Apple brought him on as a strategic advisor..... and the rest is history (with Jobs eventually taking over Apple, bringing in his NeXT people, ousting the old Apple guard, etc.). It's probably the most interesting thing about all of that.......... even though Apple was the one acquiring NeXT, the end result was essentially NeXT overtaking what Apple was at the time.
From power-on to login prompt, most modern PC's will take no longer then 10 seconds to boot into Windows XP on a clean install. If you add lots of software that starts up at boot time, it can take a lot longer - other factors like fragmentation and such can play a big part too.
I personally don't mind loading stuff in the background when I login. I don't find it particularly annoying - and you can just wait a few more seconds before you login if you want to be a masocist like that.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Yup.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
100 bucks seems a bit steep. I would love to at least play around with it and give it a go, but not for 100.00. Hopefully they'll either come out with a LiveCD or come to their senses and drop the price to something more reasonable.
"Well, I am mad, and I'm a crazy fucka when it comes to tea"
Not to mention a great deal of the reason for the success of OS X was its inclusion of Carbon for a smooth transition from the OS 9 APIs in addition to things their developers were already well-versed in, namely the NeXTStep namespaces and Obj-C, the mach microkernel, and PDF for Quartz.
BeOS, IIRC, had none of this.
Actually, I do and this reply was written from Zeat Neo Sp1 running on Athlon Barton 2500+ 512MB ram :)
It boots in about 18 sec and I can actually run Mozilla 1.8a5 on 19th sec. 18 sec does not mean that I start seeing the desktop but won't be able run appl.
Oktokie
Strictly peaking you should be using ordinals, not cardinals, to label releases.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Ah....he must belong to PETA. :)
One of the most appealing facets of BeOS, IIRC, is the fact that it was FREE.
No, it wasn't.
YellowTab calls their OS "Zeta" because Zeta is the sixth letter in the greek alphabet. Be was up to R5 and Zeta intends their OS to be the R6 Be never made.
So Eta would be my best guess.
Have they made any major improvements since Be went under, or have they just slapped some make up on the last version and are trying to sell that?
...I don't think BeOS could come back as BeOS at this point.
BeOS/Zeta still can't even boot on a machine with a gig or more memory. As the world upgrades to more modern machines, BeOS loses more and more potential users.
To bad... It was nice in its day.
Think of how much better the world would be if Apple chose BeOS over Jobs
I used to think that, before I got a chance to compare Rhapsody DR1 and BeOS on the same hardware.
After that, I was convinced Apple did the right thing.
I totaly disagree with you on a couple of points here , the unix core is in no way holding OS X back ,It is making it easy to port aplications to it and with the exstensible nature of it and the open core , it makes adding new features a snap(in) . . /etc and a few other key areas ),the rest can eassily be reinstalled from the CD .I imagine if backups are a problem for you then you are atempting to back up the wrong things .
BeOS would have been missing some of the core features that make OS X such as the is with the NeXT base and its excelent rendering and PDF creation.
The file system does have some bloat , although very little . Most of it is very usefull files and when you make your backups i think your making a few key mistakes
The design of a system like this means that you only need to back up a few key areas such as your user folder and perhaps your aplications folder if you wish (personaly i back up
The file meta data is not that bad however it is as of yet not on par with BeOSs excelent meta data types , however wait till tiger for that to change
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
My laptop's Linux takes about 30 seconds to boot up, counting from the bootloader, when resuming from a suspend. This could be tuned a LOT, though -- if I forced it to clean out more memory and write fewer caches, and repeated this on my desktop (which takes 30 seconds for a normal boot, so it'd be much faster from suspend), I might get 15 seconds.
Maybe that's cheating. My desktop linux takes about a minute, including time spent launching an X and a couple of needed programs.
But seriously, people, this is really just problem of bootscripts and choice of desktop. That means that I can make my OS boot in 30 seconds merely by switching to a lightweight window manager, doing a little bash programming, and cleaning out the init scripts I don't need.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Apple would have a real multitasking and multimedia OS several years earlier.
NeXTstep was production quality before BeOS.
What held up Openstep/Rhapsody/OSX was Adobe. They refused to port Photoshop to the Opensteop API (Yellowbox, what became Cocoa) and so Apple went back to the drawing board and produced Carbon and turned the Bluebox environment into Classic. If Apple had come up with some BeOS environment using Sheepshaver for compatibility, Adobe would have done the same thing... and they'd have taken just as long to come out with a product.
You'd think the same about lambda.
They'd have ended up producing something like Carbon whether they went with BeOS or Openstep. They had to, their biggest publishers dug in their heels until they gave them a smoother path to the new OS than "rewrite everything from scratch, or run in an emulator".
Yet another has been OS is back again.. only to be has been again. Yaaaaawn...
I am a little weary about the legality of it as they have not publicly stated anything (this could be due to a variety of things including agreements with the company that owns the code, Palm Inc).
But YellowTab does have the source. They have fixed problems with the kernel which as far as I know could not be fixed by spending some time with a hex editor. There are some disagreements as to how they obtained it, but it is accepted now that they have it (and all of it, I'd imagine).
Normal file systems have fixed fields for the meta data. BeOS, however, had very flexible meta data. You could define extra meta data which could be indexed (in the file system database) for fast searches. So an mp3 might have "artist", "bpm", "album", "genre" etc. meta data. Emails might have "sender", "subject", "recipient", meta data. This flexibility made searching fast and easy.
Anyhow, In windows/dos/unix, the extension (.txt) is generally used to determine the file type. BeOS had a "mimestring" metadata ("text/html"), so the name and filetype were totally independant (as it should be). Pre OS-X, MacOS/HFS files had creator type/file type codes to identify the filetype and keep it distinct from the name. In OS X, Apple has started distancing themselves from using the creator type/filetype code and instead uses the extension to guess the filetype.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No, the one-share thing is much older than that. Steve Jobs sold all except for one of his shares of Apple after he left the company in the 1980's, having been, along with Steve Wozniak, one of the two co-founders of the company.
In Germay ZetaOS is sold on HomeShopping for over 1 year now.
:
I don't know what a Home-Shopping Buyer does with Zeta, but they sell it as
"Has everything you need, you don't ever need to buy any other Software"
Sure, pay $100 for an OS that does not run the latest Windows applications, hardly has any applications it runs natively, has limited driver support, and it is an effort to revive an OS that already killed at least one other company. How can you go wrong?
On the plus side, it should have no malware available for it.
I think Mac support for BeOS was killed when Apple refused to release info on the G3 Macs to Be, Inc. Therefore Be targeted the X86 market, hoping to save the company that way, because that is what NeXT did. Only NeXT tanked and got saved by Apple, yet Be, Inc. tanked and nobody saved it, and Palm bought out the corpse and buried it, until this Zeta Zombie rose from the dead.
I think I'll take my chances with Linux, KNOPPIX/KANOITX seems to be stable enough, boots from a live CD, and has an option to be installed on a hard drive.
I mean unless most of the major OSS projects are being converted to ZetaOS/BeOS, I think you can forget convicing enough people to buy a copy to make it worth their while.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Its APIs were so beautiful, it hurt me to even look at WinAPI again. Cocoa is far less elegant. Plus I think all the "lickable" bullshit looks worse than BeOS UI elements. It had its quirks, yes, but it had a very, very good "feel" to it. You kinda felt you were born and raised on it after 5 minutes of using their UI.
While there is quite a large number of GNU apps included in all BeOS, IIRC they arent needed at all for everyday use. In fact, users are not encouraged to ever really use them. Of course if you're a developer you really have no choice with GCC/etc.
To me all this looks suspiciously like the long drawn out but failing efforts to revive the Amiga OS.
I am all for work, research and development of alternative OS technologies, but it should be obvious by now that there is no way a new OS can can become successful in this day and age unless it is based on open source.
Even SUN had to learn this lesson the hard way. If they couldn't make Solaris take off against Windows in the x86 space, how much chance do companies like Yellow Tab or Hyperion (AmigaOS) have?
Wouldn't it be better to support the open source Haiku OS project and then make money on something built on top of that?
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
Check out the groovy help desk. Nico- and Twiggy-bots are lounging on orange and pink beanbag chairs off to the right.
*brrrrrring*
dude: "Dude! so what's up with your operating system?"
caller: "I don't think I like it very much."
dude: "Duuuuude."
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
BeOS _was_ challenging Windows for a while. Many mainstream hardware and software developers were expressing interest and actively developing for BeOS for a while. Unfortunately the infamous focus change and Microsoft licencing bastardry helped Be Inc. to an early end.
If Apple had chosen BeOS it would be a copany with a great product but no vision or direction. Just like the 10 years before and every other product that didn't survive. Mr. Jobs at least gave the company a direction and purpose. Whether or not you agree with their direction or not is another matter though.
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
Ok i appreciate the effort of this company, but BeOS? It has been a dream for many but i doubt this will take off. This system was advanced years ago, now is just behind the others. Hardware support seems also a critical problem. Kudos to YellowTab anyway for their effort...hope them good luck.
GNU/Be would be pronounced "Gah-new-bie" which kinda sounds like "newbie" which makes it funny. :-)
"The next significant step in computing will be an OS that becomes much more proactive; it watches and learns what you like to do, and over time it will perform tasks on your behalf without being instructed to.." i sincerely hope this never happens. i can't think of anything more fucking annoying then a pc that does what it wants, not what it's told. it's bad enough as it is right now with windows. of course, your just spouting bullshit like some unsanitary fountain, so typical.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Jobs has more to do with Apple's comeback than the OS.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I'm a Mac user now because I switched to Linux a while back and learned about how cool the UNIX command-line is. If OS X were based on BeOS, I probably wouldn't be using it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm sure someone out there can do a better job of explaining this, but I'll take a shot:
Metadata is data about data. File metadata is information describing a file or its contents.
On many operating systems, file metadata comes primarily in the form of filename extensions. A file with the name "house.jpg" can reasonably be assumed to be a JPEG image file.
Unfortunately, filename extensions are pretty limited as a means of storing file metadata. There's a lot of other metadata one might want to store and retrieve for a give file.
Classic Mac OS went a small step further, storing 2 pieces of file metadata: file type and file creator. This information was stored separately from the filename, allowing Mac users to name there files whatever they wanted, without having to include a filename extension. It also allowed them to have some JPEGs open in Photoshop when double-clicked, and others to open in a web browser, by means of the files' creator metadata.
Not too much later, the World Wide Web appeared, and with it the use of filename extensions as required metadata for any files to be transferred via the Internet. So Mac users learned to live with filename extensions. Most of them were already doing so.
One development that accompanied the rise of the Internet was the development of mime types, another means of storing file metadata. BeOS used mime types extensively for storing file metadata, in conjunction with a database-driven filesystem. From what I saw, the combination was pretty effective and powerful.
File metadata on Mac OS X is a mess because Apple has officially abandoned the traditional Mac type/creator metadata system. This is one area where Apple could have taken a leadership position as they transitioned their core userbase and developers to their new OS, as they did in other areas like Core Audio, but instead of replacing the type/creator paradigm with some newer, better metadata system along the lines of that which already existed in BeOS, they simply chose to fall back to the less powerful but more internet-compatible filename extension paradigm. Yet they did not completely abandon the traditional system, as it would have made porting classic Mac apps to O S X more difficult. So some Mac OS X apps use type/creator metadata, some only use filename extensions, and some use both. Without a clear leadership direction from Apple, things are kind of a mess. Not that most users would notice.
There is some hope. Last I checked, Dominic Giampaolo was still working at Apple. He was the main brain behind the BeOS filesystem and went to work for Apple a few years back. He's responsible for the journaling support that was recently added to Mac OS X. Many folks (myself among them) are hoping that Dominic will bring the BeOS metadata system (or something like it) to Mac OS X. I believe Tiger and Spotlight will bring some improvements in this area.
GNU/Anus?
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
You watch out now. Once we make Omega, Captain Janeway will try to blow it up on us.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Just in time for Eugenia to dump GNOME!
osx metadata still exists, only it's now called property lists and lives inside bundle files.
I know Germany is not a common law country, so I am not sure if the following applies there, but in common law countries (mostly the anglo-saxon world) you could get an injunction against Yellow Tab forcing them to change the name due to the fact that there are two kinds of trademarks: common law trademarks and registered trademarks.
A registered trademark is quite obviously something you have to register with the trademark registry.
A common law trademark is established through using a mark persistently. You don't have to register it.
Needless to say, registered trademarks are easier to enforce, but common law trademarks are just as valid.
Another important fact about trademarks is that there are 40+ different categories. Two companies can hold the same trademark for their products in the same country as long as they are in different categories. Since you are a software company and Yellow Tab's ZetaOS is a software product, there can be no doubt that both companies' products fall into the same category, the one for computer software.
Now, assuming that German trademark law does acknowlegde common law trademarks, then you have established such a common law trademark by trading as Zeta Software. If you can show that you have been trading for longer than Yellow Tab has been marketing ZetaOS, then you stand a very good chance that you can get an injunction to force them to change the name. The fact that you have those errant calls will actually help you to go after them.
Even if German trademark law doesn't help you, I am sure that German company law will have various clauses that protect a registered company's name from other companies in the same sector using the name.
Don't have pity for them. They should have done their homework before launching their OS. They should have never picked that name in the first place. A simple check with the company registry would have revealed that you guys exist.
On the other hand, if your company has been founded after Yellow Tab have started to market their OS under the Zeta name, then the blame would go to you guys.
In any event, you should get some legal advice from a lawyer dealing in such matters and see what your options are.
Good luck.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
Too bad it looks like my Mac circa 1999. http://oncee.blogspot.com/
BeOS had a fully functioning bash command line. From the perspective of the user, the CLI *was* UNIX. From the perspective of the developer, it was kinda UNIX (basic POSIX, but nothing advanced like AIO, and some missing features like sockets as file descriptors).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Gee, what do you really think?
The latest BeOS release I've had any experience with was R5, but even then it was *far* snappier on a 600 MHz PIII than either Linux or WinXP is on much newer hardware. I don't remember ever having to wait any time at all to get control of the machine back under Be, even under heavy load. Too bad I can't say the same for any variant of Windows or Linux. Be was always far more responsive.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
First check BeOS!
.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010521150816/www.bene ws.com/beos/
to learn the root of the OS.
BeOS was originally developed for BeBOX(custom ppc based smp box) and later started supporting 60x lines of PPC based Apple's Macintosh computers and power computing(Taiwan's mac licensed manufactural).
With version 3.0 x86 versions started shipping.
There were 3.0, 4.0, 4.5 then 5.0 Personal Edition and 5.0 Professional Edition.
I personally believe that BeOS doomed itself with expensive public relations fund spend heavily on BeOS Preview release 2(Remember those BeOS preview release shipped with Mac related magazines for free?) and decision to start selling x86 version. They started offering free version for 5.0 called 5.0 Personal edition, which were bit late(developers have migrated to linux world then...). So company were bought out by Palm.
However, right before they were bought out by Palm, there were two main project which disappeared all together.
BeIA with SONY eVilla project and Dano(BeOS 5.5 release). BeIA pretty much slipped away when Be had office equipment auction when they closed down the building along with some handheld devices(tablet computers loaded with BeIA).
I've heard rumors that after Sony seeing the utter failure of QNX based iOpner(which was immediately followed by another QNX based 3com'saudrey), axed eVilla and destroyed all produced units, so only surviving units are the ones that were auctioned off with BE office closing in CA(developer's machine?).
After BE was sold to Palm...however, BE source along with Dano was leaked over Beshare(beos centric p2p software).
So Dano(considered as unofficial release ver 5.1d0)
OpenBeOS movement started around this time.
Now OpenBeOS has changed its name to Haiku-OS.
http://www.haiku-os.org/.
And soon people started BeOS Developer's Edition
at http://www.beosonline.com/.
And other people started BeOS http://freshmeat.net/projects/beos-max/
http://www.beos-max.org/.
Both BeOS Developer's Edition and BeOS Max revolves around Be's latest official release BeOS Personal Edition 5.0 + 5.0.3 upates and many new improvement which were contributed by a user community developed opensource softwares & drivers.
However, there versions which includes some unofficial released stuffs(stuffs from Dano and some controversial stuffs)
http://phosphuros.tk/
You can read the article by OSnews here.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6948
Here are some screen shots provided by Korean BeOS UserGroup.
http://www.bekrage.net/gallery/view_album.php?set_ albumName=screen
BeOS is nice because Localization stuffs were incorporated into GUI nicer than most other OS, making easier to support different language than English, especially where language isn't based on phonetic latin based alphabet languages such as Korean/Chinese/Japanese. Thier alphabet is 8bit(or even 16bit) character based.
Currently, Haiku-OS programmers are plugging away diligently where OS is almost ready, where most of the bread and butter applications were already worked out! This is a nicer situation where applications are already there when OS still hasn't shipped, due to special current circumstances of BeOS.
ZetaOS is heavily based on BeOS R5.0.3 + Bone network(Dano style) + lots of improvement borrowed from drivers found on BeBits(opensource community of BeOS) + Haiku-OS(OpenBeOS).
ZetaOS, there are RC1, RC2, RC3, Zeta Neo(considered as RC4) a
The need for more operating systems is always there. A real growing industry, it is!
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
HEy guess what, DOS will boot in less than a second on the same machine. Does that mean DOS is great? I'd like to see BeOS running some real apps, not just some feature limited browser or text editor.
. . .it will perform tasks on your behalf without being instructed to..
Whether you want it to or not. Yeah, this is going to be big, for about as long as talking cars were.
KFG
heh heh. Debian WOODY. Heh heh. Huh huh.
I'm only slashdot's second biggest Monkey spanker
I have no idea what bug you have up your butt, but here's a few points.
Yes, BeOS is a dead operating system. There are no marketing claims for BeOS after about 2000. If you're going to be evaluating the original claims for BeOS made during its brief moment in the sun, 1998-1999, compare those claims with what was around then, not what's around now.
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.
As a matter of fact, yes, BeOS did have a better media core than anything else did, in one specific area: latency. There was literally nothing else beyond true RTOSes that could touch it. If you go to a stage show in Vegas, Disney or even some Broadway theatres, there's a non-zero chance that the sound and lighting system is still being run by a BeOS-based system from LCS. In 2005, other operating systems have caught up in some respects, but the main thing that "beats" BeOS in media processing is simply Moore's Law: machines are so much faster now than they were six years ago that it doesn't matter that their signal processing still blows moose chunks.
There are other things that BeOS had that no other operating system had, most notably the file system and live queries that could operate on metadata. Make a virtual folder that contains all the word processing documents you've edited in the last week? No problem. BeOS was by far the most responsive operating system I've ever used. And you know what? It got more commercial applications announced for it in its first two years of public release than Linux did in its first five or six. (Some of those commercial applications are in fact still around, now on other platforms.)
Yes, BeOS had its share of problems, some of them did involve driver support, and there's been very little development on drivers since 2000. But it wasn't difficult to find supported hardware back then--I ran it on a pretty much stock Gateway PC--and I can assure you that BeOS does not suck. If Be had made some wiser business decisions (like not going after the non-existent internet appliance market, and knifing their desktop developers in order to do it), it'd probably still be around.
I'm not particularly interested in ZetaOS because, in the context of 2005, it's not a very compelling operating system. But you obviously don't have a clue why so much of the computing world was excited about it in 1999.
I agree there. A computer is a tool, and like any other tool it should do what I want not what it thinks I want at the time. I don't like the idea of my computer doing tasks for me out of the blue just because it saw a pattern of me doing them in a particular way.
When I want my computer to do something I'll tell it to.
The best example of this in Be was the Address book application. The only element in the file was the contact name... everything else was metadata... fields for address, email, phone, etc were directly searchable from the query in the filesystem. It's totally different than how everybody else uses "bundle files" [ala thumbs or .dat] or "quick readers" [ala MS office] Be was the perfect OS for the internet world... all the W3C "buzzwords" like XML and such would have thrived on a BeOS system. Be was just so far ahead nobody knew what to do with it.
BeOS suffered because it was far to radical for time... It had a nearly AS400-like "flat" system to it so you didn't [actually it even hindered] need development of 50 different helper apps... as soon as one "replicator" was created it could be used by any other program in the system. That turned off a lot of commercial people because you didn't sell an "application" you sold a set of "tools" for the OS to use. [imagine buying corel and adobe and working with both sets of tools on the same document at once! BeOS could have done that] It's a great base for OSS because the inter-module communication is well documented [and encouraged!]...you can replace parts at will as long as you follow the interface rules. That's how the Zeta and Hiakau groups have kept it going... slowly reworking each module to update the system.
Perhaps that could be because you arent really the target of BeOS. There will always be a group of hardcore nerds who want the commandline, these people will never be moved. But put your parents in front of a command line and watch the blank stare develop.
Every shot of BeOS had the DeskBar and Tracker displayed in multiple ways, you'd think they'd want to show this off.
Plus Palm owns BeOS.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
...did they consider they might be accidentially associated, i.e. with Zeta Creations?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Why can't they go after a market where it is needed? For instance, there are more and more ATMs popping up running windows and misbehaving in ways that you didn't think was possible for such a critical system.
Obviously BeOS, or whatever the marketroids call it this week, is stable, lean, fast, and seems to support media processing well. Why not go for the upscale embedded market? Why not go for set-top boxes, portable media players etc?
No business is going to jump ship and switch from Windows, OSX, Linux or whatever they run, to BeOS as their primary desktop OS. Come on.
Maybe its been updated more recently, but I've never even got it to install properly. I love different OS'es and the first thing I did when I heard about Zeta making a commercial (and polished) release of the BeOS I went immediately to their website.
Aside from the install issues I've had, is it just me or is the idea of playing money for a OS you cant test out first crazy? I mean *if* I had paid good money for the (beta 3 I believe at the time) and it didn't work I'd be pretty pissed.
I think its an interesting idea and some die-hard BeOS fans are happy about it, but their business models sucks. Make a live disk or something...
Personally I'd rather throw my money away on the Internet Urinal or something with tangible benefits. Zeta looks like an overpriced novelty (and I'm NOT saying it is, but from where I'm standing its hard to get a good look at it).
As a side note: how is this news? Zeta's been around for years now hasn't it? I mean if they'd finally released a demo THAT would be news. This is just free advertising for a dodgy products targeted apparently at die-hard BeOS fans (who would probably be using something like BeOS Max anyway).
Go figure. Wake me up when they have a demo copy I can test out on my system.
Quack, quack.
And i'm not sure why.
Heh, that's the equivalent of weaking a "kick me" piece of paper on your back in high school when it comes to the /. effect.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
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.
Sorry, the formatting appears the same as the previous post (Firefox 1.0.2, Windows XP).
Stuck down a hole! In the middle of the night! With an owl!
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?
I don't really think a singleuser system is suited for modern computing. but aapart from that it sound great.
My new blog
never know how long my linux takes to boot, or if it ever survive next boot, but least i can get nice graphs about what it is doing each time with Bootchart and another cool thing is this video camera from samsung powered with ucLinux which can boot to shell in 80msek.
> Their file system is utter crap.
Here you're wrong. The rest of what you say is largely true, albeit perhaps needlessly inflammatory, but the BeFS is actually quite good; it is today what it was in 1998, and yet, it is today what WinFS was originally supposed to be in 2004, now wants to be in 2008, and will probably not really achieve until 2012 if it keeps slipping like it has been. (The WinFS that's supposed to come out later this year (if you're optimistic) has had features cut from it that BeFS has always had, in order to meet deadlines.)
Where the BeOS fans go wrong in talking about the filesystem is this: they assume that a great filesystem is an important desktop feature that every user cares about -- when, in fact, for most users, FAT32 with the LFN extension (technically a quite horrible filesystem) would be just fine. As long as they can save their stuff and retrieve it later, almost nobody really cares, when it comes down to brass tacks, about the filesystem. I keep most of my data on FAT32 filesystems, just because they're supported by pretty much every OS, so I don't have to worry about being able to access my data. (Somebody who only uses one OS wouldn't need that portability, but somebody who only uses one OS wouldn't likely be messing with Zeta at this point, now would they?) Are there other filesystems I could use that are technically much better? Yeah. NTFS is better, but not all my OSes support it. ext2/3 is better than FAT32, but not all my OSes support it. Reiser4 is *way* better than FAT32, but guess what? Yeah, so I don't use it. And that's where BeFS is too.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> There are no marketing claims for BeOS after about 2000. If you're going
> to be evaluating the original claims for BeOS made during its brief moment
> in the sun, 1998-1999, compare those claims with what was around then, not
> what's around now.
He could have been clearer, I think he was talking about the fan base, not official company marketing claims. There are still a few loons out there claiming that BeOS has better multimedia support than current OSes, et cetera, and infinitum, ad nauseam, ad bedlam. Which is, of course, a load of hooey, because despite what PDP-11 advocates will tell you, the software industry has, in fact, made some technological improvements in the last thirty years.
> I'm not particularly interested in ZetaOS because, in the context of 2005,
> it's not a very compelling operating system.
Exactly. Zeta is about six years too late.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
BeOS was only available for the PowerPC up to the 604 series. Apple refused to give Be the G3 information, and because of that BeOS could never run on any newer Mac.
I don't like the idea either, as I think it would stifle creativity. I don't want to get stuck in some comfortable local minimum of usability, if there is a better and more interesting way around the corner.
I'm worried about creativity, as I use computers (Linux, of course) to make music. Often a new method of user interfacing can give way to new ideas in the actual work you're doing.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
But will it run on my undead Amiga?
Considering the fact that Gassee apparently wanted $400 million in the end, I think it was a wise move.
Not only that, but the NeXT system had a significant userbase, and, more importantly, software. There was a large amount of software that was available on NeXT, some of which is still being added to OSX now (Apple's Pages software, for example, was once a NeXT app called, wait for it, Pages). Also, Next had the advantage of being used in research institutions (The WWW was developed on a NeXT by Tim Berners-Lee) and was one of the very first systems to offer a fully fledged web application server (WebObjects). The fact that NeXT also had the advantage of some 8 or 9 years of experience and development behind it didn't hurt its chances either.
Possibly, one of the additional factors in Apple's decision was the fact that basing the next Apple OS on BeOS would have meant using a completely untested system. Untested in the market, I mean. Given that Apple really was in dire straights at the time (1995-1996), I think Apple made a wise decision.
But who knows, perhaps BeOS would have made apple become the absolute killer in the OS world.
> The next version would be "Infinity plus one and no returns."
Or you could go with the cardinality of the set of all permutations of an infinite set...
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
BeOS is single-user, NeXT was multiuser from the beginning and had a far better POSIX implementation. I say Apple did it right. There would have been no quick ports from linux to BeOS
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
(Most of) my systems have fans and tend to eat stuff called electricity. And most operating systems can keep running as long as you don't install new drivers. Yes, Linux is better than Windows with respect to restarting after loading drivers. On the other hand Linux power safe support is pretty abysmall compared to OSX or WinXP.
Some personal boot times, from power-up to "I can click and the machine will do":
:-)
Compaq 486SX, 8MB RAM, Win3.11: 20s
Same machine, I installed Win95b+MSWorks95: 20s
Wife's "white box", AMD k6-2 450, 300MB RAM, Win98SE: 40s
Work's Itautec (good biz brand down here) Celeron 900, 256MB RAM, Win98SE: 55s
Home double server/desktop, AthlonXP1800, 1GB RAM, k-Hoary: 90s
Transmeta 5600 laptop (on it now) 300MG RAM, k-Hoary: 45s
The last two benefited greatly from the last change (k)ubuntu did to the startup scripts... it shaved some 20s which were specially more annoying on the laptop.
And my home machine has some serious problem with hotplug or usb (takes forever to get ahold of the mouse), but I haven't got the time to look into it yet...
HTH
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
...I don't see this little O/S going anywhere. It does not offer anything radically fresh that will make people use it.
Why doesn't the Open Source world think about radically new ways of doing software? open source, not driven by economics, should be the pioneer of software development.
And some people are attacking it just now...
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Please read my post before answering. I said nothing about boot times, nor do I feel boot times are particularly relevant to OS performance in general. I was talking about the responsiveness of the system, regarding which BeOS simply walks away from anything in the mainstream today, and on much slower hardware.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
or MacOS 1011
(there are 10 kinds of people in this world... etc)
Is Zeta OS using NTFS as the default file system? In the screenshots, the main drive is named Untitled_NTFS_Volume.
HD Trailers
If all of that works...I know a big "if"...there shouldn't any shortage of software.
Moving to a BSD(unix) based system breathed new life into the MAC with a world of software possibilities and its ability to place nice with other systems. MAC has proven that unix can be used for a friendly and powerful desk top system. In a way it also proven that it is very hard to make it as a third party alternative sandwiched in between the Nix * Windows world. This reincarnation of BeOS sounds interesting enough for me to buy a copy, but I wonder about its potential to survive in niche that is similar to one that MAC decided was not a good place to be. Maybe the 2 keys this time around is that it is starting off in Europe away from Bill Gates' home market and that microsoft may be distracted with linux as a challenger to the point of not trying to crush this new version of beOS
$ sh --version GNU bash, version 2.03.0(1)-release (i586-pc-beos) Copyright 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Right. BeOS hasn't got the 'UNIX command line' then, has it? Based on whats in /boot/beos/bin and /boot/home/config/bin on my machine (python, perl, gcc, svn, cvs, as well as all the based *-utils gnu packages), I think you'll find you would have had just as much of a command line on BeOS as in MacOS X. The Terminal application has been included since, err, ever. It was there in 1996 when Apple were musing over them.
I have bash3 built here somewhere, I just couldn't be bothered installing it...
Seriously - my prediction: BeOS, at $100/copy, is overpriced. At $19.99, they would sell a lot (could even turn it into a gamimg platform), but at $100, it can't compete with either the free OSes or the proprietary ones.
Is zeta going to continue to use a 4+ year old kernel? Look at the last screenshot.
Yes,
:)
BeOS 5.0.3 + Zeta RC1-Neo will run on
Intel, Athlon, Via, Cruseo(haven't tested with New Efficieon yet).
I am currently replying this post from Barton 2500+ athlon using Zeta Neo SP1 with Mozilla 1.8a5.
()()
(@@)
oktokie
BeOS would also have been a cleaner start.
Not really.
They would have had to bolt on multiple user and filesystem permissions, which would be a fundamental change to BeOS. It lacked both.
BeOS is/was also advanced in terms of file meta data. That situation is still quite messy in MacOS X.
File metadata is a big pile of doggie poo, especially when your OS is totally dependent on them. Apple struggled with that problem for 10 years in MacOS, then the internet came along and ripped them a new asshole -- metadata travels poorly on the internet, especially between different architectures.
OSX handles metadata in a portable way with bundles and property lists. It's messy, but it's better than the alternative (non portable resource/data forks)
In the end BeOS was really no choice at all. A few nifty features couldn't compensate for the huge pile of glaring flaws.
BeOS was lightweight only because it was immature for the OS.
I think counting the "number of files that it is comprised of" is silly. Next you'll measure the software value by counting the number of lines of code. These metrics don't have real-world value.
I don't know what you meant when you say the file meta data issue is still quite messy in OS X. BeOS may have been advanced with its file meta data, but I think it is a non-issue with Tiger.
Ultimately, Apple would not be the same (ie. much less significant) if not for the purchase of NeXT. As a developer, I am glad that Apple chose the way it did.
it was also missing users and permissions. a big no-no for modern multitasking systems.
You can get a PC in the supermarket in Germany?
Yes. But they are mostly "special offers" which are not available continuously.
Are these like Uber-Walmarts (giant department store) or like the A&P (larger than usual grocery store)?
They are discounters, but the most successful ones in Germany are quite the contrary of Walmart - they have a rather limited selection of products. It seems to me that Walmart offers about anything you can imagine.
Frankly. Steve Jobs is nothing but a business man. It does absolutely no jusstice to call a business man as Mac's father and Apple's savior.
Without Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs is nothing. Jobs could be a begger on the side of street for all we know if Woz didn't invent the first Apple personal computer.
Wrong!
1. Apple would have had to build Mac OS compatibility into BeOS. That's why Mac OS X was so late in the first place. Developers were unwilling to rewrite their apps for Yellow (now Cocoa).
2. Apple would have to finish BeOS (the reason its so lightweight is because it wasn't done)
3. Apple wouldn't have had the leadership of Jobs which helped bring Apple back to relevancy. I don't believe JLG could ever have done that. So we would be without iMacs, iBooks, iPods.
4. If cloning had continued, Apple would be in the same financial shape that Be was in (in other words, looking for buyers).
Be didn't become the base for OS X but did get scooped up by PalmSource for OS 5 (Cobalt). I had odd deja vu ohhing and aweing at the Cobalt demo last year much in the same way I ohhed and awed at my friends Be box (yes he actually had one if those strange blue cubes with the blinky lights) many moons ago. At that time I thought "Kewl... let's just hope that the curse of Be does not follow it to this new incarnation."
A year later and on the verge of PalmOne releasing yet another OS 4.x (sorry 'Garnet') device. I know that the curse is alive and well. (And now PalmSource is chasing that which is Linux and shiney)
Don't get me wrong. I think Be was way ahead of it's time and love seeing it everytime it pops up. It's just not ment to be folks.
Why on earth would someone want to use a system in 2005 that lacks multiple users (if only for the security aspects) and network file systems? This looks great for an embedded appliance that doesn't need to talk to anything else.
I don't think it will catch on. It will most likely die off in about few years.
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
I remember when BeOS looked really revolutionary and awesome, but looking at those screenshots it is really showing its age. It just doesn't look like it could keep up with modern desktops (osx, gnome 2.10, longhorn).
It is funny and somewhat interesting in its funnyness but this value is totally irrelevant, your Linux, configured the same way as my Linux won't have the same result because the user is different and a lot of the reboots one experiences is directly linked to the usage he makes of his computer. I like to fiddle in my machine, I'm learning trough curiosity, I have a lot more chance to crash, hang or whatever and have to reboot than someone who's running the same server day in day out.
My last Mac on osX has been maybe rebooted 4-5 time because of something else than upgrades in its 5 years usage. However, since I'm now trying to make it an extension of my PC by integrating both computer togheter via networking stuff like VNC, DAVE et al. so they look like one machine to me, I've been rebooting it alot...
Same machine, same OS, same user, different results...
So I guess what I'm asking is don't MOD someone up just because he pulls a half decent joke about Windows unstability and Linux stability, what he said simply is irrevelant.
The mixer GUI lets you individually set volume/mute on each application. Hope this makes it into ALSA someday...
Now, can I trade in my BeOS Professional CD for ZetaOS 1.0? (I think I'm one of the 11 people who bought it...
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
I'd like to second Watts on this. I ran BeOS as my primary home OS for several years on both PPC then Intel hardware. BeOS is one of my favorite OSes ever, right up there with NewtonOS and Amiga. BeOS was incredibly responsive on even the most modest hardware back then. For me the OS provided a stable writing, web development and browsing platform that also allowed great control over disk formats, allowing recovery of crashed Mac and Windoze drives. It could also do things like play several dozen instances of large Quicktimes simulataneously - like 30 copies of a Star Wars trailer at once. BeOS rocked - it was everything that Apple and Commodore had promised but come up short with their products.
I also agree w/ parent about this new ZetaOS not being compelling in 2005. A lot of great software has been written in past 5-6 years.
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
-Tom
Open source revolutionists would find a difficult ally in BeOS, which has been closed source as long as I've known about it.
On the other hand, the BeOS community, such as it is, could provide a nice niche market for zeta.
It's been a long time.
The UNIX underpinnings are really, really helping keep the open source tools available to Apple. Portiing from Linux to BSD variants and back takes work, but is feasible. Porting to Be and back would have been painful at best, especially due to the closed source.
It's not Open source at all.
It's been a long time.
Is Be/ZetaOS a true multi-user system now? From what I understand, despite having a semi-compatible POSIX layer, there was no type of privilege system on BeOS, and no such thing as multiple logins, even at the command line level (being that the command line level has really always been above the GUI level in BeOS.)
I realize the OS is being targeted at people who don't think they care about such features, but without them, (and I don't care how cool your kernel and associated API is) it makes it extremely difficult to have a secure system.
Does anyone know the real deal on this, I'm forced to assume it isn't the case, since I don't see anyone talking about it.
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
What is with bringing back this OS from the dead? Sure, BeOS had some nifty features for its day, but nowadays, a jorunaling file system and OpenGL support are not things to write home about. BeOS died because, amoung other reasons, the complete lack of compatable applications. Renaming it does not change that. I think we should invest more energy into fixing the major problems with Linux.
/. moderation has devolved into valuing content into the digital equivalent of FunnyPages for Geeks.
If he'd kept his griping primarily to the Zeta folks, my hackles wouldn't have raised quite as much. For practical purposes, it sounds like Zeta is going to be what the next release of BeOS would have been... sort of. As another commenter pointed out, Be never shipped support for hardware-based OpenGL, and I don't think Zeta has this. I'd go out on a limb and say that if Be, Inc., hadn't lost its corporate mind, they'd have probably worked on fixing problems like that; Zeta, as far as I know, still doesn't.
Of course, there are companies out there whose business model, such as it is, involves stringing along diehard Amiga users by bringing AmigaOS variants up to parity with late '90s OS technology. Come to think of it, they're all in Germany, too. There may be something in the beer.
Funny thing about all the noise about boot up times. Linux boots slower than Windows. You know, Diesle engines take longer to start too. But once they do they can run a lot longer and farther while doing a lot more work. Just sayin.
MadOgre.com
.. wake me up when you can run it on this.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Does anyone know if Zeta is in Beta?
Anyone know if it can be run in a virtual machine, such as Virtual PC or VMWare?
Chip H.
I am using Zeta all day here and it works fine for me, it's the only OS for the x86 platform that gives me no headache. Windows is crap and we all know that, full of malware and stuff. Linux is cool but the GUI experience of linux sucks big time, it's improving, yes, but it is not ready. Now Zeta allows me to have fun with computing using my spare pentium machine, I can see the media I want, listen to music, do my office stuff, use the net with not a single problem, the system is responsive and not trying to make you a moron. I am coding some apps for Zeta, all I miss is a good high level language now so that the entry point of zeta development was easier. I see many here complaining about Zeta and others talking FUD about YellowTAB and Be/Palm/Haiku relation. Now, How many here used Zeta RC3 or Neo or Ventura? How many here saw the new kernel? not the old betas, the new stable release candidates... how many here looked without "the prejudice of the geek elite" to it and tested it with an open mind... sometimes /. folks are just barkers after all...
-- Por mais que eu ande no vale das trevas e da morte, meu PowerMac G4 Não Travará!!!
There's nothing BeOS about PalmOS except the people that wrote it.
it's running in VMWare.
Zeta creates volumes as BFS by default.
Currently, Zeta costs 99EUR or 127.70USD..
That's WAY too expensive.
I'm all for buying software. I'll be buying MacOS X Tiger when it comes out. And the price for Tiger will be $129 ($99 at Amazon after a rebate).
But, Tiger will be worth that kind of money. It's a major OS supported by lots of Apps.
Zeta needs to sell for around $49.95US without Gobe Productive bundled in. Gobe Productive ought to be offered for another $19.95US for those of us who don't already own it.
Zeta needs to get a lot of installations out there. At the current pricing, what will happen is that there will be a lot of piracy and darn few sales.
Selling it for $50US won't eliminate the piracy, but it should increase the sales of the OS quite a bit.
I would like to own it and use it. But, $127 is too much money for an OS I'm only going to play with.
Zeta looks nice. It's a shame it's going to be priced so high, that I can't justify buying it.
and the Mac's father and Apple's savior, Steve Jobs.
Eeeewww.
Okay, okay, I stand corrected!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It's funny that it says Zeta "Neo" and the kernel is almost 4 years old! See here: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?re lease=223&slide=114
Soon to be followed by ZZ (Double-Zeta) OS. And then, the ReOSZ (Refined OS Zeta), which of course will never be mass produced, due to excessive cost.
ahh, modded down by unintelligent apple zealots, i love when that happens. facts are BeOS was far superior to anything Apple had, or Jobs had at the time. Facts are that is why you are staring at 2% worldwide marketshare, instead of being 50/50 with MS/Intel. Facts are that you are a complete idiot if you think owning the audio player market is more important than owning the PC market. Guess what, if you are running a Mac now you are getting about half the performance I am on my SFF at 3 times the price. Enjoy it losers. And mod this down to. The truth hurts eh?
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
I've heard of people getting their BeOS boot time down to 3 seconds by removing drivers and things. Of course, if you leave it running then I haven't seen it crash on its own yet. The only time I have seen BeOS crash is when there are driver issues, or some very beta software running with high priority locks it up.
Bet this
Actually, it's migrating to Open Source. The Haiku project is rewriting the entire OS and AFAIK Zeta uses their code whenever they can, just like the other BeOS distributions.
Microsoft already tried that with personalized menus in Windows XP and Office. Always one of the first things I turn off whenever I have to use either one.
I remember when The Screen Savers on ZDTV always promoted BeOS. That, and Linux. I doubt they'll promote Zeta.
Yeah, this is offtopic and I'll be modded down, but I'll just let you know for the sake of bettering humanity... there is no need to reboot a linux box just to login as root. Just issue the "su" command at any terminal, and you're root. There aren't really many times when you need to fully reboot, unless you are recompiling the kernel or you have to test some hardware whose driver can't be loaded as a module... and maybe a few other rare cases.
So where could i find a copy for a 604e processor? Is there a PPC BeOS for download that is respectably up-to-date? I think the last PPC might have been v3 but here's hoping.
Some of us can't afford to have a 150W+ machine running 24/7. Mine has 4 fans, and a 380W power supply in it. Mandrake 10.0 doesn't seem to support low power mode on my AMD64.
If I had a Mac I would just put it to sleep like I do with my ibook. Mmmm Mac...
I used BeOS for awhile...it NEVER crashed...it was a little clunky...but it was the most STABLE OS I'VE EVER SEEN. I work in radio and this would be the absolute best OS to build an audio workstation or radio automation system upon
But they wouldn't trademark the greek letter zeta, they would trademark the English (Latin Alphabet) transliteration, "Zeta".
My other first post is car post.
This really is not very well thought out.
Boot times are a combination of hardware and software configurations.
The purmutations are so considerable as to render your proposed benchmark pointless.
You would at least need to know uptime to make the benchmark work.
For instance, if I take an old 486 and pop debian on it, boot once and then switch it off, eventually it will have a great BMPY. One boot of 1 min for the year.
People who boast about uptime, probably use a lot of unessesary electricity.
How about an Eco benchmark, simply the amount of electricity used by the system per day ?
but how are they going to get the dev community on board with this?
Get your torrents...
First, people who call other people asshats are automatically wrong, no matter what they may say. It's like shouting - if you shout, you're wrong, as simple as that.
But even without self-disqualification from civilised discussion, you are still wrong.
Anything can be used as a trademark, as long as it is not already used for any other product falling into the same category including common use by convention.
Thus, if you wanted to trademark the greek letter zeta for a product, then you can do that, as long as there is no other product in the same category which has been marketed using a mark that resembles the greek letter zeta.
No other company would then be allowed to use a symbol in their advertising for a product in the same category which resembles the greek letter zeta.
However, if there was a convention for a certain product that the greek letter zeta is synonym for in the category you apply for, then your application would be rejected. An example of this would be a mark resembling the staff of asclepius, ie. two intertwined snakes, the symbol for medicine if you are a pharmacy, or a hospital or a pharmaceutical company.
But in the absence of any such impediment, there is nothing that stops you from using a glyph of a foreign character set for a trademark.
Keep in mind though that if you have a trademark for the symbol that doesn't mean you also have a trademark for the pronounciation of that symbol.
If you wanted to trademark zeta, the glyph of the greek letter, and Zeta, the latin transliteration as a word, that would be two separate and independent trademarks.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
Keep in mind though that British Telecom would not have been able to defend their Yellow Pages trademark if there had been no overlapping of trademark categories.
For example, if you were a pharmaceutical company and you wanted to market a new drug under the name "Toyota Pills" or "Ford Antiseptic" etc, it would be difficult for the car companies to fight you, that is unless they also filed their marks in the pharma category.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
The answer is: You shouldn't. Zeta is targetted at novice computer users that want to do things like "write and print a text" "save the pictures from my digital camera", "email", "surf the web" and want a reliable, stable machine that does that. They don't even know what an "operating system" is or what it is exactly that they are buying! They just see the promise to get a machine that is easy to use, fast and stable and that's why they are getting it. (I think Zeta will be able to keep that promise - I had a look at it at CeBit, when I bumbed into a sales presentation of by accident.)
Zeta is already being sold on German Shopping Television. They are just showing the applications and the interface and emphasize how easy and fast and stable everything is. There is no talk at all about that it is Linux, that it is an operating system, that you could use other applications than the pre-installed ones... in fact they show that there are "more than 200 applications pre-installed" and argue that "you can do everything because everything is already there - no need to download software".
Zeta is clearly targetted at novices that want to do some things with a computer but don't want to think about the computer itself. They might have experience with windows but probably find it too complicated or are afraid of unstability and insecurity, that is why they look for a "different computer".
I am quite sure that Zeta will be a success. There are millions of people out there that just want to use a computer for some simple things and are happy when it "just works", runs stable and doesn't require much configuration. For us it might seem ridiculous, but I can see how it meets the wishes of many novice computer users.
A G4 I used as a development machine booted Debian 3 (woody) with a 2.2 series kernel in seconds. Usually, I could turn it on in the morning and by the time I had swivelled my chair back to my workstation (a PII running RedHat back then) I could connect via SSH. I found similar experiences on other PPC architectures. Though G3s, of course, are slower, but still under a minute.
That machine is gone, but I expect similar results from my Mac mini which has just arrived. I have a slow, ARM-based linux machine that boots within 30 seconds. I also seem to recall a trick on an Alpha involving linux in the BIOS which allowed booting in 2 or 3 seconds, but wasn't directly involved in using it or setting it up.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
> BeFS performance is abysmal.
It seemed fine to me. Sure, there's some overhead for the extra features, so all else being equal it's not going to perform quite as fast as a simpler filesystem like ext2, but it's not an order of magnitude worse, either, so most users would never notice.
> BeFS is metadata-only journalling.
So is ext3. So is Reiser, until version 4, which was only just released quite recently.
> BeFS fragmentation is a nightmare
I'll have to take your word on that. I never used BeOS for long enough to run into that situation. I played with 5PE for a few weeks, but ultimately it wasn't the OS I was looking for -- for reasons that had nothing to do with the filesystem.
> BeFS features are marginal
All filesystem features are marginal, that was my point. BeFS was a pretty cool piece of filesystem technology, one that filesystem designers at companies such as Microsoft are still interested in looking at and copying, but for all that, nobody really cares, because it is, after all, just a filesystem. Microsoft virtually had to hit OEMs with sticks to get them to switch from FAT32 to NTFS for default OEM installations of Windows XP. Why do you suppose that is? NTFS is in many ways a much nicer filesystem than FAT32. Why didn't everyone jump on the chance to switch to it as soon as possible? My take on that is, the OEMs figured users would place more value on the ability to access their data easily from another operating system -- something most users would never even think about, but, and here's the stinger for filesystem enthusiasts, even FEWER users would care one lick about what filesystem WinXP is using, and the various advantages of NTFS over FAT32.
The BeFS was a very interesting filesystem, as filesystems go, with very intersting features, as filesystems went, in 1998 and, frankly, for some while afterward. But, ultimately, it's just a filesystem, and nobody cares.
Prediction: if you watch Reiser4 adoption rates, they're going to be, in a word, slow. Sure, there are always a few enthusiasts. Watch, though, and see how fast Reiser4 catches on overall. Clearly, it's a superior filesystem to ext2/3. Arguably, it's much superior to NTFS. Watch as people don't all jump to using it right away based on these merits. It's just a filesystem.
(ext3 is different, because it's backward-compatible, which always improves adoption rates by several orders of magnitude.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Next through in a spare "Steve Jobs" that they had lying around . . .
The reason that Be wasn't bought was that they got a silly idea into their heads about price--something like twice what apple was offering. Apple found that for what Be wanted, they could have Next.
hawk
hawk
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
Technical reasons aside, it seems rather convenient that Apple chose NeXT and The Black Turtleneck's brainchild to form the future of MacOS. From what I understand, Jean-Louis was rather proud of making his OS from the ground up, and claimed that NeXT was based on decades-old technology (what can I say, he was trying to sell his wares).
If you think about it, had Apple purchased Be and not NeXT, they might not Avie Tevanian or any of the amazing brain trust of NeXT.
I wonder if they would have still made the iPod?
BeOS was more modern than NeXTOS, and it didn't suffer from the Unix-like exploits or Unix-like flaws that OSX has.
Besides, Apple already had MkLinux, a Mach Kernel Linux, and didn't need to buy out NeXT or Be. They could have built the OS on MkLinux and then followed the OpenStep guidlines which are available to be public. Carbon could have been developed for MkLinux as well.
The only reason Apple went with NeXT, was to get Steve Jobs back, because Apple lacked in the management department and wanted to get back to its roots.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Here at our engineering college I've been trying to get several vendors that make. Fluent (CFD), Star-CD (CFD), Nastran (FEA), HyperMesh , Abaqus (FEA) to port to Mac OS X. Especially when they support really exotic flavors of Unix. I simply give them a large excel spreadsheet with the numbers for all the engineering departments and point out that Mac OS X population is larger than our Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, AIX, BSDs, QNX population combined. We are shifting to Mac OSX in a big way and would like to replace our expensive workstations like Suns and HPs with Mac OS X commodity hardware. My push over the summer is send out the same message to the product managers of Catia, Pro/E, Unigraphics NX (although they do make Parasolid for OS X), AutoCad and Rhino3D. Aside from the folks who need to use these programs on a daily basis everything else can be found for Mac OS X right now and thanks to Fink and Darwinports many of the projects from the open source community. I believe many of these engineering applications can be ported with X11 instead of Aqua. Some elitist insist on Aqua from vendors porting to OS X, but I believe in baby steps for developers to get them acclimated to the new environment, just like Matlab. Insisting on higher GUI and Apple HCI compliance will delay and chase away these ISVs.
Zeta is not the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Omega is. The next letter after Zeta would be Eta.
The idiocy continues..
Next up, someone will tell me that Windows has to load the Internet into RAM, which is why the swap file gets real big, and it causes Windows to load slow when the moon is full.
WE'RE TALKING ABOUT WINDOWS XP, NOT SERVER 2000, OR 2003. You don't run XP on servers. Unless you like the 10 connection limit.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -