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Ars Technica on Zeta 1.0
Quantrell writes "Ars Technica has posted an extremely in-depth review of Zeta 1.0 (/.
saw another shorter review a month ago, but this new one is worth a look by anyone into things Be). Looking at the state of the OS more closely, it looks like it has a long way
to go, maybe too long. Also, the author (rightly, IMO) raises the issue of whether or not Zeta will see success in the face of open source projects like
Haiku. Is there anything but a hobby going on here?"
If BeOS yet lives.
not quite :)
If changing our world is playing God, it is just one more way in which God made us in His image. -Aubrey de Grey
There has been some speculation in the past that yellowTab does not have legal access, if any access at all, to the BeOS source code. They apparently wouldn't confirm nor deny that when asked. Has the situation changed recently? Have they made a final statement about their possession of said source code?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Why would anybody wants to use this when there are so many open source alternatives
Can we hear from someone who has used a BeOS or derivative for more than the 1 week, I'll-use-it then-write-a-review-about-it period? While I'm as willing as the next guy to try out a new OS, I'm not going to play early adopter potentially burn up a perfectly good machine with an install that renders it only marginally usable.
#include "humorous_pop_culture_reference.h"
What chance do operating systems like BEOS stand against Mac and Windows? What advantages are there to using BEOS?
...but then I realized it was Ars on Zeta 1.0 and not Ars on Zeta-Jones 1.0, which promised to be much more insightful and interesting. I really like a nice Ars.
Who is that who made that terrible news submission to Slashdot? Haiku IS NOWHERE NEAR alpha quality!! Haiku exists for 4 years now and they are still NOWHERE. How could you even compare a fully functioning OS like Zeta (or even BeOS 5) to the alpha non-working crap of Haiku????
Slashdot, please use more neutral news submissions on your front page. You are making a bad thing to yellowtab's business (an already small company) by giving FALSE HOPE to the ex-beos users that Haiku is even remotely usable or comparable to Zeta.
No, Zeta is NOT as stable as Linux,OSX or Windows or BSD, but it is WAAAAAYYYY stabler and more functional than Haiku that moves like a snail in its development targets.
Hobby or not, it succedes in other areas. Like many small OS's it has built a strong community, a group of people sharing a common interest. During my time looking after Menuet ( www.menuetos.org ) at times the 'family' aspects were almost as much fun as the technology. It's probably true here too.
Mike.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
The company decided to switch to a software-only strategy and ported BeOS to the Macintosh platform. There were other reasons to justify this switch: it was clear that Apple was always going to be able to ship the latest PowerPC hardware faster than Be, Inc. could
Contrast with...
Apple decided to switch...and ported MacOS to the Intel platform. There were other reasons to justify this switch: it was clear that Intel was always going to be able to ship the latest CPU hardware faster than IBM, Inc. could
Now, you'll notice I removed the words "software-only" from my conversion. Does that mean something? I'm doubtful, but I thought the parallels were interesting. At one time it appeared that Apple might sadly go the way of Be; that is thankfully no longer the case.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
There has been some speculation in the past that yellowTab does not have legal access, if any access at all, to the BeOS source code. They apparently wouldn't confirm nor deny that when asked. Has the situation changed recently? Have they made a final statement about their possession of said source code?
The last time I raised this question, someone pointed out that they're claiming to have overcome the 1GB limitation, which to some at least seems to indicate that they have control of the kernels source.
But I've not seen anything official from Zeta to indicate this. Just BeOS fanboys...
The real question is, will it run on my BeBox?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"Is there anything but a hobby going on here?""
Isn't the majority of OSS a "scratch an itch" hobby?
That's interesting.
It is too bad that they do not come right out and state whether or not they have legal access to the source code of the product they're selling, assuming they could even legally say that. It would put a lot of minds at ease to know that software from them is legitimate, and can be used without running into legal problems.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Do you ask Microsoft to see their secret contracts with SCO, their arrangements with Sun, IBM, Apple and others for world domination ??
That legal "question" is becoming a real troll with all the bells and whistles.
Do you really think that could work this way?
No, of course not. I just choose to not use Microsoft products.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Wouldn't they have been sued by now by the legal owners of the code (Palm?) if they did not have access to it?
I hardly think that
*you* are in danger from Palm
when using Zeta
That was only to illustrate the fact that no company is supposed to do business on illegal stuff, yet they have no reason to give you proof of that, you are supposed to assume they are.
And if they aren't, well it's up to DOJ and friends.
That whole topic is overrated, and just kept artificially alive mainly because some ppl in the "community" think they are important enough that they have the right to know about deals that aren't supposed to be made public.
Can I run Vietcong Fist Alpha on it??
No? Thought not.
I don't know if anyone remembers these, but my friend bought a Huge Bee computer on eBay several years back. It was named Huge Bee because of the ear splitting whine of the CD drive. Anyway, I couldn't resist the humor of the idea of running BeOS on a Huge Bee.
you FAIL it!!1!
Aren't you employed by Yellowtab mmu_man?
BeUnited is the standards body only, the actual site for the Haiku Operating System is here:
Haiku
As I have commented previously, YellowTab is going about this the wrong way. They seem to be trying to market this as a general purpose desktop, but that is a hard market to break in to with incredibly strong established competitors (MS, Apple) and a generally conservative (i.e. not open to drastic change) base of potential desktop customers.
The low system specs and mulitmedia capabilities scream for this to be put into a TV-set-top box like a DVR or even a game console. The low system requirements might even be good on appliances, medical imaging, kiosks, and ATMs. I think they should be trying to sell their stuff to Sony, Panasonic, Scientific-Atlanta, Deibold, etc instead of trying to break into desktops. The desktop market is just a loosing proposition for them.
...on Amigas.
Seriously, the gist of TFA's conclusion is that Zeta's usefulness will only be proven by porting Linux software to it.
I hate to sound like David Spade, but I would be excited by this because...?
I had an early PowerPC Mac in the late 90s and was excited by the prospect of running BeOS on it... until Be announced that their binaries were platform specific, which essentially meant they'd have to decide on one architecture or another.
As it stands right now, even the reviewer is pointing out that all the useful multimedia software is *nix ports (which I'm betting are not optimized to Zeta's kernel).
Kudos to Be for making a lightweight OS. Unfortunately, at the same time Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds were figuring out that their respective successes would come from pulling a Microsoft and putting a GUI to a vastly popular, proven CLI environment and getting to keep the multitudes of software already designed for UNIX.
Had Apple gone with Be, I think it would have lasted about three years before going tits-up. Five years of Classic compatibility ensured OS X's survival, and I strongly doubt Apple could have made BeOS and Classic coexist as peacefully without compromising one or both (witness Vista's back-and-forth on evolution v. backwards compatibility).
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
How is parent offtopic? GP is offtopic but parent is perfectly ontopic in the thread he's posting.
One of the primary tenants of BeBox/BeOS was multiprocessor.
How can this be an in-depth review if they don't check it out on a multiprocessor system?
Also does it support hyperthreading?
A recent German issue of c't magazine says, that YellowTab already owns _ALL_ rights of the source code.
Regards,
Dennis B. Schramm
Sigs suck!
I don't get this. He wasn't asking YellowTab, but rather the highly knowledgeable slashdot crowd. Clearly, an answer is forthcoming.
You wouldn't happen to have a link to the article in question, would you?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I do not. I don't know why I am bothering, though. When I was first viewing the page, thread parent was the only post, then another post appeared two minutes later, after I posted that.
You mean one employee lost a whole project due to his inability to make regular backups, I think.
This reeks of a FUD post...
Article: bottom of page 4: Note the hardware information shown in the About screen. This shot was taking running within VMWare. Also note the date on the kernel revision. There was some dispute early on about whether or not yellowTAB actually had full access to the source code for BeOS, or whether or not they were just reselling the old kernel and adding on third-party additions. The newer kernel revision appears to lay that question to rest, although yellowTAB has not been very open about discussing this question, possibly for licensing reasons.
If they're updating the kernel and selling it... i'd say they have access to all the source.
Sorry, there's no online version of the article available.
;-)
Here's the paragraph in German, taken from c't magazine issue #14/2005, page 88:
"Als der BeOS-Erfinder Jean-Louis Gassee vor vier Jahren das Handtuch warf und seine Firma inklusive der Urheberrechte an Palm verkaufte, war das Original-Betriebsystem trotz aller Fan-Bemühungen zum Tode verurteilt. BeOS-Adept Bernd Thorsten Korz investierte trotzdem Geld und Nerven in seine Firma YellowTab, um ein Nachfolgesystem im Bündel mit aktualisierten alten sowie neu entwickelten Anwendungen auf den Markt zu bringen. Mittlerweile hält die 38-Mann-Firma sämtliche Rechte am Quelltext des ursprünglichen Betriebssystems und hat nach eigenen Aussagen annähernd 90.000 Zeta-Pakete verkauft."
That's in Englisch:
"When BeOS inventor Jean-Louis Gassee quit four years ago and sold his company including copyrights to Palm the original operating system was doomed despite of all efforts of the BeOS community. Nevertheless Beos-initiate Bernd Thorsten Korz invested money and nerves in his company YellowTab in order to publish a BeOS-successor bundled with updated old and newly developed applications. Meanwhile the 38-man-company owns all rights of the source code of the original operating system and claims to have sold nearly 90.000 Zeta packages."
Since German is my mother language, I hope I didn't make too much mistakes
Regards,
Dennis B. Schramm
Sigs suck!
Diebold?
pervasively multi-threaded vote fraud?
64bit fully journaled file system to hold all the non-existent votes?
a media OS for a media that is complicit in war crimes.
ok it's a bit of a long shot but why not. at least BE can be useful after MS killed them and apple shut them out from the ppc market.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
YES they have. Sorry, but this is a question everyone asks.
From their website:
"I heard that ZETA is using some illegal code. Is this true?
No. yellowTAB does not use illegal or leaked software."
They aquired the rights to the code before Be was eaten by Palm. There was also some code Be opensourced before kicking the bucket. Zeta is based on BeOS 5 Dano.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Since American English is our native tongue, don't worry, we won't notice at all.
Sony is in a spiralling decline and it's not at all clear how they will be able to break out from it. The changing nature of the music industry has caught them cold, and the feauding-warlord nature of their company structure prevents them from making an effective response to the changing nature of music systems and even DVD players (their players offer less features for rival formats to DVD whereas the cheap knockoffs tend to have everything).
Sony were working with Be some years ago and there was speculation that they would buy them. They should have done. They could have had an OS that was ready-to-go on the desktop, easily ported to embedded systems, and all of the engineering team, and a company that size could have kept it ticking along lying in wait for the right opportunity to reach out and grab a sector of business.
Beos is still selling within a niche, I was using a DAW (new last year) based around it. Incredibly flexible, and awesomely powerful. If they stick at what they are actually damned good at, SMP audio for instance, they could do some really amazing things. Undercut mac, avoid the joy of windows and lose the complexity of linux.
Brain(s): 0.0% user, 1.3% system, 0.1% nice, 98.6% idle
I ran Be on a pentium-300 laptop and I actually had a rather satisfying experience with it. Be ran surprisingly fast for a Windowing OS. It ran much like QNX runs-- responsive, quick loading, fast task switching and multitasking. The article gets into this a little bitBeOS's strength was always in its relatively lightweight frameworks, and its highly responsive GUI, which were the result of a new, relatively uncluttered code base and an emphasis on multithreading everywhere in the OS. But I really don't think that it hits the nail hard enough on the head. On my laptop be can run a web browser, play mp3s, and run an email client at the same time with little noticable slowdown: again, this is on a [slow] pentium 300 mmx machine. In fact, Be performed most graphical tasks better than the same laptop running on a well tuned Gentoo install with fluxbox as the WM (honest!).
Anyways, this review of Zeta is interesting because it again revisits the platform that could potentially make a great niche for itself in lower-powered situations such as mobile and embeded devices and old [s]crappy laptops like mine. The only thing is that the article really doesn't strongly enough emphasize how dramatic Be's strengths and weakneses are: driver support is EXTREMELY limited, the multitasking and other system performance (espescially sound) is REMARKABLE...
Be is a rather fun OS to play with, and there are tons of excellent free applications for it: check out http://www.bebits.com./ The only real drawback of be is its limited hardware support and the lack of support for many applications that people are used to. Let's hope the Zeta guys stick with it and add support for some more hardware (Wireless baby, wireless.)
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
Jean-Louis Gassée should of accepted their offer of $200 million.
The problem was, it was more of an emotional want (he wanted 400). In business you can't let your decisions be driven by emotion or revenge when clearly his company wanted worth that much.
As someone who used BeOS quite a bit, there are several really important things that the reviewer misses:
BeFS. While he touches on the subject of attributes, he missed the most important part of the BeFS. It was *searchable*. On *everything*. It was really handy for emails, because you could use the attributes to get through tons of email, even if you were the most unorganised person ever. The technology in things like Apple's Spotlight are only now just getting the same capabilities that BeFS had in 1998.
Mutli-Processor. The BeOS took advantage of dual processors. The apps were all mutlithreaded. And it was *fast* because of this. This reviewer did not run a version of Zeta on a dual-processor box, and so can't say whether or not this still holds true.
Multimedia. He does go into this, but not very well - the graphics on the original BeOS were crisp and clean, and looked spectacular with just about every monitor and video card, *automatically*. This was at a time when I was still looking up Horizontal and Vertical refresh rates to put into an X config on RedHat 5.2, and that didn't even work well. Sound was amazing and took advantage of just about every sound card feature. Furthermore, it took advantage of the full power of the speakers, too. I'll never forget the first time I booted into BeOS after rebooting from my Windows partition - I nearly blew out the speakers!
In all, I think it would have been better had someone who was a Be afficianado actually write the review. It's a good review, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't tell me how the new Zeta *feels* when compared to the BeOS.
libertarianswag.com
BeUnited is working on a native port.
e -history-of-java-on-beos/
http://bryan.varnernet.com/archives/2004/09/01/th
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
With virtual memory disabled, I get over 18 billion terabytes of potential swap file space! Cool!
18 billion terabytes == 18 zettabytes. Coincidence?
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
IMO one chance Zeta might have is if it invents itself as an alternative to OSX for running music or video apps (Be was already heading in that direction when it was killed.) There's usually no need for remote applications or multiple users on dedicated studio systems, so Zeta could focus on Be's strengths and not reinvent the wheel if they went in this direction. Sound engineers are a great market for a hobby OS like this, BTW-- they have different needs than most computer users (many high end studios still use Mac OS9!) and really have no fear of using exotic tools (from the guys I've known, the more obscure the equiptment the better.)
Like BeDope, but not as BeLoved
As a person "in the know" I can say that yellowtab does have the source
Also they can't (or they would have) say as much themselves. Just the "oh look there are differences in the kernels" route
How does that have anything to do with the question of whether Yellowtab has access to the source code? They're selling Zeta as their operating system. If I buy it, I expect it to be supported. If they don't have access to the source code they won't be able to support it very well now, will they? More importantly, it would be very possible that it would die after that single release because they couldn't make improvements without access to the source code.
Generally, buying a piece of software from a company that doesn't have access to the code just isn't very bright imo.
[quote=yellowTAB]ZETA costs Eur 99[/quote]
Merely. Good luck.
...another operating system featuring processes, applications, windows, icons, and all the usual things that other operating systems have. Why should anyone use this O/S? it's basically the same thing with any other O/S, just a different iteration. It might be more polished, it may have cleaner APIs, but it is just the same.
We need fresh ideas...come on, developers, offer us something new!
Isn't that why BeOS went out of business in the first place?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
A half dozen other alternative OS's were able to boot perfectly well on Apple's PPC boxes, including several still with us (YellowDog anyone?) None of them had the benefit of having hired away a bunch of Apple engineers...
No, the "difference" was that Intel's investment arm had just dumped a boatload of cash on the struggling Be, gotten a seat on their board, and maneuvered them to going x86. Rather then confess this to the faithful however Be decided to piss all over the company that had spurned 'em and claim Apple made 'em leave Mac/PPC (boohoo)
Lesson learned? It's hard enough for free OS's to compete against the MS juggernaut, much less pricey half-written 'multimedia' ones. At least Nextstep had a richer OS & development environment, some customers beyond the hobbyist market. Oh, and was able to convince Apple to pay them $400 million to take over Apple's OS R&D.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
http://www.bug-nordic.org/haiku.php Q: 'SELECT * FROM BUG_NO_VISITORS_BLOCKED WHERE UserAgent = 'I Ain't telling you shit!';' E: 'You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 't telling you shit!'' at line 1'
I'm just guessing, but I'm pretty sure that would be aginst the agreement they have with palm, since palm is all about embedded applications.
Why not fork?
First I thought it was a typo, then I realised you typed it twice! Seriously, read your own sentence out loud to yourself. Do it a few more times. Can't you hear it doesn't sound right? What's the matter with people and spelling these days?