BeOS Lives on in the Form of Zeta

DgtlDivide writes "BeOS, one of the pinnacle examples of something really good that died far before it should have, is apparently not quite dead yet. BeOS has continued to captivate a large and devoted community. The Haiku project is working on an Open Source version of the OS and now out of Germany comes Yellowtab's Zeta, a continuation of an unreleased development version of BeOS code-named "Dano." Is Zeta worth the price? Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?"

Comments

Better, earlier

[Mikey-San]

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/zeta-1.0.ars

Eat me, lameness filter.

Re:Better, earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

He posted a link to something more informative and useful than the Slashdot article.

The Zeta website doesn't even have screenshots of all these 'great' applications and stuff. I'm meant to go out and buy their OS based upon a few scant pages of information? Yeah, right. If they told me and showed me how much better their OS was than Windows/Linux/Mac OS X then fine, but they don't.

Re:Better, earlier

[Aeiri]

Not only has Ars already run this, but Slashdot has already run this...

Running a quick Slashdot search of "zeta":
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=zeta

We have 5 articles about Zeta OS in the last 5 months, yet this article is posted like they just discovered the lost city of Atlantis...

Re:Better, earlier

[Back Slider 1969]

Thanks for ruining my deja vu.

BeOS: "I don't want to go on the cart!"

[TheLoneIguana]

"I feel happy! I feel happy!"

Re:BeOS: "I don't want to go on the cart!"

[excesspwr]

You're not fooling anyone y'know.

Re:BeOS: "I don't want to go on the cart!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you do anything?

[WHACK]

Ah, thanks very much.

Not at all. See you on Thursday.

Right.

Re:BeOS: "I don't want to go on the cart!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention "This is an ex-OS, it's pining for the fjords...", "It's only a flesh wound!", etc.

Re:BeOS: "I don't want to go on the cart!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hang around a couple of minutes, it won't be long!

Re:BeOS: "I don't want to go on the cart!"

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got to go to the *BSD's house, they've had nine this week.

Re:BeOS: "I don't want to go on the cart!"

[darkmeridian]

For those who aren't keeping track.

http://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/s/spamal otlyrics/heisnotdeadyetlyrics.html

Depends on leadership - and public image...

[raydobbs]

It depends - does it have that arrogant SOB Gasse running things? If it does - it's doomed. If not, perhaps they will stand a chance. With Apple now moving to Intel hardware - there is a better chance of BeOS finding it's way onto that hardware.

Having used an older version - it was definitely unique and ahead of it's time. That being said, it will have to have changed a great deal between when I saw it last, and it's next incarnation, otherwise - the current crop of Mac OS X and Windows XP / Vista already does what BeOS did.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Lord Kano]

Gasse miscalculated one thing, the return of Jobs.

Had Steve Jobs not been brought back to Apple, Be OS would have been the foundation for the "next generation" Mac OS instead of NeXT's.

It would have taken less work, less time and could arguably have yielded a better final result to build a new OS on top of the Be OS compared to the process of porting NeXT's OS from the ground up.

LK

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Anonymous Coward]

Zeta also faces free competition in various forms:

Haiku (BeOS clone)
Syllable (BeOS-alike, fairly mature)
ReactOS (clean Windows clone)

The BeOS user community is largely behind Haiku. Syllable and ReactOS are fairly advanced in their state of development.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is very much debatable.

While BeOS would have provided the best-of-breed OS technology for the Mac, it wouldn't have helped Apple the least bit as a company.

The way I see it, Apple's comeback was delivered through 4 major factors:
1. Steve Jobs' charisma in bringing people together to work on a common goal. This solidifies Apple into a single-minded company with everybody going in the same direction, instead of many-masted sail ship buffetted by sea winds. Be didn't have Steve Jobs. Gasse would have grounded Apple totally.
2. Mac OS X's UNIX-based foundation, which enables the scientific community and some industries to quickly adopt the Mac as both 'workstation' and 'day-to-day computer' platforms. The familiarity of UNIX infrastructure and the elegance of the GUI represent the best compromise (though separately, they may not be best-of-breeds) for most computing tasks. BeOS was sort-of POSIX-compliant. But, it wouldn't have been easy porting all those UNIX apps to BeOS-based Mac OS.
3. Cocoa. Rapid development, elegant interface, a plethora of built-in features. What else is there to say? This is THE platform which provides Mac users like us with the useful software trinkets we so much love. BeOS did not have anything close to this.
4. iPod. This is Steve Jobs in his best form. Gasse? Well....

Steve Jobs' return to Apple was essential. While I do lust for BeOS' stark efficiency and elegance, they could never have guaranteed the Mac's survival.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[azav]

Having been to the old Be office and having used the OS, I can hope the case was GOD YES. Hopefully, the disk OS folks that were recruited from Be (polite wording intended) will add some of the major goodness to Mac OS.

I believe you may have been correct yet more powerful forces were at work. Forces willing, the goodness of Be will live on in an OS that needed to be from NeXT, and Unix for matters too complex to explain.

Salut.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Lord Kano]

Had Jobs not returned, Apple would have probably ponied up the $400 million or so that Gasse wanted for Be.

Apple's problem has never been technological, they have some ass stomping programmers. Be OS would have been transformed from something cool into something SWEET if they had gotten a hold of it.

At the time Apple bought NeXT, THEY didn't have anything like Cocoa. Apple built Cocoa from the ground up for the platform that they did have. They could have done it on a Be OS foundation.

It's unknown if Apple could have implemented a POSIX compliant framework for Be OS and this is one of the big strengths of OSX.

What we're seeing now isn't so much the survival of the Macintosh platform as it is the survival of Apple in any form necessary. I can understand that Apple had their reasons for doing so, but abandoning the PPC architecture will change them. Instead of a cool company with uniquely good hardware and an OS with its own strengths they will become what Dell would be if they bought Mandriva or Red Hat.

It wasn't really a big deal to pay premium Apple prices for Mac OS on PPC, but aside from die hard Mac fans, who will pay them for the same Intel processors that can be had from Dell, HP, IBM and Gateway?

LK

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Trurl's Machine]

At the time Apple bought NeXT, THEY didn't have anything like Cocoa.

What on Earth makes you say so? Nextstep/Openstep was exactly "something like Cocoa"...

Apple built Cocoa from the ground up for the platform that they did have. They could have done it on a Be OS foundation.

Well, they would have built something and maybe even call it Cocoa... but it would be something entirely different. Building MacOS X on NexsStep, Apple immediately gained the entire *BSD software library and user experience for their new platform. Should they choose Be, they would end up in yet another proprietary dead end street. And without Jobs, there would be no iMac, iBook or iPod to save them.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[rodgerd]

Apple's problem has never been technological, they have some ass stomping programmers.

*snerk* Right. The only ass those programmers stomped was Apples, while they fucked Copland up completely.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Lord Kano]

Management issues.

LK

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Lord Kano]

And without Jobs, there would be no iMac, iBook or iPod to save them.

Without Jobs Apple would still be Apple. It wasn't him that saved the company, it was the legions of faithful Apple customers.

There's an almost religious aspect to the fanaticism with which some people remain loyal to Apple.

In my experience, I took less flack after a religious conversion than I did after a platform change.

LK
(Whoever you are burning up your mod points on me. I have excellent Karma, I can take it.)

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[steeviant]

"Apple's problem has never been technological, they have some ass stomping programmers. Be OS would have been transformed from something cool into something SWEET if they had gotten a hold of it."

Correct. Apple's problem was marketing, they'd spent so many years targetting their marketing at their own customers that the rest of the world was losing interest in them.

Having the world's coolest operating system didn't make half as much difference as having a CEO with a mind for marketing to the masses, the big turnaround for Apple (as far as profits are concerned) was the original iMac which was around before OS X.

"At the time Apple bought NeXT, THEY didn't have anything like Cocoa. Apple built Cocoa from the ground up for the platform that they did have. They could have done it on a Be OS foundation."

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

Apple didn't build Cocoa from the ground up. They took OpenStep and wrapped it up in a pretty compositing window server and tacked on the carbon libraries as a way of migrating 'classic' Mac OS toolbox applications.

They would have missed out on the cross platform compatibility, multi-user abilities, bundles, RAD tools, UNIX base and a host of other things that have been very good for Apple Inc, and OS X users had they chosen BeOS.

I'm sure BeOS would have made a very nice next generation MacOS, but I wouldn't have been as keen to use it as I was to use a revamped version of OpenStep.

"It's unknown if Apple could have implemented a POSIX compliant framework for Be OS and this is one of the big strengths of OSX."

Apple probably could have adapted BeOS to be able to do a lot of the things that OS X is capable of, but OpenStep had most of the very useful qualities that they are leveraging now before Apple ever touched it. As you say, it's just ONE of the strengths of OS X.

The switch to Intel probably wouldn't be happening right now without OS X's OpenStep heritage, which meant that OS X arrived on the PPC platform prepared to concurrently support multiple binary architectures, as OpenStep had for many years.

"What we're seeing now isn't so much the survival of the Macintosh platform as it is the survival of Apple in any form necessary. I can understand that Apple had their reasons for doing so, but abandoning the PPC architecture will change them. Instead of a cool company with uniquely good hardware and an OS with its own strengths they will become what Dell would be if they bought Mandriva or Red Hat."

What utter nonsense, if Dell bought a Linux distributor, they'd just be selling Dells with a Linux distribution installed.

They'd have to hire top knotch industrial designers to make their cases, and some of the leading people in OS research to design a new Linux distribution from the ground up with the desktop in mind, or find another NeXT waiting to be snapped up for a song.

It would take many years and billions of dollars of research to turn Dell into Apple, and in the meantime people who want a seamless desktop Unix would just keep buying Apple, no matter what CPU is inside the box.

"It wasn't really a big deal to pay premium Apple prices for Mac OS on PPC, but aside from die hard Mac fans, who will pay them for the same Intel processors that can be had from Dell, HP, IBM and Gateway?"

Me.

When I bought my PowerBook the G4 was clearly ahead of the game as far as battery life vs. processing power was concerned. Why would I not buy an Intel equipped PowerBook for the same reason?

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[NutscrapeSucks]

Technical management. The problems with Copeland were architectural despite all the ass-stomping at Apple.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[portscan]

Be OS already was mostly POSIX compliant. It certainly had ports of bash, perl, tex, octave (mentioned because you refer to the sic/eng community) and most of the unix goodies.

I think that Apple's success is due completely to the return of Steve Jobs to the company.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Billly Gates]

Apple was dieing a horrible death before Jobs came back.

Unlike BSD, Apple really was about to go under and Jobs return was a move of desperation. It had no direction or future.

Many Apple investors were even debating closing Apple down and just selling off its IP. I remember old pcworld articles from even windows die hard journalists raising a campaign to save Apple because the pc industry would be doomed to Microsoft.

Jobs gave Apple a direction. Microsoft came out with Windows95 and almost took Apple under. Many businesses put pressure on Apple's customers to move to Windows for photoshop and MacOS frankly sucked. It had no premptive multitasking, no concept of a kernel, and WindowsNT was about to come into popularity.

Jobs
1.) Killed the clones
2.) Needed a quick competitor to NT which became NextStep errr MacOSX
3.) Differentiated his products and created value by coming out with the imac. Imacs looked awesome and made the name Apple actually mean something. People valued a stylish high end system.
4.) Moved into online music and appliances with the Ipod in an effort to save the company if their pc business flopped.
5.) Prevented hollywood from going to an all microsoft format for media from the sucess of itunes and its expanded userbase

Steve Jobs saved the company and in my opinion Apple simply would not be if he did not come back.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is utter pants!

The faithful carried Apple during the worst times, yes. But, their 'legions' were shrinking, and Apple was truly, truly in a lot of problems. I had no doubt it would have continued to exist, but not in its capacity at the moment. It'd have been something in the fringe like Amiga, or something....

People like me would look at Apple hardware with longing hearts (not unlike the way I look at BeOS), but would never switched. I, and hundreds of people I know, who grew up with UNIX and Windows, took one look at Mac OS X and immediately bought Macs. We can't afford sacrificing financial and labour resources to support such technological ideals. Mac OS X, even in its nascent state now, has got all the developer support and applications to run our business--with stability and security to boot. It's a no-brainer to switch, really.

Your premise is flawed in assuming that great products bring along with it company's survival and fortune. We've seen cases where this kind of reasoning break down again and again (e.g., your beloved BeOS). Were it true, we wouldn't have any problem with the WinTel hegemony either.

In Steve Jobs we find the combination of love of excellent products, the strength to motivate people to produce them, and the savvy to market them. This was what Apple direly needed. The question is: who's going to continue when Steve Jobs is no more. A big flaw in Steve Jobs' self-aggrandising regime.

There is no doubt that Apple's turnover was for the most part due to Steve Jobs and his colonels. Events are lined up to neatly after he came back to deny the fact (iMac, return of profitability, iBook, Mac OS X, iPod, iTunes, skyrocketing stock price). There's also plenty of proof that he's an arsehole, but Gasse would have been little more than a burden on Apple's payroll.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's problem has never been technological, they have some ass stomping programmers.

If by "ass stomping" you mean "Feel the need to allocate 100 MB of ram to every running GUI program" sure. Ever wonder why the G5's need at least 1.0 GB of ram to feel 'teh snappy' ?

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Had Jobs not returned, Apple would have probably ponied up the $400 million or so that Gasse wanted for Be.

You make it sound like Apple simply offered Jobs the chance to come back and bring NeXT with him. In fact, Jobs lobbied Apple heavily to buy NeXT and competed directly with Be for the opportunity.

Amelio and Apple's board thought Be wasn't worth anywhere near the $200 million Gassee was asking. Apple was thinking more like $50 million. How they ever agreed to $427 million for NeXT is beyond my comprehension!

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Lord Kano]

Many businesses put pressure on Apple's customers to move to Windows for photoshop and MacOS frankly sucked. It had no premptive multitasking, no concept of a kernel, and WindowsNT was about to come into popularity.

Windows 95, 98 and ME had no premptive multitasking and were EASILY as unstable as Mac OS 7.5.x. You can't claim that the lack of something that the competition didn't have either was a reason that Apple was losing market share.

Jobs
1.) Killed the clones

Which is why I haven't bought any new Apple hardware since his return. I never bought a clone, but it was nice to have the choice. Apple killed off the clones because they(most notable Power Computing and Daystar) were putting out better machines at lower prices.

Many of the graphic artists that I knew jumped all over the PowerTower Pro series from Power Computing and ALL of the hardcore Mac geeks I knew wanted a Genesis MP.

2.) Needed a quick competitor to NT which became NextStep errr MacOSX


Which could have easily been the Be OS had Apple not taken him back.

3.) Differentiated his products and created value by coming out with the imac. Imacs looked awesome and made the name Apple actually mean something. People valued a stylish high end system.

The iMac was NOT a high end system. I worked for an Apple dealer when they launched. People who needed high end computers bought PowerMac G3s and then later PowerMac G4s.

4.) Moved into online music and appliances with the Ipod in an effort to save the company if their pc business flopped.

Brilliant move BTW, but it has nothing to do with the fact that they could have made Be OS into a successful OS.

5.) Prevented hollywood from going to an all microsoft format for media from the sucess of itunes and its expanded userbase

What does iTunes have to do with Hollywood? Hollywood makes movies, not music.

LK

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Billly Gates]

I dont want to debate or anything.

BeOS did intrigue me even though I never used it. It was very multimedia friendly and could boot within 15 second and was lightyears ahead of the competition.

But I was referring to Jobs saving Apple and not which Os would be the technically supperior one.

And yes Windows 9.x did support premptive multitasking while MacOS was still using Windows 3.11 style equilivant cooperative multitasking. Even though MacOS was slighty more stable. It was funny reading about premptive multitasking the MacOSX demo when it came out.

The clones might have been better but it almost made Apple go under. Remember they are a hardware company and whats good for its users is not good for Apple.

The Imac was considered stylish and kind of high end in style and demand as a result. I did not mean computer performance. It recreated a branding and corporate image for Apple which is what reattracted its many former loyalists.

Hollywood refers to music as well and Itunes and alternative non microsoft formats are needed in this age of drm. Microsoft would love to use drm not to protect media interests but to force you o the upgrade treadmill. What they are doing with drm and monitors in the Vista is unreal and scary.

MacOSX already had a real unix on it and frameworks which were converted to cocoa which is what Steve Jobs liked. I wonder how mature Beos api's were?

Still with hardware increasing in power I suppose viewing media under OSX is about as pleasant as BeOS once was.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[lostchicken]

As others have mentioned, Cocoa is just the NeXT API, very minimally changed. In fact, this becomes VERY apparent looking at the names of the API calls. Everything's in the form of NSWindow and NSRegion, NS standing for NeXTSTEP.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Anonymous Coward]

Two problems with you:

1) Gassee has been out of the BeOS picture for about four years now. You need to get caught up with the times in order to avoid looking ignorant or ill-informed.

2) Like quite a few other nerds here at Slashdot, you seem incapable of typing "its" correctly. Using "it's" in the possessive sense may be a widespread and common mistake, but it still makes you look dumb.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Lord Kano]

I misspoke. You are correct. Windows 95 preemptively multitasked protected mode 32 bit applications.

BeOS did intrigue me even though I never used it. It was very multimedia friendly and could boot within 15 second and was lightyears ahead of the competition.

I used the preview release on my 6400. I didn't use it for long, just a couple of weeks. At the time, it was AMAZING. The thing that sticks out most in my mind was how I could open and play 8 quicktime movies at the same time and although there was some stuttering it was minimal.

I've been trying to get my hands on a BeBox for about two years now. They're in short supply after all this time.

MacOS 7.x didn't compare. Mac OS 8 was a huge step in the right direction.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong. Why Copland, Pink and other efforts essentially went nowhere was because of the fact that Apple was an out of control herd of cats, each going his own way. The saying at the time, that Apple was a company of kids in dire need of adult supervision, was very true. That is why any Apple leader before Jobs could say "let's go this way!" and be ignored by his troops. People critisize (sp? !!!) Amelio, Spindler & Scully a lot, but they ignore the fact that Apple was so completely out of control that the top manager was in the end a lonely figure with no real power... Apple survived despite itself.

Only Jobs had the "moral authority", the "legitimacy" to go in, pare down the ranks by sacking all the parasites (story goes that if you could not explain to Steve what you job was in 25 words or less, you were fired on the spot) and impose a single direction to everyone. In other words, when the boss says "go THIS way", you go THIS way. Period.

We are definitively talking text-book case of management problem_S_ here, no programmer's incompetence...

BeOS/Palm

[JediLow]

Wasn't parts of BeOS supposed to be incorporated into the Palm OS? (Although, with the sale of PalmSource along with its move towards a Linux based system where does that put the BeOS components?)

Re:BeOS/Palm

[d99-sbr]

Yes, parts of BeOS was used to create PalmOS Cobalt 6. Cobalt was however pretty much DOA, and has now been officially abandoned.

A cool link!

[VAXGeek]

Click here for latest Zeta news!

slashdot

[eobanb]

news for nerds, stuff from like, a year ago.

Jesus. Just Jesus.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

This puppy is a snoooozer. ZZZZZzzzzzzzzZZZzzzZZzzzzzzz.....

And the ewoks sing

[HishamMuhammad]

"Dupe dupe! Eee chop, Dupe dupe!
Toe meet toe pee chee keene, g'noop dock fling oh ah.
Yah wah! Eee chop, yah wah!
Toe meet toe pee chee keene, g'noop dock fling oh ah...." (rest goes like the Ewok song)

And so the new Slashdot theme song is born.

Rejoice!

Re:And the ewoks sing

[hritcu]

Dupe? Advertising!

Re:And the ewoks sing

[out_sp0k1n]

Glo wah, eee chop glo wah!!

I thought

[Anonymous Coward]

That Michael Douglas lives on the form of Zeta
oh "on _in_ .."

dont worry :)

BeOS Lives? Truly???

[null etc.]

Wow, way to go with the TIMELY reporting! I liked this story better when it was submitted June 19th:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 6/19/1742245&tid=87&tid=189&tid=190&tid=8

Re: What DUPE??

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok dude, where's the original story? In order to qualify as a dupe there actually needs to be a "FIRST POST" of which there are none in this case. Nice try though.

Single user OS

[misleb]

Does the world really need a single user OS? I understand many of BeOS's merits, but that is a pretty serious limitation that makes it very undesirable in most situations. You wouldn't run your computer as root, right? Isn't that basically what you are doing when yoiu run BeOS?

-matthew

Re:Single user OS

[digital-madman]

Yeah pretty much. Think Windows 95...

Damn 15sec time filter!

Re:Single user OS

[JayAEU]

IMHO most existing Windows systems are actually used as single user machines, even though they'd be capable of being used by multiple user.

With this in mind, one can understand why YellowTab is using sales channels like http://www.rtlshop.de/rtlshop/servlet/~tvm5/rtlsho p/subsites/articleDetail.html?command=display&btUi d=bt_Article&iDf_id=7f001:-4d972e39:1047e548e3d:78 80&iDf_relayClientId=4&startPage=true, where things are usually quite simple or simplyfied.

While I'm not entirely sure if they're doing their customers a favour in claiming that Zeta is the best alternative for Windows, they say they'll take it back 30 days with your money back.

Re:Single user OS

[misleb]

By "single" user, I am not just referring to the number of people who can have unique accounts on the machine. I am talking about system security. Without user accounts, you don't have meaningful file permissions. Every process effectively runs as "root." Granted, most Windows users run as admin anyway, but I believe there are still some things a process running as such a user can't do.

Anyway, it is just a bad design. Maybe average users won't care about running as "root," but at some point it is going to kick them in the ass.

-matthew

Re:Single user OS

[gnu-sucks]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the core of Be supported user/group file permissions.

It should also be noted, that 'file permissions' are extremely antiquated in today's world.

Re:Single user OS

[DRobson]

I havent booted BeOS for a month or two now, but IIRC everything had the same style posix permissions as every other *nix you've layed your hands on. Only difference was that there was only ever one user (named 'Baron'). I think most of it is just waiting for someone to write the backend.

Re:Single user OS

[rossdee]

"Does the world really need a single user OS?"

This is /. Most of the people here are single users.

But seriously, the term PC means Personal Computer. In many cases there is only one person using it.

Re:Single user OS

[Xarius]

You wouldn't run your computer as root, right? Isn't that basically what you are doing when yoiu run BeOS?

Isn't that basically what you are doing when you run Windows XP?

I don't see most computer users even noticing, let alone complaining about the fact they run as Administrator by default.

Re:Single user OS

[Onan]

Yeah, it's been "waiting for someone to write the backend" for over a decade now.

I used BeOS on a Power Computing machine, and even back then the story was, "yeah, we laid all the foundations for it being a multiuser system, so finishing up implementing that should be a snap. We'll have it done any day now."

(Sorry, I'm _still_ bitter about BeOS abandoning the mac platform.)

Re:Single user OS

[KillShill]

they didn't abandon it, apple refused to provide specs to them for the g3 machines. and they didn't want to reverse engineer the systems and maybe have to deal with apple legal. so they went to x86 where they had support from the get go and were even encouraged to write for that platform.

apple was even scared that many mac users wanted BeOS more than mac os. it was cooler than macs for the small amount of time it existed on the ppc world.

all good things must come to an end, sometimes prematurely.

current OSs are just now trying to implement the same things that beOS had many years ago. but the difference was that BeOS was built from the ground up for those features; they cannot be bolted on without serious compromises. massive multi-threading is the future and BeOS had it done well almost a decade ago. etc etc.

if it had lived, today it would be a huge leap, technologically ahead of competing systems. there weren't any serious flaws in the design. it would have continued to mature and incorporate more of the features that made other OS's popular.

Re:Single user OS

[Onan]

they didn't abandon it, apple refused to provide specs to them for the g3 machines.

That excuse was absurd then, and it's absurd now. The g3's specs were precisely as public as every previous mac, on which BeOS had no difficulty running. LinuxPPC was up and running on the g3s almost immediately after their release, belying any claims that they were so foreign and incomprehensible as to make porting to them impossible.

I was at the BeOS developer conference immediately after the switch, and Gassee seemed pretty open about the fact that this was not a technology choice, but a market share choice. He drew some laughs from the crowd by pointing out, "We've looked at the market, and we noticed that there were a lot more Windows PCs than macs out there." Any nonsense about the mysterious nature of the g3 was just a thin veil over their choice to target a larger market.

Zeta worth the price?

[cocrane]

I've read that article, and those of you who consider buying it should know tha Zeta is published on several German teleshopping channels, and they want about 30 to 50 dollars there. m from germany and i was somewhat irritatef to see Zeta on this site.

Not Dead, Not Dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD is not dead!

Oh... err... we were talking about something else not being dead yet?

Buy to Try

[anagama]

Ok -- $95 to buy it and if you can download it, the link to the DL is very not-obvious. Add to that glowing references such as this from the 2nd page: "Besides driver support, the largest obstacle to using BeOS is lack of applications." How long can it last if it has little hardware support, outdated and few applications, and costs nearly $100 to boot?

Re:Buy to Try

[misleb]

Please tell me that you didn't pay $95...

Re:Buy to Try

[sonicattack]

[...] and costs nearly $100 to boot?

Boot manager menu (please type in credit card number and expiry date, then press listed key to boot):

F1 Windows XP ($10)
F2 Debian Sarge ($1)
F3 Zeta ($100)

Money will be drawn from your account upon successful boot. Reboot due to system crash within 3 minutes comes FREE OF CHARGE (Only applies to key F1)

Re:Buy to Try

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the AmigaOne is in a worse situation, and it hasn't stopped breathing. $1000.00 for an AmigaOne, no modern browser AT ALL, broken networking due to driver bugs, very little support, buggy hardware, yet thousands keep buying.

BeOS at $100, no prob.

Re:Buy to Try

[despisethesun]

They also have a Live CD available. It's not a free Live CD, but it's only 10 Euros and that's considerably cheaper and I believe that if you wind up purchasing the full version after that it counts towards the purchase price. Of course, a more unscrupulous individual may suggest finding it on Bittorrent to try it, but not me.

Anyway, here's the link to the Live CD page. Hope your German is good.

Re:Buy to Try

[The Wicked Priest]

Cute, but of course XP also costs ~$100 (or more, especially for Pro). It's just that the cost is often bundled in the cost of a new system.

To the questions posed in the summary, my answers would be "No", and "No". To elaborate: "Probably not", and "Definitely not".

Re:Buy to Try

[Anonymous Coward]

way to miss the joke, faggot

Re:Buy to Try

[flosofl]

****WOOOOSH*****

Re:Buy to Try

[duffahtolla]

BeOS at $100, no prob.

Yeah, Even at $100, I kinda feel like getting it just for the nostalgia.

It would be nice to see a 15 second boot again.

Re:Buy to Try

[The Wicked Priest]

I got the joke, such as it was. I see you have a very evolved sense of humor yourself. But I guess I was really replying to the grandparent, who was complaining about the cost; my point being, the cost is really no different from Windows'. (The value is another question.)

The Anti-Linux Factor???

[digital-madman]

Alright, disclaimer here. Normally I don't bother to comment on any offbeat anymore but i got something to ask...

What is the target market for this product?

Lets face it.. BeOS or Zeta (doesn't really matter what you call it) can not be a mainstream desktop OS. Just like Linux it faces the same problems, plus some. No Games, migration factors, software software software?? You could port alot of linux software to the OS. But what?s the point.

You offer all Linux software on BeOS it could be another anti-Linux migration barrier. (Although portable code aside.) For general user base, its to confusing. (That sounds a little lame i know.)

A quote from Futurama stuck in my head after that thought: "Your average voter is still as drunk and stupid as they were in 1980". Well... your average joe six pack user is just as drunk and stupid as they are in windows.

Also, where's even a niche market for this product??? Its not like the BSD's which have great server and datacenter applications. Hell, even OS/2 survives on SOME ATM machines. Where's the niche? or even market?

The only useful thing I could see this is for... is a ultra secure webserver at tops. (Security through obscurity). But mostly as a novelty for uber geeks.

In the end this will mean nothing or be a confusion point for joe six pack user looking to switch from windows.

-Digital Madman

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[Lord Kano]

I HIGHLY doubt that the Yellow Tab folks expect joe sixpack to even hear about this.

It'll be a cool toy for geeks to play with, and it might even be a good OS for a "Smart Appliance" or other embedded applications.

LK

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[digital-madman]

Wow... I didn't consider embedded..

But still where's the market none the less...

Linux also has a foot in the door on embedded. I don't see how this is anything but a geek play thing at top's.

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[csplinter]

>>Just like Linux it faces the same problems, plus some. No Games, migration factors, software software software??

All we need is developers, developers, developers, developers.

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[Lord Kano]

It's all about choice. At one time people were saying "Windows CE is the future of the embedded market, why waste time developing embedded linux?"

As we get more and more gadgets, there will be more and more room for new platforms to develop them on.

LK

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[bedouin]

Also, where's even a niche market for this product???

Multitrack recording.

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[autOmato]

See also post above.

Here in Germany Zeta is marketed on home shopping networks as the new, easy to use Windows alternative.

"Look ma, no viruses!"

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[JayAEU]

Well that's exactly what they're doing on German television: http://www.rtlshop.de/rtlshop/servlet/~tvm5/rtlsho p/subsites/articleDetail.html?command=display&btUi d=bt_Article&iDf_id=7f001:-4d972e39:1047e548e3d:78 80&iDf_relayClientId=4&startPage=true

This is a sales channel where Jane and Joe Sixpack usually watch, just check some of the other products on that page. The channel runs 24h a day and at least every 2 days they're promoting Zeta.

They even sold the pre-release versions there, when Zeta didn't even have a proper repartitioning tool. ;) I wonder how many Joes wiped their existing Windows installation in favour of Zeta and found that they lost all their data for something that doesn't even run on their box.

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[Fred_A]

"Look ma, no applications!"

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[Iome]

Also, where's even a niche market for this product???

If I had an old computer with Microsoft Windows and I was fed up with it (security problems, spyware, constant need for updates, etc.), I could have about four options:

• Get new Windows. "Advertisement says I get rid of all the problems by upgrading". Need probably new expensive hardware too and I might have doubts if upgrading will help that much.
  
• Get Apple. Needs new expensive hardware, but otherwise might be a good solution.
  
• Get some Linux. It can work or it may not, depending what distro you choose, how you set it up and are you ready to learn. It probably needs work for choosing distro, finding out about desktop environments, etc. And with a new distro (which may even cost money), there is possibility applications won't run that smoothly on older computer...
  
• Get Zeta. If it runs stable and smooth on my old computer with web browser, email client, word processing and all the basic stuff, it would be a great option. The price isn't so bad if it's easy to use.

So I see there is a good market for easy to maintain, inexpensive (using old hardware) OS for basic computer users who don't need more than the basic apps.

The price is maybe bit too much though. At lower price they could reach the volumes...

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[lemonjelo]

Considering how really quick it was when I ran it years ago on a 400Mhz laptop, I would say this would be useful in set-top boxes, DVR and email checking, that sort of thing, on fairly low power processors.

Of course, that doesn't mean anyone will use it for that purpose, just seems like a natural fit for what was designed as a multimedia OS IIRC.

Re:BeOS Lives? Truly???

[Anonymous Coward]

ok.. this is the second time someone has screamed DUPE and it is most definitely not a dupe at all... how can you claim this was originally posted in June when the article on Mad Penguin was _created_ on 2005/09/11 ??? I'd love to know how this works. Is everyone drunk here tonight? There are tons of people saying this has been reported on before and if you care to search the site... its the first. What is everyone drinking? I'd love to have one :)

Honestly

[Approaching.sanity]

Probably not no.

Re:Honestly

[Anonymous Coward]

BeOS will be very interesting if it hits the mainstream. One will have to wait and see...

Who keeps doing this?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man, who writes these?? Not only is this a dupe from the wayback machine, it has the cliché debate-invoking "Will X defy logic and accomplish Y?" question, which are really starting to drive me nuts. It seems that thats all you need for a story on Slashdot anymore... just make sure you inspire debate with a "thoughtful" question in your post...

The Days of Our Lives

[Anonymous Coward]

" Is Zeta worth the price? Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?"

Could you make it sound anymore like a soap opera?

Are we supposed to be transfixed?

BeOS the Indiana Jones of OSes. Stay tuned for the next episode when Oedipus finds out he's been doing his mom.

Will it make it as an OS?

[Coryoth]

Well it seems Zeta has been kicking around for some time. The earliest of those being from 2002 when it was first announced that yellowTab had picked up some rights to BeOS. I gather (from comments in those many stories) that Zeta has been on sale, at least in Germany, for quite some time now, and went 1.0 in July. The reviews have been lukewarm, and it really hasn't raised much (if any) mainstream attention.

Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?"

I find that rather doubtful. BeOS was a fine OS in its day, but while the rest of the world has been improving (MacOS, for instance, now actually has something decent to offer) BeOS has been mostly treading water as yellowTab try and modernise it where possible and get support for modern hardware. It's not that Zeta is bad - it looks like quite a nice OS - it's just that it certainly isn't revolutionary or particularly interesting for any reasons other than BeOS nostalgia... and these days you need to manage to stand out in some way or other as an OS to attract enough application developers. Without applications your OS is just going to slowly stagnate and die unless you can find and fill a niche. Given that Zeta is aiming at the general desktop... I just don't see them managing to get enough strng application support to really pull that off.

Jedidiah.

Re:Will it make it as an OS?

[misleb]

Zeta/Be has one serious, and ultimately fatal, flaw. It is single user. Nobody in their right mind is going to put anything important on a Be box. Maybe single user (and no meaningful file permissions) would pass in the days of Mac OS 9 or Win 95, but the world has moved on. Security is a real issue for everyone. No matter how much developer and hardware support Zeta gets, it will always suffer from that one fatal design flaw.

-matthew

Re:Will it make it as an OS?

[kahei]

It is single user.

Well, as the vast majority of OS installations in existance run as single-user installations, that doesn't sound like too much of an issue.

Time-sharing systems with multiple interactive users at one time were the environment that Unix grew up in, and I suppose the Linux community still thinks in those terms even now that most Linux machines are either single-user desktops or webservers. But it's not a particularly important role any more.

Re:Will it make it as an OS?

[Tim C]

Well, I don't know for sure, but from the sounds of it the OP meant single-user as in Win9x, not as in "single user on the machine at a time". That is, I believe that what was meant was that it only supports a single user account *on the machine*. So, no file permissions, no concept of individual preferences, no login screen, etc.

That was ok 10-15 years ago, but even home users want to keep their files separated these days. Hell, the first thing my parents did when they got their PC was to create a separate user account for each member of the family (even me, and I hardly ever see them these days)

Re:Will it make it as an OS?

[jsebrech]

Well, as the vast majority of OS installations in existance run as single-user installations, that doesn't sound like too much of an issue.

Maybe "single user" is the wrong term, maybe "horribly insecure" is better. Anything you run on beos has root level power. That's a lousy design, and apart from windows (in practical situations) all operating systems have long since abandoned it due to all the security problems it causes.

Re:Will it make it as an OS?

[Beautyon]

and inflame public interest in the OS?

Maybe they don't care, like the Plan 9 people don't care:

I don't think that the lack of interest by the world at large is due to a lack of comfortable, familiar applications. I think it's got more to do with a lack of understanding of why Plan 9 is (*really!*) interesting and a shortage of people who find that utterly compelling. People have given various excuses in the past (lack of gcc or X11, cost, licence terms) but if you're really enthused, none of that matters. Unix was a hit because it filled a niche, and what passes for Unix these days is still filling that niche, and for a lot of peple that's good enough. Those of us who can't imagine going back to living on what passes for Unix are a definite minority.

So what should be done? I don't think we should measure success by counting noses. I'm not even sure that Plan 9 needs to be a ``success''. We're using it, we like it and perhaps that's enough. Keeping up with new hardware is a worthy goal. We're all stretched a bit thin; as far as I know, none of us are able to work on Plan 9 development full-time. People have various pieces of work in progress. Perhaps after the election, the economy will pick up and we'll all have more time to devote.

`Plan 9: a ``Failure'' for 17 years and still ``failing''.'

Re:Will it make it as an OS?

[bani]

single user in this context means:

one user account on the entire system : administrator

beos has no permissions, period. everything runs as "root". in the 1980s this might have been acceptable for a pc, but in the 2000s it is most definitely not.

Re:Will it make it as an OS?

[duffahtolla]

Zeta/Be has one serious, and ultimately fatal, flaw. It is single user

Ouch!, forgot about that one.

But how many Windows users are running as Administrator? How many programs require Administrator privilage.

I'm not contradicting your point, which is a good one. I'm just wondering if the importance of multiple users isn't yet recognized by the general windows desktop population.

Re:Will it make it as an OS?

[misleb]

I wouldn't expect the "general Windows desktop population" to use BeOS anyway. If any Windows user, it would be the more tech savvy and curious. Users who might (or already have) try Linux, but are scared of the commandline.

Other /. Coverage

[zaguar]

Other Stories/Dupes

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/19/021123 4&tid=87&tid=190/
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/03/043325 6&tid=190&tid=87/

Re:Other /. Coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you need to pick up a dictionary and look up the term "DUPLICATE". You might be amazed at what you find. Sure, there has been alot of coverage on /. of Zeta, but no duplicates of this story. You posted articles with links to OSNews and NewsForge. The current Slashdot posting is linked to Mad Penguin. See what I'm getting at here? If you RTFA on any of them you'd know enough to realize none of them are dupes of the others. Enough said.

Re:BeOS Lives? Truly???

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop posting as AC, Zonk. It's not polite for editors to get all huffy.

No.

[Sfing_ter]

No.
Nyet.
Nope.
No'.
Noh.

Re:Did a yellowtab employee fart?

[utnow]

"Deluxe Edition R1 multi-lingual School Edition (proof of education required)"

hmm... shouldn't mention that i found them from slashdot then eh?

Source Code?

[Anonymous Coward]

So does Zeta have the legal rights to use the BeOS source code yet? Maybe try asking on their forums, that generally gets you a good response.

Re:Source Code?

[DRobson]

This question has been asked so many times that the parent has to be a troll if they knew enough to ask.

YellowTab have refused to comment on any questions in this area, as have Palm. YellowTab have stated they arent using illegal code in a rather roundabout manner.

And lastly, asking in the YellowTab forums is likely to get you a firm kick in the backside. It'll just look like a rather uninventive troll.

In other UNPUBLISHED news...

[Anonymous Coward]

I submitted this the other day, but never came up.. Im sure you guys might want to check this out:

http://quantum-link.org/

Quantumlink - the predecessor to America Online, has been completely reverse engineered and is now a living breathing system on the Internet. You can check it out with either real Commodore hardware, or thw VICE emulator.

Sure - it'll be great

[eclectro]

As long as it has Amiga OS compatibility.

Pervasive Threading Ahead of Time

[tjstork]

BeOS was ahead of its time because it was built on the premise that the future computers would be massively parallel. Then, Intel and AMD got into the megahertz race and it seemed like BeOS guessed wrong.

Now of course everything is going towards multiple cores and multiple processors, but BeOS is dead for the most part. Had BeOS come out later, or had multicore chips come out earlier, who knows what might have been.

Re:Pervasive Threading Ahead of Time

[jd]

BeOS also chopped-and-changed who it supported, which didn't help. It was originally for the PPC, then switched to Intel, dropping all the PPC users. Arguably, it would have done better to support the entire userbase and kept the chip-specifics confined enough that you only needed a few programmers to deal with that.

What I would like to see is BeOS and Plan9 (now Inferno) hook up. Inferno makes a great low-level environment, as it makes the entire network seem like a single system. However, the front-end isn't that great and there are very few user applications for it.

BeOS has plenty of user apps, but sucks at clustering and handling distributed resources. It also doesn't have much in the way of "serious" server applications. As such, using BeOS as a user-side OS and Inferno as the server-side, would seem the obvious match.

Re:Pervasive Threading Ahead of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that is a really good idea :)

At what level (in design) do you suppose such an integration could happen?

From your comments, what I'd presume to be a sensible direction such an effort would take:
i) BeOS kernel (slick scheduling, responsiveness, desktop suitability, etc); and
ii) Plan9 userland (basically, a "super-POSIX" environment - should be relatively easy to port BeOS apps to, since BeOS is POSIX).

Correct me if I'm wrong, I know a little, but I'm not a full-bottle gun.

The only (really critical) part remaining of such an integration/implementation is the filesystem; 9fs or BeFS? They're both revolutionary!

9fs encapsulates and presents uniformity of all resources within private namespaces. The user can have mounts from several different 9fs servers and access those mounts transparently. Way nicer than NFS.

BeFS, as we know, is awesome for searching, locking, and speed (being 64-bit, journalled, etc). All very good things for users and user applications.

It seems to me, that these two filesystems are somewhat paradoxical in design. As much as I like your idea, I think that this (the filesystem) would be a point of comprimise. Unless, in BeOS, the BeFS filesystem is itself a Server (like MediaServer, AppServer, etc) because then, adding support to access 9fs servers would be trivial. But I doubt that is the case.

I really like your idea - it hadn't occured to me before. If you have any further insight, I'd like to hear it.

Thanks

Re:Pervasive Threading Ahead of Time

[despisethesun]

Actually, Mr. AC...

Re:Pervasive Threading Ahead of Time

[KillShill]

they dropped support for ppc because apple refused to provide them specs for the then new g3's. rather than reverse engineering it and getting in trouble with apple legal, they went ahead and moved the much friendlier (in terms of support) x86.

this is common knowledge, i mean if you follow BeOS related news.

it was also published in the BeOS Bible (i know, i have a copy).

as to your other comments, had BeOS not died financially, it would have continued to mature, adding in multi-user capabilities and it would have made an excellent server due to it's pervasive multi-threading and outstanding file system. i have no doubt it would have been a major player in the niche market at least. think of niche in terms of linux and mac os.

this was almost 5 years ago. 5 years is a lot of time in the computing world. where would BeOS be now had it continued to develop?

Re:Pervasive Threading Ahead of Time

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

BeOS also chopped-and-changed who it supported, which didn't help. It was originally for the PPC,...
Actually, PPC was the second chip. It's a rare company that can bring a user base through not one but two migrations. Apple's 68K => PPC was one of the smoothest ever, they still lost huge marketshare (for this and other reasons).

Re:Pervasive Threading Ahead of Time

[jd]

I'd probably run both BeOS and Plan9 in parallel - say by using Xen or IBM's Hypervisor - and then add support for direct OS-to-OS calls through the Hypervisor. However, Plan9-over-BeOS would probably work very nicely as well. (You should even be able to run parts of the Plan9 kernel as a layer over BeOS, in a similar way to the way Wine works, or even the full kernel as with RT-Linux or UML Linux.)

I'd probably rip out BeOS' resource manager and replace it with 9fs, then rip out 9fs' local file support and tie it directly into BeFS. (The Linux clustering FS 'Lustre' is a good example of how to do this kind of engineering.)

A really, really trivial linkage would be to simply rip out Be's resource manager, link in 9fs for that purpose, and split the desktop system entirely from the server side (similar to how mainframes operate).

There's no shortage of ways to couple two OS' - the interesting thing will be to see whether anyone tries any of them out!

Multimedia OS?

[NidStyles]

I've never had the luck of touching it in any form. Not sure if that's good luck, or bad luck. I have read that the original BeOS was a great multimedia OS, in that it was great for creation, and editing media. If this is so, then why would they not continue along this same path? I mean something lacking is a great OS dedicated to Media. Sure OS X works pretty good, and so does some of the Windows stuff, but an operating system that was designed from the ground up around the Linux Kernel to do nothing but media work would sell me. I do mainly CAD work, and design work, so something that could do that as well as 3D animations, and the such would fill the niche that needs filling. Especially if they kept that price under $500 USD of course... Please, if anyone knows of an OS that already does this, I'm looking for something like that.

Why are you so wrong? Mod parent down...

[Tezkah]

BeOS already runs on Intel hardware. It has been running on x86 for over 7 years now...

Due to Apple's aggressive moves and the mounting debt of Be Inc, BeOS was soon ported to the X86 platform with its R3 release. Through the late 90s, BeOS managed to create a niche of hardcore followers, but the company failed to become solvent. As a last-ditch effort to increase interest in the failing operating system, Be Inc. released a stripped-down, but free, copy of BeOS R5 known as BeOS Personal Edition (BeOS PE). BeOS PE could be started from within Microsoft Windows or Linux, and was intended to nurture consumer interest in its product and give developers something they could tinker in.

- from Wikipedia

That being said, it will have to have changed a great deal between when I saw it last, and it's next incarnation, otherwise - the current crop of Mac OS X and Windows XP / Vista already does what BeOS did.

The only way that Mac and Windows and Linux are now able to do what BeOS was doing is that we now have 3GHZ processors in our computers, while BeOS was providing the same speed and responsiveness on much slower machines. The threading of BeOS is one of it major strengths, and windows is JUST NOW (with vista) starting to implement the idea in full.

That said, the story doesn't give us any new information... oh... Zeta!? I had never heard of this product before on slashdot...

old news?

[timmarhy]

how many of this stupid beos advernews stories do we need. this rubbish about beos being raised from the ashes by zeta has been on twice before. in fact i think maybe they used the same words almost

Re:old news?

[stud9920]

Not over yet : Roland Pisspie still has to submit a story to Timothy about it.

Re:old news?

[Trurl's Machine]

how many of this stupid beos advernews stories do we need. this rubbish about beos being raised from the ashes by zeta has been on twice before. in fact i think maybe they used the same words almost

I would say they used the same words as in the stories that "Amiga is not quite dead yet and how they are being raised from the ashes by Escom/Gateway/Fleecy Moss/whatever/whoever". It seems that the "this dead platform is not really dead" is something deeply embedded in computer culture - just consider the whole "VMS forever" or even "CP/M forever" culture. I wouldn't be surprised if you could trace back the origins of this phenomenon to Charles Babbage (abacus forever, anyone?).

Re:I took a shit in the confessional

[DrMrLordX]

No no, you're all wrong.  It's not, "God it smells!".  It's, "God smells it!".

The Haiku Project...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that the sourcecode will be rewritten in haiku form?

/*
  * Mempointer far null

  * Size T chunksize lots,
  * far allocated size.
  */
memptr far = NULL;
size_t chunksize = LOTS;
far = malloc(chunksize);

Or is it just the system messages that will be rewritten?

Fatal error. All data
have disappeared. Screen. Mind.
Both are blank.

Re:BeOS Lives? Truly???

[Kawahee]

It's generally a dupe when everybody learnt about Zeta three months ago. Because /. eds are stupid, we get to live through it again, it doesn't matter if madpenguin just wrote it recently means that it happened recently. If I write something about the Declaration of Independence, does that mean it was only written recently? I think ((someone = stupid) == true) resolves to nonzero.

Cell

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they should target PS3 or some other cell based architecture...

They haven't changed architectures for far too long if you ask me

Echo?

[sweetshot97]

Recently I recall /. was going to try out some sort of new CSS, right? I'm thinking this story is more proof that a new dupe filter needs to be developed before submissions are actually posted. What do you think?

Re:Why are you so wrong? Mod parent down...

[Anonymous Coward]

I did some benchmarking when BeOS 5 PE came out of some scientific codes I'd developed against a current version of Red Hat (from memory probably RH 6.2). Using the same versions of the gcc compiler and the same hardware under BeOS 5 the code ran 10% faster.

Is this "news" raised from the dead past?

[loki1978]

Oh man this is like so not new. Maybe two years ago it could have been called new, but not even then.
Can i post about the invention of this new machine? It is called the wheel. It's crazy and new. We just dont know yet, wich colour it should have.

omg....a post informing slashdot about the existance of Zeta.....LMAO

Re:Is this "news" raised from the dead past?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot -- where yesterday's tomorrow is here today! (apologies to whomever I stole that from.... ;-)

Re:Hey, did you hear this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Old news.

Why doesn't anyone get it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer is "NO!"

Yet again

[VonSkippy]

Yet again, the fanboys wet themselves over a dead and long buried OS.

Beating a dead horse may be a fun hobby for some, but certainly doesn't make it lie there any faster.

Vista does with BeOS did? How is the future? Warm?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Vista ain't out yet. For someone as old as me this is becoming very repetetive. People comparing OS'es that are out with things that MS absolutly swears are going to be in the next version.

XP comes nowwhere near, OSX does a bit but in many ways BeOS is still ahead of its time. It is just suffering from lack of applications, but what it mostly suffers from is idiots like you comparing its features with things MS marketing hype.

OWOWOWOW!

[Rhinobird]

Do you know how much a soda through the nostils STINGS?

No and No

[aliquis]

The question is if Haiku will ;)

Still interesting

[00_NOP]

Maybe I should have nothing more to do in life but read /. and then I'd have noticed this was a dupe, or whatever, but clearly I fail the nerdyness test because I was actually quite interested in this article and the points it raises.
I find it difficult to believe that any BeOS clone will beat Windows for all the obvious reasons - not least of which is that MS will buy any propreitary product that comes anywhere near cuasing them irritation - though that would probably be a positive outcome for the developers of zeta. Good luck to them if that's what they want, but I doubt they'll get there.
I suppose propreitary products just aren't going to beat MS unless they are something very very special - an OS and useland written in some uber type safe language with automatic checking for buffer overflows might have some merit - but who is spending the billions needed to write and market it? Not IBM, they are betting the farm (or one of the farms) on Linux.
Linux's model is the only way - from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs as someone once said. And it would be nice to get some of the Zeta/BeOS stuff in Linux (the filesystem) but we're not going to have that either as nobody is going to sell it to us (as nobody is going to buy) - so we have to rely on development efforts done for 'free' (in the sense the enduser isn't paying) and that is why Linux is also so weak - because everybody is relying on someone's good will to get so much of this done...

There, Fixed that for you.

[interactive_civilian]

so says Saeed al-Sahaf as he dozed off:

This puppy is a snoooozer. ZZZZZzzzzzzzzZZZzzzZZzzzzzzzeta.....

T,FTFY. ;D

Has ScuttleMonkey been on vacation from Slashdot for a couple of years? Maybe I should get some Slashdot summaries ready. I just heard that not only has Apple released a modern OS, updated it, updated it again, again, again, and yet again, but they have also released a fairly nifty music player (maybe some of you have heard of it?) and even an online music store to go with it!!!1!11oneoneeleventyone!

Time to start typing submissions to get everyone up to speed on this news!

Zeta Jones

[hibiscusroto.com]

at last users will be able to get a fix for their Zeta Jones. Sorry, that was bad.

Re:Vista does with BeOS did? How is the future? Wa

[johansalk]

"XP comes nowwhere near, OSX does a bit but in many ways BeOS is still ahead of its time." I've never used it, In what way is BeOS "still ahead"?

News: NeXTSTEP Lives in the Form of MacOSX !

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another surprise : NeXTSTEP is apparently not quite dead yet.

mom and pop ?

[Eric604]

Given that Zeta is aiming at the general desktop... I just don't see them managing to get enough strng application support to really pull that off.

I haven't done any research but I imagine that beos is
1.more secure than windows
2.Easier to use/setup than *nix and win.
3.lightweight => low system requirements
4.Less complex => less to break

This sounds ideal for people who don't know much about computers and just want to check mail, browse the net, could do with a 500MHz cpu and don't care that photoshop isn't available for their system; eg, mom, pop and older people.

easy to tell BeOS run by morons

[cinnamon colbert]

Just look at the link provided in the article
"The company initially decided to build a very unique sort of personal computer: the second prototype had a custom motherboard with two AT&T "Hobbit" 9309A RISC-like CPUs and three 9309S Digital Signal Processors (DSPs)"

Very Unique ?

First rule of thumb: if they can't avoid howlers on their home page, ignore them

Re:Why are you so wrong? Mod parent down...

[edwdig]

The only way that Mac and Windows and Linux are now able to do what BeOS was doing is that we now have 3GHZ processors in our computers, while BeOS was providing the same speed and responsiveness on much slower machines. The threading of BeOS is one of it major strengths, and windows is JUST NOW (with vista) starting to implement the idea in full.

You sound like the typical GEOS user did years ago. As they learned back then, it doesn't matter what you did before Windows or better than it. The only thing that matters is "Is the current version of Windows good enough?" It doesn't matter if it takes a multi-gigahertz computer to make Windows as fast as other OS's because a 2.5ghz machine is considered slow nowadays. You have to be leaps and bounds better than Windows to stand a chance against it.

Nope

[nuggetman]

No, it won't. Has anyone considered that if BeOS was so great in the first place it wouldn't have died? Oh wait, MS monopoly, gotta use that card, Be couldn't get their foot in the door. And if only Apple had gone with them, too...

You'd think they'd at least place these advernews stories so something relevant to the product happens when it appears instead of just being out of the blue like this.

I wish there was more excitment about this

[Joe Tie.]

Among the Linux crowd, it seems like there's long been this strong demand that Linux change its nature, and turn into something more akin to Windows. Which, pretty much, would destroy most of the things that are most cool about Linux. BeOS on the other hand is much closer to being a dropin replacement for Windows, at least as far as the user experience goes. The whole control panel, program installs by downloading a single binary off of a website, a single window manager and sound system. Not to mention it's an amazingly responsive system.

Do these OSes EVER get revived?

[Broken Bottle]

"Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?""

I read this sort of story on Slashdot every month or so. Some company or user group is trying to keep their 0% market share OS alive, like Newton OS, Amiga, Be, OS/2, and I'm sure there are others. Has there ever been a success story? Has anyone ever managed to resurect an OS and give it a respectable application base and user base? With all respect to the supporters, I just have to roll my eyes everytime I read something like this because I've never seen anyone succeed at keeping an OS viable. Maybe it depends on your personal definition of success...

Chris

Re:Do these OSes EVER get revived?

[mdwh2]

MacOS X shows that it's still possible to introduce a new OS, and gain market share (and even if you view it as a continuation to the first MacOS, its market share seems to have grown since the "classic" days).

Also, I don't see that you need large market share of all desktop machines in order to be viable - what matters is that you can stay in business, and that the users have products to buy. Is it possible? Amiga and Genesi ( http://www.pegasosppc.com/ ) appear to be staying in business so far, I don't know how much profit they are making from their products however.

Maybe it depends on your personal definition of success...

Yes, but if market share is all that matters, then Microsoft are the only successful ones, and we should all be using Windows.

Re:Do these OSes EVER get revived?

[toddestan]

How about Mac OS? In the late 1990's, it had a tiny marketshare. Even worse, it was tied to underpowered, expensive, and propriety computers. Then with the introduction of Mac OSX and a total revamping of Apple's hardware lineup, Mac OS came back from having a tiny marketshare to a respectably sized niche (and is still growing).

Re:Do these OSes EVER get revived?

[Frumious Wombat]

Sure; Unix.

Early 1990s, killer micros were everywhere, the Jollix BSD port was being detailed in Dr. Dobbs, and some of the geekier (defined as: people who could hose their machine for days on end without worrying about work not getting done) techs were playing with some new creation called, "Linux". It was unstable, wonky, with wierd command-line tools named after the original authors and a moded 1970s text editor.

On the other hand, Windows was breaking out, Macs had gone color, and VMS was ported to the new, blazing, Alpha processor. As friends put it, "Unix has had 20 years, hasn't caught on, so it's time to let it die in peace."

FF to 2005, and I'm sitting here on a friendly Unix (MacOS X, a far sight from the 3b2-300 I first met it on), typing into a system running on a semi-civil, but needing another cup of coffee and some etiquette training Unix, while variants of the underpinnings of both run everything from stock exchanges to toasters.

If BeOS does *something* notably better than the alternatives, there will be early adopters, who will embed it in some specialized niche. That niche will become vital, people will take it home, show it to friends, and it will spread.

Given that it's BeOS, which I ran briefly around 1997, I have very little hope of that happening. I'd be willing to put more money on Plan9 or Hurd catching on first, but then I've backed the wrong digital horse before. Maybe it's what people are looking for; a locked-down single user OS that's very fast for them, but doesn't allow anyone else in. Maybe it's time to put the Personal back into Personal computing, and stop trying to make home users run a multi-user mainframe os that's been stuffed into a single-user box. But I'll bet that experience comes out of Cupertino, UIUC, or even Redmond before it comes from the wreckage of Be.

Missing Link to the Haiku Project in the Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

http://haiku-os.org/

Re:Why are you so wrong? Mod parent down...

[Anonymous Coward]

You need a milti-billion dollar bankroll and a fucking miracle to get ahead of Microsoft.

Re:Vista does with BeOS did? How is the future? Wa

[Haydn Fenton]

RTFA, dumbass.

As for myself, I've pretty much only used Windows, I mean I've used OSX once or twice and Unbuntu a good few times but IMO, BeOS seems to work in such a more simple and elegant way. If it wasn't for the lack of decent\up-to-date\plentiful applications for it, I'd go out and buy it.

GNU Hurd?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.
Nyet.
Nope.
No'.
Noh.

Are you talking about the GNU Hurd?

Worthy target?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't the "Netcraft Confirms It" trolls ever hijack Be threads?

That wouldn't annoy me nearly as much... There's actually some validity in it too...

Fact: BeOS is dying

bah your all wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Four reasons why Be kicked it's own but: It was not public sourced (it could have used a MIT or BSD licence), the leadership and marketing were junk and stinky,it came a hare late and wasn't started on x86 and from the junk leadership arrogant decisions came some bad designs no hardware support and even less software. I hope Haiku does well because most of these flaws are are exactly why they haven't bothered to petition for the source code. Plus since it is roughly 70% done anyway and wants to be done as how be ought have been done it's doing very welly with all of 7 people two who worked at be the othersare just joe average and help write the stuff in their spare time...

No, Beos will not be a major player

[jandrese]

Back when Be was still making BeBoxes (best name ever) they were already doomed. My roommate had a Be system and I got to play around with it a bit. It was extremely nice, especially with the way it handled media (you could play multi channel audio back when even getting full duplex working on OSS was a major pain in the butt).

The problem was that it was somewhat difficult to port applications to the box. The networking in particular seemed to cause lots of problems. This ment that in 1996 (I think) there were still no decent webbrowsers for Beos. That sort of problem was endemic with Beos too. Unless you were willing to port the applications yourself, about the only thing you could do with the OS was give people impressive multimedia demos and explain how cool the filesystem is. Granted, there was a community around porting applications to Be, but they weren't well organized from what I saw.

It's possible Be has changed in the time since I saw it last, and now has a compatability layer that lets it compile stuff written for Linux right out of the box (does it support X apps yet?), but even with that it's hard to see why I would want to use it.

Re:No, Beos will not be a major player

[bigpat]

Granted, there was a community around porting applications to Be, but they weren't well organized from what I saw.

Once BeOS went x86 it went head to head with Linux as the alternative OS and the Linux open source model won hearts and minds. Why put all your effort into a closed source alternative which could go the way of the dodo while Linux offered the stability of openness?

Then Be tried to go niche and instead of going for the high end server market where they could have played the stability and performance card with multiprocessor systems, which was to be where all the money was going over the next 5 years, they decided go high end multimedia which was just as highly competitive but was a much smaller market.

Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes

[Gax]

Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?

Magic-8 says "Don't bet on it".

Hello? It failed.... 15 years ago!

[rbanzai]

Can we have a special Slashdot category for stories about failed OSs that are still being flogged?

I mean, fer cripes sake people this thing was stillborn 15 years ago! Why would anyone seriously consider using it for anything?

This is not news. It is a curiousity, like a pig with two heads.

Sorry Be is cursed...

[WareW01f]

And before modding me as flaimbait, let me explain. Disclaimer: I've coded (and been paid to do so) on Mac OS 7/8/9/X, DOS, Win 95/98/2000/XP, Palm OS 3/4/5/6, Linux, HPUX, Solaris, etc... Basicly I'm a Rodney King of OSs, they all have merits and they all suck in some way. Open your mind and code a bit before you flame an OS

I had a friend years back that actually *owned* a BeBox, in all it's blue blinking glory. At the time, we were Mac coders. We marvled at the twin LED cpu load meters on the sides, we watched the wicked kewl graphics demos that really should not have been possible at that time. And we were in awe...

Then they dropped the hardware. Understandable, they were Years Ahead Of Their Time(TM) on case mods, and hardware leads to actual loss. (Where as software, short of your cost in printed packaging and plastic CDs is slim.) Fine, it ran on a Mac, there where UMax clones to be had, and all was good...

Then Jobs came back. Good for Apple, bad for any clone vendor or anyone trying to make an OS *other* than MacOS run. (And lets face it folks even if you are a Mac zealot, you have to admit that OS 7/ early OS 8 (basicly OS 7 *skinned*) sucked pretty hard. Be ran circles around it. Hell even my cheap Linux laptop with X was doing painted window drags as opposed to the "outline" window move) Fine, Be went to x86, and some of us where like "kewl", but by then the alternate OS crowd was all about Linux and all the hot stuff was for Linux, so it was still just a toy. The other kick in the head was the rumors that Apple was about to buy Be (knowing the OS was damn kewl) but Job (again) stepped in and said, no, we're going to take my failed company Next and use that. (Any one else here about the Steve Jobs/Star Trek link of every other company/movie sucking) So another strike. I was able to play with "Rhapsody" way back then and the Yellow Box/Blue Box world of the Mac of tomorrow. (Ribbing the Mac people that they were bending to the POSIX side of the force.)

So be goes limping along. They beg vendors to install Be dual boot with Windoze *for*free*. No go. In the mean time, *some* of us got over the fact that Jobs killed the Newton, got a Palm III (which was finally, in our eyes, a viable, hackable platform) and being the MetroWerks people that we were and oh so familiar API for the Palm, switched over. (The GCC port was a big help to.) All was well.

I switched over to the dark side for a few years and did some Windoze coding (for food), still dabbling in Mac coding and Palm. OS X (finally) arrived. I moved my cheese to be able to get paid to code for the Palm. All was good. And then came the faithful PalmSource where we all learned that some of the essence of Be had seeped into Palm and OS 6 (Cobalt, that damn blue again) It was deva vu all over again. Watching the rotating cubes (again) and all of the other fun things I was seeing again for the first time. I was overjoyed... but with that same nagging feeling that this was not going to end well. Even as we partyed with Skyy Vodka and all of the other glowing blueness... the curse was there....

And here we are, PalmSource axed the BeNess of Cobalt and is going Linux (and was just bought out.) And someone is going to even *try* and hint that Be will "make a come back". I for one will be staying the hell away from it at all costs.

I expect to hear of some freak meteor accident with a key developer in the near future.

Re:Sorry Be is cursed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Basicly I'm a Rodney King of OSs

You mean you were beaten senseless by the police and it was caught on amatuer videotape. Then, after half the city rioted resulting in death and severe injury, but before the public learned you were a dope smoking idiot, you exlaimed "cant we all just get along"? Later, as you were re-arrested numerous times for driving fast while high, the public completely ignored you?

Seriously, we're all excited to read about your adventures with watching blue lights while drinking Skyy Vodka but it's not very relevant. You can't know what Access in Japan is doing with the Cobalt (PalmOS 6) source code. You ignore the fact that Jean-Louis Gasse (the founder of Be Inc. and a director of PalmSource) is the one who is pushing Linux. Why don't you stop drinking vodka long enough to realize that they are likely going to port Cobalt onto Linux and launch it in the Asian markets first?

And before you pronounce YellowTab Zeta 1.0 to be dead/redundant, whatever, take a long look at KnoppMyth. You go on and on about how you had to code for Windows and Palm to eat, as if Zeta1 is going to compete with either of those. With a port of the open-source drivers for the Plextor ConvertX, the WinTV cards and the Bt-based cards, Zeta1 would pretty much rock as a host platform for, say, MythTV and many other hope applications.

If you don't have anything nice to say, STFU!

Re:BeOS Lives? Truly???

[lelkes]

At least, we know that it hasn't died in the last 4 months.

Re:Did a yellowtab employee fart?

[HeroreV]

I read this on Wikipedia months ago, and it's not even a news site. Whatever happened to the "new" in "news"?

Zeta going open-source

[Anonymous Coward]

When is Yellowtab finally releasing Zeta's source code as they've been promising for quite some time? Many people are contributing and developing applications for Zeta and I think it is a matter of fairness for Yellowtab to keep their promise and not further delay the release of Zeta's source code.

Re:Vista does with BeOS did? How is the future? Wa

[rmayes100]

One area where I think Windows and OSX may never compare to BeOS is the performance. I was just thinking about this the other day when I tried to move Windows Media Player around on my screen while I was playing a medium sized video on a fairly high end desktop machine. It started dropping frames and the video itself was having trouble catching up to where WMP was on the screen. If you've ever played around with BeOS or seen the demo where they play 6 videos on the sides of a cube while the cube can be rotated with the mouse (on hardware 5 years ago no less) it's hard to understand why Windows XP and Mac OS X (I have a Powerbook too which is a little better though Mac OS X apparently has some real threading problems) have trouble sometimes playing just 1 video and doing anything else. Performance like that isn't just a feature you can tack on to an existing operating system as a marketing bullet for the next release, it has to be built in from the ground up.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised how widely used BeOS still is in theater sound design.

Must be getting late...

[assert(0)]

I read that as "hand jobs not returned"...

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

This used to be such a nice OS - hope it's still for sale when my next paycheque comes...

Of course it's responsive.....

[Slashcrap]

....because compared to modern Windows/Linux/OSX it doesn't fucking do anything!

Multiuser? No.
3D? Hardly.
High performance networking? Dream on.
Hardware support? Well, apparently it supports some hardware.
Stability? About the same as a one armed alcoholic on a unicycle.
Commercial software? I heard they were planning to port Cubase about 5 years ago.

Look, it was technically impressive. About 7 or 8 years ago. And what stunning innovations have been introduced since then? Other than the fact that the price has gone up.

There were some really stunning tech demoes on the Amiga a decade ago. Now they're a bit long in the tooth. See the connection?

I contend that if you took a recent Linux kernel, stripped out everything that BeOS doesn't have, wrote a window manager with no features and used something simple like DirectFB (which still probably supports more graphics chips than BeOS) it would absolutely cream BeOS. And still have more features.

I'm sure this sounds like a troll, but whenever I hear someone talking up BeOS as a viable modern OS, I consider them to be trolling. After all, someone might actually believe them and spend real money on a mid-nineties tech demo.

PS. Zeta looks like a fucking train wreck, so don't give me this "simple and elegant" bullshit.

PPS. I haven't even mentioned Zeta's business practices. I bet all those Germans that bought it off their shopping channel when it was advertised as "Windows XP without the viruses" are real fucking happy with their purchases.

Re:Of course it's responsive.....

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the fact that Zeta has an elegant API that makes it easy for developers to create efficient/responsive digital media applications? By the way, where are all the cool digital media applications for Linux? Linux seems to be carried on other factors which don't compete with Zeta while Windows Xp+Avid and MacOS+FinalCutPro are carrying the digital media torch right now. Perhaps Zeta will become a lower-cost digital media editing platform than Windows Xp+Avid and MacOS+FinalCutPro?

Should we not allow this? Should we ignorantly damn this new incarnation of the Be Operating System because, under prior ownership, they were not able to "get the message out" about the quality of their APIs for digital media? --Back in a day when digital camcorders cost $1000+, firewire was a luxury and multi-core CPUs were a dream? And, my /. kiddy, aren't most good operating systems rooted in something approaching 20+ years old?

You know, the real irony here is that if the new Zeta1 operating system is even remotely successful in fostering the creation of a lot of new digital media apps, at least a half-dozen fags will immediately begin porting its APIs to run on Linux rather than just booting it in a VMWare window or adding another 'puter to their network.

Re:Of course it's responsive.....

[djm63]

I am one of the (few) who have actually purchased zeta. Yes, its not rock solid, but it is a point oh release. I ran it for a few weeks on a cel 433 with 128Mb of RAM, it was fast but firefox struggled in so little (?!) ram. I switched to an ath 2k but zeta struggled (poor h/w support, another -ve) however on the cel 433 I could download files, browse and play mp3's simultaneously. On the ath 2k with linux (suse 9.3) the music playback stuttered when I clicked on the program launcher menu! I realise that suse can be tuned to perform in a similar way - but zeta works out of the box!
Also, another bugbear - why can't I play MP3's under linux? I know that I can find a codec on the net, and I know about the licencing issues, but I thought linux was about choice.
I also agree with the other poster that zeta (or possibly haiku) could be a great core for a media centre type appliance

Re:Vista does with BeOS did? How is the future? Wa

[misleb]

I've heard a lot about how BeOS has great features that make it way ahead of its time. I ran BeOS for a short time back in the day. It was neat and seemed to multitask well, but I saw nothing special that couldn't be emulated on another system.

Name one thing that BeOS can do that no OS could effectively emulate.

-matthew

Re:Vista does with BeOS did? How is the future? Wa

[pherthyl]

True, I remember that demo. But when you get down to it, what is that good for in real life? Do I ever play 6 videos at the same time on a cube? Do I ever watch a DVD while at the same time moving the video window around the screen like a maniac?
Hell no. Any sane person watches one video at a time and that person won't notice the difference between BeOS or any other system.

I tried BeOS back in the 4.5 days and sure it booted ridiculously quickly, but when you got there all you could do was twiddle your thumbs and sit around (albeit sitting and twiddling very fast).

What do you consider a respectable app base?

[Richard Steiner]

OS/2, for example, still has three full application suites (Lotus SmartSuite, OpenOffice 1.1, and StarOffice 5.1), two decent Mozilla-based browsers, and access to the entire legacy DOS and Windows 3.x app base, and I'll take my 16-bit copies of Quicken 98 and Visio 4 Pro running on WinOS2 over any of the equivalents I've seen in the Linux world.

In spite of this, and in spite of its continued active support by Serenity past the end of 2006, it's still considered "dead".

It seems the requirements are impossibly high when those who make the definitions are so biased against alternatives they don't understand...