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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?"
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
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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
A bullet sounds the same in every language. So stick a fucking sock in it...
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.
This is my sig.
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.
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
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
*snerk* Right. The only ass those programmers stomped was Apples, while they fucked Copland up completely.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.)
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
"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
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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).