Slashdot Mirror
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?"
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/zeta-1.0.ars
Eat me, lameness filter.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
"I feel happy! I feel happy!"
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.
news for nerds, stuff from like, a year ago.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
"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!
The filesystem is the package manager
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 6/19/1742245&tid=87&tid=189&tid=190&tid=8
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...
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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.
- from Wikipedia
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...
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....
Or is it just the system messages that will be rewritten?
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 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)
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.