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Haiku Tech Talk at Google a Success
mikesum writes "February 13 was Haiku's big day at Google, and we can say with a good degree of confidence that the Haiku Tech Talk was quite successful. We had a very special guest for this event: former Be Inc. CEO Jean Louis Gassée, who not only joined us at Google for our presentation, but also gave a few words of support and encouragement for our project. It was great to have JLG's presence, as well as that of the several ex-Be engineers who showed up for the talk. We were also glad to see Java for BeOS developer Andrew Bachman join us for this special event. Have a look at the pictures taken during the presentation, as well as the video of the event."
It seems reasonable that a specialized operating system aimed at the desktop would do that job better than a general purpose os like Linux. We all complain about bloatware that is burdened with features that almost nobody uses. This operating system could solve that problem; in theory.
On the other hand, Linux can be stripped down to the bare essentials and get most of the advantages of Haiku with much less effort. One of the complaints about gnu/linux is that there is no clear, shared vision and this results in incompatability. Solving this problem means that the Haiku team has to re-write all the gnu/linux applications. That increases their work by an order of magnitude.
So, would I contribute to this project? Nope. I am guessing that my efforts would be more productive in the gnu/linux environment.
Client-supplied disk,
both Linux and Windows failed.
BeOS read it just fine
(true story)
It was something really neat. What blew me away with BeOS 4.5 (I think that was the first Intel build), was being able to run 3 windows of video simultaneously (same 350Mhz PII running win95 could handle 1 window of video). I could spin multiple GL teapots in different windows with really crisp performance. And it worked really well with my Haupage capture card, no dropped frames. In the modern world of 100 fps, texture mapped, highly accelerated OpenGL/DirectX games that's not much of an accomplishment. On 1997-ish hardware, however, it was an accomplishment.
Compared to Win32 API, MFC and Macintosh Toolbox the API was fairly clean and simple. In fairly short order I wrote a native C++ app (as an exercise for the reader) that read in image files and broke it into R, G and B channels with histogram plots. I could then lower/raise the intensity of each channel. It could read in just about any format (jpg, gif, tiff, and some other odd-balls). In addition the app was safely multi-threaded. It was a piece of cake. Compared to my beloved Mac (on which I learned C), it was completely painless. Version 5.0 and 6.0 were going to have a lot of great, new features that were giving MS a real run for their money.
That was nearly 10 years ago. GUIs have progressed since then. I forked out the dough for Zeta - on a nostalgia kick - six months or so ago. It just didn't have the features I expect from a modern OS. When Be went belly up (remember MS had such a tight lock on OEMs Be literally couldn't give their OS away) time seems to have stopped for the BeOS. I didn't bother installing it on real hardware - just on VMware. I played around with it for a couple of days and then needed the disk space for something else. Haven't touched it since.
Well, I hope the Haiku guys have a lot of fun with their project and other users get a chance to play with what I still think is a really neat operating system.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather