Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Haiku Tech Talk at Google a Success

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the come-together dept.

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."

1 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Look at the features listed by Hackeron · · Score: 1, Troll

    * Focused on desktop, don't want to be a wristwatch
    ** So they believe in the future of desktops and not having a system that's built up of components but having a system designed for the desktop. Apple have their desktop OS running on a phone, Linux has been ported to just about anything under the sun, Microsoft have a stripped down version of their OS for phones and PDA but Haiku think they are better by focusing on desktop only -- mistake!
    * Compatible with Beos R5
    ** As he said in the presentation, why focus so much on being compatible with a 6 year old OS? - Maybe an emulator for the sake of it, but this is a priority?
    * Kernel designed for responsiveness
    ** Low latency means lower performance and that dig at Linux he made in the presentation is inaccurate - firstly, responsiveness depends on options chosen in the kernel, having the option of better performance over lower latency is a GOOD thing.
    * Unified, cohensive interface integrated, simplicity is the key, best defaults, feature complete, 7 million lines of code, Hide inner workings of the OS
    ** blah, blah, blah
    * MIT Licensed
    ** or X11 license, means you take the software, close source and sell it ;)
    * Small footprint, fast boot
    ** 60MB uncompressed is not small, Linux even with X can be as small as 6MB uncompressed if that
    * Less Debug - no need to test with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Multiple Linux kernels, Windows
    ** Absolute bullshit, he seems to encourage software to be made for their OS only, making it compatible with Linux, FreeBSD or Windows is a sin!
    * Discourages forks and alternatives
    ** Err, discourages choice and how are they going to stop a fork if someone disagrees with their direction and say wants more choice.
    * Human Interface Design
    ** err, hello? - freedesktop.org? - And what software and operating system doesn't focus on HID sooner or later?
    * One common look makes documentation, support and QA easier
    ** 1 common look? communism anyone?
    * C++ is the best for writing OS, best balance, faster dev
    ** I'm not even going to tackle this one
    * Built for large files
    ** Err? code for the filesystem can't handle small files?
    * Database like queries to find stuff
    ** Google desktop, beagle, spotlight, etc, etc, etc
    * File mimetypes, no extensions needed
    ** Great, nautilus does this, just about any file manager can implement this easily if there's demand
    * Kits, API centered around concept
    ** Errrr, gnome, kde, cocoa are all APIs with libraries centered around concept
    * In response to how do we package management, we just drop executables
    ** This guy's on crack, either everything is statically compiled (BAD IDEA) or they must be able to handle their libraries somehow
    * Includes all libraries by default
    ** Err, what happened to the small footprint? - and what about bug fixes? -- You fix a bus in a library and all software that uses it stops working - or you don't fix the library and end up with what windows is today staying backward compatible to bugs found 15 years ago.
    * Serialized instances of Haiku applications
    ** err, dbus? -- And similar has been available for way over a decade: bonobo/cobra, kparts, etc
    * Contacts/Emails stored in standard formats
    ** errr, mbox/maildir/ics(ical), old news
    * New filetype with file Attributes
    ** No details and given example of using these to create a jazz album is stupid, you'd use compatible id3 tags.
    * Add-Ons
    ** No details
    * Applications scriptable
    ** Well, like windows 2000 scripting or like shell scripting? - Depends on what the author implements in the application either way...
    * Virtual Memory Subsystem, File System Interface
    ** Sounds standard/archaic