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After 8 Years of Work, Be-Alike Haiku Releases Official Alpha

NiteMair writes "The Haiku project has finally released an official R1 alpha, after 8 years of development. This marks a significant milestone for the project, and it also debuts the first official/publicly available LiveCD ISO image that can be easily booted and used to install Haiku on x86 hardware. Haiku is a desktop operating system inspired by BeOS after Be, Inc. closed its doors in 2001. The project has remained true to the BeOS philosophy while integrating modern hardware support and features along the way." Eugenia adds this link to an article describing the history of the OS, along with a review of the alpha version."

411 comments

  1. Oh my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I wonder how strict
    Their code formatting rules are.
    Sounds like a tough job.

    1. Re:Oh my by MrNaz · · Score: 5, Funny

      You got the first post
      And started a Haiku fad
      I hope you're happy

      --
      I hate printers.
    2. Re:Oh my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

      Good god, no!

      More idiots who think they are being smart by creating three lines of text in a 5-7-5.

      Come on geeks, if you are going to be geeks at least get it right. There is more to making a haiku than 5-7-5 and trying to sound smart. Go and google/wikipedia it.

      Hint. There are no haikus on this thread so far.

    3. Re:Oh my by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Funny

      Good god, no!

      More idiots who think they are being smart by creating three lines of text in a 5-7-5.

      Come on geeks, if you are going to be geeks at least get it right. There is more to making a haiku than 5-7-5 and trying to sound smart. Go and google/wikipedia it.

      Hint. There are no haikus on this thread so far.

      Anal retentive
      I'll guess you've heard that before
      Down in your basement

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    4. Re:Oh my by the_fat_kid · · Score: 2, Funny

      Oh! Burn!

      wait, I live in my mom's basement you insensitve clod!

      --
      -- Sig under construction...
    5. Re:Oh my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Come on geeks, if you are going to be geeks at least get it right. There is more to making a haiku than 5-7-5 and trying to sound smart. Go and google/wikipedia it.

      From wikipedia: "Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji [lit. 'cutting word'] or verbal caesura."

      A haiku is more
      Than five, seven, and five words.
      Fuck you, it's autumn.

    6. Re:Oh my by Abreu · · Score: 1

      From wikipedia: "Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji [lit. 'cutting word'] or verbal caesura."

      A haiku is more

      Than five, seven, and five words.

      Fuck you, it's autumn.

      I bow to your superior skill

      --
      No sig for the moment.
    7. Re:Oh my by superdana · · Score: 0

      Poetry hero
      "Haiku sense is tingling!"
      "Uptight Man" swoops in

      Hint. There are no haikus on this thread so far.

      There are no plurals in Japanese either. Oh snap!

    8. Re:Oh my by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      Poetry hero

      "Haiku sense is tingling!"

      "Uptight Man" swoops in

      Hint. There are no haikus on this thread so far.

      There are no plurals in Japanese either. Oh snap!

      watashitachi wa disagree. :)

      (OK, special case, your point still stands...)

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
    9. Re:Oh my by Philip+K+Dickhead · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Season's are passing/
      Dripping like icicles/
      Death arrives faster

      --
      "Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
    10. Re:Oh my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Senryuu mo
      Haiku no uchi ni
      Haitteru zo

      =P

    11. Re:Oh my by Garridan · · Score: 1

      Haiku not for snobs

      Grandparent modded funny

      Frosty piss twern't

    12. Re:Oh my by fucket · · Score: 5, Funny

      Short a syllable
      A misused apostrophe
      Massive haiku fail

    13. Re:Oh my by Philip+K+Dickhead · · Score: 1

      Yeah! Forgot to type "the".

      --
      "Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
    14. Re:Oh my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That would be a senryu, not a haiku.

    15. Re:Oh my by Per+Wigren · · Score: 1

      Maki toko ha
      Misokata yu tama
      Ky omota na

      --
      My other account has a 3-digit UID.
    16. Re:Oh my by bar-agent · · Score: 1

      That would be a senryu, not a haiku.

      Hello Kitty sleeps,
      Soaking up the summer sun.
      (Senryu? My bad.)

      --
      i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
    17. Re:Oh my by l00sr · · Score: 1

      Grammar nazi says
      you misuse apostrophes
      not the parent, fool

    18. Re:Oh my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Haiku this is not.
      It's what's called a senryuu, but
      Noone really cares.

    19. Re:Oh my by Curien · · Score: 1

      "Nazi" not so much:
      your parent's complaint's correct.
      You forfeit your card!

      --
      It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
    20. Re:Oh my by eav · · Score: 1

      Running the VM version under Vista, seems stable so far. There were no problems, installed both VM and Haiku in less than 10 minutes. Connects to the internet easily. Decided to use the VM version as my system has a wireless connection. Bezilla looks to be a version of Firefox 2.x.

    21. Re:Oh my by Esvandiary · · Score: 0

      Haikus are easy,
      But sometimes they don't make sense.
      Refrigerator.

    22. Re:Oh my by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Short a syllable

      A misused apostrophe

      Massive haiku fail

      A misused apostrophe, you're is a contraction for you are... Apparently the apostrophe is not misused.

  2. Obligatory by Jeian · · Score: 4, Funny

    After eight long years
    The alpha release is done
    It took long enough

    1. Re:Obligatory by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Informative
      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Obligatory by CdBee · · Score: 0

      yeah

      If they'd got it out 3 or 4 years ago, even unfinished, it might have been better. Now they have to compete with Android, the forthcoming Chrome OS and a much-more-entrenched Apple.

      --
      I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
    3. Re:Obligatory by CarpetShark · · Score: 1

      They're had reasonably usable code out there for ages though. WINE is another project that took forever to get to 1.0, but produced tons of non-vaporware work along the way. Personally, I find this long-haul-to-stable much more professional than the other approach, of say, KDE, releasing .0 stuff which is low quality. In fact, that alone would make me want to check out this release, if I wasn't already interested in Haiku for many other reasons.

    4. Re:Obligatory by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 0

      Wheel, reinvented
      It is their time to spend, but
      I don't see the point

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    5. Re:Obligatory by Majik+Sheff · · Score: 1

      Rubber and squeezed air
      will make for a smoother ride
      than wood and steel hoops.

      --
      Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
    6. Re:Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "I don't see the point"

      The point is choice...
      And Haiku clearly offers a different choice then the ones currently available.

    7. Re:Obligatory by hosecoat · · Score: 1

      tiny U-R-L
      dot com slash haiku O-S
      alpha bittorrent

      http://tinyurl.com/haikuOSalphabittorrent

    8. Re:Obligatory by mckinleyn · · Score: 1

      Because there aren't a
      million options already
      distrowatch dot org

    9. Re:Obligatory by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      "I don't see the point"

      The point is choice...
      And Haiku clearly offers a different choice then the ones currently available.

      No, no, no... See, the second line is supposed to have seven moras, and the third is supposed to have five.

      baka yarou
      teme ga yaru no wa
      chigaimasu

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
    10. Re:Obligatory by Follier · · Score: 1

      Can it play Halo?

      No?...Just another OS?

      Back to Windows, then.

  3. What about Syllable? by Walterk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When I tried out BeOS R4, I was really impressed but couldn't really use it day to day. Ever since then I've been looking for the next best thing but never found it. I've tried Syllable and that seems great, but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet, so it's useless. Haiku should have some support for this, so I might give it a try soon!

    Unlike Syllable Haiku also supports Firefox, so I hope Amarok can be used too, that would be absolutely awesome.

    1. Re:What about Syllable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Haiku is 17 times better than Syllable.

    2. Re:What about Syllable? by Norsefire · · Score: 0

      Unlike Syllable Haiku also supports Firefox, so I hope Amarok can be used too, that would be absolutely awesome.

      Fire-fox.

      There's your problem.

      And yes, you should be able to use Ama-rok as well and still have a room for a syllable on the top line.

    3. Re:What about Syllable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I sincerely hope Amarok gets ported to Haiku. I want to use Haiku not Linux.

    4. Re:What about Syllable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fi-re-fox, A-ma-rok.

    5. Re:What about Syllable? by sardaukar_siet · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Haiku != Linux. Amarok is very deeply connected to KDE/Qt APIs which are, of course, not implemented in Haiku. Although ports can be considered (Firefox is a must), maybe a player designed for Haiku's APIs would be best for Haiku at this stage, even as a showcase.

    6. Re:What about Syllable? by cupantae · · Score: 1

      But KDE != Linux too! However, I do agree that there is likely a lot of work to be done to make that a reality. While Amarok (v1.4) is my favourite music player, I think it might be worthwhile to make a new ground-up replacement for Haiku. I say that because I am VERY excited about this. I have been watching it since reasonably early on, and it doesn't have a lot of the problems that Linux has (slow window system, fragmented systems like sound and the general feeling of things being slapped together, due to the enormous amount of choice available), but it also has the freedom and openness that I love about Linux. Hope it works out well and develops a strong following...

      --
      --
    7. Re:What about Syllable? by sardaukar_siet · · Score: 1

      KDE != Linux -> granted! How long do you think it will take to port it to Haiku? :D I hope Haiku succeeds as well, but there's a number of things here that may contribute to its implosion: 1 - it's not multi-user (yet) and I don't think it's the kind of thing that can be an after-thought - maybe in this case it can be, since it's contemplated for in the design, just not realized 2 - no WiFi - seriously? should be a top priority IMHO 3 - GCC2 - it's there for compatibility with BeOS, but who needs it still? 4 - kernel code in the hands of "relative newbies" - they're not kernel pros, so catastrophic crashes are a possibility, which makes me cringe (like blowing up on USB pendrive insertion and such) 5 - it's not attracting devs - why? it's such a cool platform! but I guess BSD/Linux already take up all the free talent in the world :| 6 - only C++ - we need Mono, Lua, Ruby,etc, etc, - with Haiku API bindings 7 - limited hardware support - I know, it can only get better, but with few devs it will take long I'm not bashing Haiku - I just think the alpha should have been out the door long, long ago. Even Linus had to push 2.6.0 before it was ready so people would pay attention to it...

    8. Re:What about Syllable? by 7+digits · · Score: 2, Funny

      > When I tried out BeOS R4, I was really impressed but couldn't really use it day to day. Ever since then I've been looking for the next best thing but never found it.

      You should have looked at NeXT at this time. It was waaay better than BeOS.

    9. Re:What about Syllable? by xouumalperxe · · Score: 1

      It's not very good for small systems, though, as it also takes up that much more space.

    10. Re:What about Syllable? by Vanders · · Score: 1

      I'd love to say "Oh we're working on the WiFi stack right now, try a developers release!" but that's just not the case. We have a large codebase and very few maintainers, so adding features has essentially ground to a halt. We've always had a hard time attracting developers, and right now the situation is critical. I suspect the release of the first Haiku Alpha will only exacerbate the problem, if that's even possible.

    11. Re:What about Syllable? by Myopic · · Score: 1

      Yeah, that's the thing that I plugged into my cable modem and wireless router two or three years ago. Golly, I haven't touched one since then.

      Oh, oh! I've got one for you! Do you know what a TRS-80 is?

    12. Re:What about Syllable? by the_womble · · Score: 1

      Given that KDE4 (and Amarok 2) can run on Windows and MacOS, a Haiku port seem impossible.

      There are also plenty of other players that could be ported. I just switched from Amarok to Quod Libet (python and Gtk are multi-platform too).

    13. Re:What about Syllable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      17 is a very precise multiple. you must have some very detailed testing criteria to nail it down so precisely.

    14. Re:What about Syllable? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 5, Funny

      Haiku is 17 times better than Syllable.

      What you call "better", I call "bloat"! I like my OSes how I like my poetry, streamlined and with everything extraneous removed. A wise man once said that the process of creating is done when you have removed everything you can. Clearly, then, Syllable is the best thing ever.

      Just as an example of its power, watch as I use Syllable to compress not only every Haiku, but every poem of every type ever, down into 3 poems!

      Sex.

      Death.

      Life.

      And for the enterprising Syllabist, you can probably guess that even this can be reduced down to a single poem, the one and only poem that you'll ever need:

      Fuck.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    15. Re:What about Syllable? by moronoxyd · · Score: 1

      > 2 - no WiFi

      Currently being worked on.
      Unprotected WiFi with an Atheros card works, drivers for other cards will be easy later on as Haiku has a compatibility layer for *BSD drivers.

      3 - GCC2

      There is GCC4 support

      4 - kernel code in the hands of "relative newbies"

      You know that the guys who started developing Linux where "newbies" as well, do you?

    16. Re:What about Syllable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yup, Cocoa then was comparable to .NET, circa 2001. .NET has had a lot of development since then, though.

    17. Re:What about Syllable? by Hucko · · Score: 1

      Counting has always been precise; translation and estimation not so much.

      --
      Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
    18. Re:What about Syllable? by 7+digits · · Score: 1

      > Yup, Cocoa then was comparable to .NET, circa 2001.

      Another way to look at this is to say that .NET circa 2001 was a comparable to NeXT Foundation + AppKit, circa 1993 (NeXTstep 3.0)

      > .NET has had a lot of development since then, though.

      Good thing. I've been told that NeXT libraries also had some maintenance since early 90's :-)

    19. Re:What about Syllable? by blackest_k · · Score: 1

      haiku 5 7 5

      syllable total seventeen

      multiple clear now

  4. Finally... by michaelleung · · Score: 1, Interesting

    What have they been doing all these years? Seriously guys, you've released it at a time when most people don't even remember what BeOS even is.

    1. Re:Finally... by geminidomino · · Score: 1

      I think you mean:

      A mighty Project
      Completed far too slowly
      What is BeOS?

    2. Re:Finally... by Walterk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Operating Systems are not trivial and hardware support is a real pain. It takes years even for large communities to do this and even a community as big as Linux's doesn't always get it right, neither do some companies for that matter. They look as if they're a small team trying to do a great deal.

      I remember using BeOS on an old Pentium 166MHz with little RAM and being able to play many songs, browse and play videos and the same time when Linux and Windows struggled to do any one of these on the machine.

      Sure, most people won't be interested, but variety is the spice of life and if some of the good aspects of BeOS get adopting, it will be a good thing for everybody.

    3. Re:Finally... by migla · · Score: 1

      Depending on how you pronounce BeOS, though.

      --
      Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
    4. Re:Finally... by djdavetrouble · · Score: 1

      I remember using BeOS on an old Pentium 166MHz with little RAM and being able to play many songs, browse and play videos and the same time when Linux and Windows struggled to do any one of these on the machine.

      Don't forget fastest boot time this side of the Pecos !

      --
      music lover since 1969
    5. Re:Finally... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure, most people won't be interested, but variety is the spice of life and if some of the good aspects of BeOS get adopting, it will be a good thing for everybody.

      True, but these days I think that it is more important to push for variety in hardware. 15 years ago you had workstations with MIPS, Alpha, Power, Sparc and perhaps
      otehr architectures. Today on the desktop it is x86, x86 or x86, now that Apple is just another resale channel for Wintel clone hardware.

      At the rate things go it will be worse in 5 years, for servers Power7 will exist and probably Power8, beyond that I'm not sure and Sparc will be killed (I don't consider
      Itanium an alternative since it's from Intel). Once Intel kills Power, they will go at AMD throat's in that order: if AMD disappears earlier than Power, the concern of giving
      Intel a monopoly for all processors from (high end) mobile phones to the largest supercomputers will be too strong.

      Right now the only architecture which may survive the x86 juggernaut is ARM (very large volume, low power and silicon area). But it does not
      compete in the same class.

      Now it would be time to start the design of a new architecture from scratch, x86 is roughly 30 years old (IBM mainframes are 45), Itanium 12 or so,
      Power and Sparc almost 20. In the 80s and early 90s, new architectures appeared fairly regularly, although many died quickly: who remembers
      Fairchild/Intergrpah's Clipper or Motorola's 88k (in my eyes superior to Power, but Motorola's bosses decided to drop it and go with IBM's Power
      instead, I still think that this was a mistake)?

      Really, there are so many things that have changed: these days a division takes much less cycles than a cache miss, for a start!

    6. Re:Finally... by datapharmer · · Score: 1

      I too am nostalgic for the return of this OS. It was amazing! I had a Pentium II 400mhz (fast at the time) and was astounded at how much quicker BeOS did everything than windows, linux, OS9 or anything else at the time. If apple hadn't killed the clones or Microsoft hadn't threatened the hardware vendors the computing landscape today would be very different.

      For anyone who is interested in why be failed: here is an article about the lawsuit that they filed against Microsoft which was later won for 23 million, but it was too little too late. Microsoft essentially told HP, Dell and others that if they even offered BeOS as an option then they wouldn't sell them licensing and they would be forced to purchase retail licenses for windows. None of the big manufacturers was willing to take that big of a gamble, so they were forced into bankruptcy.

      --
      Get a web developer
    7. Re:Finally... by rinoid · · Score: 2

      You can't lay all the blame for the demise of Power* at Intel's feet. In the desktop space they did it to themselves.

    8. Re:Finally... by pohl · · Score: 1

      I remember the Clipper. I remember, back in '98 going to a state auction where lots of old furniture & equipment was being unloaded. They had maybe a dozen machines, and nobody bought them. I remember thinking that somebody, somewhere might like to port the linux kernel to them if they had the time & the right architecture documentation. It was hard to resist; like walking by puppies in the window.

      --

      The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...

    9. Re:Finally... by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 1

      I still remember. It was the SUV... no wait, the Tank, ...or was it the mini? Aaahhh, was it a Toyota?

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    10. Re:Finally... by MancunianMaskMan · · Score: 1

      Batmobile!

    11. Re:Finally... by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 1

      No dependancy so long as you pronounce it correctly. ;)

      --
      Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
    12. Re:Finally... by rinoid · · Score: 1

      Interesting about the lawsuit, but, in all honesty BeOS was never ready for prime time in the consumer or business sense. While it was a very good technology demonstration there was no product there to really use. That was the primary problem of its failure IMO.

    13. Re:Finally... by mabhatter654 · · Score: 1

      At the end a few key pieces like Tracker and some desktop stuff was released as real open source, and enough developers had experience with the APIs to rebuild them. But a good deal of the time people were using 1999 versions of BeOS and rewriting each part in a "clean room" fashion. The OS was built from the ground up to have "replaceable" modules... but there was no LEGAL means to get the source and much was tied to companies other than Be so the rewrite had to be validly recreated.

      They had a few Be-written programs in open source, and the toolchain was primarily GCC. The goal for Haiku's first round was BeOS V5 compatibility on X86 either 1999 hardware or in a VM because there was 10 years of hardware to catch up on too!!! Getting to this point means they've excised all "Be" IP from their builds and they can legally release it (and it works!).. which is an impressive achievement... after all even WINE runs on top of another OS for video/sound/etc.

  5. Re:8 years is a long time by AHuxley · · Score: 2, Funny

    Not after 10.6 ;) Macs finally feel like BeOs.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  6. Re:8 years is a long time by GuerillaRadio · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I care, as does anyone who remembers operating systems that were responsive to user interaction first and foremost

    I feel in full control of BeOS and Haiku (also AmigaOS) and there's a lot of things that it gets right that Windows, Mac and Linux still fail to do between them. There's something kind of indefinable 'fun' about the OS as well..

    --
    If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
  7. Re:8 years is a long time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    YES!

  8. Re:8 years is a long time by chetbox · · Score: 1

    This is a good point. To the end user Haiku doesn't appear to be all that different to BeOS back in the day, and it was difficult enough to actually do anything then anyway. In those 8 years modern operating systems, and more importantly the applications that run on those operating systems, have matured massively. IMHO It's unlikely Haiku can gain the momentum that BeOS craved so long ago, especially when there's not a lot that makes it stand out as a better alternative to Linux, for example.

  9. Just another flavour of Linux? by Vanderhoth · · Score: 1

    Please forgive my ignorance, but what makes Haiku any different from some other version of Linux?

    I read through the Haiku site and I can't seem to find anything that makes it any different from say Ubuntu... With the exception of the BFS, but I'm of the opinion that the standard file system used by Linux works fine. I don't see any reason they had to reinvent the wheel.

    I think Linux would be much more competitive if the community came together and developed one definitive version rather then infinitely branching off and rewriting things that already work. It would also be a lot easier to develop software for.

    1. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Haiku is not a Linux distro nor is it based on Linux.

    2. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by mikesd81 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It'd be better if they all came to a consensus on where libraries go and follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and a package system.

      --
      That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
    3. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Vanderhoth · · Score: 0

      Well there's my problem. I'm of the "if it looks like a duck" school of thought.

      So What makes it different from Linux? or Windows for that matter?

    4. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Vanderhoth · · Score: 0

      I agree that would make my job quite a bit easier, but doing something like that would obviously make them too much alike.

    5. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Vanderhoth · · Score: 0

      So what you're saying is no one's using it?

    6. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by rcrodgers · · Score: 1

      It'd be better if they all came to a consensus on where libraries go and follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and a package system.

      Haiku, like BeOS, is in no way compatible with Linux except on a limited source code basis. It's not using the Linux kernel and cannot run Linux software, therefore there's little point in conforming to anyone's standards but perhaps Be's or their own.

      --
      The sharpest blade is no match for the sharpest mind.
    7. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by TheCycoONE · · Score: 1

      I've never used or for that matter seen BeOS, but from the article and other comments I gather it's distinguished because it was built from the ground up to be a highly responsive desktop machine capable of exploiting multiple cores. Presumably that means that when you right click for a context menu the system responds immediately, as oppose to Linux and Windows where it appears eventually when the scheduler decides it can be fit in between other applications crunching numbers in the background.

    8. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Vanderhoth · · Score: 0

      Won't that make it hard to write software for?

      As a developer I write applications for operating systems that people are using already. It would work in BeOS favor if existing software didn't already worked on their system.

      Here's the catch 22: I most likely won't be commissioned to re-write an application so that it will work on new OS that few people are using, and why would people use a system with little or no existing software.

    9. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Vanderhoth · · Score: 0

      That seems like it would be a great feature!

      In response though, wouldn't that mean that applications running in the background have to immediately give up resources so that the GUI could take control? How do you think that would affect the "results" or responsiveness of an application?

      I would theorize an application would crash if memory/CPU was suddenly younked out from under it so that a context menu could be displayed, but I haven't done any research or testing to confirm so this is just an unfounded theory I have as a developer.

    10. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not to mention that the FHS is the worst thing about Linux.

    11. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think he's saying that nobody worth punching in the face is using it.

    12. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A reason to conform to someone elses standard is to make it easier for users of the other system to adopt your new system, and to reduce problems in porting massive code bases.

      Unless there is an overriding reason, don't reinvent the wheel!

    13. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by rinoid · · Score: 1

      Aside from the moderators of this forum who see fit to label anyone a troll if they speak ill of BeOS.

    14. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 5, Informative

      A few thoughts off the top of my head:

      * It's a BeOS clone, some people miss BeOS as it was revolutionary at the time.
      * It has a somewhat different user interface to what you'll get in Ubuntu. Don't know if it's better (for you) but it is different.
      * The whole stack is developed and released together, so it's potentially integrated in a way that's harder to do with Linux (though obviously Linux has more people doing the interoperation and integration work).
      * It aims for binary compatibility with BeOS - run your old apps.
      * It's fast. I'd be surprised if it gave you the throughput of a Linux system but for desktop use BeOS was always very responsive. I don't know if Haiku is as good as BeOS in this respect but it boots *super* quick and even under full emulation it runs at a surprising speed.
      * AFAIK it's also quite lightweight compared to modern Linux running a contemporary DE. BeOS originally ran on really weedy hardware. Don't know if Haiku is *that* light but I do know that it has a fairly small resource footprint.
      * New, non-Linux kernel and OS - is this an advantage? Not necessarily but it sure is cool. It's a microkernel, too.
      * BeOS used the filesystem in very cool ways; it's powerful metadata support let you basically treat it like a database, reducing the amount of stuff you needed to do in specialised apps.
      * It still has some POSIX support so your favourite shell utilities probably ought to work.

      Taken all together, once the wireless support is done and the OS stabilised a bit more, Haiku should be an extremely good fit for a netbook, amongst other things.

    15. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by neokushan · · Score: 1

      I doubt the underlying OS is THAT extreme, it probably just shifts all UI stuff to the top of the priority queue. An application wont see its resources suddenly yoinked from it, it will just have to wait a few extra processor cycles before it gets its own turn on the CPU.

      --
      +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
    16. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But that is how multitasking operating systems work. The OS scheduler decides based on various criteria (things like process priority, etc.) how much of a "timeslice" each executing thread will get and at the end of that timeslice everything IS rudely pulled out from under it and the next thread scheduled for execution gets to run. There isn't anything new there - the claim is that this will just be an OS that considers user interaction more important (possibly marks it as higher priority in the scheduler so that UI threads from the OS get more timeslices). But definitely a preemptive multitasking system already does this - Haiku (and BeOS) just say they do it better.

      It would be interesting on Windows to use task manager to set the base priority of explorer.exe to "above normal" to see if it then made the same "start menu click" (or desktop right-click context menu, etc.) similar to Haiku.

    17. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

      Don't worry, it's perfectly safe. With a modern OS the applications do not have a direct understanding of the CPU share they're receiving, or how much memory they really have. The OS basically provides them with a (rather abstract) virtual machine that has system calls instead of real hardware. CPU and memory can be taken away from a process at pretty much any time without it being any the wiser. This all requires hardware support but that support (unlike the support required for *full* virtual machines) has been in CPUs for decades now. We *did* get stuck with bad OSes that didn't make use of this for a while - but fortunately memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking are pretty much universal features now.

      The tradeoff is that yoinking resources from applications over frequently will reduce the system's total throughput as you spend more time shuffling stuff about and less getting stuff done. The trick is to balance getting stuff done vs switching things about fast enough that everything gets to run and the user stays happy.

    18. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      Please forgive my ignorance, but what makes Haiku any different from some other version of Linux?

      I read through the Haiku site and I can't seem to find anything that makes it any different from say Ubuntu...

      Try the FAQ:

      Is Haiku based on Linux?

      Haiku is not a Linux distribution, nor does it use the Linux kernel.

      Haiku aims to be tightly integrated. That's a design trade-off with certain pros and cons. They get more performance. They also have to do all the work themselves.

      With the exception of the BFS

      Linux has a BeFS driver.

      but I'm of the opinion that the standard file system used by Linux works fine. I don't see any reason they had to reinvent the wheel.

      ext4 with large user_xattrs is in the works. That is probably sufficient to replace BFS, a meta-data rich filesystem, but not done yet. btrfs has more advantages still, will eventually have large user_xattrs, but is even less done. That said, BFS is 15 years old - no doubt it could stand some improvements too.

      I think Linux would be much more competitive if the community came together and developed one definitive version rather then infinitely branching off

      There is pretty much one version of linux. Some distros maintain their own forks for LTS. The -mm tree tests some new technology.

      There's pretty much only one X server too. That forked and everybody went with the fork.

      There are several competing desktop environments. They each have different design goals. There's inefficiency, but we don't have a better mechanism for improvement than competition in a free world.

      and rewriting things that already work

      Can you cite an example of something that was re-written for a reason other than to expand capabilities (the lack there-of being important to enough people to make it happen) which needed a better architecture? You can't keep saddling a poor architecture with patches and workarounds forever - that gets you Windows ME.

      It would also be a lot easier to develop software for.

      For distros that stand still, many vendors specifically target long-term support distros, like RHEL or Ubuntu LTS. They, and their customers, also lose certain opportunities by taking this approach. Progress isn't trivial to cope with, each problem needs to find the right balance.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    19. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by CarpetShark · · Score: 1

      It depends on how you write your software. If you're trying to port some old, crufty, legacy system that was hard-coded to use a particular GUI or DOS filesystem, then yes. If, on the other hand, you're coding new software, you can use libraries like WxWidgets to make it portable, or better, simply separate your GUI code from your main app logic, and get proper, native GUIs for each system. Even porting old software to Haiku would be arguably very worthwhile though --- even the Linux kernel itself has improved markedly from the refactoring etc. that occurs when software is ported to work on more than one system.

      Also, if you're not too interested in commercial coding, and just want to code for pleasure on a project that interests you, or to a smaller community where you might get more recognition for your efforts, then working on Haiku will probably appeal quite a lot -- there's a lot to be said for having a modern API to code against.

    20. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by SgtChaireBourne · · Score: 1, Troll

      Haiku is not a Linux distro nor is it based on Linux.

      To microsofters, everything except M$ products is called "linux". That includes OS X, Oracle and, now, Haiku.

      --
      Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
    21. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      Also... no one that can explain why it's different than Linux is using it.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    22. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by TheKidWho · · Score: 1

      IIRC The OS Is POSIX Compatible, porting *most* applications from Linux to BeOS isn't very difficult.

    23. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm of the "if it looks like a duck" school of thought.

      I find the "If I have wikipedia at my fingertips..." school of thought to be much more useful.

    24. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by jedidiah · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yes...let's create a new and entirely gratuitous standard because trolls
      and developers alike can't be bothered to be aware of the pre-existing
      standards and conventions that have existed on Unix in general (never
      mind just Linux) for 20 YEARS already.

      Losers.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    25. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Vanderhoth · · Score: 0

      I would mod you up as informative if I could. Good response.

    26. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Unfortunatly a lot of Linux developers are not aware of their Linux/gcc/bash specific code.

      But when their filesystem eats file content they suddenly pull out the POSIX to justify that.

    27. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Vanderhoth · · Score: 0

      Maybe for the laymen user.

      I know there are several different OS and each has it's their nuances, but you have to admit most operating systems out there are Windows, a variation of Unix or a variation of Linux. Even Linux itself was based off of Unix.

      Oracle is a whole different beast. I use the database, but I've gotten so many mixed answers on what Oracle actually is. I've been told it's an OS that's geared toward database optimization, but I've also been given the impression that is uses/is based off of Solaris, which I think is a variation of Unix. I could be completely wrong, reading the Wikipedia page for Oracle doesn't give many answers. Especially when you get down to the History section that talks about Oracle 11g being released for Linux; I have to assume that 11g is just the database portion of Oracle.

    28. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Linux is a kernel. BeOS is more comparable to Linux + GNU + X + KDE/GNOME. BeOS/Haiku doesn't use X, they use their own display system and window/control API (based on C++), so everthing looks and feels consistent Every window is a (higher priority) thread, so everything generally stays responsive even under high load. There's a very light feel to it. Back in the day, we used to say BeOS had the stability of Unix, the user friendliness of Macintosh, and the Minesweeper of Windows.

    29. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Vanderhoth · · Score: 0

      You rock. That's got to be the best description I've herd so far. Short and to the point.

    30. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are a retard.

    31. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course. Because we all know the app developers using non-portable constructs for no good reason are the same as the kernel filesystem developers.

    32. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      The database file system sounds interesting. Can you let me know how close it is to the (short-ish, readable) article here:

      http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/filesystem.html

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    33. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

      From a quick skim of the beginning of that article it is not quite the same thing.

      The BeOS filesystem is still hierarchical but IIRC it had superior metadata handling to most other systems and *applications used that* (in constrast to, say, extended attributes which seem to be neglected a bit by most apps). Moreover, the extended attributes seem to have been indexable and searchable.

      Take a look at this for instance:
      http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/24-scripting_the_bfs/

      This sort of stuff enabled BeOS to push stuff into the OS / filesystem that would normally be handled in an application-specific way.

      Don't know how much of this Haiku supports - if they do support it already, that would be awesome!

    34. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, well. Speaking of someone worth punching in the face, it's Jedidiah!

      How can I phrase this is a way you'll understand? How about this. The rationale behind continuing to use the FHS is like still wanting to call African people "Niggers". Intelligent people see the problems of the old ways and want to more forward. Trying new ideas and methods to find something that works even better. However, there will always be the conservative pricks like you that want to keep things just as they are because things are just how you like them. That about sum it up for you, loser?

    35. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by danieltdp · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So you are basically saying that if something already exists, we shouldn't create new things?

      --
      -- dnl
    36. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by bazaarsoft · · Score: 1

      * It aims for binary compatibility with BeOS - run your old apps.

      Cool! I have tons of 8 year old BeOS apps that I need to run. Oh, wait...

    37. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

      Heh :-) I'd probably mod you funny if I hadn't already commented on this article.

      To be fair, a benefit of Linux for some folks is "unix compatibility" yet when I started using Linux I wasn't exactly going "Yay, I really missed awk!".

      I think there are some people who genuinely miss old BeOS apps, though. It's probably one of those niche platforms for which an awesome app gets written, never ported to other platforms, then lost.

    38. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      sure, but will it run flash?
      /ducks

    39. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by abigor · · Score: 1

      I wasn't aware of an existing Unix file layout standard. HP-UX puts executables in /etc, for example.

    40. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      No, what a "loser" does is define some rigid standard while forsaking a flexible one.

      This completely goes against all the basic principles of computer science and engineering.

      Unfortunately, simple things like an "abstraction" are far too much for some people.

      Before you "fix" something, make sure it's really broken.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    41. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by 4D6963 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm of the "if it looks like a duck" school of thought

      Sounds more like your school of thought goes like "if it's not an octopus and not a fish and it has two legs, it must be a duck".

      --
      You just got troll'd!
    42. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by BuddaLicious · · Score: 1

      Oracle is a Database Software application, it is not an OS by any means. An OS by the most basic definition is the operating system that boots/ and runs programs on the machine. It takes the commands (write this data here, display this picture now) from the applications (like Oracle or Firefox)and sends them to the machine. This is a simplistic explaination (as there are memory chips like BIOS/EEPROM that boot first, and OS handles users, rights etc) but that is the basic gist. Oracle is an application (a program that runs on an OS) MYSQL, or Apache would be examples of other applications that run on an OS. UNIX, Linux, Apple OSX, Windows 95, XP, NT, 2003 etc are all OS. Cisco (and other device manufacturers) sometimes make their own OSes (Cisco's IOS). Juniper on the other hand released their own OS, but it is based on either BeOS or FreeBSD. OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD are all based on the original Berkley Unix, but are open source and free to use. Linux was "modeled" or "inspired" by Unix but is supposed to not be a direct copy of the code. Now granted Oracle is not your typical application, it has clustering and redundancy and all sorts of other complicated features, but it needs an OS to run on. Oracle is usually loaded on Unix/Linux. The most popular to load it on is Solaris, which is Sun's version of Unix. This is one of the main reasons Oracle bought Sun (and for Java and MySQL software ownership) You can run Oracle on other OS's though. IBM makes AIX, and HP makes HPUX, both which will run Oracle, and there there are various Linux distros that will run Oracle as well A good rule of thumb is with an OS you will have to load an install disk, and actually install that OS on the machine you are using. With an Applicaiton (like Oracle) you would boot up the OS, log in as a user, and then proceed to install the application. Remote terminals, desktops, Xwindowing, Virtual machines and images all confuse this topic greatly You can also have an application, that boots up when the operating systems starts, loads and begins to run a program. A linux OS can be set up to boot an apache web server or kiosk terminal when powered on. If you caught it you would see the linux code on the screen, but once booted the machine might not present a typical OS login, it may instead have a program, or web page running on the screen. I think your question got ignored because this is an uber-geek site, and your question seems a bit of a "noob" (a inexperienced user)feel to it. But I can see how from the outside view this is a very valid question - to most users what is on the screen is the equivalent of what OS or program it is running. Oh and fellow geeks, Please before you waste the time flaming (criticizing) I have tried to paraphrase and make this a simple non complicated answer, don't bother pointing out the exceptions please.

    43. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by celle · · Score: 1

      "* New, non-Linux kernel and OS - is this an advantage? Not necessarily but it sure is cool. It's a microkernel, too."

      "The Haiku kernel is a multi-threaded, modular hybrid kernel based on Travis Geiselbrecht's NewOS." [haiku.org]

      No, it's not a microkernel.

    44. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 1

      To microsofters, everything except M$ products is called "linux". That includes OS X, Oracle and, now, Haiku.

      Funny that you should use "Oracle" as an example of something that is not Linux.

      "Oracle Database" is obviously not an operating system at all.

      "Oracle Enterprise Linux", though, clearly is a Linux distro. It's a ripoff of RHEL.

    45. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by larry+bagina · · Score: 1

      there's a book on the BFS (Practical File System Design...), which is out of print, but the PDF is free.

      NTFS has streams. Unix has extended attributes (though they're not used much). Both allow you to associate named data with a file. For example, an mp3 could have an "artist" extended attribute.

      BeOS was similar, but

      • their usage was highly encouraged
      • you could index metadata
      • you could do a file search based on metadata
      • you could do a live file search based on metadata
      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    46. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by westlake · · Score: 1
      To microsofters, everything except M$ products is called "linux". That includes OS X, Oracle and, now, Haiku.

      You're joking.

      But that doesn't make it any easier to build a solid base of users for your new platform.

      The mega corp can use its mega bucks to build brand recognition. The geek goes out of his way to achieve obscurity.

    47. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Haiku is not a Linux distro nor is it based on Linux.

      Thankfully.
      Which means it might not suck.

    48. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      BeOS is more than just a high priority UI. It's a multiprocessing, preemptively multitasking, pervasively multithreading OS. It threads EVERYTHING in the OS and applications so that it is all run in parallel. Bumping up the priority in Windows isn't going to turn it into an essentially realtime OS.

    49. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by rcrodgers · · Score: 1

      As I stated, BeOS and Haiku are not Linux compatible except on a limited source code basis. I did a quick search for both QT and WxWidgets on BeBits and Haikuware (two places where many people fetch BeOS/Haiku software) and only found a QT from 2001 (2.3.0) on either site. There's no GNOME, KDE, or even X compatibility in either BeOS or Haiku by default, although I have seen an X server running on BeOS many years ago. If you put enough energy into it, you can make just about anything run on any operating system, but the question is: is it worth it? That said, yes, someone could port Linux/Unix software over to Haiku relatively easily, especially if they're willing to use native code for GUI, but that doesn't make Haiku a flavor of Linux any more than it makes Windows a flavor of Linux. There are more similarities between a Linux and Haiku binary than a Windows binary, but the fact is that they'd have to be extremely similar for a Linux binary to run on Haiku, and one of the primary goals of Haiku was to maintain binary compatibility with BeOS R5 instead of Linux. There... I'm done rambling... :-)

      --
      The sharpest blade is no match for the sharpest mind.
    50. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by Stuarticus · · Score: 1

      There's something highly ironic about the fact that BeOS was designed "without any ties to backward compatibility" yet here they have striven to ensure binary compatibility with programs people haven't used ~10 years...

      --
      If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
    51. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by rcrodgers · · Score: 1

      Be reinvented the wheel already. Haiku is just recreating Be's version with the hopes of adding their own tweaks in the future.

      --
      The sharpest blade is no match for the sharpest mind.
    52. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by rcrodgers · · Score: 1

      IIRC The OS Is POSIX Compatible, porting *most* applications from Linux to BeOS isn't very difficult.

      True, but this works primarily with command line applications and libraries. Haiku (and BeOS for that matter) already has tcpdump, for instance, but assuming they didn't, I don't think it would be terribly hard to port.

      The GUI for Wireshark, on the other hand, would prove to be a different story: I'm not sure which GUI tools or library is used in Wireshark's GUI, but I'm pretty positive that there's either no version or no recent version available on BeOS or Haiku at this time. I may be wrong, but I doubt it. Porting that would then become a question of whether the developer should through the effort to port the missing library/libraries or developing a native UI.

      Obviously some of the application's code will work just fine, but it's unlikely you're going to find very many applications that compile quickly and easily on Linux that will do the same on BeOS/Haiku.

      --
      The sharpest blade is no match for the sharpest mind.
    53. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by SgtChaireBourne · · Score: 1

      Funny that you should use "Oracle" as an example of something that is not Linux.
      "Oracle Database" is obviously not an operating system at all.

      It's quite pathetic actually to hear them refer to Oracle as 'Linux' or 'that linux stuff'. Same for Opera, Safari, Perl, Java, Apache, even the iPhone. M$ top execs often use the term that way. It just shows their view of the world as tinted through the religion of Microsoft.

      --
      Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
    54. Re:Just another flavour of Linux? by badkarmadayaccount · · Score: 1

      You are screwing with me... Seriously?

      --
      I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
  10. Congratulations by Virtex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Congratulations to the Haiku team. Back when Be closed its doors, I remember there were several projects to recreate the OS, but most people didn't expect any of them to succeed. This announcement proves that wrong. BeOS was a fantastic OS and with Haiku making strides toward a stable release, the legacy can live on. Although it's taken a while to get this far, writing a full operating system from scratch takes a long time. Even large companies with dedicated teams generally take 5+ years to build a new OS, so 8 years for a group of volunteers to release a working system is quite reasonable. Once again, congratulations and thanks for all the hard work you've put in over the years. Although only an alpha, this release is quite stable and usable. Your efforts have certainly not gone unnoticed.

    --
    For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
    1. Re:Congratulations by King_TJ · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Part of me feels like I shouldn't even say this, because I don't want to take anything away from the achievement of the people who released this alpha....

      But I remember when BeOS first gained traction. Copies of the installation CD were even being given away free, bundled with magazines - and the "buzz" was all over my workplace in the I.T. and software development portions of the company. Despite all of that, the universal conclusion of those who tried to use it for a while was the same. It was a "really cool OS in concept, but wasn't practical to use for much of anything". Much of the free software released for it was extremely buggy or incomplete "alpha" level code that never got updated after the first couple revisions. And in the realm of commercial software, it was barely a blip on the radar. Nobody saw the point in putting forth real effort to write large apps for BeOS, when the apps already ran just fine on one or more other OS's that were in widespread use already.

      I think the unfortunate truth with developing an new operating system is, you can build the technically "best and most innovative" one in the world, but at the end of the day, it's only the applications that really matter. If you have too many competing OS's out there in widespread use at one time, it becomes more of a "negative" than a "positive" - because there are too many incompatibility problems. This is what caused MS-DOS and eventually Windows to achieve dominance in the first place. People really valued the ability to buy a piece of software and know it would run fine on whichever computer they chose to buy next, instead of having to say "Oh, I had the Commodore version ... so I have to buy it again if I want it for this Atari...."

      Apple was able to get OS X into the mainstream because they understood this. Their iLife suite is a big part of what makes a Mac with OS X attractive to a lot of potential buyers. Their Final Cut movie editing software (and now, Logic software for audio, since they bought that product out) make it attractive to still other audiences.

      If Haiku can't offer similar "killer apps", I predict it will never become more than a curiosity of OS releases.

    2. Re:Congratulations by broken_chaos · · Score: 1

      Haiku has an edge over the old BeOS - from what I understand it's mostly POSIX compliant, meaning Linux and other applications won't be anywhere near as difficult to port over in a least a somewhat useful (though maybe not BeOS in philosophy) fashion.

    3. Re:Congratulations by Vancorps · · Score: 1

      You are right about the prevalence of applications correlating to the success of an operating system. With that said I had very different experiences with BeOS particular with the last release which I actually bought. I used it for all my DJ work and even did a fair amount of file based video editing on it. It was truly revolutionary as you could do with your regular machine what would require a 40k Avid machine. The only thing you couldn't do was real-time effects although at the time I'm not sure Avid could either.

      I used BeOS for two years without complaint, I had all the basic software I needed including an office suite. When it was no longer supported I drifted away from it as I wanted things like Wifi which didn't exist on many platforms yet. There were a couple of other things it started to fall short on as I demanded more of my computer but it was always responsive and rocks solid from my experience. I was running a web server with it for development purposes. It really was a nice environment to work in. They did port Mozilla to it so I had a familiar browser, if I wanted to watch a movie and I didn't have a codec for it I could just grab the dlls from a Windows installation and away I go. It was far more friendly than Linux at the time as even the hardest stuff was pretty straight forward with BeOS. I look forward to playing with the new version although my corporate overlords and the lack of emulation software will probably prevent me from running it as a primary OS.

  11. redundant haiku is redundant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    i post this anon
    because so many exist
    but what is one more?

    1. Re:redundant haiku is redundant by Jugalator · · Score: 1

      The only problem
      with Haiku is that you just
      get started and then

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    2. Re:redundant haiku is redundant by grcumb · · Score: 2, Funny

      i post this anon because so many exist but what is one more?

      Redundant haiku
      Tautology makes very
      Redundant haiku.

      --
      Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
  12. This would be really great news... by Shag · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...if Apple hadn't bought NeXT.

    But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.

    And now, they have stuff that provides a sensible approach to concurrency, BeOS or a clone of BeOS is a lot less meaningful.

    (Actually, pages 9-15 of that review are all about Be's boat having sailed.)

    --
    Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
    1. Re:This would be really great news... by GuerillaRadio · · Score: 1

      Haiku is free, as in speech. That adds to its meaningfulness quite a bit I think.

      --
      If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
    2. Re:This would be really great news... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.

      If all you want in an operating system is that it's not from Microsoft, that's a laudable goal. A sad reality though is that Windows 7 (or in most situations, Windows Vista with SP2) is to many people a superior operating system to OSX. Oh sure, it falls down in some places, but OSX totally flails in others where Windows is the current champ. I've run Linux and Windows on many of the same systems and have more experience than I want with OSX, and I've even used NeXTStep on NeXT hardware a bit, and I can tell you that OSX has no damned excuse for how chunky and unresponsive to user input it is. With that said, nor does Linux. The average user will spend less time waiting for a computer running Windows than anything else, even with antivirus taken into account. There are numerous advantages to running something else, but the average user will do no better with it.

      With that said; BeOS looked like it had some actual advantages to the end user. I had a BeBox briefly and it's frankly amazing what two 66 MHz 603e chips could do with an operating system designed from the ground up for multiprocessing. The OS was what OSX clearly wasn't: fast. Apple would have gotten a better operating system for their purposes out of BeOS, but they got Steve Jobs with NeXT. Or was it the other way around? From their official stories, they got Steve first and NeXT was an afterthought, a natural step after that point, but anyone who believes that is probably ripe for the plucking.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:This would be really great news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The average user will spend less time waiting for a computer running Windows than anything else, even with antivirus taken into account.

      Any proof of this or did you just pull it out your ass?

      I have a dual boot Vista/Ubuntu setup on a low-end but recent Dell and both feel equally responsive for common tasks - generally the biggest delays are external to the OS, like web server speeds.

    4. Re:This would be really great news... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      I've even used NeXTStep on NeXT hardware a bit, and I can tell you that OSX has no damned excuse for how chunky and unresponsive to user input it is

      Hey, that's not fair, NeXTStep had a 25MHz '030 to work with to get that kind of user experience. You're comparing Apples and Magnesium chassis.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    5. Re:This would be really great news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MacOS 10.6 still doesn't do NUMA and therefore wastes up to 30% performance on the shiny new core i7 CPUs.

    6. Re:This would be really great news... by mdwh2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Believe it or not, there are some people who might like an OS for reasons other than a knee-jerk "It's not MS" (especially hilarious given how many Mac users then run MS software on their Macs).

      But even if that's true, you could say the same about OS X - why use that, now there's BeOS? You see, if all you can say about OS X is that it doesn't have the flaws on Windows, then that applies to all non-MS OSs that are released. If you want to suggest otherwise, the burden is upon you to show how OS X is better than all other OSs (including BeOS, and I guess Linux too), not just Windows.

      And anyhow, who cares - do you post to every Linux story saying "This would be great news if ..."? Or do you just think you can get away with it because it's BeOS? And imagine the annoyance of someone posting to every OS X story, saying "This would be great news, if only Windows didn't already exist"?

      Believe it or not, some people have an interest in products other than Apple, around here. If you don't like it, skip the story. This is the first BeOS story in ages, whilst Apple stories appear several times a day - you're hardly losing out here!

    7. Re:This would be really great news... by neokushan · · Score: 1

      I think the key is that Windows 7 at least gives the illusion of greater responsiveness than Vista ever did. Thus, if what you say is true, that Ubuntu and Vista run about the same, then 7 should (in theory) feel faster than both.

      --
      +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
    8. Re:This would be really great news... by Shag · · Score: 1

      Haiku is free, as in speech. That adds to its meaningfulness quite a bit I think.

      Is it free as in beer, too?

      --
      Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
    9. Re:This would be really great news... by MBGMorden · · Score: 1

      I have a dual boot Vista/Ubuntu setup on a low-end but recent Dell and both feel equally responsive for common tasks - generally the biggest delays are external to the OS, like web server speeds.

      Actually what he mentions is something that I've noticed for a long time. I'm click happy when I'm working - I move around the computer fast and open a lot of windows/tabs (go to my web browser and it's not uncommon for me to have 3-4 windows open with a few dozen tabs each). Windows on my machine will handle this (speed-wise) like a champ. I middle click on a link and boom - instant, no jerk, tab opens up with no hesitation. When I click the close button on a tab? Same thing. Instant close. Linux on the other hand - I click middle button - it stops and thinks for a bit (only a fraction of a second, but it's a very noticeable pause) - then the tab opens. When I go to close it, I click the tab's close button and up to a half-second later it closes out, while the window does some weird shuffle to get things back in order. Even scrolling in a web page is worse. There's an active lag and redraw noticeable on the Linux system where the Windows system rolls along smoothly. And it's not just my system. Over the years (I've been using Linux in some form or another since 1998 or so) I've tried Debian, Mandrake, Redhat, Calderra, Corel, ArchLinux, Slackware, Gentoo, Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS and LinuxMint (my current preference), on countless hardware configurations. Linux has a lot of stuff going for it, but GUI responsiveness simply isn't one of them. Push it to the background with just daemon running to chew through data and it's great, but for the time being I've given up trying to use it as a desktop system, despite really wanting to.

      Mac OS X is much, much better than Linux in this regard, but even it doesn't quite compare to Windows on the responsiveness - though it's mostly a load issue. I've noticed that MacOS will be about equally responsive compared to the Windows machine with just a few Windows open, but as the window/tab count on a web browser goes up Mac OS's responsiveness goes down faster than a similar Windows machine.

      Maybe Haiku will be different. It's been a while but I do remember BeOS being the absolute king of UI responsiveness back when I last tried it. These days I'm largely not gaming anymore aside from an occasional Guitar Hero session on a console, so really if an OS can give me a word processor, a good audio player/manager, podcast player, video player, and a web browser, then I'm good to go. If Haiku can do that while remaining responsive AND give me an open source operating system, then I'd look seriously at switching.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    10. Re:This would be really great news... by GuerillaRadio · · Score: 1

      Free beer? Where!? Yeah, it's free as in air.

      --
      If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
    11. Re:This would be really great news... by speedtux · · Score: 1

      But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.

      OS X is basically Mach, NeXTStep, and Objective-C, all technologies from the 1980's. Arguably, Windows is actually more modern, with a more object-oriented kernel, CLR, its presentation framework, and languages like C# and F#.

      Of course, there is more than modernity to making a good OS. Actually, needless innovation and needless complexity is one of the most common problems with operating systems.

    12. Re:This would be really great news... by 7+digits · · Score: 1

      You really want OSX to do NUMA?

    13. Re:This would be really great news... by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      > The average user will spend less time waiting for a computer running Windows than anything else, even with antivirus taken into account.

      Tell us some more tall tales.

      Anything more than an OEM install I've installed myself from scratch and
      engineered to be on a protected subnet where it doesn't need to protect
      itself from the world will quickly (if not immediately) be subject to
      annoying slowdown, freezes and general bitrot.

      What MacOS brings to the table is the fact that it is not designed by
      BONEHEADS to run every piece of crap code that it finds on the floor
      or at the bottom of a trash can. This allows a total DUFUS to run it
      with some degree of safety. The fact that MacOS is "different" or may
      require more RAM to run well more than a good enough tradeoff for being
      "safe to run by a novice".

      The problem with BeOS is that people don't first look at "fast".

      They look at other things like "robust" or "compatable".

      The spinning cube demo is impressive when you first see it and then you
      get over it and wonder how this new OS is going to fit into how you do
      things.

      That said... it's still a shame that it couldn't find a niche for itself
      and survive if not thrive. They industry needs fresh ideas even if most
      of us don't swallow the whole jug of cool-aid at once.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    14. Re:This would be really great news... by Shag · · Score: 1

      And anyhow, who cares - do you post to every Linux story saying "This would be great news if ..."? Or do you just think you can get away with it because it's BeOS? And imagine the annoyance of someone posting to every OS X story, saying "This would be great news, if only Windows didn't already exist"?

      Believe it or not, some people have an interest in products other than Apple, around here. If you don't like it, skip the story. This is the first BeOS story in ages, whilst Apple stories appear several times a day - you're hardly losing out here!

      I think I understand. Your definition of "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" explicitly excludes anything related to business, or to history, or to business history. Right?

      Believe it or not, some people have an interest in things like that, too.

      Be was founded by a former Apple exec. it was almost bought by Apple over NeXT. Be and Apple are relevant to each other, if only historically.

      And Linux? Yeah, what would have happened to Linux if Apple had bought Be instead of NeXT - and then succeeded to the same extent that it has with OS X? Be was not UNIX underneath, after all. Apple would still have a proprietary OS, instead of a proprietary userspace built on a bunch of development frameworks they've open-sourced. Give-and-take between the Apple and Linux communities? A lot more painful.

      In the '90s, the market was Microsoft (proprietary) vs. Apple (proprietary) vs. UNIX (some proprietary, some open, including Linux). If Apple had gone with BeOS, and DEC, HP, Sun, and SGI had all basically become non-factors in the proprietary UNIX market, you'd have pretty much the same, but with open source taking more of the UNIX market, and only IBM still really flogging a commercial UNIX. Now it's Microsoft vs. UNIX (including open Linux and BSD, open-except-userspace Apple, and proprietary AIX ).

      I find that change in market, and the history it hinged upon, interesting. Sorry if that bugs you.

      --
      Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
    15. Re:This would be really great news... by Shag · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Apple would have gotten a better operating system for their purposes out of BeOS, but they got Steve Jobs with NeXT. Or was it the other way around?

      I think what you're looking for is "NeXT purchased Apple for negative 429 million dollars."

      --
      Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
    16. Re:This would be really great news... by CarpetShark · · Score: 1

      Apple...have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.

      No, they really haven't. They've been selling high-end, expensive, flashy hardware that happens to have a nice feature. But most of us just want to get the most out of the hardware we already have.

    17. Re:This would be really great news... by CarpetShark · · Score: 1

      Free as in beer is a subset of free as in speech, so when you have the latter, you always have the former. At least when someone exists who can build the free-as-in-speech source, and distribute it to you without charge.

    18. Re:This would be really great news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Haiku is free, as in speech. That adds to its meaningfulness quite a bit I think.

      Is it free as in beer, too?

      It is free as in actually free. Don't complicate the matter.

    19. Re:This would be really great news... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      It's worth noting that the CLR is heavily based on the Smalltalk-80 VM, so Windows isn't really any more modern than OS X. Objective-C runtimes have evolved and VMs have evolved, but both date from about the same era and have been improved since then. C#, semantically, is almost identical to Objective-C, it just has more C++-inspire syntax. F# could be seen as modern, in a good light. The OO kernel is based on ideas from VMS, dating back to around 1975; only a few years after UNIX.

      Both systems have undergone a lot of development over the last few decades, but both are based on ideas from the '70s and '80s.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    20. Re:This would be really great news... by bonch · · Score: 1

      That isn't quite true. OS X uses many of the same APIs from NeXTStep, but it's all implemented on top of the C-based CoreFoundation, and it uses Quartz for drawing instead of Display Postscript. These are new frameworks designed specifically for OS X. As for Objective-C being from the 1980s, you could easily point out that most Windows applications are written for Win32, which is C-based. Even the CLR is implemented on top of Win32.

    21. Re:This would be really great news... by bonch · · Score: 0

      What are you talking about? Apple has been airing ads and making it known that they have a great operating system that's better than Windows. They do have a motive of wanting to sell hardware, but that doesn't mean they're not also catering to people wanting a modern, non-Microsoft operating system.

    22. Re:This would be really great news... by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 1

      Yeah, It's such a good business strategy; I've totally got my bank by the balls by holding over negative 100 thousand dollars over their heads.

      Give me a few years and I'll own that place!

      --
      Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
    23. Re:This would be really great news... by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 1

      If it feels responsive, it's no illusion. That's what "responsive" is: it reacts to your continued input even though it is busy doing something else.

      Unresponsive OS's give you the "Spinning Hourglass of Doom" or the "Spinning Colorwheel of Death". Leopard has aimed to prevent this with what they call Grand Central Dispatch, and I'm sure Windows 7 has something similar. That's also the entire concept behind the .Net framework - it manages the threading and coding for you.

      --
      Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
    24. Re:This would be really great news... by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's worth noting that the CLR is heavily based on the Smalltalk-80 VM

      In what sense? Pretty damn sure it's not the code; if it is design, then can you please explain in more detail what CLR design decisions are "heavily based" on Smalltalk VM?

      C#, semantically, is almost identical to Objective-C, it just has more C++-inspire syntax.

      Uhh, seriously, WTF? Since when is a statically typed OO language "semantically almost identical to Objective-C", which is based on Smalltalk's message-passing, dynamic object model, with its hallmarks such as the ability to handle arbitrary messages sent to your object, and redispatch them elsewhere?

      Remember that, originally, there were 2 main families of OO languages - one static, started by Simula-67, another dynamic, started by Smalltalk. Objective-C has Smalltalk all over it; on the other hand, C++ is definitely a Simula grandkid, but so is C# - in fact C# is perhaps even more so, since virtually every Simula concept has direct representation in C#, including such bits as single-inheritance, value/reference type separation or virtual concept and keyword.

      Something that's semantically almost identical to Smalltalk (and thus much closer to Objective-C) is Ruby.

      Regarding F# - it isn't really all that modern as such (I mean, it's explicitly just another CAML dialect!), though it does have some nifty ideas in it like active patterns or units of measurement (which have been seen elsewhere before, though). The nice thing about it is that it's an attempt to take a mostly functional language with roots in academia, and put it in the mainstream by teaching C# and VB developers to appreciate the power it gives, and sticking support for it into an IDE they already use daily.

    25. Re:This would be really great news... by CarpetShark · · Score: 1

      that doesn't mean they're not also catering to people wanting a modern, non-Microsoft operating system.

      What are YOU talking about? I'm talking from personal experience --- *I* want a modern, non-microsoft operating system and they're not catering to my needs. Perhaps your experience is different, but that doesn't change the fact that they're not catering to me. It's strange that you think one contradicts the other.

    26. Re:This would be really great news... by neokushan · · Score: 1

      Well I was more referring to this article: http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/11/10/1522246.shtml

      They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista.

      --
      +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
    27. Re:This would be really great news... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      In what sense? Pretty damn sure it's not the code; if it is design, then can you please explain in more detail what CLR design decisions are "heavily based" on Smalltalk VM?

      Both are stack-based machines with instructions for dynamic dispatch. Both have the same memory model. The Java VM is most similar to the Strongtalk VM, and the CLR is similar to the JVM, so there's been quite a lot of evolution in the meantime, but they are not all that different. The only real difference is that, like Java, it permits unboxed types.

      Uhh, seriously, WTF? Since when is a statically typed OO language "semantically almost identical to Objective-C", which is based on Smalltalk's message-passing, dynamic object model, with its hallmarks such as the ability to handle arbitrary messages sent to your object, and redispatch them elsewhere?

      C# uses the same dispatch mechanism. It is not statically typed, it just features compile-time type checking (like Objective-C and StrongTalk). The dispatch is all handled dynamically using run-time lookups. The lack of a second-chance dispatch mechanism in C# (I'm a bit surprised it doesn't have one) is not difficult to fix without major changes to the language; Java gained such support in 1.3, for example. As of 1.3, Java is Objective-C with GC and ugly syntax. Given that Apple added GC to Objective-C with 10.5, the only difference between the two languages is the syntax. C# is Java with some extra syntactic sugar.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    28. Re:This would be really great news... by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 1

      Brain fart, threading and memory, obviously not coding.

      --
      Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
    29. Re:This would be really great news... by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Both are stack-based machines with instructions for dynamic dispatch.

      What is the CIL instruction for dynamic dispatch, then (I assume that by "dynamic" you mean "send this message to an object of any type" here - if you rather mean virtual dispatch, then I don't see how it is Smalltalk-specific)?

      C# uses the same dispatch mechanism. It is not statically typed, it just features compile-time type checking (like Objective-C and StrongTalk). The dispatch is all handled dynamically using run-time lookups.

      The dispatch is not all handled dynamically in C# and CLR. The fact that virtual is a keyword in C# with exact same meaning it has in C++, and the fact that virtual dispatch semantics aren't there by default, might give a clue.

      Also, you have a very interesting definition of "static typing". Can you spell it out in full, and also explain how, under your definition, C# is not statically typed, but C++ (let's forget about void* there for a moment and just focus on its object model) is?

      For the record, my definition of "static typing" is "types are associated with expressions and bound identifiers at compile-time, not just with values at run-time". By that definition, C# and Java are clearly statically typed, while Smalltalk clearly isn't.

      The dispatch is all handled dynamically using run-time lookups. The lack of a second-chance dispatch mechanism in C# (I'm a bit surprised it doesn't have one) is not difficult to fix without major changes to the language

      .NET has transparent proxy objects and Reflection since v1, which are technically enough to do redispatch; but it feels more like a slapped-on hack compared to how it's done in Smalltalk, ObjC, and other languages in that family, where redispatch uses the same mechanism as common message dispatch. In both JVM and .NET, using proxies for this requires alternative implementation techniques for dispatch that are an order of magnitude slower.

    30. Re:This would be really great news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Alpha dog runs late
      What Be Gassee-OS' Fall's fall?
      Grand Central Dispatch

    31. Re:This would be really great news... by Rutulian · · Score: 1

      Linux has a lot of stuff going for it, but GUI responsiveness simply isn't one of them. Push it to the background with just daemon running to chew through data and it's great, but for the time being I've given up trying to use it as a desktop system, despite really wanting to.

      That is certainly true. And if you've followed any of the debates with various kernel hackers and Con Kolivas, who has pushed for desktop performance patches in the kernel in the past, you're probably aware that most kernel hackers consider the desktop a low priority. Kernel preemption was a fight, the new scheduler was a fight, and there have been other things. Supposedly it is different now, but I have my doubts. There's a lot of resistance to making the kernel flexible enough to handle desktop well AND server well AND netbook well AND embedded well, mostly due to code complexity (you know what they say, "jack of all trades, master of none"). Anyway, Con Kolivas has given up, but he maintains his own patches for his own personal use and claims much better performance over the stock kernel. That said, there is some indication that the kernel lords are starting to listen....

      Anyway, responsiveness is an issue, but the original point was that:

      The average user will spend less time waiting for a computer running Windows than anything else, even with antivirus taken into account.

      and that's simply not true. Windows is slower at just about everything. Sure, it responds to your clicks, sometimes, when it's not doing anything in the background, or thrashing your hard disk, but actual performance/hardware is only adequate at best. The exception seems to be in accelerated 3D, mostly because driver developers spend a long time optimizing for that platform.

    32. Re:This would be really great news... by xmundt · · Score: 1

      Greetings and Salutations...
                I want to take a moment to point out that everyone's experience is unique and different. i run OpenSuSE on my laptop exclusively, and, the only time I see delays in switching context are from tab to tab in OPera, after it has been running for a while. Now, I know that is because one of Opera's few failings is that it seems to want to allocate every byte of memory in the system, which starts forcing things out to the swap file. However, even when the internal tabs in Opera start slowing down, switching context to another application continues to be snappy until Opera finally floods the entire memory space. When I close Opera down...Poof! All is snappy again.
                  However, I shall be pulling down an ISO and installing Haiku sometime soon, mainly because I am interested to see what folks are doing in the area. it is fairly unlikely I will actually jump ship to Haiku, though... I am more comfortable using an OS that has been in development for 40 years...
                Regards
                Dave Mundt

      --
      YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
    33. Re:This would be really great news... by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 1

      And now, they have stuff that provides a sensible approach to concurrency

      Erm, if I read that article correctly, it means Apple finally discovered that cutting edge new technology, the "thread pool". Oh, and they hacked closures into Objective C. How is that not simply a ThreadPoolExector?

    34. Re:This would be really great news... by bar-agent · · Score: 1

      Yeah, It's such a good business strategy; I've totally got my bank by the balls by holding over negative 100 thousand dollars over their heads.
      Give me a few years and I'll own that place!

      That's actually a business truism. It goes something like "If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank has the problem."

      --
      i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
    35. Re:This would be really great news... by bar-agent · · Score: 1

      Erm, if I read that article correctly, it means Apple finally discovered that cutting edge new technology, the "thread pool". Oh, and they hacked closures into Objective C. How is that not simply a ThreadPoolExector?

      There are some significant differences.

      First, it doesn't create a dozen threads. It only creates the useful number of threads, which is probably the number of threads corresponding to your cores and processors.

      Second, the Grand Central thing considers the system-wide load. It knows how many apps are running, and how loaded the CPUs and cores are, therefore it can schedule things more intelligently. Like, if one CPU is fully loaded, it'll only use the other one for tasks.

      Third, and related to the above, it special cases things like timers and I/O so that it does not have to create a bunch of threads that do nothing but wait around for an event to happen. This is extensible, by the way.

      Fourth, it's a lightweight technology, in both interface and implementation. It doesn't drop down to the kernel to do its queuing or dequeuing. It is designed to be efficient even when you've got a thousand small jobs. You don't have to create a Runnable to use it; you just give it a block (aka lambda, closure, local function), which is simpler to declare than even an anonymous class (and can accept arguments to boot).

      It isn't revolutionary, true, but everyone whose reviews I've read has agreed that it is a very good technology.

      --
      i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
    36. Re:This would be really great news... by Shag · · Score: 1

      You don't have to create a Runnable to use it; you just give it a block (aka lambda, closure, local function), which is simpler to declare than even an anonymous class (and can accept arguments to boot).

      It isn't revolutionary, true, but everyone whose reviews I've read has agreed that it is a very good technology.

      So basically you're saying that Apple is doing something that's already been done before, only making it easier and slicker?

      Shocking.

      --
      Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
    37. Re:This would be really great news... by HuguesT · · Score: 1

      Reading between the line, I think the GP meant that the NeXT OS felt very responsive on NeXT hardware, which was like a 25MHz 68030 or 68040 at the time. Given that we have now multi-GHz CPUs and that user-responsiveness is not great on OS/X, this is an indication of stupendous non-achievement.

    38. Re:This would be really great news... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      sorry, my sarcasm dial may have been turned up a bit too high.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  13. soo.... by rimcrazy · · Score: 1

    Here it is at last
    Looks like Solaris OS
    And we need this why?

    --
    "TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
  14. Re:8 years is a long time by Darth+Sdlavrot · · Score: 1

    Not after 10.6 ;) Macs finally feel like BeOs.

    Really? I can hardly tell the difference between 10.5.x and 10.6.

  15. Debian? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    So when can we expect Debian GNU/Haiku?

  16. Not free by gr8_phk · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Haiku is not Free Software. On the off chance it becomes wildly successful they can close it up and go commercial. IIRC the license is something more like BSD or MIT, but certainly not GPL.

    1. Re:Not free by GuerillaRadio · · Score: 2, Informative
      --
      If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
    2. Re:Not free by maxume · · Score: 1

      You are more radical than the FSF, they consider (modified) BSD and the like to be free software (but they created the GPL because they felt that it was important that derivatives of free software also be free):

      http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    3. Re:Not free by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's still Free Software by the FSF's and most other people's definitions. What it is *not* is copy left. So yes, you can make non-free derivatives. But the rest of the world will still have the previous, open source releases available. You even have the freedom to create a GNU-focused Haiku release if you really wanted to - it might be worth it, just for the looks of horror at the idea of a GNU/BeOS (I'd use it!).

    4. Re:Not free by Abcd1234 · · Score: 1

      Quite being a douchebag zealot. BSD and MIT are both perfectly fine open source licenses. If Haiku decided to close up their project, another team could take the last OSS release, fork it, and pick up where Haiku left off.

    5. Re:Not free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      GNU/BeOS?

      Pshh, what a newbie OS that would be!

  17. Re:8 years is a long time by A12m0v · · Score: 1

    It is only an Alpha
    It'll be long before the Beta
    A 1.0 release might never come

    --
    GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
  18. Is it 64 Bit? by stoicio · · Score: 1

    64 bits????

    1. Re:Is it 64 Bit? by Skizmo · · Score: 0
      from their site:

      Will there be a 64-bit version of Haiku available? For R1 we are only targeting x86-32 (i586 and newer). Support for x86-64 will likely come in the future, but there are no firm plans yet

    2. Re:Is it 64 Bit? by neokushan · · Score: 1

      That's a shame, with a (more or less) entirely new OS, they have a chance of designing it for entirely new hardware. But then again, BeOS is designed to run on very low-end hardware and that requires 32bit support. Catch-22 I suppose.

      --
      +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
    3. Re:Is it 64 Bit? by Narishma · · Score: 1

      Also remember they started 8 years ago. x86-64 wasn't yet available.

      --
      Mada mada dane.
    4. Re:Is it 64 Bit? by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      Also remember they started 8 years ago. x86-64 wasn't yet available.

      First let me say I can totally understand the reasoning behind their decision. They've clearly got limited developer resources, and they need to keep their direction focused. Also, there are still some computers about that haven't got 64-bit mode yet (I'm looking at you, EEE) so 32-bit still makes it easier to reach a broad audience.

      But, on the other hand, I can't help but feel this is a little short-sighted at this point. It took them eight years to reach alpha status. (Understandable, but bear with me here) How long is it going to take them to reach "stable"? What will they have at that point? And will people still be using 32-bit systems at that point?

      AMD64 has been with us for some time now... I think they have to consider where they're going to be five years from now. Aim for where the target's going to be, not where it was five or six years ago...

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
  19. 16.09.2009 starts a Haiku Launch Party in germany by theuserbl · · Score: 1

    Read it here (is in german, sorry): http://www.lelldorin.de/debug/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopi... On September 16th, 2009 in (english:)Colonge/(german:)Köln, there starts at 7 pm a'clock in "Extrablatt" at "Am Alten Markt" a Haiku Launch Party!

  20. Is the real BeOS alive in any form? by Rude+Turnip · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I remember when Palm bought the Be source code way back when in 2002(?). I heard that some of it found its way into PalmOS 5, but I wonder if any of its elements are used in Palm's new webOS.

    1. Re:Is the real BeOS alive in any form? by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      I remember when Palm bought the Be source code way back when in 2002(?). I heard that some of it found its way into PalmOS 5, but I wonder if any of its elements are used in Palm's new webOS.

      Be stuff made its way into PalmOS 6, which due to Palm's asshattery never made it onto any devices, and so Palm users were stuck with PalmOS 5 for six or seven years.

      The "PalmSource" unit which had been developing PalmOS after Palm (stupidly? I guess it made sense at the time.) split them off was acquired by ACCESS - they now hold BeOS. Palm Computing developed WebOS - I don't think they had access to BeOS when they developed WebOS.

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
  21. VirtualBox by Pec · · Score: 1

    But, does it run on VirtualBox?

    --
    This is a .sig
    1. Re:VirtualBox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yes

    2. Re:VirtualBox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      if you have a newer version of virtualbox

  22. Re:8 years is a long time by CarpetShark · · Score: 1

    Maybe, if OS X is on a quad-core and BeOS is on an old-style dual-Pentium.

  23. Why can't you connect to the internet? by Viol8 · · Score: 0

    "but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet"

    Err, have you never heard of an ethernet cable?

    1. Re:Why can't you connect to the internet? by kinnell · · Score: 5, Funny

      "but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet"

      Err, have you never heard of an ethernet cable?

      It's so much harder to plug an ethernet cable into your neighbour's router without them noticing.

      --
      If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
    2. Re:Why can't you connect to the internet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I tried plugging my ethernet cable into my office wi-fi, but the plug kept falling out of the air. Maybe you have some further helpful advice on connectivity?

    3. Re:Why can't you connect to the internet? by Viol8 · · Score: 1

      Heh funny. Though you might want to use an example of a workplace that generally doesn't have more rj45 sockets around the building than a branch of Maplins.

    4. Re:Why can't you connect to the internet? by Mr.+Roadkill · · Score: 1

      It's so much harder to plug an ethernet cable into your neighbour's router without them noticing.

      A lot of access points used to support what's called a station mode; i.e. you can plug a wired device into them, and they'll take care of that pesky wireless connection to the neighbour's open access point. It was intended as a way to allow wired devices to participate in wireless networks e.g. ethernet printservers, game consoles etc.

      I know my crappy old Minitar mnwapb does this, and 11b from something in my roof would be LOTS better than a *really* flakey 11g connection from something on my kitchen table. Not that I'd do that sort of thing, of course...

    5. Re:Why can't you connect to the internet? by ignavus · · Score: 1

      "but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet"

      Err, have you never heard of an ethernet cable?

      It's so much harder to plug an ethernet cable into your neighbour's router without them noticing.

      Not if you garotte them with the ethernet cable first.

      --
      I am anarch of all I survey.
  24. Re:8 years is a long time by rinoid · · Score: 1

    Wow the "troll" mods are out in force ... some strange loyal contingent amongst the /. crowd I only thought was reserved for discussions surrounding Linux.

    Yeah, it's kind of funny to joke that Macs "finally feel like BeOS" but in reality it is so far from the truth that it's more troll like than anything I wrote above.

    I used BeOS, well, I booted it and played with the spinning cube with videos on each face. There wasn't much else alive in there in terms of hardware support. It did tickle me though and I hope somehow the product can create some space amidst Windows, Linux, OS X, Chrome OS, etc... but I don't think so.

  25. Usable OS by zoward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've been running a VM image built from source from a couple of recent developer's releases, and I've got to say, the OS is definitely usable. Probably the largest missing piece has been a wireless stack (haven't checked the R1 alpha, so for all I know his is already there). This will make an awesome OS for a netbook - lightweight, fast, boots fast, already has a port of Firefox. Can't wait to try out the alpha.

    --
    "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
    1. Re:Usable OS by dov_0 · · Score: 1

      I must agree with above. I downloaded a vm image a year or two ago. Shows a lot of promise!

      --
      sudo mount --milk --sugar /cup/tea /mouth /etc/init.d/relax start
    2. Re:Usable OS by tttonyyy · · Score: 4, Informative

      The wireless stack is a work in progress, based on the FreeBSD 8.0 WLAN stack.

      http://www.haikuware.com/blog
      http://dev.osdrawer.net/projects/activity/haiku-wifi

      Colin is working to a bounty in the spirit of carrot driven development:

      http://www.haikuware.com/bounties/

      --
      biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
    3. Re:Usable OS by VoltageX · · Score: 1

      If it's based on the FBSD stack, then Ralink based wireless devices are a good choice.

      --
      "Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
    4. Re:Usable OS by Joe+Tie. · · Score: 1

      Wireless was a bit of a disapointment for me. I found out my chip was supported, tossed haiku onto my netbook, and was delighted by the speed and responsiveness. Then I discovered wifi doesn't work with anything but unsecured networks at the moment. It's going to be like ripping my heart out to uninstall it, but it's really not viable for me till that's in place. So close though.

      --
      Everything will be taken away from you.
  26. Posting from inside Haiku by MartinSchou · · Score: 4, Informative

    Installed it in Virtualbox, and it's running just as smoothly as I remember BeOS doing. Even installed in about 3 minutes :)

    The built in browser, Bon Echo, seems to be a Firefox derivative, possibly Firefox 2, so it's not all bad.

    If the hardware is supported, I think Haiku would make for a very very good OS for a netbook. It's using 60 MB total at the moment and hardly pegging the CPU. In fact Virtualbox is only using 38 MB according to Windows and hovering around 20% on a single core of my 2 GHz Turion x64. Granted, I'm only running the browser, but that's still quite nice.

    Google Docs works as well, though I only have a simple spreadsheet to test with. It's a little bit slow to respond, but that is probably down to the browser. Actually now the browser is already using more memory than everything else combined, and I've only had six pages open in total. That's not a good sign. And of course the Haiku website seems to be Slashdotted, so there's no help there either ;)

    But I would love to see how this OS runs on a netbook with fully supported hardware.

    1. Re:Posting from inside Haiku by int69h · · Score: 4, Informative

      Bon Echo is indeed a port of Firefox 2. Webkit was ported (again) over the summer, and work is underway to construct a new browser around it.

    2. Re:Posting from inside Haiku by MartinSchou · · Score: 1

      Then you'd expect better memory management and ECMA to really fly, right?

      Like I said, I'd love to see Haiku on a netbook with fully supported hardware. I'd suspect that the power saving options aren't as mature on Haiku though.

    3. Re:Posting from inside Haiku by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bon Echo is the codename for Firefox 2, just as Gran Paradiso is the codename for Firefox 3.0, Shiretoko is 3.5 and Namoroka is 3.6. Unofficial builds can't use the Firefox trademark, so usually use the codename.

  27. All I have to say is by ParanoiaBOTS · · Score: 1

    Haikus are easy. But sometimes they donâ(TM)t make sense. Refrigerator

  28. I'll try to break it down by CarpetShark · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No one has really answered you so far, surprisingly. I don't really know BeOS internals, but having toyed around with it as an ex-Amiga user looking for a modern equivalent (like many others), I can give you the general idea.

    Basically, it's this: unix sucks.

    Lol, it's flippant, but for all the greatness of Unix and Linux, especially compared to Windows, there's a definite truth to this. The problem is that unix is a few simple (and strong) principles from the early 70s, upon which nearly decades of evolution have occured. The fact that this was even possible is a huge testament to the flexibility of those core principles. Nonetheless, most of the evolution since is essentially a big hackish attempt to keep Unix up to date. For instance, go to phoronix and search for graphics stack. You'll find a lot of discussion about Xorg, the Linux kernel, graphics drivers, GPUs, libraries, the linux console, and how none of them are really consistent or integrated, and the problems that result. Moreover, Unix was originally designed for many users sharing a huge, expensive computer. It's not really designed for personal computers at all. Arguably, this distinction isn't so relevant these days.

    BeOS, on the other hand though, is an attempt to make a modern, coherent, friendly, desktop operating system for personal computers. It's designed to be quick, to have a logical stack of libraries that cooperate (such as for audio and graphics, again, unlike Linux's audio/graphics stack).

    Essentially, the point is just to build a modern system, and dump all the old, legacy cruft that just gets in the way. It's an attempt to draw a line under the past, and say, "OK, that's the old way. From now on, programs should use this stuff instead, so everything looks good and runs well, and integrates nicely."

    1. Re:I'll try to break it down by Viol8 · · Score: 1

      Of course it could be argued that 19 years is a long time in the computer world and BeOS would be old enough to have accumulated its own cruft by now.

    2. Re:I'll try to break it down by jedidiah · · Score: 2, Insightful

      All of this sounds nice from an academic point of view until you realize that it was
      Linux that got suitably complete hardware support first. Sure, BeOS is really nifty
      but that only gets you so far. THIS is why stuff like X remains in place. It's no
      small feat to rip it out completely and then replace it with something else that is
      equally functional.

      Otherwise some group of Linux users would have happily reinvented that wheel a long time ago.

      Besides, Unix addresses features that are just plain left out of BeOS.

      When you start to whine about X or pulse or jack, this is part of the equation.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    3. Re:I'll try to break it down by Vanderhoth · · Score: 0

      Thanks, that was an awesome response.

      I'd mod you up, but I don't have any points.

    4. Re:I'll try to break it down by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1

      Essentially, the point is just to build a modern system, and dump all the old, legacy cruft that just gets in the way.

      I get that and wish them well. In fact, I just downloaded the installer ISO and finished installing it in a VM. That said, other than the steaming pile that is the state of Linux audio, I don't know what legacy systems I'd be willing to give up. You're not going to magically make a new OS with better networking than Linux; about the best you can hope for is to get something close. Same with Xorg. Unless you have the resources of Apple, there's little chance of making something as powerful and flexible as X. You could improve the window manager, but you'll still end up running the same applications as on Linux, assuming you're lucky and they get ported or compile with minimal patching. What does tossing out the multi-user model buy you? Or the virtual memory system that's been tuned and crafty for a couple of decades? Or the security policies? Or, well, anything?

      I see Haiku as a nice research OS to inspire the designers of other OSes: "oh, that's a pretty neat desktop model!" Like Plan 9, though, I can't imagine actually using it in a live situation.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    5. Re:I'll try to break it down by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      three words:

      kernel mode setting

    6. Re:I'll try to break it down by CarpetShark · · Score: 1

      What about it? That's something I was referring to, when I mentioned the ongoing debates on phoronix. KMS is one tiny part in a big stack; it's far from a magic bullet.

    7. Re:I'll try to break it down by danieltdp · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think both views are true and do not conflict with each other. Unix and Linux are today's reality. They are usable and robust, with many strong points and some weaknesses: the OSes for today's user (besides other options such as MacOS and Windows).

      Haiku is an attempt to improve today's options. At RC1, it is not something that the majority would use instead of Unix and Linux. Maybe in the future it will be. It shows some nice features that tries to improve over today's OSes but it is not as complete as the current ones.

      We will have to wait and see if Haiku will not simply create its own new and unique caveats

      --
      -- dnl
    8. Re:I'll try to break it down by Omestes · · Score: 1

      Er... OS X is basically Unix (BSD), with a pretty shell on top. Windows is really the only major player who isn't heavily based on Unix.

      --
      A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
    9. Re:I'll try to break it down by danieltdp · · Score: 1

      Which does not changes much what I said! :-)

      I just added both (OS X and Windows) in order to avoid the obligatory replies like "Oh, you forgot that the world is not UNIX and Linux"! ;-)

      --
      -- dnl
    10. Re:I'll try to break it down by jcr · · Score: 1

      Basically, it's this: unix sucks.

      Who didn't know that?

      Unix only looks good when you compare it to Windows.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    11. Re:I'll try to break it down by AxelTorvalds · · Score: 1
      Basically, it's this: unix sucks.

      Nice and concise. I'll do you one better. They want some non-UNIX APIs and they also want a lot of the legacy UNIX APIs at the same time. Seems Microsoft and BeOS and really Apple too think that a proper UI depends upon kernel support, be it for message queues or for various services that need to have kernel like superiority to clients. I've been wondering about this for a long time, the X guys don't approach the problem that way but no matter what kinds of hacks they do, Linux desktops just don't have anything like the cohesive feel of Windows, BeOS or MacOSX. Let un not forget, BeOS had terrible networking support and terrible hardware support.

      So why didn't Haiku start with a Linux kernel, which is really good at a lot of stuff, add some patches/drivers to provide the missing mechanisms that they desire and then build on top of that? I have no belief that the interfaces that the BeOS guys provide would get accepted by the Linux kernel or a BSD kernel, at least not any time soon but I'd like to see those interfaces defined and it's a perfect job for a distribution to apply that patch and build a product out of it. Then at the very least, this new Haiku OS would have a chance in hell of maintaining hardware compatibility and running on interesting stuff.

      It also seems if you came up with a good set of audio APIs and built user space stuff that used them, you could legitimately take over Linux audio.

      I'd love to see something like this succeed, and I applaud their tenacity. It's just when you start writing a kernel from scratch and only have vague explanation about software consistency as to why you can't use an existing kernel (that happens to be very good and have great support.) Provide some kernel patches to Linux, and start a completely from scratch distribution and software model on top...

    12. Re:I'll try to break it down by mfnickster · · Score: 1

      So why didn't Haiku start with a Linux kernel, which is really good at a lot of stuff, add some patches/drivers to provide the missing mechanisms that they desire and then build on top of that?

      I'm assuming that, architectural differences aside, it's because Linux developers weren't able until recently to come up with a solid, all-purpose scheduler.

      The responsiveness of the BeOS depends in large part on efficient scheduling and priority for the GUI, which Linux couldn't match.

      --
      "Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
    13. Re:I'll try to break it down by Sam+Douglas · · Score: 1

      The way I see it, Desktop GNU/Linux is becoming more and more like a 'microkernel'. Applications are not being programmed against the Linux interfaces and glibc and X, they are being programmed against Gtk/Glib or Qt; X is conceptually 'the operating system' as far as graphics applications are concerned, and the newer system daemons (PulseAudio, NetworkManager, D-bus, etc.) are becoming 'the operating system' for other aspects.

      Likewise with sound, PulseAudio is a daemon to mitigate the shittiness and incompatibilities of the low level kernel interfaces (Alsa, OSS, whatever). I don't entirely like the implementation, and there were teething issues in distributions like Ubuntu (wasn't ready for primetime etc.) but it could effectively replace these low level kernel APIs from a regular application's point of view. ESD, Arts, Jack, whatever are all similar but with different priorities. Many of them run on a per-user basis though.

      For hardware access, desktop applications use systems like HAL. What is HAL? It's doing the kernel's job. It provides better device APIs to applications, more portable ways to mount and configure stuff, portable access to power management etc.

      NetworkManager. Manages network configuration. Provides a far more integrated way to control and configure network set up.

      D-bus. Interprocess communication mechanism. Is used to tie all these services together, and provide a way for 'user applications' -- or libraries -- to communicate with these services.

      From the kernel side of things, FUSE... getting used more and more to shift filesystems into userspace. NTFS, GVFS etc. Does it matter to users that it is running outside the kernel? No, because computers are fast enough that for a majority of purposes it is irrelevant. I currently run a custom Fuse filesystem for managing music (supports directory unions, designed to accommodate removable devices, allows me to store files in vorbis/flac hides vorbis ones if flac version exists). It is coded very naively, in fact it does a low level file open on every read call. I haven't improved that because the performance impact is negligible for its use.

      Maybe someone should tell the kernel guys.

      Most of these have implementation flaws, X can be a bit fragile, PulseAudio has been unstable at times and introduces latency, and so on. They aren't ideal, but they are a hell of a lot better than what Linux directly provides.

      This is somewhat where BeOS/Haiku design excels, it has a lightweight hybrid/micro kernel with servers logically providing useful interfaces to applications. It's easy to write applications because there is an easy to use "media kit" (i.e. vaguely equivalent to PulseAudio in the desktop GNU/Linux architecture), there is a "MIDI kit" which provides a MIDI API, and so on. Nice, clean and integrated.

      This is where desktop Linux needs to go. Saying 'oh if we got rid of X it would be fine' is easy, but it wouldn't be easy to do. X needs to get better and will, and we need to work with that. Integration and standardisation should be key and if that means restructuring how stuff has historically worked (X display managers, system init come to mind as examples) then it should be done that way, rather than chasing after impractical solutions. If the server model is better suited to making portable applications (which it certainly appears to be) then maybe Linux should move to a more microkernel-like model, and aim to provide better APIs to these user-space servers, rather than trying to duplicate work.

    14. Re:I'll try to break it down by vistic · · Score: 1

      I think this missed what was being asked....

      From what I understood of Haiku, since they don't have access to BeOS source, it's based on Linux. So how is Haiku not just another Linux distro with a customized window manager that tries to look like BeOS?

      I think they were implementing some of the BeOS libraries, but I'm not sure how it all works in practice... and if that means that old BeOS native programs (remember bebits.com?) will run without modification on Haiku... and if that means Linux programs will work as well. I guess I should give the live disc a try. I actually tried using BeOS R5 as my primary OS for about 6 months when it first came out (I had BeOS, Linux, and Windows in triple-boot using the Be Boot Manager). It was pretty nice for day to day work.

      But these days I'm pretty happy with Mac OS X.

    15. Re:I'll try to break it down by hot+soldering+iron · · Score: 1

      The basic architecture of BeOS/Haiku and Linux are aimed at different objectives, Linux is a fine server for a multitude of purposes, and Haiku is great for a single-user desktop system. Look out! Car analogy coming! It's the difference between a tractor trailer rig and a Ferrari. You can drive around town in the rig, but the sports car is ever so much more fun!

      --
      When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
    16. Re:I'll try to break it down by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      From what I understood of Haiku, since they don't have access to BeOS source, it's based on Linux. So how is Haiku not just another Linux distro with a customized window manager that tries to look like BeOS?

      From the Haiku FAQ:

      Q: "Is Haiku based on Linux?"
      A: Haiku is not a Linux distribution, nor does it use the Linux kernel.

    17. Re:I'll try to break it down by vistic · · Score: 1

      Well crap... which BeOS project was it that was going the route of using Linux... I know there was one.

    18. Re:I'll try to break it down by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think Blue-Eyed was one, maybe a couple more.

    19. Re:I'll try to break it down by rcrodgers · · Score: 1

      Of course it could be argued that 19 years is a long time in the computer world and BeOS would be old enough to have accumulated its own cruft by now.

      While that's technically true, it's not exactly what happened. As Be moved from the Hobbit processor to the PowerPC then to x86 processors, and in some cases from one version to another, they broke backwards compatibility numerous times, more often than not intentionally for the good of the OS. Some legacy things did transition from one version of BeOS to another, but the engineering managers didn't like to transition a huge amount of [bad] legacy code, they preferred to instead to rewrite a lot of things to solve the problems the earlier versions had. Of course, this has nothing to do with Haiku which is designed to recreate BeOS R5, the last official revision of BeOS.

      --
      The sharpest blade is no match for the sharpest mind.
    20. Re:I'll try to break it down by danieltdp · · Score: 1

      Ok. Got it (even without the car analogy!). But on this case, the are places where you could use either Linux or Haiku (like as a Desktop). On those places, my previous post still stands true. Look out, car analogy too: is there a place where you can use either a tractor trailer or a ferrari?

      --
      -- dnl
  29. Obligatory BeOS quote by SgtChaireBourne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here's what Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée had to say in 2001 about what happened:

    There is no technical reason why CompUSA customers shouldn't be able to walk out of the shop with a machine that asks "Which OS do you want to use today?" upon boot. And yet, even today [2001], after several years of relentless news about how Linux is ready for the general desktop and business customer, one does not find dual-boot
    ...
    A few years ago, Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée used the phrase "peaceful co-existence with Windows" to describe his company's intended relationship with Microsoft on the consumer's hard drive. Later, when it became clear that Microsoft had no intention of co-existing with a rival OS vendor peacefully, Gassée recanted, saying, "I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it."

    We could have had close to 10 years of use out of this really good Be OS in schools, products, and businesses, if not for Microserfs and Microsofters. Apple needs to learn from Be Inc. and clean out the nails Microsofters set in its track while there's still an Apple Computer . The time is over for putting up with promoters of M$, especially those inside other businesses.

    Eight years the wiser.
    So happy together then?
    Don't bend down again.

    Be OS was a very good OS so we should see good things from Haiku, too. The niche it filled will be different today for Haiku, but still highly relevant. Netbooks are all the rage now. I expect it will be tried there first.

    --
    Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
    1. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Be OS was a very good OS so we should see good things from Haiku, too. The niche it filled will be different today for Haiku, but still highly relevant. Netbooks are all the rage now. I expect it will be tried there first.

      That's where I plan to try it first, anyway, on my ASUS EEE 4G Surf 701, upg. to 1GB RAM. I have Jolicloud Linux on there now and it is adequate but not inspiring. It's still bloatware. I'd like to run moblin, but it is CRASH CITY (Tried it on Acer Aspire One. It's amazing that intel could make Linux so unreliable on their own chips in so short a time!) Now the Aspire goes to my Lady with XP back on, I have a LT3103u, and it's running Windows 7 Enterprise preview 87 days left... meh. Really enjoying the OS except for Civ 2 Gold FAIL so far.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apple did learn; they have their own retail stores. They don't rely on companies that make most of their money selling MS products and MS-related products for their business. Microsoft can't offer the Apple Store a discount on Windows if they don't sell OS X.

      Be failed because it messed its customers around. Their first releases were for PowerPC and ran on Macs and their own hardware. Then they added support for x86, and didn't provide cross-compiler toolchains, so most third-party apps became x86-only and the people on PowerPC were left in the cold. Then they announced that they were going to switch focus to BeIA, and frightened third-party commercial developers away from BeOS. Then they turned down Apple's offer, demanding ten times what Apple was willing to pay, and eventually had to sell to Palm for around 20% of Apple's offer. Plam did very well out of the deal, paying $11m for the company and then getting $23m from Microsoft in settlement of the suit over anticompetitive practices.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    3. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      In my opinion, Haiku should 'aim' to dominate, like Windows has. Aggresively if need be. If it is better, and everything works smoother than other OSs, then they should go for that goal, and hope to be the default OS. Otherwise, it just becomes an 'alternative' which is 'sorta better, but may not be in some ways', which sounds insipid, and unexciting.

      In the end (say 200 years from now), we'll all probably be using one standard OS (or at least hope to). Choice in the initial stages is a good thing, but eventually, a single universal standard is more efficient and productive for everyone. Let's hope Haiku gets us to that point sooner.

      I'll have to give it a go anyway - I've always wanted an Amiga-style OS to come to the forefront.

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    4. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They provided cross-compiler toolchains.
      They demanded $400 millions. As Apple paid $450 millions for NeXT, I guess Apple was willing to pay as much as $400 millions. Just not for Be Inc.

      The rest is factual, AFAIK.

    5. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by mckinleyn · · Score: 1

      In the end (say 200 years from now), we'll all probably be using one standard OS (or at least hope to)

      We have seen the future, and it is now.

    6. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by fm6 · · Score: 1

      Right, there's no technical reason. But there's a reason: most people aren't nerds. They don't want to fiddle with a bunch of OSs. They want somebody to sell them a computer that Just Works.

      IBM tried to keep OS/2 alive by dual-booting it with Windows. Nobody used this feature.

      And what "niche" did Be OS fill? Is there some kind of user who's been staying away from computers for 8 years?

      One thing hasn't changed: no sane manufacturer will install an OS that doesn't already have a critical mass of users and developers. A lot of good OSs have been unable to get past that problem. An OS that's as poorly supported as this one (8 years to alpha!) hasn't a prayer.

    7. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by vlm · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In the end (say 200 years from now), we'll all probably be using one standard OS (or at least hope to).

      Just like standard thread sizes, standard units of measurement, standard building codes, standard laws, and standard currencies.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    8. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Weedhopper · · Score: 3, Informative

      Insightful? Just about every 'fact' is incomplete and your timeline is completely incorrect.

      Among the things you mentioned, the Apple offer came first. The counter offer was not "ten times." More like a little under double.

      BeOS was FORCED to port to Intel when Apple refused to disclose specs for the G3 line. This wasn't done on a whim, it was done out of technical necessity.

      BeIA was the last ditch effort/nail in the coffin, not something that scared away developers. By that time, they had no developers left.

    9. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      And just like non-standard PC cases, memory types, PC (largely) and music keyboard layout, and the number base system (10).

      Unless you weren't being sarky, but I reckon those things you mentioned will come about too.

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    10. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Runaway1956 · · Score: 1

      People who think like this scare me. What about people like myself who just don't fit into any mold? Bahhhh.

      I suppose you don't like motorcycle riders either. They don't fit any standards. (Well, to be fair, there are two standards for bikers - the fat professional having a midlife crisis who wants to think he's tough, and the guys who just don't give a damn - two distinctly different standards)

      If I'm reincarnated 200 years from now, and find a world that uses one standard OS, I'll just set out to wreck it. Actually, that sounds like a good movie plot, as well as a life mission. I like it!!

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    11. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Runaway1956 · · Score: 1

      "They want somebody to sell them a computer that Just Works."

      Interesting concept. Is there any place on Planet Earth that I can find such a thing? "Just works" as in, I don't have to set up any antivirus, don't have to pay for antivirus again next year, don't have to defrag routinely - I could go on, but why bother?

      My point is, *nix "just works" as much as Windows does. The windows crowd doesn't realize that they have just been trained to accept a number of irritants and inconveniences that they don't HAVE to accept. I would rather spend a few days, or even a few months, learning a system, than to spend some undefined quantity of time, money, and effort maintaining what I see as a broken system.

      When Corporate America is liable for billions of dollars in losses due to their operating system's vulnerabilities, that OS is obviously not ready for the big time.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    12. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      Motorcyle riders? Actually I was thinking of basing my future game idea on a motorcycle concept like Tron or something :)

      Okay, to answer your point, in the far future, the car and cycle will be replaced with something that's more useful than either of those (something that can fly too). Better is better is better.

      It might sound scary, but standards really are a good thing. It would only be scary if the standard was unacceptable in some way. But in theory, I reckon it is possible to combine the best of all worlds for many cases, especially for software. I doubt even the hackiest of programmers wouldn't want memory protection in an OS these days for instance. But let's say some still do, than the software can have that option as a toggle switch somewhere.

      If I'm reincarnated 200 years from now, and find a world that uses one standard OS, I'll just set out to wreck it.

      How about if that OS really was great? Even better than 'Haiku great' with great security, great organization, lots of features but with minimal bloat, great responsiveness, idealized metadata filesystem, open source etc.?

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    13. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by westlake · · Score: 1

      There is no technical reason why CompUSA customers shouldn't be able to walk out of the shop with a machine that asks "Which OS do you want to use today?" upon boot.

      There are however plenty of other reasons:

      The geek may enjoy spending endless hours maintaining multiple operating systems, hardware drivers, software libraries. and skill sets.

      The customer at Best Buy not so much.

      It can take a generation to develop a mature backlist of software titles for the general consumer market - a complex and demanding market and one the geek doesn't understand particularly well. The worst mistake a he can make is to simply count the number of apps in a Linux repository and think that the problem has been solved.

      The dual or multi-boot PC will be assembled from hardware designed for the Windows OS - and often designed, as in the case of DirectX video cards, in close cooperation with Microsoft.

      It would be altogether miraculous if the "alternative" OS delivered a significant real-world boost in performance, security or ease of use.

      Dual-boot becomes hard to justify when everything of interest to the end-user is routinely ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app.

    14. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by jim_v2000 · · Score: 1

      "We could have had close to 10 years of use out of this really good Be OS in schools"

      If it was "really good" people would be using it. But like all OSS operating systems that I've seen, they require a good deal of computer knowledge to maintain and use, and the support is shabby. I used Ubuntu for three years after Vista came out because of stability issues. An after those three years, I'm back to Windows because frankly, it just works (99% of the time) and is fairly intuitive. No arbitrary and poorly documented config files to fuck with, fairly standard ui (not as good as Apple, but good enough), programs with the features and functionality that I need, the hardware support is there, etc. You can make excuses about how hardware and software support aren't OS issues, but excuses don't get my work done or make my programs run.

      I like my Linux based web/ssh server, but it simply sucks for use as a desktop that does anything more that surf the web.

      --
      Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
    15. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by fm6 · · Score: 1

      Poor choice of words on my part. My point was that common OSs, whatever their faults, meet most people's needs, and they have zeroincentive for try new ones. Without users, developers have no incentive to code for the new platform, and manufacturers have no incentive to bundle and support it.

      Before you go picking at my logic, look at history. Why did the original Be OS fail? It couldn't find enough users to develop critical mass, which is defined as a self-sustaining ecosystem of users and developers.

      Frustrating? You betcha. Ever since commodity systems appeared 25 years ago, I've watched Microsoft dominate their OS market, and other, superior platforms fall by the wayside. And they did it through blind luck! They just happened to provide the "preferred" OS for the original PC (despite their recommending another company's OS!) and thus achieved critical mass before anybody else was even out the gate.

      The result has been a quarter century of really bad OSs. Which sucks, but it's no use pretending that the economic forces that cause this have suddenly gone away.

    16. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Just works" as in, I don't have to set up any antivirus, don't have to pay for antivirus again next year, don't have to defrag routinely

      You're in luck! Just get Microsoft Windows and don't ever update your antivirus, don't ever defrag, and you will be just like most users.

      My point is, *nix "just works" as much as Windows does.

      Until it doesn't. The Windows irritants and inconveniences are just that, irritants and inconveniences. When something Just Does Not Work on Unix, it is not something that you can ignore and continue working around. It tends to blow away or render unusable a key component of the system. Of course, who really wants sound, internet access, a GUI, or the ability to install software?

    17. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Omestes · · Score: 1

      How about if that OS really was great? Even better than 'Haiku great' with great security, great organization, lots of features but with minimal bloat, great responsiveness, idealized metadata filesystem, open source etc.?

      But "lots of features" is synonymous with bloat. Different users have different needs, and thus need different features, so to any group a certain % of features are bloat. This would be especially true if you made the one OS to rule them all, since you'd need to cater to ALL groups, and thus include all the factors needed by everyone.

      Perhaps the One OS to Rule Them All would need to have a very small, limited, but heavily extensible kernel, meaning at base it is pretty much useless, but each subclass of users can extend it to their needs. But this, then, doesn't fit into the ideal of having "lots of features".

      Another problem is that we're dealing with individuals, so perhaps you find the standard One OS to Rule Them All install to be sufficient to your needs, but I don't, and thus I'd want a different OS. Being OSS would only make this worse, since I could just fork it. Also what about seperate needs? Is the OOTRTA going to be good for servers, embedded systems, devices, and home computers at the same time?

      We're also ignoring capitalism and greed. Why would someone want to adhere to OOTRTA if they could come out with something else that might make them money? A diverse market means there is more money to spread around, so I really doubt that a free monopoly will happen.

      This is wishful thinking. In the far far future things will be just about exactly like they are now, with hopefully even more diversity. I'd rather see a world with ten different (but good) OSs floating around, than a world with one, that way people have choice, and can pick whatever they feel works for them. This also keeps the amusing time honored passtime of OS trolling alive, which is a bonus.

      --
      A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
    18. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Runaway1956 · · Score: 1

      To be honest, I've no experience with Be. I've downloaded the CD, and I'm going to create a VM sometime today, or tonight. It's uncharted territory for me. I don't know the history, or much of anything about it.

      I'm not going to pick at your logic. I understand what you're saying, and I can't really beat it with an argument. About all I can do, is test it, learn it, and recommend it to people who MIGHT want an alternative. ;^)

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    19. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      But "lots of features" is synonymous with bloat.

      Only because things are so unstructured at the moment.

      Once everything becomes unified (such as the graphics/audio stack), and old cruft is removed, and hardware interfaces and other stuff themselves become more standardized, that'll make it much easier to cater to all groups. That will help make the code base smaller. Otherwise, complexity in one area helps create (even more) complexity in a different area, and things go pear shaped.

      See what I mean about standards. Having 10 different OSs with 10 different ways of handling gfx hardware is basically hell for developers - I can't see how that would even remotely be a good thing, apart from the initial stages where choice helps everyone to see what approaches are best. In the end though, it all needs to be unified and modularized/compartmentalized.

      Look how small Haiku is, AND it has to cater to many different gfx/audio cards.

      We're also ignoring capitalism and greed. Why would someone want to adhere to OOTRTA if they could come out with something else that might make them money?

      Because it will be the best. Haiku already has something of that philosophy. People won't pay for something better if one OS is the best. And of all the possible pieces of software that should be free or nearly free (as in beer), the OS should be one of them.

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    20. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by SEE · · Score: 1

      BeOS was FORCED to port to Intel when Apple refused to disclose specs for the G3 line. This wasn't done on a whim, it was done out of technical necessity.

      A "technical necessity" that didn't seem to stop Linux-on-PPC at all.

    21. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You have a real knack for pulling information out of your ass. Everything you have said is incorrect.

    22. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by nazsco · · Score: 1

      <quote>

      <p>
      Here's what Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gass&eacute;e had to say in 2001 about what happened:
      </p><blockquote><div><p>There is no technical reason why CompUSA customers shouldn't be able to walk out of the shop with a machine that asks "Which OS do you want to use today?" upon boot. And yet, even today [2001], after several years of relentless news about how Linux is ready for the general desktop and business customer, one does not find dual-boot
      </p></quote>

      I recall when my father bought and IBM aptiva a long time ago.

      It shipped with both Windows 95 and OS/2 WARP.

      At boot time you could select which one you would like to use, or both. then it would finish the instalation asking for some of the CDs. and voila. I recall using dual boot windows/os2 with the default installer.

    23. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by westlake · · Score: 1

      I've watched Microsoft dominate their OS market, and other, superior platforms fall by the wayside. And they did it through blind luck! They just happened to provide the "preferred" OS for the original PC (despite their recommending another company's OS!) and thus achieved critical mass before anybody else was even out the gate.

      Luck had very little to do with it.

      The Apple III was first out of the gate.

      But the Apple III was an eight-bit strictly-for-business upgrade of the Apple II and that was not going be good enough.

      PC-DOS cost $40. CP/M-86 $240.

      Microsoft negotiated a flat fee and a non-exclusive deal.

      It promised to deliver a serviceable OS in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC - and that was something IBM needed to hear.

      The MS-DOS PC was a significant entry into the market before the cloning of the PC BIOS.

    24. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Omestes · · Score: 1

      Because it will be the best. Haiku already has something of that philosophy. People won't pay for something better if one OS is the best. And of all the possible pieces of software that should be free or nearly free (as in beer), the OS should be one of them.

      The best for whom? The best for you (or me) is never going to be the best for everyone. I doubt that there will ever be a decent "1 size fits all" OS, just like I doubt that we'd ever settle on a single model of car. People have different needs and preferences, and because of this there will always be a market for different solutions.

      You also have a slight fallacy (which I'm guessing in unintentional, or I'm misreading you), you seem to be implying that there is a highest level as far as OS quality is concerned, at which there is no room for improvement. This might be true when we stop developing hardware, but for the foreseeable future there will be needed improvement in OS design because of changes in hardware. In the world of tomorrow OOTRTA might be perfect with your 60TB throughput holographic ethernet, but then someone comes and invents a 1PT quantum channel.

      Also, to be snaky; since when did corporations care that anything was the best?

      --
      A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
    25. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by snuf23 · · Score: 1

      BeOS was never an open source OS. It was completely commercial. It was very slick and had support. It did not require a computer science degree to operate. Keep in mind that it was born out of an ex Apple employee's company. Ease of use was one of the primary driving forces behind the design.

      BeOS came out during Microsoft and Intel's massive marketing push for Windows 95 and the Pentium processor. It really didn't stand a chance as it could barely get noticed and had little third party software support. From a technical standpoint it was way ahead of its time.

      This was the same time period that almost broke Apple and put a rest to any remaining alternative computers such as the Amiga and Atari ST.

      Haiku is an open source clone of BeOS. It won't have huge support and will likely end up a hobbyists novelty.

      --
      Sometimes my arms bend back.
    26. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by margaret · · Score: 1

      Be OS was a very good OS so we should see good things from Haiku, too. The niche it filled will be different today for Haiku, but still highly relevant. Netbooks are all the rage now. I expect it will be tried there first.

      I absolutely loved BeOS! I mean, I love the MacBook I have now, but BeOS was my first love :-)

      I don't own a netbook currently, but I would very likely buy one just to run BeOS/Haiku on it when it's ready. Basically, for me the OS would be the killer app that would entice me to buy the hardware.

    27. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by fm6 · · Score: 1

      Who would you recommend it to? Even if it's a superior OS, the things that make it superior (good APIs, robust multitasking, etc.) don't matter to most users. What they want to know is what good apps run on it. You don't need to test it to know that there won't be a lot.

      No harm in playing with it for fun and self-education. But don't make any plans based on it becomming widely used.

    28. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Runaway1956 · · Score: 1

      It appears that porting apps isn't terribly difficult. No, I haven't tried yet, but it looks pretty straight forward. Grab the source, and compile it. Or, did you mean Windows apps? I'll check for Wine the next time I fire it up.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    29. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by fm6 · · Score: 1

      I'm sorry, what does the Apple III have to do with anything? It was just another proprietary architecture, one of many.

      Bill Gates is the richest man ever because of MS-DOS. Collective hindsight says he was very clever to get IBM to make it the cheapest option for the PC. But that neglects a simple fact: MS-DOS wasn't his first choice. He wanted CP/M, but couldn't get Kildall to sign the NDAs IBM wanted before they would bring him on board. When that happened, he hurriedly bought the rights to Seattle DOS in order to keep his deal with IBM from falling apart.

      Gates gets credit for prescience because people assume he knew that the PC would become the basis for today's commodity systems. But that was never in IBM's game plan. On the contrary, they did everything they could to keep the architecture proprietary. What they didn't count on was their competitors ability to clone the technology without crossing any of IBM's legal barriers.

      Gates didn't buy into this unexpected future. He bought into IBM's game plan, which called for a series of proprietary systems that would dominate the desktop marketplace the same way their previous products had been a virtual monopoly for more than 3 decades. If things had gone as planned, Bill Gates would be just another rich geek, and computers would still cost you a month's salary.

    30. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Gates didn't buy into this unexpected future. He bought into IBM's game plan, which called for a series of proprietary systems that would dominate the desktop marketplace the same way their previous products had been a virtual monopoly for more than 3 decades.

      This is true - Bill has said that he knew the IBM PC would be a huge success, but thought that MS would make most of their money selling languages for it!

    31. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...and of course, a unified world religion.

    32. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by jim_v2000 · · Score: 1

      "BeOS was never an open source OS."

      Yeah, I realized that about 5 seconds after posting. Oh well.

      --
      Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
    33. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 1

      Tell me about it. I think I'm the last living person to have applied to work at Be inc. I responded to the ad for a c++ programmer. A month later I got a reply from the webmaster, apologizing for the posting staying on so long ( it didn't have a date attached with it), they were laying everyone off, rather than hiring people.

      --
      Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
    34. Re:Obligatory BeOS quote by FreonTrip · · Score: 1

      It was a question of legal liability. Apple hunting down individual coders for reverse-engineering its hardware would have been draconian - Apple suing Be, Inc. for reverse-engineering its hardware would be justified under IP law, if not expected.

  30. Re:16.09.2009 starts a Haiku Launch Party in germa by theuserbl · · Score: 1

    The link I meant is this one: http://www.lelldorin.de/debug/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=574# Sorry for the broken link in my previews post.

  31. not crash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    no it wouldnt crash, it would simply run less efficiently. say instead of completing that video transcode in 100.01% of the theoretically possibly time it would take 110%. and lots of people might say woah.. it runs 10% slower, we cant have that.. but really we see those kinds of variations all the time between compilers, dynamic linking methods, versions of libraries and os's, but when its for the very worthwhile reason that its improving perceived speed (responsiveness) then i say its well worth it.

    every os yanks the cpu and other resources away from a task when it task switches (im really only familiar with intel arch's). and actually it has little todo with the software. the intel processors have dedicated registers for task switching, including the task register which holds the descriptor for the currently running tasks memory segment which contains that tasks state (the task state segment), when the cpu is issued an instruction to interrupt or change rings due to an exception it switches tasks.

    user level tasks are just another type of task and it is the hardware since the 286 (but the 386 introduced virtualisation of memory via page tables which facilitates using hdd space as virtual memory) which made so called "preemptive" multitasking possible and really microsoft had to do very little except stop relying on the cludges which required the older model of mostly living in the 1meg real address space and mapping in pages via an extended memory manager to access a tiny bit of memory at a time. barely kinda practical for 16meg of memory but it became old quickly. so when microsoft blew their horn saying how great they were for creating an os that had preemptive multitasking it had nothing to do with them barely. they finally got with the times and implemented features which intel had made available since the 286. /end rant

  32. But what of their non-code progress? by discogravy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is there a push from the Haiku folks to get this onto machines? Or is this the equivalent of another hobby linux distro with no publicity and no one that cares for it except those that worked on it to begin with? I mean, finally, they have a product; but what now?

    1. Re:But what of their non-code progress? by MBGMorden · · Score: 1

      Usually things like this are a labor of love. If more people adopt it then great, they get more potential developers, but they're not selling it, so "marketshare" doesn't really apply, which makes any push towards getting it on machines kinda pointless. They put it out, and if people want it, they use it, if not, then oh well.

      Personally though I see it having a lot of potential. My PERSONAL opinion is that the world needs a good open source operating system for the desktop. Linux is nice for servers, but it has always fallen flat on the desktop IMHO. A chance at a fresh start is welcomed.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    2. Re:But what of their non-code progress? by discogravy · · Score: 1

      Well, ubuntu's not for sale -- I'm sure someone will charge you for it if you want, but you can't walk into a store and buy it. But you can get some netbooks, laptops and desktops preinstalled with it, and their publicity and userbase evangelism has certainly increased their marketshare; even 3 or 4 years ago, you'd have been hard pressed to find a linux distro that had the kind of community and popularity that ubuntu has now. Redhat might have been close, but their focus on corporate money/marketshare put a bit of distance between the average user and them; debian has the fanatical userbase, but can be technically difficult for newbies and is therefore destined to never have the broad userbase that ubuntu has. If you're looking for a desktop OSS OS, it's not only available, you can get it preinstalled already. And they've got help/support etc forums available.

      Be's downfall was threefold: no apps, no inroads to consumers and Apple went with Jobs' NeXT instead of Gassee's BeOS. Haiku's OSS nature means it can't be killed in the market -- there's no market that it *needs* to survive -- but without some kind of push to get it going and into people's hands, it's going to be as great as the next linux distribution you've never heard of. Which is a shame, because it's a nice OS.

    3. Re:But what of their non-code progress? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My question as well. BeOS was far more interesting when it was fresh, but now...meh. I don't know why I'm supposed to be excited about this.

  33. Also... by CarpetShark · · Score: 0

    Also... yes, you seem to think that Haiku is a variation of Linux/Unix. In fact, it's a variation of BeOS. Back in the early Mac OS days, Apple bought a company/OS technology called NeXT to build OS X from. A group of people in Apple thought they could do better, and left to form Be, Inc. and to build their own, entirely new OS, BeOS, to replace Mac OS with. For the time, NeXT was very advanced, and BeOS was probably lightyears ahead of the rest. Be sold a few dual-core PowerPC machines with BeOS back when everyone else was still fumbling around with crappy versions of windows and Mac OS and (maybe) Pentium Is. Unfortunately they didn't make much of a dent on the PC market for whatever reason (probably the microsoft monopoly and lack of apps) and so eventually started looking at smaller markets --- set top boxes, mobile phones, etc. Soon enough, Be, Inc. died, but had established itself well enough to convince others that BeOS was something good enough that it shouldn't be lost due to marketing issues. After years of work, volunteers have now built Haiku, and it's independent of those companies that failed to develop and market it further.

    1. Re:Also... by rinoid · · Score: 1

      Some more details.

      Apple offered to buy Be first but they declined thinking their valuation was higher than Apple was offering. Palm later bought the Be assets for 11million, about 10 times less than Apple's offer. Which is why my very first post in this thread, now marked troll by some troll, said "loser say what"!?

      Apple went on to buy NeXt to build OS X from its core rather than BeOS. Much smarter move IMO. NeXt was light years ahead of BeOS in terms of actual implementations and deployments (as in real shops ran real systems on NeXt tech)

  34. Modern? by copponex · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, a unix-like kernel with a pretty window manager is modern?

    Damn. That's some strong kool-aid.

    1. Re:Modern? by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      So, a unix-like kernel with a pretty window manager is modern?

      Damn. That's some strong kool-aid.

      I can kind of see your point - but on the other hand... First, Unix support is a layer in Mac OS X over the Mach kernel. Second, I would argue that having an environment based on a Unix kernel doesn't imply the OS is poorly fitted to modern systems, or that it's archaic or "not modern" or whatever... Any more than Windows' history reaching back to (and before) the DOS days implies the same. A lot depends on how the old designs have been adapted for current use - what kind of environment is present to support the current feature set.

      As for where this leaves Mac OS X - honestly I couldn't tell you. I "upgraded" from a 2004 powerbook to a EEE 901 (the powerbook was actually the better machine for a variety of reasons, but I enjoy the EEE a lot more these days) so I've basically discontinued my use of Mac OS X. I never got to the point of programming for the platform.

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
    2. Re:Modern? by Shag · · Score: 1

      I would argue that having an environment based on a Unix kernel doesn't imply the OS is poorly fitted to modern systems, or that it's archaic or "not modern" or whatever... Any more than Windows' history reaching back to (and before) the DOS days implies the same.

      I thought the NT kernel strongly resembled that of VMS. :)

      --
      Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
    3. Re:Modern? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why can't it be? Do you say new cars aren't modern because they have 4 wheels, and are powered by an internal combustion engine?

  35. cute names by jollyreaper · · Score: 0

    Geeks so love cute names
    If we must go japanese
    I say bukkake

    I once saw a guy wearing one of those sports jersey shirts and the name across the back said Bukkake. Must have been from one of those places where you can get your own name on the team jersey of your choice. I figured he did it so he could tell from the snickers behind him how many people spent too much time on the net.

    --
    Kwisatz Haderach
    Sell the spice to CHOAM
    This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    1. Re:cute names by surgeon · · Score: 1

      the original BeOS had a thing called the "psycho-killer" (Qu'est-ce que c'est?) thread to kill processes gone haywire. I wonder if it's still there, perhaps translated to some Cute Japanese equivalent

      --
      [ No prescription needed ]
  36. Take that! by Brunellus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Honking geese fly south

    Cacophonously, just like

    Slashdot pedants' posts.

  37. BeOS in historic context by argent · · Score: 1

    BeOS looked like it had some actual advantages to the end user. I had a BeBox briefly and it's frankly amazing what two 66 MHz 603e chips could do with an operating system designed from the ground up for multiprocessing.

    I use BeOS on my PowerMac and it naturally kicked MacOS butt (to the point where OS 8 under SheepShaver was faster than OS 8 on the raw hardware), but that's such a low hurdle to jump: the underlying operating system on pre-OSX Macs would have been considered primitive in 1969... it was nothing more than a set of common I/O libraries, no scheduling or central resource management at all... a single-tasking monitor like something from the early days of the IBM 360. The multitasking on later versions was kludged in through the window system, and programming for it was like writing a device driver... scheduling was handled by having the application call back to the OS to let other apps run "often enough".

    Later I got to run it on a Wintel box and compare it head-to-head with Windows (NT4 at the time) and FreeBSD and Rhapsody DR1. It was the most resource-hungry of all four operating systems, which totally blew my mind. There was more memory contention and stalling (even for command line apps) on a PC with 16M (which sounds small now, but it was pretty high end back then).

    It's not the kernel and OS design that makes OS X slow, it's the heavyweight window system. Making every window (including subwindows!) its own OpenGL texture simplifies application development somewhat, but it's a massive burden on the hardware. The API is also very MacOS/Windows like with a lot of tight cooperation required between the UI library and the display, coupling the UI to the application and creating an unnecessary bottleneck. Without that overhead it would be just as responsive as BeOS on comparable hardware.

    But the most amazingly responsive OS I've used was the one shipped with the Amiga. A very lightweight and efficient kernel, a lightweight window system that ALSO avoided coupling the UI and the application (the input handler for most standard widgets ran completely asynchronously from the app, only passing completed selection and menu events down the input chain). You were impressed by what it could do on two 66 MHz CPUs? Luxury, mate. Try it with a single 7.14 MHz 68000 and tell me how fast it is.

    1. Re:BeOS in historic context by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There was more memory contention and stalling (even for command line apps) on a PC with 16M (which sounds small now, but it was pretty high end back then).

      It most certainly was not! I think you're off by several powers of two there, me laddo. My 386 had 8MB RAM on it.

      Given this error I don't see how the rest of your comment could possibly be worth reading. My BeBox had 64MB in it and that was pretty excellent. I also Ran BeOS on a PPro with 128MB and it was FANTASTIC, like butter. YOUR problems were ALMOST CERTAINLY driver-related. The memory it was "using" was almost certainly overreported.

      It's not the kernel and OS design that makes OS X slow, it's the heavyweight window system. Making every window (including subwindows!) its own OpenGL texture simplifies application development somewhat, but it's a massive burden on the hardware.

      You have it 100% wrong. First of all, Quartz was not always GPU-accelerated. OSX was slow before that, and it's still slow (As in unresponsive.) Second of all, OSX is not a new OS, it's based on NeXTStep. Display PDF was designed to be a more scalable and efficient version of Display Postscript, which NeXTStep used to draw the display. The NeXT hardware was expensive in part because of the display hardware, much like a Mac except that at the time the NeXT graphics hardware was head and shoulders above anything Apple would sell you. NeXTStep was actually pretty responsive provided you had one of their faster machines... by which I mean a Turbo Slab with a 68040 processor, and at least 32MB RAM. I've personally sat and used OSX on a Dual G5 for around a year, got it up to 10.5 eventually and it was slow when I got there and it was slow when I left. I promise you it was less responsive than a Turbo Slab without any users mucking around in the background, and there is no excuse for this whatsoever.

      There are many good things about OSX, but responsiveness is not among them. Windows has the same power to transform windows using the GPU, and in fact this is SOP on DX9- and DX10-equipped Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines, yet they are dramatically more responsive than OSX in general. I don't have to compare apples to apples; I can compare fairly anemic windows systems to hip, hot, and happening apples and the Windows solutions still come out ahead in this regard. XPSP2 on a P4-2.8GHz where disk and memory were both slower than the aforementioned Dual G5 was peppier in every case. Ditto my Core Duo (not even Core 2) 2.16 GHz PC running XPSP3, even with a raft of crap in the tray and the requisite antivirus. You can make excuses, but GPU acceleration should have made the OS more responsive by offloading windowing tasks to the hardware and letting the CPU get on with work.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:BeOS in historic context by argent · · Score: 1

      If you had a 386 with 8MB you were doing pretty damn well. My first 486 only had 4MB, and my first laptop (Toshiba Libretto) came with 8MB and was eventually maxed out at 32MB.

      First of all, Quartz was not always GPU-accelerated.

      I have not said one word about a GPU here. Not one. Quartz was always based on OpenGL, when you didn't have a GPU (like my PowerMac 7600) it was using software OpenGL. Yes, right from the start, even on my completely unaccelerated PowerMac, and yes it was a hog right from the start because it used dedicated textures for everything.

      Second of all, OSX is not a new OS, it's based on NeXTStep

      Indeed. Rhapsody DR1 (which I mentioned above) was basically NeXTstep with a menu bar. It was still using Display Postscript instead of Quartz. I also had a NextStation, and it was more responsive with 16M and a 68040 than my powerMac under OS X with 112MB and a PPO 603e. Display Postscript, heavyweight as it was, was far lighter weight than Quartz.

    3. Re:BeOS in historic context by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Quartz was always based on OpenGL, when you didn't have a GPU (like my PowerMac 7600) it was using software OpenGL

      Quartz was not always based on OpenGL. Quartz Extreme, introduced with OS X 10.2, used hardware compositing, but prior to that it was all done in software. It wasn't using OpenGL back then either; it was using its own path into the 3D drivers. Newer versions are using OpenGL, however. Quartz itself is an evolution of Display PostScript. It adds buffering and removes flow control constructs from the graphics language, and I don't believe it shares any code with DPS, but it is not completely new. Buffering of subwindows wasn't added until 10.5, as part of the CoreAnimation framework. Until then, all views drew into the same off-screen buffer, which was then composited with the rest of the display to produce the final image. And, yes, this was very slow when done in software on a 500MHz (or even slower) PowerPC. DPS didn't do the extra buffering step, and was responsive on a 25MHz 68040.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    4. Re:BeOS in historic context by argent · · Score: 1

      Quartz was not always based on OpenGL. Quartz Extreme, introduced with OS X 10.2, used hardware compositing, but prior to that it was all done in software.

      The term "OpenGL" is not restricted to implementations based on a hardware video accelerator. There are pure software OpenGL implementations, like the one Apple still uses (for example, to implement T&L for the Intel GPUs on the first generations of Macbook (non-pro) and intel Mac Mini), which was used to run OpenGL-based software (like Quartz) on unaccelerated hardware.

      Quartz itself is an evolution of Display PostScript.

      Quartz was a complete from-scratch re-implementation, because Adobe's licensing for Display Postscript cost too much, and Apple took advantage of that to make it OpenGL-based.

      Buffering of subwindows wasn't added until 10.5

      Subwindows were implemented as separate textures in 10.1. You could see it happening just by opening up a scrollable window in just about any application that used Apple's rich text widgets and watching the memory use soar as the entire document was rendered into the scrolling area in the background.

    5. Re:BeOS in historic context by tyahand · · Score: 1

      I've personally sat and used OSX on a Dual G5 for around a year, got it up to 10.5 eventually and it was slow when I got there and it was slow when I left.

      Well, if a Dual G5 is your basis for evaluating OS X performance, then yeah, I can see how you'd think it was really slow. The G5 had a nice FPU, but it was lackluster at best on integer code, and while the memory bandwidth was much improved over the G4, it was still anemic compared to what workstation-class x86 machines could do at the time. Any of the first-gen Intel Macs easily outclassed the G5.

    6. Re:BeOS in historic context by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      If you had a 386 with 8MB you were doing pretty damn well. My first 486 only had 4MB, and my first laptop (Toshiba Libretto) came with 8MB and was eventually maxed out at 32MB.

      Yes, it was a real live 386DX25. It had 8 MB of DRAM in DIP sockets.

      I have not said one word about a GPU here. Not one. Quartz was always based on OpenGL

      Please provide a cite. I set out trying to prove you right and could only find references to the state of quartz "before unifying the graphics system under OpenGL entirely"(ref) and the like.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    7. Re:BeOS in historic context by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Subwindows were implemented as separate textures in 10.1. You could see it happening just by opening up a scrollable window in just about any application that used Apple's rich text widgets and watching the memory use soar as the entire document was rendered into the scrolling area in the background.

      No, you could see this happen because of the Backing Store, which in Cocoa programming in OSX uses only a buffered backing store. In other words, using backing store in OSX 10.1 (via NSWindow's -setBackingType: method) would cause the behavior you describe, because all windows are drawn to a buffer before being drawn to the screen so that they can be redrawn without help from the application. I've asked once for a citation that OpenGL was used for Quartz on early OSX and so far all the evidence points to the contrary. No, Quartz is simply a revised DPS engine which uses DPDF. It always outputs to OpenGL since the graphics systems were merged, which AFAIK happened after the introduction of Quartz extreme.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    8. Re:BeOS in historic context by argent · · Score: 1

      Apple confused things terribly when they started talking about using compositing on the GPU instead of the CPU. Quartz was integrated with OpenGL from the start... even on Puma (I didn't switch early enough to see Cheetah) OpenGL and Quartz applications worked together, and multiple OpenGL applications could run concurrently, including having them overlaid by other windows, and this worked whether OpenGL was handled by software or hardware.

      It's possible I'm confused about the details of the integration between OpenGL and Quartz, but in terms of the performance impact it doesn't matter: every window, from the start, was completely buffered and hidden sections of windows were always completely rendered. This applied to scrolling subwindows as well. This meant applications didn't need to deal with damage lists unless they chose to... ports of older apps like Photoshop would have retained their own rendering code, but new Cocoa applications sisn't have to handle damage events and re-render hidden portions of windows.

      This is the key point: this massive increase in memory use from the Window system, and all the extra overhead of maintaining these bitmaps, was the biggest performance penalty OS X had. I used NeXTStep, OpenStep on Intel, Rhapsody DR1, and OS X from Puma on... and NeXTStep, OpenStep, and Rhapsody were all much faster, much more lightweight, much more responsive, than OS X.

      And they were comparable to BeOS, and had lower memory requirements than BeOS. BeOS was impressive, but it wasn't so completely beyond its contemporaries as people keep trying to make out.

    9. Re:BeOS in historic context by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      OpenGL and Quartz applications worked together, and multiple OpenGL applications could run concurrently, including having them overlaid by other windows, and this worked whether OpenGL was handled by software or hardware.

      This also does not prove any point about OpenGL and Quartz. The same is true on Windows, where OpenGL isn't used by the operating system for anything, except running some screensavers — although come to think of it, the OpenGL screensaver preview is an example of this kind of behavior and even back back back in the way back with my Permedia 2 card and Windows ninety-whatever or Windows 2000 I could have the screensaver preview right next to a windowed OpenGL app. Partially-occluded OpenGL windows behaved just as you would expect them to. I've had FAR more problems with Video overlays on AV quadras and with various early hardware decoders (passthrough and not) on Windows alike.

      It's possible I'm confused about the details of the integration between OpenGL and Quartz, but in terms of the performance impact it doesn't matter: every window, from the start, was completely buffered and hidden sections of windows were always completely rendered.

      This is false; it is possible that the default was to enable Backing Store, but that is not the only behavior available to a Quartz application. Backing Store may be disabled. As we have discussed (or was that in another comment? It was a reply to you also though) it is possible to do this, yea, even in 10.1, where the backing store was definitely implemented by an offscreen buffer. egads, the PCI bandwidth that must have consumed in the early machines...

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    10. Re:BeOS in historic context by argent · · Score: 1

      This is false; it is possible that the default was to enable Backing Store, but that is not the only behavior available to a Quartz application.

      This is irrelevant; it may have been possible for Quartz applications to disable backing store, but if the majority of applications didn't (and in particular Apple's own applicatons didn't) the result is the same... IN PRACTICE you will ALWAYS have MASSIVELY higher memory requirements on OS X than on NeXTstep/OpenStep/Rhapsody. Which you did. I had to treble the RAM in my old PowerMac just install OS X.

      Which, going back several messages to the original point I was making about why OS X was such a hog compared to BeOS *and* its contemporaries, IS the point.

    11. Re:BeOS in historic context by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Which, going back several messages to the original point I was making about why OS X was such a hog compared to BeOS *and* its contemporaries, IS the point.

      You can argue any point you want, but I was arguing that OpenGL was NOT the basis of Quartz from the beginning, which was your assertion; you claimed that rendering was to an offscreen texture as a result, and that there was overhead from OpenGL. You have repeatedly changed your claims until the truth fit them. Read Dvorak much?

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    12. Re:BeOS in historic context by argent · · Score: 1

      I was arguing that OpenGL was NOT the basis of Quartz from the beginning, which was your assertion

      That was a secondary point. I was apparently wrong about the implementation, but the implementation details don't change the fundamental point I was trying to make: backing store, especially for subwindows, requires much more memory.

      you claimed that rendering was to an offscreen texture as a result, and that there was overhead from OpenGL.

      I was arguing that there was overhead due to the extra memory required for the backing store, not that there was any inherent overhead imposed by OpenGL itself. Whether rendering is implemented via OpenGL, Quickdraw, or a completely independent API and code base, there is a significant difference in the memory requirements of an implementation where virtually all applications implement the redraw using damage list and where virtually all applications use backing store.

      It seems I was wrong about this backing store being implemented as an OpenGL texture, but that doesn't change the basic point: retaining a full backing store for all windows was responsible for much higher memory requirements on OS X.

  38. Haiku Haiku by DynaSoar · · Score: 1

    I could have predicted it:
    One hour later,
    the site is Slashdotted.

    --
    "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
    1. Re:Haiku Haiku by DynaSoar · · Score: 1

      It's not only Slashdotted,
      SMTP
      fails to mail out passwords.

      --
      "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
  39. Torrents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ISO:
    http://haiku-files.org/files/releases/r1alpha1/haiku-r1alpha1-iso.zip.torrent

    Raw image:
    http://haiku-files.org/files/releases/r1alpha1/haiku-r1alpha1-image.zip.torrent

    Vmware image:
    http://haiku-files.org/files/releases/r1alpha1/haiku-r1alpha1-vmdk.zip.torrent

  40. Re:8 years is a long time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And you can't list even one of those "a lot of things" that the others can't get right?

    God you BeOS/Haiku followers are awesome!

  41. It would help to have torrents by evilpenguin · · Score: 1

    I am currently attempting to download the .iso from bittorrent. Aparrently no one (not one!) is seeding. I am downloading from 0 of 0 connected peers. Lest anyone think my network is down, I am also donwloading open solaris 10 from 64 peers...

    1. Re:It would help to have torrents by evilpenguin · · Score: 1

      I guess I should learn patience. I have four peers. I'll be leaving this up a long time, I think! ;) (It is pretty rare for my joining to be a 20% increase!)

    2. Re:It would help to have torrents by evilpenguin · · Score: 1

      Okay. I take it all back. I waited 15 minutes to post my little rant. I've just never seen a torrent start so slowly for me. Now it is up and fully saturated with peers. Let's just pretend I never posted anything, mmm'kay?

    3. Re:It would help to have torrents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      slow trackers

    4. Re:It would help to have torrents by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      Okay. I take it all back. I waited 15 minutes to post my little rant. I've just never seen a torrent start so slowly for me. Now it is up and fully saturated with peers. Let's just pretend I never posted anything, mmm'kay?

      shikatanai
      osoi torakka
      mendoi na...

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
  42. Yes, but.... by gr8_phk · · Score: 1

    The developer FAQ explicitly states that they do not want contributions under viral licenses like the GPL. They even use the word viral, and they explicitly name the GPL. Their intent to allow closed source releases has been clear for many years. I'd quote their developer FAQ, but it's currently not responding. But yes, the X11 (MIT) license is considered Free by the FSF.

    1. Re:Yes, but.... by Hatta · · Score: 1

      The developer FAQ explicitly states that they do not want contributions under viral licenses like the GPL

      The copyright notice in the MIT license is viral.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    2. Re:Yes, but.... by Abcd1234 · · Score: 1

      The developer FAQ explicitly states that they do not want contributions under viral licenses like the GPL. They even use the word viral, and they explicitly name the GPL.

      Well, given the GPL is the only high-profile viral license, I find that hardly surprising. Moreover, I can't blame them for wanting to avoid the GPL. I avoid it myself for projects I've written, as it does not meet my personal definition of "free".

      Their intent to allow closed source releases has been clear for many years. I'd quote their developer FAQ, but it's currently not responding.

      And again, who gives a shit? So they close the source. The last OSS version is always available and can be used as the basis for a fork if anyone cares to do it.

      And you should be *praising* the project for being honest about potential plans to close the source. At least they're being upfront about it. And if developers make the choice to contribute anyway, that's their decision.

    3. Re:Yes, but.... by Abcd1234 · · Score: 1

      No, it's not. At least not by any reasonable definition of the term.

      The GPL is "viral" because incorporation of GPL'd code into a project necessitates that project also be licensed under the GPL. ie, the project has been "infected" with GPL'd code, and now must itself be GPL'd.

      In contrast, the MIT license does *not* require the incorporating project be placed under the MIT license. It only requires attribution be provided in code/documentation.

    4. Re:Yes, but.... by Hatta · · Score: 1

      I didn't say the MIT license was viral. I said the copyright notice is viral. If you incorporate MIT code into your project, your project is infected with the copyright notice and cannot be licensed in such a way as to allow other users to remove that copyright notice.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    5. Re:Yes, but.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How awful, being forced to include a statement of ownership.

      Btw, what license are your trolls posted under? I need to in case I want to port them to reddit.

    6. Re:Yes, but.... by spitzak · · Score: 1

      Not really any different.

      Yes if you combine your code with something GPL and release it, the result has to be GPL'd.

      However, despite what you imply, you can still take *your* code and do anything with it you want, such as distribute it under different licenses. You can even mark it this way as dual-licensed in the GPL version of the code so others can do this directly.

      For the copyright, if you combine your code with MIT code that requires a copyright to print, the result will print the copyright. But your original code can be used without printing the copyright. Same thing, the need to print the copyright and the need to be GPL'd are both equally "viral".

    7. Re:Yes, but.... by spitzak · · Score: 1

      Actually they could "close the source" even if they released it GPL. It is their source code.

      What they want is copyright assignment or some other form of permission to use the code in any way, of anything contributed to them. This means they cannot *accept* GPL code (or a whole lot of other licenses). It has nothing to do with how they release their code.

    8. Re:Yes, but.... by Abcd1234 · · Score: 1

      However, despite what you imply, you can still take *your* code and do anything with it you want, such as distribute it under different licenses.

      Well that's a little disingenuous. Of course you can do whatever you want with your code. But the whole point, here, is that you used a GPL'd library to solve some problem you otherwise didn't want to solve yourself. And that means that, sans the GPL'd library, your application is missing some functionality it otherwise would have.

      So, sure, you can distribute your broken code any way you want. But if you want your code to leverage the functionality in a GPL'd library, then you have to release your code under the GPL. Period. And that's what makes it viral.

      The advertising clause only makes a single, minor requirement: that you add an acknowledgement. That's *very* different from the kind of restrictions the GPL puts on the distributor. So, while I stand corrected that, in a sense, the MIT license is viral (in that the advertising requirement is carried through), it's still a *very* different animal from the GPL.

    9. Re:Yes, but.... by Abcd1234 · · Score: 1

      Actually they could "close the source" even if they released it GPL. It is their source code.

      Only if copyright was signed over to them for every contribution made to the project, and that may or may not have been handled correctly (see the great Linux and Wine licensing debates, among others, for how that can work out).

      What they want is copyright assignment or some other form of permission to use the code in any way, of anything contributed to them. This means they cannot *accept* GPL code (or a whole lot of other licenses).

      And this makes no sense.

      If "It is their source code", then the code is theirs. Period. All contributions made to the project must include an assignment of copyright over to the project, and if it's under the GPL, then as you can say, they can relicense it as they see fit. Furthermore, in this case, there's no such thing as "[accepting] GPL code", as all code provided to the project is released to them.

      So, if they "cannot *accept* GPL code", then that's only because the contributions made to the project are *not* signed over to the project. Whether or no this is the case, though, I don't know.

    10. Re:Yes, but.... by spitzak · · Score: 1

      I think we are saying the same thing.

      Only the license on the contributed patches matters. It does not matter what license they release their *own* code on. They are free to change between GPL and BSD and CDDL and proprietary and whatever they want.

      Original author was making some implication that they could not use the GPL on their release, and that somehow the GPL would "infect" all contributed patches. This is bogus. Yes they could *accept* GPL patches, but they don't have to! If they distributed using the GPL-incompatible CDDL but thought maybe they want to leave open the possibility of changing to the GPL, they could not accept CDDL patches either! If they wanted to BSD the code, they could not accept code that required a NDA to be signed. Wow, that is amazing! Truth is, there is nothing magical about the GPL, no matter how much the FUDmeisters want to make you think there is.

    11. Re:Yes, but.... by gr8_phk · · Score: 1

      Original author was making some implication that they could not use the GPL on their release, and that somehow the GPL would "infect" all contributed patches. This is bogus. Yes they could *accept* GPL patches, but they don't have to!

      I think I'm the original author you mention. What I said is that they *will not* accept GPL patches - not that they don't have to. My impression for many years is that they want to preserve the right to close everything if they so desire, and that's fine, I just wanted to point it out. If someone has no intention of closing their source in the future, there is a fair chance they wouldn't want others to close it either and so would use GPL. If someone wants to reserve the option to close it later (or allow others to do so) they use BSD or MIT licenses.

      Now some parts of the OS are lagging behind others that use GPLed code. It would be prudent to borrow other code to speed development, but it seems their desire to keep a certain license is more important than using existing code to speed development. That points to a strong desire to go closed source at some point in the future. Which is fine. I just don't like calling something "Free Software" when the intention appears to be to make it nonFree in the future.

  43. Headline missed the boat by vonhammer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    After eight years work,
    Be-Alike Haiku released -
    Official Alpha.

  44. Mildly interesting by petrus4 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Although from what I read, Microsoft also helped it along, from memory Be died for the same reason that some of the people I've known who died from cancer, did; it was something from a parallel universe where good things actually happen, somehow wound up in this one by mistake, and thus had to be recalled.

    Be is one of a long list of non-mainstream technologies which I've seen wither on the vine, again for the simple reason that they were too good. There is a status quo in virtually every area in this world, including computer software. If something shows up which is intelligent, positive, and therefore radical to the point where it exceeds the "just good enough," status quo, it tends to slip back below the surface, very rapidly.

    I've often wondered how much more positive the world would be, if all of the things which have been repressed or destroyed because they were too innovative, too positive, or too endangering to a scarcity based economy, had actually been allowed to survive and be used.

    1. Re:Mildly interesting by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      Although from what I read, Microsoft also helped it along, from memory Be died for the same reason that some of the people I've known who died from cancer, did

      I'm going to go out on a limb and say that reason was cancer?

      He was an annoying little kid and his transtector was stupid...

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
    2. Re:Mildly interesting by gad_zuki! · · Score: 1

      >I've often wondered how much more positive the world would be, if all of the things which have been repressed or destroyed because they were too innovative, too positive, or too endangering to a scarcity based economy

      Id say youre suffering from confirmation bias along with having a very cynical attitude. I think the problem is, if youre a slashdot regular, then youve already incorporated a "everything sucks" attitude. Which is depressing. Afterall, its easier to complain than to do.

      The problem is once something innovative becomes mainstream, it becomes boring. Then its old news and youre sick of it. Or the implementation wasnt as good as how your envisioned it would be. Lots of innovative things are in the world right now. Heck, for all its faults Linux is something of a modern marvel. Wikipedia constantly surprises me that its not a completely useless thing. Windows 7 is pretty damn sharp.

      Now, things that arent mainstream always are stuck in your head as the idealized perfect thing you think they are. They never get put out in the real world. They never get tested or criticized. They never get a chance to disappoint you. There's no shortage of people who think Bucky Fullers 3-wheeled car would beat everything or that Tesla's wireless power would have brought utopia to mankind. Except steering a 3-wheeled car is like driving a boat and a city with wireless power is wasteful and you can kiss radio/tv/cell/wifi goodbye because of interference while youre at it.

    3. Re:Mildly interesting by CherniyVolk · · Score: 1

      Be is one of a long list of non-mainstream technologies which I've seen wither on the vine, again for the simple reason that they were too good. There is a status quo in virtually every area in this world, including computer software. If something shows up which is intelligent, positive, and therefore radical to the point where it exceeds the "just good enough," status quo, it tends to slip back below the surface, very rapidly.

      I've often wondered how much more positive the world would be, if all of the things which have been repressed or destroyed because they were too innovative, too positive, or too endangering to a scarcity based economy, had actually been allowed to survive and be used.

      I don't agree, but I will admit this is how things pan out. Here's my theory as to a possible cause...

      When I bought my first BMW, the salesmen had a very very easy job. Any hardwork that might have befallen him, was taken care of by the engineers of BMW. When I got in a BMW at the dealership, and turned the key, the car started, first time with confidence. The steering wheel seemed in tune to my expectations of how much the car should turn given how much I rotate the wheel (most american cars, regardless of sport or luxury status, seem to have a ridiculous amount of play before response is perceived). The gas seemed to follow suit. The suspension wasn't too tight, but tight enough to compliment handling. The Germans make damn fine automobiles, and the BMW is by far one of the best cars I have ever driven. I bought that BMW, and plan to buy another one.

      I would assert that BMW is one of those "very very good products, well deserving of their marketing slogan 'the ultimate driving machine'". But, they are here, alive and well and they have yet to die a sad and lonely death.

      But, one could argue that BMW doesn't rule the automotive world. General Motors probably is yet larger than BMW. And other fabulous car companies like Bugatti, Lamborghini and Ferrari have rich histories yet often find themselves owned by larger companies. Not just cars, but Omega watches is owned by Swatch (plastic toy watch company). But this can be attributed to the simple fact that selling a lot of cheap stuff renders more income than selling a few very expensive items. The industries realize these high-end companies are the source for much innovation and technical excellence, so rather than letting them die, they get bought out and preserved in a way.

      So, what happens market wise to companies who we think are too good but still fail? I think it boils down to what I first talked about. Anyone selling a BMW really only needs to be present to manage the formalities of the sale. The product will sell itself, it really is that good. The downside of this Led Zeppelin tactic (kudos if you get this reference; if you don't, you suck and need to wiki their fourth album), is that the consumer isn't so vulnerable to a clever sales pitch, and perhaps BMW may even realize their own excellence and choose not to hire the "best" salesmen.

      So the best salesmen get hired by the people who know their product is crap, and they are willing to divert funds from R&D to a talented salesman. Cut that man a huge paycheck, because he can sell a fridge to an eskimo! As the joke goes. The salesman can provide results more consistently and quicker than some engineer in the R&D department. You don't want to wait for some product to manifest, you want to sell what you already have now. If in doubt of a products quality, well that's where the salesman comes in to persuade you... help you... guide you to a purchase. Crap companies have lots of talented bullshitters, bullshiting consumers into buying bottled tap water all over the world.

      In the end, Be Inc. had their problems. They tried to compete, with a proprietary OS, in a market at war with FOSS. Today, there really is only one major proprietary OS left, that being Windows. AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, IRIX, UNICOS, MacOS (classic)... they have either all majorly revamped their models to be more FOSS friendly or at least in regards to (Open Solaris, MacOS X et al).... or they are on a steady and rapid decline.

      Just my two cents...

    4. Re:Mildly interesting by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      I actually believe that this is the false dichotomy problem.

      We see this in all sorts of places, and it things tend towards this false dichotomy structure.

      This is the false structure of the false Dichotomy, you only have two choices (mainstream). You have Democrat or Republican (forget odd balls Green, Libertarian, American Independant etc). You have Windows or Mac (forget about Linux, BeOS etc). You have Sprint or ATT, Dish or DirectTV

      This really fits many many areas, where there are a dominant two, and a bunch of also rans.

      In this case, BeOS died because it couldn't live in the world of the also-rans. Those that can live there, tend to do okay right there. BeOS can re-emerge as an "also ran" and as someone mentioned in other places might actually be a good choice for "netbooks". Just as long as people don't want it to be "Windows" or "Mac" it can do quite fine.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  45. Re:8 years is a long time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    software development path fail

  46. Haiku is 17 times better than Syllable. by yemanja · · Score: 1

    Bada Boom! I love this one!

    --
    Besta é tu si você não viver nesse mundo!
  47. Haiku-based humor by oldspewey · · Score: 1

    Haiku-based humor
    Made me laugh several times
    Hopeless nerd I am

    --
    If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
  48. Yay! by freespac3 · · Score: 1

    Possibly the best OS news I have had since OS X. Big kudos to the Haiku development team for sticking with it!

    I dearly loved BeOS, and after Zeta OS tanked I had my hopes pinned on Haiku - I wasn't disappointed!

    Cheers,
    Steve

    --
    Better to regret something you have done, then something you haven't.
  49. Haiku fucking rules! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All Macfags and M$ chair monkeys should bow to their new GOD!!!

  50. Haiku about Haiku-OS site. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Joy came to my life.
    When I saw the download link.
    Uh-oh, Slashdotted.

  51. Trailblazer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Imagine a Haiku cluster
    Something like beowulf
    that would be nice

    1. Re:Trailblazer by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      Imagine a Haiku cluster
      Something like beowulf
      that would be nice

      tsuyoinda
      haikutachi de wa
      kakkoii!

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
  52. Re:8 years is a long time by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

    Then you are probably on the wrong site. This is a site for nerds, most specifically the kind that are interested in computers. If you can't tell that the entire set of libraries has been reworked from Cocoa right down to libc (see qsort_b and friends) to support blocks and that run loops are now implemented using libdispatch, which handles thread pools and queues of closures being run in response to events from the kernel, then you are almost certainly not a nerd.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  53. Re:8 years is a long time by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Ubiquitous, indexed, filesystem metadata. I didn't need an address book app, or a music jukebox app with BeOS. MP3 tags were extracted and stored as filesystem metadata and so I could browse my music by artist, album, genre, and so on, from the Tracker. Linux, Windows and OS X all, now, include extended attribute support in their filesystems that make this possible, but they are not used.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  54. BeOS on PPC by Lord+Kano · · Score: 1

    I was always impressed with the performance of BeOS on the PowerPC. I installed the preview release on a 6400/200. It was like a whole new machine. I used to think that if Apple turned NeXT's OS into something usable in just a few years, they could have done something really special with BeOS. It's a shame that we'll never find out.

    LK

    --
    "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
    1. Re:BeOS on PPC by DragonWriter · · Score: 1

      I used to think that if Apple turned NeXT's OS into something usable in just a few years, they could have done something really special with BeOS.

      NeXT's OS was quite usable from when it first came out in 1988, which is why NeXT switched from a computer company to a software company with its main product being the NeXTSTEP (late OPENSTEP) operating system in 1993. By 1996, when Apple considered buying BeOS and ended up buying NeXT, NeXT's OS had considerable penetration in key markets; probably the only reason BeOS was considered is that Apple thought they could get it cheap.

    2. Re:BeOS on PPC by Lord+Kano · · Score: 1

      NeXT's OS was quite usable from when it first came out in 1988

      Yeah, on 68K machines. It took a lot of work to bring it to PPC. I got my hands on a copy of Rhapsody DR1, it was quite primitive.

      By 1996, when Apple considered buying BeOS and ended up buying NeXT, NeXT's OS had considerable penetration in key markets;

      And those "key markets" didn't remain Apple's.

      LK

      --
      "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
  55. Screenshoot by hviniciusg · · Score: 1

    If any one wonders how does Haiku look in an OS, here is one screenshoot
    http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haiku_Screenshot.png

    1. Re:Screenshoot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But that is the old boring look...

  56. Here're a few videos of BeOS in action... by olePigeon+(Wik) · · Score: 1

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zygz77Zz1i8
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VDYdaXApNk

    Parts 1 and 2 of the BeOS Demo.
    Incredible multitasking capabilities, journaled file system, enhanced thread management; all designed from the ground up to take advantage of multi-CPU computers.

    The demo is absolutely incredible. Remember, this is on mid '90s era technology. Dual Pentium with a few hundred megabytes of RAM. No discrete video card.

  57. Moras, not syllables... :) by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    Honking geese fly south

    Cacophonously, just like

    Slashdot pedants' posts.

    I like how the three lines in yours all rendered to the same length, too. :)

    bi- no you
    konpyutta wa
    utsukushii

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  58. Re:Lions and Tigers and Bears by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    Come on geeks, if you are going to be geeks at least get it right. There is more to making a haiku than 5-7-5 and trying to sound smart. Go and google/wikipedia it.

    From wikipedia: "Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji [lit. 'cutting word'] or verbal caesura."

    A haiku is more

    Than five, seven, and five words.

    Fuck you, it's autumn.

    It's summer, fool!

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  59. Re:8 years is a long time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ok then, how about this?

    BeOS never became unresponsive. No matter what you were doing and no matter how many programs were running, the operating system itself always remained quick and responsive. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X constantly become unresponsive for seconds and even minutes at a time during everyday activities. Think about every time you see an hourglass cursor (a concept that didn't even exist in BeOS) or every time a menu lags or every time your hard drive starts thrashing.

    BeOS has a highly advanced journalling file system that never required defragmentation and would never lose data on the drive, even if you pulled the power plug in the middle of a write operation. It also supported meta data of any type for any file, even using another file as the meta data (ie. add a text file, image, audio file, video file, etc. as a file attribute for any other file).

    On a 400MHz Pentium II PC, BeOS was capable of running 10 MP3s and 10 videos simultaneously (maybe even more), without lag or stutter. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X would have a difficult time pulling that off on a modern PC.

    Sliding title tabs on windows. This allows a user to stack windows and align the title tabs next to each other for quick and easy access to every stacked window. BeOS was the first and possibly the only OS to apply this aspect of the "file folder" metaphor.

    From pressing the power button to useable desktop, the boot time for BeOS was about 10 seconds (on a Pentium II 400MHz).

    Fewer (no?) viruses. I realise that this has a lot to do with how popular an operating system is, but if Mac and Linux users can throw this around as a selling point for their respective OSes, then the same can be done for BeOS.

  60. Re:What about Mora? by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    Fi-re-fox, A-ma-rok.

    More like "fa-i-ya-fo-k-ku-su" and "a-ma-ro-k-ku". Each can be a line on their own.

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  61. Why did apple pay more for NeXT though? by CarpetShark · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That about matches what I've read of the whole affair. Didn't know that Palm bought Be for so little though; that's been a harsh lesson for someone I'll bet.

    Does anyone happen to know why Apple only wanted to pay about $115M for BeOS, when they eventually paid something like $400M for NeXT? Did they just think NeXT was worth more (that they'd need to spend a lot more developing BeOS maybe), or did they just run out of options and get desperate by the NeXT stage, I wonder?

    1. Re:Why did apple pay more for NeXT though? by Ritchie70 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      NeXT was the more valuable property - they had actual products that they sold in quantity to actual customers.

      Also, never underestimate the power of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. He was Chairman and CEO of NeXT...

      --
      The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
    2. Re:Why did apple pay more for NeXT though? by DragonWriter · · Score: 2, Informative

      Does anyone happen to know why Apple only wanted to pay about $115M for BeOS, when they eventually paid something like $400M for NeXT?

      (1) NeXTSTEP had more of an established market presence,
      (2) NeXT had some things besides NeXTSTEP of interest (e.g., WebObjects),
      (3) NeXT had Steve Jobs (which was probably seen as positive for Apple, though it turned out not to be positive rather quickly for Apple CEO Gil Amelio.)

  62. Three more words by Tetsujin · · Score: 3, Funny

    three words:

    kernel mode setting

    Three more words:
    bicycle cheese starfish

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  63. Re:8 years is a long time by Weedhopper · · Score: 2, Funny

    BeFS.

  64. Re:8 years is a long time by greenguy · · Score: 2, Funny

    There's something kind of indefinable 'fun' about the OS as well..

    I've sent this in to Linux developers as a feature request.

    Dear developers,

    Please make Linux more fun. You know... like... fun. I think it could use 15-20% more je ne sais quoi. Then it would really rock.

    Thanks!
    Greenguy

    --
    What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
  65. You must be new here. by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    haiku da ne?
    sore chigau no yo
    shinjin sou na...

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
    1. Re:You must be new here. by DynaSoar · · Score: 1

      haiku da ne?
      sore chigau no yo
      shinjin sou na...

      I can't read that wiggly stuff,
      but I can add.
      They are all seventeen.

      --
      "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
    2. Re:You must be new here. by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      hajime ni go,
      sorede nana mei,
      mata, gomei.

      (it's not just 17 for the whole thing, it's arranged in three lines - 5-7-5. And strictly speaking it's 17 moras, not syllables - but I don't even know how to do that in English so I won't fault anybody for that. I'm just having fun here...)

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
    3. Re:You must be new here. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Easy, count syllables. Syllables are moras. Moras are syllables. /ai/ is two moras in japanese while other languages would pronounce it as the syllable /aj/. The latter fact doesn't make ai in traditional Japanese a syllable.
      By the way most people pronounce it as a syllable now, but that is called language change, not mora linguobabble. The Japanese see two moras because that's what they have been told to do at elementary school. When they sing, they have been taught to separate the two letters and pronounce them as different syllables.
      Hardly different with the situation of diphtongs in many Indoeuropean languages where the written form marks syllables differently than colloquial speech. Many of them break the syllable to match "morae" in songs too.

      A linguist cries blood
      Moras count you, chilli fruit
      In Soviet Russia

    4. Re:You must be new here. by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      Easy, count syllables. Syllables are moras. Moras are syllables.

      Except not...

      "jyan", for instance, is one syllable, but three moras, in Japanese.

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
    5. Re:You must be new here. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry but Jan is not three moras but two. By any standard it is Ja-N. Actually pronounced as a syllable /dzan,/ of course.
      Because when that form first appeared orthography didn't yet have small forms to represent ya yu yo digraphs, I could conceive that some author did use it incorrectly using the old(When in poems a character==a syllable) mantra, but that doesn't make it correct.
      The "syou" in deshou, for example, comes from semu->seu, two moras in modern Japanese as well as in old and middle. By your argument once the orthography changed to syou they should count three morae, si yo u. It isn't just incorrect, but also stupid.
      With all these sound changes syllables were(arguably) 2->2->1 while morae stayed at 2 because they are a literary convention. The 1 syllable count is arguable because it considers long vowels as long syllables which by itself is arguable. While this is usually the convention in languages with a full set of short-long versions, in other languages where they appear they are just considered two vowels. Again the Japanese themselves do the same in songs and poems.
      Of course I wasn't arguing for Japanese but for English when I said morae are syllables. In Japanese they are literary conventions elevated to the category of defining linguistic characteristic by someone clueless enough to apply Latin and Japanese metrics to modern Linguistics.

  66. Solaris OS? It reads my mind & VM's my thought by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That would be cool if Open Solaris would construct an anti-Clooney creature, like how Ripley was re-born a hybrid AlienHuman. With my anti-Clooney creature, it would be a Sybian FacehuggerPredator that attaches to everyone's ass and vibrates the fat away so none have time to sit-down and write another bad movie (requires about 10 hours of sitting at a minimum). Scott McNealy would endorse it! God wills it!

  67. Dedicated to all Pioneers by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    Haiku-based humor

    Made me laugh several times

    Hopeless nerd I am

    tatakau ka?
    kiite kudasai
    ore no uta!

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  68. Re:Screenshot by Tetsujin · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If any one wonders how does Haiku look in an OS, here is one screenshoot
    http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haiku_Screenshot.png

    So, it looks like the Be theme in KDE?

    Kind of a joke there, but also a bit of a serious comment, too: can't tell much about an OS from a screenshot like this.

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  69. I don't see the appeal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As much as it has some niceties, there are plenty of drawbacks.

    The biggest one being security, and multi-user. Yes, as much as people think, oh, we don't need multi-user systems, we do, even as a single physical user on a machine, having many logical users to serve one's needs, makes an immense amount of sense. The entire tying oneself down to BeOS API/ABI is another daft manuevre, what's the point, honestly? So we can have exceptionally dated applications?

    As for the entire plan of getting a BeOS compatible system, and then moving forward with it, great, you built a system tied to a great deal of legacy, which will heavily constrain options in the future, and offer what exactly?

    1. Re:I don't see the appeal by tverbeek · · Score: 1

      The strategy of clean-room cloning BeOS certainly made more sense when the project was begun, since the apps for it weren't dated yet, and the then-current user base was much larger. But even with it taking as long as it has so far, Haiku OS 1.0 will debut with more apps available for it than any all-new OS would, and with a larger interested user population as well, both of which make it more viable than any other "underground" OS. Will there be a niche for a new(ish) OS of the type exemplified by Haiku in the ecosysystem of 2010? I don't know. But if there is, Haiku has a better chance of surviving to fill it than a completely original OS would.

      --
      http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  70. Re:8 years is a long time by TheSunborn · · Score: 2, Informative

    How the hell do you get a linux desktop to become unresponsive? I have used Linux on my desktop for many years, and have newer seen my desktop become unresponsive for even a single second*. Some applications(Hi firefox) may be unresponsive, but X and linux always respond.

    *With the exception of when Kde/Plasma crashes. If they do that most thing become unresponsive a few seconds until the reload is complete.

  71. Too many guys... by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    Geeks so love cute names
    If we must go Japanese
    I say bukkake

    I once saw a guy wearing one of those sports jersey shirts and the name across the back said Bukkake. Must have been from one of those places where you can get your own name on the team jersey of your choice. I figured he did it so he could tell from the snickers behind him how many people spent too much time on the net.

    bukkake ka?
    otoko sugi no yo!
    shibari suki.

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  72. All ports to Alpha are 64bit. DEC Alpha's the best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Intel and AMD are nowhere as popular as the support of Alpha. Every open source application I've come across is always Alpha-compatible.

  73. OpenGL by Latent+Heat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    X is seriously deficient in graphics performance, but OpenGL isn't. So much so that Java under Linux is using OpenGL for graphics acceleration over just plain X. I am thinking things like OpenGL, available under the gamut of OS's, are a better answer than porting graphics-intensive applications to a specialty OS.

  74. I like Debian more than this would suggest... by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    So when can we expect Debian GNU/Haiku?

    debian wa
    ningyou sou
    gannuu no

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  75. wakaranai. by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    Here it is at last
    Looks like Solaris OS
    And we need this why?

    zokuuke wa,
    Bii no koto, naze?
    wakaranai.

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
    1. Re:wakaranai. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here it is at last
      Looks like Solaris OS
      And we need this why?

      zokuuke wa,
      Bii no koto, naze?
      wakaranai.

      Silly Haiku ninja
      wants spank in autumn
      i am leeroy jenkins

  76. Be kernel is written in C++? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    What advantages does that offer the OS and what are the downsides (lack of binary future compatibility when the compiler changes?)

    1. Re:Be kernel is written in C++? by larry+bagina · · Score: 1

      G++ underwent a major ABI change with the 3.0 series (they switched to intel's standard, IIRC) and bug fixes since then have also caused problems. For that reason, Haiku is using gcc ~2.95 to be binary compatible with BeOS applications. C++ does have a fragile base problem (the size of the virtual table and member variables is fixed). To compensate, BeOS added extra dummy functions and variables.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    2. Re:Be kernel is written in C++? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That the project leader doesn't have to deal with thousands of wannabe contributors. I don't think there are many willing to use C++ in their free time to write OS code.
      I like the project and hope they are successful, but C++ is a showstopper. I can write and debug C++ code, I can also wash 20 toilets with a toothbrush, but I know I don't want to do either as a hobby.

  77. Today Be-Alike by Errtu76 · · Score: 1

    tomorrow HURD!

  78. Re:Lions and Tigers and Bears by Khyber · · Score: 1

    In 8 more days it will be autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.

    And the weather's already broke here in southern California. Trees are shedding leaves like mad.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  79. Re:Lions and Tigers and Bears by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Uhh, it's the middle of September, dude. You might want to get a calendar.

  80. Be happy! by tverbeek · · Score: 1

    Be happy!

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  81. Summer in September? Preposterous! by Tetsujin · · Score: 4, Funny

    Uhh, it's the middle of September, dude. You might want to get a calendar.

    You might ask yourself,
    On what date does summer end?
    Do you see my point?

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  82. Re:8 years is a long time by Goaway · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I used and loved BeOS, and AmigaOS, and I still don't care about Haiku.

    BeOS was amazing because it was written by a group of dedicated developers with a razor-sharp vision of how to design a great OS.

    Haiku is an attempt to copy what those guys did a decade and a half ago.

    One is really a lot less exciting than the other.

  83. Re:8 years is a long time by Goaway · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How the hell do you get a linux desktop to become unresponsive?

    Run any app that gobbles up all the memory it can find, such Firefox when it goes out of control. Locks up my Linux machine *solid* for fifteen-twenty minutes until the OOM killer finally manages to run and kill the process.

  84. And, in the ReactOS camp.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And, in a similar press release, the ReactOS development team have announced they are right on schedule to release their WindowsXP-compatible Alpha1 build of ReactOS on July 4th, 2015.

  85. Re:8 years is a long time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Maybe he knows that and just has the impression that all their rewriting was quite without success because it improved very little, at least from an end-user standpoint and without speculating on the future?

  86. Southern Hemisphere Balance by DavidApi · · Score: 1

    A haiku is more
    Than five, seven, and five words.
    Fuck you, it's Spring!

    1. Re:Southern Hemisphere Balance by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      A haiku is more
      Than five, seven, and five words.
      Fuck you, it's Spring!

      I'll say it again
      for Southern Hemisphere friends:
      It's still winter, fool!

      (Pedantic, yes, but - I hope it is still funny. If it was before...)

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
    2. Re:Southern Hemisphere Balance by DavidApi · · Score: 1

      It's Spring you Northern Fool!
      Spring follows Winter on the 1st September
      So smell the yellow Daffodils

    3. Re:Southern Hemisphere Balance by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      It's Spring you Northern Fool!
      Spring follows Winter on the 1st September
      So smell the yellow Daffodils

      Huh. Is that some Southern Hemisphere thing? Or does it vary by country?

      Aroond here the seasons are roughly organized around the solstices and equinoxes - Summer starts around the solstice and ends close to the equinox, around the 20th of September.

      Now, I could certainly understand a case being made for summer and winter centering around, rather than starting on, the solstice... <shrug>

      P.S.: Your Haiku ain't one. :)

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
    4. Re:Southern Hemisphere Balance by DavidApi · · Score: 1

      I know - or rather you have reminded me.

      The seasons here in New Zealand run from the 1st of each quarter (Sep, Dec, Mar, Jun). Solstices aren't celebrated so much, which is a shame, but neither are the official starts to seasons.

      Don't know about other countries, but some of course, do it differently altogether (hot season, rainy season, etc).

      Been a pleasure.

    5. Re:Southern Hemisphere Balance by Dogtanian · · Score: 1

      When I was younger I was always under the impression that summer "officially" started on the 21st of June and ran for three months. However, I'm not sure who defined that, and "official" or not, it's a crap definition.

      Even allowing for thermal lag skewing the hottest part of the year closer to mid-July, any definition of summer that doesn't even *start* until the longest day and only includes the tail-end of June but manages to cover most of September is idiotic.

      Even regarding the variable nature of the British summer (downright awful for the past three years), in my opinion it starts in mid-to-late May, start of June at the latest. (I note that Wikipedia claims the meteorological definition of summer is June, July and August- much more satisfactory).

      And while September is a strange month that in a good year can sometimes push summer almost to the equinox, this year (and last) the first yellow leaves on the trees appeared at the start of the month.

      Similarly, if one is determined to stick to the three-month model, the earliest spring-like activity is already underway by the start of March.

      That's just the UK, but I don't know where that "summer doesn't start until June 21st" crap originated. It's pretty useless...

      --
      "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
  87. Mac OS X seems to be heading in a better direction by DavidApi · · Score: 1

    BeOS was indeed impressive to play with way back. But I think a read of Ars Technica review of Mac OS X Snow Leopard might give you reason to adjust this view. There is mention of BeOS and its limitations in the discussion on Grand Central Dispatch, that might have led to a M$-like bottleneck in terms of paradigm.

  88. You know what this would be good for? by Sloppy · · Score: 1

    A fast "media OS" with Amiga-like response? Sounds perfect for PVRs. MythTV on Haiku should beat the shit out of MythTV on Linux.

    Except Intel is way behind on their decoding drivers. AMD is even further back. Aha: Nvidia's VDPAU works. Oops, except it's closed and therefore nobody can port it to anything.

    So your PVR will decode using CPU.

    What a shitty situation.

    --
    As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
  89. Torrent? by nurb432 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ya damned pirate.. you know only pirates and terrorists use p2p

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  90. Power PC by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    I understand the issues and why they didn't, but its too bad they couldn't continue the PPC line for those of us about to be abandoned by Apple. Be was really cool on power PC and i still have my old CDs.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  91. "Fuck you, it's Autumn." by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    In 8 more days it will be autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.

    And the weather's already broke here in southern California. Trees are shedding leaves like mad.

    Fair enough...

    In any case, I absolutely love the last line of that haiku... XD

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  92. Re:Lions and Tigers and Bears by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Are you sure that's not just fires?

  93. Vega in late summer by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    Senryuu mo
    Haiku no uchi ni
    Haitteru zo

    =P

    Too many moras... "senryuu" and "haitteru" are each five on their own... :)

    Vega tatsu
    Shoryuuken!
    mata ochiru.

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  94. Re:8 years is a long time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Linux can run out of mana?

  95. Very Cool! been on the VM for awhile now by gearloos · · Score: 1

    I am wondering of they will send VMWare a virtual appliance. Nice

    --
    "Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
  96. Re:Summer in September? Preposterous! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No we dont,
    You dumbass.
    STFU, FOOL.

  97. Spellswell will support Haiku by MichaelCrawford · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I ported Working Software's Spellswell spelling checker from the Classic Mac OS to BeOS back in 1987. On Mac OS, Spellswell could link to word processors via the Word Services Apple Event Suite. On BeOS I defined a conceptually similar protocol based on BMessages.

    For all these years, I have held onto the Spellswell source code, and kept it safe, knowing that someday the Phoenix of Haiku would rise from the ashed of Be, Inc. (Or rather, I just don't like to ever throw anything away.)

    I also still have all the protocol specification documents. I just gotta organize them and throw them up on the web again.

    Word Services actually still works on Mac OS X, but not yet with Spellswell. We never did Carbonize it. Eventually Working Software was dissolved, and we all went our separate ways. But I expect I'll release an OS X-Native Spellswell at some point as well.

    Some things never die... Spellswell was originally published by Green, Johnson Inc. before Mike Green and Dave Johnson split up into Cassady and Green and Working Software. My understanding is that it could check Microsoft Word 1.0 documents on the 128k Mac. It was a huge hit, before Microsoft added a built-in speller to Word.

    A lot of that code from 1984 is still in there, for example an incredibly elaborate dictionary file format that provides compression while at the same time being editable.

    --
    Request your free CD of my piano music.
  98. Not a microkernel by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 1

    Oops, embarrassing, I always thought it was. Perhaps I just picked up the wrong idea somewhere - Google found me a whole raft of people who thought BeOS was a microkernel.

    I'm actually a bit disappointed, in a way. I'm a fan of variety in operating systems and being a hybrid kernel (which I'd generally count as a different way of structuring what I'd call a monolithic kernel, though people seem to vary on their uses of these terms) is less different to the current popular OSes than a microkernel would have been :-(

    Do you have a link for that FAQ btw, I didn't have much luck finding it on their newly revamped site. It's be really nice to see some more general architectural documentation about their kernel, which I should perhaps go hunting for. I grubbed around in their kernel code for a while recently but I just got an overview of what the APIs generally looked like and what filesystems were there.

  99. MP3 Server by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I miss BeOS it was my MP3 server the whole time I was in college, never had a single problem with the computer the whole 4 years in school.

  100. Re:8 years is a long time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    my favourite beos feature was the ability to drop a driver (a single file) into the designated drivers folder and the device would instantly just work. No rebooting, no compiling or installing. Just put the file there and you're done.

    Software installation was equally as smooth.

    I purchased BeOS R5 and Gobe productive back in the day. Fantastic pieces of software, both of them. Like everyone who has used BeOS, it will never be forgotten.

    I wish Haiku all the best for the future!! Keep this same "it just works - and easily" thing going and it will be successful...

  101. BeOS - Zeta - Haiku - BlueEyedOS by vistic · · Score: 2, Informative

    I made the same mistake when I read about Haiku, since I stopped following BeOS after Be went out of business.

    I used to use BeOS R5 exclusively for awhile, and then I kept it around some time after that with the patches (like the BONE net stack which was in development at Be Inc and which got leaked).

    Then there were all these projects that sprouted up... BlueEyedOS, OpenBeOS, YellowTab Zeta... as well as questions about what Palm might do with BeOS. And of course there were a ton of Mac, Linux, and Windows themes to mimic BeOS. At first, I think BlueEyedOS seemed to have the most going for it since it was based on Linux and had a head start.

    Years later and I hear about Haiku, and didn't realize this is what used to be OpenBeOS which was not based on Linux at all. I think a lot of people who have been out of the loop for so many years might, like me, be thinking Haiku is based on Linux like BlueEyedOS was.

  102. Re:8 years is a long time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ok then, how about this?

    BeOS never became unresponsive. No matter what you were doing and no matter how many programs were running, the operating system itself always remained quick and responsive. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X constantly become unresponsive for seconds and even minutes at a time during everyday activities. Think about every time you see an hourglass cursor (a concept that didn't even exist in BeOS) or every time a menu lags or every time your hard drive starts thrashing.

    BeOS has a highly advanced journalling file system that never required defragmentation and would never lose data on the drive, even if you pulled the power plug in the middle of a write operation. It also supported meta data of any type for any file, even using another file as the meta data (ie. add a text file, image, audio file, video file, etc. as a file attribute for any other file).

    On a 400MHz Pentium II PC, BeOS was capable of running 10 MP3s and 10 videos simultaneously (maybe even more), without lag or stutter. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X would have a difficult time pulling that off on a modern PC.

    Sliding title tabs on windows. This allows a user to stack windows and align the title tabs next to each other for quick and easy access to every stacked window. BeOS was the first and possibly the only OS to apply this aspect of the "file folder" metaphor.

    From pressing the power button to useable desktop, the boot time for BeOS was about 10 seconds (on a Pentium II 400MHz).

    Fewer (no?) viruses. I realise that this has a lot to do with how popular an operating system is, but if Mac and Linux users can throw this around as a selling point for their respective OSes, then the same can be done for BeOS.

    I second the 10 mp3s and the Videos and I've yet to see another OS not stutter or tremble at the thought. Also the player on the BeOS was the first that I ever saw doing backwards playback of mp3 and this while I had multiple video clips stenciled onto a rotating 3d cube. This without dedicated video hardware, mind you. And this was back in '98.

    I want my fucking Megahurtz back. What good is 2 cores and gigs of ram if your system can't run a flash video properly because the OS is too bloated?

  103. Booted in 5sec in the 90's. by u64 · · Score: 1

    From BIOS to GUI in 5seconds!! IN THE 90's!

    That experience chaped important parts of how i view software.

    From that day i have the 5 second barrier for deciding what's slow

    and what's fast.

    Forever spoiled.

    Imagine if BeOS was alive today on 2009 monsters we got now,

    It would bring up the GUI before we finished depressing the

    Power-button :D

  104. Re:8 years is a long time by Slashcrap · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    On a 400MHz Pentium II PC, BeOS was capable of running 10 MP3s and 10 videos simultaneously (maybe even more), without lag or stutter.

    You forget that those videos were 160x120 and encoded in Indeo 5. The rest of your comment is similarly rose tinted bullshit.

    The best thing for BeOS would be if all its fans perished. Ideally in a suicide attack on OSNews.

  105. Meh by Adam+Jorgensen · · Score: 1

    I've tried Haiku builds in VMWare and VBox now and then. Frankly, I get the feeling BeOS was 90% marketing hype and 10% fanboys hype. Maybe back when it started out it had a shot at being relevant, but that fell away when they failed to make any market headway in any direction. Haiku is cute and it's nice to see all these people claiming that it's so responsive, etc, etc, etc but honestly, it's not as though there are any running instances of Haiku at the moment loaded up with more than a trivial set of software. My Linux work system, on the other hand, is busy running multiple web-browsers, multiple database servers, a full-text search engine and VirtualBox without breaking a sweat. it's easy to think your horse is fast when it's not loaded down with anything that impedes its movement.

  106. Re:8 years is a long time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    -1 epic fail

  107. Loved BeOS by thetoadwarrior · · Score: 1

    It was my first post Windows non-Windows computer (if that makes any sense) and I loved it. I completely forgot about it since it's taken forever but I will definitely be looking into this.

  108. weedy hardware lovers, unite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Haiku Alpha 1 *does* run on weedy hardware, nicely. It's happily running on an old Dell in the garage, 600MHz Pentium III and 256MB RAM. Even the experimental wifi (atheros) is working. Booting Haiku takes less time than the BIOS self tests.
    +1 for coolness factor.