Who is "they"? I'd like to see a citation, if you have one. I've looked, and I haven't managed to find out anything definite about Be's prospects. There are plenty of generalized statements that they stink, yes, but I've seen precious few figures.
If my memory serves, they were burning about $ 25 million a year in cash. The Be IPO gave them $ 30 million. So they have about a year to prove themselves.
Their current strategy is to get themselves into set-top box applications. I don't think it's going to bear fruit this Christmas, but it might next. If they have something promising by about this time next year, I think they could sell additional stock and keep going.
I'm certainly rooting for them (and using their product right now).
I think Netscape has become a little more stable with 4.5, but I feel the pain of hapless Netscape users (including myself). In all honesty I don't think Internet Explorer is much better - I've seen both of them crash and burn badly. The main problem is the god-awful fonts.:-(
BeOS: Is it what Be says it is? Yes. It really is fast, it really is stable, it really is slick. And application support is getting pretty nice - if you're willing to pay from $ 20-200 for applications, you can get some very nice ones. This is cheaper than Windows, but admittedly more expensive than Linux.
The Be web browser is a good demonstration of both the strengths and weaknesses of the OS. It renders pages attratively, new windows pop up in under a second, the user interface is smooth and crisp, if one window is hanging waiting for a sluggish web site, you can pop up a new window and immediately go to another one. This is all fantastic; you'll love it.
But you'll hate it because it supports very minimal JavaScript and no Java. Nowadays a lot of web sites rely on those languages, so there's a surprising amount of content you simply won't be able to get to.
That's not a bad metaphor for the entire OS - what it does, it does better than anything else out there, but there are some exasperating gaps. The biggest gaps are in driver support - a lot of devices you take for granted in the Windows or even Linux world don't exist in Be. The other major gap is that I don't know of any utility for viewing or editing Microsoft Word or Excel files. Hate them as you may, there are times when they really need to be decoded:-(. However, I think this is changing in the newer versions of GoBe Productive, the native Be office suite.
If $70 isn't enormous money to you, I think it's well worth handing to Jean-Louise. It's not totally there yet, but it's getting close, and it has the most appealing personality of any other PC OS.
Well, sorta. My VB 3 real world program was painfully slow. Then we got a Pentium/75 and it became reasonably fast. Then we upgraded to VB 4 and it was slow again.
Now that we have 400mhz machines running it, it's fast again. But of course we haven't upgraded to VB 6. My recommendation is that we don't.
It seems to work better in the BBS world than on the Internet. I suspect this is because there's a smaller group of people, and they all get to know each other well, both online and off. The potential of offline meeting makes people behave a bit better. Also, in the case of most really successful BBSs (The Well, etc), the software was so cryptic to use that only the intelligent survived.
I think the answer is that the guestbook wasn't compromised. Instead, someone took advantage of the fact that the guestbook let you put in arbitrary HTML. So they put in a to go to another site after a specified delay. So we had people sending us to crack.linuxppc.org, slashdot.org, etc. This was not a compromise of the system, just a sneaky use of the guestbook. They seem to have finally fixed this problem by stripping characters from the input.
However, I remember reading yesterday that someone got backorifice on it, and that's a genuine crack. I don't know the details, though.
You forget the sheer hatred of Windows factor. I'd bet there are more people trying to crack the Windows box (or were on the day the test was announced, anyway - today it seems to be up again).
I wrote a large VB application in VB 3.0. A consultant hired by our company said that the Access database in VB 4 worked better and had some whizzo new features, so we decided to upgrade.
The experience was vile. All our old VBX controls were replaced by OCXs. In the case of one of the controls we used (Truegrid, if anyone cares), the entire interface was rewritten. As a result, every form I had using a grid had to be rewritten. In addition, the database interface had some bizarre bugs that required major changes in the tools I used to generate SQL queries.
Suffice it to say that the whole thing was a hideous mess. My best advice after going through that is to stick to whatever version of Visual Basic you first started using. Do not upgrade under any circumstances.
I think a lot of geeks are like me - rather frightfully keen on finding women, but without the tools it takes to locate them. I'd say I know less than 20 people who live in the same city as I, since I spend most of my time typing stuff in an office with few people in it (and no women at all).
Between 1987 and 1991, I ran a local BBS that had matchmaking features. Although there were about ten men for every woman, I managed to date and meet a decent number of girls. Life was good. Sadly, the world of the Internet seems to have made us closer to people in other cities and states than ones on our own back yards. For instance, I created Wonderful Women of the Web [ http://www.wonderful-women.com/ ] to showcase the talents of interesting women on the web. Naturally, I did manage to get close to a few women that way, but all of them were thousands of miles away. Through mailing lists, I managed an intense flirtation with a very shy but sexy girl in Canada, but she vanished abruptly before I got to meet her.
So online flirtation used to work far better than it does now. The Internet's great for information, but lousy for anything requiring physical meetings. In theory, with more women going online, things should get better. But in practice, physical distance winds up keeping people apart.
I think another problem is that we don't get well-rounded views of people - we're all in our little niches here on the net. We can discuss geek stuff here, digital video on my digital video forum, etc, but there's no place where we can get together as people.
Thoughts? I got the resources (T1 line, etc) to set up something if I had some good ideas as to what it should be.
You know, it's kinda funny - when I wrote the ISP FAQ at http://www.amazing.com/internet/ , I practically begged ISPs not to use NT. I told them that they were supporting their worst potential enemy, and that was a pretty dumb thing to do.
I don't think many of them believed me, but can anyone doubt the truth of that statement now? Sadly, during most of that time, they were more than happy to take the free MSIE browser. Now they face the consequences:-(.
Anyone who's serious (or semi-serious) about this should check out How to start your own country. I wish it was a bit more optimistic, but it's quite fascinating and very funny. I recommend it heartily.
Incidentally, based on the web page, I think this effort is a way of salvaging a really horrible situation through humour more than a serious effort. I think they have serious intentions of connecting people together, but not of starting a real country. And they seem to be pretty upfront about this, so I wouldn't judge them as a scam.
I suspect those of us (including me) who love their traditional product line are bitter about their attempted conversion to NT. The fact that it doesn't seem to have worked doesn't make us feel any better.
It's tough not to love their products - I'm typing this on an ageing Indigo2 that's the best computer I've ever owned. What makes matters worse is that the traditional product line is the only one making them any money. Yes, the article says that won't last, but I think enough people prefer these systems to make a viable business out of them. If they took the money used to invest in the NT workstations and put them towards some serious cost control in their traditional line, I think they would have done much better.
But that's just me speaking, and perhaps my love for their traditional systems clouds my judgement.
I'm just a little confused about Microsoft's strategy.
I thought they all but abandoned the dial-up market a year or so ago, because it was obviously a swampland of lost money. Now, I guess mainly out of paranoia, they're returning to try and beat AOL.
I know Andy Grove says that only the paranoid survive. Yes, yes, yes. But perhaps only the paranoid die by bleeding cash to try and protect their franchise? If you want a realistic Microsoft death scenerio, this might be the best one yet.
but if Roblimo's description is accurate, I don't think much of the approach. With SGI's NT efforts having a relatively poor reception, I would think they'd want to emphasize supercomputers and high-end workstations and servers as their core strengths.
Actually, it lets some of us keep our loyalty to more ancient operating systems. For instance, I really love the SGI Irix environment (I'm writing this on an Indigo2).
Because of the commonality between modern systems, I can run all the cutting edge Linux applications I need on my SGI box. So I get the best of both worlds.
I have a Windows NT 4 system I use for work. Whenever I reboot the machine, it complains "The Event log file is full". But it doesn't seem to cause the system to crash.
I seem to recall reading several comments that BackOrifice got installed on the machine. They're trying to sweep that under the rug by implying that the thunderstorms killed the server.
Nice try, but I think it's important to note that in a test where they held all the marbles, the relatively small part of the Slashdot community that took the test seriously had little trouble getting in.
After all, if it was just thunderstorms, they'd be repeating the test now - right?
I think it was two or three issues ago that Wired had a very interesting article on the highest of the high-end home theater gadgets, the $180,000 plus systems. The article described a system where a conventional video signal could be sent through a $ 25,000 black box that removed the scan lines and made it as gorgeous as HDTV.
I was wondering if anyone had actually seen this kind of system, and if so, if it was worthy of the hype.
Slashdot Mirror
Who is "they"? I'd like to see a citation, if you have one. I've looked, and I haven't managed to find out anything definite about Be's prospects. There are plenty of generalized statements that they stink, yes, but I've seen precious few figures.
If my memory serves, they were burning about $ 25 million a year in cash. The Be IPO gave them $ 30 million. So they have about a year to prove themselves.
Their current strategy is to get themselves into set-top box applications. I don't think it's going to bear fruit this Christmas, but it might next. If they have something promising by about this time next year, I think they could sell additional stock and keep going.
I'm certainly rooting for them (and using their product right now).
D
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I think Netscape has become a little more stable with 4.5, but I feel the pain of hapless Netscape users (including myself). In all honesty I don't think Internet Explorer is much better - I've seen both of them crash and burn badly. The main problem is the god-awful fonts. :-(
:-(. However, I think this is changing in the newer versions of GoBe Productive, the native Be office suite.
BeOS: Is it what Be says it is? Yes. It really is fast, it really is stable, it really is slick. And application support is getting pretty nice - if you're willing to pay from $ 20-200 for applications, you can get some very nice ones. This is cheaper than Windows, but admittedly more expensive than Linux.
The Be web browser is a good demonstration of both the strengths and weaknesses of the OS. It renders pages attratively, new windows pop up in under a second, the user interface is smooth and crisp, if one window is hanging waiting for a sluggish web site, you can pop up a new window and immediately go to another one. This is all fantastic; you'll love it.
But you'll hate it because it supports very minimal JavaScript and no Java. Nowadays a lot of web sites rely on those languages, so there's a surprising amount of content you simply won't be able to get to.
That's not a bad metaphor for the entire OS - what it does, it does better than anything else out there, but there are some exasperating gaps. The biggest gaps are in driver support - a lot of devices you take for granted in the Windows or even Linux world don't exist in Be. The other major gap is that I don't know of any utility for viewing or editing Microsoft Word or Excel files. Hate them as you may, there are times when they really need to be decoded
If $70 isn't enormous money to you, I think it's well worth handing to Jean-Louise. It's not totally there yet, but it's getting close, and it has the most appealing personality of any other PC OS.
Hope that helps.
D
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Well, sorta. My VB 3 real world program was painfully slow. Then we got a Pentium/75 and it became reasonably fast. Then we upgraded to VB 4 and it was slow again.
Now that we have 400mhz machines running it, it's fast again. But of course we haven't upgraded to VB 6. My recommendation is that we don't.
D
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It seems to work better in the BBS world than on the Internet. I suspect this is because there's a smaller group of people, and they all get to know each other well, both online and off. The potential of offline meeting makes people behave a bit better. Also, in the case of most really successful BBSs (The Well, etc), the software was so cryptic to use that only the intelligent survived.
D
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I think the answer is that the guestbook wasn't compromised. Instead, someone took advantage of the fact that the guestbook let you put in arbitrary HTML. So they put in a to go to another site after a specified delay. So we had people sending us to crack.linuxppc.org, slashdot.org, etc. This was not a compromise of the system, just a sneaky use of the guestbook. They seem to have finally fixed this problem by stripping characters from the input.
However, I remember reading yesterday that someone got backorifice on it, and that's a genuine crack. I don't know the details, though.
D
----
You forget the sheer hatred of Windows factor. I'd bet there are more people trying to crack the Windows box (or were on the day the test was announced, anyway - today it seems to be up again).
D
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I wrote a large VB application in VB 3.0. A consultant hired by our company said that the Access database in VB 4 worked better and had some whizzo new features, so we decided to upgrade.
The experience was vile. All our old VBX controls were replaced by OCXs. In the case of one of the controls we used (Truegrid, if anyone cares), the entire interface was rewritten. As a result, every form I had using a grid had to be rewritten. In addition, the database interface had some bizarre bugs that required major changes in the tools I used to generate SQL queries.
Suffice it to say that the whole thing was a hideous mess. My best advice after going through that is to stick to whatever version of Visual Basic you first started using. Do not upgrade under any circumstances.
D
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I think a lot of geeks are like me - rather frightfully keen on finding women, but without the tools it takes to locate them. I'd say I know less than 20 people who live in the same city as I, since I spend most of my time typing stuff in an office with few people in it (and no women at all).
Between 1987 and 1991, I ran a local BBS that had matchmaking features. Although there were about ten men for every woman, I managed to date and meet a decent number of girls. Life was good. Sadly, the world of the Internet seems to have made us closer to people in other cities and states than ones on our own back yards. For instance, I created Wonderful Women of the Web [ http://www.wonderful-women.com/ ] to showcase the talents of interesting women on the web. Naturally, I did manage to get close to a few women that way, but all of them were thousands of miles away. Through mailing lists, I managed an intense flirtation with a very shy but sexy girl in Canada, but she vanished abruptly before I got to meet her.
So online flirtation used to work far better than it does now. The Internet's great for information, but lousy for anything requiring physical meetings. In theory, with more women going online, things should get better. But in practice, physical distance winds up keeping people apart.
I think another problem is that we don't get well-rounded views of people - we're all in our little niches here on the net. We can discuss geek stuff here, digital video on my digital video forum, etc, but there's no place where we can get together as people.
Thoughts? I got the resources (T1 line, etc) to set up something if I had some good ideas as to what it should be.
D
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I was thinking it might come with the video capture system for the box, which I've seen for sale on occasion.
D
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You know, it's kinda funny - when I wrote the ISP FAQ at http://www.amazing.com/internet/ , I practically begged ISPs not to use NT. I told them that they were supporting their worst potential enemy, and that was a pretty dumb thing to do.
:-(.
I don't think many of them believed me, but can anyone doubt the truth of that statement now? Sadly, during most of that time, they were more than happy to take the free MSIE browser. Now they face the consequences
D
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Two questions:
What's the non-linear editing software like, and how does one find a copy of it?
How do you find a reasonably affordable 100mbps Ethernet card for an Indigo2? I thought most of them were $ 800 plus.
D
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Remember their road map from a year or so back? It was pretty clear that their then-plans were to eliminate Irix and MIPS, replacing them with Wintel.
Now they have abruptly "discovered" Linux, and hopefully they can build some nice hardware around it, but their clumsy embrace of NT still rankles.
D
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URL:
1 6/o/qid=933888089/sr=8-1/002-8997047-16604 64
:-(
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/09151790
For some reason the submission script stripped out the URL
D
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Incidentally, based on the web page, I think this effort is a way of salvaging a really horrible situation through humour more than a serious effort. I think they have serious intentions of connecting people together, but not of starting a real country. And they seem to be pretty upfront about this, so I wouldn't judge them as a scam.
D
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I suspect those of us (including me) who love their traditional product line are bitter about their attempted conversion to NT. The fact that it doesn't seem to have worked doesn't make us feel any better.
It's tough not to love their products - I'm typing this on an ageing Indigo2 that's the best computer I've ever owned. What makes matters worse is that the traditional product line is the only one making them any money. Yes, the article says that won't last, but I think enough people prefer these systems to make a viable business out of them. If they took the money used to invest in the NT workstations and put them towards some serious cost control in their traditional line, I think they would have done much better.
But that's just me speaking, and perhaps my love for their traditional systems clouds my judgement.
D
----
I'm just a little confused about Microsoft's strategy.
I thought they all but abandoned the dial-up market a year or so ago, because it was obviously a swampland of lost money. Now, I guess mainly out of paranoia, they're returning to try and beat AOL.
I know Andy Grove says that only the paranoid survive. Yes, yes, yes. But perhaps only the paranoid die by bleeding cash to try and protect their franchise? If you want a realistic Microsoft death scenerio, this might be the best one yet.
D
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but if Roblimo's description is accurate, I don't think much of the approach. With SGI's NT efforts having a relatively poor reception, I would think they'd want to emphasize supercomputers and high-end workstations and servers as their core strengths.
D
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A network error occured: Unable to connect to server ...
How's the weather up there today?
("Mst Cloudy" with scattered showers early this afternoon, otherwise partly cloudy).
Guess that excuse won't work this time.
D
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Actually, it lets some of us keep our loyalty to more ancient operating systems. For instance, I really love the SGI Irix environment (I'm writing this on an Indigo2).
Because of the commonality between modern systems, I can run all the cutting edge Linux applications I need on my SGI box. So I get the best of both worlds.
D
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I have a Windows NT 4 system I use for work. Whenever I reboot the machine, it complains "The Event log file is full". But it doesn't seem to cause the system to crash.
Maybe this is a new Windows 2000 bug?
D
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I seem to recall reading several comments that BackOrifice got installed on the machine. They're trying to sweep that under the rug by implying that the thunderstorms killed the server.
Nice try, but I think it's important to note that in a test where they held all the marbles, the relatively small part of the Slashdot community that took the test seriously had little trouble getting in.
After all, if it was just thunderstorms, they'd be repeating the test now - right?
D
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Nested mode now displays in pages of 25 comments, solving that problem.
Even when I'm at home on my modem (boo hiss), I still prefer it.
D
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I think it was two or three issues ago that Wired had a very interesting article on the highest of the high-end home theater gadgets, the $180,000 plus systems. The article described a system where a conventional video signal could be sent through a $ 25,000 black box that removed the scan lines and made it as gorgeous as HDTV.
I was wondering if anyone had actually seen this kind of system, and if so, if it was worthy of the hype.
D
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Well in this case I was referring strictly to AmigaBasic, and in that context, I think you would agree with me.
/did/ have lots of trouble with the Amiga crashing, probably because it was my first experience with C programming.
But I
D
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Use nested mode, then you get all the comments on the same page. Much, much easier to read.
D
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