I asked my fiancee (now wife) if she wanted a diamond engagement ring, with the full intent to buy whatever she wanted, even if I thought it was silly.
She thought it was silly too. She said, I don't want an engagement ring, I want a new bathtub!
So we got a double-ended old fashioned bathtub (and remodeled the bathroom around it), which we take a bath in together almost every day (it's large).
It's the single best decision we've made in our 4 years together, and I'm confident we'll still be saying that when its 40 years, and we're still taking baths together.
The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application. This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL.
Uh, why can't the problem just be that Mozilla's user interface is not very good? I'm sorry, but there's a reason why there are multiple Mozdev projects to build browsers without Mozilla's cumbersome interface, why Dave Hyatt and mpt have savaged the current interface.
Why can't some people accept the fact that Mozilla's UI needs a lot of work?
Actually, Be did exactly this. I know, because I wrote some of the docs for it.
And guess what? It didn't work.
The fact is, sticking in a floppy and a sheet of paper is vastly inferior to having the software appear in front of the user when they boot.
So, you can get around the letter of the license agreement with this tactic, but you can't get the same market leverage. And it's market leverage that pays the bills, not a "clever" legal trick.
I once signed up for a Passport account, because Microsoft was giving me 20% off the price of a TiVo (or any electronics item at 800.com) if I paid for it with Passport (then called something else).
Now I'd like to get out of the system, because I don't trust it to be secure, but because I've forgotten my password, I can't.
Go to the Passport site (http://www.passport.com) and look; there's no FAQ or other document that tells you how to cancel your account. Nor is there any e-mail address of anyone who might be able to help you do it manually.
So, when you hear Passport adoption statistics, subtract at least one. I've never used my Passport a second time, but can't get rid of it, after trying for weeks.
Moran may or may not be slow, but the next two books in his Continuing Time series are already mostly written. Bantam holds the rights to publish _The AI War_, and Moran is trying to buy them back; the book itself is finished. _The Crystal Wind_ is started.
There's other books in the series which are finished or partially written, which Moran would like to self-publish when it's possible financially, but he's got a pretty big family, and making a living as a full-time writer is not easy. He mostly works in high technology, and writes on the side these days.
There's tons more info in the DKM FAQ, mailing list, and web sites, the URLs are posted by other folks here.
If the Rumors were true, Apple didn't offer Be enough cash for BeOS when Apple was shopping around for a new kernel. If Be had sold at a reasonable price instead of holding out for a sweetheart deal, Be would be the core of OS X.
The x86 port and then BeIA were simply last ditch efforts to reposition Be in an entirely different market than it was designed for.
IMO, the only thing that could have kept Be viable was to have dumped the OS and to have kept the hardware. Commodity priced PowerPC boxes running LinuxPPC could have made Be a household name in the workstation market.
This is so stupid as to defy description. If Apple had acquired Be, there would *be* no OS X. What Apple needed wasn't an OS, they needed a leader they would actually follow. JLG would not have been that person, Amelio would have stayed, and Apple probably would have died.
The x86 port was actually wildly successful and, if management hadn't killed the retail channel while it was ramping up ahead of projections, would have been bringing way more money per MONTH than BeIA ever brought in in a QUARTER.
As for the BeBox hardware, keeping the hardware would have killed Be within 6 months (of when they dropped it). Hardware is an incredibly expensive business, with razor thin margins, and people who want to run Linux generally do it on a PC. The number of people who would have bought a BeBox to run (only) Linux is probably fewer than 2,000.
<TT>> 4. Gassee has kept Be alive on virtually
> NO PROFIT for eleven years. Do you honestly
> think he's going to let Be die now that they
> are standing on the brink of a vast ocean
> of a market?</TT>
As someone who worked at Be for three years, I can tell you that they were in business for 11 years DESPITE Jean-Louis Gassee, not because of him.
JLG did his absolute level best to keep the company from succeeding, by being completely unwilling to let the company do serious marketing. In the time I was there, three VPs of Marketing quit because they were not allowed to do their job.
My prediction is that Be's IP assets and some engineers will be acquired, but that you can say goodbye to Be before July.
This is a tragedy, because the product was amazing, and the engineers who worked on BeOS were brilliant, committed, and extremely motivated to succeed. Two years ago BeOS could do things that *still* can't be done on other "advanced" operating systems.
Be's impending death is genuinely heartbreaking. Hopefully there are lessons to be learned, like how not to treat developers, and how to not neglect your product in the marketplace...
Michael Alderete
Former Be Webmaster, Product Manager
Re:More like BeOS's filesystem?
on
MySQL FS
·
· Score: 2
Early version of BeOS did use a database FS for the entire system but they dropped it by R4 (I think that's the right version) because of performance issues.
The early versions of BeOS used a separate database (not very complex) and filesystem, which wound up being very difficult to work with, so eventually they merged the two. The "database" aspects of the BeOS filesystem are more of being able to add (relatively) arbitrary data to particular filetypes, and do searching based on those criteria. It isn't a formal database in any sense of the word.
Versions of BeOS prior to the Preview Release had a file system and a separate database. Because it was difficult to keep the data in the two separate systems consistant, it was decided that they should merge. This happened in Preview Release 1, and BFS remains relatively unchanged today.
At the time there was a lot of enthusiasm for the merged design to be a database-based file system, but after a lot of research, Dominic Giampaolo, the engineer doing the design and coding, determined that wasn't going to work. The reason is it becomes too difficult to filter out the files you aren't interested in. There is a lot of organizational value in a hierarchical, structured, traditional file system.
The design for BFS that was implemented is best described as an "attribute-adorned file system," with a query engine that can search against the attributes, and some indexing to make common queries fast. There's a fairly simple query language (along with simple GUI tools), but it's not as complex or capable as SQL (nor would you really want it to be). You can execute those queries from the command line if you want, which can be pretty useful when piped to another program (much as find is in Unix, but simpler to work with).
And could you comment on the performance of FreeBSD vs. OS X. That is, given that OS X is based on the Mach microkernel with a BSD layer on top of that, what are the performance implications, particularly for use as a web server.
Slashdot Mirror
The second page of John's Mac OS X 10.1 review contains an index to all of the Ars Technica Mac OS X articles:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q4/macosx-10.1/ma cosx-10.1-1.html
I asked my fiancee (now wife) if she wanted a diamond engagement ring, with the full intent to buy whatever she wanted, even if I thought it was silly.
She thought it was silly too. She said, I don't want an engagement ring, I want a new bathtub!
So we got a double-ended old fashioned bathtub (and remodeled the bathroom around it), which we take a bath in together almost every day (it's large).
It's the single best decision we've made in our 4 years together, and I'm confident we'll still be saying that when its 40 years, and we're still taking baths together.
The major detractor was the user interface, since it didn't feel like a Windows application. This was probably due to a poor understanding by the authors of XUL.
Uh, why can't the problem just be that Mozilla's user interface is not very good? I'm sorry, but there's a reason why there are multiple Mozdev projects to build browsers without Mozilla's cumbersome interface, why Dave Hyatt and mpt have savaged the current interface.
Why can't some people accept the fact that Mozilla's UI needs a lot of work?
Actually, Be did exactly this. I know, because I wrote some of the docs for it.
And guess what? It didn't work.
The fact is, sticking in a floppy and a sheet of paper is vastly inferior to having the software appear in front of the user when they boot.
So, you can get around the letter of the license agreement with this tactic, but you can't get the same market leverage. And it's market leverage that pays the bills, not a "clever" legal trick.
Now I'd like to get out of the system, because I don't trust it to be secure, but because I've forgotten my password, I can't.
Go to the Passport site (http://www.passport.com) and look; there's no FAQ or other document that tells you how to cancel your account. Nor is there any e-mail address of anyone who might be able to help you do it manually.
So, when you hear Passport adoption statistics, subtract at least one. I've never used my Passport a second time, but can't get rid of it, after trying for weeks.
Moran may or may not be slow, but the next two books in his Continuing Time series are already mostly written. Bantam holds the rights to publish _The AI War_, and Moran is trying to buy them back; the book itself is finished. _The Crystal Wind_ is started.
There's other books in the series which are finished or partially written, which Moran would like to self-publish when it's possible financially, but he's got a pretty big family, and making a living as a full-time writer is not easy. He mostly works in high technology, and writes on the side these days.
There's tons more info in the DKM FAQ, mailing list, and web sites, the URLs are posted by other folks here.
The x86 port and then BeIA were simply last ditch efforts to reposition Be in an entirely different market than it was designed for.
IMO, the only thing that could have kept Be viable was to have dumped the OS and to have kept the hardware. Commodity priced PowerPC boxes running LinuxPPC could have made Be a household name in the workstation market.
This is so stupid as to defy description. If Apple had acquired Be, there would *be* no OS X. What Apple needed wasn't an OS, they needed a leader they would actually follow. JLG would not have been that person, Amelio would have stayed, and Apple probably would have died.
The x86 port was actually wildly successful and, if management hadn't killed the retail channel while it was ramping up ahead of projections, would have been bringing way more money per MONTH than BeIA ever brought in in a QUARTER.
As for the BeBox hardware, keeping the hardware would have killed Be within 6 months (of when they dropped it). Hardware is an incredibly expensive business, with razor thin margins, and people who want to run Linux generally do it on a PC. The number of people who would have bought a BeBox to run (only) Linux is probably fewer than 2,000.
Michael Alderete
Be employee, 1996-1999
<TT>> 4. Gassee has kept Be alive on virtually
> NO PROFIT for eleven years. Do you honestly
> think he's going to let Be die now that they
> are standing on the brink of a vast ocean
> of a market?</TT>
As someone who worked at Be for three years, I can tell you that they were in business for 11 years DESPITE Jean-Louis Gassee, not because of him.
JLG did his absolute level best to keep the company from succeeding, by being completely unwilling to let the company do serious marketing. In the time I was there, three VPs of Marketing quit because they were not allowed to do their job.
My prediction is that Be's IP assets and some engineers will be acquired, but that you can say goodbye to Be before July.
This is a tragedy, because the product was amazing, and the engineers who worked on BeOS were brilliant, committed, and extremely motivated to succeed. Two years ago BeOS could do things that *still* can't be done on other "advanced" operating systems.
Be's impending death is genuinely heartbreaking. Hopefully there are lessons to be learned, like how not to treat developers, and how to not neglect your product in the marketplace...
Michael Alderete
Former Be Webmaster, Product Manager
The early versions of BeOS used a separate database (not very complex) and filesystem, which wound up being very difficult to work with, so eventually they merged the two. The "database" aspects of the BeOS filesystem are more of being able to add (relatively) arbitrary data to particular filetypes, and do searching based on those criteria. It isn't a formal database in any sense of the word.
Versions of BeOS prior to the Preview Release had a file system and a separate database. Because it was difficult to keep the data in the two separate systems consistant, it was decided that they should merge. This happened in Preview Release 1, and BFS remains relatively unchanged today.
At the time there was a lot of enthusiasm for the merged design to be a database-based file system, but after a lot of research, Dominic Giampaolo, the engineer doing the design and coding, determined that wasn't going to work. The reason is it becomes too difficult to filter out the files you aren't interested in. There is a lot of organizational value in a hierarchical, structured, traditional file system.
The design for BFS that was implemented is best described as an "attribute-adorned file system," with a query engine that can search against the attributes, and some indexing to make common queries fast. There's a fairly simple query language (along with simple GUI tools), but it's not as complex or capable as SQL (nor would you really want it to be). You can execute those queries from the command line if you want, which can be pretty useful when piped to another program (much as find is in Unix, but simpler to work with).
And could you comment on the performance of FreeBSD vs. OS X. That is, given that OS X is based on the Mach microkernel with a BSD layer on top of that, what are the performance implications, particularly for use as a web server.