Two interesting bits of news from the Haiku front. First, Haiku now has basic support for FireWire, thanks to GSOC student JiSheng Zhang. You cannot connect a FireWire hard drive just yet, though. Second, Russian BeOS hacker Troeglazov Gerasim has ported Samba 3.10 to Haiku, so you can now browse your Windows shares in Haiku, as well as share files through Samba in Haiku. IsComputerOn has the details, as well as some screenshots.
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All good news obviously, however as far I'm concerned. If FW is in place, it's great, that means wider support for a lot of devices and USB has overtaken the standard so one could say that with this, FW is a completed step that doesn't really has to be looked back at.
Very good job all though and a special thank you to the one bringing the actual "report" about it.
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Well, USB has taken over FW only for non-video things basicly. FW is still very much "there" for high-end video related devices. Since Haiku aims to be a BeOS replacement, which was always good in esp. the audio/video market, FW is an absolute must-have for also becoming a serious contender in that area.
However, for normal desktop usage, I agree USB has gone where FW was intended to go 
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Don't forget that most external audio interfaces out there use firewire as well as many external HDDs.
But it's true that for normal desktop usage there's not much need for firewire.
Edited 2007-09-03 12:43
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I disagree, an external FW/USB2 combo external drive is still way more useful than vanilla USB drive and the FW connection is noticeably faster than USB2. Since BeOS never had any real support for USB2, getting FW for drives would be excellent. I find USB to be pretty tacky anyway.
Nice thing with combo drives is that you can reuse the casing and bridge with bigger drives so you can keep the better interface. It's a shame that FW interfaces on drives are usually priced to make buying them a harder choice though.
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The standard answer is "when it's done." Software development on this scale, especially working with volunteers, is _so_ unpredictable. Every time anyone has said "this'll be the year!" -- Haiku developer or otherwise -- they've been wrong. Just so you know, though, the consensus that I've seen from the guys is that there'll be an official alpha release once we are able to do self-hosted development. It's possible to use gcc under Haiku right now, but it's very much hit-or-miss and it's more of a state where you can say, "hey, I can compile something... wait a second -- that just worked a moment ago?!" 
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Roadmap != deadline
The reluctance to have a roadmap may have its roots in the early (unrealistic) predictions that Haiku would have a beta in one year or two (which obviously never materialized). This is understandable, but there is no need to go from one extreme to the other.
A roadmap does not have to be a deadline set in stone, but rather a set of milestones (for alpha, beta, R1 and so on) with flexible time frames (instead of dates; for example, 2008 Q1) subject to change depending on how development progress. This would not only show those watching the project what to expect down the line, but it would also avoid having to answer ad nauseam the "when will R1 be released?" question.
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Roadmap != deadline
Wow, I completely missed this comment earlier.
This is *exactly* how I feel. What Haiku needs is a "well defined" goal, regardless of dates.
Right now everyone is just plugging away to complete R1 without knowing what's really left to complete. There's just a loose "it will be a replacement for BeOS R5" goal that is repeated over and over.
There are some milestones setup in Trac, but I think they're not complete. Trac also is not a very good way to publish your roadmap.
What needs to be done is define the areas and or milestones required for an R1 alpha/beta/final and publish them. Without that, everyone will keep asking the questions over and over.
Also with milestones, newcomers know what the priorities are, and where they can help first.
Finally, as soon as you feel you can set deadlines confidently, then they should be set (with some room for error). This increases confidence in the team. It increases confidence in themselves. Setting and achieving goals (even if they're smaller ones) is what drives people forward.
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http://youtube.com/watch?v=yAc-NDR35Sk
Anyone having flashbacks? 
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I wonder if you can do the same using "just about any other OS without batting an eye lid" on the same hardware. I could not.
When I tried Ubuntu Studio (which uses a low latency Linux kernel) on the same hardware that I ran that Haiku demo on the video, by the third instance of the video the mouse became jumpy and the sound started stuttering, and by the fourth instance the mouse stopped responding and would not even move, the sound and video came to a halt, the hard disk started churning like crazy, and all I could, short of doing a hard reset, was try to force a log off by restarting X, which did work but took several minutes.
I also use Windows XP regularly (on a different machine with double the amount of RAM), and I find myself having to wait for the system or an app to respond even the OS is not under heavy load. I will not talk about Vista, which I tried and uninstalled immediately as it was slow as molasses even with no apps running.
The point is that Haiku (like BeOS was in its days) aims and is designed to be more responsive than other OSes on the same (low-end) hardware. Of course, you don't have to take my word for it.
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It's not just video. It seems any number of programs can slow Windows down while do some basic house-keeping.
My girlfriend uses Plan3D a house design program, from the time you double click on the icon to the time you can start using the program is over a minute, with no dialog boxes on display during that program boot-up. But while that program is setting itself up I can't start up any other program not IE, not MSWrite, nothing, no even any of MS's games that all all small any light in hardware needed.
On BeOS even a hog like FireFox does not prevent me from starting other programs while it sorts itself out.
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I downloaded the large Ratatouille trailer from Apple's quicktime site. http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/ratatouille/
I duplicated the file 8 times and opened those 9 files in Quicktime. Launched all of them and hit exposé to view all the screens at once. No stuttering, no slowdowns of mouse movement. It was a bit freaky seeing 9 copies of the same video running at once, but that's beside the point It's a shame I can't make a video out of it and post it on youtube in response to the Haiku video, unless someone knows of a free video capture program. Things started slowing down at 12 instances, but I guess you can't have everything.
So no, it'll take more than a video showing simultaneous playback of 6 video files to make me bat an eyelid 
edit: I'm using a 1st gen Macbook with a 2 Ghz Core Duo and 2 GB RAM. I don't know what machine was used in the demo, but if it was a PIII or something, then I'd be impressed.
Edited 2007-09-04 14:53
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Can't edit my other post anymore 
Anyway, here's the video of my Macbook doing 10 instances of video playback smoothly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoAWEoN8e3c
Excuse the mobile phone quality, but you should still be able to see what's going on.
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"You do that these days on just about any OS without batting an eye lid."
not true...
The type of response Haiku (or BeOS) is capable of is simply not possible on the same [my] machine running opensuse 10.2 without extensive tweaking. That amounts to real time kernel installation, jack audio installation etc.
Even then, the resulting performance is not nearly as good.
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From what I can tell, this is not a USB issue. It's a mouse priority issue.
Why in blazes is the mouse being given "god status" (all CPU cycles must stop and worship the almighty USB mouse, whenever it moves)?
Under the original BeOS USB stack (inputserver) usb mouse/tablets didn't use so many resources, you could set the priority pretty high so that the pointer was responsive but because it wasn't doing much, just copy a few bytes only once in a while (100Hz) it didn't have that much impact.
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I think USB is probably not the big consumer of CPU cycles in this case. Screen areas have to be redrawn whenever the pointer is moved. The mouse pointer is currently software rendered and not a hardware bitmap that the card could simply overlay. (There's a pointer in every Haiku screenshot.) I'm sure someone will eliminate this little performance thief eventually, and make Haiku use pointer overlay when supported by hardware.