Submitted by “This is the first Haiku alpha 1 status update. The goal of this status update is to provide information on how the project is going. There has recently been an consensus that it was about time to start preparing a first alpha for a myriad of reasons. To me personally, the fact that it is about time to show off the enormous amount of work that has been put in the project the past number of years. Another good reason – in my opinion – is to get everyone behind one goal: preparing the code for a first release. So what’s the goal of this status update? Well, with a large number of developers actually working on the different components of the operating system, it is easy to lose track of what is going on. You can consider this a news update.”
I’m looking forward to the advancement of this project. Be was the first “alternative” OS that I truly fell in love with, though I didn’t discover it until about a year before the end of the company. I can’t wait to see this thing in true beta and release candidate form; I’ll most likely get one of those low-cost ultraportable laptops specifically to run Haiku away from home.
Yeah I am in the same boat as you are. I saw BeOS being demonstrated on ZDTV (now it’s G4TV). But didn’t try it out until there was a free version of it and was truly amazed at how fast it was much faster than Windows 98. I would also like to see a stable release of this and will be getting something like the Asus EeePC for it. 🙂
As long as there’s no downloadable live CD (well, or these two images with a clear discription on how to burn a CD in X little steps), I see little chance that Haiku will gain any attention outside the little circle that nourishes the OS at the moment.
Why can’t there be a way to start the OS from DOS? I mean there _was_ a way to do that. That way one could only use _one_ ordinary disk image and burn that on CD.
“Alpha update” “in development” “want a LiveCD” “working on it”
’nuff said.
I think Microsoft patched that actually.
So, you’ll be running Windows 98 to do it then ?
Looking forward to the alpha, I have not done much work on my old BeOS code for the last few years. But I have looked it over and now see a number of improvements I would like to make in Haiku version.
Hopefully a number of other BeOS programmers think the same and HaikuWare will have a flood of programs coming in soon.
I am excited
Haiku is shaping up fast
Refrigerator
If Haiku is as stable as R5 and supports some of the improved hardware that has come along, it will be a very interesting platform for the future.
I have W2K, BeOS, PCLinuxOS and now OSX running around the house so I get to compare all their aspects.
BeOS I love the most but it has only barebones software just enough to barely get by.
W2K & Linux I use because I have to, but I don’t really ever enjoy them. They sure have lots of software that lets you get things done and some of that is even good but they also have plenty of issues I am pretty fed up with. It is either DRM+activation+complexity or doesn’t quite work+complexity, I don’t want any of those.
OSX was just 30 days old when my MiniMac mobo died, it is back with its creator now. I had really high hopes for OSX but have found it to be big fat and massively bloated. Sure it is beautiful, easy on the eyes and just works fabulously (hardware willing) but I don’t see myself ever using it as my preferred OS, just another port target. On many occasions I click on the menubar and get no response for 10s. Its a CoreDuo and it feels sluggish too often. To top it off the Apple store clerk told me a 2nd 1GB DIMM stick would cost $300. I thought he was joking, he wasn’t. I am pretty sure I won’t be buying anymore Apple hardware.
I poke around the OSX applications and compare what they do and their sizes and see similar functions in old MacOS or BeOS or Windows and see that OSX apps seem too be 10-100x times bigger. As a developer I can’t grok why even the tiniest apps are now 1MB or bigger. I fondly remember the old MacOS and how tiny many full blown apps used to be, WriteNow comes to mind. Lastly I don’t really get the iLife style thing but them I’m getting pretty old.
Why does app size matter so much, well as long as the OS and its apps are bloated, they act like a anvil around the hardware forcing us to hang on to large unreliable disk drives even for a small system and forcing us to buy high end processors. With BeOS and a few other OSes, the OS and many apps can easily fit on a small SSD system with a modest processor.
If an OS and a basic set of apps for Web, IDE, Audio, Video and goodies can’t fit easily into 1GB with space to spare, it really ain’t for me. Only the lightest nixes and BeOS/Haiku can do this.
Cheers to the Haiku team!
As a developer I can’t grok why even the tiniest apps are now 1MB or bigger.
Universal binaries? Bundled frameworks (Sparkle for software updates, Growl, Crash reporters, etc)? Localized files?
Sparkle itself is 4.1MB. It contains 26 localizations taking 136KB a piece.
Really localizations could just be downloaded on demand, although I guess disk space is cheap these days so few people care !!
Even so, a lot of people I know just standardise to English – at the end of the day is the international language, its flexible, and for non-English speakers, its a lot more expressive. Apart form the French (and a few other anti-Anglo’s), the world is moving in that direction; embrace it or be left behind.
And what world is that? I ask because I doubt the Chinese and the Japanese, just to name a couple of countries, would agree with your assertion, nor would they want to have to comply with it.
The Japanese are a special situation – “we’re not Asian, we’re Japanese!”
Regarding Chinese and Korean, all outside evidence shows that you either learn English and become rich or be ignorant and remain in a rice paddy. Most people are bright enough to work out the better route. Take Singapore for example – they faced reality and it is seen as the economic miracle.
Pragmatic approaches, not cultural masturbation, delivers results. I can assure you that if Mandarin suddenly become the dominant language, I would learn it, just as if Korean were to become the dominant language.
Edited 2008-03-24 03:17 UTC
I have the feeling you need to get off your “you either know English or you are an ignorant” high horse and learn a bit more about the real world.
People in many countries may learn other languages for advancement, mere interest or just the joy of acquiring knowledge, but that does not mean that they want to give away their own cultural identity for the sake of pragmatism or corporate profits. I expect anyone wanting to bring a product to my country, to do so in my own language. To think that this is cultural masturbation is arrogant at the very least. Who is to say that I have to use a language other than mine? Why should I? How does that deliver any results *for me*?
Trying to impose a foreign language on others is far from being pragmatic, and it does not work for the most part. Believe me: I am tri-lingual (Spanish-English-Japanese), and I know what I’m talking about.
More expressive than what? Their native language? That’s bullshit.
Hilarious. If anything the world will be moving to chinese in the future.
May I suggest you hear what a language sounds like when it is directly translated – it sounds like baby English. The lack of variation in words becomes so annoying for some they start using Engish words dropped into conversations.
Or we see Chinese start to enter the English language – take New Zealand English, it is now a fusion of Maori and English; English in itself only has 25% of words of English origin. English is ultimately a bastardised language of fusion. Whilst the French tried the Microsoft approach of ‘control freak’, English has developed like the opensource world – an orgy of innovation at the grass roots.
Oh, yeah. Just like how English directly translated into another language sounds like baby language.
Hint: the problem is the direct translation. Thinking that other languages are not expressive just because they cant be directly translated into English is incredibly stupid.
Bingo.
I’m doing a lot of translation work for university (seeing I study languages and all), and trust me, you can translate between languages just fine, it just takes a lot of effort, and considerable knowledge of both the target as well as the host language, to convey the meaning to its fullest.
But it is definitely possible. It just takes more time than pressing “translate” on Babelfish.
If you want help with italian, I’m here.
@kaiwai
I thought elitist rubbish like this died with the British Empire, but I guess not. This is a discussion about a great OS called Haiku, so take your ignorant opinions about language to another forum where xenophobia is considered on-topic.
May I suggest you hear what a language sounds like when it is directly translated – it sounds like baby English. The lack of variation in words becomes so annoying for some they start using Engish words dropped into conversations.
I can’t help but laugh!
English directly translated into finnish sounds pretty boring and dull, and heck no, english ain’t even half as descriptive and varied as finnish. And I can BET this applies to quite a few languages!
Ditto for portuguese. It is interesting how much use of analogies the English language uses to express something whereas that same thing has a defined term in other richer languages. Password is one famous example of such terms: it is comprised of two distinct words – pass + word – which means that it is a specific word to allow entrance while portuguese and most other languages have a word specifically for that (“senha” in portuguese case).
If anything, that makes English reasonably easier to learn than most foreign languages for a non native speaker but to use that as a justification to push it down the throats of speakers of other languages in detriment of their own language because that allegedly “would give them an advantage over the people that don’t speak it” is simply stupidity. Yes, I do speak English – kinda – but that was my choice, because I wanted to learn it for entertainment purposes and it happens to be useful in my workplace but I don’t see why someone that doesn’t want it nor need it would have to cope with it.
Please keep your xenophobic comments to yourself. (That wasn’t aimed at you, WereCatf… That’s for Kaiwai and his language rubbish!)
Edited 2008-03-24 14:43 UTC
I absolutely love hearing of the progress Haiku is making. Every little bit puts a bigger smile on my face. Makes me happy to see BeOS’s true, worthy successor is the only one that is left standing. As was meant to be, so it has become! Yea!
I ran this under a virtual machine and was very impressed. If it did not say Haiku, I’d have sworn I was running R5!
It “seems” just as responsive, it runs BeOS apps, and it does not have all that bloat that Zeta had introduced which is a relief to see!
The good thing about this project is that we will no longer have to rely on sloppy patches and what not to make the OS work with modern hardware, which as a result will hopefully lead to less Kernal Panics in the future when one is merely thing to use a USB device or something simple to that effect.
It is also good to see there is work being done on the OpenGL and Java side of things!
The Kernel is the strong point of the things
And the app server that do more with 1/2 of BeOS app server
Only misses the devices pref, yes, after that node driver implementation
To having an OS and apps that can really utilise the hardware available to us.
I remember what BeOS 5 could so with a system almost 10 years ago that I still can’t see OS-X or Vista doing on modern hardware. Then I think, Media content manipulation, 3D modelling, an OS that is lean, unobtrusive and easy to use, how nice.
People get up in arms over it but in aviation and commerce English is the International language.
In Finland corporates run English installs of Operating Systems through their networks and it is only the small businesses and Home computers that run Finnish Language Localisations. Talking of which even when translated, half of the Finnish commands mean nothing of their English counterparts.
Standardised language can make problem solving and troubleshooting a crap load easier for companies.
Also, I’d love to see programming code in Mandarin or Japanese for that matter. Of course they have to use their language specific character sets. Should be a hoot especially with Mandarin which is one of the most complex languages on the planet up their with, Finnish.
Oh, yes, their language specific character sets. Except now there is something called Unicode that we would all be using were not for lazy programmers and the C standard libraries.
Japanese books are often a third of their English counterparts and although the language doesn’t translate nicely for current PL syntax, you could probably make a Japanese Oriented PL syntax that beats English code in conciseness.
UTF16 encoded Chinese for programming languages would use the same syntax and compares favorably to English (2 byte per command vs 2+ bytes per command in UTF8 encoded English)
Oh by the way, it’s not only possible, it has been done, many times before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_language…
The English language and it’s counterparts (other languages) is a wonderful topic… BUT SOMEWHERE ELSE, YOU DOLTS!!! 😀
This topic is about HaikuOS. Not English/other languages. Comprende? 🙂
I love Beos and Haiku.
But.. just to do some offtopic again..
Italian is much more expressive than English.
And like italian, all other romance Languages like French, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese…
I admit, for computer science english is the better choice, DIRECTLY BECAUSE of this basic expressivity.
Just dont confuse the real world with IT…
Get a life, dude.