One of the most prominent ex-Be engineers back in the “golden days” of Be, Inc., Jean-Baptiste Queru, comments (and here) on beta 5 of YellowTAB‘s Zeta, an upcoming commercial version of BeOS based on a 2 year-old unfinished Dano/EXP codeline (that was supposed to be ‘BeOS 6’ if Palm hadn’t bought the Be IP). JBQ finds the bloat & the lack of innovation dissapointing compared to what older versions of BeOS offered in their own timeline: “BeOS was about being one step ahead, not one step behind“.
Ex-Be Engineer Comments on YellowTAB’s Zeta Beta5a
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Gripe gripe gripe. This is forum fodder plain and simple. Eugenia, just because your husband makes a comment doesn’t make it a headline.
I’ve asked a few times now, but people have lost track of the discussion and the last one got real weird.
Does Gobe Productive run on Zeta?
Other than that I have to agree with JBQ that Zeta just has lost anything of the simplicity and elegence that BeOS had. Just because you have the source code doesn’t help you create the end-user experience this should be.
Vic
The fact that JBQ is my husband doesn’t make him one bit less “ex-Be engineer” (he was a Be engineer long time before we got married anyway).
Therefore, the headline is as valid as for any other ex-Be engineer. You like it or not.
where you cried that Be forgot “how to do releases” or such.
As far as i remember, article was about situation of having different parts, components, several trees, but not team able to put all together with sufficient consistency and QA.
It seems that YellowTab is trying to do just such work, but unfortunately its team is maybe too small to accomplish both this task and to play with toys like new apllications and eye-candy features.
>where you cried that Be forgot “how to do releases” or such.
Neither me or JBQ “cried” about anything like that. The person you are quoting is another french ex-Be employee.
Stop it!
What did he used to work in BeOS for like: BeFS, BeAPI, write drivers or whatever? I am just curious… 🙂
I don’t think YellowTab has the many great developers that know how to work/write on BeOS. Too bad, I never have use BeOS..
How hard would it be to set up a full interview? 😉
Prog.
>How hard would it be to set up a full interview? 😉
Very hard. He currently plays “Dark Cloud II” on this PS2.
I disagree: an opinion from an ex-Be employee (and JBQ was one of the ones people knew about- I mean, he has a three-letter acronym name- you have to be known to have one of those) is certainly something I’d like to read about.
And I agree with him- YellowTab might have the will, but I don’t think they have the experience or inspiration to create a quality BeOS release.
Be, in it’s prime, had some really ::expletive deleted:: smart people there- I have my doubts about YellowTab’s ability to follow up.
I’m also trying to say this with all due respect to YT- I mean, I’m actually planning on buying Zeta. I think it’s just really hard for a small inexperienced team to work on code they’re not experienced with. I really want them to succeed.
I think I just said the same thing like three times…
// Jay
Not even french, at least by name –
http://www.benews.com/story/4040
This is the real URL:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010622191516/www.benews.com/story/4040
Yes, Andrew is actually British, sorry.
Many. I started doing graphics driver test suites, then ported a major game, then worked on the Internet Appliance proof-of-concept that was used during the IPO, then did drivers for a video capture/playback card, then worked on the game sound API, then wrote a new framework for preference panels, then did a bit of work related to skinnable alerts on BeIA, then was a major contributor to a new makefile system. Plus all the little things I don’t remember. I’ve been a graphics engineer, a kernel engineer, and a buil dsystem engineer.
Very nice comment Jay, thank you. Indeed, my thoughts.
I personally will also support YellowTAB, because we like it or not, they carry the original BeOS code, even if the output of their work might not be what we might hope for.
And yes, JBQ was one of the most prominent Be engineers back in the day in the community, hanging out on #bedev on IRC day and night and help out BeOS devs. If JBQ has to say something about the future of BeOS, a lot of older BeOS users/devs will care to listen, hence the headline (in which I don’t have to answer anyway). JBQ was what Chris “cmd” McKillop is for QNX. 😀
>Very hard. He currently plays “Dark Cloud II” on this PS2.
And Eugenia knows that I get very angry if I’m interrupted while playing.
We already knew that Zeta != BeOS and that not much has changed since BeOS 5.
BeOS has no future, at least not with Zeta. They don’t innovate and they don’t support much newer hardware. In fact I find Zeta to look very much like the BeOS MAX releases. Which has been my only contact to BeOS so far, and I was very unimpressed – I might have been in awe if I had seen it years ago when it first came out but now BeOS just launches sub optimal apps really fast and has a nice rendering system.
I’ll take Linux and GNOME over it any day at this point.
For once I would like to see a person who hasn’t been a former BeOS userto review Zeta – so the review would be focused on the merits and flaws of the OS and not what is does different from the apparently beloved BeOS.
>We already knew that Zeta != BeOS and that not much has changed since BeOS 5.
Excuse me, but you don’t make sense… If Zeta!=BeOS then how come not much has changed?
Additionally, you make a lot of assumptions, without having used the beta. Zeta DOES have much more hardware support than any other BeOS distro. Also, is based on the Dano codeline, which has a completely new
networking stack and a whole lot new stuff.
Overall, you just sound unfair.
Yellowtab has what 6-10 people? Be probably had 50-100 (i really don’t know). Be had a lot more people than yellowtab that i do know. Be’s team was second to none so it will be difficult to keep up with them. Regardless, i appreciate what yellowtab is doing and i think they are doing a fine job.
I don’t really think the tone in a lot of these comments is appropriate. They come across as a bit sour. Feedback is important to help yellowtab shape the OS in a fashion that suits the potential audience. Sour grapes really are not. keep the commentary positive and not inflamatory.
I’ve never really used BeOS. I’ve installed it on two machines just for the heck of it, but both had unsupported video cards that I never got to work so alot of the glory of BeOS is lost when using greyscale VESA. That said, it was always smooth, and looked great. I think that while Zeta might not be that great when it comes out (I hope it is) it’s the release AFTER that that will probably tell us alot. They’re still getting used to the code, I’d assume. Once they have a release under their belt, I think things will get alot better. It took a LONG time for the first release after Netscape opensourced their code, but the new releases are very good. It’s sorta the same thing, I think.
<p>That said, I have two other comments. First is that fonts are something that next to no one uses, IMHO. Other than graphic designers and the like, who NEED them, I think most users eventually come to the realization that you don’t need 500 fonts, most people only use 2 or 3. The fonts that come with Windows are all I ever need. It might be fun to play around with tons of ’em, but they are often just… well… useless.
<p>Also, I hope that they can get some good graphics drivers. What I mean is I’d like to see drivers for nVidia and ATI cards. They don’t need to do everything, just support 2D well would be enough to start.
may depend on fact that he really worked quite long with same , post-R5 codebased BeOS versions (Be-internal developer versions since end of 2000 IIRC), so nothing really new and amazing for him there, especially in comparison with time gone.
But for those, who still tried only R5 PE based versions, it may look quite fresh.
>Yellowtab has what 6-10 people?
No more than 5 are working in the OS itself (some external people are just working on apps).
>Be probably had 50-100 (i really don’t know).
105 in its hey day. About 70 engineers at that point, yes.
> Be’s team was second to none so it will be difficult to keep up with them
Agreed.
> Also, I hope that they can get some good graphics drivers. What I mean is I’d like to see drivers for nVidia and ATI cards.
There is support for Nvidia (up to GeForce3) and most ATI cards. You just need to download their driver from http://www.bebits.com
To me it seems that you expected to find the gfx drivers pre-installed on an OS that came out in 2000, for cards released in 2001-2. I suggest you just download their drivers from BeBits.com and retry BeOS.
As for nvidia Geforce drivers for all models (inclding GeForce4), Zeta has this supported.
Thanks for take your time to answer.. Have fun with the PS2.. 🙂
>nothing really new and amazing for him there
Actually, less new. The BeOS that I remember using at Be was more advanced than zeta. It had better fonts. It had a better browser. Those two issues alone make a huge difference in my opinion.
I don’t think that adding 400 fonts and 20 window border styles makes an OS better. I think that solving real issues does, and I’ve not seen any real issue solved by zeta over R5+BONE.
“I’ve quickly played with Zeta” Doesn’t seem to be much of a base for those comments.
Why don’t you just wait ’til a beta is released that fixes some of the first (prerelease) problems and is closer to release quality, or even the final product or release 2 and then sit him down to do a real review.
Then I will really care.
If he just says too many fonts, ‘lack of choices’ that I liked from BeOS is now gone, too many buzzwords and (that it’s) a real shame Zeta definitely isn’t an improvement over R5.
Of course it isn’t better because it’s not ready.
Of course hundreds of blurry fonts suck.
I for one like choices. I like at most 3, of course they have to be great choices and not 3 crappy ones, but less is more only if the one choice is really great.
If firebird is running perfect, than make it the one browser. If you have an IM client that does yahoo only, but it does it the best, use it. If you have one that uses aim and icq well, but yahoo poorly and msn not at all, use it for aim and icq.
This is just an example. I would really prefer an IM kit that is intergrated with people files and works for everything.
But if JBQ isn’t going to add some comments that help Zeta know what they’ve done wrong and why/how to fix it, or say anything that hasn’t been said before, or wait until Zeta is closer to ready, or at least say something besides it sucks, or at least give it a real reveiw, then I don’t value what he has to say compared to anyone else that uses beos.
Stop trying to change the real issue here. JBQ was not “reviewing” anything, neither he is a reviewer. He is an engineer. What he did was to COMMENT on it, not review it. He doesn’t have to justify his opinion to you (as a reviewer might have to). He just writes what he sees and believes.
What was the browser? Was it Wagner or Clipper? What happened to them–did yellowTAB not license them?
It’s hardly been developed – BeOS was about innovating, Zeta is about living off BeOS users and their withdrawl syndromes.
the problem with not much being changed is that it’s the wrong things that have been changed . instead of developing apps that could compete with the quality of Linux/Windows/Mac apps they add eyecandy. Instead of developing on the KISS princips used on BeOS they add tons and tons of stuff.
It’s just not in the spirit of BeOS.
Stuff that sucked in BeOS several years ago still suck – where’s the innovation…
I pray that Zeta just doesn’t leave it’s developer bankrupt in the end – because it sure seems like a dead project.
Look, shut up. You haven’t used Zeta or seen the release or anything. All you’re saying is just conjecture based on a few negative words in Eugenia’s mostly positive review. There’s not enough of them to develop apps to “compete” with anybody. I doubt Zeta will ever become any sort of competition to Win/Mac/Lin.
>What was the browser? Was it Wagner or Clipper?
NetPositive. What JBQ means was that back in 1999 and 2000 NetPositive was still usable and you could do quite some things with it on the net. Today, you can’t. NetPositive doesn’t even support SSL anymore, let alone CSS and JS. And the Mozilla port sucks beyond belief (as JBQ also experienced), hense his comment regarding “a better browser back then”. YTAB hasn’t solved the HUGE browser problem yet.
Well, in case anyone wants to know what I’d like to see improved in Zeta:
I’d like to see a better filesystem, one that can have multiple simultaneous journals opened simultaneously, one where double-indirect blocks aren’t crippled to a ridiculously small value, one that solves the issue of attributes in a multi-user environment, one that allows proper file-locking.
I’d like to see a better VM, one that can handle more than 1GB of RAM, one that can use all that RAM as a disk cache, one that knows how to cache high-level filesystem entities instead of just disk blocks, one that can memory-map files, one that uses PAE so that the kernel page tables can be shares across all processes automagically.
I’d like to see better SMP support, one with teams and threads that stick to the CPU they’re running on, one that knows how to re-balance interrupt handlers across CPUs based on which CPU is likely to use the result of the interrupt, one that knows how to lazily invalidate TLB buffers by waiting for the next write to CR3 (yes, very technical, I know).
I’d like to see a better graphics system, one that manages to keep a back-buffer for its windows, one that manages to run without having to use a separate team, one that it natively compatible with X and isn’t too different in philosophy from Win32, one that allows to really have font-sensitive and color-sensitive UIs, one that supports multiple monitors, one that supports remote display.
I’d like to see better threading support, one that doesn’t have a giant spinlock around the semaphores, one that allows me to specify my stack for each thread.
I’d like to see a better mssaging system, one that doesn’t require to use multiple event queues to write even the most trivial of applications, one where messages can be sent reliably.
I’d like to see better development tools, one with a well-interegated powerful source-level debugger, one with proper tools similar to purify, quantify and purecoverage, one with proper resource editors.
That’s what I’d like to see in Zeta.
>>What was the browser? Was it Wagner or Clipper?
>NetPositive.
Actually, a proper mix of NetPositive for simple sites (there were still some of those back then) and an ad-hoc version of Opera4 based on the BeIA architecture. Both were usably fast, one with a good UI and OS integration, one with decent support for advanced markup features.
What do you think of othe beos projects like BlueEyedOS, Cosmoe, openboes, and befree?
I’ve not seen anything in any of those projects that made me feel like even trying to run any of them. They’re all going to have to be very creative if they want to go anywhere. Trying to reproduce today an OS that already feels very outdated sounds like a very bad idea, knowing that getting an OS up-to-speed is a ten-year task.
The general feel of the comments here is that YT doesn’t seem to have what it takes to advance BeOS even back to the relative state it was at its peak (much less to overtake Linux or Windows). They have the will, but they’re still missing something. Direction? Expertise? Raw talent?
Is there anything non-YT people can do to help get them back on track? Or can all we do is hope someday they will get their act together?
Legacy support: BeOS was designed to avoid bloat by not supporting legacy code. YellowTab has cluttered up BeOS by trying too hard to support legacy applications.
By offering too many choices, YellowTab is replicating the mistakes that Linux users live with daily. Soon, the clean, swift BeOS will boot in 40-75 seconds (very Linux-like) and boast 4000+ applications of dubious usefulness in the default installation, exactly like Linux.
There is support for Nvidia (up to GeForce3) and most ATI cards. You just need to download their driver from http://www.bebits.com
To me it seems that you expected to find the gfx drivers pre-installed on an OS that came out in 2000, for cards released in 2001-2. I suggest you just download their drivers from BeBits.com and retry BeOS.
I understand they currently don’t come with the OS. The only machine I had access to had a GeForce 2 Go which, while the code is there, is unsupported with the BeBits driver. When I get a chance to work with a real machine again (non-laptop) I intend to try again. It’s good to hear that they do have drivers that they will be bundeling in. I do understand that BeOS is 3 years old.
And sorry about the “<P>”s, force of habit from other sites I frequent.
>They have the will, but they’re still missing something. >Direction?
They lack a bit of this yes.
> Expertise?
They do have quite some expertise. An ex-Be engineer has actually joined them to help out.
> Raw talent?
It requires refined talent to do what JBQ described above, not just “raw” talent. Not everyone can dive in, in so much code and understand it. I remember back in the day that it was difficult to get a job there, engineers had to be really sharp to work there.
What else is missing? More knowledgable engineers to join the team. This is why I wrote on my preview article that I wish if Marcus, Alex and at least 10-15 more people who know how to write and udnerstand low-level code, to join YT. Without such powerforce, YT won’t have much lack tacklinig down big issues, ever.
>YellowTab has cluttered up BeOS by trying too hard to support legacy applications.
You do have a point.
The reason i say that is because i have been watching openbeos for a while it will take them at least another 3 years before they have a beta os they are not well organized. I hope the yellowtab zeta version can bring java
to beos with the personal edition my video card not supported. It would be nice if someone like IBM or HP or DELL bought palm personally i wish IBM would they could do for beos what they done for linux then maybe offer it as free download for personal use. it would sure as heck make microsoft unhappy.
>bought palm personally
> i wish IBM would they could do for beos what they done for linux
If IBM would bought PalmSource, they would do with BeOS what they did with their OS/2, not what they did with Linux: kill it even more than is. IBM is only interested in Linux these days, plus their high-end host OSes, AIX and z/OS. They have not the slightest interest in consumer OSes, not even in Linux as a consumer OS, proof that they don’t ship nor support Linux with their IBM PCs and laptops. They only care about Linux as a guest OS to their mainframes.
Wouldn’t this be one of those sins for a tech company, working with an ex-beos employee on a the beos code beacsue palm owns the IP on Beos and wouldn’t this be infringement, and a slap in the face?
Having used BeZilla, I can attest that it’s not nearly up to par with it’s Linux/Windows/Mac OS counterparts. However, I’ve been using Firebird for the past two weeks on my dial-up account (Thanks to the buggy VIA NIC driver, my cable happyness in BeOS will have to wait ’till my new NIC arrives), and I have to say, it’s better than BeZilla by far. My one gripe is the slow startup time, but it does start faster than BeZilla, and it hasn’t crashed on me yet. It’s quite usable, though not as speedy as a BeOS naitive app. What I’d really liek to see is someone taking the gecko engine, and creating a Net+-alike browser that supports all the modern stuff. I think (And I may be mistaken here) that that would speed it up a bit, as well as make it respect the user’s UI settings.
Of course, what I want to see in Zeta most of all is full multiuser support. I know it’s possible, and even if it would break some apps, I still want it, at least as an option. Also, some enhancements to BeFS would be nice, like JBQ said. Maybe Zeta R2 can have some kind of BeFS+ with those nifty features.
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t BeOS highly modular? If so, couldn’t all those parts of the system that aren’t up to modern standards be replaced by 3rd-party add-ons?
>Having used BeZilla, I can attest that it’s not nearly up to par with it’s Linux/Windows/Mac OS counterparts.
It is nowhere near the Windows/Linux/BSD versions.
>However, I’ve been using Firebird for the past two weeks on my dial-up account it’s better than BeZilla by far.
Use Firebird on a slower machine to see that it is neither near the Windows/Linux version either. It is also slow. You scroll that damned scrollbar and the page and the scrollbar are in complete un-sync. You click to a button and it takes visible time to get clicked. You mouse over a few CSS links and it takes seconds to underline them.
Firebird/BeZilla ports are just not good.
If Zeta is based on Dano, how come its SMP and threading support isn’t top notch? I thought that was one of the highlights of BeOS – good SMP and pervasise multi-threading.
> Use Firebird on a slower machine to see that it is neither near the
> Windows/Linux version either. It is also slow.
It is slower, but that doesn’t make it unusable.
> You scroll that damned scrollbar and the page and the scrollbar are
> in complete un-sync.
Not here, on an old Duron 850Hz.
> You click to a button and it takes visible time to get clicked.
I can’t reproduce this problem. If I recall, your machine has problems with Win32 Mozilla (menus stuff). This one is probably unique to your rig.
> You mouse over a few CSS links and it takes seconds to underline them.
I can’t reproduce this problem. Linkage?
> Firebird/BeZilla ports are just not good.
They are not on par (yet) with the Win32 builds, but they are both reasonably usable. I guess that on a current machine they *are* good (and how much is an Athlon XP 2400+ these days? 70$?)
Prog.
JBQ or Eugenia (since maybe you can ask while he is still paying the ps/2)!
Is this a dead end road for yellowtab? I am an ex-be user and have been a little excited at the idea of a code-level revivial by Yellowtab. I am also not a programmer so…can’t help. Do you believe the problems mentioned before can be addressed after the infusion of funds that may be generated from 1.0? Or are they just fighting a losing battle?
Thanks for chiming in on this BTW.
DL
By writing that Athlon XP 2400+ is that cheap, I only meant to show that this is the current low end CPU – not to imply that one has to buy it to be able to use Bezilla…
I actually enjoy using Bezilla and Firebird for BeOS on much slower CPUs.
Prog.
== Mozilla/5.0 (BeOS; U; BeOS BePC; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030506 Mozilla Firebird/0.6 ==
I used it on a 550 mhz p3. It seemed to work fine.
My beos box is currently unhooked as I can’t find room from it away from collge dorm.
Of course I did use moz on windows and linux (sometimes) too, so maybe I’m getting them confused.
> If Zeta is based on Dano, how come its SMP and threading support isn’t top notch? I thought that was one of the highlights of BeOS – good SMP and pervasise multi-threading.
And then, they were saying that Be’s marketing department was bad… 😉
> If I recall, your machine has problems with Win32 Mozilla (menus stuff). This one is probably unique to your rig.
Prognathus, let’s not just start the same discussion again. The Windows menu problem has nothing to do with the BeOS slow port. Mozilla runs FAST on both Linux and Windows on the celeron machine, it is only the Windows version that has a particular problem with XUL, not with the whole browser. BeOS’ bezilla problem has to do with speed from its A to Z. More over, this is a dual Celeron 533, the holly crown of BeOS machines back in the day.
I have an AthlonXP 1600+ too you know, and there Mozilla runs ABSOLUTELY fine on Windows (without the menu problem), but BeZilla is STILL *many times* slower.
>I thought that was one of the highlights of BeOS
>good SMP and pervasise multi-threading.
Yes, BeOS had better SMP support than Windows 95 and MacOS 7.
The BeOS multithreading was called “perverse” by many people who used it (or who were forced to use it even when they didn’t want it).
> I have an AthlonXP 1600+ too you know, and there Mozilla runs
> ABSOLUTELY fine on Windows (without the menu problem), but
> BeZilla is STILL *many times* slower.
Just curious, don’t you think agree that on this now-phased-out CPU, Firebird for BeOS *is* useable?
Prog.
>Do you believe the problems mentioned before can
>be addressed after the infusion of funds that may
>be generated from 1.0?
Well, let’s say that this is the kind of problem that can only properly be solved by a few pretty senior kernel engineers (people who genuinely have 5 years of full-time experience in kernel development). The kind of engineer who costs upwards of $250000 a year (salary + outside costs + benefits). Let’s say that you need 4 of them (a small number considering that the Be kernel team was quite bigger than that) and that they can do the job in 2 years (a small number again, considering that the Be team didn’t fix any of those issues in more than 2 years between PR1 and R4.5). We’re talking about 2 million dollars here, with an amazingly unrealistic budget. 2 million dollars is not a small amount. And in 2 years, there may be a new Windows or a new MacOS that may be revolutionary enough to make BeOS look as outdated as a Unix.
JBQ – thanks for the reply…not a positive proposition for Yellowtab but definitelty something to think about…
“Yes, BeOS had better SMP support than Windows 95 and MacOS 7”
Well since none of those OS’s (w95 and System 7) were SMP or had any sort of support for SMP that should not be too hard really. Is that supposed to be an achivement or something?
(To be fair some later versions of System 7 were SMP aware using some extentions but they were quite bad and mostly application oriented -PhotoShop et al- and not OS oriented)
“And in 2 years, there may be a new Windows or a new MacOS that may be revolutionary enough to make BeOS look as outdated as a Unix.”
What “Unix” are you talking about here? Sorry but that new MacOS would be Unix based so it is a moot point really, so BeOS would be outdated by a unix (OK, BSD) based system… so how come something can be outdated by something that is as equally outdated?
Be took too long to come out (I was following them since mid 90s with a bunch of DRs I used on an original BeBox
) by the time they hit the shelves with consumer grade stuff all they could say to differenciated them from Mac or Windows is that it booted faster…..
>They are not on par (yet) with the Win32 builds
I don’t think they will ever be.
>but they are both reasonably usable.
Sorry, no. I just downloaded the latest Firebird on my AthlonXP 1600+ and while it is of course much faster than the celerons, it is nowhere near being “usable”. For Christ’s sake, why can’t I copy/paste a url to the location bar? It just opens the freaking “View” memu when I hit CNTRL+V instead of pasting the URL on the focused location field!
As for speed, yes, it is faster than on celerons, but on the same machine I also have Win2k3 and Red Hat Linux 9. On both, Mozilla and Firebird are very responsive, on BeOS, is sketchy.
Just mouse over the Pricegrabber links on the left of this page, and Firebird/BeZilla only can highlight 1-2 every second, while on the other OSes on the same machine, it highlights them all, without losing one!
I am not asking for a faster Mozilla. I am asking for a browser that is USABLE (and not all these entry field bugs I see also on my Hotmail with the BeZilla only!!!) and as responsive as the other OSes.
As long Mozilla runs well on a PIII-500 (and it does), I expect nothing less from the BeOS port. Sorry. I am not going to be an apologist for BeOS, even if I DO love the platform. The BeOS platform lacks today a usable/bugfree/fast/GOOD browser. Mozilla IS a good browser for BeOS, but the port is just not up to par for my taste.
I just crashed it btw. After about 5 minutes of browsing. I was scrolling down a page… and kaboom.
How can one expect YellowTab to be Be, and produce and have the same corporate methodology as Be when YellowTab isn’t Be at all…
I did explained that to my article just fine:
“YellowTAB has a great advantage inheriting all this source code from Be, Inc. but also it has the inevitable curse that they will have to live in the shadow of the “legendary days” of R4.5 and R5. To overcome Be’s own legacy will take a lot of work.”
The last I check, spousal privilegdes with Eugenia’s marriage doesn’t extend to OSNews :-). Personally, I found JBQ comments as valid as they can be. Don’t like it? Close your eyes with your hands, and say to yourself “I did not see anything, I did not read anything, it’s all not true, it’s not all true, I’m getting Zeta”
You’d be fine then.
I thought it bit. But then….I wouldn’t have thought that when it was in it’s prime, and before linux and winxp got so good. i felt very windows 3.1ish, and the new ones look like they all have that same feeling. there’s nothing new and revoloutionary about any of the current crop of be wannabes. too bad, because I’d love to get behind something that is as cool and fresh today as Be was in it’s day.
>>>>”Yes, BeOS had better SMP support than Windows 95 and MacOS 7″
<<<<Well since none of those OS’s (w95 and System 7) were SMP or had any sort of support for SMP that should not be too hard really. Is that supposed to be an achivement or something?
BeOS enthusiasts have always fallen on the marketing buzzword trap. The demographics of the fans themselves are to blame. These are people (i.e. the technical writer or the musician) who have a little bit of tech background who taught themselves on how to program — with a bit of anti-MSFT slant, the buzzwords are highly persuasive.
There are many BeOS fans RIGHT NOW that still thinks that BeOS is a 64-bit OS (only the file system is 64-bit), that the BeOS kernel is written in C++ (it’s written in C), that api’s written in C++ automatically must be better than api’s written in C (a working api written in BASIC is better than a broken BeOS api written in C++), that just because BeOS is a little bit smaller and faster than Windows95/98 automatically means that BeOS is the best OS in the world (there are many OS’es that are better still).
Here’s a question that’s probably been answered elsewhere, but I haven’t seen it:
How’d YT get the rights to the Dano source?
If it has been talked about, a quick link would suffice.
// Jay
James Warkentin wrote:
Soon, the clean, swift BeOS will boot in 40-75 seconds (very Linux-like) and boast 4000+ applications of dubious usefulness in the default installation, exactly like Linux.
The Universe (and software) tends toward increased entropy.
Don’t let it happen to your favorite software project.
After Prognathus prompt me to try out Firebird on BeOS, I thought I stay a bit in the platform and download some stuff from bebits. I decided to play a game (not loaded yet).
1. Connect your joypad to the gameport of this VIA 8233 KM266(with athlonXP) motherboard.
2. See BeOS 5 lock after 1 minute. Reboot, try to probe the joystics, see the lock again.
Heh, one more way of completely locking BeOS. I have a couple more ways too on my Celerons. Bleh.
The only OSes that seem stable to me is WinXP (1 crash in 1,2 years) and MacOSX (3 crashes in 8 months). I don’t trust BeOS nor Linux, too easy to break (yes, in multiple machines and distros).
“BeOS was about being one step ahead, not one step behind” —
How was BeOS one step ahead? Examples would be good. –Just curious.
C’mon people, give YellowTab and its small team a chance. Everyone knows that Zeta is Dano prepared for release, and that the YellowTab employees are too busy preparing a release. Dont expect to see anything radical compared to what Dano was supposed to be. In time, the YellowTab team will learn the in’s and out’s of the codebase, and with the new experience (and OpenBeOS experience) bring us Zeta2, which will be more advanced than what we have now.
Some people compare about the spartan nature of R5Pro. Others compare about the bloat of a typical *nix distro. YellowTab is trying to walk a middle road, and upsetting people from both camps. Its not as if you have to install everything, there is a new installer which (based on current screenshots) looks very nice indeed.
I’ll give YellowTab a chance with Zeta R1, no judgement will be passed. For Zeta R2, thats when I’ll be a critic.
What are our alternatives? None. Even OpenBeOS depends on Zeta, and is hoping that Zeta will rejuvinate the community. All we need is the userbase of R4.5 days. The old commercial houses which were burnt on BeOS will not be back, but this time we will get new commercial houses (upstarts). Remember, BeInc always preffered to have the new Adobe emerge on the platform than to see Adobe port its software to BeOS.
Sorry, Compare in my previous post should have been COMPLAIN.
I have a different experience with Linux, but not BeOS.
BeOS with new hw (> 2000) doesn’t work for me, but you can’t say that Linux is too easy to break.
Perhaps you feel this because you use Linux with XFree and a random window/desktop manager.
Linux is stable, I have some customers with Postgres servers that make me very happy.
Linux is a great kernel, yes I’d prefer FreeBSD, but it is much stable than any Windows machine I ran, you must not use Linux with any random X11 based environment.
Obviously Zeta won’t bring more power to the community as we once expected, not notable anyway….
Like most of us probably expected… future lies within OBOS, but they need more devs…
as i’ve mentioned in different forum on here Mozilla works perfectly fine for me on my PIII 1GHz, 512MB RAM system running BeOS with BONE.
I’m using the “Stripzilla” variant available on BeBits. It is fast, it is stable. BTW i use tabbed browsing.
IBM *is* supporting Linux on x86. I work at a major Australian Bank and we are implementing Red Hat A.S. on quad CPU x86 (Xeons) servers with the view to replacing some of our Sun servers. This is being driven by our architects and our relationship with IBM.
Accessing mainframes is a must when working with older companies as they are there and you cant ignore them. Especially when there is so much data stored on them.
All you need is MQ and you have that on Solaris, NT/2000/XP, and most other OSes so having MQ on Linux makes sense if you are going to deploy it in your company.
I’m looking forward to Zeta and i will be buying it. I think there is far too much negativity based on a *beta* release.
cheers
peter
I hate to be the one to break the news here, but BeOS is dead and their is no future in expanding or improving the codebase or even reverse engineering the codebase to get the OS up-to-date. Other OSs have surpased the technological aspects of BeOS. They need to learn from BeOS, not try to Be it.
Unless one of these projects has, at a bare minimum, source compatibility with linux, then it will have miniscule following.
I think the teams working on the various “updates, re-releases, revers-engineering” projects, should instead work on two things.
1) working with the XFree86 team in speeding it up, making it more responsive.
2) building a respectable window manager suite, one that can compete with KDE or Gnome in usability but is also flux/blackbox quick.
maybee they could also work on a new clipboard that can intercept both gnome and KDE style clips and also the new window managers clips, and integrate them together as one.
just my thoughts.
It’s always amusing to see people’s reactions to these kinds of comments. I’d just like to add a few more things. It sure seems to me that Zeta is attacking a few surface-level things (more drivers and applications) without solving any of the BeOS’s root technical problems (thanks for the list, JBQ!).
Nor is Zeta solving any of the “we have a cool technology but we can’t find a compelling use for it under our implementation” problems. Here are a few examples:
Replicants: ’nuff said.
Queries: they don’t work on non-BFS partitions, which most people will rely upon. I doubt too many people can honestly claim the ability to throw everything on BFS drives, without worrying at all about using that data with other OSes. For example, MP3s are one of the most obvious uses for querying, but I’ll be damned if I have to maintain two separate-but-equal partitions full of my music, or live without music in Windows. Be always approached the problem backwards by allowing limited FAT(32) support; they needed to make BFS drives visible in Windows. Then I could have kept my MP3s and whatnot on them.
Attributes: the support for attributes is still astoundingly incomplete. Not only are new user-defined attributes not automatically added to the appropriate files, but those attributes that actually exist in common data files (ID3 tags, JPEG information, etc.) are not auto-synced. So you end up spending a crapload of time manually syncing files just for the luxury of seeing that information in the Tracker and being able to query. Even with the simplifying Tracker add-ons, I don’t want to have to manually do anything–easy as it may be–every time I pull a photo from my digital camera. That’s just stupid busywork, and there’s no reason whatsoever to require it. Heck, even WinXP’s half-assed approach is far more useful to me. At least it’ll show me the date my camera took a photo without me having to do anything manually.
Generic filetype containers: great, so my movie player can’t distinguish between a streamed movie (i.e. I can play portions of it without having downloaded the whole thing, or a media type where fast-forwarding is a really expensive operation) and a movie for which in which I need every byte to view it. And great, my photo viewer can’t display animated GIFs, or correctly handle layers, or… Abstracting sounds like a neat idea at first, but you end up with least-common denominator functionality. To users who expect their applications to support all major formats anyway, you just provide a sub-par experience because you can’t correctly account for subtle differences among the filetypes.
And, as a final note, I’ll focus on Apple a bit (to avoid the anti-MS crowd for once). You’d have to be pretty deluded to believe that Zeta will be a bigger jump from R5 than OS X 10.0 –> 10.1 was, or 10.1 –> 10.2 was. Or, for that matter, that Panther will probably be. So you have Apple releasing a new OS every year or so, each of which is a bigger jump than Zeta releases (assuming non-exponential engineering growth for YT). So you have Zeta, which is already behind the competition, advancing at a slower rate than the competition. You’d think any remotely logical person could put two and two together, but man, some of these BeOS-heads…
Dano wrote:
I think the teams working on the various “updates, re-releases, revers-engineering” projects, should instead work on two things.
1) working with the XFree86 team in speeding it up, making it more responsive.
2) building a respectable window manager suite, one that can compete with KDE or Gnome in usability but is also flux/blackbox quick.
maybee they could also work on a new clipboard that can intercept both gnome and KDE style clips and also the new window managers clips, and integrate them together as one.
I totally love this type of comments. But I don’t agree. Instead of building a respectable window manager suite or working on XFree86, I think those programmers should come over to my place, do my dishes, and wash my car. I truely don’t see why they’re wasting their time with those hobby projects while clearly I would be better off when they’d just come over and do my dishes and wash my car. I mean, how hard is that?!
List of changes in Zeta (compared to R5Pro)
– new network stack, sockets are file descriptors (needed for POSIX)
– new media kit (multichannel audio)
– support for USB2, pen devices etc
– SVG tracker
– bug fixes
– themable GUI
– v-sync based screen redraws
– auto-update bugfixes
– GCC 3.2 support
– rootless X Server
– and others
There is also a new OpenGL stack in the pipeline, may not make it in R1, but we **might** see it in a point release.
Best of all, the OS has just been defibrilated (for those that dont know, thats the electric shock doctors give to patients to revive them when their heart beats irregularly / stops). The OS and community is in the recovery ward on an intensive care hospital. The OS will soon leave the hospital on its own 2 feet. And that is A GOOD THING.
With OBOS making visible progress every day, the future is no longer bleak for BeOS lovers. Check the GlassElevator mailing list, amazing things are planned for R2. There is still an innovative spirit cooking on this platform. As long as others are still cloning this OS, it cant as obsolete as you say.
And do you know whats sad – most naysayers on this forum will swallow their pride and download a pirated version from somewhere, hoping that the OS really is as good as BeOS lovers claim it is. Dont worry mate, we’ll still accept you into the community, regardless of shortsighted public comments on forums like this one.
In my oppinion, yT doesn’t stand a chance against the three big OS’s (Windows, Linux, MacOSX). Main reasons:
1. No decent Web Browser – Mozilla and Phoenix are slow and do crash very often.
2. No Java Support – Having Java is a must today.
3. No good ICQ Client – ’nuff said.
4. No Filesharing – I don’t know about you, but I need a usable filesharing app. BeShare? Forget it.
5. No good font-rendering – Fonts just look ugly.
Without this problems being solved, I don’t think yT can compete against the others. They need to make Zeta ready for everyday-use. I doubt anybody but old loyal BeOS fans will buy it. I like BeOS, but it simply isn’t up-to-date. yT should concentrate to fix the old problems BeOS had, not add more and more stuff to bloat the OS. At this point, I won’t buy Zeta. Period.
So many of you have fastened on JBQ’s comments like a dog with a bone. You wanna call BeOS dead, cool. No matter how many arguments or what terminology you use to illustrate that opinion, some of us still have faith. You can call us what you like – mistaken, misinformed, misguided, whatever. This supposedly dead O/S just isn’t lying down though, is it? The BeOS forum at osnews is the busiest one – funny that. Many BeOS users experienced a kind of epiphany when first exposed to to this O/S. As for the comment
“Be always approached the problem backwards by allowing limited FAT(32) support; they needed to make BFS drives visible in Windows. Then I could have kept my MP3s and whatnot on them”
why single out just BeOS for this “fault”?
Anyway, I’m happy to have my 6 GB mp3’s in Windows accessible to me at all times in BeOS.
I will support Zeta’s efforts, they’re doing a fine job with limited resources. They need funds to continue & dreamers like me will hopefully open their wallets like I intend to. BeOS runs well on my 3-yr old machine, but I’ll do all I can to support Zeta.
I’m buying a copy of Zeta when it comes out simply for reviewing it — if for nothing then I think the developers need to eat (I know RMS thinks coders don’t have to eat).
BeOS was a great OS by itself. Sure, it had some flaws, pretty fundamental ones even, but it was fast, responsive and useable. It used to crash (although I’ve never seen it “lock up”) and throw me into KDL, but no biggie.
WinXP crashes about 2-3 times a day here. And no, I’m not making this up. I just did a clean reinstall for my WinXP partition last week. It still gives me a bluescreen and then reboots. It could be a piece of my hardware, that’s to blame, but everything works perfectly under Linux. And everything used to work quite nicely under BeOS as well.
I don’t use WinXP often, only to play a bit sometimes and my scanner and digital camera only work under Windows, so that’s another reason as well. There’s hope for the scanner, as it’s based on an old chipset and there’s partial support for it in Sane, but the digital camera has no drivers for it.
JBQ had a point when he listed the figures needed to get Zeta up to date. Eugenia had a point, when she said that there are too many choices in the package.
But I do challenge you to think of it in another way. Think, what you can do with it. Think, what you need to do usually and then think if YellowTAB delivers what you need. Everything except a good web browser seems to be there. One gig memory limit? I don’t have more than 256 on either of my machines and I don’t think most of the target market for Zeta has either. Yes, there’s some fancy sh*t missing in Zeta that was expected in R6 such as a working hardware accelerated OpenGL stack, bugfixes, multiple monitor support, etc. But BeOS was a rather good OS about two years ago even. Add a nice web browser and people are very likely to install it on their older machines.
Now on the other hand. Linux and BSD variants are gaining market share and are practically free. A minimalist Linux install performs quite nicely on old machines. And many people use Linux because of the philosophy behind it. A project like YellowTAB’s Zeta or AmigaOS or MorphOS or AROS or <insert your favourite non-mainstream OS here> will not make it. They will die a horrible death sooner or later.
What I would like to see is a world of choices. A world of open hardware and software standards, so you don’t have to sign an NDA to write a driver for a new piece of hardware, you either write a standards-compliant driver for it or you just download the hardware specs and then do it. But this will not happen. And until this doesn’t happen, alternative and non-mainstream operating systems are pretty much doomed. Linux, BSDs and a few others are surviving because there is no real commercial entity behind it – it’s driven by the community who tinker with it out of their free will mostly. Such communities are hard, if not impossible to destroy, but companies go bankrupt every day. It’s the new philosophy, a brave new world. It’s the way of the future. And it’s time to move on.
>They have not the slightest interest in consumer OSes, not even in >Linux as a consumer OS, proof that they don’t ship nor support >Linux with their IBM PCs and laptops. They only care about Linux as >a guest OS to their mainframes.
That’s not true Eugenia, see:
http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/industry/0,39001143,39134880,00.htm
To have JBQ comment on Zeta has been a real plus for us!
LOL, on Be 5.03, I can’t even set my Firebird preferences without crashing. And Im not a crash-prone person.
I know it’s so very easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but could Zeta be spending their time more wisely “finishing” Dano? I mean bug fixing, making sure BONE is all it can be presently, adding lots of hardware support (which they are doing), but leaving things pretty clean? i mean, we still don’t have a decent browser anyway, so if they just did this polishing work on Dano, especially because they are only 5-6 people, would Zeta be better off, at least right now?
I plan to support Zeta too.
> In fact I find Zeta to look very much like the BeOS MAX releases.
Except it’s legal (the PE licence MAX is bound to never allowed them to sell CDs).
> First is that fonts are something that next to no one uses,
You do use fonts when you read text on your screen, do you ?
> No more than 5 are working in the OS itself (some external people are just working on apps).
And we’d surely welcome JBQ if he ever wants to jump in and do innovations… like porting it to PS2 ? (but first fix all the ugly things).
> Well, in case anyone wants to know what I’d like to see improved in Zeta:
I too would like to see all this in Zeta, however we first need to fix all the things that Be never bothered/got time to fix, from print kit that didn’t have anything innovative, if at all was working, to a BONE that didn’t even have netstat (that one I fixed at least). Wait, you were at Be for quite some time, why didn’t you do all those ? *g*
Feel free to join and fix all this, then you can do innovation.
Noone is a magician, but as they say in a recent film, “We are all here to do what we are all here to do.”
> there may be a new Windows or a new MacOS that may be revolutionary enough to make BeOS look as outdated as a Unix.
Thought Unix was the hype of the moment…
> And then, they were saying that Be’s marketing department was bad… 😉
Mind you, some people really think BeOs has a microkernel
))
> Don’t like it? Close your eyes with your hands, and say to yourself
Beside, there is no spoon anyway :p
> 1. No decent Web Browser – Mozilla and Phoenix are slow and do crash very often.
You could be well surprised someday…
> 2. No Java Support – Having Java is a must today.
Look forward…
> 3. No good ICQ Client – ’nuff said.
Just launch BeIDE and start coding.
> 4. No Filesharing – I don’t know about you, but I need a usable filesharing app. BeShare? Forget it.
There are at the moment at least 5 P2P program being ported to BeOS/Zeta, and I already ported giFT, which now features FastTrack and Gnutella plugins. And you are free to bring others.
> 5. No good font-rendering – Fonts just look ugly.
As it has been explained, this was fixed already.
> What I would like to see is a world of choices. A world of open hardware and software standards, so you don’t have to sign an NDA to write a driver for a new piece of hardware,
I wish it was… To me the specs ought to be part of the manual.
http://www.smartftp.com/localization/projects/dutch/eddyspeedertemp… –> READ
Mind you, what was written in that URL is from April this year. Interesting to see how people don’t look around in order to gain some information about Zeta even though it’s all there! And it’s not caused by a lack of interest because everyone is dying for information.
> Well, in case anyone wants to know what I’d like to see improved in Zeta:
Besides, some of what you want I know are already done, or at least were started.
Feel free to join and fix all this, then you can do innovation.
Wait, you were at Be for quite some time, why didn’t you do all those ? *g*
Feel free to join and fix all this, then you can do innovation.
Just launch BeIDE and start coding.
And you are free to bring others.
the problem with all of these comments is that they would be fine if it was a Linux dev offering these suggestions… but, since we’re talking about a company that intends to make a profit from this work, Yellowtab should free to pay him and anyone else that intends to fix these problems.
Zeta is starting to look more and more like eComstation, which is just providing the base OS/2 + the patches + a ton of freeware or other bundled software. Yellowtab should fix some of these issues and show at least some sort of innovation. otherwise, all they’re going to do is to extend BeOS’s death.
Dano + Bebits drivers and ports != innovation
I had been on the fence about buying Zeta, but as it gets closer I’m not really so sure anymore. I suppose I’ll put the money I would have spent into a FreeBSD or Slackware diskset.
> http://www.smartftp.com/localization/projects/dutch/eddyspeedertemp….. –> READ
> Mind you, what was written in that URL is from April this > year. Interesting to see how people don’t look around in > order to gain some information about Zeta even though
> it’s all there! And it’s not caused by a lack of interest
> because everyone is dying for information.
The link doesn’t work. And you can’t expect people to browse the whole web in order to get such an information. Stuff like this should have been written on yT’s homepage. Seems like they don’t give a damn about updating the site. Heck, Java support isn’t even mentioned in the forums!
[revol@patrick /boot/home]$ netstat -at|grep LISTEN
tcp *:113 *:* LISTEN Vision:the_spirits_within
tcp *:7000 *:* LISTEN BeShare.x86:BeShare.x86
tcp *:5901 *:* LISTEN inetd:inetd
tcp *:23 *:* LISTEN inetd:inetd
tcp *:21 *:* LISTEN inetd:inetd
Funny, I implemented netstat in a non existing network stack for a dead OS… must be some fundamental flaw of the Matrix
“BeOS is dead, so just get over it!”
Such Insight! Marvellous!
I wonder if he’s tried BeOS 🙂
Seriously though, if you don’t like our quaint little world, don’t visit,and go ahead and find some other silly nerd site to visit.
Zeta needs more innovation!
I bet no one has even gotten around to documenting the SVG Tracker so people know how to make their own icons, change icons, convert images to icons, configure thumbnail settings for those images converted to icons, etc, etc. Or even setup a global configuration for those icons, or better yet, designed some half decent ones of their own. I wonder if all the nasty bugs in it have been fixed?
It’s all nice that YT is doing this and all, but from what I’ve seen thus far, it’s less than impressive.I wonder when R1 will be released? December 04? July 05?
SET A DEADLINE YT and ship something, anything. Then provide us with all the minor point releases required.
I have to say I am disappointed with this news item. YellowTab is doing their best to bring BeOS back to the community. Maybe it isn’t all JBQ hoped for, but who gives a rat’s ass? Just because he is your husband and he used to work for Be doesn’t mean his opinion is any more valid than anyone else. BTW, since when did Be deliver everything we hoped for? We were all looking forward to the next release of BeOS, since R5 did NOT include things that were promised. So we all hung around and supported Be, hoping that BONE, OpenGL, Java, etc would be released as PROMISED. But what did we get in return? A company that totally fucked over the community…
-G
> YellowTab is doing their best to bring BeOS back to the community.
You can’t tell if they’re really doing their best. You just can’t.
> Maybe it isn’t all JBQ hoped for, but who gives a rat’s ass?
Well, I do.
> Just because he is your husband and he used to work for > Be doesn’t mean his opinion is any more valid than anyone else.
Partially true. Oppinions are nothing but oppinions, and they differ from each other. His oppinion is as valid as everyone else’s. But since he worked for Be, don’t you think he knows what he’s talking about?
> We were all looking forward to the next release of BeOS, > since R5 did NOT include things that were promised.
Agreed.
> So we all hung around and supported Be, hoping that BONE, > OpenGL, Java, etc would be released as PROMISED. But what > did we get in return? A company that totally fucked over > the community…
The same may happen with yT…
i hope you arent on the internet with those nice ports 21 and 23 open ;-P
peter
“Well, I do. ”
That is fine, but his comments do not deserve to be a news item.
“The same may happen with yT…”
The key word here is “may”. YellowTab may go under, but that is not the same thing as what Be did. Be decided to not communicate at ALL with the community of developers and users. They totally ignored us. And all of this because of some non-existant “internet appliance” crap. The whole time, they left us dangling, hoping for the next release of BeOS, when in reality, they were just biding their time.
-G
I give a rat’s *ss too. Who is in a better position to see this than JBQ? I have the impression that JBQ is basically saying that Zeta has, in many ways departed from what was sort of considered the Be ideal of keeping things clean and polished…and innovation.
LOL, I did file my Firebird bug report, especially because I seemed to be having even more trouble than most with it.
I really do look forward to Zeta. I really want to support them. Despite what all else has been said, I am grateful to them for upgraded hardware support. Of all the Be things that have been difficult over the past 2-3 years, that has been the most trouble and biggest problem.
I can’t believe the amount of negative posts here.
I think everyone is so negative here because it is not an OpenSource project.
Also how much did you expect them to achieve in a short amount of time?
Eugenia’s review was about a beta, was it a release candidate? Am I missing something here? Will this product be released tomorrow? BTW when are we to expect it?
Also what the hell is the difference between Cosmoe and BlueEyedOS? They seem to be implenting the same thing.
I’m still having laugh attacks about those 400 or so fonts…
I mean good god, if people need fonts they usually aldready know where to look.
And if you include fonts in an OS, buy some good quality ones i.e contact agfa/bitstream/adobe/emigre/house industries
>Well since none of those OS’s (w95 and System 7) were
>SMP or had any sort of support for SMP that should not
>be too hard really. Is that supposed to be an achivement
>or something?”
It was an achievement. BeOS did something that no other desktop OS did at the time. Now every desktop OS supports SMP, and every single one does it better than BeOS. Being the first to do something doesn’t imply that your design is the best, and it’s very very hard to not get stuck in your own legacy.
>What “Unix” are you talking about here?
Any Unix that has issues with the speed of its graphics system, and that has issues getting its fonts to look right. Any Unix that can’t manage to have all applications looking the same (regardless of whether the issue is between athena vs motif vs gtk vs qt or between classic vs carbon vs cocoa). Any Unix that doesn’t allow to add arbitrary metadata to any file. Any Unix that has long boot times.
>One gig memory limit? I don’t have more than 256 and I
>don’t think most of the target market for Zeta has either.
Everybody remembers Bill Gates saying “640kB should be enough for everybody” when PCs were about to ship with 32 and 64kB of RAM. Eugenia and I have many machines with a lot more RAM than that. The 2-year-old laptop I’m typing this on already felt limited 2 years ago with its 256MB of RAM. My desktop here has 512MB (it’s 4 years old, in case you wonder). The one I have at work has 1GB and I’m sometimes wondering if I shouldn’t double that. Eugenia’s laptop has 640MB, her cube has 448MB, one of her PCs 768MB and the other has 384MB. I was discussing that matter with Eugenia, and we agreed that there was no reason today to not put at least 1GB of RAM in a PC, and that 2GB didn’t sound that unreasonable. Not being able to use such an amount of RAM today is a very serious issue in my opinion.
>List of changes in Zeta (compared to R5Pro)
Zenja, in the list you give me, there are 3 categories:
-The things that had been done by Be but never got released (it does make a difference for end-user, but says nothing about the pace at which progress is being made today)
-The things that don’t matter as they’re not core issues (SVG icons in tracker, anyone?)
-The things that either don’t work at all, or that are very poorly done, or that are not properly used.
As JLG once said about Win95 being built on top of Win3.1: if you put lipstick and a miniskirt on grandma, she’s still not gonna get dates.
Besides, even if all that was truly imlemented and working, that still wouldn’t be good enough for me to switch back to using BeOS, even part-time. Obviously it would be totally useless at work, and even at home I’d have a hard time, as most of what I do with my PC is digital drakroom stuff (ever heard of silverfast and genuine fractals? I don’t think that anyhing comes close in the BeOS world).
>the OS has just been defibrilated
But BeOS has been in cardiac arrest for so long that it’s gonna need an immediate heart-lung-liver transplant, and you’ll have to pray very hard that it can remember its own name when it wakes up.
>Besides, some of what you want I know are already done,
>or at least were started.
“were started” is the wrong word here. This is beta5 that I’ve seen, not an early development handoff. All the features should have been implemented for a very long time. All the showstoppers should be long gone a this point, as well as almost all major issues, and the only pending changes should be a little bit of polishing here and there, along with a lot of pre-release testing. When you reach beta5, you should be trying very very hard to not change anything at all.
Heh, 400 fonts. Sounds stupid to me too. The most amount of fonts by default they should put in is 20, and those not generally needed by most users (the rest kno where to find it). But fonts is part of the overbundling problem – applications is another. I understand they did some work to bring apps to Zeta, it doesn’t mean they had to bundle it. Place it in a “Extra’s CD” or create ZetaZits (BeBits, ZetaZits, get it?) for it. Heck, go the extra mile and do something like CNR.
I’ve personally about had it with all the “Ex-Be Engineer” comments here. If any of them gave more than a rat’s ass about it, they’d offer help to OBOS. Those that do, I congratulate – They deserve to be listened to. But those that don’t aren’t worth listening to – they obviously don’t give enough of a shit about it to offer any help except flapping their lips, which is no help at all. (And don’t tell me that the OBOS people would refuse your help.)