Magnussoft, the company now responsible for development on Zeta, has announced it is accepting pre-orders for Zeta 1.21. This new release will include multi-user support, will be built with GCC4, among other improvements. Bernd Korz's weblog contains more information. Korz was (is?) the CEO of YellowTAB, the company that started Zeta. Read on for a short editorial on this announcement.
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Member since:2005-07-06
I think I disagree a bit on the hardware front - honestly, I remember far more issues with, say Mandrake 7 than I ever anticipate with PCLOS/Mandriva/Buntu/Fedora.
Remember winmodems? Awkward X configs? Hell, nowadays you can be pretty sure your hardware will just work, configure itself, and make life easier.
While yes, some pace has accelerated, I think hardware is much more consolidated nowadays.
Oh, and as for apple...didn't they always just support a limited set of hardware?
I dunno. I agree with most of what you said 
Member since:2005-07-06
Indeed, it used to be worse. What I really mean is that in the past I don't remember so much hardware being released and upgraded so often. So how could small operating systems keep up? And indeed when I try them I prefer VMware.
As to Apple yes, they have always supported their own hardware. What I mean is that they have called themselves out of "the hardware competition", something that small operating system couldn't do, because I very much doubt people would buy a SkyOS PC, or a Zeta, Haiku or Syllable one.
Edited 2006-09-11 04:20
Member since:2005-12-31
Linux success story will be difficult for Zeta (agree), but Haiku will be able to attract developers. How many? I can't say for certain, but hopefully enough.
#1 Haiku OS is free & open source. Users can download & try it out. It will also attract developers.
#2 Any open source Linux drivers can be used to an extent to help create Haiku drivers.
#3 Open source Linux applications will also be portable to Haiku.
Many companies make programs for Microsoft because of:
1. Microsoft's OSes are used by the majority of computer users.
2. Companies charge & make profits with software made for WINDOWS (I'm not sure if any companies make applications for Linux, because they would have to compete with the free versions out there).
#4 Developers care to be part of a bigger OS, like Linux or Windows (or maybe Mac OS X) because these are mainstream. Linux probably didn't have many developers in the beginning either, until they released their 1st version. Haiku will have to come out with 1.0 before it starts getting attention and it may be with a later version before developers jump on board, but now Haiku will have to compete with Linux/BSD too (plus Windows & Mac OS X).
#5 Haiku & Zeta together is the answer for getting more people interested in BeOS once again. Especially if they market themselves well & make news stories.
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Repeating Linux success story will be pretty difficult.
1)Linux was/is free and open source; this means that users will happily downoad it and give it a try. Developers have been attracted by the thousands.
2) The hardware situation has changed in recent years. Even Linux is struggling to keep up with the very fast pace. Apple has given up althogeter and will support only a limited set of hardware.
3)Software. People have been spoiled with thousands of applications, often of very high quality. Only Microsoft has managed to fully satisfy its customers by attracting plenty of developers/software companies.
Linux and Apple have plenty of apps, and yet people keep complaining, because they miss their Microsoft-only favorites.
4)Attracting enough developers will be extremely difficult. I used to believe it would be more difficult for closed source projects like SkyOS or Zeta, but it seems that Haiku or Syllable aren't doing a lot better from that point of view. Why? Who knows, maybe far too many OSS projects, and small operating systems might not be among the most attractive.