It seems like only yesterday when due to a combination of hubris, bad business decisions, and pressure from Apple and Microsoft, Be, Inc. went under, with its assets - including the BeOS - bought up by Palm, who now store it in a filing cabinet somewhere in the attic of the company's Sunnyvale headquarters. Right after Be went under, the OpenBeOS project was started; an effort to recreate the BeOS as open source under the MIT license. This turned out to be a difficult task, and many doubted the project would ever get anywhere. We're seven years down the road now, and the persistence is paying off: the first Haiku alpha is nearer than ever.
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Member since:2006-05-26
I have a dual p3-450 440 GX chipset (server version of the more common 440 BX, but uses up to 2 GB ECC RAM) system with 256 MB RAM and a GeForce 5500 PCI video card (my AGP slot died, it seems: keep in mind, I've had this motherboard since January 2000, and it has been struck by lightning indirectly once, and directly once! That is, via ethernet it was zapped by an indirect zap, and once the house was struck directly while it was powered on) and with the GeForce driver available via BeBits, it ran a version of Haiku well over a year ago just fine (Haiku has made MAJOR progress since then) and was snappy. I actually took a copy of the Screen preferences app and took it back to BeOS to make BeOS 5 run my screen at 2048*1536*32 bits 
(BeOS R5 doesn't natively know about resolutions higher than 1600*1200)
Sadly, there's no SCSI driver I'm aware of for Haiku for my dual channel Adaptec controller on board, but if you get an RealTek 8169-based Gigabit ethernet controller (easily available new at a lot of stores for about $20 or less) and common USB or PS/2 mice, you'll get good performance. The one minor thing you might need to concern yourself with that hasn't been mentioned yet? A machine that old will likely have a BIOS limitation for hard drives beyond 128 GB that you'd be advised to get fixed before installing on it (Seems PC's have this every few years to deal with 
)
Member since:2006-01-27
The one minor thing you might need to concern yourself with that hasn't been mentioned yet? A machine that old will likely have a BIOS limitation for hard drives beyond 128 GB that you'd be advised to get fixed before installing on it (Seems PC's have this every few years to deal with )
Well, an older computer probably already has a smaller hard drive, although hard drive failures were much more common in the past than today.
So three solutions to this 'problem':
1) portion of hard drive remains unused
2) upgrading BIOS or using hard drive tools sometimes allow for larger drives
3) there are plenty of 40GB-80GB hard drives available new today
"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:
2006-01-27
I'll be happy if it runs on an old PII/PIII computer, but with new apps and better drivers. Those 90s machines are readily available, either for free or very cheap (I've restored several and given them away recently, maybe 8 machines total in the last two months). I'd love to set up these old "freebie" machines dual-booting Windows and Haiku, or skipping Windows all together.