Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 23rd Oct 2008 19:58 UTC, submitted by FreeGamer
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:2006-01-26
How do we know Haiku kernel is as good as BeOS kernel? We dont have the BeOS code?
That's what benchmarks are for
Already, the Haiku kernel performs many operations faster than BeOS did.
Often times reading the code does not reveal its relative performance, that actually takes real-world tests anyhow. The "performance" of BeOS wasn't necessarily a result of any special coding tricks that only Be, Inc. coders knew, but rather certain design decisions that Haiku also follows in many cases.
I think if there was ever a comparison made between Haiku's code and BeOS' code, we'd find that the Haiku code might be cleaner and better-written largely because it's FOSS, and built from the ground up to re-implement the same functionality as BeOS.
The kernel Haiku forked from was NewOS, which was written by an ex-Be engineer originally.
Member since:2007-01-22
Member since:2006-09-30
The BeOS kernel has really poor performance compared to even old Linux. It just had better design in some places (that Linux still didn't pick up), and so has the upper layers. The overall multithreading gives the impression it's faster, while the kernel is much slower.
Some parts of the BeOS kernel had gross hacks that allowed it to take shortcuts but wouldn't scale to today hardware.
Haiku has already much better code quality overall because it received a lot more peer review than BeOS ever had.
Member since:2007-07-27
Ok. Thanx for your help. Ive heard lots about Haiku. Maybe Haiku on the desktop and Solaris on the home server with ZFS would be a nice combo.
My fear was that BeOS kernel was super engineered because everyone says it is so good and now we try to imitate it with Haiku. But what says that the imitation takes the same good design decisions as BeOS? Haiku is compatible, but it could maybe have a bad design which makes it inferior to BeOS. But benchmarks reveals that Haiku is as quick as BeOS on the same hardware. This means that Haiku should not be that bad as I feared.
Just because BeOS was super, does that automatically imply that Haiku is super too? No it doesnt. But now my fears are qualmed. Thanx guys. It will be very interesting to try out Haiku under VirtualBox!
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:33 UTC
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
Linked by Anonymous on 06/18/13 22:26 UTC
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:25 UTC
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:45 UTC
"I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:32 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)".
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:58 UTC
"The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:52 UTC
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 21:03 UTC
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 20:46 UTC
"And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 17:32 UTC
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.More News »
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Member since:
2007-07-27
Ok thanx for explaining this. One more question. The BeOS kernel might be totally totally different from the Haiku kernel. Is that a problem? We know that BeOS had great performance. The Haiku kernel, could it be built less optimal and have bad performance but still obey the BeOS api and therefore be binary compatible? Could BeOS kernel be super engineered whereas the Haiku kernel could be poorly engineered and have terrible performance? Could it be so? How do we know Haiku kernel is as good as BeOS kernel? We dont have the BeOS code?