Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 14th Nov 2011 21:32 UTC, submitted by cristoper
It's no secret OSNews has a bit of a thing for the BeOS. I can only speak for myself, obviously, but relatively speaking, BeOS was the best operating system ever made. The man who started all this was Jean-Louis Gassee, former executive at Apple, who founded Be, Inc. in 1991. In the second half of the '90s, Apple was looking for a replacement for its heavily outdated Mac OS, after several failed attempts at developing its own - it came down to 
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RE[4]: Comment by Actinium
by transputer_guy on Wed 16th Nov 2011 01:10
in reply to "RE[3]: Comment by Actinium"
Member since:2005-07-08
I suspect most of the long time BeOS fans would agree with the decision that Apple took and with the superiority of the Next framework at least for business use, it just hadn't been affordable to the masses.
It wasn't obvious back then that the turnaround would work out so well and that Apple would outdo just about all consumer companies. At that point both companies were going nowhere.
The best that BeOS could have hoped for was as a niche alt OS platform, but there's no real money in that.
RE[4]: Comment by Actinium
by gfx1 on Wed 16th Nov 2011 16:14
in reply to "RE[3]: Comment by Actinium"
Member since:2006-01-20
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/25/13 0:45 UTC
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 23:59 UTC
The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 22:33 UTC
Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Linked by Howard Fosdick on 05/24/13 21:41 UTC
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 14:44 UTC
"Sources have described iOS 7 as 'black, white, and flat all over'. This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements." I couldn't be happier.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 23:22 UTC
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:04 UTC
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:01 UTC
"In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 17:52 UTC
"The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 22:23 UTC
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.More News »
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2009-03-17
Actually NeXT was doing relatively well with their WebObjects stuff. A lot of Apple's focus on the internet/client-server/services stuff comes from that.
There is also the fact that Apple did not buy the NeXTStep OS, as much as they bought the whole company; that brought one of the best the technical staffs in the industry at the time to Apple, and of course they got Jobs and his management team.
The tech from NeXT actually satisfied exactly what Apple needed: a developer-friendly, multiuser/multitasking OS, which was scalable from the desktop to the server.
BeOS and BE were simply not in the same league: a fledging product that had gathered ZERO traction, mainly because it had no real value proposition whatsoever. The amount of work/time/investment needed to get BeOS to do what Apple needed (scalability, stable APIs, multiuser, secure, network stack, etc) would have probably surpassed what they ended up paying for NeXT to begin with. And they would not have gotten neither Jobs nor the NeXT technical team.
Anything has potential really, so that is irrelevant... In the end apple wasn't really saved because of a single specific choice in the direction of their OS. Sure it did not hurt having OSX as an offering, but having Jobs at the top and the reorientation he performed turning Apple into a consumer product company is what made the difference.
Actually, kudos to Gasee for recognizing that.
Edited 2011-11-15 23:59 UTC