Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 12th Nov 2012 15:56 UTC
Can you believe they've come this far by now? Once known as OpenBeOS, Haiku today announced the release of the fourth alpha for Haiku R1. It seems like only yesterday when BeOS died and OpenBeOS rose form its ashes, generating a new hope among the legions of avid BeOS fans. Now, almost twelve years later, we've hit the fourth alpha.
Thread beginning with comment 542327
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
Be had a hard time getting developers to work with the OS back then, and I can't imagine how hard it would be to convince them today. I really can't see a future for Haiku in terms of application support. Which makes it quite pointless for me where I am now (doesn't make it pointless for everyone though).
Luckily, for quite a few people their PC is now mostly a WWW terminal, plus the basics of ~office suite, media player, IM, BT. Haiku should cover such needs relatively easily, eventually.
But I doubt it has much chance at mobile. First, it's a very desktop-focused OS. Second, that battle is probably already won, or nearly so (it's an open question if there's really a place for a third mobile ecosystem - and if yes, that will be probably MS...)
Member since:2005-07-09
Luckily, for quite a few people their PC is now mostly a WWW terminal, plus the basics of ~office suite, media player, IM, BT. Haiku should cover such needs relatively easily, eventually.
I think we will see a majority of the "basic users" moving to tablets in the next few years.
But I doubt it has much chance at mobile. First, it's a very desktop-focused OS. Second, that battle is probably already won, or nearly so (it's an open question if there's really a place for a third mobile ecosystem - and if yes, that will be probably MS...)
Yes, there are two leaders in the mobile world at the moment. But I don't think that it's impossible to gain market share there. People are not looking at phones and tablets the same way they look at desktops. In fact, they seem to be switching between ecosystems without much thought about it as long as the basic apps are there. And getting the basic apps on a mobile device at this stage is much easier than on the desktop given the simple nature of them.
I don't really see how haiku is any more desktop oriented than Windows 8 is. Sure, you'd need to remake the app server and add the hardware support. But apart from that it should make a fine base for a mobile os I think.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"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.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
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."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
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."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"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."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"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.More News »
Sponsored Links
Member since:
2005-07-09
I will always have a soft spot for BeOS. It was my main OS for several years and it has taken me quite some time to "get over" that it didn't make it.
And I'm impressed that the Haiku developers have been able to replicate it so well. Really good job!
That said, Be had a hard time getting developers to work with the OS back then, and I can't imagine how hard it would be to convince them today. I really can't see a future for Haiku in terms of application support. Which makes it quite pointless for me where I am now (doesn't make it pointless for everyone though).
However, if anyone has the desire to make Haiku a popular OS, then now is the time. It could be a perfect foundation for a mobile OS and it is quite possible for a dedicated team to catch up with the others.
I'm not saying that taking over the world is the purpose of Haiku. Just saying that if someone wants it to be big, then now is pretty much the last chance.