OSNews

Excellent piece, and always great to hear from Scot Hacker. "Anyone who has ever spent time with BeOS is forever spoiled...". That line really hits home; I'm always booting back into BeOS just to experience it, live it, - enjoy it - again. *sniff*

I'm never buying into Apple though. Doing so would make *me* feel dirty. Their hideous marketing, their userbase, their image....I guess it just isn't me. I have strong aversions to being robbed blind, too. The software and hardware would have to be 5x better than it currently is for me to even consider screwing around with their hardware, the high prices and severe lack of choice (others may disagree with me on this point, but hell, I admit it, I'm spoiled with software and cheap hardware and utmost flexibility when choosing components, and I ain't turning away from it all for OSX). I can understand lots have no interest in what I hold near and dear, though.

Now for zealots of all shapes and sizes to dissect Scot's article and rip it to shreds. OS discussion always brings with it lively debate, name-calling and abuse. In light of this, I'm preparing for some cheap entertainment

Good article. It really reflects most of my thoughts, too. In fact, I was already thinking of submitting a similar article to OSNews, but well, Scott made it first and he made it better.

>"Anyone who has ever spent time with BeOS is forever spoiled...". That line really hits home;

Exactly!!! When I wrote that piece on MacOSX some months ago, writting that I was not happy with the speed of 10.1, I was flamed, badly, by the MacOS lovers. But the above sentence REALLY explains why I was *expecting* "more" from MacOSX. If Apple wants me to switch, it will have to have the speed of BeOS. Why? Because this is what I am looking for! I am indeed spoiled by BeOS' highly responsive UI. I wish all OSes were as nicely optimized in this particular feature.

Damn you, Scot Hacker. I am looking at the balance of my savings account and already imagining it with about 3000 dollars less. OS X seems to be the start of a dream come true - the solid Unix underpinnings with a user friendly interface. By OS X1, or whatever it's called, I bet I own a Mac.

I have used the BeOS for some time, but I agree, it now feels ancient and worthless because most of my PC-time is spent writing for and surfing the web. Thanks a lot Scot, you're breaking me! </sarcasm, if you didn't know>

3000 dollars less?

You will soon spend $10000 on the software if you go for Mac.

That was a very good article.

I'd also like to point out that OS X is FreeBSD (3.2 I think) compatible. This is very important for porting UNIX applications to work on Mac OS X, because it gives a frame of reference to what apps were compatible with in the past, and how they compare to how OS X is designed. If your UNIX app compiled and ran on FreeBSD, it should also work in MacOS X.

Bravo Scot, excellent, well-balanced article!

This sort-of makes me wish I had the ~ $4300 Cdn I'd need to buy a "reasonable" bare-bones G4 box (since I can get RAM and disk MUCH cheaper than the Apple Store). I also think of OS X as the best desktop OS out there. It's just a pity it won't run on any of my hardware, even my Mac (a UMAX s900 dp180 clone, may I be cast out of the Land of Jobs forevermore).

I'm so sick of things not working in x86 land. Even something as basic as cut-n-paste is a total mishmash in Linux (also running Mandrake; 8.1, using KDE ask my desktop), and Windows is so bloody fragile... yeah, I'm running 98SE, but I "can't" upgrade to Windows 2000 or XP. My boxes are dual-processor, and I have SoundBlaster Live! cards; Creative has been unable to write SMP-safe drivers for their own hardware, despite Be's and Lunix's success in this area. And besides, I'm not convinced that 2000 or XP would solve any of my problems without introducing a myriad of new ones to contend with; most of my current problems are driver-related, since I mostly use my home computers for playing games these days.

I used my main x86 box all Friday afternoon (worked at home), no problems. Turn it on Sunday... oh look, Windows goes black instead of showing me the desktop. Cute. I don't have to time to screw with this crap, AGAIN, since the same thing happened a couple of weeks ago. Then, I'd re-installed my Radeon video drivers.

This morning, I turned the box on... it won't even give me video for POST. Hooray.

I like to think a Mac would behave better. $4300 Cdn is a lot to test that theory.

And yes, I know you can get "cheaper" iMac systems; I'm a "power user" who does a lot of actual work on his systems, in addition to playing games. I'm not downgrading from a nice 19" monitor to an iMac.

I should just throw out all this crap and invest in a GameCube for interactive entertainment. Dunno what I'll use for email and surfing, but hey, I'm sure I'd cope.

- chrish

...really good article. I found it really interesting and learned a lot.

On a related note I had a good wander round some techy shops at the weekend and found myself wishing I could afford a Mac, with a nice cinema screen. Those monitors are georgeous. A brief look at OSX left me with the impression that it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and that was only OSX.0.3 (or something).

BTW, do any BeOS users know what Scot is referring to RE. that workaround for the ctrl-tab app switching thing? I'd like to be able to switch between the current and the last used apps - like, as he suggests, Windows or Linux.

Cheers,
Mike

well, all these prices you guys are throwing around seem a little steep. Granted, spending $3K will get you a dual 800G4 w/ dual video and a superdrive, those who are on budget could easily find them on ebay for much less, I would suggest the AGP or 'Sawtooth' variety of G4 or PowerBook G4 to love on OS X with. Better yet, keep saving, word has it G5s are just around the corner, look for G4 prices to drop pretty fast, even though they seem to sell as many as they (Apple) can make, even at "all those crazy prices". And yes, this was a great article, I used to use Be, I would boot to it from a zip disk and it would run circles around my Mac OS at the time, nice. There is something to this ever-so-asthetically pleasing OS X that makes them all look 'generic' IMHO, maybe it's the vector graphic PDF based quartz display, but elegant has new meaning.

Interesting to read a review of OSX that doesn't include the obligatory comparison to Windows Xtra Pricey. But a few small points:

1. "Hey" was the creation of a guy in Hungary, Attila something-or-other. It was never part of BeOS itself AFAIK. Before hey came out, the only way to "script" in BeOS was to use C++ and dig deep into the API. So to compare hey scripting to that in OSX is not really fair.

2. There were a few BeOS apps that didn't play by the rules. I recall Mail-it as having some individual ideas about UI, and there was another mail client that eschewed the standard email store in favour of a shared cache with its own Windows port - sorry, the name escapes me.

3. BeOS also had some really bright ideas, like desktop Replicants, that somehow never caught on with developers. Replicants were like Active Desktop components, only better. But the few that were produced were buggy (there was one, which shall remain nameless, that turned out to be the most effective way to crash BeOS) and as so often in the history of BeOS, we are talking of Unrealised Potential.

4. In the same way, it is doubtful that the average user really ever used the power BFS had, since creating new attributes was basically a command-line affair (later on, there was a utility to do it in a GUI, but by then the end was near). I never did figure out how to make an attribute contain a graphic, though I knew it could be done.

Like Scot, I am a refugee from BeOS. But I ended up running Mandrake-Linux. Load up GIMP, OpenOffice and a lightweight window manager (I favour XFce) and you have all your day-to-day software. At no cost except online charges to your ISP. Journalling filesystems? Three to choose from (though admittedly without the extensible attributes). Yes, it takes a level of effort and dedication, but my Linux desktop works the way I want it to.

Also, the catching-up stage of Linux development is drawing to a close and best-of-breed apps are slowly coming to the fore. IMHO, Galeon is the finest browser available, on any platform. Using anything else is *painful* now. MP3 and video apps? I'll have to give you that one, though Linux has more than enough audio apps for the average user. How relevant video editing is to the average computer user is a debate we can get into some other time ...

Out here in the third world, Apple's hardware (when you can get it) is also ludicrously overpriced compared to the equivalent computing power in a no-name-brand, no-OS-preloaded white box with Taiwanese MB and Singaporean HD that will happily run Linux. Like, between two and three times the price. Of course, Apple can't be held responsible for exchange rates, but it is a factor in buying decisions. If I can buy two, almost three, computers for the price of one, no amount of sensual curves and lickable UI will make up for it.

Furthermore, I have no intention of being held hostage once again by the fortunes of a far-away American corporation. Apple was close to bankruptcy not so long ago and had to be bailed out by Microsoft, remember?

But if Mandrake goes under, I'll just switch to SuSe. Heck, if *every* commercial Linux distro maker goes to the wall, there will still be Debian. In this sense, Linux is immortal. That should be a powerful factor to any ex-BeOS user ...

In all a very useful report from the front, especially for those trying decide which way to go at this choice-filled time.

The reported slowness of OS X, even on a "supercomputer" is certainly disappointing. I do not have much experience with BeOS, but, heck, as Scott describes it the perceived speediness of the system sounds worse than Win95 or 98lite on my 200 mhz machine. Hopefully the optimization has just begun, but I cannot see it being anything but a looooooong process. [BTW, when I fooled around with a BestBuy 1 ghz floor model with XP installed I was appalled by how slowly the shell operated. The lastest version of Explorer must be a beast. Presumably an alternative shell like Litestep can be substituted in as with Win9x.]

The lack of a freeware/cheapware tradition in the Apple community is a big negative for me. I love trying and fooling around with all the stuff that is available for Windows and *nix, seeing if there is an improved experience available over any of the current items in my toolkit. To each his/her own.

Unfortunately despite being billed (by Scot himself AFAICT) as a personal adventure some parts of this article are obviously just researched rather than experienced, and not very well researched at that

This means that I have to wonder when reading the parts that are obviously written as a literal recounting of actual events whether in fact Scot just made all of it up, and THAT means I might as well stop reading - I can do my own research and get better results, I was along for the personal experience, the little insights that you get when YOU try something rather than reporting what otheres have said.

Scot, when you don't have anything to say about a feature because you didn't try it, or don't understand it, just don't write anything. You're not being paid to fill column inches, so it doesn't matter if the report is artificially "well rounded" by offering guesses or second hand opinion instead of experience.

>I have to wonder when reading the parts that are obviously written as a literal recounting of actual events whether in fact Scot just made all of it up

Can you please mention some of these points/parts? Because your comment is unfounded so far, and makes me believe that you made it all up just to create a diversed discussion over here.

For the record, MS bought 500K shares of non voting stock back then, hardly bailing out the company. And for that, as noted in this article, meaning, when you need Office you need Office, we received full support in the way of Office 98 for the Mac, a necessity for the Mac OS to survive (sadly) and helped with MS and the DOJ. Funny thing is, those shares more than doubled in value with the advent of the iMac and then split, yet another wise business move by MS! Apple has 5 Bill. in the bank, I don't see them going under for a few weeks now too bad about 3rd world costs, hopefully things will change, but you can attest to the author's article and a commentor that PC hardware can and will be a total nightmare, and some of us are more concerned with output then tinker/tweaker hyper geek!

I have a b&w G3 450 i'm looking to get rid of (mail me for details). I know its not a for-sale board, but hey.. i bought it for the same reason you guys are talking about. I basically wanted to check out OS X on my own. I must say I love it, and that people really are going overboard on the speed thing. Its very responsive, though i had to add a bunch of ram to get it there.. it is. At any rate, its really silly, as it boiled down to that i simply couldn't get used to the way the menu bar up top worked. This was my first foray into mac's, so i wasn't quite used to it. While it is an excellent OS, i lost interest.

Heck, my BeOS box is not gonna change until something better comes along (~1.5 years, OBOS?). Hopefully I won't get lonely, and if I do there is always BeShare.

I was at an Apple store playing with OS-X the other day. I thought the speed was roughy equal to WINXP. Both seem to be a little bogged down in the interface department. OS-X impressed me though, I severely dislike XP interface, but OS-X felt great. And I has always hated the MacOS.

The problem is price. Macs are full of things I down't want and cost way too much. For instance, the Harmon Kardon speaker looks cool and sounds better than any other case speaker, but I am going to use my own speakers. I don't need a DVD writer, which came bundled with high end G4's. I don't want integrated sound, soundblaster thank you. I would also like to choose my own HD, video card, and CD-RW, and I do want more than 4 PCI slots. And isn't it time they went to DDR and a faster bus.

Basically I want a barebones Mac, for about $1000 I can get a barebones Athlon MP 1900 dual setup. Now I don't think it is too much to ask Apple to produce a dual G4 barebones box that is less than double that.

I loved the G4s except for the price, even Sun has much lower prices now. Apple has a near perfect OS, instead of selling it to the Zealots willings to pay for Mac hardware because they love the industrial design or they have been using macs since the 80's. They should aim for the whole market, half the price and 10 times the sales. Apple's market share can be doubled quite easily.

It's awfully ironic that the Mac bashing Scot talked about is taking place right here in this very thread. I also find it ironic that everyone who has chosen to bash Apple thus far has had their facts seriously twisted. Before opening your traps, do some research.

Mr. Hacker mentions the "mysterious" lack of support for PNG (Portable Network Graphic) files in Internet Explorer has one of its two major shortcomings. Actually, PNG support is there in IE, the application is just shy about the fact. Extremely shy. In denial, actually.

To fix IE so that it will display PNG images, open IE's Preferences dialog and go to the File Helpers pane. Click on the "Extension" word at the top of the scrolling list to sort the list by the file extension and then scroll down to ".png". There are two entries that cover PNG files which can be edited with the Change button. Change the pop-up list in the "Handling" section to "View in Browser" from whatever it may be. Voila! Instant PNG support.

I don't know if this pseudo lack of support for PNG is a deliberate political choice on Microsoft's part or simply an oversight. It is possible that they are avoiding support for (and thereby slowing widespread adoption of) a format for which Apple owns at least one patent... but that would be a wild-assed conspiracy minded speculation on my part.

Gibbons Burke

I just wanted to point out to madcow about Mac OS X core audio capabilities.
Almost zero latency. Doug Wyatt is (was) coding midi right into the OS, the new audio and sequencing apps will all use the midi layer, all your intstruments will show automaticly.Just awesome stuff. When Cubase,Motu, Nuendo get their apps into X, it'll be sweet.

Now if your talking soundblaster just for audio input, I hear you there. The mini plug is lacking ,but you can put soundblaster into the G4 also.
OR, mLan will do audio over firewire.Motu has an X 'box' out there already.
The Audio aspect of X is very exciting.

Everything in his "The Bad and The Ugly" totally destroys Mac OS X
for me. I'll put it in simpler terms, the IQ of the OS is measured
by the number of buttons on the mouse. MacOS has 1. Windows 2+wheel,
Unix 3 + wheel. So, Unix/Linux is the smartest.

I would suggest that readers go over to http://shacker.livejournal.com/ and check out the "real" face of OS X....there is NO SUCH thing as a PERFECT OS ( BeOS came close...but not! )...


cheers all,

but there is GNU/GNU-Darwin ^^

I hope that it will get developed a bit more...


btw my GNU/linux with Xfree86+DRi and e16 and my usual apps (gimp, licq, mozilla, the other gtk and gnome apps) still make me happyand QNX is getting better too
(actually I'm waiting to test the next QNX release)

Even though i am posting from WinXP, i find myself being dumbed down and lost in a computer world that just has to be the dark ages. Nothing is exciting anymore. XP is awfully slow on my 1.4Ghz Athlon (Ooh, nice graphs on those benches)

Got 10.1.1 at work, playing with it all day long and to be frank, it's not really that exciting. The "oooooh!" wears of on you after 30 minutes when you are actually going to start doing something.

I do not think i will ever witness something as great as BeOS was, just a shame the potential was lost right at sunset.

Scot - Goot luck whereever you are. Hope you'll jump back in the pool with us once again in the future

The HFS+ file system can handle files > 4Gb. If an application cannot, then it needs to be revised to use the new large-file APIs that were introduced back in MacOS 9.

"1. "Hey" was the creation of a guy in Hungary, Attila something-or-other. It was never part of BeOS itself AFAIK. Before hey came out,
the only way to "script" in BeOS was to use C++ and dig deep into the API. So to compare hey scripting to that in OSX is not really fair."

Hey itself is just an extension to scripting in BeOS. The scripting support comes with the OS.

"2. and there was another
mail client that eschewed the standard email store in favour of a shared cache with its own Windows port - sorry, the name escapes me. "

i.Scribe is the name, and the idea behind it was to make a cross platform(Windows<->BeOS) e-mail client. So it's perfectly understandable that it uses it's own format

"3. BeOS also had some really bright ideas, like desktop Replicants, that somehow never caught on with developers. "

MacOS also had something similar(I don't remember what they called it). But it went away because so few people were actually using it.

"4. In the same way, it is doubtful that the average user really ever used the power BFS had"

Any BeOS user who has ever used BeMail has also experienced the power of BFS. I think the main reason why regular people hasn't bothered trying to use meta data in BFS even more is simply because they aren't used to having it, it's an unfamiliar concept, they are used to having some special software to store and manage all their information. And I think the same goes for replicants.

This article is written very well.

I run BeOS (and W2K) on my P4 and know its advantages and drawbacks. I have run Mac OS X since last March (all versions up to 10.1) and like it. However, it is still incomplete. I think Mac OS X will be my main OS in 2003 or so, on a really fast G5 or G6 machine, and I hope Mac OS X will then have Quartz rendering done by the graphics cards.

Since when I have added more RAM, giving my Mac 672 MBytes of physical RAM (to be able to run Mac OS X without any page-outs), I enjoy running Mac OS 9.1 more than ever: Not a single OS crash or freeze within one week of virtually constant use. I have used ResEdit to increase RAM allocation by modifying the SIZE resources of all system components (extensions, control panels and faceless background programmes), and all application programmes as well in the Finder. Obviously, this generous RAM allocation prevents software from violating memory-space boundaries in RAM, making a memory-protection scheme like in BeOS, W2K or Mac OS X unnecessary. Mac OS 9.1 is now so fast and crash-free that there is no need to run Mac OS X on my Mac which doesn't support my printer, my graphics card, CD-R toasting on my SCSI burner and numerous other functions I'm used to having available under Mac OS 9.1.

OSNews is slowing down a bit under the /. strain, so I've mirrored the article <a href="http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/beos_osx/">here.

I actually went out and bought the full MacOSX.1 I thought the $119 I paid was a bargain compared to the what a full non-upgrade price for WinXP would cost. I found a utility that allowed me to install it on my 7300/200 Mac. Very slow, but I love it! I am ready to fork over money for a new mac, but they don't have a machine that suits me. I don't want a n iMac. I want a tower with a G4. I want to spend no more than $1500. The only thing close is a G4 with the EDUCATIONAL discount, at around $1200. Thats a stripped down 533MHz, bare CD-rom, 128 meg machine. I know the G4 is very powerful, but 533?? I can go get a dell 1.4GHz for $999 with no discount with a CD-RW or DVD. I guess I will keep waiting till they have a model more for me. An iBook is almost a better deal. I guess they make up the price on the OS in the hardware. One things for sure... there will be NO .Net, passport, or WinXP product activation in my future !!!
Great article Scot. i enjoyed reading it.

* Hacker says that you have to learn AppleScript to automate OSX. Not exactly. AppleScript is a rich, robust system, and worth learning, but it's not the only path available to you. Apparently there are hooks for scripting aspects of the OS via good old Perl, and when those Aqua hooks fail you, it's possible to get pretty far down in the BSD layer with any of the old Unix languages that you'd care to use -- Perl, Python, Tcsh, Sh, Sed, Awk, whatever. Not all of these have high level access to applications like Office or Photoshop, but it looks like that's where things are going.

*Cmt+O opens applications from the Finder!? Wow! It drives me nuts that the Enter key renames (yes, that's a lousy decision), and I'd resigned myself to shuffling over to the mouse or, more often, just staying in the Terminal all the time and typing "open /Applications/Foo.app" all the time. Not as slick, but much faster than the mouse. I'll have to remember the Cmd+O thing, that'll save me a lot of time, thanks...

* I don't like it, but I'm betting that the HFS+ filename case respecting / insensitivity is an intractable issue. Apple has already had to patch the installed copy of Apache so that it wouldn't get tripped up by this, and people have had trouble with installations of Perl's LWP library installing a "HEAD" program that clobbered the installed "head" program. You can switch to UFS, but this raises other problems (like for example I guess you can't install Classic applications in that case). I really can't think of a good way forward here -- both UFS and HFS have big problems with OSX, and neither of them is as slick as BFS was. I almost wonder if, rather than keeping the old HFS or adopting the old UFS, if a new layout can be established that respects HFS requirements (forked files, for example), is case sensitive, maintains user/group level file controls, and ideally brings in something like Be's file attributes. That's probably a huge amount of work though, and getting it to be backwards compatible with everything (Classic applications, Carbon & Cocoa applications, and BSD programs) might ultimately be unworkable. Too bad if that's the case, and score another point for the late, great, BFS...

Hey, sorry to bring it up, but the AmigaOS was what spoiled it for me...

Why the obsession with installing mySQL on every OS you run? mySQL hiccuped several times while I read this article. Worse, it's missing features we should expect in an RDBMS. It would seem that even BFS is better than mySQL as a database. I would be more satisfied with MS SQL Server on Win2k than I would with mySQL on anything. Try Postgres, and be as discriminating with database software as you are with OSes.

Sorry for the doublepost -- I got a MySQL error, hit reload, then saw two copies of my post. Lemme guess -- broken PHPnuke-ness?

Anyway...

One interesting aspect of OSX, as noted by http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/newsletters/20011126.html">... over on O'Reilly's site, is that there are now two major cliques of Mac users -- the oldschool folks that are clinging to OS9 and all its trappings, and a new breed of OSX users, many of whom are coming over from alternative systems like Linux & BeOS. The culture of the oldschool Mac users might tend more towards more expensive software, but that's not nearly so much the case for the more recent users, who more often than not are used to free & open source software. Admittedly, a lot of this stuff lives in the Terminal, and that's not what everyone wants, but certainly you can get a huge amount of software for cheap or free.

Hint: install http://fink.sourceforge.net/">Fink packages" rel="nofollow">http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/index.php">packages you'd like to have. Not everything is building cleanly (a lot of people are using it, but I can't get Gimp to install), but there are hundreds of applications that will build with a simple "fink install foo" command. Nice.

Just curious. Since it is <a href="http://www.freebsd.org">free.

I have loved getting John Siracusa's take on OS X at ars technica and this article is just as great.... I know how OS X stacks up to several Windows flavors based on daily exposure - it was nice to read about another OS that tries (tried?) to be more.

I have to respond to all of the posts about the cost of Apple hardware. You do get more for your money in many ways. Plug+play has been a staple of the Mac world for years now. Computers last longer and upgrade fairly easy. And, if you don't have to have the top-of-line machine you can get stuff at nice prices - my EOL dual processor G4 450 is a screamer and it was like $1300. This computer won't feel slow for years to come...

Well just wanted to let everyone know that I do have my new Ti-Book G4 and loving it, though I am mad that Apple has now decided to release one with combo drive 2 weeks after I got mine... I complained, but no luck winning their sympathy! Anyways being that some of you know that I work around various computers running various things like Windows, Linux and Solaris. I spent my first day back at work on sunday getting all my network settings and shared drives and printers working seamlessly, I can admit that Apple has made this simple with Mac OS X 10.1!! A few guys I work with are now using Windows XP on their new and/or old laptops and are having some trouble connecting to various printers and/or Linux servers running printers and shared drives, and even the case of properly browsing and accessing our own Windows NT servers, though I am not going to give them grief (though they had sort of chuckled when I said I would get a PowerBook, because they thought I was wasting my time) I am fully connected with all required networking items like shared drives on both the Windows and Unix servers for everything I need, my XP buddies, still working on it and have been since the release of XP. I imagine they will find a fix soon, but I won in this arena of compatibility, I am printing to printers they can't and see shared drives that they can't either. I can admit it felt good at the end of the day!

Scot wrote an excellent article and I have always liked his opinions on things. I miss BeOS as well, but can say that Mac OS X is starting to erase that feeling and I haven't played with BeOS too much lately. I do wish the BeOS community and all involved with the 'Save BeOS' project lots of luck, I can't wait to see some positive results.

>Sorry for the doublepost -- I got a MySQL error, hit reload, then saw two copies of my post. Lemme guess -- broken PHPnuke-ness?

OSNews is written from scratch to be very lean and fast, it does not use the bloat of both the PHP/Post Nuke engines.
The reason why you got that mySQL error is because we can't change the number of our <PRE>max_connections</PRE> on our mySQL database because it dumbs core for some weird reason if we do (we tried different binaries and versions, but with the same result). So, today, because it is a special day and we have more than http://66.181.171.71/2/42699/6/">120,000 (normally we are about 15-20,000 page views per day), we ran out of bandwidth and mySQL connections. Nothing to worry about really as there is nothing we can do about, neither is a source code or PHP fault, but simply a bandwidth/mysql problem which should go away as the hits will calm down soon.

Enjoyed the article quite a bit and sympathise with a lot of the points made.

Try AppleScript. You can tie Applescript to shell scripts (and therefore other CLI scripting) and make them cross-launch each other. AppleScript Studio, available as a free download from connect.apple.com puts Applescript almost into the realm of it's own IDE.

There were some more assumptions that I disagreed with but many of them were of the "YMMV" variety so are not worth commenting on.

I tried BeOS back on PPC and enjoyed the fact it was faster than Mac OS 8 on the same hardware. Much more capable. But there were no apps worth talking about and quickly PPC became second string to x86 and I couldn't justify buying an x86 machine just to run BeOS.

I'm a breed of Mac OS user that has dumped the old way. I was Mac OS through and through but as of September I erased my dual boot (my OS9 folders) because frankly I don't need them any more. Mac OS X gives me what I need to do my job - something that Windows 2000 can't manage.

OS X is at the start of it's lifecycle and will do nothing but improve. Where will BE or XP be a year from now ?

re: Michel Clasquin ( a few points ... )

like desktop Replicants, that somehow never caught on with developers

The real problem with then, is what do you use 'em for?

In the same way, it is doubtful that the average user really ever used the power BFS had, since creating new attributes was basically a command-line affair

Err, most attr I used were made by the app that created the file

I never did figure out how to make an attribute contain a graphic, though I knew it could be done.

Didn't resedit (or something like that) make attr's, no that made .res files, but you then could use the shipped command line tool to convert it into an attr (I think)

re: tim covell ( Now I am convinced that OS X is NOT my choice )

by the number of buttons on the mouse
Doesn't MacOS support 32? Use the second button as context-menu, and use the scrolly mouse by default? (at lest thats what I've got of MacOS users, still don't (yet) have the pennys to buy a Mac )
Windows intellyMouse has 7 buttons (1st, 2nd, scroll down, scrool up, scroll click, IE: Forward, IE Back)
UNIX supports unlimited, but only really uses 5 (same as defalt for Mac) (UNIX , well solaris, don't know about others, treats a mouse button as a keyboard button)

So, using your MouseButton IQ Windows Users have the highs IQ, there mouses support 7 buttons (with pre-definded actions, UNIX wins if you exclude predefined actions. However I don't know how many mouse buttons Windows supports.)

H-kon (There will never be anything like BeOS again )
I do not think i will ever witness something as great as BeOS was
Alas I fear you are right. I'm still putting my hopes on OBeOS

mlk, wishing he had £2500 for a TiBook.

The main thing that's kept me away from Macs over the years has been the pricetag. For half the price I can get equal CPU and memory performance from x86 iron, and can get stability from one of the *IX flavors (*BSD, Linux, Solaris X86). The second thing is that I was never especially fond of the Mac OS UI. OS/X has drawn me towards the Mac hardware once again.
Though I haven't worked with it myself, I suspect that running an alternative to Aqua on OS/X should be as easy as launching the X server on its own and firing up any of the fine window managers available for the X world. I've seen versions of Enlightenment that look prettier and are far more configurable than Agua. Plus they support multiple virtual desktops.

As I understand it, Darwin is the underlying OS and is itself based on FreeBSD which means there should be a huge range of Open Source applications availble for simple porting to the Mac hardware. It may not be easy, but it should be doable.

To get back to my topic, Mr Hacker seems to have had a bad experience with Linux. I'll agree that package management can be more than a little lacking (I usually compile from source, myself) and that apt-get and the BSD Ports Tree are better solutions than RPM in many case, but overall I've rarely had any issues with the desktop - and I'm not alone. major problems seem to be an exception, not the rule.

Personally, should I have the funds available to acquire a Mac, I'll be more then happy to play and work in the OS/X world - but I'll also have the box tripple booted to LinuxPPC. . .

Hey Avi :-)

Here's what I sent to Scot, but I figured it'd be useful to post here too.

A few errors that I noticed:

- TinkerTool does not let you adjust the Finder's view font. You
mentioned this several times, but it's simply not true. If only it
were. It may be possible to do this by editing the 'txtr' (text
traits) resources inside the Finder, but I haven't tried. I used a
small 9 point font in OS 9 for my views, and it's really annoying to
have to make my windows gigantic.

- Terminal doesn't remember window sizes because you can create
multiple windows, each of which saves its position (and font, color,
etc.). The interface for this is less than optimal, which is why I'm
writing a replacement.

- The Mac supports the Open Scripting Architecture (OSA), which lets
you use other languages than AppleScript to command Mac applications.
The only currently available one for OS X is JavaScript, but under OS
9 versions of Perl, Python and Tcl, among others, were available; they
should eventually be ported.

JavaScript OSA: <http://www.latenightsw.com/freeware/JavaScriptOSA/>
Tcl OSA component: <http://www.louch.com/>
There are also a number of languages that have been ported to work
with the Objective-C runtime - not exactly scripting, but useful for
rapid application development and testing using Apple's Cocoa
frameworks. These include JavaScript and Tcl (via AAA+ Software's
Joy), AppleScript (with Apple's new AppleScript Studio), and a
Smalltalk derivative called F-Script.

<http://www.aaa-plus.com/>
<http://www.apple.com/applescript/macosx/ascript_studio/>
<http://www.fscript.org/>

- Picture clippings are certainly supported. Try dragging a selected
region out of almost any Mac graphics app (even a Classic one such as
Photoshop), you'll see a picture clipping on the desktop.

- You seem to be a bit confused about the creator code. It does
specify the "preferred app". While I'd like to see a richer method of
representing that application used, such as the bundle IDs that Mac OS
X already provides (e.g. 'com.barebones.bbedit' instead of 'R*ch'). I
don't understand what you mean about the creator being responsible for
'unexpected and undesirable behavior' - it's mainly the presence of
extensions in OS X that I've found responsible for such behavior. I'd
suggest you take a look at how OS 9 did things, with a limited amount
of metadata, and a centralized type database, as well as the
programming interfaces (in particular the Translation Manager). With
the single exception of OS X's ability to immediately present a list
of applications that can open a document, and the ability to override
the creator mapping on a global basis, OS 9's experience (actually, as
fully introduced in 8.5 and unchanged since) was much better. It did
provide a centralized file type panel, with support for mapping
extensions, type/creator, and even translation. It was especially
good in that it provided for plugin translators, which would be
queried if no application was able to open a file, and which could be
materialized as mini-translation applications, and the ability for
applications to specify what they can handle by the actual file
-content-, so the proper metadata could be assigned if it was missing,
instead of relying (as OS X does) on easily-broken name conventions.

Obviously, the BeOS filesystem-merged-with-database model and
extensible metadata is where everyone else is heading (see also
WebDAV), it's very useful, and I can't understand why Apple is going
in the other direction just to maintain an illusion of compatibility
with 30-year-old filesystem designs.

I'd love to go through and pick out problems but you are being slashdotted so you'll have to make do with what I remember

Scot says BeOS has lots of FS support. Says OS X doesn't. Offers no evidence that he even tried to find out, says he only tried FAT (which worked). Actually Scot was wrong, of course OS X supports other file systems -- it's a BSD!

Scot says MacIE 5.5 can't do PNG. Documentation, OS X users, Web standards agencies disagree. Scot doesn't offer example -> Probably related second hand or half remembered complaints of IE 5.5 on Windows (where alpha is broken)

Scot says BeOS handles files of "many gigabytes", but OS X can't. Offers no example of him trying this. Actually many BeOS users have enormous trouble with files of 2Gb or even smaller due to BFS infelicities, meanwhile Scot's fellow OS X users handle 4+Gb files with no trouble using largefile-capable application software (because it's UNIX)

I got tired of trying to guess which bits of the story were just "polish" and which had to do with Scot's actual experiences. Slashdot apparently loved it though, so something was achieved (I do hope OSNews makes money on hits)

Sorry, didn't realize this box was HTML. Here are the links from my post above:

http://www.latenightsw.com/freeware/JavaScriptOSA/">JavaScript
http://www.louch.com/>Tcl

<a href="http://www.aaa-plus.com">Joy (JavaScript/Tcl to Objective-C bridge)
http://www.apple.com/applescript/macosx/ascript_studio/">AppleS...
<a href="http://www.fscript.org/">F-Script

There's also a Java to Objective-C bridge, which I probably should have mentioned! It's been around for several years. Since Java is a less dynamic language than those mentioned above, it requires more support in terms of building Java interfaces for Objective-C classes.

Sorry Scot but I'm not going to spend big bucks for an entirely new computer that doesn't run PC apps, is slower and goes backwards as far as file systems is concerned. If I'm missing something in linux and BeOS I can always reboot to Windows. Sure there's virtual pc but it doesn't work for games and you pay more to make your computer slower. I might consider a mac if it came with a card with an athlon or pentium so that I can run PC apps natively but again this costs serious money (if it even existed!) And I would be trading the monopoly of Windows with the monopoly of Apple-you can't get a mac that's not made by Apple and there's a price for that lack of choice.

Just had to put my two bits in, I also was spoiled by the elegance that the Amiga was. Still have several I kick off every so often to remember what personal computing power is supposed to have been like.

Tried BeOS Pers. Ed. about a year ago. Anyday of the week would I choose it over Winblowz... if it had a future. A shame, really. It, also, was elegant and powerful at the same time, just like the Amiga. Almost bought it but couldn't bring myself to learning dead OS no matter how much I liked it.

I'm writing this on my Mandrake home server. The author is correct about it's stability and utilitarianism. But he's right, just don't ask linux to be a desktop computer, not just yet. New Amiga OS is supposedly xBSD based, guess I'll have to see.

Also have an iMacDV running OS9.2. I love it. I don't have to tinker with it, I don't have to fight with it, I bought it to do video and have made a little extra $change$ using it. I just tell it what to do and it does it! But I never expected to dig into it and tinker with it.

I have played with OSX at work a bit. I like it, and will get it around the time 10.2 is released. I fully expect it to become my OS of choice in about a year or so. (Bring on the apps!)

Currently building Athlon1900 unit - what will be my last Windows Box. Putting ME on it, (place flak here); it runs all 5 of my cards without arguing. I will not continue to put money into M$ marketing Dept. just so they can push an inferior product onto an unsuspecting public. No way - no how - end of story! If I had really known how much I would have to spend on M$ related junk just to keep it "up to date" I would have realized my wallet would have been better off upgrading my 10 year old Amiga!

What make a good OS? Simple, does it do what you want it to, and if it doesn't, how many resources is it going to take to make it do it? I used to work retail computer sales and have saved many people many $$$ asking them that question when they asked me "Do I need to upgrade?" The same applies here. If using a particular OS satisfies your reasoning for using a computer in the first place, then use it.

Overall, I think the article was well written and for the most part correct as long as you ignore just about everything concerning Linux. Why has Linux become the most hated OS of Be users? It confuses me since they've gotten a lot of apps from Linux. Anyways...

Chris Herborth wrote.... "I'm so sick of things not working in x86 land. Even something as basic as cut-n-paste is a total mishmash in Linux (also running Mandrake; 8.1, using KDE ask my desktop), and Windows is so bloody fragile... since I mostly use my home computers for playing games these days. "

I don't even know what to say to this .... You definatly should use Linux if you can't cut~n~paste in KDE. You need better gaming stability in windows? What a quandry. Never met a professional gamer before ...

Michel Clasquin writes... "Using anything else is *painful* now. MP3 and video apps? I'll have to give you that one, though Linux has more than enough audio apps for the average user. How relevant video editing is to the average computer user is a debate we can get into some other time ... "

Video apps are developing nicely too. There is Main Actor and Broadcast 2000 to name a couple. And for the pro's Houdini...

"But if Mandrake goes under, I'll just switch to SuSe. Heck, if *every* commercial Linux distro maker goes to the wall, there will still be Debian. In this sense, Linux is immortal. That should be a powerful factor to any ex-BeOS user ... "

<EG>Are you sure you were a Be user?</EG>

mac diesel... "For the record, MS bought 500K shares of non voting stock back then, hardly bailing out the company..... Funny thing is, those shares more than doubled in value with the advent of the iMac and then split, yet another wise business move by MS!"

Actually, good old MS bought shares w/ the right hand and sold short w/ the left ... they hedged that purchase of Apple shares. Which was probably a better business move considering Apple at the time.

Devesh.... "mySQL hiccuped several times while I read this article. Worse, it's missing features we should expect in an RDBMS. It would seem that even BFS is better than mySQL as a database. I would be more satisfied with MS SQL Server on Win2k than I would with mySQL on anything."

So many lol's in that one. First, I thought you were suggesting they purchase Oracle. Then you kind of imply that BFS is better then MySQL and could take a Slashdotting. And finally, I lol at the idea of MS taking a Slashdot. "Break out the old BSD boxes guys ... them damn ./'ers are a coming again. Someone get one of them BSD geeks on the phone..."

Larry

1. Great article and tribute to a great system. BEOS was beautiful and fast, albeit the software was lacking.
<p>
2. Perhaps Offtopic: I hope that Palm opensources BEOS which would really kick it open for software development on a superior graphical architecture, and adopts its BEIA architecture for a StrongARM based alternative. I say this as a 4 year palm/handspring user that has just traded in his 33Mhz 65K Prism for a Sharp SL5000D Linux based StrongARM handheld.
<p>
(I agree with Scott, X is bleacherous and consigns otherwise quality software to an interminable war of usability "standards", to use the term in its loosest possible sense. Nevertheless, I think that one of the competitors will eventually get it right by effectively delivering a "complete" desktop solution. I think KDE will win out in the end for stylistic and strong technical reasons, but I admit that I use a lot of Gnome software because KDE's Office 1.1 is buggy and crashprone, and Gnumeric is way more ready for primetime then KSpread.)
<p>
3. I don't understand Scott's assertion that the "drag to eject" complaint has been cleared up. If one were wiping a CDRW, then fine, but now you are burning a cd image (i.e. permanently archiving a bunch of files) by dragging it to the trash. Than's even more unexpected than ejecting the disk.
<p>
4. Redhat Linux 7.2 is nearly there. It is a matter of two or three releases from the kind of usability that will (for the first time for RH) make Windows look clunky again. Installation is already far better than Windows, and takes about as much time (fifteen minutes) as a Mac Install or even BEOS. (You can probably tell that I am an OS fetishist). Old windows requires 5 to 10 reboots. I had to pull an all-nighter to fix all of "the easiest windows to use ever"'s [XP]piss-poor default choices. Anyone who claims that RH is difficult to install hasn't ever installed any version of windows. And speaking of browsers, Konquerer is as slow as Internet Explorer, but so superior feature wise that I am noticing Konquerer feature ripoffs in IE 6. Even CDRoast (Graphical Gnome CD Burning tool) works better than Adaptec's proprietary CD copying software. The old version would terminally bluescreen any NT or 2000 system. The new version just screws the pooch and destroys the CD if you try to test before you burn. Gee, you would think that would be a feature they might want to actually verify as functional before they burned their CD's.
<p>
5. Don your asbestos suit:
Jean Gassee is completely clueless as to how the market works, and is soley to blame for the collapse of this technically inspired system because he failed to learn any of the lessons which Microsoft and the Opensource community brutally taught its competitors on multiple occasions to which he was a witness. From the proprietary BeBox, to the more expensive PowerPC, to the "appliance market" (read "desperate hype-r-jump"), he has single-handedly managed to be 4-5 years behind the curve of everything that actually is shown to work with consumers. But what can you expect from the man who singlehandedly consigned the Mac to "toy" status in the business world by killing DB4 for the Mac in favor of that glorified flatfile wannabe RDBMS, FileMaker?
<p>
Some background for those who want to flame me as a clueless idiot:
I am a former machead (from Sys7.1) who migrated to...
-> windows, realized all I had been missing (please read before lighting torches).
<li>preemptive multitasking,
<li>cheap hardware,
<li>abundant software.
(deny this and look like an idiot)
<p>
I got sick of M$'s licensing crap and decided to flee Egypt yet again (for personal, not business)->
Redhat Linux (since 4.2). Got sick of it. tried BEOS 4.0/4.5/5.0, like it, but gave up on pathetic browser. Went back to RH Linux 6.2.
Recently I have tried FreeBSD, which I find clean, but too spartan. Returned to RH 7.2, which I love, want to move into the business side of things, and have become a willing and slavish apologist for. I am an OS refugee. I have found the promised land, which is actually filled with that thing called promise.