161–170 of 187 posts
1. This is dated 2009 so I may have used my NeXT more like through 2010. Honestly a bit fuzzy on the time frame
2. Here’s a screenshot of when I got Omniweb to load gmail after a lot of fiddling: https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/3947037084/in/photolist...
> From there, things only got worse for Be. The company lingered around until 2001 when it sold its copyrights to Palm for $11 million USD. In 2002, Be brought litigation against Microsoft for anticompetitive practices, but the suit was settled out of court for $23.25 million. After purchasing BeOS, Palm promptly discontinued the OS. Palm itself later had some problems, split, and sold. The rights to BeOS are now in…
If SGI or BeBox had been the first to market with such a sexy laptop, we'd still have them around.
It was the lack of focus on laptops which killed Be and SGI (and others), but it was the focus on laptops as personal computing devices which saved Apple.
I'd kill for an alternative-universe SGI or Be laptop. Imagine the tiBook with Irix or BeOS on it .. delicious ..
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If you can recall how you got SSL going, please let everyone know! Edit: also, you're photos made me quite happy. Beautiful machines.
Thanks :) I wish I had kept more of them. I had to move a few times and got married and just didn’t have the space for 2000lbs of furniture sized systems lol. The IRIS3130 went to a museum, at least! As for the SSL… I’ll dig through my stuff and see what I have. On it. I have a screenshot of gmail loaded up… lemme find that.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/3947037084/in/photolist...
BeFS was amazing. I miss BeOS, TBH. I ran a heavily customized BeOS R5.05 install that had upgraded bits from OpenBeOS (later, HaikuOS), ZetaOS etc. I ran it as a daily driver on a Dell GX1 SFF that I swear was designed for BeOS: Max RAM the BeOS kernel supported without hackery was 768MB - The GX maxed out at 768MB; The GX1 had a Rage GPU that BeOS natively supported (Including 3D Acceleration!) which was a very sho…
You daily-drove a NeXTstation until 2008?! That's badass! kudos. I always appreciate people using stuff for as long as possible, especially when it's something awesome like a NeXT system, haha :) Dude.. just found the "for ebay" album on your Flickr profile... omg :( (Oooh also SGI Onyx2.. nice. I search the term "sgi" on Craigslist every day. All I have is a pair of O2's)
I used a NEC Versa P/75 (pentium 75 (no mmx), 40mb ram, 350mb HDD, 4GB CF card, modded ORiNOCO Gold cardbus WiFi card, heavily modded Windows 95b (not 95c, mind you. No no. Has to be 95b for reasons) for years. Dual battery packs I upgraded. Ram for 10+ hours and worked fine for MP3s, IRC, SSH, etc. :). I still have it. I didn’t stop using it on the regular till probably 2015-2016.
I have a Portege 3110ct that I upgraded to 192mb ram, 64gb ide ssd, usb2.0 pcmcia card, usb WiFi, etc. that I still use off and on. It was my primary mobile system for about 8 years. Runs a stripped down heavily customized Debian based Linux.
If you are mostly doing textual things, you can happily exist on anything made in the last 30 years assuming it has a basic tcp/ip stack and preferably SSHv2 support.
I recently dug my 386sx40 I grew up on out of storage. It desperately needs a ram upgrade and an FPU. Right now it has a 512k ISA trident video card, NE2000 ISA NIC, 250mb boot drive, 160mb storage drive, 12mb ram.
Runs windows 3.11 with CalmiraXP, Win32s, TCP/IP stack, lots of mods to the base OS (kernel tweaks for the cooperative multitasking functions etc).
… I feel like an old man ranting about the good old days. I’m only 35. I swear. Lol
The thing I loved most about BeOs is that it assumed you were a competent operator. They didn't hide "dangerous" settings from the user. For example, in the settings you could choose to turn each CPU in the machine on and off. But it didn't stop you from turning all of them off. And if you turned the last one off, the system halted, just as you'd expect. No warnings, nothing that stopped you. If you thought turning o…
> No warnings, nothing that stopped you. I'm not sure I follow why this is a good thing. Having the option is good, but some sort of a sanity check and a warning dialog just seems like looking out for your users. For example, I recently used Linux on the desktop as my daily driver and wrote about my experiences [1]. At one point, I considered that the system was perhaps a bit of a mess in regards to the installed pac…
Same dipshits who ran ZFS on top of unRAID. And unRAID is already an abomination.
grumbles
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Audio has been a disaster on Linux for a long time (yes I know about jack, ardour, pipe wire, and so on). It's not surprising that pro audio applications ignore it wholesale.
Pro Audio applications simply don't ignore it wholesale - Linux has plenty of pro audio software. Get an audio-focused distribution such as Ubuntu Studio, and you'll change your mind fast about how disastrous audio is on Linux - it just isn't. In fact, you can build the slickest, lowest-latency DAW on Linux, with stats that beat MacOS, even ...
I've tried Ubuntu Studio. It's not better except that it had early support for preempt rt. I still think Linux audio is a disaster.
I worked on Haiku this summer as part of Google summer of code, and it just made me wish their attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs. It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. There's sensible UX that doesn't expect me to be a wizard to understand what's going on or how to dig deeper. Obviously it…
Today, imagine that you are a young Windows programmer and that I'm a venture capitalist and you come and see me and say, “Mr. Gasse, do I have a deal for you.” “Yes?” “I have the word processor for Windows that will kill Microsoft Word.” What am I to do if I'm a caring venture capitalist? I have to open the drawer and instead of pulling out the checkbook I should pull out the Magnum .357 and give you the coup de grace because this will stop what otherwise would be a long, ugly, expensive agony for your family.
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> I think after Windows 7 the processes are grouped per application in Task Manager. We’re all grumpy about the redesigns of things we are familiar with, but little UX improvements happen all the time. You're right; I was mostly thinking about problems with Linux since thats my daily driver. It would have been better to say that Haiku gives developers the same UX affordances for interacting with their system as non-t…
FWIW, as with the Task Manager thing, the thing about launching the graphical debugger on crashes was added to Windows eons ago. Even Windows 9x had it, contemporaneously with BeOS. If you had a debugger installed, a "Debug" button would appear between "Close" and "Details". Debug assertion failures will pop up a dialog from the C runtime allowing you to break into the debugger there, too.