Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Be' is nice, end of story

abortretry.fail

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 187 posts

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#171

Post by Spooky23 »

helf wrote: post #164
amatecha wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

My friends had a running joke about me “over utilizing hardware”. 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 re…

Those old Toshibas were amazing.

I had a Tecra 750CDM that was incredible - I won it at work… I was like a $5000 laptop at the time and included a detachable webcam.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#172

Post by [deleted] »

tialaramex wrote: post #84
naikrovek wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

multiple comments about BeFS and none describe why it is so good.

BeFS has file attributes (so you can say this file is an email I received, add from="Bob Smith ", received="2022-11-15") and it can optionally but by default index all these attributes using an on-disk BTree. Many modern systems do have file attributes, although they're not always as capable as the ones in BeFS, and none of them to my knowledge chose to add all these BTrees because keeping them up-to-date is expensiv…

[deleted]

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#173

Post by a-dub »

jandrese wrote: post #143
mkl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of multitasking was one of the most impressive things about it. I could play four MPEG videos at once smoothly (with the interface and other windows still responsive) while Windows struggled to play one on the same hardware. That and it booted in 30 seconds including detecting and loading built-in drivers for all my hardware (Windows took 1-2 minutes and needed drivers manually installed). I never used BeOS…

It's easy to boot quickly when you have very little supported hardware to look for. I remember compiling custom FreeBSD kernels with only the hardware on my box and racing my roommate's BeBox to login prompt. Then he would start playing a bunch of movies at once and I'd open up Netscape.

ironically, freebsd was late to the multiprocessor party, with a global kernel mode lock that existed well into the mid-2000s.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#174

Post by acdha »

tialaramex wrote: post #83
Veliladon wrote: post #24

Even now over 20 years later we still haven't had anything near as cool as BeFS. Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns.

> Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns. As it soon turned out, almost everybody. All that BeFS does, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, is BTree indexes, for each index you want your filesystem gets a little slower an…

> All that BeFS does, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, is BTree indexes, for each index you want your filesystem gets a little slower and bigger. It starts out "Quite a bit worse than some of the alternatives available at the time" and goes down from there.

It’s true that indexes can impact performance but “quite a bit worse” is far from what I observed at the time. Even with hundreds of thousands of files it was quite responsive - Apple needed SSDs and 15 more years of development to get close, and Windows still hasn’t.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#175

Post by acdha »

mkl wrote: post #64
a-dub wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it can play MULTIPLE VIDEOS AT THE SAME TIME (!)

That kind of multitasking was one of the most impressive things about it. I could play four MPEG videos at once smoothly (with the interface and other windows still responsive) while Windows struggled to play one on the same hardware. That and it booted in 30 seconds including detecting and loading built-in drivers for all my hardware (Windows took 1-2 minutes and needed drivers manually installed). I never used BeOS…

Even better, they had a real I/O scheduler. I could transfer video from a DV tape reader with a tiny buffer while Mozilla compiled in the background and while the compiler got slower the tape drive never stalled and the UI never lagged. That was quite a change compared to Windows or classic macOS where you had to treat the system as a single-app device.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#176

Post by aa-jv »

duped wrote: post #166
aa-jv wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Tell me when Pro Tools supports Linux. Or Ableton. Or Cubase. Or FL Studio. Today there is one major DAW that supports Linux, which is Bitwig. But there are very few plugins and the vast majority of the revenue and users are on Windows and MacOS. The TL;DR is that there's not a convincing argument to support Linux today by the major developers. It's a chicken and egg problem to be sure. I've tried Ubuntu Studio. It's…

Based on decades of experience, I do not agree one bit.

Pro Tools isn't the only DAW game in town, in fact its not even the most commonly used any more and its also not the 'best' DAW for many jobs - merely the most entrenched in peoples minds as a "pro tool".

So many producers are giving it up for cheaper and more effective tools such as REAPER, which not only runs circles around Pro Tools but also runs really, really great on Linux. As does Ardour, which is easily in the same class of any of the other DAW's in terms of capabilities. See also, Waveform, Zrythmn, Qtractor and MusE.

As does BitWig Studio - an Ableton Live analog, arguably more powerful and feature-rich than Ableton Live, which makes sense as it is being built by ex-Ableton folks.

FL Studio? LMMS! Renoise!

Linux Audio really rocks.

Not to mention: ZynthianOS! Oh my! Monome NORNS! Holy heck!

>one major DAW

Sorry, no, this is wrong. REAPER is a major DAW, runs natively. Same with BitWig, Ardour and Harrison Mixbus. So thats at least 4. [1]

>very few plugins

I challenge you to actually install Ubuntu Studio and repeat this claim. Plus, VST plugins run great under Ubuntu Studio. You should probably try it again and update your understanding of the scene - you might've had a point 10 years ago, but as of today: just no. Linux audio is amazing.

>I still think Linux audio is a disaster.

I think you don't have enough modern experience to make this claim. My Presonus-based Ubuntu Studio DAW is the lowest latency, easiest to use and set up DAW in the studio. While the other producers are cussing through the hoops of eLicense and dongle management and unsigned/outdated kext's for super-expensive boutique/cocktail hardware, the Linux DAW users in my studio are happily whistling through the edits with their USB and Firewire-based audio i/o devices, many of which work quite happily 'out of the box', "apt update && apt upgrade" dilemma notwithstanding ..

[1] - If these DAW's can do it, there is technically no reason the other DAW's can't - its just the fixed idea that "linux audio sucks" that prevents this from happening in the industry.

Linux audio does not, in reality, suck - it actually ROCKS, hard. Linux audio only sucks if you say it does.

There are certainly no valid technical reasons for a lack of ports from the market-mindset vendors .. just the mindset you proffer, which is, imho, plain wrong.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#177

Post by abiloe »

dominicm wrote: post #51

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…

> attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs.

> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger

If this is the concept of "mainstream" and sensible "user experience" it sounds like Haiku is a complete bunch of horseshit. (And this feature is easily available in Windows anyway)

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#178

Post by emptyparadise »

abiloe wrote: post #177
dominicm wrote: post #51

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…

> attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs. > It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger If this is the concept of "mainstream" and sensible "user experience" it sounds like Haiku is a complete bunch of horseshit. (And this feature is easily available in Windows anyway)

developers are users too my dude

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#179

Post by ajsalminen »

memsom wrote: post #135
tialaramex wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Spotlight has a full text search, which is a pretty major improvement, at of course a considerable price. Feels like a reasonable choice for My Novel/ and not a sane choice for Movie Downloads/ (unless maybe Spotlight can read subtitles???) Also, an actual email client can specialise. BeFS is very general, the attributes can be typed but there's only one string type (other types include 32-bit and 64-bit in…

Dominic Giampaolo worked on Spotlight at Apple, and was the BFS guy at Be... he (along with another engineer) wrote BFS pretty much from scratch for the PR1 release. Before BFS, was OFS which was an actual database and was horribly buggy, requiring the BTree to be regenerated often enough that it was a "BIOS" level boot menu option on the BeBox running that version's Boot ROM. A lot of the wonder at BFS stems from th…

It doesn't seem entirely fair to say it stems from "marketing". There were and still are plenty of fully functional applications that rely on the filesystem attributes and indexing on BeOS/Haiku.

Attributes are exposed on the UI level and can be a useful way to organize custom structured data even for an end user: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/workshop-filetype...

I'm sure it is way more limited than some original failed vision but limiting scope doesn't have to be a bad thing and I think what they ended up with does live up to the hype in some ways. That said, it certainly also has some flaws like not even being able to efficiently use the index for the built-in file find dialog because of case insensitivity.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#180

Post by Rediscover »

helf wrote: post #27

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…

BeOS was amazing.

At AT&T (the mothership) we inherited a bunch of NeXT machines from the cellular company they invested in.

Me, I had next to my engineering books multiple BeOS boxed OS copies.

Carried them with me to where I installed them on every machine possible. Great times. Running a NeXT pizza box one one side and BeOS on a Dell Latitude on the other, and showing off the multitasking made some of my co-workers weep. (Turbo Color on the NeXT side with the frickin' sound box and monitor).

One of the co-workers was absolutely into Objective-C. Those were fantastic time showing what /could/ be done.

Edit: until 2016.

Post reply on HN