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'Be' is nice, end of story

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Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#181

Post by Rediscover »

anthk wrote: post #117
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)

People used freebsd in 2004 with lynx under a 486.

lynx(1) rocks. My favorite browser. 26 bookmark files, used daily. Plus my emacs-w3m-lynx-bookmarkextentsion.el.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#182

Post by ajsalminen »

tialaramex wrote: post #119
anentropic wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive question... if your email client would have to do that anyway, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, does moving that responsibility to the OS make a net difference? Is it that BeFS was indexing everything and not just the folders that needed to be indexed? macos spotlight is also routinely indexing the file system, doesn't seem so different to me, naively

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…

> You could not turn off indexing for some/ all folders in BeOS only for an entire filesystem (and if you do a bunch of stuff doesn't work)

That's true but you still did have some control over the indexing as you could choose what attributes to index or not in the first place.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#183

Post by helf »

Spooky23 wrote: post #171
helf wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Damn nice. Yeah I love the old Toshibas. Same with the old NECs.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#184

Post by helf »

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…

My NeXT kit that I sold:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/7215762370071298...

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#185

Post by ajsalminen »

guenthert wrote: post #157
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. Everyone who uses more than one device to access his/her e-mail? Sure BeOS had nice features, but it seems to me that it solved the wrong problems.

Using this doesn't prevent you from using another email client to access the inbox too. It is true you don't get the same view to your data on all clients/platforms but then again this is usually true to a large extent always when using multiple generic email clients to access the same inbox.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#186

Post by memsom »

ajsalminen wrote: post #179
memsom wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

No - it was marketing. The older Filesystem was a full on database and would allow the user to do all kinds of weird and wonderful things with metadata. But the Filesystem interface in BeOS prior to PR1 (well, technically AA) made it almost a herculean feat to interface an external non native file system to the OS.

BFS was written in a way that complied to a file system API that could then support other non-BFS file systems being plugged in. But because it was written in more of a traditional file system way, the database features got massively cut down to just attributes and indexes with live queries. It was a trade off. The database hype built by the DR releases (mainly for BeBox, I think only one made it publicly to Mac) was maintained because the attributes sort of mimicked the bare minimum functionality needed to tick a marketing box. But BFS really doesn't do much more than some other file systems have since done.

The OFS was more like the SQLServer based WinFS that Longhorn was going to have.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#187

Post by ajsalminen »

memsom wrote: post #186
ajsalminen wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

No - it was marketing. The older Filesystem was a full on database and would allow the user to do all kinds of weird and wonderful things with metadata. But the Filesystem interface in BeOS prior to PR1 (well, technically AA) made it almost a herculean feat to interface an external non native file system to the OS. BFS was written in a way that complied to a file system API that could then support other non-BFS file…

Well, I probably haven't seen the marketing you're referring to if it all happened before even that prerelease but people have kept talking about the BFS features for decades now and the interest is certainly not all based on some early marketing.

Yes it is a trade off. Not sure what other file systems you are referring to but I'm not aware of any others that enable the kind of applications BeOS had using these features. Those are also a key part of it.

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