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To: Dylan who wrote (10772)	4/2/1998 10:04:00 PM
From: Dirk Dawson	Respond to of 213177

Can't get a Rhapsody DR (not a developer) but BeOS is a cool "Media OS." Apple won't supply the G3 specs they need to support that processor and machines but on a 604 chip it's cool! Be is playing for a niche and I wish them well. Threat to Rhapsody? I don't know. Could be but I think it's a gearhead initiative that will settle in whenever geeks decide they're tired of the other options. Dirk

To: Dylan who wrote (10772)	4/3/1998 1:15:00 AM
From: George von Dassow	Respond to of 213177

<<What does everyone think about Be OS? >> I actually bought it and toyed with it for a while. I didn't find it to be spectacular. One remarkable thing about it is that it _feels_ very fast but in fact is not. I concluded that they give very high priority to threads that involve interacting with the user, and not very high priority to things that involve computation. Another interesting thing is the tiny size of applications... I can't remember for sure (it's been six months since I booted it up), but I think the web browser was no more than 100k, and a lot of the demo utilities (some of which do quite a bit) are only a a few k. In fact the largest program I remember was a rough port of the original Doom that came in at about a megabyte. I cannot see BeOS as a threat to Rhapsody for a variety of reasons: 1) BeOS presently has no multi-user capabilities. This is, by the way, a major drawback of the Mac OS and (last I checked) Windows 95 as well. Moreover, Rhapsody is real Unix (somewhere under all those layers), and the BeOS is not (it merely implements a Posix-compliant shell. 2) Market considerations, sad to say. Rhapsody comes with a history of sophisticated development (completely aside from the existence of the Blue Box), and nobody has done much for BeOS. Also, there are a lot of people with macs waiting to buy Rhapsody as if it were Mac OS 9 or 10 or whatever. I'm one of them. 3) No matter how much Gassee coos about "the MediaOS" there isn't much hope in my mind for a port of the Quicktime media layer. Last I checked there wasn't even a usable version of a Java VM. And so on. That keeps them pretty far from any Rhapsody or MacOS or Windows turf. Those are the important things that come to the top of my head. Where I DO see a future for the BeOS is in thin clients and information appliances, though I wouldn't know one of the latter if it fell on my head. I'm thinking of the dedicated X terminals sprinkled all over my campus that do nothing but interface to the University's library servers and so forth, and do it all rather slowly. An OS with a snappy user interface and minimal disk space requirements could really be some use there. You could make a much nicer VCR with an OS like this one. Or how about a BeOS hand-held? Again, small apps and snappy interface would go a long way. And I'd love to see a "visionary" like Gassee in the microwave oven or smart coffee pot business... :) - George P.S. - The quality of the present release is not terribly high... it is definitely a developer release.

To: Dylan who wrote (10772)	4/3/1998 9:25:00 AM
From: Alomex	Respond to of 213177

What does everyone think about Be OS? I hate to say it, but BeOS is dead. Back at a time when there was no hope for MacOS users to see a new release any time soon, Gasse took it upon himself to invest time and money and come up with a new OS, hoping all along that Apple will eventually see the light and buy them out. Just about when that was about to happen, Jobs crashed the party. BeOS, AmigaOS, OS/2, CP/M86 were all at one time advanced OS, but quality with bad marketing was beaten by mediocrity, and all of them are now dead...