OSUser: BeOS Journal #8 - Is 800MHz enough?

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BeOS Journal #8: Is 800MHz enough? Scot Hacker, ZDNet 05/23/97 It's been interesting watching Be and the Be community respond to the discontinuation of the BeBox. There was some justified grumbling for a while from a few developers who had been working on applications specific to Be hardware (like the GeekPort), but for the most part, acceptance of the decision has been wide and resounding. The decision was summed up really well in a Be newsletter, wherein the BeBox was compared to the booster stage of a rocket: After the cargo is in orbit, there's no need to spend precious fuel towing around the booster shell. The BeBox was necessary to launch the operating system into a visible orbit of public appreciation, but the real mission is upon us now -- bringing the OS to fruition with a full payload of tractor apps to pull it into the future. Leave the hardware to the other guys. Speaking of which, good news came out of MacWorld Tokyo the other day with the announcement that Motorola has inked a deal with Be to include the BeOS on every StarMax Mac clone system going out, which adds nicely to the momentum already garnered by a similar pact with PowerComputing. But it gets better: a German company called PIOS (the same people who manufactured Amiga boxes once upon a time) is just about ready to release the PIOS-1, a very low cost (around $1,000) system ready to run the BeOS. Check out their Web pages for more details, but for now, suffice to say that the PIOS-1 stands a decent chance of becoming a solid BeBox replacement, alongside the Mac clone family. And I think we can expect to see more options in not-too-distant future. Still hearing rumblings about potential x86 ports, but nothing solid there. Nevertheless, all indications are that the hardware front is going to be well-covered by third parties, and that BeOS will continue to have plenty of platforms on which it can strut its stuff. Since DR9 is heading toward implementation of a full Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), the portability of the system will get even better. To quote Be, "Ideally it will be possible for a company to slap together a new computer, write a little firmware, and poof! a new BeOS machine is born." One more exciting announcement came out of Tokyo this week: BeOS has, for the first time, been demonstrated running on a four-processor system from DayStar, whipping along on a juicy 800 MHz Genesis MP. BeOS is aimed at the high-end bit-flingers, including multimedia designers who can never seem to get enough, so this signals some great possibilities for the future. Remember that BeOS inherently supports any number of processors (although current bus designs effectively establish an upper limit of eight without hitting serious bottleneck problems), so even though this is a system faster than just about anyone could need by today's multimedia standards, Be is well-equipped to meet the resource-hungry, media-convergent future of radical computing. Now that I've got my box configured just the way I want it, downloaded and tested dozens of BeOS applications, applets, utilities and gizmos, got my network, sound, and video running just the way I want them, I find myself starting to hit a wall of sorts. The BeOS is still a ways off from replacing my main systems as a productivity computer, so I find myself looking at a whole lot of potential, but without a whole lot I can get done on a daily basis. And I find myself very much looking forward to the release of DR9 in late March, when the OS will be further honed, polished, and prepared for a mid-year 1.0 release to the general public. Because of some relatively major low-level system re-writes, DR9 will not be binary-compatible with apps written for DR8. This comes as no great surprise, but as a result, many developers waiting in the wings with their productivity and other apps are waiting for the end of March to release their wares, both to avoid confusion and to get out of the gate with all guns blazing. Check the BeWare section of Be's site for a ton of announcements of projects cooking on the back burner around the world. Among other things, DR9 will bring major improvements to the file system and database. In fact, just days after I wrote about what I perceived as shortcomings in BeOS' filetype handling, I received some mail from a Be employee noting that all my prayers were about to be answered. Sure enough, when the Be Newsletter came out the next day, it turned out that Be had anticipated every one of those concerns, and then some. You can read it for yourself, but suffice to say that filetyping will be based on MIME types, will support default and custom file handlers, and many other goodies. Talk about a responsive company... There's a fascinating demo floating around called 3DMovie, which demonstrates some of the features of the new, improved, DR9 3D Kit. Basically, you get a set of surfaces onto which you can drag movies. Nothing really special there, except that these movies are mapped onto the surface of cubes, onto the pages of books, around the surface of a sphere, and onto the planes of a pulsating, water-like surface. You can spin the cube around while all six surfaces play different movies. You can turn the pages of the book as movies continue to run on each one. And the water demo is just plain psychedelic. Imagine you're in a lake and a movie is being projected onto the top and bottom surfaces of the water. Now imagine someone dropped a stone into the lake and the water started pulsating gently, then wildly. Now imagine you can grab the surface of the water and spin it around, move it up and down, turn it over. This one has to be seen to be believed. If you haven't been to a BeOS demo yet, keep an eye out. It's worth the trip. Question is, with CPU-intensive imagination like this coming out of the Be camp, will 800MHz be enough to get us through the next few years? I'm kidding of course, but the point is that people out there are creating applications that actually use all the horsepower and OS efficiency at our disposal. And it's only going to get better. Anyway, I'm going to slow this column down a bit until DR9 comes out, so look for it twice-monthly rather than weekly, at least until late March. |
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