Tag: BeOS

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Betips Going Away

Long after the flavor’s gone, I’ve decided to turn betips.net over to someone else. This is kind of a hard decison – many hundreds of unpaid hours have gone into the site, and it served as a test-bed for some cool things, like TrackerBase. For a couple of years it was one of very few full-time servers running BeOS on the Internet. These days the site is all PHP/MySQL under OS X, but I haven’t touched the content for ages… just keep it around because it’s nice to have a domain at my fingertips for file transfer, etc. But I’ve got other ideas for that now, and this really should be in the hands of someone who lives and breathes BeOS. Let me know if you’re interested in hosting – shacker at birdhouse org.

(This post has been modified).

Music: Velvet Underground :: I Heard Her Call My Name
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SETI Orphans

A couple-three years ago I was into sharing CPU cycles with the SETI project, and was racking up points for Team BeOS. Yesterday I got a message from someone congratulating me for getting back on board and checking in new units. Huhn? I haven’t run a SETI client for at least two years, but sure enough, it shows fresh units from me being checked in as of last night. Two theories:

1) Someone hijacked my SETI account … but why would anyone do this? There’s no incentive.

2) One of several old BeOS/Windows/Linux machines I’ve sold or given away long ago has been booted into BeOS for the first time in a long time recently, and is happily crunching keys in the background, unbeknownst to the new owner. Heh. Thanks, whoever you are, wherever you are… ;)

Music: Astrud Gilberto :: The Gentle Rain
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BeView Archives

More thinking about the disappeared content on Byte.com, more discussion with other Byte editors and writers, and I finally decided to go ahead and post complete BeView archives here on birdhouse. Left behind the new subscription curtain, the articles are effectively hidden from search engines and the rest of the world, and no one is going to subscribe to CMP just to read my crusty old nuggets. A piece of computing history will be lost forever if I don’t crack them open. So the archives are now open for all, in all their occasionally embarrassing glory.

Music: Orchestre Murphy :: Hymn to the Sultan of Brunei
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Help Open Source Gobe Productive

Funny how StarOffice gets all the press for being the best alternative to MS Office — compared to Gobe Productive, StarOffice is an ineffectual pig. Gobe was forged from old Claris Works engineers dissatisfied with Apple, who went off to develop BeOS software. I wrote quite a few glowing reviews of Gobe Productive during the Be years, not just to be a cheerleader but because Productive truly rocked. They were doing stuff with cross-app data integration that Microsoft hadn’t even dreamed of yet — one app to handle spreadsheets, word processing, graphics, illustration, and presentations, shifting seamlessly between modes in a single document. Awesome.

Be belly-flopped, and Gobe did Windows and Linux versions of the product. Then the dot-com teat fizzled and Gobe hit hard times. For a while there’s been talk that Free Radical Software was going to buy the Productive license from Gobe and open source the product. But they too are cash shy, so now organizations like BeUnited are going door to door to raise collaborative money (more discussion). An open source Productive would benefit users of all platforms (even Windows). Yes, there’s got to be a good Office alternative for the open source crowd. No, StarOffice ain’t it.

Music: Other Dimensions in Music Special Quintet w/Matthew Shipp :: 2 >