Beos & you

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Anthony

Anthony

8-bit gen. (Volken)
Anyone using or have been using Beos OS and multimedia programs within Beos?
 
Anthony said:
Anyone using or have been using Beos OS and multimedia programs within Beos?

I've been doing most of my work with linux, and I'm not at all familiar with BeOS. What kind of multimedia stuff is available?
 
Moonrider said:
I've been doing most of my work with linux, and I'm not at all familiar with BeOS. What kind of multimedia stuff is available?

Truth is while both using Mac & PC and don’t think I’m happy.

In PC world I can only use 98 & 2000 because XP is nonsense to me, pointless.

I remember long ago BeOS while using early version on NeXT Cube.

I was told yesterday from a friend this is fastest thing for multimedia with fantastic programs.

But most of domains are dead (Be inc.) could someone please post some relevant link here.
 
Ok, just received this from a friend BeOS bible site :

http://www.bebits.com/


Everything that exist for BeOS is here.

Unbelievable how many drivers is supported, fantastic !!!

Look at how many professional audio and recording software exist for BeOS. :)
 
Polaris20 said:
Why is XP pointless?


That comment reflects my personal agendas toward the nature of XP.

I proposed not to voyage pointless discussion of why or why not.

All this charade of GUI is big and unnecessary.

All this flashes are slowing things down, there is no functionality in this amusement park of icons and gadgets.

From point of most direct and best way of communicating with hardware (assembler) XP fails compared to Win2000 by far.

Sure, 98SE is better then both in that department but so many new hardware is made for W2 and XP only,
and I’m not inclined to write them myself.

Just a thought for your question.
 
Anthony said:
That comment reflects my personal agendas toward the nature of XP.

I proposed not to voyage pointless discussion of why or why not.

All this charade of GUI is big and unnecessary.

All this flashes are slowing things down, there is no functionality in this amusement park of icons and gadgets.

From point of most direct and best way of communicating with hardware (assembler) XP fails compared to Win2000 by far.

Sure, 98SE is better then both in that department but so many new hardware is made for W2 and XP only,
and I’m not inclined to write them myself.

Just a thought for your question.

Anthony - I gotta disagree. I know you don't want to start a big useless discussion so I'll just say that I am a Solaris/Linux admin and I find WinXP to be the most USEFUL of all the window's OS's.

All the things that you have mentioned that are annoyances to you are easily disabled with a few tweaks.

Check out this website and try the tweaks. I'm sure XP will perform much better for you...

http://www.musicxp.net/tuning_tips.htm
 
Anthony said:
That comment reflects my personal agendas toward the nature of XP.

I proposed not to voyage pointless discussion of why or why not.

All this charade of GUI is big and unnecessary.

All this flashes are slowing things down, there is no functionality in this amusement park of icons and gadgets.

From point of most direct and best way of communicating with hardware (assembler) XP fails compared to Win2000 by far.

Sure, 98SE is better then both in that department but so many new hardware is made for W2 and XP only,
and I’m not inclined to write them myself.

Just a thought for your question.

You're smoking the good stuff man. :rolleyes:

98SE better than XP or 2000??? Thats a good one. Every heard of the application memory pointer stack? That was the single biggest reason for any of the DOS based OS's (95,98,SE,Me) to not efficiently use larger amounts of RAM. Best part is that I doesn't exist in any of the NT based OS's.

If you don't like the XP GUI, just turn it off.

Regardless, I still get better latency numbers with my Audiophile in XP than 2000. Also, you you do some research, you will see that alot off issues regarding multimedia and audio limitiations in 2000 were fixed in XP (number of MIDI ports the OS can recognize for one).
 
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vestast said:
Anthony - I gotta disagree. I know you don't want to start a big useless discussion so I'll just say that I am a Solaris/Linux admin and I find WinXP to be the most USEFUL of all the window's OS's.
All the things that you have mentioned that are annoyances to you are easily disabled with a few tweaks.
Check out this website and try the tweaks. I'm sure XP will perform much better for you...
http://www.musicxp.net/tuning_tips.htm

vestast,

Since you speak from (Solaris/Linux) environment that is the very essence of my comments, and your remark finds me in dark. You should then understand why XP requires power simply to execute same speed even early 9x shell was capable of.

Since W98 every OS was slower and simply mimicking the global predictive formulation of hardware brands to sell more periphery combined with MS "open" ears.

This way each new OS deliberately jumps over several CPU generations simply to sell more iron.

Try run something on Win9x and witness the speed with your present machine, then go back to XP and do the same. If you say that XP is the most useful for you,than that serves its productive purpose for you designated goals. Sadly not from my vista.

GUI is just the top drawer to ease the burden of going into too many details in inappropriate forum.

There are so many issues in XP that I wouldn't know where to begin.

No tweaks could remedy the essence of this problems I'm afraid.

Since furthering this matter would truly not change XP OS alone (sadly) I shall postpone with patient dissonance this for some later date.

Nevertheless, thank you for your link. :)
 
brzilian said:
You're smoking the good stuff man. :rolleyes: 98SE better than XP or 2000??? Thats a good one. Every heard of the application memory pointer stack? That was the single biggest reason for any of the DOS based OS's (95,98,SE,Me) to not efficiently use larger amounts of RAM. Best part is that I doesn't exist in any of the NT based OS's.Regardless, I still get better latency numbers with my Audiophile in XP than 2000. Also, you you do some research, you will see that alot off issues regarding multimedia and audio limitiations in 2000 were fixed in XP (number of MIDI ports the OS can recognize for one).

Vapor of Noxious cloud is not my festivity.

Even 3x could with better management use memory in more efficient manner.

You don't build new OS to make obsolete promise.

If you ever path in learning assembler language you will understand why.

If you would be hired to choose NASA equipment, that ship wouldn't reach very far. :)

There is a reason why they use several generations old CPU's and boards.

Don't fall in trendy latest is the best. Not quite.

With well written drivers and just decent memory size you could do the same in older OS.

But I blame myself, I shouldn't make a flying allusion in relation to generally accepted misconceptions and expect silence.

Forgive me for that.
 
Anthony said:
Vapor of Noxious cloud is not my festivity.

Even 3x could with better management use memory in more efficient manner.

You don't build new OS to make obsolete promise.

If you ever path in learning assembler language you will understand why.

If you would be hired to choose NASA equipment, that ship wouldn't reach very far. :)

There is a reason why they use several generations old CPU's and boards.

Don't fall in trendy latest is the best. Not quite.

With well written drivers and just decent memory size you could do the same in older OS.

But I blame myself, I shouldn't make a flying allusion in relation to generally accepted misconceptions and expect silence.

Forgive me for that.


Wow...

Please stop posting for your own sake. You're just making a fool of yourself.

Oh yeah, don't lecture me about learning assembler either. I started off my college career in Computer Engineering.
 
brzilian said:
Wow...Please stop posting for your own sake. You're just making a fool of yourself. Oh yeah, don't lecture me about learning assembler either. I started off my college career in Computer Engineering.

Good, keep learning where you have stopped.

Personal agendas always reflect lack of constructive arguments, and lest I be not thought guilty of such infantile blunder.

I’m sure you will fulfill that need in some off-topic forum.

Ad acta.


http://www.abxzone.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-42852.html
 
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Anthony said:
Good, keep learning where you have stopped.

Personal agendas always reflect lack of constructive arguments, and lest I be not thought guilty of such infantile blunder.

I’m sure you will fulfill that need in some off-topic forum.

Ad acta.


http://www.abxzone.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-42852.html


What? Now you're gonna go off on that conspiracy theory crap? Puh-lease...

What don't you back up your "claims" of Win 9x being better than 2000/XP with some factual info?

The standard versions of Windows have a big problem handling memory. This is hardly news to most of us who use Windows, but there's a hidden side to the problem that makes it worse than it might seem.
Even people who are otherwise knowledgeable about Windows miss the significance of the problem. The basic flaw is bad enough -- Windows has only a tiny area of memory to keep track of what's going on -- but the hidden aspect is that the problem can't be fixed.
Crazy as it seems, this fatal flaw in Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me is never going to go away. No software utility can fix it. Neither MemTurbo nor RAM Idle, two of the most popular programs that claim to fix Windows memory handling, do anything to fix the problem. Nothing will.
Keep that in mind the next time you see claims about programs that supposedly fix problems with Windows. A software program can't fix this Windows memory flaw any more than a set of racing tires can turn a Hyundai into a Ferrari. The design of Windows makes a fix impossible. Only a complete redesign of Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me would work -- and, in fact, that's what Microsoft is doing for the next home version of Windows, which it plans to introduce later this year. That version is Windows XP.
Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me are like big cars fitted with tiny gas tanks. They will run fine for a while and then sputter to a stop when they use up their allotment of memory.
The memory I'm referring to isn't the standard kind of memory that all computers need to function properly. It's a special area of memory unique to Windows. It's called "resource" memory, where Windows keeps its pointers to what's going on.
When that memory area gets full, Windows loses control. Your mouse might stoop responding or you'll find that you can't close a window on your screen. You'll be stymied just trying to close programs, and your Windows PC will freeze. You'll lose what you were working on.
Ready for the wacko part of this? This storage area is so small, so improbably tiny, that it's not even expressed in megabytes. Your PC's hard drive probably has hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of storage. (A megabyte is 1 million bytes, and a byte is the smallest unit of storage.) If it's a modern computer, your PC's actual memory probably reaches all the way to 64 megabytes or more.
It sure would be great if Windows knew what to do with 64 megabytes for its resources. But let's not be so greedy. It would be just fine if it knew how to deal with 32 megabytes. Or with 16 megabytes. Heck, I'd settle for 8 megs. Or even 1.
But even 1 megabyte is out of the reach of Windows when it's dealing with resources. Want to hear the really bad news about this resource memory? Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me can't set aside any more than 64 kilobytes for this vital storage. No matter how much memory your PC has -- and most new ones have at least 64 megabytes of memory -- all that Windows can use for resources is 64 kilobytes (usually called "64K").
This means Windows can only use one-tenth of 1 percent of the typical memory in a modern PC for the all-important function of keeping track of what's going on.
This is the bad news that seems to follow Windows users around like a toothache. I get dozens of letters a week from Windows users looking for ways to keep their Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows Me computers from running out of memory and crashing. They often ask if memory-enhancing programs they see on the Internet actually fix the problem.
The answer is no. The 64K limit in Windows 95, 98 and Me is a barrier that can't be taken down. No program can change this. Adding more regular memory (adding RAM, in other words) won't fix it, either. Rebooting (shutting down and starting up again) can help by clearing out resource memory. When resource memory runs low again, reboot again.
Apart from rebooting, which hardly counts as a "fix," there is no way to cure this flaw in these versions of Windows. If you want to run a version of Windows that handles memory properly, you have two current choices -- Windows NT, an older version that is about to be retired, or Windows 2000, a new version I've raved about in print and on TV. Or you can wait for Windows XP later this year.
With the introduction of Windows XP, which, because of Microsoft's nearly total monopoly on PC operating systems, will show up on practically every new PC sold by the end of the year, Microsoft will at last be making an advertised version of Windows that is reliable and able to keep running for weeks without the need for rebooting. If you're not drawn to the Mac or to Linux through your frustrations with Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me, and if you're scared away by Microsoft's refusal to tell you that Windows 2000 actually exists, you will want to upgrade to Windows XP as quickly as possible.


http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/tec041501.html

In many cases, an "out of memory" message is misleading, since your whole system really did not run out of memory. Instead, certain areas of memory (Microsoft calls "heaps") used by Windows have run low on space.
Windows maintains an area of memory for operating system resources. The maximum size of this area is 128K, in two 64K areas. Windows 95/98 uses this area of memory to store fonts, bitmaps, drop-down menu lists and other on-screen information used by each application.

When any program begins running, it uses up some space in the "system resources" area in memory. But, as you exit, some programs do not give back system resources they were temporarily using. Eventually the system will crash as it runs out of memory. The crash happens sometimes if you start and close many programs, even the same ones, without a periodic reboot. This is what Microsoft calls a resource leak or memory leak.

When you tell your system to exit a program, the program is supposed to give back the resources (memory) it was using. But, because programs are written by humans, mistakes can happen and the program may not give back all to the operating system. This failing to "give back" is the "memory leak," eventually leading to a message that your computer is low on resources. Memory leaks can also be caused by programs that automatically load every time you boot your Windows system. In Windows 95/98 you can see the list of active programs via the usual Ctrl-Alt-Del sequence. The Windows Startup folder contains programs that launch every time your system boots. In Windows 98, set the folder contents with MSCONFIG. In Windows 95, click the right mouse button on the Task Bar, click Properties, click Start Menu Programs, click Advanced and look for the Startup folder in the left pane.

The system resources problem is something you might have to live with until the misbehaving application is found. If you are sure a certain application is causing the problem, be sure to contact the software vendor.

You can keep track of your system resources via the handy tool at Start >> Programs >> Accessories >> System Tools >> Resource Meter. If you do not have a copy, you can download it at UtilMind Solutions. The resource meter adds the "fuel gauge" to your Windows task bar, to help you keep track of your system's resources. As the bar graph gauge turns from green to yellow, then the dreaded red, you know you have a problem! But you need to remember that the resource meter also consumes what you are trying to conserve: system resources.

The best preventive maintenance is to periodically reboot your Windows system.

No conspiracy, no need to buy memory, unless you only have 4M of RAM. Buying memory does not fix the "system resources" problem, because its size is fixed at 128K, no matter how much physical memory is installed.


http://www.howstuffworks.com/question466.htm

In order to understand why resources are limited, we first have to understand a bit about what resources are and how they work. Resources are Windows objects that a program can manipulate. For example, every window on the screen is a resource. Every picture that's displayed on the screen is probably a resource. If an application opens a file on disk, that open file is a resource. And so on, and so on.

If an application needs to use a resource, it asks the operating system to create or load it. For example, a program can say, "Hey, Windows, I need to create a window that's 300 pixels wide by 200 pixels high, okay?" Windows then goes ahead and creates or loads that resource, and gives the application back a magic number that represents it. "Okay, I've created your window, and it's #38710." Then the application can use that magic number to ask Windows to do other things related to that resource. "Okay, Windows; could you please display #38710 in the upper-left corner of the screen?" "Gotcha." Finally, when an application is through with a resource, it tells Windows to dispose of it. "Okay, please delete #38710." "Gotcha."

So, what format do these magic numbers take? Well, on most operating systems, it would be what's called a "pointer". You can think of memory as being like a post office, a huge collection of little boxes stretching off into the distance; every box can hold one piece of information. And just like every post office box has a number, every memory location has an address--a number that's used to access it. A pointer to something in memory is simply the address of the area in memory where it's stored. So, if I were a regular OS, and an application asked me to load a window, and I loaded that window into memory starting at memory address #12345678, I would tell the application "OK, I've loaded that window; it's #12345678."

On an Intel machine, these pointers are four bytes long. So if an application needs to hold a pointer to something, it needs to use up four bytes of memory in order to do it. That presented a problem to the original designers of Windows. Remember, memory was very limited back then; an 8MB machine was huge, and 4MB was more typical. And an application can use thousands and thousands of resources. So if resources were referred to by pointers, so that an application needed to use up four bytes of memory every time it wanted to refer to a resource, it could wind up using up huge chunks of memory just for these resource pointers.

So, instead, the Windows designers used a different scheme. They created the resource table. The resource table is essentially a big list of information about all the resources that are in memory at any given time. So if an application tells Windows to load a resource, Windows finds an empty spot in this resource table, and fills it in with the information about the resource that was just loaded. Now, instead of giving the application a four-byte pointer to the resource, Windows can just tell the application where the resource is in the table. If I tell Windows to load a window, and that window winds up taking the 383rd slot in the resource table, Windows will tell me "Okay, I've loaded the resource, and it's #383." Since these 'index numbers' are much smaller numbers than memory addresses, under this scheme, a resource's number can be stored in only two bytes instead of four; when you only have a few megabytes of memory to work with, and lots of resources being used, that's a huge improvement.

There's a problem with this scheme. There's only so many different possible values that you can store in a certain number of bytes of computer memory, just like there's only so many different numbers you can write down if you aren't allowed to use more than a certain number of digits. If you have four bytes of memory to work with, you can store billions of different possible values in those four bytes. But if you only have two bytes, there's only 65536 different numbers that you can store in those two bytes. So if you use two-byte numbers as your resource identifiers, you can't have more than 65536 resources loaded into memory at one time; if you loaded more than that, there'd be no way for programs to tell them apart. But on the computers of the day, there'd be no way to fit more than a few thousand resources into memory at one time anyway. So this limitation wasn't seen as being a problem, and the Windows designers went ahead and used the resource table and two-byte resource identifiers.

Now, we leap ahead to the present day. Memory is incredibly cheap; the memory savings from using two-byte resource numbers instead of four-byte pointers simply aren't significant anymore. There'd be more than enough memory to hold hundreds of thousands of resources in memory at one time. But there's still only 65,536 different possible resource identifiers; so only that many resources can be loaded into memory at once. Beyond that, you're out of resources, no matter how much memory you have left.


http://www2.whidbey.com/djdenham/Window_memory.htm
 
Well, yeah, BeOS is pretty cool

BeOS was originally intended as the true multimedia OS, and many aspects of it have been copied or emulated by others since then. They incorporated the "journalling file system" well before Linux did, had cd-burning capability out of the box, and remember this was in about '97-00, and incorporated the best of all worlds in a few ways. Many times I have seen a "new" shell trick over the past few years and remembered that I had seen it first in BeOS.

Back when it was officially alive, there were several groups writing softwares for recording, or tracking. There was one called "Qua" that I think was very much like a more recent and wildly successful Windows program called "Audiomulch," which is great, especially if you are a midi kinda guy (or gal). Really cheap shareware too, does great! There was also a free BeOS version of T-Racks. Many of the earlier VST plugins were available for the BeOS. I have them all.

My experience was particularly with a beat editor/tracker program called XRS. It was a great little tracker, loop machine, whatever the hell you want to call it, it was great and it was free, and it was VST compliant, so I had quite a handful of free effects. Back then, there weren't so many VST-compliant trackers for Windows, and none for free that I knew of.

Unfortunately, the Be company went belly-up just as they were hitting their stride, and their 5.1 version was their most fully functional OS, and their last. They officially sold out to the Palm company (for a big one million dollars) which I hear has a really neat OS nowadays.

The OS has been kept alive by a small crew of fantatics, who keep updating madly to remain current with recent hardware. These volunteer developers keep going, although their prospects are a little obscure, as the source code is not public and has been abandoned by its originating company. But the vigor of the original OS has not faded away.

The Be company used to give away the personal version of their OS for free, and then sell the licensed version pretty cheaply, and have thus provided us a good how-not-to-do-it sample of the "shareware" business model in action. They kicked the old oaken bucket. And so the volunteer developers have continued to work on the personal version, which remains free, and with the recent "developer's edition" add-on (free download) you can use a free, easy-to-install OS with a really wide variety of hardware now, much more than when the company was still alive. And the installation of the base OS is the fastest and easiest I have ever seen. In 2000 I installed it within 30 minutes on a pentium 1. And the personal edition creates and boots to a mini-partition on your regular Windows partition, default being 500 mb. You can then use several tricks or softwares to copy this 500 mb mini-partition to a much larger real partition. And then your "personal edition" has become a "professional edition." I am perhaps the last person on the east coast though with a legit copy of the Pro edition.

Nowaday, a lot of the best the BeOS had to offer has been co-opted by Windows and Linux. And now, with Planet CCRMA and with low-latency sound drivers for Linux, it is finally viable to use Linux for musical production. So, like BeOS, you have a free OS that, with a massive effort, (unlike BeOS but the usual for anything Linux) you can actually have an equal or superior multimedia OS for free. You still can for BeOS, too, and probably easier. Probably not as many apps tho. I don't use XRS any more. The developer, Andreas Anzani I think it is, said he was going to write a Windows version, and I haven't heard from him for a couple years. I use more conventional Windows tracker software now, as I can get a free VST-compliant tracker called "Psycle" which is my dream come true.

Anyway, BeOS is real good if you have compliant hardware. It's a really fast easy install, and it puts a "reboot to BeOS" link on your Win desktop, and it installs into a partition in your Windows directory. It can read all your Windows files -- if you use FAT instead of NTFS, and so it is exremely compatible with Windows as a second OS, requiring no repartitioning of the hard drive. So if you want to try, it is free, and it is easy. And if you don't like it, you can always change your mind and lose nothing. You will probably want to get a bunch of little add-ons from one of the big beOS sites, as the OS was never really perfected, IMHO, but rather achieved the level of Win 95, cosmetically, when the company died out.

But it was supposed to be the artist's OS, and a lot of the original dev'ers were musicians.

But did I get off topic?
 
Zeto said:
..... But did I get off topic?

LOL... Maybe a little. The purpose of this board is to call anyone you don't agree with a fool...Didn't you know that ? :rolleyes:
 
I'm not sure what YOU need it for...but I can easily get 40 tracks of audio with full-on processing in Win2000 with a P3, and on XP with a P4 it looks like I'll get 48 or so once I get something that big..so far a project topped out at 30 tracks on this one. If you're tracking heavier than that, you should be using radar, or pthd, or tape!

Outside of the technobabble, this IS all about recording and plenty of us do it all week without a hitch on PCs.

H2H
 
I followed BeOS from version 4.0? just before bestbuy carried it, The general thought on why they failed is because the owner of the company wouldn't let go and let other better qualified people do their jobs, also lack of software and drivers at the time. here are a couple of groups that are trying to reconstruct the Beos systems or concepts:

http://www.yellowtab.com/

http://www.blueeyedos.com/about/gmcolumn.html

http://www.openbeos.org/

http://www.beunited.org/

Here's a place for info and to download the personal edition:

http://www.beosmax.org/html/index.php

Another OS I've been watching over the last few years is the new AMIGA:

http://os.amiga.com/

Plus this place is good info on OS's in general:

http://www.osnews.com/index.php

So far the palm/beos killer os has yet to arrive but os6 from palm is supposed to be good.
 
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That comment reflects my personal agendas toward the nature of XP.
Personal agendas always reflect lack of constructive arguments
?

I'll second the stop posting recommendation.


Oh, and BTW, BeOS is dead. Some people, and perhaps even BeOS itself, may have not got the memo yet, but that doesn't change anything.
 
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