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Haiku Tech Talk at Google a Success 127

mikesum writes "February 13 was Haiku's big day at Google, and we can say with a good degree of confidence that the Haiku Tech Talk was quite successful. We had a very special guest for this event: former Be Inc. CEO Jean Louis Gassée, who not only joined us at Google for our presentation, but also gave a few words of support and encouragement for our project. It was great to have JLG's presence, as well as that of the several ex-Be engineers who showed up for the talk. We were also glad to see Java for BeOS developer Andrew Bachman join us for this special event. Have a look at the pictures taken during the presentation, as well as the video of the event."
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Haiku Tech Talk at Google a Success

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  • by sczimme ( 603413 ) on Saturday February 17, 2007 @12:50PM (#18052608)

    Jean Louis Gassée
    who joined us at Google and
    gave words of support .

  • I just want to wish the project good luck. I think Haiku is and will be a great operating system. The team have already accomplished a lot, but, undoubtedly, there is still much to do. Keep up the good work!
    • by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Saturday February 17, 2007 @01:42PM (#18053120) Homepage
      It's example like this I want to give to all who say "Meh ! I don't need my drivers to be opensource, nVidia's drivers for linux are good enough".

      Yeah. And how are you going to port them to Haiku ? nVidia has not interests in supporting additional OS that don't even have 1% market share. (It's already incredible that they support BSD, Solaris and 2 Linux platforms) But if nouveau [freedesktop.org] project succeeds, Haiku people will have a nice opensource code base from which to adapt a driver. And without good hardware support, nice systems like haiku won't get widespread use.

      I wish a lot of luck to Haiku, and hope they'll find a way to survive in the difficult place where companies only focus on the 1-2 most popular platforms, and refuse to help the others.
      • I believe the nouveau driver is actually based on the Haiku one, which has 3D support for a limited range of nVidia products (up to GeForce 4).
        • As far as I've read they're not *based on* but collaborating and exchanging informations.
          And the Haiku project will benefit from actual development because apparently they only support 1 generation of graphic card (the NV0x which is also supported on the next generation, i.e: NV1x. Haiku only works with TNT and GeForce 1-2 [+4MX]), and apparently isn't maintained very actively.

          The nouveau project itself is mostly build around the renouveau tool : a tool assisting in reverse engineering which sends openGL co
  • Can it be? I always was a fan of BeOS for the reason that is looked and felt so clean and fast. And now there is a new OS, obviously based on BeOS, that has Google power behind it. I want to run this on my pda, on my laptop for basic internet usage, etc...
    • by Rix ( 54095 )
      It's not based on BeOS, it's an independent implementation of the BeOS API. Also, Google talks aren't Google talking to people about things, they're people talking to Google about things. They just post video so the rest of us can benefit, too.
  • Haiku (Score:5, Funny)

    by EveryNickIsTaken ( 1054794 ) on Saturday February 17, 2007 @01:00PM (#18052696)
    Might be good OS
    But with only twelve users
    Grim future ahead.
  • ahh (Score:4, Funny)

    by physicsboy500 ( 645835 ) on Saturday February 17, 2007 @01:00PM (#18052702)

    Google learns today

    new OS will thrill us all

    Slashdotters rejoice

  • And now, a haiku. [attackcartoons.com]
  • by Spazntwich ( 208070 ) on Saturday February 17, 2007 @01:15PM (#18052836)
    I wanted to go against the grain.

    There once was a man most true
    Who came to talk in Haiku
    His OS was dead
    The workers felt dread
    Their business might soon be too
  • by Anonymous Coward
    It seems reasonable that a specialized operating system aimed at the desktop would do that job better than a general purpose os like Linux. We all complain about bloatware that is burdened with features that almost nobody uses. This operating system could solve that problem; in theory.

    On the other hand, Linux can be stripped down to the bare essentials and get most of the advantages of Haiku with much less effort. One of the complaints about gnu/linux is that there is no clear, shared vision and this res
    • by mlk ( 18543 )

      re-write all the gnu/linux application
      No. BeOS used the GNU toolchain.
    • Linux isn't the problem, per se... current kernel speed for threading, etc. is generally better in Linux than in BeOS. Where BeOS sparkled was the desktop. The problem is X/KDE/GNOME. A combination of "good enough" and "legacy apps" means it probably won't ever be replaced.
  • Another (Score:5, Funny)

    by DavidD_CA ( 750156 ) on Saturday February 17, 2007 @01:29PM (#18052982) Homepage
    Typical Slashdot
    Mention haikus and you all
    Become smartasses
  • What's interesting for me is that, they implemented new database like file system in C++, which reminds me WinFS.
  • I'm disappointed Title made me imagine Tech talk in haikus
    • I'm disappointed Title made me imagine Tech talk in haikus

      You made a mistake
      to divide lines when posting
      must choose Plain Old Text
  • webserver crashes slashdotters joke server fire mysql go boom (My-Sequel, not My-Ess-Que-Ehl, fyi.)
  • Meta-Comment (Score:2, Informative)

    by giminy ( 94188 )
    Everyone does this
    Replies with seventeen beats
    Moderate them well
  • The BeOS runs great on my Mac-clone with a 250Mhz PowerPC 603 and just 32MB of RAM. The BeIDE runs fine within that amount of RAM, and you could run plenty of other applications along with BeIDE in that amount of RAM. The OS boots up amazing fast (by today's standards) and is amazingly responsive on what is considered really low-end PC hardware by today's standards.

    I'd love to see Haiku ported to PDA's. Even some phones today have more than 64MB of RAM. The BeOS is so much more capable than Windows Mobi
    • that's why Palm bought them... there's a Palm 6 out there but never marketed that's a direct descendant of BeOS techonolgy... just like you said.. but it's TOO different to push on Palm developers without them all jumping to WinCE. What a shame.

      side note that it runs on at least 4 different CPUs.. Hobbit, PPC, X86, and Xscale...

  • Now go fix your webpage at http://haiku-os.org/ [haiku-os.org]:

    warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (11) in /home2/haiku/webapps/website/gallery2/lib/adodb/dr ivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 348.
    • Strangely enough - once I login to the site the warning goes away.

      Must be something that only affects anonymous visitors.
      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by sokoban ( 142301 )

        Strangely enough - once I login to the site the warning goes away.
        Perhaps you mean:

        And strangely enough
        once I log in to the site
        warnings go away
  • Any other questions while it loads Firefox?
  • Haiku (Score:5, Funny)

    by VorpalRodent ( 964940 ) on Saturday February 17, 2007 @01:50PM (#18053190)
    Obligatory:
    But In Soviet Russia
    Haiku Uses You
  • by Lord Bitman ( 95493 ) on Saturday February 17, 2007 @02:06PM (#18053324)
    Everything they showed didn't work, everything asked for wasn't available, they seemed _very_ impressed with themselves about a compressed form of SVG (which is just so important to Operating System design).

    I really don't see what I (or anyone) am supposed to take out of that presentation.
    • Nothing really worked
      Even the requested stuff
      Wasn't for our eyes

      They were impressed though
      Impressed with their SVG
      I found it useless

      What did I get out?
      Nothing, really. What a load!
      Bad presentation.

      From this point forward
      You will write all your comments
      In a haiku form
    • Its not a compressed implementation of SVG - its a seperate format. Phipps managed to trip over it entirely so tried to say it again, and still tripped over it. Thats why it sounds like he's excited about it, he's just saying it three times :P

      That said, it is noticably faster than SVG-icon based vector graphic implementations on BeOS (OpenTracker has a number of forks that have SVG support) due to the icon size and relative lack of difficulty to parse them.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      It's alpha software, meaning it's not feature complete (almost but not quite) and has loads of bugs. As someone who checks out the regular builds on a daily basis, the stability varies considerably from one revision to the next simply because of the rapid changes and development going on.

      There's been days when it was more stable than Linux or Windows. Others when DOS seemed more useful. I'm guessing this just happened to be the performance of a lesser build.

      The importance of HVI (which isn't strictly a form
      • > The importance of HVI (which isn't strictly a form of SVG, but of vector graphics) is that an icon that would normally take several kilobytes in disk space consumes less than the size that's free on a typical BFS inode, allowing gorgeous graphics with no extra disk seeks required; it's quite a feat that other UIs should take note of.

        Yeah, because if you're not cautious all those pesky icons will fill up your 300 GB harddisk very quickly.
        • > The importance of HVI (which isn't strictly a form of SVG, but of vector graphics) is that an icon that would normally take several kilobytes in disk space consumes less than the size that's free on a typical BFS inode, allowing gorgeous graphics with no extra disk seeks required; it's quite a feat that other UIs should take note of.

          Yeah, because if you're not cautious all those pesky icons will fill up your 300 GB harddisk very quickly.

          Talk about ignorance.

          Disk seeks have nothing to do with disk space. Because the HVI icon fits within a standard inode, you're going to see great performance because your hard drive won't have to go fetch more data just to retreive a given file's icon. BeOS did this, but they were using bitmap graphics; Haiku was able to pull it off using vector graphics.

          Anything else you'd like to try and piss on?

      • I try to avoid showing off to potential interests when I have absolutely nothing to show. I still have no idea what was "good" about the presentation. I have been asking people, and have yet to get a straight answer: What was the presentation about, why was it worth presenting?

        I'm willing to accept the distinct possibility that there's just something I don't know enough about to find interesting, but I'd love it if someone would tell me what that was.
        • I try to avoid showing off to potential interests when I have absolutely nothing to show.

          Nothing to show? Haiku is almost out of alpha, that is, it's almost feature complete. It runs R5 binary software. It's reimplemented most of the BeAPI. It's reimplemented the Be File System. It's come out with a neat icon format that allows vector graphics without degrading disk performance due to extraneous seeks. Really, the big thing left to do is finish the network stack and knock out bugs.

          Don't worry if you didn't get anything out of the presentation: you're not a low-level engineer and probably would

          • I like to think I'm great at bullshitting enough to expand nothing into something, but I really don't think I could pull off turning "We ported an existing operating system to C++ of all things for some reason. Surprisingly, it's slow and doesn't work. Also, (on a completely unrelated note) we have this smaller icon format." into a full hour.

            I heard a handful of disjointed footnotes about unrelated projects which (it being open source) should probably stay separate, and /still/ have no idea what the present
            • >To me, "we copied something that already exists, almost!" is not noteworthy.

              Creating an open source version of a closed source OS is pretty noteworthy, to me at least.
              • Why isn't anybody making an open source version of Internet Explorer?

                Oh right, 'cause they're busy making their own thing instead of copying something [almost].
  • by Viper_Viper ( 881780 ) on Saturday February 17, 2007 @02:19PM (#18053408) Homepage
    Haikus are easy
    But sometimes they don't make sense
    Refrigerator
  • Back in the '90s ... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Client-supplied disk,
    both Linux and Windows failed.
    BeOS read it just fine

    (true story)
  • * Focused on desktop, don't want to be a wristwatch
    ** So they believe in the future of desktops and not having a system that's built up of components but having a system designed for the desktop. Apple have their desktop OS running on a phone, Linux has been ported to just about anything under the sun, Microsoft have a stripped down version of their OS for phones and PDA but Haiku think they are better by focusing on desktop only -- mistake!
    * Compatible with Beos R5
    ** As he said in the presentation, why foc
    • by izomiac ( 815208 )
      For most of those you seem to be missing the point. Haiku is designed to be a successor to BeOS. Many BeOS users (current and past) have used or now use other OSes, but haven't seen the things they liked about the BeOS present in them. That's why there's a need for Haiku. There is the Cosmoe Project [cosmoe.com] that seeks to make Linux more like the BeOS, but personally I'm placing my hopes with Haiku (although I expect Cosmoe & Haiku can improve each other). That said, there are a few of your comments that
    • I don't have points currently or I'd do it myself.
    • * One common look makes documentation, support and QA easier
      ** 1 common look? communism anyone?

      This comment alone makes of you nothing more than a troll. And that is quite apart from the fact that you're completely missing the point.

      To drag this towards a strained analogy with cars:
      A Prius is fuel efficient, a Porsche is fast and an Aston Martin looks good, so noone should attempt to make a car that is fuel efficient, fast and looks good?

      All these features exist, yes, but where can I pop in a

    • Posts like the parent, all that long winded scorn from a position where opinion is indisputable fact, tend to really bug me. That is until I read them in the voice of the fat guy from the comic store on The Simpsons. Try it. It works.

  • As someone who recently bought a used BeBox (dual-66mHz PPC 603) on eBay, I'm really happy to see that there's still life in the BeOS/Haiku scene. Such a fun and powerful OS shouldn't just disappear without a sound. Huxley
  • by Stormwatch ( 703920 ) <rodrigogirao@noSPAM.hotmail.com> on Saturday February 17, 2007 @07:21PM (#18055788) Homepage
    Well, technically

    Haiku may be fantastic

    but to run what apps?
    • by Trogre ( 513942 )
      What's fantastic about it?
      There's nothing particularly special, rhythmic or even remotely clever about making a haiku.
      Look I'll invent a new way to achieve Zen:

      7 syllables
      27 syllables
      11 syllables

      There, now the top three lines of this post display a mastery of the ancient art of Trogru.

  • Argh (Score:1, Troll)

    by John Nowak ( 872479 )
    Someone say SOMETHING interesting, please!
  • by iPaul ( 559200 ) on Saturday February 17, 2007 @07:49PM (#18056020) Homepage
    It was something really neat. What blew me away with BeOS 4.5 (I think that was the first Intel build), was being able to run 3 windows of video simultaneously (same 350Mhz PII running win95 could handle 1 window of video). I could spin multiple GL teapots in different windows with really crisp performance. And it worked really well with my Haupage capture card, no dropped frames. In the modern world of 100 fps, texture mapped, highly accelerated OpenGL/DirectX games that's not much of an accomplishment. On 1997-ish hardware, however, it was an accomplishment.

    Compared to Win32 API, MFC and Macintosh Toolbox the API was fairly clean and simple. In fairly short order I wrote a native C++ app (as an exercise for the reader) that read in image files and broke it into R, G and B channels with histogram plots. I could then lower/raise the intensity of each channel. It could read in just about any format (jpg, gif, tiff, and some other odd-balls). In addition the app was safely multi-threaded. It was a piece of cake. Compared to my beloved Mac (on which I learned C), it was completely painless. Version 5.0 and 6.0 were going to have a lot of great, new features that were giving MS a real run for their money.

    That was nearly 10 years ago. GUIs have progressed since then. I forked out the dough for Zeta - on a nostalgia kick - six months or so ago. It just didn't have the features I expect from a modern OS. When Be went belly up (remember MS had such a tight lock on OEMs Be literally couldn't give their OS away) time seems to have stopped for the BeOS. I didn't bother installing it on real hardware - just on VMware. I played around with it for a couple of days and then needed the disk space for something else. Haven't touched it since.

    Well, I hope the Haiku guys have a lot of fun with their project and other users get a chance to play with what I still think is a really neat operating system.
    • by mlk ( 18543 )

      BeOS 4.5 (I think that was the first Intel build)
      3 was the first Intel build. (I have the box in my cupboard).
  • ...is that around here it seems to be the articles about other operating systems which attract the most trolls, incoherent offtopic posts, lame, unfunny attempts at humour, and other such rubbish.

    I've noticed how much flotsam is usually attached to articles about *BSD releases in particular, and now a story about Haiku seems to be attracting a fair amount of drek as well.

    Maybe this is just the paranoid conspiracy theorist in me, but I'm suspecting that my nemeses on Slashdot, the perennial GNU/cultists, fee
  • Waiting for Haiku
    Seems like an eternity
    So much anxiety

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