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Thread #: 1532

Hey JR, I made a 'score' today

Harbinger

Fri Mar 8 22:04:14 2002

I was killing time at the almost-local MicroCenter store today and cruised through their discounted books section.

The first thing I found was Linzmayer's Apple Confidential for $2.99.  JR had mentioned it in the past and for that price, it was hard to pass up.  Heck, if I don't like it, I can always shred it and put it in the litter box. ;)

The big score was found as I was passing through the Mac section (which was across from the Win9x/NT books).  On the bottom shelf I spied a single copy of the BeOS Bible -- the one with the BeOS 4.5 box shrinkwrapped to it. ;)  This had been out on the regular floor in the OS section for over a year, before it mysteriously (!) vanished.  So now I found it... and the price marked was $69.99!  Since this was the discounted books section, I did a double-take.  I passed it by, but later a sales rep asked me if I needed any help, so I asked her to do a price check on this beast.

The result?

"It's $21.04, sir."

:biggrin:

So yeah, I picked it up. :tongue:  Yes, I do realize it's a dead OS, and I wondered if any of my hardware was old enough ( :tongue: ) to run it.  I'll try it eventually, but if it doesn't work then at least it has a place to stay... right next to unopened copy of NextStep 3.1 for x86.

Consider yourselves apathetic.

Good night, and getu bless!  ;)

Jeremy Reimer

Sat Mar 9 03:57:42 2002

Apple Confidential is a great book.  All the gossip, all the history (albeit in a weird order) and PICTURES!! LOTS AND LOTS OF PICTURES!!!  

BeOS, eh, I dunno.  I never got into it.  NeXTstep on the other hand...  

Harbinger

Sat Mar 9 04:36:45 2002

from Jeremy Reimer posted at 10:57 pm on Mar. 8, 2002BeOS, eh, I dunno.  I never got into it.  NeXTstep on the other hand...  

Ehhh, I get the impression that it supports just a few more hardware options than does NextStep.  ;)

Jeremy Reimer

Sat Mar 9 07:17:45 2002

True, true.  But the underlying OS was very underwhelming.  
AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Sat Mar 9 08:21:47 2002

True, true.  But the underlying OS was very underwhelming.  

AYB begs to differ :)

Harbinger

Sat Mar 9 17:44:30 2002

Which OS are we talking about here?  I'm confused. ;)
DuffMan

Sun Mar 10 01:55:27 2002

BeOS was great in its simplicity. It look like it didnt take nearly as much effort to write it as any other modern OS. And it was beautifull.
Jeremy Reimer

Sun Mar 10 06:45:04 2002

One thing I really must do before I die is create the ultimate OS screenshot gallery, of every OS evAr.  

BeOS was a nice little lightweight OS but I found the networking to be a bit iffy, it crashed the system a couple of times.  There weren't too many apps for it either.  NeXTstep at least had Framemaker, Improv and TIFFany, the only graphics software package to be named after a crappy 80's girl singer.  ;)

DrPizza

Sun Mar 10 17:34:04 2002

BeOS didn't have simplicity.  It had omissions.

These are not the same thing.

Stubbing out security APIs, for instance (it has no authorization or authentication capabilities, but it does have "always give access"-style stubs) doesn't make it simple, but it does make it crippled.  It's not surprising that they wrote it with relatively little manpower -- they didn't bother writing half the things it needed.

Its APIs were sort-of-POSIX-but-not, and the POSIX APIs aren't particularly clean or simple.

Pervasive multithreading serves only to add complexity.  If I, the programmer, want to add threads, that decision should rest with no-one but me.  Threading introduces a number of non-trivial issues, and forcing me to deal with it is pisspoor.

Its fucking message dispatch system failed under stress, locking the entire OS up.

BeOS got a lot more praise than it ever deserved.

Harbinger

Sun Mar 10 19:14:42 2002

BeOS didn't have simplicity.  It had omissions.

Hey, it's just two sides of the same coin. ;)  Kinda like the Mac's supposedly better security (vis a vis Windows) because of its "secruity though obscurity."

DrPizza

Sun Mar 10 21:13:34 2002

Hey, it's just two sides of the same coin. ;)

I don't think that they are.

If they were going for "simple" then they wouldn't have stubbed out the calls in the first place.  They just plain wouldn't be there.  They obviously realized that the APIs should have been there, but that they couldn't, for whatever reason, finish implementing them.

Kinda like the Mac's supposedly better security (vis a vis Windows) because of its "secruity though obscurity."

This is rather different.  People don't (or at least, shouldn't) claim that legacy MacOS is more secure than other OSes -- they acknowledge that it has many technical flaws that make it insecure and unsecurable.  They do, however, say that it suffers fewer exploits per machine.  Not because it's more secuire -- it clearly isn't -- but because people aren't bothering to look for exploits.

Jeremy Reimer

Sun Mar 10 21:28:05 2002


People don't (or at least, shouldn't) claim that legacy MacOS is more secure than other OSes

You obviously never read much comp.sys.mac.advocacy.  ;)

The "Hack-a-Mac" contest was priceless.  A huge cash reward was offered by some group in Germany to see if anyone could hack their MacOS web server.  Of course a few days later this guy did, and the Germans promptly began whining, obfuscating, denying, blaming it on third party software (never mind said third party software was essential to running their site) and then basically shutting down the site and denying it ever existed.  The hacker was never paid the promised cash prize.

This was around 1997.

Harbinger

Mon Mar 11 02:25:24 2002

DrP, I was actually being facetious.  I thought the tone of my message, with the "obligatory Mac-bash" made it implicit.  Sorry, my mistake. ;)