1999-01-05

The beta website hasn't been progressing as planned since the arrival of the BeOS] (http://web.archive.org/web/19990125090610/http://www.be.com/). Umm, here, I created a whole page dedicated to acheiving a [State of Be. Make sure you are sitting down before reading this, or strap yourself in even if you are sitting:

I wiped linux off the system, and gave it all to Be.

I've been using Redhat since the 2.1 days (1994) when linux was just some silly set of CDs in the back of a magazine or at your local Software, Etc. New year, new OS, what can I say. The shell is POSIX compliant, so most of my bash scripts work out of the box, some with slight mods. Pimptastic.

Ars-techinca has a cool review of the new SGI Visual Workstations. What's even cooler, regardless of everything else cool in the land of coolness? The fact that SGI used its engineering prowess to build a kick-ass, take no prisoners, women and children running n' screaming workstation for NT. All of these other workstations on the market are clones of each other, using the same chips, same video boards, etc. Just because it has 2 processors doesn't make it a workstation, just a good BeBox. True, this means that you're a slave to SGI for Service Pack updates and such, however with IRIX, you're more likely to see a patch CD than the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes in the mail. My guess is that they'll continue this trend, at least so their CD distribution partners can continue to afford their kid's Bentley's. SGI is run by performance phreaks, the kind of people who will reprogram their car computer to eek out 0.000005% more performance, because that is more than they started with. The OSes are solid, fast, and just rock all around. The problem is the whole proprietary thing. SGI doesn't use a BIOS, they use their own custom PROM boot sequence. What are the chances Intel, Compaq, HP, etc could sell any PCs without any ISA, PCI32, or AGP1x slots this year? Slim to none, I'd say. (For those that don't get it, ISA should just be killed, PCI32 is replaced by 64-bit PCI, and AGP 1x is replaced by AGP 2x or 4x.) So SGI takes chances, but makes awesome technology, I may buy one on principal. Give it time, linux will run on it. Maybe Be as well.

You know those virtual reality cockpits (the ones you have to slide into, buckle up, and learn to fly them)? They run on SGI/IRIX boxes.

Oh, and check out the Quake FPS stat, 50+ with OpenGL emulation, not even native OpenGL drivers. This is like emulating the MacOS in Windows, imagine how slow it would be, as you have to fake an entire Mac environment in software in another OS. If the machine can crank out 50+ fps (frames per second) in emulation, can you say triple digits in full hardware support? Can you say multiple monitors doing that simultaneously? Play Unreal and Quake at the same time, same box, both in the 100's of fps? Mmm, brain melt.