OS X includes many of the technological goodies that have been built into BeOS since the beginning.
That's no surprise -- both OSes were created to address the same fundamental shortcomings in MacOS. But BeOS emerged onto the scene more than half a decade ago. Not only that, but BeOS has additional modern services that OS X does not have. Let's take a quick, admittedly biased look at some of the key technologies in OS X and BeOS, bullet-point style.
Protected memory. Both OSes seem to be equivalent here. When apps crash, the OS keeps humming. Just the way it should be.
Virtual memory. It never ceases to amaze me that the old "user friendly" MacOS requires novice users with low-memory machines to manually tweak application memory requirements. Welcome to the modern world.
World-class networking. OS X includes a networking layer based on FreeBSD. BeOS engineers are currently replacing the native net_server with a new network stack largely derived from FreeBSD. Both should perform roughly on par with Linux/BSD, bringing two OSes with consumer-level ease-of-use to the Unix server market.
Symmetric multiprocessing. OS X's Mach 3.0 kernel is fully SMP capable. But in order to take full advantage of multiple processors, services and applications must be decently multithreaded. I do not know how much effort Apple has put into multithreading its non-kernel apps and services, but I do know that BeOS is multithreaded from the lowest levels of the OS to the highest. Even the Be filesystem is pervasively multithreaded. All apps get at least two threads, and developers are actively encouraged to design fully multithreaded apps. As a result, BeOS uses 100 percent of up to eight processors, right out of the box. I have not yet seen references to OS X working with more than two processors, though I would imagine it's prepared to do so.
POSIX-compliance. Both OSes are capable of running recompiled non-graphical Unix-style applications and utilities.
Extending Enterprise Value with Web 2.0 In this webcast we will talk about how to simply build and quickly remix Web 2.0 applications and the role of the IT department and how they support mashups. We will discuss how IBM can help IT teams adapt existing enterprise systems as well as develop unique ones that can support end user driven mashups in a reliable, scalable and secure way. We will highlight a simple scenario adapting an enterprise information source for mashups and how to test it. We will also cover how IBM can help you build agile, fast and simple web applications based on dynamic scripting languages that dramatically reduces development time. Wednesday, September 24, 2008 - 12pm PT / 3pm ET
2008 International Mathematica Conference Dr. Dobb's interviews Wolfram Research's Theo Gray, co-founder and Director of User Interfaces, and Roger Germundsson, Director of Research and Development, about the upcoming 2008 International
Mathematica Conference.
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
