i might be stupid but what is beos

The Be Operating System (pronounced Be-O-S) is designed with the futurist user foremost in mind. Media creation/consumption may be BeOS's true forte, but no one can live inside a system void of email, spreadsheets, and word processors. Those applications are essential in almost every user's daily diet. Just because BeOS is billed as the MediaOS, that doesn't mean it's somehow sub-optimal at handling more mundane chores. Hardware manufacturers of the world can churn out speedy hardware faster than we (or our wallets) can keep up with them. But what good is a 1 GHz machine if the operating system you run on it keeps on crashing because it's so tangled and bloated with old code from programmers who never collaborated much. Why order a spanking new Porsche only to install Buick seats and a Volkswagen suspension? Operating systems like MacOS and Windows were not designed to be fully modular, BeOS is. Preemptive multitasking in BeOS is implemented automatically and transparently, unlike in Windows and MacOS. The Be File System or BFS is made like a database, searching for a file is instantaneous, searching for a file with any attribute can be displayed in well under a second. For example: if you wanted to find an MPEG Audio Layer 3 file or .mp3, with S in the name, and recorded in 1991 in the ID3 tag over the size of 2 megabytes, this could take minutes for Windows or MacOS to lookup, while BeOS has found it instantly. BeOS is fast because it uses pervasive multithreading, meaning that it will break up large tasks into lots of tiny tasks, thereby increasing the flow rate of data through the system while reducing the time that tasks must wait for the processor. Windows does not multithread much at all. BeOS makes use of 8 processors simultaneously and symmetrically out of the box, Windows NT can do four (not as well), and for an extra couple hundred dollars. MacOS just started implementing this concept in their newest operating systems. BeOS's symmetric multiprocessing is distributed evenly and automatically, so if one CPU is busy the current task will be sent to others; therefore BeOS uses around 99.9% or greater. Moreover, Windows does not take full advantage of the multiple CPU's. In fact, only 80% (approximately) at best gets used, which is a big problem when the rest is being wasted. Drivers are installed unadorned to the user in BeOS. The drivers are not peculiarly installed from a large database usually unnecessarily taking up space like on Windows. Instead they are automatically detected and initialized in the first boot sequence. Because BeOS is almost unknown to Windows users, and since technology is rapidly growing not all of the new hardware is compatible with BeOS. Compatibility with the most common internal hardware is not really the big issue though; peripherals that are rapidly expanding the market such as USB devices are hard to keep up with. But this is not the fault of the developers for BeOS, since there are not very many peripherals. Many third party and independent developers have been working to make the most widely used hardware compatible with BeOS. Most hardware companies do not make drivers for BeOS on their own. One can check with BeOS's website for the latest compatibility lists. Sure, most of the programs that you use in Windows or MacOS are not available for BeOS, and that's probably not going to change. There are well over a million software titles for Windows and Macintosh, and less then a percent will be ported to BeOS. The real reason for this is not because of the massive amounts of software, but because of the way the code is written. Windows is DOS, except with more dynamic link libraries or DLL's (most of which are no longer used). This makes Windows backwards compatible with almost every operating system that Microsoft has conjured up. Old code is mixed with the new code but that makes Windows messy, and slow. Everything in BeOS is small; a program that is normally very large in Windows and MacOS can sometimes be smaller then a megabyte, leaving you a lot of room for your MP3's, movies, and other databases. Five hundred megabytes is all you would ever need for BeOS and its programs, two gigabytes is almost too much. Since it's modular and POSIX compliant, almost any UNIX or Linux based software can be easily ported with the fully functional C/C++ compiler that comes with BeOS, called IDE. The full version of BeOS comes with plenty of sample code. BeOS is reliable; you can run BeOS without restarting it. Windows 9x must be restarted at the least once a week so it can clear its registry, or once a day for peek performance. MacOS is about the same. Windows NT 4, and 2000 can be run for a long time; however, it is recommended to completely restart the machine once a month. BeOS is built for everyone, the beginning, intermediate, and even the advanced computer user. BeOS is easy to install, easy to configure, and easy to get on the Internet. Intermediate users will find that it has a number of great software titles for their normal operations; everything is easily installable from drivers to applications. Advanced users will find BeOS comes with a fully capable development suite, and plenty of libraries to work with. The Professional version alone costs about $50 and has many package deals with the Gobe Productive 2.0 office suite, or with the BeOS Bible by Scot Hacker (a great read, and must have for anyone using BeOS), or both for about $120. The price for BeOS is very affordable compared to Windows ME full version, which is more than twice as much, and Windows 2000, which is more, then three times as much for the basic version. BeOS R5 is downloadable from http://free.be.com/ and runs alongside Windows. It is almost 50 megabytes and it is free. No version of Windows can be downloaded (legally at least), and only an older version of MacOS such as 7.5.3 is available from Apple's FTP server. BeOS's Website is at: http://www.be.com Recently Palm Inc. has acquired Be Inc. and the future for BeOS is really unknown.

Well aint this nice!