BeOS was the brainchild of former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gasse, who founded Be inc. in late 1990. Read the article at Macreate, a quick intro to the BeOS world.
BeOS was the brainchild of former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gasse, who founded Be inc. in late 1990. Read the article at Macreate, a quick intro to the BeOS world.
Great article, my only dislike is this, “Much like GNU Linux, and other platforms, BeOS uses workspaces.” It is the window manager that has workspaces (like KDE or Gnome) not linux which should not be capitol!
“Great article, my only dislike is this, “Much like GNU Linux, and other platforms, BeOS uses workspaces.” It is the window manager that has workspaces (like KDE or Gnome) not linux which should not be capitol!”
In that sense Linux is only a core. The author was refering to a whole GNU Linux operating system for Desktop purposes.
Sorry, but this was a poorly laid out article. The screenshots looked awful, it looks like the person runs 800×600 and then compressed them massively.
But the biggy is, sync images up with the context, don’t just dump random shots in the middle of text. When you talk about workspaces, have a shot that shows workspace block in the bottom corner. Make the screenshots match up. There was little to no such action going on.
And what was that browser, it didn’t look like net+. A shot of a completely empty screen isn’t very useful. Am I the only person who has never heard of Nisus Email.
Sorry to get on a rant. I loved BeOS in it’s time. I used full time for a long time, till winXP came out. But this article makes BeOS look like some awful hobby OS or some fallout from the 80s or something. It was really well polished in interface. That browser looks awuful.
The author mentions Abiword as being a port from KDE, which in reality is from GTK/GNOME. Just a small error… Dosen’t look like this guy did his homework. I got the gist of the article anyway…
Jean Loouis Gasse
it’s “Jean-Louis Gassée”
More on the subject of beboxen can be foudn at http://www.bebox.nu (dig in the forums there is some neat info in there).
Also I tend t agree with the first screen shot under the Weird Chapter : having beos on intel was weird (see http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=jdjwwtbdtao.fsf@hyppynaru…)
Ludovic
—
http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/blog/
The article mentions a lot of the things you noticed quickly about BeOS as a user – like Netpositive’s haiku errors.
It was a sweet little OS in its time.
The link to download PE doesn’t work, search google with that link title or here:
http://www.bebits.com/app/2680
3/4 of the links don’t work though. BTW, why are all the files exes. Does BE not have a bootloader?
before writing an article/comment?
its neither GNU Linux nor linux. It is GNU/Linux:
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html
From the article: “word processor is AbiWord, a port of the famous KDE word processor”. Ouch. Pear != Oranges Read http://abisource.com it is GTK+ based on GNU/Linux (but not fixed to)
No new information in the article, please move on, nothing to see here.
Yes, well, let’s just say the article is pretty devoid of content (as well as containing incorrect information – there was NEVER a BeBox with 4 Hobbit processors!)
Not only that, but this exact same article was published 6 months ago at AppleFritter:
http://www.applefritter.com/node/view/2587
How is this news worthy for OSNews? Slow news day?
BeOS Personal Edition was made to be loaded into another OS as a “Filesystem-in-a-file”. You could unzip a 42 mg zip file out into a 500 mg file somewhere in your Windows or Linux system, preferably in the ‘root’ directory. In Win9x you got an icon on your desktop that when clicked, would proceed to harmlessly push Windows out of RAM and load BeOS running in that 500 mg file much as mounting an ISO image file as an HDD and using it. Kind of strange how much easier and safer BeOS could push Windows out of the RAM than Windows could exit it on it’s own much of the time!
With WinMe, NT, and 2k you would need to boot the system with a BeOS boot floppy in the drive to access BeOS. You also had full read/write access to files on any FAT partitions you had. There was a read-only NTFS tool a few had use of, but it was no great shakes for reliability (but some would argue that neither was the fs it was being used to read!). I think with Linux you needed the boot floppy too, but never used that setup myself as I never felt the need to replace Linux quite as strongly as I did Windows.
Once installed, if you had another partition or drive, you could use the built-in BeOS Installer to put it happily into it’s own space and it’s built-in bootloader ‘BootMan’ to keep it all nice and conviniently accessable.
Yes, well, let’s just say the article is pretty devoid of content (as well as containing incorrect information – there was NEVER a BeBox with 4 Hobbit processors!)
YOU are incorrect there. There definitely was a working protoype of a four-processor BeBox. See this link:
http://www.bebox.nu/images.php?s=images/quad604
The author writes that it “was to run on”, which means it was supposed to run on a 4 proc. BeBox. The author is correct here.
This article wasn’t too bad; contained some minor errors, but other than that, the author pretty much summed up what most people experience when first trying out the BE.
BeOS continued investing a large portion of their talents and energies into BeOS for the PowerMac, hoping to be aquired by Apple, until December 1996 when Apple anounced that it would aquire NeXT and make OpenStep the basis of its next generation operating system.
It was Be, Inc. (_not_ BeOS) who invested into BeOS.
And there were indeed talks between Apple and be, and Apple was desperate to buy BeOS. They just bought NeXT because Gassée kept demanding more than Apple would offer, which was still alot more than what Be, Inc. was worth at the time or what Be had invested into BeOS so far.
As mentioned here before some aspects are totally incorrect and so on, but OK, well, he tried it. But using AbiWord instead of Gobe Productive … omg
I thought BeOS went out of business? AKA, they are no long producing an OS. I found be.com, is it the same?
Just curious.
And there were indeed talks between Apple and be, and Apple was desperate to buy BeOS. They just bought NeXT because Gassée kept demanding more than Apple would offer, which was still alot more than what Be, Inc. was worth at the time or what Be had invested into BeOS so far.
Actually, no. Apple was indeed in discussion with Be to buy BeOS, but when they evaluated NeXT they choose it on a technical point of view. The fact that Jean-louis Gassée demanded too much money also played, but OPENSTEP was a _lot_ more advanced than BeOS was, a _lot_ more deployed on critical missions (Wall Street, NSA..), had wonderful support for printing (as OPENSTEP display was PostScript, thus, ideal for publishing), network, true unix underneath (BSD personality ontop of the Mach kernel), etc.
People seems to think that NeXT was choosen “because of Steve Jobs” and that it was somewhat inferior to BeOS. That’s just plain wrong. Apparently Steve Jobs was supposed to be a consultant, but when he saw that Amelio just didn’t listened to any advice, he focused on Pixar. It’s only after some board members asked him to come as (i)Ceo that he came back (and Amelio was fired). And as I said, NeXT technology was a lot more advanced, stable and tested than BeOS (just take the development tools for example, like InterfaceBuilder).
Not to say that BeOS wasn’t a very cool OS — it was — and it would have probably been a wonderful OS if gaven more resources. But Apple’s choice was the good one. I think people lament the decision because NeXT and OPENSTEP were not very well known by lots of folks at the time, while nearly everybody tried BeOS at a time or another…
… as long as someone uses it on a regular basis. And that would include myself and thousands of others around the world at the present time.
It is /still/ the most responsive and generally most pleasant to use workstation OS available to me for many everyday computing tasks (e.g. writing, music listening, most web surfing, and even experimenting with C++ and Squeak coding, though I do yearn for help porting the latest Squeak VM to BeOS).
— Ed
He said 4 ‘h0bb1t’ cpu’s. Which would be wrong. The bebox ran on 603e cpu’s iirc. The prototype h0bb1t box used like 6-7 AT&T h0bb1t cpus(I’m not sure on the exact number…) But the bebox did not use that type of cpu. So you are both right
Great article, my only dislike is this, “Much like GNU Linux, and other platforms, BeOS uses workspaces.” It is the window manager that has workspaces (like KDE or Gnome) not linux which should not be capitol!
A capitol is a building or place where a governmental body meets.
A major barrier to widespread usage of BeOS 5 until the Haiku kernel matures is the relative lack of modern hardware support, particularly with regard to the chipsets on many motherboards manufactured in the past three or four years.
That is why, when my PII-450 on Intel BX440 died, I was thrilled to discover that BeOS 5 Max Edition v.3 runs just fine on my Athlon 64 on Asus K8V motherboard with 1GB ram. It doesn’t just run fine, it rocks even more on the 2004 hardware than it did on the 1999 hardware.
Of course it runs only in 32 bit mode on the Athlon64, but the fact that it runs at all is exciting news to BeOS affectionatos because the Asus K8V (and A8V) are widely available nowadays and pretty much the state-of-the-art PC architecture. It seems that the via K8T800(Pro) chipsets, which sufficiently similar to the older KT400 chipset (one of the last chipsets that Be, Inc. coded support for in the kernel) that it works.
I found this out by trial and error after my PII board died — not expecting it to work on my newer Athlon64 rig. I experimented with the safe mode options (hold shift and ctrl while booting) and found that, when I simply selected the “Don’t call the BIOS” option, it booted right away. And it immediately utilized my modern nVidia card and the onboard sound without any further tweaks!
I’ve since learned that people out there have gotten BeOS 5 to boot on Asus A8Vs also. I don’t know whether this will work with other via K8T800 based boards from Abit and other manufactures, but it seems that there is a good chance that some of them will.
BeOS on a Pentium II still beats 2 – 4 Gz class Athlons and Pentium 4’s running Linux or Windows in raw workstation performance. BeOS on Athlon64-3200 REALLY rocks and NEVER leaves the user frustrated for lack of responsiveness, even when when running lots of processor hungary apps, including a dozen or more simultaneous video streams and a bunch of OpenGL teapot demos. Try something like THAT on any flavor of *nix or Win* on any hardware you can buy for less than six figures today.
Until another workstation OS design emerges which can compete with that kind of performance, I won’t give up on BeOS (and its progeny, if successful) until someone pries my keyboard from my cold, dead fingers …
— Ed
I’ve been using BeOS for the past few years now. When I wrote the article, Mozilla/FireFox were still to crashy to use full time, but since then, I’ve upgraded.
Nisus Email stored messages in the file system. Each message wsa a text message.
BeProductive isn’t freeware, so I don’t have it.
That’s the thing I can never get used to. My system is a PII 266, and it is the fastest enviroment I’ve ever used. It makes Win2000 unbearable. Even new machines are outperformed by my machine.
BeOS was an alright system until Microsoft killed it.
Microsoft didnt kill it. The shareholders and whos ever idea to make BeIA the main focus of the company killed it.
If this article was someone’s first exposure to BeOS (which is how it was written) the reader would leave with some big misconceptions.
the first being the BeOS was an operating system that only/primarily ran on PPC architecture. That may have been it’s roots with the BeBox (which I always thought was a dual processor box not a quad). But anyhow Be’s popularity didn;t take off nor did their user community thrive until BeOS ran on x86. When BeOS was at it’s peak (slightly before Palm decapitated them) the ppc version seemed to be more of an afterthought, perhaps not from be developers, but rather from app developers. Let’s use BeBits as an example. BeBits is the software repository for BeOS software. Most if not all of the programs there you can have an x86 binary version. While one app may have an x86 binary it’s not all that unlikely that the only ppc version of this same version will be source only, or none at all. Also if you take a look at the handful of post-mortem BeOS recreation projects they’re all being designed to run on x86 hardware first with the philosophy of “we may get around to PPC support if we feel like it”. In any event a lot more should have been said about beOS running on x86 hardware in this article.
Another thing that baffled me is the screenshots the author chose to use. These have to be the most bland and vanilla screenshots I’ve ever seen of BeOS. we see the default desktop, a blank text editor, and a gl demo. ooh how exciting. There’s screenshots out there of BeOS running multiple movies and movie trailers simultaneously showing how no frames are lost. This to me is the essence of a BeOS screenshot, show the user how FAST BeOS is and how well it handles media.
seems anything with the word “BeOS” that makes it to the net gets posted on osnews these days
BeOS on a Pentium II still beats 2 – 4 Gz class Athlons and Pentium 4’s running Linux or Windows in raw workstation performance
And what sort of “workstation performance” would that be? Spinning 20 GL teapots for fun on a Voodoo3 card?
-fooks
And what sort of “workstation performance” would that be? Spinning 20 GL teapots for fun on a Voodoo3 card?
-fooks
Depends on what line of work you’re active in. BeOS is strong in the music industry with software like TuneTracker, where equivalent to *Nix remains to be seen. But except from audio, many people who use BeOS are webenthusiasts, where you’ll find software like Refraction for manipulating pictures, you got Pixel32, and you have Raycone with Insite Designer for webdesign etc.
The big difference is that in BeOS you just install them like “Blam, done” and can start working… while many *nix users get stuck in the dependencyhell (that some users have claimed for 5 years that it doesn’t exist, except that when you search any forum you’ll find zillions of Dependencyhell posts)….
I guess that is workstation performance…. and I agree..
BeOS did not have awesome “workstation” performance. It had great “personal desktop” performance. A responsive UI is a nice feature when you’re on a workstation, but it’s really not*that big of a deal, because you spend most of your time inside your specific app anyway. Indeed, when I’m on a CAD workstation, I barely even notice the host OS, because I’m not using the underlying OS, but CATIA or IDEAS or whatever. Pretty much the only thing workstation users care about is how fast (and stable!) the OpenGL is, and how fast you can store stuff to disk. BeOS was never very good at either of these things.
With regards to “dependency hell” on workstation apps: do you really think people use Gentoo as their workstation? When you run a Linux workstation, you use RedHat 9 and have no dependency hell because the app contains everything it needs to run. Indeed, the actual user usually doesn’t even care, because when your apps cost $5k-$20k, you’ve got a sysadmin that manages your workstations.
Nonsens and you know it. Howabout googling for “RedHat 9 Dependency hell”. Then when you get those almost 10000 hits, howabout searching for BeOS dependency hell and you see the difference.
Point is, BeOS let’s you get your work done, not give you more work because it doesn’t work. This is what makes systems like OSX and BeOS good, while Linux is a toy.
Let’s not forget about Image Grinder and The Awesome Resizer. I have found NOTHING else on ANY other platform that performs as easily, faster, or more straight forward than these apps. Also, there is no faster cropping than in ShowImage…
Theres drivers on bebits for geforce cards. Its no diff than installing windows and having to go find video drivers. You cant expect every OS to support 90% of the PC hardware on hte initial install like linux or such..
for the info regarding the exe files.
Does anyone here not know what BeOS was?
How could anyone _not_ know what BeOS was? Be accounts for probably 50% of the content here on any given day.
And another thing, what the hell does BeOS (or anything related to OS/2 or Amiga for that matter) have to do “Exploring the _Future_ of Computing”?
Get with the program. It’s practically 2005 for chrissake.
its an OS NEWS website. It puts out news on OSes. And BeOS is an OS. *gasp!* imagine that. Stuff for BeOS is still being developed. So it still belongs here.
I’m not saying that RedHat 9 doesn’t have dependency hell. As a pre-Yum RedHat system, it definitely has dependency hell. However, *workstation* apps don’t have dependency hell, simply because they are nearly all statically linked or include their own libraries.
I think you’re confusing “desktop” with “workstation”. You don’t install random software on a workstation. You don’t install the latest instant messenger, etc. You install the system once, and then lock it down. This is true even on the windows workstations you see.
Is there a place where I could get my hands on an installer iso or something? I’ve never tried Beos but I’d like to give it a shot.
I use Solaris, IRIX, MacOS, FreeBSD, NeXTstep, Tru64 UNIX, Linux, *BeOS, and (very) occasionally Windows. I use IRIX and Linux almost every day, but the only OS that I use EVERY day would be BeOS. It is comfortable to work in, easy to use, and doesn’t demand a lot of wallet stuffings to get good performance out of.
It may not do everything, but I haven’t seen an OS yet that does. It’s things like BeOS, Amiga, and OS/2 that fuel sites like this. The constant striving to find new and perhaps better ways to do things is also the incentive that gets you anything casually labeled an update out of Micro$oft. These projects force M$ to do something to appease their customers even with the huge monopoly Mr. Gates has achieved with his questionable business ethics.
I might be luckier than many in that I don’t often have to dual or multi-boot much anymore and can just spin my chair to another system, but things like BeOS made it worthwhile to go thru all the headaches I endured doing it before, and make me DAMN sure I’d do it again if need be!!
*Sniff* I remember BeOS. I liked it much more than MacOS. I was running it on an old 233 PII, and I could run sooo many teapot demos, watch Invader Zim and play a song all at the same time. I am not even sure if OSX can do this. I definitly know that XP or Linux cannot do this. To this day, when I use KDE, I use the BII them
But, no matter how hard you try, you can never duplicate BeOS’s quick boot, moving tabs, fast searching (Well, maybe in Tiger), and extreame responsiveness. Just, maybe the GUI. A little. I still have yet to find a BeOS theme for GNOME.
Yes, you can download a BeOS Max ISO here:
http://www.bebits.com/app/3148
Get BeOS PE. You can then partition a drive, install it onto Windows or Linux, and then when booted into it, use the installer to have it install it’s self onto the other partition.
You also have the advantage that when you get it there, it will use up to 8 CPU’s out-of-the-box with some of the best SMP around. This is one of it’s gems you don’t always hear about, and it never was used as leverage to squeeze more money out of you as M$ does as SOP.
You are right about the diff between desktop and workstation definitions; I meant “non-server,” because many server apps are actually better served by macrokernels. I was also speaking of the apps I personally tend to use, including some use of dev tools and playing around with audio, which is considered workstation use by some flavors of the definition.
My main point is that poor desktop/workstation app and system responsiveness and twirling hourglasses are not an inevitable part of the general computing experience. BeOS generally does what I command it to do by keyboard, mouse or MIDI when I command it to, with no discernable delay. I can’t say the same for Linux (even a lean Gentoo) or Windows on the same hardware.
Is there anyone out there who enjoys all those frequent but intermittent pauses that other OSes force you to take before you can move that window or get the focus of that dialog box so you can click that button, etc.??
— Ed
Didn’t mean to misspell your name in the previous post.
What’s with the download mirrors on that site??? 4/5 of them don’t work!!
BeOS isn’t dead while there’s work going on it and people use it. Are you one of these people that chips in with such comments every time there’s an article about:
SkyOS
Haiku
RISC OS
the Amiga
and of course BeOS ?
BeOS isn’t dead while there’s work going on it and people use it. Are you one of these people that chips in with such comments every time there’s an article about:
SkyOS
Haiku
RISC OS
the Amiga
and of course BeOS ?
In that sense Linux is only a core. The author was refering to a whole GNU Linux operating system for Desktop purposes.
i agree. saying GNU/linux is referring to the userspace plus kernel. so desktop environments and window managers are included in a sense.
KDE and Gnome have WMs running also, i believe Kwin for the former.
.. what can I say, is that no matter how you turn it, modern systems tend to be very slow when it comes to responsiveness.
MacOS doesn’t certainly shine on a G4 powerbook, and Linux suffers the pains of heavy Gnome and KDE (no, if you use XFCE you’re not using a desktop advanced enough in features to compare it to Windows/MacOSX); on the other side, apparently quick OSes, like my XPPro box, they have “hidden quirks”: 768Mb of ram and the system was crawling because I was opening a 2Mb jpeg file and rendering with Blender…
If Be was really that responsive, than it’s a pity we all lost that; doesn’t sound logical to you?
P.S.
Regarding workstation performance, I agree that a specialized app like CATIA e.g. hides the underlying system, but that’s by definition *highly* specialized use; how would you call a system made to perform *a single* task?
I agree about screenshots – screenshots specifically showing a desktop layout shouldn’t be compressed.
I find Gnome quite snappy on my 700 Celeron laptop, although the hard drive is a bit slow but no amount of engineering software could fix that.
Gnome and KDE are quite responsive, in fact KDE is probably one of the most responsive simply because it’s QT. Enlightenment is also very responsive, and it’s a very full featured desktop. Only an idiot defines full features by the gizmos or gui configs; what you mean is EASY ENOUGH FOR AUNT TILLIE TO CONFIGURE IT. Xfce has many features that Gnome pitifully lacks, and is a very nice desktop to work in. I honestly don’t see what part of what planet you’re coming from, but it’s gotta be the dark side of it.
I don’t know what magical means you all use to define responsive, but my definition is if it can finish interface tasks before I can continue to interface with it (can it maximize an iconified window before I can move the mouse there and click on it).
I actually find Windows XP to be about the least responsive OS because when an app locks up, it locks up the window manager controls associated with it (this is very annoying, a good interface should crush buggy programs and force them into submission). Mac OS is very snappy if you TURN OFF ALL THE ANIMATIONS. Those animations do take time, no matter how fast your proc is (since they are time based animations); seeing as how it’s usable on a 233 G3 I can’t imagine it being unresponsive on a machine that’s several times faster.
Sorry buys, but you’re being too picky. There are trade offs for responsiveness, and it’s often very much worth it. Faster != better as Windows 98/95 showed us; and yes, they were very fast but so unstable it didn’t feel so fast.
GNOME and KDE aren’t that ‘heavy’. They love RAM, yes – 128MB is too little for either. But RAM is cheap, and in terms of actual use (as opposed to perception things like redraws – a ‘slow’ redraw is ugly, but it doesn’t change how fast you can actually use the system in any real way, since the difference between fast and ‘slow’ is measured in milliseconds), they’re both pretty nippy on *any* box with more than 256MB of RAM. (Unless you’re using other RAM intensive applications like graphics editors, but these will be graphics intensive on *any* platform). I haven’t used Be, but if it truly is better at the things it claims to be – particularly multimedia – the difference is far more likely to be in the kernel than anywhere else.
This article didn’t explain what makes BeOS different from your average run-of-the-mill Wintel or Mac.
If you really want to impress someone, demonstrate how the BeFS can do useful stuff like organize your MP3s and emails and keep live queries (i.e. “saved searches”) of things you search for often.
BeOS also comes with some very decent recording software (like 3Dmix) that runs on cheap commodity hardware; for free! Every garage band and wanna-be musician should know about this.
I agree,3DmiX the native SoundRecorder,a copy of SoundPlay with some VST plug-ins,A few other free BeOS audio manipulation apps and sequencers like XRS,BamBam and SampleStudio(there’s a bunch more too)Add a Soundblaster Live! and Presto! you got yourself the poor musician’s digital studio.I have used this combination for a long time and it has yet to be rivaled in linux(not many apps) or even windoze (without shelling out big bucks for apps and fast hardware)
> And another thing, what the hell does BeOS (or anything related to OS/2 or Amiga for that matter)
> have to do “Exploring the _Future_ of Computing”?
AmigaOS and BeOS (in the guise of yellowTAB’s Zeta) are both still being developed and clones of both are being developed. I’ll give you OS/2, but even that’s relevant while there are OSNews readers still using it.
Don’t forget that the OS/2 world isn’t completely static yet, either. 🙂
You also have the advantage that when you get it there, it will use up to 8 CPU’s out-of-the-box with some of the best SMP around. This is one of it’s gems you don’t always hear about, and it never was used as leverage to squeeze more money out of you as M$ does as SOP.
Probably because if you can afford (and justify) an 8-way SMP machine, the cost of the OS fades into insignificance.
“You are right about the diff between desktop and workstation definitions; I meant “non-server,” because many server apps are actually better served by macrokernels. I was also speaking of the apps I personally tend to use, including some use of dev tools and playing around with audio, which is considered workstation use by some flavors of the definition.”
Sorry but you can’t just do CAD work on BeOS, you can’t just run Maya on it. Computers which run these applications are workstations. If the Unices including IRIX, Linux cannot fullfill (anymore) what Windows does to be defined ‘desktop-ready’ (rather workstation-ready in this example) then why would BeOS be? The point is that its not so simple to define ‘desktop-ready’ or ‘workstation-ready’ because there is a lot of complex demand, and the point is that BeOS is not the holy grail for desktop or workstation use because it has its disadvantages (here above is one outlined).
To the person who claims BeOS is popular at musicians: where are the statistics to note that its popular in respect to other OSes? I never read about that but there are advanced audio applications for RiscOS, Linux, Amiga too. Does that mean they’re popular? No. ‘Too many applications’ is a laugh though. I never see that argument in a sane Windows discussion..
Thom,
Quoting at atlam his own web site address is quite silly (ROTFLMAO)
Hobbit is the importand word. There was never a 4 processor *Hobbit* BeBox. There was a prototype PowerPC 4 processor box. Hobbits had 2 processors and some DSP’s… argue amoungst yourselves as to whether a DSP is a processor. It’s been argued here before though.
The only Hobbit boxes with more than 2 processors (and that is still not including DSP’s) wre the stop gap internal developer boxes with a PowerPC card that slaved the rest of the hardware!!
Regarding workstation performance, I agree that a specialized app like CATIA e.g. hides the underlying system, but that’s by definition *highly* specialized use; how would you call a system made to perform *a single* task?
A workstation
as commented already Be Inc had a great opportunity to sell to apple, but blew it.
Re-Enter Steve Jobs
I’m glad someone else noted the irony of having my own BeBox website quoted back at me 😉