Tim Self: Are there any Be employees hiding? So this is the time of the conference where you all get to take your best shots at us. This is why you pay to come here, right? So after this conference we actually should have you all up on stage because we feel you are all part of the media team and so we hope that you take this to heart when you leave here.
So before we get started with the Q and A, we have a little bit of business to take care of. There was a milestone that we passed, we haven't really talked about it at Be, earlier this spring, and that is the original couches on which we all ate lunch, where some people actually lived and slept on, they have been retired, let's say. And so we are going to raffle off a little piece of Be history here. And I'm going to let Alfred take it from this point on.
Alfred Landrum: All right. Well, as you may or may not know, about seven years ago Jean-Louis went out and spent his own hard earned money of $40 for four couches, that comes out to $10 a couch. The couches lasted for about seven years. And all that remains is one small piece. Now this piece of couch is held together mainly by the blood, sweat, tears and God knows what else, of the engineers that have worked so hard at Be.
We are fortunate enough to have this moment recorded with a little poetry by a Be engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. But I will give you a hint. It's a Haiku.
Multimedia
includes not just sight and sound:
it's a sofa, too.Valiant sofa
deserted in sad dumpster
soaking in the rain.(Applause.)
All right. So let's see who will get to win this piece of Be history that will one day be worth probably at least three bucks. Who wants to pull it out?
(Laughter.)
Be Team Member: Pull it out, George.
George Hoffman: Adsushi Kan.
(Applause.)
Be Team Member: Try and get that past customs.
Adsushi Kan: The explanation will be interesting.
Tim Self: So at this point, Victoria, where are you? She would like to point out we have a few Be user groups, otherwise known as BUGS, in the audience, we would like to thank you for your support, if you are here as a representative, here is your chance, stand up.
Audience Member: She is standing up.
Victoria Huntzinger: We have Beat Japan here with us. Stand up. Show your T-shirts.
(Applause.)
Victoria Huntzinger: Be Sharp, from Milpitas.
(Applause.)
Victoria Huntzinger: We have EBUG, from Eugene, Oregon.
(Applause.)
Victoria Huntzinger: RTBUG from Raleigh, North Carolina.
(Applause.)
Victoria Huntzinger: BUGGER, from Rochester, New York.
(Applause.)
Victoria Huntzinger: And FargoBUG, from Fargo, North Dakota.
(Applause.)
Tim Self: A couple more announcements. This week coming is a brand new book coming to book stores from Scott Hacker called the Be Bible, it's an end user guide.
(Applause.)
Tim Self: How many hundreds of pages thick? Look for that in your book stores or Amazon or wherever you get books.
And without further ado, let's move on to the question and answer. I'm going to preempt a couple, though.
The first one is: Is the Star Wars trailer you saw on the CD? It is not. So we leave it up to you to go find that out on the net. In fact there is no media on that CD, you have to provide your own.
Secondly, Dominic had asked me to tell you that unfortunately there is a bug in the application server on that CD.
And you wanted to talk a little bit about that?
Dominic Giampaolo:: We will have an update, there is a small bug to do with off screen bitmaps that we discovered just after the CD went off to the duplicators. There will be an update out this week, don't worry about it, probably by the time you get home we will have something in your e-mail to pick up just a downloadable update.
Tim Self: Moving along, one other thing that came up in this morning's overview session were a couple of questions on MIDI. I'm going to pass the mike over to Jon Watte, who is our media team director. He will talk about what we are doing with MIDI, so we can get that put to rest.
Jon Watte: So there is a MIDI kit and it works. And for now, you know, you can keep using it. This is not news. The news is that we are going to fix whatever is wrong with the MIDI kit. Some of you have been wondering when should we do this. Now that we have the Media Kit we will start integrating MIDI in the Media Kit. This will be defining the MIDI data format that will be streamed using the Media Kit node mechanism. If you keep writing to the old API you will keep working, we will make sure you are compatible, but once the new nodes dealing with MIDI come out, that's the preferred API that we are going to move forward.
We are putting together the documentation about how this is going to happen to kind of give you a preview and give you a chance for feedback. So the interesting part, I think we know who you are, if you haven't made yourself known, send an e-mail to Tim and let him know you want to be in the MIDI. It will be out I think this week, a description of how it's going to happen and what the timetable is. But it's too early to go into technical difficulties right here. So at least you are updated on when you are going to be updated.
Tim Self: Okay. Now it's up to you to ask questions, and we won't answer any questions that aren't spoken into the microphones. That's because our stenographer here has a hard time hearing you otherwise. So are there any questions?
Jean-Louis Gassee: Scott here is the man.
Tim Self: The author of the Be Bible.
Scott Hacker: Actually there are brand new brochures slipping into the 4.5 boxes that are in the demo labs that I hope you pick up during the next reception.
My questions are about the future, two questions actually. Is Lamar Potts here? Hi, Lamar. We have heard about your new position as the head of the Internet appliances division, but we haven't heard anything but thought experiments in that department and would like to hear if there are any details that can be divulged at this point.
Secondly, a lot of questions were raised with Thomas Dolby's demonstration of RMF, and not a lot of details given about the implementation of Rich Music Format in BeOS, what kind of hooks will be there and what we can expect to see in that department.
Tim Self: We will let Lamar go first. There are two different questions there.
Lamar Potts: If I heard the question correctly, was there any specifics about products we are doing? Was that it? I have no announcements about specific products to make. But let me see if I can answer this in a different way: There is a range of appliances that's getting a lot of attention in the marketplace today. You've got everything from the sort of handheld PDA markets and then through, you know, the WebTV experience, if you understand that. You know, if you get beyond that experience, and then look towards what a personal computer does, we believe there is a space between what these set top box and PDAs are doing that will give an experience for getting on to the web that may be described by some people in the industry as a desktop box or a web pad. That will be able to not only give access on to the web in a very easy way, you know, from an end user standpoint, but because of the way the BeOS can provide rich media, we will be able to do other things, you know, providing applications that are rich in audio and video experience as well.
Hopefully soon we will have some actual product announcements to make with some suppliers and content holders, but can't do those announcements today.
Tim Self: So, I will answer the Dolby question, or the Headspace/Beatnik question. We are still working out the details on what that schedule will look like and how it will roll out. We see it as three phases. The first phase is get the synth up to date, which is basically make the synth work with the Media Kit, and they have enhanced some other things with that. That will be a nearer term thing.
Then the other things are a little bit longer term. We have to bring NetPositive up to speed supporting Java Script, and then there is some back-end glue to make the synth talk to that that has to happen. So that's sort of a rough idea of what's happening.
And then we are just looking to help support the RMF file format and make that... we haven't put our arms around quite how we help you to export and import RMF yet. So if you have input you can send it to me, e-mail to me or you can send them to Thomas. Better yet. Thomas@Headspace.com. I hope that answers the question.
Anybody else?
Audience Member: I just had one question real quick about scheduler, actually. Okay, two questions. The first one is, how long is... I heard a couple different figures. If a process gets running and continues running forever, not a realtime process but a process, how long does it get in there if there is another process that's going to run at the same priority?
Tim Self: The kernel guy.
Cyril Meurillon: The current value of a quantum is 3 milliseconds. 3.
Audience Member: Does the scheduler run more often than that?
Cyril Meurillon: Yes. Because you may be preempted for other reasons. If a thread with a high priority shows up, it's likely to preempt you before.
Audience Member: Does the thread run both periodically as well as off of like...
Cyril Meurillon: The scheduler doesn't run as a thread, per se, it runs at interrupt level.
Audience Member: So it is running as an interrupt driver, does it get triggered by other things as well?
Cyril Meurillon: Pardon?
Audience Member: Does it get triggered by other things? In other words, if you release a semaphore, will that wake up the scheduler?
Cyril Meurillon: Yes.
Audience Member: What exactly... how does Be's scheduler decide the proportion to run different tasks which want to run but are at different priority levels? Because under realtime priority this is really simple, you just take the highest priority one, but then one of the things I end up doing every so often is I have two processes that need to run for a fair amount of time and they need then to both run concurrently but a little bit, right? And so I run one a little lower priority than the other one and I need to know what type of ratio or processor time those are actually going to get.
Cyril Meurillon: It's a complex relationship. The relationship between the priority and the actual time you run is somewhat complex. It depends on how often you block, but the idea is that...
Audience Member: Pretending that I was just eating a few seconds and not blocking...
Cyril Meurillon: If you don't block it's more simple. If you don't block and have only one CPU, then a thread with priority 11 is going to run twice more than a thread with priority 10, it's exponential. Base 2.
But in reality threads block and it becomes unconvertible.
Audience Member: Even if it's just running memory? Is there any other complications? Does Be actually rearrange priority levels when it schedules?
Cyril Meurillon: No. We don't have priority inheritance yet. But sometime.
Audience Member: Okay, that was it.
Audience Member: First I have a comment. Thank you guys for making me possible. Because you know I came from the Mac world, it's a lot of work there and I get more done here. And that's neat.
(Applause.)
Audience Member: Second, I saw a really really nice Media Kit story here this weekend, there has been a lot of talk about it. It didn't really sink in until going through the presentations. What do you... for any of you, what do you see as potential uses of the Media Kit, aside from the kinds of things we have seen from Adamation, you know, recording and editing media, or if you see more subtle uses of it in applications that we might already be doing.
Jean-Louis Gassee: If you are looking at me for subtlety...
Be Team Member: One simple example, if you saw the 3D Mixer, one nice thing would be to be able to synchronize the application with editing application. So you can have the audio editor in one work space and the video editor in the other work space and both are synchronized on the same time base. That's the kind of the stuff the Media Kit can do fairly easily that would be a little bit more simple.
Tim Self: Out of questions?
Audience Member: All right. A couple of boring questions. Then another question. As far as the POSIX layer goes, is there actually any documentation for which POSIX functionality works, which is actually thread safe, and whether there are future plans for more 1003.1 compliance.
Jean-Louis Gassee: The VP of subtlety will answer your question.
Dominic Giampaolo: The newly rewritten headers for Genki release are more consistent with what's actually in there. For R4 Intel it was just the headers which were a bit difficult to figure out, to say the least. So we looked at what's actually there, if it's there it's in the headers. So there is "_r" versions of most functions that need to be thread safe. So unfortunately there is no written documentation, though.
Audience Member: Okay. The other question I have is, there are a multiple ways to get in contact with the technical team. There is Be Dev Talk, there is the BUG suggestion form, I suppose lobbing a brick would actually work. What is the best way to get... to have a dialogue, short of lobbing bricks at each other? What is the best way to talk about some technical issue that we are concerned about? There are so many ways, it seems there is no clear-cut path to discuss something.
Jon Watte: Buy us lunch.
Stephen Beaulieu: I guess I will field that, considering that's my job. The best way to do it is to directly contact developer support. Either if you are a level II and up developer that gives you direct access through the web form, that's by far and away the best way to start a dialogue with us, because it goes into a database and we can keep track of things.
If you are not, you can still send e-mail to devsupport@be.com, and we will deal with it. But we deal with the registered paying developers first, because that's what they are paying for. They are paying for that support. You can write me directly. If you have simple questions, that is how does this stuff work, we want to make sure we can continue fielding that, regardless of whether you are an enthusiast, developer, or paid developer. We want to make sure you get the answers you need. Especially if there are things we are not providing in terms of documentation and sample code. Let us know. And as we grow the team, we will get more of that done.
Be Team Member: I'd like to add to that, if I may.
Some of us actually being retro like and so on, actually look at the Be news groups. I, for example, try to read everything in the Be news groups. And I very rarely post anything generally, but I will respond privately and I sort of cultivate a few proxies in the news group who then like convey my message repeatedly, because that's the way the news groups work. So you may not get into a direct dialogue, a guaranteed dialogue on the, you know, CompSys Be news groups, but you will get indirect support from other users who may have had a direct contact with one of us.
And then sometimes you might get direct communications, also.
Audience Member: I have a question. The exciting version Genki, you are planning the Genki to be perfectly upward compatible from 4.0?
Steve Sakoman: That's correct. 4.5.
Audience Member: It is planning or...
Steve Sakoman: It's the plan.
Audience Member: Yes, thank you.
Doug Wright: I wanted to add one thing really quickly to your question, since this is a Media Kit conference there is an e-mail at trinity@be.com, which is where we... yes, I know... which is where the Media Kit team sees e-mails about API problems and all kinds of stuff like that. Stephen can handle most questions but, you know, if it's an obvious question like why... this is really missing from the API and you want to get us in a hurry, that's... we all see it. So. Media Kit only. No POSIX.
Audience Member: This may be a dumb question, when will I be able to buy stock in Be?
Be Team Member: When it becomes public.
Jean-Louis Gassee: Unfortunately my view of this is that this is not a decision that we get to make. This is a decision that the environment makes for us. When the environment believes that we reach a stage where given the way people buy and trade stock and given the level of risk that the company presents, we can move from the sophisticated investors to the normal investors. And my view is, when I see investment bankers, I see the parking lot from my office, so when I see investment bankers fighting for parking spots, I will know it's time to think about that sort of stuff.
(Laughter.)
Be Team Member: That was really vague.
(Be Team laughter and applause.)
Jean-Louis Gassee: My lawyer briefed me.
Tim Self: A way to accelerate that is to ship apps.
(Thunderous applause from the Be Team.)
Tim Self: We don't go anywhere unless your apps go somewhere. That's why people run computers, not to run operating systems. Maybe except for you guys. So that's how we get there fastest.
Audience Member: Another question. Okay. What are your plans with the development environment? At the moment the link times with the new linker is something like four minutes for our application and that makes it almost impossible to do things which...
Audience Member: You must have a tiny app.
Audience Member: Sorry. It can only be worse.
Bob Herold: We are well aware that the current linker is not quite what would be desired in a good development environment in terms of link speed, especially when you turn on debugging information. Our compiler vendor is Cygnus, and we are working with them, first we are working with them on co-generation, then we are going to be working with them on linker problems. Right now we don't have a firm schedule for actually resolving linker problems, but it's a high priority to get done. It's unlikely that it will get done for the Genki release, but I would think that if we get something done soon after that, we would put it out as an update.
So we are aware of the problem, we are working with them to fix it and get something much better.
Scott Barta: If you are running into really long link times with debugging symbols turned on, there is one thing you can do. It's really skanky, but it works, it's a result of the fact that GCC, it will emit debugging information for all the header files you include. So if your project has a hundred source files and each one of those source files includes some Be headers, it will emit duplicate copies of all the debugging information for the Be symbols. And those will all get conglomerated into the object file.
So what you can do, actually, is if you can get it to work, make one file that includes all the sources in your application so it compiles to one object file. That way all the Be headers get included once it emits one copy of the debugging information, and for NetPositive it decreased the executable size by an order of magnitude. So it's gross, but it works.
Be Team Member: Is this following the you-don't-want-to-see-how-sausage-is-made camp?
(Laughter.)
Audience Member: Could you document this maybe what needs to be done? Because I didn't fully understand it. How do you compile into an object file?
Scott Barta: What we would need to do, is we need to have Cygnus modify the linker so it will not emit redundant debugging information when it executes. What I did is I did one file that pound included all the CPP sources in my project. And then I compiled that one file.
Audience Member: Wow.
Scott Barta: It's actually very fast.
Audience Member: Do you recall a Perl script to do that?
Scott Barta: NetPositive. Building the old way would take 15 to 20 minutes to do a full build. But this way it takes two or three. It's really amazing.
Audience Member: What's the memory footprint on that like? How much RAM would you need to compile all of those files all at once?
Be Team Member: If you don't have enough, buy more.
Laughter and applause.) 505,506c511,512
Jean-Louis Gassee: That was subtle.
Audience Member: [How about] better kernel debugging for mere mortals.
Be Team Member: There have been a couple of newsletter articles written about using the kernel debugger. And I believe a couple of them even document how to add your own comments, so if you want to do things I guess mainly contacting us if there is something you are missing outside of it or you are not sure how to use it.
Audience Member: Actually it's productive, but I'm comparing it with other tools I have used, such as GDB.
Be Team Member: Remote GDB may be a possibility. We are looking into it. We actually have looked into it before. It's nothing solid right now.
Audience Member: I want first to thank the group. I mean the BeOS is very great. I think we are all here to compliment you. And also I have a question. I'm using the Be IDE and some of the features like the Be IDE itself is very fast, therefore it's hard to implement to CVS or stuff like RC5, and I would like to know what kind of an instrument are planned on Be IDE? The other question I forget.
John Dance: The Be IDE sat fallow for a little while and starting last fall we started working on it again. We have got some great plans for it. You will see some updates in the Genki release that I think you will like. But what we need to do is get it kind of importing and exporting your file information better. And right now I'm thinking about how to do that and how to integrate it, maybe with Makefile. Not integrate it with Makefiles, but work better, you know, kind of in a split environment. And then also you can do plug-ins in the IDE or add-ons and you could actually add a little more hooks to be able to, you know, do like check in or check out from the add-ons.
Audience Member: Thank you.
Be Team Member: You again?
Audience Member: I have questions about localization of BeOS for internationalization of the operating system documentation, packaging, all that sort of thing. Is it possible to get predicted time lines on those sort of issues on various things that might be localized and to what degree?
Hiroshi Lockheimer: In terms of the technical stuff, I don't know about packaging, I will leave that to I don't know who, but in terms of the technical stuff, I want to have resource based archiving of views and things like that for R5 at the latest. So that will allow you to start localizing your apps and we will start localizing our apps, too. I don't think it's realistic to have the whole OS localized by R5, obviously, but we will start the process before that.
In terms of packaging? The Japanese box, for example, the box is in Japanese already. There are already Japanese translated, French and German, too, I think; right? Yes. User guides. I don't know what else you need.
Audience Member: I was wondering if there were going to be actual time lines for various countries. It helps us.
Hiroshi Lockheimer: Oh, other languages, you mean.
Audience Member: Other languages and what details things are going localized when. It doesn't make sense for a third party developer to run ahead of BeOS itself as far as localization efforts. And so knowing the time lines and schedules for things and having something like that published would be very useful.
Roy Graham: Bruce, the answer to the question that you have, the technical part, which is underpinnings and the operating system to support localization are actually not in the release, but the one after Genki, which is scheduled for the early part of next calendar year. So consistent with that time frame, we will actually have localization versions of the operating system. And the Japanese and French and German and Spanish are the four early targets for localization work on that. But that will not occur until the early part of next year.
Audience Member: So what else can we expect from R5?
Roy Graham: We don't have a code name for the next release after. So I'm not sure what you are talking about when you talk about R5.
Audience Member: So what's the code name?
Roy Graham: Let me just explain the process we are going to go through. We have some ideas of what we would like to have in the release beyond Genki. Part of my group's task, the marketing task this quarter is in fact to write the requirements definition, and I'm working with Steve on what's beyond Genki. The answer is, I don't know what's in that release yet. If you have things you would like to see in that release, I'm sure we will hear from you. But there are a number of areas that we want to focus support on for that release, but it's too early yet to be able to start definitively discussing what the content of that release is. But we will be putting the requirements definition together during this calendar quarter.
Audience Member: This might be a tough question and I think I already know the answer, but I'd like to hear it anyway.
Is there any business reason for developers to support the PowerPC over the BeOS? I know the PowerPC is supposed to be till at least version 5, but with the ratios I've been seeing, is there any core business reasons for that?
Roy Graham: I think that the quick and easy answer to that is I think you have to make your own business decisions in terms of what you think the market is for your individual applications. And then determine the support for both of the processes. There isn't one stock answer that would say you have got to support both or you should only be supporting one of the processes. I think you, as the individual application suppliers, have got to make that decision yourself. There isn't, unfortunately, one stock answer for that. Clearly, I think the installed base will potentially answer that question for you. There is going to be a predominance of Intel installed base and that will grow over time. So that may be a hint as to how you might answer that question.
Jean-Louis Gassee: If I may add to that. I'd love for us to continue to support the PowerPC needs, we have a number of our customers and developers would like the PowerPC and it's not for me to tell people what to do. Especially in this developer community, it doesn't work. But it needs cooperation from, you know, a potential partner there. But they have reasons which I respect and they are being very successful the way they are. They don't wish to see what they could perceive as competition for them on that platform. I respect that. I don't want to invest resources, political or engineering or whatever, in getting into an argument there. So whatever they want to do will, you know, we will support and we will just, you know, hope for the best, and right now it's pretty clear what we think the target of our efforts should be.
Audience Member: Are there any technical compromises being made so that decision could be reversed down the line? I mean, are there things being done inside the BeOS which are committing irrevocably to an Intel-only future?
Be Team Member: No.
Audience Member: Okay.
Audience Member: I have a question about UI consistency. A, is there... well, okay, first of all, there is a lot of UI elements homespun inside the BeOS all over the place. Is there an effort to stop doing that and to make the UI more consistent that Be provides, and also is there an effort to make those controls available to us as developers, because a lot of times oh, that's an awesome control but I'm not able to use it because it's not an exported control. It would be nice to have consistency that way.
Tim Martin: So the simple answer is yes, I think, right? We are working really hard right now on trying to. Even the difference between R3 and R4 I hope you started noticing we were trying really hard to keep all of our panels more consistent, to start bringing in the same kinds of metaphors and interaction models in all different parts of the OS.
However, at the same time, you know, we introduced new widgets, we introduced new controls and stuff, we start to innovate on the inside. At first we started to use them, in one instance we don't want to prematurely release something in the kit we only use once, you know? So you will see stuff that came out in R3 or R4 that we put in there and we put it in our apps and we didn't really have complete documentation for it because we realized the needs for us to work out all the problems, make sure all the parts are there that everybody needs. It's unfortunate that everybody can't use them right away, but you can trust we are working on it. Any time you see something that we work on internally on some of our apps, we are then going to try our best to turn around and put that in the kits and make it as easy for you guys to use as possible.
Does that answer your question?Audience Member: Basically.
Audience Member: Following up on that UI question, are there any plans for making Be more easily navigable with a keyboard? Just, I mean I have had bad luck trying to do that short of staying inside the terminal the entire time. And also, how about some mouse acceleration control? That would be kind of nice, coming from a Windows world.
Tim Martin: Well, actually the acceleration control we thought was going to be in R4, at least I did, it's one of the issues where, you know, is it one of the most important things that we do? The Media Kit was our focus and something like mouse acceleration fell by the wayside.
As for keyboard navigation, that actually ties totally into the answer for his question, where we start making a new control and, you know, we can't release it right away because we haven't put all the hooks for keyboard navigation and stuff like that. We actually have run into things where transition between like PowerPC keyboards and Intel keyboards interaction trying to make everybody happy have kind of shown things that we might not have thought of originally where we have to now address and make sure things like localization and stuff like that can all work in all circumstances and users can access all the functionality no matter what keyboard they have.
There are a few glaring things that are missing, like you can't access the BMenu from the keyboard, right? I'm sure that's the one everybody knows about. And I know that's one of my personal goals, to get some of those really glaring examples out of the way. But that may mean that we have to do more internal work than just flipping some switching here and there. Hopefully we will see a lot of that fixed in R5. But I can't promise anything, unfortunately.
Audience Member: When are we going to be able to get our hands on the 3D Mixer?
Tim Self: Me? We will be providing some form or another of it in the next release, the Genki release. But what happens to it right now is not yet determined in terms of commercial product. We don't want to compete with you guys. It doesn't make sense. But we will probably provide it in terms of a demo out there for people to use.
Audience Member: This may be a question that's been asked many times before, but my coming into the Be world new, one of the things I noticed was that a lot of advertising graphics for widgets is somewhat low resolution. I'm wondering, is there a reason for that? Is there any plans to change that?
Tim Self: Absolutely. I talked a little bit yesterday about how R4 was released and now we are moving to this Genki release, and it's time for us to step on... conversationally that doesn't work, does it? But it's too late. It's gone by.
It's time to step on the gas, and that means that we are going to be sharpening up our image. You will see a much broader, cleaner corporate image. It's not that this logo is going away, in fact it will become front and center, but there will be some adding on to it. So as we start to move to advertising, to co-marketing with you, we need to have that branding and logo, as it were, done. So works are well under way on that. I would say by the release you will start to see graphics and style guides and all those sorts of things that you would expect. I can't really say more about it, because it's not done. But it's going to come and it's going to come fast.
Audience Member: Following up on the question of the keyboard, Unicode provides a tremendous range of possible glyphs, a large number of which are not tied to any particular language, yet only a reasonably small subset are available with the normal keyboard layouts. Are there any plans to try to address that?
Hiroshi Lockheimer: That's what input methods are for, I think. If I'm understanding your question correctly, I think what you are asking is how do you use the other glyphs that you can't access.
Audience Member: Right, as a user.
Hiroshi Lockheimer: You use an input method?
Audience Member: So you might have an input method that you use circled numbers.
Hiroshi Lockheimer: I see, for graphic based...
Audience Member: Graphic and other.
Be Team Member: Mathematical stuff and...
Be Team Member: Nonforeign language.
Hiroshi Lockheimer: A good way to implement that might be an input method or a filter of some sort, or a key map that you switch. Those are ways to do that.
Audience Member: Totally unrelated issue. Does anyone know where I can find a replacement fan for a BeBox?
Be Team Member: Fry's.
Audience Member: Where else?
Audience Member: I've got just a quick question about killing processes. I work in a bookstore, and the number of times I have listened to people say yeah, but, you know, when an application freezes you have to know Unix in order to kill it. Is there a planned method for users to get a graphical method of seeing the applications or the processes running and killing them?
Audience Member: Invoke death grip.
Audience Member: Absolutely nothing. I can't reboot the machine without a mouse, which is really annoying.
Audience Member: There is an app on BeWare called Slayer, which is a graphical way to look at what is running and to check processes and kill them if you want to.
Audience Member: My question is one that's part of Be, rather than an add-on.
Audience Member: Process control will do that.
Andrew Kimpton: There is a feature in the BeOS which maybe you should be aware of. When we refer to three-finger salute we don't mean control to link, we mean a combination of Ctrl Alt Shift on the keyboard, and a clicking on the desk bar over the icon of the application that's causing you the problem. It will kill it. It is highly reliable, I don't believe any of us here have had any problems with it.
Be Team Member: The important thing is right Ctrl Alt Shift.
Audience Member: The one I never use.
Be Team Member: They are there for a reason!
Be Team Member: Equal opportunity keypads.
Audience Member: I still think that a kind of more Windowscentric method of doing that needs to appear. Like for example users coming from Windows are going to hit Ctrl Alt Del.
Be Team Member: That will work.
(Laughter & Applause.)
Audience Member: Ctrl Alt Del doesn't do anything for my system. Intel R4 box.
Be Team Member: File a bug!
Jean-Louis Gassee: Seriously.
Audience Member: It... is it supposed to work?
Be Team Member: Yes.
Audience Member: On any machine I've owned...
Audience Member: Kind of a partial answer to the BeBox question. PC Power and Cooling sells them that have five year warranties. They sell fans. If they can't find you a fan, they will make you one. But my question is: When are we going to get a more complete configuration manager?
Be Team Member: You mean plug-n-play configuration manager, resource configuration manager?
Audience Member: More complete for hardware configuration.
Audience Member: So you can troubleshoot an installation that doesn't work when it tries to look at a device that you don't need?
Audience Member: Yes.
Hiroshi Lockheimer: I'm sorry, what exactly did you want?
Audience Member: The configuration manager, when are we going to get a more complete configuration manager?
Hiroshi Lockheimer: What do you mean by "more complete"?
Audience Member: Like for instance, able to disable a device that you will not be using ever, like in most cases in the last two years USB. Or multiple video cards or configure a modem for...
Hiroshi Lockheimer: To a large extent that's in the release now, Genki.
Audience Member: All right.
Hiroshi Lockheimer: I'm working on... well, I want to make it better for the future, because you know, obviously a PC you should be able to turn it on and use it and not worry about all these sorts of issues. It's kind a matter of schedule.
Audience Member: Okay.
Tim Self: So we are going to wind down these last couple of questions, we are reaching the end.
Audience Member: Just a question about the user interface. I know Scott implemented the middle mouse button, which I think three button mice are amazing. Any thoughts of implementing any more middle mouse button? Click on a pane, it pops to the front, but sometimes maybe you want to activate it without having it pop to front or, you know, how you can move the little tabby bar in the middle by holding Shift, bring that to the middle mouse button for greater user interface? Any thoughts on that middle mouse button?
Tim Martin: I don't know what my colleagues would say about this from a technical standpoint, but I think most of this really lies in how we decide, what things we decide to have turned on by default and how much we want to be configurable by the user. The addition of the middle mouse stuff was great. And as more of our consumer base grows where mice have more than one button, I think you will see more people take advantage of this feature.
Audience Member: Some of the new Logitechs have a mouse wheel plus a fourth button.
Tim Martin: So hammering out exactly what standards for the mouse, different mice use different ways. Being able to technically fold it in is other people's jobs. And you know, that will come. But as for deciding the functionality of the buttons and what they do, you will probably see an increase in what you can do as to what buttons you want to define for what features. But we will also develop, we are already developing, as you see each release, what the right button and middle button should be doing.
Audience Member: Are you open to suggestions?
Tim Martin: Of course. You can always file bugs against human interface and I will get them. Any time you want to add your comments to my list is fine.
Audience Member: Thanks.
Audience Member: Two questions. How many Be employees are there now, overall?
Tim Self: Hovering around 100, I think. 95ish.
Be Team Member: Under a hundred.
Audience Member: And a technical one. Java Virtual Machine support? What's the story with that?
Tim Self: Work is under way. It's as much a licensing issue, as you might imagine, as a technical issue. We expect to see that late this year, early next year.
Audience Member: Okay. Thank you.
Tim Self: So that sort of brings us to the end of...
Audience Member: One more question?
Tim Self: You are lucky, I like you.
Audience Member: Just as a developer, the thing that makes me the most nervous about writing for the Media Kit is simply that there is going to be a bunch of nodes out there we really don't know, you know, how well they work and what kind of quality they have. So I guess more like a comment. To try to come up with something that we could like certify nodes or some way of running them through a test suite making sure we know they work. That would be really important for us, so we don't look like the jerk when the application crashes.
Be Team Member: We heard that input. I think it's added to the list of things to do.
Audience Member: Okay.
Tim Self: So before we depart, I have a few thank-yous. This conference couldn't have come off without, well, actually without anybody here. But a few people in particular. I want to thank the presenters, Stephen Beaulieu, our DTS manager, cracking the whip every day.
(Applause.)
Tim Self: There is a cast of characters underneath that, Owen Smith, Christopher Tate, Jeff Bush, and Doug Wright, who are going to probably go home immediately and sleep after this.
(Applause.)
Tim Self: And I'm sure I'm leaving people out. One other person, Dave Brown, who built all these systems, literally, there were fans and processors and motherboards all over the hallways last week and he managed to turn them into machines that work.
And George Wong, both of them were here late nights and pulled this off. One final is Michelle Wright, we actually have something for her. She is our developer programs coordinator and she is the one who booked the halls, and was in my office every day, and in everybody else's office every day making sure we were doing our jobs.
(Applause.)
One last thing. We have a gift certificate for a tub and massage at Watercourse.
Thanks for coming, we are really excited by what we see you doing, what Be can't talk about but we know you are out there doing. We know we'll see that this summer, this spring rolling out. Bother us. We are having cocktails, refreshments, the lab is open a few more hours. Thanks again, keep those comments coming in. We will do something about them.
(Applause.)