So, being a Webmaster, I'm asked several questions all the time about the web, Be, and NetPositive. I thought I'd answer some of them here.

NetPositive and URLs

$ NetPositive http://www.be.com

BMessage msg(B_ARGV_RECEIVED);

msg.AddString("argv", "NetPositive");
msg.AddString("argv", "http://www.be.com");
msg.AddInt32("argc", 2);

BMessenger messenger("application/x-vnd.Be-NPOS", -1, NULL);

if (messenger.IsValid()) {
  messenger.SendMessage( &msg );
} else {
  be_roster->Launch ("application/x-vnd.Be-NPOS", &msg );
}

$ NetPositive ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/contrib/whatsnew.txt

I am, I happily, ecstatically admit, a Macintosh novice. I cut my teeth on various forms of UNIX in the days when a stable, reliable operating system was regarded as far too sophisticated for mom, pop, and their drunken coed daughter at Wellesley. Recently, unfortunately, the tech writing team at Be moved their (our, my) production machinery from an oxygen-deprived form of UNIX (SCO) to Mac system seven-point-something. Do people actually use this thing?

But the OS isn't Apple's only, or even most important, problem. That would be this: Steve Jobs has become boring. Forget the implications of the $150M Microsoft deal—pundittier wits than I have frazzled that one to the bone. What does it mean? Who cares. The important thing isn't the deal itself, it's SJ's sound bite, blazing purple across the cover of Time magazine: "Thank you, Bill. The world's a better place."

Huh? Steve is admitting there's a world? I liked him better when he was archly solipsistic. I worked for him (at NeXT) for seven years; I never really enjoyed the aftermath of being up close in the same room with him —he has a talent for siphoning your soul out through your eyeballs -- but he was fun at a distance. Not more than a year ago, I saw him on a television show (not that I watch TV, of course) in which he spake the Steve gospel on the iniquitors of Redmond (and I paraphrase, but probably not much, it was a memorable spaking): "The thing I don't like about MS is that they have no taste...and I don't mean that in a small way." Perfect.

Perhaps the last few years spent peddling celluloid sugar water has softened his rabbit punch. Granted, many of his myth-making quotables were stolen ("The journey...") or nonsensical ("A dent in the universe"), but they never let flag the "SJ Longa, Vita Brevis" banner that was so disarmingly charming. Even his recent admission that he did indeed dump all his Apple stock was impressive in its up-yours impudence. I wish, at times, that I had that sort of gall (although, honestly, it may not be a fair test: What would YOU do with 1.5 million shares of AAPL?).

So, please, Steve, say something crudely amusing. Make fun of Bill's haircut, impugn his typing skills, insult the intelligence of his Smart House—anything—the more tasteless and irrational, the better. Let us know that you're the only one that exists. The world? Hey—it's just an extension. And extensions are disabled.

...But that's not why I called you all together here tonight.

During the Audio and Video presentation of the BeDC in Boston on a Tuesday in a dark room, I showed a trivial but amusing application called Whisper. Whisper takes voice input and fiddles with the sound in real time—most notably, it lets you shift the pitch of your voice as you speak. Certain employees at Be have already used Whisper to make prank phone calls, including a message in a demonically basso voice left on Jean-Louis' voice mail demanding that the caller (referring to himself in the third person) be given a raise. Whisper is, obviously, a productivity tool.

Since returning from Boston I've received more than one (two!) request that Whisper be availablized. Anyway, if you start at

http://www.be.com/developers/sample_code/index.html

and poke around a bit (look in the "Sound" section), you'll find a Whisper executable and BeIDE project. The interface is pretty stark, the icon is vanilla, and there's no on-line help, but all of that icing would only obscure a perfectly twisted little cake.

Here's what you do:

The app presents five "Fiddle" settings: Shift, Flipper, Whisper, Chirpy, and Splatter. These are self-descriptive sound manipulating filters. And there's a slider in the main window that does something, although the relationship between the slider and the something that it's doing isn't always clear.

The sampling rate settings (44.1, 22.05, 11.025K), in addition to having an effect on the performance of the app, also influence the character of the filters—more isn't necessarily better: Splatter, for example, is more fun at 11025 than at 44010. (But aren't we all?)

Fool your landlord tomorrow—download Whisper today! I only put about 15 copies on the Web Site, so when they're all gone, that's it.

One of the most fun things that you can do with a computer is generate interesting sounds. That's why whenever we give a demo we use big loud sound systems and a thumping beat. Of course, the history of sound and computers has come a long way from playing the star spangled banner on a Teletype, to now doing CD quality digitized stereo. Sound handling really is simple to do in the BeOS. If you are familiar with our streaming architecture, you know you get buckets, you add to the buckets, you pass them on. We get much simpler questions though. How do you turn the volume up or down.

If all you're after is the meta information related to sound, take a look in the AudioStream.h file and you'll see some interesting things.

class BDACStream for instance. Let's say you want to set the master volume of the system to be 50% of max.

BDACStream aStream;
aStream.SetVolume(B_MASTER_OUT, 0.5, 0.5);

It's that simple. It's really neat to do while you have the Sound preferences application up because you will see the sliders change accordingly. If you take a look into MediaDefs.h, you'll find some other interesting things that you can set volumes on.

You can also use the same stream thing to enable and disable various devices.

// Turn the internal speaker on
aStream.EnableDevice(B_SPEAKER_OUT, true);

// Turn the internal speaker off
aStream.EnableDevice(B_SPEAKER_OUT, false);

Audio is one of those things that I've never made a point of becoming any sort of expert at, but I love playing with things. When I first started at Be, there was this wacky thing called Audio Elements. Audio Elements allow you to play with sound by giving your a nice graphical user interface in which you can tie things together into networks and just fiddle to your heart's content. If you really want to play with sound, but you don't want to get down into the nitty gritty, you might check it out at:

http://www.adamation.com/

I've also found that speech synthesis gives me a thrill, and through my various net wanderings I found that one text to speech synthesizer suits me fine:

ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/pub/comp.speech/synthesis/rsynth

and another great source of speech stuff:

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/comp.speech

It suits me because the price is right, free, and the quality is good enough for simple things. It has a tuned database so that you can actually get quite good on those easily mispronounced words. If anyone wants text to speech, I would highly recommend these sources.

We are often asked if we are crazy and we think this is a good question. Not just because we are polite and humble, but because we feel this is a legitimate question, one that allows us to clarify our position on the central issue of our raison d'être—as we say in English.

So, yes, we're crazy, but not that crazy. It would be really insane, stupid, and expensively suicidal to present ourselves on our developers and customers doorsteps, assuming they have been waiting for us since the beginning of time, or Windows, and declare we're here to displace Microsoft. The BeOS is better, younger, faster, smaller, cheaper, easier to program, we're taking over. OS/2, with many good qualities and IBM's name and money, couldn't compete with Windows. How could we succeed where IBM failed? Precisely, as we'll discuss in a moment, we have very different goals. Contrary to what IBM attempted to do with OS/2, we are not trying to displace Windows.

Still, doing something different, against the official thinking of the moment, requires a certain lack of wisdom, the conventional one. Needless to say, we aspire to the latter kind of unbalance. Then, if we're not competing head-on with Microsoft, what are we doing on the Intel platform?

The respective positions are quite simple. Windows 95 and Windows NT are both general-purpose OSes. Windows 95 is hugely successful on the desktop and Windows NT has become a holy terror in the enterprise market. The BeOS, on the other hand, is a nascent OS specializing in digital media content creation. The general-purpose OSes have their advantages: breadth of applications, familiarity, the support of a great company.

Conversely, as a result of their very general nature, they are at a disadvantage in more specialized media applications. In our case, we lack legacy applications but, free from the baggage, we offer superior performance, ease of programming and (almost) friction-free market access, specializing in the emerging digital media applications where our elders are legacy-bound.

We are a complement to, not a replacement for, existing general-purpose OSes. Depending upon their needs and inclinations, users will pick one or the other, or more likely both. They're already doing it today on Intel systems.

From the very beginning, many operating systems have coexisted on Intel-based PCs: Versions of DOS (MS/DOS, IBM PC/DOS, DR/DOS), Windows (3.1, 95, NT), Unix (BSD, SCO, GNU, Solaris), OpenSTEP, various flavors of Linux. As a result, a genre has emerged, the boot loader. Linux, OS/2 and Windows NT all offer one and there are several independent ones, the most popular probably being System Commander. Not for my mother, obviously, I don't see her partitioning her hard disk and installing Linux or even her son's BeOS, but technically proficient users, our natural audience, have been doing it for years.

I dwell on this for two reasons. One is our Mac heritage. Many of us come from Apple; the BeOS is currently available on Power Macs. Contrary to the Intel world, the boot manager genre has no meaning in the Mac space, no need. Second, I believe there is a stark contrast between the high cost of establishing a new genre and the much lower investment required to play into an existing one. Which gets us back to the earlier question of the kind of craziness tormenting us, the lethally expensive one or the merely high risk, high reward one. On Intel systems, we play in the established context of multiple OS on the same hard disk. In that space, there is the general-purpose OS category and the special-purpose space. We play in the latter, we complement rather than replace.

Now, there is the delicate matter of execution. It will decide what kind of craziness really afflicts us.

BeDevTalk is an unmonitored discussion group in which technical information is shared by Be developers and interested parties. In this column, we summarize some of the active threads, listed by their subject lines as they appear, verbatim, in the mail.

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"At 3:52 PM -0700 8/18/97, Howard Berkey wrote:
 >The unknown bugs? :-)
 > [...]
 >Why do you ask?

 At 4:13 PM -0700 8/18/97, Brian Stern wrote:
 >Unknown bugs?
 > [...]
 >Why do you ask?