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My buddy Dane Scott, of LeBuzz and TuneTracker fame, shot me an e-mail with some juicy information, the prices for the TT "Station-in-a-Box" systems have been sliced and diced.

Though I only got this today and the same ends tomorrow at 6pm Central Time, so there's plenty of time for you to enjoy the benefits. And they are:
  • Basic "Thank You" Package
  • $999 TuneTracker Basic Station-in-a-Box
  • $79.95 TunePrepper
  • $39.95 Lightning
    • =============================
    Regularly: $1118.90 NOW: $849.95
  • Pro "Thank You" Package
  • $1299 TuneTracker Pro Station-in-a-Box
  • $79.95 TunePrepper
  • $39.95 Lightning
    • =============================
    Regularly: $1418.90 NOW: $1049.95
As Dane put it, it's their way of saying "thanks!" to all of their customers. So all you broadcasters (or wannabe), go ahead and start using the airwaves! DaaT over and out.

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Michael Phipps, back from WalterCon 2005, in Vegas (no surprise it took him several days to start posting again... *cough cough*), writes that Haiku is now selling t-shirts as a fund raiser. Why you ask? Because they want to hire their first full time dev that's why, good reason no?

The t-shirts cost $20 USD (in the US s+h is included) and they're available as I write this. For Europe (and the rest of the world) Michael is looking into how best to get things done. So you want one uh? Here's how to do it:
  • PayPal $20 to mphipps1 *at* rochester *dot* rr *dot* com.
  • Email merchandise *at* haiku *dash* os *dot* org with your name, address, shirt size and the email address that you pay pal'ed the money with.
  • Sit by your mailbox and wait. :-)
I would like to offer a criticism to this method Michael, sorry... I mean, making people stay outside by the mailbox to wait? What if it gets cold? What if it rains? What if a dog mistakes the person's leg with a fire-hydrant?

Seriously now, here's a chance to support Haiku and get yourself a shiny new t-shirt, go for it!

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In the past couple of days, a controversy has come to public light, between developer Marcus Overhagen and yellowTAB's CEO Bernd Korz. It started (publicly at least) with Marcus' blog post about his work on ISDN drivers for AVM cards.

That post generated some responses, one claimed to be by Bernd Korz, which in turn generated an e-mail from Bernd Korz to Marcus, who posted another blog entry about it.

Only the two of them know the whole story, what is certain is that this is a big mess, which doesn't shed good light on both parties. We'll have to wait and see what the repercussions are on this...

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I wrote a little tutorial on how to install Haiku on your system. Not in an emulator! Here it is:

Assuming you've setup your disk with a partition to install Haiku on, grab a copy of BeOS Max Edition v3.1b here.
Burn it. Now download the latest raw disk image of Haiku (and leave it somewhere on your hard drive) from here.

Boot from the BeOS Max disk now, and run it as a live CD. Now right-click the Desktop and you should see a partition named Haiku (the one you downloaded) that's about 60mb. I downloaded my Haiku image to a Fat32 drive. Anyways, now mount it.

Click on the deskbar menu and go to Applications/Development/Installer. Change 'Install from' to 'Haiku', and change 'Onto' to the partition you wish to install Haiku onto. My partition was a BeFS already.

My install took about 3 minutes on a P4 2.2 GHz. After you can even choose to install the bootloader.

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Co-founder of ID Software, John Carmack, announced in his QuakeCon keynote August 12 that the Quake3 source code should be released within the next week. As with the previous releases of the game, the source code will be released under the GPL.

The three big questions for most of us are how fast can we get Quake3 ported to BeOS / ZETA, if someone has a basement where he/she can keep Rudolf and his computers as long as it takes him to finish the OpenGL driver, and will BeGeistert 15 be an Quake event?

Update: Quake 3's source has now been released. It's a small download of less than 6MB. Go get it here. Start your porting!

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Xentronix announced today that their imaging/photo editing software has achieved Gold status with retail version being available from this coming Monday the 15th. Here are parts of the press release:
After many years of development, we are very pleased to announce that our imaging and photo editing suite Refraction went golden!

Since the last public beta, Beta 8, a lot has changed in Refraction. We added new tools, greatly improved the speed and stability and fixed a lot of the interface glitches. One of the most requested features were the removal of the toolbar menu, and a correctly working rotation plugin. (...)

Shipping of Refraction? will start in about a week. The application will be delivered on a CD in a DVD box, and also contains a 'Quick start manual' in both English and German. Customers who already bought Refraction as a download version can upgrade their copy to the retail version at minimal cost at the Mensys online shop. (...)

There is also a little sad news for some people. Due some major bugs and problems in BeOS and it's inabillity to run on modern hardware, we are unfortunately forced to stop support for this platform. Our products are therefore only available for Zeta.
Users in North America can order directly from Purplus thus saving in shipping cost and time. Best of luck to Xentronix, we here at ICO hope their sales become plentifull. Pre-orders have started so go ahead and get your own copy.

Update: Refraction's demo is now available for download.

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YellowBites is planning to raise the price of WonderBrush to EUR 49 including VAT when version 2.0 is released. All licenses purchased after 1.5.0 will continue to work with 2.0. So while the release date for 2.0 is yet unknown, this is a great chance to purchase this powerful application at it's current low price of about EUR 23.

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The good folks over at Arstechnica (been their reader for years now) have put up a ZETA R1 review in which the reviewer, Jeremy Reimer, seems pleased with it. It's a thourough review, focusing on several aspects, from the installation to every-day usage, even starting with "A Brief History of Time... er.. BeOS" (cue laughs).

In the end he lists the pros and cons, from his point of view, that R1 delivers, though this particular one "Many of the links to shareware and freeware applications on BeBits.com no longer work" doesn't seem to be directly related to/caused by ZETA... Head over, read it and discuss it.

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yellowTAB GmbH today announced their downloads section:

"We are continually working on ZETA and many improvements and bug fixes are ready before we are ready to release a ServicePack or update. As we don't wish our customers to wait we have decided to publish a selection of these on our website. This will give customers early access to updated drivers and applications. Whenever there is something new, customers will be able to download it from our new "Downloads" section. We hope that this extension of our service proves useful."

So what are you waiting for? Get over to yellowTAB - Downloads and your get system updated with the latest software.

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Niels Reedijk, lead developer on matters of USB & Haiku, needs testers to help him make some more progress with the project. A zip of the current build can be found on his blog.