Month: July 2017

Sebastian Anthony

The 787 Dreamliner, with its composite-fibre chassis, lithium-ion batteries, and super-efficient engines, can fairly claim to be the coolest airplane in the world. Another reasonable choice, if you really revere giant flying tubes of aluminium, is the gloriously ginormous Airbus A380. And of course, true aerospace connoisseurs would probably choose the SR-71 Blackbird, or perhaps even the Concorde. But I can tell you now, all of these planes pale in comparison to the Boeing 757, built in 1982, that I just had the pleasure of flying in.

Externally this 757, which was only the fifth of its type to roll off Boeing's production line, looks fairly normal—until you spot a giant bracket on the side of the fuselage where an optional third engine can be mounted. That pylon isn't for redundancy or extra power, though: it's for field-testing new jet engines.

Tens of millions of Winamp users are still out there. (credit: Flickr user uzi978)

As many of us are busy crafting the perfect playlist for grilling outdoors, most likely such labor is happening on a modern streaming service or within iTunes. But during the last 15 years or so, that wasn't always the case. Today, we resurface our look at the greatest MP3 player that was—Winamp. This piece originally ran on June 24, 2012 (and Winamp finally called it quits in November 2013).

MP3s are so natural to the Internet now that it’s almost hard to imagine a time before high-quality compressed music. But there was such a time—and even after "MP3" entered the mainstream, organizing, ripping, and playing back one's music collection remained a clunky and frustrating experience.

Enter Winamp, the skin-able, customizable MP3 player that "really whips the llama's ass." In the late 1990s, every music geek had a copy; llama-whipping had gone global, and the big-money acquisition offers quickly followed. AOL famously acquired the company in June 1999 for $80-$100 million—and Winamp almost immediately lost its innovative edge.

And it started with such promise, too. Haiku, the open-source successor to the late and lamented BeOS—that late, lamented operating system of the 1990s developed at Apple refugee Jean-Louis Gassée's Be Inc. BeOS was intended to compete with the "classic" Apple MacOS and with Microsoft Windows; by 1996, Gassée was jockeying to get Apple to acquire his company and make BeOS the basis of the next-generation Macintosh operating system. But then along came some guy named Steve Jobs, with a company called NeXT. And the rest, as they say, is history. Be Inc. was eventually acquired by another doomed company (Palm) and dissolved.

Haiku (initially "OpenBeOS," but changed because of copyright assertions by Palm) was launched in 2001 to create an operating system that was binary-compatible with applications written for the ill-fated BeOS. It uses the same C++ API as BeOS, but it is a re-implementation of that API, so it shares virtually none of the code of the original BeOS. As it has evolved, Haiku has taken two diverging roads: a 32-bit version that retains backward compatibility, and a 64-bit version that is more forward-looking but breaks backward compatibility because of compiler issues. That's because the 32-bit version, (like BeOS before it, is based on Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) 2.