You can't just say you worked at Be and not tell more stories! When were you there and what did you do? Why do you think you didn't take over the world? Have you tried Haiku?

indeed. Be belongs to a list of companies that would be great to hear insider stories about. also NeXT, Thinking Machines, Symbolics (sp?), Infocom, Cray, etc

Yes, as I understand it, is_computer_on and is_computer_on_fire were basically no-ops to benchmark kernel calls. One returns an integer and the other a double. But I could be very wrong, I have absolutely zero authoritative knowledge and this is simply an explanation I once heard that made sense to me.