Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 19th Nov 2001 19:44 UTC
Today, OSNews features an interview with Zac Woodall, software design Engineer at Office Data and Developer Services at Microsoft Corporation. Zac, who is also a frequent OSNews reader, talks about the new Office, .NET, WindowsXP, NTFS and how it compares to BFS filesystem, the GPL & open source movement and much more.
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A couple ways to make Windows 2000 livable for ex-BeOS users. Note that both of these cost money.
(1) Get Object Desktop from Starcode. Most people know this just as WindowBlinds, which gives you the ability to "skin" windows. That's still a really important feature, but it can add a great deal more--I haven't explored all the oddities in ObjectBar and DesktopX. One major thing this gives me is, yes, multiple desktops. I miss BeOS's [Alt]+[~] command for switching between two quickly, and it's a bit quirky, but a less functional multiple desktop bar is better than none at all. And ObjectZip is actually one of the best archive managers I've used.
(2) Get Take Command/32 from JP Software. TC/32 is a descendant of 4DOS, and it's essentially a real shell for Windows. It's not a Unix shell, but at least in my experience I've preferred TC/32 than the Windows port of bash; TC/32 just "feels native" whereas Windows bash feels like the fish out of water that it is. TC/32 is at least as powerful as a Unix shell and has some features I actually miss on occasion when I'm using bash or zsh--for instance, all TC/32 builtins can accept date ranges, and I can tell you that coming up with a command that means "show all files in the current directory and those under it that have been modified in the last two weeks" is a damn sight easier in TC/32.
I really do like Unix. My work machine is FreeBSD-based so I have a great deal of experience with it, there are some truly dynamite things about it when it comes to system management (the ports tree and CVSup really kick ass, even compared to Debian's apt system), and the absence of a few basic Unix-isms drive me nuts in Windows--whose bright idea was it to make a "modern" file system that doesn't support symbolic links? But on a day-to-day basis, it's been easier for me to bring Windows 2000 up to a livable point--which I define as "sensible enough to get out of my way"--than it has been for me to do that with FreeBSD or any Linux distributions to date.