Linked by Scot Hacker on Mon 17th Dec 2001 17:34 UTC
The story of how a BeOS refugee (and not just everyone, but the author of the 'BeOS Bible' book) lost faith in the future of computing, resigned himself to Windows but found himself bored silly, tore out half his hair at the helm of a Linux box, then rediscovered the joy of computing in MacOSX. Scot Hacker will describe his personal adventures with today's operating systems after he was set out to find an alternative to his beloved (but with no apparent future) BeOS. Update: Make sure you read the second part of the article, a rebutal, found here.
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I tried BeOS several times over the years, never really finding it to be compatible with all the hardware on any machine.
I just wanted to make a few comparisons to WinXP, although I will most likely get flamed for doing so. You mentioned the upcoming SQL based filesystem. Currently, NTFS supports unlimited attributes. While I currently can't add new ones, when I right click on an mp3 file I am presented with the author/title information (copied from the id3 tag, I believe). I *can* sort my mp3s by artist or bitrate in explorer as well, even displaying the files without file names as well.
Also, the digital camera stuff in XP is vastly improved. It supports most cameras and scanners out of the box, and can resize images in the shell to a given size. Any image type can be displayed as a thumbnail. Copying from a camera is painless, and rotating images can be done on the fly. And yes, CD burning is built in, both from data and music files.
Lastly, XP boots to login screen in under 20 seconds. An applications load faster than any other version of windows. And the UI (contrary to MS's claims) is customizable, you just have to tweak it a little (tgtsoft.com).
Just to be clear, I'm not claiming even equivalence with BeOS, which was (and is) an incredible piece of software. I just want to show that Microsoft is slowly moving in the right direction.
By the way, Xp has crashed twice on me, once due to me trying to install an unsupported driver for a smartmedia card reader (a new driver was released a week later and has worked flawlessly) and once due to a bad nVidia driver, also upgraded soon after.