Came across this post from Thinking in C++ and Thinking in Java author Bruce Eckel on his experiences with Windows Vista. Of particular interest as a former BeOS-geek was this excerpt:

“What’s amazing is that the only really innovative operating system that has appeared in at least 25 years was crushed, probably with a lot of help from Microsoft while at the same time they were claiming to be innovative. This was BeOS, and life would have been much better right about now if Microsoft had bought them instead…”

Instead Palm bought Be’s technology and the OS faded away (though it’s open source successor, Haiku, is starting to look pretty interesting). For another interesting read on the old BeOS in comparison to Windows and MacOS (of the time) see author Neal Stephenson’s essay “In the Beginning was the Command Line”.

Back to Vista… I too have this sinking feeling that trying to do serious work on this OS is a bad move. In my usual cavalier fashion, I initially leaped whole hog into it and upgraded my entire development system. The target OS for my latest project is Vista, so this made a lot of sense. You have to live in an environment for a while before you really get the feel for it. After 3 months, I’d had enough and had the IS folks set me up with a dual boot XP/Vista system so I could go back and forth. Now I’m wondering whether I will use the Vista install for any of this project’s coding or will only use it to test on…

Geek //