Flutterby™! : HailStorm speculation 2001-03-17 17:10:15+00

HailStorm speculation

2001-03-17 17:10:15+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

So on Monday, Microsoft is going to release HailStorm which, from the advance buzz, sounds like "browser meets ICQ". Open Source folks: If you want to beat Microsoft long term, concentrate on how the younger generation works. With Windows XP Microsoft is targeting older people who need a lot of screen real-estate taken up with on-screen prompting and explanations. If HailStorm lives up to the hype they'll be targetting bored horny housewives who can't type complete words ("r u hot 4 me?"); teens with the same problem, albeit with broader interests; and drooling idiots posing as CEOs of unethical .com companies. Stick with building solid operating systems to support those doing work and there will always be a market. Of course no one will pay for it, but that's the lot of those who actually make the world go 'round.

I'm really interested to see how well Aqua works. I find the UI in WinME to be 'pleasant' to use because I don't really have to think about what I'm doing most of the time. When I need to do something important I just drop to a command prompt. Of course the WinME command prompt is rather disatisfying to a Unix geek like myself.

Aqua on OSX can give me the best of both worlds: a mindless GUI layered on top of a reasonable implementation of Unix. Plus, I can get it in one of those suave Apple cubes.

But that won't come to pass until after I get some other important bills paid. Until then, it's WinME on the laptop and KDE on the Linux boxen.

I actually find myself struggling with ME fairly often, which is why it's been relegated to run Flash, IE, and Counter-Strike, and little else (although I have been diddling with Gimp for Windows recently).

You do know about the Cygnus tools, right? They're hard to find now that they're on Red Hat's website, but they're a port of the GNU tools to Windows, and make it tolerable.

There's also 4DOS from Jsoft, which is to be sure nonstandard, but gives you a command prompt with a lot of flexibility and power. It's just an extended shell, not a new OS. I can barely work without it. One of the best features: Control-PageUp gives you a popup window of recently-used directories. Second best: filename completion. Both are great for those ridiculously long directory and file names punctuated by spaces that you only find out after you type it need to be quoted at both ends. Plus you can write these nifty extended batch files and create an alias for almost anything.