If you want to use Unix, but vi and emacs give you the blues, you might want to try out NEdit, a text editor for Unix that acts more like a text editor for Windows.
Jamais Cascio reviews Scot Hacker’s BeOS Bible for Byte Magazine, and sneaks in a review of the whole operating system as well! I’d like to see the BeOS succeed, but I really do think it’s caught in a nasty pinch between the mainstream users who are shackled to Windows, and the hacker community, which has settled on the free Unix alternatives.
Washington Post tech reporter Mike Musgrove has a funny article about how his Palm palmtop has revolutionized his life. I’m planning on revolutionizing mine in the next week or two.
Peter Coffee talks about burgeoning momentum behind the Mac in his PC Week column. Such an idea would have been ridiculed not that long ago.
Nathan Myhrvold, head of research at Microsoft, is taking a “one year leave of absence.” There are rumors that he’s leaving after a power struggle with Steve Ballmer, although Myhrvold is denying those rumors. In any case, we’ll see what happens in July, 2000, when Myhrvold is supposed to be back. Maybe he’s going off to do whatever Brad Silverberg is doing.
Linux gossip: Rasterman (aka Carsten Haitzler), the author of the Enlightenment window manager, has left Red Hat (where he was working on GNOME) due to what in the entertainment industry would be called creative differences. Slashdot has posted an email message he sent to the Enlightenment mailing list in which he burns his Red Hat bridges with aplomb. If you don’t feel like reading the email message, I’ll summarize: Red Hat is a sellout, GNOME and KDE suck, and Enlightenment is on its way to being the greatest thing since sliced bread. After you’ve followed the free software world for awhile, blowups like this never come as a surprise, they’re really one of the best things about it. By the way, I’m forecasting that he’ll get a job with Penguin Computing or VA Linux Systems.
Judith Lewis has started recommending FreeBSD to friends after Linux users on Slashdot were mean to her. Slashdot is increasingly becoming a new incarnation of Guy Kawasaki’s Mac EvangeList … a staging areas for juvenile attacks on journalists. Guys, grow up.
Tara Calishain sends along a pointer to a long article from the LA Times about Red Hat. It’s a nice overview of the Linux and Red Hat phenomenon, and goes a good way toward answering the puzzling question, “How can you make money off of something free?”