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Microsoft Windows 7 "Wishlist" Leaked
Cassius Corodes is one of many readers to point out that a recent "wishlist" of new Windows development features is floating around the net. This list was supposedly leaked from Microsoft and contains some of their key development features for the next version of Windows. Given that the next new Windows release is bound to be a long way off I would recommend seasoning this news with a hefty dose of sodium chloride.
Back up XBOX 360 games to Windows PC - Ain't gonna happen
New PIP functionality for Media Center - PIP *.WMA/L
Infinite desktop, virtual desktop idea - Maybe they could port fvwm
Option to "Reopen Closed tabs" in IE - This will be addressed via "Are you sure you want to close this tab?"
Auto clean of Temp folders - How about including a way to define which are temp folders.
How about fixing the paging to use it's own partition, ffs!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So is this a new list or did they simply take the list of all the features they removed from Longhorn before it became Vista and exchanged the header?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
half that stuff on their list is already a part of firefox and either a part of many linux distros or easily addable- what is new here exactly?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
7 Things for Windows 7
No DRM
No Bloat
No Eye Candy
No ClearType
No Authentication or WGA
No Restrictions for Video or Audio Output
No Search Indexing
Yup, I still remember when I got all excited about the WinFS Filesystem (yeah, in the ATM Machine) which was supposed to come in Vista... this "leak" was surely "leaked" by Microsoft's hype department.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I know "this is Slashdot" and all that but the article is pretty much blatantly anti-Windows without a real point to be made outside of that aim. The point of news reporting is to present the facts and not try to color them by our own judgments. I'm not a regular Windows user - On the contrary I am a Solaris user/developer but to me that article sounds laughably one sided. On the one hand there is no way to know this is a comprehensive list of what is to go into Windows 7 and on the other hand we don't even know the source of this list. Just sounds like sensationalist crap.
"If Microsoft were to adopt all the recommendations made in this form, they'd have...well, they'd have OS X or Linux. Either this list was a poll of UNIX-based platform users, or these are really the problems Windows users want to see fixed."
Oh please. Fuck you! You're belittling both Windows and Linux by a stupid comment like that.
Maybe there is something in that - perhaps what they should be doing is slowly evolving a system - rather then trying to revolutionise it with every release. Although I guess it would be harder to justify having to spend money on purchasing an improved rather than new version...
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
An eject button for the DVD drive, as well as uneject. *nix has had eject and eject -t for decades, and Apple has a button on the keyboard (!) for this. But to install a third party app to f***ing close the tray is sooo 20th century. I don't think the EU is going to frown on this one as more monopolistic behaviour.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
While we're at "sensible default settings": Show those damn extensions!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Really, after Windows Vista i have really just stopped caring about what MS does. They can do whatever but i doubt Windows 7 will be anything but some minor enhanchements and some new fancy clothes when the day for gold comes. If they horribly failed with current codebase how can they do any better without a major rewrite in just a couple of years? It must suck for MS to have put themselves in this position.
HTTP/1.1 400
I began noticing this with Windows 95. The bastards said it would run in 4MB of memory. Technically it would, if you only ever wanted to start it up. (12MB was the bare minimum to run some modest apps without paging.) I admined a Dec PDP 11/45 and learned a lot about tuning a system for performance. When you had 256 KB of memory, 2 88MB HDDs, a 4 MB core memory swap disk (anyone ever see a Megastore? :) and had to shared nicely among as many as 40 users at a time, you learned how to get the most out of it. Seems the approach these days is: Throw more money at it. Buy more RAM, bigger HDD, upgrade (why do Windows upgrades always require tonnes more RAM?), faster CPU, etc. Performance tuning at Microsoft seems blasphemy.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've always been in the habit of making four partitions. Windows, applications, games and misc/tmp drive. It's worked well for me.
Wouldn't getting their heads to explode be the opposite of impotence?
The thing that I would like to see make a come back is the ability to only install parts of the OS, not absolutely everything. It irritates me that I have to either install everything that MS wants, or roll my own install. Which Windows often times complains about later.
Except for a couple of built in utilities, I rarely use any of the default programs that install. Especially that stupid instant messenger thing that I have to disable every time I install Windows.
It should also have a companion option "Fill my notification area with lots of little static icons for programs I seldom use, but to the developers they were the most important thing in the world so they want them to be already started on the rare occasions I might want to use them, least I judge the developer by the 5 second delay of starting their program, on startup."
Anyone who wants to see the extentions can change the setting in 15 seconds.
Everyone else (read: the majority) who don't want/need to see the extentions probably wouldnt know how to hide them.
So which setting makes more sense for the default?
The companies' logic is that programmer cost a lot. It's actually much cheaper, they think, to throw some money in buying more hardware to make up for the lack of optimisations in the code, than to waster the precious ( = expensive in terms of salary ) programmer's time.
Where this is actually true remains to be seen.
Specially given the current trends in hardware (additional power doesn't come from more raw power but from additional parallelism, etc.) the programmers will have *anyway* to be clever, because better hardware won't be able anymore run the same shitty code faster.
As Herb Sutter puts it The Free Lunch is Over.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
*:(yeah, I read the PR bs about 300 new features - so are you happy about the ability to spellcheck in Danish now? Did it change your life that you can now install in Polish or Russian?)
Check out Windows For Legacy PCs (WinFLP). They don;t offer it through retail, but if you can get it through your business or are willing to use the pirate networks I think it is by far the best version of Windows to date (you can even install it without Internet Explorer).
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
My three pet gripes about GUI software are 1) focus stealers -- you are typing away in one app and some other app pops up and then you are typing into some other window that has grabbed focus, 2) Files Save that makes you start over from the beginning with each program launch or even each Files Save instead of remembering where you last saved a file, and 3) programs that lock up the GUI at the least provocation (yeah you, Adobe -- I dread Web surfing into PDF files, even from a broadband connection).
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
While were on the subject of poking in the registry, how about making the registry a file system that is mounted and can be checked for errors? Or at least some kind of format that isn't obfuscated. Make it a real database or something.
Or if that's too hard, why not make regedit part of the Computer Management MMC screen? Or for that matter, allow me to have multiple copies of regedit running. I'm finding myself comparing registry entries between computers a lot but when windows will only let you have one copy running at a time, you have to do the "Open Network Registry" thing and have the registries all in one big tree instead of side by side for comparing.
Ok here's another feature request, how about make it so that windows is never in a state where it cannot boot? Why not integrate something like ERD Commander or BartPE into the OS itself? Make it a recovery partition that is read only, but will boot the computer up and allow you to run tools without needing a separate disk. (AS/400's can do this) Once you have windows up and running after installation the system will start building an emergency repair partition using files and drivers it verifies are good. If it detects an internet connection, windows will flag the network drivers as good and copy them over to the recovery partition and make them read only so you'll have internet access while in recovery mode. Then add in some kind of tool that will run MD5 sums on the system files of the non booting OS and compare them to an online database to identify a possible file that is corrupt or even say something like "Version 2.1.2 of somefile.dll cannot be used with version 2.2.0 of someotherfile.dll" Or "Your tcpip.sys does not match any official microsoft releases, it is most likely infected with a virus or corrupt. Would you like to replace it with a known good version?" (Or even offer to validate your license key and download a good copy of the file directly from MS)
"Performance tuning at Microsoft seems blasphemy."
Actually maximizing performance means that you're not buying new hardware, which pisses off Microsoft's OEM partners. And in turn, that means you're not buying new copies of Windows as well.
Earlier this decade, even the cheapest PC you could buy off the shelf had far more horsepower than was necessary for apps of the time. With the sole exception of video cards, any El Cheapo Celeron you could buy would easily exceed the hardware standards for the latest games and apps. PC sales slowed down. The solution? Design apps and OS's that have so many bells and whistles that they use up all that excess computing power, and Voila, you have to buy new hardware.
Performance tuning? Are you kidding?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
While were on the subject of poking in the registry, how about making the registry a file system that is mounted and can be checked for errors? Or at least some kind of format that isn't obfuscated. Make it a real database or something.
For exactly the same reason we can't just run all our apps under Wine, or switch to another OS entirely: We use Windows for its cruft. Developers write some strange code due to poor programming skills, unreasonable deadlines, or simply because it was easier to hack together a workaround than trying to get Microsoft to fix a buggy library or API. Then Microsoft decides to update Windows, and does their best to make the new OS run all the horrible code that somehow managed to work on the old OS... Which just makes the new OS even cruftier and buggier than the last. Repeat this cycle a dozen times and you have Windows Vista.
Unfortunately, even though Microsoft's coders would love to start from scratch, and I'm sure they could put out a good OS if they wanted to, Microsoft knows we use Windows for its cruft. If Microsoft suddenly cut old legacy apps loose (or confined them to a Classic-like abstraction layer) the new Windows would lose its main advantage over *nix or MacOS. Microsoft doesn't want to compete on features, or ease of use, or really compete at all, not when it's so much easier to beat the market over the head with their Club of +1 Legacy Support.
Our only escape from this cycle is, as customers, to do our best to rid ourselves of unmaintained, poorly written, legacy apps. Make the case for open source, virtualized, web-based, or any high-agility solution that won't tie you to some arcane software or hardware down the line. Microsoft will only rethink their strategy when the market for cruft begins to die out, so do your part.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
No, you're wrong. And pointing to a non-Microsoft document about Windows *SERVER* 2003 doesn't help at all when discussing optimizing a desktop OS.
and while the general principle of a Windows Page file and a Unix Swap partition are the same, the specifics of how they're used are very different and thus, you cannot generalize between Windows and Unix in this way. Unix Swap is used for the very simple reason that you run out of physical memory. Windows swap files are used for caching of memory objects in addition to the reasons you use a swap file.
Sit and ponder the difference for a bit. One of the primary differences is that in Windows, even if you have 4GB of RAM and thus can't actually use a "Swap" partition, Windows will still use the Page file. Seriously, sit and think about this fundamental difference for a bit.
Consider that Windows XP and Vista will attempt to optimize the location of the page file and applications on disk based on historical usage. Unix doesn't do any of this. Nor does Server 2003 That's not how it optimized system resources.
For those people who are rearranging swap files, locations of programs, etc etc on Windows desktop environments, you're not actually helping anything, and you're making it harder for users to use their desktop systems because you're forcing them to go against how MS wants the OS to be used. It makes it harder and less intuitive and none of the help files on the internet will work directly because you've moved the location of Windows stuff around to match *YOU* like it done.
And as stupid as MS is, they're not that stupid. Windows XP and Vista's setting are fine out of the box for typical desktop use. Geek away at your own desktop if it makes you feel better, but you're just making it harder for everybody else.
P.S. "Professional Windows Administrator". LOL. Really. That won't impress anybody on slashdot. And caching of IE temp files in the user roaming profile stopped after IE 5.01. That changed 4 years ago! 5 isn't even supported by MS anymore. Instead of doing all that work, go buy these guys 4G of memory and just use Windows as it was designed. If you want to do anything, lock the size of the Page file, although that's not even necessary if you use Vista.
Because hiding them is insecure...
pr0n.jpg.exe becomes pr0n.jpg, and exe files can contain their own icons and this one just happens to have an icon that looks like a jpeg file.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
At our company, we are developing a software project with three major components.
Two of those are clients -- one for HD-DVDs, and one for the web browser -- which pretty much limits us to Javascript.
The third is the server, which is somewhat based on Ruby on Rails. We host it on Amazon EC2, which means if we ever get Slashdotted, even the Ruby server(s) can simply scale up to handle the load.
For us, this makes sense. The cost of programmer time to optimize is way less than the cost of simply firing up another EC2 instance -- again, if we ever need it. We do have to make our architecture more scalable and maintainable, but that's a good thing anyway, no matter how efficient it is.
Your situation isn't quite the same. If it's highly specialized software, chances are, you're right, and nobody cares. But there are a couple of big costs here.
First, while disk space is cheap, RAM and network still aren't. If it takes up a gig on disk, how much will it take up in RAM? Maybe more, maybe less. If you're using more than a gig of RAM for something that could be done comfortably in a hundred megs, you have to remember that you're on a multi-tasking OS.
So at that point, you have to ask yourself: Is your app valuable enough to your users that they'll either tolerate a slow machine, or buy a dedicated machine for your app?
You also have almost lost downloadability at that point. Understand that if it takes a gig, but you could fit it in 10 megs, well, even dialup users will tolerate 10 megs.
There is one more reason efficient code would be desired -- once you get to a certain level of CPU power, new possibilities become available, and they do quite suddenly. This is most obvious in video games -- suddenly, we have enough power for 3D. Suddenly, we can do lighting, sort of. Suddenly, we don't have to fake it anymore -- dynamic lighting, with real shadows.
This means that if you choose a slow language, you could automatically bump yourself back a generation in what you can support. And I'm not just talking about games here.
And again, I realize that probably none of this applies to your product. I'm not calling anyone "lazy". I'm just pointing out that the inverse is not always true -- that programming for performance is not always a bad thing.
Just, in both cases, know where you stand.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I bought an Amiga 2000HD in '92. It had 1MB of memory and I added another two by populating the sockets on the SCSI card. AmigaOS 2.04 came on six floppies, uncompressed, and required about 5MB of hard drive space. Once installed, it booted in about 10 seconds and left 2.75MB of RAM free for applications.
I don't think that Win95 had a single thing that AmigaOS didn't, except maybe solitaire. Windows has always been big for what it actually did, even in '95.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?