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.

Comments

Keep those wishes coming

[ackthpt]

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!

Re:Keep those wishes coming

[jmauro]

Back up XBOX 360 games to Windows PC

I believe this is refering to the save files stored on the HD and not the actual games.

Recycling

[Tom]

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?

My Windows 7 Wishlist

[sexconker]

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

Re:My Windows 7 Wishlist

[Anonymous Coward]

They already have that product, it's called Windows 2000.
Who here thinks they should just re-release Windows 2000 with longer support period and updated drivers? /me raises hand

Maybe they can add full disk encryption if they feel like being generous

Re:My Windows 7 Wishlist

[Blakey Rat]

Ok a lot of your complaints are the general Slashdot/cranky old bastard complaints.

But no ClearType or Search Indexing? WTF, those are very very useful features. ClearType lets me actually read text on a monitor without gagging at his hideous it all is, and search indexing makes searching orders of magnitude faster at the cost of a few megabytes. Both are no-brainers.

Yup, similar to longhorn "features"

[xtracto]

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.

Re:Yup, similar to longhorn "features"

[RedBear]

I seem to remember reading some Microsoft history where it was stated that pretty much every version of Windows going back to the original release of NT were all supposed to have some sort of database filesystem like WinFS, and with every release of Windows they've failed to produce it. But I'm sure with the next version of Windows they'll succeed. Bwa, ha, ha. I mean, it will be on the announced "features list" up until a week before the official release, and then they'll cut it out for the umpteenth time. But don't worry, they'll make up for it by updating the secret specs of NTFS to once again make it unsafe to work with from any other operating system.

I'm waiting for full read/write ZFS support to solidify in Mac OS X and Linux. Once that happens there will be no looking back for me. For the first time in computing history there will finally be a single filesystem worth standardizing on, with no idiotic file size, partition size, or filename limitations that should have been overcome a decade ago. Windows, NTFS and any other proprietary filesystem can be damned as far as I'm concerned from that point forward.

A lot of /.ers seem to blow off ZFS as if it's just another filesystem, but it isn't. When it comes into its own, it's going to be BIG, for the same reason that Apple has sold over 1.4 million iPhones in the last 4 months. ZFS is going to change file storage forever. It takes something that has historically been overly complicated and not terribly reliable, and makes it simple and reliable. The best chance we have of killing off proprietary crap like NTFS is to port solid, well-supported drivers for filesystems like ZFS and Ext3 to (drumroll please)... Windows (and Mac OS X). Oddly I have noticed over the years that everyone gets up in arms about the fact that it is difficult to work with NTFS on non-Windows platforms, but there has been very little effort toward making it easy to use alternate filesystems from Windows. It's a two-way street, people. We know Microsoft is never going to build it in themselves, so it's up to us to provide that support for alternate choices.

Does this seem a bit off-topic? Well, I don't think it is. The point of all this is that if the free software community was a little more focused on providing ways to use alternative solutions from the Windows side, Windows users would already be a lot less attached to Windows and would have much less inclination to be impressed by any list of features Microsoft pulls out of their collective ass in the future. The hype machine would break down if users on all platforms could start coming together around kickass features like a cross-platform standard filesystem that works everywhere. Microsoft Office would be dead already if the OpenDocument format had been a usable specification half a decade ago instead of being finalized, what, last year? And if people knew they didn't need Microsoft Office, they would know they don't need Windows.

Microsoft may be pathetic in their inability to create quality software, but there's nothing pathetic about their continuing stranglehold on computing based on stuff like this "wishlist", a history of hyped-up phantom features that never actually get released. Something needs to be done about that instead of just obliviously continuing to play around developing for Linux and other free platforms as if they're in some private little universe that's too good to interact with everyone else.

Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition?

[Opportunist]

While we're at "sensible default settings": Show those damn extensions!

Who cares?

[miffo.swe]

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.

Re:I've done it since Win3.1

[ackthpt]

Do you ever notice that we seem to be re-inventing everything we've learned before?

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.

Re:Why didn't they include...

[jrumney]

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."

The company logic

[DrYak]

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.

Re:The company logic

[mcrbids]

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.

I run such a company. Our flagship product requires 400 MB of disk space for install on Windows, and (if you include the X11 and XCode libraries on Mac OS) about 1.5 GB on Macintosh.

I realize that this is a fair amount of disk space. I also really don't care. 1 GB of disk space represents a net user cost of about 25 cents.

A quarter.

And the software generally runs quite well on a P3 1 Ghz system that can be readily had for $50 on the used computer marketplace, even though its written in a lazy, inefficient, interpreted scripting language.

Yes, $50.

How much time do you think I spend worrying about this? None at all. Let me assure you, my clients spend much more than a quarter to buy the use of our software! How much crying would YOU do over this?

Re:I've done it since Win3.1

[DesScorp]

"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?

Re:I've done it since Win3.1

[pushing-robot]

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.