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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
Who needs Windows sodium chloride: Us open source people make our own. Just give us hydrochoric acid and sodium hydroxide and we'll make... AAAAAAGGGGHHHH
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Microsoft is displeased at the leak. Apparently it's not a wishlist at all.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
I'd like to see the option on boot "Load a lot of libraries you probably will never use, but will take up half your system memory, on start-up (Y/N)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Step 1: Release awful product
Step 2: Seed the marketplace with rumours about how great the next version will be
Step 3: Sell a lot of awful product (this is the Profit!!! step)
Step 4: Develop next version, dropping cool features and instead devoting more development time to Microsoft Bob, Clippy, and meaningless user-interface tweaks
Loop around to Step 1.
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
Oh, but they will find some way to tell you it does!
"Windows7 - Sales up 27% over Windows Vista among one-legged, blind, ambisexual, vegetarian, wombat herders born under a full moon in a month with an R in it"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
An interesting choice for the article since it is a summary of an engadet summary of this article, and here is more of supposedly the leaked list.
Greetings from here in 2007! How is life for you in 2012? Has Duke Nukem Forever shipped yet?
Here is my home page.
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.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Don't you have a bunch of important files to move around on your mac?
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.
/.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.
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
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.
Only on slashdot would that get modded "+5 informative" :)
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
First of all, it's called the page file, not the swap file. This isn't Unix and this isn't Windows 3.x. If you're going to pretend to know something about this aspect of Windows, you'd do well to at least use the correct name.
Second, and far more importantly -- You do not get fragmentation in the page file unless the page file is resized, and the only time the page file gets resized is when you consume ALL your physical memory, and ALL the memory in the page file. On a system with 1 GB of memory (which will be given a 1.5GB page file), you will have 2.5 GB of memory that you have to fill up first. Windows XP & later will display a pop-up balloon when this happen.
Fragmentation NEVER HAPPENS OTHERWISE. Why is this such a major concern to you?
Third, separate logical partitions for the page file is a bad idea because it significantly lowers the performance of paging operations. Regardless of whether you use all the physical memory in your machine or not, the page file is utilised to store data that hasn't been used recently, thus freeing more physicla memory for cacheing stuff that is used more often. Performance suffers because now the disk heads have to move further into the disk in order to get the page file. On a freshly-installed Windows system, the page file gets placed near the beginning of the disk (in the fastest portion), close to the operating system files that are likely candidates for ongoing file operations.
Consider that Mac OS X doesn't use a separate partition for its swap files, either. Speaking of which, why does Windows still use a variable sized swap file? I lock it down to 2x RAM or 4GB. Fourth, this is a bad idea because you are almost certainly not going to want to use a system that is so heavily loaded that you will need to use up to 300% of your total system memory. It's bad enough when you're running 20% over physical, isn't it? Now you're just wasting vast amounts of hard drive space for no particularly good reason. And how about moving IE's temp files somewhere else? Okay, you can still set permissions on the folder, but get it out of the user's profile. Why? Is there a sound technical reason for this? The IE temporary files (and indeed the user's general-purpose temp directory) is in a disposable area of the profile directory structure... it isn't part of the "roaming" profile. I spend 15 extra minutes just getting the directories and swap arranged correctly every time I set up someone's Windows machine. You're wasting their time and yours doing the wrong thing. Stop that and you'll be happier.
If you want to really understand how Windows works, do yourself a big favour and go pick up a copy of Windows Internals by Russinovich and Solomon. Yeah, that's the same Russinovich who discovered the Sony rootkit a couple of years ago, so, chances are he knows what he's talking about.
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?