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Windows 8 Early Build Hints At Apple, WebOS Competitor - EWeek
Microsoft's next Windows could be a cross-platform OS in the style of Apple's iOS or Hewlett-Packard's webOS, if supposed early builds are to be believed... "Bloggers Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott, in a series of April postings on Rivera’s Within Windows blog, have described the various features of what they claim is an early build of Windows 8: an Office-style ribbon integrated into Windows Explorer, complete with tools for viewing libraries, manipulating images and managing drive assets; an unlock screen that harkens to the 'Metro' design style already present in Windows Phone 7; an 'immersive' user interface and a built-in PDF reader they call 'Modern Reader.'"
It is even more annoying than WinXP in so far as something small as the file manager in Win7. You can select the files, it tells you how many you selected, but it no longer says how many MB / GB of files you selected.
Odd - mine shows the size of the selected files at the bottom. I'm running Win 7-64bit Ultimate.
Place nail here >+
If you select more than 20 items, size does no longer appear.
Its apperantly for performance reasons. The same reason why it does no longer show the size of the curren directly in the status bar.
That is for me the only thing i hate on W7. And its so useless a restriction, too.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
in 5 minutes the following comes to mind: performance, efficient usage of system resources, stability, file system, decouple GUI from core, decouple apps from core, simple remote access, get rid of the sick registry, customization, documentation, adhere to common open standards, lower hardware requirements, better modularization, remove unneeded services/bloatware, provide a powerful shell, enhance security/permission features, ...
I'm sure I can find a lot of other stuff that's wrong with windows when thinking about it...
Server Core. Haha aha ha ha. Yeah, great. Now get a unix OS and see what a real headless/GUI-less system can do. It needs SSH, for secure remote login, remote file copying and remote command execution. Of course, somebody at Microsoft is right now programming a really shit set of updates for powershell to try and copy SSH, but they'll get it wrong, naturally.
Powershell is crap. The outrageously long commands they've created are a really bad joke, especially compared to the nice simple single-purpose commands of the Unix world.
The same hardware running OS X (hackintosh or Apple) tends to outlast Windows 7 in battery drain tests. I.e, Mac OS X does some basic stuff so much more efficiently that it translates in to lower power draw for the same tasks. Windows 7 needs to be more efficient.
The registry is crap, but it works. The WOW32 registry is a bad joke dreamed up by fools.
Search is crap. It often uses >1GB memory on a 4GB system and causes huge amounts of paging. This is probably the main reason that OS X is more energy efficient. I'm a programmer, and I've spent a lot of time researching where the memory goes on my systems, and I've come to the conclusion that Windows search is the culprit. It's just shit. Apart from that, it can NEVER seem to find stuff inside files in the filesystem -- at least not as well as spotlight.
I'll throw in a few others -- IIS, shit. MMC, shit. EventViewer, fucking hell, when did that get so slow? IE, shit, get it out of my default install, Run As user/administrator holy crap, that's bad - Windows /really/ needs a sudo clone now that the (sensible) default is to not run everything as admin. UAC is NOT sudo.
Final thing off the top of my head -- those stupid Windows 7 screen-edge 'gestures', the Aero Alt-Tab thing and the absolutely retarded shake-to-minimize-everything-else 'gesture'. If I could turn them off, it'd not be so bad, but I can't find out where to get rid of this intrusive 'feature creep/trying to add as many things to a checklist as possible' crap.
Security: read this [wikipedia.org] and check out what Exec Shield and PaX do
Windows has full NX bit support. It also has ASLR, and a far better implementation of it than either Linux or OS X (as evidenced by pwn2own results).
What desktop linux distros ship with PaX?
Interoperability: more effort into native POSIX support. Mingw32, Cygwin, SFU, [...] shouldn't have to exist; this is a consequence of too much difference, most of it deliberately engineered for vendor lock-in purposes.
The reason why Win32 is not POSIX-compatible is not due to anything "deliberately engineered" - it's a consequence of backwards compatibility applied to the extreme.
That said, SUA (the new name for SFU) is native POSIX support. It does that by completely ditching Win32 subsystem, and using a POSIX subsystem implemented directly on top of NT kernel (unlike Cygwin, which tries to implement POSIX on top of Win32 - which is very hard due to many mismatches).
Mingw has nothing to do with POSIX at all, it is simply a port of gcc to Win32.
"Real" command shell: if you think PowerShell is not a joke, then perhaps you're acquainted with its super-compact syntax [stevex.net]?
Do you realize that all common commands have short aliases out of the box, most of them in fact taken from Unix shell? Sure, you can write "get-childitem", but you can also write "ls" - and all sane people do. Long names exist because PowerShell has a strict naming guide for all commands to improve discoverability (you can often guess the name of command you need by looking at the names of other commands that you know), and this is applied to common commands such as "cp" for the sake of consistency.
Oh yes, "write-output" is aliased as "echo", and "write-host" is aliased to "write". And "write-host" is a very different thing - it writes directly to the host (PowerShell can be used as a scripting language; host is the program that does so). Normal shell scripts should use "write-output" (i.e. "echo"), which writes to stdout as God intended.
A much bigger WTF is the decision to use a back-tick as a line continuation indicator. e.g., if you want to insert a linebreak into an echo statement (oh wait, it's fucking called write-host . So elegant!) you do so like this ... No \n.
What does "\n" have to do with it? In Unix shell, line continuation would be \ followed by end-of-line. "\n" is when you want to insert a newline in the output. In PowerShell, you write "`n" for the same.
The obvious reason why PowerShell does not use "\" as escape character is because it is used as the path separator by OS. They had to use something else simply because otherwise writing out paths would be very painful (and they can't just use "/" for that because that would be inconsistent with other applications - you couldn't copy/paste a path from, say, Explorer into PS then). Even so, other than the different escape character, all escape sequences are the same as in Unix shell.
Some more absurdities are move-item instead of cmd's move, copy-item instead of cmd's copy, and rename-item instead of cmd's rename. A command-line scripting language should be file-oriented from top to bottom, yet these -item suffixes are in some of the most commonly-used commands!
See above regarding consistent naming. As well, PowerShell is not file-oriented - it's object-oriented and object-tree oriented. Files are objects, directories are lists of objects, and filesystems are trees of objects. This lets it deal with any hierarchical data structure in the same way.
As well, "copy-item" is aliased to "cp", "rename-item" is aliased to "ren", and "move-item" is aliased to "mv"
By that argument, all version of Linux are just the previous version of Linux with a new skin.
There was actually a lot of under the covers changes in Windows 7, and the kernel changed substantially. Those aren't things you can see though, so you look at it and say "It's just windows with a new skin" because the skin is all you can see.
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