Microsoft Windows 7 "Wishlist" Leaked 522
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.
Keep those wishes coming (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Recycling (Score:4, Insightful)
wheres your innovation? (Score:2, Insightful)
My Windows 7 Wishlist (Score:5, Insightful)
No DRM
No Bloat
No Eye Candy
No ClearType
No Authentication or WGA
No Restrictions for Video or Audio Output
No Search Indexing
Re:Keep those wishes coming (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe this is refering to the save files stored on the HD and not the actual games.
Yup, similar to longhorn "features" (Score:4, Insightful)
Biased to say the least. (Score:1, Insightful)
"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.
Re:I Wish (Score:3, Insightful)
My short list (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I've done it since Win3.1 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:My Windows 7 Wishlist (Score:5, Insightful)
Who here thinks they should just re-release Windows 2000 with longer support period and updated drivers?
Maybe they can add full disk encryption if they feel like being generous
Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And In Other News... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I've done it since Win3.1 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:My Windows 7 Wishlist (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why didn't they include... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition? (Score:0, Insightful)
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 company logic (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [www.gotw.ca].
Re:I Wish (Score:3, Insightful)
*:(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?)
Re:I've done it since Win3.1 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yup, similar to longhorn "features" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The company logic (Score:3, Insightful)
The programmers cost Microsoft a lot.
The hardware costs their customers a lot.
The logic is that it's better for millions of computer users to be out of pocket by a few hundreds each, than it is for Microsoft to be out of pocket for a few hundred million.
When you're a monopoly, you can make products that suit you, not your customers.
My three item wish list (Score:3, Insightful)
Well OS X has Klingon, so.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The company logic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I've done it since Win3.1 (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Re:The company logic (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [pricewatch.com].
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
No, you're wrong (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Doesn't always work. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The company logic (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows on the other hand has gone through many half-assed decisions, which were deemed to be design flaws and changed in later versions (while keeping the old code around too for compatibility reasons)... resulting in an ever increasing and less manageable mess of code.
As an example, password hashing on windows is done twice using 2 algorithms, neither are great but one is significantly weaker. The weaker one is kept for compatibility with older apps.
Unix on the other hand, has a standard crypt() call, that can use any algorithm. There is also the PAM system which further abstracts the authentication process.
Linux/OSX on the other hand, stick to the original principles of unix, and although some backend things may change, the abstraction presented to user mode apps remains the same.
Re:The company logic (Score:3, Insightful)
At close to 90% profit margins for Microsoft's OS and Office divisions, I don't think you can make that claim with a straight face.
Re:Lets not cast stones (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yup, similar to longhorn "features" (Score:3, Insightful)
These are examples of why I specified "high quality, well supported" as requirements for any filesystem driver. Filesystem drivers have to be completely stable and users need to know that bugs will be fixed in a timely manner and new versions of their operating systems will continue to be supported in the future, otherwise there will be no trust and no reason to use any alternative filesystem. I am never going to trust large amounts of my data to a filesystem that is inaccessible by my main chosen operating system (Mac OS X) and only accessible from Windows through a driver made and maintained by one person in his spare time.
This is the exact reason why everyone still uses NTFS. It's the default, and there are no real alternatives. It's possible to use HFS+ from Windows but that requires expensive commercial software to be installed on every Windows computer you want to access your HFS+ drives from. If you look at things objectively, FAT32 is still the ONLY realistic choice when you are looking for a totally cross-platform filesystem, and its 4GB file size limit makes it unworkable for many purposes. So each operating system continues in most cases to be bound to a different filesystem that the others can't work with.
ZFS has no such limitations and also has a lot of other benefits that make storage management incredibly simple. It is more than worth it for the community to put a lot of effort into supporting ZFS in Linux and the BSDs, and extending that support to Windows and Mac OS X would only make things better for everyone. The new version of Mac OS X will have ZFS support before long, but millions of people will continue using the previous version for years to come, and if the community could add ZFS support to Tiger and even Panther, it would rock the foundations of the world.