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Microsoft Windows 7 "Wishlist" Leaked

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tue Nov 13, 2007 07:20 PM
from the leaky-news-always-suspect dept.
Windows IT
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.

Related Stories

Firehose:Microsoft Windows 7 'wishlist' leaked by Cassius Corodes (1084513)
[+] Windows 7 To Be Released Next Year? 561 comments
KrispySausage writes "A recently-released roadmap for the next major Window release — Windows 7 — indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010. This quickly-approaching release date would seem to be at least partially verified by news of a milestone build available for review by an anonymous third party." We've previously discussed the upcoming new OS version, as well as its danger to Vista.
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  • Keep those wishes coming (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ackthpt (218170) * on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:22PM (#21343215) Homepage Journal

    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!

    • ...and the first person to add "make it work better than Mac OS X 10.5" is FIRED!

    • Re:Keep those wishes coming (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jmauro (32523) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:33PM (#21343363) Homepage
      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.

          • Re:I Wish (Score:5, Funny)

            by s4m7 (519684) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @09:00PM (#21344261) Homepage

            perhaps what they should be doing is slowly evolving a system

            Yeah, they should be doing that. But you're right on the mark, it's not going to justify new OS sales if they don't "revolutionize" things every few years. Look at how slow Vista has been taking off, even with many OEM's shipping it unless you specify otherwise.

            Here's what I think the next evolution of windows will be: vista with a fresh coat of paint and a few new system-intensive bells and whistles that don't add much in terms of actual functionality. The key "feature" will be a bunch of built in hooks to use pay-as-you-go subscription web applications hosted by MS.

    • Windows Classic (Score:5, Funny)

      by Mr Pippin (659094) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @09:14PM (#21344379)
      Vista = New Coke
      Just admit the mistake and bring back XP.

      • Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Opportunist (166417) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:50PM (#21343587)
        While we're at "sensible default settings": Show those damn extensions!

      • Re:Am I the only person who makes a 2nd partition? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Daltorak (122403) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @10:19PM (#21344909)

        When installing Windows, I make a partition specifically for the swap file and temp files. That way they don't add to the fragmentation mess of the OS partition.
        Whoah now, hang on a minute there. You're seriously misinformed.

        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 [amazon.com] 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.

        • I've done it since Win3.1 (Score:4, Interesting)

          by khasim (1285) <brandioch.conner@gmail.com> on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:50PM (#21343577)
          And ever since Win3.1 I've been complaining about variable sized swap files. Come on, Bill!

          There's nothing to it. Just save some of the drive space when you install (this is a problem with some "recovery CD's" that grab everything) and format it later. Then add a swap file to it and set the swap file on C:\ to 0 bytes. Reboot and it's set.

          This is indeed a mystery. Even back in the 1970's you could designate a device to use for the swap file and it was pre-extended. You even had the option to place it on the middle cylinders of a disk so it was, on average, faster to access.

          Do you ever notice that we seem to be re-inventing everything we've learned before? I'd prefer to put the swap drive as close to the outer sectors as possible. That's a bitch with Windows. So it ends up on the inner sectors. I sacrifice speed to reduce fragmentation. But seeing as how the speed would be awful anyway (RAM swapping to even the fastest drive sucks rocks), I'm not bothered by it.

          • Re:I've done it since Win3.1 (Score:5, Insightful)

            by ackthpt (218170) * on Tuesday November 13 2007, @08:00PM (#21343685) Homepage Journal

            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.

            • The company logic (Score:4, Insightful)

              by DrYak (748999) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @09:10PM (#21344329) Homepage
              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 [www.gotw.ca].

              • Re:The company logic (Score:4, Insightful)

                by mcrbids (148650) on Wednesday November 14 2007, @12:59AM (#21346145) Journal
                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 [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)

              by DesScorp (410532) <<moc.liamG> <ta> <procSseD>> on Wednesday November 14 2007, @03:19AM (#21346917) Homepage Journal
              "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 (Score:5, Informative)

                by pushing-robot (1037830) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @10:03PM (#21344777)
                "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PagingFiles", multi-string value, defaults to something like "C:\pagefile.sys 512 1024". If you want more than one page file insert a null character between them.

                If you want to do things by-the-book, you can use pagefilescript.vbs which happens to be in the %systemroot%/system32 directory in XP, 2003, and probably Vista. Info here. [wordpress.com]

                  • Re:I've done it since Win3.1 (Score:5, Insightful)

                    by pushing-robot (1037830) on Wednesday November 14 2007, @03:51AM (#21347051)
                    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.

  • they wish... (Score:5, Funny)

    by night_flyer (453866) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:24PM (#21343239) Homepage
    It will sell better than Vista!

    • Re:they wish... (Score:5, Funny)

      by ackthpt (218170) * on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:29PM (#21343319) Homepage Journal

      they wish ... It will sell better than Vista!

      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"

  • Open Source Sodium Chloride (Score:5, Funny)

    by EmbeddedJanitor (597831) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:24PM (#21343247)
    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

    • Re:Open Source Sodium Chloride (Score:5, Funny)

      by PhxBlue (562201) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:46PM (#21343539) Homepage Journal

      Just give us hydrochoric acid and sodium hydroxide and we'll make... AAAAAAGGGGHHHH
      Johnny was a chemist,
      but Johnny is no more.
      What Johnny thought was H2O
      was H2SO4.

      • Re:Open Source Sodium Chloride (Score:5, Funny)

        by MightyMartian (840721) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:48PM (#21343555) Journal

        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


        Quick! Where's the Open Source PH meter?!?


        Sorry, the project's on hold while the development team debates GPLv3 vs. BSD licensing. Currently it can only detect sulfuric and nitric acids, though it does have real nifty Gnome integration.

  • Follow-up story (Score:5, Funny)

    by MrAndrews (456547) * <mcm.is.now@3.14gmail.com minus pi> on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:25PM (#21343253) Homepage
    Microsoft is displeased at the leak. Apparently it's not a wishlist at all. [pttbt.ca]

  • Recycling (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tom (822) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:25PM (#21343255) Homepage Journal
    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?

  • Standard Microsoft Operating Procedure (Score:5, Funny)

    by elronxenu (117773) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:26PM (#21343273) Homepage
    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.

  • My Windows 7 Wishlist (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sexconker (1179573) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:29PM (#21343313)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 13 2007, @08:00PM (#21343691)
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Blakey Rat (99501) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @08:35PM (#21344047)
      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.

  • Corporate development cycle (Score:5, Funny)

    by athloi (1075845) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:29PM (#21343315) Homepage Journal
    Given the latency involved with getting 65,000 people into the right parking spaces, much less coding up an operating system, I'd guess the list is this:

    1. Telepathy
    2. Time Travel
    3. Prescience
    4. Anomie
    5. 4D Interface
    6. Zen
    7. Levitation

  • Sand-poundingly obvious things ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alaska Jack (679307) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:30PM (#21343335) Journal
    17 years (!) after Windows 95-style open-and-save dialog boxes debuted, and I still can't simply drag and drop the folders *I* want into and out of the "Places" bar. (Or change the "Other places" links, if I have that left-hand taskbar thingie enabled.)

    In explorer, I can open the favorites in the left-hand pane by clicking the "favorites" button -- but there is no way to KEEP it permanently open. I have to click the favorites button every. single. time.

    Open and save dialogs highlight the entire filename in the text entry field, despite the fact that 99 times out of 100, I don't want to change the extension.

    etc etc etc.

        - Alaska Jack

    PS Using Windows XP pro. Don't know if these have changed in Vista.

  • Yup, similar to longhorn "features" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xtracto (837672) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:35PM (#21343407) Journal
    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.
    • 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.

  • More to the list... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by glimmy (796729) <nglimsdale AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:38PM (#21343445) Journal
    An interesting choice for the article since it is a summary of an engadet summary of this [arstechnica.com] article, and here [neowin.net] is more of supposedly the leaked list.

  • Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by miffo.swe (547642) <daniel@solle . s e> on Tuesday November 13 2007, @07:55PM (#21343645) Homepage Journal
    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:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nine-times (778537) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Tuesday November 13 2007, @09:16PM (#21344387) Homepage

      I care what Microsoft does on various levels. I'm not a Microsoft fan and I think Vista is a disaster, but honestly, I would *love* for Microsoft to come out with a great new OS. I'm the sort of guy who likes good software wherever it comes from.

      On the other hand, I don't care about wishlists or press releases. I also don't think that Windows can continue to compete if they keep doing what they're doing. Some key things that Windows absolutely has to do if I'm going to continue using it in the future:

      • Drop activation. At the very least, go back to offering a corporate version which doesn't require activation. Activation makes it hard to manage lots of machines, image them, and I don't need my computer going into "reduced functionality" because of an error".
      • Improve imagine support and booting from external drives. For a model to copy, watch how easy it is for someone to copy their whole OSX install to an external USB drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, and then to immediately reboot and run the copy on the USB drive, or boot that USB drive on *any* Mac without needing to reconfigure anything or install drivers.
      • better interoperability with Unix/Linux/OSX.

      That's the bare minimum that Microsoft can do before I'll even look at them again.

  • How about a user wishlist? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by webmaster404 (1148909) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @08:21PM (#21343909)
    How about a user wishlist? I would probably be using Vista instead of Ubuntu if it had these things that will probably never make it into any of the Vista service packs nor Windows 7

    1. A decent license, now open-sourcing Windows would be excellent but just having it under a "you bought the copy now do whatever you want with it" would be a ton better then the usual "Microsoft owns your computer" And that is one of the reasons I switched to Linux

    2. Good speed. I shouldn't need 4 Gigs of RAM just to get halfway decent performance out of my operating system, 512 MB should be fast enough and at 2 gigs it should have all the power needed for anything other then heavy gaming and major video editing

    3. Non-Fragmenting filesystem, Seriously, when there is file systems on Linux that never have to be de-fragmented that have been there since at least 2000, why can't Windows in 2006 not have it?

    4. Acceptance of other operating systems other then Windows. When Windows can't open up simple, free open standards by default such as .ogg, .tar and .pdf without the aid of third-party software that is just stupidity. MS needs to realize that they don't have a monopoly and that the rest of the OS world outside of MS use those and they are gaining while MS is loosing.

    5. Security without annoyances. Seriously, what is up with UAC. So now I need to click a dialog box whenever I want to run a binary from a CD-ROM??? When I clicked on it? On Ubuntu on an under-privileged account, I don't even hardly need to type my password for anything other then major system work such as installing software or changing accounts and even then it keeps it for a bit so every time I don't need to enter it.

    Its time for MS to start listing to people and make a halfway decent OS, otherwise there will be more people like me switching to Linux or OS-X.

  • Don't Worry (Score:4, Funny)

    by PPH (736903) on Tuesday November 13 2007, @11:07PM (#21345259)
    A stable, secure version of Windows is in our future and always will be.
  • First off, this post and my subsequent replies, my "general whinge with the OS"
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=304745&cid=20695969 [slashdot.org]

    Then in a little bit more detail
    (crosspost of a post I made on a forum not more than 24 hours ago, I finally documented precisely why Vista Explorer shits me to tears)
    Warning: Bad language ahead.

    Why does Windows Vista insist on a startup sound, despite me disabling all sounds, they are turned off but it does one at startup, I like quiet and what if I don't want to wake people up?

    I've been meaning to make this post for a while, I may have railed on Vista for performance problems, specifically in Crysis, you do need to give a new operating system a 'pass' for a while, let it settle in (it's nearly been a year though!!!)

    My beef still sits with Windows Explorer, something I use daily, a lot at work and home, I need it clean, simple and easy to get data into my face as quick as possible so I can react as quickly as possible (yes, I sorry to big note but I am, *that* quick on the keyboard and when working with files)

    http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh01.jpg [shackspace.com]
    Apply to all folders won't let me save the options for "Computer" (My Computer) or Desktop, this is annoying.
    also, fuck the breadcrumbs bar, in the ASSSSS

    http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh02.jpg [shackspace.com]
    That motherfucker 'task pane' which is taking space up from my damn explorer view.
    Sure, I found some website suggesting I shrink the size of it (yay) but I can still accidentally click the bastard, plus it still looks messy.

    http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/argh03.jpg [shackspace.com]
    Mofo! I accidentally clicked it, see explanation of why it eats babies in the JPG itself.

    http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/whywhy01.jpg [shackspace.com]
    Those little box pluses, I like them, why take them away? It's confusing and slowing down the amount of data I can take in per 'scene' I need info and you're witholding it, just so you can pretend you're neater than you actually are.

    http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/whywhy02.jpg [shackspace.com]
    Ahh my boxes are back, this is good, also more cluttered shit.

    http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/wtf01.jpg [shackspace.com]
    You call this a save as dialogue box?
    I hit shift tab twice (yes, I do often, try it people) to navigate quickly to where I normally would on XP.
    I slap backspace like 10 times fast, this should ensure I'm at desktop, almost instantly (shift tab x2 and backspace x10 takes me 1 second)
    Does it work? no, of course it doesn't you breadcrumb whores.

    soooo I hit browse

    http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/wtf02.jpg [shackspace.com] oh oh
    Hot jesus, make the fucking hurting stop!
    This is one of the best reasons WHY I can't deal, look at it, just look and tell me that's simple, quick and easy to work with?
    This picture alone is why osx is going to gain some serious marketshare in the next 5 years.

    http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/shambles01.jpg [shackspace.com]
    This one is a lot more subtle, this is the kind of cluttered stuff that's hard for anyone to notice is cluttered unless you analyse it.
    You'll need to see all 3 JPGS to understand where I'm going with this.
    Maybe I should've got into UI design? Maybe I should be a minimalist linux nerd but damnit that screams messy and awkward to me:/
    http://abrasion.shackspace.com/lolsta/shambles01a.jpg [shackspace.com]
    Same picture, without t