Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
Thanks Nate, maybe instead of WinFS they will focus on reading/writing to other file systems. I am also glad that they added levels of UAC, protecting people from themselves is nice in a world where grandma doesn't know that sudo rm -R / is a bad idea.
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Grandma would have to hit "y" about 10,000 times for that to really work. I think she'd figure out something was up by then. You need an "f" flag for it to delete everything without asking. And that's for Posix systems anyway.
I'm an avid Linux user because Windows has always proved to crash for me. I know it's because my line of home computers running Windows have always "met" the hardware requirements, and not exceeded them substantially, but it kind of says something when you need a $400 computer in order to boot up. All the Windows machines I use are usually slow, also, because of all of the non-Microsoft hardware installed on them that's always running in the background and taking up resources. Personally, I just don't like the fact that it runs generally slowly unless you have a gaming-scale computer.
That being said, when Vista had just come out, I was working with a guy to set up one of the laptops his company had just bought (that day, right out of the package) that had been pre-configured for a wireless internet cafe. We're both computer nerds. It took 5 minutes for the computer to boot up, and another 20 for the two of us to figure out where Vista had hidden the WiFi card control to turn it on (the button on the computer didn't do it). I would just like the next version to organize things a little better (either pre-Vista style or just logically placed under the labels that happen to pertain to their contents). Then when we turned it off, it idled for 10 minutes (no hard drive activity, any "active" processes contained somewhere within RAM and the CPU) before the power actually shut off. So, better resource management might also help.
One of my friends has a fairly adequate laptop for running Vista, and it ran acceptably, but the only problem is it went through about a 4 amp-hour battery in about 45 minutes because everything was always running. He switched to Ubuntu and the battery started lasting him about 3 hours at a time. Power management could be better handled. Even if it's for a desktop, there's no reason to waste that much power.
Another thing that's peeved me in general about all the Windows OS's is that when you're logging in, you have to wait a bit before you can do anything. Now, this is a no brainer and to be expected on any operating system, but the system should not spend all of its resources loading MSN messenger when you've just clicked on Firefox. Some kind of real-time engine would be a very nice addition to the kernel. And if this would require new drivers for everything, that might be an issue they should work on too, standardization of the kernel protocols. You can use an Ubuntu realtime kernel in a Fedora Zen installation with no problems if you add the right files in. You don't have to reinstall anything. And then it'll update correctly the next time there's a new version. So it is possible, and it would make their fan base a lot wider because of the improved and consistent support.
One thing that amazed me when I got to Linux was the lack of a need for defragmenting the drive. The main Linux partition is setup to always rearrange the files when you're planting them so that the drive is not fragmented, therefore removing the need to do it manually and decreasing required access time. WinFS may not be such a bad idea, as it would remove this problem. Not to mention that their current default, NTFS, has enough complexities to it that there are MULTIPLE open-source tools installed by default on Ubuntu devoted ONLY to diagnosing and fixing NTFS drives. Maybe they could adopt the operating system that was being developed several years ago that would never need to expand its filetable because it would take the energy required to vaporize the earth's oceans to write a one to every bit the filesystem could hold. I believe it was called znfs, or something similar, but it might be could to move to a standardized multi-platform FS.
And if I understand correctly what you're talking about with the UAC levels, it sounds like they're finally doing something about the fact that there are very few manual controls for Windows, and most major problems are fixed by backing up and reinstalling. That's one of the reasons I use Linux, if there's a problem, it gives you a precise error about the issue, usually how to fix it, or a resource to find out how, and then you run a command and it's over with. The Windows commands are generally somewhere along the lines of, "There was an error. It was either because 'foo.dll' is not a Windows file or has been corrupted." They could put a little more trust in their users, or at least the computer repair people who need specific errors to fix the problem.
If what people on this thread are saying about Win7 is true, then MS has taken a huge jump forward from their several backward steps 2 years ago, and I applaud them. I will probably stick with Linux because it better supports the things I do and is quick on old hardware (typing this on a 2003 laptop with a 1.2 GHz processor and 256 MB RAM with 3 other windows and 6 tabs open), but it would be really nice for me to not have someone e-mailing me every couple of days going, "My computer broke, can you help me?"
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein - Edward Debler [more] 
03-01-2009, 02:32
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