6 ms·

I'm going to lose it if Win10 does not integrate automatic time zone adjustment like OSX. What, does no one at MS mind having to manually change the time zone w

by wahsd 11y ago

I'm going to lose it if Win10 does not integrate automatic time zone adjustment like OSX. What, does no one at MS mind having to manually change the time zone with 7 clicks every time they travel? Why is it not just two clicks to change the time zone at least? Maybe something like right-click time, select from list of preset "favorite" time zones. That doesn't even requite a time network, let alone being able to read time stamps on surrounding wireless networks. Or there is no Outlook global search or no message threading. That's not new or challenging stuff, Microsoft. WTF? Can you think of anything else basic that is annoying as heck about Windows?

tdicola 11y ago
> Can you think of anything else basic that is annoying as heck about Windows? That it took 10 versions to finally get a resizeable command line terminal that you can copy and paste text within.
- stinos 11y ago
  To be fair: it could be resized (though in an extremely non-user friendly way) and copy/paste has been possible since a long time (no idea since which version, and again, it wasn't particularly user-friendly at all)
  - grimman 11y ago
    Copy+paste has been possible at least since Win2k. But yes, in a very user-unfriendly manner.
- AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
  This. It was just a small thing, that every now and then made life a little more difficult than it needed to be when you tried to paste something and got ~V :D
- fl0wenol 11y ago
  The console was broken for a long time primarily to make it possible to do full-screen VGA text modes for NTVDM-requiring apps. Enabling either or both required elevated hardware privileges so they shoved the whole rendering thing into CSRSS and it gave us the shatter attack and (later) no cut/paste as thanks. I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility back when asking someone to use virtualization made you sound like a nut (and back before Microsoft had Hyper-V to offer as an alternative to customers who couldn't or wouldn't budge).
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    > I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility There's a book called The Old New Thing (I think I heard about it here on HN, haven't had a chance to get it yet) that discusses a lot of quirks that Windows has and how they came about. Usually there was a purposeful decision behind it, like you suggest with backwards compatibility. It'd be interesting to see if this particular case is addressed in the book.
    - shitloadofbooks 11y ago
      The Old New Thing is Raymond Chen's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ and the book is excerpts and articles from his Blog (with some additional content no doubt). Raymond is/was a compatibility engineer at Microsoft. He was responsible for "shimming" a bunch of hacks into Windows to ensure large applications which relied on undocumented API calls wouldn't break when they overhauled libraries in a new version of Windows.
      - joshuapants 11y ago
        Ah that's right, I think someone in a comment linked to an article on his blog and that's how I found out about the book.
      - sukilot 11y ago
        I didn't realize that was his specific job. The blog title is so brilliant.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Control Menu => Properties => Options => Quick Edit Mode I can no longer remember, but I think it was already there back in the 16 bit days, or at very least Windows 95.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    A UI triumph.
sp332 11y ago
I can't understand why the built-in email client is so bad. Every other mail client Microsoft makes is at least usable. Outlook, Windows Live Mail, even outlook.com webmail has message threads enabled by default.
- AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
  I was actually a fan, and to this day use it at work. Mainly because it was a much lighter version of my bloated outlook client, just giving me emails and allowing me to respond to them. That said, I don't receive more than thirty or so emails a day so perhaps that's the effective audience for the app.
  - sp332 11y ago
    When it launched, it didn't even support POP or IMAP, only Exchange. We had to put up instructions for all of our customers to install a third-party email client just to check their email. And there was a constant stream of phone calls to our support center for months until the update came out that added IMAP. And if you have one email selected, and right-click on a different email, it selects both emails. That just seems broken.
cturner 11y ago
PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install. Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it. Does notepad handle \n separated lines correctly yet? Something about excel breaks the behaviour of the alt+tab stack. (if you have multiple documents open) Also, it's annoying the way that - by default - excel wants to open everything in the same parent window. Why why why why why would you want it to behave like this?! Apps that minimise to the small-icon part of the start bar (next to time) don't go to the back of the alt+tab stack. A bunch of NTFS features are not exposed to the user interface. Not quite in the spirit of what you're asking, but I think Windows file locking is a bad design. You can't copy that excel file (in pscp), because you have it open in excel. It'd be useful to be able to mute an application from the OS interface, and to see an indicator for audio activity ion something like the task manager. No strong answer to sshd. No TCP-check tool in the standard install. Why on earth did they get rid of telnet in the standard build? If anything we needed a better TCP-check mechanism - they got rid of the only trustworthy one that was in. Similarly with shell scripting - they actually neutered a bunch of features that were in NT in subsequent versions. Previously you could (just) ship a single bat file that would act as a self-installer for binary content. I imagine they disabled this to discourage malware. But - how is a bat particularly different than an exe? I think it's a shame Windows doesn't ship with devtools out of the box, also. If it came with devtools, would be one less hurdle to getting newbies into programming. Offer good tools at every level - an assembler, a C compiler, c#-level tools, javascript debugger, visual basic. Microsoft's grew from a successful devtool company. They should bundle a python API to windows and a recent version of python also. Make it easy to create and ship python on Windows. A community would just grow around this, with no further effort from them. Would be good if you could choose a filesystem that had strong performance with git. Either make git+NTFS fast, or else offer a well-support FS that git does want to work on. Weak scheduler, init mechanisms. (from user perspective) There's no nice IPC mechanism available for casual development. Cmd kind of has pipes but they're horrible. This is kind of evil, but if I was Microsoft I'd be tempted to make Access more accessible (i.e. ship with base office). As soon as users hit a certain level of scale they'll find themselves needing SQL Server. Access has huge lock-in to the Microsoft world. Much like the way a manager will create a microsoft word or excel document, and then suddenly you find yourself stuck with sharepoint everywhere - ugh.
Encosia 11y ago
Outlook got conversation grouping and good search (long as you let Windows Search index your mail) a couple versions back, IIRC.
- wahsd 11y ago
  Sorry, unless I totally missed something, that is not really the case. I am talking about conversation threading like Gmail and outlook global search in Outlook itself. I have not played with the most recent version and maybe I'm just not doing it right, but as far as I can tell in Outlook, searching a mail folder will only search that single mail folder, not a parent, not a child.
  - Encosia 11y ago
    Threading like Gmail is called "Show as Conversations" in Outlook. It's been available since 2010. They work almost identically as far as I've noticed (I use both Outlook and the web interface to my Google Apps email account most days). I'm not sure when exactly it was added, but this dropdown near the search input controls the scope: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7x35rgahnuultnp/outlook-search-all-items.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/7x35rgahnuultnp/outlook-search-all... For a while before, you could still search globally. If you did a single folder search, there was a link/button/something to expand the search to all folders if you didn't find what you were after in the single folder. The key with Outlook search is that you need to let the indexing service run. Search from within Outlook depends on that index for quick searches.

by wahsd 11y ago

tdicola 11y ago

> Can you think of anything else basic that is annoying as heck about Windows? That it took 10 versions to finally get a resizeable command line terminal that you can copy and paste text within.

stinos 11y ago
To be fair: it could be resized (though in an extremely non-user friendly way) and copy/paste has been possible since a long time (no idea since which version, and again, it wasn't particularly user-friendly at all)
- grimman 11y ago
  Copy+paste has been possible at least since Win2k. But yes, in a very user-unfriendly manner.
AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
This. It was just a small thing, that every now and then made life a little more difficult than it needed to be when you tried to paste something and got ~V :D
fl0wenol 11y ago
The console was broken for a long time primarily to make it possible to do full-screen VGA text modes for NTVDM-requiring apps. Enabling either or both required elevated hardware privileges so they shoved the whole rendering thing into CSRSS and it gave us the shatter attack and (later) no cut/paste as thanks. I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility back when asking someone to use virtualization made you sound like a nut (and back before Microsoft had Hyper-V to offer as an alternative to customers who couldn't or wouldn't budge).
- joshuapants 11y ago
  > I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility There's a book called The Old New Thing (I think I heard about it here on HN, haven't had a chance to get it yet) that discusses a lot of quirks that Windows has and how they came about. Usually there was a purposeful decision behind it, like you suggest with backwards compatibility. It'd be interesting to see if this particular case is addressed in the book.
  - shitloadofbooks 11y ago
    The Old New Thing is Raymond Chen's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ and the book is excerpts and articles from his Blog (with some additional content no doubt). Raymond is/was a compatibility engineer at Microsoft. He was responsible for "shimming" a bunch of hacks into Windows to ensure large applications which relied on undocumented API calls wouldn't break when they overhauled libraries in a new version of Windows.
    - joshuapants 11y ago
      Ah that's right, I think someone in a comment linked to an article on his blog and that's how I found out about the book.
    - sukilot 11y ago
      I didn't realize that was his specific job. The blog title is so brilliant.
pjmlp 11y ago
Control Menu => Properties => Options => Quick Edit Mode I can no longer remember, but I think it was already there back in the 16 bit days, or at very least Windows 95.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  A UI triumph.

sp332 11y ago

I can't understand why the built-in email client is so bad. Every other mail client Microsoft makes is at least usable. Outlook, Windows Live Mail, even outlook.com webmail has message threads enabled by default.

AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
I was actually a fan, and to this day use it at work. Mainly because it was a much lighter version of my bloated outlook client, just giving me emails and allowing me to respond to them. That said, I don't receive more than thirty or so emails a day so perhaps that's the effective audience for the app.
- sp332 11y ago
  When it launched, it didn't even support POP or IMAP, only Exchange. We had to put up instructions for all of our customers to install a third-party email client just to check their email. And there was a constant stream of phone calls to our support center for months until the update came out that added IMAP. And if you have one email selected, and right-click on a different email, it selects both emails. That just seems broken.

cturner 11y ago

PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install. Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it. Does notepad handle \n separated lines correctly yet? Something about excel breaks the behaviour of the alt+tab stack. (if you have multiple documents open) Also, it's annoying the way that - by default - excel wants to open everything in the same parent window. Why why why why why would you want it to behave like this?! Apps that minimise to the small-icon part of the start bar (next to time) don't go to the back of the alt+tab stack. A bunch of NTFS features are not exposed to the user interface. Not quite in the spirit of what you're asking, but I think Windows file locking is a bad design. You can't copy that excel file (in pscp), because you have it open in excel. It'd be useful to be able to mute an application from the OS interface, and to see an indicator for audio activity ion something like the task manager. No strong answer to sshd. No TCP-check tool in the standard install. Why on earth did they get rid of telnet in the standard build? If anything we needed a better TCP-check mechanism - they got rid of the only trustworthy one that was in. Similarly with shell scripting - they actually neutered a bunch of features that were in NT in subsequent versions. Previously you could (just) ship a single bat file that would act as a self-installer for binary content. I imagine they disabled this to discourage malware. But - how is a bat particularly different than an exe? I think it's a shame Windows doesn't ship with devtools out of the box, also. If it came with devtools, would be one less hurdle to getting newbies into programming. Offer good tools at every level - an assembler, a C compiler, c#-level tools, javascript debugger, visual basic. Microsoft's grew from a successful devtool company. They should bundle a python API to windows and a recent version of python also. Make it easy to create and ship python on Windows. A community would just grow around this, with no further effort from them. Would be good if you could choose a filesystem that had strong performance with git. Either make git+NTFS fast, or else offer a well-support FS that git does want to work on. Weak scheduler, init mechanisms. (from user perspective) There's no nice IPC mechanism available for casual development. Cmd kind of has pipes but they're horrible. This is kind of evil, but if I was Microsoft I'd be tempted to make Access more accessible (i.e. ship with base office). As soon as users hit a certain level of scale they'll find themselves needing SQL Server. Access has huge lock-in to the Microsoft world. Much like the way a manager will create a microsoft word or excel document, and then suddenly you find yourself stuck with sharepoint everywhere - ugh.

Encosia 11y ago

Outlook got conversation grouping and good search (long as you let Windows Search index your mail) a couple versions back, IIRC.

wahsd 11y ago
Sorry, unless I totally missed something, that is not really the case. I am talking about conversation threading like Gmail and outlook global search in Outlook itself. I have not played with the most recent version and maybe I'm just not doing it right, but as far as I can tell in Outlook, searching a mail folder will only search that single mail folder, not a parent, not a child.
- Encosia 11y ago
  Threading like Gmail is called "Show as Conversations" in Outlook. It's been available since 2010. They work almost identically as far as I've noticed (I use both Outlook and the web interface to my Google Apps email account most days). I'm not sure when exactly it was added, but this dropdown near the search input controls the scope: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7x35rgahnuultnp/outlook-search-all-items.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/7x35rgahnuultnp/outlook-search-all... For a while before, you could still search globally. If you did a single folder search, there was a link/button/something to expand the search to all folders if you didn't find what you were after in the single folder. The key with Outlook search is that you need to let the indexing service run. Search from within Outlook depends on that index for quick searches.