To add a worksheet in Excel 2007, I go to the bottom of the document (where the worksheet tabs are listed). The one on the far right has a tooltip which says "Insert Worksheet (Shift+F11)". That seems much more efficient than the "home/cells/format" thingy you described.

We're not talking about Exchange here, we're talking about *Windows*. Steven Sinofsky, the head of Windows is notorious about not saying anything about features before they're fully baked.

You've just described the memory allocator used in Windows 1.0 back in 1984 (no, that's not a typo). For an OS designed for a machine without any form of virtual memory, and one which needed to run on machines with 256K of RAM (again, not a typo) it was a pretty good solution. But the memory management solutions used by modern operating systems are many orders of magnitude better (demand paging trumps lock/unlock for overall resource allocation). Plus you'd have to deal with the apps that call "give me the real memory" and never release it back to the OS.

And of course apps would do this routinely because they don't care what their bad behavior does to the other apps on the system, as long as their app works just fine.

Firefox is also moving to a silent update model. And I'll bet they mess it up too.

The Black Viper list is pretty good, but the reality is that from Win7 on, the list of OS services that's enabled is the set which won't break something (if you read Black Viper's list they point out what breaks with each service disabled).

And I've not yet figured out how to convince Google Chrome to stop auto-updating (and I don't want to stop flash from auto-updating, flash and pdf are the two biggest vectors for malware out there). I just wish their auto-updaters respected the user and recognized that they should. Larry Osterman wrote an article about this a couple of years ago: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2007/08/20/applet-mitigations-updaters.aspx

Trigger started services were introduced in Windows 7, this isn't new. I just wish people were taking advantage of them (I'm looking at you Google chrome and Adobe with your long running processes that do nothing but check to see if there's an update).

Longhorn (and more specifically WinFS) was one of the very few times MSFT's ever talked about features that weren't delivered. For Windows 7, I can only think of one feature which was announced that wasn't actually delivered (bluetooth audio).

Except for Longhorn features, what Windows features were promoted but not delivered?

I think he's referring to "Shatter attacks", which is standard terminology. But shatter attacks only work when window messages are passed between a user mode process and a system process. And ever since Windows Vista, they've been completely neutered (desktop apps can't interact with service processes).

The sharing stuff looks to be very similar to the clipboard - you select some stuff in one app, select the "share" system control, it presents a list of apps which can share the thing you selected and you pick the one you want to share with. All of these interactions are user initiated, so I don't see how malware gets involved.

You could always go read the UEFI Specs to see if the UEFI folks have considered this. My guess is that they have already thought of this and it's answered in the specs somewhere.

From TFA:

As a reminder, the telemetry data is opt-in, anonymous, and private, but it does represent hundreds of millions of sessions from all customer types.

You have to opt into reporting telemetry. So if you don't want your data being uploaded to MSFT, when Windows asks you if you want to opt in, don't.

One of Microsoft's big problems in Office 97-2003 was that people were not noticing features that Microsoft wanted them to use

One of the other motivations about the ribbon: When Microsoft asked users about what features they would like to see in Office, it turns out they asked for features that were already there. But the menu system was so complicated that nobody figured that out.

Jensen Harris (architect of the Ribbon) has an awesome talk about the history of the Office UI that led to the creation of the ribbon on his blog. Search for "why the ui". He also did a video of the story

Actually the \ character was chosen because the "/" character was used in DOS 1.0 for command line switches. And / was used in DOS 1.0 for command line switches because that's what they used in the DEC operating systems (VMS, DECSystem 10, DECSystem 20) from the 1970s. Remember that DOS 1.0 didn't support directories (all files were located at the root of the drive). They added directory support in DOS 2.0. Once / was used as a command line switch delimiter, it couldn't be used as a path separator, so they chose \ instead.

If you're going to blame the "/" character on anyone, it's not MSFT, it's DEC.

Oh and here's a little known fact: DOS (and Windows) allows the user to use either \ or / as a path separator.

Actually, *every* year, the Mac was compromised first.

To be fair, Lockheed-Martin was hacked because they depended on a 3rd party (RSA) for a critical part of their security infrastructure.

When RSA subsequently had a massive data compromise, instead of letting their customers know what happened, they downplayed the ramifications of the breach. And RSA just won a pwnie for their efforts.

Not that that changes your response in any significant way.

And Microsoft will continue to support Windows XP. It's just not going to be providing FREE support, you'll have to have a custom support agreement.

Custom support agreements can go on a LONG time