https://blogs.windows.com/wind...

The tile all windows command is not gone, just right-click the taskbar...

Yeah the lowercase i looks like a deal breaker to me, is there even a reason for it to look like that?

Well known SIDs are, eh, well known and are the same on all machines, other SIDs have a randomly generated machine/domain part and the number after the last dash is called a RID and represents a group or a user on the machine/domain. The filesystem does not care, it is treated as a normal name but the folders in the recyclebin have the ACL set to allow access for only that user. The recyclebin is a shell concept, the low-level file APIs in kernel32 treats it as any normal folder tree.

Yep, this sucks when you disable flash in IE, breaks a lot of sites. Most web designers are doing it wrong, you can just put the html5 video tag inside the flash tag or vice versa and get automatic fallback handling, no javascript detection required.

I was thinking about drivers that are not open. A bit like how you can use Windows NDIS driver on Linux. Ideally I'd like this for Android so all OEM camera, sensor and GPS drivers etc follow one ABI so you can upgrade your phone without waiting for anyone to make custom ROMs.

That is not strictly true, there are currently 3 types of extensions where one provides a abstraction layer: 1) Legacy/Overlay. These access the XUL DOM directly. 2) Bootstrap/Restartless. Like 1 but without UI overlays so they can be added/removed without restarts. 3) Using the addons SDK. These are supposed to be abstracted away from the Firefox XUL and are "based on HTML5" and all those buzzwords. https://blog.mozilla.org/addon...

If the ABI was stable in some form, v1, v2 etc you could at least develop a translation layer to keep old hardware working.

Win 8.1 added a couple of extra requirements on top of what the initial Windows 8 needed, the important one is support for 16byte atomic exchange (the old unused bits tricks no longer work since they support more RAM in 8.1)

.lnk files stores the computer name, size and date times for its target and will try to fix broken shortcuts, this works once in a while if you are lucky. Of course it has to scan all your disks which takes a bit longer these days. There is even a service (on by default) that tries to track files across your local network/domain...

Programs cannot really set themselves as the default anymore, this change was made in Windows 8 IIRC. They can trigger the change default app dialog but messing with the registry directly does not work. The default verb for a type is now stored along with some crypto goo in the registry that only the shell knows and ShellExecute checks this...

MS changed their mind and will now allow you to hide/block driver updates: https://support.microsoft.com/...

Welcome to Vista (Beta 2, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michae... )

Even worse, both the flash embed and the html5 video tag supports fallback "innerhtml" so if they put the html5 video code inside the flash embed tag they don't even need the no flash detection/warning code nor any other scripting. The html could be the same for all platforms and devices...

Get your driver models straight, WDM (win98/2000+) is the driver model for generic devices, U/K WDF sits on top of this. WDDM is only for display devices (new in Vista) and you also have NDIS for network and various other storport/miniport layers. A laptop that supports WDDM 1.0 only conveys information about the graphics hardware...