Well, as you'll recall, I was at one point sending steveb an email about once a week voicing my opinion and desire for a new version of IE, even going as far as to offer to rewrite it for free. Even though Microsoft vehemently claimed there was not going to be a new IE before Longhorn, it seems Steve listened.

We have a new IE 7 coming out in beta this summer. I decided that it must have been my emails, I mean, what else could it have been. I have another issue I found that I would like to see resolved, well a combination issue really, so I am going to craft a new email and see what we can get done.

If anyone else has anything they would like me to pass on to Steve, drop me a line and I'll be glad to help.

To:steveb@microsoft.com
From:bob@blogbybob.com
Subject:Metric Issue in Windows XP/Windows 2003

Good morning!

    I am happy to see that Microsoft will be releasing a new version of IE sooner than was originally expected, I would love to be on the beta ;). I know alot of people are pressing for 'features', but as an average user, I would be happy to just see security. I will be blogging about my thoughts on some of the things I've read about IE 7 later today or tomorrow if you want to stop by and read it.

Anyhow, that isn't the reason for this email, there is something I noticed in Windows 2003 and most likely in XP as well that I thought you might be interested in, I know alot of people would like to see a solution crafted for it. In Exchange, when you use multiple servers, the servers 'auto calibrate', taking measures of latency/bandwidth etc between servers to find the best path to move data. This is something that Windows itself could use. When I plug into ethernet while still on wireless so I can move a large file, Windows doesn't take any metric reading and figure out that 'Hey, I can move data alot faster over that ethernet' unless you manually disable the wireless connection. I would think that you have seen this before, maybe you even have a patch for it?

In a related behavioral issue, meaning another issue of metric, when you copy from one network share to another, the data is moved from the first network share, to the local machine and then to the second network share. This doesn't take advantage of the possibly faster connections that are between the servers themselves, and even ignoring that, is substantially slower than moving them directly.

Anyhow, thanks again for the great work on getting some 'Distinguished Engineers' working on IE 7, and I look forward to hearing your feedback from my blog about it when I get it up.

Bob