Santa Claus can't deliver on my PC deficit

ALL OF my relatives have been nagging me for a holiday gift list. Unfortunately, they can't give me what I really want - some improvements for my PC and a couple of industry choices that really bug me.

First, I really want a standardised way to manage and queue on-line software updates. Right now everyone has their own idea on how to do things. Remarkably, Microsoft has one of the more reasonable methods, downloading updates in the background and then applying them as the last thing that happens before the system shuts down. About the only drawback to this process is having a way to request a "pause" of a day or two before a download is executed; traveling laptop users in bandwidth-constrained environments don't need to be sucking down megs of patches.

Others are much less civil. The Firefox crew basically gives you the choice of "Update now, or we're updating when you start up the browser next time," so if you are lucky, you remember to restart your browser to load the update before you shut down. If you're not so lucky, you have to wait a minute or two to get a browser window as the upgrade happens. A couple of applications don't even bother to ask you, they just do updates when they startup up and need to do them regardless of what you need to be doing.

What I'd like is a one button "on/off" switch for updates, and a queue to selectively manage them. Yes, I'm dreaming. Failing that, I'd like to see the "update on shutdown" approach that Microsoft uses applied across the board.

Speaking of one-button, I'd love a single-click way for generating e-mail processing rules in Outlook or Outlook Express. Right now, it's a multi-click process of opening up a message, "Create Rule from Message," select an action, and typically tell it what folder to shove future messages into. Give me a button that says "Generate rule from last action," so if I've deleted something as spam or dragged something off into a folder from the in-box, I can simply click and the rule is generated from my most previous action based upon the last e-mail handled.

Moving to hardware, I wish that Sony would give up making up their own "standards." You'd think Betamax and MemoryStick would have been enough, but now they're going to burn more of their money trying to shove Blu-ray out the door. Sony is so righteous that its mini-DVD videocamera tells you when you put in non-Sony disks into the drive.

Finally, I'd like a faster way for wireless standards to be formalized. Everyone better be happy with 802.11n because it's likely to be another decade before A) There's a better-faster-stronger standard that everyone can agree on and B) Isn't polluted in a move to implementation by various flavours of "draft" and "pre" cooked up by individual vendors playing marketing semantics. The dogfights over ultrawideband (UWB) have been equally sad, delaying implementation of an innovative and useful technology for any number of months. µ