Out of curiosity: what operating system does automatically queue separately initiated copy operations? Wouldn't it be quite confusing if some copy operation just wouldn't start at all before some other - possibly very time consuming - operation was concluded?
As another poster mentioned, Mac OS does this. It solves the problem you mentioned by combining the file copy progress bars under a single window. Visually, it looks like a queue, with the top progressing fastest, and the ones below progressing very slowly or not at all.
Linux. It doesn't queue individual files,but it does schedule disk blocks to minimize seeks and maximize throughput. Look up "elevator algorithm " and "Linux IO scheduler" for more detail.
I'd be surprised if it didn't. Then again, I was rather surprised that Windows XP's throughput dropped massively when I started copying more than one file at once, so it seems that it didn't do a good job of it.
This is on such a different level as to be irrelevant. The I/O scheduler will still try to accommodate requests within timeframes of seconds, at most. When copying large files to/from two different areas on a spinning disk simultaneously, this means significant time will be spent flying the heads back and forth between them, regardless of the elevator. So queueing two 8GB movie files to go one after another will be significantly faster than copying them simultaneously.
I'm 90% sure that one of the changes made to the way Lion copies files was this exactly - it now queues operations for maximum throughput. I do wish I could find a link that said this - I apologize for that.
Everyone is assuming that they are doing no improvements in the back-end. This was a discussion about the front-end of copy operations. I like the new interface and think that while it does not seem whoopingly big, it will make copy-pasta more tasty.
Just when I thought I could hate on microsoft, they come out with a nice improvement.
HOWEVER what I'd really like to see is a tool which shows you during boot time what boot ops are not behaving well, and give a very easy and responsive interface for murdering those ops. If its a video driver, fall back to default, some crap that can show me a web browser to troubleshoot with giant warnings that your video driver is dead. If they can get this whole startup taking god knows how long due to one bad application mess, windows will be quite awesome.
And then they need to help developers get the posix tools ported to windows an the most meaningful way out-of-the-box with no special install. Including replacing CMD with Bash and changing their FS to support a good structure like linux (C:, D: can still exist, but make a Sys: which contains things like proc and friends)
