I have a sneaking feeling that the Regiter's reporter is a Scripting News reader ;-): The Register

Eazel is also creating an opportunity for third-party clients to live in that window, for example. We also recognised the default folder icon as being an identical duplicate of the one from OS/2 Warp 3.0, circa 1994, and although Andy assured us that Eazel doesn't lift artwork, maybe someone could... um... peer-review this one.

The idea of storing and refreshing this file preview information somewhere also gave us a touch of the heebie-jeebies. Nautilus won't store this at the file system level in extended attributes, like Windows or BeOS, but cache it somewhere in userland in XML format. Herztfeld said the team had considered doing the Right Thing - to the extent of trying to hire the Right People - but judged against it. "It's a multi-year process to get people to change their file systems. We'd still have to store metadata at the file system somewhere, and we'd gain only a small increase in performance"

I have a plan...