The default Human theme is wasting so much space that my 1280x800 screen becomes confusing when a few applications are open. This problem becomes even more dominant on small systems with a small display such as the eeePC.

In this perspective Windows performs much better which is a shame!

The Clearlooks Compact Gnome theme (http://martin.ankerl.com/2007/11/04/clearlooks-compact-gnome-theme/) tries to solve this problem but (1) it is not installed by default and even not included in Ubuntu at all and (2) this theme itself has a lot of room for improvement. It's improvements should be merged to the Human theme and become default in Ubuntu. Also it would be great to configure the percentage of wasted space and the default icon size in the "appearance" settings.