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Windows 7 To Be Called ... Windows 7

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Mike Nash came forward today in a blog post on the Windows Vista Blog and revealed the official name for Windows Code Name '7' as simply 'Windows 7.' The reasoning, by Mr. Nash, is that Windows 7 is 'the seventh release of Windows.' As much wonderful sense as this makes on first glance, it seems as if Microsoft's marketing teams pulled this number out of thin air: the Windows 7 kernel is version 6.1, and there's no way Windows 7 adds up as the seventh release of Windows anyway."

4 of 772 comments (clear)

  1. Lucky 7 by McNihil · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    that's what they are hoping for.

    Just close the casket already, we don't need Microsoft.

  2. Re:Lets count: by Threni · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    That's odd. For me it was:

    1) Windows 95
    2) Windows 98se
    3) Windows 2000
    4) Windows XP
    5) Windows Vista (for a few months)
    6) Ubuntu.

    So Vista was the last one. I suppose I'll try Windows 7 if Microsoft give away a free edition which works as a VM, as an apology for wasting my time with an OS which can't even copy files properly. I'm really enjoying Ubuntu, so I'd like to thank Microsoft for giving me little nudges toward it - things like pointless and ineffective nags whenever I try and do anything, harassment whenever I add hardware or try and move my hard drive from one pc to another and the fact that I'm apparently supposed to pay more for a disk containing Vista than I paid for the netbook I'm currently happily running Ubuntu on.

  3. Re:Isn't There an Iron Maiden Song For This? by westlake · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    They called it Windows 7 because 7 is a lucky number, and they need all the luck they can get.
    .

    When the dice are loaded in your favor, you don't need luck.

    Microsoft is the first U.S. "industrial" company to get a AAA credit rating from S&P and Moody's in ten years.

    It's become a damn short list.

    If your employer is trying to raise money, the odds are 7 in 10 that his bonds are rated "below investment grade" - junk.

    In November Vista will have 20% of the desktop market - based on mass-market webstats - and Windows 90% of the whole.

    Top Operating System Share Trend

  4. You need a lesson in OS by pikine · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I don't know what you think an OS is, but let me tell you what it is. Operating system is a layer in the computing platform that arbitrates the sharing of resources among several processes which run under it. Game that comes with its own device driver does not necessarily qualify for an OS. For the same reason, I don't consider DOS an OS because it doesn't arbitrate the sharing of computing resource. It never needed to because all DOS programs monopolize the computing resource on that computer.

    Windows has always had an API which allows cooperative multitasking and sharing of, at the very minimum, GUI resources. Windows 3.0 introduced a 386 enhanced mode which runs a 32-bit virtual machine hypervisor that makes Windows fully capable of preemptive scheduling of MS-DOS programs, although it's still vulnerable to ill-behaved 16-bit Windows programs. Windows 3.1 came with more device drivers, relying only on MS-DOS for networking and networked drives. In Windows 95, each WIN32 application has their own address space that is isolated from the 16-bit programs. However, since its UI framework (USER.EXE) is still a 16-bit program, misbehaving WIN16 programs are still able to bring WIN32 to its knee. That does not negate the fact that Windows 95 is managing the sharing of pretty much all computing resources, though poorly.

    That said, Windows Vista almost disqualifies as an OS because the OS itself utilizes most of the resources on the computer, leaving little for application programs.

    It's not unusual for an OS to exit back to its underlying platform. Did you know that Minix (the OS that inspired Linux) can exit back to the boot loader, and Solaris (Sun OS) can exit back to OpenBoot (similar to OpenFirmware), much like how Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 95 exit back to DOS?

    --
    I once had a signature.