Windows 7 is… 6.1?
And here we were all hoping Windows 7 would signal a return to simplicity. Now Microsoft says Windows 7 is actually Windows 6.1. That’s the version number that appears in the code, even though the version number on the box is 7.
Microsoft claims the convoluted version numbering ensures backward application compatibility. Vista is 6.0, and apparently using 7.0 in the code would break a lot of Windows applications. “Windows 7” is just a dumbed-down version number for marketing purposes.
If you have to show two different version numbers to your developers and customers, then you have serious problems wrangling your developer community. Call it 6.1, call it Vista SE — but please don’t treat your customers like idiots who can’t do decimals. Even Apple doesn’t do that, and their products are designed to be idiotproof.
Google Makes You Smarter
Nicholas Carr once wrote a long, long article claiming Google makes you stupid. Guess what? He was wrong. A new UCLA study says Google makes you smarter. No, it doesn’t just make you look smart in chat — it actually exercises your brain.
“There’s so much interest in exercising our minds as we age,” said the researcher, Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. “One result of this study is that these technologies are not all bad. They may be good in keeping our brains active.”
To study what brains look like when people are searching the Internet, Small recruited two groups of people: one that had minimal computer experience and another that was Web savvy.
Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning, according to Small’s study, which appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
Note that it’s the tech-savvy users who get the biggest brain boost from search. The study proves something else we’ve known all along: put a n00b in front of a computer, and he’s still a n00b.
