Software
Minority Report Computer
Think of it as the Power Glove with big-screen TVs. One of the science advisors on Minority Report, John Underkoffler, founded a company called Oblong Industries to make Tom Cruise’s fancy computers a reality. The result is G-speak, a spatial operating system using huge monitors and clunky mittens.
Sure, spatial computing looks impractical now, but so did multitouch early last year. Now it’s on iPhones.
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.
