Big news. Huge news. Microsoft huge. Bill Gates has pulled out all the stops and announced that the new, much anticipated hated by me, operating system for personal computers that aren’t Apple or Linus or Abu Dhabi, will be name Microsoft Windows 7. BTW: Today is Hug Your Ubuntu Day.

7

Not Seven, nor Se7en, nor Sven, not even Melinda.

Something about this is the seventh incarnation of the operating system.

• 3.1
• 93
• 98
• 2000
• ME
• XP
• Vista
• 7

Bill Gates is a Prick.

This series of names is like a 2 year old counting. 1, 8, 3, birdie, I gotta go pee, elebenty.

Here are 6 things that are named 7 that are better than 7.

1. The Group of 7 – its a bunch of nations but I always thing it sounds sinister when I hear a newser mention them.  They are often called the G7, but their are eight of them. That makes it cooler too. Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
2. Se7en – a really creepy movie, starring that African-American actor that isn’t Denzel or James Earl. It’s about the seven deadly sins, which didn’t make the list because it’s all Bible stuff that I rather enjoy.
3. 7 Days in May – a book I read when I was in high school and then they made it into a movie. I wish they made the movie first so I would have gotten a better grade on my book report. Kids have it easy now: they rent the DVD of To Kill a Mockingbird then go on the web and buy a book report.



I think I’ll Netflix this. Just to see what the similarities are with the Gore/Bush election.

4. The Chicago 7 – of which Obama was the leader. Either that or he was learning to do his numbers in cursive. I forget which.
5. 7 of 7-Eleven. We don’t have 7-Eleven stores. I’m pretty sure about that spelling, I’m not going to Google Search it (Hi Serg and Brin!) I’m that certain. I like Slurpies and they have free Slurpies Day sometime in May.
6. 7-Up. Also 10-2-4 which is on the Dr (skipped a period) Pepper label. Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepa too?

She is the one on the left. The other one is Salt. SaltnPepa. Clever.

Better than Microsoft Windows 7, that’s for damn sure.

UPDATE: Here is the official simple explanation.

Sure, the first version of Windows was 1.0, the second 2.0 and the third 3.0, but after that all hell breaks loose. I really can’t do it any more justice other than to reprint it below:

Following Windows 3.0 was Windows NT which was code versioned as Windows 3.1. Then came Windows 95, which was code versioned as Windows 4.0. Then, Windows 98, 98 SE and Windows Millennium each shipped as 4.0.1998, 4.10.2222, and 4.90.3000, respectively. So we’re counting all 9x versions as being 4.0.

Windows 2000 code was 5.0 and then we shipped Windows XP as 5.1, even though it was a major release we didn’t’ want to change code version numbers to maximize application compatibility.

That brings us to Windows Vista, which is 6.0. So we see Windows 7 as our next logical significant release and 7^th in the family of Windows releases.

We learned a lot about using 5.1 for XP and how that helped developers with version checking for API compatibility. We also had the lesson reinforced when we applied the version number in the Windows Vista code as Windows 6.0– that changing basic version numbers can cause application compatibility issues.

So we decided to ship the Windows 7 code as Windows 6.1 – which is what you will see in the actual version of the product in cmd.exe or computer properties.

There’s been some fodder about whether using 6.1 in the code is an indicator of the relevance of Windows 7. It is not.