Another stupid Windows 7 assumption

Rumor: "It only works with touchscreens."
Reality: Windows 7 adds support for multi-touch, but no Microsoft never said it would require any kind of touchscreen. They'd have to be insane to do that.

No, that doesn't make Shipping Seven a fraud

When I decided to finally start my tech blog today, Blogspot was the first site that came to mind. To make sure I liked the format, I checkout another Blogspot blog I sometimes visit: Shipping Seven. One of the comments on this post was some guy claiming he was a fraud, linking to this for explanation. Well, let's go over what wrong with this claim:

"Here are some of the more-glaring factual errors in the post that completely strip Shipping Seven of any authenticity or authority it may have on the topic of Windows 7:

'How many times has the Ubuntu or Mac OS X kernel been rewritten?'

Correction: OS X is powered by a rewrite of the XNU kernel which is a modified version of the Mach kernel which, in turn, is a complete rewrite of the original BSD kernel."

Did any of those rewrites happen while it was the "Mac OS X kernel"?

The accuser goes on to write:

"And, of course, Ubuntu isn't an OS in and of itself, rather it's just a distribution of Linux."

That's nonsense. What if I said "Windows isn't an OS in and of itself, rather it's just a distribution of the NT kernel."?

"While it can be argued that not every developer at Microsoft is expected to have intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of other operating systems, no one in their right mind would believe that the Windows kernel programmers don't even know what kernels their strongest competitors are currently using."

When did Shipping Seven ever claim to be a "Windows kernel programmer"?

Just because he overlooked XNU's pre-Mac OS X history, and didn't anticipate your nonsense about Ubuntu not being an OS, doesn't mean he doesn't know what kernels those OSs (or distributions) use.

" 'We spent a boatload of time during Windows Vista making everything 'componentizable' - So that we could (by creating some xml files that our build process uses) create a boatload of different versions of Vista (and Server 2008).

You already have MinWin - It is the core system components that Windows Vista needs to function; everything else on the system depends directly or indirectly on it. It is the last thing you could (theoretically) uninstall.

So, if you really really want it, you can get it, I suppose - you probably could (using the command line) uninstall almost every single Windows Vista system component, including the user interface. I don't know what the hell you'd do with just a kernel and a kernel loader on your machine, though.'

Assuming you can get past the way that the post was written (with references like "using the command line" which indicate a general lack of knowledge about computers in general; treating the command line as if it were a "god mode" that can be used to do just about anything), there's still the matter of factual inaccuracies - and inconsistencies in the article itself."

He didn't say why you would use the command line. What program would you use to delete Explorer?

"You can't change/modify/revert pre-build settings by running commands in the command line. Components that are integrated at compile time simply cannot be removed by running a bunch of commands afterwards - especially not from within the resulting OS itself."

It depends on how the pre-build settings are implemented in the binaries. If it's just a matter of whether or not a file is included, then, yes, you can remove a feature by deleting its file at the command line.

Windows 7 rumors debunked

There's been a lot of misinformation about Windows 7 going around. So here's why I think all these rumors are just plain incorrect:

Rumor: The next version of Windows is codenamed "7", Windows Seven, Windows "7", or Windows Se7en.
Reality: The next version of Windows is codenamed Windows 7.

Rumor: Microsoft plans to ship Windows 7 three years from now.
Reality: Microsoft plans to finish Windows 7 three years after they started working on it.

Rumor: Bill Gates said Windows 7 would ship next year.
Reality: Bill Gates said "sometime in the next year or so" they "will have a new version."

Rumor: Windows 7 is being rewritten from scratch or near scratch,.
Reality: Microsoft has made it clear that Windows 7 is an evolution of Windows Vista. Also, they never said they were throwing away any code. They're merely making it possible for them to build a small part of the OS ("MinWin") without the rest of Windows, probably just for testing the kernel.

Rumor: Any screenshots claiming to show Windows 7's GUI are fake, as Windows 7 is just MinWin right now.
Reality: As I said before, Microsoft never said they were throwing away any code, or that they weren't working on the GUI yet.

That's all the major misinformation I can think of right now. I'm gonna add links to my sources if/when I get around to it.