Google is testing using HTTPS by default on all Gmail pages, though the move would likely inhibit performance

After prompting by a group of privacy advocates, Google said Tuesday that it plans to test a more secure version of its Gmail service to see if it is viable.

Google plans to change its back-end servers so that some users will automatically use an encrypted HTTPS connection when they use Gmail. Right now, everyone uses HTTPS to log in to Gmail, but after that Web pages are sent without encryption.

This is a bad thing, privacy experts say, because it means that hackers with access to a network — say at a café with Wi-Fi — could take over a Google account using a technique known as session hijacking. They could also read e-mail, which often contains sensitive information.

“If you wanted to steal someone’s identity, the inbox is where it’s at,” said Christopher Soghoian, one of the experts who called on Google to make the changes.

Soghoian, a student fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, was one of 38 security and privacy experts who Tuesday called on Google to adopt HTTPS.

Not only does HTTPS encrypt e-mail, making it harder to read, it also provides a way of authenticating the servers, so users can be more sure that they’re really talking to Google and not some phishing site.

Gmail users can already read their messages via HTTPS, but to do this they need to click a “browser connection” box at the bottom of the settings page. Under the test, HTTPS would be turned on by default. HTTPS can be used to securely connect part or all of a Web page.

Google Docs and Calendar users can connect via HTTPS as well, but there’s no setting to make this permanent. Users must simply type in https:// every time they connect to these services.

Last year, Google said it didn’t use HTTPS by default because it would make the Web site too slow.

Soghoian has floated the idea at privacy events over the past few weeks that Google should be pressured to adopt SSL, and Google’s response to him was fast.

“We’ll move small samples of different types of Gmail users to HTTPS to see what their experience is, and whether it affects the performance of their e-mail,” Google Software Engineer Alma Whitten said in a blog posting Tuesday. “Does it load fast enough? Is it responsive enough? Are there particular regions, or networks, or computer setups that do particularly poorly on HTTPS?”

If the test works out, then Google will “turn on HTTPS by default more broadly, hopefully for all Gmail users,” Whitten said.

Google wouldn’t say when it will begin testing, but the company is ahead of rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, which do not offer their users an HTTPS connection, said Jeremiah Grossman, CTO with White Hat Security.

Because encrypted messages contain more information, HTTPS can slow down Web surfing, and if Google finds that performance is so bad that some users drop the service, that would be a major problem, he said.

On the other hand, HTTPS performance can be sped up by using special chips on the server, called accelerators. But that costs money.

“Free, always-on HTTPS is pretty unusual in the e-mail business, particularly for a free e-mail service,” Whitten wrote. “But we see it as another way to make the Web safer and more useful. It’s something we’d like to see all major webmail services provide.”

According to Computer Weekly,
Social networking site MySpace has neither confirmed nor denied reports that it is preparing for a massive round of layoffs.

MySpace could be planning to lay off as many as 500 of its 1,600 employees in an attempt to cut costs and stay ahead of rival Facebook, according to US media reports.

“It is no secret that we are looking for ways to improve our products, increase the value of our digital assets and enhance the overall financial strength of the company,” MySpace said.

The Los Angeles Times last week reported that MySpace owners, News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media, had cancelled a plan to move to new offices in Playa Vista, California.

The company had committed to a 12-year, $350m lease, but said it was cancelling the move because of financial difficulties.

News Corp’s $580m purchase of MySpace in 2005 was considered by analysts to be a brilliant move by Murdoch to enhance the media conglomerate’s digital portfolio, according to Reuters.

Since then, advertising revenue has dropped and Facebook and Twitter have surpassed MySpace in popularity.

The dedicated core of enterprise desktop users will include programmers and task workers

With laptop shipments gaining momentum over the past few years the question arises: Are desktops on the verge of being banished from the enterprise?

Desktops remain the primary computers of “task workers,” which includes clerks, accountants and others who are bound to their desks, and programmers, with laptops becoming the primary computers for many other enterprise employees.

Enterprise use of laptops has exploded as they become affordable and companies seek to provide greater mobility to workers while also increasing productivity. Laptops allow employees to telecommute or work on the road, and can make it easier for salespeople and executives to close deals. Laptops also reduce the need to buy separate monitors and other peripherals.

Laptop shipments increased by about 60 percent between 2006 and 2008, while desktop PC shipments flattened during the same period, according to Gartner. Toshiba sensed the laptop trend as early as 2001, when it stopped selling desktops and focused on selling mobile products and servers.

But that doesn’t mean doom and gloom for desktops, said George Shiffler, principal analyst at Gartner Dataquest. There will be a core of desktop users, including programmers who need the speed of a desktop. Desktops will also remain a tool for task workers as companies look to secure data and reduce maintenance costs, analysts said.

“Why give a laptop to somebody working in a call center?” Shiffler asked. Such workers do not need laptops, which are more expensive and generally require more maintenance, or even a top-line desktop — all they need is a basic desktop.

Laptops are also more vulnerable to theft, analysts said. Stolen laptops could cost companies an average of $49,246, with computer costs and the value of data included, according to a study released in April by Ponemon Institute.

While desktop PCs account for the bulk of personal computers sold to enterprises, the gap in laptop sales to enterprises is closing. Of 168 million PCs sold worldwide to professional organizations in 2008, about 95 million were desktops and 73 million were laptops. That’s compared to 94.6 million desktops and 47.3 million laptops that shipped in 2006.

Concerns about data integrity triggered Guidance, a Web software provider, to choose a majority of desktops for its hardware infrastructure. The company of 50 employees has a mix of 80 percent desktops and 20 percent laptops.

“Because desktops are stationary, they have a lot of advantages,” said Jon Provisor, chief technology officer at Guidance. Desktop maintenance is easier for tasks such as remote security scans and software patches, Provisor said. Desktops are also always connected to the network, which makes it easier to manage them remotely.

General maintenance is difficult for laptops on the road, and users may load rogue software that introduces malware into the network, he said. “[Laptops] aggregate a whole bunch of software — like plug-ins for Facebook or images or video which end up corrupting the system drive. The desktop is a business tool that is simpler and easier to retain,” Provisor said.

Steve Rausch, director of information services at Gibson General Hospital in Indiana, agreed, saying desktops are better suited for office tasks like payroll management. The hospital has deployed desktops for employees such as clerks, who are not mobile.

Security breaches worry Rausch the most, as it’s hard to track the lost information from a stolen laptop. “Then we have to tell all our customers that there’s a potential that your Social Security number, financial information have been stolen. That’s a black eye for us,” he said.

Replacing laptops also could be expensive compared to desktops, Rausch said. Desktops have a lifespan of about five years, as opposed to three years for a laptop, Rausch said.

Laptop components and batteries also need to be continuously replaced, Provisor said. “From our perspective, desktops are here to stay,” he said.

There is a growing interest in devices like virtual desktops and thin clients, which are disk-less terminals that pull resources like storage and memory from central PCs like servers, said Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates. These small devices have fewer components, consume less power and use less space than traditional minitowers, which could save enterprises money.

For example, Guidance has placed orders for Hewlett-Packard’s Compaq dc7900, a small desktop without a power supply that combines components from a laptop and desktop in one box. Rausch is considering disk-less thin clients for use in Gibson General Hospital rooms to take down patient data. Such thin clients access data from servers rather than storing it in memory.

Stripping out IE from Windows 7 is an attempt to duplicate a failed remedy from an earlier antitrust ruling, Opera says

Microsoft’s plan to strip out its Internet Explorer (IE) browser from Windows 7, due for sale in the fall, in Europe is designed to force the European Commission’s hand as it devises an antitrust remedy to restore fair competition in the browser market, said Jon von Tetzchner, the CEO of Norwegian browser maker Opera.

“Microsoft is trying to set the remedy itself by stripping out IE,” he said in a phone interview Friday.

Opera complained to the Commission about the bundling of IE in Windows in 2007. The complaint sparked an antitrust probe that resulted in formal charges of monopoly abuse in January this year.

The Commission is now formulating a remedy that would include the creation of a ballot screen containing a selection of browsers for users to choose from when they install Windows on their new computers.

Von Tetzchner said such a remedy is just as important now as it was before Microsoft announced the plan to unbundle IE from the new version of the OS.

Microsoft, however, is trying to derail the process by offering a version of Windows without a browser, said Von Tetzchner. “They are trying to replicate the remedy in the media player case, which we all know didn’t work.”

“If Microsoft got its way there would be no ballot screen, just a version of Windows that has no browser at all — just like the edition ‘n’ of Windows that resulted from the earlier European antitrust case,” he said.

In that case in 2004, the Commission ruled that Microsoft had distorted competition in the market for media players by bundling its Windows Media Player into Windows. It ordered the software giant to sell a version of Windows that had the media player stripped out, as well as selling the fully bundled version of Windows.

The ruling didn’t insist on a price differential between the two versions. Microsoft complied, launching Windows edition ‘n’ which, not surprisingly, bombed in the market.

The Commission doesn’t want to make the same mistake this time, in its remedy for restoring competition in the browser market, and rival browser makers are insistent that there must be no repeat of the edition ‘n’ debacle.

“It’s very important that there is an effective remedy for the browser market,” Von Tetzchner said.

“Now that Microsoft has acknowledged it has been breaking the law by bundling IE into Windows, the Commission must push ahead with an effective remedy,” he added.

A ruling by the Commission was expected late this year. Von Tetzchner said it may come sooner, following Microsoft’s decision to strip out IE from Windows 7. “Their decision should make room for a faster conclusion,” he said.

In 1996, database and applications software vendor Oracle and Unix workstation supplier Sun Microsystems got together to launch a bold campaign to revolutionise computing.

The hegemony of software giant Microsoft and chip maker Intel would be toppled by the ‘network computer’, the two companies argued, a thin client device that would draw data and applications from a network such as the Internet.

At a time when the total number of PCs sold annually worldwide stood at 70 million, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made the staggering claim that there would be a billion network computers by the year 2006.

In light of that ultimately unsuccessful launch by these two ‘first-movers’ in network computers, announcement of the industry-reshaping $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle makes a little more sense – even though, in more recent times, the two companies’ cultures could not have been more different.

There is no mystery as to why Sun was looking for an acquirer; it was in real danger of going bust. Its final financial report as a stand-alone company, published just days after the Oracle deal was announced on 20 April, revealed quarterly revenues down 20% year-on-year to $2.61 billion, and a net loss of $201 million. In November 2008, Sun announced a plan to lay off around 6,000 workers, almost a fifth of its workforce, to claw back costs.

More perplexing is why Oracle would want to be Sun’s knight in shining armour. IBM, which just weeks before was rumoured to be close to sealing the deal, seemed a more logical suitor, and Oracle’s announcement was met primarily with surprise.
Sun’s portfolio is already a complex mix of hardware and software, so bolting it onto to Oracle’s database, middleware and applications stack makes for a confusing picture. What is more, Sun wasn’t able to make money from its own portfolio, so how will its new owner?

There are some obvious areas of synergy. The addition of Sun’s Solaris operating system, for example, allows Oracle to sell businesses support for the entire stack, from operating system to applications via middleware and databases. And it will certainly benefit Oracle to own MySQL, the leading open source challenge to its database business which Sun bought for $1 billion only 18 months ago – if only because it allows it to kill it.

Others are more puzzling. Ellison described the Sun-developed Java programming language as “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired,” even though Sun made it largely free and open source in 2007.

The answer to this particular conundrum may lie not in technology per se, but in personnel. Oracle’s Fusion middleware range is based on Java, and the Sun acquisition will bring with it some of the world’s experts, including original Java inventor James Gosling.

Indeed, this boost is one way in which the Sun buy makes perfect sense. The acquisition brings with it considerable technical talent (Sun was for long the Apple for enterprise to the techies who may not have chosen to work for the sharp-suited corporate Oracle, but who would ultimately prefer that prospect to redundancy).

Another reason relates to cloud computing. Ellison has to date been one of the most vociferous cloud heretics. Even as he announced cloud computing initiatives in partnership with Intel and Amazon last year, he rubbished the term. “What the hell is cloud computing?” he said. “We’ve redefined ‘cloud computing’ to include everything we currently do.”

And despite the fact that he was Salesforce.com’s sugar daddy, he has been equally cool on software-as-a-service. “It’s hard to point to any software-as-a-service provider that’s doing a good job of improving its profitability,” he said a year ago.
But this was all before he owned a hardware company that not only builds its own servers and storage systems (Oracle is now the world’s biggest supplier of tape libraries, for example) but that has already made significant investments in building a cloud computing infrastructure.

The combination of Oracle and Sun is the only company that makes everything in a ‘cloud’ above the component level, especially since Oracle’s acquisition of virtualisation management tool vendor Virtual Iron that was announced shortly after the Sun deal. “We will be the only company out there that can provide everything from the applications to the disk,” said Oracle president Charles Phillips at a recent customer conference.

according to Oracle’s official website,

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

“Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “This transaction will preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.”

For many, this seeming reversal of the evolution of the IT industry will send shivers up their spine. But this is the direction the industry appears to be moving in; customers’ hunger for value and simplicity, and anger over money wasted on integration, is prompting the return of the ‘one stop shop’ vendor.

Having added Sun’s technical wizardry to his own ruthless commerciality, Ellison has one of the strongest hands in the sector. We may see those billion network computers yet.

I read it on CRN,

Gigabyte rolled out their latest range of motherboards featuring its 24-phase power VRM design and Smart 6 technologies during Computex 2009 in Taiwan. The vendor also showcased various motherboard models featuring the Intel P55 chipset series as well as the GA-MA785G-UD3H based on the AMD 785G chipset.

The vendor’s proprietary 24-phase power VRM is designed to enhance the efficiency of power delivery to the CPU while reducing heat, by spreading the workload over the 24 power phases.

Gigabyte also introduced its Smart 6 Technologies (including Smart QuickBoot, Smart Recorder, Smart TimeLock, Smart Recovery, Smart QuickBoost and Smart DualBIOS for better PC system management) that have been designed keeping user-friendliness in mind.

The vendor displayed its flagship X58 chipset-based GA-EX58A-Extreme motherboard and the upcoming Intel P55 chipset-based GA-EP55-UD5 motherboard. Both motherboards feature the 24-phase power VRM design that enable uninterrupted power delivery to the system for overclocking ability, combined with low temperatures for stability. They also support next generation SATA at 6Gbps to deliver twice the data transfer rate of current SATA motherboards. Also on display was the Smart TPM that allows users to lock the TPM protected content remotely, by using a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone.

On the AMD side, the vendor presented the GA-MA790FXT-UD5P, i.e. the AMD Dragon Platform motherboard for AMD AM3 Phenom II processors that deliver high performance computing for work, home and gaming. The new flagship motherboard for the AMD platform supports 45nm AMD Phenom II processors featuring Hypertransport 3.0 technology. Other noteworthy features include high-performance DDR3 support that allows the vendor’s motherboard to reach memory speeds of up to 1666 MHz for fast memory access.

Further, Gigabyte showcased its GA-MA785G-UD3H motherboard that features DirectX 10.1 gaming and fluid computing with ATI Stream technology. The motherboard features an AMD 785G chipset with ATI RADEON HD 4200 graphics and is AMD’s Mainstream Desktop solution for Microsoft Windows 7.

The range of motherboards will be distributed in India by Avnet, Ingram Micro, Redington and Neoteric Infomatique.

Here is a news I found on Infoworld, I thought I would like to share it with the readers, it goes,

Google tests ‘revolutionary’ cloud-based database

The Fusion Tables online database with data-spaces technology is designed to sidestep the limitations of conventional relational databases

Google has released an early version of a new type of database whose approach to data management will be revolutionary, according to an analyst who has studied the technology behind it.

On Tuesday, Google quietly announced in its research team blog a new online database called Fusion Tables designed to sidestep the limitations of conventional relational databases.

Specifically, Fusion Tables has been built to simplify a number of operations that are notoriously difficult in relational databases, including the integration of data from multiple, heterogenous sources and the ability to collaborate on large data sets, according to Google.

“Without an easy way to offer all the collaborators access to the same server, data sets get copied, emailed and ftp’d — resulting in multiple versions that get out of sync very quickly,” reads the Google announcement, which has been largely overlooked, probably because it was made on the same day the company held a high-profile press event to launch its Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.

Under the hood of Fusion Tables is data-spaces technology, which will make conventional databases go the way of the rotary phone, according to Stephen E. Arnold, a technology and financial analyst who is president of Arnold Information Technology.

Data spaces as a concept has been around since the early 1990s, and Google, realizing its potential, has been developing it since it acquired Transformic, a pioneer of the technology, in 2005, Arnold said.

Data-spaces technology seeks to solve the problem of the multiple data types and data formats that reside in organizations, which have to scrub the data and make it uniform, often at great cost and effort, in order to store and analyze it in conventional databases.

Data spaces envisions a system that creates an index that provides access to data in its disparate formats and types, solving what Arnold calls the “Tower of Babel” problem.

In the case of Fusion Tables, the technology should allow Google to add to the conventional two-dimensional database tables a third coordinate with elements like product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages and the like, as well as a fourth dimension of real-time updates, he said.

“So now we have an n-cube, a four-dimensional space, and in that space we can now do new kinds of queries which create new kinds of products and new market opportunities,” said Arnold, whose research about this topic includes a study done for IDC last August.

“If you’re IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, your worst nightmare is now visible. Google is going to automatically construct data spaces and implement new types of queries,” he said. “Those guys are going to be blindsided.”

Fusion Tables is an early version of the product, as evidenced by its “Labs” label, which means Google considers it an experimental product. “As usual with first releases, we realize there is much missing, and we look forward to hearing your feedback,” Google’s blog post reads.

Release Date

Microsoft Confirmed that they are ready to put Windows 7 on store shelves and computer makers will have systems ready to sell with Vista’s successor on Oct. 22.

Microsoft will also offer discounted or free upgrades to Windows 7 to users who buy PCs in the months leading up to the operating system’s launch in a program dubbed “Windows Upgrade Option,” said a company spokeswoman.

Till the confirmation of the released date, Microsoft had been coy about naming a release date for Windows 7, although it edged toward a timetable last month. Both Bill Veghte, the senior vice president who runs the Windows Business unit, and Steven Sinofsky, the senior vice president of the Windows engineering group, said then that Windows 7 was on track for the holiday selling season, and would make the final milestone — called “release to manufacturing,” or RTM — in mid-August.

Speed Test

A post directed from PC world,

“Improving performance is one of Microsoft’s design goals with Windows 7, and many early reviewers (including ours) have said that the new OS seems peppier than Vista. But tests of the Windows 7 Release Candidate in our PC World Test Center found that while Windows 7 was slightly faster on our WorldBench 6 suite, the differences may be barely noticeable to users.

WorldBench 6 consists of a number of tests involving 10 common applications, including Microsoft Office, Firefox, and Photoshop. On the individual tests, the benchmark results were generally within a few percentage points of each other. One notable exception, however, was Nero 7 Ultra Edition, where Windows 7 made significant improvements, ranging from a 12% speed-up to a 26% speed-up, depending on the PC we used in our tests. Although we have yet to confirm it, PC World Test Center Director Jeff Kuta notes that this difference may be due to updated hard-disk drivers in Windows 7. Any improvements to Windows 7’s disk support will be more noticeable in an application like Nero, which uses the hard drive heavily. The test involving WinZip, another hard-drive-dependent task, also showed marked improvement under Windows 7.

Windows 7 won’t expand the narrow market

Post directed from www.sci-technews.com

Ben Reitzser (from one of U.S.A’s respectable companies Barclays Capital ) expert of analysis, he said “Microsoft’s new OS Windows 7 won’t be enough for save the market. Market won’t be better than now”. He claimed, Windows 7 won’t expand the narrow market .

And expectations, notebook sales will increase and on 2009 sales will be 40 million.

Windows 7’s User Interface

On October 28, 2008, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 7. Until then, the company had been uncharacteristically secretive about its new OS; over the past few months, Microsoft has let on that the taskbar will undergo a number of changes, and that many bundled applications would be unbundled and shipped with Windows Live instead. There have also been occasional screenshots of some of the new applets like Calculator and Paint. Now that the covers were finally off, the scale of the new OS became clear. The user interface has undergone the most radical overhaul and update since the introduction of Windows 95 thirteen years ago.

While windows 7 doesn’t undo these architectural changes—they were essential for the long-term health of the platform—it equally hasn’t made any more. Any hardware or software that works with Windows Vista should also work correctly with Windows 7, so unlike the transition from XP to Vista, the transition from Vista to 7 won’t show any regressions; nothing that used to work will stop working.

So, rather than low-level, largely invisible system changes, the work on Windows 7 has focused much more on the user experience. The way people use computers is changing; for example, it’s increasingly the case that new PCs are bought to augment existing home machines rather than replacement, so there are more home networks and shared devices. Business users are switching to laptops, with the result that people expect to seamlessly use their (Domain-joined) office PC on their home network.

As well as these broader industry trends, Microsoft also has extensive data on how people use its software. Through the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), an optional, off-by-default feature of many Microsoft programs, the company has learned a great deal about the things that users do. For example, from CEIP data Microsoft knows that 70% of users have between 5 and 15 windows open at any one time, and that most of the time they only actively use one or two of those windows. With this kind of data, Microsoft has streamlined and refined the user experience.

The biggest visible result of all this is the taskbar. The taskbar in Windows 7 is worlds apart from the taskbar we’ve known and loved ever since the days of Chicago.

Text descriptions on the buttons are gone, in favor of big icons. The icons can—finally—be rearranged; no longer will restarting an application put all your taskbar icons in the wrong order. The navigation between windows is now two-level; mousing over an icon shows a set of window thumbnails, and clicking the thumbnail switches windows.

Right clicking the icons shows a new UI device that Microsoft calls “Jump Lists.”

They’re also found on the Start Menu:

Jump lists provide quick access to application features. Applications that use the system API for their Most Recently Used list (the list of recently-used filenames that many apps have in their File menus) will automatically acquire a Jump List containing their most recently used files. There’s also an API to allow applications to add custom entries; Media Player, for example, includes special options to control playback.

This automatic support for new features is a result of deliberate effort on Microsoft’s part. The company wants existing applications to benefit from as many of the 7 features as they can without any developer effort. New applications can extend this automatic support through new APIs to further enrich the user experience. The taskbar thumbnails are another example of this approach. All applications get thumbnails, but applications with explicit support for 7 will be able to add thumbnails on a finer-grained basis. IE8, for instance, has a thumbnail per tab (rather than per window).

Window management has also undergone changes. In recognition of the fact that people tend only to use one or two windows concurrently, 7 makes organizing windows quicker and easier. Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it automatically; dragging it off the top of the screen restores it. Dragging a window to the left or right edge of the screen resizes the window so that it takes 50% of the screen. With this, a pair of windows can be quickly docked to each screen edge to facilitate interaction between them.

Another common task that 7 improves is “peeking” at windows; switching to a window briefly just to read something within the window but not actually interact with the window. To make this easier, scrubbing the mouse over the taskbar thumbnails will turn every window except the one being pointed at into a glass outline; moving the mouse away will reinstate all the glass windows. As well as being used for peeking at windows, you can also peek at the desktop:

Peeking at the desktop is particularly significant, because the desktop is now where gadgets live. Because people are increasingly using laptops, taking up a big chunk of space for the sidebar isn’t really viable; Microsoft has responded by scrapping the sidebar and putting the gadgets onto the desktop itself. Gadgets are supposed to provide at-a-glance information; peeking at the desktop, therefore, becomes essential for using gadgets.

The taskbar’s system tray has also been improved. A common complaint about the tray is that it fills with useless icons and annoying notifications. With 7, the tray is now owned entirely by the user. By default, new tray icons are hidden and invisible; the icons are only displayed if explicitly enabled. The icons themselves have also been streamlined to make common tasks (such as switching wireless networks) easier and faster.

The other significant part of the Windows UI is Explorer. Windows 7 introduces a new concept named Libraries. Libraries provide a view onto arbitrary parts of the filesystem with organization optimized for different kinds of files. In use, Libraries feel like a kind of WinFS-lite; they don’t have the complex database system underneath, but they do retain the idea of a custom view of your files that’s independent of where the files are.

These UI changes represent a brave move by the company. The new UI takes the concepts that Windows users have been using for the last 13 years and extends them in new and exciting ways. Windows 7 may not change much under the hood, but the extent of these interface changes makes it clear that this is very much a major release.