Microsoft Manager Claims Window 7 Inspired by OS X, Windows 7 Team Lashes Out

A Microsoft advertising executive, speaking with the site PCR, went on record to say that he believed Windows 7's design to be inspired by OS X. Now Microsoft is refuting the quote, which seems bound to wind up in the latest round of "Get a Mac" commercials.

In the interview with PCR, Simon Aldous, Microsoft's Partner Group Manager is asked, "Is Windows 7 really a much more agile operating system, in terms of the specific uses it can be moulded to?"

He replies:

...I saw an article recently that described it as ‘Vista on steroids’, and in some ways you can absolutely relate to that. One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

The quote sparked a fury of web activity. After all, to give OS X its propers, the operating system did have a richer, more graphical environment than Windows in the XP era, and Microsoft seemed to strive to catch up with Windows Vista and then Windows 7, looking to provide a similarly rich graphical interface -- something that many customers demanded. When looking at Windows 7, some graphical features do vaguely resemble those of OS X, but there's significant differences as well (OS X's Launcher Bar differs tremendously from Windows 7's Task Bar) that indicate that the OS is no mere OS X clone, even in terms of looks.

One important point that many of those quoting Mr. Aldous's remarks failed to make clear was that he was not involved in the design of Windows 7 (he's an advertising/PR section manager). The Windows 7 Team's chief blogger, Brandon LeBlanc, has posted a blog blasting the suggestion that Windows 7 is an OS X clone.

He writes:

An inaccurate quote has been floating around the Internet today about the design origins of Windows 7 and whether its look and feel was “borrowed” from Mac OS X. Unfortunately this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7. I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed. If you’re interested in learning more about the design of Windows 7, I suggest reading this AP story with Julie Larson-Green as well as these WSJ (membership required) and Fast Company articles. And here is one of many blog posts on the E7 blog discussing the design process of Windows 7.

Many Apple-leaning sites, nonetheless are seizing on the quote as evidence that OS X is gaining on Windows. Writes Apple Insider, "The similarities between Windows 7 and Apple's latest operating system upgrade, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, were noted by The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg in his review of the Microsoft software. He said he believes that the Mac OS is still the superior operating system, but only slightly."

Apple Insider goes on to note the terrific sales managed by the well-received Snow Leopard. It fails to note, however, the equally terrific sales that Windows 7 has put up, besting Vista's launch week by a reported 234 percent.

Windows 7 Loses to Windows XP in Netbook Battery Life

With Windows Vista, Microsoft revamped many features and piled on a lot of functionality that Windows XP didn't have -- among other things improving security. An unfortunate side effect of this, though was that Windows Vista was much bulkier than Windows XP and more battery hungry. As a result, up until October most netbooks used Windows XP.

With Windows 7, more new features were added, but this time a more disciplined approach concerning OS bulk was taken, helped, in part, by a large public testing phase. Windows 7 was trimmed down from Vista both in memory and install size, and many of its critical metrics (boot time, etc.) approached the high bar set by Windows XP.

However, Microsoft still fell a bit short of the eight-year-old OS in a couple of critical metrics. According to numerous testers one of the biggest failures is in battery life on netbooks. According to recent tests, it isn't even close -- Windows 7 delivers much worse battery life.

Versus the grizzled veteran XP, Windows 7 averaged 47 minutes less battery life in testing by Laptop. In some models, such as ASUS 1008HA, the deficit was almost an hour (57 minutes), cutting the battery life by approximately 16 percent (roughly 1/6th). Further testing by Liliputing and jkOnTheRun confirmed the lower run times.

A recent comparison by CNET between 64-bit Windows 7 and competitor Apple's OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", run on MacBooks with Boot Camp showed Windows 7 to trail behind Snow Leopard in battery life as well. It also was bested by Snow Leopard in boot time, shutdown time, multimedia encoding, and multitasking tests.

Looking on the positive side, it is a marked improvement that Windows 7 can run on the majority of netbooks -- a feat Vista couldn't pull off. However, its disappointing to see that for all the hard work Microsoft poured into the operating system, that it still can't beat a well-designed product it made almost a decade ago.

Xbox Live Ban Reaches 1 Million, Microsoft Tells Them to Buy a New Console

Yesterday, news broke that Microsoft had banned a massive amount of players from its Xbox Live service which is available on its popular Xbox 360 gaming console. According to reports, the banned players had one thing in common -- they had modified their console's hardware or firmware to carry out unauthorized activity such as installation of an alternate OS, playing out of zone media, or running pirated software.

Initially, the estimates pegged the number of banned users at 600,000. Now CNET is reporting that over 1 million players have been banned from the service. That's a pretty incredible number as Xbox Live only has 20 million subscribers. That means that approximately 1 in 20 players has been banned, or roughly 5 percent of the service's total population.

The ban coincided with the release of Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on Tuesday, and many are speculating that the rampant piracy of the game before its release triggered Activision to demand action from Microsoft. Pirated copies were widely floating around torrents sites over the weekend, and players with modified consoles may have taken it out for a spin ahead of release.

Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry Hryb, aka Major Nelson has stated, "Players who find their Gamertags banned from Xbox Live have wound up in that situation due to violations of the Xbox Live Terms of Use. The Xbox Live team monitors players for not just cheating, but also for things like threats, racism, profanity, and just being an all around poor sport and ruining the game for others."

He continues, "When a Gamertag comes up as violating our policies for online behavior, the person who owns that Gamertag is punished by being banned from the service. Keep in mind, this isn't just a ban on a particular game. This is a ban on the Xbox Live service as a whole, so you won't be able to go online at all during your ban. Initially, you may be banned for a day, a week, or depending on severity, permanently! Kiss that $50 goodbye."

The ban revokes the consoles' crypto keys, making information saved by them unreadable on other Xboxes. The ban also limits the console's functionality, via blocking HD installation and the use of a media extender. For those banned, they do have the option of buying a new console, but that's a rather pricey option. Users who do move to another Xbox should be able to get back on Xbox Live as Microsoft hasn't yet banned Gamertags -- just placed the ban on individual consoles. When it gets down to it, it appears that as Major Nelson pointed out, over 1 million Xbox users are out a bit of money and enjoyment because Microsoft decided to crack down hard on console modding.

Nano-sized Micelles Used to Treat Spinal Cord Injury

Micelles are commonly used in biomedicine to deliver drugs to tissue

Spinal cord injuries can be the most devastating of any type of injury sustained in an accident. The injuries can leave the victim paralyzed and can lead to death. Research into the treatment of spinal cord injuries is well funded and being undertaken around the world.

A group of researchers at Purdue University have discovered a new way to repair damaged nerve fibers in spinal cord injuries. The researchers are using nano-spheres injected into the blood shortly after the accident to repair the nerve fibers. The nano-spheres are synthetic copolymer micelles.

These spheres are used for drug delivery and are about 60nm in size making them about 100 times smaller than the diameter of a red blood cell. The spheres are being studied as a method to deliver drugs to targeted cells in the body, like cancer cells. The Purdue researchers have demonstrated that the micelles themselves can repair damaged axons. Axons are nerve fibers in the body that transmit electrical impulses to the spinal cord.

"That was a very surprising discovery," said Ji-Xin Cheng, an professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and Department of Chemistry. "Micelles have been used for 30 years as drug-delivery vehicles in research, but no one has ever used them directly as a medicine."

One of the features of these micelles is that they combine two types of polymers. One of the polymers is hydrophobic and the other is hydrophilic (water hating and water loving). The hydrophobic polymer can be loaded with drugs to treat disease.

In the Purdue research, the micelles are used instead of conventional membrane sealing agents. The outside of the micelles can be coated with poly ethylene glycol (PEG) and with the coating they are not quickly filtered by the kidney or captured by the liver. That gives the micelles enough time to reach the site of tissue and nerve damage inside the body. The researchers say that the micelles coated with PEG can be used in non-toxic concentrations.

"With the micelles, you need only about 1/100,000th the concentration of regular polyethylene glycol," Cheng said.

Researchers at Purdue have been using PEG to treat spinal cord injuries in animals and have shown that PEG targets damaged cells and seals the damaged area thereby reducing further damage. The PEG also helps to restore cell function.

During testing the researchers found that treatment with PEG without using micelles was able to restore about 18% of axons in a segment of damaged spinal cord. When treated with PEG infused micelles 60% of the axons in the damaged area recovered. Micelle treated animals recovered the coordinated use of all four limbs while those treated without micelles did not.

The experiment mimics what happens in a traumatic spinal cord injury and the findings have shown that the treatment with micelles could be used to repair damage caused to the spinal cord from compression injuries. The research is funded by a grant from Showalter Trust from Purdue and a grant from the Indiana Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research Fund.

Google Seeks Mobile Web Advertising Domination, Buys AdMob for $750 Million

Google enters yet another market with AdMob purchase

Search and advertising giant Google has purchased mobile web advertising technology firm AdMob for $750 million in stock.

The mobile internet experience on mobile phones and PDAs has been improving rapidly, but mobile web access still suffers from interoperability and usability problems. Part of this is due to the small size of the screens of used, as well as hardware limitations. Despite these problems, there are now hundreds of millions of mobile internet users, resulting in a fury of investment as companies seek to exploit this new market.

Apple iPhone and Google Android users browse the internet more often than anyone else, contributing to Google's 5x mobile search advertising growth over the past two years. A quarter of those iPhone and Android users spend nearly 90 minutes per day using applications on their devices, according to Google.

AdMob was formed in 2006 to provide specialized advertising to the mobile web. Although mobile ad spending is only estimated to reach $416 million in 2009, mobile ad spending has been growing in excess of 30% annually. AdMob has already partnered with hundreds of companies, including Ford, Coca-Cola, Electronic Arts, Proctor & Gamble, and Paramount Pictures. Their advertising platform has already served up over 125 billion impressions on the 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications that make up their publisher network.

AdMob also has unique data collection and data mining capabilities that Google may also be interested in exploiting.

"Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time," said Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management at Google. "AdMob is the quintessential Silicon Valley startup, generating impressive year on year revenue growth, and we're excited to welcome this talented team to Google."

Regardless of the negative connotations of advertising, it remains the primary source of income for content providers who have eschewed the subscription-based business model. Many app developers also rely on advertising revenues to provide their apps for free.

"I think people underestimate how important ads have been to funding the development of innovative content on the internet. Our goal all along at AdMob has been to make it possible for developers and publishers to bring their products and ideas to mobile with the same business model," said Omar Hamoui, Founder and CEO of AdMob.

Google believes that this deal can only help accelerate development of the mobile web. It plans to offer mobile advertising to its massive advertiser base and rapidly increasing the amount of advertising revenue available. They believe this will offer a tremendous incentive to develop content and applications, as they will know that they is an advertising base there for them, allowing them to focus more on their users and less on how to generate revenue.

"We're proud of the progress we've made towards accomplishing this goal, and joining Google will only accelerate this process, ultimately leading to very real benefits for end users around the world. As publishers and developers generate more revenue from their mobile products, they will invest more, and their mobile offerings will become richer, more creative and more robust," added Hamoui.

Google denies any attempt to discourage competition, noting that AdMob is just one of more than a dozen mobile ad networks in the U.S. that have proliferated in recent years. AdMob's smaller competitors include Millenial, JumpTap, and Quattro Wireless.

AOL acquired Third Screen Media in 2007 and runs it as the mobile ad subsidiary of its Advertising.com network. Microsoft bought ScreenTonic in 2007 as well, while Yahoo took over Actionality later that year as part of its mobile push.

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