7 ms·
if (osName.startsWith("windows 9"))
- e40 12y agoWindows 10 makes more sense now!
- AsakiIssa 12y agoNow it makes sense why they are calling it Windows 10! To avoid OS String detection edge cases against "Windows 95/98"
- happycube 12y ago... except that in a lot of cases apps'll see "Windows 6.4"
- Eyas 12y agoright, well-written apps should ask for version number, which would be 6.x. The question is how to handle the wealth of poorly written apps out there? Especially keeping in mind that poorly written != useless/bad, at least not always.
- jrochkind1 12y agoPlus they had to catch up with OSX. I imagine future versions will be Windows 10 II, Windows 10 III, Windows 10 IV, Windows 10 V, etc.
- GHFigs 12y agoSo why not "Windows X"? Oh...
- jrochkind1 12y agoFor unix interoperability and palandromic satisfaction, we can now offer you X Windows for Windows X. Discounts for straight-edgers (xWWx for sXe!)
- rory096 12y ago"Coyote" "Jackal" "Fox" "Dingo" ... "Redondo Beach"
- computerslol 12y agoI prefer to imagine the world where windows version names mirror street fighter version names. "Super Windows X Turbo: World Warriors Edition" sounds pretty sweet to me.
- wmf 12y agoEven that is too consistent. Maybe Windows 10.1, Windows 10.1 Update, Windows 10.1 Update Extended, etc. (I guess the downvoters haven't installed Windows 8.1 Update.)
- eloisant 12y agoAt some point maybe they'll take a hint from their Xbox division and call it Windows One.
- Mindless2112 12y agoWindows 10 is supposedly going to be the "last major version" of Windows. [1] [1] http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-christens-the-next-version-of-windows-as-windows-10-7000034196/ http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-christens-the-next-version-of...
- tbrock 12y agoDon't they say that every time?
- wolfgke 12y agoAlso DirectX 11 was originally supposed to be the last major DirectX version with only some minor updates planned, since Microsoft saw no additional parts of the graphics pipeline that could additionally accelerated by hardware (Source: some AMD talk a few years ago). A few months ago DirectX 12 was announced (and it's quite probable that AMD's Mantle was the reason for this roadmap change).
- brute 12y agoNot only OSX but OSX 10.10 That are a lot of 10s.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- serve_yay 12y agoBut, the marketing name doesn't have to match the version identifier string. This issue would have been super-easy to work around if they wanted to call it Windows 9. Hell, put two spaces before 9. Make it "Windows Version 9" instead of "Windows 9". Whatever. MS does this all the time, shimming around people's broken & crappy app code. This looks like no sweat to me.
- vacri 12y agoWhy is it so necessary that Windows 9 be the next in the list? I mean, it's not a particularly standard list for user workstations: 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8.
- serve_yay 12y agoYep, that too. I just seriously doubt this was the reason. Marketing and technology are only tenuously related, as we know :)
- badthingfactory 12y agoI was actually rather surprised when this version wasn't called "Windows One"
- BruceIV 12y agoI can't seem to find the link again, but I think I read a Microsoft blog post somewhere saying that that name was already taken (by a Mr. Gates, circa 1985).
- chx 12y agoI heard that too but http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Windows_1.0 http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Windows_1.0 seriously? Who would mix that up? Also, given "One product family. One platform. One store" and the Xbox One they would have a cool One theme to build on.
- 12y ago
- consultutah 12y agoThat is very scary...
- colinbartlett 12y agoCan someone explain this? Does this really have anything to do with why they are calling it Windows 10? Is there really any known rationale for skipping?
- rando289 12y agoIt has nothing to do with it, although it may have been part of their plan to spread this rumor to the programming community, which would really make it be part of their calculus. how big corporations pick names is actually quite interesting: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/title-tk/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/title-tk/
- Someone1234 12y ago> It has nothing to do with it [Citation Needed]
- rando289 12y agoI gave a citation, and it's is about 100x more authoritative than the random internet comment which this story is based on. I think people are dumb is why I got 3 downvotes and ignored while the other gets front page hacker news status.
- slashnull 12y agoI don't know if Microsoft outsources product naming, but with all that rebranding they do all the time, they just have to be a goldmine for naming companies
- ericras 12y agoFrom http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/new_windows_version_will_be_called_windows_10/ckwq83x http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/new_windo... "Microsoft dev here, the internal rumours are that early testing revealed just how many third party products that had code of the form if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9")) { /* 95 and 98 */ } else { and that this was the pragmatic solution to avoid that."
- Smudge 12y agoSo, by this versioning logic, Microsoft would also have to skip Windows 70-89, and many versions after 99, since 10-69 and 90-99 would be used by that time. They'd also have to skip 95 and 98, of course. Am I missing any other versions, or can we expect 11, 12, 13, etc (all the way until 69)?
- Eyas 12y agoThe point is that checking of the OS name starts with "Windows 9" is a common thing that apps did. Its not about Microsoft logic, its about breaking existing apps. They are badly written, but the only person who will pay is the user, not the dev.
- Smudge 12y agoNo, I get it. I was just extrapolating, since presumably devs are still checking if the name starts with "Windows 7", "Windows 8", etc. But maybe they're not. Either way, if it's the user's problem, it's Microsoft's problem.
- personjerry 12y agoPeople only checked for the 9 because 98 and 95 both start with 9 and it was easy to support both at the same time. Other versions can be more explicitly checked.
- wmf 12y agoWindows 69 probably isn't a great name.
- shawnbaden 12y agoNot unprecedented. They skipped Office 13.
- ahmetkun 12y agosame thing happened with Opera 10. you were notified that your browser is 'too old'
- lmkg 12y agoYup. I'm using Opera 12.16. The User Agent starts with Opera 9.80 (the last version before 10 was 9.6x). Apparently, too many sites would use a regex to parse the first digit after "Opera" and check if it was higher than 6 or 7. Opera was thus forced to identify itself inaccurately.
- harryh 12y agoThere are many ways that could have dealt with this problem that wouldn't have involved changing the name of the product as it appears in on the box. It's silly to think that this is the reason for skipping version 9. They did that for marketing reasons.
- kmontrose 12y agoSuch as? App compat's out (ie. "Run this program in compatibility mode for"), too many libraries. They'd never get an accurate enough list of affected programs. They can't change the reported OS name, too many apps display it; and it'd be crazy weird (a bug for all practical purposes) to have programs claim they're on "Windows 10" while the box says "Windows 9". Probably can't change the format of the name either, ie. "Windows(tm) 9" or "Microsoft Windows 9" or whatever; I bet tons of apps just check for "Windows " as well. It's an unfortunate choice, but I don't really see an alternative if they wanted a numeric version number.
- harryh 12y agoSpend some time reading The Old New Thing. Microsoft's ability to deal with buggy applications is world class. It's one of the core competencies of the Windows team. There are not too many libraries.
- Arnavion 12y agokmontrose is right. App compat is an application-level thing, not a library-level thing. Applications can load libraries dynamically even if they didn't want to (shell extensions are the classic example here). Do you want explorer.exe to think the OS is named Windows 10 because it loads a library that requires the compat fix?
- harryh 12y agoThe OS can force libraries to behave in different ways when used by different applications.
- anonymfus 12y agoBroader search: https://searchcode.com/?q=startsWith%28%22windows+9%22%29 https://searchcode.com/?q=startsWith%28%22windows+9%22%29
- AsakiIssa 12y agoI have come to realize that 99.9% of these string comparisons examples are in Java. Does Sun/Oracle not trust developers to check `os.version` as well?
- comex 12y agoBecause startsWith is a Java function, and most other Windows applications would be in C or C++, which has a few more variants is a bit harder to search for (especially with the lack of any public regex code search engines).
- boyter 12y agosearchcode.com actually did have regex support for a while. Nobody used it. Probably down to how I implemented it more than anything else. I am looking to add it back in sometime in the future once I roll out SPDX support and a few advanced filtering options (number of lines of code, multi languages etc...)
- comex 12y agoBack when it was searchco.de? I think I might have used it during that time... don't remember. Just know that it would make me extremely happy if you added it back, since I can't find such functionality anywhere on the Internet anymore.
- boyter 12y agoThat's the one. The moment its live ill let you know via twitter.
- mey 12y agoAnd that's just the open source stuff...
- mandeepj 12y agoSo MS fixed Windows 9x (remember y2k? :-) ) problem by renaming its new OS as Windows 10? Jokes apart, Imagine if they had to release a patch for that or for god sake, a new OS :-)
- JosephHatfield 12y ago"Windows 9" would have started causing confusion by the time Microsoft released patch version "Windows 9.5"
- mdisraeli 12y agoReaders of Raymon Chen's blog The Old New Thing may be familiar with exactly this sort of thing, which forced windows 95 to have the version number 3.95, instead of 4.0 [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/13/72476.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/13/72476...]. Making the libraries cope with bad programming is not good practice, but it is what keeps businesses using your software for decades. The Old New Thing really should be standard reading, because this sort of thing is barely the tip of the iceberg. Other similar API avoidances that Microsoft have found programmers using to check things include obscure undocumented registry keys, API implementation bugs (seriously!), the padding data in tangentially related structures returned by API calls, and more
- deciplex 12y agoUgh. I would hate to have that job. At some point you just have to let some idiot's poorly thought-out idea blow up in his face.
- derefr 12y agoIt doesn't blow up in his face; he may not even be in business any more. He's the guy who wrote the driver for the crap scanner your customers use. The only person to blame when an update makes their scanner stop working is you, the company who shipped the update.
- deciplex 12y agoYou're right in the sense that the only person the customer will blame is oftentimes you, and there is some merit in that, and some merit in the idea that you should add dodgy hacks to your code to provide for some backward compatibility. However, the more accommodating you are with this stuff, and the more you clutter up your code base, and the less easily-maintainable your stuff gets as a result, the less you are able to deliver later on. And while, contrary to your argument here, you actually stand a fair chance of the end user realizing it's the printer drivers that suck and not your OS, the cries of "Windows sucks now" are the fault of nobody but Microsoft.
- lalmachado 12y agoand this one to: https://searchcode.com/?q=indexOf%28%22windows+9%22%29 https://searchcode.com/?q=indexOf%28%22windows+9%22%29
- mkagenius 12y agoWouldn't it break even if the control goes to the else part? I mean, how does the programmer know that Windows 9 will not break in the else part? (and only break when clubbed with Windows 95 or Windows 98)