Windows 10

Something like that, my understanding was that some lazy coders might have used the 9 as shortcut to identify 95/98, thus potentially causing compatibility issues and breaking software that would've otherwise worked.

KuoH

reverend said:
That's actually to improve compatibility with old code which just checked the major version number - kind of like the old Year 2000 bug.
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Why didn't they stick with the real version number, from the days of the Windows 3 and 3.1, instead of jumping from the year's name to XP and Vista (what did those even mean?), then to 7 without ever existed a 6, 5, 4, etc. Go figure.
 
I really shouldn't pile on, since I actually don't dislike Windows 10 as much as its predecessor and this is old news, but...

Something
Happened
In
Testing

3dtq5QP.png


KuoH
 
Dashmellow said:
Oh, great!...........Windows X :D
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OSX wasn't the only reason they didn't call it that... X Windows has literally been around for decades...

Module 79L said:
Why didn't they stick with the real version number, from the days of the Windows 3 and 3.1, instead of jumping from the year's name to XP and Vista (what did those even mean?), then to 7 without ever existed a 6, 5, 4, etc. Go figure.
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short answer: marketing. there was a big kerfuffle about windows "7" actually being version 6.1 when it came out, and that died down after a while too.

long version:
win9x (and ME) was version 4.x, but there was also Windows NT4.
NT5 was called Win2000
5.x was called XP (and server 2003)
6.0 = vista/server2008
6.1 = win7/server2008r2
6.2 = win8/server2012
6.3 = win8.1/server2012r2
6.4 = win10 "technical previews"
not my source, but a good reference for everything up to 8.0: http://www.smattie.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2-OS-Version.png

edit: ARS Technica:
Why Windows 10 isn’t version 6 any more and why it will probably work -
Windows 7 wasn't version 7.0, and Windows 8 wasn't version 8.0. Windows 10 is 10.0.

it's not entirely unheard of to just jump versions. firefox releases a new MAJOR version (the number ahead of the first decimal) every 6 weeks, even if it doesn't include any new functionality and is only bugfixes. chrome has a similar release schedule. even Linux itself recently jumped the kernel version from the 2.3 that it'd been on for ages to 3.0, "just because".
 
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kuoh said:
I really shouldn't pile on, since I actually don't dislike Windows 10 as much as its predecessor and this is old news, but...

Something
Happened
In
Testing

3dtq5QP.png


KuoH
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at least they got rid of that stupid emoticon that 8.x has when it breaks. but they couldn't get away from blue, could they? ;)
 
niko said:
"Big Brother" is getting bigger
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I don't think that your emails on other mail servers are safer. Once upon a time there was Lavabit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
The service suspended its operations on August 8, 2013 after US government ordered it to turn over its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) private keys.

Maybe https://www.hushmail.com/ or https://protonmail.ch/ or https://countermail.com/ or https://www.neomailbox.com/ are good solutions. If not, OpenPGP or an attached container of TC are good enough and let you use the common mail servers.
niko said:
At least back then I had quite nice hand writing, where communication was done via Mail-Post
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Yes, there was a hassle to open those envelopes and read your letters.
Gibson99 said:
maybe the EU browser election screen will make a sudden comeback...
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If they want browser selection, why not Notepad selection or Wordpad selection ...why not media player selection ? or antivirus&firewall selection ?
 
Gibson99 said:
short answer: marketing.
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Well, for me real marketing would've been if they followed a logical series, so that people could see a time sequence or at least a number sequence that made sense. The way MS did it it's more like a marketing flop! :)
 
Module 79L said:
Well, for me real marketing would've been if they followed a logical series, so that people could see a time sequence or at least a number sequence that made sense. The way MS did it it's more like a marketing flop! :)
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Me too, but when you change marketing strategies as often as they did, it's amazing it's as coherent as it is.
 
Interestingly, Apple managed to go consecutively from OS 1.0 right through to OS X, completely changing both Macintosh hardware and software technologies along the way while coming up with some remarkable juggling tricks to continue support for legacy software throughout. For example, there was the Classic Environment that allowed applications compatible with OS 9 to run on the entirely new Unix based OS X . There was also Rosetta which allowed older PowerPC applications to run on most Macintosh Intel machines.
 
Dashmellow said:
Interestingly, Apple managed to go consecutively from OS 1.0 right through to OS X, completely changing both Macintosh hardware and software technologies along the way while coming up with some remarkable juggling tricks to continue support for legacy software throughout. For example, there was the Classic Environment that allowed applications compatible with OS 9 to run on the entirely new Unix based OS X . There was also Rosetta which allowed older PowerPC applications to run on most Macintosh Intel machines.
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not to diminish those accomplishments, but it's a LOT easier to do when you have a much smaller installed base, and very limited hardware variations to support. It's also why they can update iOS with the cadence they do - they only have to support like 5 or 10 devices, not the hundreds of android devices out there.
 
Gibson99 said:
not to diminish those accomplishments, but it's a LOT easier to do when you have a much smaller installed base, and very limited hardware variations to support. It's also why they can update iOS with the cadence they do - they only have to support like 5 or 10 devices, not the hundreds of android devices out there.
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I agree, but it's not necessarily the number of different Windows machines out there or the market share. The Mac OS encompasses a vast number of different legacy laptop and desktop hardware variations over the years that were and in some cases are still in service, not just the few they have on the market at any given time that are essentially the same such as iOS devices. It includes perhaps 100 million users. And you're talking here about long term support and seamless integration of older software that ran on an entirely different chip and then transitioned it again into a completely different OS environment. I don't see the installed base making a huge difference in the challenge of pulling it off regardless of how many millions of units they sold.
 
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kuoh said:
I really shouldn't pile on, since I actually don't dislike Windows 10 as much as its predecessor and this is old news, but...

Something
Happened
In
Testing

3dtq5QP.png


KuoH
Click to expand...

I got a couple of these during setup, about the most pointless error message I've seen yet, no clue at all as to what the problem was
 
@jokiin curious to know what your travel netbook video performance of 1080P videos is like after Win 10
I remember only Media Player would play smoothly on that one trade show video
 
I haven't upgraded that one yet, not sure if I should before October in case it makes things worse

did my desktop at home which has dual 22" monitors, had drama with the video card but eventually got it sorted
 
OK so for consistency... the official Build number of windows hasn't always correlated to the "version" of windows, but now it actually kind of does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions#Windows_NT

the build number for the release (RTM) version of win10 is 10240. looking at previous versions in the table above, very few of the build versions line up, but win2000 and win7 were close.

too bad about the inconsistent marketing... "windows experience"? really? at least 95, 98 and 2000 (and server 03/08) made some sort of sense since it was roughly when they were released, but what the hell is R2? "oh, let's not call it a service pack - we'll make it a complete OS "upgrade" and call it something else. like 8.1. :rolleyes:
 
Dont like 95, not that i tried it or had bad luck with it, but it remind me that in 95 i still had the best job i ever had, untill the "GD" goverment ruined that too.
 
kamkar1 said:
Dont like 95, not that i tried it or had bad luck with it, but it remind me that in 95 i still had the best job i ever had, untill the "GD" goverment ruined that too.
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I stayed on 3.11 till 98 came out, fixing most of the issues w/ 95. stayed on that till i started beta testing nt5 (before they decided to call it 2000). i didn't have the issues other gamers had w/ 2000 - it ran all my stuff just fine. but then again i didn't overclock anything, so maybe that's why.
 
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