[QUOTE=HAL 9000 Computer]
I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. <snip> This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeapordize it.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you. I know very very little about this subject and wanted to make a 2001 joke, but I was afraid of being the dummy know nothing making a stupid joke in a serious conversation.
You stole my joke… Damn you!
I’ll supply the youtube clip though.
To the OP, possibly the same reason they went from the Xbox360 to the Xbox One.I imagine they will stick to their internal version numbering - unless they have completely rewritten the kernel or something (which I don’t think they have).
I’ll confirm this later - I’m downloading the technical preview right now.
The two version strings are:
‘Microsoft Windows’
‘6.4.9841’
It’s the first of these strings that (long ago) would have returned ‘Windows 98’, but Microsoft stopped putting any version numbering in it after (I think) XP - so skipping Win9 definitely has nothing at all to do with legacy software mistakenly thinking it’s running in Win9x.
The minor version segment of the formal version number is interestingly high. I won’t be surprised if the actual release version clicks over to 6.5.x (although I know version numbering doesn’t really work like that)
Marketing and distance from a flawed product. Remember when Vista came out and MS said they weren’t going to number the OS releases anymore? Then Vista fell on its face out of the gate and we got Windows 7.
Windows 8 went over like a wet fart at church and Vista ruined non number names so we get Windows 10. Also just announcing skipping a number gets people talking which helps them with branding.
I also wouldn’t be shocked they timed this announcement to coincide with Apple being in the dog house with perceived iOS and iPhone 6 issues.
Probably because of the widespread rumours that Windows 9 would be a free upgrade.
Focus groups.
Microsoft isn’t sitting a bunch of boffins down in a room and having them guess about what will be the most appealing to customers based on weird superstitions, rumors, odd tech theories, or other junk. They’re too big of a company for that, and too corporate.
No, they’re just gathering up a bunch of potential names and presenting them to focus groups to see which one people like the best. Windows 10 won out because people liked it best, and now everyone’s trying to work backwards to figure out why they liked it best, but they’re looking in the wrong place. Don’t look internal to Microsoft, just look at people in general. People like 10 better than 9. Figure that out and you’ll have your answer.
Amen. Outlook, Explorer and Essential should be retired immediately.
If this is a brand new base, then it should be Windows 7.0. But that would be confusing with the existence of Windows 7, so I expected them to jump up. like they did with Windows Media Player.
But if it’s still the Vista core, I guess keeping it 6.x works. But I’m not sure that’s the best foundation for what they are proposing to do from now on.
Do you have any cite for the idea that HAL was the problem? My understanding was that Windows 2000 was just really buggy, because they tried to do too much with it. Was software in 2000 really needing direct hardware access, rather than using DirectX? Because DirectX was Microsoft’s answer to the HAL problem. There were Windows 95 programs that just switched the computer into DOS mode just to get direct access to the hardware, and Microsoft wanted to stop that.
I mean, you’d had over 2 years for software developers to move to the NT-only concept, and 5 years of having access to DirectX. Were there really that many programs that wouldn’t work? I know I very rarely encountered such on Windows XP, despite running a lot of retro games (the most likely to want direct access) and you say compatibility was about the same.
Well, then they’re really screwed, because the next version will have to be 20, then 40, and 50, and we all just have to hope that programmers stop doing that before they use 60 because after that, we’re outta numbers and we have to start calling them, oh, I don’t know, cat names?
Personally, I like the “7 ate 9” theory.
MS is located in a part of the PNW that kind of has a salty flavor, they should play that up,
Windows Orca
Windows Seal
Windows Sockeye
Windows Geoduck
Windows Albatross
Windows Hammerhead
Windows Kelp
Windows Spongebob
It wasn’t quite that arbitrary, though it was a marketing decision. As I understand it (from journalists at the time) previous versions of Windows had been so late that application developers started waiting rather than implementing to the new APIs. MS wanted applications to be ready to hit the road ASAP after the release, so they named it 95 early on as a promise that it would actually be released in 1995. And it was. In September, IIRC?
Of course, journalists BS a lot. I was a UNIX and RTOS programmer at the time, using Windows on my desktop or laptop (with a number of reclaimed Macs at home.)
Engineer_Comp_Geek has the history down accurately as far as I know from my son who worked on the NT development team. Incidentally, Dave Cutler, who headed the team brought a lot over from the DEC OS that he helped develop.
My take is that they when they realized how fucked up this OS was, they decided to give it an even number as a warning.
My son is now working on improving the UI or Word. That is such a sysphian task that I predict it will never succeed. I have never used Word myself, although my wife does and hates it.
We all know we have about 5 years before we get Windows 20/20.
You may be joking, but actually being able to use some of that upper memory made a big difference in my setup in what I was able to run. There was some stuff about real mode, EMM and all that which I have gladly forgotten.
It’s all about back-compat. Apparently there are some significant 3rd party apps that don’t play well with long paths.
Likewise the fact that MAX_PATH is still 256-ish characters. Support for “//?/” format file references is still so spotty in the wild they have to keep the old methods and their limitations alive.
I think Chimera is referring to the shell default value that is used to identify the directories to try if a command is typed without an absolute path. It typically needs to hold several directory options to be useful, and it can go pretty deep.
The problem is that lots of programs define fixed buffers for storing things like PATH. If your program assumes that the maximum length of the PATH is 2048 bytes and the PATH is actually longer than that your program will crash when you get the PATH. The same holds for MAXPATH (the maximum length of a file path). So many programs have hardcoded 256-byte buffers for file paths that there’s no way Microsoft can increase the limit. They are hamstrung by their own success. Some people say “Let the old programs crash” but that’s not good for marketing - nobody will buy the next version of Windows when they hear that the Photoshop they paid $600 for won’t run on it.
I installed Windows 10 this weekend. It’s Windows 7 with a flat UI and the Windows 8 Start screen tacked onto the Start menu. Windows 8 UI apps run in windows instead of taking up the entire screen but they are still as clunky as they were in Windows 8.
I have to give credit to whoever came up with the idea of putting the Start screen on the Start menu. It was a clever way of saving face for Microsoft. They couldn’t just abandon all of the concepts they introduced in Windows 8. That would have looked like an admission that Windows 8 was a complete failure (it was, but they can’t admit it publicly). Windows 10 has the stuff that made Windows 8 so terrible but takes it out of your way so you can ignore it if you want to.