[Edhotmetal]

I just installed the windows technical preview for windows 10 the other day and I think it's great so far. Has anyone else tried it? What do you think?

[LHN91]

I'm running it on my desktop - couple of relatively minor issues, but otherwise it's pretty good.

[Edhotmetal]

I like that windows finally recognizes when you plug in headphones so it doesn't blast your ears out. 

[Scooby_Doo]

I like that windows finally recognizes when you plug in headphones so it doesn't blast your ears out. 

Maybe it's a mobo feature, but mine does that. (win 8)

[Patriot]

Excuse my ignorance, but Windows 10? as in TEN, that comes after NINE..

Or did 9 get renumbered to 8.1 and they decided to count from 10 on?
I'm confused, honestly confused

[The E]

Excuse my ignorance, but Windows 10? as in TEN, that comes after NINE..

Or did 9 get renumbered to 8.1 and they decided to count from 10 on?
I'm confused, honestly confused

There's a very stupid reason for this. See, there are a lot of programs out there which check for the Windows version by retrieving the OS name and checking if it starts with "Windows 9"; if it does, the routines for Windows 95/98 activate. This is obviously not going to work out too well.

[Dragon]

Interesting. Talk about lazy programming, it likely did seem like a good idea at the time, but despite programs being updated, old code often lingers around surprisingly long (especially if concerned with legacy OS support).

[LHN91]

At least one site explicitly noted that several core Java libraries have this kind of code.

[Patriot]

Excuse my ignorance, but Windows 10? as in TEN, that comes after NINE..

Or did 9 get renumbered to 8.1 and they decided to count from 10 on?
I'm confused, honestly confused

There's a very stupid reason for this. See, there are a lot of programs out there which check for the Windows version by retrieving the OS name and checking if it starts with "Windows 9"; if it does, the routines for Windows 95/98 activate. This is obviously not going to work out too well.

HA, that is actually rather funny xD

[AtomicClucker]

So, does Windows blend?

And, does it do back flips?

If not then I'll be sorely disappointed.

[Luis Dias]

Excuse my ignorance, but Windows 10? as in TEN, that comes after NINE..

Or did 9 get renumbered to 8.1 and they decided to count from 10 on?
I'm confused, honestly confused

There's a very stupid reason for this. See, there are a lot of programs out there which check for the Windows version by retrieving the OS name and checking if it starts with "Windows 9"; if it does, the routines for Windows 95/98 activate. This is obviously not going to work out too well.

HA, that is actually rather funny xD

It's actually the poorest reason ever. Were I Microsoft impersonated, I'd absolutely troll every single one of these applications and do a Windows 9 anyway. If the apps ****ed up, their problem.

[MP-Ryan]

It's actually the poorest reason ever. Were I Microsoft impersonated, I'd absolutely troll every single one of these applications and do a Windows 9 anyway. If the apps ****ed up, their problem.

While it's absolutely true, that won't stop the vast majority of people from screeching at Microsoft for it.

[The E]

It's actually the poorest reason ever. Were I Microsoft impersonated, I'd absolutely troll every single one of these applications and do a Windows 9 anyway. If the apps ****ed up, their problem.

Sure. But then MS could basically write off a bunch of business customers. I'll bet you that a lot of this crap code can be found in some business-relevant apps, making businesses that already passed on WIn 8 less likely to switch to 10. From MS' perspective, Win 8 was another Vista in terms of success, they cannot do two Vistas in a row.

[Luis Dias]

Yeah I totally know that it would be a massive kluster**** that MS can't cope with, gladly I'm not MS impersonated.

And you really have a measure of how bloated and ridiculous Windows has become when even the name itself has become a legacy programming problem.

[Dragon]

Remember, the general idea is that Windows is fully backwards-compatible. It's not entirely true, some things (like sound in Supereme Commander...) just plain don't work, but most things do (I'm using a Win 98-era Windows Commander and it runs just fine on 8. Talk about robust). I suppose you could shave off a lot of stuff if you did away with that concept, but it'd likely cause a whole lot of issues for old programs. MS has a good reason to care about legacy stuff, too, businesses wouldn't exactly like rewriting their programs with each Windows upgrade. By now, after 10 or so Windows versions, it's understandable that it accumulated some cruft.

Also, it's not like MS is at fault for that particular legacy issue. It's lazy programmers using Windows name instead of internal version number for identifying system version. It's not a very good practice, but that doesn't mean it isn't common. It's just another example of boneheaded programming decision biting someone after a few years of being "good enough". That's why you write things right from the start, and avoid sloppy solutions like that.

[Zacam]

Windows 7 was the first purchased OS version I ever went for (for DiY system building).

Windows 10, depending on how it shakes out through the Tech Preview and iterations, might just be the next thing to go for with current/future generation hardware.

Still not a fan of the start menu changes, but I do like that there is control over it and that it even exists as it does in the first place without having to require a 3rd party utility. And while I've never used 8/8.1, from observation of their use, the context in 10 is much better.

[karajorma]

For all their many many faults, blaming the naming change being necessary on Microsoft is like blaming Y2K on Dionysius Exiguus.

[Phantom Hoover]

It's actually the poorest reason ever. Were I Microsoft impersonated, I'd absolutely troll every single one of these applications and do a Windows 9 anyway. If the apps ****ed up, their problem.

While it's absolutely true, that won't stop the vast majority of people from screeching at Microsoft for it.

A while back, probably during the Win95 or 98 era, some MS programmers were working on making use of the HLT instruction on Intel chips. It's meant to shut down the CPU until there's significant input from the hardware, so it's useful to lower power consumption on laptops. The problem was, on many of the laptops of the time -- some of them from a major manufacturer -- the instruction would just lock the computer up completely, so they had to drop the feature. Some time after the OS was released some 3rd-party tools were released that could do the same thing, and of course everyone tut-tutted at Microsoft for their laziness and stupidity.

[Luis Dias]

For all their many many faults, blaming the naming change being necessary on Microsoft is like blaming Y2K on Dionysius Exiguus.

It's absolutely their fault. I can't imagine Apple for instance ever doing anything remotely like this for this same reason. If their new versions of the OS or apps create backward compatibility problems, then either people move on or deal with it. And that's the best attitude for these things. That MS is having to ****ing change the name of their OS because some odd programmers were amazingly lazy 10 years ago is truly astounding. It reflects precisely on how ****ed MS is now that they can't afford to have some weird things happening with some odd moronic programs. They can't afford the small quakes here and there. And they can't afford them because people are just tired of MS shenanigans for decades now.

So yes, it's 100% their fault. And I'm going to laugh about this for years, if not decades. "Hey, remember when Windows went straight from 8 to 10?"

[The E]

Yep. In a way, this is absolutely MS' fault for guaranteeing backwards compatibility with ancient programs; But given that that's the reason why MS is as big as it is, it's really hard to blame them for it.