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Why Are Operating System Version Names So Absurd?
jfruh writes "Apple's spent more than a decade on version 10 — or, rather, X — of its flagship operating system, with .x versions named after big cats (and many of them, it turns out, after the same big cats). Ubuntu Linux is scrambling to find ever more obscure animals to alliteratively name its versions after. And let's not even talk about Windows, whose current shipping OS is sold as Windows 7 but is really Windows NT 6.1. Why is this area of software marketing so ridiculous?"
It helps when you're googling to know which software version you're in. Sometimes it's easier to Google for "Ubuntu Boring Beaver" than "Ubuntu 11.04" or whatever. Likewise with Windows, noone ever calls it Windows NT so noone would bother searching for Windows NT 6.1 issues.
It's all in the marketing, as many have stated.
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i suppose MsDOS 6.22, windows 3.11, system V and AmigaOS 3.1 were much more meaningfull, right? jeez, TFA is a waste of time
...because convincing people to pay $200 to upgrade from Windows NT 6.0 to Windows NT 6.1 is not as easy as telling them it's a whole new version of Windows.
Also, Apple uses the big cat theme for the same reason. Tell somebody you want $30 to upgrade them from 10.7 to 10.8 and you wouldn't have much success. On the flip side, there's not enough of a difference between each version of Mac OS X to warrant each getting its own major number. They're all based on the same underlying kernel and subsystems but have new features and UI improvements as the big selling point.
You missed a couple of NT releases, here is the complete list:
3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, 2000, XP/2003, Vista/2008, 7/2008R2, 8/2012
I can't blame you for missing 3.51, although it was a separate release from 3.5. I also can't blame you for completely dismissing the existence of Vista, I know I would like to.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
This is correct. MS changes the kernel major version number when they introduce major (sometimes backward-incompatible) driver-interface changes. They actually aren't always backward-incompatible; NT6.0 (Vista) would actually load most NT5.1 (XP) or even 5.0 (2000) drivers just fine... but it wasn't generally supported, and the installers would freak out at the changed major version number (this could be worked around by running in Compatibility Mode to spoof the version info, among other things). Besides, some drivers (notably network and printer drivers, which had significant interface changes) just *didn't* work correctly, if at all, with NT6.x. Windows 8 is still NT 6.2 because, although they've removed a few more of the old NT5.x driver interfaces, the 6.x drivers will still work.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Apple's animal names started as internal code names (intended to obscure what was being worked on), that leaked out. Rumor sites would talk about the upcoming project 'Puma', not really knowing much about it, and then it became apparent that this was the next version of the OS, so the same sites would continue to refer to it as 'Puma' to keep things consistent.
Repeat again with 'Jaguar', but this time Apple's marketing department noticed that people liked the name, and decided to continue using it themselves. The next code name was then chosen with marketing's involvement....
'Sensible' is a curse word.
It's whatever colour Apple wants it to be.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.