Possible Reason Behind Version Hop to Windows 10: Compatibility

First time accepted submitter ndykman (659315) writes The Independent reports that a MS developer has suggested a real reason behind the Windows 10 name: old code. More specifically, code that looks for "Windows 9" to determine the Windows version. Fine for Windows 95 or Windows 98, but not so great for a new operating system. The article includes a link that shows that yes, this would be a problem.

Comments

Re:Windows 9X

[ArcadeMan]

Windows 9.8, Secure Edition

11

[Jamu]

It would have been better if they'd gone with Windows 11. One better.

Re:11

[JustOK]

+11 Spinal Tap

How badly coded are Windows applications?

[ArcadeMan]

If something as stupid as the name of the operating system can trip up some applications, what about the rest of the code?

Instead of giving programmers dozens of ways of checking and doing things, they should be forced into doing it one way. Easier to prevent mistakes, check for errors, etc.

Re:How badly coded are Windows applications?

[CaptainDork]

Ah ... grasshopper ...

You will learn as, you progress in your journey, that convenience is a forever code.

I give you, Y2K.

Re:How badly coded are Windows applications?

[thegarbz]

Major fallacy right there. This has nothing to do with windows applications, and nothing to do with giving programmers ways of checking things.

This has everything to do with bad programming, and no Mac and Linux are most definitely not immune from this either. Windows has an API to determine the version number, just like Linux has a way of determining it too. The problem is when programmers don't know or understand the API that things break. It's not even a case of giving programmers different ways of checking things. Different APIs are there for different reasons, the problem is idiot programmers who use the response of one API to infer information they should otherwise have gotten from another.

Re:How badly coded are Windows applications?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Microsoft has a history of treating broken apps very gracefully; this explanation seems perfectly plausible and very much in line with what Raymond Chen writes about on his Old New Thing blog.

Re:How badly coded are Windows applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

The search in the article shows mainly Java applications.

But the coding problem isn't specific to Windows. Opera suffers from this problem and so does every web browser that had a "version 10" that browser strings looked only for "1" or version 20 that looked for a "2" like Firefox.

Opera still by default says its Opera 9.8

But ultimately, garbage code needs to be thrown away and programmers need to stop doing stupid things like this.

Re:How badly coded are Windows applications?

[steelfood]

It's also rather short-sighted, not to mention lazy, to look for "Windows 9.*". I mean, Windows began with version numbers (Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0). There's no reason to think that Microsoft wouldn't go back to version numbers.

At the very least, look for the string "Windows 95" and "Windows 98", since there are really only two versions of Windows relevant to the "Windows 9.*" search string. I know hindsight is 20/20, but this one really was avoidable by the simple principle of not being lazy (even if ignorant).

Re:How badly coded are Windows applications?

[PPH]

Leave it to the software industry to call the Year 2000 problem 'Y2K'. That's how they got into trouble in the first place.

Re:How badly coded are Windows applications?

[dbIII]

I had a Y2K bug introduced in 2008 in Macrovison's piece of shit "protection" software, flexlm, which stopped me running the software I had paid for because a perpetual licence was dated "00" and so was the year 2000.
The phone support guy had never heard of the Y2K bug!
It took a week and a half to sort out and meanwhile three people in the office had to work around it instead of using the software that was "protected". And people wonder why I prefer open source software.

Re:This is Java code

[thegarbz]

GetVersionEx(Inout_ LPOSVERSIONINFO lpVersionInfo);
Returns the major and minor versions, build number, platform id, service pack major and minor, and the product type.

It basically spits out all the crap in that appears on the bottom right corner of windows when you boot up in safemode.
Also unlike the stupid marketing names the OS versions actually make sense.

Windows 8 returns version 6.2.

I call hogwash

[Excelcia]

I call this hogwash. When you ask Windows what version it is in software, it doesn't return its marketing name (Windows 95, Windows 2000), it returns it's platform ID (1 for DOS based, 2 for NT based), and its version numbers in major, minor format. Windows 95 returned 4.0 (platform 1), Windows 98 returned 4.1 (platform 1). Windows 2000 returned 5.0 (platform 2).

better name

[goombah99]

they should have just changed the whole name from "windows" to "Balmers gone, and its safe to us windows again, please come back".

Re: better name

[Anonymous Coward]

2008 is growing on me, but really after half a decade it's likely just Stockholm syndrome.

Re:Doh!

[jellomizer]

I figured it had to do with Roman numerals.
They skipped Windows 4 (IV) and they are skipping version 9 (IX)
I figured there is a bug in the roman numeral check for the numbers the need to subtract before the value.

Re:And Java fail again

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't Windows, the problem is incompetent programmers. Instead of calling the proper API to get the version number, morons are doing things like

if (os.startsWith("Windows 9")

You're right. Failing to close your parens is a sign of an incompetent programmer.

Re:Bullcrap

[Your.Master]

Type this into powershell:

(Get-WmiObject Win32_OperatingSystem).Caption

There's your marketing name.

Took about 60 seconds of Googling to not only find this, but to find it in code that was making the same sort of error we're talking about (not literally the number 9). See this: http://ss64.com/ps/get-wmiobje... -- that's using the -match operator which is a regex comparison, and thus inferring whether it's a server build by a mismatch between the marketing name and the build name..

Granted, I don't think powershell existed on Windows 95. I expect it's just wrapping an API that did exist. If it comes right down to it, the registry itself has the versioning information available to anybody who can use ctrl+f in regedit to find the key, and people do indeed do that.

Trust me, MS doesn't give the slightest concern about any broken Java apps.

No, I don't trust that statement in the slightest. Why would you think that? It's very contrary to Microsoft's behaviour in the past.

I have no idea why they chose to name Windows "Windows 10", and I'm not convinced of this, but this is not so implausible as you seem to think.

Re:Windows 9X

[donaldm]

The whole article is Bull since MS Windows uses the NT kernel and their so called Windows 10 has an NT 6.4 kernel (see here ). For those that won't read the article the following is a list of NT versions from MS Windows Vista.

NT6.0 - MS Windows Vista, Server 2008
NT6.1 - MS Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, Home Server 2011
NT6.2 - MS Windows 8
NT6.3 - MS Windows 8.1
NT6.4 - MS Windows 10

Sure some of the apps my be different (slightly :)) but the basic kernel is only a minor increment. If the developers find difficulty in writing software that can't determine revision difference then I suggest they go back to school. Basically the whole reason to go to version 10 is IMHO marketing hype of which the Microsoft PR department excels (pun intended).