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Windows Kernel Version Bumped To 10.0
jones_supa writes: In Windows, the kernel version number is once again in sync with the product version. Build 9888 of Windows 10 Technical Preview is making the rounds in a private channel and the kernel version has indeed been bumped from 6.4 to 10.0. Version 6.x has been in use since Windows Vista. Neowin speculates that this large jump in version number is likely related to the massive overhaul of the underlying components of the OS to make it the core for all of Microsoft's products. The company is working to consolidate all of its platforms into what's called OneCore, which, as the name implies, will be the one core for all of Microsoft's operating systems. It will be interesting to see if this causes any software compatibility issues with legacy applications.
They actually had a good reason to skip 9. Too many third party products checked whether they were running on Windows 95 or Windows 98 by matching the string "Windows 9". It would have been the Microsoft version of the Y2K problem.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
They didn't rewrite the kernel from scratch so that puts it into 6.4 - 6.99999 range.
Just a minor nitpick... Software version numbers are not decimal numbers but separate units (major.minor).
After 6.9 comes 6.10. After 6.99999 comes 6.100000.
That's the reason given but it makes no sense. The Windows API doesn't give out names like that. The Windows 95 version was internally identified as version 4.0. Windows 98 was version 4.10. (ME was 4.90, and a separate flag indicates if the system was Windows NT-based, allowing programs to known the difference between Windows 95 (4.0) and Windows NT 4.0.)
So that explanation makes no sense.
Even more, if you check out the documentation on getting version information, the version returned is now tied to the application manifest as of Windows 8.1 anyway. So you'll only ever get version 6.2 (Windows 8) back unless you explicitly target later version of Windows, meaning the jump to version 10 can't cause problems with older software.
This whole "Windows 9*" check thing makes no sense. Well, except for Java applications, because Sun actually built Java to pull the version number and then translate it into a string rather than expose it via any public Java API. I guess the idea was that you shouldn't need to know the OS your Java app is running on, but as anyone who's done anything with Java knows, that never actually works in practice. As far as I know that's the only case where you'd ever be doing version checks against strings under Windows.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Bad programmers seldom use APIs correctly.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!