Microsoft: Still a Thing

[Mongrel]

Well, it's not like 9 was any go-

Oh. Right.

[Thad]

...I mean we're not putting 7 in the bad column and 8 in the good one, are we?

[Mongrel]

...I mean we're not putting 7 in the bad column and 8 in the good one, are we?

I dunno about anyone else, but I'm not. I was making a joke about the fact that they conspicuously skipped nine.

10 isn't horrible but I sure wouldn't call it good.

(in before Thad replies "How would you know? You still haven't used it!")

[Upthorn]

Windows 10 is distinctly worse than 8.1 (the actual 9), which was distinctly better than 8, which was distinctly worse than 7...
Windows 11 seems to breaks this pattern, in that everything I've heard about it so far makes it sound like the worst release since ME.

I think Thad's confusion is that the star trek movie rule is often phrased specifically as even numbered films are good, rather than just "they alternate between bad and good".

[Thad]

8.1 (the actual 9)

Nah, there was nothing in 8.1 that would have justified a major-version bump.

Though come to that, there wasn't really anything in 7, 8, or 10 that did, either. Besides marketing.

[beatbandito]

fun fact: win11 previews will force reinstall forever if you try and revert back to 10

[mharr]

Is this double agents trying to boost the Steam Deck or something?

[Upthorn]

8.1 (the actual 9)

Nah, there was nothing in 8.1 that would have justified a major-version bump.

Though come to that, there wasn't really anything in 7, 8, or 10 that did, either. Besides marketing.

It's widely known that 8.1's internal version number was 9.

[Thad]

...no, I think you're confusing 6.3 with 6+3.

[Mazian]

Eh? It was internally version 6.3.

Windows 7 actually being 6.1 under the hood was a running gag when it was new.

[Thad]

Yeah, Windows 2000 was NT 5, and XP was 5.1.

Vista was 6.0; it introduced major breaking changes (perhaps most notably, a rewritten driver stack; hardware drivers for Windows XP and earlier don't work on Windows Vista and later).

Every update since has been an incremental update -- while there have in some cases been major changes on the frontend (particularly in Win8), the backend hasn't seen the same kind of major breaking change since Vista.

Windows 7 was numbered 6.1 internally, but 7 was the more obvious name from a marketing perspective. Similar for 6.2 (8) and 6.3 (8.1).

Windows 10 was initially numbered 6.4 internally, but MS finally decided that having a mismatch between the number on the marketing materials and the number in the development tree wasn't worth the confusion so 6.4 was renumbered as 10 before release.

(I've heard that the reason they skipped 9 was to avoid breaking compatibility with poorly-coded legacy apps that checked the version number for the wildcard Windows 9* to see if a user was running Windows 95 or 98. I've never seen any hard evidence to back that claim up but it's plausible.)

I'm not sure where 11 would fit in a universe where the 6.x numbering had continued, whether it would be 6.5 or 7.0. On the one hand, it's got significant breaking changes that prevent it running on older hardware, which would be an argument in favor of a major-version bump, but on the other hand, I'm not sure how much those changes are actually necessary to get the thing to run; I've heard there are workarounds that will allow it to run on older hardware.

As for my thoughts on Windows 10 in general -- I think it's a great OS in an enterprise environment, where operations can turn off all the shit I hate about it.

The core of Win10 is solid; it's the bullshit piled on top of it that gives me conniptions. Some of the problems from the initial release have been mitigated -- you can turn off most of the telemetry, and AIUI it's a lot less likely to reboot while you're in the middle of watching a goddamn video than it used to be. And I think there's a "restart without installing updates" option now, so if you just want to reboot and not have to sit through a half-hour update installation, you can do that. And there are workarounds for some of the more obnoxious elements -- you can avoid tying your login to an MS account if you don't connect to the Internet until after you're finished with the initial setup.

But it still does shit that drives me nuts -- most notably, the constant fucking advertising. No, I do not want you to advertise MS Office to me in my system tray or my menu bar or ribbon bar or whatever the fuck you call it now; fuck you.

[Upthorn]

Okay, my memory is fucked. Wow.

[Thad]

Happens to the best of us.

I'm not sure how long it took me to figure out that Ubuntu's versioning system was YY.MM but it was an embarrassingly long amount of time.

[mharr]

As for my thoughts on Windows 10 in general -- I think it's a great OS in an enterprise environment, where operations can turn off all the shit I hate about it.

And where the mothership will to some degree support their ability to do that rather than working against it at every turn? Or are corporate ops starting to fight that tide more too?

[Thad]

MS has made a lot of questionable decisions over the years, but I'd be very surprised if even they thought taking control of accounts and software updates away from corporate IT departments would be a viable business strategy.

[Mongrel]

Presumably this is why any version of Windows labelled as being for 'home' use has been grossly inferior to the Enterprise edition, even if they're not substantially different under the hood?

[Brantly B.]

Can confirm that my desktop OEM Professional edition is usable and my laptop Home edition may as well not have a firewall.

[Thad]

Presumably this is why any version of Windows labelled as being for 'home' use has been grossly inferior to the Enterprise edition, even if they're not substantially different under the hood?

Not entirely. A lot of it is just deliberate removal of useful features that have nothing to do with domain controllers, group policy, or other business-specific applications, for no real purpose but to have two different versions at different price points.

[Thad]

Exchange Server bug gets a fix after ruining admin’s New Year’s plans

...At least Y2K and Y2K38 make sense. YYMMDDHHMM -- not stored as a string but as a fucking ten-digit signed integer -- is the stupidest goddamn date/time format I have ever seen.

[Brantly B.]

It's definitely not the first time I've seen an integer used to represent a formatted calendar date though. What's surprising is that nobody else is reporting being bit by this (even though it happens to require a specific set of decisions, I'm sure at least 20 or 30 other people in the universe did the exact same thing).