Same here.

But I wonder why my browser needs to provide details about the plugins I have installed to any website I visit. What kind of legitimate use could that have?

Unfortunately, this upgrade broke one of my favorite plugins: Tree Style Tab. A previous upgrade caused the whole tree to be expanded when restoring the tabs at Firefox startup, and now since FF 34 new tabs are no longer opened as a child of the current tab :-(

Version numbers? We can increment them!

There is a bug in the e-mail. It should be 'We therefore ask you to send this email to all your friends and then delete all your files on your harddisk manually'.

You still need some of those files on your harddisk in order to send an e-mail. Friends with less than average intelligence might not realize that.

To make it cross-platform for real is hard. Lots of programmers don't try to avoid platform-specific and write code such as:

string fullname = directoryname + "\" + filename;

...instead of:

fullname = Path.Combine(directoryname, filename);

Another mistake is using explicitly hardcoded paths that only exist in Windows. And another challenge would be case-sensitivity of the filesystem on Linux; this can break programs that were developed and tested on Windows only.

The framework must provide for platform-independent ways to do things so that it is easier/shorter to do it the right way than using a naive but non-portable approach. Or programmers not really thinking things through will simply keep writing non-portable code anyway. The example above illustrates that; it is way more conventient to combine pathnames with such a non-portable string concatenation than it is with the right approach.

Does it run Linux?

Not mentioned in TFA, and I haven't seen anyone talk about it yet in the comments here. Or maybe the answer is so obviously 'yes' that nobody even talks about it anymore.

Quick!! Let's buy some extra licenses now before it's too late!

Oh wait...
Never mind, we switched to Linux a long time ago already :-/

That was exactly my point. The 'negative thinkers/pessimists' worked very hard to solve all Y2K problems, then January 1st, 2000 passed by and all the 'positive thinkers' said "see, there was nothing to worry about" without taking into account all the work that had been done to fix the problems.

See also: Y2K

This reminds me of a John Connor quote from the movie Terminator 2:

"Easy money!"

The whole point of Java is that it is supposed to be platform independent. So you shouldn't need to get the OS version at all.

I know, I know, reality is different. But that might explain the apparent lack of such an API.

Who cares about "success"? Happiness is much more important. It's the simple things in life that matter. The best things in life are free. You don't need a high IQ to be happy.

And this is what is wrong with the world.

Let's turn the situation around: suppose you and your children are walking on the street. Will you still prefer the autonomous car to protect it's single driver at all costs and kill you and your children instead? And then imagine how many autonomous cars will be on the road in the future, all with that same logic built-in...

I wonder if they wrote it more or less from scratch, or if they managed to reuse a lot of code from some other platform (e.g. Office for Mac OS X)?