So what do you think that Java API would return on Windows 9? Don't you think Oracle would have it return the string "Windows 9"?

Perhaps you should read some of the stories on The Old New Thing about the hoops MS jumps through to maintain compatibility. Here's one (of many). In that one, we find that MS changed the internal implementation of critical sections in Vista, but found that some programs were looking directly at the internals instead of using the API. So in order to not break those programs, MS made sure the value in the internal struct people were peeking at had the value those programs were expecting. Keep looking back through the archives and you'll find dozens of examples of MS doing crazy stuff just to keep programs working in newer versions of the OS. And with many Java apps being big and enterprisey, you can be sure that MS is going to do whatever it can to keep them from breaking on Windows 9^H10.

How do you figure the jEdit code is 13 years old? It may have been written 13 years ago, but if it's still doing the same bogus check today, that still counts. As of the time of this post, the current version of that file was last modified September 29, 2013 -- only a year ago -- and it's still doing the if(osName.contains("Windows 9")) check.

MS already basically did that... In Windows 8.1 and later, GetVersionEx() lies about the version number (it returns Windows NT 6.2, aka. Windows 8.0) unless the developer has specifically marked the EXE as compatible with Win8.1: Operating system version changes in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

But this probably won't help with broken Java code though, since I'm sure Oracle will mark java.exe as compatible with Windows 9/10, and had MS not decided to jump to Win10, it would've returned "Windows 9" for os.name.

Windows does return integers. See the dwMajorVersion and dwMinorVersion members of the OSVERSIONINFOEX struct. This seems to be a Java-specific issue, or at least specific to Java programmers--for whatever reason, a lot of Java code checks the "os.name" property to determine the OS version instead of "os.version".

Which is pretty cool for scripting; I write pretty much all of my Windows scripts in PowerShell these days, instead of .bat or .vbs. But PS isn't good for interactive use... While filtering for large files isn't something that I do often, I do like to sort ls output by date, or by file size. This is quick and easy to do with Unix-style ls:

ls -lt or ls -lS

But with PowerShell?

ls | sort -property LastWriteTime or ls | sort -property Length

Not something quick and easy to type. Which is too bad--I was hoping for an interactive shell a bit more modern than CMD.

While "engine" is one possible translation of "khrueang", that's not the sense that's being used in "khrueang toem". There, "khreuang" means "ingredient" or "item" (sense 2 at this dictionary)--you wouldn't literally translate "khrueang duem" (beverage) as "engine drink", right? :) So, a better literal translation of "khrueang toem" is "additional ingredient".

TFS talks about not being able to get an export license, so we know it's not in Georgia (unless you mean the country). And TFA says it's in the UK (which is where Pinewood's main studio is... they did recently open a location near Atlanta, Georgia though).

There is a Windows version of iTunes, you know... but it is true that there's no iBooks for Windows.

Text size has no relation to the display size. Text size is generally specified in "points", where one point is approximately 1/72 inch. If you find the text too small to read, the obvious solution is to increase the size. Display size affects how much text you can display given a certain text size. E.g., you might get 40 lines of 10 point text on a 24" monitor, and 45 lines of 10 point text on a 32" monitor.

Why wouldn't reading on a 27" work? A long time ago, I had a 15" CRT and was able to read text on it without any problems. And even further back, there were 9" screens, and even smaller ones. You just couldn't get as much text on them (e.g., 40 columns across).

The benefit of higher resolution is that text is sharper, since you can use more pixels to draw the characters while keeping the same point size. E.g., instead of using 8x12 pixels to draw a character, you can use 16x24, which looks a lot better. It's even more noticeable if you work with Chinese/Japanese/Korean text, where the characters are much more detailed than the Roman alphabet. Some characters (such as this one) turn into an indistinct mess if you have to squeeze it into a 12x12 pixel cell, but if you have 24x24 to work with, it looks a lot better.

In any case, this Dell monitor sounds interesting... I was considering their previous 4K 24" monitor, but the way it faked being two half-screens (to work around HDMI limitations?) seemed annoying and glitch-prone, and I heard that the next generation of monitors wouldn't have to do that. I currently have a 24" monitor, and am looking for something the same size, but I suppose 27" isn't too much bigger.

Who cares how many "high end-PC years" it took? Nobody's going to try to factor a 1024-bit modulus using a single high-end PC. It took 4 actual years to factor 10 numbers. And why do you think someone who wants to factor the RSA modulus for a 1024-bit CA cert would have waited until today to start the process? Those certs have been around for over 10 years; if someone with enough computing power wanted to factor one, they could be done by now.

You missed the boat/raft on that one... Slashdot supported it over 10 years ago. Support was removed due to people abusing Unicode control characters (particularly the RTL/LTR direction overrides). Does SN let you switch to RTL text? Or post a ton of stacked combining characters (i.e., "Zalgo" text)?

That said, Slashdot should just blacklist the control characters--Unicode publishes a list of them.

You're not supposed to drink the alcohol--even pure methanol is pretty toxic if you drink it. You're just supposed to burn the alcohol in a stove. A proper alcohol burner will mix the vapors with air and produce a hot blue flame that works quite well at heating food.

It is: Tools -> Add-ons, Plugins page, change the Shockwave Flash plugin to "Ask to activate". You can also configure per-host exceptions by clicking the globe/padlock icon in the address bar -> More Information -> Permissions tab.

No it didn't. A few utilities that nobody used (e.g., the commandline ftp.exe, which doesn't even support PASV mode) were ported from BSD (not even FreeBSD), but the TCP/IP stack in Windows was not from BSD.

>2014
>not using a computer that has an IOMMU

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