I would assert precisely the opposite. "trade-offs to preserve compatibility and interoperability" do not cripple the functionality to users-- failures to engineer compatibility and interoperability is what cripples functionality.

The number of times that there's been a new feature and I've said "oh, excellent, it's true that my old files no longer work, but this is so wonderful I don't care" has been very close to zero. The number of times there's been a new feature and I've said "those assholes, I have twenty thousand files that don't work any more, what in the world were those idiots thinking?" is decidedly not zero.

The Tesla Roadster made electric cars cool, in that it was a car for the ultra-top end market, people who otherwise would be buying a Lotus or Ferrari. So, it was an existence proof that you could make an EV that contended with top-end sports cars.

Actually, Leaf is the top selling EV on the market right now. If you count electric cars with gasoline backup, Volt would be on the list.

Tesla doesn't make a mass-market EV yet; their Model S right now is rather a luxury car rather than something for the average buyer. While I'd love to have one... I don't think Tesla comes anywhere close to being "the first" in the way of mass market EVs. There are a lot of electric cars out there, both mass-market and otherwise.

no, that was the M2-F2.

Spectacular video of the crash, though.

http://www.airspacemag.com/ist...

I would too, but they haven't been given the budget to do so. In fact, congress has been demanding the opposite: it had previously been very insistent that NASA needs to downselect to just one.

It's quite a victory that they managed to keep on funding two options.

Trust me, they do. Windows 10 won't fly if they can't get corporate types to adopt it. The corporates won't adopt it if their large number of custom (and frequently very shoddy) Java apps (in use in 90% of large corporations according to a recent survey) won't run. MS cares about making sure Java apps work OK.

Because Java's API design is fucked up.

Windows NT 4.0: os.name = "Windows NT", os.version = "4.0"
Windows 95 (= MSDOS 7.0): os.name = "Windows 95", os.version = "4.0"
Windows 98: (also MSDOS 7.0): os.name = "Windows 98", os.version = "4.1"
Windows 2000 (aka NT 5): os.name = "Windows 2000", os.version = "5.0"

Given these 4 versions as the likely target platforms, how do I determine if I'm running on Windows-the-DPMI-DOS-Extender or Windows NT?

I've seen at least one suggestion that all future versions of Windows will be Windows 10. So, that would presumably be Windows 10.90 you're looking forward to?

Yes, I can believe it. Microsoft needs to sell the latest version of Windows to all of its big corporate clients, and almost all of them run custom Java applications. Java applications are quite likely to have bugs like this because Java doesn't provide an easy way to get the operating system version number.

The code I see in almost all of the search results isn't really trying to determine an exact version: it's trying to work out which basic operating system family is in use, i.e. distinguish between Windows-which-was-a-DPMI-DOS-Extender and Windows NT.

Right. And what is that proper API in Java?

Because only Java was designed to discourage operating-system-version-dependent code and therefore intentionally lacks a way of checking the operating system version except through a string; most other languages provide an API that gives you major & minor version numbers in integers, which is much more convenient.

Most of them are trying to choose between "sh -c", "command.com /c" and "cmd.exe /c" as a way to parse & execute command lines.

Almost all of the results in the search are Java applications. Java doesn't provide access to the specified API. The only way you can do it is with System.getProperty("os.name") and System.getProperty("os.version") which both return strings.

The code that turns up in most of the search results is trying to determine the correct executable and arguments to execute a command line (i.e. it picks the right one of "sh -c", "command.com /c", or "cmd.exe /c"). How would you propose doing this without determining what operating system you're running on?

[citation needed]

Right, but "immersive" doesn't mean "difficult to distinguish from reality" but rather "easy to treat as if it were real". I mean, I used to find playing Elite on my Sinclair Spectrum "immersive", but there's not a chance I'd ever fail to know it wasn't real. Being immersive means allowing people to retain what's often called "willing suspension of disbelief" -- as long as the system I'm looking at behaves consistently, I can treat it as if it were real, so I can (at least sort-of) believe in its existence as a real thing. And maintaining that sense of existence is what people mean when they say immersion.

The filters they applied in the video make the scenes look less realistic overall, but they make them more consistent, and that lets me believe in them as real in a way I can't easily believe in the unfiltered scene.