Comments on: Perhaps Microsoft Could Hire Count von Count

By: Episode 69: Pod-o-ween at WhatTheCast?

Episode 69: Pod-o-ween at WhatTheCast? — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:37:53 +0000

[...] razor blades in candy, bad reboots, the end of the world (and possibly John Cusack’s career), Windows 7’s questionable numbering scheme, how Crispy hated The Plan and a college event Brian refers to as “the Rose Bowl Parade meets [...]

By: Ross

Ross — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:53:44 +0000

Personally, I think they should have just done what movie franchises do when they want to make the fact that they’re producing Yet Another Sequel In A Milked-Dry Franchise, and roll back the naming system altogether.

Call the next version “Windows”. Just “Windows”.

Or maybe “Windows Balboa”

By: links for 2009-10-22 | GFMorris.com

links for 2009-10-22 | GFMorris.com — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:30:09 +0000

[...] Perhaps Microsoft Could Hire Count von Count | Live Granades (tags: gfmorris_comment) [...]

By: Kat

Kat — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:29:32 +0000

This was brilliant! Made me feel much more grateful for the versioning scheme we use for our software at work.

By: Adam Cadre

Adam Cadre — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:20:26 +0000

Actually, the numbering scheme makes sense to me, insofar as it lines up with the Windows editions that I have actually been offered when I have bought computers.

Windows 1 and 2 never caught on.

Windows 3.0 was the big “whoa, I guess DOS is going away” OS for PCs. The tweaked version, 3.1, followed almost immediately on its heels. NT was also floating around, as I recall, but as a home user I never encountered it. My first laptop had 3.1 on it.

My next two computers came with Windows 95 and 98, respectively. 98 was billed as a fixed-up version of 95, so if MS wants to call them both Windows 4, that makes sense to me. I know ME and 2000 existed, but I never ran into them – the computer manufacturers I considered buying from seemed either not to take them seriously enough to offer them or to deem them not appropriate for my segment of the market.

My next two computers after that came with XP. Call that 5.

My next computer after that came with Vista. Call that 6.

This new OS seems to be a fixed-up version of Vista, which suggests it should be 6.1, but the Vista name is poisonous enough that I can see why MS would want to make a cleaner break with it.

By: Jonathan Creekmore

Jonathan Creekmore — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:56:52 +0000

I am pretty sure that Knuth already uses e for the version number for Metafont.

By: Chris Adams

Chris Adams — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:31:07 +0000

They should switch to picking version numbers the way TeX does it: adding digits of transcendental numbers. TeX already uses pi, so maybe Microsoft could use e. Today is Windows 2.7182818284 release day!

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:52:59 +0000

The numbering scheme makes WordPress’s numbering schema much, much more sane by comparison.