In some ways it's comforting that such an intergral part of all of our lives doesn't have to be branded and packaged in a way that's stylistic. It's nice knowing that this truly is a community project, and that it's an effort of people - not some megacorp who needs to market it to the highest amount of people possible.
Thank fucking God. I loathe version names. Place these in release date order: Lion, Snow Leopard, and Tiger. Now, place these in release order: 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8. Which do you find communicated more useful information?
Dude, version name is a great vessel for branding and promotion. Most distros have version names and version numbers, it's not hard to dereference a version name and they serve a purpose.
More brand awareness for open source projects == good.
Historically the name came first. Engineering would start working
on a new version, Foo, and later on Marketing would decide it if was
going to be 1.3 or 2.0
At least that's how it worked in commercial software. Now the names
have taken on a life of their own.
And before that it was "Diseased Newt". It's not like these names have ever been marketing-visible or descriptory. At least with this one it sort of makes sense, since 2015 is the year of the sheep in Chinese zodiac.
In his own words, he keeps naming things after himself.
(Although that's not entirely accurate. Linux was named by the guy who uploaded it to the ftp site; Linus' original name for it was Freax. (A 'Free' 'Unix'; the 'x' at the end being de rigueur for a Unix variant.) Hooray for opinionated people who just wantonly change names with no regard for the creator's desire, I suppose.)
> .. after extensive statistical analysis of my G+ polling, I've come to the inescapable conclusion that internet polls are bad.
> Big surprise.
> But "Hurr durr I'ma sheep" trounced "I like online polls" by a 62-to-38% margin, in a poll that people weren't even supposed to participate in. Who can argue with solid numbers like that? 5,796 votes from people who can't even follow the most basic directions?
If, on the Internet, there is a forum with two posts, one titled "WARNING: READ THIS IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE, PROPERTY, AND THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF YOUR SPECIES. ALSO, IMPORTANT TAX INFORMATION." and the other titled "Test post, please ignore", the first would have a few views, and maybe a couple posts.
The second would be a veritable Times Square.
Torvalds got precisely what was coming to him.
The next version will be code named "Warning: Do Not Click".
which was the most upvoted post on reddit until about a year ago (a fairly significant achievement, given the enormous growth of reddit in the intervening years).
Notable features from Linux Weather Forecast by Jonathan Corbet:
- Basic support for applying patches to a running kernel, allowing the application of fixes without the need to reboot the system. There is still work to be done to get to a fully featured live-patching system, but the foundation is there in 4.0.
- The remap_file_pages() system call has been removed. Emulation of its functionality remains, though, so applications should not break.
- The kernel's support for large nonvolatile memory devices has improved considerably.
- The lazytime mount option allows for more efficient and accurate tracking of file access times.
- The kernel address sanitizer (KASan) is an important new development tool for ensuring that the kernel is not accessing memory that it shouldn't.
I wouldn't be surprised if Linus pushes for 5.0 after 4.9 this time. And then maybe after that you realize the major version number is meaningless when you will never break backwards compatibility (like with web browsers) and drop it entirely.
Web browsers break backwards-compatibility all the time. They use the major version number bump to justify it. I gave up trying to keep a Firefox extension I wrote up-to-date since the API changed every 6 weeks. I think it's settled down a bit since the early days, but the reason they bump the major version number is so they can break things.
He can't drop the decimal easily, as there are apparently too many scripts that expect the kernel version to have a decimal in it. But I think 4.9 -> 5.0 is a decent workaround to the problem.
That's funny, because the reason why Microsoft decided to skip from Windows 8 to Windows 10 is because there's too much software out there that tests that the version of Windows starts with "9" and interprets this as they are currently running Windows 95 or 98.
Highly improbable to be the case. Microsoft damaged XP compatibility with Vista; that they would care about software built for 95-98 in 2015 seems unlikely by comparison. It's also just a product name. Programmers will check the kernel version, not the "friendly" consumer-facing string.
I realize this information has been circulated around, but unless this has been confirmed by Microsoft please don't claim facts without evidence.
I hope you do understand that it would not damaging compatibility with 95-98, but with windows 8. The class of programs that this is for runs fine on Windows 8, because they are not executing legacy code for 95-98. But the check for 95-98 would return true for windows 9. So the legacy code will be executed, probably breaking stuff because the API has changed a lot.
I do understand that. We'd be talking about programs built in the 95-98 era however, and the majority would not be in current use. The biggest exception would be enterprise, though if they're upgrading to a recently released Windows version they'd (hopefully!) be using more modern software too.
At the end of the day, we're still only guessing at Microsoft's rationale. Esoteric compatibility issues seem lower down the list from issues like breaking away from the Windows 8 name (which has accumulated negative association in the public view).
Until Microsoft says for sure, it's just a bit silly to make the claim as fact.
And you're discounting company-internal products that were built in the 95-98 era, then updated when new business regulations came out, but were never rewritten in a modern language and the company wouldn't spend time and money to port them to Windows 9 when they worked fine on every previous version -- they'll just wait until a newer version of Windows fixes the problem or Microsoft very forcibly drop support for 8 completely.
A deleted comment by somebody claiming to be a Microsoft developer, commenting on an "internal rumours". That's not what I would consider "evidence".
And there's no need to use the condescending "cute". I certainly wasn't trying to start a flame war here. I'm asking you to verify information before repeating it as fact.
Jesus Hermann Christ. It's not just looking for "Windows 9", it's looking for a "9" anywhere in the version string. Yes, it's under an if clause looking for "Windows" also in the version string, so it won't trigger on "Plan 9" or something, but still it'll get triggered by something like Windows 19.
Interesting that you would call my claim "highly improbable" because I didn't cite any sources and in the same breath, make a claim without any sources.
"Unverified"? Sure. "Highly improbable"? You don't know that any better than I do.
Kinda feels like projects where the version number is effectively meaningless except for "equals" or "greater than" comparisons should just use a yyyy.n scheme so you can at least tell at a glance how old a thing is.
This is the answer I was looking for. Funny, I've been a long time linux user, and never knew about these internal names.
It does seem like a slight against our Ubuntu, Debain, Mac OS, Windows et al. comrades.
Without any context, "Hurr, durr, I'm a sheep" seems rude to users and administrators of every OS distribution. With this context, it seems like maybe not a very funny addition to a long running joke.
OSX Yosemite
Linux "Hurr durr I'ma sheep"
-----
In some ways it's comforting that such an intergral part of all of our lives doesn't have to be branded and packaged in a way that's stylistic. It's nice knowing that this truly is a community project, and that it's an effort of people - not some megacorp who needs to market it to the highest amount of people possible.
Great work everyone who worked on this.