Comment by BlakePetersen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BlakePetersen | Hacker News Reader

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You offer a tool that's directed at a certain group of people, namely those who are running Windows (which is apparent by the question it seeks to answers, "Which WINDOWS operating system am I running?") Then some mac user struts in, takes off his Wayfarers and goes, "Let's see what it will do when I check what version of Windows my MAC is running heh heh heh -- OH LOOK AT THOSE IDIOTS IN REDMOND! THEY 'CLAIM' I AM ON WIN8.1! WHAT MORONS. Market Share Conspiracy Rabble Rabble"... and so on.

It's like a dude signing up for a Gynecologist appointment online and then questioning why they 'claim' you are a woman in the background questionnaire.

I mean, come the on... Is this really trending at #2?

I think it's just a very public example of shitty coding. No decent code review should have allowed a catch-all condition to default to Windows 8.1 instead of "Unknown" or "Other" or some such. It's just a sad lack of attention to detail in a very public-facing way.

There may have been a number of other factors at play that led to the decision to have windows 8.1 as the default. I wouldn't immediately jump to "shitty code" as the culprit here, especially when the tool works exactly as it should for it's intended audience. It may have been something as simple as developing this tool before having confirmation as to which user-agent win 8.1 would use at time of launch (is it be 5.2? nope, bumped up to 5.3. Good thing we put in that fallback before pushing into production!) or evaluating the ROI on supporting an 'other/unknown' fallback with additional development.

One may consider putting resources toward developing code for a user-base that provides no return on the development investment is 'shitty coding'.

Well how many people using non-windows OS do you expect to go to Microsoft's website to check for what Windows version they are using? It not lack of attention to detail, it is a waste of time trying to implement a complex User Agent parsing for that 1 in a million who decides to do it for fun.

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