backwards-compatibility

Brief question: If I use relatively "minor" Java 7 language features previously unavailable in Java 6, such as the try-muticatch block... does this imply that my program won't run in machines with JRE 6 or JRE 5 installed after being compiled as is? If that's correct, is there a quick way to produce a JRE6 .jar executable without changing a Java 7 source code (which, by the way, the only Java 7 feature it would use is the try-multicatch block)? You are correct. Multi-catch is a Java 7 language feature and there is no way to compile it to Java 6 (or earlier) JVM compatible bytecode. Using a

I'd like to use HTML5's placeholder attribute (You can see it in cation in the newsletter at Thought Results ). But when I use older browsers, of course, they don't render anything. I can use JavaScript to imitate it, but then, I shouldn't use it and it's done the old way. How can I have both HTML5 placeholder attribute, and at the same time simulate it for older browsers? You can detect if a browser supports the attribute: http://diveintohtml5.info/detect.html#input-placeholder function supports_input_placeholder() { var i = document.createElement('input'); return 'placeholder' in i; } If it

This question has been asked before perhaps multiple times, but I can't get the typical solution to work for me. The proposed solution is to put this in the "app.config" file: <configuration> <startup> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0"/> </startup> </configuration> But with a simple "Hello World" program, I still get the error: "Unable to find a version of the runtime to run this application.". For some background, I'm using Windows XP (through Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7), and only installed the .NET 4.0 runtime on XP. After some research, I found this page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us

I need to run a program that uses ftd2xx on my BeagleBoard xM rev C running Ubuntu 12.04. I am trying to use the ARM library libftd2xx.so provided here . libFTDI is not an option. The difference that I noticed comes from running readelf -hA on libftd2xx.so vs other libraries on the BeagleBoard that work. The arch-specific section gives OS name as "ARM926EF-S" for ftd2xx instead of "7-A" for other libraries and CPU_arch as "v5TEJ" instead of "v7". I'm assuming this means that the library is meant for the ARM v5 instruction set, and the BeagleBoard is running ARM v7. Is there some way to get