Windows : Com File Effect

I'll never claim to know everything about Linux nor Windows, I know a lot more about the former than the latter, mainly as the Windows is a closed source product.  As such it doesn't get my attention as much, unless something is going wrong.... Today I have found an effect I can't explain (at least not easily) in windows, clearly it's some sort of reserved file name or type effect.... Maybe you can explain this to me.

So, open any folder, right click and go to create a new text file...

Once you have the file...

Change the name to "COM" and a port number, so "COM1" in my case.... It can be any COM port name, even if you don't have that port installed or active on your machine....

Once you complete the name, or change focus of the text entry (by say taking a screen shot - not actually committing the new file to disk) you get this strange message...

"The Specified device name is invalid"....

What device?  I'm trying to create a filename.  I was immediately a little puzzled, I've used Windows since Windows 2.0  I've never ran into this issue.

Googling around I find a chap on social.technet.microsoft.com saying not to use a whole plethora of names for files or folder as they're reserved, I have never heard of this.

The official Microsoft advice likewise says not to use these values, and it kindled a memory in me from programming in DOS 6 back in the mid 90's, one would in Pascal, you could "println(PRN, 'some message');" and see the message print out on the printer.

I find it amazingly odd that these files are still reserved in 2018, they're proper nouns, they're things you may want to name files, and they have a FULL Path, which makes them very distinct than the COM port device.  Its odd, trust me.

But the oddest thing is, what does Windows do, what is the piece of code picked up and made to run that message box upon creation of the file?  And I've got to wonder how exploitable that maybe in local malware to open lots of message boxes and annoy the user.

Backwards Play Lists - A YouTube Annoyance

Today I have mostly been doing COM work in the office - yes COM - I hate COM... but enough of that, in my personal time I've also been doing some 2D OpenGL, not sprites either, I've been using real quads to do things, blending them and playing about, I'm thinking about little scrolling game ideas to put my 2D graphics to the test.

I've also come here to rant a touch, because I'm so so sick of people on youtube - and there are dozens of them who do this - not looking at their content, these are people with sometimes swish content, cool intro's, 1000+ views per video - which is good going... but then they do the little things wrong, things like.... They have a play list, and the list is backwards!

What do I mean "Backwards"?... Well lets say its a series of uploads, and they're numbered "Episode 1", then "Episode 2", it'd be freaking nice if they bothered to add them into the play list in that order... I know its probably a real fiddle to remove all the videos from the play list and then re-add them all again, because the YouTube folks don't seem to have spotted this problem themselves.

But to us the viewer, where content is king, having to stop move to the player and click back down the list to find the "next" to play is a fucking ball ache.