so it wouldn't work for those poor suckers running windows

oh poor poor them, my heart bleeds for them ... not!

besides which, they get to play with Emplode which is a little harder for use to get running. It would be nice to have some perks :-)

Anyway, would the Windoze NT family command ipconfig deliver the functionality you need? I presume it is no problem in Java to detect which platform you are running on.