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Think about that last comment. No 64 bit apps? Be realistic. It trivial to write your own 64 bit app. It needn't do anything fancy. Just play with memory accessible only through 64-bit addressing.

This was most likely an oversight by the testing group, albeit a huge one.

> This was most likely an oversight by the testing
> group, albeit a huge one.

What testing group?

No, seriously.

Jason

I assume they tested internally.

An oversight? It's a monumental screw-up.

I agree. This is something that should not be allowed to happen to a product that costs €129,- (Tiger).

A monumental screw-up indeed. Reminds me of some of the updates to Panther that made a lot of people pull their hair out due to similair monumental errors.

I lost some hair during Panther usage.

I totally agree with this. No company is perfect. Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Apple have all screwed up at one time or another.

I know a lot of people blame the world's problems on Microsoft, but they are not the antichrist (despite having questionable/downright illegal business practises).

And no I am not a "Microsoft Apologist" as someone is bound to call me now. I run Linux and nothing else. I'm just saying that Microsoft isn't all bad. It would be nice, however, if they didn't have to try and obliderate every company in their path.

Microsoft did help bring a computer into almost every home in America however. (And please don't say "Well some other company would have done it"...that's almost as dumb as saying "Well the US helped a great deal ending WW2, but if they hadn't done it, some other country would have").

Microsoft did help bring a computer into almost every home in America however. (And please don't say "Well some other company would have done it"...that's almost as dumb as saying "Well the US helped a great deal ending WW2, but if they hadn't done it, some other country would have").

Now, if that's such a stupid argument then please tell me what Microsoft did to help bring a computer into almost every home in America? Because seriously, I don't have a clue, so I'm curious.

I was personally under the impression that the internet was what started the huge home computing boom. People started to hear about this thing called internet in the mid/late 90's and decided to get a computer in order to check it out. Now, the thing is that pretty much every x86 computer out there had Windows pre-installed. Did people really go out to buy a computer with Windows or just a computer? There wasn't much of a choice really.
Would the computers have been sold without an operating system if Microsoft wasn't so successful with their marketing?
There were several much more modern, stable and easy to use operating systems out there at the time. I'm pretty sure that the hardware companies would have chosen any of them if Windows hadn't existed.

It's pretty easy for MS to take credit for that part of the history when all they did to "help the people" was to be very agressive with their marketing. They happened to be at the right place at the right time. It was pretty much pure luck.
MS didn't do anything better than the other companies (like IBM, Be, NeXT, Apple, Amiga etc.) except for marketing. But I'm pretty sure that one or two of those companies would have gotten a large piece of the pie if it wasn't for MS. Because if there is a demand for something, someone will provide it.

Microsoft did help bring a computer into almost every home in America however. (And please don't say "Well some other company would have done it"...that's almost as dumb as saying "Well the US helped a great deal ending WW2, but if they hadn't done it, some other country would have").

Oh pulease, don't go around wrapping your naked body in the flag of the USA, with the nice patriotic feel good factor bullshit that went goes with it.

Circa 1980s, there were three big companies going for the end users desktop, Atari, Amiga and Apple - IBM concentrations were on delivering desktops for enterprise customers - they never saw a market for the end user, they saw the computer as a business machine, and sold it as such.

So sunshine, it had NOTHING to do with IBM or Microsoft - the people who 'trail blazed' the market for the end user wasn't Microsoft, and believe me, had Compaq never created a clone, and IBM was never challenged by the DOJ, the world would be a rather different place today - you might actually have some diversity in the marketplace besides one over arching company that dictates the direction of the whole industry - anyone who dares gets in its way, is automtically crushed into oblivion.

Open sourcing software isn't the ideal solution in every single circumstance...and I wish people would realize that. If Apple did that, they could say bye bye to their hardware business and their software business. Honestly, how many of you that use OS X pay for support services?

For Red Hat, open source is perfect. It helped them build a successful business without having to pour billions into it. Without Open Source, who would be able to stop or slow down the MS steamroller?

I prefer Open Source software, but I do not think every company should rush out and open source all of their products. Not all companies have a Red Hat style business model, and could not survive if they did this.

If Adobe open sourced Acrobat, do you think they could survive, considering their main business is licensing their software, not selling support services?

"Perhaps those types of glitches would not happen if Apple would open source future versions of Mac OS and had a large enough base of developers and testers."
yes because 17 incompatible forks of OS X would be much more desirable than a single major fuck up once in a while

The suggestion was not forking Mac OS but to open source it so that it would profit from a coherent development effort and testing by the OSS community.

I don't it's possible for something to be Open Source without forking; take Linux for example, where being Open Source has been a mixed blessing.

Granted Linux might not have survived very long or ammounted to much if it wasn't open source, now it's a very capable operating system depending on the distribution you use; however, there are hundreds of distributions out there, and in many cases you cannot take a complicated package from one distribution and install it in another, for that matter it's impossible with simple packages without some kind of complication.

While you might not invision forking for an Open Source OS X that doesn't mean others won't try it, if it's freely available to the public you bet it'll be forked by someone before bery long. OpenSolaris already has a distribution does it not?

Open Source is generally good for the people, but not always what's best for the product.

"Well the US helped a great deal ending WW2, but if they hadn't done it, some other country would have"

Fact are Russia started crushing germany during the winter and if America could of listerned their would of been a lot less American injuries and deathes...

America had to invade Europe otherwise it would have gone red copletely. Even as it was France and Italy had strong communist parties in the post-war years. If the USSR would have had access to Europe's agricultural and industrial might (as well as intellectuals 'recruited' to the USA after the liberation) the world would be a VERY different place now. Not in the least because Europe still dominated Africa, supplier of among others : oil, gas, diamonds and ofcourse the big one : uranium (from Belgian Congo).

Are you trying to say Apple poured billions into the development of OSX???

how many billions would you say they poured???

There was a study done years ago on Red Hat 7 and Debian 2.2 saying it would have cost over $2 billion to develop all of the software in the distributions. Perhaps re-reading my comment would be in order, considering I was referring to Red Hat and not Apple.

it is *very* unlikely that apple will choose 32 bit x86 when 64 bit x86 are already readily available for quite some time... even though they don't *have* an 64 bit os obviously.

The iMac G5 and OSX were presented as 64 bits, one could at least compile the OS for 64 bits. Well, maybe it is and just the 64 bits won't run. But if the OS is, why not the bundled software?

It's like putting a 4GB disk in a PC with a BIOS that can only access 2! Half is wasted! Aaargh!

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Why would you want the software to be 64-bit when it doesn't need to be? 64 bits allows you to address 64 bits worth of memory space, as opposed to 32 bits, which only allow for a 4-gig memory space. Having a 64-bit memory space means that any pointer to a memory address (which programs have absolutely tons of) would be double the size (64 bits instead of 32), meaning that unless you'd actually be using more than 4 gigs of RAM per program, you'd be needlessly wasting a bunch of memory, slowing your entire computer down. None of the programs that ship with Tiger require that kind of memory, so making them 64-bit would make them waste RAM and thus slow them down with absolutely zero benefit to you.

Tiger does allow programs to be written in 64-bit. Programs such as Mathematica or other high-end scientific applications often need to deal with huge (read: greater than 4-gig) data sets, at which point having a 64-bit address space is a tremendous advantage. Even high-end Photoshop users or other similarly demanding applications could benefit, although I don't know offhand whether Photoshop itself currently supports it or not.

even extreamly big mathematica projects usually don't require that sizes of memory. mathematca just gains a lot of speed calculating in very big numbers (which is a very common thing to do), bigger than you can store in a 32 bit register.

you are right about the pointer size, they are of course twice as big in 64 bit mode but you are overestimating the number of pointers an modern os is going to use. there should hardly be a couple of thousend, so who cares if your os uses 300kb for pointers or 600kb? i'm pretty sure there aren't many macs with 8MB ram out there running osx.

All PowerPC computers are 64 bit architecture, but only some can access more than 32 bits of memory. Only Macs shipped with Tiger would be eligable for a repair or refund at Apple's option (because it did not advertise 64-bit memory addressability prior to that).

That is exactly it and the funny thing is that people throw that out like its some trivial small thing when its literally what makes the difference between life and death for a company.

Now I didn't say that it is something trivial. Marketing is an art in itself. But it really has no relevance in this discussion. If MS hadn't been there to be the best in marketing, someone of the others would have been the best. It's all relative you know.

But I questioned in which way MS helped to get a computer into almost every home in the west world, that no one else could.
Many people like to think of MS as the cyber messiah blessing us with the new fresh technology that no-one else could provide. And MS loves it. But those who has a bit of insight in the rest of the industry knows that they aren't doing much exciting work over at MS camp compared to many other companies or uni's.
I'm not saying that MS aren't doing anything right, because they are, and they are getting better. But they don't have any magical knowledge about technology that no other company, oss-team or individual person has. They just have the advantage of being in the spotlight all the time.

Sure there were a few other things that MS did that competitors failed to do (trust me I was running OS/2 and IBM screwed more up then just not marketing the OS) but generally I'd agree that the marketing is what did it the most.

Oh yes. All of the competing products had their flaws. I'm not saying they were perfect. But overall MS was many years behind them technology-wise and has mainly been playing catch-up ever since.

Hehehe, I find that one really funny - the Apple Developer Transition Kits (mactels) are 64 bit machines, not 32 bit.

Go look up EM64T on Intel's site.

If you're right then they won't fix the glitch, and then they won't have the reputation of making computers that last a very long time before being obsolete or useless.

I don't think that Apple want's to get rid of any of it's selling points right when it's on the verge of comming out with x86 Macs, especially if it wants former Mac users to swtich instead of just counting on sales to new users.

As it is people who haven't even used Macs tell me that the switch to x86 processors is a mistake because they are slower; Apple will need all of its halo effect intact if it wants a smooth transition.