What is Digg?51 Comments
- pyrates, on 10/28/2008, -17/+44Some inaccuracies in that article again when comparing to Windows. But I expect that with a site with a bias:
1. You can bundle 32-bit and 64-bit in one application on windows. OS X couldn't do this because they generally don't use an installer to install their applications. But in windows, the installer will detect if you got 64-bit or 32-bit and install the appropriate one. Look to here for an example:
http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/download.php?mode= ...
2. Windows Vista x64 can run all 32-bit apps with no problems, so I don't see the point they're trying to make here. Just because they decide to re-use a directory and move the 32-bit libraries to another directory is not a failing on Microsoft's part. Show me exactly what problems this actually causes, because from an end users perspective, it hasn't caused any that I can see. The only exception is anti-virus software and other software that installs some driver or kernel extension in Windows.
3. The system32 folder not being able to be renamed was most likely because some applications had depended on that being their instead of using the environment variables and so to keep compatibility, they simply moved the 32-bit libraries to the wow64 folder and used the existing system32 folder for 64-bit libraries. This also probably is what allows them to set the compatibility mode for applications to report to it an earlier version of windows or to use only 256 colors, etc. This is what businesses like. They don't like being cut off from being able to run their old applications. - jermm, on 10/29/2008, -9/+161: They'll to it like universal binary, put both in the appname.app
Yes, the app will be X more MBs, but 5 MB on your 500 GB drive... - AngelBunny, on 10/29/2008, -3/+10"When released to developers around spring and to end users a few months later, Snow Leopard will support using a 64-bit kernel on all Intel Macs with 64-bit CPU, such as the Core 2 Duo." -second sentence in the article. you should really read it over first.
- imcquill, on 10/29/2008, -1/+8He means "bundled" in the sense that, you could then take a universal binary that is installed on one mac and just copy it from a 32 bit machine to a 64 machine and it would run. No installer necessary. Both binaries are present in the application bundle.
- inactive, on 10/29/2008, -1/+8Of course it will. The article is so full of inaccuracies that you're better off not reading it at all. Any 64 bit core will of course run the 64 bit kernel in Snow Leopard. The confusion comes with the original 32 bit macbooks, which of course, must run the 32 bit kernel.
- roctimo, on 10/29/2008, -2/+9How about we make regular old Leopard as fast and responsive and free of the rainbow pinwheel as Tiger is? THEN we can worry about a snow leopard.
- gllopc, on 10/29/2008, -2/+7If you're referring to Apple's drivers, they'll be out when Snow Leopard is released, as Apple makes the drivers. There are, I'm sure, some third-party odd devices, like scanners for instance, which may require some update; but they are few and far between.
- newbill123, on 10/29/2008, -0/+5Considering that Apple has pledged to stay away from significant new, end-user features with Snow Leopard, that means changes will be most visible as optimizations and stability improvements.
The rainbow pinwheel appears when the system is starved of resources and can't respond to the end user. For most, adding RAM would reduce cache misses and the associated rainbow pointer appearances.
But high-end Macs come with 4GB of RAM which is the max usable in a 32-bit address space. This may have few pinwheels today, but down the road what could be done to up this limit? Oh yeah, upgrade OS X to a 64-bit address space. Which is what they've been doing since before the Intel transition. - thinkdifferent, on 10/29/2008, -1/+6Devs do NOT have to host different versions. Mac OS X has supported for quite a long time multiple binary bundles. One common form is the Universal, in which both Intel & PowerPC binaries exist. You can even have a 4-way bundle with PPC, PPC64, i386, X86_64, which would support 32 & 64 bit PowerPC & Intel processors & switch as appropriate. Given that the majority of an application's size is from resource files (ie text, graphics), the additional weight of providing a second, or nth binary is relatively small.
- pipdip, on 10/29/2008, -4/+9It will be interesting to see how fast x64 drivers come out. It took Windows driver developers a couple years to get their x64 act together and things still aren't perfect.
- kien64, on 10/29/2008, -0/+5Agreed, I also run 32-bit apps - Adobe Suite [CS3] - on vista64 with no issues to date (been using vista64 for the past 8 months on my XPS 1530).
- cyssero, on 04/18/2009, -0/+4When most of the hardware that goes into a Mac is controlled by the manufacturer of the OS themselves, I can't imagine it being too hard. With Windows, you're supporting literally billions of different hardware configurations. Unfortunately cheap parts also means cheap support, and too many manufacturers don't give a squat about working drivers, let alone x64 support.
- inactive, on 10/29/2008, -0/+4That's exactly what Snow Leopard is aimed at, improving functionality over adding features. Of course Leopard is slow, look at all the extra process' that are running - Time Machine, Stacks, Quick Look, Spaces, Finder Cover Flow, etc... of course it's going to be slower than Tiger. All that eye candy comes at a price, that price is your precious CPU cycles. Leopard is bloatware.
- Vadi0, on 10/29/2008, -1/+5I'm on Ubuntu 64bit. It's nice, but your second-favourite company Adobe has yet to make a single product 64bit compatible - meaning your OS better do a good job at providing 32bit compatibility things to keep the stuff working.
Most of the time it's OK though. - jamesmcm, on 10/29/2008, -3/+6Which is exactly like the Windows Installer works I dunno why you're being buried.
- inactive, on 10/29/2008, -4/+6Funny thing that there were ads claiming that apple "supercomputers" were 64 bit before OSX even was released.
- jerryn, on 10/29/2008, -0/+2The Core 2 Duo is not faster if you run Altivec enabled code! I've got an HP quad core and a Dual G5 Powermac. The G5 is faster at rendering video.. MUCH faster!
- inactive, on 10/29/2008, -1/+3The intel core duo that was put into the first gen macbooks was indeed 32 bit. The minis have no idea about, but I wouldn't be surprised if their first generation was also 32 bit.
ozymandias:~ jadus$ machine
i486
I just did that on a 4 month old macbook pro, definitely 64 bit. - cmf2, on 10/29/2008, -2/+4If you had a 32 bit version of windows and wanted the 64 bit version, you had to pay for it as well. There is also a lot more to snow leopard than it appears at first glance. Your thoughts were mine exactly when I first heard about it. Things like using the graphics card for processing tasks when not needed for graphics should offer a significant performance boost.
- supermanred, on 10/30/2008, -0/+2Those ads were true. Before OS X came out.
OS X contains more 64 bit code now than Windows Vista 64 and when snow leopard arrives, it will be mostly 64 bit and apple is rewriting most of the bundled apps as 64 bit cocoa apps.
RIght now my 2 year old macbook smokes ANYTHING we have at work at doing the basic tasks we do every day (office work, adobe apps etc) even MICROSOFT office apps open up and run much quicker (in Windows, in Parallels which is an emulator) than the office apps run in native Windows Vista at work. - yabos, on 10/29/2008, -0/+2G5 is called a Power Mac not Mac Pro.
Yes they seem to be leaving PPC behind pretty quick but it's incredible how much faster the Core 2 Duo is over the G5. - CptnEvilStomper, on 10/29/2008, -0/+2Snow Leopard IS Leopard. When Apple brought Leopard out, they tried to stuff way too much into it and as a consequence the original release was full of bugs and glitches. They've worked pretty much all of them out, but Snow Leopard is going to be an overhauled version of Leopard that hopefully will be as solid as Tiger was while still incorporating all the spiffy new features of Leopard. They're also reworking and adding to the core foundation of the OS (64-bit kernel, OpenCL, better multi-thread management, ImageBoot, 16 TB RAM limit). If Apple pulls this off it's going to be crazy.
Also, about Macs only being able to use 4 GB, that's a Windows-only problem now, and even with 4 GB installed you'll never be able to use 4 GB running Windows. PCs running a 32-bit version Windows are limited to somewhere between 2 and 3.5 GB of RAM, depending on how much hardware you have installed and how much VRAM your video card uses. Every Mac made since the Santa Rosa platform came out can get around this problem. Leopard uses a 32-bit kernel but makes use of PAE, so Leopard can use up to 32 GB of RAM. The only machine that you can actually install 32 GB into is the Mac Pro, though - every other model is limited to either 2 or 4 GB.
BTW, Linux, FreeBSD and even Solaris also use PAE. Microsoft has incorporated PAE into their 32-bit server OS's but they failed miserably when they tried to include it in XP, and they've since given up on the idea completely. - jerryn, on 10/29/2008, -0/+2If Apple does not support the 64bit 10.6 kernel on the MacPro (I've got a dual 2.6ghz PPC.. Nice box I'm not upgrading anytime soon) then I will switch my G5 MacPro to be 100% Linux. Currently I dual boot Yellow Dog Linux and OS/X 10.5. The 970MP really is a nice processor and when you use the Altivec code.. it is a very fast box. Yellow Dog Linux has just about all the features I want. My HP Desktop runs Gentoo Linux very well.
- mockupscaledown, on 10/29/2008, -2/+4Welcome to the future... of 2004.
- dungbeetle, on 10/29/2008, -3/+5It seems to me that Snow Leopard is basically a service pack and you have to pay for it. Wow.
- darienphoenix, on 10/29/2008, -3/+4@pyrates: 1 - That's not 'one application', that's 'two different versions of the same application'.
2 & 3: It's clunky, counterintuitive, and unprofessional. If businesses demand their programs work, they should demand those programs are written by software engineers with half a brain. If they're using software which was so sloppily coded that it doesn't even check the environment vars for the correct system folder path, lack of backwards compatibility is the least of their problems. - newbill123, on 10/29/2008, -0/+1No one has mentioned the price of Snow Leopard yet.
The most expensive releases of OS X (Tiger and Leopard) have had significant end user visible features and had a $129 price tag; Apple says Snow Leopard won't have significant end-user features.
How much did other OS X releases cost which consisted of optimization and stability improvements? A Puma (10.1) upgrade was the cost of the distribution media ($0), an iPod Touch Update was $20 due to Sarbanes Oxley accounting requirements (or so was claimed). I expect Apple to be looking at the under $30 upgrade release, while offering a version with a $129 price tag for Tiger users who skipped Leopard.
More than likely actual prices will be set by market pressures and how Apple wants to be perceived in a market considering Microsoft's Windows 7 pricing. - vilago, on 10/29/2008, -1/+2WORD VOMIT!!!
- Rekutyn, on 03/09/2009, -0/+1Run an SSE3 enabled codec, then.
- cardyology, on 10/29/2008, -3/+4RTFA
- Elranzer, on 10/29/2008, -4/+5Of course the site is biased. Never mind that Mac OS X's competitors have had 64-bit support since 2000 (Windows 2000 AS-LE and Linux, of course). When Apple does it, THAT'S when the market is ready. Who cares if Windows and Linux have had 64-bit since 2000? Apple will have it in 2009, so 2009 is the year of 64-bit!
Apple... always playing catch up, I see. - Numbski, on 10/29/2008, -1/+2So - I'm curious. I have a first gen intel mini that is Intel Core Duo. I thought the Core Duo's *were* x86-64. They aren't? What kind of output do you guys get from `machine` in terminal?
chibi:~ numbski$ machine
i486 - itsbob, on 10/29/2008, -0/+1But will it run crysis?
- newbill123, on 10/29/2008, -1/+2As I recall the ads touted the "G3 processor" in every new Macintosh as 64-bit compatible, not the OS itself.
With Apple's disasterous transition from a 24-bit to 32-bit clean address space (IIcx -> IIci timeframe), Apple was expecting a similar disaster in the Intel world and was trying to have their "answer" ready in consumer's minds.
But dancing bunny men made the hardware transition a painless non-issue on the PC side of things. Getting a faster processor also got them future compatibility with most folks not even being aware of it. - pyrates, on 10/29/2008, -1/+2Not according to the end user. To them its one application and they don't need to worry about selecting the right one. It will do it automatically.
When you combined points 2 and 3 together, your entire point was against point 3 and not point 2. So try not to lump things together. I asked in point 2 to show why this was a problem and you chose to avoid it.
For point 3, you can't just break a businesses custom application. You need to give them time to allow them to change it. That's how Microsoft did it with UAC by redirecting reads/writes that were intended for the program files directory to the users own directory instead. But they don't keep this compatibility there forever, they do remove it. They just need to ensure that application developers have time to move their application up to work on the new version of windows, that's all. If you don't do this, you do lose a lot of money so it's worth it for Microsoft to allow transitions like this from one version of windows to another.
Please actually address my points next time. You attempted to with point 1 but then failed on point 2 and 3. - Penta5, on 08/30/2009, -0/+1My Macbook 2.4ghz runs 64bit in 10.6. Just hold 6 and 4 on bootup.
To check that you are running 64 bit open terminal and enter:
ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi
It will return either “EFI32″ or “EFI64.” - NSResponder, on 10/30/2008, -0/+1"You can bundle 32-bit and 64-bit in one application on windows. OS X couldn't do this because they generally don't use an installer to install their applications"
That's not correct. You can put any number of binaries in the same application wrapper on OS X, and I typically build anything I'm writing quad-fat (PPC 32/64 and Intel 32/64).
-jcr - Junior612, on 10/29/2008, -8/+9So my 64 bit capable (white) MacBook won't be able to take advantage of a 64 bit kernel?
But what about this: http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/64bit.html
"Leopard delivers 64-bit power in one universal operating system. Now the Cocoa application frameworks, as well as graphics, scripting, and the UNIX foundations of the Mac, are all 64-bit. And since you get full performance and compatibility for your 32-bit applications and drivers, you don’t need to update everything on your system just to run a single 64-bit application."
- rossinio, on 10/29/2008, -1/+1*crickets chirping*
- cmf2, on 10/29/2008, -3/+3OS X currently has 64 bit support, as in you can run 64 bit applications just fine. The kernel is finally going 64 bit with the main advantage of that being that it will allow individual programs access to more ram.
Yes windows had full 64 bit before mac but they also had huge driver issues. Apple went to 64 bit in stages and avoided those issues while still allowing the use of 64 bit programs, it also allowed them to release only one OS. What good is creating a 64 bit operating system if the vast majority of your users don't even use it? - richthomas, on 10/29/2008, -1/+1some apps do have installers. ones which install a lot of files like Office and Creative Suite and Apples app suites like an iLife upgrade, Final Cut, Aperture and even some small apps. these installers can have both 32 and 64-bit versions.
devs that simply have their applications inside a disk image will have do host both 32 and 64-bit versions. - inkswamp, on 10/31/2008, -1/+1No, the 10.5.x updates are more comparable to service packs. Speaking of which, Apple has released 5 "service packs" in the year that Leopard has been out and the sixth is right around the corner. Vista: 1 service pack in one-and-a-half years.
I'm thinking if a company is making the kind of effort that Apple makes, it doesn't hurt quite so much to pay for their major OS updates a little more frequently. At least you're actually getting something worthwhile, not just a new UI slapped on a lot of old crap. - BlatheringIdiot, on 10/29/2008, -2/+2"Snow Leopard is basically a service pack and you have to pay for it"
Hence 'Snow'- you're the one getting a snow-job. because you pay twice.
I'm happy with 10.5.5- it's kinda like Vista- throw enough resources (Ram, L2, Mhz, Cores...) at it and it'll purr like a good leopard. I'll work on leaning it up a bit and dropping unwanted services. - kien64, on 10/29/2008, -4/+4The adoption rate of OSX 64 should be seemless, unlike the windows fiasco. Another great strength of Apple, product execution. Crack that whip Steve!
- dungbeetle, on 10/29/2008, -2/+1Not really. If you have 32 bit Vista you can send $10 for the 64 bit disc. While technically not free because of the disc and shipping costs it is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a whole new OS.
- P0peRatz0, on 10/29/2008, -6/+5You'll need more than that to run Windows 7.
- khyberkitsune, on 10/29/2008, -5/+3"Again, that's because 64-bit programs can't load and run 32-bit plugins, and vice versa."
Umm, yea, whatever. Author has no ***** clue what he's talking about.
Oh, that's right, it's Apple he's talking about. They do things differently from the rest of the world. Full 64-bit performance using a 32-bit kernel? *****. - wikinerd, on 10/29/2008, -4/+2Well, yes, Mac OS X is slightly late in 64bit support, but it's one of the earliest systems to implement and employ it on a full-scale adoption.
try thinking the whole thing over before posting, please -
Show 51 - 55 of 55 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is