

The Great PC RAM Swindle - pmorici
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/03/road_to_mac_os_x_snow_leopard_64_bits_santa_rosa_and_the_great_pc_swindle.html

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halo
Really old news, sensationalist headline for a crappy biased article.
Microsoft have been moving forward towards 64-bit for a while, although they
arguably should offer 64-bit as default on new builds, and a large proportion
of people run 64-bit Linux.

Apple offered upgrades to 4gb of memory without explaining the disadvantages
and Mac OS X Tiger showed the amount of physical memory rather than the amount
addressable - <http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=364707> \- why is
it a "swindle" when Dell do it but not when Apple do it?

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ryanwaggoner
Actually, a tiny _proportion_ of people run 64-bit Linux.

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litewulf
I'd actually say its easier to run 64-bit Vista than Linux due to the fact
that people often ship binaries for Windows that seem to work whereas the SOs
in Linux leave you with a mixed-mode install. Sigh.

~~~
thwarted
The biggest problem I ran into with this was that earlier versions of package
managers didn't handle multiple arches installed on the same system very well
(claims of package conflicts due to the names being the same, things like
that). That seems to have been fixed or is being worked on.

~~~
litewulf
My honest response is I don't know what the current state of the world is like
in 64bit land.

My one experience was deeply frightening (what do you mean I can't listen to
music without having to maintain a 32bit userland?)

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Raphael
If there is no 32-bit version of Mac OS X Leopard, then why does it need the
8gb hack at all?

And why does Microsoft still sell 32-bit Windows?

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davi
Maybe why needs an 8gb hack:

"Currently, Mac OS X Leopard hosts both 32-bit and 64-bit apps on top of a
32-bit kernel (below). Using PAE, the 32-bit kernel can address 32GB of RAM in
the Mac Pro and Xserve; Apple's consumer machines only support 4GB RAM, but
unlike 32-bit operating systems they can use the entire 4GB (with appropriate
hardware support). Leopard's 32-bit kernel enabled Apple to ship 64-bit
development tools to give coders the ability to build applications that can
work with huge data sets in a 64-bit virtual memory space (and port over
existing 64-bit code), without also requiring an immediate upgrade to all of
Mac OS X's drivers and other kernel-level extensions. That transition will
happen with Snow Leopard."
[http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/08/26/road_to_mac_os...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/08/26/road_to_mac_os_x_10_6_snow_leopard_64_bits.html&page=3)

I don't know if this is right, but it caught my attention when I read it.

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arthurk
They seem to hype the whole 64-bit stuff a lot. I've had a full 64-bit Gentoo
running for quite year and the difference to 32-bit wasn't even noticeable.

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gaius
Running what?

Unless you're doing CAD, 3D or video editing, 64-bit on the desktop is just
for bragging.

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there
well he said gentoo, so i guess that means running gcc.

~~~
gaius
Over and over and over again... :-P

