On Aug 26, 2010, at 2:54 PM, Tina K. wrote: > On the Windows side developers are still supporting XP which is about nine > years old now, but in Apple land four years seems to be the lifespan of an OS.
You're comparing Apples and toasters. Apple needs only to support a small population of different hardware, while Microsoft has a very long tail of a wide range of hardware, and worse, a veritable dinosaurian tail of developers, who have managed to find all the parts that XP breaks in 2K, and 7 breaks in XP and they seem to have concentrated all their efforts on making these parts absolutely central to their applications. I deal with this BS all the friggin time. We have lab instruments that cannot be upgraded past NT4, past Win2K or in one case cannot be upgraded to WinXP service pack 3, because Windows changed the firewire driver. Now why an instrument manufacturer found it necessary to screw around with a standard system interface I have no frigging idea. It's a standard system call: "Read the <bleep> firewire port" Microsoft is a vast lumbering beast with a committee of brains scattered throughout it's body trying to keep up with a nimble, single-minded highly intelligent competitor. The committee of brains may individually be really smart, but it takes a long time to turn the beast anyway. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of the iMac Group, a group for those using Apple iMacs and eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to imaclist@googlegroups.com To leave this group, send email to imaclist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist
