Mainly the fear is "we can't do the same thing because some relatively obvious part of that is patented and we'll get sued". Usually, I guess, the legit avenue would be to ask company X for a licence to use the patent and put some litigation lawyers out of work to the benefit of contract lawyers.

Problem is I don't think company X is obliged to licence the patent and even if they did they will ask some stupendous amount of money for it which is effectively the same thing as not offering it at all. Maybe if there was a mechanism whereby the granting of a patent to bust copycats in court also came with a way to allow licencees of said patent at a reasonable rate for those who actually wanted to advance the state of the art in a meaningful way. Maybe with some timeframes about when the licencing must start.

Perhaps they would have to demonstrate some significant advance...

I know. Words like "reasonable" and "significant" would need defining... more lawyers I guess.

You will find that infact some trials in Tasmania have already taken place and a report on the effectiveness, or otherwise, of that effort can be had here.

You need to check out how Snow Leopard is built a little better, as it will not be 100% 64bit. It will be 'more' of a hybrid, but still not a full 64bit OS.

I don't profess to have a knowledge intricate enough to claim SnowLeopard is 100% 64-bit, not to mention that Snow Leopard isn't actually out yet and things may change. What I have learned is best represented by the graphic on this page where there is an end-to-end path of 64-bitness for Snow Leopard that wasn't there for previous iterations of the OS. To me that means a 64-bit OS. Perhaps to you it doesn't.

Because it DOESN'T matter in the Windows world. 32bit applications get performance benefits on the 64bit OS. Also if developers want to provide a full 64bit version, it is a simple recompile, you don't have to re-write the application like a lot of people (Adobe for example) find they have to do on OS X. This is why if you want a 64bit version of Adobe software, you need Vistax64, as the development APIs Apple sold Adobe never got moved to 64bit as promised.

You claim it doesn't matter for the windows world and then pick out a counterexample for an application written in Carbon. You're either deliberately obfuscating the issue or not understanding what's going on.

1. If you write your application in Cocoa a 64-bit version is a recompile away just as in Windows
2. Apple never sold Adobe anything, the devtools are free
3. What never got moved to 64-bit was the Carbon framework which was more of an interim measure to support software written for the PowerPC days and Adobe, understandably, were reluctant to do a complete re-write (using, I believe, Codewarrior)

All MS API sets(development platforms) move to 64bit, even old 16bit applications can be recompiled as 64bit applications. (You can't do this with System 9 applications, nor even the whole early 32bit transition APIs Apple provided.) Understand?

Perfectly. I don't disagree at all. Of course a lot of this was necessitated by the transition to OS X and from the PowerPC architecture to x86.

For everything the application (Apache in this example) that touches the OS, an OS API, or asks the OS to do, gets processed in 32bit mode. So if Apache asks OS X's kernel for a file from the File System, this is all happening in 32bit. Every API Apache uses that goes through the OS X kernel is processed in 32bit mode - not only in the OS, but the CPU is shifted to 32bit mode to process the call as well. Understand?

Yes, why do you keep asking me that?

You are defending Apple on something they don't need to be defended on and are more a problem in the industry when it comes to this subject than some 'noble' company. Do you remember the Apple ads talking about the FIRST 64bit Personal Computer? How ironic that this many years later it still isn't even running a native 64bit OS, where Windows has been doing 64bit versions since the mid 90s. (Yes NT 4.0 versions had 64bit modes and used 48bit addressing space on hardware capable of it, like the DEC Alpha) Apple is out of their league and making a fool of themselves in the process.

I don't quite get what you mean by 'noble' company. Apple certainly don't need me to defend them and I do remember the ads, though I remember it as the first 64-bit laptop (though that was also false). Yes, they were misleading, but Apple's certainly not alone in that game. They did a similar one for the FASTEST PC on the planet...

I'm not disputing windows was there first*, what I'm saying is that while Microsoft has its feet in both 32 and 64bit OSs Apple is trying to move the entire product line. If Snow Leopard delivers what is being promised Apple will not be able to claim beating Windows to 64-bit. What it can claim is to be the first away from 32-bit*.

Understand? ;-)

* for comparisons between Apple and Microsoft at least

If you are referring to the Apple marketing machine, they ya, 32bit and 64bit are not much different, just larger memory addressing. (Of course OS X is still a 32bit OS could be the reason they like to create this mis-perception.)

This is true(ish), I grant you, however at least there is a clear intent to redress this issue for the client OS within the next few months with the release of snow leopard and that will be the only OS Apple will distribute.

Microsoft will undoubtedly have versions of Windows 7 in 32 and 64-bit and by default distribute the 32-bit version. I completely understand why they might do this, I might even be convinced it is in their interest to do that, but I think it holds back the development of the platform in general.

Finally Leopard itself does support full 64-bitness, for example Apache on OS X Server is running as a proper 64-bit application. I don't mean to dispute your claims that it remains effectively a 32-bit OS, just that it's not as cut and dried as it might appear.