[cbk1994]

Originally Posted by Spikedude

Since then, Mac has ditched power-pc (making everything less compatible)

Are you just pulling this stuff out of your ass or what? Not that I agree with the rest of your post, but this is a pretty strange statement. They switched to a different processor architecture, and as such, all apps need to be recompiled for the new architecture or be run using emulation software. They had plenty of good reasons for switching off of PPC, too.

The same thing happens in the Linux world. It's just less of a problem because most software tends to be free (as in freedom) and can fairly easily be compiled for new architectures by the community. On OS X it's a bigger problem in a large part because more programs are non-free (and thus can only be recompiled by the developer). The vast majority of software has Intel versions available now (even Graal).

Microsoft and Apple are both money-sucking computer conglomerates who intentionally make new software incompatible with old versions so you have to repurchase every major program for every operating system.

If you don't understand how the change to Intel chips necessitated the transition, then you shouldn't be talking about it.

Your comment about Microsoft is particularly ridiculous. Microsoft goes to incredible lengths to keep new versions of Windows compatible with old software, even building in quirks in their operating system so old apps continue to run. For example:

Originally Posted by Joel Spolsky, "How Microsoft Lost the API War"

I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.