Re:I Almost Bought a Scanner
by wombat_trouble on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @06:44PM
(#34525818)
For all the hate Microsoft regularly gets, they are pretty amazing about that: I have ancient software that still runs fine on Windows 11 through layers upon layers of compatibility libraries baked into the OS.
I'm sure it's costing them dearly, but there's plenty of niche and industrial hardware like this that lasts much longer than a generation of operating systems, and there's no alternative. Linux pays lip service to compatibility, but ABIs change constantly and it's easy to get stuck in dependency hell. MacOS X is... MacOS X.
Speaking of smelly: My scanner just broke down last week. The powersupply started smelling burned plastic and then gave up the ghost completely. Can't find a powersuppy fitting the special contact. It has been working since windows 95 or so, was now running windows 10 without problems and without having to install special drivers from the producer. Old was a canon, early USB model.
Whole thing sorta smells like Apple trying to further assert the dominance of AArch64, what with their insane stake in the ISA and it's eventual dominance. Not a terrible thing inherently, but the push to depreciate 32-bit hardware and software alike was pointless. 32-bit ARM can (and should) live alongside AArch64 as an ISA. From what I understand, the M1 even has secure 32-bit emulation mode built-in, without any OS functionality to leverage it.
Whatever Apple does, it's hard for developers to treat the Mac like a regular development target now. Besides the ISA change, the push for Metal-agnostic GPU pipelines has left developers scrambling. Massive open projects like Blender didn't even have an Apple Silicon strategy until Apple sponsored one. It's a bit of a mess, and kinda tragic that Apple is pointlessly complicating cross-platform development.