Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0: 64-bit Power Under Windows And OS X

[Guest]

San Jose (CA) - Adobe today announced Lightroom 2.0, Adobe's first native 64-bit application using OS X Cocoa APIs.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0: 64-bit Power Under Windows And OS X : Read more

 

[JonnyDough]

It's always nice to see 64-bit software coming to market to help push 64 bit computing. 64-bits are noticeably faster than 32, and more secure. We've had x86/x64 processors for years now and still haven't made the switch. MS is partly to blame for that. Hopefully Windows 7 will be all 64. MS is afraid of losing customers, but going to 64 bit and releasing a limited OS to developers a year or two ahead of time is a great strategy that should have been implemented a long time ago. There's a reason they have MSDN.

 

[velocityg4]

[citation][nom]JonnyDough[/nom]It's always nice to see 64-bit software coming to market to help push 64 bit computing. 64-bits are noticeably faster than 32, and more secure. We've had x86/x64 processors for years now and still haven't made the switch. MS is partly to blame for that. Hopefully Windows 7 will be all 64. MS is afraid of losing customers, but going to 64 bit and releasing a limited OS to developers a year or two ahead of time is a great strategy that should have been implemented a long time ago. There's a reason they have MSDN.[/citation]
MS could have made the OS more transparent to 64 bit rather than having separate 32 and 64 bit versions. Like Apple did with OS X. The Windows installer should just detect whether the CPU is 64 or 32 bit and installed the appropriate components. Heck OS X not only automatically installs appropriate 64/32 bit support but also x86 or PPC support. While MS whom is supposed to have so much experience with so many various hardware types could not even make an OS that could install appropriately between 64 and 32 bit.

 

[JonnyDough]

The Windows installer should just detect whether the CPU is 64 or 32 bit and installed the appropriate components.

Umm, no it shouldn't. What it should do is it should have instructions detailing to the end-user which version they will likely want to install. Which version you want to run depends on your software and applications, not your hardware.

The majority of people are using 32-bit software. In fact, there are very few mainstream applications that run in 64-bit mode. XP Pro x64 uses a 32-bit emulator of sorts. It has two registries, one for x86 and for x64.

You were right when you said they need an OS that can run both. They have that. It's XP x64, the only problem is that they never released it mainstream because of the conflicts. Not all 32-bit apps will run on it, and hardware/driver support was pretty horrible on release (and still is a bit lacking).

What they should have done is marketed the switch to 64-bit in the media, i.e. television. Make the masses of home users excited about 64-bit computing with a commercial. Announce what it does with security, state its speed increase, and the fact that it lets you use up to 16GBs of ram and how that can be of benefit. If home users use it, then businesses would surely use it because of the benefits stated. The switch to Vista could have been delayed another half a year and been 64-bit only, giving extra time to hardware vendors to write new drivers.

 

[JonnyDough]

Which version you want to run depends on your software and applications, not your hardware.

I misspoke. It depends on both your hardware (because obviously you need to have the right hardware to run x64), AND your software. If you don't have 32-bit applications and you want a lot of ram or more speed or better security, or bragging rights in benchmarks: run x64.