[teilo]

This is going to make my life miserable.

I wish it were possible that we could say goodbye to Rosetta and Universals Binaries yesterday. However, there are a good number of "Universal" pieces of software out there in common use, that have vestigial PowerPC components. I just ran into one yesterday, on a business critical piece of software at my company - supposedly UB software, that has a command-line utility that is compiled for PowerPC, and that in the most current version of the software. Quite a number of times, I have run into software that is UB, and yet part of the install process relies on Rosetta.

Oh, and I have to run Acrobat 7 for a couple business-critical websites, because we make templates using an old build of PDFLib, and since it's legacy software, we won't be upgrading to a newer build.

I believe I will have to setup an instance of Snow Leopard in Parallels, if I move to Lion.

Well, I don't fault Apple for this. Perhaps it will force this nonsense to stop sooner than later.

[Hoff]

Welcome to enterprise computing, and to the world of zombie software management.

Other OS vendors can carry decades of cruft and baggage for reasons of compatibility with older applications, and that really slows down development, and the testing costs scale upward for whatever you can't retire. You end up implementing the Windows XP box in Windows 7, the pain that has been IE6 replacements and upgrades, and various other forms of API and run-time and source-code compatibility, and translators.

Some of this zombie software lives on ten and twenty years past expectations, and longer.

Apple throws features and hardware under the bus when it gets in the way of their skating to where they think the puck will be.