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*Second, the version numbers: older software products used to have two version numbers: major and minor (e.g. in {{w|MS-DOS}} 6.22 the major number is 6 and the minor is 22). Newer products tend to have hundreds of minor revisions, all of them numbered, so a typical user may well find themselves updating version 6.0.0.1 to 7.3.8.1 without knowing at all the differences between both versions or which other versions are in between. The ¾ in the Macromedia Java version is a joke on complex version numbers, which (so far) have never included fractions. | *Second, the version numbers: older software products used to have two version numbers: major and minor (e.g. in {{w|MS-DOS}} 6.22 the major number is 6 and the minor is 22). Newer products tend to have hundreds of minor revisions, all of them numbered, so a typical user may well find themselves updating version 6.0.0.1 to 7.3.8.1 without knowing at all the differences between both versions or which other versions are in between. The ¾ in the Macromedia Java version is a joke on complex version numbers, which (so far) have never included fractions. | ||
| − | *Third, the 32-bit or 48-bit version: The {{w|Intel 80386}} processor used an architecture known as {{w|IA-32}}, which implies the {{w|Address bus|address bus}} is 32-bit wide and thus able to handle up to 4{{w|Gibibyte|GiB}} of {{w|Random-access memory|RAM}} memory. This was plenty for the early 1990s, when a typical home PC would have about 8MiB (this is 512 times less than 4GiB). However, about 10 years after that, a typical home PC could well use more than 4GiB of RAM, so several {{w|64-bit computing|64-bit architectures}} were created. These architectures are not compatible ( | + | *Third, the 32-bit or 48-bit version: The {{w|Intel 80386}} processor used an architecture known as {{w|IA-32}}, which implies the {{w|Address bus|address bus}} is 32-bit wide and thus able to handle up to 4{{w|Gibibyte|GiB}} of {{w|Random-access memory|RAM}} memory. This was plenty for the early 1990s, when a typical home PC would have about 8MiB (this is 512 times less than 4GiB). However, about 10 years after that, a typical home PC could well use more than 4GiB of RAM, so several {{w|64-bit computing|64-bit architectures}} were created. These architectures are not compatible(32b SW runs on 64b HW but 64b SW doesn't work on 32b HW), so programs (including the Java Runtime Environment, or JRE) often have 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Furthermore, the JRE is heavily used by many web browsers, and for this to work the JRE and browser need to be the same "number of bits". This means that most people have installed both versions of the JRE to be able to use it with both 32-bit and 64-bit browsers. There's no 48-bit architecture (though some 64-bit processors including the {{w|x86-64|most common ones}} don't actually <b>use</b> all 64 bits everywhere, ignoring some bits so actual virtual or physical memory is smaller (in the case of the most common ones, 48bits virtual and 40bits physical), they simulate a full 64-bit environment to allow adding more bits later, so there are no specific 48-bit applications). |
*Fourth, the text would suggest that the user has a high enough version to run the software (Java major version 7 is certainly higher than Java major version 6), and yet it informs the user that it must update to a new version. It's possible that the website actually ''broke'' as new Java updates have been released, and the user must downgrade to an older version. The cause of the issue is impossible to guess. | *Fourth, the text would suggest that the user has a high enough version to run the software (Java major version 7 is certainly higher than Java major version 6), and yet it informs the user that it must update to a new version. It's possible that the website actually ''broke'' as new Java updates have been released, and the user must downgrade to an older version. The cause of the issue is impossible to guess. | ||
