On Jun 1, 2010, at 11:43 AM, Kathy K wrote:

> And re the ten point four point eleven... good grief I'll be laughing at 
> myself about that for ages—but then who came up with that idea anyway?

It's actually a pretty standard version numbering style in the IT industry. 

It goes :

Major.Major minor.minor.subminor (if you have that.) Each step is a whole 
integer.

Major is for truly significant changes: OS 7, OS 8, OS 9, OS 10

Major minor is for significant changes within the major. 10.2, 10.4, 10.5, etc.

Apple has mostly, since OS 7.6, sold each of these as a paid upgrade. A few 
were updates, like 8.0-8.1, 9.0-9.2.2 and 10.0-10.1, but 8.1 to 8.6 was paid, 
and every OSX version since 10.2 was paid.

Minor are the updates within a paid update, they're free (at least Apple's 
are). 10.4.1-10.4.11 Eleven separate updates were shipped for 10.4 before 10.5 
was released.

Subminor (Apple doesn't use these, but other companies, like Oracle, do) 
usually means a bug fix that may be applicable only to a sub-population of 
users, or it may mean a very small, often single-issue update.

Not all companies use all the steps and what you pay for and what you get for 
free varies.

-- 
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs


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