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Try Out Chrome OS In a Virtual Machine
itwbennett writes "Some very generous Alpha OS geeks have snagged the Chrome OS source code and compiled a version to share with the rest of us, writes blogger Peter Smith. 'The build comes in the form of a virtual machine, which means you'll need VMWare or VirtualBox running, and of course the image of Chrome OS itself. The folks at gdgt are distributing the latter, and they've set up a page with all the links you'll need. You'll need to create a gdgt account if you don't have one yet. The Chrome OS image is only a bit over 300 megs, so it's a fast download. If you need a little more handholding, TechCrunch has a step-by-step guide to getting Chrome OS installed and running using VirtualBox, and a Chrome OS torrent they link to.'"
I can
The only novelty is that the lack of a "shutdown" option seems to be intentional; the local machine is supposed to be stateless in the sense that it commits all transactions remotely before announcing their completion. Plan 9 also tried to achieve that goal, at least initially.
Kudos to the people who put these images together, though--they've saved many of us significant time.
The Chrome OS kernel isn't a webapp?
I'm so disappointed.
I got really excited until I realised that this wasn't for the DEC Alpha processor. Shit.
There's a lot of handwaving about how Chrome is not Windows, how it won't let you use photoshop on the netbook, as if you would. Here's a hint: if you're trying to run Photoshop on a 10" screen, you're doing it wrong.
Look for disastrous reports from Gartner, Forrester and of course the Rob Enderle / Maureen O'Gara flackalyst duet on how Chrome is the worst thing since smallpox. These are your clues that this is the real thing. They said the same things about the When Google says they released the source, people build it and publish virtual machines the same day.
Netbooks are stepping up in performance, as this four-threaded model shows, and will soon be able to do many more things. Yes, VDI is starting to ramp. There is still a place for Chrome. It's the dead-simple desktop interface that many of the technology impaired need. It's a point on the graph twice the distance on the line from Debian to Ubuntu.
A bunch of people are going to whine it doesn't support disk. It's a next-generation operating system and solid state is the storage of the next generation. It has local storage - just not the slow kind you're used to. There is no more reason to support the legacy spinning disk on this platform than there is to support tape storage or floppy disk. Moving parts are so 2008.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
i played with it for 30 minutes today. the entire thing is a web browser and they have some non Google stuff there to keep the DoJ away. believe it or not there is an icon for Hotmail there as well as Yahoo, Hulu, Facebook, Twitter and the rest is Google apps. Each "app" just opens a new browser tab.
Torrents ought to be choice #1 in distributing files of any decent size. As an example, I thought it was utterly retarded that the recent Ubuntu 9.10 release didn't have the download torrents front and center. Why the hell not? Obviously they didn't have the bandwidth to handle all the direct downloads, as I started one just to see how slowly it would go. It crawled along at less than 1 KB/s for hours. They had the torrents advertised on the forums, at least, but they clearly made the launch harder on their servers than it should have been.
Torrents let you do more with less bandwidth. Take advantage of that! I understand some people may not be able to use them because of their ISP being a douchbag or whatever, and those people will need normal HTTP/FTP transactions and mirrors... but everyone else can use torrents and share your burden with you.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
before RMS crashes the party!
I don't suppose anyone else has run into this problem, the VirtualBox forum community doesn't seem to be any help with this:
After I log in, a gradient blue backdrop appears along with a mouse cursor. Then nothing. I can move the cursor around but other than that the system seems frozen.
I tried 5 different builds... one of which I compiled myself. 3 of them had this problem, the other two couldn't even find the network card and had no offline user so I couldn't get past the login screen.
Theres torrents available, just not from that gdgt place because they want people to log in...
Torrent and Info: http://pastie.org/706872 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/457451/ide.vmdk.torrent Because making an account on some shady website that's exploiting the situation seems wrong.
Link?
Google wants everybody online all the time - I want an OS that works when I'm OFFLINE - I'm guessing this isn't.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/
Yes it requires an account to download.
However it is not verified. AKA login immediately after.
I pounded the keyboard a few times and dloaded no problem.
I'd tell u my user and pass if I could.
Google's go is interesting and a truely a head-fucking excercise in adapting to new syntax... Everything else they've done since search has been a waste of time.
Chrome/Chromium is like the perfect Gnome desktop browser and ChromeOS is like... just fucking kill me now! If they'd written it in vala, it'd be worth a dive into the code. ChromeOS isn't even worth that -- what a complete and total waste of time.
Depends on who you ask. If you ask me, torrents not only clogs my connection regardless of upload/download speed so no one can browse the net, but are actually slower than most http/ftp downloads that support a few simultaneous connections.
That's why rapidshare et all are so popular. Besides, most people don't know what torrents are. You can't have them front and center to general users.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Torrents let you do more with less bandwidth. Take advantage of that!
I think torrents do not work the way you think they work. That's like saying it uses less gas to drive at 100mph than 50, because you get there so much sooner..
warning!! That's the goatse/last measure OS. (If you don't know what that means, you don't want to find out. trust me.)
I think he means the server needs less bandwidth. Of course the downloaders will be uploading, too, using more of their own bandwidth.
I saw an Eee PC running one of the demos in their presentation...is there a build available for that?
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
User: DotSlash
Pass: Slashdot
Dunno if it allows multiple logins....
I tried logging in using 1 google and one googlemail ID and passwords, nothing doing - using VirtualBox.
User confusion, really. Users are fragile and easily puzzled creatures. Every link you put on your website is a link the user can frantically flail onto and accidentally click. Then you end up with people on your forum asking why the OS isn't working. After all, they burned the file right onto the CD!
In the case of a beta OS meant to be run inside a VM, yeah, user competence is probably not a huge issue. In the case of an OS which is trying to be a mass-market OS, you want it to be as easy as humanly possible, and adding a torrent link to the homepage does not make things any easier.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Torrents are actually pretty inefficient(I don't mean to knock the design of the protocol; but making heavy use of last-mile upload capacity, which is some of the shittiest and most expensive pipe on the whole network, cannot be made as efficient as a conventional client/server setup). Further, they tend to promote the energy-inefficient situation of having large numbers of small servers, all bandwidth starved, spending hours nearly idling(but not able to sleep or shut down) as they wait for the bits to trickle in.
They do, though, have a great advantage, which is why we bother: In absence of a functional micropayment system, bittorrent is pretty much the best way of allowing the bandwidth costs of distributing something to be spread across all parties who are interested in receiving it. If it were possible to transact in 1cent increments, everyone would almost certainly be better off if the distributor just dumped it on Amazon EC2 or some other big hosting service and let interested parties pay the per-megabyte download costs directly(saving themselves the upload bandwidth and power costs). Since that isn't really viable(particularly, though not exclusively, if what is being distributed isn't wholly legal), bittorrent's easy sharing of hosting duties among downloaders is the next best thing.
+1, thank you for saving me from registering for yet another website that I'll only need to log into once.
Am I the only one with a CPU lacking virtualization? :(
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
I understand exactly how torrents work. You are doing more with less in the sense that the file's uploading does not depend on only your bandwidth capabilities... which were not sufficient in the Ubuntu example I gave.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
2.4 MB/sec
ChromeOS is a very good move for everyone involved. Remember, this OS and the devices it will run on are not targeting average slashdotters. I can personally vouch that I come across daily contact with people, business people not just teenagers, who don't use anything other than their browser. The worst aspect of a computer for them, is upgrading, updating all applications, viruses, malware, and general maintenance of the system. They nearly all fail in these, and after a year, they think their laptop is not usable anymore and go and buy a new one. They would LOVE this OS, and are they primary targets of it. Also, synchronisation between multiple computers is a bitch, that even they most fail at. And they hate leaving their documents here and there. Files and directories don't work for them, it's a broken metaphor for most people, and as much as love to organise my files in hierarchical directories, they simply don't care. They just want access to their information, when they need, as conveniently as possible.
I hate Web apps as much as the next guy on this forum, and even use my trusty IMAP client for fetching my emails from Gmail. But I can't deny that web apps are the future, specially when HTML 5 comes off age and becomes widespread. If you look back at what the Web looked like 5 years ago and compare it to now, you'll see that it will be irresistible in 5 years time. Have a look at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ to get a taste of what we are looking at.
On a more general note, anyone who is comparing this to old failed projects based on thin clients, X terminals or net pcs, is missing the point. Yes, the technology behind this might be similar to those, but times are changing. On the one hand, people are getting used to ever-present always-available services. On the other hand, 3G is now widespread, affordable, and provides great utility for many. Laptops and phones are converging. 2007 was the year of netbooks, 2010 might be the year of smartbooks (running ARM processors). Smartphones are morphing into Internet tablets (e.g,, N900). These are very different, and interesting times.
Yes, this is cloud computing, and yes, it raises huge privacy issues. It is up to us the tech savvy crown to raise these issues and address them.
Slashdotters can always run their trusty Debian or Fedora or FreeBSD or on their computer. And they remain great choices. But Google is pushing applications to go online and cross browser. They are pushing for open source drivers. They are pushing for open standards and cooperation with upstream and downstream projects. This is a Good Thing (TM) for all of us, even if we are not the target consumers of this OS.
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Depends on who you ask. If you ask me, torrents not only clogs my connection regardless of upload/download speed so no one can browse the net, but are actually slower than most http/ftp downloads that support a few simultaneous connections.
Any reasonable client lets you control how much bandwidth it uses... it's up to you to know how to configure your client so it allows you to do other things while you torrent.
That's why rapidshare et all are so popular.
Most people can't afford as much upload capacity as RS has... that isn't cheap, you know. My argument is that torrents are more useful for the uploader of the files, not necessarily the downloader.
Besides, most people don't know what torrents are. You can't have them front and center to general users.
Why is that? Because of the negative rap that torrents get. Which is why the bullshit in the original AC's post is a troll. I'm refuting this point of view.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
The Chrome OS image is only a bit over 300 megs, so it's a fast download.
I'm on dial-up, you insensitive clod!
R.Mo
A very good point. I thought nothing of the impact the number of links on a page could have on navigation until I watched my girlfriend or my brother try to figure out which link was the one they needed when downloading software.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Call me paranoiac! Call me antique! Tell me whatever you want, but THEY MUST BE OUT OF THEIR MINDS if they think I would leave ALL my stuff on THEIR SERVERS.
It might be faster than blinking, but I simply DO-NOT-LIKE the paradigm they're trying to spread.
It reminds me the "old" ATM machines, when a mainframe did all the processing. I guess I don't have to recall it was a bank who owned the mainframe and that you must pay them periodically.
I think the idea of avoiding the startup delay is really cool, but has a SMALL detail.. data is stored on GOOGLE servers, which means if Google powers down their servers you cannot access your data.
Tomorrow Google could say, "ok, since now you must pay to use our services.." And that's when you regret your decisions. I haven't mentioned the fact they can do whatever they want with the data in their servers (yeah.. yeah.. the data confidentiality agreement - i don't think so).
Nevertheless, I think it might be suitable for some people in some cases. Computers would require less hardware, which is a pro.
In summary, I like the idea of speed up the OS, but I think some stuff is private property and must remain as such (at least for my stuff).
Most ISPs in the U.S.A. throttle torrent traffics, so you don't actually see the speed increase. Or you might even get completely blocked, in the case of universities network.
New Economic Perspectives
try BugMeNot next time. (just looked on bugmenot for gdgt) Crap, gdgt is blocked from bugmenot. well, you can use this for other websites that you need to log into on a one-time basis
Ironically, I could torrent just fine on a 50mbit connection at my university. 1 hour spent in the student union could easily see me upload 8-10GB... very handy for private sites.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Excellent points. I find myself wishing to turn my computer off but have to leave it on for days to seed back to 1:1 ratio. It really would be awesome to allow for this kind of micro transactions. I'd just be concerned they would end up getting greedy and over charging to the point where the benefit would be lost on the end users, driving us frugal bastards back to leaving our bandwidth starved computers on all night.
Hmm http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/ not working, please do not slashdot the site which are not ready to take the load, or atleast let them be ready for high volume of traffic.
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
I don't know about you, but long battery life to me would be a killer app. I think that the standard six hours or less shows a peculiar lack of any progress. Sure, I can go to a coffee shop with my laptop. But I can't relax at a coffee shop with my laptop. How long will a smart-phone CPU with a notebook-sized battery last, I wonder?
I also consider a boot time of less than 10 seconds a killer app. The standard 45 seconds or more that even Windows XP (old) on my Core 2 Duo (new) gives me is baffling after 25 years of the PC. (Really, its more like two minutes before it is really ready to give me attention.) If my computer shuts down in two seconds and boots in three, l wouldn't plan my morning around it: "Time to make coffee --- no, wait, start the computer before you make coffee, then it will be ready at the same time."
Security is also a killer app. Encrypted home directory + read-only root + twin root partitions + a lot of other things = a lot more peace of mind. What if my laptop is stolen? Well, at least they're not going to find anything on it. My house guest is asking me if he can borrow my laptop. If it's a Windows laptop, I (but admittedly not the average user) will do a quick mental check --- do I have anything private on it that he might see? Is he going to accidentally download a virus on it? Etc. Sure, I can do things so that it will be less of a problem, but it's a lot easier if the computer already is set up as much as Chrome OS is for sharing.
Now that I look at them, what do these things all have in common? A less-stressed user experience. I don't have to think as much as I used to about taking care of my computer. Sure, it won't run Final Cut Pro. But I say, you should have made these the priorities --- at least with some --- any of your models. Get battery life, boot speed, and security to where you would have expected to be in the 21st century. Then branch out to fancy applications. Which is exactly what will probably happen. Browsers are only getting abler.
I am getting "Incorrect username and/or password."
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
So you could just run this and save Google the hassle of creating linux or mac versions of Chrome :)
~/ One man's opinions is a lifetime of pain.
..which is some of the shittiest and most expensive pipe on the whole network, cannot be made as efficient as a conventional client/server setup).
Efficient in what sense? Certainly not time in release cases. If host A has a 100MB file and a 10MB/s connection, the most that host can upload that file at is 6/min. At 10,000 users this takes about 28 hours.
If the first torrent uploads to 2 people, and those two people to two more...etc it will quickly (4 hours) beat the single host case even if every pipe after the first is 1/100th the speed.
Ever not get a link right? Sometimes it's a nuisance that you can't edit a posted slashdot post. <sigh> I wouldn't change it though.
handwaving.
As long as I'm following up to fix the link, I might as well point out that this absurd article tries to tar Google's cloud services with Microsoft's T-Mobile Danger brush - as if the two were related in some way other than as polar opposites. That link works better if you're tying Microsoft's cloud services since they're the ones to fire the footgun in that case. They try and say that if you paid for Photoshop on your PC, you're licensed to use it on your netbook. They point out that this alpha OS that's a year from initial release hasn't signed a single cellular provider and doesn't yet support cellular wireless data - even though it was Google that made any-app-you-want any-device-you-want data-only wireless possible. They even quote an analyst from some thinktank I've never heard of (Interpret?). The only way to describe this article is "hit piece". Later let's examine why this author would do this, and who he's trying to help. For now I want to talk about the extremely disruptive nature of this change, in the context of stuff many of you don't konw.
Long ago there was this guy who wanted to make phone calls over radio. He was a bright guy and rigged up the radios to talk to the phone through an acoustic coupler, only to find that "The Phone Company" (at the time there was only one, AT&T) would not permit him to connect his device to a phone on their network. Like any stubborn geek he persisted in his insistence that his equipment could not harm their network. Unlike your common geek he sued all the way to the Supreme Court, gaining fame and support along the way. Ultimately his efforts resulted in the Carterfone decision, and all of the advanced telephony changes we enjoy today including dialup, wireless phones, cellular phones and the Internet, and propelled him to ignonimy. Somebody needs to find this man and reward him for what he's done for us. It is because of his persistence and efforts that the AT&T monopoly was broken and we enjoy the advancements we have today.
Kids today (lawn, get off) are going to have trouble grasping this idea, so let's walk it back and forget some things: Forget tweeting your various stages of pooping. Forget SMS'ing pics of the dead squirrel you found. Forget texting. Forget even calling Mom from the corner that you're going over to Tommy's house to play the latest online game, because none of that is possible. You're like the poor kids who have no cel, except nobody has one so it's NBD. Now forget wandering around the house with the wireless phone, because that wasn't possible either. Now you've got a phone or two in your house if you're not poor but you can only talk on them when you're withing a few feet because there's this coiled wire that connects you to the phone which is either mounted on the wall or attached to the wall with a wire so Mom can hear everything you say - but it gets worse! Mom can't even own this phone - she can't upgrade it to a new model from the store because it doesn't belong to her. She only leases it from the phone company. They don't even have to make new models of phone, because what is she going to do if they don't? The phone company can cut off even this limited access any time they like or charge her anything they like (and they liked a LOT) because they're not just the phone company - they're the phone company. They don't have to care -- that was actually their motto. "We don't have to care: We're the phone company." Oh, the horror! I wanted to rip the onion from my belt and throw it at them to express my disgust.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's comments like yours Obispus that makes Slashdot THE place to come to for Informative commentary on where the computing world is heading.
Back to going over the Chrome OS source...
I've been waiting for the next platform shift. It's been moving towards cloud computing for about a decade, now, but aside from killing the client-server application, the Internet really hasn't caused any major change in platform.
We all still boot an O/S and run applications on the O/S, some of which are Internet-access applications. But it's struck me for some time that the browser really *should* be the next generation O/S. With plugins and all, Firefox is showing lots of signs, but it's just not stepping up to the plate - I guess the vision isn't quite there - the guys at Firefox still see the browser as a browser.
A decade ago, the idea of moving any kind of application "into the cloud" was a laughable concept that most people wouldn't dare touch. Nowadays, it's so common that perhaps 50% of all software development is now oriented around "cloud computing". I wouldn't be surprised if the number was even higher.
So Google's taking this trend to its logical conclusion: why bother with "local" at all?
It's an interesting take, and one that's sure to really upset the Winopoly if it's got any success at all. The flaws of the Winopoly are obvious and horrible - security woes too many to number, spam spewing from the many leaks, disks that crash, and an Operating System so big, complex, and cumbersome to work on that not even one of the wealthiest companies in the world can do much about it.
After investing untold billions into the Windows codebase, the result was Windows Vista/Windows 7, which is a bit prettier but certainly won't be introducing meaningful change. It might even be more secure, as much as something larger and more complicated is ever more secure than simpler, ancestral systems.
But Chromium takes us a whole new direction. My guess is that it *belongs* in a VM/application style software stack, where you can either run it alone on a netbook or something, or run it as a Win/Lin/OSX application. VMWare makes this a reality, even if it's never set up as an "application".
My guess? It's going to succeed, but in about 5 years' time. Google really needs to unify Chromium and Android. They should be virtually identical platforms. Microsoft is going the other way with IE - trying to pound the web, kicking and screaming, back into Windows proprietary extensions.
They *still* haven't figured it out...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If you compile it yourself you can run the "live disk" and it isn't too hard to do if you have Ubuntu Karmic. I am running Chromium OS on my laptop right now, it is nice a snappy with a pretty fast boot time - around 9-10 seconds.
Did you know that all of the mainframe vendors (IBM and, uh, IBM) have built web front-ends to the mainframe so their platforms can remain relevant?
I already have browsers coming out my ears. I like doing some of my own processing on the fat multicores in my notebook.
That would be sweet. I'm having trouble seeing how this release is preventing you from doing that since you don't have to install it - in fact, installing this looks to be quite a chore. You should avoid it until it's more stable.
The hot new buzzword is "cloud", but the cloud is just virtual machines rendering services to clients, and the services are the same processing of storage to render output they always have been.
Google still hasn't shown a real 1) educational 2) business case 3) entertainment or 4) porn case for ChromeOS.
Ahem. It's been one day since they released the source code. They haven't launched the OS and don't intend to for a year. Don't you think you're being a tad bit impatient? If you want to test the alpha for those properties you're welcome to, but Google hasn't promised anything because it's very early.
Interesting note: Google has two operating systems released right now. How odd is that?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's a Linux with a GUI but without X-Windows!
Who gives a shit that they're inefficient, what matters is that my download speed will be 1200 times as fast as 1 KB with a torrent because I won't be relying on a piece of shit mirror being banged by the 1000 users of Linux to DL their distro. Torrents give you better speed because you can take one piece from the server, share it, then intershare it between all the different peers. It works.
Wake me up when ChromeOS can run World of Warcraft
C'mon people. I'm sure this is a very nice project and perhaps it might eventually be popular with Grandma Homeuser, but is everyone so dumbstruck by the Google name that they can't state what must be said?
First of all, it's not an OS, so please don't call it an OS. That term has an actual prior meaning that should not be hijacked in an attempt to sound geeky-cool. Perhaps "operating environment" is the right term? In any case, it's just a web app in the end.
Secondly, as a developer, I will never ever ever use this kind of app as my main interface. I need to be able to write/compile/debug software that executes on my actual hardware, not just on some virtual machine in the sky. If you take that away from me, you are taking away one of my most important freedoms. Not to mention that you're also thrusting me back into the 1960's. I own a computer, not just a "terminal".
Third, all your data lives in the cloud. This isn't a showstopper for me personally, but I know it's a big problem for many people. Speak up!
Folks, once the coolness factor wears off, are you really going to want this? I think not.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
I'm getting it as well.. :(
I predict ChromeOS will be as successful as Microsoft Bob.
First of all, this isn't really about businesses. It's about home users, students, and private individuals, at least for the moment. My babysitter is a nursing student, and I was telling her (i.e. flirting with her geek style) about ChromeOS and she was all over it. Why? Nothing to break. She doesn't need anything but a basic word processor, and actually uses Google Docs already as that's used by her school. Likewise, her email is gmail from school. She is a self-described techno-idiot, and loves the idea of a cheap computer with limited moving parts.
Second of all, when and if this sort of thing breaks in the corporate space, it won't replace desktop PC's. It will replace terminals (either traditional dumb terminals or Citrix) in call centers, at least at first. These things literally run one and only one application all day long. Right now, businesses are using Citrix to run a web browser or even a terminal emulator for reliability and ease of maintenance, and it ain't cheap--real example. Imagine when they can replace these with $100 "ChromeOS Boxes". Clear win. As for the politics point, I promise you that the girl in the call center has absolutely no political clout. She'll take what she gets and like it.
The small business users may be the last market to move because they often rely on unusual apps. But I do think that the availability of the Google platform and ChromeOS may push applications that have in the past been PC based onto the cloud. As this becomes more common, Chrome OS starts to make sense. This is a long-term play for Google, and I don't think they expect much uptake overnight.
The real story here, though, is that whether Chrome OS wins or loses, the web has reached the point that Bill Gates feared ten years ago: it is now "the platform" for many apps. Worse, it has got a great, powerful, profitable company in Google, pushing it as a platform from many different angles. It will replace desktop PC's--not in 5 years, maybe not in 10, but in 20? Count on it. It's worth noting, though, that this will be just as bad for Apple as it is for Microsoft. What happens to AppleTV and iTunes store sales when you just stream your movies and music off Amazon when you want to watch them? This technology is already here.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
What he's saying is the effective cost to you and to the ISP for using your upload bandwidth is so high that if, instead that money was used to host the file on a major CDN, the overall cost would be less.
I can't say whether he's right or wrong, but you aren't following his argument.
Torrents would be much better if they chose peers based on logical (not necessarily physical) distance.
dead now.
At some point we have to learn to stop hating and realise we already are web app users, especially the /.ers here. As much as I loathe web apps, I am a increasingly heavy user of them. Like many of us I've made the switch to gmail, partly because it integrates tightly with my android phone, and partly because it'll do 95% of what outlook et al can do, the other 5% of that being crash, crash my pc outright and corrupt my data.
Chrome is going primarily benefit subset of users who were previously forced to buy a laptop or desktop for what they want to do, or worse, struggle to do it on their pokey smartphone screen.
I really don't see chrome OS and it's cloud being any signifcant threat to how computing is done right now, just adding a new flavour. I really do not think the handwringing over restricted capabilities is valid. If you want to use rich applications on high powered hardware you'd just get a desktop in the first place, if you want portable computing horsepower you get a lappy. If you don't need anything extraneous you'll go smaller.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
netbook style devices for using the cloud and surfing the web. Hardware has come a long way over the past few years. Most home users use email and the web. I work in IT, I ssh, remote desktop or export my display and run things on the server pretty much all day. I could easily do most of my job from a netbook. The only downside is the physical size being too small. (I love my dual 20" monitors!)
If I look at how I use my personal computer at home, a netbook has enough power to handle about 90% of what I do. I stopped playing intensive games on my PC years ago and bought an xbox. I got tired of having to constantly upgrade it.. Spending 300$ on a console is much more bang for the buck. The only things I wouldn't want to do on a netbook is photo and video editing. My kids computer has a processor that was released in 2002 and it does everything they need it to do. I have an old computer with a celeron processor running my website on linux. Quite frankly, i'm running out of excuses to convince my wife I need a new computer every couple of years.
These devices won't replace your laptop or desktop in the foreseeable future but they are perfectly suited for those times where you don't want to carry them around. You just want something cheap, lightweight, long battery life but powerful enough to surf the web, check your email, edit some documents, remote desktop back to the office, etc.
Having something like Chrome OS, that is optimized to interface with the cloud can't lose. If it does lose, it will be to a competitor who was able implement it better.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
if its a reasonably sized file, i find dropbox works well as a file sharing system - all the advantages of bitorrent in a legitimate sense (large file transfers, incremental downloads, and checking if a file is correct), and a few more (web access). Sure, you're stuck with a 2gb account if you want a free one, but, that's enough for a cd or other reasonably sized upload
If you're just downloading Ubuntu you don't need to continue uploading once you've finished downloading.
I downloaded 9.10 using both bittorrent and HTTP -- KTorrent (and other clients) have an option to fetch chunks from an HTTP server.
They're using someone elses work to grab subscribers, and slashdot is complicit by providing this advertisement for their scammy shitty web site.
Wow, its a web browser that looks and acts like the open source webkit rendering engine. ChromeOS is fricking incredible!!
Good job Google!! w00t!!
All those talented engineers at google who designed a browser and operating system and then had the audacity to... combine the two!!
I look forward to eventually paying google monthly fees so I can use a web browser and access all of my files.
... a (crappy) browser that doesn't let me do anything but what firefox does (maybe even better)?
No seriously, why?
To me Chrome OS is not an OS, is an os with only a broswer on top.
What happens when the internet is down?
What? What? What?
Will google success on this cr*p?
Ciao!
You realise you can turn it off, then continue the seeding stage later ? I seed a linux distro and it's not running all the time, even thought the computer is. I think my ratio is 5:1 over 6 months.
Interesting to note: this build comes with Adobe Flash built-in.
Well, call me old-fashioned for not understanding new trends, but I have to say that I'm deeply unimpressed by what I've seen so far.
Basically, it's just a browser that you can't minimize or resize. What the hell?
No need to run this in a virtual box. I already have a browser, thanks.
see a Text Widget
Pirated? How does one pirate open source software?
We'd have a caption like this: No CLI. Less space than a harddrive. Lame.
Why is that? Because of the negative rap that torrents get.
Er, no: because most PCs don't come with torrent clients already installed - so most users will have to find one (hopefully not being deterred about the second paragraph on Wikipedia about clients being used to distribute malware), install it, probably have to set up port forwarding on their router (what - you want people to leech?) and maybe find that their provider has blocked the standard ports.
OTOH, they can just hit the HTTP/FTP link in their regular browser.
Oh, and as for the "negative rap" - that's not just "OMG torrents are for piracy" ignorance: as other posters have pointed out, not every network has bandwidth to spare - especially for upload, when networks were designed primarily for web browsing and email (Got ADSL? Even if you get 24Mb/s download the fastest upload is 3.5Mb/s - and 1Mb/s up is more likely).
However, we can correct the GP post for you:
You can't have (torrents) front and center to general users unless torrents "work for you" and you are happy to exclude anybody who is "too stupid" to spend time learning about torrent clients instead of just downloading what they wanted with the software they already have.
Better?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Your math is flawed.
In the prefect case where everyone has 1MB/s upload it would in theory take 100 seconds for any number of people. This is because any one peer starts sharing what it's downloaded as soon as it has one single block of the file.
Of course blocks are not infinity small, people don't have 1MByte upload speeds and it's not a 'big start'.
The best models depend on the state of the swarm. During the initial seed then there is one slow seeder first order approximation is that everybody in the swarm is at the same percentage level. Transfer rate is limited by the upstream of that first seeder.
If the many of peers disappear once they have the file then the swarm is in a seeder starved state. The download rate of any one peer will be about the same as it's upload rate because of the 'tit for tat' like sharing rules in most clients when they aren't seeding.
If the swarm has lots of seeders then in addition to the 'tit for tat' rate a peer will get a 'fair share' of the total upload bandwidth of all the seeders. This is what can fill your downstream rate.
The vast majority of swarms are in the seeder starved state but at the moment the ChromeOS VMs are seeder rich; go for it.
It looks exactly like the Chrome/Chromium browser, with a few more desktop icons and a weird window manager.
Well, yes - that's exactly what its meant to be: a stripped-down OS exclusively for running webapps.
Media hype aside, Chrome was never going to be a technically fascinating OS: the interesting bit is going to come when we see what the hardware is, and how it is marketed.
(The "weird window manager" might make sense when its running on the target hardware - Android or iPhone would be a bit weird on a regular desktop).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Torrents would be much better if they chose peers based on logical (not necessarily physical) distance.
In a perfect world perhaps, but in the real world this has been attempted and it fails badly. Even if the scheme can't be abused (somebody says "I'm the best" then pisses off once they have the file) the guesses the algorithms make are always worse than the default algorithm.
The basic for the default is "tit for tat", or "here's a block you wanted now you give me something and I'll give you more". Odd as it may seem this actually tends to favour the closer (well behaved) peers.
What Bittorrent actually needs is something that will encourage people to seed as this is the only way that a swarm will get enough overall bandwidth to fill downstream links in a world of ADSL. So called 'seed boxes' can also fill this role by adding more upstream to a swarm but they cost money.
300MB for what is in effect a web browser with a few drivers and a bootloader? Jesus H Christ. Windows XP ISO image isn't that much bigger and its a fully fledged operating system with a shedload of drivers AND a web browser and not just a thin client terminal OS.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
It's not bandwidth utilisation that slows everything down when torrenting - it's the high amount of active connections the connection tracker on your router has to keep track of. Before you know it CPU utilisation on your router jumps to 100% and it's this that brings your network to a crawl. I have my linux box (Pentium 4 D underclocked to 1.8ghz) doing all the NAT and connection tracking and consequently can have torrents running 24/7.
Not here to bash Google or to talk about what IS or IS NOT an operating system. But the GDGT vmware image runs horrible on my machine. Even after dedicating 4+ gigs of RAM to the VM. Not sure if it's just a mega mega beta release, but I'd like to see how it runs natively on a netbook or something. The videos shown at their conference were pretty impressive. Oh and most people are forgetting that "UI IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE" for christ's sake quit your Google belly aching. they know what they're doing.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Who says you have to choose one or the other? It seems to me (And this is just speculation. But the lack of a hard drive and such on netbooks with Chrome OS makes me hopeful) that this will be relatively low-cost. I've got an old, slow computer. I can keep it and use it for all my offline needs and pick up Chrome OS to surf the web faster.
Useless 300Mb worth of sh*t because it cannot authenticate my google id (I am behind a proxy). Why do I have to be connected to the internet to have a peek at the OS?
That only happens on cheap routers. If you had a decent one and you wouldn't have those problems.
there's nothing wrong with bittorrent, it's just that most clients come misconfigured by default, with a huge number of active connections allowed, this has a tendency to hose most consumer routers just keeping track of peers, limit active connections in your client and things work a lot better.
ctrl+alt+t will open up a console session
F8 will give you a screen with other keyboard shortcuts (there's a bunch of stuff that's interesting).
As an example, I thought it was utterly retarded that the recent Ubuntu 9.10 release didn't have the download torrents front and center. Why the hell not? Obviously they didn't have the bandwidth to handle all the direct downloads, as I started one just to see how slowly it would go. It crawled along at less than 1 KB/s for hours.
I had no problems with Ubuntu at all.
Sure, the US servers were crawling along the first few days, but that's why there are so many mirrors. I just looked slightly further down the list, and downloaded from a server in Uzbekistan instead.
We're talking about downloading CD images, not playing an FPS online--therefore you should be trying to pick a server with few active connections, not dogpile the same server as everyone else because of its low ping.
Talk to the busybox developers. They have plenty of experience of being the victims of piracy. You pirate it by distributing it in a way that doesn't conform to the licence agreement you have for it. Generally by not releasing the source code and not letting people know they can distribute it themselves under the terms of the licence in question.
Look in your settings moron. Every bit-torrent program I have ever used had throttling control on both upload and download, as well as "open connections" limits to keep your shitty equipment from bogging down.
Read. The. Fucking. Manual. Or. Google. It. Tard.
If Ubuntu can be bankrolled for a reasonably small amount of cash (few millions to tens of millions), then surely Google can spare a hundred million to create their own, full linux based OS, without many of the problems of current systems, Ubuntu included.
I can see how some Google engineers can come up with something pretty special, taking the best of Linux, Windows and Mac OS's (and others) to create something they can then push for on netbooks and desktops throughout the markets in the world.
With a massive effort like this it might even spur on ports for things that previously didn't have a linux presence.
I think only something as big as Google can create the 'year of the linux desktop'
Web apps are cool, but they are in a lot of ways pointless. There is no good security model for them, the app framework maker owns the rights to them, the tools to build basic web apps run $700.00 [1], and you don't know if the app will work on all platforms. And you don't know if the version of a webapp you have documents written under will be upgraded from under you, breaking all your stuff. At least with locally installed apps, you can stick at a version level for a bit until bugs are fixed. With web apps, you are forced to the latest version.
Yes, they are cool, but to use the obligatory car analogy, the Prius modified to do 0-60 in 3 seconds is cool. However, you still need to move your cargo by boring old 18 wheelers from the core warehouse to the retail stores. Web apps just cannot do the heavy lifting, for the simple fact that bandwidth is becoming more and more expensive as time goes on and ISPs resort to throttling or charging fees as opposed to upgrading their networks.
[1]: Yes, there are cheaper ways to run Flash, but if a business is pirating their core development apps and someone rats them out, they won't be around long.
My regular browser handles torrent links just fine.
Oh, maybe you were talking about inferior browsers and not Opera.
I got really excited until I realised that this wasn't for the DEC Alpha processor.
Good news everyone! If you have a CPU, you can run debian on it.
From the list of supported architectures:
Please use the apparently official page:
http://getchrome.eu/download.php
Many ISO versions available...
Gmail is the only app I'll use online. Youtube and whatnot are just media viewers. For real work I'll stick to something I can sit by the river and work on and not worry about an internet connection. I used to imap my google account, but really what's the point? Its just as fast on the browser and I've always liked the interface. I don't even chat much anymore. The web should be for finding information and communicating and not your new operating system. I know most people disagree at this point, but hey, I miss the quaint days of gopher. Stumble upon has forced me to realize that the web is a huge time waster with 100 million different new crazy things to see. I can't imagine spending every waking moment on the web though.
zosxavius photography
Everyone would almost certainly be better off if the distributor just dumped it on Amazon EC2 or some other big hosting service and let interested parties pay the per-megabyte download costs directly(saving themselves the upload bandwidth and power costs). Since that isn't really viable(particularly, though not exclusively, if what is being distributed isn't wholly legal), bittorrent's easy sharing of hosting duties among downloaders is the next best thing.
What percentage of people that use torrents (and I'm talking about both "as in speech" and "as in beer" uses of torrent here) do you think actually give a crap about how much the power and bandwidth they're using costs? There certainly exists such a population of users (I'm one of them) but I'd guess it's somewhere around 5% of the total.
What is with the 'from 56 dollars' on that gdgt page?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Efficient in what sense? Certainly not time
No not time. Network overhead. It actually costs bandwidth to maintain 50 TCP connections instead of 1. Yes you get it faster, but at the cost of transferring more bytes overall. If we were all paying by the kb, torrents would be marginally more expensive in aggregate.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Here is how I run the Chrome OS on my GNU/Linux Slamd64 distro, using kvm.
1) Download the vmware's image
2) Run this.
$ kvm -m 512 -snapshot chrome-os.qcow2 -vga std chrome-os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk
You can logon using username: chronos and password: chronos .Ctrl-Alt-t for terminal/shell.
IMO, the Chrome OS is just a fullscreen Chrome brower which run on Ubunto 9.10 32bit. But the best part is, it boots very fast, less then 7 seconds on my systems.
p/s: MY firefox browser also runs fullscreen on my desktop, so, I don't miss much the Chrome OS. I think I just wait for stable Chromium browser code to be officaiily relaased.
Thank you.
PC gaming has become an afterthought for most game companies. Consoles are locked down computers purposed to play games. The older PS3 could have another operating system installed, though with certain hardware unable to be accessed. The newer ones don't allow any other OS at all. Purchased software can be installed, but you can't do anything on your own unless green lit by the console maker.
Apple ensures that its operating system cannot run on anything that Apple does not sell. The relatively rare hackintosh does not do anything to change this on any large scale. You want to run some Apple software, you must buy Apple.
In Chrome OS, your applications run "on the cloud". Not locally. Not where you have the control.
The trend lines are away from computers being a remarkably versatile, general purpose tool and toward a locked down appliance.
I don't like this.
Most current routers have uPnP and its enabled by default, at least the ones Ive used, no need to open a port if using a current torrent client, it does all the work for you and closes the port when its done.
Anyone that has Free Download Manager has a torrent client and probably doesn't even know it.
The client lets you limit the upload speed so your point about upload bandwidth is moot.
Many people do not know how to use torrents, as much as we wish they did. I think what ubuntu should do is make it really, really easy, even automated maybe, to use the other server downloads that are not totally taxed out. That's how I downloaded mine -- my school network blocks torrents -- but it was not very easy to find.
I use 10 minute email when bugmenot fails.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
An OS with an order of magnitude less capability can boot an order of magnitude faster.
Alright - assuming that you don't know how to configure bit torrent, then you'll almost certainly NOT want to download this prototype of an alpha operating system. ChromeOS may be ready to rock for the average user in a year or so, but right now, it's not even made it to a public alpha stage. Almost nothing works. It's something to play with - e-peen for geeks.
Now get off my lawn. Go play with your - uhhh - windows or something.
Oh wait - I have an idea for you. If your torrent client clogs your intartubez, you should install Wondershaper. Have fun - but I still want you off my lawn!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That isn't true now.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Four months ago I started at a quasi-governmental organization that looks after the needs of the widows and orphans of my province. The current state of the system reflects the mentality of the late 80's-early 90's. Everything in a word processing document or spreadsheet. Ad-hoc, unstructured storage of said documents on mapped network drives ("It's on the G: drive? I thought it was supposed to be on the U: drive!"). Telnet-based trust accounting system. Badly-utilized email system being used for any and all communication within the organization including sending the aforementioned documents as email attachments. They've had SharePoint for 6 years but never used it for more than a standard HTML intranet.
If the lessons of the past 15 years are to be learned from, every operation within this organization can be done with centralized or distributed servers and a browser interface. With the possible exception of the relatively few documents in the legal department, the information generated, managed and communicated within our organization can be done without using heavy client-server applications.
Now, if someone was able to come up with a browser OS allowed us to roll out light, inexpensive end-user workstations that can be easily managed due to the lack of requirements for things such as Word, Excel, Outlook, anti-virus, Telnet app, Telnet 3270 app, DMS interface for Word and Outlook etc., our support and capital costs would drop immensely.
Chrome OS is probably not that solution now, but being open source and our requirements not being anywhere near unique, it shouldn't be too long before the requisite changes are made.
Some may say that what I describe are just the old mainframe dumb-terminals or X-terminals. I would reply that those were the right paradigm with the wrong technology. A browser OS provides the richer interface the dumb terminals lacked and the local processing ability the X-Terminals couldn't provide.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Oh, maybe you were talking about inferior browsers and not Opera.
...and you know, it would actually make most webmasters' lives much easier if they could just tell people to fuck off and come back when they had installed a decent web browser (or failing that, anything other than IE6). Unfortunately, if you do that, many people will just do the "fuck off" bit and not the "come back" bit - which is not very helpful if the whole purpose of the website was to get your message out to as many people as possible.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I invite you to ponder the meanings of the words "Most", "at least the ones I've used", "Anyone that has" and "lets you" in your post.
Compare these with the fact that anybody with a web browser can download via HTTP or FTP with a single click, and then weigh against the minimal advantage of using a torrent when most clients are on ADSL and/or are leeching (possibly inadvertently because their ISP has blocked the default ports or they don't understand about leaving the client seeding after the download).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
The point was that even if the up data-rate of the host is 100 X that of the clients, for a sufficiently large user base, torrents is a time efficient and system + the idea that it cost the cost .00X$ per download, and as you are getting it for free, you can help lower that cost by downloading it once, and passing on a copy or two before you stop seeding.
I understand that my model wasn't perfect, but it wasn't horrible. Consider that I also didn't take into account the time delay of having hosts go down because of unanticipated high demand (this happens).
Certainly a more valid point IF client cost models were different. But as it is, I have 'unlimited**' internet. nonetheless, point taken.
Which is why the bullshit in the original AC's post is a troll. I'm refuting this point of view.
/a
You are lucky. In our place, we have traffic shape monitoring and port blocking. If weird ports are being used to transfer large amount of data, the machine is filtered from the network, claiming "unknown virus attacking port 31337" or something like that.
New Economic Perspectives
"We flatland folks don't go for charity"
Can you not see a team using Bespin on this platform? https://bespin.mozilla.com/
The Pirate Bay has a .torrent for the bzipped (280 MB) file instead of your 700 MB one...
and it has 10 times more seeders...
I'm still loading, so I can't say for sure, that it's no fake (and not infected with something), but it has a good rating...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I think this is a fair question... but I think we need to figure that in the medium term wireless high-speed Internet is going to become (even) more ubiquitous than it currently is. Granted, subways are a challenge, but would it be possible to do a wifi hotspot in the cars? I think people are going to demand this sort of "bandwidth everywhere" for other reasons, I think that smart engineers (and yes, I am an engineer) can make it feasible in the long run, and I think that it will happen. The biggest barrier, of course, is the Telcos/Wireless Companies, who don't want anything that might lesson their ability to milk consumers.
I guess the thing is that I don't think this is a short-term play on Google's part. I think this is part of their 5 year plan, not their 2 year plan. And it may be 10-20 years before the full effects of the move to the cloud become clear. Thing about where the "thin client" was 10 years ago versus where it is today? Ten years ago it was vaporware. Not it's a reality, albeit in a different form.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
for a sufficiently large user base,
Your model is misleading, actually I think You are being misled by your model.
Your exponential growth model doesn't match anything in bittorrent;
You don't have to pass the data on to two people, one is enough (except for 'cheaters')
You don't have to wait for the previous person to get the whole file, they pass data on as soon as they have it
In fact the plain copy a block and pass it to the next person is the simplest reasonable model.
And finally, the file has to get from your machine to the big hosting machine. During that time the torrent would have already passed the file on to all the people who want it. In the perfect world. Torrent wins before a big host even gets started.
OTOH, if you are a big host it often doesn't make much difference to http. You have to be the 'seed box' to provide the additional bandwidth that the asymmetry of an ADSL connection takes away from your customer's upstream. If you want them to have 300K/s downstream but they only have 50K/s upstream you have to seed at 250K/s per user rather than 300K/s per user. Add on to that the bittorrent overheads too.
Only if you're satisfied with providing the data at the speed of the customer's upstream can you minimise your upstream costs and let the swarm stay in the seeder starved state. (or get to seeder rich naturally)
There are things that could change the landscape, local ISP provided seed boxes for example, but right now that's how things are.
Call me paranoiac! Call me antique! Tell me whatever you want, but THEY MUST BE OUT OF THEIR MINDS if they think I would leave ALL my stuff on THEIR SERVERS. It might be faster than blinking, but I simply DO-NOT-LIKE the paradigm they're trying to spread. It reminds me the "old" ATM machines, when a mainframe did all the processing. I guess I don't have to recall it was a bank who owned the mainframe and that you must pay them periodically. I think the idea of avoiding the startup delay is really cool, but has a SMALL detail.. data is stored on GOOGLE servers, which means if Google powers down their servers you cannot access your data. Tomorrow Google could say, "ok, since now you must pay to use our services.." And that's when you regret your decisions. I haven't mentioned the fact they can do whatever they want with the data in their servers (yeah.. yeah.. the data confidentiality agreement - i don't think so). Nevertheless, I think it might be suitable for some people in some cases. Computers would require less hardware, which is a pro. In summary, I like the idea of speed up the OS, but I think some stuff is private property and must remain as such (at least for my stuff).
I generally agree with you about the absurdity of trusting one company with *all* of your personal data. Call me optimstic, but I hope the marketplace and its ability to respond to choice (especially in the post-Web 2.0 world) will help us. Google starts charging for access tomorrow? EvilCo* acquires Google with a draconian TOS? These events create another opportunity for someone, small and scrappy, to unseat Google's dominance, something of which I'm certain Google is emiently aware. What feeds their stock price, value, and product pipeline? We do, with every query, click-through, and gmail message. If we go away from Google, they fade into oblivion. Therein lies the beauty of the marketplace. It's also why keeping the pipes (i.e. open-source technologies) free (as in freedom) is critical.
* Of course there is no provision for the data that EvilCo already has in this scenario. If this were to actually occur, those of us in the cloud are screwed, only at the mercy of whatever protections governing bodies can provide.
Thank your pointing out some of the flaws in my [overly simplistic] model. I do think having the host as the primary seeder in release cases would be a smart thing to do, and then switch over to host only when the 'swarm' drops below a certain threshold.
Even more so, I know someone in Peru who can't possibly download Ubuntu at a decent speed, but the torrents see great performance there as it goes over area networks instead of slow backbones.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
It's a balancing act. (In legitimate cases) Torrents help uplink-starved sources when there are many interested downloaders.
With few downloaders, you're better off manually going to the source (http) directly. KTorrent offering http it makes me wonder if the protocol could extend to use http as another source (for starvation cases).
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.