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Google To Drop Chrome Support For 32-bit Linux
prisoninmate writes: Google announces that its Google Chrome web browser will no longer be available for 32-bit hardware platforms. Additionally, Google Chrome will no longer be supported on the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) and Debian GNU/Linux 7 (Wheezy) operating systems. Users are urged to update to the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) release and Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie) respectively. Google will continue to support the 32-bit build configurations for those who want to build the open-source Chromium web browser on various Linux kernel-based operating systems. Reader SmartAboutThings writes, on a similar note, that: Microsoft is tolling the death knell for Internet Explorer with an announcement that it will end support for all older versions next year. Microsoft says that all versions older than the latest one will no longer be supported starting Jan. 12, 2016. After this date, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or technical support for older Internet Explorer versions. Furthermore, Internet Explorer 11 will be the last version of Internet Explorer as Microsoft shifts its focus on its next web browser, Microsoft Edge.
The source tarball will no longer support 32 bit Linux? Or are they pulling closed source hijinx?
Yesterday, Google Announced that they will drop support for their product ${product}. Google will continue to support the product for the next few months[, offering users the opportunity to download a tar file of their data]. Google said they chose this step because they wanted to "do the right thing", and "continue to enhance our products for all of our users".
The users of ${product} weren't happy at all about the announcement. Twitter user &{name} writes, ${random_user_quote here}. On other internet platforms, the responses were similar.
I run 32 bit versions of Linux on older hardware that doesn't require 64 bit, will other browser developers be following in Google's foot steps? I can always switch from Chrome to Firefox or another browser but is indication that 32 bit Linux support is going away in general?
This is great. Now perhaps they could make a 64-bit Linux version of Google Earth available? Pretty please?
And? Is Chrome supported on Win10 for 32 bit? Ah nope, as the summary states, Google stops delivering 32bit versions of Chrome for all OS. On a side note: Linuxes come with Firefox which works perfectly on 32bit hardware.
So are they killing the Android builds of Chrome as well, or does the summary suck as usual?
Of course. A company is in the business where they get their revenues. Airlines get their revenues from flying people around. Airlines do in fact have excellent tech for figuring out demand, routes, and other things. As a matter of fact, American Airlines and its SABRE system made data processing (IT to you kids) history in the 70s.
See, Google is an advertising company. People are under the erroneous impression that they are a tech company. Any and all tech they develop is to enhance their business - advertising. They may develop tech that initially doesn't have any advertising purpose, but eventually that is what will happen. And by advertising purpose, I mean either showing ads or collecting consumer data.
Facebook and Yahoo! are Google's biggest competitors and they are not tech companies either.
Anyway, calling Google a tech company is just as ridiculous as calling Amazon a tech company or Delta Airlines or JP Morgan Chase.
Not really. I've tried Windows 10 on Pentium M era hardware, and it is horrible. Lack of driver support, and Windows Defender eats up most of the CPU time. Not saying that Linux runs all fine and dandy on these systems, but it runs better then Windows 10 (for that matter, Windows 7 and Windows 8 run better then Windows 10 does on older hardware).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
That's too bad since most Android phones are 32-bit right now.
Looks like it's about time to upgrade my Vista machines.
And? Is Chrome supported on Win10 for 32 bit?
Yes, it is.
On a side note: Linuxes come with Firefox which works perfectly on 32bit hardware.
On a side note: Windows 10 comes with Edge which works perfectly on 32-bit hardware. Of course, Firefox and Chrome work great as well. As you can easily see, Windows is all about choice.
Instead of installing Windows 10 on it, you can recycle the computer. At least that way it can still be useful. Windows 10 is shit even before concerns about the pervasive spying. Apparently Microsoft said "ah fuck it" to any usability and visual design considerations. They didn't even fix the hotchpotch of cluttered old interfaces and dumbed down new interfaces that they introduced with Windows 8. You can't even uninstall fucking FLASH from Windows 10. And you still can't turn off "telemetry", not even in the professional version. I get Windows 10 for free and I'm not going to use it. It's awful.
Fully supported, ha! Hello, drivers? Of the top of my head: video, sound, networking, USB, etc. If you are dealing with an older computer, these components will be older which means they most likely won't have a Windows 10 driver.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Modern app appers use 32 APPS, not 32 LUDDITE bits!
Apps!
LOL, Nope.
For the record...
Chrome binaries which include features listed below will not longer be updated after March 2016:
- AAC, H.264, and MP3 Support
It's possible to leverage ffmpeg to give additional codecs support to chromium.
AFAIK Packman's and OpenSUSE's build of chromium use this.
- Adobe Flash (PPAPI)
To be more precise, it's the *bundling of flash* which is unavailable with chormium.
Support for PPAPI can be compiled in Chromium, and if a suitable separate binary is provided, you get working flash version 19.
(Again, Packman's and OpenSUSE's build is done so)
For that matters, it's the same situation with Firefox: there's a plugin called "freshplayer" that enables support for PPAPI plugins in Firefox (it's basically a NSAPI to PPAPI wrapper).
Again with a a suitable binary provided, you get working flash verison 19 (instead of version 11 which was the last version that flash provided for NSAPI).
Though you don't get all the advantage of Google's sandboxing model.
It's povided in OpenSUSE and Packman.
(I don't have experience with Ubuntu, but I strongly suspect that they do the same. Or in any other way, it should definitely be available in some PPA)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I've used Edge on a tablet and it works as well as I would expect. It's certainly the best browser on Windows 10 with regard to properly supporting touch - bringing up the virtual keyboard in tablet mode etc. Chrome also has fairly good support but it's not quite to the same standard. Firefox lags behind both.
The most important feature of the closed-source Chrome is it's the way to stream Netflix on Linux.
Indeed, Widevine CDN is currently the only supported DRM for Linux users.
And currently, there are howtos floating on the web explaining how to enable support for Widevine CDN plugin in Chromium.
Mozilla has announced that they'll eventually support Adobe's CDN under Linux which should give other alternative to support Netflix here.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Even my wife's 1-year-old HP laptop freezes up all the time with Windows 10. (Never happened before the upgrade, must be a driver problem.)
It's ridiculous that in 2015 someone is selling a video service where you can't just use whatever player you want to.
Then what non-ridiculous method of conditional access to video would be acceptable to the companies that fund production of feature films?
I'm not sure one of the examples you chose is the best:
A company is in the business where they get their revenues.
And Amazon Web Services gets its revenues from leasing resources to customers willing to run their software on someone else's computer.
calling Google a tech company is just as ridiculous as calling Amazon a tech company
I don't follow. Is AWS not "tech"? Or does revenue from Marketplace commissions and FBA services outweigh AWS revenue?
So what is Microsoft going to do for IE9 on Vista and Server 2008, both of which are EOL much later than January, 2016? Vista's EOL is April, 2017 while Windows Server 2008's EOL is January, 2020. I wouldn't want an unpatched IE9 running on either OS, where the OS continues to receive security updates, but the browser does not...
Windows Server 2008 is still widely used as it's the last Windows Server OS available as x86... (And Windows Server 2008 R2 is not a free update...)
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
I know that this is hard to digest for a Linux neckbeard, but Windows 10 is actually a great way to breathe life to an old computer. Even 32-bit is fully supported. There, I said it.
As the above title stated, Microsoft is dropping support for all IE before 11. So if one was on XP, the last version of IE that would have worked for them would have been 8, and they'd be SOL if IE was all they used. It's never made sense to me why Microsoft would bother supporting 32-bit beyond 8, since 10 practically requires at least 4GB of memory, which 32-bit Windows can't handle - no matter what the version.
As far as 32-bit Linux goes, they can remain w/ Firefox or Opera. Actually, if you toss in Konqueror/ReKonq as well as Epiphany/Web, there are more choices there. Chrome does depend on you running on the latest if not greatest devices, and there is nothing to suggest that it would be a good fit on XP era Linux boxes.
If you put aside the spyware - which I fixed w/ ShutUp10, Windows 10 is just fine. The desktop mode is as usable as Windows 7, and the tablet mode is fine as well.
Only issue is that the apps sometimes crash a lot - like News. Also, in News, I can no longer configure what sources exactly I want, which sucks! Windows 10 could use a wider variety of apps.
Windows 10 supports drivers from Windows Vista and newer.
I know this is hard to digest for a Windows old-timer like you, but Windows 10 runs like molasses on low-end hardware. The best way to breathe a little life into an old computer is to install a low-end Linux desktop (XFCE, LXDE).
I don't mind them dropping support for 32-bit builds so much. Just about any computer that is going to be used to run Chrome (or other heavy browsers like Firefox) is likely already capable of running a 64-bit OS. What does bother me is Google dropping support for Debian 7 and Ubuntu 12.04. Those platforms are still supported by their respective projects. Both only have about 4-5 years of support, so building Chrome packages for them isn't a super-long investment. Why not continue to support them for another year or two, until Debian and Canonical put them out to pasture?
If Windows 10 supports video drivers from Windows 7, then why does the Get Windows 10 app on my Acer Aspire X1 PC running Windows 7 say the integrated GPU in the PC's nForce chipset is incompatible with Windows 10?
I know that this is hard to digest for a Linux neckbeard, but Windows 10 is actually a great way to breathe life to an old computer. Even 32-bit is fully supported. There, I said it.
Aye, you said it...pity it was complete and utter bollocks.
Hint: $your_definition_of_old != $my_definition_of_old
Maybe for scheißt und kichert, I'll try it on my Celeron 433 box...
From Internet Explorer Support Lifecycle Policy FAQ, linked in the featured article:
So yes, IE 9 security updates will continue. So will IE 8 updates for those Windows XP users who have applied the "Piece of $#!+ Ready" registry hack.
This is terrible news! My computer won't run the newest version of Internet Explorer. I hope I can find another browser out there...
I'm sure MS would have loved to drop 32 bit support. After all it's double the trouble (more or less). The fact is that MS isn't in a position to be picky about what end user H/W they want to support.
If you put aside the spyware
I won't. If you're in the habit of bending over for Microsoft, suit yourself.
which I fixed w/ ShutUp10
No. You think you did, but you did not.
Windows 10 is just fine.
No. Absolutely not. It comes with Flash! In 2015!
The desktop mode is as usable as Windows 7
Not even close.
and the tablet mode is fine as well.
Yikes.
Only issue is that the apps sometimes crash a lot - like News. Also, in News, I can no longer configure what sources exactly I want, which sucks!
I see that you have low expectations. That explains a lot.
Windows 10 could use a wider variety of apps.
No, it needs less of that crap, especially not preinstalled. I didn't want the Microsoft news page as my homepage in Internet Explorer 6 on XP, and I don't want Microsoft's news app now. Microsoft Windows 10 Professional comes with start menu tiles for XBox and fucking Minecraft! What the hell is wrong with that company!
which 32-bit Windows can't handle
Look I count myself among the windows haters but there is plenty wrong and deficient in Windows to complain about without making false statements. There are several variants of 32-bit Windows that do PAE
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This is also a blow to the low-cost computing push (RaspberryPi, etc). Virtually all the ARM SBCs are 32-bit today, and their claim-to-fame is having a real browser (Chrome). If they stop 32-bit compatibility, that will greatly harm lightweight browser consumers from smart TVs to 3rd-world computing.
Oh well, there's always Firefox.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
The browser may not need more than 4 GB of memory but it sure wants the extra registers in 64 bit x86, and on ARMv8 you definitely don't want to power up the 32 bit module if you can avoid it.
I recently picked up an old Thinkpad Z61t at a thrift store for a fiver. Perfect condition. Original Core Duo, 2gb of RAM. Tossed another Gig of RAM at it, and had no trouble getting the Windows 7 it came with upgraded to 10. No driver problems except for a little fiddliness with the bluetooth. But then I've had nightmares with bluetooth on Windows all the way back to XP. It's only marginally useful for video (SD Youtube works ok) but general use it's more than adequate*. Granted multimedia is sort of a requirement these days but if I were stuck using one for work or similar it'd be just fine. With the relatively big jump in hardware requirements between 7 and 8-10 (NX bit support primarily) just about anything capable of running Windows 10 should run it decently.
That said, I did order a $3 Core 2 Duo off eBay to drop in it because why not? I'll also likely go Linux on it soon, depending on a couple applications.
* I accept that my definition of adequate probably varies a bit from the average. I use it as a side-computer for IRC, looking up game wikis, etc if I'm doing something on my mainbox that doesn't do windowed mode well. And yes, I realize even Core Duos are a generation or two ahead of Pentium M.
Video drivers are a bit of a special case since Windows uses graphics for the desktop so much more now. Windows 10 wants WDDM 2.0 graphics drivers where possible. I suspect it'd work fine, but you might lose some of the animations and eye candy. I've installed Windows 10 on a number of old computers and haven't had too much trouble with drivers, but I rarely try to use them for things like gaming or other graphically-intensive things. It's supposed to work with WDDM 1.3 as well, but all that gets complicated.
Such as? If it's anything post Windows Vista, or even XP, 64-bit was available, so why would anyone use 32-bit Windows w/ PAE?
Yes, but on 32-bit windows, there are other ways to run popular services (i.e. Netflix), but on Linux the only way I'm currently aware of is to run a full fledged Chrome (Chromium won't cut it) and have the libnssX libraries installed.
I just recently set up a laptop for a family member to do this. It runs 32-bit Mint and they stream to their TV via chromecast.
While they would *love* for it to be outright impossible to copy, their goal is to make it as much a pain in the ass to copy as possible.
Let's say they didn't do any of these DRM shenanigans. You could 'wget http://netflix.com/popular_mov...' and have it run in the background at whatever speed the internet provides. You might have a 90 minute film in less than 10 minutes.
If you screen record, then that means your computer is now watching this video and unable to do anything else for the full duration of the feature. For most folks that's just too much trouble, they would just as soon wait til they want to watch it and stream it live if the computer's going to be tied up anyway.
That's the goal of all this gunk, trying to find a way to maximize inconvenience for those who want to use it in a manner they didn't want while delivering what they deem an acceptable experience. Note that a blu-ray rip of a film or series to mkv and then streaming to Kodi I find a much better experience than Netflix, and I find it frustrating that Content and the delivery channel are being linked (have to use a 'netflix' app for some things, a 'hulu' for others, etc). Basically I don't find the situation 'acceptable', but there aren't enough of me to make a difference in the market. Also so long as I have an application that lets me rip media, I can buy media and circumvent the DRM.
On the other hand, for things like Netflix, where the model is explicitly 'rental', it makes some sense. However always-online DRM for *purchased* content that restricts my choice of playback device/application annoys the piss out of me.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
But the Get Windows 10 app will not let me proceed, instead telling me that NVIDIA has not made the GPU compatible and giving a link to shop for a new PC. Should I take a screenshot? Is there a recommended half-height discrete GPU to use instead of the integrated one? (Because the case is compact, a full-height GPU will not fit.) Should I follow the instructions in this thread to create USB install media? Or should I just leave that PC at Windows 7 and then attempt to Linux it once Windows 7 reaches end of extended support in a few years?
Plus it's not a bad idea to go 64-bit clean on Linux installations if possible as if one doesn't force 64-bit clean, over time and installing additional software often the box becomes a polluted mess of 32 bit and 64 bit programs and libraries. Better to drop 32 bit altogether if it's practical.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Trust me, pretty much all Windows 7 video drivers work perfectly in Windows 10.
That's mostly up to you. I didn't upgrade to Windows 7 until I needed DirectX 10. The main advantages of Windows 10 is going to be DirectX 12 and things like Windows Store apps, which may not interest you. I suspect your box probably wouldn't be running much DirectX 12 anyway. It's not impossible to roll back if you don't like it, but might be kind of a pain. As far as a video card upgrade, just about anything discrete is going to be a big upgrade. I'm partial to nvidia myself. Mostly comes down to whether you want to put money into that box or put it towards a new system.
Incidentally, if you're the tepples I suspect you are, you should know that I just about have robotfindskitten finished in NES 6502 Assembly. Been a lot more fun than the C version I wrote. It's fully playable but the winning animation isn't done yet. Maybe I'll work on the variable-width font version next :) I'm terrible with web forums and forgot to get back and check on how things went, and now the threads are over a year old. Small world.
I already dropped support for Chrome.
Sure, if you like a tearing desktop with no animations. :)
Counter-intuitively, most actual programs run slower in 64-bit, because the advantage from all the new registers doesn't overcome the penalty for the object code and many objects in memory being 2x the size, so only half as much fits in CPU cache. Depends on the program, of course, but stuff running faster in 64-bit is surprisingly rare outside of number-crunching.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hmm, strange, since firefox 42 I've not really had any issues with the touch keyboard on windows 10, after activating the ui settings in firefox to enable the touch keyboard ofc. Haven't really used tablet mode though even though I'm using it on a tablet, but I've enabled the option to bring up the touch keyboard in desktop mode in windows settings.
Microsoft says that all versions older than the latest one will no longer be supported starting Jan. 12, 2016.
In January my company will upgrade to IE 11, because of this, and probably stay on a current version from then on. It feels so weird. I'm used to having to code for a version of IE that is several years old. It's a good time to be a web developer!
Well, this is disappointing. My mom & dad are on an antique Dell with a 32-bit processor. First OpenSUSE announced they were abandoning 32-bit, and I thought "OK, I'll install Lubuntu or Xubuntu or something." Now Google does this. I had them on Chrome because of the baked in Flash support. I suppose I could get away with Chromium... I think the only site my folks ever visit with video is Youtube. Still, just one more annoying thing.
Actually, almost all programs on .NET run about 10% faster, but are about 20% larger on disk.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
You said it. 64 bit address space is handy, but it's the extra registers. And, the 64 bit x86 ABI allows the first six arguments of a function to be passed in registers instead of stack pushes. The code is more compact and about 30% faster in execution, just by rebuilding for 64 bit.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
One anecdote: I picked up an Asus EE PC 1005PEG netbook on Craigslist for $100 to use for carefree international travel. It had been upgraded to W7 Ultimate before I bought it and I accidentally let it upgrade to W10 two months or so ago. The upgrade installed the 32-bit OS although the CPU supports 64-bit. It runs perfectly acceptably for all email/Office/browsing apps despite its "low end" hardware: Atom N450 1.66 GHz, 2 GB memory, 802.11b, 100Mb Ethernet, 250 GB disk
Not really true.
Only addresses/pointers [and longs] double in size. Most generated code uses the lower 8 regs were possible, so no prefix byte. Also, offsets can be smaller due to RIP relative addressing. Because the ABI specifies the first six function arguments are in registers, no wasteful pushes on calls. Also, because of the extra registers, this reduces "register pressure". That is, you don't have to store the value in a register to the stack frame just to make room for another value because you don't have enough registers to go around ["stack spill"]. So, you do fewer extraneous memory accesses. Because of the 64 bit wide registers, you can do real 64 bit multiply/divides.
The CPU instruction execution unit is much smarter than you imagine. Some of the instructions may be larger, but they're fetched a cache line at a time. They then get predecoded and put into a cached instruction execution queue.
The execution unit doesn't just "look at one instruction, execute it, then forget about it". While executing an instruction, it's looking ahead at several instructions to see which ones can be executed simultaneously with the current one. Within a given function, the execution unit just refetches from the queue and doesn't even need to redecode instructions from the L1 cache
With more registers, it is easier for the execution unit to detect parallelism and perform out-of-order, parallel, and speculative execution that make things go faster. If something gets "spilled" back to the stack, the compiler knows it did this, but the execution can't [and shouldn't] because it can't discern whether the stack write was for "spill" or whether a function that will need the data in memory will [soon] be called.
I regularly write and build programs and I regularly disassemble them to see if the code is efficient enough. They are quite compact.
And, given all of the above, overall, 64 bit is about 30% faster. Based on what I've read, and what I've benchmarked.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
> "To provide the best experience for the most-used Linux versions"
Ho-hum.
Diminishing returns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns
4- to 8-bit: holy mf! a real computer!
8- to 16-bit: wow! we can manage the entire company with that!
16- to 32-bit: that will enable us to solve a lot of technical problems: excellent.
32- to 64-bit: why do we need 64-bit, after all? Oh, yes, the videos, more gradients -- that's nice, I suppose.
64- to 128-bit: glares in games are more real... and something else, I believe... maybe orbit calculation?
128- to 256-bit: meh.
And stop that with more registers, ok? I changed all light bulbs in my house to leds and my electric bill is not 10% of what it used to be.
I love that someone thinks I'm trolling when I'm stating what many people (not just me) have seen. Windows 10 is a lot heavier then 7 or 8 on equivalent hardware
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Honest question - how am I trolling when I'm stating things that many people have seen and reported back to Microsoft? Windows 10 is slower then its predecessors on 32 bit hardware, and I've stated what was eating CPU time (desktop effects and Windows Defender, neither of which can be disabled)
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
The announcement was only about Linux, and more specifically it was only about .DEB packages.
Because they have an Atom chipset more than 3 years old, which lacks the amd64 instruction set.
And if there are no Windows 7 drivers for my machine? 32-bit machines go way back you know.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
And, given all of the above, overall, 64 bit is about 30% faster. Based on what I've read, and what I've benchmarked
But are you looking at number crunching, or at "card walloping code": iterating though a large array of large objects, applying some simple transformation to each. Most business code, after all, does nothing interesting to a lot of bloated objects. (of course, such code is almost always I/O bound anyhow, so maybe it doesn't matter.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No, I'm looking at all job mixes. Ripping through a large array is going to be memory bound. Business code will benefit more from 64 bit.
When you do a function call in 32 bit, you have to calculate the argument values, then do pushes to the stack. In 64 bit, you put them directly into the correct registers. The optimizer is usually good enough to do the calculation directly on the target register (e.g. it doesn't calc the value in %rax and then move it to %rXX--it does the calc directly on %rXX). So, for four arguments, you save four push instructions, not to mention storing the the cache/dram. Further, if some of the args are just passed along: ...
fncA(a,b,c,d)
{
fncB(a,b,7,9)
}
The a/b values are simply already in the correct regs, so you skip two fetches and two pushes.
Once again, the extra regs allow the exec unit to see the parallelism available. This can be [and is] applied to almost every five instruction sequence in any function.
Oh, forgot to mention the RIP relative addressing advantage when generating PIC (position independent code). In 64 bit, address calculation is done relative to the %rip (program counter) register. This is wonderful for shared libraries (e.g. .so's, .dll's) which are built using PIC. In 32 bit, you have to burn the %ebx register to have a base register to address from. So, the available register count dwindles by one.
Speculative execution. If you have a sequence like: ... ...
inst1
inst2
inst3
inst4
test
bnz value_nonzero
value_is_zero:
inst5
inst6
b elsewhere
value_is_nonzero: ...
inst20
inst21
The execution unit may execute both pathways simultaneously [speculatively] (e.g. either the branch is taken or not). The exec unit may not have enough info to decide the branch (e.g. the data dependency graph shows that one part is waiting on a memory fetch--Or it's waiting on results from the [relatively slow] floating point unit). But, the exec unit doesn't wait until the branch is decided. It keeps executing both in separate instruction streams because it notices that they are independent of what the branch is waiting for.
When the branch is [able to be] decided, it will throw away the path that isn't used. The advantage is that whatever decision path is used, we're already several instructions into it. That is, we didn't have to wait until the test results were available. This can be nested. If one or more of the paths have themselves conditional branching, they, too, will split and do speculative execution. These speculative paths form a tree structure. IIRC, x86 have a max tree depth of four?
Doing this is greatly aided by the extra registers. It reduces the number of pipeline stalls.
Seriously, if any of the above is news to you, I'd refrain from making statements about 64 bit performance. Your original about "many objects being 2x the size" was my clue. Even if you are a programmer of sorts, it seems to me that you don't truly understand much about the underlying architecture [x86 in particular].
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
What's the downside of [just selling WebM or MP4 files with no digital restrictions management]?
The inability to sell more than one such file, as it takes next to no expertise and effort to casually infringe the copyright in a DRM-free file in pristine quality, especially compared to the expertise and effort that the studio needs to investigate such casual infringement.
If a production company comes back and says "no, DRM-free standard files over a standard protocol is unacceptable" then we should ask them just what the hell their agenda is
The agenda is being able to sell more than one copy.
I got a Thinkpad R60, so it's slightly older than the Z61t (which for $5 is bargain!). The Windows 10 upgrade mostly worked. The issues I ran into was 1) Would not install off of a USB flash drive and 2) No drivers for the graphics card (ATI Radeon X1400) in Windows 10. I solved 1 by burning to DVD to install, and 2 by installing the Vista x64 (!) driver which Windows 10 didn't seem to have a problem with. I'd say Windows 10 is faster than Windows 7. The big problem with Windows 7 now is that Microsoft won't do another service pack and there's just so many updates now that Windows update will bring an older computer to its knees for a considerable amount of time whenever it does an update check. Which was my main motivation for taking Microsoft up on their free Windows 10 offer for this particular computer. Still, not bad for a computer that I bought before Vista was released. Runs pretty good - Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, 3GB of ram (chipset limitation, I actually have 4GB physically installed), and a 120GB SSD (which is speed limited by the SATA1 interface).
If you have a 32-bit machine, you're pretty much locked out of Windows 10 anyway. Windows 10 (and Windows 8) requires the CPU support the NX bit, which only a handful of 32 bit CPU's support.
If you stupidly standardize on "use Diffie Hellman for key exchange" and then it turns out that there's a critical flaw in Diffie Hellman, then you're basically an idiot who's written a useless standard.
For the record, the current problems isn't that there's a critical flaw in the Diffie Hellman key exchance itself - there's no fundamental problem in the way Diffie Hellman works.
The problem are the implementation (who are rather lazy in their approach to pick random prime).
Or to put an example: it doesn't matter if AES is the currently most un-crackable and resistant encryption algorithm when everybody repeats one of the vowel 8 times in a row to pick an 8 caracter password:
you'll just defeat it by bruteforcing using a dictionnary only containing 6 entries (on for each vowel).
Same actually happened for DH:
DH works, but some implementation only use small primes, and nearly everbody uses one of the few precomputed prime that comes out of the box.
And the largest part of the work for cracking depends on this prime, so if there's only small number of primes used in the wild, you just need to spend your cracking efforts on those few primes, and bam! you've insta-cracked the communication of everyone clueless enough to use the same prime.
Same also happened with DSA a few year back. It also depends on prime number, cracking DSA also relies on guessing the prime. If everybody picks just one of the few prime of some default list instead of computing a completely random prime, this dramatically reduce the size of the dictionary you need to use to brute force the key. It's possible to crack the private key just by trying the few common prime used by everyone.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]