No, Chrome is pushed by SO MANY free downloads. I've noticed that many of the OpenCandy-based "shit I don't want" suggestion portions of installers tend to push Google Chrome. Avast Free pushes it incessantly. Chrome installs through many of the same channels that DefaultTab, WhiteSmoke, MapsGalaxy, etc. do it. Most of my residential customers have no idea what Chrome is or why it's on their computer.
This continues to work in Microsoft's favor even today. There are so many things that only work with ActiveX, it's insane. Citrix and any Blue Cross Blue Shield website come to mind. There was a/. article a few days ago about how Koreans are largely stuck on IE due to Korean government encryption that requires an ActiveX plugin to work.
Somehow I doubt that anyone on Slashdot is offended by the notion of a Nazi-themed orgy. The Internet generation doesn't get shocked very easily anymore. Goatse, Tubgirl, NumberGenderNumberContainer videos, and half the memes ever created are far more offensive than some people having a role-playing orgy behind closed doors.
I believe I just coined the term NumberGenderNumberContainer...
It seems like everything surrounding that bill is exactly how people should respond to such a thing. America has the same "name it something no one can oppose" problem. If you put "predators" or "child pornography" or a child's name or any kind of "Insert Assumed Positive Direction Here Act" in the title, anyone who votes against it supports serial baby rapist arson embezzlers who bootleg Trix cereal...and the American public at large buys that sensationalist nonsense because they're so FUCKING STUPID that they can't perform the monumental task of typing something into a search engine and read three paragraphs of reality.
Snowden's leaks have made me want to kill puppy dogs, throw children into giant fans, set flags on fire, cut my catalytic converter off my vehicle, and burn apple pies in the oven at an alarming rate.
Oh wait, that's not reality. That's reality as presented by these reality fabrication engineers.
I wasn't a terribly "clean" kid; I didn't shower often at all and didn't wash my hands unless I was about to cook food. I still refuse to use hand sanitizer or anti-germ wipes and I don't expect every surface I touch to be disinfected. Some of that has changed as I have gotten older (I shower at least once a day and by most peoples' standards I'm quite "clean"), but I'm willing to bet that my "unclean" behaviors in the past and my lack of fear of germs and dirt and grease under the nails explain why I very rarely get sick (once a year maybe) and even more rarely stay sick longer than a few days.
I read somewhere that there's a theory about auto-immune diseases being a result of humans no longer having parasites and infections. The theory was that the immune system has nothing to do and "gets bored." The possible solution is introducing a limited amount of relatively benign parasites. I don't feel like searching for it right now, but I found it to be a fascinating theory.
As an added bonus, I can kill germ-o-phobes by breathing at them and there will be no evidence linking it back to me. I'M A FUCKING VIKING.
After changing CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START and its respective alignment parameter from 16MB to 1MB, I can boot a reasonably capable kernel (1975KB gzip, 5MB vmlinux.o) with a BusyBox + uClibc initramfs in QEMU with RAM limited to 13MB. 12MB locks up silently (likely a fault of my initramfs scripts) and 8MB panics due to running out of memory, though I could likely hit 12MB if I just dropped more drivers like CIFS and ethernet controllers. "free" shows 8MB used once the system's up and running from tmpfs, so there's room for most of my shell scripts to get some work done.
It's still nowhere near running in 4MB, and never will be. I do understand that it's not relevant to the vast majority of x86 users, and the main reason I want this capability is so I can play around with (and maybe even USE) an old Compaq Contura Aero 4/25. Fortunately, that was upgraded by the original owner to 12MB of RAM, and if I boot from floppies and don't use initramfs, it'll probably work fine. There's something to be said for an OS in 2013 that can still be used on 1994 hardware! Maybe I can interface the RS-232 port to the SPI-to-ethernet interface I bought a few weeks ago. Hmmmm...
I'm no stranger to compiling kernels, and my complaints are not that it's "not easy." I build Linux kernel/initramfs combinations that we use in-house, and one of the experimental projects we're working on would require distribution of the smallest possible combination of those two (primarily due to serving customers with crappy rural DSL connections). We still have customers with Celeron machines in the three-digit MHz ranges and much smaller caches than the CPU in a new $300 laptop, so decreasing the kernel's size is helpful, especially with some of the disk-intensive stuff we may run on top of it. Features bring bloat and the work to remove that bloat is not "fun," so developers don't want to do it (and who could blame them?)
Another use case where a tighter kernel may be helpful is one running in a virtualized environment. Since kernel-mode code (even with KVM acceleration) will frequently trigger fallbacks into the hypervisor, we theoretically can minimize these expensive triggers by "running a tighter ship." VMs tend to amplify cache line evictions since two or more kernels are often running on the same physical chip with at least a shared L2 cache between them, and less code in the VM means less cache line evictions.
I wouldn't call the dependencies "nonsensical." My complaints about dependencies are that they aren't sufficiently tunable for expert users without editing the code directly. Features constantly and quickly being added means dependencies brought in to support those features. Some features can't be turned off in the source at all, like TCP fast open. TFO is also a prime example of what I have a problem with: not only is it not removable, but also forces the inclusion of a bunch of encryption options JUST FOR INCLUDING TCP/IPv4.
You do realize that there are lots of "switches" that turn on simply by virtue of the option "CONFIG_X86=y" right? The DS booting (an older 2.6 uClinux kernel) with 4MB and an ARM chip is irrelevant. I am aware that Linux can boot on MIPS and ARM routers with 8MB of RAM, but the relevance is nil when compared to x86. In fact, I dare you: compile an x86 kernel with almost nothing in it but console drivers and whatnot (I've build gzip-compressed kernels at ~800K compressed), make a minimalist BusyBox+uClibc initramfs, fire up QEMU/KVM with the "-m 16" option and boot your kernel. It won't work. Someone here suggested changing an advanced setting I didn't try yet, so that might make a difference, but it doesn't change the fact that ARM and x86 are two different worlds and a lot is forced in x86 that is optional in ARM.
Also, perhaps you should consider being less of an asshole when you fire off a knee-jerk response like this one. You are capable of questioning information without being condescending.
Linux has had compressed memory for quite some time, originally as Compcache and now as ZRAM. I have managed to use it on low-memory systems even today to get more work done faster. I'm not saying this to attack OS X, but rather to point out that equivalents already do exist. Also, I remember when a company (Quarterdeck?) offered a product for DOS/Windows called "RAM Doubler" that did the same kind of thing.
One of the most frustrating things for me is that the frenzy over the past six or seven years has led to some serious annoyances with the kernel's behavior:
1. Linux kernels for i386/x86 can't boot in less than roughly 28MB of RAM. I have tried to make it happen, but the features added along the way don't allow it. Perhaps it's the change to ELF? I'm not sure.
2. Linux x86 can't have the perf subsystem removed. It's sort of pointless for a Turion 64 X2 or a Core i3, but for systems with weaker processors (netbooks, embedded, etc.) every single evicted cache line counts.
3. Some parts of the kernel seem to be dependent on other parts almost arbitrarily. I once embarked on a quest to see what it took to discard the entire cryptographic subsystem. Long story short: good luck. I was surprised at how many different hashing and crypto algorithms were required to make use of common hardware and filesystems and network protocols. Are all of these interdependencies really necessary?
4. The help text for lots of kernel configuration options are in SEVERE need of updating and clarification. Most of the network drivers still say roughly the exact same thing, and some of the help text sounds pretty silly at this point.
5. Speaking of help text, why doesn't the kernel show me what options are forcing the mandatory selection of a particular option? For some, it's simple, but try hitting the question mark on CRC32c and you get a disastrous and impossible to read list of things that force the selection of that option. The help screen should show an option dependency tree that explains how the option in question was forced.
6. ARM is still a disaster. I have a Motorola Triumph I don't use anymore, but I wanted to build a custom system for. It uses a Snapdragon SoC and the only kernel I can use with it is a 2.6 series kernel from Motorola (or derivatives based on that code base) with lots of nasty deviations from the mainline kernel tree that will never make it into said mainline tree. I have a WonderMedia WM8650-based netbook that originally came with an Android 2.3 port and I can't build anything but the WonderMedia GPL compliance kernel release if I want to use most of the hardware in the netbook, even though general WM8650 support exists in mainline. Something needs to change to make it easier for vendors to bring their drivers and SoC specifics to mainline so that ARM devices aren't permanently stuck with the kernel version that they originally shipped with.
I'm still using a VIA C7-M netbook which suffers heavily due to the tiny on-chip caches. I also have a Fujitsu P2110 with a Transmeta TM5800 CPU that makes my VIA look like an i7. I also own Phenom II servers, AMD A8 laptops, MIPS routers, a Raspberry Pi, and many Android devices I've collected over the years. What I've seen is that the mad rush to develop for every new thing and every new idea results in old hardware being tossed by the wayside and ignored, especially when that hardware isn't based on an x86 processor. Even then, I'm sure that this frenetic, rapid development process has resulted in a lot of unnecessary bloat and a pile of little unnoticed security holes. It may be time to step back and stop adding new features. I would like to see the existing mainline kernel become much more heavily optimized and cleaned up, and then see the inclusion of support for at least some of the embedded platforms that never managed to make it back into mainline. I know that this is an unrealistically broad set of "wants," but I also know that these are the big nasty unspoken problems in the Linux world that there are no easy answers for.
I strongly second this one. It's an amazing remake that clearly had a lot of effort put into it and it's an insane amount of fun. I used to play T2K in DOS and Typhoon 2001 is good enough to make me never really want to go back. For some extra fun, you can turn on camera rotation...it'll blow your mind.
That's entirely state- and city-specific, actually. Some are, some aren't, and finding out which and how much, and keeping track of it all plus dealing with different tax rates for different goods and services too is kind of a pain in the ass.
MBA screens are disturbingly easy to bust, and replacement even with used parts costs half the price of the laptop. Oddly enough, most of my customers who bring in a smashed MBA and get the bad news just go out and buy ANOTHER BRAND NEW MAC. I'm happy for them that they have that kind of disposable income, I guess.
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No, Chrome is pushed by SO MANY free downloads. I've noticed that many of the OpenCandy-based "shit I don't want" suggestion portions of installers tend to push Google Chrome. Avast Free pushes it incessantly. Chrome installs through many of the same channels that DefaultTab, WhiteSmoke, MapsGalaxy, etc. do it. Most of my residential customers have no idea what Chrome is or why it's on their computer.
This continues to work in Microsoft's favor even today. There are so many things that only work with ActiveX, it's insane. Citrix and any Blue Cross Blue Shield website come to mind. There was a /. article a few days ago about how Koreans are largely stuck on IE due to Korean government encryption that requires an ActiveX plugin to work.
Somehow I doubt that anyone on Slashdot is offended by the notion of a Nazi-themed orgy. The Internet generation doesn't get shocked very easily anymore. Goatse, Tubgirl, NumberGenderNumberContainer videos, and half the memes ever created are far more offensive than some people having a role-playing orgy behind closed doors.
I believe I just coined the term NumberGenderNumberContainer...
It seems like everything surrounding that bill is exactly how people should respond to such a thing. America has the same "name it something no one can oppose" problem. If you put "predators" or "child pornography" or a child's name or any kind of "Insert Assumed Positive Direction Here Act" in the title, anyone who votes against it supports serial baby rapist arson embezzlers who bootleg Trix cereal...and the American public at large buys that sensationalist nonsense because they're so FUCKING STUPID that they can't perform the monumental task of typing something into a search engine and read three paragraphs of reality.
Snowden's leaks have made me want to kill puppy dogs, throw children into giant fans, set flags on fire, cut my catalytic converter off my vehicle, and burn apple pies in the oven at an alarming rate.
Oh wait, that's not reality. That's reality as presented by these reality fabrication engineers.
I find 3 AM to be quite interesting. I was there, man. I lived in that moment.
I wasn't a terribly "clean" kid; I didn't shower often at all and didn't wash my hands unless I was about to cook food. I still refuse to use hand sanitizer or anti-germ wipes and I don't expect every surface I touch to be disinfected. Some of that has changed as I have gotten older (I shower at least once a day and by most peoples' standards I'm quite "clean"), but I'm willing to bet that my "unclean" behaviors in the past and my lack of fear of germs and dirt and grease under the nails explain why I very rarely get sick (once a year maybe) and even more rarely stay sick longer than a few days.
I read somewhere that there's a theory about auto-immune diseases being a result of humans no longer having parasites and infections. The theory was that the immune system has nothing to do and "gets bored." The possible solution is introducing a limited amount of relatively benign parasites. I don't feel like searching for it right now, but I found it to be a fascinating theory.
As an added bonus, I can kill germ-o-phobes by breathing at them and there will be no evidence linking it back to me. I'M A FUCKING VIKING.
Clearly he needs to re-read most of the Bastard Operator From Hell series.
Follow-up to the minimum RAM aspect:
After changing CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START and its respective alignment parameter from 16MB to 1MB, I can boot a reasonably capable kernel (1975KB gzip, 5MB vmlinux.o) with a BusyBox + uClibc initramfs in QEMU with RAM limited to 13MB. 12MB locks up silently (likely a fault of my initramfs scripts) and 8MB panics due to running out of memory, though I could likely hit 12MB if I just dropped more drivers like CIFS and ethernet controllers. "free" shows 8MB used once the system's up and running from tmpfs, so there's room for most of my shell scripts to get some work done.
It's still nowhere near running in 4MB, and never will be. I do understand that it's not relevant to the vast majority of x86 users, and the main reason I want this capability is so I can play around with (and maybe even USE) an old Compaq Contura Aero 4/25. Fortunately, that was upgraded by the original owner to 12MB of RAM, and if I boot from floppies and don't use initramfs, it'll probably work fine. There's something to be said for an OS in 2013 that can still be used on 1994 hardware! Maybe I can interface the RS-232 port to the SPI-to-ethernet interface I bought a few weeks ago. Hmmmm...
For future reference, I found the message for the commit that changed CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START to 16MB from 1MB: http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-tip-commits/msg02353.html
I'm no stranger to compiling kernels, and my complaints are not that it's "not easy." I build Linux kernel/initramfs combinations that we use in-house, and one of the experimental projects we're working on would require distribution of the smallest possible combination of those two (primarily due to serving customers with crappy rural DSL connections). We still have customers with Celeron machines in the three-digit MHz ranges and much smaller caches than the CPU in a new $300 laptop, so decreasing the kernel's size is helpful, especially with some of the disk-intensive stuff we may run on top of it. Features bring bloat and the work to remove that bloat is not "fun," so developers don't want to do it (and who could blame them?)
Another use case where a tighter kernel may be helpful is one running in a virtualized environment. Since kernel-mode code (even with KVM acceleration) will frequently trigger fallbacks into the hypervisor, we theoretically can minimize these expensive triggers by "running a tighter ship." VMs tend to amplify cache line evictions since two or more kernels are often running on the same physical chip with at least a shared L2 cache between them, and less code in the VM means less cache line evictions.
I wouldn't call the dependencies "nonsensical." My complaints about dependencies are that they aren't sufficiently tunable for expert users without editing the code directly. Features constantly and quickly being added means dependencies brought in to support those features. Some features can't be turned off in the source at all, like TCP fast open. TFO is also a prime example of what I have a problem with: not only is it not removable, but also forces the inclusion of a bunch of encryption options JUST FOR INCLUDING TCP/IPv4.
You're thinking hydrogen. This is HELIUM!
H = OH THE HUMANITY
He = OH THE CHIPMUNK HUMANITY
I didn't have Slashdot set to handle my line breaks correctly. Sorry.
You do realize that there are lots of "switches" that turn on simply by virtue of the option "CONFIG_X86=y" right? The DS booting (an older 2.6 uClinux kernel) with 4MB and an ARM chip is irrelevant. I am aware that Linux can boot on MIPS and ARM routers with 8MB of RAM, but the relevance is nil when compared to x86. In fact, I dare you: compile an x86 kernel with almost nothing in it but console drivers and whatnot (I've build gzip-compressed kernels at ~800K compressed), make a minimalist BusyBox+uClibc initramfs, fire up QEMU/KVM with the "-m 16" option and boot your kernel. It won't work. Someone here suggested changing an advanced setting I didn't try yet, so that might make a difference, but it doesn't change the fact that ARM and x86 are two different worlds and a lot is forced in x86 that is optional in ARM.
Also, perhaps you should consider being less of an asshole when you fire off a knee-jerk response like this one. You are capable of questioning information without being condescending.
I changed to "plain old text" mode. That'll teach 'em.
Slashdot ate all my line breaks. Apologies.
Nah, Slashdot just didn't use a condom.
Linux has had compressed memory for quite some time, originally as Compcache and now as ZRAM. I have managed to use it on low-memory systems even today to get more work done faster. I'm not saying this to attack OS X, but rather to point out that equivalents already do exist. Also, I remember when a company (Quarterdeck?) offered a product for DOS/Windows called "RAM Doubler" that did the same kind of thing.
One of the most frustrating things for me is that the frenzy over the past six or seven years has led to some serious annoyances with the kernel's behavior: 1. Linux kernels for i386/x86 can't boot in less than roughly 28MB of RAM. I have tried to make it happen, but the features added along the way don't allow it. Perhaps it's the change to ELF? I'm not sure. 2. Linux x86 can't have the perf subsystem removed. It's sort of pointless for a Turion 64 X2 or a Core i3, but for systems with weaker processors (netbooks, embedded, etc.) every single evicted cache line counts. 3. Some parts of the kernel seem to be dependent on other parts almost arbitrarily. I once embarked on a quest to see what it took to discard the entire cryptographic subsystem. Long story short: good luck. I was surprised at how many different hashing and crypto algorithms were required to make use of common hardware and filesystems and network protocols. Are all of these interdependencies really necessary? 4. The help text for lots of kernel configuration options are in SEVERE need of updating and clarification. Most of the network drivers still say roughly the exact same thing, and some of the help text sounds pretty silly at this point. 5. Speaking of help text, why doesn't the kernel show me what options are forcing the mandatory selection of a particular option? For some, it's simple, but try hitting the question mark on CRC32c and you get a disastrous and impossible to read list of things that force the selection of that option. The help screen should show an option dependency tree that explains how the option in question was forced. 6. ARM is still a disaster. I have a Motorola Triumph I don't use anymore, but I wanted to build a custom system for. It uses a Snapdragon SoC and the only kernel I can use with it is a 2.6 series kernel from Motorola (or derivatives based on that code base) with lots of nasty deviations from the mainline kernel tree that will never make it into said mainline tree. I have a WonderMedia WM8650-based netbook that originally came with an Android 2.3 port and I can't build anything but the WonderMedia GPL compliance kernel release if I want to use most of the hardware in the netbook, even though general WM8650 support exists in mainline. Something needs to change to make it easier for vendors to bring their drivers and SoC specifics to mainline so that ARM devices aren't permanently stuck with the kernel version that they originally shipped with. I'm still using a VIA C7-M netbook which suffers heavily due to the tiny on-chip caches. I also have a Fujitsu P2110 with a Transmeta TM5800 CPU that makes my VIA look like an i7. I also own Phenom II servers, AMD A8 laptops, MIPS routers, a Raspberry Pi, and many Android devices I've collected over the years. What I've seen is that the mad rush to develop for every new thing and every new idea results in old hardware being tossed by the wayside and ignored, especially when that hardware isn't based on an x86 processor. Even then, I'm sure that this frenetic, rapid development process has resulted in a lot of unnecessary bloat and a pile of little unnoticed security holes. It may be time to step back and stop adding new features. I would like to see the existing mainline kernel become much more heavily optimized and cleaned up, and then see the inclusion of support for at least some of the embedded platforms that never managed to make it back into mainline. I know that this is an unrealistically broad set of "wants," but I also know that these are the big nasty unspoken problems in the Linux world that there are no easy answers for.
I strongly second this one. It's an amazing remake that clearly had a lot of effort put into it and it's an insane amount of fun. I used to play T2K in DOS and Typhoon 2001 is good enough to make me never really want to go back. For some extra fun, you can turn on camera rotation...it'll blow your mind.
The laws need to be changed. Speed limits don't increase safety. They only serve to fatten the state's wallet.
That's entirely state- and city-specific, actually. Some are, some aren't, and finding out which and how much, and keeping track of it all plus dealing with different tax rates for different goods and services too is kind of a pain in the ass.
People use Bing?
MBA screens are disturbingly easy to bust, and replacement even with used parts costs half the price of the laptop. Oddly enough, most of my customers who bring in a smashed MBA and get the bad news just go out and buy ANOTHER BRAND NEW MAC. I'm happy for them that they have that kind of disposable income, I guess.