Just about three years ago I moved an AXPpci33 from my friend's house to my house in one of the worst rain storms ever.
As if that wasn't already a bad enough idea, the case was poorly assembled, the motherboard wasn't screwed or snapped in, and i was trying to carry too many things in.
Well, as the title hints I dropped the whole thing in a 3" deep puddle of water that had collected in front of my garage. I cursed for a little while, picked it up and carried it into the house. I used a blow dryer and carefully blew everything dry and then assembled it on my bureau without the case.
I plugged in the AT power supply that also took the fall, and a monitor I had lying around.
Didn't work. I cursed for a little while, again.
About three weeks passed and I decided to try it again, for some reason I decided to attatch a keyboard this time. As if for some reason I felt like typing on the drowned board.
I turned it on, the screen did not indicate any functionality, and nothing else interesting seemed to happen. I walked away.
I came back after some time and found a blue SRM boot console awaiting me! Either I didn't wait long enough for the boot sequence the first time or it required the keyboard to realize there was a video console, I don't know. I tried a couple of times to figure it out back then but I don't remember my conclusion. Probably for the same reason I didn't remember it back then.
Amazingly it still works. It ran linux for a while, then sat in a pile of other worthless computers for a year or so at the shack. Sometime last year this stupid fat ass, robby, spilled a couple sodas on it. We told him that we boned his girlfriend and what not, but that's for the subject of another post.
Anyway, as recently as last April it was out of the pile and running OpenVMS Alpha 7.2-1 and Multinet 4.3. We didn't use the CDROM drive to install VMS, I made the system disk using another vms system.
The CDROM drive was used after the soda incident to install Solaris 2.6 on a Sparc IPX.
Its a little ironic that even gross incompetence and stupidity don't always result in destroyed hardware as frequently as hardware inexplicably dies. (iBook screen, iMac DV that sufferent a quadruple failure for no reason, VAX TOY????, every AMD I've ever owned, the list goes on and on)
GCC is a good compiler. It's neither as good as Compaq's C compiler on Alpha nor is it as good as Sun's compiler on Sparc, however. GCC couldn't even make 64 bit binaries until the 3.0 release.
Although, the compiler is a minimal issue, I use Solaris as my desktop at work and we run it on the production servers. I've also worked with Tru64, etc. I've never worked with a UNIX so broken out of the box. It's a good 4 hours of work before you can comfortable use a Solaris system. Unlike many other UNIXes, which require post-installation work but aren't as ugly. (Ever service enabled by default, open mail relay,/bin/sh, insufficient path, hideously outdated drivers, 30,302 patches to apply, broken patches, patches that re-enable services you've disabled.)
We recently purchased a Sun Fire 150 system to use for a few web-services. The system came preinsatelled with The Solaris Operating Environment version 8. It presented a minimally impressive configuration menu but it wasn't able to configure the NICs because it couldn't figure out what they were.
Solaris may technically be a good Operating System, however I do not find it particularly excellent. I'll take MacOS X (or Server) over Solaris anyday. I'll even go so far as to say I'd rather use Debian than Solaris.
*BSD isn't dying. Parts of it have been integrated into nearly every operating system written since. As noted above, it makes up the foundation of the most modern and beautiful operating system ever written.
I love OS X! I got my first mac, an iMac DV 400mhz on eBay and OS X from staples. It was absolutely the coolest OS I have ever seen.
I sold the iMac and got an iBook. At the same time they released the X.1 upgrade. For a while it seemed faster. Since the iBook was 500mhz (oh by the way, i missed the 600mhz model price shift by 2 days).
I used it for five months, right up until I couldn't take the performance hit any longer. Few things that annoyed me. The web browsing was terribly slow, also switching between apps was really slow. The transparent terminal helped for a while since I could read the contents of the IE window beneath the terminal, but it didn't help me work it pimpstyle with the chicks on AIM.
I don't know why this made me think of the Radio Shack Color Computer, but it did.
Seems like the Duron and the Celeron (DX/SX, etc) are just crippled versions of the "better" Athlon and Pentium x.
Much like back in the late 70s when Radio Shack was designing their more affordable Color Computer they anticipated it to have 32k of ram using 16k RAM chips and designed the board for those chips. The chips didn't actually exist when the board was designed, but they *knew* as it was rolling down the assembly line the 16k RAM chips would be available.
Murphy has taught us well and true to form 16k RAM chips were not available. The chip manufacturers skipped 16k to 32k! So instead of their "low end" computer being built with 32k total it had 64k total. Which was 16k more than their "high end" model!
Solution: break the most significant address line.
For the same cost to the company they produced a bit less than they marketed and sold. (yes, pun intended.) For the sole intent of keeping the price of the high end model inflated.
This is exactly what intel did with the 486's. They made DX processors and applied too many volts to the FPU and blew it out. (blown out as in destroyed not to be confused blown out as in programmed with PLA).
I guess now the trend is going to be low-end 32-bit, high end 64-bit. This is considerably less less transparent to the programmer. And I am not quite sure how this is going to benefit AMD's venture into the 64-bit arena.
It would be nice to have one of those available under the GPL. I'm CPE student and the only software available which can be used to simulate and path PCB (printed circuit boards) is really really expensive. Way beyond the scope of my knowledge.
I wonder how many people are actually going to benefit from this though? I, as an engineering student, programmer, and open source enthusiast, appreciate this kind of GPL release. Not as much as I'd appreciate a CPE toolkit!:)
Well, all that aside I guess I should just write my own toolkit for CPE and design. Then I could release it and others could benefit from my hard work, the way Open Source Software works.
We don't know much about the logistics so I'm making some assumptions here. Firstly I'm going to assume that they have at least three songs from each album at $16 per album. Since I'm sure the RIAA's stance is that you can't buy three songs off the album (I know, I know, Singles, etc, but come on.)
Lets do some math. $1,000,000/$16 = 62500*3 = 187500 songs! DAMN. That's a lot of songs.
Looks like subscriptions can be axed, Slashdot won't need editors anymore!
Although, it will only be possible to replace slashdot's editors with the newsblaster program if they can implement some sort of misspelling and false information algorithm.
RMS is not completing this with the hopes that it will conquer the OS market driving both Linux and Windows into the ground. (Debatable)
The FSF is responsible for nearly all of the Unix-like applications that are found in every distribution of Linux! Despite RMS's insistence the Operating System is still called "Linux."
Well, It's not linux! The kernel is linux, just try running the kernel without the GNU tools. Good luck.
Anyway, this isn't a flame, so I'll get to my point. RMS is completing the Hurd so he can have his complete GNU system. He needs the Hurd to complete the crackpot scheme he and his comunist chums hatched back in 1984 -- GNU.
I have no doubt that Linux will be sucessful in eventually becoming the predominant desktop OS.
The problem with your prediction is that Linux lacks unity. It isn't possible to take over the desktop market until development can procede in one direction! The problem with Linux is that you have your Gnome people, you have your KDE people. Still deeper your RedHat, Debian, SuSE, and Mandrake people.
How do you expect Linux will take over the desktop if there are not professional applications available for it?
There is no doubt that it's making tremendous headway in the server market, but I think your prediction is little more than a pipe dream.
This seems to be the trend now that the novelty and excitement surrounding Linux has died out.
It is not a sound business model to develop apps and games for Linux for several reasons.
1: Linux doesn't control enough of the desktop market.
2: Most users of Linux apt-get (or the RedHat equivalent) their software. (eg: aren't going to pay for much)
3: It's difficult to develop for every distribution. Most commmercial software is made to run on RedHat. I use Debian. I'm SOL.
4: Those who use RedHat and consider buying software worry about products being discontinued, like this.
Same thing happened to Loki. They did a really good job porting games to Linux, but sales were pathetic.
I remember going into Electronics Boutique a year ago. They had a rack with the $50 Linux software right in front of the store. I went into the store last week all the software was gone. Was it sold? No. It was moved to the back of the store and marked down to $9. I bought Loki's release of Quake II for the tin it came in.
I wouldn't buy software when a semi-working version is available for free. Especially if I thought it would be discontinued.
Linux has its applications but why would you drop that kind of cash on that kind of machine to run linux on it? You can run linux on a cheap Athlon and have the same (if not better) performance.
Not only that but linux can't even begin to compare to the impressiveness of MacOS X. I have a G3 running OSX and I would kill to have the G4.
Its impressive, sure, but it begs the question: WHY?
Also, what are the benefits? Fink runs on the BSD compatibility layer, you can compile all your favorite X apps (that aren't packaged on fink) and you can run a rootless X!
Maybe I am just missing the point of the whole thing, and this is not a flame or a troll. This is genuine interest. What would compell someone to run Linux instead of MacOS X on such an elegant (and expensive) machine?
The clie is cool, but I could do everything it does 6 months before its release on my HP Jornada.
There, now that this comment isn't offtopic, I can respond to the part of your comment I cared about. You SHOULD get a Mac! Immediately.
MacOX X is way better than linux. Good GUI, solid unix underpinning, etc.
Even if you don't like MacOS X (which I find highly unlikely) you could still run Linux on it.
Six months is a lot of experience..
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: -1, Troll
I don't understand this at all! Six months ago you stopped using MS and are using Linux? Probably Red Hat. You don't hear much about "viruses" or worms, but if you're running Red Hat you've probably been compromised already.
The fact that you haven't heard anything about "viruses" for Linux just scares me. You're probably a storm DDOS client host or something. Telnet to port 22, if you see SSH-1.5 1.2.26 you're probably already beat!
I want the menus to be attatched to their windows. So I can flip through the file menu of another application without first dragging
the mouse all the way to the window then
all the way back up.
MacOS X is reason enough to use a Mac
despite my inability to wrap myself around
the many "features" of 9 rewritten into 10.
Obviously, michael, you are as attentive as you are a critic. At least if Katz would have done the review I wouldn't have seen it (because like 70,000 other slashdot readers, I have slashdot ignore Jon Katz posts).
I am not saying this pilot was flawless, but the storyline is leaps and bounds ahead of Voyager.
Voyager = Gilligan's Island in space.
Slashdot Mirror
Just about three years ago I moved an AXPpci33 from my friend's house to my house in one of the worst rain storms ever.
As if that wasn't already a bad enough idea, the case was poorly assembled, the motherboard wasn't screwed or snapped in, and i was trying to carry too many things in.
Well, as the title hints I dropped the whole thing in a 3" deep puddle of water that had collected in front of my garage. I cursed for a little while, picked it up and carried it into the house. I used a blow dryer and carefully blew everything dry and then assembled it on my bureau without the case.
I plugged in the AT power supply that also took the fall, and a monitor I had lying around.
Didn't work. I cursed for a little while, again.
About three weeks passed and I decided to try it again, for some reason I decided to attatch a keyboard this time. As if for some reason I felt like typing on the drowned board.
I turned it on, the screen did not indicate any functionality, and nothing else interesting seemed to happen. I walked away.
I came back after some time and found a blue SRM boot console awaiting me! Either I didn't wait long enough for the boot sequence the first time or it required the keyboard to realize there was a video console, I don't know. I tried a couple of times to figure it out back then but I don't remember my conclusion. Probably for the same reason I didn't remember it back then.
Amazingly it still works. It ran linux for a while, then sat in a pile of other worthless computers for a year or so at the shack. Sometime last year this stupid fat ass, robby, spilled a couple sodas on it. We told him that we boned his girlfriend and what not, but that's for the subject of another post.
Anyway, as recently as last April it was out of the pile and running OpenVMS Alpha 7.2-1 and Multinet 4.3. We didn't use the CDROM drive to install VMS, I made the system disk using another vms system.
The CDROM drive was used after the soda incident to install Solaris 2.6 on a Sparc IPX.
Its a little ironic that even gross incompetence and stupidity don't always result in destroyed hardware as frequently as hardware inexplicably dies. (iBook screen, iMac DV that sufferent a quadruple failure for no reason, VAX TOY????, every AMD I've ever owned, the list goes on and on)
I already don't bathe and carry around a ziplock full of tea bags and my 286 laptop which runs Emacs. What more of a membership could there be?
GCC is a good compiler. It's neither as good as Compaq's C compiler on Alpha nor is it as good as Sun's compiler on Sparc, however. GCC couldn't even make 64 bit binaries until the 3.0 release.
/bin/sh, insufficient path, hideously outdated drivers, 30,302 patches to apply, broken patches, patches that re-enable services you've disabled.)
Although, the compiler is a minimal issue, I use Solaris as my desktop at work and we run it on the production servers. I've also worked with Tru64, etc. I've never worked with a UNIX so broken out of the box. It's a good 4 hours of work before you can comfortable use a Solaris system. Unlike many other UNIXes, which require post-installation work but aren't as ugly. (Ever service enabled by default, open mail relay,
We recently purchased a Sun Fire 150 system to use for a few web-services. The system came preinsatelled with The Solaris Operating Environment version 8. It presented a minimally impressive configuration menu but it wasn't able to configure the NICs because it couldn't figure out what they were.
Solaris may technically be a good Operating System, however I do not find it particularly excellent. I'll take MacOS X (or Server) over Solaris anyday. I'll even go so far as to say I'd rather use Debian than Solaris.
You for got to add the Mac OS X users.
*BSD isn't dying. Parts of it have been integrated into nearly every operating system written since. As noted above, it makes up the foundation of the most modern and beautiful operating system ever written.
I love OS X! I got my first mac, an iMac DV 400mhz on eBay and OS X from staples. It was absolutely the coolest OS I have ever seen.
I sold the iMac and got an iBook. At the same time they released the X.1 upgrade. For a while it seemed faster. Since the iBook was 500mhz (oh by the way, i missed the 600mhz model price shift by 2 days).
I used it for five months, right up until I couldn't take the performance hit any longer. Few things that annoyed me. The web browsing was terribly slow, also switching between apps was really slow. The transparent terminal helped for a while since I could read the contents of the IE window beneath the terminal, but it didn't help me work it pimpstyle with the chicks on AIM.
I don't know why this made me think of the Radio Shack Color Computer, but it did.
Seems like the Duron and the Celeron (DX/SX, etc) are just crippled versions of the "better" Athlon and Pentium x.
Much like back in the late 70s when Radio Shack was designing their more affordable Color Computer they anticipated it to have 32k of ram using 16k RAM chips and designed the board for those chips. The chips didn't actually exist when the board was designed, but they *knew* as it was rolling down the assembly line the 16k RAM chips would be available.
Murphy has taught us well and true to form 16k RAM chips were not available. The chip manufacturers skipped 16k to 32k! So instead of
their "low end" computer being built with 32k total it had 64k total. Which was 16k more than their "high end" model!
Solution: break the most significant address line.
For the same cost to the company they produced a bit less than they marketed and sold. (yes, pun intended.) For the sole intent of keeping the price of the high end model inflated.
This is exactly what intel did with the 486's. They made DX processors and applied too many volts to the FPU and blew it out. (blown out as in destroyed not to be confused blown out as in programmed with PLA).
I guess now the trend is going to be low-end 32-bit, high end 64-bit. This is considerably less less transparent to the programmer. And I am not quite sure how this is going to benefit AMD's venture into the 64-bit arena.
It would be nice to have one of those available under the GPL. I'm CPE student and the only software available which can be used to simulate and path PCB (printed circuit boards) is really really expensive. Way beyond the scope of my knowledge.
:)
I wonder how many people are actually going to benefit from this though? I, as an engineering student, programmer, and open source enthusiast, appreciate this kind of GPL release. Not as much as I'd appreciate a CPE toolkit!
Well, all that aside I guess I should just write my own toolkit for CPE and design. Then I could release it and others could benefit from my hard work, the way Open Source Software works.
average cd price: $16
We don't know much about the logistics so I'm making some assumptions here. Firstly I'm going to assume that they have at least three songs from each album at $16 per album. Since I'm sure the RIAA's stance is that you can't buy three songs off the album (I know, I know, Singles, etc, but come on.)
Lets do some math. $1,000,000/$16 = 62500*3 = 187500 songs! DAMN. That's a lot of songs.
If you have a Mac or linux or Sun or VMS or any other system, you can't get PalmOS software from them.
Let me just say that if your only other system runs VMS, you have considerably more problems than not being able to view PDF files on your PDA.
As mentioned above, you can convert between pdf and html on adobe's website.
The most amusing part is that XP has been available for some time now and someone finally noticed this clause.
It makes me wonder what else is floating around in there.
Looks like subscriptions can be axed, Slashdot won't need editors anymore!
Although, it will only be possible to replace slashdot's editors with the newsblaster program if they can implement some sort of misspelling and false information algorithm.
Hurd isn't done. But now I'm not offtopic.
and Apple will finally release OS X
WHAT?! Apple did release OS X!
RMS is not completing this with the hopes that it will conquer the OS market driving both Linux and Windows into the ground. (Debatable)
The FSF is responsible for nearly all of the Unix-like applications that are found in every distribution of Linux! Despite RMS's insistence the Operating System is still called "Linux."
Well, It's not linux! The kernel is linux, just try running the kernel without the GNU tools. Good luck.
Anyway, this isn't a flame, so I'll get to my point. RMS is completing the Hurd so he can have his complete GNU system. He needs the Hurd to complete the crackpot scheme he and his comunist chums hatched back in 1984 -- GNU.
I have no doubt that Linux will be sucessful in eventually becoming the predominant desktop OS.
The problem with your prediction is that Linux lacks unity. It isn't possible to take over the desktop market until development can procede in one direction! The problem with Linux is that you have your Gnome people, you have your KDE people. Still deeper your RedHat, Debian, SuSE, and Mandrake people.
How do you expect Linux will take over the desktop if there are not professional applications available for it?
There is no doubt that it's making tremendous headway in the server market, but I think your prediction is little more than a pipe dream.
This seems to be the trend now that the novelty and excitement surrounding Linux has died out.
It is not a sound business model to develop apps and games for Linux for several reasons.
1: Linux doesn't control enough of the desktop market.
2: Most users of Linux apt-get (or the RedHat equivalent) their software. (eg: aren't going to pay for much)
3: It's difficult to develop for every distribution. Most commmercial software is made to run on RedHat. I use Debian. I'm SOL.
4: Those who use RedHat and consider buying software worry about products being discontinued, like this.
Same thing happened to Loki. They did a really good job porting games to Linux, but sales were pathetic.
I remember going into Electronics Boutique a year ago. They had a rack with the $50 Linux software right in front of the store. I went into the store last week all the software was gone. Was it sold? No. It was moved to the back of the store and marked down to $9. I bought Loki's release of Quake II for the tin it came in.
I wouldn't buy software when a semi-working version is available for free. Especially if I thought it would be discontinued.
Linux has its applications but why would you drop that kind of cash on that kind of machine to run linux on it? You can run linux on a cheap Athlon and have the same (if not better) performance.
Not only that but linux can't even begin to compare to the impressiveness of MacOS X. I have a G3 running OSX and I would kill to have the G4.
Its impressive, sure, but it begs the question: WHY?
Also, what are the benefits? Fink runs on the BSD compatibility layer, you can compile all your favorite X apps (that aren't packaged on fink) and you can run a rootless X!
Maybe I am just missing the point of the whole thing, and this is not a flame or a troll. This is genuine interest. What would compell someone to run Linux instead of MacOS X on such an elegant (and expensive) machine?
This sounds a bit like a technology that would preceed the public transportation seen on Futurama.
The real question is, do these cars read your destination from your mind or can you just speak directives to them like turbolifts?
The clie is cool, but I could do everything it does 6 months before its release on my HP Jornada.
There, now that this comment isn't offtopic, I can respond to the part of your comment I cared about. You SHOULD get a Mac! Immediately.
MacOX X is way better than linux. Good GUI, solid unix underpinning, etc.
Even if you don't like MacOS X (which I find highly unlikely) you could still run Linux on it.
I don't understand this at all! Six months ago you stopped using MS and are using Linux? Probably Red Hat. You don't hear much about "viruses" or worms, but if you're running Red Hat you've probably been compromised already.
The fact that you haven't heard anything about "viruses" for Linux just scares me. You're probably a storm DDOS client host or something. Telnet to port 22, if you see SSH-1.5 1.2.26 you're probably already beat!
that's not what I meant at all...
I want the menus to be attatched to their windows. So I can flip through the file menu of another application without first dragging
the mouse all the way to the window then
all the way back up.
MacOS X is reason enough to use a Mac
despite my inability to wrap myself around
the many "features" of 9 rewritten into 10.
Mac OS X is eye candy. Pure eye candy.
10.1 is much improved. The speed improvment
is tremendous.
There are few things that are
annoying like not being able to get rid of the
menu bar at the top of the screen, but that puts the Mac is Mac OS.
...the mantra is release early release often but it never truly reaches gold because its never finished.
This is good. I think GNOME would only increase the number of weekly patches needed to keep a solaris system secure for more than 23 seconds.
I just heard it again. He said polar plating.
Obviously, michael, you are as attentive as you are a critic. At least if Katz would have done the review I wouldn't have seen it (because like 70,000 other slashdot readers, I have slashdot ignore Jon Katz posts).
I am not saying this pilot was flawless, but the storyline is leaps and bounds ahead of Voyager.
Voyager = Gilligan's Island in space.