I failed out of college, with a huge debt over my head (could not pass the higher level CS courses to save my life). Through long hours of work and putting in a lot of effort at low-paying internship/quasi-contract work, I managed to get a 'real' job at an software company for ~30k/year (just in the nick of time). I have managed to hang on, doing work that saves the higher-paid people time, thus justifying my expense. My problem, though it seems weird to put it this way, is that I have been promoted to where I am encroaching on the low end of the other people's salaries. I am slowly losing my competetive edge, and the justification of my employment.
I have myself wedged into a useful area, and I would need to be replaced if let go; but it wouldn't be difficult to find someone who would jump at my job at a decent pay cut from what I make now. This is a Very Scary Thought.
The only thing I can do is live on the cheap, share a college-level apartment (holes in the walls, bad area, dirty and smelly) with 3 other people and keep my rent at ~$300/month (very low in urban Massachusetts near tech areas), and no car payment so I can pay off my rediculous student loans. At my current estimation, if I remain employed for another 1.5 years I will break out of debt, and can begin saving for the inevitable Big Rainy Day.
I suppose I could beg my uncle the plumber for an internship if things go they way I suspect they will. It's just a question of When.
I run an Indigo 2 with a MIPS R4400 200mhz 1mb cache....which is a fairly low end model. By doing some rough cpu benchmarks (rendering scenes in POV-Ray), it seemed to place a little shy of my old PC, which is a 233mhz Pentium II.
Note that for the video capture above on an Indigo 2, you'd need the galileo video option, or some similar device, but that's nit-picking.
The MIPS R10k and R12k systems are far superior, though even with the Max Impact graphics set, you will be disappointed with textured 3d if you're used to current hardware (max is similar to a TnT2, I'd say).
Still, my indigo was out (with the "extreme" graphics set - 8 GL processors, 2 raster engines, 1 geometry pre-processor, no texture) when the best PC you could buy was a decked-out 486, or possibly a pentium 60.
I still want a Crimson Reality Engine, just for the coolness factor. Best looking case ever!:)
You should be able to stream a bare minimum of at least 25megabytes a second, with compression off, to a medium (just above consumer) end tape drive such as a standalone SDLT unit. So it's roughly 2 minutes to transfer to tape, and I'll even throw in another minute for loading, rewinding, and unloading.
With the 15 minute drive, and reading back on your home machine, you're looking at around 21 minutes for the transfer.
My math may be wrong, but I think you would need a 19.05 Megabit connection to your house, excluding all network overhead to counter the tape example.:)
If you go with a higher end Ampex unit, the tape speeds are staggering. I'm talking the ones with cassettes the size of briefcases (I kid you not). We had one back in '98 that had 330GB tapes, they must be well over a terabyte each by now.
If you live 5000 miles away (as in your example), you might be lucky to have any kind of internet access at all.:) Besides, the tape in the car example only really works for large amounts of data (I'm guessing 100TB or so could fit confortably in a wagon.)
In all seriousness, has anyone else experienced UPS's fictional tracking system?
The last few times I have had something shipped overnight, the tracking system (and the people on the phone) tell me that my packages are signed for by "Shelly" at the front desk at 10:04 am in Chelmsford, MA.
Problem is, I have never met a "Shelly", I live 60 miles from Chelmsford, I most certainly do NOT have a "front desk", and the packages show up randomly in the afternoon.
Bizarre. This is why I shy away from UPS whenever possible....kindof sucks that they bought all the Mailboxes Etc. around here.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum, "Computer Networks" 4th Ed. P. 91, Prentice Hall, Copyright 2003, 1996 Pearson Education, Inc. ISBN 0-13-066102-3 No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
I wonder what FLOPS benchmark they are using, and what the weightings are for floating point divides, multiplication, etc (didn't see it in the article.)
If you want to really cut a machine down to size, see how many FLOPS it gets with a heavy floating point divide weighting. Using a flops benchmark with light divides can make your machine look awesome.:)
Haul in equipment, cable everything up, tape masses of cables to the floor so people don't trip over them, play, tear up tape, put cables away, haul equipment away. Repeat.
Bought a Radeon 8500 retail the day it came out. Installed stock drivers...worked okay, but lacking functionality, so I upgraded to the drivers on ATI's site.....boom, BSOD on Win2k.
Rebuilt the system for the hell of it, same exact problem.
Sold it to a friend running 98, those drivers were okay.
Terrible part is, I have a Sony G520 that looks amazing with an ATI card at 1600x1200 at 85hz, but if I push my Ti200 past 60hz at the same resolution, all the pixels mush together. It's really striking and gets worse almost linearly as you increase the refresh rate. It's unreadable at decent refresh rates.
I may have to buy a matrox to regain the crisp 2d.
Steely Dan - Pretzel Logic, Aja Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene Peter Gabriel - Us Dire Straits - Money for Nothing Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out Rush - Moving Pictures Fleetwood Mac - Rumours Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - So Far U2 - The Joshua Tree
I've worked with Academy Award winning animators and effects people, and their #1 continual complaint is that their clients have no imagination. They whine that they get asked to do the same effects over and over, because the director saw some effect somewhere else and wants to copy it.
I think the same problem presented itself 30 years ago when analog 'sythesizers' such as the moog modulars became popular. Early work was highly experimental (especially so with Buchla boxes), but once synths were used in pop recordings, other people would want to use the same particular sound as well (often as a gimmick to sell more records, cashing in on the synth craze).
Because of this trend of using similar sounds, rather than trying to be unique and develop your own, synth makers began to make smaller, less versatile synths that satisfied most peoples' needs, while limiting the creativity of the true artists. This trend continued into the 80's when synthesizers tried more and more to sound like instruments that already existed. You've got to remember that in the beginning, there were people against having synths be keyboard controlled, because that would influence people into playing one and treating it like other keyboard instruments that already existed (organs, piano, etc). I believe that they had a point, but I also don't think there was a better controller device available.
(for a good book on the subject, check out "Analog Days" by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco)
Think of it in this perspective: If there were only two or three computers in the world capable of rendering VFX for movies (substitute in synthesizers for creating music), only the most talented artists would be allowed to have time on the machines. Most of the work coming out of this would be top-notch. Now that the barriers to entry in the field are much lower, there aren't enough brilliant minds to go around, so you end up with much higher percentage of crap, but in absolute numbers, you should also get more great works.
There are truly brilliant, creative people out there. They are, however, a tiny minority of the populace at large. Maybe I have a bad outlook on things, but it's very demoralizing when you realize that most people are boring, uninteresting, uncreative blobs of matter.
I thank God that once in a while, I find something that gives me hope for humanity.
I'm not up on the tech specs of IBM's offering quoted, but the V480 has 4-way memory interleaving afaik, and a maximum of 32GB RAM. (Note that the IBM in the list has half the memory of the Sun system quoted). Also, the USIII cu processors used in the V480 have 8mb of cache, which isn't too bad either.
Still my favorite thing about the sun systems are the serial consoles....incredibly useful to watch your machine post remotely over a low bandwitdh connection. How is this accomplished on x86 machines?
Second favorite has to be the sun racks. By far the best racks I've ever used....dual power sequencers, extremely heavy guage construction, pre threaded holes, great cooling with the fan assembly, etc. I can't say that I've seen everybody's rack offering, but from what I have come in contact with the sun racks are far and above the best. The worst I've used are racks from WrightLine, and the second worst are from Compaq.
If you want the part number for a sun rack: SG-XARY-030A:)
In case anyone was intrigued by the 'building a moog' bit, I would recommend going to synthtech, as they seem to have the nicest kits around, and have got good reviews.
I myself would have to go with a 'kit' vendor, since I lack the EE knowledge to design my own circuits.:-)
(prodigy owner who wishes he had splurged on a mini or polymoog instead)
But if you convert the file to an mp3 or burn it to a CD, your name won't appear.
So, take a digital sampling of analog electrical signals and lose some 'data' due to the A->D conversion. Compress this in a lossy manner to AAC. Sell to people online.
Now, you download this, and extract the compressed file to raw (or wav or whatever) and burn it to a cd to strip the DRM. This might still sound tolerable, you only lost info twice.
Now rip the raw bits from the CD, no loss for that, bits are bits. Encode in a lossy manner to mp3. That's three times you lost information.
How close are you to the original?
So much for audio fidelity going up over time, the push lately is to lower quality via lossy formats.
You should be able to fit around 120 uncompressed CD's on an 80gb drive now. Compared to the cost of the CDs, the drive's cost is almost negligable, and it only has to deliver 150K/second for cd audio.
For people who own less than 120 CDs, like myself and possibly a good portion of the population, why not just keep everything around uncompressed, or use a lossless compression algorithm? At least this way you could make *exact* duplicates of your CDs should your originals die.
That's around $1,200 worth of CDs, at a low $10 a pop, that will fit uncompressed on the 80gb drive.
This is pretty much what I do now. When I buy a new cd, I go home and rip to my hard drive, then throw the original in the car. If it gets all scratched up, I don't care and burn a new copy. No big deal, just as good as the orignal.
Certainly as drives always get bigger and cheaper, this will be even more viable.
I don't know what the big deal is, I've had these movies in my LaserDisc collection for some time (excepting THX1138 because I never liked it). All of the movies I have are widescreen, or in the case of earlier movies, at the original aspect ratio. Before you knock the quality of LDs watch a well-mastered movie (criterions are nice) on a high-end player. I have seen many a laserdisc master that is better than a quick and dirty DVD master, even though the DVD format has the capability of looking better. I think once the marketing people figured out that only videophiles were buying LD players, they stopped making the crappy LD masters and concentrated on catering to the high-end.
Any time someone thinks I'm weird for having the collection, and a nice LD player, I show them the movies they can't get on DVD.
Granted, some films are finally making it to DVD.
But I'm still the only guy around who can watch SW Special Edition in Dolby Digital surround!:)
Can't return items without the UPC sometimes
on
Are Rebates Scandalous?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My big problem with rebates, is that they require you to send in the UPC (sometimes to two places, violating the laws of physics), but if you send in the UPC, you can't return the product to the store if it fails for some reason.
I run into this all the time, because at least half the stuff I buy breaks or fails to operate within specifications within the time alloted by the store for returns (30 days in general). It's a pain to be constantly returning things, but it's even worse if you have to send the UPC to the rebate people in the same time period as the warranty! It's like you are forced to choose one or the other...it's really a gamble.
It's not the lack of the community embracing the architechture, it's OEMs not producing a 64bit system that is affordable. Look at the damn prices for an Itanium1 or Sparc station.
Yeah, a SparcStation is like $10 on ebay now, who can afford that!;)
I actually have a bunch of the IPX workstations, they are a nice form factor, and can withstand a huge amount of weight. Typically, I use them as stands for my SGI Indigo's to keep them off the floor in case of a flood.
Personally, I recommend the Ultra 1 machines, if anyone is seriously looking for an older Sun box. They are very well built machines, and are deceivingly fast (they boot solaris 9 about 5x as fast as a new 280R), and make great little machines to play around with. I use one for testing custom jumpstart installs because they post so damn fast. Just get an an Ultra 1E as they have the fast ethernet interface (and probably no graphics, which you don't need anyways.) A system with around 256mb of ram and a couple small scsi disks shouldn't set you back more than $120 max.
Just don't expect to do any number crunching on one. My theory is if I develop on one of them and things run tolerably fast, then my apps will haul on a real machine.:)
Check out the SPEC web site [spec.org]. The performance of Sun's SPARC processors is pathetic. Sun is forced to migrate to the x86 instruction-set architecture (ISA). Sun is forced to use Opteron or Xeon. The irony is that the Opteron, the descendant of the lowly 4-bit 4004 traffic-light controller, beats the pants off of the UltraSPARC.
If you buy high-end server hardware based on what an individual CPU benchmarks at in terms raw flops/integer ops, you really have no clue about what people look for in enterprise systems.
If people actually bought systems based on the speed of individual processors, Alpha would have dominated the market.
p.s. How many single-system-image x86 machines do you see with hundreds of cpus?
First they claim solarisx86 is the answer, then they come out with AMD powered blades and claim solarisx86 is dead and cancels it, then they bundle sun linux for their amd blades, then they decide to resurect solarisx86 after all the vendors left and use it in conjection with linux, now they are deciding to cancel linux again?
What the hell are you smoking? Solaris x86 was (to my knowledge) never intended to be 'the answer', whatever that means. It was devleoped originally for the sun workstations based on the 80386 microprocessor, which were eventually abandoned for sparc. The x86 port has only continued this long because some people actually like to use it on the subset of x86 hardware that it supports. It's also fairly useful for development (same os, different arch)and instructional purposes for those who can't afford sparc hardware personally. They did can Solaris 9 for x86 briefly, but there was pressure from the market (gasp!) to continue support, so they brought it back. Sun just recently came out with a blade server, heck, I'm not even sure if you can buy them yet with AMD cpus, so they couldn't have done what you said (bring back solaris x86 AFTER selling AMD blades.)
Redhat has stated publically they do not like Sun marketing Solarisx86 and they consider it a competitor. My guess is redhat is willing to do a port if Sun cancels solarisx86 and eventually moved to redhat linux for their sparc machines.
This is like saying that RedHat doesn't like Microsoft marketing Windows x86. Let's see, RedHat could either A. Get money from sun for licensing their distribution and making a couple tweaks or B. Get nothing from Sun, and just have people install the freely-available version of RedHat or some other distro. You say that "redhat is willing to do a port if Sun cancels Solaris x86 and eventually moved to redhat linux for their sparc machines." Pardon me while I choke laughing so hard. wtf? Honestly...
Whoever modded the parent up to 4 ought to do some sort of pennance.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I can't help but smirk and snicker when I think about the Japanese and their
"Solah Powah Towahs!"
Are these 'Japanese' from Boston by any chance?
I have been fearing this for the past few years.
I failed out of college, with a huge debt over my head (could not pass the higher level CS courses to save my life). Through long hours of work and putting in a lot of effort at low-paying internship/quasi-contract work, I managed to get a 'real' job at an software company for ~30k/year (just in the nick of time). I have managed to hang on, doing work that saves the higher-paid people time, thus justifying my expense. My problem, though it seems weird to put it this way, is that I have been promoted to where I am encroaching on the low end of the other people's salaries. I am slowly losing my competetive edge, and the justification of my employment.
I have myself wedged into a useful area, and I would need to be replaced if let go; but it wouldn't be difficult to find someone who would jump at my job at a decent pay cut from what I make now. This is a Very Scary Thought.
The only thing I can do is live on the cheap, share a college-level apartment (holes in the walls, bad area, dirty and smelly) with 3 other people and keep my rent at ~$300/month (very low in urban Massachusetts near tech areas), and no car payment so I can pay off my rediculous student loans. At my current estimation, if I remain employed for another 1.5 years I will break out of debt, and can begin saving for the inevitable Big Rainy Day.
I suppose I could beg my uncle the plumber for an internship if things go they way I suspect they will. It's just a question of When.
Dude,
Holidays are AWESOME for downloading! I got like at least 15% more bandwitdh on July 4th!
I run an Indigo 2 with a MIPS R4400 200mhz 1mb cache....which is a fairly low end model. By doing some rough cpu benchmarks (rendering scenes in POV-Ray), it seemed to place a little shy of my old PC, which is a 233mhz Pentium II.
:)
Note that for the video capture above on an Indigo 2, you'd need the galileo video option, or some similar device, but that's nit-picking.
The MIPS R10k and R12k systems are far superior, though even with the Max Impact graphics set, you will be disappointed with textured 3d if you're used to current hardware (max is similar to a TnT2, I'd say).
Still, my indigo was out (with the "extreme" graphics set - 8 GL processors, 2 raster engines, 1 geometry pre-processor, no texture) when the best PC you could buy was a decked-out 486, or possibly a pentium 60.
I still want a Crimson Reality Engine, just for the coolness factor. Best looking case ever!
I've never had any problem with how fast the 'su' command executes on my machine.
You should be able to stream a bare minimum of at least 25megabytes a second, with compression off, to a medium (just above consumer) end tape drive such as a standalone SDLT unit. So it's roughly 2 minutes to transfer to tape, and I'll even throw in another minute for loading, rewinding, and unloading.
:)
:) Besides, the tape in the car example only really works for large amounts of data (I'm guessing 100TB or so could fit confortably in a wagon.)
With the 15 minute drive, and reading back on your home machine, you're looking at around 21 minutes for the transfer.
My math may be wrong, but I think you would need a 19.05 Megabit connection to your house, excluding all network overhead to counter the tape example.
If you go with a higher end Ampex unit, the tape speeds are staggering. I'm talking the ones with cassettes the size of briefcases (I kid you not). We had one back in '98 that had 330GB tapes, they must be well over a terabyte each by now.
If you live 5000 miles away (as in your example), you might be lucky to have any kind of internet access at all.
In all seriousness, has anyone else experienced UPS's fictional tracking system?
The last few times I have had something shipped overnight, the tracking system (and the people on the phone) tell me that my packages are signed for by "Shelly" at the front desk at 10:04 am in Chelmsford, MA.
Problem is, I have never met a "Shelly", I live 60 miles from Chelmsford, I most certainly do NOT have a "front desk", and the packages show up randomly in the afternoon.
Bizarre. This is why I shy away from UPS whenever possible....kindof sucks that they bought all the Mailboxes Etc. around here.
mod me offtopic!
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew S. Tanenbaum, "Computer Networks" 4th Ed. P. 91, Prentice Hall, Copyright 2003, 1996 Pearson Education, Inc. ISBN 0-13-066102-3 No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Shit! Even when I cite a work, it's illegal.
I wonder what FLOPS benchmark they are using, and what the weightings are for floating point divides, multiplication, etc (didn't see it in the article.)
If you want to really cut a machine down to size, see how many FLOPS it gets with a heavy floating point divide weighting. Using a flops benchmark with light divides can make your machine look awesome.
Duct tape is an indispensable tool for musicians.
Haul in equipment, cable everything up, tape masses of cables to the floor so people don't trip over them, play, tear up tape, put cables away, haul equipment away. Repeat.
Can I add one too?
Bought a Radeon 8500 retail the day it came out. Installed stock drivers...worked okay, but lacking functionality, so I upgraded to the drivers on ATI's site.....boom, BSOD on Win2k.
Rebuilt the system for the hell of it, same exact problem.
Sold it to a friend running 98, those drivers were okay.
Terrible part is, I have a Sony G520 that looks amazing with an ATI card at 1600x1200 at 85hz, but if I push my Ti200 past 60hz at the same resolution, all the pixels mush together. It's really striking and gets worse almost linearly as you increase the refresh rate. It's unreadable at decent refresh rates.
I may have to buy a matrox to regain the crisp 2d.
Can someone *PLEASE* find a happy medium between friggin fast and damned slow?
;)
Isn't that AMD's target market?
Ok, here's a few more (no repeats from parent):
Steely Dan - Pretzel Logic, Aja
Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene
Peter Gabriel - Us
Dire Straits - Money for Nothing
Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out
Rush - Moving Pictures
Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - So Far
U2 - The Joshua Tree
Judge a company by its products or services, not by its C.E.O.
I've worked with Academy Award winning animators and effects people, and their #1 continual complaint is that their clients have no imagination. They whine that they get asked to do the same effects over and over, because the director saw some effect somewhere else and wants to copy it.
I think the same problem presented itself 30 years ago when analog 'sythesizers' such as the moog modulars became popular. Early work was highly experimental (especially so with Buchla boxes), but once synths were used in pop recordings, other people would want to use the same particular sound as well (often as a gimmick to sell more records, cashing in on the synth craze).
Because of this trend of using similar sounds, rather than trying to be unique and develop your own, synth makers began to make smaller, less versatile synths that satisfied most peoples' needs, while limiting the creativity of the true artists. This trend continued into the 80's when synthesizers tried more and more to sound like instruments that already existed. You've got to remember that in the beginning, there were people against having synths be keyboard controlled, because that would influence people into playing one and treating it like other keyboard instruments that already existed (organs, piano, etc). I believe that they had a point, but I also don't think there was a better controller device available.
(for a good book on the subject, check out "Analog Days" by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco)
Think of it in this perspective: If there were only two or three computers in the world capable of rendering VFX for movies (substitute in synthesizers for creating music), only the most talented artists would be allowed to have time on the machines. Most of the work coming out of this would be top-notch. Now that the barriers to entry in the field are much lower, there aren't enough brilliant minds to go around, so you end up with much higher percentage of crap, but in absolute numbers, you should also get more great works.
There are truly brilliant, creative people out there. They are, however, a tiny minority of the populace at large. Maybe I have a bad outlook on things, but it's very demoralizing when you realize that most people are boring, uninteresting, uncreative blobs of matter.
I thank God that once in a while, I find something that gives me hope for humanity.
I'm not up on the tech specs of IBM's offering quoted, but the V480 has 4-way memory interleaving afaik, and a maximum of 32GB RAM. (Note that the IBM in the list has half the memory of the Sun system quoted). Also, the USIII cu processors used in the V480 have 8mb of cache, which isn't too bad either.
:)
Still my favorite thing about the sun systems are the serial consoles....incredibly useful to watch your machine post remotely over a low bandwitdh connection. How is this accomplished on x86 machines?
Second favorite has to be the sun racks. By far the best racks I've ever used....dual power sequencers, extremely heavy guage construction, pre threaded holes, great cooling with the fan assembly, etc. I can't say that I've seen everybody's rack offering, but from what I have come in contact with the sun racks are far and above the best. The worst I've used are racks from WrightLine, and the second worst are from Compaq.
If you want the part number for a sun rack: SG-XARY-030A
mpb
Go back to #povray you troll. ;)
^scatha^
In case anyone was intrigued by the 'building a moog' bit, I would recommend going to synthtech, as they seem to have the nicest kits around, and have got good reviews.
:-)
I myself would have to go with a 'kit' vendor, since I lack the EE knowledge to design my own circuits.
(prodigy owner who wishes he had splurged on a mini or polymoog instead)
But if you convert the file to an mp3 or burn it to a CD, your name won't appear.
::shrug::
So, take a digital sampling of analog electrical signals and lose some 'data' due to the A->D conversion. Compress this in a lossy manner to AAC. Sell to people online.
Now, you download this, and extract the compressed file to raw (or wav or whatever) and burn it to a cd to strip the DRM. This might still sound tolerable, you only lost info twice.
Now rip the raw bits from the CD, no loss for that, bits are bits. Encode in a lossy manner to mp3. That's three times you lost information.
How close are you to the original?
So much for audio fidelity going up over time, the push lately is to lower quality via lossy formats.
You should be able to fit around 120 uncompressed CD's on an 80gb drive now. Compared to the cost of the CDs, the drive's cost is almost negligable, and it only has to deliver 150K/second for cd audio.
For people who own less than 120 CDs, like myself and possibly a good portion of the population, why not just keep everything around uncompressed, or use a lossless compression algorithm? At least this way you could make *exact* duplicates of your CDs should your originals die.
That's around $1,200 worth of CDs, at a low $10 a pop, that will fit uncompressed on the 80gb drive.
This is pretty much what I do now. When I buy a new cd, I go home and rip to my hard drive, then throw the original in the car. If it gets all scratched up, I don't care and burn a new copy. No big deal, just as good as the orignal.
Certainly as drives always get bigger and cheaper, this will be even more viable.
I guess do whatever suits you best.
Where's SW? Where's Schindlers list?
:)
Where's THX1138?
I don't know what the big deal is, I've had these movies in my LaserDisc collection for some time (excepting THX1138 because I never liked it). All of the movies I have are widescreen, or in the case of earlier movies, at the original aspect ratio. Before you knock the quality of LDs watch a well-mastered movie (criterions are nice) on a high-end player. I have seen many a laserdisc master that is better than a quick and dirty DVD master, even though the DVD format has the capability of looking better. I think once the marketing people figured out that only videophiles were buying LD players, they stopped making the crappy LD masters and concentrated on catering to the high-end.
Any time someone thinks I'm weird for having the collection, and a nice LD player, I show them the movies they can't get on DVD.
Granted, some films are finally making it to DVD.
But I'm still the only guy around who can watch SW Special Edition in Dolby Digital surround!
My big problem with rebates, is that they require you to send in the UPC (sometimes to two places, violating the laws of physics), but if you send in the UPC, you can't return the product to the store if it fails for some reason.
I run into this all the time, because at least half the stuff I buy breaks or fails to operate within specifications within the time alloted by the store for returns (30 days in general). It's a pain to be constantly returning things, but it's even worse if you have to send the UPC to the rebate people in the same time period as the warranty! It's like you are forced to choose one or the other...it's really a gamble.
It's not the lack of the community embracing the architechture, it's OEMs not producing a 64bit system that is affordable. Look at the damn prices for an Itanium1 or Sparc station.
;)
:)
Yeah, a SparcStation is like $10 on ebay now, who can afford that!
I actually have a bunch of the IPX workstations, they are a nice form factor, and can withstand a huge amount of weight. Typically, I use them as stands for my SGI Indigo's to keep them off the floor in case of a flood.
Personally, I recommend the Ultra 1 machines, if anyone is seriously looking for an older Sun box. They are very well built machines, and are deceivingly fast (they boot solaris 9 about 5x as fast as a new 280R), and make great little machines to play around with. I use one for testing custom jumpstart installs because they post so damn fast. Just get an an Ultra 1E as they have the fast ethernet interface (and probably no graphics, which you don't need anyways.) A system with around 256mb of ram and a couple small scsi disks shouldn't set you back more than $120 max.
See the Sun System Handbook for hardware specifics.
Just don't expect to do any number crunching on one. My theory is if I develop on one of them and things run tolerably fast, then my apps will haul on a real machine.
Check out the SPEC web site [spec.org]. The performance of Sun's SPARC processors is pathetic. Sun is forced to migrate to the x86 instruction-set architecture (ISA). Sun is forced to use Opteron or Xeon. The irony is that the Opteron, the descendant of the lowly 4-bit 4004 traffic-light controller, beats the pants off of the UltraSPARC.
If you buy high-end server hardware based on what an individual CPU benchmarks at in terms raw flops/integer ops, you really have no clue about what people look for in enterprise systems.
If people actually bought systems based on the speed of individual processors, Alpha would have dominated the market.
p.s. How many single-system-image x86 machines do you see with hundreds of cpus?
> (bandwidth costs money and the mp3's have to originate from a CD at some point)
False. I have an mp3 archive (and an offline lossless-compression archive on AIT) of a good portion of my vinyl, and some 1/4" open-reel tapes.
This is like saying that RedHat doesn't like Microsoft marketing Windows x86. Let's see, RedHat could either A. Get money from sun for licensing their distribution and making a couple tweaks or B. Get nothing from Sun, and just have people install the freely-available version of RedHat or some other distro. You say that "redhat is willing to do a port if Sun cancels Solaris x86 and eventually moved to redhat linux for their sparc machines." Pardon me while I choke laughing so hard. wtf? Honestly...
Whoever modded the parent up to 4 ought to do some sort of pennance.