The issue of USA vs. Others on the mobile/wireless world really bothers me, because I feel like the pundits are missing some important factors. First, the US has built a wired telecommunications infrastructure, and we've been doing it for so long that the wireless infrastructure is more of a "like to have" than a "need to have". Second, we have so much more land area and spread-out population that implementing anything requiring wide-scale infrastructure is far more difficult to begin with.
I'd love to see SGI try and make a laptop, considering that there have already been UltraSPARC laptops, PA-RISC laptops, and RS/6000 laptops.
Of course it would have a beautiful case in red or purple, would have an excellent display and graphics hardware, and would be reasonable in size. Of course it would only last 5 minutes on a full battery charge (need to plug it in), and would easily weight 30 lbs.;)
Boot server actually doesn't have to be Solaris. I've installed many a Sun machine using a FreeBSD box as my boot/install server. You just have to know how to configure it, since the Sun-provided scripts won't do it all for you on non-Solaris.
High performance, sure. Low cost? You've got to be kidding. The price is almost the same as the Sun Blade 2500, which is a dual 1.26GHz UltraSPARC-IIIi machine. (of course they also look quite similar on the outside, and may share some bits)
Of course it is still cheaper than an IBM POWER-based workstation. Too bad IBM always prices their low-end machines out of the market, even though there higher-end stuff can be a pretty good deal.
Hey, I'm with you on this one. Personally, I am just sick of quirky PC hardware. I know people sometimes talk about their computers having disagreeable personalities. Well its a computer, and computers should not have personalities! They should just work as intended. I should not have to fight with my machine to make it boot off the device I want to, or perform voodoo rituals in response to intermittent issues when stressing things.
Several years ago I got my first non-x86 machine that was powerful enough to be my main desktop (as opposed to an on-the-side tinker machine). It was an SGI Indigo2 (195MHz MIPS R10000). It worked like a dream (ok, an Octane would do much better on I/O with the same CPU, but those were pricy), and I never had any problems with it.
Later on, I finally got around to upgrading my PC (a P2-266 at the time) to an Athlon. However, I never had any love left for the PC at that point. Sure, it worked, but still had its issues. Ever since I got that SGI, I've basically maintained two desktops. The real UNIX workstation for almost everything, and the PC for running games and nothing else.
These days my main desktop is a Sun Ultra 60 (2 x 450MHz UltraSPARC-II). Sure, it may not be as fast as your souped up PC, but for normal tasks it isn't too shabby either. It is also rock solid, doesn't really have "issues or quirks," and I'm quite happy with it.
Ok, I graduated from RPI not too long ago, and noticed a glaring error in their report on the school. Yeah, I know we won this ranking, and I'm happy to see that. However, when I look at the question "Do students have access to Usenet newsgroups?" and see an "X" (no), I see something wrong.
We definitely have Usenet access, and even have a bunch of rpi.* newsgroups accessable inside the school. Someone definitely overlooked something.
I don't know what you must be smoking to make an assumption like that. Now it is *way* faster than cars are legally allowed to drive in the US (don't think I've seen posted limits much in excess of 70mph, and thats only on major out-of-the-city highways). But I know my nothing-special car can easily drive faster than that. (just havn't tried much unless by accident, lest I tempt the cops)
Actually, the whole "pool of storage" option also works with IBM's LVM and JFS. They just call 'em "volume groups". (though it may not be anywhere near as advanced)
Yeah, and what about those of us that always found CS interesting, and would have taken that route even without any sort of boom? Now we're all f*cked because there's no way to differentiate ourselves from the bandwagon-jumpers who got in the game a few years earlier and now have "experience".
Just keep in mind that the DOD itself doesn't actually do much of anything in the way of software development. They mainly manage contracts with companies like yours. So you should make sure you ask the right questions, lest you find yourself jumping on-board what later turns out to be a non/semi-technical managerial position.
You can also download the ISOs for Solaris straight off Sun's website, if you don't want to pay for media.
Another thing to note is that the "License" is probably nothing more than a sheet of paper that says "You're legally allowed to run this software on that machine". Solaris itself has absolutely no enforcement of licensing.
If you put 8 CPUs in that SS1000, and installed Solaris 8, it would work just perfectly fine with all the CPUs. (Support for sun4d machines SS1000/SC2000 was dropped in Solaris 9)
Of course the SGI Indy doesn't use OpenFirmware, but I still like that sort of flexibility. The whole concept of being able to use "the network" for so many things beyond "browsing the web" (like booting, installing, etc) feels so foreign to the PeeCee world that you need special hardware to do it. Of course it is quite commonplace elsewhere.
Heck, I actually have an SGI Indigo2 with no removable media drives! (not even a cd-rom) I was able to install it over the network. Likewise, I've got a Sun Netra T1 with the same sort of issue, and it too got installed over the network.
The need for a floppy drive really only exists in the PC world, where it is the ONLY univerally-supported, easily portable (and writable) boot device. (no, not everything can boot from CD-ROM or USB)
I use SpamAssassin too, and I'm paranoid about losing legitimate e-mail (such as when my uncle sends something w/o a subject line, and his sig is practically an ad for his company). So I just have it filter spam into a separate mail folder, which I periodically glance over and clean out. Few real e-mails are ever in there, but some are on occasion.
Oh, you mean the acronyms that came out of nowhere when laptop makers didn't want to use scarry numbers to describe their LCDs? I've always known and referred to resolutions by numbers, not names or acronyms. Heck, didn't even know what all those laptop-res names even meant when I first started seeing them.
Yeah, the support on the client-end for the hardware should be practically nothing. Heck, the user could replace a broken unit. You just plug a new one in. No configuration whatsoever on the client-end.
Actually, here's an interesting tidbit I've observed first-hand. It seems some 2D graphics operations (such as scrolling in a web browser) actually feel signifigantly *faster* on a SunRay than on the local framebuffer of a Sun Workstation.
I think this stems from the fact that once upon a time, Sun said "Our new UPA interconnect is so great, these new UPA cards no longer need the 2D acceleration hardware we had in the old TurboGX". (might have made sense at the time, but today it means that those cards are quite sluggish for normal non-special 2D stuff)
Just think of the SunRay as "VNC in an embedded box", only the server-software connects it to X, and it has support for USB, audio, and video capture (albeit only supported by SunForum, as far as I know) Oh, and it works a lot better than VNC too. It isn't quirky, and it isn't sluggish.
Yeah, I'll also agree that OpenBSD has a dreadful installer. Even minimalist NetBSD is doing better these days. My main complaints are that it has no "go back and change something" capability, and that the drive partitioning piece seems to forget that most screens only have 24 lines on them.
On the flip side, it is quite easy to manually install OpenBSD (just like NetBSD), which is convenient if you're doing something grossly non-standard or just building a filesystem tree for a net-booted box.
Of course there are really 3 combat training centers... NTC (Ft. Irwin, CA), JRTC (Ft. Polk, LA), and CMTC (Hohenfels, Germany). But yeah, NTC is the biggest one and the one in the desert.
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The issue of USA vs. Others on the mobile/wireless world really bothers me, because I feel like the pundits are missing some important factors. First, the US has built a wired telecommunications infrastructure, and we've been doing it for so long that the wireless infrastructure is more of a "like to have" than a "need to have". Second, we have so much more land area and spread-out population that implementing anything requiring wide-scale infrastructure is far more difficult to begin with.
I'd love to see SGI try and make a laptop, considering that there have already been UltraSPARC laptops, PA-RISC laptops, and RS/6000 laptops.
;)
Of course it would have a beautiful case in red or purple, would have an excellent display and graphics hardware, and would be reasonable in size. Of course it would only last 5 minutes on a full battery charge (need to plug it in), and would easily weight 30 lbs.
Boot server actually doesn't have to be Solaris. I've installed many a Sun machine using a FreeBSD box as my boot/install server. You just have to know how to configure it, since the Sun-provided scripts won't do it all for you on non-Solaris.
High performance, sure. Low cost? You've got to be kidding. The price is almost the same as the Sun Blade 2500, which is a dual 1.26GHz UltraSPARC-IIIi machine. (of course they also look quite similar on the outside, and may share some bits)
Of course it is still cheaper than an IBM POWER-based workstation. Too bad IBM always prices their low-end machines out of the market, even though there higher-end stuff can be a pretty good deal.
Hey, I'm with you on this one. Personally, I am just sick of quirky PC hardware. I know people sometimes talk about their computers having disagreeable personalities. Well its a computer, and computers should not have personalities! They should just work as intended. I should not have to fight with my machine to make it boot off the device I want to, or perform voodoo rituals in response to intermittent issues when stressing things.
Several years ago I got my first non-x86 machine that was powerful enough to be my main desktop (as opposed to an on-the-side tinker machine). It was an SGI Indigo2 (195MHz MIPS R10000). It worked like a dream (ok, an Octane would do much better on I/O with the same CPU, but those were pricy), and I never had any problems with it.
Later on, I finally got around to upgrading my PC (a P2-266 at the time) to an Athlon. However, I never had any love left for the PC at that point. Sure, it worked, but still had its issues. Ever since I got that SGI, I've basically maintained two desktops. The real UNIX workstation for almost everything, and the PC for running games and nothing else.
These days my main desktop is a Sun Ultra 60 (2 x 450MHz UltraSPARC-II). Sure, it may not be as fast as your souped up PC, but for normal tasks it isn't too shabby either. It is also rock solid, doesn't really have "issues or quirks," and I'm quite happy with it.
The binary is 80kB? I think you mean the shell script that launches the binary.
Ok, I graduated from RPI not too long ago, and noticed a glaring error in their report on the school. Yeah, I know we won this ranking, and I'm happy to see that. However, when I look at the question "Do students have access to Usenet newsgroups?" and see an "X" (no), I see something wrong.
We definitely have Usenet access, and even have a bunch of rpi.* newsgroups accessable inside the school. Someone definitely overlooked something.
I don't know what you must be smoking to make an assumption like that. Now it is *way* faster than cars are legally allowed to drive in the US (don't think I've seen posted limits much in excess of 70mph, and thats only on major out-of-the-city highways). But I know my nothing-special car can easily drive faster than that. (just havn't tried much unless by accident, lest I tempt the cops)
HP used to be known for electronics test equipment, but that was ripped out as Agilent a while ago.
Actually, the whole "pool of storage" option also works with IBM's LVM and JFS. They just call 'em "volume groups". (though it may not be anywhere near as advanced)
Yeah, and what about those of us that always found CS interesting, and would have taken that route even without any sort of boom? Now we're all f*cked because there's no way to differentiate ourselves from the bandwagon-jumpers who got in the game a few years earlier and now have "experience".
Just keep in mind that the DOD itself doesn't actually do much of anything in the way of software development. They mainly manage contracts with companies like yours. So you should make sure you ask the right questions, lest you find yourself jumping on-board what later turns out to be a non/semi-technical managerial position.
You mean like this?
Basically, the NetBSD pkgsrc collection (their ports-equivalent) has been ported to a number of OSes, including Solaris.
You can also download the ISOs for Solaris straight off Sun's website, if you don't want to pay for media.
Another thing to note is that the "License" is probably nothing more than a sheet of paper that says "You're legally allowed to run this software on that machine". Solaris itself has absolutely no enforcement of licensing.
If you put 8 CPUs in that SS1000, and installed Solaris 8, it would work just perfectly fine with all the CPUs. (Support for sun4d machines SS1000/SC2000 was dropped in Solaris 9)
Of course the SGI Indy doesn't use OpenFirmware, but I still like that sort of flexibility. The whole concept of being able to use "the network" for so many things beyond "browsing the web" (like booting, installing, etc) feels so foreign to the PeeCee world that you need special hardware to do it. Of course it is quite commonplace elsewhere.
Heck, I actually have an SGI Indigo2 with no removable media drives! (not even a cd-rom) I was able to install it over the network. Likewise, I've got a Sun Netra T1 with the same sort of issue, and it too got installed over the network.
The need for a floppy drive really only exists in the PC world, where it is the ONLY univerally-supported, easily portable (and writable) boot device. (no, not everything can boot from CD-ROM or USB)
I use SpamAssassin too, and I'm paranoid about losing legitimate e-mail (such as when my uncle sends something w/o a subject line, and his sig is practically an ad for his company). So I just have it filter spam into a separate mail folder, which I periodically glance over and clean out. Few real e-mails are ever in there, but some are on occasion.
Oh, you mean the acronyms that came out of nowhere when laptop makers didn't want to use scarry numbers to describe their LCDs? I've always known and referred to resolutions by numbers, not names or acronyms. Heck, didn't even know what all those laptop-res names even meant when I first started seeing them.
Yeah, the support on the client-end for the hardware should be practically nothing. Heck, the user could replace a broken unit. You just plug a new one in. No configuration whatsoever on the client-end.
Actually, here's an interesting tidbit I've observed first-hand. It seems some 2D graphics operations (such as scrolling in a web browser) actually feel signifigantly *faster* on a SunRay than on the local framebuffer of a Sun Workstation.
I think this stems from the fact that once upon a time, Sun said "Our new UPA interconnect is so great, these new UPA cards no longer need the 2D acceleration hardware we had in the old TurboGX". (might have made sense at the time, but today it means that those cards are quite sluggish for normal non-special 2D stuff)
Just think of the SunRay as "VNC in an embedded box", only the server-software connects it to X, and it has support for USB, audio, and video capture (albeit only supported by SunForum, as far as I know) Oh, and it works a lot better than VNC too. It isn't quirky, and it isn't sluggish.
Yeah, I'll also agree that OpenBSD has a dreadful installer. Even minimalist NetBSD is doing better these days. My main complaints are that it has no "go back and change something" capability, and that the drive partitioning piece seems to forget that most screens only have 24 lines on them.
On the flip side, it is quite easy to manually install OpenBSD (just like NetBSD), which is convenient if you're doing something grossly non-standard or just building a filesystem tree for a net-booted box.
You know, that sounds exactly like what FreeBSD folks usually say about Linux.
True, but I wonder if the IRA has motivation to attack anyone other than the English. Of course, I wouldn't really know if they have or not.
Why? I thought most of the hostages were civilians, not soldiers.
Of course there are really 3 combat training centers... NTC (Ft. Irwin, CA), JRTC (Ft. Polk, LA), and CMTC (Hohenfels, Germany). But yeah, NTC is the biggest one and the one in the desert.