Well, I definitely had fun in college playing with an old Sun 3/280 from 1987'ish. Motorola 68020 @ 25MHz, 32MB of RAM, a 650MB hard drive (12" platter beast), and an ~800MB hard drive (half width, same height/depth) (of course this was only a few years ago, so these were old but interesting machines) Ran SunOS and NetBSD on the thing, though mostly SunOS 4.1.
One thing I always really enjoyed, was playing with machines that were "way too friggin expensive" and that I never even knew existed when I was younger, but now are easily available through dumpster diving. Basically, the non-personal computers.
Yeah, my first (well, my family's first, with me around) was a Laser 128 (1MHz Apple IIe clone). Second was an Epson Apex with an Intel 8088. Then onto the IBM PS/1 with a 486SX-25. Finally when I got my own machine, I had a 486DX2-66. Well, enough of that. Still makes me feel old when I'm around kids who never knew a machine under 500MHz, and that was when they were really young.
This seems to be a way-too-common misconception around here... People seem to forget that binary code is *both* OS-specific *and* machine architecture-specific, and that the latter is MUCH harder to overcome.
It is relatively easy, depending on the fundamental OS differences, to write compatability layers allowing code from one OS to run on another, given that they both use the same type of processor. (easy for FreeBSD's Linux compatability, much harder for Wine, but the same fundamental principle)
But if the processors are different architectures, you might as well be emulating the whole damn machine.
This irritates me to no end, that every time Linux gets ported to some is-not-a-PC architecture, hordes of people somehow think all their compiled Linux apps will magically run on it now, where they didn't before. Sure, baring processor-specific or endian-specific code, you could more easily recompile your open-source code for that platform, but your binaries are just as incompatable as before.
Yeah, I even love having them at home. I've got a couple in my apartment, so I can take a desktop with me between the computer room and my living room. Also, once I'm ready to move into my new house (and it is all wired), I plan on putting Sun Rays all over the place.
In short, the SunRay has totally eliminated any and all desire for me to put desktop computers all over my residence.
Oh, you mean this? Yes, already on the market. I saw one on display at a technology show a few weeks ago. Shares the same chasis as one of their normal Sun laptops, though without all the peripherals built in. Only kink is that the wireless is 802.11b, not 802.11g. (FYI, I think the retail price is around $1500, which actually isn't more than some of the fully-integrated desktop models Sun makes) Also, it supposedly has 6-8 hour battery life.
Yeah, one thing I found pretty cool at Fort Monmouth was actually the little museum they had there. I found it quite fascinating to learn that we had developed counter-target-aquisition radars (radars that see incoming artillery and mortar rounds) back in the 50's. Probably highly classified at the time. Makes you wonder what they've got under the covers now.
Also rather amusing to see newspaper articles from the 30's talking about some "mystery ray" the miltary was using to locate ships.;)
This is why I love IBM Thinkpads:) To remove the hard drive, undo one screw on the bottom, remove the side-cover, and slide it out! (though my new laptop is a PowerBook, and I don't even think I know how to open the sucker, even if I removed the screws)
Well, thankfully the WaMu near me is open until 6pm on weekdays, which in and of itself is a HUGE plus, compared with other "normal" banks that like to close at 5pm or even 4pm sometimes.
(Always personally wondered how the world was supposed to work, when the people who provided services, and the people who took advantage of said services, were preoccupied with their respective jobs during the exact same hours.)
I'll kick in a "me too" on that one as well. They're definitely one of the friendliest and most inviting bank environments I've been in lately. Combined with their free checking accounts, I've moved accounts from other "normal-style" banks there over the past year.
And no, the service isn't slow. Quite quick, actually. At most banks, they have the classic "teller window" and maybe one or two slow tellers serving a whole like of people. At WaMu, they adjust the available tellers to meet demand, and the line is never very long.
As far as play areas, that actually does make sense. You see, banks do have services that require waiting a bit, and then interacting with a desk-person for a while (opening accounts, setting up financial services, loan processing, etc.), and that idea lets them bring the kids along.
Precisely! And most embedded devices these days do it with battery-backed SRAM. This means that even when "off", they still sip power (albeit at a very slow rate). MRAM would have huge advantages in this market.
Why does everyone assume every bit of semiconductor/electronics technology has to be for "their PCs"? Hello everyone! Those PC processors are actually in the MINORITY of parts shipped in the overall microprocessor market!
You know, the core memory of "way back when" was also magnetic, and nonvolitile. Actually, it was destructive-on-read, so you only had to refresh a bit it when reading it. Otherwise, you could turn the machine off and it would keep its contents.
(No, I'm not that old. But I had some friends in college who played around with an old PDP-11/45 we found, which used core.)
True, but first-to-market doesn't always win the competition. Sometimes a company may be first, but their self-imposed legal red-tape (i.e. Beta vs VHS) is their undoing. Other times, a bigger company with more leverage and marketting funds may just totally overwhelm them on mindshare, and win despite being late-to-market (i.e. Microsoft).
Re:Dangers of using ATA or SATA for Raid
on
SATA vs ATA?
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· Score: 1
Actually, despite being quite a proprietary system over all, I kinda like the approach that my CLARiiON FC array takes to this problem.
It has special set-aside space on a number of drives that it designates as the "cache vault". Then, it has its own special UPS connected to the box that holds the RAID controllers and the first 10 drives of the system. When the main power fails, the controllers flush the write cache to this "cache vault" location, and then tell the UPS that its ok to "shut down now". When main power returns, it reads this data back in and continues about its business. The thing is VERY picky about everything being just right to enable write cache, however, with good reason.
I did an extensive writeup on my experiences with these boxes here, and even included info on how to "fake" the existance of one of those special UPS units if you didn't happen to have one. (with the intention of being scripted into something like "nut", of course)
What I actually find interesting, is that while most everyone launches west-to-east to gain this boost from Earth's rotation, not everyone does.
The one example I can think of to counter this is Israel. They actually launch east-to-west (probably in a similar fashion as Hebrew is written right-to-left, not left-to-right). Of course there is a very good reason they do this. To the west of them, is just the Mediterranean. To the right are a whole lot of countries they have traditionally considered hostile (with good reason). So if anything goes wrong, probably better to have things explode and fall into the water, than into the middle of Syria.
Yeah, if I really wanted to do this, a Netra would be much better suited to the task. You can even get those with DC power supplies, so you'd only need a DC-DC converter. Of course it would cost "him" more money.
Actually, eBay parts for the EXX00 "enterprise servers" are a heck of a lot cheaper on eBay than parts for an E450.
It is one of those oddities, due to market conditions, where you find a few things that are uber-expensive on vendor sites, but uber-cheap on eBay. Some that I've observed:
EXX00 components Fibre Channel stuff FDDI stuff (ok, useful a few years ago when I had systems where I could get a free FDDI card, but 100Mbit ethernet cost $$$ and was hard to find)
True, but there are plenty of smaller and more reasonable sized Sun machines that would be a heck of a lot more practical (and physically robust) for this sort of application. Of course they probably would cost him a lot more "out of pocket" money than this free E450 he picked up.
I still prefer Sun's older (and probably revitilized) tagline...
"The Network Is the Computer"
Seriously, understanding this phrase makes it a lot easier to figure out why older Solaris installs seemed lacking in some areas if you didn't have services like NIS and bootparams running out there on your network.
I'll definitely vouch for that one. Of course the coolest part is that the components for an E4500 can be had (ok, on eBay) for MUCH cheaper than the components for an E450.
Um, the E450 doesn't support hot-swapping those components. You'd need the higher-end EXX00 line of machines for that. Of course to use that feature, you can't use memory interleaving to its full potential on such machines.
But the difference is that you can write C code that talks directly to the hardware, though without inline asm I think it is limited to arbitrary memory addressing. In any case, I have written C code that ran on bare hardware without an OS or anything. I don't think you could do that in a VM-based language like Java.
Likewise, while you could write a Java VM in Java, could it run on the machine without having to run inside yet another VM that was written in a non-VM language?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you mean those guys over at Ft. Irwin, CA, running around with MILES gear on their M16's, M1A1's, and vests....
Well, I definitely had fun in college playing with an old Sun 3/280 from 1987'ish. Motorola 68020 @ 25MHz, 32MB of RAM, a 650MB hard drive (12" platter beast), and an ~800MB hard drive (half width, same height/depth) (of course this was only a few years ago, so these were old but interesting machines) Ran SunOS and NetBSD on the thing, though mostly SunOS 4.1.
One thing I always really enjoyed, was playing with machines that were "way too friggin expensive" and that I never even knew existed when I was younger, but now are easily available through dumpster diving. Basically, the non-personal computers.
Yeah, my first (well, my family's first, with me around) was a Laser 128 (1MHz Apple IIe clone). Second was an Epson Apex with an Intel 8088. Then onto the IBM PS/1 with a 486SX-25. Finally when I got my own machine, I had a 486DX2-66. Well, enough of that. Still makes me feel old when I'm around kids who never knew a machine under 500MHz, and that was when they were really young.
This seems to be a way-too-common misconception around here... People seem to forget that binary code is *both* OS-specific *and* machine architecture-specific, and that the latter is MUCH harder to overcome.
It is relatively easy, depending on the fundamental OS differences, to write compatability layers allowing code from one OS to run on another, given that they both use the same type of processor. (easy for FreeBSD's Linux compatability, much harder for Wine, but the same fundamental principle)
But if the processors are different architectures, you might as well be emulating the whole damn machine.
This irritates me to no end, that every time Linux gets ported to some is-not-a-PC architecture, hordes of people somehow think all their compiled Linux apps will magically run on it now, where they didn't before. Sure, baring processor-specific or endian-specific code, you could more easily recompile your open-source code for that platform, but your binaries are just as incompatable as before.
As far as I can tell, that graphical dialog asking for your password is probably just a "sudo" frontend, akin to the one I've also seen in KDE.
Yeah, I even love having them at home. I've got a couple in my apartment, so I can take a desktop with me between the computer room and my living room. Also, once I'm ready to move into my new house (and it is all wired), I plan on putting Sun Rays all over the place.
In short, the SunRay has totally eliminated any and all desire for me to put desktop computers all over my residence.
Oh, you mean this?
Yes, already on the market. I saw one on display at a technology show a few weeks ago. Shares the same chasis as one of their normal Sun laptops, though without all the peripherals built in. Only kink is that the wireless is 802.11b, not 802.11g. (FYI, I think the retail price is around $1500, which actually isn't more than some of the fully-integrated desktop models Sun makes) Also, it supposedly has 6-8 hour battery life.
Yeah, one thing I found pretty cool at Fort Monmouth was actually the little museum they had there. I found it quite fascinating to learn that we had developed counter-target-aquisition radars (radars that see incoming artillery and mortar rounds) back in the 50's. Probably highly classified at the time. Makes you wonder what they've got under the covers now.
;)
Also rather amusing to see newspaper articles from the 30's talking about some "mystery ray" the miltary was using to locate ships.
This is why I love IBM Thinkpads :) To remove the hard drive, undo one screw on the bottom, remove the side-cover, and slide it out! (though my new laptop is a PowerBook, and I don't even think I know how to open the sucker, even if I removed the screws)
Well, thankfully the WaMu near me is open until 6pm on weekdays, which in and of itself is a HUGE plus, compared with other "normal" banks that like to close at 5pm or even 4pm sometimes.
(Always personally wondered how the world was supposed to work, when the people who provided services, and the people who took advantage of said services, were preoccupied with their respective jobs during the exact same hours.)
I'll kick in a "me too" on that one as well. They're definitely one of the friendliest and most inviting bank environments I've been in lately. Combined with their free checking accounts, I've moved accounts from other "normal-style" banks there over the past year.
And no, the service isn't slow. Quite quick, actually. At most banks, they have the classic "teller window" and maybe one or two slow tellers serving a whole like of people. At WaMu, they adjust the available tellers to meet demand, and the line is never very long.
As far as play areas, that actually does make sense. You see, banks do have services that require waiting a bit, and then interacting with a desk-person for a while (opening accounts, setting up financial services, loan processing, etc.), and that idea lets them bring the kids along.
Precisely! And most embedded devices these days do it with battery-backed SRAM. This means that even when "off", they still sip power (albeit at a very slow rate). MRAM would have huge advantages in this market.
Why does everyone assume every bit of semiconductor/electronics technology has to be for "their PCs"? Hello everyone! Those PC processors are actually in the MINORITY of parts shipped in the overall microprocessor market!
You know, the core memory of "way back when" was also magnetic, and nonvolitile. Actually, it was destructive-on-read, so you only had to refresh a bit it when reading it. Otherwise, you could turn the machine off and it would keep its contents.
(No, I'm not that old. But I had some friends in college who played around with an old PDP-11/45 we found, which used core.)
True, but first-to-market doesn't always win the competition. Sometimes a company may be first, but their self-imposed legal red-tape (i.e. Beta vs VHS) is their undoing. Other times, a bigger company with more leverage and marketting funds may just totally overwhelm them on mindshare, and win despite being late-to-market (i.e. Microsoft).
Um, you mean ARPA (now DARPA)
SunForum for Solaris
Actually, despite being quite a proprietary system over all, I kinda like the approach that my CLARiiON FC array takes to this problem.
It has special set-aside space on a number of drives that it designates as the "cache vault". Then, it has its own special UPS connected to the box that holds the RAID controllers and the first 10 drives of the system. When the main power fails, the controllers flush the write cache to this "cache vault" location, and then tell the UPS that its ok to "shut down now". When main power returns, it reads this data back in and continues about its business. The thing is VERY picky about everything being just right to enable write cache, however, with good reason.
I did an extensive writeup on my experiences with these boxes here, and even included info on how to "fake" the existance of one of those special UPS units if you didn't happen to have one. (with the intention of being scripted into something like "nut", of course)
What I actually find interesting, is that while most everyone launches west-to-east to gain this boost from Earth's rotation, not everyone does.
The one example I can think of to counter this is Israel. They actually launch east-to-west (probably in a similar fashion as Hebrew is written right-to-left, not left-to-right). Of course there is a very good reason they do this. To the west of them, is just the Mediterranean. To the right are a whole lot of countries they have traditionally considered hostile (with good reason). So if anything goes wrong, probably better to have things explode and fall into the water, than into the middle of Syria.
Yeah, if I really wanted to do this, a Netra would be much better suited to the task. You can even get those with DC power supplies, so you'd only need a DC-DC converter. Of course it would cost "him" more money.
Actually, eBay parts for the EXX00 "enterprise servers" are a heck of a lot cheaper on eBay than parts for an E450.
It is one of those oddities, due to market conditions, where you find a few things that are uber-expensive on vendor sites, but uber-cheap on eBay. Some that I've observed:
EXX00 components
Fibre Channel stuff
FDDI stuff (ok, useful a few years ago when I had systems where I could get a free FDDI card, but 100Mbit ethernet cost $$$ and was hard to find)
True, but there are plenty of smaller and more reasonable sized Sun machines that would be a heck of a lot more practical (and physically robust) for this sort of application. Of course they probably would cost him a lot more "out of pocket" money than this free E450 he picked up.
I still prefer Sun's older (and probably revitilized) tagline...
"The Network Is the Computer"
Seriously, understanding this phrase makes it a lot easier to figure out why older Solaris installs seemed lacking in some areas if you didn't have services like NIS and bootparams running out there on your network.
I'll definitely vouch for that one. Of course the coolest part is that the components for an E4500 can be had (ok, on eBay) for MUCH cheaper than the components for an E450.
Um, the E450 doesn't support hot-swapping those components. You'd need the higher-end EXX00 line of machines for that. Of course to use that feature, you can't use memory interleaving to its full potential on such machines.
But the difference is that you can write C code that talks directly to the hardware, though without inline asm I think it is limited to arbitrary memory addressing. In any case, I have written C code that ran on bare hardware without an OS or anything. I don't think you could do that in a VM-based language like Java.
Likewise, while you could write a Java VM in Java, could it run on the machine without having to run inside yet another VM that was written in a non-VM language?