Ok, so when did IRIX or Solaris run on PowerPC? Just because they provide binary cross-OS compatability, doesn't mean they also provide processor emulation. This emulation is probably just a system-call shim layer, like FreeBSD's Linux emulation. The code still runs native, but syscalls are translated and sometimes emulated.
Well, my "good sparc" is my main desktop machine. I'm typing on it right now, in fact. (the Athlon is the "PeeCee machine" I use for games and watching full-screen video, and nothing else.) I like having rock-solid hardware with none of the "quirks" many people experience on PC machines, especially on the desktop, where driver support may be shoddy. (the "not so good one", is my firewall, of course)
My Indigo2 has a lot of other uses, as well. First, it's my current "chat-program machine", but I also use it to play MP3s (it has good audio hardware, unlike the Sun). In addition, whenever I need/want to do OpenGL in X, that's the box for it. It's 3D hardware works much better than anything I could possibly get from Sun without spending tons of money on something new.
Why? Because I'm less of a developer and more of a sysadmin personality. First, I like learning about lots of different platforms. From all this I'm now quite familar with Solaris, AIX, IRIX, as well as Free/Net/Open *BSD and the like.
Also, I don't "need" that many machines, but I do find myself getting quite used to having most of them.
First, I like the separation of desktop and server. The server is my trustworthy, reliable, back-end machine that always stays up and is independent of my "desktop". Second, I like having 2 "heads" on my desktop. It's nice to make the "chat programs and misc stuff" appear on a separate display for when I'm doing full-screen stuff on the main monitor. Now I could do that by just making one machine dual-head, but with my equipment there's no need.
Now, I've just described the need for only 2-3 machines. One thing you need to keep in mind is when you tell most people "I have a computer", they assume you mean: computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. When I say "I've got six or eight", they take that image and multiply it. What they don't realize is what I think of as "infrastructure machines". Those would be the firewall and console server. The firewall has obvious uses. The console server's usefulness is twofold. First, it saves me from having a bank of terminals over the desk, and second it allows me to get at the console of some devices remotely over the network.
Well, like everyone here, I've got a dorm room that scares people when they walk by. Some pictures from sophomore year can be found here. However, while the general layout remains the same, I'm always changing the hardware, so this is what I've got now.
I guess one thing that's special about my "massive pile of computing" is that I like to collect some diversity in my equipment. I've got many different OS's, and most of my machines are not PeeCees (none are Macs).
Of course like many of you, I technically have several more machines than are noted. I refer to this as "the pile", and I basically think of it as the computers I could assemble and/or put into service from stuff I have if I needed to. Always nice to have crap laying around when you want to test something.
Static RAM certanly does not maintain state when the power goes out. However, it does require very little power to maintain state, and no special circuity.
SRAM is basically something like 6 transistors per bit.
DRAM, on the other hand, not only requires power to maintain state, but also requires special refresh circuitry. This is because a bit in DRAM is effectively a transistor and a tiny capacitor.
Actually, they shouldn't have to recompile anything, unless they want their apps to use 64-bit addressing. (but they will have to modify the OS kernel)
Real 64-bit chips which are new versions of older 32-bit lines are fully backwards compatable.
Case in point, you don't need to recompile 32-bit SPARC applications to run them natively on a 64-bit UltraSPARC.
$500 for a SunRay, which is a totally stateless networked keyboard+mouse+graphics+audio. There's nothing to break, nothing to upgrade... Almost no upkeep costs.
In short, they ONLY have to actually worry about maintaining the back-end, not the front-end.
Last I checked, telco systems had to run off DC due to regulations on line noise, or something like that.
Thus, you can easily buy Sun Netra rackmount servers with DC power supplies (or AC, whatever you want). They take 48VDC, and regulate it down to whatever the guts of the computer wants to use.
I'm sorry, but running Linux/etc on that SGI defeats the whole purpose of getting the SGI. You loose all support for the cooler hardware.
People don't just buy the SGI to say "hey, I've got an SGI, now let's see what it'll run". They buy them because SGIs have unique hardware features (yes, even the old ones) that IRIX supports.
For example, I've used my Indigo2 for some OpenGL coding. With IRIX, OpenGL in-a-window works in X "out of the box". No fussing, it just works! (there's also the Indy/O2 with video features, etc.)
Oh, and of course, IRIX has cool demos:)
A free 'nix would just turn the SGI into "yet another computer". SGI's are special, have features you won't find on that old Sun box, and damnit I want them to work!
I think you mean the UltraSparc-II. If you wanted a US3, then you'd have a 6800, and be ranting about a problem with the prefetch pipeline (which Sun caught early-on).
Being a fan of no-hassle embedded solutions myself, I'd have to agree. The place in home theater that a PC does belong, though, is for playing all those movies we've been collecting in DIVX formats and such. I'm sure everyone, especially college students, has amassed a large collection of movies (and TV shows, etc) in formats friendly to the computer but not the home theater. Some day, we may want to watch them in the family room.
What I'd like is a more embedded-like solution to this problem. Say a minimalist PC. Give it no/little local storage (preferably net-boot, though a solid state disk would work too), have it boot almost instantly, and make it mount network shares (samba/NFS/etc) and/or CDs for all the video content. Then have a simple menu-selector app running that lets you chose/play movies. The back-end OS could be anything. Preferably an x86 'nix (FreeBSD, Linux, etc.), for network interoperability and managability. However, the back-end should be mostly invisible when you're actually using it.
Speaking of separate cards... How many "good" non-integrated cards are there?
I started back in '94 with a Creative Labs Video Blaster. Nice card. No tuner, but that's what the spare VCR is for. Then, when I upgraded my computer to the point that the VB was no longer compatable with it, I got myself an ATI-TV card. (my main video card was ATI, so they interfaced together). I think the image was a tad blurrier, but otherwise not too shabby.
Then, when I upgraded from that P2 box to a more modern Athlon/w GeForce, I wound up getting a common Hauppauge WinTV. Let me tell you, image-quality-wise, it's a piece of crap. I still use it (it's "good enough" for now), but the picture quality is not as good as my older cards. Among other isses, fast motion makes the image look horizonally "liney", which is kinda annoying.
(and yes, all 3 cards work in Linux, though it took quite a while before the ATI-TV got it's support written)
I've had SCSI drives die, but only crappy ones. One that failed was an old Compaq rebranded Seagate 4GB, and the others were IBM "DHFS" model 1GB-2GB drives. But then again, these are old and crappy models.
All my other SCSI drives work just fine and dandy:) Heck, that even includes this one model of SCSI drive that's over 10 years old (it's 3.5" half-height, and comes from 400MB-2GB) and made by IBM. If those things survive the first decade, they're gonna survive the next one:)
I have stopped trusting cheap IDE disks when I care, though... When you run as much equipment personally as I do, you notice things. Just yesterday, the 1.5 year old IBM IDE system disk in my file server started failing. Well, it's getting replaced by a nice 10krpm 18.2GB SCSI disk next week:) (thank goodness I use RAID for my important data)
It's amazing how so many people complain about the noise of their one or two computers... Maybe it's just that a single machine's noise sounds out of place or something.
Well I'm the freak with 8 24/7 machines in his dorm room, and the whitenoise of them all together is quite audible. However, I actually like that noise. When I'm trying to sleep in a computer-less room, I often find it "too quiet", or a "deafening silence" of sorts.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. What the heck were you smoking?
I'd trust an old Sparc running something like OpenBSD FAR more than I'd ever trust PC hardware for something "critical to your network" like a firewall/router box. I used to use a complete Sparc IPX for exactly that, and am now doing the same with a SPARCstation 5. They work beautifully. The hardware is high-quality, rock-solid stable, and won't ever fail me. It's the kind of machine I don't have to worry about, because I know it'll run forever.
Speaking of old sparc mods... I've always thought it would be cool to strip a SPARCstation 1 or 2, put some padding in it, and then try to use it as a container for delivering or serving pizza. After all, they don't call the chasis a "pizza box" for nothing!:)
Why does everyone think Linux on Sparc would be better? What you like about Linux isn't the kernel, but rather the userspace apps and utilities. Well, run them on Solaris! Actually, Sun does seem to be progressively improving Solaris with regard to userspace stuff. Things just move slower in their world in that area, since the core of the OS and the hardware are a bit more important.
(posted from a Sun Ultra 30 running Solaris 8, KDE 2.1, and browsing with Opera 5)
I think the intent isn't big-endian vs little-endian. The issue is that the way mainframes store numbers is "different" than normal machines. Kinda in a weird way, though I'm not up to speed on the details.
Myself, being a bit of a platform freak, I see this all the time.
GCC is way too lenient. Heck, I've even found cases where MSVC++ catches more things.
I've also used the Sun Workshop compiler, IBM's xlc, and SGI's MIPSpro.
IBM xlc has this neat thing where error messages not only indicate line number, but also where exactly in the line it found the error.
BTW, MIPSpro is my favorate so far. It's error messages are actually quite informative. Also, if you happen to be on an SMP box, add the "-apo" compiler flag and it auto-parallelizes your program. Has anyone else seen a compiler that can make your plain single-threaded app take advantage of multiple CPUs?
Hmm... At my school, all the lower-level CS courses seem to be stuck in MS-land. (well, the undergrad TA's are all MS freaks, even though the profs/grad-TAs aren't) So, back when I took those, I would code my project in Linux, then make it "VC++ Compatable and Tested" before turning it in.
Now that I'm in upper-level courses, I get to see more of what the CS department here really supports (Solaris, and some FreeBSD). So, since most of my code has to work in Solaris, I just use the Ultra 30 I got myself this summer:) (much nicer than ssh'ing into something else for testing and de-quirking) Oh, and in the rare instances that I have to use Windows... (like one class where we had to write Win32 and UNIX versions of system programs) Well, that's what the SunPCi card is for! (and I can minimize it when I want to, and it doesn't eat system resources) That Sun is really nice, as now I'm taking a class where I need to do graphical stuff on Solaris, and it's nicer to work from my dorm room, than to either go to the lab or do cross-campus remote-X.
Speaking of such... I've got a friend who already has permission from his girlfriend for 3-phase AC and raised flooring when he has a house someday... Then again, this is a special case (she's just as eccentric as he is), and the rest of us can only hope to be so lucky.
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Ok, so when did IRIX or Solaris run on PowerPC? Just because they provide binary cross-OS compatability, doesn't mean they also provide processor emulation. This emulation is probably just a system-call shim layer, like FreeBSD's Linux emulation. The code still runs native, but syscalls are translated and sometimes emulated.
DP = Developer Preview
Well, my "good sparc" is my main desktop machine. I'm typing on it right now, in fact. (the Athlon is the "PeeCee machine" I use for games and watching full-screen video, and nothing else.) I like having rock-solid hardware with none of the "quirks" many people experience on PC machines, especially on the desktop, where driver support may be shoddy.
(the "not so good one", is my firewall, of course)
My Indigo2 has a lot of other uses, as well. First, it's my current "chat-program machine", but I also use it to play MP3s (it has good audio hardware, unlike the Sun). In addition, whenever I need/want to do OpenGL in X, that's the box for it. It's 3D hardware works much better than anything I could possibly get from Sun without spending tons of money on something new.
Why? Because I'm less of a developer and more of a sysadmin personality. First, I like learning about lots of different platforms. From all this I'm now quite familar with Solaris, AIX, IRIX, as well as Free/Net/Open *BSD and the like.
Also, I don't "need" that many machines, but I do find myself getting quite used to having most of them.
First, I like the separation of desktop and server. The server is my trustworthy, reliable, back-end machine that always stays up and is independent of my "desktop". Second, I like having 2 "heads" on my desktop. It's nice to make the "chat programs and misc stuff" appear on a separate display for when I'm doing full-screen stuff on the main monitor. Now I could do that by just making one machine dual-head, but with my equipment there's no need.
Now, I've just described the need for only 2-3 machines. One thing you need to keep in mind is when you tell most people "I have a computer", they assume you mean: computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. When I say "I've got six or eight", they take that image and multiply it. What they don't realize is what I think of as "infrastructure machines". Those would be the firewall and console server. The firewall has obvious uses. The console server's usefulness is twofold. First, it saves me from having a bank of terminals over the desk, and second it allows me to get at the console of some devices remotely over the network.
However, while the general layout remains the same, I'm always changing the hardware, so this is what I've got now.
I guess one thing that's special about my "massive pile of computing" is that I like to collect some diversity in my equipment. I've got many different OS's, and most of my machines are not PeeCees (none are Macs).
Of course like many of you, I technically have several more machines than are noted. I refer to this as "the pile", and I basically think of it as the computers I could assemble and/or put into service from stuff I have if I needed to. Always nice to have crap laying around when you want to test something.
Static RAM certanly does not maintain state when the power goes out. However, it does require very little power to maintain state, and no special circuity.
SRAM is basically something like 6 transistors per bit.
DRAM, on the other hand, not only requires power to maintain state, but also requires special refresh circuitry. This is because a bit in DRAM is effectively a transistor and a tiny capacitor.
Actually, they shouldn't have to recompile anything, unless they want their apps to use 64-bit addressing. (but they will have to modify the OS kernel)
Real 64-bit chips which are new versions of older 32-bit lines are fully backwards compatable.
Case in point, you don't need to recompile 32-bit SPARC applications to run them natively on a 64-bit UltraSPARC.
Already happened :)
Look at Sun's newest high-end graphics card, the XVR-1000. The heart of this card is the MAJC, which is Sun's new async processor.
$500 for a SunRay, which is a totally stateless networked keyboard+mouse+graphics+audio. There's nothing to break, nothing to upgrade... Almost no upkeep costs.
In short, they ONLY have to actually worry about maintaining the back-end, not the front-end.
Last I checked, telco systems had to run off DC due to regulations on line noise, or something like that.
Thus, you can easily buy Sun Netra rackmount servers with DC power supplies (or AC, whatever you want). They take 48VDC, and regulate it down to whatever the guts of the computer wants to use.
I'm sorry, but running Linux/etc on that SGI defeats the whole purpose of getting the SGI. You loose all support for the cooler hardware.
:)
People don't just buy the SGI to say "hey, I've got an SGI, now let's see what it'll run". They buy them because SGIs have unique hardware features (yes, even the old ones) that IRIX supports.
For example, I've used my Indigo2 for some OpenGL coding. With IRIX, OpenGL in-a-window works in X "out of the box". No fussing, it just works! (there's also the Indy/O2 with video features, etc.)
Oh, and of course, IRIX has cool demos
A free 'nix would just turn the SGI into "yet another computer". SGI's are special, have features you won't find on that old Sun box, and damnit I want them to work!
I think you mean the UltraSparc-II. If you wanted a US3, then you'd have a 6800, and be ranting about a problem with the prefetch pipeline (which Sun caught early-on).
According to Sun's website, the UltraSparc-III 900MHz Cu chip only has a dissipation of 65 watts.
Being a fan of no-hassle embedded solutions myself, I'd have to agree. The place in home theater that a PC does belong, though, is for playing all those movies we've been collecting in DIVX formats and such. I'm sure everyone, especially college students, has amassed a large collection of movies (and TV shows, etc) in formats friendly to the computer but not the home theater. Some day, we may want to watch them in the family room.
What I'd like is a more embedded-like solution to this problem. Say a minimalist PC. Give it no/little local storage (preferably net-boot, though a solid state disk would work too), have it boot almost instantly, and make it mount network shares (samba/NFS/etc) and/or CDs for all the video content. Then have a simple menu-selector app running that lets you chose/play movies. The back-end OS could be anything. Preferably an x86 'nix (FreeBSD, Linux, etc.), for network interoperability and managability. However, the back-end should be mostly invisible when you're actually using it.
Speaking of separate cards... How many "good" non-integrated cards are there?
/w GeForce, I wound up getting a common Hauppauge WinTV. Let me tell you, image-quality-wise, it's a piece of crap. I still use it (it's "good enough" for now), but the picture quality is not as good as my older cards. Among other isses, fast motion makes the image look horizonally "liney", which is kinda annoying.
I started back in '94 with a Creative Labs Video Blaster. Nice card. No tuner, but that's what the spare VCR is for. Then, when I upgraded my computer to the point that the VB was no longer compatable with it, I got myself an ATI-TV card. (my main video card was ATI, so they interfaced together). I think the image was a tad blurrier, but otherwise not too shabby.
Then, when I upgraded from that P2 box to a more modern Athlon
(and yes, all 3 cards work in Linux, though it took quite a while before the ATI-TV got it's support written)
I've had SCSI drives die, but only crappy ones.
:) Heck, that even includes this one model of SCSI drive that's over 10 years old (it's 3.5" half-height, and comes from 400MB-2GB) and made by IBM. If those things survive the first decade, they're gonna survive the next one :)
:) (thank goodness I use RAID for my important data)
One that failed was an old Compaq rebranded Seagate 4GB, and the others were IBM "DHFS" model 1GB-2GB drives. But then again, these are old and crappy models.
All my other SCSI drives work just fine and dandy
I have stopped trusting cheap IDE disks when I care, though... When you run as much equipment personally as I do, you notice things. Just yesterday, the 1.5 year old IBM IDE system disk in my file server started failing. Well, it's getting replaced by a nice 10krpm 18.2GB SCSI disk next week
It's amazing how so many people complain about the noise of their one or two computers... Maybe it's just that a single machine's noise sounds out of place or something.
Well I'm the freak with 8 24/7 machines in his dorm room, and the whitenoise of them all together is quite audible. However, I actually like that noise. When I'm trying to sleep in a computer-less room, I often find it "too quiet", or a "deafening silence" of sorts.
AMD AXPs? I didn't know AMD made Alpha processors.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. What the heck were you smoking?
I'd trust an old Sparc running something like OpenBSD FAR more than I'd ever trust PC hardware for something "critical to your network" like a firewall/router box. I used to use a complete Sparc IPX for exactly that, and am now doing the same with a SPARCstation 5. They work beautifully. The hardware is high-quality, rock-solid stable, and won't ever fail me. It's the kind of machine I don't have to worry about, because I know it'll run forever.
Speaking of old sparc mods... I've always thought it would be cool to strip a SPARCstation 1 or 2, put some padding in it, and then try to use it as a container for delivering or serving pizza. After all, they don't call the chasis a "pizza box" for nothing! :)
Why does everyone think Linux on Sparc would be better? What you like about Linux isn't the kernel, but rather the userspace apps and utilities. Well, run them on Solaris! Actually, Sun does seem to be progressively improving Solaris with regard to userspace stuff. Things just move slower in their world in that area, since the core of the OS and the hardware are a bit more important.
(posted from a Sun Ultra 30 running Solaris 8, KDE 2.1, and browsing with Opera 5)
I think the intent isn't big-endian vs little-endian. The issue is that the way mainframes store numbers is "different" than normal machines. Kinda in a weird way, though I'm not up to speed on the details.
Mod this up!
Myself, being a bit of a platform freak, I see this all the time.
GCC is way too lenient. Heck, I've even found cases where MSVC++ catches more things.
I've also used the Sun Workshop compiler, IBM's xlc, and SGI's MIPSpro.
IBM xlc has this neat thing where error messages not only indicate line number, but also where exactly in the line it found the error.
BTW, MIPSpro is my favorate so far. It's error messages are actually quite informative. Also, if you happen to be on an SMP box, add the "-apo" compiler flag and it auto-parallelizes your program. Has anyone else seen a compiler that can make your plain single-threaded app take advantage of multiple CPUs?
Hmm... At my school, all the lower-level CS courses seem to be stuck in MS-land. (well, the undergrad TA's are all MS freaks, even though the profs/grad-TAs aren't) So, back when I took those, I would code my project in Linux, then make it "VC++ Compatable and Tested" before turning it in.
:) (much nicer than ssh'ing into something else for testing and de-quirking) Oh, and in the rare instances that I have to use Windows... (like one class where we had to write Win32 and UNIX versions of system programs) Well, that's what the SunPCi card is for! (and I can minimize it when I want to, and it doesn't eat system resources) That Sun is really nice, as now I'm taking a class where I need to do graphical stuff on Solaris, and it's nicer to work from my dorm room, than to either go to the lab or do cross-campus remote-X.
Now that I'm in upper-level courses, I get to see more of what the CS department here really supports (Solaris, and some FreeBSD). So, since most of my code has to work in Solaris, I just use the Ultra 30 I got myself this summer
Speaking of such... I've got a friend who already has permission from his girlfriend for 3-phase AC and raised flooring when he has a house someday... Then again, this is a special case (she's just as eccentric as he is), and the rest of us can only hope to be so lucky.