Lemme take a shot at guessing what I see...
Besides the PeeCee hardware, on the left I notice a Sun lunchbox (IPC/IPX/LX/Classic), a Sun 611 case (or a lunchbox, so it could be a machine or a drive box), 2 Sun Aurora-style pizzaboxes (Sparc 4/5/20).
On the right, I see something that looks DEC... Could be an Alpha. Also, what appears to be a DLT drive.
Umm... As long as you stick to PeeCee hardware, you're wannabe nerds;) Get some racks of Sun Fire 280R boxes, maybe some IBM RS/6000 p640's.... Oh, and don't forget to throw a full-rack SGI Origin 2000 in the corner;) (they're dirt cheap refurb from SGI these days)
If you don't have a few hundred grand laying around (like me), then just build the same level of hardware, but base you're definition of "state of the art" on what was that expensive back 1993'ish... RS/6000 590's, Sun SPARCserver 2000's, etc... (unfortunately, though, back in those days very little was easy to rackmount)
I recently installed Ximian GNOME (recent release version) on my Sun Ultra 30 machine, and I've got to say that thing's a dog. It felt so sluggish it's not even funny.
Now I'm running KDE 2.2 on the box, and it's really snappy.
My only complaint is really slow opaque window dragging, but that's really Sun's fault, for somehow deciding not to include pixel-copy hardware 2D acceleration in their Creator3D framebuffers. (a strange reason why for some things, SunRay thin-clients feel faster at graphics) Anyone know if other newer Sun framebuffers fix this lack of feature?
What is it with all these people using KVMs on their servers? There's a MUCH better, more managable, and more "proper" way do to this... Ever hear of a SERIAL CONSOLE SERVER? Yes, that's right, UNIX can do the system console over the SERIAL PORT! Much cheaper, lets you do console logging, etc. In fact, real servers don't even need to have video cards installed at all! (not talking about PeeCee hardware here)
For heading a rack of boxes, I'd either recommend an old machine with a big multi-port serial board and a program called "conserver", or one of those embedded serial console server solutions (i.e. PortMaster)
I agree! x2x has been a godsend for my computing setup. Not only does it let me move my mouse/keyboard across multiple displays like I had a multi-headed machine, but it does cut 'n paste too! I used to have an unmanagable keyboard mess on my desk. Now I just boot the boxes, then stow their keyboards aside. (then again, I've got 3 monitors in front of me on 3 different boxes running 3 different 'nix OSs... Isn't X wonderful?)
KVMs don't belong in the server room, unless you're trying to use NT where it doesn't belong.
The proper way to control your servers is with a serial console server. One cable per box, you can log, and you can get to it from anywhere. In fact, "real servers" (not PCs) shouldn't even need to have video cards installed at all!
Yeah, they really should take a look at KDE on their machines. I'm sitting here on my Ultra 30, using KDE. When I tried Ximian Gnome on this box, it was very slow and painful to use. KDE, on the other hand, is quite snappy.
(now if only Sun would come out with a Creator3D series 4, or something equivalent that actually bothered to included pixel-copy hardware for 2D acceleration, I'd be very happy. They had it on the old 8-bit TurboGX... Why not on newer stuff?)
Well, to explain this, I can easily quote a friend of mine as saying:
"Linux is for people who hate Windows. FreeBSD is for people who like UNIX."
What this pretty much means, is that FreeBSD is popular in the role Linux was originally intended for ('nix for low-cost PCs), while Linux is touted as the big/noisy "alternative to Microsoft".
Another thing to note, is that while Linux can't technically be called a UNIX (it looks the same, but is very different inside), BSD is a real UNIX (though it can't be called one only for legal reasons).
Actually, it is possible... Ever hear of multifunction cards? (i.e. quad ethernet) Then again, they probably just use their own PCI bridge chips to give them more bus...
My 1993-era POWERserver 590 (66MHz Pwr2) really blew me away when I found these results (MB/s) in the STREAM benchmarks. And yes, I did reverify them. Though you only get these numbers with at least "-O5" to the compiler, so it could be doing something funny. However, without super-optimization, it does get at least half these numbers, which is still pretty impressive.
IBM's older Power2 processor is probably the ultimate example of "mhz doesn't count". The version I've got in a machine runs at 66MHz, but smokes a 200MHz 21064 Alpha. (then again, it was 6-way superscalar and loaded 8 words from memory per clock) Heck, in my own usage, it "feels" like a low-end P2 (and probably is just as good or better on FLOPS).
"I have personally kept at least a half dozen people from joining or staying with AOL by telling them their alternatives."
You know that you're probably the only reason they're not on AOL. If you don't see them, or move out of town for a year or so, chances are they'll all drift back to AOL "'cause it's what all their friends use". AOL seems to have some kind of weird evil draw like that.
"What I don't understand is why companies like Macromedia, Autodesk, and Adobe don't recognize the market niche that their product line would fill in?"
Actually, several of those companies used to support UNIX (Solaris, IRIX, etc.) decently at one point in time. Did you know there was Photoshop for 'nix? Well, only up to 3.0 anyways.
At some point (a bit before Linux went big) they all seem to have said "to hell with unix", and stopped the ports. Now it's completely foreign to them.
"Linux Has one of the best OpenGL implementations available, namely Mesa."
Oh please! Mese is meant to be a knock-off in-software OpenGL implementation. Sure, it may work properly, but you don't use Mesa for hardware accelerated OpenGL. Also, the nVidia drivers aren't all that great when it comes to things like "gasp" OpenGL-in-a-Window. (ok, it works, but not that well)
OpenGL in X kinda just works perfectly if you're using a real UNIX machine (yes, I've got an SGI and a Sun). On a Linux box, it's hack 'n pray. Remember, for professional work it's the "quality" of the implementation/output just as much as the speed. (and most pro-grade PeeCee 3D cards are still NT-only, it seems)
Ahh... One of the reasons I liked U-571 (although not in space). When the Americans hop on the U-boat, and immediately get in a crunch, they're all frantic because they can't read the German labels on all the controls.
Has anyone noticed that most of the ST uniforms look like cheap "jumpsuits"? The only place where the uniforms looked good, was in ST2-ST6 (and the begining of ST7). Those actually looked like the military-style uniforms they're supposed to be. Damnit, I want to see my starship officers wearing noticible (not pips) rank insignia and service ribbons! At least the ST:TNG movie uniforms look a tad better than the the shows, but not good enough.
One thing I really like about TNG, is that when ever the Borg appeared, one got a very serious sense of "from this point forward, our entire civilization as we have known it will be over".
I find the sound track to "The Best of Both Worlds" to fit very well with the mood of the two-part episode. Heck, First Contact also induced the proper mood about the borg.
Voyager seems to have "softened" the Borg, and I don't like that. All of a sudden they're not scarry any more. One doesn't think "Oh shit, I'm gonna be assimilated for sure... my life is over" when seeing them on the screen.
I find the only useful purpose for Windows is gaming and some multimedia things (but this is shrinking).
For many people, they feel like leaving Windows means losing functionality. For me, I feel like using Windows loses functionality. It just feels like a toy when doing serious networking. UNIX has shined in this area for as long as I can remember.
If you look at my room, I've got lots of machines and none are running Windows. Sure, I've got one PeeCee that's dual-boot capable, but if I'm not gaming and it happens to be in Windows, you won't see it because I switched away from it on the OmniView KVM box.
On that subject, the person who deserves the title "sanitation engineer" is not the garbage man. It's the person who actually has to design the landfill and waste handling systems. This is actually an engineering job that most people don't even think about.
Actually, with respect to space, "international" is just a glossy cover word for "United States and Russia, with a few struts made in France"
Space travel is just so expensive right now, to the point that only the US can really afford it, and Russia is really still in it because they still have the infrastructure for it (from being able to afford it in the past).
It's kinda interesting how the U.S. can afford all this with NASA having such a puny budget compared to the rest of what the Gov't spends on.
My favorate platform for a nice lite X terminal is actually an old SPARCstation running something like NetBSD. Sure, it'll probably only do 8 bit color well, but the image quality will be good and you'll get a res of 1152x900.
Another advantage of machines like Suns is that you can make them behave more "terminal-like", by running them totally diskless. Net-booting the things is very easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Lemme take a shot at guessing what I see...
Besides the PeeCee hardware, on the left I notice a Sun lunchbox (IPC/IPX/LX/Classic), a Sun 611 case (or a lunchbox, so it could be a machine or a drive box), 2 Sun Aurora-style pizzaboxes (Sparc 4/5/20).
On the right, I see something that looks DEC... Could be an Alpha. Also, what appears to be a DLT drive.
You know "2 of those"? Are you sure you didn't mean you knew "the 2" that are attracted to server rooms?
Umm... As long as you stick to PeeCee hardware, you're wannabe nerds ;) Get some racks of Sun Fire 280R boxes, maybe some IBM RS/6000 p640's.... Oh, and don't forget to throw a full-rack SGI Origin 2000 in the corner ;) (they're dirt cheap refurb from SGI these days)
If you don't have a few hundred grand laying around (like me), then just build the same level of hardware, but base you're definition of "state of the art" on what was that expensive back 1993'ish... RS/6000 590's, Sun SPARCserver 2000's, etc... (unfortunately, though, back in those days very little was easy to rackmount)
I recently installed Ximian GNOME (recent release version) on my Sun Ultra 30 machine, and I've got to say that thing's a dog. It felt so sluggish it's not even funny.
Now I'm running KDE 2.2 on the box, and it's really snappy.
My only complaint is really slow opaque window dragging, but that's really Sun's fault, for somehow deciding not to include pixel-copy hardware 2D acceleration in their Creator3D framebuffers. (a strange reason why for some things, SunRay thin-clients feel faster at graphics) Anyone know if other newer Sun framebuffers fix this lack of feature?
What is it with all these people using KVMs on their servers? There's a MUCH better, more managable, and more "proper" way do to this... Ever hear of a SERIAL CONSOLE SERVER? Yes, that's right, UNIX can do the system console over the SERIAL PORT! Much cheaper, lets you do console logging, etc. In fact, real servers don't even need to have video cards installed at all! (not talking about PeeCee hardware here)
For heading a rack of boxes, I'd either recommend an old machine with a big multi-port serial board and a program called "conserver", or one of those embedded serial console server solutions (i.e. PortMaster)
I agree! x2x has been a godsend for my computing setup. Not only does it let me move my mouse/keyboard across multiple displays like I had a multi-headed machine, but it does cut 'n paste too! I used to have an unmanagable keyboard mess on my desk. Now I just boot the boxes, then stow their keyboards aside. (then again, I've got 3 monitors in front of me on 3 different boxes running 3 different 'nix OSs... Isn't X wonderful?)
KVMs don't belong in the server room, unless you're trying to use NT where it doesn't belong.
The proper way to control your servers is with a serial console server. One cable per box, you can log, and you can get to it from anywhere. In fact, "real servers" (not PCs) shouldn't even need to have video cards installed at all!
Yeah, they really should take a look at KDE on their machines. I'm sitting here on my Ultra 30, using KDE. When I tried Ximian Gnome on this box, it was very slow and painful to use. KDE, on the other hand, is quite snappy.
(now if only Sun would come out with a Creator3D series 4, or something equivalent that actually bothered to included pixel-copy hardware for 2D acceleration, I'd be very happy. They had it on the old 8-bit TurboGX... Why not on newer stuff?)
Umm... It kinda already is a cluster. Specifically, its an RS/6000 SP system, which is IBM's compute cluster technology.
Well, to explain this, I can easily quote a friend of mine as saying:
"Linux is for people who hate Windows. FreeBSD is for people who like UNIX."
What this pretty much means, is that FreeBSD is popular in the role Linux was originally intended for ('nix for low-cost PCs), while Linux is touted as the big/noisy "alternative to Microsoft".
Another thing to note, is that while Linux can't technically be called a UNIX (it looks the same, but is very different inside), BSD is a real UNIX (though it can't be called one only for legal reasons).
Actually, it is possible... Ever hear of multifunction cards? (i.e. quad ethernet) Then again, they probably just use their own PCI bridge chips to give them more bus...
IBM RS/6000 POWERserver 590
My webserver, in fact. (though it's done other things as well)
My 1993-era POWERserver 590 (66MHz Pwr2) really blew me away when I found these results (MB/s) in the STREAM benchmarks. And yes, I did reverify them. Though you only get these numbers with at least "-O5" to the compiler, so it could be doing something funny. However, without super-optimization, it does get at least half these numbers, which is still pretty impressive.
Machine ncpus COPY SCALE ADD TRIAD
RS/6000 590 1 600.0 533.3 654.5 654.5
IBM's older Power2 processor is probably the ultimate example of "mhz doesn't count". The version I've got in a machine runs at 66MHz, but smokes a 200MHz 21064 Alpha. (then again, it was 6-way superscalar and loaded 8 words from memory per clock) Heck, in my own usage, it "feels" like a low-end P2 (and probably is just as good or better on FLOPS).
And this thing was made in 1992!
No, I think that was Selma Blair.
"I have personally kept at least a half dozen people from joining or staying with AOL by telling them their alternatives."
You know that you're probably the only reason they're not on AOL. If you don't see them, or move out of town for a year or so, chances are they'll all drift back to AOL "'cause it's what all their friends use". AOL seems to have some kind of weird evil draw like that.
"What I don't understand is why companies like Macromedia, Autodesk, and Adobe don't recognize the market niche that their product line would fill in?"
Actually, several of those companies used to support UNIX (Solaris, IRIX, etc.) decently at one point in time. Did you know there was Photoshop for 'nix? Well, only up to 3.0 anyways.
At some point (a bit before Linux went big) they all seem to have said "to hell with unix", and stopped the ports. Now it's completely foreign to them.
"Linux Has one of the best OpenGL implementations available, namely Mesa."
Oh please! Mese is meant to be a knock-off in-software OpenGL implementation. Sure, it may work properly, but you don't use Mesa for hardware accelerated OpenGL. Also, the nVidia drivers aren't all that great when it comes to things like "gasp" OpenGL-in-a-Window. (ok, it works, but not that well)
OpenGL in X kinda just works perfectly if you're using a real UNIX machine (yes, I've got an SGI and a Sun). On a Linux box, it's hack 'n pray. Remember, for professional work it's the "quality" of the implementation/output just as much as the speed. (and most pro-grade PeeCee 3D cards are still NT-only, it seems)
Ahh... One of the reasons I liked U-571 (although not in space). When the Americans hop on the U-boat, and immediately get in a crunch, they're all frantic because they can't read the German labels on all the controls.
Has anyone noticed that most of the ST uniforms look like cheap "jumpsuits"? The only place where the uniforms looked good, was in ST2-ST6 (and the begining of ST7). Those actually looked like the military-style uniforms they're supposed to be. Damnit, I want to see my starship officers wearing noticible (not pips) rank insignia and service ribbons! At least the ST:TNG movie uniforms look a tad better than the the shows, but not good enough.
One thing I really like about TNG, is that when ever the Borg appeared, one got a very serious sense of "from this point forward, our entire civilization as we have known it will be over".
I find the sound track to "The Best of Both Worlds" to fit very well with the mood of the two-part episode. Heck, First Contact also induced the proper mood about the borg.
Voyager seems to have "softened" the Borg, and I don't like that. All of a sudden they're not scarry any more. One doesn't think "Oh shit, I'm gonna be assimilated for sure... my life is over" when seeing them on the screen.
I find the only useful purpose for Windows is gaming and some multimedia things (but this is shrinking).
For many people, they feel like leaving Windows means losing functionality. For me, I feel like using Windows loses functionality. It just feels like a toy when doing serious networking. UNIX has shined in this area for as long as I can remember.
If you look at my room, I've got lots of machines and none are running Windows. Sure, I've got one PeeCee that's dual-boot capable, but if I'm not gaming and it happens to be in Windows, you won't see it because I switched away from it on the OmniView KVM box.
On that subject, the person who deserves the title "sanitation engineer" is not the garbage man. It's the person who actually has to design the landfill and waste handling systems. This is actually an engineering job that most people don't even think about.
Actually, with respect to space, "international" is just a glossy cover word for "United States and Russia, with a few struts made in France"
Space travel is just so expensive right now, to the point that only the US can really afford it, and Russia is really still in it because they still have the infrastructure for it (from being able to afford it in the past).
It's kinda interesting how the U.S. can afford all this with NASA having such a puny budget compared to the rest of what the Gov't spends on.
My favorate platform for a nice lite X terminal is actually an old SPARCstation running something like NetBSD. Sure, it'll probably only do 8 bit color well, but the image quality will be good and you'll get a res of 1152x900. Another advantage of machines like Suns is that you can make them behave more "terminal-like", by running them totally diskless. Net-booting the things is very easy.