Laporte's original TV gig, TheSite, was even better. See more here
TheSite was one of the first shows on MSNBC when it first came on the air. Unlike the other shows on the network, it was produced by ZDTV (long before they had their own channel). It was more classy, more professional, and yet seemed more interesting than anything on ZDTV/TechTV/G4.
Too bad it was canceled 2.5 years later, before most people had even heard of MSNBC, let alone the show itself.
Soledad O'Brian, DevNull, and Cliff Stoll rocked!
on
The Screen Savers Reunited
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I loved The Site, I watched it almost every weekday for about two years. They canceled it after preempting it with the Princess Diana death broadcasts.
The Site was the perfect blend of high tech news and tech-related interest stories. I never cared much for ZDTV/TechTV/G4, they were actually "too geeky" in a bad sort of way.
Leo Laporte was the voice and actor (motion caption) for the tech gossip character "DevNull" (Laporte's old radio handle). He was also "Technical Managing Producer" of the hour-long show, so he did most of his work behind the scenes. The show was actually recorded in the same studio where all of the TechTV shows were, except they had just one huge room, a "working set" where segments were recorded all day while researchers, TV show webmasters, and others were hard at work in the background. These people were often featured in their own segments. It was very cool to hear from the show's own tech people (the show's site was originally hosted on a SPARCstation 20 running Apache and connected to a single T1). I loved the little details like that. And yet they really didn't dwell on the really technical aspects.
Soledad O'Brian was a great host, I think that job fit her better than the current news gigs she does these days. There was also a really good band of reporters for the show, Craig Miller was awesome, I wonder what he's up to these days? Lots of people from the old science show days from KRON/Discovery Channel.
Cliff Stoll ended each weekday show with about 5 minutes of insight, rants, and stories from his home in Berkeley.
TheSite was a nice grounded "magazine" look into the dotcom world. They interviewed a lot of visionaries and up-and-coming people in the industry. Lots of cool viewpoints and persepctives. Too bad their budget didn't allow for travel beyond the SF Bay / Silicon Valley area.
I really miss TheSite, but there won't even be anything like it. Even in it's best days, The Screen Savers was just a bunch of unwashed geeks hanging around Leo Laporte. Lots of geek details, flash, and no substance. *sigh*
AFAIK, Google only logs the IP address, search query, and time/date. This helps the company track usage, patterns, and gives them a huge database of real-world search strings for testing.
I recall hearing about this when Google first spoke up about its massive server farms and distributed storage. From what I recall, their logs are spread across all of their servers as well.
I think it would be neat to bring up a list of all of the Google search queries requested via my IP address. It would be fun to see what sort of stuff I was looking at several years ago... "Windows 2000 Reviews", "linux 2.4 kernel new features", etc.
>> like IRIX -- I could give 10 good solid reasons, but I leave >> them out for brevity > > I'm curious. I heard years ago that it wasn't very secure. But it > runs on exceedingly high-end stuff. And there was the whole > excellent support for OpenGL thing. So from a completely > outsider perspective, what's not to like?
Prior to IRIX 6.5 (1998), it was a pain to maintain and secure. It was also unstable, especially on the newer/faster hardware.
6.5.x has helped a lot. It's far more secure out of the box, but an experienced UNIX administrator will still have to spend at least 5 minutes disabling accounts and services to secure the machine, but it's way easier than securing Solaris. The RedHat style chkconfig is nice too. As SGI lost their hardware performance edge, I think they started to focus on stabilizing their software.
6.5.x also has a quarterly update of bug fixes, new features, and security updates. (SGI does release interim patches for the past year's worth of IRIX versions) Makes administration much easier than the painful mess of patches that was IRIX 5.3 and 6.2.
OpenGL support is rock-solid... for OpenGL 1.2 and earlier. It's been ages since SGI has done much with IRIX graphics.
Overall I like IRIX way more than Solaris. But it's a moot point. Solaris is the dominant oldschool commerical UNIX. A modern SGI system uses Itanium2 processors and SuSE, not IRIX.
SGI's MIPS-based machines (and their first NT PC too) used an ARCS PROM and SASH bootloader. These come from the Advanced RISC Computing Specification, back in the pre-Pentium days when people thought Intel was about to drop into obscurity.
It is like the entire computer is full of shareware
The only piece of "shareware" I have seen that comes with Mac OS X is the Quicktime Player mentioned above. The basic / free version has several of the menu options removed. Just like the Windows version. But as others have pointed out, you can use a quick applescript to reenable these features. Everything else that ships with Mac OS X are the full, complete versions.
There are several freeware movie players for Mac OS X that are far better than Quicktime Player. They can play just as many file formats too as Quicktime Player is just a front-end to the Quicktime libraries. There are also some other apps that come with Mac OS X that'll do the fullscreen trick for you.
"DVD Player" is how you watch DVD movies on a Mac. It comes with the OS and it can play full screen with the click of a button or keystroke.
iMovie is for editing home videos, it can play your quicktime movies full screen for you if you want.
iDVD is for authoring DVD movies, it can preview your (converted to MPEG2) quicktime movies full screen for you if you want.
By the time they retire it's possible that they will be older than the grandparents, even the great-grandparents of their pilots. Interestingly NASA's B52 is the oldest in terms of when it was built, but has the least flying hours on it.
The plane you speak of is NASA's B-52A, built in about 1952. From what I've read, it also has many parts from later B-52s, making it a B-52ABCDEFG:)
NASA just recently retired that B-52A and replaced it with a shiny new B-52H that's only 45 years old!
I'm pretty sure their old B-52A is headed for a museum as it was the plane used to carry and release thelegendary X-15 as well as the X-38 and more recently the X-43 scramjet. I think they also used it to test the parachute breaking system that the shuttle uses.
Russian commercial aircraft are flying older for the same reason that Boeing B-52(G)s designed in 1947 and updated throughout the 1950s are.
Just to pick nits: the active B-52 fleet is made up of B-52(H) models, which were built in 1960, making them a few years newer than the B-52(G). The "newer" H models have more efficient and more powerful engines than the G, and had numerous other improvements. The difference between the B-52(H) and B-52(G) is significant. The difference between the B-52(H) and B-52(A) from 1952 is HUGE!
AFAIK, the B-52(G), which were actively used in Gulf War I, are currently sitting in the desert to be chopped up. The B-52(H) are currently flying out of Barksdale, Louisiana, and Minot, North Dakota.
But back to your point, yeah, the B-52 dates back to the 1940s and aside from some modern computers and sensors, is still flying today with mostly 1950s technology.
Another old bird is the KC-135, the military version of the Boeing 707 4 engine jet (very similar to the Douglas DC-8). There are still a huge number of these birds flying in the US military for cargo, in-flight refueling, and intel/AWACS. The KC-135 is almost as old as the B-52 and was designed by the same group of engineers.
Swiftech is my guess as the first who will offer widespread, professional watercooling solutions for 1U rack-mount water cooling solutions using the Laing DDC pump, rebadged as the MCP350. I don't think any of the other big players in that industry currently have the products or expertise to pull it off in the near future.
Yeah, I bet Dell or HP can't figure out how to do that.
*rolls eyes*
Actually, given some of the recent decisions made by HP, they probably couldn't!
You're right. I guess I should have said "liquid cooling".
Like the original Cray 1, the current Cray X1E uses Fluorinert to cool the system itself (check out the swanky video of the Fluorinert vapor jets on cray.com!). There's also a loop of some sort of refrigerant between the heat exchanger indoors and the cooling tower outdoors.
I agree, both solutions would help. Our room is a nice cool 62.5. Best condtions to work in!
We keep ours at 73 degrees, about 2 degrees warmer than the rest of the building. We did the 60 degree thing for awhile, but it required quite a bit more electricity to maintain that temp. The servers work fine at 80 degrees, but 73 is more comfortable and provides a little more cushion.
Maybe my ignorance is showing here, but does any installation use outside air for cooling? It seems that it would make sense in places that have cold winters (like here in the midwest). You'd need a lot of filtering and/or humidity control to make that a realistic option. Better yet to make use of outside air temperature. Which is exactly what your heatpump loop or your AC cooling tower is for.
Blade servers are a noble start. Less duplication of power supplies and network gear. I imagine the situation will continue to get better over time.
Duplication is nice in some respects, more redundancy is a big plus. That and you actually have several useful machines when you finally tear it all down. Who's going to buy 3 blades off ebay when they can't afford the backplane to plug 'em into?
Unlike most companies that are considering going back to water cooling, Cray has always used water cooling for their big iron. In fact, the only air cooled Crays are the lower end or smaller configured systems.
>> I noticed that Bill Gates was one of the 1st people to do this, >> even when the cost was super high > >..yeah, cause I'm sure the cost is a big concern for him huh?
Blackbox has been working great on my machines for 4+ years. This new version looks kind of neat but I'm in no rush to upgrade just for AA fonts. EWMH complance doesn't mean anything to me.
Some people have had good luck with Illustrator and Photoshop on Mac OS X, but let me tell you about my experience:
Illustrator 8 and Photoshop 6 ran great on Mac OS 9. In fact, they were some of the most stable applications I used on the "classic" Mac OS.
Now I'm running Mac OS X, along with Illustrator CS and Photoshop CS. But get this... all of my other applications have been rock solid, but the new Adobe apps have been crashing at least once a week.
The early 1990s only sucked if you were forced to use a 486 with a 14" VGA monitor.
1992 was a great year for computing! Apple's Quadra 840av was a multimedia powerhouse, Silicon Graphics had both the Indigo2 and Onyx for those who needed more power, Adobe Photoshop 2.0 and 2.5 with the new one-pass color flatbed scanners made color desktop publishing a lot easier and a lot cheaper. You could even buy a good graphics card and 20" monitor bundle for less than $2500! Almost half of what that would have cost just 2 years earlier!!
Like all Quadras, the AV's also had onboard ethernet.
The text-to-speech and voice recognition were also pretty impressive for 1992, they made good use of the AT&T DSP that was soldered to the mobo.
My only complaint about the 660av and 840av was the lack of realtime video compression, you could capture video but you either needed a load of ram or a load of disk space as compression was done after capture. Thankfully Radius made a nice add-on board that did realtime MJPEG compression making the AV macs some very nice editing machines if you added VideoFusion, Avid VideoShop, or Adobe Premiere.
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Laporte's original TV gig, TheSite, was even better. See more here
TheSite was one of the first shows on MSNBC when it first came on the air. Unlike the other shows on the network, it was produced by ZDTV (long before they had their own channel). It was more classy, more professional, and yet seemed more interesting than anything on ZDTV/TechTV/G4.
Too bad it was canceled 2.5 years later, before most people had even heard of MSNBC, let alone the show itself.
I loved The Site, I watched it almost every weekday for about two years. They canceled it after preempting it with the Princess Diana death broadcasts.
The Site was the perfect blend of high tech news and tech-related interest stories. I never cared much for ZDTV/TechTV/G4, they were actually "too geeky" in a bad sort of way.
Leo Laporte was the voice and actor (motion caption) for the tech gossip character "DevNull" (Laporte's old radio handle). He was also "Technical Managing Producer" of the hour-long show, so he did most of his work behind the scenes. The show was actually recorded in the same studio where all of the TechTV shows were, except they had just one huge room, a "working set" where segments were recorded all day while researchers, TV show webmasters, and others were hard at work in the background. These people were often featured in their own segments. It was very cool to hear from the show's own tech people (the show's site was originally hosted on a SPARCstation 20 running Apache and connected to a single T1). I loved the little details like that. And yet they really didn't dwell on the really technical aspects.
Soledad O'Brian was a great host, I think that job fit her better than the current news gigs she does these days. There was also a really good band of reporters for the show, Craig Miller was awesome, I wonder what he's up to these days? Lots of people from the old science show days from KRON/Discovery Channel.
Cliff Stoll ended each weekday show with about 5 minutes of insight, rants, and stories from his home in Berkeley.
TheSite was a nice grounded "magazine" look into the dotcom world. They interviewed a lot of visionaries and up-and-coming people in the industry. Lots of cool viewpoints and persepctives. Too bad their budget didn't allow for travel beyond the SF Bay / Silicon Valley area.
I really miss TheSite, but there won't even be anything like it. Even in it's best days, The Screen Savers was just a bunch of unwashed geeks hanging around Leo Laporte. Lots of geek details, flash, and no substance. *sigh*
AFAIK, Google only logs the IP address, search query, and time/date. This helps the company track usage, patterns, and gives them a huge database of real-world search strings for testing.
I recall hearing about this when Google first spoke up about its massive server farms and distributed storage. From what I recall, their logs are spread across all of their servers as well.
I think it would be neat to bring up a list of all of the Google search queries requested via my IP address. It would be fun to see what sort of stuff I was looking at several years ago... "Windows 2000 Reviews", "linux 2.4 kernel new features", etc.
Unless you're still using a 486, you shouldn't have to worry about JPEG decompression using up your CPU cycles. It doesn't require that much power.
That said, I do wish libjpeg was faster and actually made significant use of SSE. Intel's optimized jpeg routines are way WAY faster.
Pokey the Penguin never needed any publicity!
http://www.yellow5.com/pokey/
Chinese Dentist Ono Holiday was almost as good!
http://www.fat-rat.com/ONO/
HOORAY!
>> like IRIX -- I could give 10 good solid reasons, but I leave
>> them out for brevity
>
> I'm curious. I heard years ago that it wasn't very secure. But it
> runs on exceedingly high-end stuff. And there was the whole
> excellent support for OpenGL thing. So from a completely
> outsider perspective, what's not to like?
Prior to IRIX 6.5 (1998), it was a pain to maintain and secure. It was also unstable, especially on the newer/faster hardware.
6.5.x has helped a lot. It's far more secure out of the box, but an experienced UNIX administrator will still have to spend at least 5 minutes disabling accounts and services to secure the machine, but it's way easier than securing Solaris. The RedHat style chkconfig is nice too. As SGI lost their hardware performance edge, I think they started to focus on stabilizing their software.
6.5.x also has a quarterly update of bug fixes, new features, and security updates. (SGI does release interim patches for the past year's worth of IRIX versions) Makes administration much easier than the painful mess of patches that was IRIX 5.3 and 6.2.
OpenGL support is rock-solid... for OpenGL 1.2 and earlier. It's been ages since SGI has done much with IRIX graphics.
Overall I like IRIX way more than Solaris. But it's a moot point. Solaris is the dominant oldschool commerical UNIX. A modern SGI system uses Itanium2 processors and SuSE, not IRIX.
SGI's MIPS-based machines (and their first NT PC too) used an ARCS PROM and SASH bootloader. These come from the Advanced RISC Computing Specification, back in the pre-Pentium days when people thought Intel was about to drop into obscurity.
SASH is pretty slick, actually.
It is like the entire computer is full of shareware
The only piece of "shareware" I have seen that comes with Mac OS X is the Quicktime Player mentioned above. The basic / free version has several of the menu options removed. Just like the Windows version. But as others have pointed out, you can use a quick applescript to reenable these features. Everything else that ships with Mac OS X are the full, complete versions.
There are several freeware movie players for Mac OS X that are far better than Quicktime Player. They can play just as many file formats too as Quicktime Player is just a front-end to the Quicktime libraries. There are also some other apps that come with Mac OS X that'll do the fullscreen trick for you.
"DVD Player" is how you watch DVD movies on a Mac. It comes with the OS and it can play full screen with the click of a button or keystroke.
iMovie is for editing home videos, it can play your quicktime movies full screen for you if you want.
iDVD is for authoring DVD movies, it can preview your (converted to MPEG2) quicktime movies full screen for you if you want.
By the time they retire it's possible that they will be older than the grandparents, even the great-grandparents of their pilots.
:)
Interestingly NASA's B52 is the oldest in terms of when it was built, but has the least flying hours on it.
The plane you speak of is NASA's B-52A, built in about 1952. From what I've read, it also has many parts from later B-52s, making it a B-52ABCDEFG
NASA just recently retired that B-52A and replaced it with a shiny new B-52H that's only 45 years old!
I'm pretty sure their old B-52A is headed for a museum as it was the plane used to carry and release thelegendary X-15 as well as the X-38 and more recently the X-43 scramjet. I think they also used it to test the parachute breaking system that the shuttle uses.
Russian commercial aircraft are flying older for the same reason that Boeing B-52(G)s designed in 1947 and updated throughout the 1950s are.
Just to pick nits: the active B-52 fleet is made up of B-52(H) models, which were built in 1960, making them a few years newer than the B-52(G). The "newer" H models have more efficient and more powerful engines than the G, and had numerous other improvements. The difference between the B-52(H) and B-52(G) is significant. The difference between the B-52(H) and B-52(A) from 1952 is HUGE!
AFAIK, the B-52(G), which were actively used in Gulf War I, are currently sitting in the desert to be chopped up. The B-52(H) are currently flying out of Barksdale, Louisiana, and Minot, North Dakota.
But back to your point, yeah, the B-52 dates back to the 1940s and aside from some modern computers and sensors, is still flying today with mostly 1950s technology.
Another old bird is the KC-135, the military version of the Boeing 707 4 engine jet (very similar to the Douglas DC-8). There are still a huge number of these birds flying in the US military for cargo, in-flight refueling, and intel/AWACS. The KC-135 is almost as old as the B-52 and was designed by the same group of engineers.
Hey, and who needs water? There's a few of those non-wetting liquids that we could use. Flow them around the die itself for maximum heat transfer!
u mp/microelectronic/moww_et_collage.jpg
That's what Cray does. They spray the stuff directly onto the dice to utilize evaporative cooling.
http://www.idexpositivepumpcare.com/images/microp
Swiftech is my guess as the first who will offer widespread, professional watercooling solutions for 1U rack-mount water cooling solutions using the Laing DDC pump, rebadged as the MCP350. I don't think any of the other big players in that industry currently have the products or expertise to pull it off in the near future.
Yeah, I bet Dell or HP can't figure out how to do that.
*rolls eyes*
Actually, given some of the recent decisions made by HP, they probably couldn't!
You're right. I guess I should have said "liquid cooling".
Like the original Cray 1, the current Cray X1E uses Fluorinert to cool the system itself (check out the swanky video of the Fluorinert vapor jets on cray.com!). There's also a loop of some sort of refrigerant between the heat exchanger indoors and the cooling tower outdoors.
I agree, both solutions would help. Our room is a nice cool 62.5. Best condtions to work in!
We keep ours at 73 degrees, about 2 degrees warmer than the rest of the building. We did the 60 degree thing for awhile, but it required quite a bit more electricity to maintain that temp. The servers work fine at 80 degrees, but 73 is more comfortable and provides a little more cushion.
Maybe my ignorance is showing here, but does any installation use outside air for cooling? It seems that it would make sense in places that have cold winters (like here in the midwest).
You'd need a lot of filtering and/or humidity control to make that a realistic option. Better yet to make use of outside air temperature. Which is exactly what your heatpump loop or your AC cooling tower is for.
Blade servers are a noble start. Less duplication of power supplies and network gear. I imagine the situation will continue to get better over time.
Duplication is nice in some respects, more redundancy is a big plus. That and you actually have several useful machines when you finally tear it all down. Who's going to buy 3 blades off ebay when they can't afford the backplane to plug 'em into?
Unlike most companies that are considering going back to water cooling, Cray has always used water cooling for their big iron. In fact, the only air cooled Crays are the lower end or smaller configured systems.
All hail the Cray X1E !
Mac OS X?
I always thought Chip was a Linux user?
>> I noticed that Bill Gates was one of the 1st people to do this, ..yeah, cause I'm sure the cost is a big concern for him huh?
>> even when the cost was super high
>
>
You don't get rich by writing checks!
I don't really care about the size of the screen, I would just plug the movie player gizmo into the nearest TV or monitor anyway.
What I care about is the physical size of the gizmo itself!
I would much rather carry around an iPod than a PSP!
Whoa! Blackbox was finally updated?!?
What next? An update to linuxconf? An update to fvwm95?
Blackbox has been working great on my machines for 4+ years. This new version looks kind of neat but I'm in no rush to upgrade just for AA fonts. EWMH complance doesn't mean anything to me.
Some people have had good luck with Illustrator and Photoshop on Mac OS X, but let me tell you about my experience:
Illustrator 8 and Photoshop 6 ran great on Mac OS 9. In fact, they were some of the most stable applications I used on the "classic" Mac OS.
Now I'm running Mac OS X, along with Illustrator CS and Photoshop CS. But get this... all of my other applications have been rock solid, but the new Adobe apps have been crashing at least once a week.
Hmm...
The early 1990s only sucked if you were forced to use a 486 with a 14" VGA monitor.
1992 was a great year for computing!
Apple's Quadra 840av was a multimedia powerhouse, Silicon Graphics had both the Indigo2 and Onyx for those who needed more power, Adobe Photoshop 2.0 and 2.5 with the new one-pass color flatbed scanners made color desktop publishing a lot easier and a lot cheaper. You could even buy a good graphics card and 20" monitor bundle for less than $2500! Almost half of what that would have cost just 2 years earlier!!
1992 rocked, for me at least.
Like all Quadras, the AV's also had onboard ethernet.
The text-to-speech and voice recognition were also pretty impressive for 1992, they made good use of the AT&T DSP that was soldered to the mobo.
My only complaint about the 660av and 840av was the lack of realtime video compression, you could capture video but you either needed a load of ram or a load of disk space as compression was done after capture. Thankfully Radius made a nice add-on board that did realtime MJPEG compression making the AV macs some very nice editing machines if you added VideoFusion, Avid VideoShop, or Adobe Premiere.