I found VS6 to be better than VS.Net. VS.Net 2004 is better than the first version.
Of the dozens of Win32 developers I know, most are still using VS6. It's not the latest, but it works well without being too much. Obviously C# /.net developers need a newer version... and the newer versions also have better compilers (but Intel's extra-cost compilers are even better yet).
Also announced were new monitors, that use DVI this time!! USB and Firewire hubs built in. Aluminum to match the G5. Smallest is 20" widescreen, largest is 30" (2560x1600, requires the DDL version of the GeForce 8600 Ultra).
Is there a modern GUI toolkit that relies only upon OpenGL? With GLUT to handle keys and mouse, it would be very easy to port I would imagine. Sort of like the IRISgl widgets SGI used back in the IRIX 3.0 - 5.3 days?
With themes you could match the host's look-and-feel. Or you could have your own totally different look. I don't mind apps that have their own look... it's the "almost native" look that bugs me.
(Of course, SGI eventually moved to Motif for their widgets and morphed IRISgl into OpenGL, using it generally for graphics only)
Does anyone know if any of the modern popular game consoles support OpenGL?
I would have to agree with you on this. In my experience, portability takes more time but (generally) ensures quality. What breaks on Linux might not break on Windows, exposing a potental problem. I find more bugs in my code by porting than with any other bug-hunting technique. Many are minor and often don't even affect the user in that exact revision of the app. BUT, it's these little things that cause major problems down the road when I modify or change certain features.
For a commercial example, look at Quake 3, I think Carmack's portability (Win32, Linux, MacOS Classic [and later, Mac OS X]) helped a great deal. Q3A was fairly lightweight for its abilities and ran decent on just about any platform with a decent graphics card. (Now we're getting into hardware details, but I digress)
hybrid turbodiesel 2 or 3 seater would be very cool.
I'd be happy with a modern (common-rail direct injection) 500 - 750 cc turbodiesel and a 5 speed stick. This would give great fuel economy without requiring the added complexity of a hybrid drivetrain. Diesel is simple and reliable, no need to add on a genset and batteries. How I wish BMW offered a small turbodiesel in the 3-series for the American market......
I wonder if you could take advantage of the diesel's torque to implement some sort of oversized flywheel for energy storage...
BTW, have you seen the numbers on the new Mercedes CDI diesel? Same size displacement as their 3.2 L V6... Gasoline: 221 HP, 232 ft-lbs torque.... Turbodiesel: 201 HP, 369 ft-lbs torque (at a lower rpm, no less!) ((Granted BMW and pretty much anyone in Japan can crank out more HP in a 3.2 L gasoline car than Mercedes can... I just found the numbers from two fairly modern engines from the same company to be quite interesting))
My last techie girlfriend owned a Wallstreet model Powerbook *shudder*
I know several people that still use their Wallstreet PowerBook G3s, mostly writers. Those machines came in 9 flavors: 233 MHz, 266 MHz, 300 MHz; 12", 13", 14" LCD. Ability to use two batteries. Thicker and heavier duty than the Lombard and Pismo PowerBook G3s. Awesome keyboard. Dedicated MPEG-2 DVD decoder available on a CardBus card.
It's a time machine, though, I think Wallstreet/Mainstreet came out in 1998. Most of the folks that I know who still use theirs have stuck with Mac OS 8.6, 9.1, or 9.2.2. They generally use MS Office 1998 or 2001 (or Nisus Writer). For that, it works great.
OS X 10.3 is awesome, but you really need a Pismo PowerBook G3 to get good performance.... 400 MHz G3 and Rage128 graphics (plus USB and Firewire) makes for a good OS X experience. Actually, I don't think 10.3 will install on a Wallstreet anymore, at least not without using Xpostfacto to help start the install. Which is sad and odd, considering that 10.3 runs much faster than 10.1 or 10.2.... even (or especially) when using an oldschool CRT iMac.
Can you expand on your comment about Altix? My department is about to make a purchase decision and an Altix machine will be in the mix (agains a p690 and something from HP).
There's nothing wrong with the Altix, it's actually an amazing piece of kit. (Provided the task you're working with can make use of the Itanium2 and needs insane amounts of interconnect bandwidth with very low latency).
Altix, like any other big machine, is expensive. When it comes to price, it's no cluster. (Well, I suppose you could cluster a bunch of Altix 350s, but why bother when you can use real NUMAlink?)
The zdnet version I read earlier said it'd run OS X, at least initially, but they might explore running Red Hat or Yellowdog.
I have a feeling that as more time goes on, more and more Apple-based clusters will use OS X. Apple continues to optimize the OS. They also continue to add remote administration features (both GUI and command line) while at the same time keeping the BSD-ness of OS X as pure as possible. (OS X is based on NeXTstep and OPENSTEP, so it does have some oddities when compared to "pure" 4.4BSD or Free/Open/Net BSD).
There are also some Apple software cluster technologies (such as Xgrid) but I'm not sure if they're hardcore enough for something of this magnitude. Apple has mainly been aiming their cluster software and marketing towards the small-scale (10 to 100 notes) research groups.
$5.8 M is absolute peanuts in terms of US Military budgets. You can't even buy replacement engines for a KC-135 (of which there are hundreds in service for various tasks) for $5.8M.
This purchase is segment of a drop in the bucket. It won't even make a dent on the balance sheet. Cutbacks and low funding in other areas is a result of the net picture (stemming from policy and tradition...)
Just be glad they didn't buy $58.0 M worth of Cray X1 or SGI Altix gear.
If you want the best % of drive utilization go for raid 5. It works by Striping the data across 2 drives then XORing the data on the 3rd drive.
That makes a little more sense, but it still seems like black magic to me. In the case of a big array, how can that one parity drive recover the data from any one dead drive? Is it because most of the data is striped across the rest od the drives? How about the case of just a 3-drive RAID-5 with 250 GB drives... two data drives (500 GB total) plus one parity drive. If one drive dies, now you only have half of the stripe data (just 250 GB worth of the stripe... every other block I suppose). But the parity drive, which is also 250 GB is built of parity data for BOTH drives. How that can work is complete black magic to me. It seems like data is being pulled out of the thin air.
If you can explain this to me, please do so!:)
Related question: would RAID 5 still work if the data stored was purely random (say from a bingo cage) numbers?
If you set the aqua color to "graphite" in the appearance control panel, you'll replace the blue with a nice grayscale theme. It looks very nice with brushed metal and blends in better with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro's look.
There are also some 3rd party tools to change the entire theme itself.
Despite my UPSes, I still find it reassuring that I can pick up my telephone at any time and get a dial tone. If I'm away from home for 5 days, and the power has been out the whole time, I can still come home and pick up the phone, expecting it to work.
I live in a rural area where the power co-op often doesn't know about outages until someone reports them. I'm at the end of a line, and I've had outages that have only affected me.
It's also nice to know that in an emergency, someone can come into my house and make an emergency call. It's also nice to know that I could probably make a call from another farmhouse too.
Cell phone coverage is awful here. We have three competiting technologies with very few towers each. Hooray for lack of standards in rual America! Thankfully we do have 1 MBit "Reach" (Paradyne Hotwire MVL) SDSL!:) I can't complain about 768/768 that works fine 8 miles from the telco shed.
Now, I don't mind if telcos upgrade their aging first-generation DS1 and DS3 gear for the longhaul trunks. But where I live that's already been done. Lots of fibre connecting the hick towns, gotta love RTC grants!
You've got to be kidding. Plenty of hosts on Clear Channel criticize Bush regularly. Removing the Dixie Chicks from playlists was done in response to listener demand, not some partisan decision from management.
You know, I keep hearing about this Dixie Chicks ban too, but from the two Clear Channel country stations (in two different cities) I've listened to, both have been playing the Dixie Chicks quite a bit over the past 18 months. And, from what I understand, Clear Channel HQ has access to all playlists and logs, so it's not like they don't know about it...
Possibly because we all had Apple laptops that weren't burning our laps?
Unlike my 300 MHz Wallstreet PowerBook G3, my 550 MHz Titanium PowerBook G4 was just as hot-running as any PC notebook I've seen. Not comfortable for lap use for more than 20 minutes. Oddly enough, my new 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 runs much cooler... improved design? It's not any louder either. Might have something to do with the switch from titanium to aluminum.
The tray-load CD (266 or 333 MHz, 66 MHz FSB, RagePro) or the slot-load CD (350+ MHz, 100 MHz FSB, Rage128) version? The slot-load models are **much** faster under OS X. If you have a tray-load version, you may want to consider running a flavor of Linux.
If you can, round up one or two sticks of RAM to upgrade the machine to 384 MB or more. If you're going with OS X, try to use 10.3.x, it's much faster than previous versions... not so important for a G4, but for a little G3-based iMac like you have, it will make a big difference.
No, the problem is that they were using a flashy desktop scheme instead of simplifying it first. And since this is a Mac GUI, I'm not sure that they really had any good alternatives (such as a low-color or greyscale scheme).
I think there's a monochrome "haxie" on the web somewhere, but no such low color scheme available from Apple.
There is, however, a monochome theme built in to OS X, in the Appearance control panel there's a choice of either Aqua or "Graphite" (grayscale) for the widgets. I personally use graphite, the bright blue is pretty nasty.
Does anyone know if Mac OS X 10.3.4 has better USB drive performance? I see that the release notes mention USB fixes/changes since 10.3.3, but it is not much more specific than that.
GIF really makes that screenshot look bad. The gradent in the window bar was reduced to just two colors and the icons and RAID tab are a dithered mess.
Back in the "what possible use would anyone have for 3D?" days, Silicon Graphics made gobs of 3D utilities such as this. Many exist today as viewers for their (awesome) Performance CoPilot system for IRIX and Linux. Over time they learned that most admins perfer text most of the time. But man, fddivis on a large monitor sure does make the NOC look way more productive to the suits!!
They even had a 3D intra-website link manager at one time!
USR and the Courier modem...
on
The 3Com Saga
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· Score: 1
I knew USR was on the downswing when it took ages for their Courier modem to get a firmware upgrade to V.90, and again to V.92.
The Courier, for those in the dialup set, was the gold standard for modems after Hayes left the market. If you needed reliability and had the money, you used the beefy Courier. Not too common in homes, but sighted all over the business world.
What huge city did the original poster come from? Since when is a city of 15,000 people a hick town? When someone says "hicksville" I tend to picture a town of 200 - 2000 people. The type with two gas stations, a bar or two, maybe a resturant, and nothing more.
have you even heard *anything* about 3com lately?
on
The 3Com Saga
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· Score: 1
A buddy and I were talking about 3com not too long ago. The conversation came about when I asked him "hmm, have you even heard anything about 3com lately?". 10 years ago, people were buying 3com 10BaseT switches and hubs like crazy. 6 years ago, 3com 100BaseT switches were the norm. But today? Do you even know anyone (large business, small business, or otherwise?) that has bought 3com gear lately?
Maybe the disconnected ring in their new logo had a real meaning!
On the flip side, companies like Extreme Networks have been putting out some amazing switches lately.
Slashdot Mirror
I found VS6 to be better than VS.Net. VS.Net 2004 is better than the first version.
.net developers need a newer version... and the newer versions also have better compilers (but Intel's extra-cost compilers are even better yet).
Of the dozens of Win32 developers I know, most are still using VS6. It's not the latest, but it works well without being too much. Obviously C# /
Also announced were new monitors, that use DVI this time!! USB and Firewire hubs built in. Aluminum to match the G5. Smallest is 20" widescreen, largest is 30" (2560x1600, requires the DDL version of the GeForce 8600 Ultra).
More details at Apple.com.
This rises an intersting question:
Is there a modern GUI toolkit that relies only upon OpenGL? With GLUT to handle keys and mouse, it would be very easy to port I would imagine. Sort of like the IRISgl widgets SGI used back in the IRIX 3.0 - 5.3 days?
With themes you could match the host's look-and-feel. Or you could have your own totally different look. I don't mind apps that have their own look... it's the "almost native" look that bugs me.
(Of course, SGI eventually moved to Motif for their widgets and morphed IRISgl into OpenGL, using it generally for graphics only)
Does anyone know if any of the modern popular game consoles support OpenGL?
I would have to agree with you on this. In my experience, portability takes more time but (generally) ensures quality. What breaks on Linux might not break on Windows, exposing a potental problem. I find more bugs in my code by porting than with any other bug-hunting technique. Many are minor and often don't even affect the user in that exact revision of the app. BUT, it's these little things that cause major problems down the road when I modify or change certain features.
For a commercial example, look at Quake 3, I think Carmack's portability (Win32, Linux, MacOS Classic [and later, Mac OS X]) helped a great deal. Q3A was fairly lightweight for its abilities and ran decent on just about any platform with a decent graphics card. (Now we're getting into hardware details, but I digress)
Ted Kennedy's 1967 Oldsmobile has killed more people in the USA than all of our nuclear power plant accidents combined.
To clarify:
In the USA, Ted Kennedy's 1967 Oldsmobile has killed more people than all of our nuclear power plant accidents combined.
Anyone know who first said this? I'm thinking it originally came from Rush Limbaugh, but I'm not quite certain.
Did you learn nothing from Three Mile Island?
Ted Kennedy's 1967 Oldsmobile has killed more people in the USA than all of our nuclear power plant accidents combined.
hybrid turbodiesel 2 or 3 seater would be very cool.
I'd be happy with a modern (common-rail direct injection) 500 - 750 cc turbodiesel and a 5 speed stick. This would give great fuel economy without requiring the added complexity of a hybrid drivetrain. Diesel is simple and reliable, no need to add on a genset and batteries. How I wish BMW offered a small turbodiesel in the 3-series for the American market......
I wonder if you could take advantage of the diesel's torque to implement some sort of oversized flywheel for energy storage...
BTW, have you seen the numbers on the new Mercedes CDI diesel? Same size displacement as their 3.2 L V6... Gasoline: 221 HP, 232 ft-lbs torque.... Turbodiesel: 201 HP, 369 ft-lbs torque (at a lower rpm, no less!)
((Granted BMW and pretty much anyone in Japan can crank out more HP in a 3.2 L gasoline car than Mercedes can... I just found the numbers from two fairly modern engines from the same company to be quite interesting))
My last techie girlfriend owned a Wallstreet model Powerbook *shudder*
I know several people that still use their Wallstreet PowerBook G3s, mostly writers. Those machines came in 9 flavors: 233 MHz, 266 MHz, 300 MHz; 12", 13", 14" LCD. Ability to use two batteries. Thicker and heavier duty than the Lombard and Pismo PowerBook G3s. Awesome keyboard. Dedicated MPEG-2 DVD decoder available on a CardBus card.
It's a time machine, though, I think Wallstreet/Mainstreet came out in 1998. Most of the folks that I know who still use theirs have stuck with Mac OS 8.6, 9.1, or 9.2.2. They generally use MS Office 1998 or 2001 (or Nisus Writer). For that, it works great.
OS X 10.3 is awesome, but you really need a Pismo PowerBook G3 to get good performance.... 400 MHz G3 and Rage128 graphics (plus USB and Firewire) makes for a good OS X experience. Actually, I don't think 10.3 will install on a Wallstreet anymore, at least not without using Xpostfacto to help start the install. Which is sad and odd, considering that 10.3 runs much faster than 10.1 or 10.2.... even (or especially) when using an oldschool CRT iMac.
Can you expand on your comment about Altix? My department is about to make a purchase decision and an Altix machine will be in the mix (agains a p690 and something from HP).
There's nothing wrong with the Altix, it's actually an amazing piece of kit. (Provided the task you're working with can make use of the Itanium2 and needs insane amounts of interconnect bandwidth with very low latency).
Altix, like any other big machine, is expensive. When it comes to price, it's no cluster. (Well, I suppose you could cluster a bunch of Altix 350s, but why bother when you can use real NUMAlink?)
The zdnet version I read earlier said it'd run OS X, at least initially, but they might explore running Red Hat or Yellowdog.
I have a feeling that as more time goes on, more and more Apple-based clusters will use OS X. Apple continues to optimize the OS. They also continue to add remote administration features (both GUI and command line) while at the same time keeping the BSD-ness of OS X as pure as possible. (OS X is based on NeXTstep and OPENSTEP, so it does have some oddities when compared to "pure" 4.4BSD or Free/Open/Net BSD).
There are also some Apple software cluster technologies (such as Xgrid) but I'm not sure if they're hardcore enough for something of this magnitude. Apple has mainly been aiming their cluster software and marketing towards the small-scale (10 to 100 notes) research groups.
>> "US$5.8 million"
$5.8 M is absolute peanuts in terms of US Military budgets. You can't even buy replacement engines for a KC-135 (of which there are hundreds in service for various tasks) for $5.8M.
This purchase is segment of a drop in the bucket. It won't even make a dent on the balance sheet. Cutbacks and low funding in other areas is a result of the net picture (stemming from policy and tradition...)
Just be glad they didn't buy $58.0 M worth of Cray X1 or SGI Altix gear.
If you want the best % of drive utilization go for raid 5. It works by Striping the data across 2 drives then XORing the data on the 3rd drive.
:)
That makes a little more sense, but it still seems like black magic to me. In the case of a big array, how can that one parity drive recover the data from any one dead drive? Is it because most of the data is striped across the rest od the drives? How about the case of just a 3-drive RAID-5 with 250 GB drives... two data drives (500 GB total) plus one parity drive. If one drive dies, now you only have half of the stripe data (just 250 GB worth of the stripe... every other block I suppose). But the parity drive, which is also 250 GB is built of parity data for BOTH drives. How that can work is complete black magic to me. It seems like data is being pulled out of the thin air.
If you can explain this to me, please do so!
Related question: would RAID 5 still work if the data stored was purely random (say from a bingo cage) numbers?
If you set the aqua color to "graphite" in the appearance control panel, you'll replace the blue with a nice grayscale theme. It looks very nice with brushed metal and blends in better with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro's look.
There are also some 3rd party tools to change the entire theme itself.
Despite my UPSes, I still find it reassuring that I can pick up my telephone at any time and get a dial tone. If I'm away from home for 5 days, and the power has been out the whole time, I can still come home and pick up the phone, expecting it to work.
:) I can't complain about 768/768 that works fine 8 miles from the telco shed.
I live in a rural area where the power co-op often doesn't know about outages until someone reports them. I'm at the end of a line, and I've had outages that have only affected me.
It's also nice to know that in an emergency, someone can come into my house and make an emergency call. It's also nice to know that I could probably make a call from another farmhouse too.
Cell phone coverage is awful here. We have three competiting technologies with very few towers each. Hooray for lack of standards in rual America! Thankfully we do have 1 MBit "Reach" (Paradyne Hotwire MVL) SDSL!
Now, I don't mind if telcos upgrade their aging first-generation DS1 and DS3 gear for the longhaul trunks. But where I live that's already been done. Lots of fibre connecting the hick towns, gotta love RTC grants!
You've got to be kidding. Plenty of hosts on Clear Channel criticize Bush regularly. Removing the Dixie Chicks from playlists was done in response to listener demand, not some partisan decision from management.
You know, I keep hearing about this Dixie Chicks ban too, but from the two Clear Channel country stations (in two different cities) I've listened to, both have been playing the Dixie Chicks quite a bit over the past 18 months. And, from what I understand, Clear Channel HQ has access to all playlists and logs, so it's not like they don't know about it...
Possibly because we all had Apple laptops that weren't burning our laps?
Unlike my 300 MHz Wallstreet PowerBook G3, my 550 MHz Titanium PowerBook G4 was just as hot-running as any PC notebook I've seen. Not comfortable for lap use for more than 20 minutes. Oddly enough, my new 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 runs much cooler... improved design? It's not any louder either. Might have something to do with the switch from titanium to aluminum.
The tray-load CD (266 or 333 MHz, 66 MHz FSB, RagePro) or the slot-load CD (350+ MHz, 100 MHz FSB, Rage128) version? The slot-load models are **much** faster under OS X. If you have a tray-load version, you may want to consider running a flavor of Linux.
If you can, round up one or two sticks of RAM to upgrade the machine to 384 MB or more. If you're going with OS X, try to use 10.3.x, it's much faster than previous versions... not so important for a G4, but for a little G3-based iMac like you have, it will make a big difference.
Thou shalt not use a pair of HTML tags without using Preview first!!!!
No, the problem is that they were using a flashy desktop scheme instead of simplifying it first. And since this is a Mac GUI, I'm not sure that they really had any good alternatives (such as a low-color or greyscale scheme).
I think there's a monochrome "haxie" on the web somewhere, but no such low color scheme available from Apple.
There is, however, a monochome theme built in to OS X, in the Appearance control panel there's a choice of either Aqua or "Graphite" (grayscale) for the widgets. I personally use graphite, the bright blue is pretty nasty.
Does anyone know if Mac OS X 10.3.4 has better USB drive performance? I see that the release notes mention USB fixes/changes since 10.3.3, but it is not much more specific than that.
Thou Shalt Not Use GIF for Screenshots!
f
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/004/flash/RAID0.gi
GIF really makes that screenshot look bad. The gradent in the window bar was reduced to just two colors and the icons and RAID tab are a dithered mess.
Back in the "what possible use would anyone have for 3D?" days, Silicon Graphics made gobs of 3D utilities such as this. Many exist today as viewers for their (awesome) Performance CoPilot system for IRIX and Linux. Over time they learned that most admins perfer text most of the time. But man, fddivis on a large monitor sure does make the NOC look way more productive to the suits!!
They even had a 3D intra-website link manager at one time!
I knew USR was on the downswing when it took ages for their Courier modem to get a firmware upgrade to V.90, and again to V.92.
The Courier, for those in the dialup set, was the gold standard for modems after Hayes left the market. If you needed reliability and had the money, you used the beefy Courier. Not too common in homes, but sighted all over the business world.
What huge city did the original poster come from? Since when is a city of 15,000 people a hick town? When someone says "hicksville" I tend to picture a town of 200 - 2000 people. The type with two gas stations, a bar or two, maybe a resturant, and nothing more.
A buddy and I were talking about 3com not too long ago. The conversation came about when I asked him "hmm, have you even heard anything about 3com lately?". 10 years ago, people were buying 3com 10BaseT switches and hubs like crazy. 6 years ago, 3com 100BaseT switches were the norm. But today? Do you even know anyone (large business, small business, or otherwise?) that has bought 3com gear lately?
Maybe the disconnected ring in their new logo had a real meaning!
On the flip side, companies like Extreme Networks have been putting out some amazing switches lately.