SGI could easily compete in the post dot bomb economy in new area's that complement it's high end graphics systems.. gaming is the child of SGI (and others) excellent work, an industry meant to be worth much much more than the cd sales market...
Not saying they should make consoles, but imagine! your P4 4.01ghz playing HalfLife 3, with an SGI video card...mmmmm!
I often wonder why SGI hasn't tried to do the console thing again. They were the real brains behind the Ultra64 arcade game (and later, Nintendo 64) architecture.
These days SGI's strengths are in it's system architecture and OS skillz.... their OS (IRIX) can run on anything from an Indy to a 512 processor Origin 3000. With a special kernel, it can run on a 1024 processor beast. These are single system image machines... not clusters.
3D chipsets are best left to NVidia, ATI, and 3DLabs, let those companies kill each other over the latest buzzwords. If you have an insane need, SGI does have the Infinite Realitty 4, which has 11 GB of gfx ram and texture manipulation hardware from hell. Keep in mind an IR4 subsystem will take up half of a rack and requires a pretty beefy SGI host.
I work at a DoD facilty that is on the brink of buying a 2048 CPU Origin 3900. We get machines of this class every other year. Nothing excites the 'eggheads' like an SGI.
One of the coolest things of such a machine is booting the entire beast from a single hard drive. For those that don't already know this, SGI's Origin and Altix systems are single image machines, not clusters. 512 processors in a single machine (1024 and 2048 processors with a special kernel). The current Origin 3900 architecture doesn't physically scale past 2048, though.
Well yes it'll cost a lot more since you'd have to have AutoCad ported to Irix and there's no such thing as Alias anymore.
Back when Alias still existed, there was an IRIX version of AutoCAD... and SunOS version as well. Corel Draw was also available for many flavors of unix.
Yep, but they're BIG, insanely high bandwidth beats. 512 and 1024 processor, single-image machines (not clusters).
If SGI were to die, I'm sure the NSA would buy up the patents so they could continue with their work.
And for those that claim the MIPS R14K is too far behind, keep in mind that the Altix series of machines uses the exact same Origin 3000 architecture, but with the Itanium2 (and soon, Madison) processor and Linux OS. Altix is currently limited to 64 processors due to kernel scaling issues... but give SGI and Linus time and they'll have 512 processor Linux machines too.
Here's an interesting tidbit from SGI's site... some performance numbers of Intel's Madison (next generation Itanium) on SGI's Altix (Linux/Itanium-based machine running on Origin 3000 architecture)
The machine is limited to 64 processors per single-system image (O3K can handle up to 512 out of the box, or 1024 with a special kernel) but the Itanium2 is about 2x as fast as the MIPS R14K... plus the Itanium system can run a very slightly modified linux distribution (currently Red Hat plus SGI's ProPack kernel patches and additional utilities).
Pretty neat stuff for the high-end Linux market. Of course, the number of people that need Origin/Altix level system I/O is pretty slim...
See my other post. These already exist from at least one company (DeepVideo). SGI and a few other companies are even supporting the mutliple layers in the software development kits. MutliLayerDisplays are a neat idea for certain tasks and make for a very cool demo. But not quite as cool as the true stereo displays (again, see my previous post).
I got to play with a few such monitors at the Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) developer conference last week. Deep Video Imaging has a multilayer display, exactly as you described. Also, SeeReal has a truely stereo (one image per eye) monitor that works by tracking the user's eye position. The downside of the SeeReal monitor is the lack of support for more than one user at a time.
The display you're thinking of is a MultiLayerDisplay made by Deep Video Imaging.
The top layer is a mostly transparent LCD (not perfectly transparent, but close enough) and the bottom layer is a standard LCD with a powerful backlight. The effect is amazing!
I saw this display and a few others at SGI's developer conference last week -- gobs of really cool stereo 3D and psuedo-stereo 3D monitors. The coolest was one by SeeReal, a display that tracks the position of the user's eyes to provide a true stereo image without needing any special eyewear. The downside of most of the displays is that they're designed for one user only.
Texas Tech and FEMA have a lot of info on the subj
on
Surviving Tornadoes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Texas Tech University (the folks that invented the 2x4 launcher for testing the strength of building siding and other fun games) and FEMI have put together a lot of Tornado survival info over the years.
While I agree that a modern PC will be much faster than any O2 (that machine is 7 years old, good grief!), I do have to point out a few things...
unless you were attached to those funny 4 bit visuals on the O2s Do you mean 5-bit visuals? The two most common visuals on O2 were RGBA5551 (common for analog video work) and 8-bit visuals -- RGBA8888 (common for everything else, but slightly slower for realtime video).
Some OpenGL extensions are not available (think those funky SGI, SGIS, SGIX ones, and ARB_multitexture is just different than SGIS_multitexture) Most of the funky SGI extensions from that era are now available in one form or another in OpenGL 1.3 and 1.4.
Even if you compare PCs to Octanes, Octane 2s or Fuels, the PCs wins Fuel blows... while its faster for single CPU tasks than Octane/Octane2 due to its use of Origin3000 parts, it's limited to one CPU and its only XIO interface is used for graphics. Everything else hangs of a single 64/66 PCI bus. It's a good workstation if you need IRIX, but it's pretty much worthless for most tasks people use SGIs for in the first place! Octane/Octane2 still has its uses. It no longer leads the performance or RAM capacity race, but it can still outperform most PCs for real-world information processing due to its architecture. Granted, your application has to be written for the platform. Common uses of the Octane are MRI scanner processing, front end to an Origin supercomputer, and realtime visual effects work on HD material (IFX Piranha, Jaleo, MuleHD, Discreet Flame and Smoke). This type of work often involves mutliple maxed out channels of fibrechannel, uncompressed HD video interfaces, and sometimes a GSN (HIPPI 6400) 800 Megabytes/sec connection to one or more larger SGIs. Octane makes for a pretty lousy 3D modeling box these days as cards such as the 3DLabsWildcat 7210 or VP990 atop a modern PC can simply outperfom any SGI config for that type of task and do so for a lower cost.
Other points:
The O2 was a 32-bit machine. Even with an R10K or R12K CPU shoehorned in, the O2 was limited to 32-bit addressing and pointers. It did, however, still use the full 64-bit IRIX OS with large filesystem and file support.
One area where you may find a problem in porting your software is texture usage. Because the O2 used system ram for everything, it could handle up to about 900 MB of textures without any sort of swapping or transfering. While there are a few apps that make use of this, most don't and you're unlikely to run into such a situation with your applications... but it is something to keep in mind. If you need a lot of textures, consider the 3DLabs V990 as it can handle about 400 MB worth.
The O2 is about 7 years old. While it did have some specific uses and advantages (mainly video and high texture usage), it was not quite a powerhouse when it was originally announced. O2 replaced the low end Indy... both were 32-bit machines with significant memory limits. (Indy was limited to 256 MB RAM, O2 was limited to 1 GB RAM).
It was the R10K Indigo2 and its replacement, the Octane that were the 64-bit desktop beasts back in their days.
You'll find the Linux PC to be much faster. The O2 had its advantages back in its day, but is has been 7 years since the introduction of its architecture and gfx chips. I'd be willing to bet that your replacement workstation will have a faster CPU, faster memory, faster graphics, and a faster hard drive. A lot of new tech pops up in 7 years.
One of the best original uses for O2 was graphics with a lot of textures. As O2 uses a shared bank of ram for everything, a texture could be nearly any size. Some crazy people even wrote demos that would fly over 800MB+ texture maps. The downside of O2 is the rather limited geometry performance. This is why many of the "Killer Apps" for O2 are in the video industry... such as controlling the weather graphics for The Weather Channel and for local TV stations. Not much geometry there, it's mostly textures and makes good use of the O2's built in analog video ports (or optional digital video card).
Another downside of O2 is its CPU performance. The machine was originally designed for the R5000 processor and as such, the R10K and R12K processors were basiclly hacked in. They don't even use the IRIX64 kernel that an Octane does! Plus performance is much lower. We've seen cases where a CPU benchmark on a 300 MHz R12K O2 is less than 40% of the score on a similar Octane. So they are clearly totally different machines with totally different uses.
I think you'll find modern Linux PCs to much much faster than your O2s, especially for CPU performance. Graphics should be much faster too, unless you had been using some very specific O2 features, but even then you'd have to have been using some very large textures to see a difference.
Keep in mind that the SGI O2 was first sold in 1996. Yep, 7 years ago. You're more than due for an upgrade!
Unfortunatly if Irix is better it might be too little too late for this dieing company. Isn't it true they sold opengl to Microsoft.
Brainless management, crazy high prices, and new MIPS processors behind schedule. There are gobs of reasons why SGI may tank soon. They do have a pretty cool new Linux/Itanium2 system based on Origin architecture. 512 GB RAM and 64 processors on a single linux box (not a cluster).
The biggest SGI is MIPS/IRIX based, though... up to 1024 processors and 1 TB ram on a single machine. Insane system thruput with a price to match! Unfortunately for SGI (and for Cray and their X1) there are only so many governments that can afford (or need the interprocessor thruput of) such huge machines.
SGI still has the rights to most of its technology and patents. They did, however, sell some tech to Microsoft just before the XBox launch. While it was never made public, it is belived the tech was several generalied 3D game console patents SGI filed when creating the Nintendo 64 and various Video-on-demand settop boxes.
OpenGL, while still "owned" by SGI, is mostly handled by the OpenGL board (opengl.org).
2) Install the security patches for your version of IRIX (note that IRIX releases previous to 6.5.15 will probably not have the most recent security patches available).
3) If you're a security newbie, run the "Improve System Security" application... it can be found under the Security and Access Control section of the System Manager.
IRIX has changed a lot over the past 6 years. At one point, a stock install of IRIX had almost a dozen root-exploitable holes. These days security holes in IRIX are rare, and are quickly patched by SGI. The company has gone a step further and has actually been making useful security suggestions to its customers. IRIX 6.5 includes a pointy-clicky GUI app to help its artsy users secure some common weaknesses.
For those that have been away from IRIX for awhile, even since 6.5.0 shipped, a lot has been added in recent years... IPFilter, SSH, Kerberos, and other security-aware goodies are now offically supported and have been added in IRIX updates.
IRIX is no OpenBSD, but it has come a LONG way to make itself more secure, especially over the past two years. These days it's on-par with most Linux and Unix distros... average is a pretty good step up from what it once was.
The XP login window has copied from OS X - the window changes size dynamically when you click on the user login icons to make the password box show, exactly like OS X does.
I wasn't aware of that... the only XP boxes I've used were configured to auto-login, never showing the actual login box. I mainly use Win2K, which has an NT 4 style login box.
Now, if the Longhorn login window "shakes its head" when an incorrect login/pass is entered, *that* would be copying.
(If you don't know what I'm talking about, find a Mac and try logging in with a bogus login/pass combination... the login window jitters side to side for a moment as though it's shaking it's head in a "no" fashion...... something straight out of NeXTSTEP/Openstep).
Good point. But keep in mind that Word and Excel were GUI apps for the Macintosh back in 1985. I outta dig up some old screenshots and/or find some old copies. As I recall, they looked a lot like the current versions, though with with far fewer features and much simpler & smaller toolbars.
Do you ever notice that when Microsoft makes a Mac version of a piss-poor Windows product that it tends to not suck [as much]?
Somewhat. When it comes to Office, I prefer the Mac versions to those for Windows. Perhaps it's because MS had some extra time in bringing the Mac versions to market. (MS Mac Office 98 / MS Windows Office 97.... MS Mac Office 2001 / MS Windows Office 2000.... Office v.X for OS X doesn't really count as it's a hybrid of Office 2001 and Office XP). The look and feel seems easier to live with and the Entrouage email/calendar/pim app is a lot more sane than Outlook (though is lacking full Excange integration).
MSN Messenger for the Mac is a pretty smooth little app... single file to deal with and none of the virus-like atributes of the Windows version.
MS IE for Mac was pretty good back in the days of Netscape 4. But these days there are MUCH better choices for Mac users.
Windows Media Player for the Mac (they need a better name for that app) works, but feels like quick and dirty port... I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't done by the MS MBU (Macintosh Business Unit -- MS's Mac software team located in the Silicon Valley).
Plus it mentions RH 6.2, I doubt anyone is running a website on that anymore (shudder).
HAH! I know of *many* sites that use a RH 6.2 boxes for serving, and even some that use RH 5.x distros as well. Just because RH no longer rolls their own fixes doesn't mean that the distros have dried up. Many sysadmins would rather manually update the software on their servers than go thru the trouble of migrating to yet another distro.
There are also those that use a heavily locked down ancient distro for serving. Apache is kept current and everything else is closed. This is even easier to do in an environment where each task has its own server. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I'll tell you what, there is no way in hell that I would ever use RH 8 or 9 for a server. Even a bare bones install has way too much BS. For my needs, Debian does my Linux needs quite well. As do IRIX and Solaris. RH is great for the desktop, but nutty crazy for server use.
Two kids (one of which was from the TV series, The Partridge Family) collide on a street corner... one is eating a chocolate bar, the other peanut butter straight from the jar (!)...
"You got peanut butter on my chocolate!" "You got chocolate in my peanut butter" HMMM! *cue music and announcer*
I thought frames weren't part of the browser until 3.0 came out. If I remember correctly, Netscape 2 had the ultra-ugly 'N' that had the "push in, push out" appearance, and the browser didn't support colored backgrounds or frames.
The "throbber" you're thinking of was in Netscape 1.0 and maybe 1.1. It was replaced with the modern (up thru version 4.8) animation at either version 1.1N or 1.1, I don't recall the exact version.
I used version 1.1N, 1.12, and 1.2b for a long time on Solaris, IRIX, and Mac OS. These versions supported colored backgrounds and tables, but not frames. Animation was somewhat supported via server-push (a major kluge).
Netscape 2.0 supported frames as well as plugins and animated GIF files. Livescript ("Javascript"), Java, and VRML were also loosely supported. There was also a "Gold" version which added HTML editing features.
Slashdot Mirror
With 3600 employees left, there should be plenty of SGI slashdot layoff articles for us to enjoy over the coming months and years.
SGI could easily compete in the post dot bomb economy in new area's that complement it's high end graphics systems.. gaming is the child of SGI (and others) excellent work, an industry meant to be worth much much more than the cd sales market...
Not saying they should make consoles, but imagine! your P4 4.01ghz playing HalfLife 3, with an SGI video card...mmmmm!
I often wonder why SGI hasn't tried to do the console thing again. They were the real brains behind the Ultra64 arcade game (and later, Nintendo 64) architecture.
These days SGI's strengths are in it's system architecture and OS skillz.... their OS (IRIX) can run on anything from an Indy to a 512 processor Origin 3000. With a special kernel, it can run on a 1024 processor beast. These are single system image machines... not clusters.
3D chipsets are best left to NVidia, ATI, and 3DLabs, let those companies kill each other over the latest buzzwords. If you have an insane need, SGI does have the Infinite Realitty 4, which has 11 GB of gfx ram and texture manipulation hardware from hell. Keep in mind an IR4 subsystem will take up half of a rack and requires a pretty beefy SGI host.
I work at a DoD facilty that is on the brink of buying a 2048 CPU Origin 3900. We get machines of this class every other year. Nothing excites the 'eggheads' like an SGI.
One of the coolest things of such a machine is booting the entire beast from a single hard drive. For those that don't already know this, SGI's Origin and Altix systems are single image machines, not clusters. 512 processors in a single machine (1024 and 2048 processors with a special kernel). The current Origin 3900 architecture doesn't physically scale past 2048, though.
Well yes it'll cost a lot more since you'd have to have AutoCad ported to Irix and there's no such thing as Alias anymore.
Back when Alias still existed, there was an IRIX version of AutoCAD... and SunOS version as well. Corel Draw was also available for many flavors of unix.
The government owns a few SGI supercomputers.
Yep, but they're BIG, insanely high bandwidth beats. 512 and 1024 processor, single-image machines (not clusters).
If SGI were to die, I'm sure the NSA would buy up the patents so they could continue with their work.
And for those that claim the MIPS R14K is too far behind, keep in mind that the Altix series of machines uses the exact same Origin 3000 architecture, but with the Itanium2 (and soon, Madison) processor and Linux OS. Altix is currently limited to 64 processors due to kernel scaling issues... but give SGI and Linus time and they'll have 512 processor Linux machines too.
Here's an interesting tidbit from SGI's site... some performance numbers of Intel's Madison (next generation Itanium) on SGI's Altix (Linux/Itanium-based machine running on Origin 3000 architecture)
a y/madison.html
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2003/m
The machine is limited to 64 processors per single-system image (O3K can handle up to 512 out of the box, or 1024 with a special kernel) but the Itanium2 is about 2x as fast as the MIPS R14K... plus the Itanium system can run a very slightly modified linux distribution (currently Red Hat plus SGI's ProPack kernel patches and additional utilities).
Pretty neat stuff for the high-end Linux market. Of course, the number of people that need Origin/Altix level system I/O is pretty slim...
See my other post. These already exist from at least one company (DeepVideo). SGI and a few other companies are even supporting the mutliple layers in the software development kits. MutliLayerDisplays are a neat idea for certain tasks and make for a very cool demo. But not quite as cool as the true stereo displays (again, see my previous post).
I got to play with a few such monitors at the Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) developer conference last week. Deep Video Imaging has a multilayer display, exactly as you described. Also, SeeReal has a truely stereo (one image per eye) monitor that works by tracking the user's eye position. The downside of the SeeReal monitor is the lack of support for more than one user at a time.
The display you're thinking of is a MultiLayerDisplay made by Deep Video Imaging.
The top layer is a mostly transparent LCD (not perfectly transparent, but close enough) and the bottom layer is a standard LCD with a powerful backlight. The effect is amazing!
I saw this display and a few others at SGI's developer conference last week -- gobs of really cool stereo 3D and psuedo-stereo 3D monitors. The coolest was one by SeeReal, a display that tracks the position of the user's eyes to provide a true stereo image without needing any special eyewear. The downside of most of the displays is that they're designed for one user only.
There are plent of Mac case mods...
http://www.applefritter.com/hacks/index.html
Texas Tech University (the folks that invented the 2x4 launcher for testing the strength of building siding and other fun games) and FEMI have put together a lot of Tornado survival info over the years.
Check out FEMA's website as well as Texas Tech's Wind Engineering site.
While I agree that a modern PC will be much faster than any O2 (that machine is 7 years old, good grief!), I do have to point out a few things...
unless you were attached to those funny 4 bit visuals on the O2s
Do you mean 5-bit visuals? The two most common visuals on O2 were RGBA5551 (common for analog video work) and 8-bit visuals -- RGBA8888 (common for everything else, but slightly slower for realtime video).
Some OpenGL extensions are not available (think those funky SGI, SGIS, SGIX ones, and ARB_multitexture is just different than SGIS_multitexture)
Most of the funky SGI extensions from that era are now available in one form or another in OpenGL 1.3 and 1.4.
Even if you compare PCs to Octanes, Octane 2s or Fuels, the PCs wins
Fuel blows... while its faster for single CPU tasks than Octane/Octane2 due to its use of Origin3000 parts, it's limited to one CPU and its only XIO interface is used for graphics. Everything else hangs of a single 64/66 PCI bus. It's a good workstation if you need IRIX, but it's pretty much worthless for most tasks people use SGIs for in the first place!
Octane/Octane2 still has its uses. It no longer leads the performance or RAM capacity race, but it can still outperform most PCs for real-world information processing due to its architecture. Granted, your application has to be written for the platform. Common uses of the Octane are MRI scanner processing, front end to an Origin supercomputer, and realtime visual effects work on HD material (IFX Piranha, Jaleo, MuleHD, Discreet Flame and Smoke). This type of work often involves mutliple maxed out channels of fibrechannel, uncompressed HD video interfaces, and sometimes a GSN (HIPPI 6400) 800 Megabytes/sec connection to one or more larger SGIs. Octane makes for a pretty lousy 3D modeling box these days as cards such as the 3DLabsWildcat 7210 or VP990 atop a modern PC can simply outperfom any SGI config for that type of task and do so for a lower cost.
Other points:
The O2 was a 32-bit machine. Even with an R10K or R12K CPU shoehorned in, the O2 was limited to 32-bit addressing and pointers. It did, however, still use the full 64-bit IRIX OS with large filesystem and file support.
One area where you may find a problem in porting your software is texture usage. Because the O2 used system ram for everything, it could handle up to about 900 MB of textures without any sort of swapping or transfering. While there are a few apps that make use of this, most don't and you're unlikely to run into such a situation with your applications... but it is something to keep in mind. If you need a lot of textures, consider the 3DLabs V990 as it can handle about 400 MB worth.
The O2 is about 7 years old. While it did have some specific uses and advantages (mainly video and high texture usage), it was not quite a powerhouse when it was originally announced. O2 replaced the low end Indy... both were 32-bit machines with significant memory limits. (Indy was limited to 256 MB RAM, O2 was limited to 1 GB RAM).
It was the R10K Indigo2 and its replacement, the Octane that were the 64-bit desktop beasts back in their days.
You'll find the Linux PC to be much faster. The O2 had its advantages back in its day, but is has been 7 years since the introduction of its architecture and gfx chips. I'd be willing to bet that your replacement workstation will have a faster CPU, faster memory, faster graphics, and a faster hard drive. A lot of new tech pops up in 7 years.
One of the best original uses for O2 was graphics with a lot of textures. As O2 uses a shared bank of ram for everything, a texture could be nearly any size. Some crazy people even wrote demos that would fly over 800MB+ texture maps. The downside of O2 is the rather limited geometry performance. This is why many of the "Killer Apps" for O2 are in the video industry... such as controlling the weather graphics for The Weather Channel and for local TV stations. Not much geometry there, it's mostly textures and makes good use of the O2's built in analog video ports (or optional digital video card).
Another downside of O2 is its CPU performance. The machine was originally designed for the R5000 processor and as such, the R10K and R12K processors were basiclly hacked in. They don't even use the IRIX64 kernel that an Octane does! Plus performance is much lower. We've seen cases where a CPU benchmark on a 300 MHz R12K O2 is less than 40% of the score on a similar Octane. So they are clearly totally different machines with totally different uses.
I think you'll find modern Linux PCs to much much faster than your O2s, especially for CPU performance. Graphics should be much faster too, unless you had been using some very specific O2 features, but even then you'd have to have been using some very large textures to see a difference.
Keep in mind that the SGI O2 was first sold in 1996. Yep, 7 years ago. You're more than due for an upgrade!
Unfortunatly if Irix is better it might be too little too late for this dieing company. Isn't it true they sold opengl to Microsoft.
Brainless management, crazy high prices, and new MIPS processors behind schedule. There are gobs of reasons why SGI may tank soon. They do have a pretty cool new Linux/Itanium2 system based on Origin architecture. 512 GB RAM and 64 processors on a single linux box (not a cluster).
The biggest SGI is MIPS/IRIX based, though... up to 1024 processors and 1 TB ram on a single machine. Insane system thruput with a price to match! Unfortunately for SGI (and for Cray and their X1) there are only so many governments that can afford (or need the interprocessor thruput of) such huge machines.
SGI still has the rights to most of its technology and patents. They did, however, sell some tech to Microsoft just before the XBox launch. While it was never made public, it is belived the tech was several generalied 3D game console patents SGI filed when creating the Nintendo 64 and various Video-on-demand settop boxes.
OpenGL, while still "owned" by SGI, is mostly handled by the OpenGL board (opengl.org).
IRIX 6.5.19 and newer uses Sendmail 8.12.x. I belive BIND was also updated at the same time.
But yeah, most IRIX boxes (especially older ones) are running Sendmail 8.9.3 or worse.
1) Update your install of IRIX 6.5 to the most recent version available to you (6.5.16m for most people, 6.5.19 or 6.5.20 for those with a support contract). If you're unsure about updating, read about the IRIX Release Process as well as theIRIX Compatibility Mandate.
2) Install the security patches for your version of IRIX (note that IRIX releases previous to 6.5.15 will probably not have the most recent security patches available).
3) If you're a security newbie, run the "Improve System Security" application... it can be found under the Security and Access Control section of the System Manager.
4) Install IPFilter, be sure to learn how to use it.
5) Subscribe to SGI's security advisory mailing list.
6) Newbies outta read some of SGI's other sysadmin manuals as well:
Personal Sysadmin
IRIX Admin
7) Update your various freeware apps... be sure to read the seperate freeware security notice:
http://freeware.sgi.com
IRIX has changed a lot over the past 6 years. At one point, a stock install of IRIX had almost a dozen root-exploitable holes. These days security holes in IRIX are rare, and are quickly patched by SGI. The company has gone a step further and has actually been making useful security suggestions to its customers. IRIX 6.5 includes a pointy-clicky GUI app to help its artsy users secure some common weaknesses.
For those that have been away from IRIX for awhile, even since 6.5.0 shipped, a lot has been added in recent years... IPFilter, SSH, Kerberos, and other security-aware goodies are now offically supported and have been added in IRIX updates.
IRIX is no OpenBSD, but it has come a LONG way to make itself more secure, especially over the past two years. These days it's on-par with most Linux and Unix distros... average is a pretty good step up from what it once was.
The XP login window has copied from OS X - the window changes size dynamically when you click on the user login icons to make the password box show, exactly like OS X does.
I wasn't aware of that... the only XP boxes I've used were configured to auto-login, never showing the actual login box. I mainly use Win2K, which has an NT 4 style login box.
It doen't look too similar to me...
n g
f
Mac OS X:
http://www4.macnn.com/team/osx/osx_consoleLogin.p
Oldschool Mac OS 9 (foreign):
http://www.macopoli.com/Sito/Schede_figg/Login.gi
Now, if the Longhorn login window "shakes its head" when an incorrect login/pass is entered, *that* would be copying.
(If you don't know what I'm talking about, find a Mac and try logging in with a bogus login/pass combination... the login window jitters side to side for a moment as though it's shaking it's head in a "no" fashion...... something straight out of NeXTSTEP/Openstep).
Good point. But keep in mind that Word and Excel were GUI apps for the Macintosh back in 1985. I outta dig up some old screenshots and/or find some old copies. As I recall, they looked a lot like the current versions, though with with far fewer features and much simpler & smaller toolbars.
Do you ever notice that when Microsoft makes a Mac version of a piss-poor Windows product that it tends to not suck [as much]?
Somewhat. When it comes to Office, I prefer the Mac versions to those for Windows. Perhaps it's because MS had some extra time in bringing the Mac versions to market. (MS Mac Office 98 / MS Windows Office 97.... MS Mac Office 2001 / MS Windows Office 2000.... Office v.X for OS X doesn't really count as it's a hybrid of Office 2001 and Office XP). The look and feel seems easier to live with and the Entrouage email/calendar/pim app is a lot more sane than Outlook (though is lacking full Excange integration).
MSN Messenger for the Mac is a pretty smooth little app... single file to deal with and none of the virus-like atributes of the Windows version.
MS IE for Mac was pretty good back in the days of Netscape 4. But these days there are MUCH better choices for Mac users.
Windows Media Player for the Mac (they need a better name for that app) works, but feels like quick and dirty port... I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't done by the MS MBU (Macintosh Business Unit -- MS's Mac software team located in the Silicon Valley).
Plus it mentions RH 6.2, I doubt anyone is running a website on that anymore (shudder).
HAH! I know of *many* sites that use a RH 6.2 boxes for serving, and even some that use RH 5.x distros as well. Just because RH no longer rolls their own fixes doesn't mean that the distros have dried up. Many sysadmins would rather manually update the software on their servers than go thru the trouble of migrating to yet another distro.
There are also those that use a heavily locked down ancient distro for serving. Apache is kept current and everything else is closed. This is even easier to do in an environment where each task has its own server. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I'll tell you what, there is no way in hell that I would ever use RH 8 or 9 for a server. Even a bare bones install has way too much BS. For my needs, Debian does my Linux needs quite well. As do IRIX and Solaris. RH is great for the desktop, but nutty crazy for server use.
Two kids (one of which was from the TV series, The Partridge Family) collide on a street corner... one is eating a chocolate bar, the other peanut butter straight from the jar (!)...
"You got peanut butter on my chocolate!"
"You got chocolate in my peanut butter"
HMMM!
*cue music and announcer*
Reese's Peanutbutter Cups
The commerican ran for ages.
I thought frames weren't part of the browser until 3.0 came out. If I remember correctly, Netscape 2 had the ultra-ugly 'N' that had the "push in, push out" appearance, and the browser didn't support colored backgrounds or frames.
The "throbber" you're thinking of was in Netscape 1.0 and maybe 1.1. It was replaced with the modern (up thru version 4.8) animation at either version 1.1N or 1.1, I don't recall the exact version.
I used version 1.1N, 1.12, and 1.2b for a long time on Solaris, IRIX, and Mac OS. These versions supported colored backgrounds and tables, but not frames. Animation was somewhat supported via server-push (a major kluge).
Netscape 2.0 supported frames as well as plugins and animated GIF files. Livescript ("Javascript"), Java, and VRML were also loosely supported. There was also a "Gold" version which added HTML editing features.