For design, it'll always be a Mac. Best tool for the situation I say.
Our department his a small public usage lab of newer iMacs (700 MHz G3 w/ 512 MB PC100 ram). To make life a lot easier, we setup Apple's netboot software on an OS X server and configured the stock harddrives on the iMacs for use as a scratch/temp drive for user use. The setup has been wonderful... boot times are a bit longer than normal, but still not too bad. There is no such thing as software maintainance on any of the iMacs anymore as the internal drives are simply a free for all space (though we do find some FUNKY stuff on them every now and then). The users are happy and do everything from web surfing to DV firewire video editing on the machines. Though, I have to admit, 50% of the users in that lab simply burn CDs with the iMac's internal CDRW.
The Sun Ray is almost a paradox... it can do far more than a generic xterminal, yet probably has even less internal hardware. The server keeps track of user states, such that if the Sun Ray loses power or just up and dies, the user can do a mid-session login on another Sun Ray and continue working.
For a really cool demo, login via a Sun Ray, start playing a movie with Real Player or a similar app. Unplug the Sun Ray. Login via another, different Sun Ray. Watch the movie continue playing where it left off. (Not to mention that the desktop will be exactly as you left it).
Note, however, it is possible to be logged in on more than on Sun Ray with independant sessions. The above example just demos the "terminal failover" feature.
2.4.12 last week, 2.4.13 this week! Woohoo! Time to compile another one for the workstations and servers! Gotta love Linux, wouldn't see this from Microsoft, ever!
Forget my hot date (hah!) I'm going to be burning ISOs tonight! This is way cool, I had no idea that 7.2 was in the works!! I hope to have this working at home and at work by tomorrow afternoon!
Along a similar thread, I'd be interested in some good links for Calculus tutorials and other "upper highschool, early college" math and beyond. I'm now out of highschool and wish I would have paid attention in my PreCal and Cal I classes. I passed, but didn't learn a thing. The calc websites I've run across thus far seem to be geared towards someone currently getting classroom instruction. It's funny... I didn't like math in highschool and now that I'm out I think I could really enjoy it or at least enjoy learning a bit more. At any rate, some good links would be appreciated. Until then, I think I'll hit google s'more and try to find some better sites.
Re:emacs history, direction ?
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Total=1.
Jippity! I'm asking for some help and I get marked as flamebait?!?
Awhile back my organization had several major security concerns with both Win2K Server and Win2K Datacenter, most of which dealt with LDAP. After our concerns were finally escallated high enough within Microsoft, a surprising reply was sent to us... it basicly stated that some of the holes were to be patched by Q4 2001 but that we should consider upgrading to what they called 'whistler datacenter' (essentially the server and datacenter versions of Windows XP) for complete security. I for one am tired of feeding the M$ machine.
emacs history, direction ?
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm new to unix and all that goes with it. Is there a good reference with information on the history of emacs, current state of emacs, and the future direction and goals of emacs? The GNU website has some info, but not a whole lot. Thanks in advance.
I have several machines at home (SGI Octane, Sun Ultra 2, several x86 PCs) though only two are Macs. One is an old PowerMac 8600, the other is a much newer iBook 500. I really haven't experienced the crashing so many folks are talking about. Back when my 8600 was running Mac OS 8.5 and Internet Explorer 4.0 it would freeze up on me every now and then, but overall both machines are very stable, even when running (gasp!) MS Mac Office 98, MS Mac Office 2001, and IE 5.0. Right now the 8600 is running Mac OS 8.6 and the iBook is running 9.1. My only real complaints right now are that IE 5.0 will sometimes stall for about 20 seconds while rendering a page. LPR printing to printers on my unix boxen is somewhat limited in flexibility. NFS clients for Mac OS 8.X/9.X are pricey. Hopefully OS X and OmniWeb will
I have heard, though, some major horror stories about iMac/iBook/G3/G4 stability with versions of Mac OS prior to 9.1, especially when using USB devices. Luckilly 9.1 and 9.2.1 are a free upgrade to 9.X. 8.6 is the free upgrade to 8.5.X. There is no free upgrade from 8.X to 9.X.:( But that's ok, I can't afford any more expensive ram for my 8600 anyway!
Perhaps I'm alone... I love GNOME, but I really don't care for Nautilus. In fact, I sort of have a strong distaste for it. But I have to give Andy and company from Eazel credit for taking a risk and for following their dreams. They've made a product that's loved by many... just not me.
Has the person worked with enough types of networking gear to understand the history, future, and direction so that he can make informed decisions as new products become available? Having only worked with ethernet is a bad sign.
Has he worked with powerful software tools, both commercial and opensource? (HP Openview, CA Unicenter, etc).
What is his experience with router equipment? Experience with at least one other large scale platform other than Cisco is a huge plus.
I use an old SiliconGraphics Indy (mine has a 200 MHz R4400 CPU) salvaged from a lab upgrade for my video conferencing. InPerson supports a whole bucket load of audio codec along with H.261, RGB8, and HDCC video codecs. When conversing with other InPerson users we can use a shared whiteboard and a 3D model space as well. The app is no longer sold, but it works fine on pretty much any SGI that can run IRIX 5.3, 6.2, or 6.5.X. It works great on most 150 MHz or faster Indys. Fair warning, the "IndyCam" is trash. It is what you would expect from any cheap montior-top cam from 1993. Indy has SVideo and Composite (RCA) NTSC/PAL input jacks, so use an old camcorder or small lab cam.
At any rate, this is what I use for my conferencing. It beats the heck outta a windows box. Some folks hate IRIX, but at least it's POSIX complaint and can run gcc, etc (http://freeware.sgi.com). And InPerson is much cooler than Sun's conferecing app anyway.:P
Once upon a time software engineers would go through great lengths to optimize their code. Hardware engineers would work closely with the software folks to develop efficent and useful fast paths. Oft-cursed quality assurance teams would spend months hunting down elusive bugs and areas of poor performance. Physical equipment was both elegent and overengineered.
Today we have copper heatsinks that have undergone more engineering than the typical Formula One racecar.
Nevermind that we have to reinstall Windows every eight months or constatnly watch Bugtraq regardless of our platform.
Tell me about it. We have one department that is almost complete with their Solaris 2.5.1 -> 2.7 (Solaris 7) upgrade evaluation. I have 8 on my personal workstation (an old Ultra 30) but 7 on pretty much everything else.
Kinda reminds me of Waterloo's Maple. For years, simple revisions to Maple V were the current version. Then came Maple 6. Maple 7 followed less than a year later.
SunOS 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7 (Solaris 2.5, 2.6 and 7) were Sun's transition to a 64-bit OS. 5.5 added support for the UltraSPARC processor, 5.5.1 added 64-bit register support, 5.6 64-bit files and filesystems, and 5.7 an optimized 64-bit kernel. (Of course, SGI IRIX users will gloat about SGI having done this years earlier with IRIX 6.0, but the point is moot).
SunOS 5.8 (Solaris 8) brought us... nothing too special. And 5.9 (Solaris 9)? Even less.
I don't really understand why Sun didn't just make a "Solaris 7.1, Solaris 7.5, and Solaris 7.6" before going to 8. Maybe it's because I've never been much of a numbers game fan.
If there's a sliver lining in all this, perhaps it's that SunOS 5.8 was the last to support the Sun4m architecture (SPARCstation 10 and SPARCstation 20), no more upgrading for those old machines of mine. Not that I would need to anyway, they're happily running 5.7.
change is good, but keep offering CDE
on
No GNOME For Solaris 9
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm hard to please, I have major issues with every desktop environment I've used. I don't love CDE, but it's fine with me. I certainly prefer it over the latest GNOME builds from Ximian and Sun.
I support change, so please bring on GNOME and/or KDE and attempt to make them better. But please keep CDE and Motif for those of us that don't want the 'latest and greatest'. Patch a few of CDE's major memory leaks and I'll be a happy, content user.
What was the name of the PDA Cellphone combo from about 1993/1994? I remember seeing it in all the magazines back in the hayday of the Newton/Zarus/Psion/Zoomer/etc. It looked about the size of a household cordless phone (narrow, tall) but had a narrow, tall touch-sensitive LCD on it. As I recall, it wasn't anything too special, and wasn't compatible with anything, but it still was very cool
I'll have to dig thru my old PopSci issues if noone else can think of it. I remember being wowed by that little gizmo.
Actually, Rhapsody and Openstep are different. Openstep was a Mach 2.5+ kernel with BSD 4.3 UNIX layer. Rhapsody was Mach 2.5++ kernel with a BSD 4.4 UNIX layer. There were so many differences between the two at the OS level that they should be considered two different OS's.
That is 100% correct. I appologize for any confusion I may have made in my inital post. Rhapsody grew from Openstep and while similar, is quite a bit different.
Some friends and I compiled OpenOffice many months ago on a PII-450. As I recall, the actual compile time (not including the hours spent collecting required libraries, etc) was over 20 hours and required mad amounts of ram and disk.
That said, how is compile time with OpenOffice these days and with modern 1-2 GHz CPUs?
Copland came close to being finished, Apple had released an early developer release (DR0) to select developers and had already started a Mac OS 9 marketing campaign.
Slashdot Mirror
For design, it'll always be a Mac.
Best tool for the situation I say.
Our department his a small public usage lab of newer iMacs (700 MHz G3 w/ 512 MB PC100 ram). To make life a lot easier, we setup Apple's netboot software on an OS X server and configured the stock harddrives on the iMacs for use as a scratch/temp drive for user use. The setup has been wonderful... boot times are a bit longer than normal, but still not too bad. There is no such thing as software maintainance on any of the iMacs anymore as the internal drives are simply a free for all space (though we do find some FUNKY stuff on them every now and then). The users are happy and do everything from web surfing to DV firewire video editing on the machines. Though, I have to admit, 50% of the users in that lab simply burn CDs with the iMac's internal CDRW.
The Sun Ray is almost a paradox... it can do far more than a generic xterminal, yet probably has even less internal hardware. The server keeps track of user states, such that if the Sun Ray loses power or just up and dies, the user can do a mid-session login on another Sun Ray and continue working.
For a really cool demo, login via a Sun Ray, start playing a movie with Real Player or a similar app. Unplug the Sun Ray. Login via another, different Sun Ray. Watch the movie continue playing where it left off. (Not to mention that the desktop will be exactly as you left it).
Note, however, it is possible to be logged in on more than on Sun Ray with independant sessions. The above example just demos the "terminal failover" feature.
Thats 25 GigaBytes of RAM, not counting the slowaris overhead.
Then install 50 GB for good measure. The 4800 is one hellofa machine and can handle up to 96 GB of RAM.
2.4.12 last week, 2.4.13 this week! Woohoo! Time to compile another one for the workstations and servers! Gotta love Linux, wouldn't see this from Microsoft, ever!
Forget my hot date (hah!) I'm going to be burning ISOs tonight! This is way cool, I had no idea that 7.2 was in the works!! I hope to have this working at home and at work by tomorrow afternoon!
Along a similar thread, I'd be interested in some good links for Calculus tutorials and other "upper highschool, early college" math and beyond. I'm now out of highschool and wish I would have paid attention in my PreCal and Cal I classes. I passed, but didn't learn a thing. The calc websites I've run across thus far seem to be geared towards someone currently getting classroom instruction. It's funny... I didn't like math in highschool and now that I'm out I think I could really enjoy it or at least enjoy learning a bit more. At any rate, some good links would be appreciated. Until then, I think I'll hit google s'more and try to find some better sites.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Total=1.
Jippity! I'm asking for some help and I get marked as flamebait?!?
Awhile back my organization had several major security concerns with both Win2K Server and Win2K Datacenter, most of which dealt with LDAP. After our concerns were finally escallated high enough within Microsoft, a surprising reply was sent to us... it basicly stated that some of the holes were to be patched by Q4 2001 but that we should consider upgrading to what they called 'whistler datacenter' (essentially the server and datacenter versions of Windows XP) for complete security. I for one am tired of feeding the M$ machine.
I'm new to unix and all that goes with it. Is there a good reference with information on the history of emacs, current state of emacs, and the future direction and goals of emacs? The GNU website has some info, but not a whole lot. Thanks in advance.
I have several machines at home (SGI Octane, Sun Ultra 2, several x86 PCs) though only two are Macs. One is an old PowerMac 8600, the other is a much newer iBook 500. I really haven't experienced the crashing so many folks are talking about. Back when my 8600 was running Mac OS 8.5 and Internet Explorer 4.0 it would freeze up on me every now and then, but overall both machines are very stable, even when running (gasp!) MS Mac Office 98, MS Mac Office 2001, and IE 5.0. Right now the 8600 is running Mac OS 8.6 and the iBook is running 9.1. My only real complaints right now are that IE 5.0 will sometimes stall for about 20 seconds while rendering a page. LPR printing to printers on my unix boxen is somewhat limited in flexibility. NFS clients for Mac OS 8.X/9.X are pricey. Hopefully OS X and OmniWeb will
:( But that's ok, I can't afford any more expensive ram for my 8600 anyway!
I have heard, though, some major horror stories about iMac/iBook/G3/G4 stability with versions of Mac OS prior to 9.1, especially when using USB devices. Luckilly 9.1 and 9.2.1 are a free upgrade to 9.X. 8.6 is the free upgrade to 8.5.X. There is no free upgrade from 8.X to 9.X.
Prepare to lose all karma...
Perhaps I'm alone... I love GNOME, but I really don't care for Nautilus. In fact, I sort of have a strong distaste for it. But I have to give Andy and company from Eazel credit for taking a risk and for following their dreams. They've made a product that's loved by many... just not me.
Has the person worked with enough types of networking gear to understand the history, future, and direction so that he can make informed decisions as new products become available? Having only worked with ethernet is a bad sign.
Has he worked with powerful software tools, both commercial and opensource? (HP Openview, CA Unicenter, etc).
What is his experience with router equipment? Experience with at least one other large scale platform other than Cisco is a huge plus.
How does YD compare to SuSE's PPC offerings? Looks like SuSE has put together a pretty nice PPC distro too:
d ex.html
http://www.suse.com/us/products/suse_linux/ppc/in
Has anyone attempted to port the XFS filesystem from SiliconGraphics to a PowerPC Linux variant?
I use an old SiliconGraphics Indy (mine has a 200 MHz R4400 CPU) salvaged from a lab upgrade for my video conferencing. InPerson supports a whole bucket load of audio codec along with H.261, RGB8, and HDCC video codecs. When conversing with other InPerson users we can use a shared whiteboard and a 3D model space as well. The app is no longer sold, but it works fine on pretty much any SGI that can run IRIX 5.3, 6.2, or 6.5.X. It works great on most 150 MHz or faster Indys. Fair warning, the "IndyCam" is trash. It is what you would expect from any cheap montior-top cam from 1993. Indy has SVideo and Composite (RCA) NTSC/PAL input jacks, so use an old camcorder or small lab cam.
:P
At any rate, this is what I use for my conferencing. It beats the heck outta a windows box. Some folks hate IRIX, but at least it's POSIX complaint and can run gcc, etc (http://freeware.sgi.com). And InPerson is much cooler than Sun's conferecing app anyway.
Does this mean that if I were to hitch up one of my uncle's clydesdales to my PC, it could provide about 700 watts of cooling power? Neat!
Once upon a time software engineers would go through great lengths to optimize their code. Hardware engineers would work closely with the software folks to develop efficent and useful fast paths. Oft-cursed quality assurance teams would spend months hunting down elusive bugs and areas of poor performance. Physical equipment was both elegent and overengineered.
Today we have copper heatsinks that have undergone more engineering than the typical Formula One racecar.
Nevermind that we have to reinstall Windows every eight months or constatnly watch Bugtraq regardless of our platform.
Tell me about it. We have one department that is almost complete with their Solaris 2.5.1 -> 2.7 (Solaris 7) upgrade evaluation. I have 8 on my personal workstation (an old Ultra 30) but 7 on pretty much everything else.
Kinda reminds me of Waterloo's Maple. For years, simple revisions to Maple V were the current version. Then came Maple 6. Maple 7 followed less than a year later.
SunOS 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7 (Solaris 2.5, 2.6 and 7) were Sun's transition to a 64-bit OS. 5.5 added support for the UltraSPARC processor, 5.5.1 added 64-bit register support, 5.6 64-bit files and filesystems, and 5.7 an optimized 64-bit kernel. (Of course, SGI IRIX users will gloat about SGI having done this years earlier with IRIX 6.0, but the point is moot).
SunOS 5.8 (Solaris 8) brought us... nothing too special. And 5.9 (Solaris 9)? Even less.
I don't really understand why Sun didn't just make a "Solaris 7.1, Solaris 7.5, and Solaris 7.6" before going to 8. Maybe it's because I've never been much of a numbers game fan.
If there's a sliver lining in all this, perhaps it's that SunOS 5.8 was the last to support the Sun4m architecture (SPARCstation 10 and SPARCstation 20), no more upgrading for those old machines of mine. Not that I would need to anyway, they're happily running 5.7.
I'm hard to please, I have major issues with every desktop environment I've used. I don't love CDE, but it's fine with me. I certainly prefer it over the latest GNOME builds from Ximian and Sun.
I support change, so please bring on GNOME and/or KDE and attempt to make them better. But please keep CDE and Motif for those of us that don't want the 'latest and greatest'. Patch a few of CDE's major memory leaks and I'll be a happy, content user.
What was the name of the PDA Cellphone combo from about 1993/1994? I remember seeing it in all the magazines back in the hayday of the Newton/Zarus/Psion/Zoomer/etc. It looked about the size of a household cordless phone (narrow, tall) but had a narrow, tall touch-sensitive LCD on it. As I recall, it wasn't anything too special, and wasn't compatible with anything, but it still was very cool
I'll have to dig thru my old PopSci issues if noone else can think of it. I remember being wowed by that little gizmo.
Actually, Rhapsody and Openstep are different. Openstep was a Mach 2.5+ kernel with BSD 4.3 UNIX layer. Rhapsody was Mach 2.5++ kernel with a BSD 4.4 UNIX layer. There were so many differences between the two at the OS level that they should be considered two different OS's.
That is 100% correct. I appologize for any confusion I may have made in my inital post. Rhapsody grew from Openstep and while similar, is quite a bit different.
>>Today the current version of Mac OS X is
>>10.1, aka Darwin 1.3.1.
>
>10.0 was Darwin 1.3.1
>10.1 is Darwin 1.4.1
Oops, another typo. That is correct. 10.1 is Darwin 1.4.1.
Some friends and I compiled OpenOffice many months ago on a PII-450. As I recall, the actual compile time (not including the hours spent collecting required libraries, etc) was over 20 hours and required mad amounts of ram and disk.
That said, how is compile time with OpenOffice these days and with modern 1-2 GHz CPUs?
How often is it built?
Whoops, typo.
Copland came close to being finished, Apple had released an early developer release (DR0) to select developers and had already started a Mac OS 9 marketing campaign.
That should be "Mac OS 8".