Used PowerMacs (at least anything less than 3 years old) are horribly expensive. May as well buy a new Cube or iBook. Then you can at least swtich-hit and work with Linux, Mac OS X, and Mac OS 9.1.
If you're pricing one from the Apple Store, be sure to check out their refurbished models, they often have some really good deals that're only around for a day or two. Keep in mind that you can use any cheap USB keyboard, so you may consider selling the stock keyboard and mouse on eBay for about $90 for the pair. The original OS X and 9.1 CDs can get a fair sum, too. Probably want to keep the (very cool) diagnostics CD.
The 'cluedness' of the average USENET poster has gone down the tubes. Sure, it's always been a great place for newbies to get some help from the veterans, but lately things have gotten out of control. Cross-posting is rampant, trolls are everywhere, and spammers think folks care about their offerings. Technical discussion has given away to politics. Less than 18 months ago comp.sys.sgi.* was full of interesting chatter, these days half of the posts are by folks asking how to install a (completely unaccelerated and very unfinished) Linux port on an SGI MIPS machine they bought off eBay for $50. The true engineers, developers, and scientific users have pulled completely out and rely on private mailing lists.
On the PowerBook G3 series (Wallstreet/Lombard/Pismo) the gfx chip (RageII - RageMobility128 depending on model) is on the bottom of the PCB and somewhat connected to the bottom of the case via a metal plate. That's where almost all of the heat comes from. The heatsink on the CPU is the little metal shelding box that covers the half of the top of the PCB. Heat coming from the keyboard is from the CPU.
3L direct-injection inline 6. Bought it in Harlingen, Texas at Cardenas AutoPlex. With about 50% highway miles I got about 38 MPG, not bad for heavy sedan. 0-60 acceleration is not too good, about 8 seconds, but that's a damn sight better than, say, a diesel pickup truck.
It's not ergo in the traditional sense, but my PowerBook G3 has a wonderful keyboard. In fact, one of the reasons I bought was for the keyboard. Not too cramped, good key travel, an almost-real keys (not chicklets).
FWIW, it has been working fine thus far on my G4/400 (Sawtooth). I have 256 MB RAM and the original ATI Rage128 Pro in the AGP slot. Though, it looks like we G4 users may be alone, because my buddy with a beige G3 (466 MHz G3 upgrade card + ATI Radeon PCI) has had nothing but trouble.
I too agree that it's not as grabbing at the original Myst, but then I guess I had some pretty high expectations. Still, I think it's an enjoyable worthwhile game, but:
Be sure to read the messageboards first to see if it'll work on your machine / gfx card combo!!
Take a look at Ximian - Solaris has already offered a preview to customers and IIRC, it is going to become the default desktop at some point. How can this be a bad thing?
It's a bad thing because it causes the bloated, slow, commercial giants to use open source to leverage their own sales. I cringe when I think of how Sun is going to use GNOME to push their proprietary OS for their proprietary hardware (and their slooow x86 port).
Imagine the reverse scenario. Could I write proprietary software, and restrict its use to proprietary OSes? I think not.
Proprietary software is generally closed-source. Compile only for your proprietary OS (or have some sort of a license manager) and you can restrict its uage to proprietary OS'es pretty easily.
This may be somewhat redundant, but Apple does not recommend the use of Voiceprint unless the user has a high quality microphone -and- has the audio inputs set to 16 bit / 48 kHz. It's too easy to defeat otherwise.
I recently watched a program about the NSA on a cable television station (I don't recall if it was History Channel, Discovery Channel, or TLC). The only NSA computer photos shown were some Cray and SGI Origin PR photos in what looked to be a small machine room. It was mentioned that the NSA currently has 11 acres of supercomputers and disk storage. Another comment suggested that they used up "10 years worth of storage" in only a few months after the datawarehouse was built.
Now I see how Cray turned a profit this past quarter and why EMC^2 is doing so well!
I hate to do it, but I have to wonder what IBM's *real* intentions are. Also, just who will get accounts on this machine? The big names: Torvalds, Cox, ESR, RMS? Friends/customers of IBM? The real coders (Apache members, GNOME members, etc)?
I'm almost scared that they may just use this as a way to collect information about up-and-coming projects. Even if I'm working on a GPL'ed project, I'm somewhat weary of compiling and running it on a machine owned by someone else. One day it may be my app... the next it could be "IBM MEGA COMMERCIAL APP". Maybe not the code, but perhaps the idea. I can't compete with IBM when it comes to resources.
SGI Origin 3X00 series. Up to 512 MIPS R14000/500 CPUs, 1 TB RAM. ~700 GB/sec system bandwidth. Add as many PCI or XIO expansion chassis as you desire. (VME can be added via XIO). Add up to 16 "G-Brick" Onyx 3000 / InfiniteReality 3 graphics subsystems. Add up to 36 individual "snowball" DM3 dual channel SD/HD digital video cards for editing HDTV. Add up to 768 SCSI and/or Fibre Channel XIO cards.
Be sure to win the lottery. Err... Be sure to win several lotteries.
http://www.sgi.com/origin/3000/3800.html
http://www.sara.nl/Customer/systems/sgi3800/
No Linux yet, just IRIX + some Cray libraries (SCSL). Can be partitioned if you want to run different instances of IRIX. Can also be clustered via ethernet, gigE, HiPPI, or GSN (800 MegaBytes/sec HiPPI derrivative).
Are you thinking Motif or Athena? Motif's defaults are very simple, clean, and nicely shaded. Athena (Xaw) is the beast behind the really nasty X apps (xedit, xfig, other such old, horrid beasts). It looks nice to me and *very* similar to default GTK+.
... so I can play the new games on my TV. Seriously. It's the older, simpler, more fun games that I enjoy. My roommates have all of the wizbang new consoles, but we still spend more time playing and enjoying our collection of SNES games. The eyecandy of a new game is only fun for about two days.
Mac OS is used by at least a few million folks, most of whom don't know what they're doing, and many of which have nice equipment and lots of bandwidth (artists, DTP folks, etc). Can you think of a better group to hax0r and use their resources?
The reason Mac OS (classic) doesn't get Hax0red has to deal with the OS's architecture. A circa 1982 design with no command-line interface, no unix or dos roots, and no real non-gui way to control the beast. The closest I've seen was a background-only daemon that listens on a certain TCP port for AppleScript commands which it will then execute. Not too useful.
Slashdot Mirror
What company *won't* die sooner or later?
Used PowerMacs (at least anything less than 3 years old) are horribly expensive. May as well buy a new Cube or iBook. Then you can at least swtich-hit and work with Linux, Mac OS X, and Mac OS 9.1.
If you're pricing one from the Apple Store, be sure to check out their refurbished models, they often have some really good deals that're only around for a day or two. Keep in mind that you can use any cheap USB keyboard, so you may consider selling the stock keyboard and mouse on eBay for about $90 for the pair. The original OS X and 9.1 CDs can get a fair sum, too. Probably want to keep the (very cool) diagnostics CD.
The only tape drives I've ever had problems with have been the ghetto-cheap Best Buy discount aisle variety.
/ DLT+8000/Default.htm
Get a decent tape drive:
http://www.quantum.com/Products/Quantum+l+DLTtape
And a decent app:
http://www.estinc.com/products.php
Or if perhaps you need a slightly larger tape "drive":
http://www.storagetek.com/products/tape/9310/
The 'cluedness' of the average USENET poster has gone down the tubes. Sure, it's always been a great place for newbies to get some help from the veterans, but lately things have gotten out of control. Cross-posting is rampant, trolls are everywhere, and spammers think folks care about their offerings. Technical discussion has given away to politics. Less than 18 months ago comp.sys.sgi.* was full of interesting chatter, these days half of the posts are by folks asking how to install a (completely unaccelerated and very unfinished) Linux port on an SGI MIPS machine they bought off eBay for $50. The true engineers, developers, and scientific users have pulled completely out and rely on private mailing lists.
Google didn't kill USENET, lamers did.
On the PowerBook G3 series (Wallstreet/Lombard/Pismo) the gfx chip (RageII - RageMobility128 depending on model) is on the bottom of the PCB and somewhat connected to the bottom of the case via a metal plate. That's where almost all of the heat comes from. The heatsink on the CPU is the little metal shelding box that covers the half of the top of the PCB. Heat coming from the keyboard is from the CPU.
I [heart] my 1998 Mercedes-Benz E300 Turbodiesel.
3L direct-injection inline 6. Bought it in Harlingen, Texas at Cardenas AutoPlex. With about 50% highway miles I got about 38 MPG, not bad for heavy sedan. 0-60 acceleration is not too good, about 8 seconds, but that's a damn sight better than, say, a diesel pickup truck.
It's not ergo in the traditional sense, but my PowerBook G3 has a wonderful keyboard. In fact, one of the reasons I bought was for the keyboard. Not too cramped, good key travel, an almost-real keys (not chicklets).
see subject
Only reason it's called NIC is beacuse Ellison is still nuts over the name (and logo) of his N|C (Network Computer) projects in the late 90's.
Ever since Solaris 7 (or 2.6 if you had DiskSuite) there has been a journaling option for UFS.
Add the 'logging' option to your mount command (-o logging) and say goodbye to fsck.
FWIW, it has been working fine thus far on my G4/400 (Sawtooth). I have 256 MB RAM and the original ATI Rage128 Pro in the AGP slot. Though, it looks like we G4 users may be alone, because my buddy with a beige G3 (466 MHz G3 upgrade card + ATI Radeon PCI) has had nothing but trouble.
I too agree that it's not as grabbing at the original Myst, but then I guess I had some pretty high expectations. Still, I think it's an enjoyable worthwhile game, but:
Be sure to read the messageboards first to see if it'll work on your machine / gfx card combo!!
I wonder what RMS's take on this whole concept is.
Take a look at Ximian - Solaris has already offered a preview to customers and IIRC, it is going to become the default desktop at some point. How can this be a bad thing?
It's a bad thing because it causes the bloated, slow, commercial giants to use open source to leverage their own sales. I cringe when I think of how Sun is going to use GNOME to push their proprietary OS for their proprietary hardware (and their slooow x86 port).
Imagine the reverse scenario. Could I write proprietary software, and restrict its use to proprietary OSes? I think not.
Proprietary software is generally closed-source. Compile only for your proprietary OS (or have some sort of a license manager) and you can restrict its uage to proprietary OS'es pretty easily.
This may be somewhat redundant, but Apple does not recommend the use of Voiceprint unless the user has a high quality microphone -and- has the audio inputs set to 16 bit / 48 kHz. It's too easy to defeat otherwise.
I recently watched a program about the NSA on a cable television station (I don't recall if it was History Channel, Discovery Channel, or TLC). The only NSA computer photos shown were some Cray and SGI Origin PR photos in what looked to be a small machine room. It was mentioned that the NSA currently has 11 acres of supercomputers and disk storage. Another comment suggested that they used up "10 years worth of storage" in only a few months after the datawarehouse was built.
Now I see how Cray turned a profit this past quarter and why EMC^2 is doing so well!
I hate to do it, but I have to wonder what IBM's *real* intentions are. Also, just who will get accounts on this machine? The big names: Torvalds, Cox, ESR, RMS? Friends/customers of IBM? The real coders (Apache members, GNOME members, etc)?
I'm almost scared that they may just use this as a way to collect information about up-and-coming projects. Even if I'm working on a GPL'ed project, I'm somewhat weary of compiling and running it on a machine owned by someone else. One day it may be my app... the next it could be "IBM MEGA COMMERCIAL APP". Maybe not the code, but perhaps the idea. I can't compete with IBM when it comes to resources.
Buyer Beware.
SGI Origin 3X00 series. Up to 512 MIPS R14000/500 CPUs, 1 TB RAM. ~700 GB/sec system bandwidth. Add as many PCI or XIO expansion chassis as you desire. (VME can be added via XIO). Add up to 16 "G-Brick" Onyx 3000 / InfiniteReality 3 graphics subsystems. Add up to 36 individual "snowball" DM3 dual channel SD/HD digital video cards for editing HDTV. Add up to 768 SCSI and/or Fibre Channel XIO cards.
Be sure to win the lottery. Err... Be sure to win several lotteries.
http://www.sgi.com/origin/3000/3800.html
http://www.sara.nl/Customer/systems/sgi3800/
No Linux yet, just IRIX + some Cray libraries (SCSL). Can be partitioned if you want to run different instances of IRIX. Can also be clustered via ethernet, gigE, HiPPI, or GSN (800 MegaBytes/sec HiPPI derrivative).
I dunno, MotifZone looks alive and well:
http://www.motifzone.net/
BTW, grab the latest version of OpenMotif (or order a CD).
Are you thinking Motif or Athena? Motif's defaults are very simple, clean, and nicely shaded. Athena (Xaw) is the beast behind the really nasty X apps (xedit, xfig, other such old, horrid beasts). It looks nice to me and *very* similar to default GTK+.
... so I can play the new games on my TV. Seriously. It's the older, simpler, more fun games that I enjoy. My roommates have all of the wizbang new consoles, but we still spend more time playing and enjoying our collection of SNES games. The eyecandy of a new game is only fun for about two days.
I never paid enough attention to the goofy ad.
The site www.army.mil is running WebSTAR/4.2 ID/70636 on MacOS.
The site 140.183.234.14 is running Phantom/2.2.1 on MacOS.
The site www.goarmy.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/4.0 on Solaris.
The site www.cia.gov is running Netscape-Enterprise/4.1 on Solaris.
Mac OS is used by at least a few million folks, most of whom don't know what they're doing, and many of which have nice equipment and lots of bandwidth (artists, DTP folks, etc). Can you think of a better group to hax0r and use their resources?
The reason Mac OS (classic) doesn't get Hax0red has to deal with the OS's architecture. A circa 1982 design with no command-line interface, no unix or dos roots, and no real non-gui way to control the beast. The closest I've seen was a background-only daemon that listens on a certain TCP port for AppleScript commands which it will then execute. Not too useful.
Hey now! I kinda like that "chiropractor" chick!!