SGI actually does have a set price list for each country they do business. SGI sales offices and VARs, however, rarely charge list price. Depending on the type of order (single item, multiple items, educational, promotional, etc) they have various discounts. Confusing, yes, but if you call or email a sales office you can generally get a nicely-detailed quote within the day... from which you can see their discount schedule (ie, 15% off on hardware, 20% off on software, etc). I keep in contact with the same sales rep that my former university used over 6 years ago, really can't complain too much.
Thanks everyone for the input. I will certainly check out some of the suggestions. Does anyone happen to know just how well GIMP scales? SGI's Origin/Onyx 3000 scales to 512 processors right now (though it's possible to go to 1024) as a single machine with ungodly bandwidth. While we could not afford such a beast, we could probably go for a 64-processor system as it could be used for many uses... batch jobs, rendering, etc... plus multiple IR3 gfx pipes could be used as several different "workstation/terminal" interfaces for interactive work. Though if GIMP doesn't scale to >1 processors very well, then we may as well just buy a bunch of wiz-bang 1.X GHz PCs. Will investigate other options as well. Thanks again for all of the help!
I can start a project on a used SGI Indy or Indigo2 running IRIX 6.5. If I need more power on a single system I can order an Origin 3000 with 512 CPUs, 1TB RAM, and ungodly bandwidth. Soon they will be available up to 1024 CPU, 2TB config. If your project/idea/business takes off and brings in money and demand, you're going to need to supply. How far can your Linux box with mysql+php go? Maybe an 8-CPU Xeon or Alpha?
Why do you need Linux support for your O2? Every O2 is licensed for at least IRIX 6.3, most are licensed for IRIX 6.5. Go to http://freeware.sgi.com and grab whatever utilities and compilers you need. Make sure you've got 128+ MB RAM.
Let's face it... to be honest, I use Windows half the time, most of my machines are set up for a dual boot. That said, I look for cards that work well under both xfree86 and windows. ATI makes great hardware, but their drivers.... well, their drivers stink. The RagePro finally got decent windows and Mac OS drivers about the time the Rage128 shipped, though the win drivers performed a bit better. And thus far, only their Mac drivers for the Rage128 have impressed me. Both the Mac and Win drivers for the Radeon fail to impress, I'm afraid that it'll be months before their Radeon drivers are 'up to speed' with decent stability and performance.
But because I'm not all that excided about performance and the latest wiz-bang thing, I've been pretty happy with the Matrox Millenium II PCI under both Windows and Linux on the PC platform. The G400 has worked well for me as well, though I only own one.
Figure out what you want. Something that works and will be trouble free or the latest wiz-bang thing that'll be dated soon anyway. You can get some 'killer 3d' board and alpha drivers, but you'll pay dearly for it (both the hardware and downtime). Or you can get a conservative card, have few or no problems, and leave the 3D to your Dreamcast or PS2. Sorta like trying to overclock your Mom's Honda Insight vs driving your Dad's midrange '97 Mercedes-Benz E320.
Most of my boxes with GFX have the Matrox Millenium II PCI. The machines with larger monitors have the 8 MB editions, the rest have 4 MB. Way more than enough for a 2D card. Works great, can't complain. May try an ATI Radeon if/when drivers come available.
Which ATI card are you talking about? The rather slow "RagePro" series came just after the even slower RageII. There was a RageProTurbo that finally enabled AGP support. There is, however, the much different and much newer/faster Rage128 series, including the Rage128Pro. *Great* card for 2D and even moderate 3D. Sure isn't a Radeon, though (but doesn't have Radeon prices either...)
At work our 'big' machine is a 3-year-old Onyx Infinite Reality (IR). It has 8 CPUs and two gfx pipes (not all that much seeing how the Onyx 3000 scales to 512 CPUs and 16 pipes). Using OpenGL and the IRIS/OpenGL Performer API we create a variety of (real-time) simulations and demonstrations for our clients. Seems the courtroom 3D exhibit fad has sorta gone away so these days we mostly design interactive presentations and demos for impress-the-investors pitches to deploy either on-site on an Octane2 VPro V8 or in our own "Reality Center" VR theater driven by the Onyx.
Anyway... with our somewhat dated hardware, most render passes take a couple ms, letting us do at least 5, sometimes 8 passes per frame (at a truly-sustained 60 Hz). With the decent geometry and raster hardware of the IR we are able to use pretty complex models and still have no problems with multiple dynamic lights, a continous roaming ground texture, and whatever effects are needed to add realism. All of this on a 1280x1024 projector (the second pipe usually handles a monitor with menus and/or "dashboard" controls)... on hardware that was shipping when NVIDIA was selling only the Riva128, ATi the RageII, and 3Dfx the Voodoo1 and Voodoo Rush.
SGI's current hardware is amazing... and they continue to maintain and update features for the now-replaced Onyx2. Even with some pretty serious work going on, we rarely are using more than 30% of the CPU provided by our 8 MIPS R10000 processors running at 195 MHz. I can't even imagine what would be possible with a maxed out Onyx3000. To say that a "TNT2 can run circles around an Onyx2" is ludicrous. Perhaps in quake, but that would be about it. And yes, SGI and NVIDIA have been working together. Their Intel systems with "VPRO" gfx are based mostly on NVIDIA Quadro/Gefoce gfx. In typical SGI marketing blunder, the Octane2's new gfx is also called "VPRO", even though its V6 and V8 gfx have nothing to do with NVIDIA. (And yet the latest VPRO for Intel is the V7.... jippity!)
Sears here (Woodlands/Houston) had about 12 PS2 boxes on Saturday. Only a few folks looking at them. Nice demo machine set up (though it used a LCD display, I think the game, TTT, would have looked better on a CRT).
>>on my dual-466/256MB RAM. This hardware is okay, but I wouldn't call a dual 466 anything to screem home about anymore.
Heh, I remember when a blazing fast Linux box was a 486/100, and that was in the days of folks running Windows on P90s. Sorta sad how even the Linux camp sorta expect its users to be no more than 18 months behind the bleeding edge of the technology curve.
Perhaps a Mozilla developer can explain, comment?
on
Mozilla .6 Released
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· Score: 1
I've been using browsers since the novel days of Midas and Viola (gotta love ORA), and more recently with Mosaic, Netscape, and MSIE. I was as happy as could be in the "golden era" of Netscape 1.1N. Sure it would crash every now and then, but for the most part it was a great performer. Netscape 2.X brought about plugins and animated gif support, that was about the point where I began to see the start of BrowserBloat. Some versions of Netscape 3.X were downright scary with their sheer number of Java bugs and overall slowness, quite happy when MSIE 3.X and newer version of OmniWeb (for NeXTSTEP and Openstep) came out.
In the NS camp, here we are today with Netscape 4.76, Netscape 6, and Mozilla 0.6. Of the three I use 4.76 on a regular basis on my SGI Octane for browsing and email. It's not as fast as it could be, but it has been almost rock solid (compared to the daily segfaults I was getting with 4.70). I've tried all three on my linux boxes (a P233MMX and a dual PPro200) as well as my Mac G3... Mozilla is certainly faster and does a much better job at rendering, but why on earth does it gobble up so many resources? RAM, disk, and CPU cycles (when rendering, compared to other browsers). Folks rightfully 'dis 4.X, but as far as I know and have seen, 4.76 finally works and works pretty well (at least as good as any Netscape browser since 2.02). Mozilla is certainly an improvement, but not as much as I had hope (or as much as folks claim). The sheer footprints are quite a bit higher than other similar written-almost-from-the-ground-up browsers (such as Mac OS MSIE 4.0-5.0 and OmniWeb 4.0). My two PCs are great performers, especially the dual PPro, but Netscape & Mozilla bring them to their knees while a complex data set in Vis5D works without a hitch. GIMP is quite snappy with large files. And Matlab has been great.
Congratulations on the sucess with Mozilla, but please keep working and perhaps consider branching off with an even more revolutionary, "lighter" browser.
Exactly how I feel. 4.76 sure ain't like the good old days of 1.1N, but it's one of the best things available today. If Mac OS X and OmniWeb 4 ran better on my old G3, I'd use that.
I'm happy to see Mozilla work and all, but I still can't get over its sheer size and requirements. I thought it was going to be a step ahead. MSIE 4.5/5.0 for Mac OS Classic and OmniWeb 4 for Mac OS X are both pretty decent examples of almost-written-from-scratch browsers that have very impressive (read: small) requirements. What happined to Mozilla?!? Is there hope for the long-term? My P233MMX and my Dual PPro 200 machines (both equiped with SCSI drives) are quite zippy for everything but Netscape and Mozilla. They even handle the GIMP quite well. As it stands, the only un*x box that runs a browser well for me is my SGI Octane. Most of the time I just have fire up my G3 or boot into Windows on one of the PCs.
Is there a skin for 6 yet that looks like stock Netscape 4.7X? Or perhaps like HotJava 3? I really like the GUI of those two. I don't care much for the most of the new wiz-bang skins nor can I stomach the "look what I did in 2 minutes with xpaint" default skin of Netscape 6.
All I want is a "Netscape 4.8X". A slightly more stable version of 4.76 (which is a LOT better than 4.70) and with some of the motif gui bugs fixed. Then I'd be set for life... or at least another 18 - 24 months.
The Banshee was a pretty nice card, all things considered. Good 2D, Good 3D, Great Price. Too many folks confuse the Banshee with the Rush (the very first 2D/3D card from 3Dfx, it combined the original Voodoo 1 with 2D) when they look back. The Rush sucked. The Banshee was a pretty nice card.
Ahh, yes... their very first 2D/3D card. Slower than a stock Voodoo 1 for 3D and slower than most other 2D cards for everything else. Made the pass-thru HD15 monitor ports on the Voodoo 1 look pretty good...
It would be "un-Apple-like", but it would make ColorSync even MORE popular. ColorSync is pretty much The Standard anyway and probably one of the few remaining reasons that graphic and layout artists continue to use the Mac OS over anything else. I've been hooked since the day I learned that I could download ColorSync profiles for my printer. The OS already had profiles for my monitor and printer. Very, very slick. Several of Apple's monitors of the past and present went even a step further, capible of doing a self calibration (if you don't mind waiting 2 - 5 minutes while the thing flickers and flashes and whatnot). For the truly hardcore, some of Apple's monitors have a setting where the system will recalibrate itself each time you finish fiddling with the monitor's brightness and contrast (most Apple monitors of the past 5 years have communicated with the computer via ADB or USB).
No major super-huge changes, lots of small fixes and improved support for Octane2 VPro gfx and Onyx/Origin 3000 hardware. Gotta love an OS like this that can tame a 512 processor Origin 3000 with 1 TB RAM yet still work great on my Indy!
I like OmniWeb on NeXTSTEP, OpenStep, and Mac OS X... and MSIE 5 on Windows, Mac OS 9, and Solaris (yes, Solaris). Netscape may be MSFT-free, but it's a piece of trash right now. MSIE on Solaris may look goofy with its Windows widgets, but it has yet to give me any problems (and it runs pretty well, too). Netscape is going to have to grow up... and I don't mean get larger, 4.X is bad enough, 6.0 is worse yet. It needs to become something I can trust and run without having to worry about segfaults every ten minutes.
Netscape is going to have to get a hellofa lot more stable before it becomes my browser of choice again. I lost interest when 2.0 and its buggy, slow plugins came out. Version 1.1N was the last that actually impressed me. I like OmniWeb on NeXTSTEP, OpenStep, and Mac OS X... and MSIE 5 on Windows, Mac OS =
www.microsoft.com/unix
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SGI actually does have a set price list for each country they do business. SGI sales offices and VARs, however, rarely charge list price. Depending on the type of order (single item, multiple items, educational, promotional, etc) they have various discounts. Confusing, yes, but if you call or email a sales office you can generally get a nicely-detailed quote within the day... from which you can see their discount schedule (ie, 15% off on hardware, 20% off on software, etc). I keep in contact with the same sales rep that my former university used over 6 years ago, really can't complain too much.
Thanks everyone for the input. I will certainly check out some of the suggestions. Does anyone happen to know just how well GIMP scales? SGI's Origin/Onyx 3000 scales to 512 processors right now (though it's possible to go to 1024) as a single machine with ungodly bandwidth. While we could not afford such a beast, we could probably go for a 64-processor system as it could be used for many uses... batch jobs, rendering, etc... plus multiple IR3 gfx pipes could be used as several different "workstation/terminal" interfaces for interactive work. Though if GIMP doesn't scale to >1 processors very well, then we may as well just buy a bunch of wiz-bang 1.X GHz PCs. Will investigate other options as well. Thanks again for all of the help!
I can start a project on a used SGI Indy or Indigo2 running IRIX 6.5. If I need more power on a single system I can order an Origin 3000 with 512 CPUs, 1TB RAM, and ungodly bandwidth. Soon they will be available up to 1024 CPU, 2TB config. If your project/idea/business takes off and brings in money and demand, you're going to need to supply. How far can your Linux box with mysql+php go? Maybe an 8-CPU Xeon or Alpha?
Why do you need Linux support for your O2? Every O2 is licensed for at least IRIX 6.3, most are licensed for IRIX 6.5. Go to http://freeware.sgi.com and grab whatever utilities and compilers you need. Make sure you've got 128+ MB RAM.
Let's face it... to be honest, I use Windows half the time, most of my machines are set up for a dual boot. That said, I look for cards that work well under both xfree86 and windows. ATI makes great hardware, but their drivers.... well, their drivers stink. The RagePro finally got decent windows and Mac OS drivers about the time the Rage128 shipped, though the win drivers performed a bit better. And thus far, only their Mac drivers for the Rage128 have impressed me. Both the Mac and Win drivers for the Radeon fail to impress, I'm afraid that it'll be months before their Radeon drivers are 'up to speed' with decent stability and performance.
But because I'm not all that excided about performance and the latest wiz-bang thing, I've been pretty happy with the Matrox Millenium II PCI under both Windows and Linux on the PC platform. The G400 has worked well for me as well, though I only own one.
Figure out what you want. Something that works and will be trouble free or the latest wiz-bang thing that'll be dated soon anyway. You can get some 'killer 3d' board and alpha drivers, but you'll pay dearly for it (both the hardware and downtime). Or you can get a conservative card, have few or no problems, and leave the 3D to your Dreamcast or PS2. Sorta like trying to overclock your Mom's Honda Insight vs driving your Dad's midrange '97 Mercedes-Benz E320.
Most of my boxes with GFX have the Matrox Millenium II PCI. The machines with larger monitors have the 8 MB editions, the rest have 4 MB. Way more than enough for a 2D card. Works great, can't complain. May try an ATI Radeon if/when drivers come available.
Which ATI card are you talking about? The rather slow "RagePro" series came just after the even slower RageII. There was a RageProTurbo that finally enabled AGP support. There is, however, the much different and much newer/faster Rage128 series, including the Rage128Pro. *Great* card for 2D and even moderate 3D. Sure isn't a Radeon, though (but doesn't have Radeon prices either...)
You're refering to the Rage128 Pro, a speed-boost of the Rage 128. The "RagePro" was a *MUCH* slower beast that evolved from the RageII.
At work our 'big' machine is a 3-year-old Onyx Infinite Reality (IR). It has 8 CPUs and two gfx pipes (not all that much seeing how the Onyx 3000 scales to 512 CPUs and 16 pipes). Using OpenGL and the IRIS/OpenGL Performer API we create a variety of (real-time) simulations and demonstrations for our clients. Seems the courtroom 3D exhibit fad has sorta gone away so these days we mostly design interactive presentations and demos for impress-the-investors pitches to deploy either on-site on an Octane2 VPro V8 or in our own "Reality Center" VR theater driven by the Onyx.
Anyway... with our somewhat dated hardware, most render passes take a couple ms, letting us do at least 5, sometimes 8 passes per frame (at a truly-sustained 60 Hz). With the decent geometry and raster hardware of the IR we are able to use pretty complex models and still have no problems with multiple dynamic lights, a continous roaming ground texture, and whatever effects are needed to add realism. All of this on a 1280x1024 projector (the second pipe usually handles a monitor with menus and/or "dashboard" controls)... on hardware that was shipping when NVIDIA was selling only the Riva128, ATi the RageII, and 3Dfx the Voodoo1 and Voodoo Rush.
SGI's current hardware is amazing... and they continue to maintain and update features for the now-replaced Onyx2. Even with some pretty serious work going on, we rarely are using more than 30% of the CPU provided by our 8 MIPS R10000 processors running at 195 MHz. I can't even imagine what would be possible with a maxed out Onyx3000. To say that a "TNT2 can run circles around an Onyx2" is ludicrous. Perhaps in quake, but that would be about it. And yes, SGI and NVIDIA have been working together. Their Intel systems with "VPRO" gfx are based mostly on NVIDIA Quadro/Gefoce gfx. In typical SGI marketing blunder, the Octane2's new gfx is also called "VPRO", even though its V6 and V8 gfx have nothing to do with NVIDIA. (And yet the latest VPRO for Intel is the V7.... jippity!)
Sears here (Woodlands/Houston) had about 12 PS2 boxes on Saturday. Only a few folks looking at them. Nice demo machine set up (though it used a LCD display, I think the game, TTT, would have looked better on a CRT).
Not really.
>>on my dual-466/256MB RAM. This hardware is okay, but I wouldn't call a dual 466 anything to screem home about anymore.
Heh, I remember when a blazing fast Linux box was a 486/100, and that was in the days of folks running Windows on P90s. Sorta sad how even the Linux camp sorta expect its users to be no more than 18 months behind the bleeding edge of the technology curve.
I've been using browsers since the novel days of Midas and Viola (gotta love ORA), and more recently with Mosaic, Netscape, and MSIE. I was as happy as could be in the "golden era" of Netscape 1.1N. Sure it would crash every now and then, but for the most part it was a great performer. Netscape 2.X brought about plugins and animated gif support, that was about the point where I began to see the start of BrowserBloat. Some versions of Netscape 3.X were downright scary with their sheer number of Java bugs and overall slowness, quite happy when MSIE 3.X and newer version of OmniWeb (for NeXTSTEP and Openstep) came out.
In the NS camp, here we are today with Netscape 4.76, Netscape 6, and Mozilla 0.6. Of the three I use 4.76 on a regular basis on my SGI Octane for browsing and email. It's not as fast as it could be, but it has been almost rock solid (compared to the daily segfaults I was getting with 4.70). I've tried all three on my linux boxes (a P233MMX and a dual PPro200) as well as my Mac G3... Mozilla is certainly faster and does a much better job at rendering, but why on earth does it gobble up so many resources? RAM, disk, and CPU cycles (when rendering, compared to other browsers). Folks rightfully 'dis 4.X, but as far as I know and have seen, 4.76 finally works and works pretty well (at least as good as any Netscape browser since 2.02). Mozilla is certainly an improvement, but not as much as I had hope (or as much as folks claim). The sheer footprints are quite a bit higher than other similar written-almost-from-the-ground-up browsers (such as Mac OS MSIE 4.0-5.0 and OmniWeb 4.0). My two PCs are great performers, especially the dual PPro, but Netscape & Mozilla bring them to their knees while a complex data set in Vis5D works without a hitch. GIMP is quite snappy with large files. And Matlab has been great.
Congratulations on the sucess with Mozilla, but please keep working and perhaps consider branching off with an even more revolutionary, "lighter" browser.
Exactly how I feel. 4.76 sure ain't like the good old days of 1.1N, but it's one of the best things available today. If Mac OS X and OmniWeb 4 ran better on my old G3, I'd use that.
I'm happy to see Mozilla work and all, but I still can't get over its sheer size and requirements. I thought it was going to be a step ahead. MSIE 4.5/5.0 for Mac OS Classic and OmniWeb 4 for Mac OS X are both pretty decent examples of almost-written-from-scratch browsers that have very impressive (read: small) requirements. What happined to Mozilla?!? Is there hope for the long-term? My P233MMX and my Dual PPro 200 machines (both equiped with SCSI drives) are quite zippy for everything but Netscape and Mozilla. They even handle the GIMP quite well. As it stands, the only un*x box that runs a browser well for me is my SGI Octane. Most of the time I just have fire up my G3 or boot into Windows on one of the PCs.
*sigh*
Is there a skin for 6 yet that looks like stock Netscape 4.7X? Or perhaps like HotJava 3? I really like the GUI of those two. I don't care much for the most of the new wiz-bang skins nor can I stomach the "look what I did in 2 minutes with xpaint" default skin of Netscape 6.
All I want is a "Netscape 4.8X". A slightly more stable version of 4.76 (which is a LOT better than 4.70) and with some of the motif gui bugs fixed. Then I'd be set for life... or at least another 18 - 24 months.
The Banshee was a pretty nice card, all things considered. Good 2D, Good 3D, Great Price. Too many folks confuse the Banshee with the Rush (the very first 2D/3D card from 3Dfx, it combined the original Voodoo 1 with 2D) when they look back. The Rush sucked. The Banshee was a pretty nice card.
Ahh, yes... their very first 2D/3D card. Slower than a stock Voodoo 1 for 3D and slower than most other 2D cards for everything else. Made the pass-thru HD15 monitor ports on the Voodoo 1 look pretty good...
It would be "un-Apple-like", but it would make ColorSync even MORE popular. ColorSync is pretty much The Standard anyway and probably one of the few remaining reasons that graphic and layout artists continue to use the Mac OS over anything else. I've been hooked since the day I learned that I could download ColorSync profiles for my printer. The OS already had profiles for my monitor and printer. Very, very slick. Several of Apple's monitors of the past and present went even a step further, capible of doing a self calibration (if you don't mind waiting 2 - 5 minutes while the thing flickers and flashes and whatnot). For the truly hardcore, some of Apple's monitors have a setting where the system will recalibrate itself each time you finish fiddling with the monitor's brightness and contrast (most Apple monitors of the past 5 years have communicated with the computer via ADB or USB).
Food for thought.
3dwm! I can see the ads now, "is your OS stuck in 2 dimensions?".
Flex time tripled the number of LAN games (Quake and the such). Didn't last long.
along with MIPSpro 7.2.1.3
http://support.s gi. com/colls/patches/tools/relstream/index.html
No major super-huge changes, lots of small fixes and improved support for Octane2 VPro gfx and Onyx/Origin 3000 hardware. Gotta love an OS like this that can tame a 512 processor Origin 3000 with 1 TB RAM yet still work great on my Indy!
I like OmniWeb on NeXTSTEP, OpenStep, and Mac OS X... and MSIE 5 on Windows, Mac OS 9, and Solaris (yes, Solaris). Netscape may be MSFT-free, but it's a piece of trash right now. MSIE on Solaris may look goofy with its Windows widgets, but it has yet to give me any problems (and it runs pretty well, too). Netscape is going to have to grow up... and I don't mean get larger, 4.X is bad enough, 6.0 is worse yet. It needs to become something I can trust and run without having to worry about segfaults every ten minutes.
www.microsoft.com/unix
Netscape is going to have to get a hellofa lot more stable before it becomes my browser of choice again. I lost interest when 2.0 and its buggy, slow plugins came out. Version 1.1N was the last that actually impressed me. I like OmniWeb on NeXTSTEP, OpenStep, and Mac OS X... and MSIE 5 on Windows, Mac OS =
www.microsoft.com/unix