Did you build the IRIX version yourself? I haven't been able to find a binary of it (I'm running IRIX64 6.5.9m). Netscape 4.X for me on IRIX has been just as bad as what you've described for Linux. The bus errors and segfaults are REALLY, REALLY annoying after typing out a long email or finding an obscure website and not having had time to bookmark it. I hear Richard Hess at SGI is hard at work on an "offical SGI version" of 4.75/4.76 and 6.0, I hope he has a chance to work out at least some of the problems. Getting the keypad to work again would be nice, too.
I've been using OmniWeb 4 for Mac OS X since 4.0beta3. Beta 7 has been totally awesome. Just hope they find time to make a final 3.0 (or even a 3.1) for Openstep 4.2 (the OS version is at 3.0fc2 right now).
Agreed, Blacklab on G4 hardware is effortless to install (even without gfx) and it tears through double-precision floating point like nobody's business. But if you're a fella that just looking to _play_ with a cluster, you're probably MUCH better off buying a dozen eMachines/PeoplePC/whatever IA-32/x86 boxes.
Now that Apple's G4s ship with onboard 10/100/1000 gigabit ethernet, I wonder if gbit switches will come down in price a bit.
What are your goals, how many concurrent jobs will you be running (and with what priorities), and do you know where the bottlenecks reside?
Clustering, high-performance computing in general encompasses a huge number of problems and solutions. There are literally gobs of different routes one could take. Beowulf and Benchmarks, while easy to remeber and look at, are not the solution to everything. Perhaps you need the vector performance of a Cray or maybe the cache-coherent shared-memory system of a Data General AViiON or Silicon Graphics Origin. It all depends on your needs. Do the research before assuming you need one exact solution.
FWIW, you may want to look at SGI's Advanced Clustering Environment for an all-inclusive, free, open-source solution. It's available for both SGI MIPS IRIX and IA-32/Intel Linux and works quite well with SGI's great Performance Copilot analysis software. They also know a thing or two about high performance computing. If you need more power you can build a warehouse of Linux boxes or a buy a 512-processor Origin 3000 (w/ 1TB RAM and 714 GByte/sec bandwidth)... or a cluster of those!
Again, this is something that should be addressed to Apple. Mac OS X is not GPL and therefor most Slashdot readers can't do much to fix this. Let Apple know, it's why they have a feedback form on their Mac OS X site.
Apple's AIX-based, large format servers were well-recieved, but overpriced and poorly marketed (Apple targeted education and publishing -- audiences that at the time had no idea what Unix was, let alone the AIX flavor). AIX media wasn't included nor was any administration software. After a minor speedbump, the Apple Network Servers disappeared.
As for a clone server, "Apple is a hardware company" and any sort of licensing would end up costing both parties more than it would be worth. Buuuutttt... why couldn't Apple make an ATX PowerMac G4 board based on the UMA1 or UMA2 chipset? They could sell it at a price where they would be making money but low enough to make it worthwhile for end-users and VARs to customize. Sun does it.
Say what you will about quality, etc, but Mac OS X is made by an actual commerical company. In theory this means support and well-tested code. If nothing else, it means there is someone to sue if all else fails.
While the GUI is still sluggish for me, everything else about the OS has been wicked fast. I haven't done any benchmarks, but as far as my daily work (compiling, running scripts, etc) it feels MUCH faster than any other box I have around.
You're right-on about it being moreso about the features and layout of NeXTstep. Only really difference is the color and style of the GUI widgets and the exact names of the directories.
It's well known that Jobs uses both Toshiba and IBM laptops running NeXTstep/OpenStep (the OS made by his former company, NeXT... the basis of Mac OS X). His presentations are often run off his personal laptop and he bought some of his recent machines preconfigured by Bifrost Workstations (see link at http://www.beyondboxes.com/next/).
I see that AOLserver (www.aolserver.com) now has a binary for Mac OS X Public Beta. As does Apache (1.3.X, cross compiled for PPC & Intel for OS X and Darwin). Now if Oracle would only port Oracle 9 to OS X...
But seriously, NetInfo is over 10 years old and was created by NeXT for their NeXTstep operating system (later renamed OpenStep after some major changes). Mac OS X is based on OpenStep.
Follow the links, learn about NeXT's NeXTstep and OpenStep. See where your Windowmaker/AfterStep/GNUstep are modeled after. See what Apple's Mac OS X is based on. See what NetInfo is all about.
The author of the article has probably never touched a NeXT system (or a PC, SPARC, or HP box running OpenStep). NetInfo is not new, it's over 10 years old and well documented. Properly implemented on a network it makes life soooooo much easier. Please, before you compare NeXTstep/OpenStep/Rhapsody/MacOSX to your favorite flavor of BSD, do some research on NeXTstep and NetInfo. It makes a lot more sense if you have a real interstanding of why things are the way they are.
Try this link for some pointers and URLs:
http://204.214.75.123/next/index.html
Just because Mac OS X has BSD components doesn't mean that it needs to be compared to every other BSD out there. We went thru all of this in the late 80's with NeXTstep/OpenStep. Mac OS X is essentially OpenStep with display pdf (rather than postscript), updated media layers, and Mac app compatibility layers. It's not intended to be a killer replacement for xBSD, it never was.
Looks pretty clear to me. Crusoe, while being fast enough for the average joe, isn't as fast as folks had hoped. But because Torvalds works for Transmeta, every last Slashdotter is hoping and praying for Crusoe to come out on top. Linus working on something that isn't successfull?! Slashdot won't let that happen, or at least let its readers think that.
Quicktime is not just an app, a file format, or a plugin, but rather an entire media layer for Mac OS and Windows (granted Apple's Mac OS uses it a great deal more than Windows). A Quicktime file (such as a.mov) can contain not just audio and video, but several tracks of each (alternative languages, for example) but also text, effects, vector graphics, and more. These days Apple is pushing Sorenson Video 2 as the codec of choice for most Quicktime movies, and as it stands this codec is only available for Mac OS and Windows. Asking Apple to port the Quicktime architecture and some Quicktime-savvy players and other tools to Linux is not the only way to try to get modern.mov playback on Linux. You may want to contact Sorenson or a Linux developer to look into the possibilty of licensing Sorenson Video 2 for a Linux player.
For now, why not just contact the producers of these websites and their downloadable movies and request that they provide an MPEG-1 or DiVX version as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you build the IRIX version yourself? I haven't been able to find a binary of it (I'm running IRIX64 6.5.9m). Netscape 4.X for me on IRIX has been just as bad as what you've described for Linux. The bus errors and segfaults are REALLY, REALLY annoying after typing out a long email or finding an obscure website and not having had time to bookmark it. I hear Richard Hess at SGI is hard at work on an "offical SGI version" of 4.75/4.76 and 6.0, I hope he has a chance to work out at least some of the problems. Getting the keypad to work again would be nice, too.
I've been using OmniWeb 4 for Mac OS X since 4.0beta3. Beta 7 has been totally awesome. Just hope they find time to make a final 3.0 (or even a 3.1) for Openstep 4.2 (the OS version is at 3.0fc2 right now).
that soldiers recompile the kernel of their battlefield computer. I think the version number pissing match has gone much too far.
Agreed, Blacklab on G4 hardware is effortless to install (even without gfx) and it tears through double-precision floating point like nobody's business. But if you're a fella that just looking to _play_ with a cluster, you're probably MUCH better off buying a dozen eMachines/PeoplePC/whatever IA-32/x86 boxes.
Now that Apple's G4s ship with onboard 10/100/1000 gigabit ethernet, I wonder if gbit switches will come down in price a bit.
What are your goals, how many concurrent jobs will you be running (and with what priorities), and do you know where the bottlenecks reside?
Clustering, high-performance computing in general encompasses a huge number of problems and solutions. There are literally gobs of different routes one could take. Beowulf and Benchmarks, while easy to remeber and look at, are not the solution to everything. Perhaps you need the vector performance of a Cray or maybe the cache-coherent shared-memory system of a Data General AViiON or Silicon Graphics Origin. It all depends on your needs. Do the research before assuming you need one exact solution.
FWIW, you may want to look at SGI's Advanced Clustering Environment for an all-inclusive, free, open-source solution. It's available for both SGI MIPS IRIX and IA-32/Intel Linux and works quite well with SGI's great Performance Copilot analysis software. They also know a thing or two about high performance computing. If you need more power you can build a warehouse of Linux boxes or a buy a 512-processor Origin 3000 (w/ 1TB RAM and 714 GByte/sec bandwidth)... or a cluster of those!
My $0.02
Use some of the existing Mac OS X YP/NIS/NIS+ tools if you don't care for NeXT's NetInfo. Let Apple know how you feel about this.
I belive bash is included. Grab the GNU tools and compile your favorite shell.
Again, this is something that should be addressed to Apple. Mac OS X is not GPL and therefor most Slashdot readers can't do much to fix this. Let Apple know, it's why they have a feedback form on their Mac OS X site.
Apple's AIX-based, large format servers were well-recieved, but overpriced and poorly marketed (Apple targeted education and publishing -- audiences that at the time had no idea what Unix was, let alone the AIX flavor). AIX media wasn't included nor was any administration software. After a minor speedbump, the Apple Network Servers disappeared.
As for a clone server, "Apple is a hardware company" and any sort of licensing would end up costing both parties more than it would be worth. Buuuutttt... why couldn't Apple make an ATX PowerMac G4 board based on the UMA1 or UMA2 chipset? They could sell it at a price where they would be making money but low enough to make it worthwhile for end-users and VARs to customize. Sun does it.
about half-way down the page:
http://macosrumors.com/?view=recent
Say what you will about quality, etc, but Mac OS X is made by an actual commerical company. In theory this means support and well-tested code. If nothing else, it means there is someone to sue if all else fails.
While the GUI is still sluggish for me, everything else about the OS has been wicked fast. I haven't done any benchmarks, but as far as my daily work (compiling, running scripts, etc) it feels MUCH faster than any other box I have around.
You're right-on about it being moreso about the features and layout of NeXTstep. Only really difference is the color and style of the GUI widgets and the exact names of the directories.
It's well known that Jobs uses both Toshiba and IBM laptops running NeXTstep/OpenStep (the OS made by his former company, NeXT... the basis of Mac OS X). His presentations are often run off his personal laptop and he bought some of his recent machines preconfigured by Bifrost Workstations (see link at http://www.beyondboxes.com/next/).
I see that AOLserver (www.aolserver.com) now has a binary for Mac OS X Public Beta. As does Apache (1.3.X, cross compiled for PPC & Intel for OS X and Darwin). Now if Oracle would only port Oracle 9 to OS X...
>>is that Mac finally invented something
Who's Mac? Some guy that works for Apple?
But seriously, NetInfo is over 10 years old and was created by NeXT for their NeXTstep operating system (later renamed OpenStep after some major changes). Mac OS X is based on OpenStep.
Go to the Mac OS X section of Apple's website and submit a complaint. THat's what it's there for.
http://www.beyondboxes.com/next/
Follow the links, learn about NeXT's NeXTstep and OpenStep. See where your Windowmaker/AfterStep/GNUstep are modeled after. See what Apple's Mac OS X is based on. See what NetInfo is all about.
my poor connection is bogged down already.. here is a mirror of that page of NeXT hardware and software links (NeXTstep, OpenStep, NetInfo):
http://www.beyondboxes.com/next/
see subject
The author of the article has probably never touched a NeXT system (or a PC, SPARC, or HP box running OpenStep). NetInfo is not new, it's over 10 years old and well documented. Properly implemented on a network it makes life soooooo much easier. Please, before you compare NeXTstep/OpenStep/Rhapsody/MacOSX to your favorite flavor of BSD, do some research on NeXTstep and NetInfo. It makes a lot more sense if you have a real interstanding of why things are the way they are.
Try this link for some pointers and URLs:
http://204.214.75.123/next/index.html
Just because Mac OS X has BSD components doesn't mean that it needs to be compared to every other BSD out there. We went thru all of this in the late 80's with NeXTstep/OpenStep. Mac OS X is essentially OpenStep with display pdf (rather than postscript), updated media layers, and Mac app compatibility layers. It's not intended to be a killer replacement for xBSD, it never was.
my P233 MMX back. Be sure it's got a 7200 RPM drive and 64 MB RAM, though. 8 MB Matrox Millenium II and a 19" monitor helps.
Looks pretty clear to me. Crusoe, while being fast enough for the average joe, isn't as fast as folks had hoped. But because Torvalds works for Transmeta, every last Slashdotter is hoping and praying for Crusoe to come out on top. Linus working on something that isn't successfull?! Slashdot won't let that happen, or at least let its readers think that.
Quicktime is not just an app, a file format, or a plugin, but rather an entire media layer for Mac OS and Windows (granted Apple's Mac OS uses it a great deal more than Windows). A Quicktime file (such as a .mov) can contain not just audio and video, but several tracks of each (alternative languages, for example) but also text, effects, vector graphics, and more. These days Apple is pushing Sorenson Video 2 as the codec of choice for most Quicktime movies, and as it stands this codec is only available for Mac OS and Windows. Asking Apple to port the Quicktime architecture and some Quicktime-savvy players and other tools to Linux is not the only way to try to get modern .mov playback on Linux. You may want to contact Sorenson or a Linux developer to look into the possibilty of licensing Sorenson Video 2 for a Linux player.
For now, why not just contact the producers of these websites and their downloadable movies and request that they provide an MPEG-1 or DiVX version as well.