But my 6-year old son hogs it all the time to play Doom. =]
I don't know if I'd recommend it for a general workstation. I'm running IRIX 6.5.15, and it's as ugly as ever. Haven't loaded up gnome yet.
It all comes down to application support. If you're just wanting to run normal desktop stuff, forget it. Stick to x86 or Mac. But if it's just out of curiosity and a desire to learn, hit eBay and get yourself a variety. I've got VAXstations, an AlphaStation, a couple of SPARCstations, a NeXTstation, and the SGI. Not to mention the bigger stuff.. a couple of MicroVAXen and a VAX 6000-510. In all, I've spent maybe $1000 on odd hardware, and most of that was for the Alpha and the SGI. The rest were free or under $100. Ok, the VAX wound up costing me a bit for truck rental and medical bills after hauling around 80-pound hard drives, but it was still under $100. And the former owner bought me dinner for hauling it away.
Actually, if you let the chickens roam free and eat bugs and stuff, they taste a lot different than the store-bought ones.
As for the bones, you'll just need to breed special boneless chickens.
Last time I was out in Las Vegas (for Black Hat and DefCon) I wound up in a similar situation... lots of MP3s and movies on a laptop, but no good connection for sound. So we picked up a generic FM transmitter of the type used on portable CD players in cars without cassette decks. It worked, but it had a fair amound of frequency drift - we had to tweak it from time to time to keep it on frequency. Plus, sometimes it's hard to find an unused channel.
The range was pretty good, though - maybe 100 feet or so. We actually set one of the laptops in the back window of the car on the drive back, running a Powerpoint loop advertising "FM 89.9" or some such, with a cell phone number for requests. We set another laptop on random play over the FM transmitter, and watched all the cars behind us pull up close to look at the sign, tune in their radio, and then jockey for position to try to stay in range of the transmitter.
The IRS wants you to understand the 1040 and to fill it out correctly. Most companies don't want or don't expect you to read the EULA, and it'll stay like that as long as we let them get away with writing outrageous EULAs which carry the force of law and require all sorts of insane concessions on the part of the user.
Just as a historical footnote... it doesn't always pay to try to jump too far ahead. Check out the history of the Intel 432... ahead of its time, but not exactly a success.
Damn you, Admiral Hopper! I've got a huge stack of COBOL listings on my desk that I've got to translate to, of all things, vbscript (damn you, Bill Gates!)
The most annoying ones are those IIS worms that infest my DSL provider's network and fill up my Apache logs with crap. Anyone had any luck with Code Red Vigilante or anything similar?
You get to buy nifty things like this for 'em. Yeah, some might argue that a two year old can't really appreciate a microscope, or a Lego Mindstorms kit, but you've got to start them early, right?
I spent under $70 and got myself a SPARC to learn on... an old IPX, and they dropped support for sun4c after Solaris 7, but the point is you can get some good experience from cheap hardware on eBay.
Hey, us Linux on MicroVAX users would be happy to have that many!
Re:Ummm...
on
On Hacktivism
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well spoken. I realized one day that pretty much the only education I'd had about Communism, at least before college, consisted of 'Communist = Evil'. Not even in high school did we ever cover the basics of what it really is.
I spoke to a friend who spent some time travelling around Laos. Apparently the system's worked pretty well for them. They've got better education and nutrition now, access to healthcare, and at least some hope of sending their children on to something beyond a subsistence-level existence in a small village. And when you're operating on that scale, I really can't see how capitalism could be argued to be that much better.
Empirical evidence would suggest, however, that communism hasn't worked out terribly well for the long term in larger implementations.
Pick your cause before you pick the site...
on
On Hacktivism
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
To quote cDc at DefCon a couple of years ago.
Personally I think 'hacktivism' is a grossly overused excuse for vandalism. Hacking sites as a 'service' to the operators is passe... now the kiddies have to act like they've got some sort of noble political agenda.
I still think that's proportionately not as cool as my 19.2 Kbps paraglider setup. =] No link yet, but when I get it working you'll be able to watch my flights real-time, along with what meager telemetry you can get out of a 35-pound nylon and Kevlar aircraft.
Anyone know where I can get a super-compact frame grabber? Maybe I'll put my helmet-cam online too. =]
Did I say +? I meant -. =] Ok, so almost 10 years old. Yeah, there's hardware out there that blows it away, but for whatever reason 3D apps like that silly spinbutton thing look better than anything that runs in a window on my Windows box. Yeah, you can get good 3D running full-screen, but I just haven't been impressed by anything running in a normal window.
Yeah, it does happen. If I recall, though, it's relatively rare. How many cases do you know of? I've heard of one or two, in the news or in a psych textbook, but I can think of at least three cases of child molestation by a male that affected someone I know personally.
A residential phone solution that's a couple orders of magnitude more complicated and less reliable than what I've got now!
We've got VoIP here. It's down frequently, even when the network is up. And when it comes to broadband reliability... well, I notice my DSL line being down about 6 hours out of the month, so it's probably down a lot more than that. My POTS line hasn't been down for any noticeable length of time in the last 20 years.
As deplorable as child pornography is, I'm glad to see this struck down. The legislation was way to vague, and from what I understand made any simulation of underage sex illegal. That would presumably include some of the anime that's so popular around here, if it could be argued that any character portrayed might appear to be under age 18. The whole thing borders on 'thought crime'.
Go after the real child pornographers, the ones harming innocent children. String them up by their testicles and make them read Jon Katz articles, or whatever... but don't start making artificial arrangements of pixels a felony.
Just thought I'd share my own experience with buying stuff on eBay from Germany. I purchased a couple of hard-to-find video displays from a guy in Hamburg, and had only one real problem - somehow he got both my home and my work address on the package. I'd wanted it shipped to my home. Anyway, somehow it ended up at work. I work on a US Air Force base, and this was shortly after Sept. 11. I got a nasty call from the base mail center that they had a mislabeled international package for me that showed lots of weird wires and things on the x-ray machine and they wanted to know what the heck it was. Fortunately I was able to get it straightened out, claimed my package, and deprived the explosive ordinance disposal team of a suspicious package destruction.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd stop him, but hey... it's IRIX. What 6-year old can't bust root on that?
But my 6-year old son hogs it all the time to play Doom. =]
I don't know if I'd recommend it for a general workstation. I'm running IRIX 6.5.15, and it's as ugly as ever. Haven't loaded up gnome yet.
It all comes down to application support. If you're just wanting to run normal desktop stuff, forget it. Stick to x86 or Mac. But if it's just out of curiosity and a desire to learn, hit eBay and get yourself a variety. I've got VAXstations, an AlphaStation, a couple of SPARCstations, a NeXTstation, and the SGI. Not to mention the bigger stuff.. a couple of MicroVAXen and a VAX 6000-510. In all, I've spent maybe $1000 on odd hardware, and most of that was for the Alpha and the SGI. The rest were free or under $100. Ok, the VAX wound up costing me a bit for truck rental and medical bills after hauling around 80-pound hard drives, but it was still under $100. And the former owner bought me dinner for hauling it away.
But we still haven't had any...
PIGS... IN... SPAAAAAAAAAACE!
(insert obligatory rant about lame lameness filter here)
Actually, if you let the chickens roam free and eat bugs and stuff, they taste a lot different than the store-bought ones. As for the bones, you'll just need to breed special boneless chickens.
Last time I was out in Las Vegas (for Black Hat and DefCon) I wound up in a similar situation... lots of MP3s and movies on a laptop, but no good connection for sound. So we picked up a generic FM transmitter of the type used on portable CD players in cars without cassette decks. It worked, but it had a fair amound of frequency drift - we had to tweak it from time to time to keep it on frequency. Plus, sometimes it's hard to find an unused channel.
The range was pretty good, though - maybe 100 feet or so. We actually set one of the laptops in the back window of the car on the drive back, running a Powerpoint loop advertising "FM 89.9" or some such, with a cell phone number for requests. We set another laptop on random play over the FM transmitter, and watched all the cars behind us pull up close to look at the sign, tune in their radio, and then jockey for position to try to stay in range of the transmitter.
The IRS wants you to understand the 1040 and to fill it out correctly. Most companies don't want or don't expect you to read the EULA, and it'll stay like that as long as we let them get away with writing outrageous EULAs which carry the force of law and require all sorts of insane concessions on the part of the user.
Just as a historical footnote... it doesn't always pay to try to jump too far ahead. Check out the history of the Intel 432... ahead of its time, but not exactly a success.
Damn you, Admiral Hopper! I've got a huge stack of COBOL listings on my desk that I've got to translate to, of all things, vbscript (damn you, Bill Gates!)
The most annoying ones are those IIS worms that infest my DSL provider's network and fill up my Apache logs with crap. Anyone had any luck with Code Red Vigilante or anything similar?
Or does The Rock's head look exactly like one of those clay reconstructions they make from the skulls of murder victims or ancient mummies?
You get to buy nifty things like this for 'em. Yeah, some might argue that a two year old can't really appreciate a microscope, or a Lego Mindstorms kit, but you've got to start them early, right?
I spent under $70 and got myself a SPARC to learn on... an old IPX, and they dropped support for sun4c after Solaris 7, but the point is you can get some good experience from cheap hardware on eBay.
Hey, us Linux on MicroVAX users would be happy to have that many!
Well spoken. I realized one day that pretty much the only education I'd had about Communism, at least before college, consisted of 'Communist = Evil'. Not even in high school did we ever cover the basics of what it really is.
I spoke to a friend who spent some time travelling around Laos. Apparently the system's worked pretty well for them. They've got better education and nutrition now, access to healthcare, and at least some hope of sending their children on to something beyond a subsistence-level existence in a small village. And when you're operating on that scale, I really can't see how capitalism could be argued to be that much better.
Empirical evidence would suggest, however, that communism hasn't worked out terribly well for the long term in larger implementations.
To quote cDc at DefCon a couple of years ago.
Personally I think 'hacktivism' is a grossly overused excuse for vandalism. Hacking sites as a 'service' to the operators is passe... now the kiddies have to act like they've got some sort of noble political agenda.
I still think that's proportionately not as cool as my 19.2 Kbps paraglider setup. =] No link yet, but when I get it working you'll be able to watch my flights real-time, along with what meager telemetry you can get out of a 35-pound nylon and Kevlar aircraft.
Anyone know where I can get a super-compact frame grabber? Maybe I'll put my helmet-cam online too. =]
Most excellent! Many thanks for providing a useful service in an intelligent format.
Though it still seems like you ought to be able to obtain an authoritative database of ISBN numbers. I couldn't find one last time I looked, though.
Did I say +? I meant -. =] Ok, so almost 10 years old. Yeah, there's hardware out there that blows it away, but for whatever reason 3D apps like that silly spinbutton thing look better than anything that runs in a window on my Windows box. Yeah, you can get good 3D running full-screen, but I just haven't been impressed by anything running in a normal window.
Hey, at least they're making SOME progress. I've got a 10+ year old SGI Indigo2 at home, and it still does smoother 3D than my modern Windows XP box.
Yeah, it does happen. If I recall, though, it's relatively rare. How many cases do you know of? I've heard of one or two, in the news or in a psych textbook, but I can think of at least three cases of child molestation by a male that affected someone I know personally.
A residential phone solution that's a couple orders of magnitude more complicated and less reliable than what I've got now!
We've got VoIP here. It's down frequently, even when the network is up. And when it comes to broadband reliability... well, I notice my DSL line being down about 6 hours out of the month, so it's probably down a lot more than that. My POTS line hasn't been down for any noticeable length of time in the last 20 years.
And I can buy a POTS phone for about $10.
As deplorable as child pornography is, I'm glad to see this struck down. The legislation was way to vague, and from what I understand made any simulation of underage sex illegal. That would presumably include some of the anime that's so popular around here, if it could be argued that any character portrayed might appear to be under age 18. The whole thing borders on 'thought crime'.
Go after the real child pornographers, the ones harming innocent children. String them up by their testicles and make them read Jon Katz articles, or whatever... but don't start making artificial arrangements of pixels a felony.
Just thought I'd share my own experience with buying stuff on eBay from Germany. I purchased a couple of hard-to-find video displays from a guy in Hamburg, and had only one real problem - somehow he got both my home and my work address on the package. I'd wanted it shipped to my home. Anyway, somehow it ended up at work. I work on a US Air Force base, and this was shortly after Sept. 11. I got a nasty call from the base mail center that they had a mislabeled international package for me that showed lots of weird wires and things on the x-ray machine and they wanted to know what the heck it was. Fortunately I was able to get it straightened out, claimed my package, and deprived the explosive ordinance disposal team of a suspicious package destruction.
The ham slice is just plain nasty, though. Every one I've had has somehow managed to be totally dry, despite soaking in a packet of juice.
Chicken a la king is pretty good. Smells a bit like dog food, but oh well. The vacuum-sealed crackers are great with the peanut butter.
The freeze-dried peaches, on the other hand, should be kept around for packing fragile items for shipping.
A concrete hot air balloon would really be something.