Nowadays the only people using them are die-hards and people who got them in order to play with their version of Unix. I'd like to play with their unix too, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a whole new computer to do it.
Interesting comment...I just bought an old PowerMac 7600/120 from eBay for exactly that purpose (ie: to play around with OS X). A few bucks on upgrades (a 500MHz G3 card from Sonnet and an additional 256MB of RAM, plus a 18GB Seagate Barracuda I had lying around, and an old Sony SCSI CD-RW drive), and the thing runs OS X pretty well. Of course I would have never paid the prices Apple wants to buy their equipment new. If Apple does OS X on Intel, Windows and Linux better watch out...
You do realise all the Amiga users were laughing at you throughout the 80's, don't you? Good.
Much like the workstation crowd was laughing at you during the 80's, and the rest of the industry laughed at you in the 90's and 00's. So the Amiga had a cool gfx card once...SO FUCKING WHAT?!? where's you're Amiga now?
Here's the link to the XPostFacto page at Other World Computing. I haven't had any experience installing OS X on anything other than my 7600 (and an Indigo iMac at work), but according to the documentation, the following systems should work:
Apple PowerMac 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 9500, 9600, plus clone systems based on one of these systems, including Umax S900 and J700, PowerComputing PowerWave, PowerTower Pro, Daystar Genesis and Daystar Millenium.
Also check out xlr8yourmac.com, as the forums and boards there have lots of information about people doing strange and unsupported things to their Macs (and clones).
I'd say Yellow Dog is an excellent solution to pre-Blue & White PowerMac OS needs. OS X won't run on most systems made before that and even B&Ws, original iMacs, and iBooks system will run faster with Yellow-Dog than OS X.
You can use XPostFacto to install OS X onto many pre B&W Macs. OS X 10.0 and 10.1 will install onto a 604 based system; 10.2 requires a G3 or G4. I used XPostFacto to install OS X 10.0.3 onto my ancient 7600/120...mind you it runs like shit, but it is possible nonetheless. I also have YDL 2.3 on there, together with Mac OS 9.1 (which runs the best out of the lot of them).
Of course I only just finished downloading and installing YellowDog 2.3 yesterday on my old PowerMac 7600. Since YD uses apt-get in addition to RPM, is it possible to simply do an apt-get dist upgrade like you would on a Debian system? Has anyone tried this when upgrading older versions of YD?
Shame to hear about your 4100 being so crappy. I bought an Inspiron 4100 just over a year ago, and it's probably the most reliable machine I've ever owned (desktop systems included). I drag it to and from work every day, and it's been on numerous trips with me. It did have to have it's 40GB IBM Travelstar HDD replaced about 2 months ago, but Dell (Australia) sorted it out quickly, and a replacement drive was shipped out to me the next day (and was an upgraded drive from 4500rpm to 5400rpm too).
I will admit that the actual 'feel' of the notebook isn't all that robust...you can feel the plastic flexing when you pick it up from one corner, which makes me nervous. But in actual use it's been extremely reliable.
Are you in the US? I wonder if Dell tech support varies in quality from country to country? Also, my 4100 was built in Malaysia. Are all notebooks built in the same place? Does anyone know of variability with Dell notebooks depending on country of origin?
Mazda 121...is that the 'jellybean' shaped 121, or is it an earlier version? 100kW in a car that small should be good fun. No wonder people are getting traction problems:-). btw, you are in the US aren't you? I don't think we got Mazda 323 GTXs here in Australia, but I'm not really a Mazda expert.
I think Peugeot may have pulled out of the US because of quality issues (not sure about that though). The 205s are great fun...like driving a go-cart. I have a 206...just one of the regular 1.6 litre 82kW versions (not the 2.0 litre 100kW GTi), but it handles brilliantly and is a lot of fun to drive.
If you like the Cooper, you might also like the CLio [renault.com].
The French pocket rockets certainly are a lot of fun. The Peugeot 205 GTi and 206 GTi are in the same class as the Clio Sport, but I don't think you get Peugeots in the US either.
I've worked inside a handful of medium-sized machines
That must have been very cramped for you, even in a medium sized machine. Personally, I prefer to work inside something larger, like a Sun E10K...at least you can sort of stand up and stretch from time to time. I do concede however that working in a smaller system has its advantages from time to time. I remember once when I had to work in a little Compaq Deskpro for 3 months (they were refurbishing the interior of the SGI Origin 3000 that I normally used as an office)...it was pretty uncomfortable, but at least the boss never poked his nose in to disturb my web surfing!
but I wonder if there is anyone out there that is using all of this triangle processing power for purposes other than games?
Nvidia at least (and quite possibly ATI too...I'm not sure) slightly tweaks the chip design of its GeForce gaming chips, and then severely tweaks the driver design, and sells them as 'workstation' graphics chips, ie: the Quadro line of chips. They are becoming competitive with more traditional (and expensive) workstation chipsets and video boards. In this application, obviously the user is more focused on doing things like rotating highly complex wireframe and rendered models (eg: in CAD or industrial design) than they are with pumping out textures.
Don't know if this is what you'd really call 'novel' though...Nvidia is just trying to take advantage of their work in the gaming area in the premium-priced graphics workstation area.
2nd) on a per MHZ basis the US III is more efficient that any intel P4, i.e. it gets more done per clock cycle.
Oft quoted, but irrelevant. Efficiency doesn't matter when Intel has a 2GHz lead over Sun. The entire point of the P4 architecture is to sacrifice a high IPC to go for high clock speeds, which results in better overall performance. Comparing Sun's new blades (650MHz UltraSPARC IIi?) with something like IBM's dual hyperthreaded 2.4GHz P4 Xeon blades is a cruel joke, with the joke being on Sun.
Only the most die-hard Sun shops, or those with legacy Solaris apps will be buying these things. They're hideously slow, no matter how efficient the CPU architecture might be.
They are not that expensive (I get an edu discount, but I don't think they list that high otherwise)
In Australia, you automatically get a 40% discount off the list price if you are an educational institution. Even at 40% off, most of the low end Sun stuff still suffers from a low price/performance ratio compared to just about any quality Intel server (especially considering that you also get discounts from the big Intel server manufacturers if you're an.edu too).
How much of the average knowledge worker's output gets uploaded to centralized file servers or websites?
We have a fairly simple solution to that problem where I work (apart from all the usual lectures from the sysadmin staff about saving work onto the file servers etc etc)...only install 4GB drives into the desktops. After you've installed Windows and a few key apps, there isn't too much space left over for any data. I guess you could fake it out with larger hard drives by only making a very small partition and leaving the majority of the drive unpartitioned (and thus unavailable to the average non-admin/root user).
Locutus Enterprise is the pay version that Clarke hopes to lure corporations to shell out money for (for secure trading of research and other documents).
Maybe I'm missing a point somewhere here...what's wrong with centralised file/document servers, or groupware like Notes, GroupWise or Exchange for sharing documents and research within a company? Why P2P? Will we look back at these stories in a couple of years and think the same way about them as we now do with stories about 'Java applications storming the desktop', 'Push applications redefining the way we work on the net', or 'Debian releases new version before 2025'?
You should try Gentoo. The Gentoo forums are refreshingly nice and helpful.
Phew, I've just finished a hard 9-to-5 of being a total cunt to newbies on the Debian mailing lists and IRC channels. You mean that now I can unwind by coming home, firing up my Debian kernel 0.99 box, and calling all the newbies on the Gentoo lists "ass-fucking micro$hit loving cum-slurping lesbian mandrake-loving drones"? All fucking right!
This means clean support for more than 4GB ram. This already affects my work - the ability of software to use exactly 110% of actual RAM must be a physical law of the universe - and I'm hardly working with the top end of equipment
Try not loading your entire porn collection into RAM at once. Thumbnail files can be a good way to quickly scan through a collection on the hard disk, before committing both valuable RAM and ejaculate to a specific set of images.
..everyone will forget that Sun has done this decades ago.
The article clearly shows Sun falling drastically behind just about every other 64 bit architecture in both integer and floating point performance. Maybe Sun hasn't improved their performance scores since decades ago too....
Five years ago (1998) hardly anyone had heard of Linux. In the company I worked in back then I remember a consultant we hired mentioning it, but nobody I knew (even the techies) had even heard of it.
Five years ago large slabs of the university department I worked in were using Linux on their everyday desktops for software development and general e-mail/web browsing. Six months later, I left the university with a bunch of other people to join a biotechnology (proteomics) startup. We originally used Linux for e-mail/file/print/firewalling applications from the very start, as did our software group on their desktops. Our use of Linux has only expanded since then.
I don't know where you were working, or what sort of techies you were associating with, but in 1998 Linux was receiving a lot of attention in scientific, technical computing and software development circles.
FLTK looks pretty awful though. We have a bunch of custom apps here at work coded in C++/FLTK and they don't look like they fit in anywhere...they look as alien on my KDE desktop as they do on a Windows 2000 box. They've got some weirdo widgets in there too...there's that one with the little rolling wheel that you use to increase or decrease a value...what's the deal with that?
Actually, none of these things may actually be FLTK's fault...the guys who developed the apps haven't got an aesthetic bone in their bodies so maybe the shitty look of the apps is more due to them than the toolkit.
No, at this point in time you are correct. A 3 figure salary is what most CS and IT grads can expect at the moment. Has anyone stopped to think that the reason girls are staying away from CS/IT is that 1) the industry has collapsed and has stayed down the toilet since the dot.com crash, and 2) there's a lot more interesting and meaningful careers out there apart from working 80 hour weeks writing some fucking pointless piece of code for some fucking pointless company. Maybe they're just smarter than us.
The new version of Mono includes database providers for Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase, ODBC, OleDB, Gnome Data Access, SqLite, MySQL and of course, Postgres....but no DB2? I guess you could code it through ODBC, but given the native support for other less commonly used databases it's a little surprising. Did IBM do something to piss the developers off?
He's not talking about pro cards...he's talking about regular gaming oriented cards. When something new like a Radeon 9700 is released in Australia, the retail price is often between $AUD700 and $AUD900...of course you can find better deals if you hunt around, but average retail prices are pretty extreme.
Slashdot Mirror
Nowadays the only people using them are die-hards and people who got them in order to play with their version of Unix. I'd like to play with their unix too, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a whole new computer to do it.
Interesting comment...I just bought an old PowerMac 7600/120 from eBay for exactly that purpose (ie: to play around with OS X). A few bucks on upgrades (a 500MHz G3 card from Sonnet and an additional 256MB of RAM, plus a 18GB Seagate Barracuda I had lying around, and an old Sony SCSI CD-RW drive), and the thing runs OS X pretty well. Of course I would have never paid the prices Apple wants to buy their equipment new. If Apple does OS X on Intel, Windows and Linux better watch out...
You do realise all the Amiga users were laughing at you throughout the 80's, don't you? Good.
Much like the workstation crowd was laughing at you during the 80's, and the rest of the industry laughed at you in the 90's and 00's. So the Amiga had a cool gfx card once...SO FUCKING WHAT?!? where's you're Amiga now?
Here's the link to the XPostFacto page at Other World Computing. I haven't had any experience installing OS X on anything other than my 7600 (and an Indigo iMac at work), but according to the documentation, the following systems should work:
Apple PowerMac 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 9500, 9600, plus clone systems based on one of these systems, including Umax S900 and J700, PowerComputing PowerWave, PowerTower Pro, Daystar Genesis and Daystar Millenium.
Also check out xlr8yourmac.com, as the forums and boards there have lots of information about people doing strange and unsupported things to their Macs (and clones).
I'd say Yellow Dog is an excellent solution to pre-Blue & White PowerMac OS needs. OS X won't run on most systems made before that and even B&Ws, original iMacs, and iBooks system will run faster with Yellow-Dog than OS X.
You can use XPostFacto to install OS X onto many pre B&W Macs. OS X 10.0 and 10.1 will install onto a 604 based system; 10.2 requires a G3 or G4. I used XPostFacto to install OS X 10.0.3 onto my ancient 7600/120...mind you it runs like shit, but it is possible nonetheless. I also have YDL 2.3 on there, together with Mac OS 9.1 (which runs the best out of the lot of them).
Why would I want a distribution for one architecture that's different from the distro on all the other architectures I run?
I thought YellowDog was heavily based on RedHat?
Of course I only just finished downloading and installing YellowDog 2.3 yesterday on my old PowerMac 7600. Since YD uses apt-get in addition to RPM, is it possible to simply do an apt-get dist upgrade like you would on a Debian system? Has anyone tried this when upgrading older versions of YD?
Shame to hear about your 4100 being so crappy. I bought an Inspiron 4100 just over a year ago, and it's probably the most reliable machine I've ever owned (desktop systems included). I drag it to and from work every day, and it's been on numerous trips with me. It did have to have it's 40GB IBM Travelstar HDD replaced about 2 months ago, but Dell (Australia) sorted it out quickly, and a replacement drive was shipped out to me the next day (and was an upgraded drive from 4500rpm to 5400rpm too).
I will admit that the actual 'feel' of the notebook isn't all that robust...you can feel the plastic flexing when you pick it up from one corner, which makes me nervous. But in actual use it's been extremely reliable.
Are you in the US? I wonder if Dell tech support varies in quality from country to country? Also, my 4100 was built in Malaysia. Are all notebooks built in the same place? Does anyone know of variability with Dell notebooks depending on country of origin?
For instance, the other day I was making a little presentation to my boss and suddenly used the:
.
.
1.
2. . .
3. Profit!!
Step list . .
That's from South Park (the 'Underpants Gnome' episode). It's not a Slashdot thing (although being unemployed and single probably is).
Mazda 121...is that the 'jellybean' shaped 121, or is it an earlier version? 100kW in a car that small should be good fun. No wonder people are getting traction problems :-). btw, you are in the US aren't you? I don't think we got Mazda 323 GTXs here in Australia, but I'm not really a Mazda expert.
I think Peugeot may have pulled out of the US because of quality issues (not sure about that though). The 205s are great fun...like driving a go-cart. I have a 206...just one of the regular 1.6 litre 82kW versions (not the 2.0 litre 100kW GTi), but it handles brilliantly and is a lot of fun to drive.
If you like the Cooper, you might also like the CLio [renault.com].
The French pocket rockets certainly are a lot of fun. The Peugeot 205 GTi and 206 GTi are in the same class as the Clio Sport, but I don't think you get Peugeots in the US either.
I've worked inside a handful of medium-sized machines
That must have been very cramped for you, even in a medium sized machine. Personally, I prefer to work inside something larger, like a Sun E10K...at least you can sort of stand up and stretch from time to time. I do concede however that working in a smaller system has its advantages from time to time. I remember once when I had to work in a little Compaq Deskpro for 3 months (they were refurbishing the interior of the SGI Origin 3000 that I normally used as an office)...it was pretty uncomfortable, but at least the boss never poked his nose in to disturb my web surfing!
Thank you.
but I wonder if there is anyone out there that is using all of this triangle processing power for purposes other than games?
Nvidia at least (and quite possibly ATI too...I'm not sure) slightly tweaks the chip design of its GeForce gaming chips, and then severely tweaks the driver design, and sells them as 'workstation' graphics chips, ie: the Quadro line of chips. They are becoming competitive with more traditional (and expensive) workstation chipsets and video boards. In this application, obviously the user is more focused on doing things like rotating highly complex wireframe and rendered models (eg: in CAD or industrial design) than they are with pumping out textures.
Don't know if this is what you'd really call 'novel' though...Nvidia is just trying to take advantage of their work in the gaming area in the premium-priced graphics workstation area.
2nd) on a per MHZ basis the US III is more efficient that any intel P4, i.e. it gets more done per clock cycle.
Oft quoted, but irrelevant. Efficiency doesn't matter when Intel has a 2GHz lead over Sun. The entire point of the P4 architecture is to sacrifice a high IPC to go for high clock speeds, which results in better overall performance. Comparing Sun's new blades (650MHz UltraSPARC IIi?) with something like IBM's dual hyperthreaded 2.4GHz P4 Xeon blades is a cruel joke, with the joke being on Sun.
Only the most die-hard Sun shops, or those with legacy Solaris apps will be buying these things. They're hideously slow, no matter how efficient the CPU architecture might be.
They are not that expensive (I get an edu discount, but I don't think they list that high otherwise)
.edu too).
In Australia, you automatically get a 40% discount off the list price if you are an educational institution. Even at 40% off, most of the low end Sun stuff still suffers from a low price/performance ratio compared to just about any quality Intel server (especially considering that you also get discounts from the big Intel server manufacturers if you're an
How much of the average knowledge worker's output gets uploaded to centralized file servers or websites?
We have a fairly simple solution to that problem where I work (apart from all the usual lectures from the sysadmin staff about saving work onto the file servers etc etc)...only install 4GB drives into the desktops. After you've installed Windows and a few key apps, there isn't too much space left over for any data. I guess you could fake it out with larger hard drives by only making a very small partition and leaving the majority of the drive unpartitioned (and thus unavailable to the average non-admin/root user).
Locutus Enterprise is the pay version that Clarke hopes to lure corporations to shell out money for (for secure trading of research and other documents).
Maybe I'm missing a point somewhere here...what's wrong with centralised file/document servers, or groupware like Notes, GroupWise or Exchange for sharing documents and research within a company? Why P2P? Will we look back at these stories in a couple of years and think the same way about them as we now do with stories about 'Java applications storming the desktop', 'Push applications redefining the way we work on the net', or 'Debian releases new version before 2025'?
You should try Gentoo. The Gentoo forums are refreshingly nice and helpful.
Phew, I've just finished a hard 9-to-5 of being a total cunt to newbies on the Debian mailing lists and IRC channels. You mean that now I can unwind by coming home, firing up my Debian kernel 0.99 box, and calling all the newbies on the Gentoo lists "ass-fucking micro$hit loving cum-slurping lesbian mandrake-loving drones"? All fucking right!
This means clean support for more than 4GB ram. This already affects my work - the ability of software to use exactly 110% of actual RAM must be a physical law of the universe - and I'm hardly working with the top end of equipment
Try not loading your entire porn collection into RAM at once. Thumbnail files can be a good way to quickly scan through a collection on the hard disk, before committing both valuable RAM and ejaculate to a specific set of images.
..everyone will forget that Sun has done this decades ago.
The article clearly shows Sun falling drastically behind just about every other 64 bit architecture in both integer and floating point performance. Maybe Sun hasn't improved their performance scores since decades ago too....
Five years ago (1998) hardly anyone had heard of Linux. In the company I worked in back then I remember a consultant we hired mentioning it, but nobody I knew (even the techies) had even heard of it.
Five years ago large slabs of the university department I worked in were using Linux on their everyday desktops for software development and general e-mail/web browsing. Six months later, I left the university with a bunch of other people to join a biotechnology (proteomics) startup. We originally used Linux for e-mail/file/print/firewalling applications from the very start, as did our software group on their desktops. Our use of Linux has only expanded since then.
I don't know where you were working, or what sort of techies you were associating with, but in 1998 Linux was receiving a lot of attention in scientific, technical computing and software development circles.
FLTK looks pretty awful though. We have a bunch of custom apps here at work coded in C++/FLTK and they don't look like they fit in anywhere...they look as alien on my KDE desktop as they do on a Windows 2000 box. They've got some weirdo widgets in there too...there's that one with the little rolling wheel that you use to increase or decrease a value...what's the deal with that?
Actually, none of these things may actually be FLTK's fault...the guys who developed the apps haven't got an aesthetic bone in their bodies so maybe the shitty look of the apps is more due to them than the toolkit.
No, at this point in time you are correct. A 3 figure salary is what most CS and IT grads can expect at the moment. Has anyone stopped to think that the reason girls are staying away from CS/IT is that 1) the industry has collapsed and has stayed down the toilet since the dot.com crash, and 2) there's a lot more interesting and meaningful careers out there apart from working 80 hour weeks writing some fucking pointless piece of code for some fucking pointless company. Maybe they're just smarter than us.
The new version of Mono includes database providers for Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase, ODBC, OleDB, Gnome Data Access, SqLite, MySQL and of course, Postgres. ...but no DB2? I guess you could code it through ODBC, but given the native support for other less commonly used databases it's a little surprising. Did IBM do something to piss the developers off?
He's not talking about pro cards...he's talking about regular gaming oriented cards. When something new like a Radeon 9700 is released in Australia, the retail price is often between $AUD700 and $AUD900...of course you can find better deals if you hunt around, but average retail prices are pretty extreme.