I scored a GRiD Compass 1101 sometime ago at the Dallas Sidewalk Sale. Still have the thing too. It's big and heavy compared to anything made in the last 8 years, though for a '81 vintage machine it's at least briefcase-crammable, compared to a Compaq Luggable. It had an 8086 for brains, (I think) 384k RAM, GPIB for an I/O bus (this is where the external disk hung), a dinky little plasma display, and, get this, bubble memory for nonvolatile storage. That means your data is (so 'they' say) EMP-proof. There was no batteries. You had to jam an AC cord into this thing.
The truly striking feature has to be the cast magnesium case. (Alloy, kids, not pure magnesium, that would be stupid. First person to suggest that this machine is flammable gets GUN!!!) Usually when I show this machine off to someone I'll plug it in, turn it on, start it doing something, set the thing on the floor, jump up and down on it like a madman, and then show the screen. It's taken ritual torture and doesn't yet have a scar to prove it.
The thing is fscking amazing. I hear that there was a TEMPEST rated version out there. With the bubble memory and the freaky OS these things ran (DOS 2.x was an option, but wasn't popular) I could see this machine as being popular with the CIA and the like.
Umm... Motorola has been doing embedded PowerPC from nearly day 1. They have not been exceedingly popular due to cost & complexity. And, of course, Motorola makes a *lot* of money off of other embedded stuff, like HC1x, HC705, and Coldfire. IBM won't give two shits, IMHO, since they seem to shy away from embedded products.
So, why would this affect what lives in Macs? 'splain!
I've seen the guts of an Ultra 10 (Ultra 5s big brother). I am quite familiar with the guts of Ultra 1s and 2s. The only reasons I'd buy Sun at my shop are for the reliable hardware and the good multiuser performance. The Ultra5 may have an Ultrasparc CPU. That's where the similarity ends. It has no Big Honkin' Power Supply. No SBUS/MBUS mezzanine cards (regardless of performance, these keep much cooler than PCI). They have the PC-style mess of cables running every which way. No SCA-hot swap SCSI. Hell, no SCSI by default!
If you need many cycles on your desk, or must run Solaris/SPARC apps, this isn't such a bad deal, but I'd bet you could find a PC for less that will perform as well or better.
The University of Texas (@austin) has a similar $6mil deal with M$. Students can buy a copy of Office or Visual Studio for $10. Departments can deploy NT to their delight. However, NT seems to be serving one purpose: to run the Windows PC networks. I'm an admin here at the Electrical and Computer Engineering dept, and that's pretty much the only service that NT provides. Unfortunately, university labs are required to have some sort of Windows machines due to the demand professors place on running specialized software (often written by themselves) that runs in such an environment. Compound that with the familiarity most lusers have with Office, and voila. Dependence on M$.
Fortunately, that's as far as it goes. The main services at the university (dialup, mail, news, etc... ) are provided by various unices. In my dept, we rely mostly on Solaris and AIX running the common open source network services suite (sendmail, Apache, ssh, etc...) but are moving to Linux for some services (log server, security, network traffic monitoring). Even my boss, who wanted to spend sickening sums of money about a year ago on NT Terminal Server and new NCD terms that support it, recently decided that we should convert some of our NT workstations (esp. some of the Dell dual Xeons that are going mostly underused) to Linux. Other departments, including RTF, are setting up their NT machines to dual boot to Linux, for those who prefer it. If anything, I think my university is using UNIX more often than ever.
Not that it's likely to happen, but I wonder if IBM will give Sony crap about labeling their product with PS2. Remember, they're in cahoots with Nintendo for the Dolphin and the PS2 is their competition...
Hmm... seems to me that with USB, Firewire, and especially a PCMCIA slot, there's no lack of orifices on this device from which to extract a real-world connection. Decently fast PCMCIA modems and ethernet cards are fairly cheap, and you're not limited to one type of media, as is the case with the Dreamcast at the moment. My roomate is getting a Dreamcast today, and the lack of an ethernet interface will make using it over our cable modem near-impossible (save a modem serving PPP on another machine plus a loop simulator).
I'd take this news with a grain of salt. This is reminiscent of the PII/Celeron bus speed limiter rumors that went around about a year ago. I still have yet to see a current Intel chip that outright reject anything above its rated bus clock.
It's a hardware prob, but not the chipset, exactly. First, are you overclocking the memory bus (i.e. not 66MHz or 100MHz)? You could cheezle the PIIX or confuse the drive, since the PCI clock is 1/2 or 1/3 the memory bus clock (the DMA transfer mode is governed by the PCI clock). Running at 83MHz bus, regardless of the CPU's multiplied clock speed, makes you run the controller at 25% over rated speed!!! I've had no luck with multiple boards at 83, one an SIS 5571 and the other an Intel BX, though it's been known to be stable at 75. Second, what kind of cable do you have? Is it UDMA-rated? The cables designed to do so have a finer pitch ribbon cable so that every other wire is a ground lead. This decreases signal loss over distance. Look at *this* for more info on these cables. Also, is the cable hooked into any other IDE devices, esp. ones that don't do UDMA? Putting UDMA devices on a separate bus can sometimes alleviate these troubles.
Me? I believe in SCSI. It "Just Works", with far less CPU overhead and sickeningly fast throughput. It's worth every last penny.
As about 500 people have previously said, this has already been discussed. C'mon! This guy's attempt is lame. Circuit Cellar did an article last month about a 'C508 used for datalogging that can speak tftp back to a host through a modem PPP connection. That's slicker than a "web server" with a "filesystem" serving "piddly shit" to a routing machine that handles the real connection. Show me one place where this server can do something useful.
Woohoo! There's a webserver caught up my nose! And it's cabled to a PC! Everybody dance!
It's funny you should mention that... I remember an old (article/paper/written thingy) from DEC explaining the arrangement of data on a hard disk. IIRC, it said "...simply imagine the disk as a four-dimensional hypercube...cylinders, heads, sectors, tracks..."
Aack! Networker! I spent the last week trying to recover an index for a client that the server pooped on. The definitive answer from the tech support guy was "Well, just delete the old one and restore from tape!" This turned out to be a two-day process (had to bring the server up/down a few times and wait for the scheduled backups to complete). And this wasn't the first time...
IMHO any backup software worth its salt shouldn't cheezle its own databases, for any reason. Not saying that Networker isn't right for certain installations (mine involves >100 Slowlaris, AIX, Linux, and NT boxen), just that I've been less than pleased with it.
I'll be trying IBM's ADSM (ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager). Seems to be the rage with all the humongo database server installations. Just need IBM to ship us those driver CDs (hint, hint, you know who you are!)
Agreed. I don't even think it was a hoax; just that the author was blowing a little bit of smoke. I can't for the life of me see running at 115kbps on a PIC (I've tried it with a 4MHz 16C84 long ago, and could crank out no more than 19.2kbps without drops, and that's with writing the data directly to an external eeprom), and I surely doubt that it can do all of RFC1122 (what about 1123? huh? Those are supposed to be implemented in tandem). However, SLIP is very simple (could take 10 words of code) and 512 words on a PIC goes very far.
I'll believe it when I see code....
...but I digress. Shame on you, moderators! You'd post two articles hawking X10 giveaways but something of at least some technical merit you remove without a trace even if it is a joke?
Some sound card chipset company (Trident, I think) is coming out with a combo modem/sound card chip which essentially will function like a sound card with an additional channel for a DAA (telco electrical interface). Thus, you get a sound card plus Winmodem in one package. Downside: nobody's written a software codec for Linux yet for all the popular modem protocols. Of course, this is no trivial matter. Hey, any EE grad students in communications looking for a fun and rewarding research project?:)
Apparently the 'cultivated in mice' part is nothing new. Apparently, the same polymer matrix stuff has been used to grow human ears on the backs of mice. They look funny, too. I saw this on one of those Fox Thursday Night Trash-TV shows. It must be true.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and, uh... forgive my grammar. It's late and I have an emag exam tomorrow.
I scored a GRiD Compass 1101 sometime ago at the Dallas Sidewalk Sale. Still have the thing too. It's big and heavy compared to anything made in the last 8 years, though for a '81 vintage machine it's at least briefcase-crammable, compared to a Compaq Luggable. It had an 8086 for brains, (I think) 384k RAM, GPIB for an I/O bus (this is where the external disk hung), a dinky little plasma display, and, get this, bubble memory for nonvolatile storage. That means your data is (so 'they' say) EMP-proof. There was no batteries. You had to jam an AC cord into this thing.
The truly striking feature has to be the cast magnesium case. (Alloy, kids, not pure magnesium, that would be stupid. First person to suggest that this machine is flammable gets GUN!!!) Usually when I show this machine off to someone I'll plug it in, turn it on, start it doing something, set the thing on the floor, jump up and down on it like a madman, and then show the screen. It's taken ritual torture and doesn't yet have a scar to prove it.
The thing is fscking amazing. I hear that there was a TEMPEST rated version out there. With the bubble memory and the freaky OS these things ran (DOS 2.x was an option, but wasn't popular) I could see this machine as being popular with the CIA and the like.
*NOTE*
Check contents of package before accepting. Contents may not exist.
Umm... Motorola has been doing embedded PowerPC from nearly day 1. They have not been exceedingly popular due to cost & complexity. And, of course, Motorola makes a *lot* of money off of other embedded stuff, like HC1x, HC705, and Coldfire. IBM won't give two shits, IMHO, since they seem to shy away from embedded products.
So, why would this affect what lives in Macs? 'splain!
>The good ol' US of A will collapse in one form or
>another and it's physical and intellectual assets
>will be parceled off to
>the highest bidders.
...on Ebay.
I've seen the guts of an Ultra 10 (Ultra 5s big brother). I am quite familiar with the guts of Ultra 1s and 2s. The only reasons I'd buy Sun at my shop are for the reliable hardware and the good multiuser performance. The Ultra5 may have an Ultrasparc CPU. That's where the similarity ends. It has no Big Honkin' Power Supply. No SBUS/MBUS mezzanine cards (regardless of performance, these keep much cooler than PCI). They have the PC-style mess of cables running every which way. No SCA-hot swap SCSI. Hell, no SCSI by default!
If you need many cycles on your desk, or must run Solaris/SPARC apps, this isn't such a bad deal, but I'd bet you could find a PC for less that will perform as well or better.
The image on the front page looks surprisingly like the Quicktime logo. Think about it, won't you? Thank you.
The University of Texas (@austin) has a similar $6mil deal with M$. Students can buy a copy of Office or Visual Studio for $10. Departments can deploy NT to their delight. However, NT seems to be serving one purpose: to run the Windows PC networks. I'm an admin here at the Electrical and Computer Engineering dept, and that's pretty much the only service that NT provides. Unfortunately, university labs are required to have some sort of Windows machines due to the demand professors place on running specialized software (often written by themselves) that runs in such an environment. Compound that with the familiarity most lusers have with Office, and voila. Dependence on M$.
Fortunately, that's as far as it goes. The main services at the university (dialup, mail, news, etc... ) are provided by various unices. In my dept, we rely mostly on Solaris and AIX running the common open source network services suite (sendmail, Apache, ssh, etc...) but are moving to Linux for some services (log server, security, network traffic monitoring). Even my boss, who wanted to spend sickening sums of money about a year ago on NT Terminal Server and new NCD terms that support it, recently decided that we should convert some of our NT workstations (esp. some of the Dell dual Xeons that are going mostly underused) to Linux. Other departments, including RTF, are setting up their NT machines to dual boot to Linux, for those who prefer it. If anything, I think my university is using UNIX more often than ever.
"The FIN is a non-partisan,grassroots network of citizens and businesses "
s/citizens/thugs/
s/businesses/hitmen/
Not that it's likely to happen, but I wonder if IBM will give Sony crap about labeling their product with PS2. Remember, they're in cahoots with Nintendo for the Dolphin and the PS2 is their competition...
Hmm... seems to me that with USB, Firewire, and especially a PCMCIA slot, there's no lack of orifices on this device from which to extract a real-world connection. Decently fast PCMCIA modems and ethernet cards are fairly cheap, and you're not limited to one type of media, as is the case with the Dreamcast at the moment. My roomate is getting a Dreamcast today, and the lack of an ethernet interface will make using it over our cable modem near-impossible (save a modem serving PPP on another machine plus a loop simulator).
However, the thing does indeed look funny. It could be the possible love-child of a HP 712/60 and a component CD player .
I'd take this news with a grain of salt. This is reminiscent of the PII/Celeron bus speed limiter rumors that went around about a year ago. I still have yet to see a current Intel chip that outright reject anything above its rated bus clock.
It's a hardware prob, but not the chipset, exactly. First, are you overclocking the memory bus (i.e. not 66MHz or 100MHz)? You could cheezle the PIIX or confuse the drive, since the PCI clock is 1/2 or 1/3 the memory bus clock (the DMA transfer mode is governed by the PCI clock). Running at 83MHz bus, regardless of the CPU's multiplied clock speed, makes you run the controller at 25% over rated speed!!! I've had no luck with multiple boards at 83, one an SIS 5571 and the other an Intel BX, though it's been known to be stable at 75. Second, what kind of cable do you have? Is it UDMA-rated? The cables designed to do so have a finer pitch ribbon cable so that every other wire is a ground lead. This decreases signal loss over distance. Look at *this* for more info on these cables. Also, is the cable hooked into any other IDE devices, esp. ones that don't do UDMA? Putting UDMA devices on a separate bus can sometimes alleviate these troubles.
Me? I believe in SCSI. It "Just Works", with far less CPU overhead and sickeningly fast throughput. It's worth every last penny.
Really? I thought that the FAA's myriad of radio systems (RADAR, etc...) used them for their finals?
As about 500 people have previously said, this has already been discussed. C'mon! This guy's attempt is lame. Circuit Cellar did an article last month about a 'C508 used for datalogging that can speak tftp back to a host through a modem PPP connection. That's slicker than a "web server" with a "filesystem" serving "piddly shit" to a routing machine that handles the real connection. Show me one place where this server can do something useful.
Woohoo! There's a webserver caught up my nose! And it's cabled to a PC! Everybody dance!
It's funny you should mention that... I remember an old (article/paper/written thingy) from DEC explaining the arrangement of data on a hard disk. IIRC, it said "...simply imagine the disk as a four-dimensional hypercube...cylinders, heads, sectors, tracks..."
From IBM:
Inventor(s):
Wing; Malcolm J. , Menlo Park, CA
Kelly; Edmund J. , San Jose, CA
Then compare with:
Simpson; Homer J.
Moose; Bullwinkle J.
Jay Ward works for Transmeta! Aliens! Mind
Control! Bwahahaha!
Ooh! Neat! Someone's found a way to /. the human brain.
Maybe Trace Beaulieu will do a Freshmeat parody next!
Aack! Networker! I spent the last week trying to recover an index for a client that the server pooped on. The definitive answer from the tech support guy was "Well, just delete the old one and restore from tape!" This turned out to be a two-day process (had to bring the server up/down a few times and wait for the scheduled backups to complete). And this wasn't the first time...
IMHO any backup software worth its salt shouldn't cheezle its own databases, for any reason. Not saying that Networker isn't right for certain installations (mine involves >100 Slowlaris, AIX, Linux, and NT boxen), just that I've been less than pleased with it.
I'll be trying IBM's ADSM (ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager). Seems to be the rage with all the humongo database server installations. Just need IBM to ship us those driver CDs (hint, hint, you know who you are!)
Agreed. I don't even think it was a hoax; just that the author was blowing a little bit of smoke. I can't for the life of me see running at 115kbps on a PIC (I've tried it with a 4MHz 16C84 long ago, and could crank out no more than 19.2kbps without drops, and that's with writing the data directly to an external eeprom), and I surely doubt that it can do all of RFC1122 (what about 1123? huh? Those are supposed to be implemented in tandem). However, SLIP is very simple (could take 10 words of code) and 512 words on a PIC goes very far.
I'll believe it when I see code....
...but I digress. Shame on you, moderators! You'd post two articles hawking X10 giveaways but something of at least some technical merit you remove without a trace even if it is a joke?
Some sound card chipset company (Trident, I think) is coming out with a combo modem/sound card chip which essentially will function like a sound card with an additional channel for a DAA (telco electrical interface). Thus, you get a sound card plus Winmodem in one package. Downside: nobody's written a software codec for Linux yet for all the popular modem protocols. Of course, this is no trivial matter. Hey, any EE grad students in communications looking for a fun and rewarding research project? :)
Hmm... rumor has it that w2k is making core development team members quit Micros~1. And they're promising failover?
Apparently the 'cultivated in mice' part is nothing new. Apparently, the same polymer matrix stuff has been used to grow human ears on the backs of mice. They look funny, too. I saw this on one of those Fox Thursday Night Trash-TV shows. It must be true.