Seems to work for me. I just followed the instructions and copied the files from my NTFS partition, extracted the tarball, ran the "fixnwn" script, and the dang thing works! Loaded my save game and everything.
Neverwinter Nights works with: [X] Debian Woody 3.0
The hardware and code morphing software were designed for eachother, and the x86 ISA doesn't enforce bounds checking or an object model, so the overhead shoould be much lower than a JVM. I'm not so sure you get much of a performace increase by using Astro native code.
This is how I understand it as well. I posted a question about just this sometime ago somewhere, and I was told that it was stupid/impossible to run "native" Crusoe code because there really is no such thing.
There was a lot of conjecture going on if the microcode could be supplanted with something else, say turning the Crusoe into a MIPS compatible processor, for instance. I don't think that anything ever came of this wild speculation.
I run a web hosting company and charge you for bandwidth.
I call my buddy and tell him to hammer your site unmercifully with everything he's got.
???
Profit!
No law against this. It like me providing you with a doorbell service. If I want more money, I just keep pushing the button. If you were dumb enough to sign up for this then you'd better trust me.
Yeah, my general policy with X is "if it ain't broke then don't fix it!"
This applies to major versions, like upgrading from 3.3.6 might be a good idea, but 4.1.x might not, especially if 4.1.x works good for you.
Sometimes you have to stick with an older version because your ancient card has been dropped. My laptop, a Compaq Contura 4/25c falls into this category. It has this weird _QVGA_ video which AFAIK is 3.3.6 only.
Somehow though, Debian has managed to port the 3.3.6 XF86_SVGA xserver to 4.1.x, so I could potentially install the latest version. I did this for my friend, he has Cirrus Laptop Mystery Video which worked with 3.3.6 but not 4.1.x, the Debian backport fixed him right up.
X is really a fantastically stable platform. It is great that the X team is working away, but don't feel like you _have_ to upgrade just because a new version is out. The new versions are mainly made to support new hardware. If your hardware works ok then you do not necessarily need to upgrade unless you just want to.
You have to build the Pyramids wonder first, or else have a really advanced Democracy. Usually I change my Democracy to Communism right before I instigate global warfare to keep my workers from rioting. Even then I kind of feel guilty about it...
This makes sense, except man the heat out of those blade servers should be pretty phenomenal. Well they are smart cookies and I'm sure they can figure out the thermodynamics of it all, after all thats what Sun workstations are good at!
I just pieced together an AMD system for myself, an XP2400+, an Asus A7N8X Deluxe, 1Gb DDR333, and a 120Gb HDD. I'd like to see any current Sun workstation beat this combo considering I have OpenGL/Linux well in hand.
If you can't beat 'em... buy their shit and sell it as your own!
I've been watching Ebay for deals on Sun equipment and have never seen something that seems like a good deal. Like I might consider paying $100 for an Ultra10, but thats about it. If they go more mainstream and were to make some kick-ass motherboards for AMD systems they could probably go a long ways. Sun motherboards have mega-bandwidth which is exactly what AMD processors could use. Sun is also noted for scalability; i.e. add a second processor and your system will be nearly twice as fast.
You might want to look into a Radeon 9700 Pro. Your old card is probably a major bottleneck for gaming. New Total System Cost: $900.
Nah. Using an nForce2 chipset I'll go with an nVidia option. I happen to have a GeForce4MX-440 DDR AGP 8X card here that will probably work for now. I always buy older graphics cards because I don't use Windows. Therefore I wait a year, the price drops, and the Linux drivers materialize.
Heck, I was cutting edge Linux OpenGL way back when... I compiled Mesa 2.6 for my Voodoo2 and was rocking with Quake2 years and years ago. Ah those days of yore...
but this is like reading the comments after John Carmack has posted some remarks on graphics chips. There's always a rush of people to claim "I know its not trendy, but he's full of shit". Ah, the rebel without a cause . ..
I know enough to know that Linux, Carmack, and Stallman know way more about their respective fields than I ever will. But having used their things, I know some subset of it. I have run The Hurd and compared it to GNU/Linux and, well, frankly Linus is right. Linux works better now than Hurd does, and really thats what matters. You take what works and use it. Sure, I can toy with Hurd for some exotic computing occasionally, but when it comes to surfing, emailing, slashdotting, or fragging, I'm booting to Linux (Debian Woody, for that matter). You have to use the best available stuff or else you are stupid.
Yes, I can get all visionary and idealistic too, I like the underdog. For me its Hurd, for you it might be BeOS whatever. When I'm at work, I'm running Windows2000 because thats what I have and thats what I have to use, and frankly, its proper for a corporate environment if they could ever figure out how to get the damn server configured properly. [pant pant... ok mellow... mellow]
Yeah. There's a lot of rebels on/. for sure. The Linux kernel is dead! Long live the Linux kernel!
What they ( both AMD and Intel ) should do is set up the cores so that in 32-bit mode you get Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP), but you could couple the cores for 64-bit mode.
Man I am so smart I think I'll grab another beer and gloat about it.
Drool... I can't wait to put this bohemoth together. My Dual PII-450 is starting to crap out with weird NMI errors, so I figured I'd make myself a new system.
AMD Athlon XP 2400+ CPU
Asus A7N8X nForce2 MoBo
2 x 512Mb DDR333 RAM's
WD1200JB 120Gb ATA133
Since I already have monitor, video, case, P/S KB, mouse, and everything else...
Total: about $550 !!!
This is going to be an excellent system... Doom III... Neverwinter Nights... Unreal ][... oh yes they will be mine! This is a great price IMHO for a system is just a hair shy of state of the art. You've gotta check out these nForce2 motherboards, they have got to be the most feature packed boards I've ever seen.
Intel stuff is good, but they have to be a bit too conservative to make really excellent things. My last AMD system was my 386/40 which was a fine machine. I'm looking forward to running this new system. For the price, you can't touch this setup using Intel stuff.
64-bit really is a waste at the moment for the average gamer. Think about it, you have to push twice as many bits around for no obvious reason unless you want to crunch really big numbers or access huge amounts of RAM. I have a 64-bit machine, a HP/9000 C200 workstation, and I run it in 32-bit mode because it is faster and better supported. Think about a big V8 engine vs a 4cyl, the V8 ultimately will develop more power, but the 4cyl will wind up faster and is more responsive.
At least AMD Hammer can run in 32-bit mode (maybe for better performance) but can drop into 64-bit mode if you need that big RAM addressing. Companies with mega power servers want 64-bit so they can load the machines with RAM, but ordinary gamers and power users benefit more from fast 32-bit speed: we cannot afford 3Tb of RAM just so we can play UT2003 on a ramdisk! Better to be able to quickly slurp it up from the HDD as needed, and there is no benefit using 64-bit arithmetic for the layman as we just don't need that kind of precision for anything.
Rain Power! Since every day in England is cold and rainy, they need to install huge funnels above the country which will collect all of that rain and then use it to drive massive hydroelectric turbines.
Problem solved. That will be $100 please.
I'd still sign up for the next flight if I could.
on
More on Columbia
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I volunteer! Pick me! I'll do it!
Really though. I thought that space exploration was a pretty risky endeavour. NASA tries to be as careful as possible, but they have a limited budget and finite resources. Given the staggering risks involved, I'd say that they are still doing pretty well. This latest explosion will cause a new wave of safety checking which is all good stuff. How many of you wouldn't give you left nut to be on that next shuttle anyways. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!
I think my Linux solution is pretty spiff. I snagged the XDrum source a long time ago. It was more or less freeware (send an email if you like it) but the upstream author seems to have disappeared. I did send him an email years ago, but since I can't get ahold of him I boldly forked the source and made some mods. I dropped Gravis Ultrasound support completely and made it so that it only uses 16 bit Linux kernel OSS output. Then I rewrote the makefiles to use the autoconf/automake stuff from GNU so that you can do the./configure thing. And then added Debian support and built i386 and Arm packages (and the Arm port actually does work on my Netwinder).
You just can't do this kind of stuff in Windows if you are on a low budget like I am. I cannot afford to purchase MS Visual Studio, and I don't want to. Why-o-why anybody would ever want to use Windows for even amateur sound work is beyond me. There is some amazing sound stuff out there for Linux.
Probably the most amazing Linux sound app I have ever screwed with is Cecilia by the University of Montreal. This program can make really weird Pink Floyd type noises and I really can only use a fraction of its powers.
To get a really pro Linux audio setup kicking you want two good sound cards, probably SB Live! or AC97 at the least. That way you mix you audio on one and record on the other card.
For instance, if you use the GtkGEP + XDrum combo I mentioned above, I haven't figured out how to record the output yet, so I think you need a second sound card and loop the output from card1 into the line in of card2. Then it should be easy to record from card2.
Don't even piss with Windows and try to do sound stuff unless you have a lot of money and even then I'd be rather suspicious of the results. The common app that comes to mind is Cakewalk, but Linux has a mess of midi programs too, probably a lot better than Cakewalk if you are a tech-savvy musician.
Hmm... I just run my guitar straight into my soundcard via one of those barrel adapters. Then I use the magic of Linux sound to make some pretty crunchy rock sounding goodness using Gtk Guitar Effects Processor. I'm real happy with it. I just got an Epiphone Slasher which is an inexpensive yet pretty good quality axe with some decent humbuckers as stock equipment.
But I digress. I run this sucker straight into my SB Live! Value card on the line-in jack and use that GtkGEP program for some great sounds. You can run my Debian port of XDrum concurrently with GtkGEP so you have drum machine + guitar effects. You provide the guitar and the Linux:-)
It is sweet! Really, if Gibson has made digital guitar it should be a good thing considering you want to run clean into the computer and let it add all the effects and stuff. You can simulate a tube amp pretty well in software. Yeah I know that there are some pro musicians out there who are going to say that the only way to go is stick a mike in front of a tube amp. But music is all about experimentation. You rig up whatever crazy setup gives you a sound you like.
For the casual guitarist like myself, I have a lot of fun playing the inexpensive Epiphone and running it through Linux with all these spiffy programs, and I didn't have to spend much in the way of cash for a rack of expensive effects units.
Access is the only thing that MS ever made that gets The_Dougster's Stamp of Approval. Access is a very lightweight database with a shitload of features. It is so feature heavy it makes other apps seem like toys. As long as you don't make Access serve for more than a couple dozen people, it is pretty amazing.
Word, Excel, Powerpoint... feh. Nothing new here, but man Access is so intense when you use all the VBA stuffings. If I was Oracle, I'd steal whoever it was that made Access.
IMHO, Access is the only MS product ever that is worth its weight. It really is an innovative thing. The rest is pretty much bad copies.
If some wise/.'er knows which product MS copied to make Access, I'd like to know.
I'm gonna can this sig because it won't display on/. properly. It harken's back to ANSI BBS days, which the Linux console, xterm, and gnome-terminal all handle nicely. I want this to get out because I just see too many boring gray $ prompts.
You are supposed to get a nice colorized version of this:
<9>(thunder)[/home/doug] $
The slashdot sig processor munges the line, but by ecode'ing it it, here it is: (should be 2 lines)
Of course you need a real ESC character or you can stick in the octal code \033 also. You can generate an ESC in vim by pressing [CTRL]-v and then [ESC] (hereafer referred to [CTRL]-v [ESC]). If you open your.bashrc or.bash_profile respectively, paste this in, and issue the command...
:g/ESC/s//[CTRL]-v [ESC]/g
... it will hopefully stick ESC chars in instead of the ESC string. Then just: $ source.bashrc and you should get the expected results.
I had this spiffy engineer.com email address hosted by first iname.com and then subsequently mail.com. Well, some while ago I noticed that I hadn't gotten any email for a while. So I sent a test email message to myself which subsequently vanished. No "undeliverable" error, nothing... black hole.
It turns out that mail.com had sold engineer.com to somebody, and that was that. I don't know how many freemailer's lost their email address because of that, but it must have been more than a few. Heck, engineer.com is still probably getting spam from all those online sweepstakes sites that I signed up with way back then, hehehe...
What was annoying was the absolute lack of warning. Yes, the mail.com agreement stated subject to termination without advance warning but I honestly didn't expect them to actually play that trump card. Well, live and learn.
I don't think that Python is any slower than Java. Furthermore, it really doesn't change as much as you claim. Considering you can do in a 200 line Python program what might take 10X as much code in Java or most other languages, porting some Python to a newer version is a piece of cake, but rarely necessary. You really should try it. Yes you can compare runtimes, which are similar, but it is fantastically easy to write exceedingly powerful Python programs which are quite succinct and take very little time to develop and debug.
Python is probably the future of programming. It should be taught at every school and university. I can write Python programs in hours which might take me weeks in other languages. But I don't always have a choice what I can work in. Thats how I know.
Yeah, Python is some real good stuff. Heck on these modern mega-fast cpu's, if flies. Who cares if its interpreted vs compiled. Though this makes me think here... I think that Python is semi-compiled by the interpreter at runtime, making it much like Java. Hmmm... considering how easy it is to do Python compared to the C++'ish nature of Java, yes I'd have to say that Python Won!
Python really is a rockin' language. You can save _soo_ much time at work if you use Python vs anything else for just about anything. Python+Tk (Tkinter) is fantastic once you get the hang of it.
For my compiled stuff I use GNAT Ada95 + GtkADA nowadays. Still, Python/Tkinter blows it away.
Re: how ATA snarfed SCSI
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 1
[ an aside ]
> I own scsi equipment myself for my home > pecee, but today I wouldn't even consider > buying scsi.
I can relate. I have 2 23Gb Seagate Elite's, a couple IBM SCSI drives, and a Yamaha CRW8424S, and today I just ordered a 120Gb UDMA100 IDE drive to replace all those hard drives ( which are starting to exhibit strange errors ). It was a cool experiment, but I'd really rather have one small drive than a noisy heavy external tower full of concrete-block sized drives. Plus SCSI cabling is an expensive nightmare.
Maybe iSCSI will be the shit someday. Who knows. I'm looking forward to ditching all these Elite23 monsters. Yeah, they were cheap, yeah they are pretty fast, but they are just too much of a hassle to use on a low budget. Time to move on and take advantage of newer solutions.
Re:it is VERY trollish
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 1
> Hopefully they will make a change before the > software industry does, as Linux/x86 has the > momentum that could overtake them if they > don't act fast.
Wow. I thought I'd never hear such. Anyways, this is kind of a depressing thread. I've toyed with older Sparc boxes, and they were nice workstations, but they just couldn't hold a candle to a fast AMD cpu running Linux. I'd think that Sun ought to get in bed with AMD rather than switch to Intel cpu's. Intel is making some really great processors, no doubt, but I always seem to like the underdogs as well.
What I wonder is if Sun could develop an alternative chipset that would enable them to run Intel or AMD processors yet still keep their bandwidth flag flying. In this case the motherboard would be the defining item rather than the processor. Or are current chipsets already maxing out the performance of the cpu's with no room left to go? I always though that if you could have your smart peripherals talking to each other on a big fast backplane, then you get mega performance since the cpu is just directing the traffic flow occasionally and has a lot of cycles to do other things.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to work for me. I just followed the instructions and copied the files from my NTFS partition, extracted the tarball, ran the "fixnwn" script, and the dang thing works! Loaded my save game and everything.
Neverwinter Nights works with:
[X] Debian Woody 3.0
And now the fun begins! I've been toying with it somewhat in WinDOS so far. If you liked Baldur's Gate et al then this is for you! (OpenGL required)
This is how I understand it as well. I posted a question about just this sometime ago somewhere, and I was told that it was stupid/impossible to run "native" Crusoe code because there really is no such thing.
There was a lot of conjecture going on if the microcode could be supplanted with something else, say turning the Crusoe into a MIPS compatible processor, for instance. I don't think that anything ever came of this wild speculation.
No law against this. It like me providing you with a doorbell service. If I want more money, I just keep pushing the button. If you were dumb enough to sign up for this then you'd better trust me.
Yeah, my general policy with X is "if it ain't broke then don't fix it!"
This applies to major versions, like upgrading from 3.3.6 might be a good idea, but 4.1.x might not, especially if 4.1.x works good for you.
Sometimes you have to stick with an older version because your ancient card has been dropped. My laptop, a Compaq Contura 4/25c falls into this category. It has this weird _QVGA_ video which AFAIK is 3.3.6 only.
Somehow though, Debian has managed to port the 3.3.6 XF86_SVGA xserver to 4.1.x, so I could potentially install the latest version. I did this for my friend, he has Cirrus Laptop Mystery Video which worked with 3.3.6 but not 4.1.x, the Debian backport fixed him right up.
X is really a fantastically stable platform. It is great that the X team is working away, but don't feel like you _have_ to upgrade just because a new version is out. The new versions are mainly made to support new hardware. If your hardware works ok then you do not necessarily need to upgrade unless you just want to.
I'm just curious, but if all of your drivers work
so great, why are you running such a bleeding-edge
version of X?
Yes, I agree with you about the heat!
Wait, no I don't. Maybe that's because they are using mobile processors with low wattage!
Dooh! Dang they're onto me. Blow up the planet.
You have to build the Pyramids wonder first, or else have a really advanced Democracy. Usually I change my Democracy to Communism right before I instigate global warfare to keep my workers from rioting. Even then I kind of feel guilty about it...
I just pieced together an AMD system for myself, an XP2400+, an Asus A7N8X Deluxe, 1Gb DDR333, and a 120Gb HDD. I'd like to see any current Sun workstation beat this combo considering I have OpenGL/Linux well in hand.
If you can't beat 'em... buy their shit and sell it as your own!
I've been watching Ebay for deals on Sun equipment and have never seen something that seems like a good deal. Like I might consider paying $100 for an Ultra10, but thats about it. If they go more mainstream and were to make some kick-ass motherboards for AMD systems they could probably go a long ways. Sun motherboards have mega-bandwidth which is exactly what AMD processors could use. Sun is also noted for scalability; i.e. add a second processor and your system will be nearly twice as fast.
This should be really interesting...
Nah. Using an nForce2 chipset I'll go with an nVidia option. I happen to have a GeForce4MX-440 DDR AGP 8X card here that will probably work for now. I always buy older graphics cards because I don't use Windows. Therefore I wait a year, the price drops, and the Linux drivers materialize.
Heck, I was cutting edge Linux OpenGL way back when... I compiled Mesa 2.6 for my Voodoo2 and was rocking with Quake2 years and years ago. Ah those days of yore...
I know enough to know that Linux, Carmack, and Stallman know way more about their respective fields than I ever will. But having used their things, I know some subset of it. I have run The Hurd and compared it to GNU/Linux and, well, frankly Linus is right. Linux works better now than Hurd does, and really thats what matters. You take what works and use it. Sure, I can toy with Hurd for some exotic computing occasionally, but when it comes to surfing, emailing, slashdotting, or fragging, I'm booting to Linux (Debian Woody, for that matter). You have to use the best available stuff or else you are stupid.
Yes, I can get all visionary and idealistic too, I like the underdog. For me its Hurd, for you it might be BeOS whatever. When I'm at work, I'm running Windows2000 because thats what I have and thats what I have to use, and frankly, its proper for a corporate environment if they could ever figure out how to get the damn server configured properly. [pant pant... ok mellow... mellow]
Yeah. There's a lot of rebels on /. for sure. The Linux kernel is dead! Long live the Linux kernel!
Man I am so smart I think I'll grab another beer and gloat about it.
Since I already have monitor, video, case, P/S
KB, mouse, and everything else...
This is going to be an excellent system... Doom III... Neverwinter Nights... Unreal ][... oh yes they will be mine! This is a great price IMHO for a system is just a hair shy of state of the art. You've gotta check out these nForce2 motherboards, they have got to be the most feature packed boards I've ever seen.
Intel stuff is good, but they have to be a bit too conservative to make really excellent things. My last AMD system was my 386/40 which was a fine machine. I'm looking forward to running this new system. For the price, you can't touch this setup using Intel stuff.
64-bit really is a waste at the moment for the average gamer. Think about it, you have to push twice as many bits around for no obvious reason unless you want to crunch really big numbers or access huge amounts of RAM. I have a 64-bit machine, a HP/9000 C200 workstation, and I run it in 32-bit mode because it is faster and better supported. Think about a big V8 engine vs a 4cyl, the V8 ultimately will develop more power, but the 4cyl will wind up faster and is more responsive.
At least AMD Hammer can run in 32-bit mode (maybe for better performance) but can drop into 64-bit mode if you need that big RAM addressing. Companies with mega power servers want 64-bit so they can load the machines with RAM, but ordinary gamers and power users benefit more from fast 32-bit speed: we cannot afford 3Tb of RAM just so we can play UT2003 on a ramdisk! Better to be able to quickly slurp it up from the HDD as needed, and there is no benefit using 64-bit arithmetic for the layman as we just don't need that kind of precision for anything.
Problem solved. That will be $100 please.
Really though. I thought that space exploration was a pretty risky endeavour. NASA tries to be as careful as possible, but they have a limited budget and finite resources. Given the staggering risks involved, I'd say that they are still doing pretty well. This latest explosion will cause a new wave of safety checking which is all good stuff. How many of you wouldn't give you left nut to be on that next shuttle anyways. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!
No guts, no glory...
You just can't do this kind of stuff in Windows if you are on a low budget like I am. I cannot afford to purchase MS Visual Studio, and I don't want to. Why-o-why anybody would ever want to use Windows for even amateur sound work is beyond me. There is some amazing sound stuff out there for Linux.
Probably the most amazing Linux sound app I have ever screwed with is Cecilia by the University of Montreal. This program can make really weird Pink Floyd type noises and I really can only use a fraction of its powers.
To get a really pro Linux audio setup kicking you want two good sound cards, probably SB Live! or AC97 at the least. That way you mix you audio on one and record on the other card.
For instance, if you use the GtkGEP + XDrum combo I mentioned above, I haven't figured out how to record the output yet, so I think you need a second sound card and loop the output from card1 into the line in of card2. Then it should be easy to record from card2.
Don't even piss with Windows and try to do sound stuff unless you have a lot of money and even then I'd be rather suspicious of the results. The common app that comes to mind is Cakewalk, but Linux has a mess of midi programs too, probably a lot better than Cakewalk if you are a tech-savvy musician.
But I digress. I run this sucker straight into my SB Live! Value card on the line-in jack and use that GtkGEP program for some great sounds. You can run my Debian port of XDrum concurrently with GtkGEP so you have drum machine + guitar effects. You provide the guitar and the Linux :-)
It is sweet! Really, if Gibson has made digital guitar it should be a good thing considering you want to run clean into the computer and let it add all the effects and stuff. You can simulate a tube amp pretty well in software. Yeah I know that there are some pro musicians out there who are going to say that the only way to go is stick a mike in front of a tube amp. But music is all about experimentation. You rig up whatever crazy setup gives you a sound you like.
For the casual guitarist like myself, I have a lot of fun playing the inexpensive Epiphone and running it through Linux with all these spiffy programs, and I didn't have to spend much in the way of cash for a rack of expensive effects units.
Try it!
Word, Excel, Powerpoint ... feh. Nothing new here, but man Access is so intense when you use all the VBA stuffings. If I was Oracle, I'd steal whoever it was that made Access.
IMHO, Access is the only MS product ever that is worth its weight. It really is an innovative thing. The rest is pretty much bad copies.
If some wise /.'er knows which product MS copied to make Access, I'd like to know.
You are supposed to get a nice colorized version of this:
The slashdot sig processor munges the line, but by ecode'ing it it, here it is: (should be 2 lines)
Of course you need a real ESC character or you can stick in the octal code \033 also. You can generate an ESC in vim by pressing [CTRL]-v and then [ESC] (hereafer referred to [CTRL]-v [ESC]). If you open your$ source
and you should get the expected results.
It turns out that mail.com had sold engineer.com to somebody, and that was that. I don't know how many freemailer's lost their email address because of that, but it must have been more than a few. Heck, engineer.com is still probably getting spam from all those online sweepstakes sites that I signed up with way back then, hehehe...
What was annoying was the absolute lack of warning. Yes, the mail.com agreement stated subject to termination without advance warning but I honestly didn't expect them to actually play that trump card. Well, live and learn.
Python is probably the future of programming. It should be taught at every school and university. I can write Python programs in hours which might take me weeks in other languages. But I don't always have a choice what I can work in. Thats how I know.
Python really is a rockin' language. You can save _soo_ much time at work if you use Python vs anything else for just about anything. Python+Tk (Tkinter) is fantastic once you get the hang of it.
For my compiled stuff I use GNAT Ada95 + GtkADA nowadays. Still, Python/Tkinter blows it away.
[ an aside ]
> I own scsi equipment myself for my home
> pecee, but today I wouldn't even consider
> buying scsi.
I can relate. I have 2 23Gb Seagate Elite's, a couple IBM SCSI drives, and a Yamaha CRW8424S, and today I just ordered a 120Gb UDMA100 IDE drive to replace all those hard drives ( which are starting to exhibit strange errors ). It was a cool experiment, but I'd really rather have one small drive than a noisy heavy external tower full of concrete-block sized drives. Plus SCSI cabling is an expensive nightmare.
Maybe iSCSI will be the shit someday. Who knows. I'm looking forward to ditching all these Elite23 monsters. Yeah, they were cheap, yeah they are pretty fast, but they are just too much of a hassle to use on a low budget. Time to move on and take advantage of newer solutions.
> software industry does, as Linux/x86 has the
> momentum that could overtake them if they
> don't act fast.
Wow. I thought I'd never hear such. Anyways, this is kind of a depressing thread. I've toyed with older Sparc boxes, and they were nice workstations, but they just couldn't hold a candle to a fast AMD cpu running Linux. I'd think that Sun ought to get in bed with AMD rather than switch to Intel cpu's. Intel is making some really great processors, no doubt, but I always seem to like the underdogs as well.
What I wonder is if Sun could develop an alternative chipset that would enable them to run Intel or AMD processors yet still keep their bandwidth flag flying. In this case the motherboard would be the defining item rather than the processor. Or are current chipsets already maxing out the performance of the cpu's with no room left to go? I always though that if you could have your smart peripherals talking to each other on a big fast backplane, then you get mega performance since the cpu is just directing the traffic flow occasionally and has a lot of cycles to do other things.
Check it out:
The Infamous Space Cadet Keyboard
Wow. Press [Super][Meta][Shift][Control][Alt][X] to continue... Imagine a Beo^H^H^H one of these puppies!