I wonder if any computer system collectors have any IBM System/360 machines that are still in operation.
S/360 is interesting because it was one of the first standardized architectures created by a computer company. Before that, each seperate machine had its own instruction set and architecture, and they were incompatible with each other.
A mid-sized functional IBM System/360 is quite a sight. Multiple cabinets of core memory, CPU cabinets, tape systems, consoles with thousands of blinkenlights... A real fun system to watch in operation.
Hopefully someone out there still operates one for fun. It's expensive, but we have rich geeks right? }:)
When people spend money on something, there's a tendancy to defend it, even when it may be inferior to a free alternative. They have to justify the cost.
I see this all the time, from people buying premium gas to expensive laptops. It cost $$$, so it must be good.
I stand corrected. This must be new, because I looked a few months ago and found nothing. }:)
Forgive my ignorance. I now respect Dell a bit more... Though I don't understand why every page they serve says "Dell recommends Windows XP" on it. WTF?
Dell still charges the "Windows Tax" on all its workstations. Try ordering a Dimension series without Windows, for instance. Not possible! They only offer Linux on two particular models of workstation (Precision) which are expensive and are limited in what video cards you can purchase with them.
Dell only seems to want to support Linux on the server side. They should support Linux all the way! If they don't want to offer it pre-installed on their workstations, they should at least offer a machine without Windows.
And when my health insurance premiums go up because morons like you require brain surgery to fix damage that could have been prevented with a helmet, that's also your choice, huh?
Stop being so selfish. Just because it's you that gets hurt doesn't mean others aren't affected. Besides, think about your friends and family. I'm sure SOMEONE out there cares about you.
I used to bring remote controls into class and mess with the TV's all the time.
You see, at my school we had this thing called "Channel One". It was this "newscast" put on by teenagers (complete with advertising) that was beamed into the school every day via satellite and we were all FORCED to watch it. Apparently the school had some deal with Channel One, wherein they got all those free TV's in exchange for showing the newscast. I never understood what the point was, for the TV's were never used for anything BUT Channel One, but I digress.
Anyway, I didn't have a watch; it was a full-sized remote control hidden in my huge bookbag. I'd turn the TV off in the middle of the newscast and the teacher would have to get up to turn it back on. Eventually I came into class one day to find a piece of black tape over the TV's IR sensor. Drat, foiled!
It was fun to fight that irritating captive-audience bit of commercialism, though. Luckily as the school year progressed, the teacher got less strict about watching the newscast and let the class catch up on homework or whatever during that time; actively watching it became optional...
Where did the practice of charging per CPU come from? Afterall, even if it has four processors, it's still ONE system, and is running ONE copy of the OS in ONE bank of RAM.
You can't really do more on a multi-CPU system; you can just do what you're already doing faster, since there's more CPU's to handle running processes.
Those SparcStation 10's are TOUGH cookies. We still have a couple in service, with one of them serving as a syslog server. Compare that to some of Sun's more recent junk, like the Ultra 10's, and you see how much their quality has declined.
We're thinking of replacing that old SS10, as grepping through large logs through a 10Mbytes/sec SCSI bus is slow, but it's so rock solid that we never seem to get around to it.
If I recall, SparcStation 10's were pricey when they came out, sometimes exceeding $10K for a decent config! When you consider that they came out in 1991 or so and some are still in service, folks definitely got their money's worth!
-Z
Re:um... I'd have a different perspective
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 1
Old, small drives are SLOW. That's why I don't like using them, even in places where 2GB would suffice.
Part of the reason new, bigass drives are so fast is the bit density; you have the platters spinning at around the same speed but that much more data is moving past the head at any given moment.
Also, a 6GB partition on an 80GB drive will encompass only a tiny part of the disk's surface, meaning the heads don't have to move very far at all when performing random access within that partition. That's why I have a 6GB partition on my 80 gigger as / on my linux box; operations involving / end up being lightning fast!
Not to mention.. no actual photos that HE took of the item. Just stock production photography, captures from the movies, and scans of the "letters of authenticity".
If I were selling something worth $150K, I'd definitely include better photos, and build a seperate web page describing the item with much more detail.
Yeah, I noticed that before, when Mozilla was still under the arm of AOL, they hardly had any marketing at all. They barely pushed their Mozilla suite back then, instead focusing all the marketing effort on the (then crippled) Netscape 6/7 releases.
I think this hurt Mozilla's adoption greatly; if they had marketed with the furor they're marketing with now, they would have a LOT more users, as AOL could have placed links to their stuff on pages visited by TENS of millions of people daily.
Kudos to the Mozilla team and all the people pushing Firefox to the masses. It's about freakin' time. }:)
As a network admin at a major university, I have to chime in here.
We tend to go out and slaughter morons who put wireless access points on our network. Why? Well, it's rather simple.
First, we have our own wireless network. It has a sentry authentication system that keeps access restricted to only those with an account. The primary reason for this is so that we can track usage; if someone decides to do something illegal or waste bandwidth, we have a log telling us exactly what IP was on at what time and can track them down so we can kill, or at least slap them around some.
Second, a WAP on one of our own networks opens the network to anyone with a laptop. Not only can they use our network without authorization, but they can swipe the IP's of important systems, resulting in Denial of Service. Additionally, when their Windows craptops eventually get 0wn3d by some virus, they'll start spewing crap out to the Internet from one of our IP's. Who gets the shit from other ISP's complaining about it? WE DO! And we have no idea who to kill (or at least maim a bit) since the access wasn't authenticated in any way.
Anyway, that's the point of view of an actual admin.
There's some problems with the IPX that should make you think twice before considering it.
1) CPU speed: The CPU in a Sparc IPX is slow. We're talking a MicroSPARC at 40MHz. Even running basic applications in a shell, it feels like slogging through mud. I have a SparcStation classic, which uses a MicroSPARC at 50MHz (slightly faster) and it's pure torture, especially when you fire up gcc to compile something.
2) Bus speed: The 20MHz SBUS can barely support 10Mbps ethernet at full speed. I put an hme 100Mbps adapter in my SparcClassic and couldn't push more than about 12Mbps through it with large packets. It absolutely choked with smaller ones. The system also adds about 4ms of latency to any packet going through it, in my experience. Again, this is the slightly faster SparcClassic, not even an IPX! If you have a really fast (3Mbps or greater) DSL connection, you may lose out on performance because of this.
Don't get me wrong, it's a fun as hell box to play with, and you can get them to network boot and run off a serial console, but they're just plain torture for doing real work. Even a PCI-bus 486 is loads faster.
I've always wondered why they can't manufacture DRAM chips with spare memory cells, the same way that hard drives get spare sectors. Then rather than tossing out chips for as little as one bad bit, they can remap the bad bits to the spare cells and still use the chip.
Yields would go up, prices would go down.
I can't be the only person to have thought of this; why isn't it done?
I don't know about you, but pretty much all the LCD's I've used have been VASTLY brighter, on average, than the CRT's I've used.
In fact, at work I have an LCD and a CRT on my desk in a dual-head setup, and I had to LOWER the brightness of the LCD to make it more balanced, because the CRT is absolutely no match for the LCD in terms of brightness.
Additionally, LCD's seem much better at rejecting glare from overhead lights as CRT's. When the office light is on, the readability of the LCD is unchanged, whereas the CRT becomes somewhat washed out.
Long live LCD's. I can't wait till they give me another LCD panel to replace my remaining CRT.
Well, there's a type of person rumored to exist, that belongs to a group known as the "unwashed masses". These individuals don't really care about computers or technology much, and use their computers much like they would use a television set or a toaster oven.
I only know a few of these types; they don't really like Firefox nor hate it, they just don't care, so they'll likely keep using MSIE since it's always there for them.
The biggest downside is that we are vastly outnumbered by these people, even if we'd rather not associated with them often, so most companies and such will continue to cater to them. As a collective, they are the "customer" who the companies want to support. So those of us who don't want to join this collective get screwed.
It's unfortunate, too, but that's just the way it is. Most people just Don't Care(TM).
I'm sure that if copyright didn't exist, and only people who really loved to write, compose music, etc. did so, because there was less economic gain, then the quantity would decrease, but the QUALITY would increase vastly.
I don't think I'd mind living in a world where this is the case.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if any computer system collectors have any IBM System/360 machines that are still in operation.
S/360 is interesting because it was one of the first standardized architectures created by a computer company. Before that, each seperate machine had its own instruction set and architecture, and they were incompatible with each other.
A mid-sized functional IBM System/360 is quite a sight. Multiple cabinets of core memory, CPU cabinets, tape systems, consoles with thousands of blinkenlights... A real fun system to watch in operation.
Hopefully someone out there still operates one for fun. It's expensive, but we have rich geeks right? }:)
-Z
That must be an awfully big 1%, because pretty much everyone I know tossed that CD in the trash along with the packaging for their DSL modem.
The software is generally useless; a web browser to the DSL modem is usually enough to configure things these days.
-Z
When people spend money on something, there's a tendancy to defend it, even when it may be inferior to a free alternative. They have to justify the cost.
I see this all the time, from people buying premium gas to expensive laptops. It cost $$$, so it must be good.
Simple psychology.
-Z
I stand corrected. This must be new, because I looked a few months ago and found nothing. }:)
Forgive my ignorance. I now respect Dell a bit more... Though I don't understand why every page they serve says "Dell recommends Windows XP" on it. WTF?
-Z
Dell still charges the "Windows Tax" on all its workstations. Try ordering a Dimension series without Windows, for instance. Not possible! They only offer Linux on two particular models of workstation (Precision) which are expensive and are limited in what video cards you can purchase with them.
Dell only seems to want to support Linux on the server side. They should support Linux all the way! If they don't want to offer it pre-installed on their workstations, they should at least offer a machine without Windows.
Argh!
-Z
And when my health insurance premiums go up because morons like you require brain surgery to fix damage that could have been prevented with a helmet, that's also your choice, huh?
Stop being so selfish. Just because it's you that gets hurt doesn't mean others aren't affected. Besides, think about your friends and family. I'm sure SOMEONE out there cares about you.
-Z
I used to bring remote controls into class and mess with the TV's all the time.
You see, at my school we had this thing called "Channel One". It was this "newscast" put on by teenagers (complete with advertising) that was beamed into the school every day via satellite and we were all FORCED to watch it. Apparently the school had some deal with Channel One, wherein they got all those free TV's in exchange for showing the newscast. I never understood what the point was, for the TV's were never used for anything BUT Channel One, but I digress.
Anyway, I didn't have a watch; it was a full-sized remote control hidden in my huge bookbag. I'd turn the TV off in the middle of the newscast and the teacher would have to get up to turn it back on. Eventually I came into class one day to find a piece of black tape over the TV's IR sensor. Drat, foiled!
It was fun to fight that irritating captive-audience bit of commercialism, though. Luckily as the school year progressed, the teacher got less strict about watching the newscast and let the class catch up on homework or whatever during that time; actively watching it became optional...
-Z
Where did the practice of charging per CPU come from? Afterall, even if it has four processors, it's still ONE system, and is running ONE copy of the OS in ONE bank of RAM.
You can't really do more on a multi-CPU system; you can just do what you're already doing faster, since there's more CPU's to handle running processes.
So what's the deal?
-Z
I once saw the Canon EOS Digital Rebel, a high end consumer digital camera, at Walmart.
So they do sell some high-end (for consumers, anyway) stuff.
-Z
>Piracy never really affected the Sega CD, which has >no copy protection at all, because no one had CD >burners.
Piracy never really affected the Sega CD, because no one actually bought the thing. }:)
-Z
I don't really mind the taxes so much, because it legitimizes piracy in my eyes.
Afterall, I'm giving the MPAA money whenever I buy a blank.. So I should get something in return, right?
Netflix + DVD Decryptor here I come!
Unfortunately the people who NEVER pirate movies end up getting screwed with no recourse other than to start pirating...
Doesn't the MPAA realize this? }:)
-Z
Obviously a foreign company that doesn't care about US laws (like China) will build these, and make a lot of money.
Where there's a market, there's a way.
-Z
What about droids? It seems pretty clear that in the Star Wars universe, menial jobs are performed by droids. (and even some non-menial jobs)
I see no reason why they couldn't just have droids keeping the station clean...
-Z
Those SparcStation 10's are TOUGH cookies. We still have a couple in service, with one of them serving as a syslog server. Compare that to some of Sun's more recent junk, like the Ultra 10's, and you see how much their quality has declined.
We're thinking of replacing that old SS10, as grepping through large logs through a 10Mbytes/sec SCSI bus is slow, but it's so rock solid that we never seem to get around to it.
If I recall, SparcStation 10's were pricey when they came out, sometimes exceeding $10K for a decent config! When you consider that they came out in 1991 or so and some are still in service, folks definitely got their money's worth!
-Z
Old, small drives are SLOW. That's why I don't like using them, even in places where 2GB would suffice.
Part of the reason new, bigass drives are so fast is the bit density; you have the platters spinning at around the same speed but that much more data is moving past the head at any given moment.
Also, a 6GB partition on an 80GB drive will encompass only a tiny part of the disk's surface, meaning the heads don't have to move very far at all when performing random access within that partition. That's why I have a 6GB partition on my 80 gigger as / on my linux box; operations involving / end up being lightning fast!
-Z
Not to mention.. no actual photos that HE took of the item. Just stock production photography, captures from the movies, and scans of the "letters of authenticity".
If I were selling something worth $150K, I'd definitely include better photos, and build a seperate web page describing the item with much more detail.
-Z
They should have turned this into an even funnier joke by saying that they were expecting shipments of duct tape but got chainsaws instead.
What an awesome opportunity to make the player go "NO WONDER!!" and laugh out loud, but they didn't think of it. }:)
-Z
Yeah, I noticed that before, when Mozilla was still under the arm of AOL, they hardly had any marketing at all. They barely pushed their Mozilla suite back then, instead focusing all the marketing effort on the (then crippled) Netscape 6/7 releases.
I think this hurt Mozilla's adoption greatly; if they had marketed with the furor they're marketing with now, they would have a LOT more users, as AOL could have placed links to their stuff on pages visited by TENS of millions of people daily.
Kudos to the Mozilla team and all the people pushing Firefox to the masses. It's about freakin' time. }:)
-Z
As a network admin at a major university, I have to chime in here.
We tend to go out and slaughter morons who put wireless access points on our network. Why? Well, it's rather simple.
First, we have our own wireless network. It has a sentry authentication system that keeps access restricted to only those with an account. The primary reason for this is so that we can track usage; if someone decides to do something illegal or waste bandwidth, we have a log telling us exactly what IP was on at what time and can track them down so we can kill, or at least slap them around some.
Second, a WAP on one of our own networks opens the network to anyone with a laptop. Not only can they use our network without authorization, but they can swipe the IP's of important systems, resulting in Denial of Service. Additionally, when their Windows craptops eventually get 0wn3d by some virus, they'll start spewing crap out to the Internet from one of our IP's. Who gets the shit from other ISP's complaining about it? WE DO! And we have no idea who to kill (or at least maim a bit) since the access wasn't authenticated in any way.
Anyway, that's the point of view of an actual admin.
-Z
There's some problems with the IPX that should make you think twice before considering it.
1) CPU speed: The CPU in a Sparc IPX is slow. We're talking a MicroSPARC at 40MHz. Even running basic applications in a shell, it feels like slogging through mud. I have a SparcStation classic, which uses a MicroSPARC at 50MHz (slightly faster) and it's pure torture, especially when you fire up gcc to compile something.
2) Bus speed: The 20MHz SBUS can barely support 10Mbps ethernet at full speed. I put an hme 100Mbps adapter in my SparcClassic and couldn't push more than about 12Mbps through it with large packets. It absolutely choked with smaller ones. The system also adds about 4ms of latency to any packet going through it, in my experience. Again, this is the slightly faster SparcClassic, not even an IPX! If you have a really fast (3Mbps or greater) DSL connection, you may lose out on performance because of this.
Don't get me wrong, it's a fun as hell box to play with, and you can get them to network boot and run off a serial console, but they're just plain torture for doing real work. Even a PCI-bus 486 is loads faster.
-Z
I've always wondered why they can't manufacture DRAM chips with spare memory cells, the same way that hard drives get spare sectors. Then rather than tossing out chips for as little as one bad bit, they can remap the bad bits to the spare cells and still use the chip.
Yields would go up, prices would go down.
I can't be the only person to have thought of this; why isn't it done?
-Z
I don't know about you, but pretty much all the LCD's I've used have been VASTLY brighter, on average, than the CRT's I've used.
In fact, at work I have an LCD and a CRT on my desk in a dual-head setup, and I had to LOWER the brightness of the LCD to make it more balanced, because the CRT is absolutely no match for the LCD in terms of brightness.
Additionally, LCD's seem much better at rejecting glare from overhead lights as CRT's. When the office light is on, the readability of the LCD is unchanged, whereas the CRT becomes somewhat washed out.
Long live LCD's. I can't wait till they give me another LCD panel to replace my remaining CRT.
-Z
Well, this *IS* BASIC we're talking about, so there you go. }:)
I wouldn't exactly call BASIC a major programming language; it is but a toy. (A toy that was widely used in the 70's and 80's, but I digress)
-Z
Well, there's a type of person rumored to exist, that belongs to a group known as the "unwashed masses". These individuals don't really care about computers or technology much, and use their computers much like they would use a television set or a toaster oven.
I only know a few of these types; they don't really like Firefox nor hate it, they just don't care, so they'll likely keep using MSIE since it's always there for them.
The biggest downside is that we are vastly outnumbered by these people, even if we'd rather not associated with them often, so most companies and such will continue to cater to them. As a collective, they are the "customer" who the companies want to support. So those of us who don't want to join this collective get screwed.
It's unfortunate, too, but that's just the way it is. Most people just Don't Care(TM).
-Z
I'm sure that if copyright didn't exist, and only people who really loved to write, compose music, etc. did so, because there was less economic gain, then the quantity would decrease, but the QUALITY would increase vastly.
I don't think I'd mind living in a world where this is the case.
-Z