The AlphaPC164 i was jsut given suprised me by having a almost full unixlike OS as its firmware (SRM).
This is what I love about Sun hardware. You have a complete FORTH interpreter in the OpenBoot PROM, you can 'cd/' and 'ls' to get a list of devices, you can 'test net' or 'watch-net' to diagnose network issues, 'probe scsi' to find SCSI devices, etc. etc. A few months ago I wrote a little bit of FORTH which would make the chassis LED blink, so I could find a particular box in a rack full of kit. Marvellous. The lights-out managment features on the newer boxes allow you get to the PROM through the console line when the machine is switched off - well, enough of the PROM to let you power up the machine remotely - this was fantastic for one datacentre that I've worked in, you had to give security 24 hours notice if you needed entry to the facility.
I have a Sun type 6 USB keyboard. Next to the (stupidly small, and useless for strafe) alt key and the other side of the space bar are two keys with diamonds on them.
I've never witnessed them do anything useful under Solaris, windows or linux, they don't even seem to generate keysyms (unlike the Sun specific Stop -> Cut keys). What are they for?
On a British keyboard, the backslash key i actually in the lower left hand corner, next to the left Shift key.
Where God intended:)
My Keyboard is a Sun type 6 USB keyboard - as shifted with Sun Rays. I love it since it has the standard Stop, Again, Props, Undo, Front, Copy, Open, Paste, Find and Cut keys. It takes a little while to train linux to use them like Solaris does but it's worth it, oh yes.
Who was the first to use concentration camps? Yes, again it was the British in Africa.
You say it like it was a bad thing. No really.
The British army in South Africa were trying to fight a traditional war against a highly mobile enemy which was using guerrilla warfare tactics. The concentration camps were intended to stop the civilian Boer population from supplying the enemy in key areas by concentrating them together in a camp. The sanitary conditions and the level of medical care at the time were dreadful and consequently disease (particularly typhoid) swept through the camps killing thousands, they weren't gassed or gunned down. A similar proportion of the British army serving in South Africa at the time was killed by the same diseases. I would argue that camp x-ray is a concentration camp - but this time it's a concentration of suspected or actual combatants removed from the general population and held under modern sanitary and health care conditions.
Don't confuse concentration camps with extermination camps.
So I guess this could be true, but as someone who has worked with Sun before, I find it very, very hard to believe.
I have worked at Sun and this smells very real to me. I have a friend at Sun who wrote an application in his spare time (in Java) which was officially adopted for internal use - he spent a month working with the internal applications gestapo having it re-written from scratch "to official standards". I agree with much of what the document says. Writing a complex Java application means targeting a specific JRE version, it is not at all unusual for Sun software products to install the particular JRE which they were written against (look at SunMC and the SunRay server software) - it's easier to keep patched without breaking other things.
Until the Java developers use Solaris as their tier one development platform and API changes are controlled in the same was Solaris itself (PSARC) this will continue to be a problem.
Have you ever tried to compile GNOME on Solaris? Trust me, it's not just a./configure, make && make install. Last time I tried (~3 months ago) it took hours and hours of tedious dependency resolving and source hacking just to get it to compile cleanly, let alone work. Somethings just wouldn't compile, or would compile then seg fault when run. It's been a significant porting effort (and QA effort) that Sun has undertaken and congratulations to them for getting this far. I for one am hugely grateful.
when I wanted to complain about the entitlement/ID cards scheme. I got a reply from my MP (a copy of a letter sent to our Incompetent Home Secretary), on House of Commons headed notepaper in the post 3 days later. For once I feel slightly included in the political process...
As a 20 something, I agree that most things aren't meant to last - that's because of greed, pure and simple. It's up to you to seek out the brands which are still worth purchasing. I have no idea what a Sunbeam toaster is, but in the UK we have Dualit toasters. Designed for the catering trade, they have a clockword timer, a replaceable heating element and styling which can't really be called retro, since it hasn't changed in the last 50 years - and none of this modern bimetallic strip nonsense. I'm hugely pleased with mine:)
On the subject of laptops. I have a 500MHz PIII StinkPad which is a constant source of irritation (not only because of it's battery technology - that sucks anyway). It's just that little bit too slow to play DivX files (MPEG4 encoded films) - I've encoded much of my collection of Western films into DivX and it'd be nice to be able to view them on the move...
I have three batteries with matching 'good' FRU's and one battery with a supposed 'bad' FRU. They're all hosed. The age of the battery and the treatment it's received would seem to be more important.
Apparently the battery issue is caused by over charging and top-up charging. I'm told you can avoid the problem by charging the battery while the laptop is switched off - and once the charging light turns from amber to green, disconnect the power and run the laptop from the battery or remove the battery and run the laptop from mains. You don't have to worry so much about proper charge cycles with these batteries, just give it a complete cycle once a week or so (for a heavily used machine).
It mightt be possible to recondition a dodgy battery by discharging/charging it fully - the problem is, the laptop won't run at all on a battery which reports itself empty, so you can't discharge it that way. I had an idea to make a little device which will draw a steady current from the battery until it's really empty - not being much of an electronics geek, I'm rather worried about causing a fire:)
Solaris 2.0 was based on code legitimatly licensed from AT&T. Indeed, Sun contributed to the development of SVR4 itself (it contained the SunOS VFS framework and VM subsystem).
If there's any of the IP which SCO now finds that it owns in Solaris, then it's been bought and paid for.
I think snooty audiophiles would be most concerned about the quality of the DSP on the MP3 player - that and the 'engine noise' coming from the power supply. I'm not an audiophile, but I did build my own MP3 player from the insides of an old laptop, a floppy disk based linux distribution and a homemade shell script based webserver control system. It's a bit clunky, but I'm proud of it:)
If I cared much about the quality of the sound, I suppose I'd need try to produce an optical digital output and run it into a decent pre-amp. As it is, it's playing through an old pair of PC speakers that go 'pop' whenever the refrigerator motor starts up in the kitchen:). I'd far rather fiddle about with the user interface (hey, we need voice activation!) than improve the quality of the sound.
Gnome mines is in the Solaris Gnome 2 beta, downloadable from www.sun.com (beta3 is just out).
I don't think I'll ever be able to beat my all time best on the windows 3.11 version of winmine (76 on expert! - I got lucky).
Re:Women in Crichton Books
on
Prey
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Crichton is like Lucas, he has some great ideas, interesting twists, and generally strong plots. His character development, particularly of women, barely qualifies as one dimensional.
I thought Princess Leia was pretty three dimensional - especially in that metal bikini outfit. Rrrr.
I have never understood why anyone would want to run Linnux on these things. This snippit is from the zSeries FAQ from IBM's website:
Question: What advantages does Linux on zSeries bring to VSE/ESA(TM) customers?
Answer: VSE customers see two major benefits: First is new application choices. A very large number of applications are available, or planned, for Linux on zSeries. Most of those applications are not available on VSE itself. For example, VSE customers have expressed interest in WebSphere Application Server or SAMBA under Linux on zSeries.
Running samba on a mainframe? Why? Sounds like an excellent way to turn a multi-million dollar machine into a bunch of mediocre windows file servers...
The number of enterprise Linux applications is miniscule in comparison to those on available on Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, so you're likely to be developing them in-house - why bother, if you're spending that sort of cash on the hardware, I sure you can afford some decent software?
UNIX is unsuitable for this platform. It does an excellent job of using the hardware available, memory especially. Mainframe memory is hugely expensive, why waste it by having n copies of the same page in the buffer caches of n instances of Linux?
The 2000 is the same model as the 1000, except for slighty faster CPU's and the option of better a graphics card (which can also be fitted to a 1000) early model 1000's had dodgy pre-fetch cache 750MHz USIII's, no customer should have one of those these days, but it's worth checking because Sun were field swapping them out free of charge. They are cracking machines, apart from the ugly case:)...
I think a brand spanking new SunBlade can be had for like 999 dollars...
These boxes give Sun workstations a bad name and are best avoided. They're manufactured by a third party using the cheapest PC components and an UltraSPARCIIi with a tiny level 2 cache, they don't even have a real UPA - it's a fudged PC bus. The power supplies, disks and on-board ATI M64 graphics chips are all crap. The SunBlade 2000 is the first decent workstation in the product range, there's plenty of level 2 cache, decent memory bandwidth (and capacity) and fcal disks - which is no surprise, as the system board is also used in the 280R server. It's just a shame the case is so ugly:). If you're not spending your own money go for one of these.
If you are spending your own money, 1000 dollars will buy you a decently spec'ed second hand Ultra2 or Ultra60 on ebay which will give you a much better all round experience of Sun kit, these boxes were selling for $20,000-30,000 5 years ago and if previous SPARCstations are anything to go by, will give good service for another 5-10 years.
If your Sun hardware has an endemic problem, and all your software is build around Solaris, where do you go?
Fujitsu?
I wouldn't, but you do have a choice. Every systems vendor has product issues from time to time. They all try to hush things up initially, because they are not necessarily aware that the problem is widespread and there's no point in causing panic - especially when initial findings pointed to environmental factors such as heat/EM noise. A single hardware issue is unlikely to affect all models and Sun was more than happy to generously discount on future purchases in order to keep the business. SunService did a stirling job during the E-cache (and the GBIC) issues. My systems were clustered and the problem was taken very seriously by Sun, I suffered little downtime and as such I have few complaints.
A typo I realise, but my workd needs a kill -HUP... *sigh*.
The fact is Unix has had 25 years to get it right on some of the most advanced hardware in the world. Windows 7 year old a cludgy GUI layer on a bad VMS clone on PC hardware. No wonder is sucks.
Only if you consider WordPerfect to be a "ripoff" of Wordstar. Or EasyWriter. Or Electric Pencil. Or one of the other dedicated word processing systems that were around for a good decade before WordPerfect was published....
Now how many people remember the PenDown ROM for the BBC Master?
Slashdot Mirror
The AlphaPC164 i was jsut given suprised me by having a almost full unixlike OS as its firmware (SRM).
/' and 'ls' to get a list of devices, you can 'test net' or 'watch-net' to diagnose network issues, 'probe scsi' to find SCSI devices, etc. etc. A few months ago I wrote a little bit of FORTH which would make the chassis LED blink, so I could find a particular box in a rack full of kit. Marvellous. The lights-out managment features on the newer boxes allow you get to the PROM through the console line when the machine is switched off - well, enough of the PROM to let you power up the machine remotely - this was fantastic for one datacentre that I've worked in, you had to give security 24 hours notice if you needed entry to the facility.
This is what I love about Sun hardware. You have a complete FORTH interpreter in the OpenBoot PROM, you can 'cd
I have a Sun type 6 USB keyboard. Next to the (stupidly small, and useless for strafe) alt key and the other side of the space bar are two keys with diamonds on them.
I've never witnessed them do anything useful under Solaris, windows or linux, they don't even seem to generate keysyms (unlike the Sun specific Stop -> Cut keys). What are they for?
On a British keyboard, the backslash key i actually in the lower left hand corner, next to the left Shift key.
:)
Where God intended
My Keyboard is a Sun type 6 USB keyboard - as shifted with Sun Rays. I love it since it has the standard Stop, Again, Props, Undo, Front, Copy, Open, Paste, Find and Cut keys. It takes a little while to train linux to use them like Solaris does but it's worth it, oh yes.
You're asking me to justify the morality of a war?
Who was the first to use concentration camps? Yes, again it was the British in Africa.
You say it like it was a bad thing. No really.
The British army in South Africa were trying to fight a traditional war against a highly mobile enemy which was using guerrilla warfare tactics. The concentration camps were intended to stop the civilian Boer population from supplying the enemy in key areas by concentrating them together in a camp. The sanitary conditions and the level of medical care at the time were dreadful and consequently disease (particularly typhoid) swept through the camps killing thousands, they weren't gassed or gunned down. A similar proportion of the British army serving in South Africa at the time was killed by the same diseases. I would argue that camp x-ray is a concentration camp - but this time it's a concentration of suspected or actual combatants removed from the general population and held under modern sanitary and health care conditions.
Don't confuse concentration camps with extermination camps.
So I guess this could be true, but as someone who has worked with Sun before, I find it very, very hard to believe.
I have worked at Sun and this smells very real to me. I have a friend at Sun who wrote an application in his spare time (in Java) which was officially adopted for internal use - he spent a month working with the internal applications gestapo having it re-written from scratch "to official standards". I agree with much of what the document says. Writing a complex Java application means targeting a specific JRE version, it is not at all unusual for Sun software products to install the particular JRE which they were written against (look at SunMC and the SunRay server software) - it's easier to keep patched without breaking other things.
Until the Java developers use Solaris as their tier one development platform and API changes are controlled in the same was Solaris itself (PSARC) this will continue to be a problem.
I just had my sysadmin install it and everytime I try to start it from the dtlogin, I get gnome-session segfaults. Lousy, Sun distribution.
Have you still got the box it came in?
Have you ever tried to compile GNOME on Solaris? Trust me, it's not just a ./configure, make && make install. Last time I tried (~3 months ago) it took hours and hours of tedious dependency resolving and source hacking just to get it to compile cleanly, let alone work. Somethings just wouldn't compile, or would compile then seg fault when run. It's been a significant porting effort (and QA effort) that Sun has undertaken and congratulations to them for getting this far. I for one am hugely grateful.
Now if only we had mousewheel support...
...I thought the Right Honourable member for Scunthorpe was just being rude.
Seriously though, I used:
FaxYourMP.com
when I wanted to complain about the entitlement/ID cards scheme. I got a reply from my MP (a copy of a letter sent to our Incompetent Home Secretary), on House of Commons headed notepaper in the post 3 days later. For once I feel slightly included in the political process...
As a 20 something, I agree that most things aren't meant to last - that's because of greed, pure and simple. It's up to you to seek out the brands which are still worth purchasing. I have no idea what a Sunbeam toaster is, but in the UK we have Dualit toasters. Designed for the catering trade, they have a clockword timer, a replaceable heating element and styling which can't really be called retro, since it hasn't changed in the last 50 years - and none of this modern bimetallic strip nonsense. I'm hugely pleased with mine :)
On the subject of laptops. I have a 500MHz PIII StinkPad which is a constant source of irritation (not only because of it's battery technology - that sucks anyway). It's just that little bit too slow to play DivX files (MPEG4 encoded films) - I've encoded much of my collection of Western films into DivX and it'd be nice to be able to view them on the move...
I have three batteries with matching 'good' FRU's and one battery with a supposed 'bad' FRU. They're all hosed. The age of the battery and the treatment it's received would seem to be more important.
Apparently the battery issue is caused by over charging and top-up charging. I'm told you can avoid the problem by charging the battery while the laptop is switched off - and once the charging light turns from amber to green, disconnect the power and run the laptop from the battery or remove the battery and run the laptop from mains. You don't have to worry so much about proper charge cycles with these batteries, just give it a complete cycle once a week or so (for a heavily used machine).
:)
It mightt be possible to recondition a dodgy battery by discharging/charging it fully - the problem is, the laptop won't run at all on a battery which reports itself empty, so you can't discharge it that way. I had an idea to make a little device which will draw a steady current from the battery until it's really empty - not being much of an electronics geek, I'm rather worried about causing a fire
There would certainly be no reason to sue Sun.
Solaris 2.0 was based on code legitimatly licensed from AT&T. Indeed, Sun contributed to the development of SVR4 itself (it contained the SunOS VFS framework and VM subsystem).
If there's any of the IP which SCO now finds that it owns in Solaris, then it's been bought and paid for.
I think snooty audiophiles would be most concerned about the quality of the DSP on the MP3 player - that and the 'engine noise' coming from the power supply. I'm not an audiophile, but I did build my own MP3 player from the insides of an old laptop, a floppy disk based linux distribution and a homemade shell script based webserver control system. It's a bit clunky, but I'm proud of it :)
:). I'd far rather fiddle about with the user interface (hey, we need voice activation!) than improve the quality of the sound.
If I cared much about the quality of the sound, I suppose I'd need try to produce an optical digital output and run it into a decent pre-amp. As it is, it's playing through an old pair of PC speakers that go 'pop' whenever the refrigerator motor starts up in the kitchen
Gnome mines is in the Solaris Gnome 2 beta, downloadable from www.sun.com (beta3 is just out).
I don't think I'll ever be able to beat my all time best on the windows 3.11 version of winmine (76 on expert! - I got lucky).
Crichton is like Lucas, he has some great ideas, interesting twists, and generally strong plots. His character development, particularly of women, barely qualifies as one dimensional.
I thought Princess Leia was pretty three dimensional - especially in that metal bikini outfit. Rrrr.
When UD works on one of the many operating systems that I actually use, I'll be there (and I'm hardly going to be using wine on SPARC).
I have never understood why anyone would want to run Linnux on these things. This snippit is from the zSeries FAQ from IBM's website:
Question: What advantages does Linux on zSeries bring to VSE/ESA(TM) customers?
Answer: VSE customers see two major benefits: First is new application choices. A very large number of applications are available, or planned, for Linux on zSeries. Most of those applications are not available on VSE itself. For example, VSE customers have expressed interest in WebSphere Application Server or SAMBA under Linux on zSeries.
Running samba on a mainframe? Why? Sounds like an excellent way to turn a multi-million dollar machine into a bunch of mediocre windows file servers...
The number of enterprise Linux applications is miniscule in comparison to those on available on Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, so you're likely to be developing them in-house - why bother, if you're spending that sort of cash on the hardware, I sure you can afford some decent software?
UNIX is unsuitable for this platform. It does an excellent job of using the hardware available, memory especially. Mainframe memory is hugely expensive, why waste it by having n copies of the same page in the buffer caches of n instances of Linux?
Bizarre idea...
The 2000 is the same model as the 1000, except for slighty faster CPU's and the option of better a graphics card (which can also be fitted to a 1000) early model 1000's had dodgy pre-fetch cache 750MHz USIII's, no customer should have one of those these days, but it's worth checking because Sun were field swapping them out free of charge. They are cracking machines, apart from the ugly case :)...
I think a brand spanking new SunBlade can be had for like 999 dollars...
:). If you're not spending your own money go for one of these.
These boxes give Sun workstations a bad name and are best avoided. They're manufactured by a third party using the cheapest PC components and an UltraSPARCIIi with a tiny level 2 cache, they don't even have a real UPA - it's a fudged PC bus. The power supplies, disks and on-board ATI M64 graphics chips are all crap. The SunBlade 2000 is the first decent workstation in the product range, there's plenty of level 2 cache, decent memory bandwidth (and capacity) and fcal disks - which is no surprise, as the system board is also used in the 280R server. It's just a shame the case is so ugly
If you are spending your own money, 1000 dollars will buy you a decently spec'ed second hand Ultra2 or Ultra60 on ebay which will give you a much better all round experience of Sun kit, these boxes were selling for $20,000-30,000 5 years ago and if previous SPARCstations are anything to go by, will give good service for another 5-10 years.
I do recomend 512+, for all unices
Well, I would recommend sizing your swap according to the applications requirement rather than relying on rules of thumb. Use pmap.
And don't forget to configure a dump device - a production Solaris crash dump is a rare beauty and a terrible thing to waste.
If your Sun hardware has an endemic problem, and all your software is build around Solaris, where do you go?
Fujitsu?
I wouldn't, but you do have a choice. Every systems vendor has product issues from time to time. They all try to hush things up initially, because they are not necessarily aware that the problem is widespread and there's no point in causing panic - especially when initial findings pointed to environmental factors such as heat/EM noise. A single hardware issue is unlikely to affect all models and Sun was more than happy to generously discount on future purchases in order to keep the business. SunService did a stirling job during the E-cache (and the GBIC) issues. My systems were clustered and the problem was taken very seriously by Sun, I suffered little downtime and as such I have few complaints.
anywhere in the workd
A typo I realise, but my workd needs a kill -HUP... *sigh*.
The fact is Unix has had 25 years to get it right on some of the most advanced hardware in the world. Windows 7 year old a cludgy GUI layer on a bad VMS clone on PC hardware. No wonder is sucks.
What a beautiful turn of phrase.
Best not mention Scunthorpe. :)
Only if you consider WordPerfect to be a "ripoff" of Wordstar. Or EasyWriter. Or Electric Pencil. Or one of the other dedicated word processing systems that were around for a good decade before WordPerfect was published....
Now how many people remember the PenDown ROM for the BBC Master?