I've never worked with such a stupidly configured OS before in my LIFE, and having great userhelping automatic programs destroy config files is _not clever_.
First rule of RedHat use: destroy linuxconf.
Second rule of RedHat use: install Mandrake;)
As a Sun Sysadmin, I see only 2 problems that keep this box from UTTERLY blowing away the competition.
1) The drives are non SCSI, so in sun land, you can't mirror the hard drives [1]
2) (Follows from 1) The drives don't hot swap.
Welp, there's at least 2 answers for that: the T1 200, which has hot swap SCSI HDDs, but costs more (though less I would hope than the T1 105), and attaching an external thin disk subsystem via PCI SCSI or FCAL card. A problem I can see is the way small L2 caches of the IIe CPU, though these aren't meant for serious CPU data crunching, they're meant for firewalls, webservers, appliances, etc which like lots and lots of RAM.. And going with standard PC133 instead of the way expensive mezzanine cards is a fucking maxizoomwin!!
I think Sun's really got it on the ball with this product release! I hope that the fact that it's loong overdue doesn't stunt its chances too badly..
With the execption of our teeth and eyes. We are only about 30 days old. All your old cells die, and new ones take their place. The real question on aging is, why do we even age at all? Dispite the fact that we competely replace our cells about one a month, we still age.
Look into telomerase for the answer.. If only we could figure out how to have our bodies automagically tell the difference between benign telomerase (used to rejuvenate cells) and cancerous telomerase (which creates unchecked cell reproduction, aka cancer). That's why there's billions in them thar hills...
If you are just looking for a system to email and surf with, the G4 is a bit too hardware for that.
I would agree, but for the high-end current and next-gen consumer apps (video editing, MP3 ripping, video ripping, analog music synth emulation (Reason, Rebirth, variants of which will be consumerware)) the G4 is ideal..
Meesa love 128kbps normal stereo at highest-quality VBR at 6x, faster since I put on the DVDROM firmware update;)
Because they chose only to produce the first book, we will now have great CG shots, but not enough plot to keep most interested.
Said with a different inflection, one might imagine that very sentence being used to pitch the film.
(I wonder if our alien overlords will ever tell us exactly how much tapioca was required to replace all those brains in Hollywood.. the electronic subsystems required to maintain the limbic responses and keep up a moderately-responsive Eliza script must be wonderfully advanced!)
If anything nice UI/system wise with OSX, OSS OSes and GUIs will simply steal them and make them part of the coollective. I _like_ the enlargement of the *nix ecosphere, and I think it'll be a suitable kick in the ass to competing GUI environments to get them to interoperate and improve..
Little things like not using X make it non-standard (besides the *steps, name a Unix that hasn't used some incarnation of X post the Sun vs The World(tm) desktop war).
Well, if it's not using the Win32 APIs, then by default it is not part of the desktop/workstation "standard".. And quite frankly, with side-by-side XFree now and integrated XFree probably coming, this is a non-issue IMHO. Most OSX users won't need X, but it's available to the ones that do and can be bothered to find a copy of XFree and install it. Good enough for me..
but I think I heard something about a good number of config files moved to XML? If so, that's pretty far away from any of the current *nix's.
Your tone seems to imply that that's a _bad_ thing. Why _NOT_ try something new based on an open standard to make system configuration both human-'readable' (and text-editable) as well as machine-parser-friendly? I think consolidating configs into XML or some other easily-parsable structured TEXT (not binary/ISAM/ODM/whatever) is clever and could be exceedingly cool if done correctly. What's wrong with trying something new?
We won't be able to get any better if we are beholden to the design decisions of the past to the point that we are too lazy, jaded, or bored to try something new. There's room to try new ways of doing things: it's up to the real world to decide whether they're better or not..
Frankly, I'm pretty darned excited.. I wonder how long it'll take to turn samba admin into a 'control panel', and be done with Dave..
(now if only for the cool 1U OSX PPC servers:pppp)..
Oh, and I absolutely LOVE the G4 hardware. The instant I openned the case, I thought "Damn, why didn't anyone else think of this!?" You really have to see it to understand, though.
You think _that's_ cool, check out the _insides_ of a Cube sometime.. Bloody brilliant packaging and engineering IMHO.. I recently slapped a 512MB DIMM into mine, just cuz I could.. Nice to turn off virtual memory..
Apple owns (and charges for) superior personal system design.
Oh, and I may have enough for one of the Ti PBG4s.. though I'll wait for a bit more high-end market slumpage to pick out some bargains...
I can't wait for a fully functional OSX that supports my Airport and other widgets.. Now if only Deus Ex would work with my 3-button USB moose:pp
Your Working Boy,
Re:Supercool hot laserbeams of love...
on
Laser-equipped 747
·
· Score: 1
And instead of shooting down missiles, it would need to shoot down cars on the ground.
Yeah, but some mischievous hackers will reprogram it to lase the professor's house and make it burst with popcorn..
Your Working Boy,
Re:Cool but a BFT (Big F*SCKING Target)
on
Laser-equipped 747
·
· Score: 1
Because the six fast moving sidewinders fired from 100Ms that's locked onto one of the port engines is a fair bit more manueverable than the single IBCM that's heading towards downtown Washington DC.
The only thing that'll be able to get within 100 miles of one of these cap ships is a stealth fighter.. Who else is fielding one of those?
Don't doubt that these won't be considered as critical (and as well defended) as an aircraft carrier.. Think center of a battle group, coordinated by AWACS..
Your Working Boy,
OK, anyone try hacking a Jeep trip computer?
on
Linux Powered Dodge
·
· Score: 2
Just curious, has anyone tried hacking the embedded system powering recent (1999+)Jeep/Durango/Caravan trip computers? I would _love_ to have a 'screensaver' instead of just the compass + temp.. Heck, even horizontal space invaders using the garage door opener buttons would be cool;)
Does slrn support NNTPS and authentication? And no, I won't be running local stunnels.. (besides, I use trn anyways when browsing live spools:p )
(Netscape supports NNTPS and authentication OK, M$ supports them in a shite way (try using a self-signed cert with the M$ newsreader sometime.. tedious!))
Um I'll take the faster ECP/EPP parellel port anyday thank you... USB's only advantage is # of connectable devices (figuring you want to buy that many USB hubs or own that many USB devices)... If USB could conpete speedwise with ECP/EPP than I would have less of a problem with it, but frankly it can't... (In case your curious ECP/EPP can get 2.4 MBps, as opposed to USB's 1.2 MBps... or in other words twice the speed...)
Macintosh has always been serial-based, and USB is a godsend as compared to the hodgepodge nightmare that is RS-232.. (I just spent a twisted afternoon with a breakout box trying to pinout a connection between a Sun Netra RJ45 to a Portmaster.. Aiee!)
Really? I've edited video's back on my old 486DX2 50 Mhz machine... It was slow to do, but you could do it... & my current system (a K6-2 500) does video editing pretty easily... Though then again I don't have a camcorder & normally take pieces made by others & splice them together with various music, etc...
Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.. Mac 0wnz desktop video.. And with Firewire it's super easy to print to tape, spool forwards and backwards, etc.. and iMovie is a fantastic piece of software.. Better than anything on Linux or Windows for the casual editor, and FCP is waay better than Adobe Premiere..
That's why Emachines is sucessful to... both are crappy systems, but sure they hold your hand for you... Packard Bell used to do that to (though they thought they could charge the same price for it)...
Plus, comparing Athlon GHz to P4 GHz is pretty useless..
It's like person A saying to person B "My car goes up to 140, yours only goes up to 110, neener neener!", without mentioning that A's speedo is marked in KM/h while B's is in MPH...
I would definitely take a E10k if I could, even with the PCI DR/AP limitations (can't run 80/160MBps SCSI on them with DR/AP support).. IIRC some components of the backplane were SPOF as well (though rare failures:p).. I can't wait until the USIII upgrades and Serengeti come along, so some of these puppies start appearing in the refurb/off-lease lists;)
BTW, isn't DSD support for all enterprise multi-CPU getting incorporated into Solaris soon?
I'd like to be free to know that upon returning to Canada, the Canadian Customs agents will treat me as well as the friendly, chipper, informative, helpful and welcoming American Customs staff always do.
Where the hell are you hitting these kinds of US customs staff? My last 3-4 returns from Canada (Toronto, Montreal) had US agents who were uniformly rude, surly, and obnoxious..
OTOH at least one of those trips I didn't even have to provide ID to the Canadian customs girl..
(and Schipol was the most civilized of all: just wave your passport and stroll on thru with your carryon.. Guess the Netherlands don't have to worry about terrorism..)
A company can't spend so much money on IT related projects in one year to be strapped for the next two years. Yes, they can shift a bit more money in the budget to IT and then shift it back, and a little more, to other areas the next year, but it isn't plausible that it would so severely effect the IT budget in 2001 that "they don't have any to spend on new stuff they DO need."
Also keep in mind that any company that did 'intelligent' Y2k systems and infrastructure analysis also got for the first time something very rare in IT: a complete inventory of all hardware and software in the company. The useful Y2k tools were actually IT inventory tools which incorporated stuff like Y2k compliance DBs and hardware testers. Bindview and WRQ did this pretty well IMHO. SMS was, as predicted, shite.
(I sold my soul to Y2k for about a year.. The money was good but the job was SO DEPRESSING... I was actually running a hardware compliance lab as well as doing checks on shell/perl/VB scripting and 'info resource' knowledge working.. I actually wrote a 'virus' that would infect word/excel/access documents and fix their years to 4-digit years (don't ask about microsoft year digits please, I'm sick to death of the whole thing:p) then resave the data, but my boss was really afraid of it getting loose;)
I think PDJ is getting unduly harshly criticized, he did sound the alarm and provide a fairly accurate regular understanding of the problem along the whole period of time of the issue. I personally saw many Y2k issues crop up, I personally fixed many Y2k issues in scripts as well as Perl (and yes, a few of those were of the data corrupting variety, not just cosmetic or display-crashing, imagine backups stopping happening because of a 2-digit date compare.. Stupid, but unfixed life would have SUCKED for awhile.. no documentation, the developer/admin had left years before, the usual clusterfuck...)
DARK CITY was a far better movie with a more plausible--certainly a more interesting--story and a minimum of gratuitous violence. Why did everyone ignore it?
Because, while it did feature the winsome charms of Jennifer Connelly, it did not have much in the way of skin-tight rubber-clad kung-fu chicks, big fucking guns and chop-socky action..
Slashdot Mirror
The QT5 beta cures this somewhat.
I agree tho, QT4's section in the interface hall of shame is well-deserved..
Your Working Boy,
I've never worked with such a stupidly configured OS before in my LIFE, and having great userhelping automatic programs destroy config files is _not clever_.
;)
First rule of RedHat use: destroy linuxconf.
Second rule of RedHat use: install Mandrake
Your Working Boy,
As a Sun Sysadmin, I see only 2 problems that keep this box from UTTERLY blowing away the competition.
1) The drives are non SCSI, so in sun land, you can't mirror the hard drives [1]
2) (Follows from 1) The drives don't hot swap.
Welp, there's at least 2 answers for that: the T1 200, which has hot swap SCSI HDDs, but costs more (though less I would hope than the T1 105), and attaching an external thin disk subsystem via PCI SCSI or FCAL card. A problem I can see is the way small L2 caches of the IIe CPU, though these aren't meant for serious CPU data crunching, they're meant for firewalls, webservers, appliances, etc which like lots and lots of RAM.. And going with standard PC133 instead of the way expensive mezzanine cards is a fucking maxizoomwin!!
I think Sun's really got it on the ball with this product release! I hope that the fact that it's loong overdue doesn't stunt its chances too badly..
Now where are those USIIIs again????
Your Working Boy,
Solaris 8 is free (beer) for up to and including 8 CPUs though they charge $75 for the media package (several CDROMs)..
(check here for details)
Your Working Boy,
No video, single NIC, IDE
1 PCI slot, good for a nice fast, stable SCSI or FCAL card. 2x100Mb ports. 1GB of PC133.
Sounds pretty sweet to me, and as expandable as I really need for many roles..
btw, got a T1 105 hooked up to a big ol' external RAID, works like the beez neez, though mezzanine memory costs $$$ out the a$$ (more than RAMBUS!)
Your Working Boy,
Corporations suck at real R&D.
Not all of them.
It's an oldie but a goodie.
Your Working Boy,
With the execption of our teeth and eyes. We are only about 30 days old. All your old cells die, and new ones take their place. The real question on aging is, why do we even age at all? Dispite the fact that we competely replace our cells about one a month, we still age.
Look into telomerase for the answer.. If only we could figure out how to have our bodies automagically tell the difference between benign telomerase (used to rejuvenate cells) and cancerous telomerase (which creates unchecked cell reproduction, aka cancer). That's why there's billions in them thar hills...
Your Working Boy,
If you are just looking for a system to email and surf with, the G4 is a bit too hardware for that.
;)
I would agree, but for the high-end current and next-gen consumer apps (video editing, MP3 ripping, video ripping, analog music synth emulation (Reason, Rebirth, variants of which will be consumerware)) the G4 is ideal..
Meesa love 128kbps normal stereo at highest-quality VBR at 6x, faster since I put on the DVDROM firmware update
Your Working Boy,
Because they chose only to produce the first book, we will now have great CG shots, but not enough plot to keep most interested.
Said with a different inflection, one might imagine that very sentence being used to pitch the film.
(I wonder if our alien overlords will ever tell us exactly how much tapioca was required to replace all those brains in Hollywood.. the electronic subsystems required to maintain the limbic responses and keep up a moderately-responsive Eliza script must be wonderfully advanced!)
Your Working Boy,
"Good artists borrow, Great artists steal.."
;)
If anything nice UI/system wise with OSX, OSS OSes and GUIs will simply steal them and make them part of the coollective. I _like_ the enlargement of the *nix ecosphere, and I think it'll be a suitable kick in the ass to competing GUI environments to get them to interoperate and improve..
(Jobs stole that quote BTW
Your Working Boy,
Little things like not using X make it non-standard (besides the *steps, name a Unix that hasn't used some incarnation of X post the Sun vs The World(tm) desktop war).
:pppp)..
Well, if it's not using the Win32 APIs, then by default it is not part of the desktop/workstation "standard".. And quite frankly, with side-by-side XFree now and integrated XFree probably coming, this is a non-issue IMHO. Most OSX users won't need X, but it's available to the ones that do and can be bothered to find a copy of XFree and install it. Good enough for me..
but I think I heard something about a good number of config files moved to XML? If so, that's pretty far away from any of the current *nix's.
Your tone seems to imply that that's a _bad_ thing. Why _NOT_ try something new based on an open standard to make system configuration both human-'readable' (and text-editable) as well as machine-parser-friendly? I think consolidating configs into XML or some other easily-parsable structured TEXT (not binary/ISAM/ODM/whatever) is clever and could be exceedingly cool if done correctly. What's wrong with trying something new?
We won't be able to get any better if we are beholden to the design decisions of the past to the point that we are too lazy, jaded, or bored to try something new. There's room to try new ways of doing things: it's up to the real world to decide whether they're better or not..
Frankly, I'm pretty darned excited.. I wonder how long it'll take to turn samba admin into a 'control panel', and be done with Dave..
(now if only for the cool 1U OSX PPC servers
Your Working Boy,
Oh, and I absolutely LOVE the G4 hardware. The instant I openned the case, I thought "Damn, why didn't anyone else think of this!?" You really have to see it to understand, though.
:pp
You think _that's_ cool, check out the _insides_ of a Cube sometime.. Bloody brilliant packaging and engineering IMHO.. I recently slapped a 512MB DIMM into mine, just cuz I could.. Nice to turn off virtual memory..
Apple owns (and charges for) superior personal system design.
Oh, and I may have enough for one of the Ti PBG4s.. though I'll wait for a bit more high-end market slumpage to pick out some bargains...
I can't wait for a fully functional OSX that supports my Airport and other widgets.. Now if only Deus Ex would work with my 3-button USB moose
Your Working Boy,
And instead of shooting down missiles, it would need to shoot down cars on the ground.
Yeah, but some mischievous hackers will reprogram it to lase the professor's house and make it burst with popcorn..
Your Working Boy,
Because the six fast moving sidewinders fired from 100Ms that's locked onto one of the port engines is a fair bit more manueverable than the single IBCM that's heading towards downtown Washington DC.
The only thing that'll be able to get within 100 miles of one of these cap ships is a stealth fighter.. Who else is fielding one of those?
Don't doubt that these won't be considered as critical (and as well defended) as an aircraft carrier.. Think center of a battle group, coordinated by AWACS..
Your Working Boy,
Just curious, has anyone tried hacking the embedded system powering recent (1999+)Jeep/Durango/Caravan trip computers? I would _love_ to have a 'screensaver' instead of just the compass + temp.. Heck, even horizontal space invaders using the garage door opener buttons would be cool ;)
Your Working Boy,
Does slrn support NNTPS and authentication? And no, I won't be running local stunnels.. (besides, I use trn anyways when browsing live spools :p )
(Netscape supports NNTPS and authentication OK, M$ supports them in a shite way (try using a self-signed cert with the M$ newsreader sometime.. tedious!))
Your Working Boy,
ASU is slashdotted :(
Your Working Boy,
It's not standard, but hardware RAID for E(2|4)50s is available...
Your Working Boy,
Um I'll take the faster ECP/EPP parellel port anyday thank you... USB's only advantage is # of connectable devices (figuring you want to buy that many USB hubs or own that many USB devices)... If USB could conpete speedwise with ECP/EPP than I would have less of a problem with it, but frankly it can't... (In case your curious ECP/EPP can get 2.4 MBps, as opposed to USB's 1.2 MBps... or in other words twice the speed...)
Macintosh has always been serial-based, and USB is a godsend as compared to the hodgepodge nightmare that is RS-232.. (I just spent a twisted afternoon with a breakout box trying to pinout a connection between a Sun Netra RJ45 to a Portmaster.. Aiee!)
Really? I've edited video's back on my old 486DX2 50 Mhz machine... It was slow to do, but you could do it... & my current system (a K6-2 500) does video editing pretty easily... Though then again I don't have a camcorder & normally take pieces made by others & splice them together with various music, etc...
Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.. Mac 0wnz desktop video.. And with Firewire it's super easy to print to tape, spool forwards and backwards, etc.. and iMovie is a fantastic piece of software.. Better than anything on Linux or Windows for the casual editor, and FCP is waay better than Adobe Premiere..
That's why Emachines is sucessful to... both are crappy systems, but sure they hold your hand for you... Packard Bell used to do that to (though they thought they could charge the same price for it)...
Emachines successful? Only in a lawsuit.. Have you checked their stock and news lately??
Your Working Boy,
Just a note: the RADEON Cubes have a fan on the vidcard..
;)
(and mine, with a RAGE128 and no virtual memory swapping, _is_ silent
BTW, keep an eye out for the 'cube' laptop, rumored to be a slick G4-equipped beauty..
Your Working Boy,
Plus, comparing Athlon GHz to P4 GHz is pretty useless..
It's like person A saying to person B "My car goes up to 140, yours only goes up to 110, neener neener!", without mentioning that A's speedo is marked in KM/h while B's is in MPH...
Your Working Boy,
I would definitely take a E10k if I could, even with the PCI DR/AP limitations (can't run 80/160MBps SCSI on them with DR/AP support).. IIRC some components of the backplane were SPOF as well (though rare failures :p).. I can't wait until the USIII upgrades and Serengeti come along, so some of these puppies start appearing in the refurb/off-lease lists ;)
BTW, isn't DSD support for all enterprise multi-CPU getting incorporated into Solaris soon?
Your Working Boy,
I'd like to be free to know that upon returning to Canada, the Canadian Customs agents will treat me as well as the friendly, chipper, informative, helpful and welcoming American Customs staff always do.
Where the hell are you hitting these kinds of US customs staff? My last 3-4 returns from Canada (Toronto, Montreal) had US agents who were uniformly rude, surly, and obnoxious..
OTOH at least one of those trips I didn't even have to provide ID to the Canadian customs girl..
(and Schipol was the most civilized of all: just wave your passport and stroll on thru with your carryon.. Guess the Netherlands don't have to worry about terrorism..)
Your Working Boy,
A company can't spend so much money on IT related projects in one year to be strapped for the next two years. Yes, they can shift a bit more money in the budget to IT and then shift it back, and a little more, to other areas the next year, but it isn't plausible that it would so severely effect the IT budget in 2001 that "they don't have any to spend on new stuff they DO need."
:p) then resave the data, but my boss was really afraid of it getting loose ;)
Also keep in mind that any company that did 'intelligent' Y2k systems and infrastructure analysis also got for the first time something very rare in IT: a complete inventory of all hardware and software in the company. The useful Y2k tools were actually IT inventory tools which incorporated stuff like Y2k compliance DBs and hardware testers. Bindview and WRQ did this pretty well IMHO. SMS was, as predicted, shite.
(I sold my soul to Y2k for about a year.. The money was good but the job was SO DEPRESSING... I was actually running a hardware compliance lab as well as doing checks on shell/perl/VB scripting and 'info resource' knowledge working.. I actually wrote a 'virus' that would infect word/excel/access documents and fix their years to 4-digit years (don't ask about microsoft year digits please, I'm sick to death of the whole thing
I think PDJ is getting unduly harshly criticized, he did sound the alarm and provide a fairly accurate regular understanding of the problem along the whole period of time of the issue. I personally saw many Y2k issues crop up, I personally fixed many Y2k issues in scripts as well as Perl (and yes, a few of those were of the data corrupting variety, not just cosmetic or display-crashing, imagine backups stopping happening because of a 2-digit date compare.. Stupid, but unfixed life would have SUCKED for awhile.. no documentation, the developer/admin had left years before, the usual clusterfuck...)
Your Working Boy,
DARK CITY was a far better movie with a more plausible--certainly a more interesting--story and a minimum of gratuitous violence. Why did everyone ignore it?
Because, while it did feature the winsome charms of Jennifer Connelly, it did not have much in the way of skin-tight rubber-clad kung-fu chicks, big fucking guns and chop-socky action..
Your Working Boy,