A note from the Usenet Oldnews archive - ucbvax.2667 - commentary contemporary to the imminent release of IBM's PC. Interesting mainly because of when it was written.
Sigh.. we could all have PowerPC machines if it wasn't for a funny turn of events.
Yes, but doesn't ARM lack floating-point support? It's also a 32-bit architecture in an age where such a thing is slowly dying and doesn't warrent much R&D. ARM is more valuable as a highly integrated, high-speed embedded tool. LART has been using StrongARM in low-power applications, and they've benefitted from having a large amount of functionality directly in the processor package - UART, I believe the RAM controller as well, and a hacker-friendly bus.
All of these nifties, coupled with the low-power consumption and lack of integral FPU, means that ARM is very attractive for non-desktop applications. Desktop PCs, as it has been shown over and over, can succeed despite having some of the most poorly engineered technology imaginable.
That's simplistic. Unix doesn't "run" the internet. If you're looking for one particular target to assign such blame, it would probably be Cisco. Anyway, Unix is hardly homogenous, and in the case of cross-platform attacks, modern firewalling practice means that the sites that end up getting attacked generally deserve to be. If you're going to be secure, either limit access with a firewall or hire someone competent to hover over exposed servers. Unix should generally not be exposed to the outside world. The same goes with any other featureful server. Smart sites know this and use either turnkey firewalls or homebrew ones.
Could someone knowledgeable comment on the possibility of a program that could recode exist mpeg audio into a free format such as Vorbis? I'd like to do something like: nice 20 find ~/mpeg_audio -type f -exec 'mpeg2vorbis' '{}' ';'
Also, is there a featureful Vorbis decoder for Win32? Perhaps a Winamp input plugin?
I have a K5 system with no fans. It doesn't have a hard drive (Linux, netbooted with NFSroot), so the load on the power supply isn't very high. It had been running for half a year in the basement with a fried fan, and no one noticed. Nowadays it runs with the cover popped off on both the case and the power supply, which seems to allow enough circulation to not die.
The cheap fan on the K5 gave out (Kingston Memory upgrade for a VLbus 486 mobo), and it hasn't melted yet either. The system is completely quiet, except for noise induced in the sound system. Yeah, unshielded switching power supply is quite noisy, and interestingly is variously noisy depending on system activity. Sort of an audible top.
Everyone's heard the paranoia before, and there has been plenty of speculation - what biological catastrophe will we bring upon ourselves by creating life? There seems to be the widespread belief that the entire ecosystem can be devastated by a rogue bacterium or viroid of some kind. I don't pretend to be a biologist, but approaching the problem from a logical perspective, a system as ancient and tested as the global ecosystem must have comparitively few holes in it awaiting exploitation by a rogue organism.
Aren't we being a little conceited in believing that it's so easy to set off an apocalypse? In working with a few hundred genes, would we create something that brings about the end of organic life as we know it on this planet?
And putting it into slightly closer perspective, will we achieve the same ends by using genetic manipulation in staple foods and livestock?
While it's easy enough to do harm to the ecosystem, I find it hard to believe that changing a few genes will have that much effect to such a complex and resilient system.
Sorry about the lousy formatting in the first post, btw.
How about a new 386? (don't laugh.. yet)
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I've been thinking about designing a reference implementation of an 80386 motherboard, one that actually does things right - hardware that puts the processor into 32-bit protected mode *right* *away*, minimalistic yet functional boot PROM similar to Sun bootproms on Sun3+, clean hardware design, multiple bus support - add to the list. What first got me thinking about this was Ingo Cyliax's CS335 workstation, a homebrew 68030 motherboard with an ISA bus and a Minix port. Essentially, a somewhat PC-compatible 68k machine. This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time - an open motherboard design with schematics and all else freely available. Granted, it's limited and not particularly fast, but it still is worth looking at. There was a similar project that involved building an NS32535 machine, called the pc532. It's supported in NetBSD and (possibly) OpenBSD. I'm not naive enough to suggest that a home-grown motherboard design could ever be fabricated economically, but the fun part would be designing it and perhaps porting Unix to it while the machine is running on a circuit-level simulator. That's close enough to the real thing for me (I don't look forward to trying to debug problems on a five-layer PC board, do you?:-) Flame and moderate away, but at least give some thought as to what "open source hardware" could be. Wouldn't it be satisfying to have had in designing a well-engineered x86 workstation (Sun 386i comes to mind, amongst others), built from cheap parts but free of the insanity of Wintel architecture? Dreamer.. you're nothing but a dreamer..:-)
Fine, but you need a program before you can throw CPU at it. distributed.net is best suited for problems that used fixed algorithms to analyze large quantities of data that require little human interpretation or manipulation, but simply need a LOT of CPU thrown at them.
Wouldn't it be cool if these were ARM motherboards? After all, Corel's Netwinders are ARM-based, right? Of course, it would break IA32 compatibility all to hell but the idea of a post-1990 chip architecture under the hood is appealing. Or at least post-1985..
I thought I heard somewhere that Linux growth is actually logarithmic, and not exponential..? Perhaps it had to do with the growth of the developer base. ( y=log(x) and not y=10^x ?? log base 10 right?)
PRK is laser surgery. There was an old form of surgery called RK, radial keratomy, where an opthalmogist actually cut slits on the cornea with a scalpel called a microtome. The idea was that the scarring would cause the cornea to contract. Brilliant, huh? That didn't work out that well.. PRK is the laser version, to my knowledge. After checking out www.surgicaleyes.com I've fallen for the propaganda of the eyewear industry and decided definitely against any surgery. LASIK is invasive and does only a (large) fraction of your corneal surface. Constrast perception falls. Night vision sucks. Your corneas fall out. Your brain rots. Oh no, wait, TV does that. Whatever.. I'm sticking with contacts and glasses, the latter of course giving that valuable first impression of intelligence (it sticks if I don't say anything:-)
There was an article in Time on this very subject a week or two ago - and there is a heavy bias towards LASIK (laser-aided in situ something keratomy..), which is great for people with really severe myopia (-6 or worse), severe farsightedness, or anything more than a touch of astigmatism. For everybody else, like people such as myself who are in the -5 range with no astigmatism, PRK (photo-refractive keratomy) seems to be the way to go. LASIK puts you in the hands of a surgeon, a competent one hopefully, but a human nonetheless. PRK is done with a computer-programmed excimer laser. It's not as likely to put you into the coveted +/-0.5 range as LASIK, and won't do much for astigmatism, but there are always fix-ups, and you don't need to worry about a surgeon having a bad day and digging out your cornea.
Obviously, PRK isn't a panacea, and there is plenty of room for human error, but I just don't see any reason to go with LASIK over PRK. LASIK is invasive, runs the risk of epithelial cell ingrowth into the cut, and hasn't been around for as long.
Am I missing something, or are there any other reasons to go with LASIK? From my research, PRK is the way to go.
Here's another reason, probably not true, but here goes. Supposedly, typewriter salesman wanted to show off how fast their new machine was, and how much than the old quill it was. They all sucked at typing though (typing at 50WPM was a big deal and considered superhuman). So, the keyboard was arranged so that only the top row is required to spell out T-Y-P-E-W-R-I-T-E-R.. easy enough for any salesman to learn to type quickly:-)
It's an old toy safe box. The combination lock opens with one turn, i.e. get the number right and you're in. Needless to say, the important stuff is stored and encrypted with the far more secure device to the left of the box.
The Nutcracker is used for the spiritual Kernel Compile Dance (it lasts a long time on this box, let me tell you).
It's completely dependent on the network. The only reason the floppy is there is to load up a ROM image of the Etherboot image. Check out SLUG's Etherboot site for an explanation of how this works. My motivation for this was the noise my computer used to make, which I've relegated to the basement server. Now it's almost completely quiet, except when the CD or floppy is going, or when the monitor is on, or that stupid power supply buzz which is probably a bad sign but I don't feel like investigating.
The power supply is on a shielded surface (well, kinda) and is behaving itself for the time being. My dad came over and *touched* the heatsinks to see if they were hot. This freaked me out until he explained that there was no current path, i.e. birds on a wire, but still, damn... anyway it's worth it. If it wasn't for that damn buzz it'd be completely quiet. If you really want a quiet system, go for an NCD X-term and sleep more easily too (oh did I mention, I'm not liable if your cat Fluffy likes to poke around power supplies and finds out just what curiousity did to the.. well, you know)
Thanks for the comments, it's good to know that not everyone thinks I'm a loony;-) ("I want it quiet! REALLY quiet!" "oookay...")
Heh.. that's an idea. Or maybe I should put my monitor in a custom enclosure and hang the board inside a la Sparc SLC/ELC. I can't actually extend the CD drive very far because that's an *internal* drive with a two foot cable. I'll probably just tape it to the bottom of my shelf so I can get some shelf space back. The drive was a late addition stolen from my server which I was hesitant to add, fearing the power dissipation might push my uncooled power supply over the edge. Nope, it just buzzes a lot when I'm playing MP3s from the drive. An audibal CPU monitor, neat trick huh;-)
- Does having the case off like that interfere with your monitor/radio/TV reception?
Hmm.. nope. I have a Sun3/50 in the basement that causes a lot more trouble with that. Wanna see a pic (I got snap-happy with a digicam last week..;-)
- How do you keep the cards from wobbling in their slots and/or snapping at the connectors?
Hmm.. they just don't. ISA and VL-BUS.
- The drives seem far from your chair. Do you have to get up to change disks?
Yeh. Bummer. I don't use floppies, tho. The drive just boots the computer, the floppy holds Etherboot. (no EPROM yet, I wouldn't have the floppy there otherwise)
- Is the thing under the floppy drive a CD-ROM drive or what?
That is a 1994 vintage NEC 3x SCSI cd-rom. To the lower left is a cheesy Star Trek sticker. Identify the rest of the Trek geek material in the pic for bonus points;-)
On top of the floppy, hidden by the SCSI, is of course my caseless power supply, my main source of concern in the first few hours of operation. No fires yet!
Well, the neat part is that it doesn't have a fan either. I took off the power supply case so it doesn't overheat (two weeks so far). It's an AMDK5-75 under light load so the CPU gets by without a fan too. To top it off, it boots diskless, so no annoying sound at all! (Well, the power supply buzzes in proportion to CPU activity, but...;-)
Why don't you hack together a script with 'lynx -dump'? I'll probably get around to doing that, and the speed difference is pretty small... you don't even need to use Perl. bash, sed, and grep are all you really need (IFS!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
- From "Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present" (fascinating reading all the way through - check out the part about iAPX 432), we have "IBM's choice, the 8086". Read this on an empty stomach. It's fairly incredible.
- A note from the Usenet Oldnews archive - ucbvax.2667 - commentary contemporary to the imminent release of IBM's PC. Interesting mainly because of when it was written.
Sigh.. we could all have PowerPC machines if it wasn't for a funny turn of events.All of these nifties, coupled with the low-power consumption and lack of integral FPU, means that ARM is very attractive for non-desktop applications. Desktop PCs, as it has been shown over and over, can succeed despite having some of the most poorly engineered technology imaginable.
Could someone knowledgeable comment on the possibility of a program that could recode exist mpeg audio into a free format such as Vorbis? I'd like to do something like: nice 20 find ~/mpeg_audio -type f -exec 'mpeg2vorbis' '{}' ';'
Also, is there a featureful Vorbis decoder for Win32? Perhaps a Winamp input plugin?
maciek@jabba:~$ host microsoft-.com
microsoft-.com A 209.207.246.170
maciek@jabba:~$ ping microsoft-.com
ping: unknown host microsoft-.com
maciek@jabba:~$ nslookup microsoft-.com
Server: localhost
Address: 127.0.0.1
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: microsoft-.com
Address: 209.207.246.170
maciek@jabba:~$
In other words, not following RFCs results in non-deterministic behavior.
The cheap fan on the K5 gave out (Kingston Memory upgrade for a VLbus 486 mobo), and it hasn't melted yet either. The system is completely quiet, except for noise induced in the sound system. Yeah, unshielded switching power supply is quite noisy, and interestingly is variously noisy depending on system activity. Sort of an audible top.
Aren't we being a little conceited in believing that it's so easy to set off an apocalypse? In working with a few hundred genes, would we create something that brings about the end of organic life as we know it on this planet?
And putting it into slightly closer perspective, will we achieve the same ends by using genetic manipulation in staple foods and livestock?
While it's easy enough to do harm to the ecosystem, I find it hard to believe that changing a few genes will have that much effect to such a complex and resilient system.
- Schematics for the new IBM PowerPC Open Platform Reference Design
- The comp.sys.m68k FAQ: info about one of the first and most hacked on (and loved) Unix microprocessors. Cheap and well-documented.
- A picture of Ingo Cyliax's 68030 workstation, the CS335.
Sorry about the lousy formatting in the first post, btw.I've been thinking about designing a reference implementation of an 80386 motherboard, one that actually does things right - hardware that puts the processor into 32-bit protected mode *right* *away*, minimalistic yet functional boot PROM similar to Sun bootproms on Sun3+, clean hardware design, multiple bus support - add to the list. What first got me thinking about this was Ingo Cyliax's CS335 workstation, a homebrew 68030 motherboard with an ISA bus and a Minix port. Essentially, a somewhat PC-compatible 68k machine. This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time - an open motherboard design with schematics and all else freely available. Granted, it's limited and not particularly fast, but it still is worth looking at. There was a similar project that involved building an NS32535 machine, called the pc532. It's supported in NetBSD and (possibly) OpenBSD. I'm not naive enough to suggest that a home-grown motherboard design could ever be fabricated economically, but the fun part would be designing it and perhaps porting Unix to it while the machine is running on a circuit-level simulator. That's close enough to the real thing for me (I don't look forward to trying to debug problems on a five-layer PC board, do you? :-) Flame and moderate away, but at least give some thought as to what "open source hardware" could be. Wouldn't it be satisfying to have had in designing a well-engineered x86 workstation (Sun 386i comes to mind, amongst others), built from cheap parts but free of the insanity of Wintel architecture? Dreamer.. you're nothing but a dreamer.. :-)
Where else in the system might you find BSD code? csh, man, etc?
If BSD developers are credited, do IPO offers go to the Regents of UCB?
No, of course not.. that would like talking to the FSF about GPL'd code. Forget that.
Fine, but you need a program before you can throw CPU at it. distributed.net is best suited for problems that used fixed algorithms to analyze large quantities of data that require little human interpretation or manipulation, but simply need a LOT of CPU thrown at them.
SGI and Sun have both made workstations based upon x86 that have no PC heritage, thank God.. anyone remember the Sun 386i?
Just imagine getting flamed.. ouch. Time to pull out those asbestos boxers.
Hmm, maybe you could moderated out of existence too...
Wouldn't it be cool if these were ARM motherboards? After all, Corel's Netwinders are ARM-based, right? Of course, it would break IA32 compatibility all to hell but the idea of a post-1990 chip architecture under the hood is appealing. Or at least post-1985..
I thought I heard somewhere that Linux growth is actually logarithmic, and not exponential..? Perhaps it had to do with the growth of the developer base. ( y=log(x) and not y=10^x ?? log base 10 right?)
ack, not contributing too much here..
PRK is laser surgery. There was an old form of surgery called RK, radial keratomy, where an opthalmogist actually cut slits on the cornea with a scalpel called a microtome. The idea was that the scarring would cause the cornea to contract. Brilliant, huh? That didn't work out that well.. PRK is the laser version, to my knowledge. After checking out www.surgicaleyes.com I've fallen for the propaganda of the eyewear industry and decided definitely against any surgery. LASIK is invasive and does only a (large) fraction of your corneal surface. Constrast perception falls. Night vision sucks. Your corneas fall out. Your brain rots. Oh no, wait, TV does that. Whatever.. I'm sticking with contacts and glasses, the latter of course giving that valuable first impression of intelligence (it sticks if I don't say anything :-)
There was an article in Time on this very subject a week or two ago - and there is a heavy bias towards LASIK (laser-aided in situ something keratomy..), which is great for people with really severe myopia (-6 or worse), severe farsightedness, or anything more than a touch of astigmatism. For everybody else, like people such as myself who are in the -5 range with no astigmatism, PRK (photo-refractive keratomy) seems to be the way to go. LASIK puts you in the hands of a surgeon, a competent one hopefully, but a human nonetheless. PRK is done with a computer-programmed excimer laser. It's not as likely to put you into the coveted +/-0.5 range as LASIK, and won't do much for astigmatism, but there are always fix-ups, and you don't need to worry about a surgeon having a bad day and digging out your cornea.
Obviously, PRK isn't a panacea, and there is plenty of room for human error, but I just don't see any reason to go with LASIK over PRK. LASIK is invasive, runs the risk of epithelial cell ingrowth into the cut, and hasn't been around for as long.
Am I missing something, or are there any other reasons to go with LASIK? From my research, PRK is the way to go.
Here's another reason, probably not true, but here goes. Supposedly, typewriter salesman wanted to show off how fast their new machine was, and how much than the old quill it was. They all sucked at typing though (typing at 50WPM was a big deal and considered superhuman). So, the keyboard was arranged so that only the top row is required to spell out T-Y-P-E-W-R-I-T-E-R.. easy enough for any salesman to learn to type quickly :-)
The Nutcracker is used for the spiritual Kernel Compile Dance (it lasts a long time on this box, let me tell you).
The power supply is on a shielded surface (well, kinda) and is behaving itself for the time being. My dad came over and *touched* the heatsinks to see if they were hot. This freaked me out until he explained that there was no current path, i.e. birds on a wire, but still, damn... anyway it's worth it. If it wasn't for that damn buzz it'd be completely quiet. If you really want a quiet system, go for an NCD X-term and sleep more easily too (oh did I mention, I'm not liable if your cat Fluffy likes to poke around power supplies and finds out just what curiousity did to the.. well, you know)
Thanks for the comments, it's good to know that not everyone thinks I'm a loony ;-) ("I want it quiet! REALLY quiet!" "oookay...")
Heh.. that's an idea. Or maybe I should put my monitor in a custom enclosure and hang the board inside a la Sparc SLC/ELC. I can't actually extend the CD drive very far because that's an *internal* drive with a two foot cable. I'll probably just tape it to the bottom of my shelf so I can get some shelf space back. The drive was a late addition stolen from my server which I was hesitant to add, fearing the power dissipation might push my uncooled power supply over the edge. Nope, it just buzzes a lot when I'm playing MP3s from the drive. An audibal CPU monitor, neat trick huh ;-)
- Does having the case off like that interfere with your monitor/radio/TV reception?
;-)
;-)
Hmm.. nope. I have a Sun3/50 in the basement that causes a lot more trouble with that. Wanna see a pic (I got snap-happy with a digicam last week..
- How do you keep the cards from wobbling in their slots and/or snapping at the connectors?
Hmm.. they just don't. ISA and VL-BUS.
- The drives seem far from your chair. Do you have to get up to change disks?
Yeh. Bummer. I don't use floppies, tho. The drive just boots the computer, the floppy holds Etherboot. (no EPROM yet, I wouldn't have the floppy there otherwise)
- Is the thing under the floppy drive a CD-ROM drive or what?
That is a 1994 vintage NEC 3x SCSI cd-rom. To the lower left is a cheesy Star Trek sticker. Identify the rest of the Trek geek material in the pic for bonus points
On top of the floppy, hidden by the SCSI, is of course my caseless power supply, my main source of concern in the first few hours of operation. No fires yet!
Well, the neat part is that it doesn't have a fan either. I took off the power supply case so it doesn't overheat (two weeks so far). It's an AMDK5-75 under light load so the CPU gets by without a fan too. To top it off, it boots diskless, so no annoying sound at all! (Well, the power supply buzzes in proportion to CPU activity, but... ;-)
Check it out...
Why don't you hack together a script with 'lynx -dump'? I'll probably get around to doing that, and the speed difference is pretty small... you don't even need to use Perl. bash, sed, and grep are all you really need (IFS! ;-)