Do I know you? Why would you say such things about someone you don't know after reading a few paragraphs on a discussion board? Why the name calling?
You think I'm arrogant for questioning someones opinion and offering my one? Well maybe so. But in this case I happen to be right. Maybe you didnt' see my follow up post to Ford Perfect. Maybe you missed that he also mispoke.
> WTF are you talking about. This has nothing to > do with rebooting his old machine.
No it doesn't. And neither does this. And neither did your post. But it's a freaking discussion forum not a tech support line.
> Again nothing to do with the facts presented. > But thanks for the insight into your mind.
Again you are too right. These are calld opinions. I sometimes have them about people or things.
Then you go on about your opinions, which is fine, but sort of funny after you criticize someone for writing theirs down.
> I enjoy watching ppl like you get their asses > handed to them. Watching them squirm in meetings > where their ideas are so blatantly wrong and > they know it but keep persisting because their > precious little egos are hurt.
[sarcastic]WTF is this!! This isn't about SGI, dork![/sarcastic]
Ummm I don't go really go to meetings, I'm a student. And when I do work it's usually just me and my boss.
> Oh and just a tip... everyone knows your a > prick... They dont tell you becasue they are > just being nice. Unlike you. > > People like you suck. But sadly you wont go > away.
Why don't they tell me then, especially if I deserve it? Are they affraid of me? Maybe I'm not nice. But who are you man? Is the internet too small to reveal your name?
Last I checked I didn't have any enemies. Care to update me on this one?
I don't know what HP does well but I'd say that SGI scales the best out of any company making HPC systems. Where else can you get a computer that will go from 4 CPUs to 1024 in a single standard system? Plus where else do you get latencies of a couple hundred nanonsecond between the furthest nodes (much less between adjascent nodes), cache coherency, a bisection bandwidth that scales linearly, and RAS out the ass, all running a single 64-bit UNIX OS? Maybe were' off topic here. I only know a few people who have large systems (one guy has a 128CPU Origin2000!). Most hobbiest collect workstations, a few brave souls have desksides or single racks.
Yeah lots of companies are already dead. Their stocks go up and go down. They're in the red, they're in the black. They come out with new products. I guess they're zombies...
If they're worthless to the hobbyist market then why... is there a hobbiest market?
I don't pretend to know what your budget is but I got my IRIX 6.5 disks for $50. Don't know why you'd want it but occasionally you'll see IRIX 5.3 disks floating around for $20 or $30.
Ummm... and all the software (lots of it is opensource) on freeware.sgi.com is compiled for MIPS3, so it will work on an Indigo, Indigo2, Indy, O2, Octane, and anything later.
The biggest pain with upgrading IRIX is that it comes on multiple disks. Most people I know just copy the contents of the CDs to disk. Then just download the overlays from support.sgi.com (I think 6.5.22 is the latest freely available). Then just swmgr -f/foo/bar/dist.
Paid support is very expensive, there's nothing appropriate for the hobbiest community. Though you can pickup disks for not too much money on eBay.
Interested in selling any? If they are in perfect condition I'd be interested.
Remember to set a static route and add a search or domain line to your resolv.conf, that usually trips people up when they're trying to get a system on the net.
BTW, I wouldn't bother installing Linux unless you're interested in improving the port or just messing around.
IRIX has a bad release back in the early/mid 90s and now it has a rap as being unsecure. In truth it's not that bad. You would not want to just connect a freshly installed system right to the internet though. By default many services are turned on, I suppose for the convenience of desktop users. Basically just chkconfig off what you don't need and go through the system manager/security and access contorl settings. You can find more detailed guides on hardening IRIX on nekochan and the groups.
Indeed the Indigo is much trickier to reset the PROM password. What you have to do then is remove the graphics and CPU board to get to the backplane and you can ground one pin on the EEPROM. As you can imagine it requires alot of care.
180MHz is damn slow. The O2s release was delayed, it should have come out earlier and they should have upgraded it more agressively. And finally they should have designed an evolution of it instead of just selling it for 7 years. For all the stuff they did right in the 80s and early 90s SGI made many many mistakes in the late 90s.
My O2 is an R12K @ 400MHz with 2MB L2 cach;)
> What the artical fails to explain is what these > people are running on them that is so much better > than what we are using on Mac's and PC's.
Most of the hobbiests are running opensource/freeware apps. So in many regards there is no difference between what is commonly run on Macs and PCs.
There are also people who buy an old SGI system and use it to teach themselves UNIX, C, or OpenGL.
There are fewer and fewer people who do serious work on SGI workstations. And few of those people travel in the hobbiest circles. I know people that do software development on SGI systems, artists who use Maya or Eclipse. Some people do AVID or Discrete. I personally run Pro/ENGINEER on my system. Several of the guys on www.nekochan.net write movie editing software, image compositing, effects, or work on opensource projects. It's pretty impressive actually because often they take the time to optimize or write code specifically for SGI hardware. Pegamento on an O2 or Octane2 is very impressive! Most of the profession-type hobbiests pay for all their software, have support contracts, and serious machines.
There's also the sketchy realm of abandonware. People often hack and run products like old versions of Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, Word Perfect, Matador, AVID Illusion, etc.
The thing an O2 excels at is video though, not 3D. And IRIX comes with some pretty good tools for capturing, converting, and editing video and audio. If you can afford any of the profession video applications, or perhaps your own programmer the O2 can still do amazing things with video. Most TV weather stations have a compliment of O2s for real time video stuff. About two years ago channel 10 in Rochester NY bought a whole fleet and they prominently feature them in their 'Weather Lab':) Many TV stations still use O2s for on air graphics. SGI systems were used to do all the graphics for this past Summer's Olympics.
So basically they make good interesting little desktops. They're very pretty to look at. They're little marvels of engineering and packaging. They're pretty cheap now. There's an active community of people and a bit of a cult thing going on, kinda like Apple. And depending on your application(s) and budget they still can do real work.
> Of course, the machine (well, IRIX) promptly killed itself,
Most likely user error.
> and nobody knew the equivalent of the BIOS
SGI's have a PROM, it's pretty slick.
> password to allow reinstallation
Most SGIs have a jumper to reset the PROM password. It's a FAQ that should take 10 seconds to figure out. It's also in the user manual which if you don't have you can download off of techpubs.sgi.com. You could also have posted on any of the comp.sys.sgi groups and after people flame you for asking a FAQ someone would tell you what to do.
> from the IRIX CDs and bootable SCSI CD-ROM > drive we'd spent weeks hunting down.
I've never had a SCSI CD-ROM that wouldn't boot IRIX. Any Toshiba drive will work.
> There turned out to be no way of resetting > that password, at least not without wiping > the MAC address too. Given that the machine > was only useful as an X terminal and web > browsing machine, it didn't seem worth doing.
Sad indeed because all you needed to do was set a jumper.
This is one of the reasons I don't listen to most people's opinions unless it's pretty clear they're experts. It makes more sense to figure it our yourself. Too many times I hear people have immense difficulty or distaste for something and the reason is because they don't know what they're doing. Kinda like the people in infomercials who can't chop an onion or coil up a garden hose or rake leaves.
Or maybe it's more like a Ferrari. Lottery winners will abuse their high performance cars and then complain when something goes wrong ("stupid imported piece of junk!"). In fact this is so common many long-time Ferrari owner's have a name for these type of people: gold-chainers.
To be sure SGI systems have their quirks but most of the negative things you hear about them are not true. I'd encourage people to pick one up and see for themselves but then I don't want to drive up prices;)
You can get scratch and dent Octanes on eBay for less than $100. You can get refurbished systems from a place like Reputable for less than $200. Shipping is what kills you. But still, these prices are insane?
> I agree with your point that these drivers are > incredibly skilled, but your examples are way to > extreme/entirely wrong (the fuel/air mixture > thing, as someone already corrected)
Your overall statement might be right but it is true that the drivers control the cars fuel mixture. It's among the many controls found on the steering wheel. Perhaps 'control' is not the best word, perhaps 'alter.' It's typically done to lean the mixture and conserve fuel. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they could also get more power out of the car when needed by messing with the mix.
I wish people would google more things instead of just accepting the last thing they heard.
Actually for a long time now the cars have had a fuel mixture knob on the steering wheel. If you listen to the pit radio you can hear them giving the driver advise about how to tune the mixture.
What does this have to do with F1? F1 has never involved sports cars.
If you like sports car racing (which I do) there are many many leagues out there. Heck without much expense you can join the SCCA and go racing yourself.
And if you like vintage sports car racing (which I do) they still do that too. Take a trip to Monteray, Goodwood, Watkins Glen, or a million other places and you can see people racing cars from years past.
> it makes me wonder if they're shaving less time > off the total than if they put this kind of focus > on the driver (proper diet, reflexive training, > etc.)
They do that too. Even if you don't want to call what the drivers do in the car a sport taken on their own each driver is a world-class athlete. Schumacher's training schedule and diet are frightening. Ever see the guy leap after a win? And they don't just hop in a car and go. They train all year, practice all year, test all year, drive all year.
> In this case, SGI has a computer reportedly > faster than Blue Gene/L,
All IBM has is a report too. Nothing is 'official' until the next top500 list is released.
> but it is neither 1) in production by the > deadline
Amazing what people believe and then pass on without checking out the facts. The SGI system was fully installed and running in *October*. This was on Slashdot last week. In fact one of the interesting things about the story was that the whole system was built in only 4 months. In fact it is the IBM system which is not running in production. This is such a glaring error I wonder if you typed SGI instead of IBM...
>nor 2) independently verified results.
Neither are IBMs. Wait for the top500 list. 3 numbers have come from SGI, 42-ish, 51-ish, and 60-ish. But ultimately who cares? It's merely interesting trivia. Besides the SGI system is interesting for several reasons and even if it is not at the top of the top500 list it still leads in other metrics.
Yup. Though I don't think anything is 'official' till the new top500 list comes out.
> or does this mean that the SGI machine (to be > built for NASA) wasn't all that exciting?
Columbia is definitely exciting. Even if it doesn't post the largest LINPAK numbers it is an exceptional machine on several different metrics. And don't use the future tense, the system was finished in October.
Minor correction... The CrayLink branding of SGIs router and node interconnect was pure marketing and had no relation to the technology accquired from their purchase of Cray.
Too bad that Adobe killed their IRIX ports, as crappy as they were. Some of the image operations that Adobe used to quote (typicall Mac vs. PC) are done in real time on an O2.
>reason to try to prove that creationists are wrong.
Most scientists would agree that talking to creationists is a waste of time. However if these jokers are sucessfull in getting their ideas taught in public schools and messing with the perceptions of the general population/those in government/so on, then scientific funding and research could be in danger. So some scientists think that this trend needs to be countered so as to preserve funding and an intelligent pool of young people to carry on the science.
>Doing all of this work just to show that >somebody's imaginary friend didn't create life >seems a bit strange.
This work wasn't done to shut up creationists... nothing can really do that. This work is called science, and it's what scientists do for a living. I'm sure in the future more work will be done that will disprove some classic creationist arguments, though I doubt the researches doing the work will take much notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I know you? Why would you say such things about someone you don't know after reading a few paragraphs on a discussion board? Why the name calling?
You think I'm arrogant for questioning someones opinion and offering my one? Well maybe so. But in this case I happen to be right. Maybe you didnt' see my follow up post to Ford Perfect. Maybe you missed that he also mispoke.
> WTF are you talking about. This has nothing to
> do with rebooting his old machine.
No it doesn't. And neither does this. And neither did your post. But it's a freaking discussion forum not a tech support line.
> Again nothing to do with the facts presented.
> But thanks for the insight into your mind.
Again you are too right. These are calld opinions. I sometimes have them about people or things.
Then you go on about your opinions, which is fine, but sort of funny after you criticize someone for writing theirs down.
> I enjoy watching ppl like you get their asses
> handed to them. Watching them squirm in meetings
> where their ideas are so blatantly wrong and
> they know it but keep persisting because their
> precious little egos are hurt.
[sarcastic]WTF is this!! This isn't about SGI, dork![/sarcastic]
Ummm I don't go really go to meetings, I'm a student. And when I do work it's usually just me and my boss.
> Oh and just a tip... everyone knows your a
> prick... They dont tell you becasue they are
> just being nice. Unlike you.
>
> People like you suck. But sadly you wont go
> away.
Why don't they tell me then, especially if I deserve it? Are they affraid of me? Maybe I'm not nice. But who are you man? Is the internet too small to reveal your name?
Last I checked I didn't have any enemies. Care to update me on this one?
I don't know what HP does well but I'd say that SGI scales the best out of any company making HPC systems. Where else can you get a computer that will go from 4 CPUs to 1024 in a single standard system? Plus where else do you get latencies of a couple hundred nanonsecond between the furthest nodes (much less between adjascent nodes), cache coherency, a bisection bandwidth that scales linearly, and RAS out the ass, all running a single 64-bit UNIX OS? Maybe were' off topic here. I only know a few people who have large systems (one guy has a 128CPU Origin2000!). Most hobbiest collect workstations, a few brave souls have desksides or single racks.
Yeah lots of companies are already dead. Their stocks go up and go down. They're in the red, they're in the black. They come out with new products. I guess they're zombies ...
Personally I like inst, I find it very easy to use. And the swmgr front end is even better.
The biggest chore is feeding in all the disks.
All you have to tell inst is:
keep *
install default
install prereqs
go
And then give it the disks it asks for. If you install lots of systems it makes sense to either create a disk image or setup an installation server.
If they're worthless to the hobbyist market then why ... is there a hobbiest market?
... and all the software (lots of it is opensource) on freeware.sgi.com is compiled for MIPS3, so it will work on an Indigo, Indigo2, Indy, O2, Octane, and anything later.
I don't pretend to know what your budget is but I got my IRIX 6.5 disks for $50. Don't know why you'd want it but occasionally you'll see IRIX 5.3 disks floating around for $20 or $30.
Ummm
Maybe by open source support you meant Linux?
The biggest pain with upgrading IRIX is that it comes on multiple disks. Most people I know just copy the contents of the CDs to disk. Then just download the overlays from support.sgi.com (I think 6.5.22 is the latest freely available). Then just swmgr -f /foo/bar/dist.
Paid support is very expensive, there's nothing appropriate for the hobbiest community. Though you can pickup disks for not too much money on eBay.
Remember to set a static route and add a search or domain line to your resolv.conf, that usually trips people up when they're trying to get a system on the net.
BTW, I wouldn't bother installing Linux unless you're interested in improving the port or just messing around.
For good links try nekochan.net, sgi stuff, and Ian Mapleson's site.
IRIX has a bad release back in the early/mid 90s and now it has a rap as being unsecure. In truth it's not that bad. You would not want to just connect a freshly installed system right to the internet though. By default many services are turned on, I suppose for the convenience of desktop users. Basically just chkconfig off what you don't need and go through the system manager/security and access contorl settings. You can find more detailed guides on hardening IRIX on nekochan and the groups.
Those are Pete's systems. There's an O2, Octane2, Onyx, 2 Origin 200s, and an Indigo.
...
I wouldn't bet on it. The Onyx alone has 16 fast processors in it, 4 CPUs, and 12 GEs!
Then there's also the question of useable power, sustained power, and application specific performance and on and on
Indeed the Indigo is much trickier to reset the PROM password. What you have to do then is remove the graphics and CPU board to get to the backplane and you can ground one pin on the EEPROM. As you can imagine it requires alot of care.
180MHz is damn slow. The O2s release was delayed, it should have come out earlier and they should have upgraded it more agressively. And finally they should have designed an evolution of it instead of just selling it for 7 years. For all the stuff they did right in the 80s and early 90s SGI made many many mistakes in the late 90s.
;)
My O2 is an R12K @ 400MHz with 2MB L2 cach
> What the artical fails to explain is what these
> people are running on them that is so much better
> than what we are using on Mac's and PC's.
Most of the hobbiests are running opensource/freeware apps. So in many regards there is no difference between what is commonly run on Macs and PCs.
There are also people who buy an old SGI system and use it to teach themselves UNIX, C, or OpenGL.
There are fewer and fewer people who do serious work on SGI workstations. And few of those people travel in the hobbiest circles. I know people that do software development on SGI systems, artists who use Maya or Eclipse. Some people do AVID or Discrete. I personally run Pro/ENGINEER on my system. Several of the guys on www.nekochan.net write movie editing software, image compositing, effects, or work on opensource projects. It's pretty impressive actually because often they take the time to optimize or write code specifically for SGI hardware. Pegamento on an O2 or Octane2 is very impressive! Most of the profession-type hobbiests pay for all their software, have support contracts, and serious machines.
There's also the sketchy realm of abandonware. People often hack and run products like old versions of Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, Word Perfect, Matador, AVID Illusion, etc.
The thing an O2 excels at is video though, not 3D. And IRIX comes with some pretty good tools for capturing, converting, and editing video and audio. If you can afford any of the profession video applications, or perhaps your own programmer the O2 can still do amazing things with video. Most TV weather stations have a compliment of O2s for real time video stuff. About two years ago channel 10 in Rochester NY bought a whole fleet and they prominently feature them in their 'Weather Lab':) Many TV stations still use O2s for on air graphics. SGI systems were used to do all the graphics for this past Summer's Olympics.
So basically they make good interesting little desktops. They're very pretty to look at. They're little marvels of engineering and packaging. They're pretty cheap now. There's an active community of people and a bit of a cult thing going on, kinda like Apple. And depending on your application(s) and budget they still can do real work.
> Of course, the machine (well, IRIX) promptly killed itself,
;)
Most likely user error.
> and nobody knew the equivalent of the BIOS
SGI's have a PROM, it's pretty slick.
> password to allow reinstallation
Most SGIs have a jumper to reset the PROM password. It's a FAQ that should take 10 seconds to figure out. It's also in the user manual which if you don't have you can download off of techpubs.sgi.com. You could also have posted on any of the comp.sys.sgi groups and after people flame you for asking a FAQ someone would tell you what to do.
> from the IRIX CDs and bootable SCSI CD-ROM
> drive we'd spent weeks hunting down.
I've never had a SCSI CD-ROM that wouldn't boot IRIX. Any Toshiba drive will work.
> There turned out to be no way of resetting
> that password, at least not without wiping
> the MAC address too. Given that the machine
> was only useful as an X terminal and web
> browsing machine, it didn't seem worth doing.
Sad indeed because all you needed to do was set a jumper.
This is one of the reasons I don't listen to most people's opinions unless it's pretty clear they're experts. It makes more sense to figure it our yourself. Too many times I hear people have immense difficulty or distaste for something and the reason is because they don't know what they're doing. Kinda like the people in infomercials who can't chop an onion or coil up a garden hose or rake leaves.
Or maybe it's more like a Ferrari. Lottery winners will abuse their high performance cars and then complain when something goes wrong ("stupid imported piece of junk!"). In fact this is so common many long-time Ferrari owner's have a name for these type of people: gold-chainers.
To be sure SGI systems have their quirks but most of the negative things you hear about them are not true. I'd encourage people to pick one up and see for themselves but then I don't want to drive up prices
Man I shudder at those case mods (at any case mods of old systems really). It's butchering.
You can get scratch and dent Octanes on eBay for less than $100. You can get refurbished systems from a place like Reputable for less than $200. Shipping is what kills you. But still, these prices are insane?
A few short rebutals:
Fangio, Senna, Prost, Brabham, Clark, Stewart.
> I agree with your point that these drivers are
: //www.formula1.com/insight/
> incredibly skilled, but your examples are way to
> extreme/entirely wrong (the fuel/air mixture
> thing, as someone already corrected)
Your overall statement might be right but it is true that the drivers control the cars fuel mixture. It's among the many controls found on the steering wheel. Perhaps 'control' is not the best word, perhaps 'alter.' It's typically done to lean the mixture and conserve fuel. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they could also get more power out of the car when needed by messing with the mix.
I wish people would google more things instead of just accepting the last thing they heard.
These are two good reads:
http://www.atlasf1.com/2000/aut/gray.html
http
Actually for a long time now the cars have had a fuel mixture knob on the steering wheel. If you listen to the pit radio you can hear them giving the driver advise about how to tune the mixture.
1 /6 45.html
http://www.formula1.com/insight/technicalinfo/1
What does this have to do with F1? F1 has never involved sports cars.
If you like sports car racing (which I do) there are many many leagues out there. Heck without much expense you can join the SCCA and go racing yourself.
And if you like vintage sports car racing (which I do) they still do that too. Take a trip to Monteray, Goodwood, Watkins Glen, or a million other places and you can see people racing cars from years past.
> it makes me wonder if they're shaving less time
> off the total than if they put this kind of focus
> on the driver (proper diet, reflexive training,
> etc.)
They do that too. Even if you don't want to call what the drivers do in the car a sport taken on their own each driver is a world-class athlete. Schumacher's training schedule and diet are frightening. Ever see the guy leap after a win? And they don't just hop in a car and go. They train all year, practice all year, test all year, drive all year.
> In this case, SGI has a computer reportedly
> faster than Blue Gene/L,
All IBM has is a report too. Nothing is 'official' until the next top500 list is released.
> but it is neither 1) in production by the
> deadline
Amazing what people believe and then pass on without checking out the facts. The SGI system was fully installed and running in *October*. This was on Slashdot last week. In fact one of the interesting things about the story was that the whole system was built in only 4 months. In fact it is the IBM system which is not running in production. This is such a glaring error I wonder if you typed SGI instead of IBM...
>nor 2) independently verified results.
Neither are IBMs. Wait for the top500 list. 3 numbers have come from SGI, 42-ish, 51-ish, and 60-ish. But ultimately who cares? It's merely interesting trivia. Besides the SGI system is interesting for several reasons and even if it is not at the top of the top500 list it still leads in other metrics.
> Does this mean that IBM leapfrogged SGI
Yup. Though I don't think anything is 'official' till the new top500 list comes out.
> or does this mean that the SGI machine (to be
> built for NASA) wasn't all that exciting?
Columbia is definitely exciting. Even if it doesn't post the largest LINPAK numbers it is an exceptional machine on several different metrics. And don't use the future tense, the system was finished in October.
NASA's Columbia system cost $45M. SGI charges money for their products. This Japanese system is probably on the order of $10M.
Minor correction ... The CrayLink branding of SGIs router and node interconnect was pure marketing and had no relation to the technology accquired from their purchase of Cray.
Funny to see this as I have the following installed on my O2:
Photoshop 3.01
Illustrator 5.0
Frame Maker 5.5
Premiere 4.3?
Too bad that Adobe killed their IRIX ports, as crappy as they were. Some of the image operations that Adobe used to quote (typicall Mac vs. PC) are done in real time on an O2.
>The evolutionists are wrong because there is no
... nothing can really do that. This work is called science, and it's what scientists do for a living. I'm sure in the future more work will be done that will disprove some classic creationist arguments, though I doubt the researches doing the work will take much notice.
They're called scientists, not 'evolutionists'.
>reason to try to prove that creationists are wrong.
Most scientists would agree that talking to creationists is a waste of time. However if these jokers are sucessfull in getting their ideas taught in public schools and messing with the perceptions of the general population/those in government/so on, then scientific funding and research could be in danger. So some scientists think that this trend needs to be countered so as to preserve funding and an intelligent pool of young people to carry on the science.
>Doing all of this work just to show that
>somebody's imaginary friend didn't create life
>seems a bit strange.
This work wasn't done to shut up creationists