These aren't *actual* G4s. They're not going to be scavenging old Macs to keep fighters flying. They're just the same architecture at the silicon level.
In the same way Intel really hasn't changed much of anything in their last N releases other than the socket.
Working in automotive I understand how "vintage" tech makes it into "current" production: Timelines, budgets, work with what is known to work. That said, it is entertaining to read press releases from last decade surrounding what is going into the F35.
The 'high speed data bus' is IEEE 1394b. It's running on Freescale/NXP/Qualcomm PowerPC embedded processors designed off of the PowerPC G4 (in triplicate) built by the GreenHills compiler. I haven't found any info on it but I'd hate to see what version of Matlab/Simulink they're stuck with as well. Likely 6.5 or R13.
The problem with that was it was pitched as a "COTS" system to save cost. None of those products are "commercial off the shelf" solutions anymore. The hayday of the G4 in mass quantities is gone. I wonder how much money Freescale is guaranteed to keep fab lines up and running for a chip designed in the 90s. I also want to know how the NXP acquisition went through.
End of the day the feds would have probably been better off just making their own CPU and fab lines.
Cars and then computers. Hyped technologies which completely failed in real life.
You must be living in a bubble if you aren't aware of them actually being used. I'm on a few different facebook groups for specific 3D printers and it's amazing what 'average' people are doing with them.
In terms of adoption it's on par with computers in the mid 80s or the internet in the mid 90s or I anticipate VR will be in the 2020s. It's just a tool like a hammer or bronze.
Companies have already moved past PLA and ABS for prototypes into stainless steel for production parts.
Similarly at my last job, the boss has been clamoring for years to buy us a high end ($30k+) computer, and all the engineers continue to tell him not to. He gets furious because "it's the way of the future", and we tell him it's simply a tool for poor engineers who can't use the slide rule.
That tells me more about your engineers than it does about your boss.
Absolutely. But the "CI" part helps to automate it. Our builds are in the ~50 minute range. Individual developers build on their own machines. There's no 'safe' build machine. At least with a CI setup they get immediate "You broke it dumbass" feedback.
I work in automotive embedded and I can't wait to get our CI server up and running. I think a lot of people forget what the 'good ole days' were like.
We'll have people working on their own branches and then on Friday merges we have the whole thing fall apart. Meaning people don't have binaries to test until at least Saturday. Then the whole process starts over. ClearCase being a cluster doesn't help.
Don't compare the consumer lines to the professional. They're designed by different groups. My wife's Inspiron required a near complete teardown to get to the hard drive.
Unless you need the latest and greatest the old ones work fine. I have a M6700 from 2012. The i7-3940xm still benchmarks fairly well. You can get one used laptop with CPU on Ebay for under $1k.
The Precision line always has been. (And it's been priced accordingly.)
My current laptop is a machine from 2012. You can find full teardown manuals online. (They were designed to be fixed by in-house IT). Parts are easy to find. I was even able to swap the processor to a faster version.
USB, Displayport, HDMI, VGA, eSATA, Gigabit and Firewire.
who in their right mind is going to design a chrome-only website?
"Who in their right mind is going to design an IE6 only website!?" History does repeat itself.
Also, I can see a lot of projects adopting Chrome's core to provide a UI to an app. When looking at the mess that is Python's UI toolkits we decided to go with Flask and HTML5. With a bit more work we can just make 'a double click this exe and the app opens' interface. All driven on the backend by a web framework and HTML5, rendered locally in a chrome window.
I am continually baffled by the number of people mindlessly signing up for an active listening (and soon, viewing) device in their homes.
I'm not. It's convenient. We have an Echo in the house and the shop. I have a Google Home as well that we're trying out.
I also grew up with 1984 but always assumed unless I took precautions otherwise, someone was listening. Always. Maybe it's because I had nutty conspiracy theorist friends in HS (When 'conspiracy theory' was the CIA is listening, not Chemtrail Gay Frogs).
Even if both devices were actually twice as good as they were they're not hard to outsmart and avoid. It also lets our household blend in with the noise. Amazon (and the CIA) is more than welcome to know how many times my son listens to Thomas and Friends theme song, how many kitchen timers we set and when we turn on and off the lights.
IF I was planning something it's not that hard to go off grid. You'd think users of Slashdot would know how to setup a VPS in a foreign country accessed only through TOR. NextCloud, IRC servers. Hell a shared document in/tmp that everyone just typed plans into. Just for fun I've set up hidden TOR services: IMAP mail, nginx website, IRC server, PGP keyserver. If you're not sure if you're being infiltrated setup IRL keysigning parties and setup a web of trust.
So yeah. Hi NSA. Hi CIA. Hi Russia. I know you're listening. I've always thought you were and always lived my life accordingly.
Both companies I've worked for were large Fortune 200 engineering firms. I personally use Matlab/Simulink. But the CAD guys got the same basic work station with a better CAD GPU.
"Edge cases" have always been the use case for desktops. Remember the old full height, full sized ATX towers? Those were the Z840s of their day. Your average home user got by just fine with an Apple II.
Companies have found that salaries are much more expensive than hardware. That machine costs around ~2 hours of engineering time to lease per month. They have always paid for 'edge cases' to simulate, compile, render, etc to allow their workers to work on what they were paid to do and not sword fight in the hall way.
My current desktop has 2 Xeons in it and room for 256GB of RAM. Mobile is always playing catch up. So while this may have an 'i7' and compete fine with older desktops in engineering we've just taken that to mean we get that much faster desktops.
Where did I say anything about licensing? I said a BS.
The days of taking 16 year olds and training them on the job vanished about the time we transitioned from an agrarian society to a manufacturing society. Sure - some jobs will give you job-specific knowledge - that may or may not help you at your next gig when your current employer goes bust.
I had it in the 90s. What exactly 'disappeared' about it? I learned to solder, debug embedded controllers, a host of other skills that have come in handy since.
They want employees with a broad-based industry knowledge.
How's that working out for IT? It sounds like it's a hard truth that IT must learn.
Using your house-building analogy, if the conventions for blueprints are non-standard or different for each house, then the skills needed by the plumbers, electricians, etc. will be higher.
You over-estimate how accurate blueprints are. The good plumbers, electricians, etc all know how to handle the edge cases. A good plumber can walk into a plant that has pipes shoestringed everywhere and fix the problem no problem.
Hands on training is actually a lot better for your 'bicycle science' stacks. Go look at the electrical and plumbing work in any building from the 1900s that is still in use as a factory. It's where thinking on your feet is a lot better than book smarts. Most PhD grads I know shut down if something is outside their narrow window of how things 'should' be.
I'll take a voctech graduate over a PhD any day of the week when the actual plan differs from the blueprint.
Slashdot Mirror
At the same time, you can do anything with it, and across multiple platforms especially, it is the fastest way to get anything done.
Maybe a decade ago. Now it's Python. Which has the added benefit of being readable.
And once you want to move beyond some simple automation scripts it has a much larger ecosystem than Perl.
if the company is going to pay me $75 an hour to code I
That's it? I ask $75 for the stuff I like to do. Perl would be $200/hr minimum.
few crates of G4s in a couple warehouses.
These aren't *actual* G4s. They're not going to be scavenging old Macs to keep fighters flying. They're just the same architecture at the silicon level.
In the same way Intel really hasn't changed much of anything in their last N releases other than the socket.
Er, "IEEE 1394 and Power ISA v.2.03".
Working in automotive I understand how "vintage" tech makes it into "current" production: Timelines, budgets, work with what is known to work. That said, it is entertaining to read press releases from last decade surrounding what is going into the F35.
The 'high speed data bus' is IEEE 1394b. It's running on Freescale/NXP/Qualcomm PowerPC embedded processors designed off of the PowerPC G4 (in triplicate) built by the GreenHills compiler. I haven't found any info on it but I'd hate to see what version of Matlab/Simulink they're stuck with as well. Likely 6.5 or R13.
The problem with that was it was pitched as a "COTS" system to save cost. None of those products are "commercial off the shelf" solutions anymore. The hayday of the G4 in mass quantities is gone. I wonder how much money Freescale is guaranteed to keep fab lines up and running for a chip designed in the 90s. I also want to know how the NXP acquisition went through.
End of the day the feds would have probably been better off just making their own CPU and fab lines.
Cars and then computers. Hyped technologies which completely failed in real life.
You must be living in a bubble if you aren't aware of them actually being used. I'm on a few different facebook groups for specific 3D printers and it's amazing what 'average' people are doing with them.
In terms of adoption it's on par with computers in the mid 80s or the internet in the mid 90s or I anticipate VR will be in the 2020s. It's just a tool like a hammer or bronze.
Companies have already moved past PLA and ABS for prototypes into stainless steel for production parts.
Similarly at my last job, the boss has been clamoring for years to buy us a high end ($30k+) computer, and all the engineers continue to tell him not to. He gets furious because "it's the way of the future", and we tell him it's simply a tool for poor engineers who can't use the slide rule.
That tells me more about your engineers than it does about your boss.
Absolutely. But the "CI" part helps to automate it. Our builds are in the ~50 minute range. Individual developers build on their own machines. There's no 'safe' build machine. At least with a CI setup they get immediate "You broke it dumbass" feedback.
I work in automotive embedded and I can't wait to get our CI server up and running. I think a lot of people forget what the 'good ole days' were like.
We'll have people working on their own branches and then on Friday merges we have the whole thing fall apart. Meaning people don't have binaries to test until at least Saturday. Then the whole process starts over. ClearCase being a cluster doesn't help.
I now take payments in goats and manual labor.
I almost always sign them with a circle, square and triangle. No one in the US ever check.
The only time I'd ever had the signature checked against my passport was when I was in Europe and they never saw the non-chipped cards.
They're all over engineering. Trying to get engineers just to upgrade versions of software is like pulling teeth.
I've worked with peers that are as proficient in Excel as your average 16 year old these days.
Don't compare the consumer lines to the professional. They're designed by different groups. My wife's Inspiron required a near complete teardown to get to the hard drive.
http://www.dell.com/support/ma...
I'm considering a new laptop this Black Friday
Unless you need the latest and greatest the old ones work fine. I have a M6700 from 2012. The i7-3940xm still benchmarks fairly well. You can get one used laptop with CPU on Ebay for under $1k.
The Precision line always has been. (And it's been priced accordingly.)
My current laptop is a machine from 2012. You can find full teardown manuals online. (They were designed to be fixed by in-house IT). Parts are easy to find. I was even able to swap the processor to a faster version.
USB, Displayport, HDMI, VGA, eSATA, Gigabit and Firewire.
I don't even get WTF the point of the comment is.
Can we solicit comments of all the shit Dell, HP and Microsoft has told me throughout the years while pointing the finger at each other?
then suddenly you start using a VPN and traffic analysis shows that you're not visiting any of your usual haunts.
Suddenly? I've had one all along and always visit my usual haunts.
who in their right mind is going to design a chrome-only website?
"Who in their right mind is going to design an IE6 only website!?" History does repeat itself.
Also, I can see a lot of projects adopting Chrome's core to provide a UI to an app. When looking at the mess that is Python's UI toolkits we decided to go with Flask and HTML5. With a bit more work we can just make 'a double click this exe and the app opens' interface. All driven on the backend by a web framework and HTML5, rendered locally in a chrome window.
I am continually baffled by the number of people mindlessly signing up for an active listening (and soon, viewing) device in their homes.
I'm not. It's convenient. We have an Echo in the house and the shop. I have a Google Home as well that we're trying out.
I also grew up with 1984 but always assumed unless I took precautions otherwise, someone was listening. Always. Maybe it's because I had nutty conspiracy theorist friends in HS (When 'conspiracy theory' was the CIA is listening, not Chemtrail Gay Frogs).
Even if both devices were actually twice as good as they were they're not hard to outsmart and avoid. It also lets our household blend in with the noise. Amazon (and the CIA) is more than welcome to know how many times my son listens to Thomas and Friends theme song, how many kitchen timers we set and when we turn on and off the lights.
IF I was planning something it's not that hard to go off grid. You'd think users of Slashdot would know how to setup a VPS in a foreign country accessed only through TOR. NextCloud, IRC servers. Hell a shared document in /tmp that everyone just typed plans into. Just for fun I've set up hidden TOR services: IMAP mail, nginx website, IRC server, PGP keyserver. If you're not sure if you're being infiltrated setup IRL keysigning parties and setup a web of trust.
So yeah. Hi NSA. Hi CIA. Hi Russia. I know you're listening. I've always thought you were and always lived my life accordingly.
Al^H^H Computer. Hello Computer.
My current laptop benchmarks better than that and it's from 2012.
Both companies I've worked for were large Fortune 200 engineering firms. I personally use Matlab/Simulink. But the CAD guys got the same basic work station with a better CAD GPU.
"Edge cases" have always been the use case for desktops. Remember the old full height, full sized ATX towers? Those were the Z840s of their day. Your average home user got by just fine with an Apple II.
Companies have found that salaries are much more expensive than hardware. That machine costs around ~2 hours of engineering time to lease per month. They have always paid for 'edge cases' to simulate, compile, render, etc to allow their workers to work on what they were paid to do and not sword fight in the hall way.
Everyone is criemer except for you.
My current desktop has 2 Xeons in it and room for 256GB of RAM. Mobile is always playing catch up. So while this may have an 'i7' and compete fine with older desktops in engineering we've just taken that to mean we get that much faster desktops.
Where did I say anything about licensing? I said a BS.
The days of taking 16 year olds and training them on the job vanished about the time we transitioned from an agrarian society to a manufacturing society. Sure - some jobs will give you job-specific knowledge - that may or may not help you at your next gig when your current employer goes bust.
I had it in the 90s. What exactly 'disappeared' about it? I learned to solder, debug embedded controllers, a host of other skills that have come in handy since.
They want employees with a broad-based industry knowledge.
How's that working out for IT? It sounds like it's a hard truth that IT must learn.
Using your house-building analogy, if the conventions for blueprints are non-standard or different for each house, then the skills needed by the plumbers, electricians, etc. will be higher.
You over-estimate how accurate blueprints are. The good plumbers, electricians, etc all know how to handle the edge cases. A good plumber can walk into a plant that has pipes shoestringed everywhere and fix the problem no problem.
Hands on training is actually a lot better for your 'bicycle science' stacks. Go look at the electrical and plumbing work in any building from the 1900s that is still in use as a factory. It's where thinking on your feet is a lot better than book smarts. Most PhD grads I know shut down if something is outside their narrow window of how things 'should' be.
I'll take a voctech graduate over a PhD any day of the week when the actual plan differs from the blueprint.