A similar system is employed at my school. We have a "Text book rental system" which is payed for in our tuition.
Essentially, each professor gets to choose a single book for their course, which the university rents out to the student free of charge. At the end of the semestere, these books are return. Professors are still free to require supplemental text, but most will use a book from the rental system.
At current count, this has saved me from buying 5 books, and I'm only in my first year.
Unfortunately, most of my Comp Sci professors have opted not to use this system.
Facebook is about the strangest thing I have ever come across.
I don't know whether to call it great or frightening.
It's a time waster more than anything. When I have work to do, and I want to procrastinate I read other people's Facebook profiles. Some of these people I know very well, other's just happen to be listed as my friend through odd circumstance or what have you.
What's scary is that almost everyone in college has an account. I was back home the other day, and just for shits and giggles, I dug out my old high school year book (I moved half-way through high school, Texas to North Carolina. Except for a few, I haven't kept up with my old, Texas friends), and almost everybody in my grade had a profile!
My sisters' best friend's brother has a Facebook profile, My Grandparent's old friend's son has a Facebook profile. This girl I had a crush on in sixth grade has a profile. Fuckin' frightening.
And what's even more frightening is that Facebook is no longer limited to College students. There's a "high school" version which just requires a valid e-mail address. It used to be that the College and High School version were completely separate, but that's no longer the case. Disturbing.
Look at the prices for _good_ SCSI hard drives, and already your close to $1000. Segate 75 gigabyte 10k disks are around $300. $600 for 140ish gigabytes.
Next thing you've got to look at is processor cache. It's expensive anywhere you put it, so most low-end Intel processors have around 1 to 2 megabytes of it. A 30 grand OpenPower machine is likely to have double or triple that (he said not knowing).
Plus a lot of other things I don't feel like rattling off right now.
A $1000 OpenPower server would be nice, though. So would a Cray that fits in my pocket that costs $25.
Ever since I saw a story here about Lego case mods, I've been building my RAID array enclosures completely out of them. Now, I swear by them: cheap and modular.
Duplo will due in a pinch, but they really only work well with larger 5.25" half-height or full-height drives.
If the license is anything like the older Solaris 9 license, this only applies for evaluation use. If you are using Solaris for Education/Non-Profit use, or are developing software, this doesn't apply
Really, I wish they'd return to the license they used for Solaris 8: Right-To-Use license was free for sun4u systems with up to 8 processors for any use.
You must either not be very old, or be very new to computers.
I remember when IE was a joke that was shunned, and Netscape 4 was new and shiny.
It's rather scary to see people who fondly remember IE.
I pity you. Throwing things out just because you think they were "worthless" isn't acceptable behaviour. Somebody (if not me), would've bought them on eBay, and they could've been to some use to somebody, rather that just filling up the landfills.
If you store you valuable data (most especially pr0n) for the long term, and don't have bottom less pockets, Magneto Optical (MO) is the way to go.
Fujistu is the only company I know to make 3.5 in drives in the US. About $350 for a UW SCSI, cheaper for IDE/Firewire/USB. Olympus, and Sony also sell them in Japan. Maximum Capacity about 2.3 Gigibytes around $10 for the disks (Cheaper for lower capacity).
More companies make 5.25 in ones that can hold up to 9.1 gigabytes, but the drives will cost you about $1000, and the disks about 50 a piece.
Much more convinient and eco friendly than CD-Rs, more reliable, tougher, &c &c.
There are quite a few niches in which any x86 or Mac machine wouldn't be enough.
Very, Very Big CAD projects need a 64-Bit processor and the extra address space that comes with them. The G5 (or 970) is 64-Bit, but OS X isn't yet 32-bit clean. x86 is out of the question.
A lot of specific applications are also better run on Workstations. I've been told that Molecular Analysis simulations are faster on a MIPS R1k/195 than on a 2 GHz Intel.
Thanks to a lot of open source stuff, lots of applications are availible for these other platforms. Abiword, Mozilla, and others can all be made to work on pretty much all of the Six Big Unicies. Just look at SGI's Freeware collection.
You can even play Doom on most of these machines.;)
Quote:
"still a stellar example of bad UI design"
"accessible to new users"
Are Vi and Emacs stellar examples of bad UI Design then? Neither are perticularly accessable to new users. How do you suggest we go about fixing them?
The problem is making them "more accessible to new users"is that no matter what you say, changing the way an application works on the level of the UI can, and usually will hurt experianced users. No offense to any programmers, but few of them can design good, useable UIs that are still "accessible to new users." I can think of example UI, but I shall bit my tongue for fear of flames.
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A similar system is employed at my school. We have a "Text book rental system" which is payed for in our tuition. Essentially, each professor gets to choose a single book for their course, which the university rents out to the student free of charge. At the end of the semestere, these books are return. Professors are still free to require supplemental text, but most will use a book from the rental system. At current count, this has saved me from buying 5 books, and I'm only in my first year. Unfortunately, most of my Comp Sci professors have opted not to use this system.
Facebook is about the strangest thing I have ever come across.
I don't know whether to call it great or frightening.
It's a time waster more than anything. When I have work to do, and I want to procrastinate I read other people's Facebook profiles. Some of these people I know very well, other's just happen to be listed as my friend through odd circumstance or what have you.
What's scary is that almost everyone in college has an account. I was back home the other day, and just for shits and giggles, I dug out my old high school year book (I moved half-way through high school, Texas to North Carolina. Except for a few, I haven't kept up with my old, Texas friends), and almost everybody in my grade had a profile!
My sisters' best friend's brother has a Facebook profile, My Grandparent's old friend's son has a Facebook profile. This girl I had a crush on in sixth grade has a profile. Fuckin' frightening.
And what's even more frightening is that Facebook is no longer limited to College students. There's a "high school" version which just requires a valid e-mail address. It used to be that the College and High School version were completely separate, but that's no longer the case. Disturbing.
Too bad there seems to be no coverage of AFS. I'd love to see a book documenting using Kerberos V with AFS.
HA!
Look at the prices for _good_ SCSI hard drives, and already your close to $1000. Segate 75 gigabyte 10k disks are around $300. $600 for 140ish gigabytes.
Next thing you've got to look at is processor cache. It's expensive anywhere you put it, so most low-end Intel processors have around 1 to 2 megabytes of it. A 30 grand OpenPower machine is likely to have double or triple that (he said not knowing).
Plus a lot of other things I don't feel like rattling off right now.
A $1000 OpenPower server would be nice, though. So would a Cray that fits in my pocket that costs $25.
No, seriously.
Ever since I saw a story here about Lego case mods, I've been building my RAID array enclosures completely out of them. Now, I swear by them: cheap and modular.
Duplo will due in a pinch, but they really only work well with larger 5.25" half-height or full-height drives.
HTH
If the license is anything like the older Solaris 9 license, this only applies for evaluation use. If you are using Solaris for Education/Non-Profit use, or are developing software, this doesn't apply
Really, I wish they'd return to the license they used for Solaris 8: Right-To-Use license was free for sun4u systems with up to 8 processors for any use.
The big trouble is having just one.
This is a valid point.
You must either not be very old, or be very new to computers. I remember when IE was a joke that was shunned, and Netscape 4 was new and shiny. It's rather scary to see people who fondly remember IE.
I pity you. Throwing things out just because you think they were "worthless" isn't acceptable behaviour. Somebody (if not me), would've bought them on eBay, and they could've been to some use to somebody, rather that just filling up the landfills.
It is really sad the history that is lost...
If you store you valuable data (most especially pr0n) for the long term, and don't have bottom less pockets, Magneto Optical (MO) is the way to go.
Fujistu is the only company I know to make 3.5 in drives in the US. About $350 for a UW SCSI, cheaper for IDE/Firewire/USB. Olympus, and Sony also sell them in Japan. Maximum Capacity about 2.3 Gigibytes around $10 for the disks (Cheaper for lower capacity).
More companies make 5.25 in ones that can hold up to 9.1 gigabytes, but the drives will cost you about $1000, and the disks about 50 a piece.
Much more convinient and eco friendly than CD-Rs, more reliable, tougher, &c &c.
For the Snark WAS a bojum, you see.
There are quite a few niches in which any x86 or Mac machine wouldn't be enough.
Very, Very Big CAD projects need a 64-Bit processor and the extra address space that comes with them. The G5 (or 970) is 64-Bit, but OS X isn't yet 32-bit clean. x86 is out of the question.
A lot of specific applications are also better run on Workstations. I've been told that Molecular Analysis simulations are faster on a MIPS R1k/195 than on a 2 GHz Intel.
Thanks to a lot of open source stuff, lots of applications are availible for these other platforms. Abiword, Mozilla, and others can all be made to work on pretty much all of the Six Big Unicies. Just look at SGI's Freeware collection.
You can even play Doom on most of these machines. ;)
"still a stellar example of bad UI design"
"accessible to new users"
Are Vi and Emacs stellar examples of bad UI Design then? Neither are perticularly accessable to new users. How do you suggest we go about fixing them?
The problem is making them "more accessible to new users"is that no matter what you say, changing the way an application works on the level of the UI can, and usually will hurt experianced users. No offense to any programmers, but few of them can design good, useable UIs that are still "accessible to new users." I can think of example UI, but I shall bit my tongue for fear of flames.