Everything Else

Being in my twenties, I lament not having lived in the 80s and early 90s to use the SGIs and other related products. I often re-read old threads here and look at photos online with nostalgia. Currently, I have several problems with today's market.

1. I don't like the OS choice. Currently the market is pretty much Windows, OS X (wintel still) and GNU/Linux. I have a particular hate for GNU/Linux and try to avoid it outside of my work. I have never owned an Apple product and after they went to wintel, I pledged never to buy one ever. To this day my wife and I have had or used 0 iCrap products. I personally like to use FreeBSD, but the lack of software support for some major applications leave it out of the market. It took GNU/Linux 20 years to start being recognized in key consumer areas (like the gaming industry and media/design). Currently the market is set: Windows - OS X - GNU/Linux. Anything else is considered hobbyist and is very limited in a professional environment software-wise.

2. The architecture. x86 (with 64bit extension) is just overwhelming. Indeed, ARM is making progress, but it's still not enough to be an alternative. All the other RISC (basically POWER and SPARC) are used in mid to enterprise level and dropped the workstation line somewhere between 2006-2009. This is far worse than the OS problem. There really isn't an alternative here and we can only hope AMD doesn't go bankrupt as then wintel will be a full monopolist.

I do own a modern computer, which I consider selling for parts, but there is just nothing that can meet today's demands in terms of work and home use. Just a short list of the things not available (or current versions) outside of x86: Java, Flash, some codecs, GPU support, peripheral support (webcam, headphone, mouse, cell phone), etc.

Is there any hope for the future and a cure for this casualware x86 windows/mac/linux dominance? I want to get rid of (at least my home) computers, but there simply isn't an alternative. And it doesn't look like one will come (I don't consider ARM a possible success in the desktop/workstation market).

Or maybe I should just buy a Tezro, max it out, and hope for the best... still I can't find one under the $1000 range (even not maxed).

I always say, if only I could have been born 20 years earlier and catch the entire IT industry since the (relative) start...

What is one to do or hope for, besides wait another 10+ years to see the next thing out?

Sounds like you are a victim of marketing. Choose something you like and use it. Unless your main interest is pulling the ol' pud, almost every platform has anything you'd need. (Within limits, of course. If you need to do CAD, then BeOS is not the best choice.)

Computers aren't that important to life and you're too young to be sitting around diddling with a stupid computer anyhow. Computing is mostly a waste of time. Get outside and do something worthwhile. A Mirror dinghy on the Bay is great fun and healthier some dark and gloomy dungeon. And get laid more.

you're perfectly right, right now it totally sucks
i'm 101% with you and it saddens me to see how things developed in recent years. variety is crucial for proper evolution and so are different sections. the desktop landscape today completely lacks both which leads to "one for all". needless to say that this is very bad in many ways.

i'm afraid i have no solution right now. i was thinking about the very same many times but i guess all we can do is just wait and hope it gets better again. in the meantime your idea of getting a terzo and hope for better times is probably as good as it gets under these circumstances. also stocking up the "good stuff" as long as you can still get it doesn't hurt for sure.
and keep in mind that the former top-notch products always lacked some amount of common stuff even in their prime so having an x86 standing by for "the rest" is the classic package.

What's your exact problem? You don't like current OSes, okay I don't think there's much to debate here, that's your opinion.

But what about the CPU architecture? How often to you program assembler, so that you contact with the actual architecture? It was a lot of fun in the 90s, but actually it doesn't matter if it gets the job done, and one cannot make a case for Intel building bad CPUs, that's not the case. In the not-low-power segment, Intel does a pretty decent job and because it is so freaking hard to build a CPU, I don't expect this to change too soon. I don't think the old commercial RISCs (POWER, SPARC, let's also include Itanium) will ever scale down again, because there's nothing to get from there. The PC market is saturated, sales are actually going down. And the workstation market disappeared as PCs based on standard components outperformed specialized hardware, or rather that they were fast enough that no engineer or designer found it worthwile to spend 20k instead of 2k. I own a zoo of classic RISCs myself, but as much as I enjoy them, I also understand the reasons why they disappeared, won't appear again and why there's nothing to do about it.

Now interesting developments happen in the low-power segment. I expect a rage against tablets in 3...2...1....
But simply based on selling figures, mobile devices are the current wave of innovation. Frankly, I don't think that the currently available devices will be like what people will be using 20 years from now, they all need to find the right formfactor running the right software, and of course they all need hardware that's both energy efficient and powerful. Those attributes are primarily driven by how the chip is implemented and not by the instruction set. Actually the instruction set has become a minor detail in todays CPUs, which is why Intel was able to stay competitive with its CISCs against the RISCs, because they simply added a thin converter to drive the internal RISC while staying compatible. In times when CPUs are in their billions of transistors, such a conversion is not that complicated compared to the whole chip. Which is why basically all new designs are based on ARM, which gives the manifacturer an instant basis of available software for their SoC.


So what's my point? Yes there was heavy consolidation on the architecture front, but it was completely understandable why this happened and why it will probaly stay that way.
In case you are serious about experimenting with strange architectures, there are powerful FPGA boards available starting at something like 100$, where you can run any custom design (up to a certain complexity) or even create your own. There are even openly developed CPUs like the OpenRISC. This is an opportunity that didn't exist in the 90s, where building a chip meant investion millions to build an ASIC.

Just to clarify: I am a computer engineering student in uni and work in the software field. I have 0 experience with CAD, Maya, Photoshop, etc.

I do own a NVIDIA GTX 660Ti and I use it for CUDA parallel programming learning (outside my uni). However, look at this:

Supported binary drivers by NVIDIA with CUDA enabled:
Windows
OS X (x86)
GNU/Linux (x86)
FreeBSD (x86)
Solaris (x86)

CUDA toolking available for download:
Windows
OS X
GNU/Linux

... so I am still forced to use the "trio"

You're not "forced" to do anything. If the state of the computer industry annoys you that much, either learn to love it or find something else to do. I hear art majors get a lot of arse. Maybe you could try that for a while.

It seems to me like you're pissed that you can't afford things, not that they don't exist.

I'll tell you a secret. Nobody in the 90's was going to sell you a credible RISC/UNIX workstation for under a thousand dollars either.

Edited to add: What alternate universe do you live in where Java doesn't exist outside of x86?

Y U NO BUY AMIGAONE X1000 ?
Seriously, why could You possibly forget about the best OS ever made?



1. All operating systems support headphones. I tested it with OSX/intel, OpenBSD/sparc, OpenBSD/sparc64, MacOS 8.0/68k, MacOS8/ppc, MacOSX 10.4.11/ppc, also Solaris and many others. Even Haiku does support headphones.
2. Is a webcam really necessary for Your life?
3. Mouse -> look up. Even HP-UX does.
4. Codecs? I played [ slowly, and soundless - but did it] a video in .mp4 and .flv, on this.



I wish I was born back then, at least I could be like "we used it at work and now I can buy it cheaper~" instead of "i;'ve seen that it was awesome, and so on, and i can own it now~".

For whatever reason, netbook-class performance in a multi-thousand-dollar price is a tough sell for a lot of people...

Slow day over in irc.nekochan?

Because no one wants to pay post $1000 for performance you can get for sub-$300, including a non-shit OS?

*looks at PowerPC assembler in the Terminal window* Well ...

Are you really gonna make us reread the entire topic just to see who you quoted (or did you accidentally leave the attribution off)?

You can do parallel programming with MIPS-based hardware under Irix, too. For example if you buy a iSPAN 55MC8
PCI-X card (Link: http://www.iphase.com/products/product.cfm/PCI/441 ) and plug it into one of the
PCI-X slots of a sgi Fuel. Next, you have to write a driver that runs under Irix and can use the iSpan card.
If the driver is finished you can enjoy programming the 16 MIPS64 cores each running at up to 750 MHz.

I promise if you can do that, major high-end networking hardware companies like Cisco will be very interested
in hiring you when you finished university.

haha indeed. trolling swapped over here

and you're never forced to one single system. use what you feel good with and mix as needed

By all means, share with us from your font of infinite wisdom which non-x86 core they should have used. The IBM P6lite core used last generation is looking pretty long in the tooth... or do Atom class microarchitectures really appeal to you on some level?

It's pretty obvious to those of us who actually pay attention that IBM isn't particularly interested in that market anymore. The only core they have that's even remotely in the proper class for a modern game console is the PPC 476, which is inconveniently totally lacking in SIMD support and is pretty weak on floating-point, both of which are somewhat important for that workload.

Who else do you propose licensing a game console core from?

For what it's worth, I actually think the core design they're using for those systems (8-core low-clock Jaguar) is pretty questionable, but "wahh, it's x86" isn't the reason.

well he actually was aiming for the fact that there is no serious alternative at the moment indeed which is one of the main points of this thread

When, after the 80's, was there ever a serious alternative for the low end? The only time I can think of is the period in the very early 90's when NEC (and others) were pushing low-end MIPS running NT against the Pentium.

Other than that, it's almost always been RISC/UNIX being relegated to a high-end computing niche. Just like right now.

You stuck that "almost" in there but Silicon Graphics itself is a counter-example. The Indigo in particular was intended to bring graphics to the masses. That was Clark's whole schtick. He got driven out of the company because of it - the Venture Capitalists wanted the big bucks now , while he was focused on the future.

Silicon Graphics was not intended to be high-end. It was intended to be what Apple became, only a little classier

This is also a good illustration of my premise that too much money in too few hands destroys society. Or the society we had in the seventies, at any rate. We had a middle class and "innovation". Now you have a top-down master-slave society, with all the creative people occupied by baking bread and putting on circuses. Whenever I hear the business press idolize Steve Jobs, it makes me laugh. Don't they see their own internal conflict ? Or are the highly-educated college-graduate masses too stupid to see it ?

Steve Jobs was everything they tell young people to not do these days. He was the product of a totally working-class, dirty hands, rust belt, non-investor, non-job creator background. He went to a wacko leftist liberal arts college mostly famous for producing Che Guevara / Hugo Chavez compatibles for almost one semester. He was never a "team player." He had no math or science training. He never had an MBA and his early business experiences were a disaster. The best thing he ever did for computing was financially a miserable failure. He was the exact opposite of everything the press and guidance counselors tell people to do.

Yet they idolize him. Steve Jobs was typical of the seventies, a time that is now gone with the wind, never to return. The Establishment is not going to ever relinquish control of society willingly. The very image they promote as the ideal is the one they absolutely will not allow. It jeopardizes their bottom line ... Funny funny funny.