Everything Else

If we're including machines that cost 8000UKP as something other than high-end niche, then RISC/UNIX is mainstream right now. You can get Power7+ systems for ~$5000.

I wish. Even my refurb Power6 cost me close to $10K in a reasonable configuration (sufficient RAM, 2-way, RAID), and just try getting IBM to sell you anything if you're not going to buy a service contract. That $5K base shrinks off in the distance really quickly.

But I think hamei meant the Indy (right?). As a starving student when it came out, it was juuuuuuuust ... out ... of reach. But boy did I want one! And listing for around $5K wasn't all that much compared with, say, the Quadras and (gurgle) Performas they were foisting on unwitting undergrads in the university bookstore. Hell, the Q800 MSRP was (checks service circular) $4700 new itself. I don't remember what the ed price was, but it wasn't a whole lot less.

When I did summer research at the Salk Institute, I got one all to myself and even took my picture with the IndyCam. That was good times.

Yes, I know that. I meant overall, in the course of Microsoft, they've rarely gone off of x86. This is one of those cases. (The original XBOX was not.)

What is this, POWER7 for $5000? And where is it?

The base 710 system was, before the 7+ refresh, slightly above 5k. I guess IBM bumped up list again.

Still, with discounts factored in, it's likely to end up well under 6k.

exactly but that very field is very small now and in some areas (e.g. desktop) not even existant anymore.

Agree with you, the slashdot mentality is somewhat naive but here's the thing - your front-line wisdom isn't worth a shit either. Except maybe in the case of IBM, the people in charge of every American "high-tech" firm either don't have a clue or could care less. Meg Whitman couldn't fill out a bingo card. The stupid greedy bitch cares about one thing and one thing only - her bank account.

All any of them care about is how much they can steal - your front line wisdom is nothing but food for their propaganda mill. If she could sell all the HP front-liners into sex slavery in Saudi Arabia, she'd do it in a heartbeat.

And please don't feed me that nonsense about "She only does well if the company does well." That's the third biggest lie in the Universe. CEO's walk away from zeppelin crashes with millions. Company performance has absolutely nothing to do with executive compensation. They are aristocrats and deserve that money, you little person !

If you think anyone else in "high-tech" is any better, I have a beautiful bridge. I can let it go this week only to you for the good-friend price of ... how much did you say was in your bank account ?

Good suggestion. Now playing

Everything under the Sun is in tune
but the Sun is eclipsed by Larry Ellison

How come people are so stupid ? When Larry wanted the city of San Francisco to pony up a few hundred million dollars and hand over the waterfront to him because "the America's Cup is going to bring a beeeellion dollars !!! to the City !" they were all cheering and throwing flowers.

But of course that was a fraud, SF will probably lose several tens of millions, it was a transparent lie from day one, yet everyone fell all over themselves to give Larry whatever he wanted.

The same thing was true of Mickeysoft for decades. "We'll partner with Microsoft !" ... you stupid shit. Mickey is going to eat you up and spit you out.

But people keep falling for it. Besides total stupidity, why ? Greed doesn't answer the question, even greedy people know that loaning Al Capone a few hundred would be a "bad investment."

Lack of knowledge amongst executives, I guess?

I figure some of these execs really have no clue.

"B-But Microsoft is a big deal!" is probably their reaction to the others telling them that Microsoft will devour them.

I have RISC OS box as my daily driver now and can do most of the things I want just fine. At least zillion times better than I ever could do with Linux, as the quantity of Linux software hardly can replace the quality of available software. Then again I do not do anything with video or work with photographs in RAW format.

For those things I do not want to do but sometimes have to, like paying bills I still have an x86 laptop as a back up plan.

Ok, I confess. Also use it to play a game or two on some rare occasions.

I have an RPi (with an Atrix dock) that runs RISC OS, and I think it's a beautiful interface, but the problem I have is *doing* something with it.

Case in point, the two computers I probably use 3/4ths of the time are both "vintage" Power Macs (a quad G5, which is my desktop workhorse, and an iMac G4 which is my second workstation). The quad runs the full spectrum of applications, Photoshop, HD video editing, browser (TenFourFox, natch), terminal, software development (mostly in Terminal but a little in Xcode), some games, office apps, and my classic OS 9 apps (QuarkXPress being the major one I need Classic for). The iMac does VNC, terminal, browsing and a little bit of old-school Palm OS development with pluac2. The quad is almost seven years old, the fastest of the Power Macs; the iMac is about a decade old.

Terminal and net access, though, is the majority of what they do and I think the majority of what most people do. I'm fortunate in that I'm skilled and crazy enough to maintain a fork of Firefox for Power Macs (TenFourFox) that can still run on 10.4. We're current with Firefox; our port of Fx20 will come out next week, and we maintain an ESR port for "less adventurous users." Short of plugin support (for security as much as compatibility) and WebGL, the browser supports everything Tier-1 Firefox does, even most add-ons, and even has a PowerPC JIT for JavaScript. This means I don't really need an Intel Mac (I do for Android development and TurboTax, but those are two specific applications).

When I tried using RISC OS on the RPi, NetSurf is very capable within its skill set, but it can't do much, and lacking JavaScript support altogether is a real concern. ISTR there was an Fx2 port at one time, but even our beloved SGIs are now capable of at least Fx3 (not a minor point, since Fx3 is the first Firefox that was Acid2 compliant). And given how important a reasonably current browser is in today's world, it hurts the platform. I certainly couldn't use it on a daily basis, let's put it that way. At least Raspbian has Midori, even if it's WebKit (IIRC).

They recognized this in the PPC Amiga community too. There's at least a Firefox 4 port, anyway, and that's a start. (Various versions of WebKit Origyn still float around on that platform also.)

This is part of the reason I still try to do updates periodically on Classilla, although the renderer is still rather lacking; it can do some JavaScript, and when emulating a mobile user agent, it actually doesn't do too badly on layout. I can take a Mac OS 9 laptop on the road and still do a lot.

Mind you, I don't like putting my money into x86. So, when I needed a laptop that could run Flash for an online course I'm taking (I won't run Flash on Power Macs anymore because of the security pitfalls), I bought a Samsung ARM Chromebook, turned it to dev mode, and installed a miniroot of Arch Linux within ChromeOS. This does everything I need, and I don't need to feed Chipzilla.

Hopefully some enterprising soul in the RISC OS community is trying to narrow the gap. I do like the Iyonix hardware.

You need to try some of the RISC OS software like: ProCAD+, Artworks 2, Compo, TechWriter, Photodesk and many others to see how easy it is to work with different applications and how well everything works together.

I mostly toy around with 2D graphics for fun and there is no better software to draw those than ProCAD+. Those drawings can then be brought to ArtWorks 2 to get some colour and you can later combine things and put everything together in Composition.

For example if I wanted to make animated GIF, then I could draw the shapes in ProCAD+ with very little effort and strain to mousehand using different snaps. Then I could finish it in ArtWorks 2 and drop the finished image to Compo. After that I could just modify one of the example CompoScripts to do all the hard work for me and use InterGIF to combine all the images into a single animated GIF file.

I think you misunderstand me. I definitely appreciate how well RISC OS is put together and how well it interoperates. I'm saying that even with all that, even though I *like* RISC OS, I can't use it as a daily driver. It doesn't do enough of what I need it to do.

But yes, I definitely appreciate its design.

To me javascript on NetSurf is not a big problem as actually prefer simple web pages more. Javascript seems to be a work in progress feature as there is some experimental javascript support in development builds. Though I have not really noticed anything different other, than Gmail is not anymore defaulting to simpler view of things and you still have to select basic HTML view manually.

Only thing really missing that I would like to have on RISC OS is some modern 3D modelling application. I have a version of Top Model, but it is not working properly even in Aemulator and crashes when doing almost anything. Modelling part would easily be doable with this system but the actual rendering would need lots of patience.

CAD war ! CAD war ! Everybody take cover !

I had a sports injury some years ago that stresses the arm when using mouse for drawing. All the drawing aids, like zillion snaps and other clever features make drawing accurate pictures very easy and fast with minimal work. So at least it works for me and every function of the program can be configured to work with wanted keyboard shortcut.

I only need to export the drawing to RISC OS vector image format Draw and then can drop it to ArtWorks 2 to have more realistic colours with transparency for the image.

I need to play around with RiscOS on my Pi some more. The more Windows goes down the tablet toilet, the more I really want to find an alternative, but I've been burned with Linux too many times to consider that route. What I've seen of RiscOS impresses me greatly. It'd take some getting used to to not have Photoshop or Jeskola Buzz, but any full-featured image-editing program should theoretically work for drawing (at least if the rPi version supports Wacom tablets,) and now that I'm branching out into MIDI gear I'm not as dependent on x86 VSTs for music as I was even at the beginning of the year...

Well, that's good to hear. Mind you, I certainly prefer simpler web pages too, and the growth of the mobile web has been good for niche browsers since they tend to be more functional than flashy. But we're getting to the point where a certain minimum capacity is being assumed, of course, and the rapid release strategy of both Mozilla and Google is pushing that time faster and faster.

So it's good to know that RISC OS is trying to keep up.