Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

The price is kind of a turn off. Even the 2F 10" is still $400 and very rare to find. I don't know if the 9" is worth buying as it seems too small, but it's half the price.

If only there were more non IA-32 notebooks out there...I would buy right away. PowerBooks are too old now and Yeeloong is too expensive for what it offers. I may consider a 9", but it's too tiny. I am using a X220 right now, mainly due to 9hour battery with WiFi on (and it's not a ultrabook).

They're not rare to find, you can buy them from Lemote's Alibaba shop. But yeah the larger screen plus shipping is getting up there. Hopefully some non Windows-enabled ARM netbooks will be affordable soon.

... to do what? I'm typing this on an iBook G4 running TenFourFox. It does what I need it to, and they're cheap to maintain and replace. There are some Linux distros that run very well on them if you don't want OS X.

That said, I would certainly like a more modern non-x86 laptop, but it suffices.

Using a borrowed modern x86 lappy this very second. Has all the bells and whistles. Slower than my Fuel. What crap.

I can hardly wait to get back to a real operating system.

I just wish all the RISC based workstations didn't die out 4 years ago. So what if Intel makes fast and powerful CPU's? With all the heavy OS's now it takes gigs just to boot up. Not to mention how sluggish your system becomes. I am using top-of-the-line CPU from 2006 and it's sluggish as hell.I am tired of the Intel monopoly on the market. And given there is little to no alternative if you want current processors it's very discouraging. I am still uneasy about ordering a Yeeloong due to the limited graphical settings. C'est la vie.

That sounds like it used to be different, but considering the performance leaps during the 90s, you can now work a lot better on a 6y old system than when you did the same comparison 15 years ago.
The push towards mobile devices is our friend here, because it slows down the rising of system requirements in general.


If you are talking about desktops, that is true. In the mobile sector, there's a lot more movement and actually Intel plays a minor role there at best.
But actually, in the age of platform independence, what's the matter about a processor architecture? as long as the cpu fulfills your needs, there's nothing wrong with it, and considering power/watt, Intel is the leader in the upper half of the market, ARM leads the lower half.

If you and enough people like you shelled out $20k+ for a RISC workstation 4-ish years ago they'd still be around. If enough people bought an Indy or Alpha when they were pushing them to the power users they'd still be around. The inexpensive software wasn't there, true, but then Intel and AMD caught up. Take a look at the PCs we have now - they make an Ultra-80 look so-so for about $500-$1000 (multicore somewhat-crossbarred, 2/3-3/4-assed switched I/O, 2/3rds assed drive interfaces that will kind of do reordering - yeah, doesn't sound so fantastic that way, but compare it to where PCs were 10 years ago). The fancy, really nice RAS-type stuff generally wasn't in the workstations, anyway, unless it was the ones that really leveraged server parts, and there are still companies that make very nice servers with non-Intel stuff.

That said, I do wish that PCs came with decent firmware. EFI is a step up from PC-BIOS, but still not in the same league as SRM or OpenBoot.



BSD? Windows is the way it is because MS marketing likes gegaws. Linux distros are the way they are because it's "cool" and everyone feels the need to do their own thing. Solaris is slow because... well, I don't know why Solaris is so slow - but ZFS is neat. The BSDs tend to be pretty speedy, so try one of those.

I would buy a Longsoon if I could find a 3A, I emailed tekmote, but they don't reply to their mail. And couldn't find a us reseller that has any.

Don't look at me: I bought my quad G5 new, which is a much more practical RISC workstation than, say, the G5 or POWER4-based IntelliStations (though largely because AIX 5L and up aren't good workstation OSes). Someone on 68KMLA pointed out the G5 was woefully undercached compared to the POWER4s it was descended from, and I certainly think that's true, but I did my part. Short of buying a Tezro, of course ...

The main reason I didn't go SPARC was my large investment in Apple software, and I didn't dig Solaris. I dig it even less now that they're Snoracle.

We'll call them again. Last time it was mayo mayo but phone calls are cheap. (We don't use AT&T)

Email Lemote directly. If Tekmote doesn't want to sell you something why argue with them about it? Their prices are outrageous anyway.
What are you going to run on it? Miod said OpenBSD isn't ready. And isn't OpenBSD the reason anybody would buy a Loongson?

Plenty of people (especially on this board!) are running older RISC workstations and servers. What OS are heavy? Solaris still runs great on 10 year old hardware and you don't ever have to boot it except once in ten years. OpenBSD runs on tons of platforms and so do the other BSD. None of the BSD are heavy.

You're running a top of the line CPU from 2006 with what, Windows? What do you expect then? WinTel is about forcing you to upgrade to have tolerable performance. Dump the WinTel crap and run what you like. Who's holding a gun to your head? Loongson isn't the answer if you want a fast workstation. They make great little servers and ok development boxes but they're no Origin 350. But if people don't like WinTel and keep buying it, the arms race will never end. If you look around and ask you'll find something that meets your needs.

usually it's the applications, that turn your computer slow, but that's independent from the OS. try running a current webbrowser (firefox 2.0 is not current) on some OpenBSD on an old RISC box and visit a usual website with some javascript etc and you'll notice, that the "weight" of the OS is the smallest of all problems when running on legacy systems.

Which just needs port-specific maintainers. We have JavaScript compilation on PowerPC now, for example, if I may toot my own horn a little. There are MIPS and SPARC JaegerMonkey backends too.

Blocking Javascript has been a big help here with Fireflop crashes. It's just like the good ol' dayes of the browser wars ...

you cannot surf today's web with javascript completely disabled. there are so many sites, that fundamentally rely on dynamically loading content, that will not work without it.

you'll probably state that you are not interested at all in this new stuff and think it's good riddance not being able to visit those sites. it's your own opinion and you are fully entitled to have one, but fact is that you simply cannot use the whole web on legacy machines, and there are a lot of people who may be interested in old systems, but don't want to do without youtube, facebook, twitter, ...

I was listening until you used facebook, tweeter and youtube for examples

There were a whole lot of people who thought that money grew on trees while real estate and the stock market could never go down, too. "We have conquered the business cycle with computer algorithms and quants !"

Yeah.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public ...

https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Mozilla_Firefox

Yeah, I checked Tekmote's webpage out when it was first mentioned here, and aside from the steep price, there is some small print which suggests that they ship directly it from China. Which means VAT, customs & clearance fees etc. on top of that for most customers. So if its cheaper to buy directly in China, it might make more sense.

That's why I put those examples to the end of my posting I'm not using facebook myself, but don't see what's wrong about web video. Okay maybe you don't like Google being the owner of youtube, but even "better" services like Vimeo need either flash or HTML5 video, both of which are not possible with Firefix 2.0 on IRIX.
My point is simply that turning off javascript or any other way of not using modern technology is not a valid solution for everyone.

Good luck with that. The girl there has been saying "any time now !" for more since before Prometheus stole fire.


Living within their means wasn't a valid choice for most people either.

The thing is, actions have consequences. If you play in the toilet, you get shit on your hands.