Here's the link:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/my ... amusement/
While many of the points made herein are Mac OS 9 specific, such as the poor multithreading which is probably what manifests itself in the brief "lockups", in general, the browser focused commentary we can all relate to. The browser is the one application which has well and truly left old computers behind. And while my old-schoolness is rearing its head here when I refer to the browser as an "application", the fact is it's not. It's a platform for uncountable numbers of applications. We might complain about bloated web pages, and slow Javascript, and N-layers of containment, sandboxing and inefficiency that browser based apps dictate, but... whatever. Fact is, that's where much of the new app dev is happening.
As painful as it is, an old gen-1 Atom N270 has about 4 times the MIPS (the measure of compute, not the proc
) that a Fuel 700Mhz does. I can still play more concurrent video streams on a Fuel than an Atom will handle, but in the web browsing department, it's a different story.
There have been all sorts of custom add-on boards designed for the Apple II, Commodore, Amiga and Atari communities. Stuff that lets these machines access SD card storage, provides proc acceleration, etc. I wonder about a little browser offload card add-on for our SGIs... it could also provide USB ports, storage, wireless & security services (firewall)... I'm thinking a dual NIC BananaPi connecting directly to the SGI NIC, providing DHCP services, a modern browser via XDMCP and firewall services. Second NIC on Banana goes to uplink. This also adds USB ports to SGIs (exported auto via NFS to host) and wireless. A nice 3-d printed case to match the design sensibilities of *pick your favorite SGI*, and voila!
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/my ... amusement/
While many of the points made herein are Mac OS 9 specific, such as the poor multithreading which is probably what manifests itself in the brief "lockups", in general, the browser focused commentary we can all relate to. The browser is the one application which has well and truly left old computers behind. And while my old-schoolness is rearing its head here when I refer to the browser as an "application", the fact is it's not. It's a platform for uncountable numbers of applications. We might complain about bloated web pages, and slow Javascript, and N-layers of containment, sandboxing and inefficiency that browser based apps dictate, but... whatever. Fact is, that's where much of the new app dev is happening.
As painful as it is, an old gen-1 Atom N270 has about 4 times the MIPS (the measure of compute, not the proc
) that a Fuel 700Mhz does. I can still play more concurrent video streams on a Fuel than an Atom will handle, but in the web browsing department, it's a different story.
There have been all sorts of custom add-on boards designed for the Apple II, Commodore, Amiga and Atari communities. Stuff that lets these machines access SD card storage, provides proc acceleration, etc. I wonder about a little browser offload card add-on for our SGIs... it could also provide USB ports, storage, wireless & security services (firewall)... I'm thinking a dual NIC BananaPi connecting directly to the SGI NIC, providing DHCP services, a modern browser via XDMCP and firewall services. Second NIC on Banana goes to uplink. This also adds USB ports to SGIs (exported auto via NFS to host) and wireless. A nice 3-d printed case to match the design sensibilities of *pick your favorite SGI*, and voila!
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(single-CM)
Dual Itanium 
<-------- A very happy forum member.