The collected works of GIJoe - Page 3

hamei wrote: What would be ? (Not the girl, the window manager.) Seriously curious ...

at the risk of starting a shitstorm in this thread - after looking around a bit i began using gnome 3.10 a few weeks ago as a temporary OSX replacement and grew to like it quite a bit. it did however require a handful of extensions installed to really suit my needs as a tablet-user but now i might actually shed a tear when i get my apple back. still missing a quick desktop search like OSX's spotlight or 'everything' on windows though.
look & feel aside i suppose any of the major modern desktops on linux solves a bunch of problem i've always had with the old school bunch of graphical unix environments even in their prime - inconsistent drag&drop and copy&paste behaviour between applications and shitty file open/save dialogs without folder history or bookmarks and often not even the ability to automatically add the proper file extension.
having access to filemanagers with tabs and all sorts of display modes and quicklook capability to choose from also certainly helps to get stuff done.

a blast from the past it must be getting quite warm under that helmet after a while? personally never tried anything but crystaleyes + headtracker in an onyx-run CAVE back in the day.

the oculus rift DK1 might also be worth it - unless that's too recent a hardware for you. easier to install/operate than DK2 and already totally mindblowing. great to tinker with in unity 4 (and possibly unreal 4) engine.

well, after my little foray into linux land i'd say a well integrated quick desktop search engine in the style of spotlight is what linux is lacking - if you can count that as a part of filemanagement. other than that it is more about selecting the filemanager to suit your needs - from the endless list of candidates.
windows explorer functionality seems to be getting downgraded with every new release ever since vista. well, their whole OS is a disjointed thing anyways. that company seemingly can't see the forest for the trees...

edit: there's more to it than functionality tho and that is an area where for me unix/linux lags a bit: look&feel is important. slow redraw of vector icons, frequently stalled desktop. and have you tried selecting/highlighting for rename and moving files around with a wacom pen on an sgi? infuriating.
the gnome desktop i installed is pretty nice overall, has decent customization and is even easy on the eyes but now, being back on the mac at last it's just so noticeable how much more fluid and tuned everything feels.

i guess they did see this kind of constant change working out well for apple so started copying that.
but they neither have the flair, nor invest the time and thought into designing and polishing nor do they have the fanatical userbase to put up with it all.

digikam (look out for lots of KDE dependencies) and nomacs should both have this feature as well.

looks good to me, provided one buys at least a mid-range model. those 840 pro's are quite affordable. however, even if SSD's had terrible longevity - the enormous speed boost compared to a spinning drive and the absence of noise/vibration are so noticeable, would still be worth it to just burn through and discard them i think.

with SSDs in all my machines i do a lot more backups now though considering that it seems impossible to retrieve anything from a dying/defective drive.

more frequent backups are just an insurance against sudden drive death really - which could happen with a brand new drive. i seem to have killed about four hard disks in my laptop over the course of three years but in all cases i was able to recover data or 'heard' it coming.
agreed that coming back to a solely hard disk based machine feels like going back to the stone age. unbearable.

guardian: sounds like your wife is running what apple calls a fusion drive. what happens with that if the SSD part fails? is the data from the big disk in such an event retrievable (and complete)?

smj wrote: Seagate has been offering these for a while now - original as the Momentus XT line in 2010. Review at AnandTech .

hey, that's the drive that keeps failing me quite consistently. about to send mine back to seagate for another round. decent speed but seems not really suitable for a laptop environment. a far cry from SSD speeds still.

sgtprobe: just wondering what you have against the current mac pro? the box - well cylinder - seems ace as a personal workstation as far as hardware goes. small and quiet? yes please. software availability/comparably inferior OSX ports of applications seem to be a problem however.

btw. that line about modo being a young software is getting long in the tooth. this thing has been around for 10 years at least now. stop treating it like the next big thing.

if memory serves there are some 3d format converters installed in irix by default. i think they have their own category in the toolchest even. i recall inventor support as being part of that. but if that included conversion-from capability is an entirely different question.
also if you have a version of maya installed on the octane, check the plugin manager for any inventor format plugins that are likely not autoloaded by default but may have shipped with the software.
last place i'd look is ivview. this might have the option to export into some other format long forgotten by history.

in any case these 1996-style models are likely pretty lowpoly by today's standards and a messy CAD export to boot. might not be of much use other than for volume reference. if you have the real thing on the desk why not get to work proper? shouldn't be hard to recreate in subdivs - or even booleans if you like it messy.

nice find!
horrible looking topology on that head though.

the (optional) PCI cardcage also has it's own little fan built in from what I remember.

just wanted to give another vote to corner desks. i have one with panels mounted between the legs. that adds extra stability (and provides space for putting cables out of sight). i do not see a problem with putting computers on wooden floors though? worst case just get some thin mat to protect the floorboards and isolate vibrations.

for size reference, from left to right the monitors shown are 27", 20" (pivoted), 24" and 15".

also note the modded aeron chair. still waiting for an aftermarket headrest to show up in the mail.

i can also only state that i've never seen an issue browsing the web on my i7 non-retina MBP and an i5 mac mini. certainly no laggy behaviour at all using semi-recent firefoxes. 10.7 and 10.9 here.

portable machines can get slow when they are getting really hot however. apple runs a kernel task that from the looks of it is just hogging CPU cycles for a while till the CPU cools down. feels like system swapping to a really slow HD in these cases. if memory serves there are some options you can set to keep it from doing that.

Internet Fate wrote: No I haven't assessed the practicality of running maya on any of the machines. Once again this is all new to me so I'm trying to feel it out. If maya would be hard to run on an Impact then are there any alternatives with better performance?

it's pretty simple - get the top end configuration of your desired workstation model:

- indy in all it's configurations is a bit too small for proper 3D work unless you only work untextured.
- o2 R12k 400 mhz and maxed out RAM. probably too slow for maya but softimage will do. as should older software.
- indigo2 R10k 195 mhz and maximum impact graphics with the texture option. you can run softimage 3D well on this one. high-impact is also a graphics card worth considering for this system.
- octane2 dual R14k-600 and V8 or V12. maya runs in acceptable fashion - and everything else that ever came out for the SGI.
- fuel - any CPU config and V12 graphics. should run at least as well as on the octane except for rendering due to being limited to one CPU.
- tezro - any configuration should do, really.

keep in mind that the software available on the sgi is at least about 12+ years behind what is out there these days in terms of functionality, performance and UX. that can be quite hard to get accustomed to ('how could we ever work with THIS?'-effect). there's also nothing magical about this platform, it was simply the best option available in the 1990's. the world moved on and surpassed it. so don't expect in 2015 to stumble into a secret fairy land of hardware accelerated CG wonder that somehow can still compete.

a few other notes:
- you are about a decade too late for the big SGI hardware bonanza. decent systems might not be so easy to find anymore. sorry about that
- the computers are old and parts of them will have become unreliable and prone to breaking. so get spares if you want to work with them! also some knowledge about how to fix issues yourself will definitely come in handy
- these systems use lots of semi-exotic bits that you can't buy in computer stores (anymore). think about your storage options and connectivity with whatever system you have used so far
- be prepared for the noise and power-draw of these boxes. the indigo2 can easily be used as a heater. the octane sounds like a jet engine
- not all sgi's play nice with current day monitors

duck wrote: I would humbly beg to differ. In my opinion, the mardigras cards for Octane are better for Maya because they do not glitch like the odyssey boards do (both the V6 and V12 I've had have acted in the same way)..

what glitches are you referring to specifically? from what i recall there were always window refresh issues not just in maya but all over 4Dwm as well where windows would leave funky colored bits behind when dragged and resized. can not remember if these were only on Vpro and it was all dandy on older machines since i had only used Vpro for so long.

what i do vividly remember though is the abysmal performance of my indigo2 max impact when dragging windows around. even in '97 that was just mind boggling next to just about any other computer. 2D certainly did not seem like it's strong point. hope the octane equivalent fares better in that regard. (no i did not own a max impact in '97. bit tight on a student budget. that took a few years... )

when unix workstations were common it was well known that unlike PCs or home computers in general you were not supposed to shut them down and start them back up on a daily basis and one of the reasons given was that the hardware wouldn't cope well with that. the sgi's i used to use in the office were kept running all year round, even the indy's and o2's that had zero server duty.

seems like a case of " you're running it wrong ".

MrBill wrote: I'll keep an eye out for either the granite or the "indigo2 slab" keyboard. Id much rather get the slab. Is that what is pictured here along with this indigo 2 at auction? http://www.ebay.com/itm/141651640986?_t ... EBIDX%3AIT

looks that way. big, heavy and with a very audible click. i'd prefer granite though. beige tends to look pretty poor after all those years and does not really fit the sgi machines. or just get something dark and non-sgi with those kinds of caps. would also recommend to not use the sgi ball mouse and get a laser model with scrollwheel. that can be put to use in 6.5 and with the imwheel utility.

guardian452 wrote: When are *all* workstations going to having the cpus and gpus mounted to the same giant heatsink with one bigass fan to cool it all? (ala trash can) It doesn't make much sense anymore to do it the old way...

you mean like the mac pro? never i suppose. you'd need totally different expansion cards for that? - or it would have to be one massive trashcan indeed. cool machine though.

indy was super ergonomic with those 17 or 20 inch monitors put on top of it, just the right height. loved that. indigo2 was a bit too fat - you had to look up slightly when sat at the desk. also it was blowing hot air my way. now that i found a questionable design decision.

chicaneuk wrote: It is no wonder that as soon as LCD's became affordable, the CRT died off so quickly. I remember the days of going to LAN parties and having to lug my computer and monitor back and forth and it became excruciating after a while. Not to mention working in IT as computer monitors ramped up quickly from little 12-14" tiddlers, to being regularly 17 or 19" - my poor back.

i imagine the number of people who carry their desktop screens around often must have been pretty small at all times. might have had more to do with the very stable image, drastically lower energy requirements and heat output and the lack of the high pitched whine that CRTs emit. also, how did we ever fit keyboards, wacom tablets and CRTs on a normal sized office desk?

advanced - that's some kind word about the xbox right there... first i head in a while.

personally i'm down to two charcoal keyboards and one octane cardcage expansion slot cover of bulletproof construction.
i took some pictures of my last machine before giving it away, that's good enough. far better for the ears, too.

guardian452 wrote: IBM T221. 22", 3840x2400. Was a very nice screen up until recently

4K at 22 inches seems rather packed. is there some sort of retina-like functionality you'd use this for? sounds like anything like icons and interfaces with hardcoded fonts would be pretty much unreadable?

hmm.... i don't think the interface of anything graphics related will be usable at this kind of resolution. sure, content will look crisp but a photoshop, maya, illustrator, lightroom interface? or anything else that comes with lots of icons or narrow sliders for that matter.

aaaaaanyway, that's a pretty nice fuel the OP has here. wish i'd have had something like that back in the day.

ah, now studiopaint is the one software i miss from the IRIX days. very nicely done painterly feeling.

it is a bit of a forgetful one though. make sure you backup the work done with it/save multiple versions. it sometimes just fails to load in old projects. you can always access the layers separately in the filesystem and reimport but it can be a bit of a bummer.

i am surely the only one who imagines hamei living in some 1950's era bunker, surrounded by humming old computers that go 'pop' once in a while, wearing only a tinfoil hat while molesting that poor poor kid.

> ./mindbleach

buses on those narrow country lanes? won't get far with those...
"donkey powered rickshahs" - that's a new one to describe big black chelsea tractors indeed.

well, blackberry makes the 'passport' which still comes with a keyboard. of course it is entirely up to debate if blackberry is still 'a thing'.
i was fond of these for quite a while, too but nowadays i find touchscreen-based ones to work better. no crammed together buttons anymore and when you don't need a keyboard, it just conveniently fades out of the way.

i don't remember this company or product specifically, no. but a mate in uni used to have small computers running some sort of cut-down/mobile version of windows in the form factor of a small netbook around '97/'98. perhaps something in-betweeen a small laptop and an early nokia communicator, widescreen i think. these were a 'thing', too, for a brief period at least.

in my experience the o2 always was a dog, even when brand new. remember the disappointment in the lab when we got those when they were sgi's newest and people going back to using their R5k indy's pretty quickly. it just did not feel like a substantial upgrade. upside were some prett useful video/texture capabilities and of course the looks.

as for the SSD upgrade i have to say i'm a bit surprised about those numbers. it's not even maxing out the internal bus from the looks of it? is that the adaptor? would be interesting to see how it performs when hooked up to one of those U160 adaptors or whatever fastest you can install in an octane.

is it possible to tune the system by moving the OS and apps over to a really fast filesystem and only have the absolute minimum of data required to kick off the boot process on a disk recognized in the PROM? i imagine having it all on an SSD connected to something faster than internal UW-SCSI would make a ton of difference to the overall experience. heck, even starting netscape might be quick.

uunix wrote: Is what is available usable in SMOKE etc do you know?

definitely not. this device requires application developers to write a plugin to make it usable within their software, it's not a general input device available to the OS you could map functionality to. few application devs bothered. as i recall on SGI all that was usable were a few particular versions of old software, some CAD tools and a really old version of maya, according to the driver interface.

i used it with custom software that required it to even start up and it is technically a cool, fancy and very accurate multi-axis joystick, just woefully under-supported due to the way they require application-specific plugins. same issue exists today for the current crop of these devices.

the one shown is in pretty bad shape btw. also, you'd want the space-mouse, not the -ball i think. the latter is just plastic, on the flimsy side and puts extra stress on your forearm because when pulling the ball up on Z axis it is so light that you constantly have to fight the base to stay put. no such issue with the mouse which is much heavier (i used both, obviously).

all well possible my comment is only in regards to which device is preferable in my opinion. i originally got the 4000 FLX as pictured in that ebay auction and traded it quickly for the much better space mouse (classic). never used the original space ball but have seen it. perhaps gluing the space ball base to the table might solve the main issue i had with it. that was no option back when i used them though.

they still do displays on their more recent top end models. i have not used any of these but an input device should not require you to glance at it IMO. less is more here. wacom also had customizable button displays in the previous generation, glad to see they dropped them again. maybe in the next iteration they will drop tablet buttons completely and sell it as the new wave of simplicity? then they'll have come full circle.

speaking of buttons - these were no good on any of the 3d connexion devices i have used. squishy little things without proper feedback, badly placed. not suited to map frequently used functions to for my purposes. they should have put the buttons on the actual 'joystick'. plenty of space on that ball for starters.

there was a game controller from microsoft called the 'strategic commander' - basically some sort of joystick in the shape of a mouse on a fixed base - i found way superior to the space mouse as an input device for working in 3d apps to fire off commands using gestures and map functionality onto the buttons, replacing the keyboard.
also a lot cheaper.

IAMNOTDEFECTIVE wrote: Hello everyone!
So I actually only found out about SGI last Saturday and I've been frantically getting all the info I need about SGI. Now before I go into the main reason of this post I want to say: Daaaamn! These machines are beautiful! 0_0

simple solution: get the prettiest machine you can find, put it on a shelf and continue to work with what you have. getting an sgi nowadays makes no sense beyond collecting them.

not sure anybody else has touched on this but: hardware this old is not reliable anymore. you better not bet the farm on this stuff to keep trucking along and IMO should not let it run unattended for extended periods either. lastly you need to know where to source replacement parts and how to fix small hardware issues yourself.
when i was running an octane 2 about 10 years ago and partially depending on it for work still, i had an entire replacement unit with a very similar configuration on the shelf, for those worst case scenarios.

yes, but:
- the fuel in decent configurations isn't cheap nor common, replacement parts may not be so easy to find either
- it's also not exactly known as a trouble free machine, plenty of evidence on this forum
- it may be more silent than an octane (that's easy, really) but it will be like a really noisy PC

OP: what you should probably do is try and hook up with someone from on here who lives halfway close to you to have a look at an actual sgi up and running - preferably with maya - before buying anything. because it sounds like you've never seen them working in the flesh?

Trippynet wrote:

GIJoe wrote: - it may be more silent than an octane (that's easy, really) but it will be like a really noisy PC

It can be easily fixed. My Fuel has a new PSU fan, new hard drive cage fans, and new graphics board fans. Basically the only fan I didn't change is the stonking huge 14cm one at the back. And now? It's as quiet as my PC.

then we'd need to know what kind of PC we're comparing to here.
at all the places i worked in the last 10+ years and for my own machines at home those 'silent'-cases, -power supplies and big fat CPU cooler blocks like the noctua's were used. you can reduce a full blown 3D-workstation to something that barely emits any noise even when rendering on the CPU and is completely unnoticable in an office with a few people. only the GPU under load can make the thing a bit louder.

my guess is the fuel will be in line with an early-2000's high end PC? i used to run an intellistation z-pro or whatever they were called. server-room-ready fan configuration. boy.... i went out and bought a noise-proofed cabinet to house it (and the octane). i preferred cooking the computers as opposed to ruining my hearing.

vishnu wrote: I honestly don't find the fans in my unmodified octane2 to be that loud, though it's entirely possible that the reason why is that my hearing has been irrevocably damaged by my lifelong loud rock 'n roll obsession...

must be. mine always sounded like a vacuum cleaner on a low power setting. and that was with fastfan=off...
fit for the server room perhaps but not the home office.

should have gotten me some of that rock'n roll obsession from the sounds of it.

vishnu wrote: Don't know about PA but in Maya there's always been the option to turn off everything but the view window and run the program entirely from the hotbox. In these days of megapixel LCDs there's not really much of a reason to do that anymore. Oh hotbox, we miss you so....

the default interface is very distracting in this app in particular. you're best off to hide everything you don't use constantly and rely on hotkeys, a custom menuset and your own selection of context/marking menu's for the bulk of the job really.
thankfully nowadays they have a more monochrome icon scheme going on and finally allow to display a shelf icon as plain text button ... instead of nicely drawn but confusing looking colorful blob variation 5000 from the maya of old.

never seen anybody use the hotbox much though, outside of demo videos. that thing looks like it would need some serious customization to become useful. can only take in so much text at once - arghl.