I wrote:
With my SGIs...
I dabble, I've built a little software like ThisForth,
swi-prolog
, and
Hercules mainframe emulator
, played with lots and lots of nekoware (thanks contributors), I dabble in animation with lightwave, SoftImnage, Shake, Smoke, Flame, Blender, and other CG tools, run a a mediawiki (neko PHP and neko Postgres) and use them as huge heaters and to astound visitors touring the facility with the heat, noise, and blinking lights. When stuff builds cleanly its fun to throw 16 CPUs and 16Gb RAM at a build.. But even my desktop at work has 16Gb RAM (and two thunderbolt ports) these day... I use them for reliving the glory days when UNIX ruled and I dreamed of having access to stuff like this, even the SGIs I used at university or in construction of a military flight simulator were never as powerful as the SGIs I have now.
I dabble in
Stereographics
with Crystal Eyes Shutter glasses, and mess about with
spaceballs
.
Another use is to capture
screenshots
as I update the
wiki
..
I think I have a shorter answer. I use my SGIs as an unbounded creative outlet, a cathartic release from the stresses and strains of work (
1a
) and fighting with the publisher/editors on my programming book.
Nuke wrote:
I agree with much of this. They really need to stop penalizing students for getting ahead. And if I go to college, I don't think I'll learn anything, just because of what I've seen.
Get a piece of paper son, you'll need it in the real world. Even if you don't learn anything. Also I had a lecturer say you almost know more about this subject than I do, during one 3rd subject. Questions in class were always of the format "Can anyone else think of how or why ... " conversations in class were almost private conversations with the rest of the class struggling to try to keep up with why my answer was correct but the more optional or elegant way was .. The first (two week) assignment, I handed it in the next day after it was given nicely typeset in LaTeX, while the rest of the class was lining up to complain about how hard the assignment was. I got 100% for that one and the next few assignment were briefly glanced at, 100% written on it and given back to me straight away. I assure you I never felt penalized for getting ahead, quite the opposite.
On the topic of students. I went through university with some straight-"A" students who could quote directly anything in the course notes or text book but give them a real world practical topic and they were just clueless... I also knew other students who got average to better than average grades but had the ability to with little more than a paper clip and a few lines of anything from perl to assembler hack something together had power gloves and VR goggles in their dorm room, etc. Guess which ones got plush jobs and fast track to management.
I've talked with a well paid MSc in computer science who have never held a soldering iron or seen anything below the Java JVM and said as much.
nuke wrote:
In any case, he never got paid, so he doesn't matter.
Fscking people over is very very uncool, no matter what the reason. One day you'll piss off someone who does something like deleting the firmware off the routers the day they leave and wait for your next network issue and someone to reboot the routers months after they have left... or worse. What goes around comes around.
R.
1a
. For the next few months I am doing poker machine stuff in C/C++, OpenGL on Linux. It is far less glamourous than you think.. After a fews days debugging/testing, I really can't understand how people would actually put money in those machines just to sit there for hours but I have been through the more remote parts of Nevada and even the PX'es on base have poker machines with people sitting there for hours.
I see another one maybe every week or so.
J5600, 2 x Mac, 3 x SUN, Alpha DS20E, Alpha 800 5/550, 3 x RS/6000, Amiga 4000 VideoToaster, Amiga4000 -030, 733MHz Sam440 AmigaOS 4.1 update 1. Tandem Himalaya S-Series Nonstop S72000 ServerNet.
oh wow.. what a step forward". If crashing JVMs is not a problem explain products like Azul systems ZingJVM (also junk, IMHO).
