The collected works of WhizzMan

It's been quite a while since I've been online here, but I thought this might interest people here.

Today I have cleared out most of my sparc collection, that is, all the pizza boxes. Gone to the trash are:

About 5 SS20, 3 SS5, 1 SS10, 4 SS4, 2 U1 and 1U2 and one SS1000 gutted apart from plain main board and some have a PSU left
The main board of the SS1000 is pulled.

I now have frankensteined some remaining machines together and specs are:

SS1+ with unknown specs, I think it has 64M ram.
SS4 with audio board, CDROM, SS5 PSU and SCSI backplane (3 internal drives) and 160M ram.
SS5/110 with LEGO (24Bits gfx), 128M CDROM and 2 internal drives
SS20 with 2*Ross 150MHz, 384M ram, CG14 24bits GFX, CDROM and floppy. I think fast ethernet as well.
Ultra2 3DCreator with 2*400MHz UltrasparcII CPUs and 2 G ram and a DVD drive.

I still have to sort out about 5-10 lunchboxes, but not today, I'm done with sorting computers. I might move the SGI TP9100 stuff to the place that was previously occupied with the Sparcs but that is about it.

I may have some spare sparc parts left over that people could use. I don't think it's anything special, but this stuff is getting rare so I may hold the key to getting your systems running.

Luckily, I pulled those, but I suck at shipping.

Netherlands, close to Amsterdam.

so where do you live then?

Well, that might prove to be a problem regarding local pickup or using someone as a courier. I might get to shipping some sooner or later though. Don't feel ashamed to nudge me via PM or bother me on the IRCchannel.

Decided to toss the SS1000 main board. It's huge and I'll never use it. The CPU modules, RAM (only 8M sticks unfortunately) and the EPROMs are ripped off.

BUMP!

I am fairly certain I had a converted R7000 O2 amongst the "pile" of SGI I still had to sort, that was reported to stop working after about a year of use. Since a friend of mine has access to flow and reflow equipment, I tried to find the O2 in question and get the board out for reflow. I went through several rooms, gathered all the O2s I could find, tried booting them and one with a Rev. B CPU board didn't boot. I took that CPU board to the reflow guy and we there tried to pry the cooler off. Well, it came off, taking part of the CPU with it. I'm not certain it was in fact an RM7000/600, but it's broken now so I might as well put one on.

I'd like to get my hands on an RM7000/600 CPU and a PROM so I can get this board fixed and make certain it'll run properly. Does anyone happen to have spare CPUs or PROMs available, or access to "affordable" parts? I found a supplier for the CPU, but a single one will cost over $150 including shipping and I'll probably get import duties and fares over that. That will make the price a bit steep for "just an experiment" so I'm hoping for a friendlier alternative.

I have 4 or 5 O2s on the shelf. Since it'd be a "fun" project, the objective is to do it on the cheap. Spending this much money on an SGI would probably not be the most productive way to throw money at my SGI collection. I can think of other things for other machines that would be much nicer to have than spending over $150 on getting an O2 to run at 600MHz.

What would you want with SAS in a laptop? Sure, SAS and SATA Differ, but both have queueing now and the latest SATA transfer rates mean you won't be bottlenecked there. Second of all, what good would ECC be in a laptop? I could go for parity, but ECC? Why would you want to have power hungry 15K rpm drives in a laptop when you can have SSD if access time matters?

Ehm, what is falsely about that? Have they actually sold Steamboxes yet?

Trailer parks are developing markets as well.

RX7 are notorious for requiring a lot of maintenance on everything, not just the engine itself. The 1st gen MR2 is a nice car, but beware of water damage on the generator and parts in that area due to leakage from above. The 2nd gen is notorious for rusting in the sills and they never can be made "good" once that has happened, unless you are willing to spend much more than a good one will cost you.

In a laptop? I seriously have my doubts that the advertised MTBF will be valid if the drive is not mounted in a shock free, climate controlled environment.

15K RPM drives are so sensitive to vibration and shock that they can't even stand being shouted at , let alone being tossed all over the place. They also don't have G sensors that will park heads in the event of imminent shock like almost all current 2.5" SATA disks do. If you do an insane amount of writing, you can put a RAID1 SSD setup in them and just replace the drives that fail before you lose data. You can get over 500G SSDs for prices comparable to the same storage in 15K RPM now and you'd still be faster with the SSD in latency, transfer rate and IOPS. Just keep replacement drives on stock and you shouldn't have a problem with availability of your system.

15K RPM disks run much hotter than slower disks. This means they require much more air flow, which you will also have to provide. Sure, they'll run at the higher temperature, but the constant temperature changes will make the bearings wear much quicker and the magnetic density and track width will vary a lot more than in a temperature controlled environment.

The laptop I'm typing this from has "Mobile Workstation" on it. It's now 5 years old and apart from replacing the keyboard 3 times due to worn keys, It's basically still the same as when I bought it. Yes, I've upgraded it from a single 160G drive and a DVD burner to a 160G+500G and I've gone from 2G ram to the max of 4G. Other than that, it's still the same and I will probably replace the 160G drive with an Intel 330 240G SSD in the coming months. It would be able to run Windows8 just fine if it would have the EFI stuff MicroSoft requires. It would be able to run the latest OSX version just fine if Apple would allow it as well. The current offering from the vendor that is the "direct replacement" will come with 16G ram, a 1920*1050 IPS panel, a quadro GFX card and a 3rd gen intel quad core I5. Mine is a 15.4", but you can get a 17" version as well. Mine will do two external monitors using HDMI and VGA, or on a docking station you can use dual link DVI to drive a 2560*1500 or so monitor in combination with the laptop screen. The successor will drive dual display port screens at that resolution plus the laptop's own panel.

There are at least two comparable offerings in specs from major other vendors, so there is a market and there is competition in it. These are high spec portable computers that are using dedicated hardware designed for portable use. Look at what a portable workstation will be used for, what environmental conditions it will encounter and then pick the hardware that is most suitable for that. If you start putting a desktop computer or a server into a smaller enclosure, you don't get the best portable computer, because the components in it aren't designed for that and the philosophy of their design doesn't fit with portability.

What, the statement only has access to 1% of the steam library?

You are speculating about a product that has not yet been officially announced or sold. Steam will most likely make sure it will be a competitive offer before they will finalize the design and pricing. They are aware there are several large game console platforms out there already and they are also aware that they will have to offer enough interesting titles to make the hardware a success.

The only thing that is not speculation is "Linux". For all we know it could be an ARM SoC console when it comes to hardware. They will not offer the console until there are enough games for it to make it worth buying the console.

Windows is a POS that requires insane hardware to run your virus scanner and may have a few cycles left to run a game. It's not designed for dedicated game consoles and even MicroSoft doesn't run it on their own gaming platform. Just because a game runs on windows doesn't mean that playing the same game on a console can't be at least as much fun or a better gaming experience.

If you want to trash some product, please stick to facts only. There are plenty products that have plenty of facts available about them that deserve trashing. The Steam Console is not one of them (yet).

You might want to give an example where you think I'm not doing that if you want a serious answer to that question.