The collected works of Y888099 - Page 3

I don't if it happens due to Trump rules but it seems we are doomed into 'No-Go Zone' with USA purchases.

I will be in UK (Gloucestershire) for the end of the next week. Two weeks there, than back to Denmark.

My customer in UK needs a SCSI ram-disk of 64GB using DDR2-RAM, SCSI to sATA interface and other things
Say, no less than 600 USD + shipping. But it needs to pass the customs clearance, which will charge more money.

It's a complex device, the only one who produces it is located in California.
There are no resellers in EU. There will be customs fees, and also the postage fee is not cheap.

I have to inform him, to be prepared. The final bill will be a shock.

This kind of customer is more like a friend. Small business.
That's a bug life. USA

p.s.
good luck!

Raion-Fox wrote: A G4S at 1.5GHz ran circles around my P4 3GHz

OrangeBox, IBM PC, P4@3Ghz, 2Gb of ram


LittleCube, MacMini-G4, [email protected], 2Gb of ram


Both these machines used the same hard drive, external box. USB2.
Both with 2.6.39 linux kernel, also the userland was configured with the same profile.
They used the same version of gcc, binutils, and glibc.

So, mr.LittleCube/Hz is 2X mr.OrangeBox/Hz

johnnym wrote: Impressive result!

Also bought a cluster of mac-mini! Two are PPC-G4, two are x86-i2. They are stacked together as tower, with glue layer between them. A lan switch on the top, with five ports 10/100/1000 auto sensing, and they all join the lan through NFS.

PPC-nodes are useful and faster when you want to test 'stages' without the need of passing through qemu-ppc.

Unfortunately there is no mac-mini/MIPS

Very cool

You say " WUAAAAA TOOoooooooo COOoooooooooooooooL " in the first five minutes you watch the video, while the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings is taking a caffe-break, and your brain fails to regain consciousness but knows it must do it, otherwise it will be dead two days later.

So, at the end of the pipe of your thoughts, there is new incoming socket, and it's what your consciousness thinks - Typical "done because we can" project - Which is then distilled as rebuke: don't try it at home

A book about PCI. Hope to see the light out of the tunnel.

jirka wrote: Fossil Wrist PDA version 2.0 - a smartwatch that runs near full version of the Palm OS 4.0

MC68EZ328 cpu inside?

johnnym wrote: HP 9000 Model 712/80

I owned a 712*100Mhz/192MB of ram, it was good as X11 terminal, but with gentoo it took 15 weeks (24h/24) just to compile a minimal stage4

johnnym wrote: Sounds like a good burn-in test. If it doesn't went up in flames during 105 days of continuous operation, heat might not be a problem for the electronics of this machine

Yes, it was a burn-in test
I was curious, at the end I understood these 712 machines are slow, but affordable.
They can be used as server.

Before selling I had also bought a second NIC+Uart card, which uses a strange "Y" cable.
It was useful to control a logic analyzer made by HP.


p.s.
One of the problems I had recompiling stuff was the C++ compiler. If you want to recompile things like cmake, you have to deal with C++, which eats *a lot of ram*, and since the machine was limited to 192MB (180MB usable for the userspace), you have to use the swap. The problem was ... I allocated 2GB of swap on a slow hard drive. It was less than 10Mbyte/sec. It didn't help.

Still looking for one. Need more CPU power.
Let me know if you one one for sale.

The solution is: a couple of macmini-G4 stacked in a tower.
Well, here I have four units, two are intel-i2, two are-G4.
The whole satisfies all my personal and professional needs.

p.s.
MacMini-G4 is the best solution even if you want to experiment MorphOS.
Check it out: it's supported, and the license comes with a discount.

I use a personal wikipedia (MoinMoin, written in python) to track what I have in the laboratory, so I can access it through a browser.

Fields are like: { what is it { hw,sw,fw}? does it work?, which is the last working branch?, how much did it cost?, how much I was paid for it? did they pay me {yes, no, N/A as it's personal project}? when I started the project?, which project is it?, where is stuff located? Whom have I to contact (email,phone,address)?, notes if any? }

But, I care more on red lines ( it's not a personal project, still waiting for the money ).

jan-jaap wrote: The purpose of my inventory is not to know where things are. This should be obvious

Not so obvious if you travel a lot and you have parts hosted in different offices and warehouses!
For me, "where is it"? Is important, as well as the person I have to contact if I need parts shipped.

johnnym wrote: So why not use a directory structure like an inventory?

Some time ago (2011? ), I started a file system project, bTree-driven as it should be, but ... at some point I wanted to do a bit of research, so I started wondering why shouldn't I have to use multiple keys to point to an inode.

A tree is not a natural structure when you have do deal with some items which might have correlations.

Allowing correlation breaks the tree-shape of the information, so file systems don't allow them. But I wanted to see what could happen, so I applied some ideas to the engine, and tags were then allowed, so you can have relational items, and organize them into categories by the use of"tags".

A tag is a new actor, you have files with contain data and metadata, you have folders which contain files but only of those with the same mother node (classical concept of a classic folder), and you have tags which contain inode to files and folders (one, or many) from everywhere on the volume.

With a tree-based model you should have have multiple copies of the same information, or use "soft/hard link" (e.g. ln -s ... ) to point to the item (file or folder) you want to relate into a category, whereas the tag-design paradigm is to use tags to group items (files, folders) that can then be pulled into a view (workspace, or category); this allows you to have multiple view of the same information at once without the need to replicate them, and it's also more efficient to assign or reassign those tags and their related views on the fly. More efficient than having to deal with hard/soft links.

But, a tag makes the file system more fragile than a broken link, it's more hugger-mugger when things decide to break themselves, so ... of course there are problems with the consistency of the whole volume, and hey? Don't expect performances. Neither fix-tools, and be sure that a the first crash you will completely lose everything.

Not so good.

Btw, at the end of my research, I understood it's more useful for tasks like handling a library, like a collection of music, or ebooks, on your PDA, I mean when insert/delete events don't happen so frequently.

So, I am looking for a Cardbus uart card, based on 16550A/16950 chip.
I can't find on ebay uart cards without parts which protrude out of the pcmcia slot

I will take a picture of my mate's card to show what I mean.

Bah, based on what a friend of mine paid

• PCI Shoebox : 90 euro
• CAD-Duo PCI : 25 euro

I want to point out three things
1) the IBM firmware pre-initializes the PCI in the proper way, according to what the linux kernel is expcted to find
2) the IBM firmware passes the 'device tree' to the kernel, which is what modern kernels need to find
3) PPC64 is more supported than PPC32, especially for the PCI part

Conclusion: POWER5 and POWER6 machines are the ideal platform for linux.

spiroyster wrote: What you have just described here is pretty much a graph database.

sorry, I don't know graph databases, never used, never studied, I don't know their properties.

spiroyster wrote: One which focuses on the relationships between entities, rather than just the data itself.
Dynamic data model!

I don't get your point. "Data" is file's content, as well as file's metadata (access time, attributes {RWX RWX RWX}, owner, group, etc etc). Nothing different from a classic UNIX filesystem; I mean it's just a fs with tags, which allows items to be grouped within or without the the constraints of having the same mother node.

if you don't remove this constrain, you obtain a classic tree, with folders and files.

Relaxing one degree of freedom you obtain tags; basically a tag is like a folder (and they have a lot of routines in common), but it can points to an item { file, folder } n-degrees deeper in the tree hierarchy.

A tag can virtually groups other tags, including itself, but this might potentially cause endless disasters because in this case it adds itself twice in the entry block like a closed loop (deadlock). So, I removed this possibility: a tag can point to other tags, but it can't point to itself.

Shiunbird wrote: However, on point 1, I'm not entirely sure of this. I have problems with graphic drivers that should in theory work with Linux. After a lot of digging out, it seems that the matrox drivers expect a different memory address and I'm not sure that's related to the way PCI initializes. It runs well with framebuffer.

well, with IBM OF ... at least you won't see this



For two reasons

• IBM moved the PCI stuff into PCI64, so if you have a 64bit IBM machine you are already aligned
• IBM released devicetree configurations for their machines (it's "in-Trunk", a git-term which means you can find them in linux kernel source, somewere), so both the firmware and the kernel shouldn't have problems in probing since things are (should be?) already properly described

In my case .. I am on a 32bit machine, dead since 2.6.25, with a strange DMA engine on where I need to invalidate data cache to enforce coherency. And it uses an old firmware (uboot v1.2 ~ 2008) which neither understand nor provides support for dts blob.

It's unaligned with modern kernels, which expect some job done by the firmware, e.g. uboot doesn't initialize the PCI, and it doesn't understand the dts description encoded into the kernel, so you see Quirks

Quirks means ... you have a problem with PCI_IO, there is a conflict with address translation, things are NOT correctly pre-initialized by the firmware (OF is much more advanced, especially in PCI-auto-remapping), and the kernel is NOT able to handle them, resulting a failure.

To solve it, I had to add a boot wrapper between the bootloader and the kernel: it does the properly initialization, it understands the device tree, it passes the information to the kernel, making it happy. So it can bootstrap without Quirks.

Video boards like Ati Radeon, Voodoo3-4-5, use both PCI_IO and PCI_MEM. Before fixing the Quirks problem I was using Matrox M1 (MGA first generation), which is PCI_MEM only, therefore it only requires a windows in the PCI memory

and here it is


4Mbyte mapped in the PCI_MEM space without a problem!

But I have a lot of issues with vgaarb, as some "legacy" VGA devices implemented on PCI typically have the same hard-decoded addresses as they did on ISA. When multiple PCI devices are accessed at same time they need some kind of coordination.

I don't need confb (text console, directly offered by kernel), therefore I simply removed this module, enjoying a pure framebuffer on which I can attach (/dev/fb0, in userspace) an homemade directfb-vt200-terminal.

It works with less problems, even if it's a bit slower, but not so bad.

Shiunbird wrote: This affects Power Macs as well.

You could try to reprogram the Matrox's bios into OF-BIOS. I know there are Matrox with PC-bios, and Matrox with OF-bios. Some hardware, different firmware. It might help.

Shiunbird wrote: 3D acceleration.

3D acceleration, as well as 2D acceleration, are X11's matter, and they go more complex. They involve DRI and DRM. Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0) and higher DRI support. They both need kernel support as well as X11 drivers support

From my point of view, they are "userspace modules", /usr/lib/xorg/modules/*, therefore I handle them as "catalyst" problems if any. It's not kernel matter, I mean, once you have provided the proper kernel support.

Also, I don't know if Debian uses "fbdev" or a dedicated framebuffer, e.g. VIDEO="mga, ati, stl1, ...."

This is what I am using in a product I am developing. It's an X11-terminal made around an embedded CPU, PowerPC405GP, attached to a MGA video card. There is also an fpga for other PCI stuff, but it doesn't matter


/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/43-graphic-card.conf





p.s.
I am not planning to add a video card to my C3600 workstation, it's already happy without it and I don't want to put Xorg stuff on the harddirve (because it costs a lot of time and effort with catalyst. HPPA is ... experimental)

So, I'd prefer to use a dedicated X11-term, which can be a laptop loaded with MobaXterm (you can download a free copy, you can buy a full featured commercial version for 60 euro). The HP box is more happy of being a server, and I am more happy if I can put my effort only on one machine (e.g. the PowerPC405GP) instead of supporting X11 everywhere.

You might consider to do the same: just assure you have a good lan connectivity (100Mbps), and no bottleneck in the network.

Oh, about tektronix and HP envizex xterminals: as far as I experimented, they are all pseudocolor (except NCD900 which costs a leg and an arm, plus an eye of your head), you can used them but only if you can forget gtk, kde, qt. They work good only with motif.

OldBlueBear wrote: duel

is it slang? humor?

In my head, "duel" sounds like a contest with deadly weapons arranged between two people in order to settle a point of honor.

OldBlueBear wrote: R14K@600Mhz

Yup, expensive and rare.
Say no less than 400 euro for a 2xR14K@600Mhz.

Old gold days ... gone .... (a bit of nostalgia) with SGI-MIPS is not like with m68k classic (Apple? Atari? Amiga?) where you can remove a 68000 DIP CPU, and replace it with a 68010, or with an accelerator board (e.g. MTEC 68030). Unfortunately CPUs in the MIPS family are different beasts which vary the Vcore and pinout even between two close generation.

s0ke wrote: Im getting out of the everything scene. Basically trying to widdle everything down to just a laptop

Welcome to the desert truth of reality: switching On and Off an old SGI machine is funny for the first sixty six minutes and six seconds. Then ... when you realize there is no good software ... it becomes boring, like the electricity bill you have to pay (especially for those who own 1-Kwatt machines, Onyx2?), and space wasted by an object which is less useful than a brick to stop the door.

But collectors see it differently. They don't need to find software, their purpose is just *to own* the last winter-heater. I suppose because in winter and autumn it's so cold and rainy outside, where they live.

So we have two kind of minds: purpose-driven, and collectors(1).

Supposing you are a purpose-driven, I suppose your laptop comes with more useful software. Ain't it? It was the same for me: sold my SGI for the same reason!


(1) well, I am also a collector, in a different way. I mean I prefer collecting spores and mushrooms. Dead organic matter useful for biological purposes, instead of dead metals which are only useful to decorate the attic.

dexter1 wrote: If you want to discuss his decision, PM him or start a thread somewhere in everything else.

So, in this forum you have to send PM to keep things private, isn't odds you have to keep discussion private?
For sure, I don't want to open a topic to discuss anything regarding a simple comment. It will be a waste of time like talking about linux. Therefore once again, it was the last occasion lost to have a good mini-discussion, born accidentally , which should have handled with a few comments.

Go on this way and you will see how fast people will leave the whole forum, which frankly, already looks like a desert.

The R12000 has 600 IO-pins and uses 2.3 volts.
The R14000 has 527 IO-pins and uses 1.5 volts

This Is exactly what I meant in my previous post, where I wrote

Unfortunately CPUs in the MIPS family are different beasts which vary the Vcore and pinout even between two close generation.

For me it's a noGo.

I'm still fighting with EagleCad, trying to design the footprint of a molex-connector for a slimfilm keyboard

I have already soldered the original connector, and measured it, so the component library is 90% ready, but I still have no idea of the part number, and it seems there are too many unused pins, which is odd.

It's a 15x18 matrix, on two connectors with a pitch of 1mm, why the connecotor B uses just 14 of 18 pins? We have 2 pins used for the Capslk's led, 12 pins used for the Key-matrix.

Why didn't the use two connectors of 15 pins each?

Does it make sense? I have already reversed the keyboard map, it seems all the keys are present, including meta keys (arrows, shift, option, ctrl, enter, etc), but I have the feeling there is still something missing.

I think it will take me busy for a while

Imagine you have a deadline, you are under pressure, you are in a rush to modify your pcb.
So you start your EDA and then this happens...



The above picture comes form internet, so now I know it also happened to other users, as it happened yesterday to me.

It's funny how things go in circle. In 80s there were timeSharing mainframes, and it was the primary reason people in companies jumped on PCs. Personal Computers (Personal -> individual) allowed individuals to gain control over their own data. So, they were no longer held hostage by their data being in silos owned by other companies.

So, why on the why Autodesk is now promoting cloud services? Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Autodesk is wrong in her opinion if she believes *users* haven't learnt the lesson, including reasons to move from EagleCAD, whose license is unacceptable, to new CAD programs (gEAD and DipTrace) and figure out how to convert existing designs into new-CAD formats.

I am filling a pro/con list, to decide if to buy/not a better EDA-workstation.

I've been using Protel 99 SE for years, and to me, there isn't a big difference between Protel 99 and Altium R14, besides the neaely added features from DXP2004, but If one like me doesn't do high speed design (usb2-3, epci, etc) , and just need a CAD tool (without EDA-like smartness), then 99SE should suffice, though it may have a hard time running on newer computers.

I know it runs on WinXP, never tried Win10, I know it crashes on Win7. That's bug life.

Btw, I have recently found a second-hands workstation with OrCAD v10 (full license, full features) installed. Asking to Virtuoso users (like my colleague), he said that if Cadence releases something, it will work, though you need to know exactly how it works before using it as Cadence is not designing tools for beginners.

So, what next? If I will put the money (1.5K euro/IBM Xeon Machine/1 host-seat license) into the new purchase, I would expect OrCAD to be best tool for veterans, and hell for beginners, but I won't exclude it will also be a bloody hell for people with rusty knowledge.

Hard decision

guardian452 wrote: I've been using eagle forever, finally upgraded to autodesk version late last year. Worth it.

Here I have

• EagleCAD v5.11.0, student perpetual license, node-locked to my laptop
• EagleCAD v6.06.0, professional perpetual license, node-locked to my laptop

As individual student designer, I created just a few projects, including my thesis, which can be moved to KiCAD in a two working days (or during a weekend?) and nobody cares if it will takes longer, but as person who works freelance ... well, I have deadlines and there are some 1.2GB of libraries with my own footprints / packages and projects made for my customers. So, in this case this story has a 'legacy' component that needs to be considered if I decide to move to another CAD.

Perpetual means never ending or changing, but with Autodesk, starting from Eagle-v8, the license is now subjected to expire, and a few services are offered as cloud-services, which means you MUST stay connected to a remote server if you want to operate. This is not acceptable when I need to work inside bunkers, or places where there is no internet connections.

Even if I do my best, it's unacceptable.

guardian452 wrote: I've tried a few others and they all suck IMO. Their salesmen suck too.

Have you tried DipTrace?
I am impressed by their quality, and also the price list seems interesting.
(1.5K euro per professional license)

Bonus: with DipTrace you can import DXF files from AutoCad and it helps a lot when you have to design your own complex footprints/packages, e.g. Ampx connectors, typically used in avionics.

Designing them on EagleCADv6's library editor is a bloody hell, frustrating a not so productive

guardian452 wrote: I don't know orcad very well but building your own footprints/packages tends to be a pita no matter what you are using.

Yup, OrCad v10 comes with a similar DXF-import feature, which is a bonus for me.

guardian452 wrote: I've considered altium

I have a node locked Altium-v14 machine, my second laptop, IBM Thinkpad X61S. Bought when I went to Shenzhen (China). I can't move the software to a different machine, and the LCD is too small for me, also the computer-power is not so good as it's an intel dual core i2 @ 1.6Ghz, limited to 2GB of ram, and with Window XP/32 under the hood.

I bought it to learn Altium, whose price list is in order of n*K euro.

The Chinese latptop is also loaded with a full license version of Protel 99. Found it on the hard drive D: as rescue plus license, probably the previous owner unistalled it when he/she decided to move to Alitium. It's node locked, so I can only re-install it on the Chinese laptop, btw I have to say it runs better on the limited hardware where it's loaded. Unfortunately I don't have the DXF module.

Protel and Altium also offer module to handle HDL, and they both handle hierarchically, so you can embed your HDL (hardware description language) as black-box module, and it goes so damn productive.


p.s.
can I shoot the monkey?

I finally get the time to take a picture. As you can see modern pcmcia-uart are longer, and they end with an RJ45 connector, which is also taller than the the pcmcia slot itself.

I can't use them, I need smaller slim pcmcia-uart adapter, with smaller connector. Borrowed for courtesy of my colleague, her adapter is perfect for my needs, even it uses a custom cable.

guardian452 wrote: don't work in a bunker without a signal

oh, about this, it's really funny what happens when I have to go to some customers who claim to be in business with aerospace, defence and security. To enter, you have to pass the check-in, as well as the check-out when you want to go home. It implies two or five cops in mimetic suit who 'check' you, looking for devices like smartphone, mp3 player, as everything with a storage-device is banned as they suppose you could be a spy. So, you'd better (for your own safety) declare what you have, and leave devices in their custody.

Your laptop, which of course has an hard drive, must have a signed approval-pass with a bar-code attached to their archive. Your hard drive must have a list of its contents, and it's subject to randomly control during both the check-in or check-out. Everything is registered, who you are, where you live, how can they catch you if you something goes wrong.

They are paranoid about information stolen. You cannot use any encrypted volume. It's banned. Also linux,freeBSD are not the welcome, not approved, therefore banned. Ironically Windows XP/32 (which is now deprecated from Microsoft support, they don't care) is approved as well as SunOS

And when you finally enter, you are disconnected from internet, you must stay unplugged, disconnected. You can only (but you need an approval pass) use the local network, which connects you only to their minor-server (called "Minos", like the one in Greek mythology), but only with a user-level. Mine is 'guest level', it means my plastic-pass can just open the door of the toilet (and only the one at the ground floor), and when I use my-pass to login to the lab I can't do anything more advanced than using ftp to get/put files to his guest folder.

Every attempt to use a GPRS/radio-link is severely punished. Every attempt to access the laboratory server is logged, you are under Snort, and if they found something strange with your mac-address (which is also registered during the check-in) you will be kicked faster than you can ran. There are also Gitters and Jammer radio machines with rods and grids, mainly used to -1- detect all the in-coming/out-coming radio signals (not approved, therefore banned), -2- locate where the signals comes from, -3- disturb the signal, and -4- and alert cops.

It's cured by defense, they are on the third floor of the building, where they develop radars. Everything is full of these kind of grids, so they have eyes, hears, microphones, and antennas everywhere.

So, you are really unplugged, inside a bunker. No chance to escape, no chance to access an external cloud, but you can really try to feel like an inmate

My customer contact is a she. Business lady, strict as a piece of iron. Never seen a smile, and people around her say "yes, madam". Never heard a "no", and when she talks for more than 2 minutes, people appears frightened

Funny job, even if I rarely need to physically go to this kind of customer, sometimes I happen to stay there for a couple of weeks.

May be the nicest machine which can carry MorphOS with you when you travel

SiliconClassics wrote: one of the nicest laptops Apple ever produced

but, N'-ah, the keyboard's connector is to high-density, an hell if you want to hack it, as well as the LCD's connector, and the frame is made by aluminium which is difficult to be modified as you neither paint it nor glue it.

From this point of view it's not nice. As far as I have experimented, the best ever is the last PowerBookG3! Made of plastic, with friendlier connectors. Not a piece of cake, but at least your reaction to hacking's resistance (and of course its resistance is futile) doesn't range from wild enthusiasm to outright belligerence

(yup, I am running a super secret project)

MorphOS supported graphics cards:

With 3d hardware acceleration:
ATI Radeon 8500 LE (R200)
ATI Radeon 8500 (R200)
ATI Radeon 9000 (RV250)
ATI Radeon 9000 Pro (RV250)
ATI Radeon 9100 (R200)
ATI Radeon 9100 LE (R200)
ATI Radeon 9200 SE (RV280)
ATI Radeon 9200 (RV280)
ATI Radeon 9200 Pro (RV280)
ATI Radeon 9250 (RV280)
ATI Radeon 9550 Mobility (no W3D)
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (no W3D)
ATI Radeon 9650 (no W3D)
ATI Radeon 9600 XT (no W3D)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (no W3D)
ATI Radeon 9800 (no W3D)
ATI Radeon 9800 XT (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X600 XT (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X800 XT / Pro (R420) (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X1300 (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X1300 Pro (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X1550 (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X1600 (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X1600 Pro (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X1800 (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X1900 GT (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X1950 XT (no W3D)
ATI Radeon X1950 Pro (no W3D)
ATI FireGL X3 (R420) (no W3D)

With limited 3d hardware acceleration (W3D legacy software only):
3DFX Voodoo3 2000 (Avenger)
3DFX Voodoo3 3000 (Avenger)
3DFX Voodoo3 3500 (Avenger)
3DFX Voodoo4 4500 (Napalm)
3DFX Voodoo5 5500 (Napalm)
ATI Radeon 7000VE (RV100)
ATI Radeon 7200 (R100)
ATI Radeon 7500 (RV200)

Without 3d hardware acceleration:
AMD Radeon HD 2400
AMD Radeon HD 3450
AMD Radeon HD 4350
AMD Radeon HD 4550
AMD Radeon HD 4650
AMD Radeon HD 5450
AMD Radeon HD 6450
AMD Radeon HD 6570
AMD Radeon HD 7570
ATI Rage128 Pro
3D Labs / Texas Instruments Permedia2
3D Labs / Texas Instruments Permedia2v
Silicon Motion SM502
SiS 300 / 305
SiS 315
SiS 6326
XGI Volari V3XT
XGI Volari V5
XGI Volari V5XT
XGI Volari V8 (Ultra)

Apple PowerBook G4 @ 867Mhz, 12 inch, features NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go graphics with 32 MB of VRAM: noGo
Apple PowerBook G4 @ 1Ghz, 12 inch, features NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 graphics with 32 MB of VRAM: noGo
Apple PowerBook G4 @ 1.33Ghz, 12 inch, features NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 graphics with 64MB of VRAM: noGo
Apple PowerBook G4 @ 1.67Ghz, 15 inch , features ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics with 128 MB of VRAM: BinGo!

Nvidia still unsupported. Hope it will be one day.

Yesterday my -next-door-girl- asked me to steal a fridge's compressor with the idea of converting it into an airbrush machine to paint skulls. Today she is painting a lot of skulls and snakes in bloody true colors, even if the background looks dead metal.

I am observing her work sitting in an angle of her lab. The way she puts her long fingers on the airbrush-gun makes in my mind the picture of a witch in the wood preparing some kind of poison spell.

uunix wrote: Does she know you are watching her?

I believe she likes to be watched. I am not sure, but she doesn't say me to go away, and when she paints anatomic parts, I noticed the way she paints becomes more sensual when I stay. Perhaps she needs to be observed as ego burst, or as inspiration.

I still don't know her very well, I see her only during the weekends. Her eyes are not the warm kind of eyes who shine, they are blue ice, and even her face expression is deceiving which makes it difficult to understand what comes into her mind when she watches at you, and she is not talkative, so all I can catch is an encrypted body language from a stranger eccentric artistic, and it doesn't help.

But curiosity never vanishes in mysterious circumstances. It grows. So I like watching her, like she was the artwork of a
mysterious artist to be demystified.

Strange sex appeal, I have to confess. Especially when she plays with the air-brush gun and I am not sure about who observes whom. Some part of the surface on where she paints are like a mirror, so she probably looks at me. I feel observed. Her eyes on me, even if I can see them directly.

So, I am more freaking bored than a fish in its water ball. I have to prepare a PCI card for a customer, which means design it on Altium, hot-air solder a Spartan fpga, prepare the interface, blablablabla.

From the office window I see a beautiful swimming pool full of people who take fresh water and sun. Lucky they are! Including those two lifeguard blond girls in red swimsuit.

What is actually annoying is ... I am still waiting for customer's constraints, they have meeting time, and meeting time, and meeting time, and I am still waiting for their decision, I can't proced without them, and I can't leave the office.

I am going to have my lunch time (1 hour and half) to the swimming pool. As my latest purchase I have ordered three-days-tickets (with 2% of discount), since I suspect they will take a lot of time (say until Tuesday) to take a decision and to provide me inputs.

Swimming pool time

I came across opinions on the future of EagleCAD. Interesting alternatives.

OldBlueBear wrote: I am searching for Octane 2 Hardware schematics
but finding nothing so far on the web

And don't you guess why?

OldBlueBear wrote: The sort of thing required to trace signals with a DVM pin to pin (cold system) or with a scope or logic analyzer, classic hardware support gen.

What is the purpose, btw?

uunix wrote: OCTANE 3 4

LOL

Which is supposed to be based on the last i9 by intel? (fresh news, it's now available)



In the meanwhile I am observing how damn complex (a professional EDA cad like) Altium goes when you design a motherboard. From my point of view, everything runs of out control as soon as you need more than six layers.

SGI-mobos have twelve levels.

So, even reverse engineering is not a piece of cake, and it is very time consuming. It's one of the reasons why we don't have hardware schematics and detailed documentation.

Include what?

I emailed a couple of guys who works for Apple-USA (found their email-addresses included within linux sources), asking them for a few hardware and firmware details on a more than *fifteen years old* laptop. Copyright usually expires after ten years, so my question was formally viable, indeed they replied ... that ... they can't reply on this kind of question, so you are all alone, flesh and bones, with what is included within (linux? open-)sources, and this is the only gift you will get from Apple.

SGI guys have never replied to my emails, I am still confident ... some day ... I will find something close to my door, like a message in the bottle, ground shipped to escape internal badass-cops controls.

So, back to Apple-story, I spent a couple of weeks, an hour per day, back from my job, to reverse the keyboard's map, the pad-chip and its protocol.

At the end, I throw my whole laptop away, as reversing such a things is destructive, but it's fine for me since I wanted to develop my own adapter.


Preliminary

Just to say - how long -, and - how much - effort you have to invest even in simple things

OldBlueBear wrote: if you look at normal MTBF

The 'Mean time between failures' is usually referred to continuous working condition, so the probability that 'machine which has been working for a certain amount of time 24h/24 might have a failure' is assumed to be quantity X is a 'time-to-failure' described by the Weibull distribution which gives a distribution for which the failure rate is proportional to a power of time, and such a probability is virtually equal to 1.0 (certain event, a failure is going to happen soon, if it hasn't already happened) if the process time has elapsed the Tao constant by a confidence factor.

X: failure
p(X) = probability of failure
if process-time > K * Tao then p(X) =1, X: is a certain event

K is confidence factor, which depends on your experience about the process. You can calculate Tao, as well as the equivalent Tao of a capacitor discharge, which is also equal to the first law of Newton which describes how a body becomes cold (first approximation of the differential Heat equation).

They have all in common the characteristic of being an exponential function.

So you can invert the equation with a logarithm, and this gives you the predicted failure time.

So what?

Can you replace the hardware? Yes.
Do you need any detailed documentation (schematic) to do so? No, you just a good soul who sells you the part for a decent price.

Can you redesign the hardware with modern components? No, unless you are a company like SGI, or an hardware guru.

Can you simulate the whole SGI machine on a PC? Well ... might be ... a project like this is currently on the way, aiming for the emulation of a (simpler than Octane) IP22-Indy. Still not completed. Fingers crossed.

The FSCK factor can never be wrong, as we can talk as long as we want, the the Entropy grows up anyway

Fellows on Google believe in 'Saint Weibull' and they take it seriouly as it was a prediction from their own personal oracle! They have mastered the confidence factor, so when the K * Tay says it's time to replace a machine, they do so, even if the machine is still (apparently?) in working condition.

I say 'apparently' because it's a mathematical model of the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of where p(X) is always zero, as the assumption that things never go broken. So, from the point of view of Saint Weibull, when K * Tao has passed then ... it's like talking about a dead iron walking on the tiptoes on the border of the collapse. The Google business model is based on this, and it assumes it's a good description, so they replace their hardware according to the predicted failure-time before a real failure happens, and they are happy as this means 'zero stop time' for their servers.

vishnu wrote: At my place of employ we use OrCAD

v10?

At the end, I bought the workstation, so I now can learn OrCAD. It costed me a lot of money, but the hardware is very fast, stable, and it comes with a full license.

vishnu wrote: LT Spice

I put 500 euro in Tina-v8. It's the best spice ever.
LT Spice comes from a limited version of it.



p.s.
I am going to buy this routing software, you can export the netlist from OrCAD and import into Electra, and this gives you more power under your finger tips.

Elf wrote: Supposedly they have a ~20 yr lifetime from when written.

Bah, when I worked with Beckman (a German company) they sent me on a far oil-platform because one of their equipment was offline. Once there, I found a metallic tube whose thickness make you think it can survive an atomic bomb (10Kg of metal with a battery). It took a quarter of hour to unmount it, just to access the electronic, and once done, I found an old MC68HC11-A in DIP48 package attached to a latch attached to 32Kbyte of static-ram and 32Kbyte of UV-ROM. Typical '80-90s design. There were of course other circuits around, including a RS485 module on the bottom of the tube, in current loop.

The real reason I was there: to replace the equipment with a new modern one, based on ARM-chip. So, I removed everything, and I installed the new equipment. Then I repeated the procedure for all other equipment-points, at the end of the week everything got updated. So I went back home.

You say ~20 yr lifetime from when written, I say the apparently-dead-node has pumped a lot of oil in its life. The label on the EPROM says "Beckman, 1989".

2016 - 1989 = 27 years old equipment. I replaced twenty one nodes, only one of twenty one was defective in a windows of 27 years! Awesome! The MTBF prediction was wrong by seven years.

I took all the old PCBs back with me, and I had a chance to investigate the defective one once I got to my hotel. Well do you guess where was the failure?

I thought the PSU. Checked, It was not
I thought the UV-ROM. Checked, It was not
I thought the RAM. Checked, It was not
I thought the CPU. Checked, It was not

At the end the node was offline because a capacitor on the RS485 module had decided to die (thanks god without releasing acid on the pcb). So everything was alive, but unable to communicate.

Including mbed

Who on the planet can accept to put his/her personal sources on a remote toolchain builder?
They say, as 'bonus', the toolchain is always updated so you don't need to waste your time with it.