The collected works of bluecode - Page 2

As was mentioned in another thread in the IBM section I write systems software in assembler for IBM mainframes. Yeah they still exist, they still work great, they still cost tons of money and we still do everything in assembler. But business is getting tight, like everything else. I've worked on this platform all my career and I still love it.

That's kind of cool in a train-wreck sort of way. But it's also really offensive

Email Lemote directly. If Tekmote doesn't want to sell you something why argue with them about it? Their prices are outrageous anyway.
What are you going to run on it? Miod said OpenBSD isn't ready. And isn't OpenBSD the reason anybody would buy a Loongson?

Plenty of people (especially on this board!) are running older RISC workstations and servers. What OS are heavy? Solaris still runs great on 10 year old hardware and you don't ever have to boot it except once in ten years. OpenBSD runs on tons of platforms and so do the other BSD. None of the BSD are heavy.

You're running a top of the line CPU from 2006 with what, Windows? What do you expect then? WinTel is about forcing you to upgrade to have tolerable performance. Dump the WinTel crap and run what you like. Who's holding a gun to your head? Loongson isn't the answer if you want a fast workstation. They make great little servers and ok development boxes but they're no Origin 350. But if people don't like WinTel and keep buying it, the arms race will never end. If you look around and ask you'll find something that meets your needs.

Back on topic, the boxes coming out of Lemote are good boxes and good values. I don't know how long they will last but I do know the engineering is holding up. I've kept mine going for a week straight building OpenBSD from source. It doesn't take a week, but I did the builds multiple times to see what the box was made of and afaiac it passed with flying colors. It didn't catch on fire or heat up my office and it doesn't give me a headache because it's nearly silent, and it doesn't break the bank because it uses almost no electricity. The little thing just goes and works. My experience with Chinese products has not been very good, especially not their hardware (as in screws, bolts, tools, etc.) but I am very happy with the quality and performance and price point of this Lemote box. I don't like laptops so I didn't buy one, but you could get opinions from people who did and see what they think also. Rather than generalizations even though they might be mostly correct (after all, they're generalizations! ) there are always exceptions. Anything that gives me a viable choice over WinTel is A Good Thing . I have mostly old Sun/SPARC hardware because of that and it is very nice to see something new being made that isn't Intel, isn't expected to run Windows, and is well built and priced fairly. I'm hoping to see more Lemote export hardware and more companies getting a variety of useful green hardware out there. This is an excellent start.

In the immortal words of Chico Escuela:

"In base-ball… Base-ball been berry, berry good to me! Thank you berry much. Thank you. Thank you berry much. Hane? Thank you, Hane.”

--
It had to be said.

Man you guys are spoiled. If I had an Alpha box it would be running VMS. I can't imagine having so much Alpha hardware around that I would ever be willing to abuse even one junker with Windows!

Now that UEFI is shipping and you're going to need permission from WinTel to run anything but Windows 8 on your brand new WinTel or WinARM box, this http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/11/26/2016228/is-intel-planning-to-kill-enthusiast-pcs is nailing the coffin shut.

This was posted yesterday on the reg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/26 ... c_preview/

Lemote is not sitting still. Lots of MIPS goodness ahead.

Maybe for now, but we can expect that to silently disappear. And even now it not trivial according to what the guy on Distrowatch said about his recent laptop buy.

"Don't be so gullible, McFly!" The handwriting is on the wall.

What is DSG?

Thanks. I only buy manual transmission vehicles for that and other reasons.

There are already servers and supercomputers built on their previous chips. These guys are serious and they're invested in this big-time.



They have their own Debian-based distro and have been committing many patches to the Linux kernel. OpenBSD runs on it (of course!) and some people have said NetBSD and FreeBSD will run on it also.
The box pictured in your link is the previous version, the newer ones have the switches and jacks rearranged and a micro serial port on the front and they did away with the garish http://www.lemote.com lettering.

What is good in that last picture is it shows you the size of the box compared to a keyboard. That is a LOT of 800MHz MIPS III (64 bit) goodness in a tiny package. 512M of RAM, 160GB sata HD. Amazing little box. Later models also have a much smaller fan and don't use the copper plate. From what I read they decreased the power dissipation too and they now run about 12W.

That was a Saturday Night Live skit. If nothing else my post should bump your thread. Just trying to help

The Redbook here http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4078.pdf talks about the audio adapter as in it says it exists, but it doesn't give any details how to use it.

Could you actually hear anything over the fan roar if you could get it to work? Maybe that's why there's no volume control

Edit: I'm trying to find some relevant links. This isn't my area, but IBM *always* documents everything. It has to be somewhere.

http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v ... bility.htm

Nice Shovel, Recondas. Looks like a nice chop too. What all do you have there?

"Friends don't let friends let Windows touch real hardware." It's just offensive. From a practical angle, Windows is hardly noted for stability and running anything under it is clearly A Bad Thing



There are always certain people who like to play internet lawyers and create FUD. Lucky for me I have six lawyers in my family. I put the fudmeisters on ignore so I don't even see the idiotic comments after the first time. Good forum feature btw

Sorry I didn't update this thread until now. I was going to use the capture utility somebody pointed me to in this thread but my installed system was big enough to just go over the biggest USB drive I have, so I couldn't actually try it. Disappointing. The system is now installed in VirtualBox where it doesn't have to take up much space or monopolize perfectly good crappy hardware.

Yeah we know it doesn't run on PCs. But there are a few dozen billion lines elsewhere. The guys writing it don't get paid much but it beats being a web developer.

I don't know it any more but I used to use it a little. You need a special keyboard for it so if you don't have one you get bored quickly. After I left the school where they were set up for I haven't seen it since. It's a pretty neat language, and very old. I understand actuaries still use it but I don't know who else does. I can see where it would be good for CAD since it has operators for matrix and vector operations but now pretty much anybody who needs that stuff just calls a library.

It's a nice language for doing quick math stuff sort of like Perl or Tcl are for writing quick utility scripts. APL makes Perl look verbose

The idea of major financial systems running on APL is a bit scary.

I just did a new install in vbox and then then used Windows "user settings and files transfer wizard". It is far from perfect but at least it got the email set up properly. Without passworss though, idiots! It doesn't appear to save almost any app, but the person this is for didn't need all the crap on the system anyway so now the system is smaller and has only what's needed.

For moving the system as is, the tool suggested by somebody in this thread is the first thing to try if you have a big enough USB drive. You won't know how much USB drive you need until you run it. The other thing I don't like about that tool is it doesn't seem to let you resize your system. For me the system was installed on a whole drive but needed actually only a small fraction of that. I was too busy and lazy to go burn a gparted live CD but that would have been another thing that probably could have helped me at least see if the tool worked. Since I want Windows totally out of existence I didn't have the patience to run down every possible alternative. For me the best alternative is no Windows at all and I'm working on this now. It was part of my plan all along. It will free up a box and get the person to learn UNIX as an end-user enough to do email, word processing etc. Now we are closer to that. Windows will soon be gone. Oh, happy, happy day!

The vbox forums have suggested approaches for doing this migration also. If you have a system you really want to preserve as is only you can decide if the stupid computer tricks and hoop jumping are worth it. For me this is one of the reasons I hate Windows so much. I've moved complete Linux installations around quickly and with no difficulty. Windows is painful from beginning to end. I just want it to GO AWAY!!!

RPG isn't a computer language in the sense that most people think of computer languages. It's a positional Report Program Generator. IBM has come up with a few other systems like that, including DMS. Again, they're application generators , not proper languages. If IBM hadn't put out RPG about the same time they put out COBOL, it would probably have been accepted on the esolang website

Does this mean you didn't floor-plan this in your new computer room!?

Did they ever exist? Sounds like you're talking about a server on wheels.

Google groups should DIE! It's one of the worst things ever to infest Usenet, even worse than AOL.

99% of spam and posts from idiots comes from google groups.

Use a Usenet newsreader and a free news server.

http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/

It's not either/or. You get ALOM whether you run headless or not.

Sun boxes ROCK

Usenet didn't go away. There are numerous reliable free servers, there are plenty of pay servers, and there's FOSS software to run your own newsserver. I run my own news server and so do many people. It's the ultimate distributed network, there is no one place all the Usenet news lives.

There are gateways like gmane and google groups but they aren't Usenet, they're interfaces to Usenet.

Usenet is very much alive, despite more "modern" alternatives like this forum, etc. Usenet still has advantages like simple text interface, high performance, usual lack of moderation etc. Biggest advantage of all is it's free as in freedom. Nobody can censor Usenet, nobody can delete posts or stop people from sharing information. Usenet is one of the best things left about the internet.

This doesn't look like memory. Maybe one of the CPU modules got unseated during shipping? Unplug the box (even when off, they are all really on) and try reseating them. Plug back in and watch the power-on self tests on your serial console.

I'd be very surprised if it works with Z. I've never seen any twinax or RS-232 stuff hooked up to any mainframe.

Usually when you say OS/400 and Z in the same sentence there is a problem

I think that's it. ARM is about giving the most cycles per watt and now that everybody is past the point of realizing they spend much more on cooling or power than they do on hardware and software multiplied together, ARM is giving Intel some very serious heartburn in the data center.



Intel has been the market leader in toy machines and small rack gear from the beginning and their ISA is a disgrace. They take complexity for complexity' sake to high art. It's pretty clear all you need to sell a lot of hardware is to get Windows to run on it and then do some "creative" marketing.

You really could do most desktop computing with a 32 bit box but that doesn't sell new hardware.

I'm not into what passes for a "supercomputer" these days but that one is notable for being one of the very few using SPARC CPUs. It is nice that Fujitsu are committed to SPARC and too bad their boxes aren't more plentiful/cheap.

You're the guy running NT on Alpha, aren't you?

Then no.

In all seriousness, pick an architecture you like and run it. There's nothing new under the Sun. Old stuff is usually better. Except Intel

How many people actually have any interaction with the hardware? UNIX boxes are 99% C and the rest is assembly wrapped in C. Most UNIX and Windows programmers are completely isolated from the box they're coding on. The API is the machine. Does it really matter what the architecture is as long as it performs as you want?

There are a lot of nice emulators around in case you like hardware you can't get for some reason.

Sorry, man. No intent to pick on you. Just lamenting the state of affairs from a different angle. Unfortunately the point is still to most people the hardware doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to any C programmer if the hardware has register windows or a stack, etc. By the time the coder sees it it's all abstracted away unless he's writing the OS. It's only for those of us who love assembly programming the hardware matters but stuff like UNIX has made hardware magnitudes less relevant. The API is the machine. You will be assimilated.



APIs are not a collection of theory. It is the hardware as the OS presents it to you. Unless you're writing your own OS this is where your reality begins and ends. You can't see or touch anything below that.

Software is relevant without hardware. Software is an abstraction, hardware is an abstraction. You can run software through your head without any hardware. If you're an engineer you can run hardware through your head. It all depends on your world view. Everything is increasingly abstracted away and good hardware mostly doesn't matter any more, because nobody gets close to it. That's what I'm saying. There was a time when all this mattered but every day it gets further and further away...

"My advice to you, is to start drinking heavily..."

That sounds pretty tasty and you're a good photographer too.

To the forum host and mods, thanks for the forums. Long may "unpopular" hardware and software wave!

Opera doesn't make money. Services make money. So they're working on email hosting and stuff that could make money.

In the meantime I grabbed their old releases for Solaris SPARC. Because some day it will all be gone.

Firefox is still making new builds for Solaris Intel and SPARC. And that's good since Solaris until very recently came with Mozilla 1.2 or something horrible and useless...

No, I had a bad experience with LISP in the 1970s and didn't look at it again until the last couple of years. Neat stuff (now).

I hear the company is still in business and if you have the cash you can get a system and help from guys who actually know something.

Isn't there LISP on trailing-edge?

Does modern AIX run on anything other than IBM hardware? I've never heard of anybody doing it. IBM software generally only runs on their machines. Not that that means anything for AIX, just a data point.

It helps a lot and so does a long wheelbase. I rode small 400/500 class bikes for years and I was intimidated to get my dream bike but I finally did. At first it did feel like a Mack (not that I know what one of those feels like, but everything is relative right?) but pretty soon I couldn't stand to ride small bikes anymore. A local Moto Guzzi shop was giving free test rides and even though the bikes were sprightly and turned like a dream I felt very exposed perched out there alone in the breeze. It was like there was no bike, on those you sit way high. I prefer sitting down, in a Harley and using the forwards. Been in lots of bad weather from floods to hurricanes and big is what you want if you happen to be on a bike in unfavorable circumstances on the road.

Never rode a touring bike but they look like they would get plenty of sail effect.

I would like to show pics of my office but I'm pretty sure I have nothing guys on this board would be interested in

I want it, I want it all. I just can't afford it. If you still have this stuff when I get some cash your rx2620 is on the top of my list.