The collected works of chancehooper

I think my top Anime would have to be:

1) Akira (I still want Kaneda's bike!) - it's the film that got me into Japanese anime in the first place.

2) Ghost in the Shell

3) Wings of the Honneamise - not technically the best film ever made, but it tries to tell a more emotional story than the usual schoolgirl-in-underwear fare and is almost like a Japanese 1984.

4) Metropolis - ok, maybe not as genre-defining as Fritz Lang's effort, but still a real tour de force.

5) Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind - It's Miyazaki, it's beautiful and it's not as outright moralistic as Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away

6) Steamboy - why? because of the way the Japanese view the English is almost as comically sterotyped as the way they're viewed in the West, but also because I love a good Steampunk story and this is definitely one of those. A real rip-roaring old-time adventure.

7) Crying Freeman - a good idea for the central character premise, although the sequels become awful. The live-action film is actually pretty good, too.

Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend - because it's the film that (literally) spawned the whole demon/schoolgirl/border-line hentai sterotype that anime is viewed with - not a brilliant story, nor a technical masterpiece, but worth seeing for completeness' sake.

That's my view, anyways...

All the documentation I have seen in the way of techpubs and PDF manuals for the O2k and onyx2 deskside vixen speak about getting a 210v circuit installed as they are very US-centric. Anyone here have one in the UK? If so, do you require 3-phase commercial wiring, power converters or are you running them off your standard wall sockets?

Just curious as I live in a listed building and doubt I could take up the stone floors to install a commercial wiring system...

Great, thanks for the info - now I just have two hurdles to cross: finding one I can afford to ship/is in the UK and convincing the wife that it's "only a little computer for the studio"... Wish me luck!

I wonder how much it would take to port IRIX to that architecture? From what I can see, it's vanilla enough as a CPU - effectively it's an R16k@1GHz but with 8 cores. I should imagine that the fact IRIX can natively support NUMA and single-image computing over multiple nodes, I'd think that this could be patched in relatively easily.

I don't know what the pin array is, but it could conceivably be mounted on a daughterboard for inclusion in machines like the Onyx2, Tezro and Octane, as they would probably have enough clearance - much like the old 68040/68060 accelerator boards for Amigas and 68k Macs. Now that would be interesting - especially as the state-of-the-art PCs still struggle to maintain the system-wide bandwidth of something like an Onyx2 or even an O2 - they rely heavily on multiple cores and high clock speeds to overcome the bottlenecks through brute force, but a quick (1-2ghz) multicore MIPS CPU fitted into a proper architecture would take less power, do as much actual work on a system-to-system comparison and would work with things like Flint, Flame and Smoke as well as all the other old heavyweight apps that are being sold off at fire-sale prices...

I can dream...!

Nothing is impossible to reverse engineer, but also if this became a viable platform to license to, I'm sure they could find people to de-compile the code they have, not to mention re-hiring staff.

Having said that, even the hobbyist developer communities can pretty much crack into any kernel or sealed code-base - as long as they got agreement from SGI/rackable. Which is feasible as they have no commercial interest in it, even to the point of ending MIPS/Irix support. Who knows? As I stated before, this is more a wish-list than a practical wel-researched proposal!