The collected works of guardian452 - Page 16

I've tried duckduckgo but I've been using bing for so long, since it was called live search... I suppose the no tracking features are nice but there is a difference between privacy and anonymity and I have no expectations of privacy on the internet anyway. Besides, I like Bing's daily photo on my home page and little popover trivial pursuits

Yes, you're right. I posted it in the wrong forum, and just copied and pasted it over here, after forgetting that the forum truncates long links
FMV = some parts movie, some parts 3D game..

hamei wrote: On the OtherDuck Front, thank you both to GL1zda and smj : here's the initial duckduck screen -

quackquack.jpg

Well, that's a big help. Let's go over to Winders and turn off NoScript -

quackscreen.jpg

Now I have used duck duck before but I never in a meeleon years would have noticed that, much less clicked on it to find out what it does. I always thought three strips was something the germans put on their running shoes and how do you come up with "settings" from that?? Especially since there are already other buttons at the bottom, I assumed if they had any settings (and why would they, since they supposedly "don't track" you) They could come up with a gear icon down there that said... settings... under it. I always thought gears was the icon for settings, which is almost as silly as random lines, but we are used to gears for settings by now, so it works.

ClassicHasClass wrote: The technical term is "hamburger menu."

Because, you know, hamburgers suggest settings. Maybe toppings.

If it doesn't make me hungry it isn't a very good hamburger. Why don't they call it a settings menu?? Anyways, I've been conditioned to act upon just blindly clicking at a picture if I don't know what it means, the problem is I didn't see it at all. Never knew they had any settings. Why don't they put their hamburger , adidas , settings menu, with their other links at the bottom?

I guess I'm not the only one who misses the days only 5-10 years ago when this was an icon :

Specifically the icon in Apple-Land of a mounted HDD circa. 2007-2011. I wonder how much work it would take to get some of that art put back in a modern version?? Especially since we have retina macs now...


Windows 7 was just as beautiful from around the same time. The wallpaper pictures that came with it are gorgeous.

Notbad, I ran a 2x195 as my main box for a few years with mxi

Yeah I got my octane from uni and somehow found the invoice to the machine for about $65000 and that was before I had upgraded to 1 gig of memory and installed a bigger-than-4GB disk That cost was with 128 megs. There were some software line items that I guess we can't discuss here but that was the cost just for the box itself.

It was circa 2008-2010 I was running it, it became a single 400 with a V6 before being "upgraded" for something different. At the time I was a broke student and it was much nicer than my P4 1.5ghz (with RDRAM!) box.

I should track down another one this year, I really miss it. Dunno if I should hold out for fuel/tezro. More speed would be good but Octanes are soooo nice...

Wish I remembered or still had it, to be honest... I believe it was mostly compiler rated. The unit had bought 4 identical machines on one PO in 97 for one of the CS labs and the total bill tipped the scales at about 300K.

I remember when they were getting rid of them and I snatched a pair of them. E.g. Friend: "those look expensive" Me: "yeah they probably cost five grand each when they were new!" The grizzled greybeard systems guy who was helping us said, probably quite a bit more than that, managed to track down the original invoice and emailed it to me. Which was a bit of a shock and I couldn't believe, at the time, they would just give something like that away for free!

They also had a bunch of sun boxes but I wasn't interested because they didn't look nearly as cool

Now that it has been pointed out to me I am seeing hamburgers all over the place. Right beneath our very own neko-girl, even! I always thought it was just a styling thing because I always see it accompanied by text e.g. "quick links"

smj wrote:

commodorejohn wrote: God, I miss the days of icons you could actually tell what they were .

So don't upgrade to Windows 8 /10 / OSX Mavericks /Yosemite - instead just wait a couple of years. They'll need to make everything look "new" and "fresh" again, and they'll invent this brilliant new design aesthetic of rich graphics and skeuomorphism , which is of course totally novel and never before seen, because they'll need a hook to sell Windows 11 / OSX Annapurna...

Of course. It is only fashion. To not run a newer version just because of appearance, well I was able to get over it without too much trouble. The new window dressings aren't enough bother to put up with an old version, although for personal tastes I still have a machine with 10.6 that I like to play with.

It is not difficult to make windows 7 look and feel like windows 2000. I originally did this because having cleartype on a retina display looks really ugly with vmware's scaled framebuffer. But the more I look at it, the more I think mickey had their UX buttoned up right 15 years ago. It looks really crisp and clean.

josehill wrote: Ah, the joys of visiting a web page for a 250 word article, and receiving ten megabytes of "content."

I recall watching full screen video on my 2006 MacBook Pro without the MBP breaking a sweat. Now, simply watching a low resolution YouTube video pegs the CPU and triggers "wind tunnel mode" on the fans.

This is "progress", the computer industry has been this way as long as I've been alive and will continue to do so long into the future.

For nerds like me who like to play with different things once in a while it can be fun. The illuminati have conditioned us consumers to demand the latest and greatest all the time. My machine is not supported by apple so it is kind of a personal 'fuck you' to them to continue to run their newest software on my ancient hardware. Etc. The fun new games tend to have issues ranging from minor glitches to not working at all if your OS version doesn't match up.

What really "boils my teakettle", so to speak, is programs (typically iphone apps) that stop working until you update. (e.g. some mobile games) Those are quickly deleted. I should be able to run the old version if I want to, especially if I find the app useful and it is working fine. If you are going to go off your rocker about something, let's talk about that.

Security? Hah!

My printer (canon inkjet) and the printer at the office (HP print/copy/fax combo thingy) both use airprint. So there is no driver needed. And there will always be postscript...

aaaaannnddd if we don't upgrade we can keep watching? Will this work even with openvpn/ssh tunnels? Or PPTP only?

I'm sure we can come up with a way around it. It's just another arms race. Otherwise it will be back to bittorrent for me. Which I've never had a problem with.

This maaaybe (??) explains why youtube recently started complaining that "your browser is no longer supported and you may not be able to view certain videos" (safari 5)

Hi, I have a 20" cinema display, I've never had a DVI-equipped SGI but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work with a simple plug-and-pray. ISTR the OSD (for brightness) is generated by software on the host, but if the display does not connect to that driver it will fallback to an internal OSD. Don't quote me on that.

Other than that is just a relatively stupid LCD monitor and should just work at a variety of different scaled resolutions. It will probably not run anything other than 60 hz. The manual is here http://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0 ... rGuide.pdf . (edit: fixed link) They do not do any sort of analog input.

ItsMeOnly has had a similar very impressive site for years

There are other creative solutions, depending on your environment, this may or may not be suitable...
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16720700

vishnu wrote:

hamei wrote: For an individual room, if it's long-term I still think the aircons we use here are the way to go. The fan and some cooling coils are inside the room in a box high up on the wall, the compressor and heat exchanger live outside. It's all connected by a couple insulated hoses through the wall. 3" hole through the wall is enough. They make them in small sizes, too.

Vendor? I'm not a guy who's afraid to put three inch holes through the wall of his house, in fact I've got my three inch hole saw right here...

I've seen those from mitsubishi but I'm sure there are others. Example: http://www.mitsubishiwallunits.com/mits ... oducts.php

Went into my local store the other day about two weeks ago for some DB9 connectors and a new wifi AP for the office. This is all they had left:

Which I suppose is how they will be remembered, cheap radio cars and bluetooth speakers. I remember as a child my parents would buy those little kits, build a lemon battery, water-powered clock, etc. I had one of those 150-circuits-in-one cardboard things with the spring terminals which was a lot of fun I guess all the normal kids got legos and a sega :/

I got my DB9s and a new phone case for $0.99 but had to go up to meijers for the airport. I also stocked up on soldering supplies and etc, since I guess from now on I'll have to get that sort of stuff online.

The lady said there would only be one store left in all of north KY (and it would *only* be about 30 mins away from me whereas this one is about 3 mins away from my house and 5 mins away from work) but based on recent news stories I'm guessing not even that one will remain.

Kinda sad. I liked looking at the little kits and toys but their prices on that stuff were always astronomical. Tho they tended to put official arduinos and shields on clearance for $3-$5 fairly often.

TeamBlackFox wrote: Radioshack never kept up with the times. I say good riddance.

I disagree. It was pretty much the only game in town for getting electronics tools and small parts e.g. passives without having to wait for overnight shipping. Because sometimes you need something *now* and not tomorrow by 10:30am.

We can hope a department store like home depot or meijers maybe will fill in this gap.

Radioshack's problem was that they kept a whole store full of useless junk that nobody* ever cared about when all the good stuff was in the back aisle.

* and I mean nobody. Of all the times I went in there I've never seen anybody even glance at it. Off brand cell phones, a couple small TVs, overpriced toys. It's all either electrical types like me who need more solder or whatever, or the people who are looking for a new steeereo cable or phone charger etc.

It will be very tricky, and according to the release notes of version 6.2 it is not supported. Maybe an older version will work. I am trying to build it on OSX (just for fun as there is already a binary available...)

There are quite a few dependencies including trilinos.
https://xyce.sandia.gov/documentation/B ... Guide.html

https://xyce.sandia.gov/downloads/_asse ... es_6.2.pdf

Xyce 6.2 currently supports any of the following operating system platforms (all versions imply the earliest supported—Xyce generally works on later versions as well). These platforms are supported in the sense that they have been subject to certification testing for the Xyce version 6.2 release.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, x86 (serial only) and x86-64 (serial and parallel)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, x86-64 (serial and parallel)
- Microsoft Windows 7 , x86 (serial)
- Apple OS X, x86-64 (serial and parallel)
- TLCC (serial and parallel)
- Red Sky (serial and parallel)

Build Supported Platforms (not Certified)
The platforms listed in this section are “not supported” in the sense that they are not subject to nightly regression testing, and they also were not subject to certification testing for the Xyce version 6.2 release. Despite this lack of testing rigor, Xyce has been known to run under these configurations.
- FreeBSD 9.x on Intel x86 and x86-64 architectures (serial and parallel)
- Distributions of Linux other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Microsoft Windows under Cygwin and MinGW.
Please contact the Xyce development team for platform and configuration availability.

It looks like something that would be cool to run on a many-P origin

No, it needs a double-link DVI (one socket but with more of the pins in use...) or otherwise it will have to run at a scaled resolution, which may not be much of a problem depending on preferences. Different from having two physical ports...

The T221 has multiple DVI sockets and can act like 2 or 4 monitors internally. Cinema 30 is much lower resolution so it can all fit on one port.

http://fireuser.com/blog/what_does_dual ... ally_mean/

framebuffer X works on octane with gentoo linux, at least it did circa 2006/7 (in the stone ages ). A basic KDE desktop (also from around the same time) was actually quite usable on a dual 195. Don't ask me how to set it up as I had quite a bit of assistance from a guru but it is possible. I don't know if you can do it with a modern version of linux.

vishnu wrote: Is anybody on the irc channel these days? I've meant to check it out a million times but then I remember I can no longer compile my fave irc client. smirc, in case you had to know...

I used to be [mjw]; suppose I could log in and go back to lurking... yup, looks like the same people in there as always

Looked like 2000 to me, but I'm not a coin-is-sue-her of old windows

There are lots of options but I think your best bet is to get an AC-line powered small box fan and stick it in the space above the door. On low speed they don't make much noise.

I think a louvered plate (search for: inlet or return duct) in the door (inlet) and also the panel over the door (outlet) would also help with appearances, they make them in white and they are reasonably handsome.

Example: http://www.homedepot.com/p/SPEEDI-GRILL ... /202542252

I had an IR Onyx (1) for many years, and yes it is a very cool machine but the whole absurdity of it put a lot of limitations on what you can do. Quake through Quake3 are all playable, the hardware features are very nice such as buffering and AA, but it's hardly impressive nowadays especially when most 3D programs that run on it (irix demos) have less than impressive texturing that doesn't do a good job of showing off what the hardware can do. I think among the best demos for it would be the rss-glx package and even those run pretty well on ancient low end PC hardware. All of the good IR stuff was proprietary and is either not available or requires huge periphery that would dwarf the onyx itself.

Lack of sound unless you have vigrasound or the ASO makes games kinda dull. The huge 9" blower does adjust it's speed but it is never quiet, in a cold room it is quite noisy and in a warm room it is a jet engine (and within a few hours of it running, ANY room will be a warm room). You should budget about $100 extra every month for your electric bill if you decide to run it 24x7 (at LEAST, not accounting for cooling costs. 1.5kWx24hx30Dx$0.10 kwh. 1.5kW is a very minimum spec system but with one RM you can get away with a 120V outlet) So you will not be using it as a server. You will probably not want to run it in summer. You don't want to cycle it on and off all the time, because of the fragility of the many DCDC converters scattered throughout the system. etc, etc, etc.

For a lot of applications the vpro is harder, better, faster, stronger. Unless you need the specialized features (raster memory, video I/O, etc) or have 8 monitors you want to hook up to one pipe, the business case just isn't there.

And yet, we love them anyway. The whole ridiculousness of the machine is what makes them appealing to me. I wanted one ever since I was six and rode the magic carpet at disney. Eventually, you get one if you want one enough. I don't want another one. Maybe an octane or a tezro but I've recovered from the lunacy of the big boxes.

Ignore what blackfox has to say about price, as he's never bought or sold one personally, and have to live with it in the house. I did, and the transaction was "technically" $0 on both counts. You ideally need to be able to pick it up, and be very patient. And the same words are true when you go to sell it. It took me two years to find one, and several months to figure out how to get rid of it (I didn't want to part it out or sell it for scrap, which made getting rid of it much harder). Shipping is not expensive if your fedex account has sufficient volume to get a good discount, it's only 300 pounds and is easily palletized. I could send that anywhere in the country for <$200. If you don't have access to a corporate account, then I will agree, don't bother. I bet more than half of the onyx owners here got them either for free or less than $200. They are not hard to move, people say you will need a pickup truck or large van but that is only for the racks.

Apple makes a 5K imac now that is pretty good-by the time you price a decent (not an el cheapo $500) 4K monitor it is like they are giving a high end computer for free. It depends on your price of "high end" and I would consider a $2500 imac to be decidedly mid-range. Maybe my standards are outdated, but I consider, as far as workstations are concerned, (low end < $500 < midrange < $5000 < high end).

The problem is 4K is a LOT of pixels that until very recently most hardware was not designed to cope with. E.G. the reason they have done an imac and not a standalone monitor is because there is no good interface that has the bandwidth in one connection - yet.

SGIs can of course run very high resolutions, to 4K and beyond, but only with additional specialized hardware, and definitely not an Onyx (1). I think anything with a v12 or a newer infinitereality (3 or 4) would be a good bet.

If you just want to get a pretty picture and high performance I think you will find yourself coming back to the imac after looking at every other option. Because that's what I'm coming up with. Not to mention, mac is the only one that really does a good job of working with high-DPI displays out of the box. I'm typing on one now with one retinal and one standard monitor and the support is about as good as you can get, even when dragging windows between the two - but you will have to update your programs to support it. For example, there is a free retina patch for office 2011, but I recently broke down and got Autocad 2015 after giving up for the last time on Dassault's Draftsight and it's crashes and memory leaks. I just wish I had switched sooner, because autocad on a retina screen is a really beautiful thing.

The two members here that I know of who have high-DPI monitors on SGI are hamei and mia (both with IBM T220/T221). DPI independence is something that Irix does much better than even windows 8 or 10, or -gasp- linux, it is really good for something that was last updated 10 years ago but sadly I don't think it can be considered state-of-the-art anymore.

foetz wrote: well let's be clear, an onyx rack at home is for fun. you can't justify that reasonably but the good thing is you don't have to either
if you dig it and find some good offer just take it and enjoy the view

I can think of far worse vices than having an onyx for fun, that's really the whole point of these machines. If you can't have fun with them, then why bother?

Trekiej wrote: I wish had a job that could use these machines it would justify the cost at least.

I don't think there is a single workplace left that would justify the addition of an onyx- for anything. Maybe there are few dozen in the world left, still chugging along and entrenched with expensive peripherals, but then you will not get to have fun with it. You would have better luck procuring a Mercedes SL as a company car

TeamBlackFox wrote: You're right that I haven't bought/sold one personally, but I was VERY close to getting one.

I wasn't trying to come across as poo-pooing you but you don't *have* to spend a lot of money on one. There is also a large generational divide between onyx1 and onyx4 for example. If he wants an infinitereality box of any generation, scour dovebid and every once in a blue moon you can see a lot** of onyx2's or origin2ks for less than the cost of lunch. If you can afford the inevitable trip to pick them up you can get a very good deal. The problem is always location.

*edit: Not lot as in "many" but lot as in "multiple units in a single auction"

Sheesh, I have Duke Energy (in Kentucky USA). Last month (jan 15-feb 16) I paid $131.11 for 1557 kWh which works out to $0.084/kWh. If my apartment building wasn't so old, it would probably be half that. I bet more than half of my electric bill goes right out the windows and cracks in the walls as heat in the winter, and cool air in the summer. In the spring and fall when the weather is nice, I spend $20-30 on electric, but in the summer months it can get close to $200.

Compared to my pentium MMX that I had to compare it to, and if you stick with nothing more graphically intensive than xterm and a browser, etc (in 2006 the www was not the fat pig it is now) it was not horrible at all ISTR glxgears being able to run without too much tearing.

Thankfully I always plug my car in at work which helps the bill quite a bit. I am sure the majority of our bill is the furnace. When my lease is up (next october :/ ) I'm planning on moving to a newer apartment which will hopefully have more efficient appliances and insulation, and they will let me hook up an evse.

I think some ptfe (dry lube) would be better suited for this application than heavy grease, no ?

hmmm, slight addition:

8% run more than one operating system on the same machine
50% have a Windows PC desktop or laptop
58% have a Mac desktop or laptop
5% have a Unix or Linux computer

Curious how many of those 8% are virtual machine vs. dual-boot or boot camp ?

But this survey is also from 5 years ago... when I was still a student.

Your screen does not need to be SOG capable because with O2 it will send the H and V sync on the right pins (unlike using a sun 13w3 adapter which is the wrong pinout for SGI).

It does need to be SOG-tolerant. Meaning, if it isn't compatible it will have a green tint. Lots of very cheap and or very expensive monitors will do this. Your typical dell monitor will work fine

hammei, my momma was a soccer mom and I was shuffled to and fro in the tiny back seat of her ram-air'ed pontiac trans am. No headrest mounted DVD players for me.

Cracks me up how on nekochan of all sites you would link to a image viewer that requires js to work We have an attachment mechanism... and it is quite good, even guests can see them and AFAIK the limits are generous to the point that I have never run into them.

If you can desolder the stubs of the old pins and push them out of the plastic you could stuff new ones through the connector body and resolder them

ivelegacy wrote: try ADA, try GNAT
Avionics industries are using it, i was using it in my previous job for aircraft control unit tests.
ADA is a bit pedantic, but amazing and really safe.

I do automotive firmware and we use CoDeSys which is very similar syntactically to pascal (targeting EV supervisory controllers, similar to an automotive BCM or PLC-type machines).

My one complaint is that while I don't have anything against hungarian notation, our target libraries use "systems" type, not "apps" type hungarian notation. So what I do is both, type prefix first and then a more useful prefix (typically whatever the name of the interfacing node is, my controller has to interface with many different nodes on the network,etc). Further reading: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html

I think to the average programmer it would seem very clumsy, but it IS very safe, and a lot of these conventions force you to work slowly and deliberately, they were designed that way. You get used to it.

The Codesys is freely available, it is an implementation of IEC 61131-3
http://www.codesys.com

Serial numbers could mean anything. The E could be 5, the 5th letter, for may, the fifth month.

It could be the 3rd machine in the 30th production lot, or the 3rd lot, or the 300th. Somebody, somewhere, knows. It ranks up there on the trainspotter index, IMO. But the number by itself doesn't mean a whole lot.

Then again, I have as my main keyboard a TG3 with a datestamp of 06/06/06 (:

If you can't find anybody closer (I am in USA) I could fix it for free if you pay for shipping both ways. It is a bit of a stretch however, so I don't recommend it.

While I can replace the caps easily enough, we don't know for sure if that is the problem, and I do not have a machine to test it with (though if the diagnostic drawing says the power-on pin, I can test it on bench easily enough...)

Acrylic peecee cases have been around since the pentium 3 was hot stuff. However, yours is very nice

Ditto everything chicaneuk says except on price. Apple is so cheap compared to any other unix vendor, even linux-based OEMs, it's a no-brainer. You can get a good laptop or workstation for at or under 2k USD, and a very good one for not much more. Maybe the exchange rates aren't favorable right now ? They are way cheaper than SGI ever was...

If you compare a macbook to (say) thinkpad, not only is the apple cheaper, but then you don't have to worry about silverfish, etc I think that fiasco put me off peecees again for a while to come just when I had started looking at them again.

TeamBlackFox wrote: They both have Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, so that covers most office needs of browser, email, calendar, office suite etc.

How about Safari, Mail, Microsoft Office...

TeamBlackFox wrote: Lenovo, the company I use for laptops and desktops does have the problem with spyware, but even the Windows users I know reimage their devices, only morons use a Windows OEM install. Since I'm using BSD or Solaris on the systems their spyware has no bearing on me, the user, and their hardware refurbs are good and new and usually competitive in pricing especially compared to the non-expandable rubbish bin Mac Pro, or the Macbook Pro with a glued in battery.

Re-imaging takes time, you have to have a valid windows license AND media. I have some panasonic toughbook peecees in the shop and at other facilities; if you don't want to use panasonic's image, you have to buy an additional windows license. At least how parent company's IT explained it to me. The mac pro has six thunderbolt sockets, expandable!, and now that laptop batteries outlast a typical working day, what is the point of being able to swap one out. I've always preferred an extension cord, anyway. Not saying these aren't valid points, just giving the counter-argument.

Besides, some of us want a computer that matches our new watch I'm personally kinda bummed that the new macbook, despite having eliminated "all but one" port to rule them all, still has a headphone socket. W-T-F? Bluetooth headphones have been mainstream for many years now... Also slightly bummed that it isn't a lightning socket but USB. Perhaps a good thing but I did lose a small bet... losing magsafe was not a wise change IMO, either.

TeamBlackFox wrote: Apple is worse than Windows, and I say this because I've worked with Windows Server and I would rather support that, Exchange, IIS and everything else than have to support OS X.

I see it differently because for our very limited use a combination of OSX server and a dropbox account does everything we need. Besides, I am an the engineer and do limited IT support on weekends. Our corporate office (parent company) has a bigger IT department with two people working full time, but they have their own work to do. So any additional help from them can take a month or more. It's just easier if I can do it all myself. I honestly don't know much about windows beyond using it, my wife knows more about windows than me and she has nothing but retail and entertainment experience (no IT), I just avoid it so I don't think I would be comfortable administering anything on that level. (could be room for improvement) I've been playing with unix in some capacity for 15 years. I actually started with debian, used it for a few years, then tried PC-BSD when it was in its infancy, etc. Moved me to freebsd for a while but something about the box I had was incompatible, perhaps the wifi?? Did the gentoo thing, and then irix, before switching to mac. So I am very windows-poor but unix-rich and as long as apple keeps mac OSX around I'll keep using it. If they decide that iShinyThings are more important, well, I'll probably do a hamei and keep using it, anyway. It's a doomsday that will probably never happen, at least not for several more years.

commodorejohn wrote:

I'm personally kinda bummed that the new macbook, despite having eliminated "all but one" port to rule them all, still has a headphone socket.

That's because you're mentally ill. Failing to discard useful features is not a shortcoming.

Wanted to clarify this bit, another USB socket would have been more useful. If there really was no space for anything else but two ports a headset jack seems like kind of a waste IMO. Besides, they could peddle overpriced BT headphones (meanwhile, my 4-year-old jaybirds "take a lickin' and keep on tickin'"). That, or I plug decent speaker/headphone into a focusrite USB interface.

Besides, it would be more symmetrical, which should appeal to Ive's aesthetic. (maybe, what do I know, I'm no designer artisté )