The collected works of hamei - Page 3

Intel-OUTSIDE wrote: (american-football = rugby for pussy's!)

I want to see you explain that to Otis Sistrunk

QuicksilverG4 wrote: ... And how long that glass held

Looks like at least quarter-inch plate. Glass is stronger than steel in compression - as long as you don't hit it with a hammer

Scott Tarr wrote: Gobe Productive is still my favorite office suite.

With the demise of BeOS, the Gobe people have ported to Windows .... but I wonder if they'd consider an Irix release ? With so many Octanes coming off eBay and people using Irix at home, is there enough demand to pay for porting ? It'd be much nicer than Open Orifice .....

very last line on the page :

http://www.freepascal.org/future.html

unixmuseum wrote: Very strange that the same drive in the O2 works flawlessly...

Cables, termination, the usual scsi chicken-sacrificing procedure .... I've had an almost-new beautiful-looking cable crap out and the only way to tell was to buy a new one and install it. Poof ! Everything worked again ... sigh. Better than IDE tho ....

wolflord wrote: I'm almost 100% positive than you cannot use the usb ports for anything but a keyboard, mouse, the usb iMic, and I think there was a pair of usb speakers. But definatly not for an external CD/DVD at this point.

Do you know for certain that the 3000 even works with usb keyboard and mouse ? Fuel comes with ps/2 keyboard and mouse even tho it has the usb ports and the manual doesn't say anything at all about using usb accessories Guess I could go buy one and see, hunh ?

TeeTylerToe wrote: any reason not to use the cdrw/dvd tools on SGI's freeware site?

Command line only and you need to run as root (iirc) but I've burnt several CD's that way. Late Irix supports udfs but don't know if the cd-writing tools on freeware can use it ?

these suckers look great on V12 ... but ! there are two versions in dexter1's directory from February 2004 - one mips3 and one mips4. There is also one version in nekoware from July 2004. I *ass*ume that the nekoware July version is the hot ticket, but gotta ask .... ? Speaking of version control, they are all rss-glx-0.7.6. Ahem Also, I remember that lisa had a simple way to get them to show up in the normal toolchest desktop -> customize -> screensaver menu but can't find the directions to save my ... whatever. And her web page is now blank Anybody remember how, off the top of their head ? tia

squeen wrote: I posted a news item ( http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/weblog/archives/2003_12.html ) that explained how to integrate the rss with xscreensaver. The Nekoware versions of both these are the ones I run.

Thanks, squeen ... very thorough, but the only bad part about doing it your way is that I'd lose the couple of SGI savers that I kinda like. I don't have the locking concern that you do - at least not right now. Good to know it can be done tho. And lisp's package/method has disappeared It was never at nekochan, was it ?

dexter1 wrote: Hold your horses

hreeeeheeeheeehee, whicker whicker

I am actually repackaging xscreensavers and flireflies and rss-glx right now atm, with some openGL1.1 fixes for some GL -xscreensavers (glmatrix for instance) and a fireflies speedup. rssglx full-mipspro build should be finished early next week.

Oh great ! Thanks. For right now I came up with a quik-n-dirty crappy way to do it ; all I wanted was something to throw on the screen when I go out back to the latrine so I just put a link on the desktop to the directory they live in, then kick one on and maximize it when I want to leave the box for a few minutes.

They do look great .... are there any newer additions out ? Seems like the Linux crowd oughta be good for *something* !

dexter1 wrote: Linux? Who said the reallyslick was Linux? http://www.reallyslick.com/

Hamei is actually using Windows stuff

Eeeeeeuw Did you have to tell me ? I just hope running it thru a MIPSPro compiler thoroughly fumigated the code !

wolflord wrote: No, I don't know for certain that USB keyboards/mice will work with the USB ports. Only one way to find out though...

Okay, I can now confirm that a USB mouse does indeed work on a Fuel. Guess I'll ASSume that the keyboard does also and pick up one of them spiffy-looking charcoal USB mouse/keyboard sets.

dexter1 wrote: - Added all reallyslick screensavers in 4Dwm screensaver panel. Now's your chance, Hamei!

Burnin up the wahrs even as I type - thanks, dextrous !

Channel twelve report : Yowsa ! Very nice. Noticeable improvement and they were good before. Like the integration, too. Wurra wurra professional, five gold stars. I know, I know, they're just screen savers but damn, they look good. They should come stock with Irix, they're that much nicer.

Hmm, here's an observation - not a bitch ! we don' do no steenkin' bitchin' here ! But when I think about installing an SGI tardist, inside swmgr I can read the release notes. Not so with nekoware (or at least I haven't figured out how yet.) It can be nice to see what's going on before you install a program .....

Scott Tarr wrote: I found this part most interesting...

Better yet, Dorado is the first in a long line of workstations. The aging IRIX on MIPS line has a successor at last, and you can even run the old binaries if you don't mind a speed hit.

Any thoughts on this?

Why would anyone want to buy this ? There's not a single thing about it that's special. You can buy anything you want from Sun and they haven't changed their minds every fifteen minutes about what their future is. AND you can still run Solaris executables even on their newest workstations ! Nothing on the desktop that SGI has done newer than the Octane shows any imagination whatsoever - so why spend four times as much money for half as much computer ? It was different when you were comparing an Octane to a Clunker, but hell - what has SGI done that's technically advanced or exciting since 1996 ? Nothing , as far as I can see.

chervarium wrote: The newly introduced host and dig commands (from the BIND distribution)

Is there a standalone < dig > around here or should I look in neko_BIND ? (I searched, really.) Kinda hate to further decimate the bandwidth for a small utility - looks like everyone is testing out squeen's new script right now

SiliconBunny wrote:

hamei wrote: Why would anyone want to buy this ? There's not a single thing about it that's special.

Because MIPS just isn't fast enough, no matter how balanced a system it's in.

And whose fault is that ? Mmm-hmm. Maybe SGI should have put their money into MIPS instead of a new "corporate image" complete with fifty milion dollar font ?

Because making MIPS faster requires far more money now than it did in the past - the bar is much higher. Sun have quaterly revenue in the *billions*, and they can't do it anymore.

AMD managed somehow ..... we could go look up their relative size, compared to SGI a few years ago.

Speaking of Sun, they have changed their roadmap massively:
snip >>
Exactly what sort of roadmap is that?

Like any company, Sun has gone with the flow when their previous plans turned out to be a mistake. But I'm not aware of them

1) consistently lying to their customers
2) forcing Sparc customers to change platforms if they don't want

Not only that, but Sun has

1) made Solaris free
2) offerred a reasonably-priced fast desktop computer
3) gives customers a choice between Windows, Solaris, or Linux

And oh yes, when Sun says "we support Open Source" they aren't being a bunch of cynical bastards - or do you happen to have the information handy that would make Linux run on VW320's ? WITH support for the Cobalt chipset ? Or O2's ? Or ANY SGi workstation ? Right, SGI "supports" open source.

Sun are now where SGI where 5-6 years ago

I respectfully disagree. Sun may have some of the same problems SGI had 5 to 6 years ago, but there's one big difference. Sun is a leader with faith in their own technologies, unlike modern SGI. I'm sorry - except in a very few areas, today's SGI is just a bunch of wannabe also-rans, lapping up other people's work and trying to resell it at a large markup.

SiliconBunny wrote:

hamei wrote: Nothing on the desktop that SGI has done newer than the Octane shows any imagination whatsoever

Then you're not looking hard enough. The Origin 3000 is pretty advanced.
So's getting that architecture to work with Itanium.

Goody. Now put an Origin 3000 on your desktop. Oh yes ! The Fuel ! I even have one ! Guess what ? I like the box but you know what ? It's crap. Two year old $12,000 computer with bad motherboard. It was a *very* common problem. Return ? Yeah, right. Quality control ? Yeah right.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall when you tell John Mashey that that stuff isn't exciting or technologically advanced.

I'd love to be able to ask John Mashey why my triple-overpriced Fuel is a piece of unreliable crap. Sure, I paid for it. I'll admit I was stupid. I thought SGI built good stuff. At one time, they did. I should have listened when my friend at Hubble told me to dump the SGI has-beens.

Or is the market so flooded with scalable NUMA systems that Origin and Altix are now mundane?

My suspicion is that you're right - "the market" for scalable Numa systems is flooded. It's kinda like the Segway, ya know ? Three people had a use for them and then it was over. Or motorcycles, even. The Japanese thought that the motorcycle boom was going to last forever but it didn't. People can do 99.5% of what the SGI 4.5 million dollar scalable Numa system does with fifty bucks worth of clustered peecees. It was a dumb fucking thing to bet the company on. They should have gone into manufacturing peecee graphics cards ten years ago, when they could have owned that market. If they'd had a management, they'd have been nVidia today - PLUS having the rest of the line. Instead, they have a history of miserable failures (from a sales standpoint. I actually liked my VW320.)

Go and work with F25ks and you'll realise how far behind the curve Sun are.

I don't mean to say that Sun is technologically wonderful. They aren't. But they have a klew about what a company is supposed to do. And one of those things is not "lie to your customers."

Let's look at a few examples :

R18k - did they ever announce that they were dropping it ? Up to a month before that cpu was supposed to be introduced they were still talking their "Irix roadmap." So how do the people who bought into that three weeks earlier feel ? Oh sure, SGI didn't want to hurt sales while changing their "strategy" .... so people who bought new Irix-MIPS machines then can just take it in the shorts, hey ? The people involved in large purchases knew, I suppose ? So at what point does one become "in the know" enough to avoid getting screwed ? One million ? Five million ? Ten ?

Why lie about the DCD option ? "Only works on V12" - my ass. Certainly there are limitations to it, but "doesn't work" is a flagrant lie.

Here's a good one - small, but tip of an iceberg, ya know ? $30 Adaptec cards for $500. Now, as an isolated instance sure, what the heck. But as a corporate strategy, the way it has become ? This Dorado device, with ATi graphics and Itanic cpu's (no MIPSPro there, eh ?) and maybe some Adaptec or Hauppauge or BenQ accessory cards and EIDE disks running modified Linux encased in some pretty plastic - who in his right mind is going to pay $8500 for that ? 5 people in the whole world ? Oh yeah, the SGI mantra - bandwidth. Wow. Let's Get Real(tm). If most people needed "bandwidth" SGI would be rolling in dough.

Ya know what else ? I'm not so sure that this much-vaunted SGI "bandwidth" is even real. Over the years in Usenet I've noticed quite a few people who actually tried to use that 'bandwidth' but weren't able to. Then Alexis would explain why they couldn't .... so much for "bandwidth" ? To a great extent it's just sales talk ?

CXFS is vastly more capable than any other shared filesystem out there. Do you have any idea how incredibly difficult it is to do something like that?

Very nice. Incredible, just like the jugglers with the dozens of spinning plates that were always on Ed Sullivan right before Topo Gigio. Now how old is it ? and if that's all that SGI can do, perhaps they should go into the shared filesystem business ? Btw, seems to me one of the major difficulties Hubble was having was *with* the filesystem - and they didn't get squat for help from SGI, notwithstanding the 200+ seats of maintenance they were paying for. Notice the past tense.

In what way is Onyx4 not advanced? Do you have that many machines with 32 graphics cores - that you can combine and split at will - that the Onyx4 is a mediocre box?

Like I said, y'all got an Onyx4 on your desktop ? Beyond that, I remember someone having so much trouble (with an Onyx4) that SGI could not fix with the ATi graphics that they had to go back to Infinite Reality ... So much for 32 wonderful graphics cores, if they can't make them do what they claim.

Have you seen the sort of bandwidth and sustained throughput that clusters of Altix and Origins can get talking to SGI storage? I fail to see how that is mundane or not advanced - it blows other vendors away.

Wanna buy an Amphicar ? Have you seen any other autos that can drive and also float ? I'm sure there are people who need that but basing a company on such a singular talent ? Someone recently said to me that "they have a great interconnect. Too bad that's all they have." And even that came from Cray ..... can we say 'has-beens' ?

There's more to life than the desktop.

Sure. But this Dorado thingy is a desktop/side machine. That's what we were discussing. In fact, there's more to life than computers but that ain't germane to a conversation about workstations.

In order to have any sort of R&D - or, indeed, any sort of future - SGI has to build and sell what the market wants.

And they've been doing so well at that that their stock is running about a buck anda half. A little better and they can get de-listed from The Market. They can obviously talk the Talk but walking, now that's another matter. But then they've been a Talk company for quite a while now, haven't they ? We should have realized it was the beginning of the end when they locked up the maintenance stream. When a company starts to emulate Ebenezeer Scrooge, then the handwriting is on the wall.

This isn't 2000 any more. Companies don't buy IT equipment just because it's new and shiny. SGI are still innovating and still doing clever stuff, and still surviving because of that.

They are still "surviving" because they made enough money when they built and sold something special that they have (had) assets to sell. They are "living" off their assets. When that's gone, then what ?

The only people who might have had an interest in buying SGI would have been Sun - they need the high-end scalability. But not even Sun were willing to do a complete about face and swallow Itanium as their server CPU - so they jumped into bed with Fujitsu

Yes, exactly. "Not even Sun" were willing to do what SGI did ...

If they were still doing pure MIPS/IRIX they would have gone under several years ago.

First, I don't think anyone wants them to do "pure MIPS/Irix." We would like them to do a better job of supporting the MIPS/Irix they already sold and let the customers decide which product they prefer.

Second, that statement is pure conjecture. I can conjecture in the opposite direction and claim that "if SGI had spent its resources wisely, they'd

1) own the peecee graphics market today and be rolling in dough

2) still have a band of energetic, creative engineers doing new interesting things, rather than hacking peecee hardware they bought at Fry's then airbrushing the manufacturer's name off. Perhaps if they still had the fifty mil they pissed away on a font, they could afford to get the firewire and usb drivers working properly.

3) If they'd believed in themselves rather than what some corp's wife read in a Ziff-Davis mag at the dentist's, maybe the new R18K processor *would* have been competitive. PowerPC seems to be and it's no great shakes. AMD isn't the world's largest company. Might have been competitive enough so that, taken with the other advantages SGI used to have, they'd still be selling interesting, differentiated computers instead of Loonix on a has-been chip.

Would NASA have even bothered to talk to SGI for Columbia if it was Origin 3000 based? No, of course not - they would have gone to IBM.

well .... to quote Silicon Bunny

Governments don't like to see their technology suppliers being bought - it doesn't give them the warm fuzzies. They'd much rather bail them out with lucrative research grants and large scale projects. Look at how badly HP have screwed government departments over with their laughable Alpha 'road-map'.

No further comment needed ...

IBM will not buy SGI. At all. It's just not going to happen. Quite apart from the fact that SGI is dwarfed by IBM - an utterly insignificant player - IBM already have products in every area that SGI do.

Why on earth would IBM spend money to buy a non-competitive niche player when they already have higher volume sales from competing products?

Why on earth would a customer buy from a niche player with shaky financial prospects when IBM "already have higher volume sales from competing products" ?

Do you think IBM sales lose sleep at night when thinking of Altix vs. their POWER5/Linux business?

There's no business justification for it at all.

In other words, in comparison to IBM SGI hasn't got much to offer.

And that's not even touching on all the regulatory pain IBM would incur from the US goverment. Look at the hopes SGI had to jump through when buying Cray.

Bullshit. The US government asked SGI to buy Cray. They didn't want it to go to Japan. That would have been politically unpopular at the time. Nowadays probably no one would care but Japan was the bogeyman then that China is now. Besides, then was then, now is now. There is no longer any regulatory anything from the US government. You now have an "ownership" society. Once upon a time you had to pay people off to break the laws. Now it's assumed that if you're a company, anything is okay. Ownership, ya know ? Next best thing to feudalism ... or maybe even better. Feudal lords actually had responsibilities to their serfs.

I still look forward to the new machines from SGI, because they're still exciting, innovative, and ultimately very clever pieces of kit.

Actually, they aren't. Big deal, a water-cooled door. Numalink came from Cray. Name something they've actually done besides produce sexy-looking cases since 1998. Though admittedly, the cases look good. Probably they should go into that business. They could be the case-makers for real computer companies.

Oh, I almost forgot ! Recreating Jerusalem exactly as it was in the Time of Christ ! Maybe they could get some nice fundamentalist group to support them if they turn all their energies into proving the Earth was Created in six days. In fact, that's kinda looking like their best bet, right now.

Dubhthach wrote: ... pity Cosmo ain't around anymore be interesting to hear what he got to say

Well, there ya have it. When people like cosmos and rhoenie leave sgi, what has the moving finger writ ? Once upon a time Silicon Graphics was special. The computers we use are really great - pleasant to use, reliable, good performance, excellent engineering, real Quality. Fun. No wonder people are very intense about them and they cost way more than their era's competition does on the used market.

But what they are doing now is writing press releases. The rest is pitiful. All they are now is an overpriced Dell. I almost said a clever Dell using quality components rather than the cheapest junk, but laptop DVD drives ? EIDE disks ? in an $ 8500 deskside ? They've gotta be shooting up or something to think that's gonna fly. Sad.

I guess the best workstation we'll ever see from SGI is a dual 600 Octane w/V12. Luckily that's good enough for me but otherwise, Silicon Graphics, r.i.p.

SiliconBunny wrote: Hamei, if you want to disillusion yourself into thinking that SGI are intellectually bankrupt, doomed, whatever - be my guest. I'm not going to argue with you.

SB, I don't need to do any self-disillusioning. SGI has already taken that job and run with it.

But there are a lot of good people at SGI, doing some very clever things -

There are always a lot of good people at wherever, doing good things. There are still a few excellent, smart, capable people in IBM supporting OS/2. But ....

... don't bad mouth the company, and belittle those people's work, just because SGI isn't doing what you, personally, think they should be doing.

Badmouth ? I didn't badmouth anyone. I merely spoke the truth. Deny anything I said, with facts. We're too much entranced here by what Silicon Graphics was , and too out of touch with what they've become.

If you don't understand what SGI are doing

I do understand what they're doing. They're fucking up in about as many ways as John Akers could have dreamed of and selling off their assets to drag out the process. It's a classic scenario. It's you who don't understand what they are doing. You have been blinded by love.

and why

The why is simple. As I explained, one of the corp's wives read some articles in a Ziff-Davis magazine explaining how things were gonna be, so they went with it. Last time this happened they went NT. This time it's Linux. They haven't had a fucking klew since Ed McCracken left.

maybe it's not because an entire company of clever people are wrong

And maybe John Akers was right on the money and maybe no home in America will ever have a use for a computer and maybe 640k of memory is enough for anyone and maybe little green men from Mars are attacking New York even as we speak. But you guys always love to talk about how "the Market" dictates these things. I'd just like to point out how "the Market" is judging SGI : today it's at $ .78/share. Keep running their hi-tech company like this and they'll be de-listed in another month or so. Here; this is what "the Market" has to say about how well SGI is doing :

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=SGI

Face it, SB. There are three possibilities.

1) they haven't got a fucking klew and so they're dribbling through their assets on the way to death

2) they do have a klew so they're collecting their salaries until the company goes into the grave.

3) they know that the gov't has a lot of SGI boxes, so they're planning on sucking off the collective tit while screaming about private property, innovation, hi-tech, and the evils of Socialism

Maybe you should run your own tech company for 4-5 years before making such sweeping statements about SGI's direction and achievements.

Their achievements were great. That's why we all have old Silicon Graphics boxes and use them. But they stopped achieving in 1996. In 1995 their stock sold for $ 42 a share. They had a klew at the time. They've been on a logarithmic downhill slope ever since. You can't invoke "the Market" this and "the Market" that without looking at how "the Market" judges what they are doing. I don't see any way you can claim that "the Market" endorses a single thing they've done for the past ten years.

By the way, I did run my own company - for twenty-five years. I know exactly what happens when your outgo exceeds your income for ten years running. It's not rocket science.

chicago-joe wrote: I have not tried overclocking a 250MHz chip to 300MHz, if it works, expect the CPU chip to run very hot.

In my O2 it works for about thirty seconds before everything freezes.

Oh well.

colin wrote: Is it possible obtain 450 MHz? I would be intersted in overclocking an R12K/400 module in O2.

Is it the soldered-on ball grid array type chip that the Octanes have ? If so, the chip itself seems to be okay at 450mhz ....

managed resistance wrote: From personal experience, I can tell you that many people will often go to great extremes to avoid the simple solutions.

You've been to China too, hunh ?

dexter1 wrote: The best C++ book out there is: "The C++ Programming Language, Third Edition" by Bjarne Stroustrup.

Old news, but --

http://members.safe-t.net/jwalker/progr ... rview.html

Intel-OUTSIDE wrote: ... how many people here know that dell(u.k.) claim that removing the factory windows install from there laptops invalidates the warranty?

That's funny ... because in China you can buy Dell computers direct from Dell without Windfows preinstalled. The cheapest options come with a FreeDOS floppy and that's it. Yeah, Dell sucks but it's better than ... Gateway ? Better than Acer for sure, anyway. I hate the Acers we have - total garbage. Yuck.

Just tried to play a wmv file - I know, ugh - but :

any chance the mplayer krew could enable this at the next compile time ? It'd make one fewer reason to fire up the smelly Windows box.