The collected works of hamei - Page 5

zafunk wrote: Hmm.... well, only time will tell. So far, turning the monitoring off has saved me, but I may have to get a new mobo eventually

Going on two years now here .... if it finally dies it'll go into the scrapper. The Fuel just isn't that great a computer to spend SGI's version of money on.

foetz wrote: yes, sadly the fuel was more sort of a mips-pc like the alpha-pc those days or the 604e based ibms.

Didn't mean to come off as quite so negative about the Fuel - it's not a bad computer, actually. It's just that SGI still had their heads up their asses when they priced it. Okay, the mainboard and cpu are low-volume high-cost items. But $600 for an off-the-shelf peecee case ? The exact same one they used in the 230 and 330 machines ? And the rest of their Fuel prices are equally nonsensical. No wonder they are bankrupt. No one who isn't a fanboy (us) is gonna spend six times what something is worth just because it says SGI on the outside. And then they shit on their fanboy constituency. Great.

Oskar45 wrote: ... what would *you* think is the computer equivalent of what we call in German "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" ...

An updated Octane would be tits. Tezro guts in an Octane package ? That would make a very nice desktop, imo.

Obelix wrote: I am sorry, but it is not a question of a buggy environmental monitor.
When my Fuel began flooding me with warning messages about the +5V line exceeding 5.5V, I checked the voltage with a precision voltmeter and found it was absolutely true.

Looks as if your warnings were different from what the rest of us are/were getting. Pretty sure I was also getting the 1.5v up-and-down warnings that Oskar45 saw. Your power supply should be fairly simple to repair; it's just a typical peecee-type switching power supply. Per my other comments on the Fuel, one would expect a $550 power supply to last more than a few years. I don't think the Fuel is a bad computer - it's just way overpriced for the quality of the components.

Oskar45 wrote:

hamei wrote:

Oskar45 wrote: ... what would *you* think is the computer equivalent of what we call in German "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" ...

An updated Octane would be tits.

Precisely what updates have you in mind?

Faster memory system
faster disk system
1/4" more lateral room in the disk-drive area so that you could have a built-in DVD-ROM
support for IDE devices so that we don't have to beat our heads in to have a DVD burner
gigE built in

With the exception of the wider trays for a DVD-ROM they could have done all of it with a newer mainboard. Okay, not the IDE support, that'd have to go in a shoebox but otherwise SGI could have created a better Fuel than the Fuel by just offering a new mainboard and some red skins. Perhaps they didn't want to cannibalize Tezro sales but I doubt that would have been a problem. Perhaps it would not have been optimum but it would have resulted in a better computer, imo. Octanes are really nicely designed. The Fuel is ... uhhm, conventional. Dellishly conventional.

schleusel wrote: ... from Fortron Source (Sparkle) ...

I think I'm going to puke

Dr. Dave wrote: Actually I've used quite a few Sparkle (Fortron) PSU's here for PC kit, they're really pretty good quality for the price ...

I made the mistake of going to their website. Fortron isTaiwanian. In Kunshan I live surounded by Taiwanians. They make me puke. I used to think that Milpitas was the armpit of the Universe ...

josehill wrote: It would be nice to be able to buy a common USB2 card, slap it into any PCI SGI box (like an O2, or even an O2K, not just the more recent machines), and then connect one or two $250 500 GB USB2 drives and have them work without having to sacrifice a goat first, rather than pay the same amount for a 73 GB SCA drive.

I'm hoping that the newish cheap nas devices will fill that gap. There's a new kuro box coming out soon that sounds good. Real good.

josehill wrote: I agree! (Well, maybe I'd only say it's "really, really great!", not "perfect!" )

I'm not talking about adding all sorts of wizzy effects or bubblegum and eye candy, but really just some tiny, gradual improvements in functionality.

It would be nice if some stuff like the icon view of an ftp site didn't blow up all the time, cdrom's are far too slow and finicky on my boxes at least and x-window locks up more than i would like but otherwise, yeah. It's purty good.

I'm putting a lot of hope into this kurobox thingy for mundane tasks and saying a little prayer every night that someone somewhere will sell me an 800 mhz fuel processor for cheap. Overall, it's hard to beat Irix on MIPS.

nekonoko wrote: Updated/uploaded Firefox-1.5.0.7 with "official branding" as this was apparently a big issue for some.

just out of curiosity, what's the difference ?

nekonoko wrote: The difference is it says "Firefox" instead of "Deer Park".

ah-ha ! that's certainly an important feature

WolvesOfTheNight wrote: I am wondering if there is a better way to move her? I can't think of one, but I thought I would check.

Cat, hmmm. Tie a rope around her neck and let her run behind the car ?

Syonyk wrote: I made Music Player Daemon box out of it! I may even contribute a tardist to the Nekoware archives here in a few weeks.

That's very cool. Umm, btw there's an mpd tardist in /beta at the moment that joerg just built. Care to compare performance for us ?

Syonyk wrote: Oh, I didn't look in the /beta section - I just pulled the current section.

I shall take a look at it!

foetz used to do that to me all the time - I'd ask "how about blank-blank ?" and he'd say "in my directory or "in beta." Finally I learned to look more carefully

Good to have a test of the mpd concept tho and nice to have more people compiling apps. Now, how about a look at Lilypond ?

nekonoko wrote: Okay got this licked - new static MIPSpro Firefox-2.0 build in 'beta'.

Seems to run well, maybe a little faster ? Not sure. Only thing bad is that the rmb menu is now about six kilometers long and the "open in new tab" choice doesn't work [fireflop problem, not a nekoware problem.] To tell you the truth, I don't really like the way tabs work now. It's too easy to hit the "close" button when you mean to do something else.

One vote for 'move to /current,' tho. Gracias, nekonoko !

edit : the rmb button context menu returned to its previous behaviour, suddenly and all by itself. Not looking this gift horse in the mouth.

joerg wrote: Hamei have to install or update his neko_ruby.

You're right, mine was busted. But since I never use it I may just remove the thing ...

ipaddict wrote: Such a beautiful language, too.

Freudian sloop - just had the Assistant do a google images for "ace bandage". Now, you'd think that would be a nice clean topic, wouldn't you ?

squeen wrote: Second-hand Octane on ebay......................................$300
mencoder and ffmpeg from nekoware................................$0
Nekochan.net annual fees....................................................$0

Making cross platform movies from IRIX.............*priceless*.


today is a good day
thanks all

Squeen, I am very sad to inform you that you'll have to take that photo down, toss your Octane and go buy a nice new Dell wintendo machine. There is no place even in a mom-n-pop for this kind of thing. That Octane consumes too much power and it's too big and too slow. No one can do worthwhile work with old SGI junk so just give it up and move on.

We have this on the highest authority.

digitalpioneer wrote: Two thumbs up while I'm hangin' ten!!

-------

We don't want your damned thumbs. Just hand over the girl !

digitalpioneer wrote: @hamei: She is quite ... ummm ... errrr ... ahhhhh... shall we say comely, now isn't she?

Indubitably

That wav file refuses to play at the correct speed for me, however. Strange.

squeen wrote: I What I really was psyched about was how nicely the nekoware media tools (ffmpeg and mplayer) were working for animation creation.

Neko Irix mplayer works better than Windows Media Player

http://www.roumazeilles.net/news/en/wor ... -networks/

"Public-Key cryptography ready to shatter?

Sunday, November 19th, 2006

Public-Key Cryptography is a very common technique used to protect sensitive information by encoding it in such a way that decoding relies on the extreme difficulty of some mathematics techniques (like finding the root factors of a prime integer). Today, a large part of our security is relying on this (including most of the secure communications over Internet).

But German cryptologist, Jean-Pierre Seifert (Universities of Haïfa and Innsbruck) seems on the bring of reavealing an unusual line of attack to this critical technology. He is set to present this in the next RSA conference in 2007. This could be a shattering blow to Internet security as we know it.

Essentially, the attack relies on the possibility to observe the operation of the CPU itself. Today’s microprocessors include a technique known as predictive branching that tries to anticipate results of some calculations. If the prediction is right, everything is very fast, if not the microprocessor still has to do a lengthy calculation. This results usually in huge performance improvements, but for the cryptologist it means that without knowing too much you can identify (from the exterior) what the microprocessor calculation results are, just by looking at the time it takes to do the computation steps.

This opens the door to a new generation of spying software that could rather easily crack the secret keys of some of the communications we consider quite secure. For the moment, since no precise details have been given, and since no demonstration has been made in the public, we are rather secure, but the vast majority of the specialists already consider that approach will certainly lead to a flurry of new easy-to-write spyware (before that cracking the secure key of those communications could take from years to millions of millenia of heavy computation; now we are speaking of near instantaneous break through)."

Interesting. Kinda like they investigate nukular physics - crash two trains in a tunnel then see what parts fly out the ends

skip wrote: ... nuclear posted about the GL extensions, it seems that fixing these is likely to be quite involved.

Maybe it's time to call in our resident OpenGL expert, Mr Squeen ...

jimmer wrote: Get it here:

http://www.sillypages.org/sgi/notes-0.1.tar.gz

Needs the Viewkit dev stuff installed to compile, I guess ?

Geoman wrote: Seems like there are good expectations on the marked concerning the CEO change.

By the time the old CEO has thoroughly disappointed everyone, they could name Bozo as next CEO and the stock price would go up

jimmer wrote:

hamei wrote: Needs the Viewkit dev stuff installed to compile, I guess ?

Indeed it does - sorry

No prob, just have to dig thru the closet, try to find the 367 CD's required to add an option to Irix. Either that or wait for someone else to do it

Frapazoid wrote: They should've ...

It's a dead horse. You could fill an Encyclopaedia Brittanica-sized bookshelf with "they should have" but ... they didn't.

That's why they pissed away the billion dollars they had and went bankrupt.

I find it interesting because I am seeing the same thing in smaller foreigner companies all over China now - absolute imbeciles in charge. But they certainly get their oversized salaries .... wonder where this will lead, eventually ?

So Postfix and Cyrus have been running a while and I'm watching the logs ... and I'm relaying some mail ! Rotten bastards. Not a lot but still, this is intolerable. I'm also getting mail to a local host that hasn't been turned on in months and never had a publically-visible host name. Originally I set Postfix up to allow relaying from addresses in the local network (had another machine that was doing its own smtp at one time) but this appears to maybe be a mistake ? From looking at the log it appears that there are some unexplained "max connection rate" hits and also some strange addresses ( mailto:[email protected] , for example) trying to get through.

anyway, if you are running Postfix I would suggest not allowing relaying from your local network addresses. So far that seems to have stopped the problem. Any other suggestions willingly accepted. The logs from Postfix are not as good as Weasel logs. Sure is faster tho.

Bastard spammers

shel wrote: You can control Postfix's idea of what your local network is, and, unless you specify addresses that aren't really on your network, it's bulletproof in my experience. Postfix (since pretty early versions) rejects relaying by default. It's posible to override this with configuration, of course.

The problem was trying to accomodate users who are not on the local network and who do not have static IP's .... pop-before-smtp is really what I needed and now that I've kinda given up on the hokey workarounds I was using, it seems like that is actually an option via Perl. Why it isn't part of the Postfix base package is kind of a mystery to me, tho. Seems like almost everyone is travelling all over with a laptop these days. Postfix is definitely fast. Mikey likes that part !

squeen wrote: I had a wierd problem with the DCD V12 and my Octane2. With a regular DVI cable (no dual link) and the SGI (Sony) 23" LCD monitor I could run the Octane at 1920x1200@75 Hz (xsetmon reported). However I later plugged in a new HP 23" LCD, it wouldn't support the resolution---it runs at 1920x1200@50 Hz on a Linux box. The Octane did not have a slower video format for 1920x1200, so I switched the monitors back, which is unfortunate since the HP has two DVI-I inputs and the SGI/SOny only has a DVI and an analog.

VFO is my only solution?

Weird - my V12 shows a res of 1920 x 1200 x 50 in xsetmon and several others close to that.

stuart wrote:

hamei wrote: Weird - my V12 shows a res of 1920 x 1200 x 50 in xsetmon and several others close to that.

Hmm - I have 72Hz, 60Hz and 50Hz for 2@1920x1200, but only 60Hz and 25Hz(!) for 1920x1200... odd.

I think there's a randomizer in the xsetmon code I also have stuff like 1920x1154_2398r2 and 1920x1154_30f ... I suppose the 1920x1154_5994 is 59.95 herz refresh ? There's a 1920x1154_50 in here too. The 1920x1200_50 is the very last one displayed before you get the 2@ lists ... maybe os revision ? This is 6.5.30.

If you need, squeen, I can pull the settings file and email it to you.

scottE wrote: If I want the use V8 gfx with 12-bits per component in mind, which CRT display would be best? (Also, any recommendations for a good place to buy it?)

If you weren't in Alaska this'd be a no-brainer - Sony 24" new version GDM-FW900. Damned thing weighs so much to ship tho

Personally can't stand LCD's - even the IBM P260 here is better than a flat panel. Ugh.