The collected works of hamei - Page 59

josehill wrote: Aren't you a little early to be installing Server 2003? It isn't EOL'd until July!

It was either that or move to the dog house

foetz wrote:

vishnu wrote: We had hundreds of the 24" SGI and Sun monitors at work back in the day ... We recycled the whole lot of 'em ...

terrible, i'd be only too glad to take them all

You must live on the ground floor ....

hoosyny wrote: The ATEN Firewire is not compatible, or faulty ?

Seems that way

All the no-name firewire 400 cards I've tried worked fine as long as they use a TI chip. (I forget which one but you can look it up easily.)

The truth is that I do not care too much about the Firewire card because I was reading that IRIX support for Firewire is not perfect and complete anyway.

Firewire in Irix is good for a couple things - there are several firewire SD - CF - etc card readers that work great. Faster and more painless than a USB card reader in Windows, in fact.

Also, disks work fine except for running xfs_repair. There is even a fix for that but I've never hunted it down. Sata is easier.

TeamBlackFox wrote: I'm looking to keep it as a silent 24/7 system.

Were you planning to put it in the neighbor's garage and run a long ethernet cable over to your house ?

ivelegacy wrote: i do not like OpenOffice, and i need a Word application

If you need to give docs to other people, there is a Ted in nekoware. It makes rft's. With Windows hiding the extensions, most people won't even know they aren't MS doc files. There are some things about the interface which are annoying but in general, it's ok.

In the other direction, you're screwed. All these decades of a thousand eyes, a thousand hands but still nothing. Really fast javascript tho. Be still, my heart.

Trippynet wrote: It's possible to get full 100Mb networking with the Indigo2, but then you need the GIO expansion card and these are a lot more expensive (and rare).

Don't know if the supply is holding up but those guys in Canada used to have them on sale pretty regularly.

TeamBlackFox wrote:

josehill wrote: I love "interface responsiveness." Hit the return key or click on something on a reasonable IRIX machine, and the machine feels like it immediately starts doing what you asked it to do.

Indeed this feels the case on GaNoU/Leenux and used to be on FreeBSD, until I switched to i3wm on FreeBSD.

After extensive research, I've decided that this is because Unix and the Yewnix wannabes on the desktop are braindead crap. Yes, this includes the newly-fashionable bsd's.

4Dwm is possibly responsive due to older software being lighter and, maybe in Irix case, written by smarter people. It is not as responsive on an smp box as I expected, however. In fact, it's disappointing.

There are a couple contributing factors ; the software is often shit written by imbeciles. Both BeOS and OS/2 have well-understood thoroughly documented methods for keeping the interface responsive. That was twenty effing years ago. You would think that knowledge would propagate. You'd be mistaken.

At the operating system level, it seems unbelievable that so few people would understand the difference between a server and a desktop. But what the hell, three hundred and fifty million butt-slapping grunting morons happily threw away four trillion dollars and the soul of the country handing the best friend the US had in the middle east over to our worst enemy, all based on lies a third-grader could see through. So I guess it shouldn't be a surprise.

Factoid : Unix handles threading very very poorly. Threads are not preemptive. Priorities are not kicked up, they are downgraded (eventually) if a thread doesn't give way all by itself. This is not that much better than cooperative multitasking. It works about as well, too.

The scheduler sucks. You can verify that by watching the cpu monitor. Processors are not evenly loaded. This is a good indication of a craapy design. 'Throw another processor at it ! That'll fix it !' Unh, yeah.

In short, pthreads are crap.

Loonix COULD have rectified these problems to create a high quality responsive desktop. Then they could have really had The Year of Loonix on the Desktop.

Instead. they created gtk3.

Gag me with a spoon.

TeamBlackFox wrote: AbiWord is decently compatible with MS Word.

Unfortunately, the one we have in nekoware also has trouble with doc files - at least the ones I tried. Most of the formatting got seriously screwed up. Open Orifice is still the only thing we have commonly available that imports ok

jan-jaap wrote: I have to pay €0,23 per kWh.

I s'pose you know, you have the world's most expensive electricity ? Even post-Enron California is only about a third that price. There must be a reason ?

TeamBlackFox wrote: ... we paid $400 this month to Virginia Dickhole Power Co.

White man build big fire, sit far away. Indian build small fire, sit close.

vishnu wrote: I think the first thing to do would be to check the installed software and remove any CADduo driver(s) you see there...

Even before that, I'd do a < printenv > from the prom, write down anything interesting, then do < enableall > and < resetenv >. That way you're starting out with a clean foundation.

foetz wrote: ... a good machine is much more than just the peak performance of some of the components ...

Why did it fall apart ? I know why SGI fell apart - their management was a collection of imbeciles. But there really is a segment of the population that wants what SGI offered at one time, isn't there ? A complete package that works well, not faddish crap that disappears in a week and never worked properly to begin with ?

Apple was sort of going that way but now they are also off in lalaland, doing ridiculous crap to attract 'investors', industry lapdogs and fanboyz. Look at their stewpid bouncing icons - oh boy oh boy, now we're talking Dodge Charger ! This is some cumputin', ain't it ?

Gag.

I am pretty tired of this antique SGI hardware crapping out but there's nothing current that's nearly as good. Current operating systems are just flashy worthless shit and they all have cameras buried in your underwear drawer.

It's disgusting.

foetz wrote: most programs reach their peak at some point i.e. the ideal mix of features, speed and usability. after that from a developer's perspective whatever you do you can only make it worse. sgi did a great job in that regard by switching to the quarterly 6.5.x updates; only adding or correcting what actually makes sense. only very few companies have ever accomplished that. under those circumstances the user actually benefits from newer machines but as i said that's very rare unfortunately.

This is all true BUT there are long-tested, well-documented methods to ensure that a desktop user interface stays responsive. Even if the program itself is a bloated turd, the interface can stay responsive to input. It's tried, tested, and proven over several decades.

Also totally ignored and forgotten.

wtf ? Are all these people writing application software stupid ? Or they just don't care ? Their egos are all so big they are convinced that their program is the only one that counts and the only one which any user deserves to run ? And if it's busy well hell, the user can just wait until it's finished doing what it wants ?

There is something wrong with this situation. Either that or it's true, no one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.


btw, you'll like this, foetz : several people recently have told me they are sick of US software. The German stuff seems to work better, be better designed and tested and more functional.

vishnu wrote: vishnu's jailbait avatar! We need a handcuffed smiley...

Kumba wrote: The wheels screech like the tortured cries of a hundred suffering children, though.

Mm, there's this stuff called "oil" ?

ivelegacy wrote: guys i do not want OpenOffice, i want Word Perfect, and i like to know about it

If any old word processor will work for you, then Word Perfect will be fine. This is Word Perfect 6, you know. Compatibility with other formats will be limited. The other common options would be Abiword (in nekoware), Ted (in nekoware), Framemaker (commercial but can read and write some doc formats), and there's a demo of Artstream that might be of interest. Artstream crashes for me if I try to do too much with it but you may have better luck. If you are only doing documents for yourself, you might try playing with Showcase. That's on the Applications CD ? It creates 'compelling multimedia presentations' but you should be able to limit yourself to one medium

There are some others but they are harder to find than a needle in a haystack.

All of them do word processing fine, it's when you try to exchange Mickeysoft Word doc files with other people that you have problems. Ted does rtf, which works with Word as long as the person on the other end doesn't turn it into a doc file. The Abiword in nekoware pretty much butchers doc files. A newer one might be better. Framemaker is okay up to Word 97, maybe 2000. After that I have not tried. Open Office is probably the best bet for importing Mickeysoft documents. Exporting is easy - worst case is you print to a PostScript file, then use ps2pdf to change it to a pdf. That works like a charm and almost anyone can read those.

Mickey should be tied to a post in front of a firing squad for the newest docx abortion. The only way I have found around that so far is some Windows crap or an online converter. Grrr. Anyone know of a handy-dandy docx-to-reasonable converter ?

TeamBlackFox wrote: Still looking, I need quieter fans than the stock ones.

TeamBlackFox wrote: If you're a Gentoo MIPS developer, why not use a Gentoo box with remote X to pull a recent Libreoffice or Apache OpenOffice copy over.

This is actually a huge project, much bigger than it looks on the surface. Just building the thing took something like eight hours on an O3000 .... there are some threads here from the time the original was done with input from the guy who did it, check them out.

In fact, we're lucky to have the version we do. I hate the thing but it can be useful.

Possibly the most useful thing the entire non-M$ world could use would be a good doc/docx-to-rtf converter. Or maybe doc-to-postscript. Many non-mainstream word processors can work with rtf. It's possible already to import rtf's but getting the general public to pay attention to what they are doing, ha ! good luck with that.

Antiword would be a potential starting point.

vishnu wrote: I'm in Minnesota, I couldn't keep this place warm in the winter if I had a freakin' tokamak in my basement...

What we do in Mongolia (same as Meenasoda, right ?) is build the bed out of bricks and put a fire underneath it. Then you spend most of winter in bed ... Collate this with that other thread and ...

foetz wrote: if i got that right TeamBlackFox suggested using an office on gentoo and just using the sgi for x.

In that case, skip the waste of electricity and run it on any old Loonix box directly. What's the point of Irix if all you do is display gtk2/qt/gtk3 Loonix programs on it ? Additional complexity that adds nothing .. why bother ?

vishnu wrote: XSgi is missing the RANDR extention. Been meaning to look into that for a while now, anyone know where sgi keeps the source code for their version of X?

I noticed that in the past. The odd thing is that xrandr is incompatible with xcinerama, so it must be possible to build loonix-fireflop without randr ? Either that or no one uses cinerama on loonix ?

TeamBlackFox wrote: ... browsing the internet from Sakuya or Alice isn't really a priority. Just have my FreeBSD or NetBSD boxes download it onto an NFSv3 share ...

Whoa. You download the internet for local use ? Isn't that kind of extreme ?

Trekiej wrote: Is there a bounty system here?

You bring in the head of an NSA official and I'll see what I can scrounge up ...

Correction : just checked with our M$ Word 2000, it claims to import and save_as WordPerfect 5 files.

Online claims are that Word 2007 will read-write wpd6 files.

Not sure how well that works but it's worth a test run. Abiword didn't do so hot for us but maybe Mickey is better. In daily use, we found it was easier to stick to rtf.

This one :

http://xibios.free.fr/english/xallwrite.html

has had me fascinated for years. It looks great and the website is still there but no trace of the files anywhere Any clues, miod ?

vishnu wrote: There's got to be an open source Open Document reader somewhere that we can get to run under Irix, yes/no?

ajw99 is right, you can unzip a docx and retrieve the text but other than the raw materials contained therein, you lose everything

Did a new search, there's now a couple potentials :

this one is c#, might be translatable into a real language ?

https://docx.codeplex.com/

and this one, originally written for open orfice, newer oo supposedly translates automatically (no good for us) but this still exists, as the builtin oo translator is apparently not so good :

http://www.oooninja.com/2008/12/better- ... erter.html

So, things are looking up on the docx front ?

ivelegacy wrote: also X11 is working ONLY on Impact/SR video board, the V6 is not supported

Mardi Gras and VPro don't do video. They are graphics boards. Octane Compression, Personal Video, Impact Video, Video for Impact (gotta love SGI naming), Digital Video, etc are video boards.

SGI != PeeCee.

btw, i am fine with WP-v6, here it is a screenshot,

Glad you like it, here's your screeny on a more permanent basis ... those photo sites suck the big ten inch

it is running on SGI/Impact, i have exported the display to quartX11 on macOSX in order to take a snapshot;

If you want to save yourself some trouble, < snapshot > is included with just about all the later versions of Irix. Not sure where it lives but if you did

keep *
install standard
install prereqs

it will be on the disk somewhere.

smj wrote: Maya can probably spread back-end rendering jobs across multiple machines - again, I'm not a Maya user, but it seems likely. But MPI won't let you automatically parallelize and distribute the front-end GUI application at runtime.

I'm not a Maya user either but there's threads here ... hey guys ! look up ! FAQ, Search, Members, User Control Panel. It's the one that starts with an 'S'.

Anyhoo, the gist of the discussion in the past was that the renderer built in to Maya would use multiple processors up to four. (Not MPI, cpu's.) But in actual testing, performance maxed at about two. There may have been some limitations related to the license, also.

Distributed rendering is generally done by other applications, not Maya. That Search thing might shed some light on which ones, if any, use MPI. foetz could probably chime in here ...

uunix wrote: An employee of SGI wrote a 5 or 6 part blog on the demise of SGI and I'm sure it was the section 'CRAP SUPPLIERS'..

As an ex-supplier (not to SGI but to other companies) there is a second side to that story.

Chapter One : Purchasing agents are worthless scum-sucking lying loser pricks. They should all be drowned like unwanted kittens. They get a quote, then they beat you up harder. Then they cut the quantity. Then they increase the requirements. Then they threaten you. Then they want to reduce the price again .

Or there is the other method : "here, we have a few prototypes to make, can you do it for cheap ? When (if, actually) the production run comes in you can make it all back and more." Of course, what happens is that when (if) the part goes into production, after you have a few hundred unpaid hours in figuring out the best way to make the part, what needs to be changed or improved, a few dozen phone calls with the 'design team' to correct weaknesses, they take your quote and shop it around to get cheaper prices elsewhere. For five cents they will happily forget every promise they ever made. Hey, it's just business ! gotta make a prooofit ! (Even when that means being an unethical worthless asshole, but hey ! again, this is the USA ! Money is what counts, right ? Then they get righteous about welfare queens.)

On several occasions, late in life after I'd figured this out, as soon as those people would start in on the "this is just a few parts, understand, but when the production comes ..." I'd hand them a twenty and tell them to go away. It was a lot cheaper. (The look on their face was worth the twenty)

Or they take the long view and sucker you in, sweet-talk you into buying a lot of equipment and hiring people to do a large volume, then once you are committed they squeeze you and squeeze you and squeeze you until you are working for less than free. Ask anyone in Sillycone Valley - Applied Materials (biggest player of this particular game) is SHIT . If there were a mass execution of Applied Materials PA's, there would be a thousand cheering vendors buying tickets to watch.

(Yes, I did do work for Applied Materials and yes, it did take over 120 days and countless phone calls to get paid. Fuck them, forever and ever, amen.)

How can one make quality parts under those circumstances ? SGI was responsible for that state of affairs.

Chapter Two : worthless asshole MBA's running large companies, e.g. SGI. Pay your bills ? Oh no, we work on other peoples' money ! Aren't we smart ? Pay on time ? You gotta be kidding ! Do you know the cost of money ? If we pay 90 days late, that's free financing ! Plus, did you know ? The public is really dumb ! We can buy $15 cards from Adaptec and sell them for $500 ! Whoo, that's some good business there, boy ! Nobody will ever figure that out cuz we's so clever !

Nobody but the good suppliers (and eventually the public), who will no longer do business with your company. "Don't you want to make 500 power supplies for us ?" No, not when we lose five bucks on each one. Go get them in Taiwan, they don't know about you. Yet.

Again, my life got soooo much better when I went c.o.d. If they wouldn't give me the work under those circumstances, they didn't plan to pay for it anyway. I wasn't losing anything.

Try going into the grocery store and telling the checkout lady to send you a bill, you'll gladly pay it next Tuesday. Yeah right. Fuck two ten, net thirty. They always take the two but pay in one-twenty. After fifty-three phone calls. Maybe.

I almost forgot ... SGI's drooling loser worthless design team (great spiky haircuts tho. And cool tattos. And don't forget the impeccable taste in artisanal beers). Open your late-model SGI, you will find evidence of the most moronic execution on the planet. Just one example out of thousands : Altix 350 case and O350 case. Almost exactly the same except three holes .050" different. They couldn't possibly have kept the serial ports in the same place ? New stamping dies, twice as much to keep in inventory, twice as much paperwork (or more), ten times as much potential for fuckups, all for what ? A sixteenth inch difference in the serial port location ? Wanna talk stoopid ? Here's the problem with that "we'll do the intelligent work, them little brown people can do the nasty factory work" : when your so-called designers have the brains of a flea, that plan fails.

This is not the only example of gross imbecility on SGI's part. Think "Fuel power supply" for another. In fact, every time you turn around in late-version SGI products, you find some piece of total shit that never should have seen the light of day.

It wasn't the Inventor's Dilemna that doomed SGI. It was their own stupidity and greed. They wanted big money for products that were no longer worth a shit.

foetz wrote: why me?

Horse's mouth

If you'd like to trade for a duoconnect, I'm up for it. Duoconnect works in a Fuel but not the O350. Has usb and firewire, don't know if there's loonix drivers tho.

Curses ! Foiled again

VenomousPinecone wrote: Nope, just always trying to play with something new.

They are rare as hen's teeth in China, too. We've called the company that supposedly makes them a few times - the girl who answers the phone never even knows what they are. Then when you do get to someone who claims to know, it's always "Not quite yet, should be ready in another month or two."

Been that way for five years now.

Just in case no one noticed, git is shit, github is a large bowl of worthless vomit, and Leenus is a braindead dork.

What a huge pile of hippopotamus crap

commodorejohn wrote: All version-control software is shit.

Could be, but I've used svn and cvs before, they were kinda clunky but at least they worked.

This git thing is absolutely useless. Plus so far, out of three pieces of software I've gitted, not a single one actually built. Not even MIPSPro, Sun Studio.

"This way to the vomitorium, please ..."

smj wrote:

foetz wrote: now that's a stock start

Fixed that for you.

You think he's kidding ... at smj's place, if you ask to use the bathroom he says, "Sure ! Sure, no problem. Can't get there through the hall, it's full. But here, take this path through the kitchen. When you get to the stack of HP-9000's, veer right. Then at the NeXT turboslabs, joggle around the Indy's on your left. A few yards farther you should see some RS/6000's, if you squeeze in behind them you can get through the opening into the bathroom. Just take the Atari's off the seat if you want to pee."

It's actually easier to go outside and climb in through the window

surrealdeal wrote: For what you are colloquially referring to as IRIX, is, actually, GNU/IRIX ; or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU + IRIX.

This is in Solaris, actually, but I take your point. The FOSS stuff is like a hot girl you meet in the bar who asks, "Wanta come over to my house and we can play ?

Then when you get there, three thugs hit you in the back of the head with a brick and take all your money.

I should know better by now

Pontus wrote: Come on hamei. Give us some meat on the bone, why does it suck?

You're right, it's not just git. The git thing is more of an indicator, like gcc hardcoded into the Makefiles. It's getting to be like going to a bar in North Beach - when that girl with big boobies grabs your crotch but she has an Adam's apple, better demand to see baby pictures.

What precipitated this observation was I just tried three gits from Slowaris. I don't think we even have it in nekoware, do we ? I'd look but want to avoid getting sucked down that bowl of sewage.

The git thing seems to be following the path blazed by hardcoded gcc, by package managers, by chasing the tail of flashy crap projects, e.g. gtk2 / gtk3. It's all tending in the direction of force-fed commoditized low-quality garbage, the exact thing that Loonix originally set out to avoid.

My git example : grabbed a git, or gitted a grab, whatever. < cat README > -- bla bla about the wonderful developers, thanks so much, etc etc. <cat INSTAll> -- a really long description of ./configure options.

Okay kewlo, do < ./configure --help >. Umm, file not found ? wtf ? <ls > , yup, no configure. Oh christ, nice q/c there, guys. Okay, let me rack the old meat RAM, umm, < autoconf >, yes ?

So I got a configure script but it didn't work. Sooprize sooprize.

Well, there's a mailing list. Joined. Gave them a short blast of dragon's breath. Who cares, the software is trash anyhow, at least I can vent. As you would expect, 40,000 whines and snivels about how it's open sores, if I'm so smart I can fix it, if I were truly hip to the jive I'd already know that you have to do < auto re conf -i > to get a configure script, if I am not versed in the secret handshake then I don't deserve to use our glorious software, &c &c ad infinitem glory glory hallelujah.

I replied, "Oh yeah ? Show me where the info is in your README or INSTALL docs, you mentally-retarded chimpanzees ?" to which of course they had no answer because the info needed to compile their crap software is not anywhere to be found.

In short, it's shit, Pontus. In plainest of terms, the stinky stuff that comes out the ass of an orang-outang with dysentery.

Yes, I am sure there are a few 'projects' using git that aren't like that. But in my testing, 3 out of 3 were a worthless waste of time and effort. This seems to be the direction that Free ! Open Source ! software is headed.


The silver lining : disgust with this shit caused me to rethink Communigate. Five minutes to find them, seven minutes to read the info and find the download (still works on OS/2, Irix, probably Plan 9. Nobody 'deprecated' over there.) Five minutes to download, another five to follow the instructions and mirabile dictu, in under an hour I had an smtp-imap-pop mail server running. And I didn't have to add user accounts to the operating system to get mail accounts ! Imagine that ! And the instructions .. the software actually DID what the readme's said ! Holy shit, I died and done went to heaven, Martha.

I still have this mental illness where I think that open source, where you should be able to match the software to your own circumstances, is a great idea. But this is a mental illness because that's not reality. The reality of open sores now is, it's just as non-responsive to users as commercial software ever was, except it has the added bonus of being lower quality. The worst of both worlds, hooray !

I thought that removing fiscal restraints would lead to higher quality. No commercial outfit is going to spend six hours removing some tiny little glitch, while a person who was proud of his work could happily spend six weeks of hobby time hunting down bugs. But this was not realistic. These people have no pride. Removing the fear of being thrown out in the street also removed the incentive listen to users. It went from "the source is available so anyone can improve it and nobody can take it away after you are dependent on it" to "the source is available so if you want it to work, you'll have to fix it yourself and we don't really give a damn if it's garbage or not."

Not good.

You are correct, Pontus. It isn't just git. It's the entire Open Sores ecosystem. The majority of it has leprosy. And malaria. And Down's Syndrome. And scabies. And measles. Five years ago it was okay, if not perfect. But now, if you want to avoid catching some loathsome disease, better run far and run fast.

A funny footnote : came across this survey

http://acomp.stanford.edu/surveys/2009_ ... ergraduate

some interesting things ... roughly 50% use Windows, 50% Apple, 5% yes that's five per cent, use Linux. Since the numbers add up to more than 100%, my guess is we're talking dual-boot. So that Linux figure is probably even smaller than 5%. And this ain't Frostbite Falls Community College.

Maybe the kids of today are smarter than I thought. Smarter than me, that's for sure.

guardian452 wrote: hmmm, slight addition:

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.

Ja, it's a Big Picture of the forest from a distance, for sure. But no matter what, the number of Stanford students using Linux is tiny. That's kind of a shock, especially when you consider the history of Stanford.

And I don't think it's getting better, guard. My guess would be, that number is even smaller today. Linux 'on the desktop' seems to have imploded. It offers nothing except hassle.

Maybe the incentive for open sores has dried up ? I went there because I got shafted by software companies several times. But the software land rush is over, you can get pretty much anything you want for cheap or free now, Linux never turned into a quality alternative, why bother with it ?

Surprising survey, eh ?

uunix wrote: ... both of which sound like a harrier jump jet all the time, which I would never want to work next to.

Just pump up the volume ... 7 years and 50 days on 11 should do it

smj wrote: If you're looking for a general rule - avoid the 1U formfactor if you want to escape the noise.

I have an HP switch that is the exception to that rule : they took a 45* chop out of the bottom and laid a big fan over at an angle. Pretty clever way to get some quietness and a lot of air movement into a 1U case.

uunix wrote: If you have no allegiance to a football team in the UK, can I please ask you spare a positive thought for my little team ...

Who's your quarterback ?

TeamBlackFox wrote: ... preferably less than $200 USD.

I don't think you're going to find that - at least not from anyone who knows what they are. But you could watch fleabay and craigslist for a Matrox dualhead2go. I have seen those for less than a hundred. According to several reports, if you get it set up on Windders the settings are persistent, so works under other operating systems as well.