The collected works of josehill - Page 10

vishnu wrote: So then it is permissible to ask if anyone knows of a vendor who offers a software product that can do one thing or another? In this case it was a C++ compiler for Irix 5.3, but mentioning a perment license crossed the boundary?

The original poster's question did not necessarily cross the line. It may not be obvious to a new member of the community where to go to get software through legitimate channels, and we should be as helpful and welcoming as possible, within the rules of the forum. Unfortunately, other than jan-jaap's suggestion of an open source alternative to the MIPSpro Compiler, we got distracted from the OP's question by engaging in yet another fruitless review of Forum Policy.

Aside from sharing pointers to non-commercial alternatives (like open source software), it is acceptable to point people to legitimate commercial sources , such as the original vendor or authorized resellers, and there are examples of exactly that in the forum. It is not acceptable to offer to buy/sell/trade commercial software directly on this forum.

Unfortunately, it is pretty common for someone (like bluecode, in this case) to take that as a cue to argue for changing the forum policy regarding the buying/selling/trading of commercial software. As recondas mentioned, the topic has been discussed ad nauseam , and it is extraordinarily unlikely that someone is going to introduce a point to the conversation that has not already been raised, again ad nauseam . Pretty soon, it becomes tempting to shut down all discussion of the topic, rather than allow leeway for pointers to legitimate sources. None of us are paid to host, moderate, or participate in this forum, and recurring headaches don't help any of us.

The owner of this site has been very generous in managing and hosting this resource, and his position on the matter has been very clear. This is a community, and it is largely self-governing, but, at the end of the day, it isn't a democracy. Use it and contribute to it to the degree it is helpful and mutually beneficial, but keep in mind that all of us -- including the moderators -- are guests in another guy's sandbox.

Oskar45 wrote:

josehill wrote: ad nauseum

ad nause a m

Of course. Thanks for the fix. Latin is not my first language.

vishnu wrote:

In the flyleaf of HMQ-380-C, SGI wrote: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Unpublished Proprietary Information - All Right Reserved

I noticed that and thought it must be a typo, along with the purple front pages, or it was a beta prior to the final version or something. I guess that must be why it's not on techpubs. Now I'm curious to go through the whole ridiculous 288 page thing to figure out what were the juicy bits they didn't want anyone to know!

IIRC, you needed to go through SGI's two week Origin training and certification courses to get these books. Basically, they were proprietary lecture notes and supplementary materials and weren't made available through external channels. SGI didn't mind system owners doing things like adding drives and peripherals to big Origins and Onyxes, but they could be pretty finicky about owners poking around in greater depth, especially when they could charge many tens of thousands of dollars for annual support and maintenance contracts. If you messed with something you weren't supposed to, and it broke, the contract could be voided, and then you'd pay truly jaw-dropping sums for parts and labor. I took a few other courses from SGI back when they had a nice office and training center in Hudson, Massachusetts, and I always tried to sneak into the Origin Technician classes to see what they were up to, but they'd boot me out pretty quickly.

Trevalin wrote: By way of comparison, my last experience using Maya 6.5 was on an SGI 320 VW under Win2000 with dual 1 GHZ PIII's, and I'm wondering if there was a configuration of an IRIX box that would be somewhat similar in performance?

I've only used Maya 6.5 on an 800 MHz v12 Fuel. It felt fine to me on that hardware, but I really only played around with it a little bit for hobby purposes, nothing very heavy duty.

You might find Ian Mapleson's SGI Performance Comparison page to be helpful - http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/perfcomp.html

Look in the sidebar there for "Maya V6.5 Simple Scene" for a set of benchmarks on various SGI systems.

foetz wrote: it's this time again. hope you have a good time wherever you are

Foetz's greetings have become a holiday tradition! All the best to you, foetz, and to nekochanners everywhere!

Very nice! We used nearly identical hardware (180 MHz) to host the corporate R&D intranet portal for a German pharmaceuticals firm around 1996-1998. When retired from industrial service, the machine served for several years as a failover router between my home network and my redundant DSL and cable internet connections. When I needed a faster router, the Challenge S found a new life as a very capable print server.

ClassicHasClass wrote: The only PPC Duo was the 2300. Those are nice little machines, very collectable.

I am also a huge devotee of the PowerBook 1400.

I have a Duo 270c and a Duo 2300, along with a DuoDock II. When they were new, the Duos drew a lot of attention. There was nothing else on the market nearly as sleek and portable at the time. At our old shop, they found second lives as serial terminal replacements in our data center. Their compact size made them ideal for placement directly in racks.

I also have a PB 1400 - the first laptop I ever purchased. Over the years, I maxed out the RAM, upgraded the hard drive, and added a video card and a Dayna dual coax-RJ ethernet PCMCIA card. Still runs great, dual booting into either MacOS 8.6 or 9.1.

I walked into my freshman year of college carrying an electric typewriter with correctable ribbon and no interest in computers, while my roommate walked in with a brand-new 128k Mac. Later that week, I was publishing our dorm newsletter from our room. By my senior year, I had saved up enough money to buy my first computer, a brand new SE/30 for $3,600. (Some years later, I gave the SE/30 to a friend who wanted a computer for his kid to play with. A few years later, that SE/30 came back to me, upgraded with an Micron Xceed color video card and gray scale adapter and an Apple RGB display. Thanks to a kind Nekochanner, the SE/30 now has 128 MB and has run everything from System 6 to 7.5, and a little A/UX, in between.

This was neat: a short story, with photos, discussing the discovery and resurrection of two early 5.25" floppy Mac prototypes, aka "Twiggy" Macs. http://www.cultofmac.com/239280/twiggy- ... macintosh/

scottE wrote: Nice! I still have to respect anyone who who laid out newsletters with a typewriter, but there's just something about even dot-matrix printed pages that looks better.

Heh. Yeah, I did the manual layout of typewritten copy back in high school, and I figured it'd be the same in college, but I immediately adopted my roommate's Mac and his copies of MacWrite and MacPaint. The idea of WYSIWYG displays and printing was a revelation.

Quite a nice machine, even as an 80 MHz PPC 601, but even better with a G3 upgrade! I used an 80 MHz 7100 as a video microscopy station back in the day (alongside the Indigo mentioned on another thread). I also recall coming away with bloody hands after trying to upgrade the RAM on a few of those old beasties. Inaccessible RAM location, lots of sharp metal edges, and some disassembly required.

foetz wrote: wow nice work there and thanks for sharing

Indeed! Congratulations!

Sean4000 wrote: Bump, I'm back from a nasty 2 years of my life.

Glad you're back!

Interesting video. Thanks for sharing.

This might be old news to Nekochanners who have a lot of vintage Mac hardware, as it has been around for a couple of years, but I don't recall seeing it mentioned before, and it seems pretty neat, at least to me:

"Floppy Emu is a prototype floppy disk drive emulator for vintage Macs. It uses an SD memory card and custom hardware to mimic a 400K, 800K, or 1.4MB 3.5 inch disk drive and floppy disk. It plugs into the Mac’s external or internal floppy connector, and behaves exactly like a real disk drive, requiring no special software on the Mac."

Anyway, in case it helps anyone - http://www.bigmessowires.com/macintosh-floppy-emu/

Sorry to hear that, Jimmer. You've been an important part of the community, and you will be missed.
Best wishes,
jh

I'm a huge fan of DiskWarrior (which does work on 10.9.x), but in cases where the disk is obviously starting to fail at the hardware level and has problems mounting, my go-to tool is Data Rescue from Prosoft Engineering .

Data Rescue is an extraction tool, not a repair tool. It will attempt to copy everything it can from a dying disk to a new disk. IMHO, if you're the kind of person who tries to fix broken Macs rather than throw them away, it is absolutely worth spending the $99 for Data Rescue before you need it. Alternately, you can download it and run it in demo mode to see if it can help before forking over the cash, but that may be a risky proposition for a disk that may be falling apart.

(Disclaimer: I have no connection to Prosoft, aside from having my bacon saved by their utilities on more than one occasion. They also have an interesting history , having written disk utilities and other tools as contractors for Apple and others from "back in the day." Their NetWare client kept the Macs in my former BigCo running on the network for many years after Novell dropped support for Macs.)

guardian452 wrote: But if there was going to be a Right Time, it would have been with release 10.6... Better late than never, tho I suspect they are working on their own improved FS more suitable for their users.

I suppose, though the 10.6 was a really big refinement and consolidation of the platform. It was even billed as having minimal new end user-visible features, with nearly all of the improvement either under the hood or targeted at developers. I look at it as the "reference release" for Intel Macs, with 10.9 becoming (perhaps) the next "reference release." It took around four years to get from 10.6 to 10.9's under-the-hood improvements. I can't imagine it would've been possible to get that far at the time 10.6 was released, though I agree that the market would have raved about those improvements, if they would have been deliverable. As it was, it was probably a big enough effort just to get a fully Cocoa'd Finder built and tested.

But, yeah, I'd love to have the 10.6 user experience with 10.9's "invisible" improvements.

Geoman wrote: And for me Windows user I'd love to have the Windows 7 user experience with 8.1 "invisible" improvements.

Exactly! I was thinking the same thing about Windows when I wrote my comment about 10.6. (Some of the visible Mac changes had me thinking about using Windows more often, but then MS released Win8, so now I've shifted work to a notebook. Made of paper.)

I also agree with your remark about filesystems - "As for filesystems, I don't trust any of them - all the important stuff is on a RAID 10 + scheduled backups."

Considering what you both Gardian & Josehill wrote, I take backe my 'under the hood statement'.

You're a gentleman to say that, Geoman. On balance, it is debatable just how important those "under the hood" improvements really are if their impact is not widely felt, so I do see your original point. The old "If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it" story. Time will tell.

vishnu wrote: That's why we all read alt.sysadmin.recovery though, right?

I hadn't read it before, but after reading a couple of threads, I'm all in!

foetz = stud

hamei wrote: This is from Windows 2k, but might still be relevant : (thanks to josehill ) Windows Services for Unix works on ID's , not names. So you can have the same user and group on both machines but still have problems. Get the group and user id's to match.

Thanks for the thanks, hamei.

Minor point: the UID thing is a Unix thing, not a W2k thing. The Unix kernel (and hence anything that works with it, like NFS) tracks users and groups by numeric user identifiers (UIDs) and group identifiers (GIDs).

For example, let's say that there is an account named "josehill" with UID = 47291, and that account belongs to a group called "knuckleheads" with GID = 91356. Technically, as far as Unix systems are concerned, the account is 47291, and it belongs to group 91356. The "josehill/knuckleheads" combo is completely arbitrary and irrelevant to the system - it is nothing more than an easily remembered alias for the convenience of human users.

Conversely, if there is an account with UID = 47291 called "josehill" on one system and an account with UID = 47291 called "hamei" on another system, the two Unix systems will treat the "josehill" and "hamei" accounts as if they are the same account -- because they are the same account, i.e. account # 47291.

So, when using a Unix technology (like NFS) to connect to a system that uses a different model for identifying users (like Windows), you need to configure a mapping between the Unix user model and the other system's model. That's the step that hamei (correctly) called "awful" when working with Windows Services for Unix. He also could have said "clumsy, torturous, abusive, maddening, etc."

My guess is that this mapping was not correctly performed between the original poster's Mac and PC. With default security and sharing enabled on the Mac, /Users is visible, so a Windows machine should be able to see the names of the user directories within the Mac's /Users directory. However, unless the UID issue is sorted out, the Windows machine will not be able to see what is inside those directories.

I agree with the other people who have suggested using the Mac's SMB file sharing, especially with a small network. It's FAR, FAR easier to configure sharing between a Mac and Windows machine using Windows file sharing tech than it is to use NFS. I'd only bother with configuring Windows machines to use NFS if you are managing a dozen or more machines, and NIS/NFS is already the standard for file sharing and directory services in your organization.

In my environments, XP and W2k survive on some virtual machines, mostly kept around for the odd need to access or convert data from old programs that have long been on the extinction list. For my Windows hosts, they've all been running Win7 happily for quite a while. I expect that situation will continue until around January 14, 2020, i.e. Microsoft's Win7 extended support end date .

Very cool! Thanks for sharing this!

guardian452 wrote: Windows 8 is out for a few years now, don't understand why people would bother 'updating' to something out-of-date already...

In many corporate environments, the cost of training and transition support is seen as being significantly more for Win8 than for Win7. Especially for businesses that already have a significant Win7 footprint, it probably makes more economic sense to consolidate everyone on Win7 for the next few years, effectively skipping Win8.

I think a lot of IT execs expect Microsoft (particularly under a new CEO) to revamp its Windows strategy, and they suspect that Win8's adoption has been rocky enough that whatever follows Win8 might take some different approaches to the user interface. From that perspective, one could argue that Win8 is "out-of-date", while Win7 is the version with legs, so skip 8 entirely and just wait for whatever comes next.

Win8 does have some nice enterprise features that Win7 lacks, but those features don't seem compelling enough to justify the migration costs for many businesses.

ClassicHasClass wrote: My 40MHz-clockchipped Q800 is smirking in the corner. (It runs 3.1.1.)

My old SE/30 really wants to run A/UX again, too. Just haven't gotten around to it.

Anyone know if A/UX supported the old Micron Xceed video cards? My SE/30 has a card in it that it didn't have when it last ran A/UX.

guardian452 wrote: I don't think they even have win7 computers on the clearance shelf anymore.

That may be true, but larger businesses have any number of arrangements for procuring Win7 machines from major manufacturers, while individuals and small businesses still can order Win7 machines online through Dell, HP, etc.

Another thing is that some of the more heavily regulated industries, like pharmaceuticals and healthcare, have regulatory requirements to validate and document the accurate operation of certain processes and software. Introduce a new OS, and you need to go back and revalidate your software, update your documentation, and do mandated staff training, all of which can be tedious, disruptive, and expensive, while yielding benefits that are not necessarily noticeable.

One other comment: from my perspective, and it is one shared by a lot of IT and business execs, Windows 8 is not something that most users were asking for, especially business users. Windows 8 is something that Microsoft wanted, to add revenue by forcing an artificial upgrade cycle and to create a new mobile/tablet strategy. The former doesn't show much consideration for its customers, and the latter, while very important, was botched in its execution and didn't need to have much to do with its desktop/laptop strategy beyond questions of integration. Instead, Microsoft decided to go for fusion of desktop and mobile use cases into one platform, rather than integration between two different use cases. Again, that's not to say that Windows 8 is without its merits, it's just that the implementation doesn't align well with most customers' priorities.

Interesting. Thanks for the great overview!

nongrato wrote: i've seen on YouTube a lot of videos of IRIX demos, but they seem to be absent in my IRIX distribution, at least i'm unable to find them anywhere- the toolchest item "find-> demos" is greyed out and there is no "demos" tab in the icon catalog. Where do people get them? Should they be purchased separately?

Some models, such as O2s, Octanes, and Onyx2s, shipped with machine-specific demo CDs, but those discs technically were not part of the "standard" IRIX distribution. Another source of demonstration/trial software were SGI's "Hot Mix" CDs, which were released regularly to support contract customers.

This is my early favorite to win the coveted "Nekochan Post of the Year" award!

jimmer wrote: For this i had to come out of retirement?

Couldn't Oskar45 and Hamei throw digi-mud at each other, whilst Foetz quietly provided a perfect solution? Sigh.

I consider OS X 10.6.8 to be the "reference release" of OS X. Everything after that seems to have valued form over function. Too bad it looks like we've seen our last 10.6 security update. It's nice to see a little bit of color get reintroduced to Finder icons in Yosemite, though. I never liked the "let's make everything gray/invisible" approach that has been in place since 10.5.

GIJoe wrote: what i'd however really like to see -
dark UI colors - in fact: customizable colors for all UI elements.

I remember how easy that was back in the pre-OS X days!

GIJoe wrote: finder with two-column display and a path-input bar (breadcrumbs a la windows)

Somebody suggested Path Finder to me a few days ago. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks interesting.

Yes, indeed. I'll go with Tiger as the "reference release" for the PowerPC architecture, even though I actually run Leopard on my G4 laptop (17"!).

ClassicHasClass wrote:

josehill wrote: I consider OS X 10.6.8 to be the "reference release" of OS X. Everything after that seems to have valued form over function. Too bad it looks like we've seen our last 10.6 security update. It's nice to see a little bit of color get reintroduced to Finder icons in Yosemite, though. I never liked the "let's make everything gray/invisible" approach that has been in place since 10.5.

Tiger forever.

(I'm typing this in 10.4.11.)

ianj wrote: There is no such thing as a "reference release" of Mac OS X. You all are crazy.

Actually, there is such a thing, and it is defined in Apple's OS documentation, i.e. "a stand-alone system software package that can be installed regardless of the version of OS X currently installed (assuming the Mac is compatible with the reference release)".

That said, I originally wrote that I considered 10.6.8 to be a "reference release" (in quotes, not in caps, since I was using a phrase in a colloquial way, not in an Official Way®). I was using it to mean "the standard by which I judge other versions". In practice, I think that 10.6.8 was a truly mature release that had nearly all core functions working well, and, for the first time in OS X (IMHO), subsequent revisions of OS X did not have a compelling balance of new, useful functions/features vs removed, broken, or arbitrary functions/features. I've been upgrading and testing new Mac OS (and other OS) releases as soon as they came out since I first got interested in computers in 1984. In almost every case, I've immediately moved my personal production machines to the new OS in order to get the new functions.

Now, after being an early adopter for more than twenty-five years (and continuing to be an early adopter in other areas of tech/process), I decide that Lion and beyond haven't met my cost/benefit criteria (and I used a term informally to describe my opinion about a Mac OS version), so I'm either crazy or a luddite? Sorry - that's just wrong.

Cory5412 wrote: In regards to the Reference Release -- do you mean the initial release of any given "version" of Mac OS X? I'm actually not sure how to parse this article, but I imagine that what it means is that 10.5.0, 10.6.0, 10.7.0, 10.8.0 and 10.9.0 are the "reference releases" of Mac OS X. Not that Mac OS X 10.6.8 is the reference point for the entire Mac OS X family.

By Apple's definition, 10.6.3 is the last reference release of 10.6, since that is the last standalone, bare-metal, generic 10.6 installer that Apple shipped. I think I was clear in my later post that I was using a looser definition of reference release than the official Apple definition. Fine, I regret using the colloquialism.

A whole lot has changed since 2009 when Mac OS X 10.6.0 was released, and Apple's simply not willing to run their platform that way, whether or not it would cater to your particular whims.

Please, spare the condescension. I doubt anyone here expects Apple to cater to their particular whims. Why can't people who are happy with the changes that Apple has made accept that others may have legitimate reasons to be disappointed about the direction that Apple (or any other company one may care about) is taking, and they are not necessarily lazy/stupid/crazy/geriatric/overly conservative/etc if they voice those disappointments on a forum with supposedly sophisticated, experience computer users?

If your whims are a commercially supported desktop operating system that rarely changes, you really should be looking at a commercial UNIX or VMS, and if you think that Apple's "fumbling around with the latest trends in UI design and functionality for the f*ck of it" gets in the way of your productivity, then I suspect you'd find it worth your time, money, and effort to move to another platform.

Except that doesn't seem to work well as a solution for the general workforce. Companies generally don't buy operating systems to run operating systems. They buy operating systems to run applications and to support workflows. A frequently updated OS that breaks applications and workflows, for seemingly arbitrary reasons, especially after being quite serviceable across many years of previous upgrades, is a step backward for most business customers. Apple (and other vendors) are perfectly free to change their OS as they see fit. That doesn't mean that we should stand and applaud when those changes disrupt our businesses, increase our training costs, etc. There is a reason that businesses have been slow to adopt Windows 8. (Actually, Windows 8 is the reason I haven't moved my own business from mostly Mac OS to Win7. Win7 is solid, generally stable, and it has a clear support lifecycle. I guess now I can be called crazy because I don't love Win8.)

It seems odd to say, but these days, it's possible that the boxes of cables, miscellaneous gear, and software might be more valuable than the stack of Indys.

I've been happy with GMX.com as a free IMAP email provider that plays well with Apple Mail. I don't know if it makes a difference, but they are a subsidiary of a German firm, and at least once upon a time, they touted their privacy policies as being more oriented toward EU notions of privacy than US gov't ones. Of course, the US subsidiary has to play by US rules, but maybe the EU lineage makes a difference on the margins.

(I also have Gmail, Exchange, and other accounts elsewhere.)

Edit: I forgot to mention, their webmail interface is quirky, but not bad, once you get used to it. Unfortunately, it is supported by schlocky, cheesy ads for nutritional supplements, Thai women "who want to meet you!", and so on. The site works fine with AdBlock enabled, though. In any case, I access it through IMAP 95% of the time.

Very nice.

henrik2008 wrote: i dont know how much irix 6.5.22 can regonize when we are talking about scsi hdd in terma of gigabyte ?!.

Up to 9 exa bytes, though I don't remember if there is a smaller size limit on Indy hardware. In the worst case, it would be well into the terabytes.

Technically, there are two drive bays in an Indy, though it is usually recommended to use only one hard drive in an Indy because of possible heat problems. When Indys were new, the most common configurations had either only one hard drive, or a hard drive with a floptical drive in the second drive slot. In general, hard drives generate a lot more heat than flopticals do. Having said that, I did run an Indy with two 9 GB hard drives successfully for many years.