The collected works of josehill - Page 12

guardian452 wrote: I'd probably like it more if this old thinkpad had a battery - any battery would do - or at least if the power socket wasn't so loose Runs pretty well considering this machine is close to a decade old.

I will give that to Microsoft. Their last few OSs perform very well on older hardware. While I loathe a lot of the Win8.x interface, Win8 is surprisingly zippy on my ten year old, entry level Dell laptop.

johnmccrea wrote: And if you haven't seen it, earlier this week I finally told the story of the big pitch to TJ and the exec team (for what would become WebFORCE): http://therealmccrea.com/2014/11/19/the-pitch-to-tj/

Thanks for sharing that story, John. I had a WebFORCE Indy on my desk and a few WebFORCE Challenges in the data center for quite a few years. It really was a great solution at the time.

hamei wrote: By the mid-eighties SCSI must have existed ?

Yep. SCSI was one of the selling points of the Mac Plus back in 1986. You could add 10-20 MB for around $1,000, IIRC...and it was worth it, too!

foetz wrote: the last one of the first gimp generation based on motif. for historical reasons and for hamei

You're a good man, foetz!

A clever solution to an interesting problem, Classy! Well done.

I've been a fan of PalmOS for quite a while. In the late 90s, I used to enjoy debating the merits of my Newton MessagePad 130 versus the various Palm Pilot models that many of my colleagues used. Eventually, the smaller size, the ability of Palm devices to sync with the corporate email/calendar system (Lotus Notes), and Apple's termination of the Newton platform led me to acquire a Palm IIIe Special Edition . It was very cool to look at, with a transparent plastic shell, and it was very functional, especially when attached to a Palm Keyboard. I still have the IIIe SE and keyboard, though it's been a while since I fired it up.

I bought a Treo 700p as soon as it came out, and it was one of the best cell phones I've ever had. I even ran the Java version of the Opera browser on it. I still use it daily as a timer and alarm clock.

I wish you hadn't mentioned the Dana AlphSmart Wireless device. It sounds like it would be fun to play with, and I see one on eBay going for slightly more than I'd like to spend (counting shipping), but not too much more...

Once again, foetz: you rock!

Next in the series: http://therealmccrea.com/2015/01/05/to- ... -software/

...with a bonus link to a copy of the old Silicon Surf site. Cool.

It's been a rough month or so for the SGI crowd. Looks like www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl is down at the moment.

The mirror site is still up at http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/o2cpumod.html

nekonoko wrote:

vishnu wrote: Not to tip my ignorance too much but what the hell are those things? Their manufacturers website doesn't ID them other than to say they're EOL...

http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/o2cpumod.html

That's exactly how I operate. My main Neko bookmark is the new posts one.

GL1zdA wrote: Personally, I always start with "New posts" so I've simply added search.php?search_id=newposts - to my bookmarks and Firefox start page, this way FF always suggest the correct link whenever I start typing "neko".

Same can be done for "Active topics": search.php?search_id=active_topics

I should add that the way I read Nekochan posts most often is via an RSS feed reader . I find the RSS feed to be the fastest way, by far, to keep up with what is being posted in the forums.

guardian452 wrote: Jose: I've only recently started using rss, now that it is dead to the rest of the world. I should add nekochan to my feeds...

I've been hearing that RSS is dead for more than a decade, but it keeps on going!

foetz wrote: rss is nice but only when using it through a local program. otherwise in case of web based services you give them all your feeds, they see what you read when and for how long and from where and so on ...

Fair enough, but the folks at The Old Reader seem to be in it for the right reasons. They built an RSS reader for their own use, and then they made the mistake of making it available to other people. Word spread, it took off, and their hobby started bankrupting them (more or less). To cover their costs, they started charging for people who follow more than a handful of feeds. I gladly pay them $20/year for their service.

Obviously, there are other models involving ads and data sharing that other companies use for keeping the lights on, but so far, this bunch hasn't gone down the road of "monetizing" user data. We all need to decide how much information (if any) we're willing to share with third parties in exchange for various services.

foetz wrote: mozilla used to have an rss reader included. it could be compiled with the main program as an option. i remember including it with some of my builds back then. it looked quite similar to the email client. not sure if it's still around tho

Indeed, I remember using it with your builds!

Any chance it's a normal thermal recalibration routine? http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic. ... 1&t=692435

It's not uncommon with warmer or high rpm drives in confined boxes, like Indys.

foetz wrote: oh you're running cde. that's quite a rare sight

I'd boot mine up in CDE every now and then, just from curiosity. As far as CDE experiences go, the SGI version was quite nice and snappy. I can't quite put my finger on any objective reason why this was the case, but CDE somehow felt smoother on an SGI machine than on Sun or AIX machines of similar vintage and power. It's easy to setup CDE and then switch back to the Irix Interactive Desktop when finished (just a matter of installing the CDE eoe and then setting/unsetting some chkconfig flags), so if you are at all curious, I suggest giving it a try.

foetz wrote: oh i did run cde on irix myself a couple of times. it's just not something you see often

That's for sure. Whenever I ran it, people would walk by and assume I was running a remote display. "Hey! How did you get those cool fonts in AIX?"

uunix wrote: The desktop you see is from a Power6 AIX CDE, I was telneted into the Indy.

...which makes the last few remarks by foetz and me even funnier. Well, at least to me.

I figure some of you might enjoy this slightly breezy article about how Paper scaled its web servers to handle publishing semi-naked photos of Kim Kardashian: https://medium.com/message/how-paper-ma ... 67f8d37688

Worthwhile if only for this paragraph:

One of the things nerds love to do is look at other people’s stacks and say, “what a house of cards!” In fact I fully expect people to link to this article and write things like, “sounds okay, but they should have used Jizzawatt with the Hamstring extensions and Graunt.ns for all their smexing.”

I'm definitely guilty of ridiculing someone's approach to smexing. I did it just last week, in fact.

(h/t DaringFireball )

LOL. Excellent! I remember that movie!

If you're using EFS, are any of your partitions larger than 8 GB? Did you make new filesystems in addition to repartitioning?

kshuff wrote: Yup, that's it. Didn't miss a step in fx, the filesystem isn't being made by the installation. When inst came up I escaped to a shell and ran mkfs /dev/dsk/dks0d1s6 and then mounted the filesystem under /root/usr and proceeded with the software installation, 5.3 is being installed now. Something so easy can turn out to be something so hard.

Sorry that I wasn't clearer before - that's exactly what I was driving at when I asked, "Did you make new filesystems in addition to repartitioning?"

After running into fs problems enough times, an explicit, manual mkfs or mkfs_xfs step has long been a part of my personal recipe for a fresh IRIX installation, whether 5.x or 6.x. I'm glad to hear that things got sorted out.

hamei wrote: What would have been impressive is if The Cloud were smart enough to auto-scale itself. Now that could be an interesting technical story. And really, it should be able to do that.

To be fair, things are getting much closer to that, and the tools mentioned in the article are part of the reason why. It's true that from an information architecture standpoint, there's nothing wildly different than what we envisioned when we were scaling Origins fifteen years ago, but from a tools perspective, scaling things are leaps and bounds better, simpler, and more generally automated and automatable than they were even three or four years ago.

While you have a point in saying that this guy was just doing his job, the truth is that I see companies every day with technologists who are not at all current on "cloud" tech, and they are holding their companies back in terms of capabilities and costs because of it.

A new post in the series, with an interesting video at the end - http://therealmccrea.com/2015/01/25/the ... ng-system/

tomvos wrote: It would definitely help if more people would understand this simple truth. Because advertising is running rampant on the internet, everybody is forced to buy new hardware - for the simple fact that otherwise advertising makes your machine crawl while all you want is some simple plain information. I think the signal-noise-ratio of most websites is so bad, we need out high performance machines mainly to display all this noise. (And our brain is tasked with filtering for information within all this noise.)

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

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

guardian452 wrote: It is not difficult to make windows 7 look and feel like windows 2000. I originally did this because having cleartype on a retina display looks really ugly with vmware's scaled framebuffer. But the more I look at it, the more I think mickey had their UX buttoned up right 15 years ago. It looks really crisp and clean.

I think there's a lot of truth to that. I set up my main Win7 box that way, even though it has a 21" flat panel display. The interface has its quirks, but once you figure them out, they don't get in the way of actual work, and Mickey is supporting Win7 into 2020. Not bad at all, actually.

The best thing that happened to Apple after it went down the road of iOS-ifying MacOS is that Microsoft released Win8, instead of something more like a Win7.5.

guardian452 wrote: ItsMeOnly has had a similar very impressive site for years

Yeah, his site is pretty legendary.

It'll definitely install and run on IRIX 5.3 (WP6 and IRIX 5.3 both came out around the same time in 1994), and it runs on IRIX 6.x systems, but you may need to do some tricks to get it to install on newer systems, mostly because of changes in the FLEXlm license manager between IRIX 5.x and IRIX 6.x, IIRC.

smj wrote: And now, finally, this thread is relevant to the thread title...

By the power vested in me as a moderator of this forum, I hereby declare smj to be the winner of this thread.

The specific nature of the prize will be determined by hamei.

ItsMeOnly wrote:

josehill wrote: legendary.

Meh

Yeah, maybe you're correct!

Nice to see you posting!

Coincidently, this article:
The Pro Dumpster Diver Who’s Making Thousands Off America’s Biggest Retailers
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/high-end-d ... tt-malone/

I don't recall what the terms were for Windows, but, as an fyi, SGI offered the IRIX version of Cosmo Code at no cost with free downloads. See this thread for info about the IRIX version. viewtopic.php?t=16723134

No worries, recondas. You were absolutely correct to shut down the Site Builder CD discussion, imho. My comment was strictly in the context of the IRIX Cosmo Code.

recondas wrote:

josehill wrote: I don't recall what the terms were for Windows, but, as an fyi, SGI offered the IRIX version of Cosmo Code at no cost with free downloads. See this thread for info about the IRIX version. viewtopic.php?t=16723134

foetz wrote: cosmo code was free at some point. sgi themselves provided an unlimited license on their site so no legal issues in this case

No disagreements with respect to SGI's Cosmo Code, but my reminder was in response to the request for an image of one of Microsoft's MSFT Site Builder CDs. While that CD is reported to include a number of demo/trail applications, knowing MS I wouldn't be surprised to find the EUA/license specifically forbids third-party distribution of the contents.

If you think I' over the top on this issue, let me ask if anyone here would willing risk being the recipient of cease-and-desist legal action from Microsoft? It isn't fair to put Pete in that position either.

vishnu wrote: I don't know what Microsoft's policy on redistribution of those CDROMs was, my guess, since they were trying to reach as large an audience as possible, would be that they didn't care. Perhaps miod would be so kind as to look at the terms and conditions if he can still read the disk, and report back...

Part of the reason that we draw a pretty hard line is that we really don't have the time or inclination to referee software licenses or to make guesses about the thoughts of corporate attorneys.

ivelegacy wrote: can you tell me more about these tricks ?
i have IRIX 6.5.22

I don't remember any specifics, but searching old Usenet newsgroup posts might get you closer to an answer. (I'm not trying to be difficult. I really don't remember.)

Thanks for the nginx! I've been thinking of playing with that on IRIX.

hamei wrote: Just "up"graded from win 2k on the Assist's kompewter. It made eight years. I'd have done a straight reinstall except wanted to try canavan's rdesktop (works well.) Server 2003 seems okay so far.

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

hamei wrote: The Sun Solaris Netscape Oracle iPlanet Java One Server to Conquer Them All server is pretty nifty as well. There is a slow-moving open-source version of that, which I have thought would be fun to try on Urx.

It's not popular with the groupies, which is a +1 for me as well

Plus, it shares some DNA with Netscape FastTrack Server that used to be bundled with IRIX!

TeamBlackFox wrote: And its funny because my Octane *feels* faster than my i5 school laptop for about a 25% of what I do.

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. On a current laptop, there is an ever-so-slightly perceptible moment where it feels like the machine's mind is somewhere else, probably looking for some kewl visual effect to show you or figuring out a way to send all your personal data to some botnet controller somewhere.

foetz wrote: all modifications that came later did not add actual functionality.

Pretty much the story of my life, right there!

Yes - to run MIPSPro 7.4+ compilers on IRIX 6.5, you need the IRIX Development Foundation 1.3 for IRIX 6.5 systems CD. That's actually the CD that SAQ was referring to in the last post on the thread that recondas linked to .

The IDF 1.3 CD is a base (i.e. "full") installer; it is not an overlay/update installer.

Keeping track of necessary IRIX development software can be a little confusing, in part because SGI changed how it bundled libraries and tools (see note below) and the fact that SGI's libraries and tools are as tied to MIPSPro versions (e.g. 7.0.x-7.4.x) as they are to IRIX versions, and MIPSPro versions could be used on more than one version of IRIX. If you used the MIPSPro compilers, you had to be careful to use the right IDF/IDO version, otherwise you'd break your compiler, especially if you were rebuilding a machine and wanted to use an older (expensive) compiler license.

I just noticed the time of day, and I don't have the time to procrastinate and research this further, but it occurs to me that a matrix showing compatible versions of MIPSPro, IDF, IDL, etc. would be a great addition to the nekochan wiki, assuming the information isn't already out there, somewhere.

Note: As of MIPSpro 7.2, the IRIS Developer's Option (IDO) CD was replaced by sets of IRIX Development Foundation (IDF) and IRIX Development Libraries (IDL) CDs. For more info, consult the IDF/IDO/IDL release notes for various versions, (e.g. IDF 1.2 , IDF 1.3 ).