The collected works of josehill - Page 5

The original Cricket Graph remains one of the greatest, most elegant programs ever written. Seriously. I have yet to find a program that graphs as simply and intuitively.

(Note: Cricket Graph III, which was released after Computer Associates bought Cricket, was nowhere near as good as the predecessor, even if CG III did have more chart types.)

By the way, Mac OS X includes a fun little graphing application called "Grapher." It's in /Applications/Utilities . In addition to graphing equations, it can also plot data points and, much like Cricket Graph, generate interpolations based on those data points. To do so, create a new graph, selecting the appropriate graph type. Then, go to the Equation menu and select "New Point Set." Click on "Edit Points," and you'll be able to upload a comma-delimited file of x-y coordinates. Once your data is loaded, click on "Interpolation," and you'll have the same options as in the old Cricket Graph -- Affine (linear), Polynomial, and Exponential.

Quite a positive review at http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/31/a- ... -ipad.html

I may well get the 3G version when it comes out. It could be an interesting tool for me when I'm at client sites.

Exactly. Not "toy."

Exactly right!

Nice!

Assuming enough RAM and reasonable expectations, I think that running Leopard on a G4 mini is fine, even if Tiger is a bit more "tuned" to the G4 mini's capabilities.

As bigD said, if you go for a G4, you'll want to max out the RAM. The performance difference under Leopard between a 512/768 MB G4 and a 1 GB G4 is larger than the difference between a G4 running Tiger and the same G4 running Leopard.

Keep in mind that the internal drive on a G4 mini is sloow -- some (all?) of the G4 models only had 4200 rpm drives, and that can really slow down Leopard. If you have a faster spare drive laying around (either 2.5" ATA for internal use or an external FireWire drive), you might want to try using it as a boot drive. Again, the difference in performance with a faster drive will be greater than the difference between Tiger and Leopard.

I have started recommending to friends and colleagues to move their G4s to Leopard for security purposes, even if there is a moderate speed penalty. Tiger security is getting a bit out of date. At home, I only keep one machine on Tiger so that I can run Classic, but that's it.

I also agree that, unless you get a G4 mini for "almost free," an Intel mini, even the original Core model, is a better value. If you find yourself spending over $300 on a G4 mini and upgrades, you probably should go with an Intel instead.

Check out http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Device/Mac_ ... PowerPC%29 for an excellent, illustrated guide to upgrading a PPC mini.

It'd be interesting to see how a G4 mini with an SSD would perform in real world benchmarks compared with a standard drive, but it'd be hard to justify paying for an SSD to put in an old mini. If you just happened to have one laying around, however...

Your memory?

The C compiler was part of the 5.3 IDO, but with 6.2, compilers were marketed as separate products and were no longer included in the IDO.

Also, with 6.2, the IDO was broken into two components, the IDF (foundation) and the IDL (libraries), much like in IRIX 6.5.

As an aside, the 6.2 IDF/IDL can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.sgi.com/sgi/IRIX6.2/

As you've pointed out in the past, there's quite a lot in a name, or an abbreviation, particularly in a technical field. I guess that's one reason why marketers and engineers generally have such positive views of each other.

I think we both agree that precision in language is extremely important...and I think it helps us to get to the bottom of things here.

First off, you are correct, and I was (partly) wrong.

Some of the issue is version specific, some of it is due to ambiguity in SGI documentation, and some of it is due to folklore.

In short, the official IDO product did, indeed, include the C compiler into the 6.4 era, so skywriter is correct.

However, by MIPSpro 7.2 (basically the 6.5 era), SGI documentation said things like "the IRIS(R) Developer's Option (IDO) CD was replaced by the IDF and IRIX(R) Development Libraries (IDL) CD sets." Likewise, other bits of the IDO were broken out into separate products. For example, DBX, SpeedShop, ProDev WorkShop, and WorkShopMPF all became part of a new "ProDev Workshop" product release.

Before IRIX 6.5, SGI made the IRIX 5.3 IDO available for free download, and it also made the 6.2 IDF and IDL images available for download in a similar place. I'm pretty sure that this is where the erroneous conflation of IDO = IDF + IDL got started, and, as above, SGI documentation does little to dispel the notion.

The situation was confusing enough that it got its own entry in the hallowed SGI FAQ - http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sgi/faq/apps/section-5.html

For my own part, I only state lamely that, starting in the IRIX 5.3 era, I worked in an environment that did C, C++, and Fortran programming, so I always ordered compilers as individual products, not really thinking about the IDO per se .

I'll save the memory jokes for myself, and I yield the field to skywriter (though I will italicize per se , lest my extremely traditionalist 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Hughes, rise from the grave to exact her vengeance upon linguistic revolutionaries).

In addition to all the compelling reasons given by tgc, I notice that support for Solaris 7 is being dropped, too. I think it's very hard to argue against dropping pre-IRIX 6.5 support when a gigantic release like Solaris 7 is also being consigned to the dustbin of gcc history.

One quick test - temporarily disable the firewall on the Mac and see if that helps. Nine times out of ten, problems with net application connectivity like this on the mac are due to firewall settings.

I guess that was inevitable...

Not exactly. A console displays various status and error messages that terminals do not display. Also, a user can only have one console at a time.

To start a console via the Toolchest, use Toolchest -> System -> Utilities -> Start New Console.

For more info, see the man page for winterm , paying special attention to the console option (-console or -C).

For extra credit, examine the contents of the following scripts:
/usr/sbin/startconsole
/usr/sbin/winterm

System consoles to the same system via winterm? Do both windows display the same system messages simultaneously? If not, only one of them is a real console. When startconsole or the "open new console" command is used, the last one opened becomes the console, while the previous ones become regular terminal windows.

I guess I stand corrected. So much for what the man page says.

I hadn't heard that term before. Thanks for the laugh!

I agree with bri3d. I've taken apart a couple of eMacs over the years, and they are quite labor intensive. There are some decent teardown/repair guides and service manuals on the net if you search hard enough for them -- definitely worth a look if you haven't opened up one of these machines before.

You misspelled solace.

I'll refrain from speculating about whether there are any correlations between your political preferences and your spelling skills.

I knew that there was no way that I could have been the first!

Tempus fugit...

...though if you've already installed an earlier version of 6.5 on the machine, you can update directly to 6.5.22 via a "live" installation without having to boot from installation media. Just be sure to install patch 5086 first. If you don't already have the patch, it is freely downloadable from http://support.sgi.com/

Hi, fu. Just a home LAN, so I haven't been using ssh. Interesting idea, though -- some quick googling suggests that it's not an uncommon approach.

@skywriter - I ended up springing for a Microsoft Technet Direct Subscription so that I can download any edition of Windows (or Windows editions of Office, etc.) at any point to verify that a particular edition does what I want it to do. Worth the $250 or so a year for a geek like me. (1st year rate is $349, but you can usually find discount codes online to drop the price. Seems MS actually wants developers and testers to use Technet...)

Oooh! Shiny!

You dang kids today with your fast 'puters! You don't know whatch'er missin'! Back when I was a young man, every vector image loaded sllooowww like that, and we liked it! We had to walk a couple of miles to school, too!

Yep - a very good tool for folks running XP...

Thanks for the link! Wonderful pictures.

I was ten years old when the USA celebrated its bicentennial, in much the same fashion as the Argentines, and I still remember seeing the ARA Libertad when it visited New York City for the celebration.

I hope that you enjoyed the festivities!

They let you near the controls? Forget hamei calling you "General" -- from now on, I shall know you as "Admiral Diego!"

O2 display output uses sync on green. Some non-SOG monitors will still display the output reasonably well, but with a greenish tint.

Before you start cavorting with the ladies, be aware that the version of 6.5.22 that is freely downloadable from SGI is only an updater (also known as an "overlay"), not a full installer. The free 6.5.22 updater will update any previously installed older version of IRIX 6.5 to 6.5.22.

In other words, you still need to get your hands on a full set of installation media.

What type/speed cpu do you have? The older cpus can work with any version of IRIX 6.5, while certain cpus require newer versions of IRIX. If I remember correctly, IRIX 6.5.4 or newer will work on every O2.

Okay, that helps. Any version of IRIX 6.5, including the first release from June 1998, will install fine on that system, and all older versions of 6.5 can be upgraded to 6.5.22 via the downloadable overlays.

For planning purposes, a default IRIX 6.5 installation without any extra software should weigh in at around 2 GB on your hard drive.

Office 3.0 for Windows was out in '92, and my recollection is that was the first reasonably mature version of it as a suite on Windows. It is a little hard to remember, but back then, even though PowerPoint existed, it wasn't nearly the standard that it is today. PowerPoint "culture" had yet to take hold. In the early to mid '90s, presentations still were much more likely to be done by overhead transparencies, often made with a photocopier, or, for more formal presentations, using 35 mm slides that were constructed by snapping photos of printouts or other original material. Anyone else remember applying adhesive lettering to photos by hand, placing the photos (or laser printer output) on a light table, and then taking pictures of the work for slide output? It seems like very ancient history, but it was pretty common practice even into the late '90s. There was even some competition in the electronic presentation market: Aldus (later Adobe) Persuasion lasted until the late 90s, some people liked using a product called More on the mac, and there were a few others.

As an aside, I remember ooh'ing and ah'ing over my group's first "portable" computer projector around 1998. It output a dim 640x480 pixels, and it was about the size and four times the weight of the suitcase my grandparents used to carry their worldly possessions from Italy to America 120 years ago.

As for Acrobat, version 2.0 came out in '94, with 1996's version 3.0 probably being the version that started to get real traction, especially on the net.

It's interesting that you remarked about Office 97. I worked for one of the world's largest science/tech oriented firms for about a decade, and the firm was very conservative about upgrading its basic software infrastructure, often skipping whole generations of Office. In 1997, the company standardized its appx 150k workers from a hodgepodge of platforms and tools to NT 4 and Office 97 (aside from scientists and a few others who required UNIX or Macs). While we upgraded quickly to Windows 2000 when it came out, we stayed on Office 97 globally until its end-of-support in 2004, when we migrated en masse to the XP flavor of Windows and Office. In all of those years of exchanging documents inside and outside of the company, I only recall two occasions where Office 97 didn't handle features from a newer release, and in both cases, they were fairly trivial things, like a type of animation or graphics transparency. AFAIK, the company remains on Windows/Office XP and is just starting to migrate to Win7. No idea what version of Office it is moving to.

I have a small business now, and we use Office 2008 on the Macs and Office 2003 on the PCs. I'm kicking the tires on Office 2010 to see if the interface overhaul and web features are worthwhile.

I think you mean Aldus Persuasion, later known as Adobe Persuasion, which was mentioned above.

You are right, of course, that the final nail in Persuasion's coffin was the bundling of PowerPoint into Microsoft Office. (Anyone remember what happened to Lotus 123 when Excel was bundled into Office?)

Beyond that, however, is the fact that none of the presentation software packages were particularly omnipresent until the late 90s, in part because of the absence of computer projectors. In those halcyon pre-bullet point days, most information sharing was in the long form: Word documents, printouts, etc.

You're right about Harvard Graphics, and I almost mentioned HG in my earlier response, but I figured that we were already straying far enough off topic before bringing in even more software!

Come to think of it, I'll probably split these last few posts into a new thread...

Like many of the Aldus packages (and Microsoft packages like Excel and PowerPoint), Persuasion began on the Mac, but later versions were also available for PC. Persuasion never came close to HG's market share on the PC, since the PowerPoint/Office bundle started dominating the field not long after Persuasion came to the PC.

Note: If you came to this thread looking for the discussions about:

• SGI's use of Jot and Presenter

• Microsoft Office displacing Persuasion, Harvard Graphics, and Lotus 123

• Whether or not Microsoft has done anything worthwhile with Office since 1997

• etc.

I split those into a new topic, " Windows/Macs & Office, Jot & Presenter, Adobe, Ancient History ".

Cheers,
jh