The collected works of oreissig - Page 1

What do you mean by OEM? There were quite some branded SGI workstations sold, e.g. from control data, but as far as I know, they all ran standard IRIX.
The set of installation CDs for IRIX 6.5 is splitted into two parts, one is version specific (overlays, (complementary) applications) and one is not (foundations, dev. libs). In theory, developer foundations are also not version specific, but as it turns out, there exist two revisions of dev. foundations and later IRIXes want the later one (part-nr. ending with -03 instead of -02).

btw, you can get IRIX 6.5.22 overlays from SGI for free after registering in supportfolio

I originally started with a little bit of QuickBasic, and later some Pascal/Delphi, but really got fluent in programming with Java during university (Java is the lingua franca in education today), which is also what I'm using at work. I also grasped some knowledge in C++, but it really feels like shifting down a gear in my mind

Anyway, if I had to pick a new language to learn, it would definately be dependent upon what I would do with it...there is little sense learning Modula-3 if you were to do serverside-webprogramming. There is little sense in learning LISP if you were to do performance-critical programming. There is little sense in learning an interpreted (incl. JITed) language if you were to do low-level programming.

it seems they only postponed it

it really doesn't matter for IBM

I actually don't see, how any of this might have any impact on IBMs customership, because IBM isn't interested in the small fishes, that's not where the big money is coming from (which is why IBM dropped its thinkpads). Larger customers simply have a support contract, which is why it doesn't matter to their customer base.

so it is not the case, that IBM will charge an additional cost for accessing their patches, it only locks out the small fishes, that don't bring any money to them anyway (which is sad for us hobbyists, but totally understandable from a business point of view)

that's one nice and long paragraph, that you have written, which boils down to "IBM lost the PC-business, because of clones"...yes, that's how the PC-business works, it's made that way, that's not the case for mainframes or i or AIX (yes it is a unix, but it's probably the most different unix in current existence, so porting should be everything but trivial). there simply will be no easy alternative

and to repeat the essence of my previous posting: none of the customers relevant to IBM will notice any difference, they don't have to pay more, because they already have a support contract

that's right, but when you consider the prevalence of unix-based systems in the whole world of computing, that's basically a logical conclusion to make. Of course there are still isolated niches like IBM Mainframes and they do important business and they do a whole lot of business transactions, by far the largest part of serious computation takes place on somehow unix-like systems

if you count cheap featurephones with JavaME, then almost all phones ship with java. when you consider how many of these featurephones actually run some form of application, JavaME is alive and kicking just like TurboPascal...
iOS and WP7 don't involve Java, but Android and the old Blackberry-OS are thoroughly based on it, so it's a mixed bag...important yes, 95% no

probably the best bet to get mainframe in real hardware (although still being really rare) is an MP3000

it's obsoleting IRIX before version 6, so what? angry about not being able to run bleeding edge software on your old Indigo R3k?

why would it be called G5? it doesn't have to do anything with the then popular PowerPC CPU

this was nowhere near complete to be able to run commercial applications, and it got dropped in 6.0 anyway

I once had to deal a little with Smalltalk and found it strange at first, but very refreshing after getting used to "really everything is an object" (or rather a message call), even loops and if-constructs

That sounds like it used to be different, but considering the performance leaps during the 90s, you can now work a lot better on a 6y old system than when you did the same comparison 15 years ago.
The push towards mobile devices is our friend here, because it slows down the rising of system requirements in general.


If you are talking about desktops, that is true. In the mobile sector, there's a lot more movement and actually Intel plays a minor role there at best.
But actually, in the age of platform independence, what's the matter about a processor architecture? as long as the cpu fulfills your needs, there's nothing wrong with it, and considering power/watt, Intel is the leader in the upper half of the market, ARM leads the lower half.

so the iPhone is a workstation?

usually it's the applications, that turn your computer slow, but that's independent from the OS. try running a current webbrowser (firefox 2.0 is not current) on some OpenBSD on an old RISC box and visit a usual website with some javascript etc and you'll notice, that the "weight" of the OS is the smallest of all problems when running on legacy systems.

you cannot surf today's web with javascript completely disabled. there are so many sites, that fundamentally rely on dynamically loading content, that will not work without it.

you'll probably state that you are not interested at all in this new stuff and think it's good riddance not being able to visit those sites. it's your own opinion and you are fully entitled to have one, but fact is that you simply cannot use the whole web on legacy machines, and there are a lot of people who may be interested in old systems, but don't want to do without youtube, facebook, twitter, ...

That's why I put those examples to the end of my posting I'm not using facebook myself, but don't see what's wrong about web video. Okay maybe you don't like Google being the owner of youtube, but even "better" services like Vimeo need either flash or HTML5 video, both of which are not possible with Firefix 2.0 on IRIX.
My point is simply that turning off javascript or any other way of not using modern technology is not a valid solution for everyone.

dude your swearing don't make your arguments more clear, quite the contrary
it simply is not a simple fact

not actually one place to see, but I want to ride the complete transsib from moscow to wladivostok some time in my life

what's wrong with companies being involved, if they play along the rules (which are defined by the GPL license, which is actually used to sue companies really high fines if they don't comply)? The promise was never that it has to stay hobbyist only, the promise was that everyone could join in, that doesn't exclude companies.

By the time linux started, it wasn't mature enough to be serious competition for major unix vendors anyway.

because they have been allowed to. But how would a company "steal" Linux?

you mean they buy the FSF so that they alter the GPL?
You don't need to tell me that copyright legislation is broken, I'm not talking about copyright laws. I'm talking about the Linux kernel and the GPL.

But the voting system in the US with its "winner takes it all"-approach yields the current two-party systems, and if there are only two parties, there's no real need for parties to differentiate substantially. Winner takes it all practially eliminates the chance of a third party getting involved, which might cause them to build coalitions to have legislative power. Not that coalitions cannot do silly stuff either, but it's far better than the single-party rulings in the US.

My point is: Yes those people do elect, but the system makes it impossible for a fresh movement to ever get into power, so basically they have no choice but the established parties.

IRIX 6.5 » Books » End-User » Impressario User's Guide

I don't have a deep understanding about the whole financial mess, but actually I don't think the people making decisions have it either.
The only thing that I know for sure is that forcing states to spend less money will not help them to reignite their economy, actually it's quite the contrary. Although it may be trivial to assume from a microeconomical standpoint that spending less money = more money left, it's not so hard to realize the failure when thinking in macroeconomic terms.
I guess we'll need some mechanism to permanently transfer money between participating countries with different economic strengths (just like it's already happening in federal states, e.g. germany, where there are states with higher productivity than others), but that will most likely be a hard fight to implement.

There's newer versions of OpenSolaris Illumos for UltraSPARC hardware, like OpenSXCE , but that's probably not on the same level of maturity than official Solaris 10.

These figures are worthless, both are completely overpriced. I bought my c8000 (which is WAY better than a C3700) some time ago for something like 25€ + shipping. Everything above 50-100€ is just utopian, except there's something very special about this particular machine. You'll always find idiots on ebay (mostly commercial sellers), who radically overestimate the value of their merchandise.

Actually I only look for auctions on ebay and ignore the "buy it now" offers, because they are all completely overpriced (they are okay for small accessories, but I never saw a whole machine at a reasonable price). You probably have to wait some time to find the machine you are looking for*, but in the end, you'll pay the actual market price.

* simply because auctions find a buyer pretty much all the time, even if it's for 1,50$, in contrast to utopian buy now offers, that get posted again and again for a year or so