The collected works of robespierre - Page 7

I don't have any UltraSparc machines, but it seems like the answers to your questions are: the Blade 1000 can use 1200 MHz CPUs if it has a high enough OBP revision and (maybe) a late model motherboard.
the XVR-600 and XVR-1200 are 3DLabs graphic cards with Sun firmware, and the XVR-1000 is an in-house Sun card. of those, the XVR-1000 has the most memory and is a UPA card (so there can be up to two in a Blade 1000). the others are PCI cards.
The SB-1000 uses eight 232-pin PC-100 ECC DIMMs, with a maximum memory of 8GB.

the cheap one-chip router boxes that the ISPs supply to their customers just don't have the hardware for anything but ethernet. so it's safe to say that the WAN connection is via ethernet.

the vbob only provides digital video ports, except for the genlock ports. each BNC connection is a video stream, in SMPTE 259M-C for standard definition and SMPTE 292M for high definition.

OSF/1 was an operating system from the Open Software Foundation in Cambridge, MA. (no relation at all to free software or open source)
It was mainly used by DEC under license, on the Alpha machines. That system was initially called OSF/1, but DEC renamed it later to Digital Unix, and later under Compaq it was called Tru64.
There did exist a version of OSF/1 for the MIPS-based DECstations, but it was experimental. I don't think it was used much in business or academia. It probably was mainly used as a means to develop software for the Alpha before the hardware was ready.

Diskless workstations were an early form of thin client. The idea is that system administration and backup only need to be done for the server, and all the clients are "zero state" so require no management. In practice, they were less cost effective, because all the I/O needed to go through a very slow shared network. In order to work without a disk, the workstations needed to have code in firmware to set up networking, find a server, and load the operating system over the network. Once unix is working, it just mounts its root over NFS (or AFS or RFS) and works like a unix system with a very slow disk.

The scenario you describe, though, sounds more like the DECstations were only used as terminals, with the users logging on to their accounts on an Alpha server. That was even less cost effective, since Xterminals were available at a small fraction of the cost of a workstation, and performed the same task. But at least disk access would be fast (since it's from a session on a server, to the server's own disk). This kind of remote login from a terminal is achieved using xdm.

the ultrix kernel would have been stored on the Alpha server. DECstations were capable of two different methods for netbooting: a) using Internet protocols bootp and tftp, or b) using a protocol from the DECNet suite called MOP. They do exactly the same thing, but if your network infrastructure was heavily DEC based you might have used MOP, versus bootp/tftp in a TCP/IP network.

the term you are looking for is "download codes". they are commonly included in releases of independent music. there are a lot of providers, but just a few minutes rifling through my record collection turned up little 3cmx5cm sheets with two providers: bandcamp.com and posterdisc.com. there are various terms of service and quantity rates that you should be aware of. posterdisc.com provides 1000 codes for $100, which is either cheap or really expensive depending on how you look at data hosting costs.

with Li-ion batteries, they can be damaged to the point of catching fire or exploding if they are charged incorrectly or overcharged. to try to make them safer, there are battery supervisor chips built into the battery module itself. the problem is that if the battery is drained completely, there will be no power to run the supervisor chip. and without it, the battery can't be charged.
the designers know that it's a problem, so the supervisor chips are supposed to prevent total discharge of the battery. even that's no guarantee that it won't become totally discharged (because the cell self-discharges), so the better ones will allow charging a dead cell at a very low rate. but by that point the cell is usually damaged, since lithium cells age rapidly when they are drained like that.

your post doesn't entirely make sense; the Impact Digital Video board does not work with either of the breakout boxes made for Galileo. It needs its own specific box, or you can make an adapter cable from 7x 75-ohm mini coax cables.

Did you get anywhere with this?
I was thinking about some of the new manycore processors and how they really could use a denser cooling solution. for fpgas, too.
I stumbled on this presentation that gives a lot of useful details including a blueprint for a whole tank system (near the end):
http://youtu.be/ivVoANqFBuY
One detail I hadn't seen before is that they use a special heat transfer material on the outside of the metal chip case, made of sintered copper. since it's sintered, it has a much larger surface area and lower thermal resistance, similar to the reason ultracaps have high capacitance. what I don't know is if they apply it chemically, as a paste or what.

i watched more of his slide presentations...
it's hugely interesting, but there are a lot of problems with routing cables and plastic components leaching into the dielectric fluid. PVC insulation seems to be a particular problem, so you really want to custom engineer the entire device using materials that aren't attacked by the fluid. Teflon insulated wires instead of PVC, and so forth (you may have noticed that the cables in his test computer are not standard ethernet Cat5). At least the epoxy chip underfill is compatible.

Yes, many are. There are also a huge number of power converters for trains that use it, but they tend to be hermetically sealed.
That solves a lot of problems, but at a high cost, since multi-pin hermetic connectors can cost several hundred dollars... per connector.

The daughter board is what makes it an m6 as opposed to an m3. See
http://www.shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh- ... H_AFB.html

There are 3 geometry engines on the main board (m3), and 3 more on the daughter board (m6).
The connectors on the daughter board go to a bracket that has DE9 connectors and are labeled "serial port". I don't know what they were for, but one trade article says "the software driver functionality was never enabled."
( http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/26/1/graphics/2352 )
Maybe it was intended to compete with SGI Discreet workstations that use serial ports to communicate with video decks. (one of the meanings of "VLAN".)

I haven't found a diagram from SGI that labels them, although it may exist.
It just seems obvious that Cobalt is the central one with the fan, Lithium is the lower one by the PCI slots, and Arsenic is the left one between the DRAM and the back panel.

DPI is useful for spying. It doesn't have much use for a firewall scenario.

I hope whoever gets these, if they plan to split them up has adequate antistatic workstation and trays

That adapter is for the Presenter 1280 flat panel, not the 1600SW.

The R8000 is a single CPU, but it has very high throughput per clock cycle; something like 4 integer and 4 floating point per cycle IIRC.

If you were "flashing" it from software it is most definitely a FLASH and not a PROM.
The xilinx chip on the CPU module is for setting the CPU timing only and does not have any boot software; that's why it is a write-once device, since only the factory needs to write into it.

Is it a job for Herr Doktor Rotwang?
I've taken old disks apart but not with the intention of fixing them. From what I gather the torque applied to the case screws is also somewhat critical? But a reasonable torque driver is pocket change, it shouldn't take aerospace tools.
In the days of PDP11s and such things it was much more common to repair hard drives, since they only lasted a few thousand hours between failures. Obviously no clean rooms.

By looking closely at the riser for the "mbus" board, you can see the silkscreen 'CYCLE COMPUTER CORPORATION'. They were an outfit that made rackmount SPARC computers and also upgrades for older Sun workstations. (including a SS5 module called the Cycle-5 that you could plug into a SS1, SS2, or even a 3/80). My bets are on it being an UltraSPARC upgrade made by Cycle for the SS10/20.

Extron makes video switchers and distribution amplifiers. The 112 is a buffered display mirror: it lets you send the same video signal along two different cables to two displays. It can also convert sync signals and shift the signals' timing.

I have a couple of them but they are buried pretty far back in storage.

the manuals are here:
http://www.extron.com/download/files/la ... 12plus.pdf

I have a 2TB Hitachi SATA drive that never stops seeking!
It starts beavering away as soon as it comes up to speed and unlocks the heads, and only quiets down when reading or writing large files. It keeps this up constantly until it decides to go to sleep. It has always done this.

Anyone else see something like that? I spent some time searching and discovered that Western Digital has a feature called "Preemptive Wear Leveling" but nothing about Hitachi. Seems like a worthless feature in any case, as magnetic disks don't require any wear leveling.

Laphroaig is most excellent. Also, it's a rare drink that you can identify by smell at twenty paces.
Carpano Antica was also a nice discovery, a vermouth that's actually pleasant to drink straight.

wasn't this called XUI for DECWindows?

The disk seeks all the time, cold or hot, rain or shine; just like the post office. If it was tcal I'd expect it to stop after at most several seconds, but it does it continuously.

Edit: I should correct that. It's only most of the time that it seeks constantly: sometimes for an unexplained reason it stops and sounds "normal".

It actually does this even when no computer is attached. And it doesn't flash the disk activity light, so it is something internal to the drive controller.

These tape units were adaptable to different computer systems using "formatters", which were bus translator boards that were attached, sometimes inside the drive, sometimes inside an I/O cabinet or sometimes by themselves. It looks like that drive has three interfaces coming out of it, so it might have some formatters on board. The busses they use are all ancient stuff like Unibus, there is nothing modern like SCSI except on some very late 1990s drives. And it goes without saying that no tape drive uses async serial comms.
I'm surprised there's no light for 6250 cpi.

Am I the only one who has read RISKS Digest? The potential for abuse here is kind of amazing.
Just move his glass coffee table 18 inches to the left...
Who would I trust with this thing? Not Microsoft.

This talk explains why software has so far failed to develop an engineering culture:



I think he spends too little time on the subject of error recovery. There are, like he says, fairly mature systems and methodologies for verifying that programs are correct, which for some reason the industry isn't using. But there are notably fewer articles from academia about ways to make programs withstand the unexpected.

I think that back in the '50s the commercial banana was the Gros Michel, which was larger than the Cavendish bananas we have today. It was also sweeter and more tart.

I have not used one of these cards, but fiber ethernet has several "gotchas".
Are you sure that the SFP fiber module is the correct wavelength for your switch port?

This came across my desk today: https://diafygi.github.io/webrtc-ips/
Firefox and Chrome have been enhanced to support a new protocol called STUN (sounds like the taser, but it's an IETF design for opening connections through NATs, and therefore through firewalls). It has the side-effect of deanonymizing browsers that use VPNs, and exposing their local and public IP addresses to any website. So people who use VPN to view shows that are blocked in their country could soon see them stop working.

Very nice! Reminds me of my Compaq Portable II. Although yours seems to have 6 ISA slots (maybe 7, depending on how that parallel port is implemented), and the Portable II only has 4.

Those old keyboards are sometimes very interesting, many of them are capacitive. So in an odd reversal, they are like little multitouch screens hidden under the caps and buckling springs.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the CGA cards in some of these types of machines also had lightpen ports. So if you can find an old lightpen (I am kicking myself for missing 2/$7 on ebay recently) you can experiment with how well that works. Unfortunately the green screens had long persistence and that makes them less accurate. The composite output on the CGA card is also required for some old software to support color, using artifact colors; things like King's Quest et cetera. That was the only way for the PC to display 16 color graphics at the time.

It was a renderman-compatible program similar to BMRT, Entropy, or Pixie.
Probably worth hanging on to.

Only tangentially related to Tru64 and media-related s/w, has anybody had experience with the DEC AV300-AA? It's a TurboChannel card that has SVideo in and out. Other than the LoFi and the DECTalk products, it seems to be the only A/V device from Digital.

You can use XLV to create stripes and concatenated volumes without a license, it only requires one for plexes (mirroring). Not sure if the situation is the same with XVM, but perusing techpubs it seems to be the same.

From your symptoms it seems like you're using automounting/mediad. If you just turn that off, and add entries to fstab manually, I don't think you will still see things breaking.

hamei: he means that the numbers are non-consecutive, not that they constantly change. he says that the jumpers are on the test card.

The loop ID of a fibre channel disk is set by seven pins on its connector, they do not have jumpers.
Normally they would be fixed by the backplane based on location, with the high bits variable for chaining multiple enclosures together. That assignment can be changed at runtime if the enclosure has "intelligent services", an embedded microcontroller for configuring the array. That is different from a RAID processor. The way you communicate with the services is either as a target (it has its own bus/loop interface), or as a slave to a designated FC disk using ESI/SFF-8067. You should be able to tell them apart by a scsi bus probe. One of the functions could be assigning loop IDs to drives based on location (e.g. so you can provide a hot spare disk).

looking for info about these D9 arrays, they seem to use SES (a dedicated target that provides services).
http://download.autodesk.com/us/systemd ... _guide.pdf

The drive does not "grab" an address based on its spinup order, since the address is what determines the spinup order when staggered start is enabled. All these options are controlled by SCA connector pins, none of it is managed by the drive.

So when you do a hinv from winterm the disk id's are different each time you boot? what if the array stays powered on across reboots?

OpenGL is mainly used for displaying the editing interface in a graphics application.
rendering is a software process that happens in non-realtime to create final output, with much higher quality than hardware typically can produce. there have been hardware-accelerated renderers, such as Gelato, but it has been discontinued.

Also, SGI made both workstations (like the Octane) and servers (like the Origin). If you had a heavy rendering task, you would run it on a server with many processors. Workstations like the Octane, with OpenGL graphics, were used for the interactive part of the task.

It is for a special genlock cable. The cable separates into 4 BNC cables, that are for Genlock In and Out and GPI In and Out. The Genlock connectors are the only analog video signals used with the AV2.