The collected works of tomvos - Page 1

Plays smooth as silk on my O2 with a 270MHz CPU. Thanks for the addictive game.

Well, it's kinda OK-ish. I did not stumble over really a nasty bug yet. Emacs-24.3.1 (though Apple still bundles an antique emacs 22.1.1) works, Lisp works, Java7 works, VMWare Fusion 5 works ... even Shake still works fine. But there is no new feature where I could say: “Boy, how could I use an OS without this feature?”

But then, the new Tags feature is a step backward in usability — at least in my opinion. I liked the usage of color tints in the old Mac OS 9 days very much. I got used to the coloured labels instead of the coloured icons which returned with Mac OS X 10.3.

(Mac) OS X 10.9 uses colours for labels and for tags. Which means that a file can have several colours at the same time. So they put coloured dots before the file. Well, ... personally I don't like it. Now I have a lot of coloured dots in my Finder and a hard time to quickly visualized a file's context.



Why does OS X have such a mighty quartz display system when Apple does not use it to tint some icons?

guardian452 wrote: I can see why they don't have tinted icons anymore. With so much emphasis on icon design nowadays, and many finder windows already looking like a technicolour yawn, it would get out of hand quickly.

I agree, adding a tint to application icons won’t help much. But contrary to apples commercials, most files on my computer are not images but text files. Which result in lots of mainly white icons. I would not mind to be able to tint these files as I see fit.

Studied mechanical engineering. Worked for five years in the field of energy efficiency for industrial customers. Coming fresh from university I thought this would be the job to change the world for better. While there are possibilities to save some money by energy efficiency, it won’t save us in the long run. Over time I got quite disillusionated and finally switched to an IT job.

Now I'm working in the support area of a company making EDM (energy data management) software for public utility companies. I’m one of the guys who is called whenever a customer has a problem with their Oracle RDBMS. While it's not the most glorious job, I have quite reasonable work hours, managed to fix my social life (which was nearly killed during my first job because of too many days spent on customer sites), and after getting some routine I have enough time to pursue - within limits - my own interests during the normal work.

smj wrote: Modology responded and indicated he doesn't think he has the sources for these images any longer.

Anybody around who downloaded them (and can find them now)? Please feel free to tar them up and post as a local attachment!

I think I still have a copy of the images in question. See the SGI-Wallpapers-by-Modology.tar.gz attachment.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." - Nils Bohr

But then 10 years into the future is not such a big time range. I think we won't see any generic intelligence - like it resides in every human being - anytime soon. However it would not surprise me to see some form of specialized "intelligence". E.g. think about the routing and scheduling of police patrols. Today software exists which recommends the best routes to achieve lower crime rates. Very often, after haven proven successful, these system's plans are thrusted more and more and the system basically advises the schedules of the cops.

Or the big area of logistics. Managing all those planes, ships, and transporters to increase their utilization and minimize shipping times. This was a very difficult task and today the human being pales in comparison to software in this task.

But is this really intelligence? I think the term AI was burned during the demise of all the Lisp Machines at the end of the cold war. Most companies in this field of business went bankrupt in the late '80. Nowadays nobody wants to be associated with AI. We rather like to call it "Big Data" and not to be very specific how to refine the essence of data into meaning and meaning into predictions. This fits much better with the business of delivering domain specific solutions. Though, once upon a time we called these expert systems.

So I think we simply see the reappearance of expert systems. Not much real intelligence there. And even less artificial intelligence. Just clever solutions to very narrowly defined problems.

VenomousPinecone wrote: I think the reason most naive realists do not want to see Artificial General Intelligence, or think it is impossible, is that if AI (AGI) is created it would allow us to see OUR strings... our cheap little puppet tricks of evolutionary biology.

Hmm, shouldn't the discovery of an AGI work exactly the other way round? First we learn about all the strings pulling us, then we simulate all these strings and call ist AGI? Because assuming that AGI can be created without knowing about the strings beforehand ... this would assume a very spontaneous great jump forward in computing. Something where applying the buzzword "rupture" to new technology would actually make sense.

hamei wrote: Web browsers : they are shit. All of them. With 300 million people in the US and just as many in Europe, at least half those people use a web browser on occasion -- but there is not a single one that is worth two pennies. Absolutely worthless shit designed and implemented solely for the purpose of jamming advertising down our throats, while conveniently using our hardware and $50/mo connections to supply them with ever more data for targeting yet more crap down our throats. I'm tired of being a foie gras goose.

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.)

hamei wrote: The other approach is to tell the truth. We have a serious problem with that in this society. For instance, the managers of NASA that launched for political reasons despite all the concerns of the engineers are actually murdering scum.

This happens all the time, however most of the times the result is not such dire. Experts are asked, they tell (mostly) the truth which does not fit the shiny truth management likes to see, so a different kind of truth is told by management. Sooner or later, the discrepancy between management truth and "the" truth is too obvious to ignore. At this point in time, someone defines this discrepancy as a problem and asks the expert. Which is the point where this process lapses into recursion.

Well, I'm a little late, but nevertheless: Welcome. Enjoy the ride, there are lot of curiosities, amenities, stupidities ... even some profanities and very little modernities.

Last year I used about 2600 kWh/a at 0,23 EUR/kWh. For a small apartment, heating is done by natural gas. There's no AC, because in Germany there aren't so many days of extreme heat.
But I know, if I run some of the SGIs for a prolonged period, this figure will go up noticeable.


BTW, glad that the server is up and running again.

You could search in the SGI Knowledge Base for the following sentence (include the quotes):



This leads to a huge 34.7 GB download. The URL is like this.

http://download.sgi.com/content_request ... epo.tar.gz

I haven't finished the download yet, but perhaps somewhere in this big pile of bits may be a SLES 9 ia64. Or perhaps it's really just a pile of bits. I don't know, but it may be worth a try.

I received the audio card today. Thanks. It's in perfect condition. "ivelegacy" did a fine job to select a good protective packaging. So in case someone thinks about buying something from "ivelegacy" - I can highly recommend him.

Too bad he's left this place. I'll always remember this quote, since it works on so many levels.

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”

We need people like Stallman. People that irritate, people that have a clear message. People that stand their ground, no matter what the odds are.

Which is not to say that I agree with everything what Stallman says. On the contrary. His lack of ability to acknowledge other peoples work is one thing I really can't stand.

Nevertheless, he challenges the current way we deal with software. And this is a good thing. Because if you really think that our current mental state how we think about software and the implications by software as codified rules are beyond improvement ..., well then you really must have been living behind the moon in the last few years.

I was standing before the same question. Finally I resorted to a customized table.

Basically I choose the table plate, one leg and one small shelf as the right leg. On the table plate I put another small board which is rested on three wooden pieces. This board carries the displays. Which leaves me with some storage place on top of the computers for their equipment, as you can see.

On this desk I can house a Fuel underneath, a Dec VLC4000, a Dec Multia Alpha, a G4 Cube, and a Quadra 700 (which has a MacIvory III inside ). Oh, and there's a MacBook Air—can you spot it? Originally I intended to place one Indy where the Multia is now, but then I got the Multi for such a low price, so plans changed.

But if you want to use you desk not only as a work area but as a storage area, too—then I can recommend these shelf like kinf of desks. The only drawback is, that this desk costs more than $250. But then, it's made of real wood instead of plywood.

Hi,

I've got Genera 8.3 on a MacIvory III - however currently it's not installed because the hard drive died. I've got a CF2SCSI adapter and want to use this to install Genera 8.3 again. This time I'm going to write notes of the complete install (from empty disk, installing OS 7.5, updating stuff, installing Genera, first steps like restoring Genera documentation, etc.). Because this is a rather long story, it's still sitting on my desk—yeah, call me lazy.

Anyway, I use a Plextor Plexwriter in an external SCSI enclosure (PX-R412Ci). I had no problems to install from this device. And it's definitely not a 1X SCSI CD-ROM. So I would say that this "your CDROM is too new" advise is not really true. But you can read it in many places. I even asked David K. Schmidt when I bought the Genera 8.3 CDs if I need a 1X drive. His reply:

These CDs are reprints of the originals. These CDs can be loaded by any speed CD drive that works with your Quadra 700. ISO images are available at the same cost.

I also tried with an Apple PowerCD. This is a 1X drive and the results were kinda unreliable. Sometimes it did work, sometimes the install of Genera 8.3 failed.


Perhaps you want to try the latest installer? Try this URL and download the archive listed under 3. Newer Ivory life support software.

http://www.mcmax.info/symbolics/download.html

I had no trouble to install from this software. If everything else fails, perhaps you could post a screenshot of the error you receive during the installation.


Edit: I used FWB CDROM-Toolkit 3.02d as a driver for the Plextor. Maybe this driver helps to make the installer read the Genera CD correctly.

For what's it worth, my MacIvory-III is housed in a Quadra 700. A nice little box and it works without any problems.

ClassicHasClass wrote: Yes, but what revision is it? (I was considering finding a Q700 until robespierre's post.)

Just tell me where to look and I can send you the information. On the apple mainboard there is something printed like "820-8020-B". I'm not sure if this is the information you're looking for.

But I assume robespierre talked about the revision of the MacIvory, not the Mac. According to the label on the back side my MacIvory3 is Rev.i, S/N 30508, while the Mac OS Control panel states it's rev. 20.1.

MoviesOS, who cares? Anyway it's hard to beat a movie with TMC Connection Machines in it. At least from a retro computer enthusiast's point of view. So my vote goes to the 1993 movie.

Another option to use a SD Card with a SCSI device may be this:

http://shop.codesrc.com

They are currently out of stock, but perhaps you're lucky and can find one of these on ebay. However, as you stated, they are not in the 20 $ range. But I doubt that you'll find any something2SCSI converter in the 20 $ range.

duck wrote: Check out the rest of the channel as well.

Thanks for the link. These guys are quite good at explaining topics. I never thought about the fact that humanity might end by the means of a stamp collector and his overambitious AI.

Got the e-mail, too. The mentioned link leads to


I think it is really bad practice to send these kinds of password reset e-mails from anything else than the original domain, i.e. sgi.com . But then, that's just my 2ct.

IRIX is now legacy software.

Software > Legacy Software > Operating Systems > IRIX

It seems to contains some of the previously available stuff. I did not manage to find the 6.5.22 update you could download with a free account. Oh, and many of the patches are linked to their describing document—hence they are in the category "Documentation".

On the other hand, I'm glad there is still the free accounts access to the SGI support site. Compare this to Oracle or HP. Even while I have access to Oracle database stuff (from my work account), everything regarding Solaris or old Sun hardware is still locked behind the paid maintenance contract.

I hope they keep the old techpubs.sgi.com untouched since it is quite well organised.

Well, I'm just glad that tagbody and go made it to the Common Lisp standard even so Dijkstra did consider goto to be harmful. But then this goto like structure has a precise scope in Lisp. I don't know enough C, but it looks for me like you simply call whatever the symbol points to.

ivelegacy wrote: But what happens if you attempt to jump outside the function you are in? It happens that the stack is smashed, invalidated, gone, garbage!

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I never followed the rabbit hole deep down to the CPU instruction and register level. I naively assumed that modern a compiler would at least warn you about stuff which is likely to make all hell brake loose.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a17991/voyager-1-voyager-2-retiring-engineer/

So, if anybody likes retro-computing *and* would like to get paid for it ... this is your opportunity of a life time.

Hamei, don't worry. Some people like to listen to Noam Chomsky and read his books. Others prefer to watch the weekend sports results. And everybody thinks their way is the best way to deal with life. That's nothing anybody should take personally.

Interesting video. I bought my iPad-Pro and Pencil about a month ago. I had an original iPad before, however as I had no real need for it, I just gave it to my brother a few years ago.

I had quite low expections about the iPad-Pro, but I needed a recent iOS device for some development. Strangely enough, the iPad-pro did really grow on me. Whenever I read intricate stuff, I need to have a sheet of paper and a pencil to scribble my notes and my interpretation about the stuff I just read. That's just the way I transfer information into my brain. Your method may be different, but for me this approach works.

Due to the size of the iPad-Pro, using 50/50 split view to read a PDF and using notes app to scribble my notes works very well. I tried to do this before on the smaller iPad, but because of the size I was always forced to switch apps between the PDF and the notes app. Which was just a tiny bit to much context switch to make reading stuff on a smaller iPad cumbersome. On the iPad-Pro I really enjoy reading and scribbling on the same slate of glass without app switching.

I share the authors opinion that the iPad-Pro has just reached a size which makes it possible to use it as a serious device. It has literally grown beyond being primarily a content consumption device.

Now, wouldn't it be funny if Microsoft build its own Linux distribution?