The collected works of josehill - Page 4

done

Last I heard, he was still with SGI in Belgium, believe it or not. By the way, if you're on LinkedIn, he has an active profile there.

Cool!

I've been doing more and more of my routine information grazing via RSS, rather than via mailing lists, forums, blogs, etc. I'll be interested to see if I can run through Nekochan.Net items more quickly this way. Thanks for adding the feature!

One suggestion: I've subscribed to a bunch of the feeds in order to figure out which stream is most useful to me. However, they all show up with the same name, "Nekochan Net," by default in my feed reader. Is it possible to make the feed title more descriptive, e.g. "Nekochan Net - New Topics?" Of course, I can customize how the feeds display once I subscribe to them, but it might be less confusing for some if the names are more explicit.

Thanks again -- really looking forward to trying this out!

Yeah, I figured that it was probably a phpBB thing, and not something that was easily configurable. The full names are correctly displayed in the drop down subscription menu (in Safari and Firefox), but when you view the feed in Safari, you don't get any descriptive info besides "Nekochan Net." Likewise, when using Google Reader, you only see "Nekochan Net."

Well, I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles. Still, thanks again for enabling the feature!

http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/sgi.html#SYSCOMP

O2 and Octane have very different architectures, and, when they were new, they had very different prices.

O2 was targeted as a low end workstation, whereas Octane was a mid/high end workstation. It's more fair to compare O2 vs Indy and Octane vs Indigo2. (Interestingly, a high-spec R5K Indy can beat a low-spec R5K O2 in some respects.)

Sorry to spoil the fun.

Isn't this the part where people chime in about how stupid SGI is for doing anything at all besides IRIX/MIPS, how capitalism is the worst approach to economics ever, how we're all doomed, how...

Oh, never mind. I'm just going to hide in my cave full of canned goods and ammunition, and finish preparing for the inevitable.

Me, too! While I use the CS3 version on my workhorse Mac, I still look at Photoshop 3 as one of the best pieces of commercial software ever released. A terrific balance of power, performance, and reliability.

Heh. I was going to write that v5.5 is the second best version of Photoshop.

The biggest reason I use CS3 is compatibility with files that other people send to me, otherwise I'd be happy with older versions.

(Don't get me started on how much I like Aldus Freehand v3/v4 and still use the latter every now and then!)

It's quite nice on my 800 MHz R16k!

Coincidentally, I came across this article today while searching for something completely unrelated to this thread:
Original link - http://www.macuser.com/huh/new_yorker_c ... cant_q.php
Link to some videos of the artist using Photoshop 3.0 - http://www.bobstaake.com/pixfix/films.shtml

It's been covered a little bit in a previous thread , but I've always thought that the story behind the core tech used to port the MacOS versions of Photoshop and Premiere to UNIX platforms was pretty interesting. Metrowerks, which purchased the core tech (aka Quorum Equal / Latitude), planned to use it to port its CodeWarrior IDE to NeXTSTEP and other UNIX platforms, and it was also the favored approach to early Rhapsody/MacOS X development before the Carbon API strategy matured.

Interesting 1997 interview with one of the Latitude principals at http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech ... index.html

Your description of the machine is a little confusing, but it sounds like the machine is a dual processor MDD, not a "dual core" system.

You'll probably want to make sure that the machine has been upgraded to the latest firmware. If it hasn't already been upgraded, you'll need to boot it from a writable MacOS 9 filesystem in order to run the firmware update.

I don't have any experience running Linux or any of the non-Apple BSDs on this particular hardware, so I'll limit my comments to versions of MacOS.

The first question to ask is whether or not you want to boot MacOS 9 on this machine or if you want to run Classic apps under OS X. If neither, then I'd recommend installing Leopard (MacOS X 10.5.x). Leopard will perform quite nicely on this hardware, and it still receives security updates, etc. from Apple. Aside from a slight performance decrease compared to Tiger (10.4.x), the only significant disadvantage of Leopard on this machine is that Leopard doesn't support Classic.

If you want to run Classic apps or boot into MacOS 9, then install OS 9 first, and then install Tiger on top of it, unless you have software which specifically requires an older version of OS X. Tiger will give a nice balance between being reasonably up to date while having very good performance. Unfortunately, Apple no longer provides updates for Tiger, and some third party software packages are beginning to drop support for Tiger, too.

If this were my machine, I'd probably either create two partitions on the existing hard drive, or I'd add a second internal IDE/ATA hard drive. On one partition/drive, I'd install a bootable OS 9.2.x first, followed by installing Tiger on the same partition/drive. On the other partition/drive, I'd install Leopard. This configuration would let you boot natively into MacOS 9, MacOS 10.4.x, or MacOS 10.5.x.

As far as hardware upgrades go, it's reasonable to add more RAM, particularly if you plan on running Leopard, though it's not critical. If you boot into MacOS 9, it'll only see 1.5 GB of RAM, IIRC. Adding USB 2 ports is a good idea, but keep in mind that they will operate in USB 1.1 mode when booting under OS 9. If you need high speed external storage under MacOS 9, Firewire or SCSI are the only real options. The only thing likely to have a major impact on performance would be getting a new video card if it currently has a low spec card installed. Just be sure to get a card that has native support for Leopard technologies like Core Image. There's a bunch of info about that on the net. Also, some people have had good luck flashing less expensive Windows versions of cards into Mac versions . I wouldn't bother with a SATA upgrade.

Good luck -- it sounds like you're getting a very nice machine.

Very nice! I'm jealous!

If you'd like to write your own script, the very nice overview of the behind the scenes command line approach taken by Carbon Copy Cloner can give you some good ideas, including the creation of bootable images. See http://www.bombich.com/mactips/image.html

Follow up with reading the man pages for some of the described OS X commands, and you'll be able to set up a range of backup scripts.

Or, as you suggest, there's nothing wrong with using Retrospect.

By then, the Keepers of the Olde Wayes had long departed the building. Those who followed had incomplete knowledge of the Legends.

Sure. Just look for something that's from the right vintage on eBay. There are a bunch of reasonable external solutions, too. Some of the older El Gato solutions should work nicely on your machine.

That one probably wouldn't work. The spec page says it needs an Intel CPU. You'd want to look at older hardware, like the EyeTV 2.

That model shipped with the Radeon 9000. Not a bad card for its era, and perfectly adequate for routine computer use, though obviously you would struggle a bit with frame rates on late generation PowerPC games. Check out the video card benchmarks section at http://lowendmac.com/video/agp/radeon-9000.html , and don't forget to verify that any new card you try is explicitly supported for hardware acceleration by whatever version of the OS you pick. Just because a card will work with a particular version of OS X does not necessarily mean that it will work in accelerated mode.

I'd be very surprised if they did that. Adobe sells PS into the professional graphics market, and there really isn't significant customer demand for Linux workstations in that space. When Adobe made the SGI and Sun versions, there was a perceived market for systems with UNIX-levels of reliability in high end shops. It was the age of MacOS 7.x and Windows NT 3.x/4.x, which weren't always the most reliable system for production work. History suggests that there wasn't really that much of a market for Photoshop on *nix.

That's a pretty big "thing."


For professional shops (aka "where the money is"), it's all about the workflow. There is *nix on the server side, but most of the enduser workflow revolves around PCs and Macs, and there isn't much of an economic reason for shops to migrate away from what they are already doing. Maintaining (or changing) the workflow is far, far more expensive than the cost of hardware.

It's also not about Apple. A lot of shops, including some of the largest, have been running their businesses on Windows boxes for a long time, and many people, including me, would argue that Adobe devotes significantly more attention to the Windows versions of the apps than the Apple versions. Want a new Adobe app? It'll come out on Windows long before it comes out on Apple.

I'm **not** saying that Linux can't do the job. I am saying that the business case for Adobe to invest in porting Photoshop to a third platform today (and supporting it tomorrow) isn't there. Most of Adobe's customers would probably scream bloody murder at the idea of Adobe investing resources to do that instead of focusing on the installed base.

Besides, I keep hearing that anything that can be done in Photoshop can be done in the Gimp, so the problem is already solved.

Interesting...thanks for the link.

pentium, if it makes you feel better, I've been to Japan several times, and I'm glad I went, but I've never been to Vancouver. A few people I know insist that Vancouver is the most beautiful city in the world, so I guess I'm out of the loop, too.

I think they're positioning the Altix line for larger, higher end installations, while the Origin/Octane lines are aimed at SMB/workgroup applications.

I agree that it is a little clumsy, since the Origin model name was much more closely associated with the highest end of computing, not with the SMB/workgroup market.

aka, "The Ozone."

Oy. I know that there are a lot of Wordpress fans, and you can do good things with it, but whenever I end up working with it, it feels like another, hacked together open source package that can't decide whether it wants to be "kewl" or whether it wants to be easy to use. I definitely prefer MovableType or hosted TypePad, but of course, those aren't free. Much more polished, however.

I still use NEdit as my preferred editor just about everywhere except on the Mac, where I like BBEdit or BBedit's surprisingly capable little brother, the free TextWrangler.

I am taking a look at Joomla and Drupal at the moment for some content management projects. I have used Zope on some past projects. It was quite capable and the performance was pretty good, but non-technical content creators generally found it to be intimidating.

-jh

Don't worry. You are not alone.

I'll have to check it out. I doubt I'll move from the BareBones tools, but I definitely like the idea of good, open source editors.

Before I became set in my ways, I would try every new text editor I could lay my hands on. I don't even want to guess how many editors on the old Info-Mac archive I tried...

On the Mac side, I've been very happy with JollysFastVNC ( http://www.jinx.de/JollysFastVNC.html ) as a client. It's not as well known as some of the other clients, like " Chicken of the VNC ," but I've found JollysFastVNC's performance and stability to be excellent.

However, for this particular use case, I think you'd be better off using Microsoft's built in Remote Desktop Connection software on both the Mac and Windows sides. Enable "Remote Assistance" and "Remote Desktop" on the Windows machine, and then download and install the Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac. The Mac client is free, and it can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx . Noticeably faster than VNC, at least in my house.

Oy. I'm running Win 7 Professional on my machines. That's one thing that I really hate about the Windows family. Way too many SKUs with arcane differences.

I haven't been running any flavor of VNC under Win7. TightVNC was my preferred free VNC server on Windows, but that was under XP. I see that there is a TightVNC beta that supports Win7. http://www.tightvnc.com/download.php