Recent content by shieldforyoureyes

300,000 line numerical programs with no user interface are portable, no matter what language they're written in. FORTRAN got to the position it's in because all high-end compiler work was focused on making FORTRAN run fast on vector machines. These days, all compiler work is focused on...

vi (or clones: vim). Trivia: vi was written by Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, and [co-] creator of NFS, UltraSPARC, and Java.

Although my preference is BSD, then commercial Unix, then Linux, I will admit that for the vast majority of uses, the choice of Linux or BSD is a matter of taste. There are technical differences, but they're subtle. The question is which style of configuration & administration do you prefer...

You can change the sector size when you reformat. Some exotic systems (Clariion RAID arrays are a famous example) use a weird sector size. The tearing-up-the-highway example is very good. Reformating actually lays out where the tracks & sectors go, so it's just like building a new road.

Ah... is that (/usr/home) true of all Linuxes? I'm used to /home being a mount point by itself. (My /home at the moment is a pair of mirrored drives.) Irix likes /usr/people.

Yeah, early SunOS was BSD. They switched to SysV with SunOS 5, and it was a complete switch, not just added SysVisms. Solaris 1 is SunOS 4 (BSD), all the later versions are SunOS 5 (SysV). So - "Solaris 8" is technically "SunOS 5.8". The distinction between SunOS and Solaris is really just...

A big /home is nice.

I actually own a "BSD OR DEATH" t-shirt. (I can't really wear it anymore though, since my main machines are Solaris & Irix.)

It was an RS/6000 MCA card. Painfully rare & expensive... or free, if you wait long enough.

I use an interface box from Prairie Digital. The only problem is speed - it talks ASCII commands over a 9600 bps serial line to the host - which makes it slow, but *incredibly* easy to control. I bought mine to control some lights & other gadgetry in an art installation at the Whitney...

I paid $200 for a *used* 10 megabit ethernet card once. AARRGG. I have some ethernet-over-fiber (FOIRL) hardware that was obscenely expensive when it was new. Fiber is cool.

Macintosh (original 128K ram, 400k floppy, no hard drive) 286 3B2/300 (mid-80s AT&T multi-user Unix system) 3B2/400 VAXstation-3100 (desktop version of the popular minicomputer) RS/6000 Powerserver 930 (Monsterous 220-volt server - 1st generation POWER processor, the ancestor of PowerPC.)...

Ok - I was just hunting around a bit, since I can never keep this stuff straight - the Nova was DG's original 16 bit mini. Then they came out with the Eclipse, which was also 16 bit. Then there was a project, codenamed "Eagle" which was a 32 bit version of the Eclipse. That's the MV/8000...

Minicomputers are great fun. A friend of mine collections DG gear. He has a few Novas and... I think an Eagle? They're very hard to get. If you're interested in aquiring a fridge- sized mini, I'd suggest a DEC PDP-11 as the easiest to aquire. They also come in a very wide range of sizes - an...

It seems to me that your question is Escalade versus Highpoint, not RAID1 versus RAID5. The question of performance really depends on what you're doing. What size files, how many users, what kind of LAN, etc. How hard are you pushing the existing system?