31–40 of 50 posts
Nice to see someone with the geekiness and wherewithal to really commit to the bit.
> No “AI” writing aids, no “AI” summaries, no ChatGPT, no Gemini search nonsense, nothing. I take pride in doing research and writing properly, without the “aid” of digital parrots with brain damage, and if there’s any errors, they’re mine and mine alone. Take pride in your work and reject “AI”. This guy better not be using spell check with a tantrum like that tagged to his opening line.
I like it. Remember when people used to have badges on their sites? Like HTML5 or XHTML or Apache or whatever. Maybe we could bring back one for "made by humans".
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All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro. Personally I'd be wary of spending $3500+ on a system that relies on nVidia support. They previously released an AI focused SBC, the Jetson Nano, that shipped with a custom distro based on the already aging Ubuntu 18.04, then abandoned support for it after a few years. All the dependencies required to run ML/AI stuff became outdated, and…
> All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro The system76 one uses an ampere chip, but a discrete nvidia card; so not quite the same. Generally I agree, I do not mix nvidia/linux. The point is that arm workstations are clearly being produced by many different vendors at this point.
"Hot desking like it's 2007"... Nowadays instead of carrying a smartcard you carry a slim 13" laptop and plug in a single USB-C cable from the docking station. Much better, yes. But just being able to plug in a smart card in a meeting room and get going instantly would be appreciated even today.
And in particular it would be amazing for that to work with a) huge monitors, b) audio and video.
> No “AI” writing aids, no “AI” summaries, no ChatGPT, no Gemini search nonsense, nothing. I take pride in doing research and writing properly, without the “aid” of digital parrots with brain damage, and if there’s any errors, they’re mine and mine alone. Take pride in your work and reject “AI”. This guy better not be using spell check with a tantrum like that tagged to his opening line.
If you think spell(1) is AI, you misunderstand at least one of them.
I would love to hear counterpoints -- The Sun Ray thin client experience seems interesting, but the modern version of that seems to be the web/app/cloud ecosystem we have now (where the load and storage of your interaction are resident on some other system, potentially freeing up your local device from resource needs). Specifically, a self-hosted collaborative model with Nextcloud + Collabora or similar. I do wonder…
I used a Sun Ray for two summers when interning at Sun Labs in 2002 and 2003. They were kind of awesome and kind of sucked at the same time. First, the display wasn't that great for the time, and they were expensive for what you got. Second, we had ours hooked up to (one of) the labs' E10ks. Because it was shared amongst many users, some things could get janky under load. One thing in particular is that certain image…
There was no way to build that for $100 to $200 at that time.
Our Cobalt Networks boxes were about $1k.
Take out the disk, add the display.
Just because the software makes it a thin client doesn't make the hardware cheaper.
(200x) "Never bet against x86" -> (202x) "Never bet against ARM"
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> (200x) "Never bet against x86" -> (202x) "Never bet against ARM" Citation needed. There is only 1 workstation maker with ARM: Apple.
You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now. I sure as hell hope that if Qualcomm even comes close to parity with other platforms they change their name because I'm going to have a hard time associated Snapdragon and their other products with anything that is quality. So far these are for desktop CPUs what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant is for cars. On the ot…
This is true, but there's a consolation -- they suck much much less than RISC-V kit.
I run a bunch of nearly 15 year old laptops. I am not a performance addict. But I have not laid fingers on a RISC-V box I'd be willing to spend a morning on.
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And what about *BSD?
"If 386BSD had been available before I created Linux, then Linux might not have been born" - Linus My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash. BSD was the white coat academic world and not very welcoming to outsiders. Linux was the dirty hacker style at a time where online collab became a thing. And then there was the lawsuit that held back BSD at a crucial time in history.
Agreed, but my impression was of a more complex one than you imply.
There were a whole bunch of competing commercial Unix-like OSes in the 1980s.
But there were other prejudices as well.
In Proper Grown-Up Unix terms, PCs were toys, poorly-made weird little things that were no more than office equipment. So nothing worth using ran on the 386.
There was no local bus yet, no IDE or EIDE, slow AT expansion bus, no processor cache, and so on -- meaning a forest of proprietary or semi-proprietary extensions and buses and special slots. This opened up a market for a vendor to port to Brand X PCs and Brand X's own weird storage and display.
Enter Interactive Corp, which tried to combat this, and worked on Unix ports for various vendors' hardware. Expensive OS for expensive machines.
And there was SCO which wasn't proud, wasn't fancy, ran on commodity kit, and didn't try to be a general purpose OS like that white lab-coat brigade expected. So SCO Xenix worked, and you could run apps on it, but in the box there was no C compiler, no networking, no X11, nothing. It was a runtime-only OS and it was still expensive.
Everyone sneered at it but it did the job. I put in a lot of it.
Then if you weren't paying, someone else was who would never see the word "Unix", there were all the vastly expensive RISC boxes with their vastly expensive expansions and vastly expensive -- well, everything. Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, SGI, loads of company would sell you rooms full of workstations, single-user minicomputers with big screens. They cost as much as a house.
Actual BSD ran on actual minicomputers that cost as much as a small street of houses and those dudes wouldn't even look at PCs.
Which left a market for enterprising vendors squeezing Unix-like things onto low end kit.
Various flavours of BSD, including BSD/OS; SCO Xenix in both 286 and 386 versions; Interactive 386ix; several vendors' own-brand licensed Unixes, including Dell, later, an official Intel one that mainly ran on Intel's own pizza-box workstations.
And all the proprietary computer vendors entered the game too. Commodore did Unix for high-end Amigas; Atari did Unix for high-end STs; Acorn did Unix for high-end Archimedes; Apple did Unix for high-end Macs, allegedly originally just to get a US military deal; etc. etc.
All these are still $1000 per instance OSes though.
Then, universally scorned, MWC Coherent, a real Unix-like OS for $99... and QNX, which was apparently good but mainly focused on real-time stuff, and cost more than the casual could afford.
(As a European I never saw this but it was in all the ads in all the US mags. There was a lot of "cheap" American stuff we didn't get over here, like paid-for shareware. We had metered phone calls so no BBS scene. Only rich Americans got that stuff.)
Coherent was so good that AT&T accused them of theft and sent Dennis Ritchie around to check. He came back and said, no, it's legit.
And Andy Tanenbaum's Minix, a toy for students, not for real work, but essentially free with a book.
These latter indirectly showed that you _could_ copy AT&T's holy grail and make it work, so while Richard Stallman was building all the tools but choosing the wrong kernel and sabotaging the whole thing, along came this Finnish kid with his learning exercise, and excited beardies on Usenet said that it actually worked and it was at least as good as Minix and was getting to Coherent levels.
So the point is, there was a spectrum, from legendary machines made from purest unobtainium, to ludicrously expensive x86 stuff for very specific (and ludicrously expensive models) of PC kit, to the still ludicrously expensive SCO that got no respect, to "cheap" stuff that nobody had in Europe because it had no business purpose. There was legendary free stuff in America but it only ran on room sized computers that cost as much as a lottery win, so I never saw it. "Free" as in "it's free if you're so rich it doesn't matter."
And "free" shareware that was "free" as in "the phone bill to get it will cost more than just buying a commercial version in a shiny box".
But there _was_ a spectrum, from vastly expensive to "a small business will pay for this", down to theoretical stuff in America that you could dream about... which paved the way until the point where an ordinary PC was a 32-bit machine with a memory management unit and hundreds of megs of disk and several megs of RAM, and suddenly, this Lin-Min-Gnu-ix thing was doable, if you had a beard and a checked shirt with black jeans and wore hiking boots every day.