Newer things
There are not much news. I still keep heavy duty Thinkmate machines both in office and home which run 24/7/365 days. Still Ubuntu, now 19.04. Still the good old windows manager blackbox.Here a more recent screenshot at home.
This year, I have the first time also a 4TB SSD for the main harddrive at home. It does not give much improvement (unlike the OS harddrives, which I had SSD'd all since 2008), but it makes the machine a bit more quiet even. In a couple of years, there will probably be no moving platter any more. A change which happened also in the last 10 years is that for long term backups (which are not overwritten) I now backup onto external harddrives on an external mac. USB is still a bit unreliable (on all operating systems, partly due to the mechanics of having something external attached, I have had several USB drives mounted on the linux box besides the internal harddrives). One reason for backing up externally on OS X that in OSX, it is trivial to have the HD well encrypted in a standard way (which I'm sure will be readable also in 10 years). My long term backups end up in places which are safe even if all cloud services, all banks, or storage places would disappear or be corrupted. They would be safe even if Boston (and Switzerland) would be nuked or our house burn down. I recently moved back from an external RAID rig to standard cheap 5 TB drives for long term backups or 8 TB drives for short time backups. What happened is that if RAID fails badly like with a defective controller (which happend to me), then it is no more easy to retrieve the information easily. Long term backups are important. I just recently noticed a file failure (due to a case insensitivity of OS X) which got unnoticed for a while. Of course, also all the backups had been overwritten with the wrong file. But long term backups helped to get the file back.
Older stuff (what comes has last been updated in 2010)
I run a mixture of Mandriva and Ubuntu flavours. on my linux boxes. Comparison with OS X. While OS X is great, there are still advantages of Linux:- A properly configured linux box is much snappier. OS X can lock you out. The "turning wheel of annoyance" is absent in linux. With respect to latency, OSX (Leopard) is at the level of early linux distributions. (Snow leopard has improved). An OS should never lock out or delay the user.
- An other advantage of Linux is not having to reboot after an update, an annoyance which makes OSX unfit for scientific computing.
- The lack of digital right management (you can for example not take a screen shot in OS X when a DVD is playing), the vendor independence, the transparency of what process are running (iTune processes for example).
- Case insensitivity of the file system on OS X is a serious problem for me. I have many cases, where different files are in the same directory (like Makefile or makefile, Index.html index.html, Readme, README). Apple could not inherit a clear case sensitive setup from "Next".
- On linux, I can run different windows managers. I personally use since 10 years the minimal windows manager "blackbox", which has essentially no footprint and still looks good. See also 2010 screenshot. I never will need more than that.
"Oliver with family in the home office. Probably around 2008 or 2009.
Nostalgia with old computers: ... "dead" usually means "put asleep and put to rest". Very
few machines actually died on me, even so some got parts replaced: for PCs it is usually the power supply,
for macs the CD Rom, for handhelds mechanical disasters like sitting on it.
Computer RAM HD Bought status Company CPU Clock OS hostname -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Genie_I 14 K - 1980 dead TCS_Trommeschl. Z80_A 4 MHz Dos 2 Atari_1400_ST 1 M 20 M 1986 dead Atari 68000 8 MHz GemOS 3 Nextstation 8 M 200 M 1990 dead Next_Coorp. 68040 25 MHz Nextstep 4 Sparc_LX 24 M 450 M 1994 dead Sun Microsparc 50 Mhz Sun OS 4.1 5 7200/75 32 M 500 M 1995 dead Apple PPC_601 75 Mhz Mac OS 6-7 6 5300_Powerb 16 M 250 M 1996 dead Apple PPC_603e 100 Mhz Mac OS 6-7 7 Dell 128 M 8 G 1996 alive Dell P_II 300 MHz Redhat hadamard 8 6500/225 64 M 3 G 1997 dead Apple PPC_603e 225 MHz Mac OS 7-9 9 Image_sys 64 M 4 G 1999 alive Image_systems AMD_K6 300 MHz Redhat/Mandrake 10 Tuxtops 64 M 4 G 2000 dead Tuxtops Celeron 450 MHz Redhat/Mandrake 11 Gateway 128 M 15 G 2000 alive Gateway P_III 800 MHz Mandrake 6--10 ncd3 12 Cube_G4 320 M 20 G 2001 retired Apple MPC7400/G4 450 Mhz Mac OS 9-10 13 IMac_G4 512 M 40 G 2002 retired Apple MPC7400/G4 700 Mhz Mac OS 10 14 Dell 512 M 20 G 2002 alive Dell P_III 1000 Mhz Mandrake 7-10 wiener 15 Dell 512 M 80 G 2002 alive Dell P_IV 2250 Mhz Mandrake 8-10 knill8 16 Ibook 512 M 30 G 2002 dead Apple G3 800 Mhz Mac OS 10 17 Zaurus 64 M 128 M 2003 dead Sharp StrongARM 206 Mhz Lineo's Embedix 18 Visionman 1 G 120 G 2003 alive Visionman 2x-Athlon 1666 Mhz Mand. 8-10/Ubuntu space 19 Ibook_G4 768 M 60 M 2004 alive Apple G4 1070 Mhz Mac OS 10 knill4 20 Noname 500 M 150 M 2004 alive Self_built P_IV 2500 Mhz Mandrake 9-10 moser 21 MacMini 500 M 1 T 2004 alive Apple G4 1420 Mhz Mac OS 10 knill2 22 IMac_G5 1 G 160 G 2004 dead Apple G5 1500 Mhz Mac OS 10 knill5 23 Dell_XPS_Gen5 3 G 750 G 2005 alive Dell P_D 3000 Mhz Mandriva/Ubuntu knill10 24 Mac Mini Intel 1 G 250 G 2006 alive Apple Intel 1660 Ghz Mac OS 10 time 25 IMac_Core_Duo 1 G 250 G 2006 alive Apple Intel 2160 Ghz Mac OS 10 diophant 26 MacMini Core_Duo 1 G 80 G 2006 alive Apple Intel 2000 Ghz Mac OS 10 knill0 27 Thinkmate_Core_Duo 4 G 1 T 2008 alive Thinkmate Intel 3000 Ghz Ubuntu matter 28 IMac_Core Duo 4 G 500 G 2008 alive Apple Intel 3066 Ghz Mac OS 10 knill3 29 MacBook Duo 2 G 250 G 2008 alive Apple Intel 2400 Ghz Mac OS 10 knill11 30 IMac_i5 8 G 1 T 2009 alive Apple i5 2666 Ghz Mac OS 10 knill27 31 Thinkmate_quad 6 G 2 T 2010 alive Thinkmate Intel 3300 Ghz Ubuntu knill9 |
My Geekcode-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GM d s: a? C++ ULS++++ P++ L++ E--- W++ N+ !o !K w--- !O M+ V !PS !PE Y+ PGP++ t !5 !X R !tv b++ DI D+ G e++++ h---- r+++ y++++ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------can be decoded here. |