[geeks] X on "that other platform"

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

I fired up the PC on Friday to play games because I'm pissed-off at life
and needed things to kill that didn't have next-of-kin that could tell
nasty stories about me in a courtroom.  Jedi Knight II, BTW, is a very
good stress outlet, and quite a good game, even if a bit frustrating.  
Playing it, of course, necessitated an install of an OS produced by a
small monopolistic software vendor in the Pacific northwest who shall
remain nameless.

I thought I'd give XFree86/Win32 a spin, since the Cygnus group (or
whomever is doing Cygwin) managed to get the backend to talk to
DirectCrash rather than the GDI--so it might be able to draw a window
sometime this week.  Also, it might be nice, considering that I could have
a 1600x1200_72 display[1] on a faster video device.

Now, there's a fairly good chance that I'm missing something, but it's not
-supposed- to be approximately half as responsive as VNC, correct?  Talk
about hella slow.  Editing text was painful, and (as a benchmark) XEmacs
tetris was completely unplayable.

gfx head on the PC is GeForce 2/64.  The network is 100baseT full duplex
on both ends.  No network apps were running.  Nothing unusual was running
on the Octane (although the load was at 3!).  What's wrong here?  Is
XFree86/Win32 -that- bad, or was it stupid of me to start my session with
XDMCP?  Does the SGI perhaps optimize so much of X in hardware that it
runs pathetically over anything other than the local head?

I don't know how I lived with Windows before.  I remember being happy,
once I got away from the consumer versions and hopped onto NT.  I remember
getting buttloads of work done.  But, damn.  It's blazing fast, and it's
also slow enough as to be unusable all at the same time--kinda like a
Chevy Z06 stuck in first gear.  The dumbest things take forever, and the
dumbest things happen right away.

Hell, it takes longer to fully start IE than it does to fully start the
system (from hibernate mode) and get to the security prompt.  One of these
processes loads 512 megabytes of information from disc.  One loads much
less, I would hope.

That, and I got a kernel blue screen (not a driver or an
IRQL_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL, but a core kernel panic) today.  Given that I
haven't even seen one of those in about four years (and that was on
S/Linux which was accepted as not ready for mass consumption), I decided
that I didn't feel safe in trusting actual work to that system.

So, my Model M, SGI mouse, and IBM P200 are back on the Octane to stay[2].
I'll toss something else on the PC so that I can still play games and
read/edit the occasional Word document, but I don't seen any benefits in
further self-abuse in trying to use that as my console.

Oh, and just so that this message isn't just another Windows rant, what's
the magic voodoo dance to get Netscape 4.79 to put my toolbars back in the
right order (menubar, nav bar, location, personal)?  I accidentally nudged
the nav bar below the location bar, and no combination of "swap back in
place", "close", "reopen", "hide toolbar", "show toolbar", "quit", and
"restart" seems to have the desired effect.  It's as if, much like its
codebase and the rest of the universe, Netscape tends towards entropy and
abhors order (except for in the case of a missing </table>, in which
case it will slap your fingers until you say 100 hail Marcs and offer a
slaughtered IE installation disc as sacrifice).

--Jonathan
[1] Incidentally, what's the cheapest Octane gfx option I'd need to have
    this on the console?  SSI, right?  Does the performance suck?
[2] Barring, of course, my obtaining a more ballsy piece of Unix hardware.