[rescue] Mac Appliance

[joshua d boyd]

On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 11:34:45AM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On August 3, Mike Dombrowski wrote:
> > Home PC's don't need SMP.
> 
>   Wow, thanks for deciding that for the rest of the world.
> 
>   *I* will decide what my computing needs are, thank you.

Somehow I don't think that anyone is ever going to start calling Crays and
PDPs home PCs anytime soon.  Even if that is what we need.
 
>   I feel the need to explain something about NetBSD with regard to
> things like SMP.  Linux and FreeBSD, despite < 1% arguments to the
> contrary, really usefully only run on one platform.  It's relatively
> easy to do something like that on one platform.  NetBSD runs on FORTY
> different platforms, supporting like A DOZEN different [incompatible]
> processor architectures.  Now that 90% of the SMP stuff is done in an
> architecture-independent way, the other 10% need only be done for the
> other processors.  As a case in point, NetBSD/vax went SMP a matter of
> weeks after NetBSD/i386 did.

I get the impression that Linux is pretty usefull (but far from
optimized) on PPC machines, and that for the most part hardware
support is excellent (although still not optimized).  Tivo is a PPC linux
machine after all.  Mips and strongarm also seem to be getting somewhere
finally.

I really just care that an OS doesn't crash, and that it does support my
hardware.  If NetBSD supported it well (like it should for my SS2 if I can
ever ger linux's rarp troubles worked out to load NetBSD), I'd be just as
happy using it. 

> > Hrm, so graphics accelerators like Geforce don't count? Nor sound 
> > accelerators like SB Live? Intel CPUs are so stinking powerful that 
> > they can simply brute force everything. God, that NeXT, they would 
> 
>   "Fast-clocked" != "powerful".  Clock speed isn't a measure of
> computing performance.

Especially if you've only got 4 bloody registers.  Darn it McGuire, stop
ranting and invent a time machine so that we can go beat the 386 guy who
decided to stick with 4 registers.  That alone would radically improve
things.
 
>   I have a nine-year-old machine in my computer room whose primary clock
> is 33MHz per processor.  Yes, thirty-three.  For floating-point
> applications, you have to clock an Intel processor at like 500MHz to
> get similar performance.

Care to say which machine that is?

>   Though I don't agree with the idea, we must understand why they did
> it.  NeXTs have a postscript display system...Why interpret the
> postscript twice?  Not trying to be agumentative, but I it's an
> important point.

So, what they really should have done is dropped in a dedicated Postscript
chip.  Wait, wasn't that essentially what the Dimension was?  I wonder if
that board also make the printer faster.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd