Back in the last millenium when I worked at the local Uni's IT centre one of my colleagues was waiting eagerly for the retirement of the big and once-awesome Sparc so he could boot Linux on it and get 4 penguins on the boot-up screen :-)
OT: did the Evil Empire ever get Hotmail running on it's own OS instead of Solaris, as I understood it was when they bought it?
John Stumbles wibbled on Saturday 28 November 2009 01:22
I remmeber when someone I knew did that on a Sun and linux blew up complaining about "too many PCI slots".
:o)
I've never used Windows on my home machine. I went from MS-DOS with GEM to SunOS on SPARC hardware and stayed with that until Solaris 10 (*) when I switched to Ubuntu on Intel hardware. Indeed, I'd never used Windows at all, even for work, until NT 3.1. It appalled me then (I was working for Xerox at the time and had a Star workstation
I had a brief foray into the world of Macs a couple of years ago and bought a Mini. I hated it, and also discovered that the "it just works" mantra was tosh, so sold it again.
(* If anyone would like a SunBlade 2000 workstation, drop me a note...)
My one-and-only exposure to Linux on SPARC (which admittedly was some time ago) made me vow never to try it again. It was very broken.
I came across a Philips application note that may explain something I have wondered about, the lack of integrated ballast CFLs rated at 25W and above.
Application note AN00048, "Self Oscillating 25W CFL Lamp Circuit" from
"The reason for the lamp power reduction to about 22 W is that there are no THD-requirements for mains powers lower than 25 W so that a preconditioner function will be obsolete."
This means that power factor correction would be needed over 25W, which would make the lamp uncompetitive. The application note is interesting, as it describes a circuit similar to many current CFLs.
MJA.
Huge wibbled on Saturday 28 November 2009 10:47
Debian on Sparc was fine for me. Once the thing has booted, and bar the device names, you wouldn't really notice the difference.
I happened to be going through the M9000 specs on Friday, so it's still fresh in my mind. I guess Linux doesn't often run a system which can handle 288 PCI slots! I think on last millenium's systems, it was still over
100 PCI slots.
Just to show that things really are marching on, Cree announced on Dec
1, 186 Lumens per Watt from a High-Power LED
had been the limiting factor, LEDs would now be the norm. The failure of the industry to bring any viable products to the mass market has not been down to this.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.