Terje said "Price of SGI machine that I am using ($24000)
Netscape causes the window manager to crash sometimes
if I leave it running all the time. So I have to quit
it every time. "
Paul said "It sounds like your highly vaunted $24000 SGI multiprocessor machine has about the same stability
problems as your Pentium/NT machine.
Gee, think aboutit. $24,000 doesn't buy much these days!"
Well, what I meant to day that I have to quit Netscape at
the end of each day, as when it runs too long something
strange happens, and it starts to use up too much memory,
and then my matlab program runs out of memory and stops
with that error. Nothing has ever crashed the operating
system. Never a random reboot. So, the operating system
is rock solid. The programs that you run under the operating
system are not. The Netscape that came with the machine
was ported by SGI, and it worked great, but didn't support
frames and java and some other new things that weren't
around when I got the machine. So, I upgraded to a version
of Netscape that came from Netscape. That is when the
Netscape problems started. But I have never had a problem
with Netscape after I started to quit it a the end of the
day. You have to know that I usually have about 10-15
Netscapes running at the same time as I am unwilling to
wait for anything to download. I have it set so that I
can download up to 10 things at a time. I do this while
Matlab is doing all of its processing. So, I would say
that for the $24k that we spend, we got the performance
of about 11 PC's. That is something that we do as well.
We are constantly jumping from machine to machine keeping
them all bussy generating images. We don't have enough
computers. The way we do multitasking with PC's is to
have many of them and run them in paralell. But then
we take the network to its knees. So we got CDROMs and
put all of our raw data on them. Then we can create images
without using the network so much. Then we just put the
resultant images on the novell server. Oh, by the way,
matlab tells me how many FPU operations I have done each
session when I quit. Yesterday I did over 104billion FPU
operations in about a half a day while I was programming
and running all of my Netscapes. I spend alot of time
waiting, that is why I have time to read this stuff and
respond.
Oh, I am daring enough to try the lastest beta version of
Windows NT, but that is not my job. We have someone who
fixes all of the broken machines. He likes NT as do I,
since it is way better than 95 and 3.1, but it isn't as
good as the SGI & IRIX 5.3 but it is a whole lot cheaper.
Basically all of these things have their purpose, and I
use them all.
Also, Windows NT comes with Techtronix drivers, why don't
they work? And it comes with Novell drivers and the drivers
for the card. Shouldn't they work as well? If they have
problems, then why were they included with NT? Well, we
aren't the NT experts, so there is no point discussing it
other than letting you know my experiences so that you can
add them to your own, and I add your to mine.
Terje |
