[14598] in Athena Bugs
sun4 8.0I: athena 8.0 and sparc classics
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (biomorph@MIT.EDU)
Sun Aug 25 21:57:11 1996
From: biomorph@MIT.EDU
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 1996 21:57:06 EDT
System name: w20-575-125
Type and version: SPARC/Classic 8.0I
Display type: cgthree
What were you trying to do?
use arrow keys and the 'backspace' key on a sparc classic
What's wrong:
they don't do anything. this is in both athena tcsh and emacs 19. i'm
currently using the 'del' key instead of the 'backspace' key for the
relevant function
What should have happened:
tcsh should've give me the previous/next command in my history, emacs
should move the cursor around. backspace should backspace in tcsh (it
does work here in emacs).
Please describe any relevant documentation references:
man pages? info pages?
ps-
you can most likely stop reading here, but if you're bored, feel free
to continue. i'm a tad displeased with your choice to dispose of the
DECstations and RS6k's in favour of these nasty sun things, and the
rather gratuitous indy's. last i checked, sun's workstation prices weren't
all that stellar, especially bearing in mind that both their hardware
and their software is generally of the lowest common denominator.
for instance, the dec 5k/133's, in floating point benchmarks i ran,
were marginally outperformed by the indy's and the sparc 5's. what's up
with that? the snakes that are in the 6.001 lab (hp9000/700's, i believe)
blow anything athena has out of the water, and they're roughly as old
as the dec 5k's... why aren't those in the clusters? further, the RS6k/320's
were, at the time of their removal, the most powerful machine's athena
had (for certain things... i'll admit that the RS6k's were frightening
and ugly and really shouldn't have been seen by the face of man, but they
did do some math stuff real nicey-nice).
now it's true that the indy's have some use. i can concieve of them filling
some nitch in the ecosystem of academic computing... but to populate the
clusters with them to the level i see now? and do we really need this many
microphones and cameras?
the core of my gripe is that athena might better spend it's money buying
computing power, rather than splefty nifty gee-whiz graphics/sound
multimedia bullshit workstations. most people i see logging in do 3 thing:
1.) send zephyrs, 2.) send email, 3.) browse the WWW. these are not
resource intensive tasks, and do not require high end machines (i've got
a VAXstation 3100 at home doing these things, it'll outperform one of
your sparc 5's most of the time, and tie it the rest (not running athena
on it was the key)). athena could invest in a butt-load of 486's running
linux/netBSD/Hurd/freeBSD/minix/xenix-for-all-i-care and populate
the clusters with those, and even those will punch holes in these sparc
classics (at least), and then maybe get some nice alphas or high
end PA-RISC, or even (heaven forfend) ultrasparc machines. or high end
MIPS too, i guess.
the people who want to run xzewd will have machines capable of doing
that just peachy, at a low price, the people who need 24 bpp graphics
will have that, the people doing finite element analysis for numerical
analysis of navier-stokes for a vicid, rotational fluid in a rotating
frame of reference will have theirs.
and sipb already has athena ported to linux and netBSD! and hp-ux, last
time i checked. though it's a little flaky.
and then, cluster patrol will have enough money to buy more wrist rests
for the clusters that bozos can go and steal.
adios,
bayard
