jrg@apple.com (John R. Galloway Jr.) (06/28/90)
My sister, who is a Tex-on-Vax expert, is looking at a new job where they are using Sparc's. They have asked her to let them know what facilities she would have to get to go there and she has asked me for some advice (she is a statistician specializing on quality control of cancer data). Anyway I suggested the following o A Sparcstation1+, 8MB, 105MB disk, 19" 8 bit color for the office (hooked up to the local net on which is general NFS disk space and their main data base (which is Informix)) o A Sparcstation1+ 8MB 210MB disk, 19" mono at home o 19.2 baud (trailblazer+) modems to run slip and get NFS access to servers from home o FrameMaker o Mathmetica Questions: 0) Are there floating point options on the Sparc1+ that are worth getting (i.e. no custom programming and significant crunching improvement) 1) She does a lot of equation/table/graphing sort of doc work, does FrameMaker handle this well? Is it the document processor of choice on Sun these days? If need be can FramMaker paste in TeX generated stuff? 2) What other sw is being used by writers of highly math oriented papers? 3) Does Sun support slip? if so what modems work best? 4) I recomended Mathematica (thought never having used it or FrameMaker) for scientific visualization work. They use standard stat tools (like SAS) but it didn't sound like they were to sophisticated in graphics output and that is something she wants to get into. Any stat folk out there using Sparcs and if so what sw are you using? 5) anyting I left out? Thanks a lot (from my sister as well), please respond to jrg@apple.com since I do not read this group. internet jrg@apple.com John R. Galloway, Jr. (soon to be) jrg@galloway.sj.ca.us applelink d3413 CEO..receptionist 795 Beaver Creek Way human (408) 259-2490 Galloway Research San Jose, CA 95133 These are my views, NOT Apple's, I am a GUEST here, not an employee!!
bob@morningstar.com (06/29/90)
| From: jrg@apple.com (John R. Galloway Jr.) | Date: 28 Jun 90 04:15:37 GMT | | My sister, who is a Tex-on-Vax expert... | | 1) She does a lot of equation/table/graphing sort of doc work, does | FrameMaker handle this well? Is it the document processor of | choice on Sun these days? If need be can FramMaker paste in TeX | generated stuff? Why should she switch from TeX to FrameMaker, unless her entire new group is already Frame-centric? A SparcStation is a comfortable TeX engine, and there are reasonable previewers available for both X and SunView (and, presumably, OW). My "document processor [environment] of choice" consists of GNU Emacs, LaTeX, and an X dvi previewer, all running on a SparcStation; with a PostScript printer attached to the (fast!) parallel port of a SLAT out the back. The best thing is that the software's all free. | 3) Does Sun support slip? Sun may not (yet), but Suns do. Get uunet.uu.net:networking/cslipbeta.tar.Z, which works fine under 4.0.3. PPP (the new Point to Point Protocol, where you should be pinning your future) performs even better. I don't know whether either has run under 4.1 yet, but if not, work is likely underway. I've seen queries on tcp-ip, sun-spots, and sun-nets, but I don't recall seeing a response yet. We're still on 4.0.3 until then. | if so what modems work best? We've seen 1.3-1.5Kbps on FTP transfers between SPARCs connected by Trailblazer Plusses using PPP. Interactive traffic is reasonable. I haven't tried any heavy NFS activity.