declan@portia.Stanford.EDU (Declan McCullagh) (07/09/90)
MacWeek's Mac the Knife column has always shown little restraint; it's no suprise to see that sort of NeXT-bashing taking place. Apple is, as usual, above most criticisms, and NeXT is portrayed as an evil upstart that can't possibly succeed. Of course, the NeXT community may feel similarly about the Macintosh, but we've got a better product, no? $-) Right now, NeXT is in the peculiar position of having a superior interface and development environment, operating system, and overall design (in my opinion), but few third-party products and only one computer model to choose from. Also, NeXTs don't seem to be selling that well in the general marketplace - someone posted an ancedote a few days ago about two-digit sales quotas at Businessland stores - and colleges seem to be rushing to buy color SPARCstations... One lab here at Stanford, for instance, has 35 color SPARCstations and only six NeXTs. But, fortunately, that will (should?) all change later this year... Robert Lin posted that NeXT's announcement may include: >- System 2.0, with high performance file system and task scheduler > algorithm thoroughly revised. You'd be surprised how much performance > is lost to poorly optimized schedulers. >- New Canon 32 ms, 512 M floptical to fix persistent complaints. >- The 68040, of course, at 25 Mhz and maybe 33 model, depending on > Motorola's production capability. >- Low prices. Major price cuts can be achieved while still preserving > profit margin because one very expensive cost, our "free" NeXT > software, has been amortized and paid for by us pioneers. >- A show of strength from major software vendors, with applications > available for immediate delivery, to once and for all silence > critics of the "no apps" variety. Then, the NeXT community will have a machine that can do what it originally promised to. There are a few interesting upgrade problems that will arise, though... Will NeXT offer a Greyscale -> Color upgrade, and if so, how will they handle them? Personally, I don't want to have to trade in MY greyscale monitor for a color one - I want BOTH on my desktop. Might the color upgrade entail a separate board? It would be nice (although perhaps not feasible) to fit all the support chips on the main processor board. And how will NeXT handle the problem of TWO monitors attached to one cube - at the moment, the power supply is built to work with only one monitor; the second one might have to plug into an AC outlet. Of course, this unbridled speculation IS very premature... One thing that will probably come about, though, is that Sun and others will have a hard time competing against the kind of intrinsic value offered by a low-priced color '040-based NeXT. Just about everything a Sun comes with can be found on a NeXT, and the converse isn't true: A NeXT comes with bundled NextStep applications, a DSP, cheap optical drives, a low-cost 400 dpi printer, and so on... -Declan ------------------------------------------------- Olympic Technologies : Registered NeXT Developers NeXT Mail:declan@portia.stanford.edu -------------------------------------------------
hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (07/14/90)
In article <1990Jul9.033654.24628@portia.Stanford.EDU> declan@portia.Stanford.EDU (Declan McCullagh) writes: >Of course, the NeXT community may feel similarly about the Macintosh, but we've got a better product, no? $-) > I'd definitely take a NeXT over a Mac (I have, in fact }-), but ... until *this* is delivered: > >>- System 2.0, with high performance file system and task scheduler >> algorithm thoroughly revised. You'd be surprised how much performance >> is lost to poorly optimized schedulers. I wouldn't recommend either to anyone else. Running find on my winchester (ostensibly looking for core files, but there are lots of valid reasons) brings the entire system to a crawl, if not a halt. The display manager takes upwards of 20 seconds to respond to window/mouse selections, and you can watch window redraws one widget at a time. This is pretty sad performance for a machine that supposedly has mainframe-style I/O channels and a 25MHz data bus. A simple getty sitting on an open (floating, temporarily disconnected) serial line eats up huge amounts of CPU time when it *should* be sitting idle. But for some reason, it prefers to spit out "Next Login" endlessly, cutting in to my compile performance. I've got a little RS232 tester connector on the line, it shows that DCD is low, and that getty is set on a dialup device, but it always succeeds in opening the device. Pretty poor. (And this stupid Mac mini-din serial connector drives me nuts too. No ring indicate, no RTS/CTS flow control, what a stupid idea.) >>- New Canon 32 ms, 512 M floptical to fix persistent complaints. >>- The 68040, of course, at 25 Mhz and maybe 33 model, depending on >> Motorola's production capability. >>- Low prices. Major price cuts can be achieved while still preserving >> profit margin because one very expensive cost, our "free" NeXT >> software, has been amortized and paid for by us pioneers. >>- A show of strength from major software vendors, with applications >> available for immediate delivery, to once and for all silence >> critics of the "no apps" variety. > >Then, the NeXT community will have a machine that can do what it originally promised to. > At long last. But there's no denying, it certainly NEEDs all those improvements. >There are a few interesting upgrade problems that will arise, though... Will NeXT offer a Greyscale -> Color upgrade, and if so, how will they handle them? Personally, I don't want to have to trade in MY greyscale monitor for a color one - I want BOTH on my desktop. > You either have a huge desk, or a paperless office, or maybe both. }-) My current desk is a fair size, but just barely deep enough for the monitor and keyboard. (Hey, I guess we need voice or eye-tracking input too, eh?) >Might the color upgrade entail a separate board? It would be nice (although perhaps not feasible) to fit all the support chips on the main processor board. And how will NeXT handle the problem of TWO monitors attached to one cube - at the moment, the power supply is built to work with only one monitor; the second one might have to plug into an AC outlet. > Oh, horrors, then they might have to actually provide a primitive power switch! I think this soft-power switch stuff is nonsense. At least on my good old HP41 it made sense - you could program the thing to turn itself both off and on. It doesn't seem to serve much good on the NeXT, and it's damn frustrating when the machine goes off the deep end. (Then I have to crawl around down dark corners looking for the plug...) Of course, I have a similar gripe about MacIIs. So it goes... (Don't know what it is, but these things tend to crash pretty often in my experience. Am I cursed?) >Of course, this unbridled speculation IS very premature... One thing that will probably come about, though, is that Sun and others will have a hard time competing against the kind of intrinsic value offered by a low-priced color '040-based NeXT. Just about everything a Sun comes with can be found on a NeXT, and the converse isn't true: A NeXT comes with bundled NextStep applications, a DSP, cheap optical drives, a low-cost 400 dpi printer, and so on... There's nothing preventing any other company from creating really slick software bundles for their systems; Apollo had a pretty nice package for their 2500/3500 products. And there's nothing to prevent anyone from adding some whiz-bang floating point unit to their workstation; the DSP doesn't need to be tightly coupled to the CPU, it wouldn't be a difficult add-on. The other guys may take a long time realizing there's a demand for DSP-equipped workstations, but it's no great hardship to supply the rest. Most optical drives are SCSI compatible, after all... -- -- Howard Chu @ University of Michigan one million data bits stored on a chip, one million bits per chip if one of those data bits happens to flip, one million data bits stored on the chip...
hannum@schubert.psu.edu (Charles Hannum) (07/26/90)
In article <1990Jul14.060523.13513@math.lsa.umich.edu> hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) writes: >A simple getty sitting on an open (floating, temporarily disconnected) serial >line eats up huge amounts of CPU time when it *should* be sitting idle. But >for some reason, it prefers to spit out "Next Login" endlessly, cutting in to >my compile performance. I've got a little RS232 tester connector on the line, >it shows that DCD is low, and that getty is set on a dialup device, but it >always succeeds in opening the device. Pretty poor. (And this stupid Mac >mini-din serial connector drives me nuts too. No ring indicate, no RTS/CTS >flow control, what a stupid idea.) Trying to getty a non-existant serial port is rather dumb. Just kill your getty and be done with it... >Oh, horrors, then they might have to actually provide a primitive power switch! >I think this soft-power switch stuff is nonsense. At least on my good old HP41 >it made sense - you could program the thing to turn itself both off and on. It >doesn't seem to serve much good on the NeXT, and it's damn frustrating when the >machine goes off the deep end. (Then I have to crawl around down dark corners >looking for the plug...) Of course, I have a similar gripe about MacIIs. So it >goes... (Don't know what it is, but these things tend to crash pretty often in >my experience. Am I cursed?) No you don't. Just hit Command-Command-~ to get into the mini-Monitor, or if it's *really* screwed, Alt-Command-* (on the numeric pad) will always reboot. -- Virtually, Charles Martin Hannum "Those who say a thing cannot be done should Please send mail to: under no circumstances stand in the way of hannum@schubert.psu.edu he who is doing it." - a misquote
jmann@bigbootay.sw.stratus.com (Jim Mann) (07/27/90)
I have had at least one case in which the monitor program hung, none of the keyboard sequences worked, and I had to pull the plug. This was in the company of two NeXT system engineers who agreed that was the only thing that would work. Jim
wiml@milton.u.washington.edu (William Lewis) (07/28/90)
In article <1990Jul25.211440.25462@acc.stolaf.edu> hannum@schubert.psu.edu (Charles Hannum) writes: >No you don't. Just hit Command-Command-~ to get into the mini-Monitor, or if >it's *really* screwed, Alt-Command-* (on the numeric pad) will always reboot. Actually, it's pretty easy to get the machine hung enough that it doesn't respond to the keyboard at all (mouse frozen, keyboard frozen, magic key combinations not working). If you call up the NMI window and hit the NMI combination twice in quick succession, the NMI gets, er, masked, along with everything else, and the only recourse I've found is to pull the plug. There are other ways it seems but I've never been able to find out afterwards what they were ... -- wiml@blake.acs.washington.edu Seattle, Washington | No sig under (William Lewis) | 47 41' 15" N 122 42' 58" W |||||||| construction
absinthe@milton.u.washington.edu (Daniel Faken) (07/30/90)
yes, pressing command-command-tilde (ie. calling up the nmi window) repeatedly quickly will crash the machine so that the only resort is the plug.