Please MS just go to hell...

[Bassman59]

What does a "real" workstation consist of then? I am eager to know this 

Well, I remember that our old Apollo WORKSTATIONS ran Mentor PCB CAD software shipped on those fun tape cartridges. Does that count?

[mansaxel]

What does a "real" workstation consist of then? I am eager to know this 

In my mind, it's a minimum 32-bit desktop machine, preferably RISC architecture, NOT made by Intel, running natively in Network Byte Order, with a POSIX compliant OS, sporting X11 graphical UI.

Typical examples are nearly all SparcStations, RS/6000 43p boxes, PA-RISC machines running H-PUKES (but to offset that abomination, they have to have a GPIB adapter)  and the like.

Linux or shudder Windows does not qualify. Especially not on i386.

[bd139]

I agree. As I'm sure you know I formerly wrangled SPARCstations. Throwing all the poo into the bucket your life hasn't sucked until you've tried installing early Cadence Virtuoso releases on 10 netbooted SPARCstation 10's with only local swap disks over a 10base2 NFS shared CDROM drive with caddies. Even tar was quicker off the formely nodded to QIC tapes.

I was quite happy to use windows NT after that

[mansaxel]

I agree. As I'm sure you know I formerly wrangled SPARCstations. Throwing all the poo into the bucket your life hasn't sucked until you've tried installing early Cadence Virtuoso releases on 10 netbooted SPARCstation 10's with only local swap disks over a 10base2 NFS shared CDROM drive with caddies. Even tar was quicker off the formely nodded to QIC tapes.

I was quite happy to use windows NT after that

I'm not surprised. Local disks combined with networked file systems did go a long way towards making machines usable.

IMNSHO the biggest failure there was letting the users store files locally. SUN was on the right track with "The network is the computer" and it is entirely incomprehensible to me that, to this day, an AD joined Windows box, with a networked home directory for a given user, immediately starts to write shite to C:\Users\%user% -- it's not intuitive, very inelegant, and a big trap for multiuser almost-workstations. And don't get me started on "roaming profiles". Every time I come across that trainwreck of a clusterfuck, I want to kill something.

[SiliconWizard]

So. Has MS gone to hell already?
Or maybe that's where they have been all along... 

[bd139]

I agree. As I'm sure you know I formerly wrangled SPARCstations. Throwing all the poo into the bucket your life hasn't sucked until you've tried installing early Cadence Virtuoso releases on 10 netbooted SPARCstation 10's with only local swap disks over a 10base2 NFS shared CDROM drive with caddies. Even tar was quicker off the formely nodded to QIC tapes.

I was quite happy to use windows NT after that

I'm not surprised. Local disks combined with networked file systems did go a long way towards making machines usable.

IMNSHO the biggest failure there was letting the users store files locally. SUN was on the right track with "The network is the computer" and it is entirely incomprehensible to me that, to this day, an AD joined Windows box, with a networked home directory for a given user, immediately starts to write shite to C:\Users\%user% -- it's not intuitive, very inelegant, and a big trap for multiuser almost-workstations. And don't get me started on "roaming profiles". Every time I come across that trainwreck of a clusterfuck, I want to kill something.

On that note you’ll be pleased to know that COVID has nearly completely killed the concept of profiles. Everyone spent a lot of time moving to Azure AD and OneDrive as the corp distributed network solution to support remote working. This turned out to work rather well compared to the old way of doing things. It’s not perfect but it’s the only “complete” solution out there that doesn’t require a stack of kit. The key decent thing if you ask me is it’s fully optimised for occasionally connected scenarios like mobile workforce unlike say Google’s stuff which is a brick without the network.

When correctly applied (big disclaimer there) InTune is pretty good. You just ship your users hardware direct from the manufacturer and they sign in using their SSO creds and 30 minutes later out pops a locked down corp machine.

All this is why MS hasn’t gone to hell yet. No one else can get close to this.

[PKTKS]

What does a "real" workstation consist of then? I am eager to know this 

Exactly all the items we talk above..

Folks are splitting things making a proper setup unlikely to go right...

As of  Mandrake..  it came from Conectiva Linux making Mandriva.. which failed to get a proper share distro

btw they were trapped in that same pitfall of making Studio..  Home... Scientific... School.. 

Bunch of splitted things
Much more concerned with GUI than function as a whole

Paul

[mansaxel]

Everyone spent a lot of time moving to Azure AD and OneDrive as the corp distributed network solution to support remote working.

<snip>

All this is why MS hasn’t gone to hell yet. No one else can get close to this.

It is also completely unusable for sensitive data. I do not trust it to keep anything except completely harmless information that is already published.

I work at a media company. We have a constitutional obligation to keep our sources secret if they so desire. Failure will put journalists in jail. The current stampede towards everything in the cloud leaves us without source protection for digitally transmitted and/or stored information, and even if we retain a local ability to keep information separated, that is going to stick out like a beacon to people scanning for anomalies.

No-one is going to fool me that M$, The Book Store or the Goog are able to block for instance FISA orders. If we have journalists reporting on things that are of interest to 3-letter agencies, they will learn of it, before the public does. And in ways that compromise the source.

So, this rant is mostly aimed at pointing out the need for separate computing resources, something that's more or less equally hard on all platforms, what with our flocking around easy ways out from problems.

[PKTKS]

(..)

You just ship your users hardware direct from the manufacturer and they sign in using their SSO creds and 30 minutes later out pops a locked down corp machine.

All this is why MS hasn’t gone to hell yet. No one else can get close to this.

Even with my deep despise of all MS sickos you do have a point here

AutoDesk made such move with Eagle by turning a good usable product in such a subscription cloud thingo forcing every corporation out there to "rent" their stack or nothing..

Tenants forced to renew their embed Eagle every 3y. E.g. pretty much all clients are now forced to rent software . no options left ..

I am afraid how many other platforms will resist that big money make coin machines..

However we are still free to choose if that "easy" worth that much (abandoning our will  to purchase own and control our goods and property and privacy.. )

Even wanting them to fuck off.. you do have a point here (unfortunately)

Paul

[PKTKS]

For the record - A PROPER WORKSTATION SETUP - for CAD/EDA and simple numeric applications - without considering the GUI or server side or backup (NAS) required stuff list

Alphabetic ordered - non extensive - just primary  targets..

Without considering the required dependency among GCC and AVR and LIBC compilers and proper setup of required GPU drivers and DRM kernel.. (2 more lists needed..) (e.g. where things are getting fuzzy with BOOST LLVM/CLANG stack added in)

Workstation for CAD/EDA/SIM  basic stuff (license free e.g. rent free part GNU part OSS)

• http://ardour.org/releases/
• http://www.audacityteam.org/
• http://blender.org
• http://ctan.org/
• http://dfu-util.sourceforge.net/
• http://ffmpeg.org/
• http://github.com/tpaviot/oce/releases/
• http://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/minipro/ 
• http://github.com/OpenBoardView
• http://gnuradio.org
• http://guvcview.sourceforge.net/
• http://jackit.sourceforge.net/
• http://kicad-pcb.org/
• http://lame.sourceforge.net/
• http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/
• http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
• http://ngspice.sourceforge.net/
• http://openhantek.org/
• http://pdl.perl.org/
• http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/gputils/
• http://www.caam.rice.edu/software/ARPACK/
• http://www.clisp.org/
• http://www.dosbox.com/
• http://www.flashrom.org/Flashrom
• http://www.freecadweb.org/
• http://www.gimp.org/
• http://www.gtk.org/
• http://www.gnu.org/software/octave
• http://www.gnuplot.org/
• http://www.libsdl.org/
• http://www.matroska.org/
• http://www.netlib.org/blas/
• http://www.netlib.org/lapack/
• http://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/
• http://www.nongnu.org/avrdude/
• http://www.qemu.org/
• http://www.r-project.org/
• http://www.sigrok.org
• http://www.videolan.org/
• http://www.vorbis.com/
• http://www.winehq.com/
• http://www.wings3d.org/
• http://www.wxwidgets.org/
• http://www.xiph.org/

Reference for the record - some stuff may be moved from sourceforge
since GIT took over a lot of stuff

Pre requisites  - bottom line

• http://gcc.gnu.org/
• http://www.gnu.org/pub/gnu/glibc/
• http://mesa.freedesktop.org/

Paul

PS> updated w.more  refs at 23 aug 21

[bd139]

Everyone spent a lot of time moving to Azure AD and OneDrive as the corp distributed network solution to support remote working.

<snip>

All this is why MS hasn’t gone to hell yet. No one else can get close to this.

It is also completely unusable for sensitive data. I do not trust it to keep anything except completely harmless information that is already published.

I work at a media company. We have a constitutional obligation to keep our sources secret if they so desire. Failure will put journalists in jail. The current stampede towards everything in the cloud leaves us without source protection for digitally transmitted and/or stored information, and even if we retain a local ability to keep information separated, that is going to stick out like a beacon to people scanning for anomalies.

No-one is going to fool me that M$, The Book Store or the Goog are able to block for instance FISA orders. If we have journalists reporting on things that are of interest to 3-letter agencies, they will learn of it, before the public does. And in ways that compromise the source.

So, this rant is mostly aimed at pointing out the need for separate computing resources, something that's more or less equally hard on all platforms, what with our flocking around easy ways out from problems.

We have possibly higher security requirements than that in fintech market as we carry PII, finance, protected, medicial and insurance data on a vast scale. Saying that at no point do we think our cloud provider is at risk of these orders because the TLA spooks don't need to enter via that path and happily come knocking on the front door and telling us to hand it over. And when that happens we do have a massive tarpit of highly skilled lawyers to keep them busy for months.

The only way to protect sources is anonymous escrow to break source tracking and signing for authenticity purposes via preshared keys via side channel. Then there is no risk of source attribution.

[coppice]

What does a "real" workstation consist of then? I am eager to know this 

Its easy to define a workstation.

• A bus station is where the bus stops.
• A train station is where the train stops.
• A work station is where...

[PKTKS]

What does a "real" workstation consist of then? I am eager to know this 

Its easy to define a workstation.

• A bus station is where the bus stops.
• A train station is where the train stops.
• A work station is where...

Comes handy IgorsLab hosting a proper Workstation soft/hard ranking

https://www.igorslab.de/en/workstation-graphics-card-charts-benchmarks-tests-and-details/

Interesting details.. as usual the folk can add something

particular interesting the page on Wattage
https://www.igorslab.de/en/workstation-graphics-card-charts-benchmarks-tests-and-details/15/

Paul

[bd139]

I was mostly trolling earlier

A workstation is simply what your software vendor certifies the software you need to use on so everyone can point back at them when a six figure sum goes to shit. This is usually some crate from HPE with a Z at the start that runs windows in 2021.

[mnementh]

Honestly... I wouldn't take MS' place on a bet... Because of their market position, everybody expects them to make one OS  that runs on every fucking shitbox made in the last 2 decades from Ifni knows what parts that they have zero control over, make it so every shiny idiotic gewgaw being flogged on FurkBook as well as your 20-year-old checkbook software will run on it, make it all secure (even other people's 6-layer dipshit software) and keep it secure in a world full of ne'er-do-wells for another 2 decades, and since it is well-known they sell in bulk to OEMs for cheap, they don't even expect to pay for all that personalized toe-jam-licking service, all the while damning them for engaging in the same datamining that the same people who are bitching aboot it all volunteer for on other online "services".

Honestly, it's a wonder it works at all, much less as well as it does.

Don't get me wrong; I understand the gripes aboot 11. And I will be one of the millions staying away in droves on my personal machines until they get their shit sorted, just like I did with Win7 and everything that came between it and Win10.

And before you say Bleepity-BleepOS, or Honk-on-BoboNIX, realize that I just spent weeks with a dozen different *NIX variants on my Intel MacPro, all supposedly optimized for Macs, and it was like being teabagged by Satan every 5 minutes with one thing or another. 

In the end, the only variant that actually successfully installed and was usable was a plain vanilla build of Cinnamon/Ubuntu; the one *NIX subgenus that seems to be pretty universally despised around here.

   I see folks running around with their hair on fire in here (okay, slight exaggeration, but still), however the fact is I have a life and shit to get done. I want privacy, but first I need a machine that works without building the OS by hand. I don't build my car from the ground up anymore either, for the same reason; I just buy one that runs.

Point being... I see a lot of OS-related ideology being bandied about here as if it were compelling need; and that is just not so for a lot of people.   

mnem

[mansaxel]

...however the fact is I have a life and shit to get done. I want privacy, but first I need a machine that works without building the OS by hand. I don't build my car from the ground up anymore either, for the same reason; I just buy one that runs.

Point being... I see a lot of OS-related ideology being bandied about here as if it were compelling need; and that is just not so for a lot of people.   

You apparently need a Mac. Not a broken one, a reasonably new, unbroken one, with a supported OS X release.

I gave up on all the others years ago; for things that just need to work, every day, a MacBook is the only thing that copes. Think of it as a reliable UNIX(tm) that can show videos and Powerpoints. And won't fuck up hibernation.

Yes, I think fondly of my sequence of SUN workstations, once every 5 years I try booting my RS/6000 workstation (which has a PCI full-length graphics card that cost something like 18000 USD new, and does Quake II in fullscreen; there is a port) and I'm running a bunch of vm's with FreeBSD and Devuan for various infrastructure stuff, but it's my two Macbooks (one for work, one for play) that do the heavy lifting.

[bd139]

As of about a week ago Apple are added to the vendor shitlist here. There another thread about that though.

They still produce the best hardware and software combo but now compromised privacy and a compliance nightmare means I can’t conscientiously continue using their platform without endorsing a downward spiral for my kids.

As you’ve heard me say: always have an exit plan and that has been played.

Reference in context: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/18/german-politician-letter-tim-cook-csam-scanning/

[mansaxel]

Yes, that is a shit show. They played the privacy game well, for a while, but apparently it was hollow.

[bd139]

Yes indeed. The key problem being they cannot now put this cat back in the bag. They have declared the capability and now it can be made a legislative requirement to continue existing in regional markets. Craig makes hollow promises when confronted and steamrolls high profile critics resulting in loss of trust.

Basically you’re going to like this feature. Oh you don’t. No you’re wrong you’re going to like it if you like it or not.

Get fucked.

On a positive note where do you think those piles of test gear on the TEA thread I’m buying are being funded from 

Edit: keeping it on topic, you have to go with the vendor travelling in the right direction always. As much as MS are shitbags they only do this if you use OneDrive and do not do it and compromise your device doing so.

[mnementh]

So... I'm still okay to continue leeching off Apple with my curb-score MacPro, right...?

Gawddammit, I just spent $40 on a GPU & power pigtails to get it running again, and I wanna utilize that !@$#%!!!! investment!

mnem
 

[bd139]

You’re you’re ok as it won’t run the nasty versions of OSX coming over the hill 

[james_s]

You apparently need a Mac. Not a broken one, a reasonably new, unbroken one, with a supported OS X release.

I gave up on all the others years ago; for things that just need to work, every day, a MacBook is the only thing that copes. Think of it as a reliable UNIX(tm) that can show videos and Powerpoints. And won't fuck up hibernation.

Yes, I think fondly of my sequence of SUN workstations, once every 5 years I try booting my RS/6000 workstation (which has a PCI full-length graphics card that cost something like 18000 USD new, and does Quake II in fullscreen; there is a port) and I'm running a bunch of vm's with FreeBSD and Devuan for various infrastructure stuff, but it's my two Macbooks (one for work, one for play) that do the heavy lifting.

I'd buy a Mac if I had more choice, but none of their offerings are close enough to my liking to justify the price. I use one daily that belongs to my employer and there are a lot of things I like about it, but several deal breakers that preclude me from every spending my own money on one. I'm really not fond of the direction they are going, making the OS look more and more like iOS. One of the things I long thought Apple did so much better than Microsoft was not trying the idiocy of creating a unified experience between mobile and desktop, and lately Apple seems to be heading that way. The hardware is too locked down, I hate having no ports other than USB-C, and the whole thing just feels like it sacrifices far too much to be unnecessarily thin, it's too much form over function. As an employer owned appliance though it's fine. It does everything I need to do my job and I don't use it for anything else.

[mnementh]

Maybe you need a prehistoric cheese-grater MacPro too. 

mnem
"...if you took all the girls I knew when I was single,
and brought them all together for one night;
you know they'd never match my sweet imagination...
and everything looks worse in black and white."

[Zucca]

and the whole thing just feels like it sacrifices far too much to be unnecessarily thin, it's too much form over function. As an employer owned appliance though it's fine. It does everything I need to do my job and I don't use it for anything else.

The monumental idiot decision that if it is slim it will look better and sell more. So fruuustt..ckkk...  retarted.
All those brain damaged product artist designers convincing the management it is the right thing to do. Meanwhile the eng in the room are just sad and they are too shy to speak the hell up....

Sometime even the ETH port is gone... Are you shitting me in my face?

It's not just Apple, this colossal nosense it spreading like COVID Delta in the entire laptop industry.

[Bud]

All those brain damaged product artist designers convincing the management it is the right thing to do.

I think it is the other way around.