From owner-freebsd-stable Sat Dec 14 10: 1:46 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4616137B401 for ; Sat, 14 Dec 2002 10:01:44 -0800 (PST) Received: from mtiwmhc13.worldnet.att.net (mtiwmhc13.worldnet.att.net [204.127.131.117]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 72EFF43EC2 for ; Sat, 14 Dec 2002 10:01:43 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from sec.local ([12.88.90.15]) by mtiwmhc13.worldnet.att.net (InterMail vM.5.01.05.12 201-253-122-126-112-20020820) with ESMTP id <20021214180136.GGPX20003.mtiwmhc13.worldnet.att.net@sec.local> for ; Sat, 14 Dec 2002 18:01:36 +0000 Received: from mac.com (prime.local [192.168.1.3]) by sec.local (8.12.6/8.12.6) with ESMTP id gBECFdU5028926 for ; Sat, 14 Dec 2002 07:15:40 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Message-ID: <3DFB7202.6030504@mac.com> Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 13:01:38 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021120 Netscape/7.01 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG" Subject: Re: Cyrix CPUs, was: Re: Repeatable crash from nautilus2 References: <20021214004356.36247.qmail@web40302.mail.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Rhett Monteg Hollander wrote: > All right, gentlemen, let's finish with it. [ ... ] > like to trash, anyway. > To Charles Swiger: It wasn't my intent to unduly criticise Cyrix processors, Rhett. It sounds like you know enough about the Cyrix CPUs that you might be able to contribute something towards FreeBSD's documentation. At least, if you were willing to accurately identify problems, instead of taking the approach that any problems that might have occured were fixed in such-and-such version of the harware, and thus nobody should be gauche enough to mention the fact that some Cyrix CPU's had real issues. This probably isn't the place for hardware advocacy, which was why I was trying to direct people towards things like what FreeBSD's LINT says. >> PS: I think the guys at NeXT decided that the x86 >> platform had enough issues without trying to work >> around broken hardware; in hindsight, that may have >> been a wrong decision, but I'm still using a 33MHz >> 68040 NeXTstation as a primary machine. > > Nope. Is that "Nope", I'm not using a NeXTstation? Or "Nope", I'm wrong that NeXT decided not to even attempt to support the Cyrix processor line? > In September of 1985 Steven Jobs came out Apple > and founded NextStep (numerous problems inside Apple > led to this point). Four years later a first NeXT was > introduced. All NeXTs were built with Motorola CPUs, > like Apple Macintoshes. I don't think that Intel CPUs > in 1989 were buggy (for your reference, AMD, Cyrix & > Co. started producing proprietarly designed CPUs only > since 1991-92); Teach grandma to suck eggs. I used to sell software and provide technical support to NS users since CMU got their first 4 MB cubes. I was at IT Solutions, which consulted for Swiss Bank Corp; SBC had 4000 NeXT's, which was the largest non-government deployment site. ITS was also a reseller of the NeXT-designed Canon object.station 41's, which were most notable for a failure mode where the power supply would short 120VAC through the PS/2 mouse port. [ Briefly-- the mouse didn't last long (nor did the MB or PS), but enough to absolutely catch the user's attention. It didn't happen very often. Nor have I never seen a PS actually catch on fire. But it's for certain that electronic devices stop working when you let the smoke out of 'em. ] Software problems, or even hardware problems which do not present a clear and immediate danger to people in the vicinity of the hardware, aren't in the same category. -Chuck To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message