SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
For those not following this project it is a FOSS reimplementation of the Win32 interface, which supports a great deal of humanity's historical computational effort. The new ReactOS release has reached 0.42 and the filesystems ext, btrfs are apparently RW, though Reiserfs and UFS are readonly mounts, successful systems have been shown running.
A nice gallery of some successfully run high profile applications is here (e.g. SimCity and PhotoshopCS2 !!), although interesting, not why I am reporting this.
There are an *enormous* number of scientific instruments (not just microscopes, but various scanners, PCR decks , robots) which originally came with a Win32 driver disk, and have since gone out of business or stopped support. There might only be a single run instance on a crusty old i386 (yes, I've seen that!!).
This is an ambitious project and of course depends on the effective WINE project. It deserves some specific credit and visibility, for providing a possible threshold in the future that sufficient OLD applications can be run independent of the new Microsoft "One OS to rule them All", that it may be possible to construct hybrid machines running Linux, and sufficient driver support from ReactOS to manage the old device drivers that WINE may find difficult to reverse engineer.
But in general, more OS choice's are a good thing!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @08:15PM
Any x86 is junk. Any amd64 more than 5 years old is junk. Nobody cares about your energy wasting CPUs. You are not elite for still having a Core 2 Duo, you are an idiot who would waste electricity over a stupid emotional attachment to hardware.
The only old hardware worth keeping is SPARC, and that's for testing software for correctness.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @08:28PM
And when you reach age 25, you will be shot in the head, and you will be fed to the dogs. Old hardware is dog food. You are old hardware.
(Score: 4, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Sunday August 28 2016, @10:11PM
Hello? Hello! Anyone missing their child? They appear to be special needs and alone on the internet leaving comments. Soylent mods, please phone the appropriate authorities so this unfortunate person gets the help they need.
(Score: -1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @12:26AM
You are an idiot and probably a Drumpf-supporting Republican.
There' s no need to waste energy just because you have a hard-on for old hard-ware. People like you are the reason that nations consume too much electricity over bullshit reasons. The fucking ice caps are melting and right-wing types like you would rather let the brown people of the world drown than distribute power evenly among all people regardless of skin color. Nobody needs a 600W power supply just to sit around and watch Youtube videos. While you sit in your throne of smug whiteness, wasting precious electricity, there are blacks and immigrants RIGHT IN YOUR OWN TOWN that are starving.
It's vile, borderline racist, wasteful, and an absolutely disgusting hobby to keep your old equipment around. Your capacitors are probably leaking and your solder is lead poison. But you would rather sit in your smug position and brag, "I haven't upgraded my hardware in years" because it makes you a god in your circlejerk of white only friends. Get a fucking grip you over-sensitive racist motherfucker.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 29 2016, @11:32AM
I'd vote for tump if he built a wall around your house. But after reading your post I'm sure you already reside in a walled institution.
What a crappy libtroll. I'd say your almost as bad as that Milo twat on the alt-fart side.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29 2016, @02:40PM
The Efficiency Optimization Center thanks you for your concern about wastefulness. We have determined that your flesh is not being used to its maximum efficiency.
Please report to your nearest Efficiency Optimization Station where your flesh will be reclaimed and efficiently recycled as fertilizer in a Chinese iPhone toxic waste dump.
Thank you for supporting a greener way of life where you are dead.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday August 29 2016, @04:00AM
I have recently been memory testing with a Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2.
AMD beat the pants off of Intel back in the day.
The Pentium D, running at 3Ghz with a memory bandwidth of 2.2GB/s (DDR2) runs Memtest86+ 3x slower than the Athlon 64 at 2Ghz with a memory bandwidth of 1.5GB/s (DDR1).
The Athlon also supports ECC memory. At this point, I think buying the memory will be cheaper than buying a used server board+used memory (and would not save on power draw).
I actually got the machine from the trash. The reason it was there: Video card + resulting PSU and memory failure. I checked e-bay for replacement boards: they all appeared to use an added DDR2 memory controller that does not support ECC. The PCI-E slots appear to be damaged, but I can work around them. I plan to do more extensive testing before buying ECC memory, but I currently would not trade my Athlon 64 for newer crap.
TL;DR: For my use-case of a back-up server made from salvaged parts, the Athlon 64 should be good. ECC memory is essential since I want to use ZFS to correct any disk errors from redundant disks. For intermittent use, 70-100W of power draw is not that big a deal.
PS: I am aware that there is an economic theory that capital costs don't matter (possibly related to the sunk-cost fallacy), but they do.
I am also planning on building a power-hungry computing machine: as a proof of concept until I can afford more efficient hardware. The proof of concept would let me get all the software working: preventing new, expensive, hardware from sitting idle.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday August 29 2016, @04:19AM
Yes, the video card failure was caused by blown caps.
I opted to recover components like inductors from my old Pentium 4 boards (rather than repair them).
I mean: even if I replace the caps...Pentium 4's are simply too power hungry.