[Raion]

I've recently retired the Nintendo 64 category, as it hasn't had activity in over a year. It has not been viable to keep around, so I've archived the entire forum in the Boneyard.


I have been meaning for a while to thin out/consolidate categories, but before I do so, I am very much opening this as an RFC.

We have four categories staying unconditionally:

Itanium

IBM

x86 boxes

Other UNIX

I would like to strongly eliminate one of the others, and would also be open to culling two total.

My thought was to combine Amiga/Commodore with the Atari forum into a 68k board and make it inclusive to 68k apple stuff, change IBM into a POWER/PowerPC forum and move PowerPC discussions from Apple there, and move the x86 Apple stuff into the x86 boxes category. That does however leave ARM out, which is problematic, so I'm hesitant especially on the latter category.

The other idea I had would be to make HP, Compaq and DEC merge into Itanium, and we can turn it into a HP Enterprise forum, covering all HPPA, Itanium, Alpha etc. including SGI's itanium stuff.

I am not currently open on my end to making the primary categories inclusive to itanium/sgi x86 boxes, because they're a very different design and don't have critical mass to warrant their own specific categories, but I don't wanna exclude them at all. It really was a problem IMHO at nekochan that the forums would mix IRIX and GNU/Linux /Itanium topics together and people who don't read titles/contents thoroughly (me included) would sometimes reply unhelpfully.

Therefore, my position as a staff member is we need to keep them separated. I'm aware not everyone agrees, and if there's really sufficient demand then I'll open it up to the other four staff to overrule me (per our rules, if two agree on a simlar position and the others don't take sides/abstain then we will reconsider our current status quo)

All this to say, I think we need to be vigilant to adapt to the changing conditions of our site and make changes as necessary.

Discuss below or PM me, Kaigan, Dexter1, Micrex22 or Dodoid with any thoughts if you wanna share privately. We have a policy as staff that if a user comes to us privately, we won't identify them by name unless it's absolutely necessary (i.e. if someone is reporting harassment or something)

[Shiunbird]

At work, we run through this exercise every few years, and it always ends up in frustration, just because people have different natural organisation tactics.

You go, catalog years of knowledge into different buckets according to your own obvious logic, and someone else has tons of trouble to find it out later on. It's always only obvious from our own perspective.

To consolidate, I'd do a few suggestions:

- Apple warrants a category for itself. A division per system architecture doesn't make much sense, as Apple machines don't match others even when they share CPU architecture.
As far as I know, there's not much in common between Apple's 68k systems and others, besides the fact that they are running Motorola CPUs. You get Nubus, you need to load the Mac ROM even if you are trying to run a different OS, etc.. A PowerPC Mac may run OpenFirmware and PowerPC just like many IBM boxes but, honestly, I have tons of experience with both, and there's not much of transferrable knowledge and overlap there.
You also have the specific knowledge that comes out of Apple's architecture changes: 68k to PPC emulator on PPC Macs? The transition to Intel and to ARM?

- I don't know SGI's Itanium well enough to be able to suggest, but I'd go on the same direction of thought as you did. Is there enough commonality between SGI Itanium boxes and HP's Itanium systems that someone coming from the HP world would be able to contribute to the discussions?

Extrapolating the thought, I'd suggest something like:
- Apple - all architectures
- Non-Apple 68k
- HP & Co. - as you mentioned, and it would cover not only the hardware, but HP-UX on both hppa and Itanium, Tru64 and etc..
- Sun & Co. - Solaris, SPARC, the odd talk about ZFS and dtrace =)
And I'd make two changes to the primary categories:
- IBM non-x86
- x86 including IBM x86

Not sure what to say about organising the SGI topics, because I'm only getting started.

[Raion]

SGI itanium systems have nothing in common with MIPS systems. They're EFI based, the only real difference between HP and SGI machines is that SGI machines are limited to Linux and windows.

[lunatic]

SGI Itanium machines are somewhat special in the sense that they share similarities with the later Origin platforms. This is unique and not comparable to HP Itaniums. If you go beyond the first generation (Merced) Itaniums, SGI machines won't run Windows.

It's not like this warrants a special sub forum. I personally would rather like to read fewer forums with activity than clicking through a number of sub categories with no new postings. I also like to read things I don't know already, because I like to learn new things.

[vishnu]

As the proud owner of a Sun Blade 2500 Silver I guess I would just lobby to have the Sun/Oracle/Fujitsu category stay at the top level. Something I'm regretful of is that I didn't keep my old copies of Unix Review magazine, which went out of print quite a while ago, but they had some world class experts on Sun/Solaris/Sparc who wrote really interesting articles about that architecture almost every month.

[Raion]

The Itaniums only share some basic hardware similarities on the first gen Altix models, but software-wise they're entirely different and have EFI like all Itanium boxes do.

[Raion]

Reorganized. I eliminated one category and kept things slightly different. I am tempted to ax the BeOS forum, but I love BeOS in a way, so I'd rather not.

[Raion]

Reorganized the Emulation category. Since nobody else has stepped up to make an alternative, I collapsed everything into a General Emulation forum.

Same rules apply -- All emulation questions go there.