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What a great article! There's a lot to get through there, so I thought I'd add a bit of extra info about one bit I know well.

Tim mentions how much more clear it is to use direct assignment (A=B+C) for all types (including lists) than having to worry about the details of the specific classes. This issue is part of the study of generic programming. This is generally quite easy to do with functional languages (e.g. have a look at some Mathematica programs to see what I mean).

A lot of effort is going into making this available in C++, with a particularly success being achieved by the STL. The STL gets over the problem of speed through using templates, which (as Tim mentions) are dealt with at compile time rather than run time. Although Tim apparently has no time for templates, they certainly achieve good results in the STL.

Those of you with their thinking hats on will be wondering "but what happens if I write A=B+C+D?". The STL would create two loops and two memory copies, since it thinks of it as ((B+C)+D). Some very interesting work to avoid this problem is being implemented in class libraries such as POOMA and Blitz++ which implement the fiendishly clever concept of expression templates to actually create and traverse a parse tree of the expression at compile time. Of course, this can lead to very long compilation times. An amazing side effect of this approach is that if you never actually use a value in A (having assigned B+C to it), then it will never get evaluated (e.g. the classes use 'lazy evaluation').

If you're interested in trying out some of these ideas in a strongly typed language, it's worth looking at C++. You'll need a good compiler though--if you're using GCC make sure it's the latest version, or for better results still try KAI C++. If you're a complete newcomer try out a functional language--I particularly recommend Mathematica, although you can use the functional concepts in Python (e.g. Map()) and Perl to make a start.

(July 20, 1999) SGI and NVIDIA Form Strategic Alliance, Settle Patent Litigation

It sounds to me that like it will use the DRI infrastructure in XFree 4.0, but provide an OpenGL-certified drop-in replacement for the (Mesa) default libGL.so and libGLU.so that is used for the Open-Source drivers, and presumably a DRI-compliant XFree4.0 driver module and linux kernel module, which could all be in the form of closed-source replacement files.

There was a move to standardise an ABI for GL applications on linux a short time ago, so that commercial offerings would be possible within the DRI/Mesa/GL framework.

Link:

reality.sgi.com/opengl/linux/linuxbase.html

Sure you can. Just buy yourself a copy of Maya and build it yourself, if you think there's a market.

If you don't like what's for sale, don't buy it, but don't expect to get what you want if you're not willing to pay.

Ah - found the link. Try looking here.

If you have ever used a SGI Indy running Irix paired with that amazingly *ahem* interesting 4DWM desktop windowing environment the dynamic resizing of icons should be familiar to you.

I used to have access to one back in the mid 90's... whoa... that sounds cool.

I know when I took people by the lab to see it they would immediately go "COOL!!!" when they saw the scrolly thingie make the folder icons look bigger then smaller then bigger then... you get the idea.

It's no wonder SGI's never caught on... it must have been the amazing easy to install no issues approach to software they have always used. I know I am not alone in feeling this way.

Latra, Jay
http://www.mp3.com/fudge/

If you have ever used a SGI Indy running Irix paired with that amazingly *ahem* interesting 4DWM desktop windowing environment the dynamic resizing of icons should be familiar to you.

I used to have access to one back in the mid 90's... whoa... that sounds cool.

I know when I took people by the lab to see it they would immediately go "COOL!!!" when they saw the scrolly thingie make the folder icons look bigger then smaller then bigger then... you get the idea.

It's no wonder SGI's never caught on... it must have been the amazing easy to install no issues approach to software they have always used. I know I am not alone in feeling this way.

Latra, Jay
http://www.mp3.com/fudge/

But the truth is that the SWF format is never going to be a usable Web format until it comes out from under Macromedia's control. As it stands, they can just change the format slightly any time competing development packages are released (hence no-one really has tried releasing a competing application to Flash). The Flash 4 plugin has been around for ages. Why hasn't the revised file format already been released?

One link of interest if you're looking into generating Flash under Linux is Paul Haeberli's library at http://reality.sgi.com/grafica/flash . Bear in mind that it doesn't come with source and it only outputs version 3 SWF.

K.
-

Let's face it: without common standards-compliant compilers, Open Source would be nearly helpless to advance on multiple platforms.

In 1999, gcc saw its first major upgrade for years, as egcs and gcc were merged. This went along with continued developments to make programmers more productive, such as the Standard Template Library and new Matrix Template Library (an awesome project at Notre Dame), to mean we can spend less time doing generic stuff and more time doing application-specific stuff.

GCC made great advances in 1999, and is deserving of recognition.

The fundamental problem with patenting information is that you cannot exclude other people from having the same (or similar ideas) independently. Technology comes in waves and each wave of ideas builds on the previous infrastructure/memeware left by the previous. Creating a rigid legislative framework for a fluid medium is cause for trouble and only enriches only lawyers. There are a number of problems with the current system. The holy mantra of network effects (ie Metcalfe's Law that the utility of a network increases as the square of the number of participants) encourages companies to create Ponzi schemes to try and create the maximum customer base for their wares (can we say .con here?) on the hope that they can exclude any competitors (a la AOL instant messaging) and sell their customers to advertisers. Patents are just one weapon in this scheme as the speed of penetration translations to market share and any delaying tactics on your competition hurts their growth rates. There are actually some rather interesting theoretical work on modelling word-of-mouth effects as quantum waves but in practical terms, a patent system designed for manufacturing is just not suited for creating new services. Imposing a slow moving legislative process (and there are good reasons why people prefer time to think over complex issues) over a fast mutating technology market is like controlling hot air with a piece of string. I would argue that if Amazon really thought their idea was so hot, they should create the software and license it to other players and let them reap the benefits. If the idea is so simple that people can implement it without paying then it must not have been that novel or distinctive in the first place. Now what are worthy things that deserve protection? I would probably nominate file formats (ie anything stored in permanent form) as in return for making it non-proprietary, the community can award the firm some rights such as naming and/or leadership/respect role. Here one can contrast the reputation of Adobe (Postscript -> PDF) vs SGI (GL -> OpenGL) in their efforts to foster the wider market. IMHO Adobe had a chance to compete with Microsoft in defining desktop document standards (ie interface to printers, especially industrial ones) but blew it while SGI has gone whole hog and freed up their GLX and Performer APIs.

Unfortunately companies can measure #patents but not intangibles like goodwill but which is more important in the long-term?. Unfortunately (or maybe deliberately so) consumer education for complex technical stuff like computers has still a long way to go when people can still confuse MHZ (effectively the RPM of the CPU) with the total software/hardware package (ie motor + comfort + millage). Perhaps consumer education is one area where Linux can be more effective, especially in warning against the long-term hard that frivilous patents can cause.

LL

The fundamental problem with patenting information is that you cannot exclude other people from having the same (or similar ideas) independently. Technology comes in waves and each wave of ideas builds on the previous infrastructure/memeware left by the previous. Creating a rigid legislative framework for a fluid medium is cause for trouble and only enriches only lawyers. There are a number of problems with the current system. The holy mantra of network effects (ie Metcalfe's Law that the utility of a network increases as the square of the number of participants) encourages companies to create Ponzi schemes to try and create the maximum customer base for their wares (can we say .con here?) on the hope that they can exclude any competitors (a la AOL instant messaging) and sell their customers to advertisers. Patents are just one weapon in this scheme as the speed of penetration translations to market share and any delaying tactics on your competition hurts their growth rates. There are actually some rather interesting theoretical work on modelling word-of-mouth effects as quantum waves but in practical terms, a patent system designed for manufacturing is just not suited for creating new services. Imposing a slow moving legislative process (and there are good reasons why people prefer time to think over complex issues) over a fast mutating technology market is like controlling hot air with a piece of string. I would argue that if Amazon really thought their idea was so hot, they should create the software and license it to other players and let them reap the benefits. If the idea is so simple that people can implement it without paying then it must not have been that novel or distinctive in the first place. Now what are worthy things that deserve protection? I would probably nominate file formats (ie anything stored in permanent form) as in return for making it non-proprietary, the community can award the firm some rights such as naming and/or leadership/respect role. Here one can contrast the reputation of Adobe (Postscript -> PDF) vs SGI (GL -> OpenGL) in their efforts to foster the wider market. IMHO Adobe had a chance to compete with Microsoft in defining desktop document standards (ie interface to printers, especially industrial ones) but blew it while SGI has gone whole hog and freed up their GLX and Performer APIs.

Unfortunately companies can measure #patents but not intangibles like goodwill but which is more important in the long-term?. Unfortunately (or maybe deliberately so) consumer education for complex technical stuff like computers has still a long way to go when people can still confuse MHZ (effectively the RPM of the CPU) with the total software/hardware package (ie motor + comfort + millage). Perhaps consumer education is one area where Linux can be more effective, especially in warning against the long-term hard that frivilous patents can cause.

LL

Apple Macintosh

• Yellow Dog Linux
• MkLinux
• LinuxPPC

• SGI Linux
  
  --Ivan, weenie NT4 user: bite me!

This all sounds kind of suspect to me. AFAIK, there is a certain amount of noise involved in any existing method of digitally scanning an analog image. (In fact, SGI's LavaRand random-number system is based on this principle.) I find it hard to believe that any "watermark" as well hidden within the image as the article suggests wouldn't be lost in the process of scanning it back into digital form.

But I still prefer SGI's.

The old cube one, I hope. The new logo just plain sucks.

I wonder how much SGI paid to be told they should change their name from Silicon Graphics to SGI. When I saw that press release I cracked up.

• High Frame Rate.
• Deterministic Frame Rate.
• Image Quality.
• Price.

Avid and SoftImage are wildly different beasts in a completely different market space -- they are used to render animations "off-line", with image quality being paramount and frame rate an absolute non-issue. They're also more geared towards the user interface (for the animator) than towards the run-time visuals (for the pilot). The finished animations go into movie F/X and TV commercials.

This is all a long-winded way of saying, whatever is going on with animation packages like Avid & Maya & SoftImage & etc. is occuring in an area totally unrelated to IRIS Performer & the Modelling, Simulation, and Imaging (MS&I) industry.

It's not a world that's had much exposure in Linux yet though (before today! :-) but with IRIS Performer being released for Linux now, other MS&I kits like MPI's Vega just having been announced as coming soon, and SGI's general impetus towards bringing its graphics firepower into the Linux space, I think we'll see a lot more in this area in the times to come.

Regarding "a shift from visualization workstations to internet servers": this isn't the case, there's been no such shift. Many of the same capabilities of our systems that make graphics work well (bandwidth, I/O, and the myriad features in IRIX) are also very well suited for servers & the internet, so we're nailing all three birds here with the same basic R&D stones.

More specifically, SGI is focusing its efforts on three business areas, which you're free to abbreviate as S, G, and I ... :-)

• High Performance Systems: (aka: SERVERS)
  Scalable, high-performance servers for HPC, technical computing, and Business Intelligence Applications.

• Visual Computing Solutions (aka: GRAPHICS)
  Solutions for collaboration, visualization of complex data and media-rich content creation. This is where IRIS Performer and our high-end graphics systems fit in.

• Broadband Systems (aka: INTERNET)
  Internet infrastructure products with "appliance-like" features for broadband content, applications, and services.

• High Frame Rate.
• Deterministic Frame Rate.
• Image Quality.
• Price.

Avid and SoftImage are wildly different beasts in a completely different market space -- they are used to render animations "off-line", with image quality being paramount and frame rate an absolute non-issue. They're also more geared towards the user interface (for the animator) than towards the run-time visuals (for the pilot). The finished animations go into movie F/X and TV commercials.

This is all a long-winded way of saying, whatever is going on with animation packages like Avid & Maya & SoftImage & etc. is occuring in an area totally unrelated to IRIS Performer & the Modelling, Simulation, and Imaging (MS&I) industry.

It's not a world that's had much exposure in Linux yet though (before today! :-) but with IRIS Performer being released for Linux now, other MS&I kits like MPI's Vega just having been announced as coming soon, and SGI's general impetus towards bringing its graphics firepower into the Linux space, I think we'll see a lot more in this area in the times to come.

Regarding "a shift from visualization workstations to internet servers": this isn't the case, there's been no such shift. Many of the same capabilities of our systems that make graphics work well (bandwidth, I/O, and the myriad features in IRIX) are also very well suited for servers & the internet, so we're nailing all three birds here with the same basic R&D stones.

More specifically, SGI is focusing its efforts on three business areas, which you're free to abbreviate as S, G, and I ... :-)

• High Performance Systems: (aka: SERVERS)
  Scalable, high-performance servers for HPC, technical computing, and Business Intelligence Applications.

• Visual Computing Solutions (aka: GRAPHICS)
  Solutions for collaboration, visualization of complex data and media-rich content creation. This is where IRIS Performer and our high-end graphics systems fit in.

• Broadband Systems (aka: INTERNET)
  Internet infrastructure products with "appliance-like" features for broadband content, applications, and services.

As for demos & the magic bus.. I am posting this from the I/ITSEC tradeshow in Orlando, FL this week (a military & industry show for training & simulation systems) and not to be too shy the demos we're showing here are friggin' AWESOME. But these aren't the sort of things you can typically see on the Magic Bus -- SGI doesn't make most of the demos we show (we make the boxes they come in!) and for the grand majority of the very cool ones, we only have permission to "show" them at particular tradeshows and/or in the presence of their owners.

The "old" (and now familiar) demos that you saw were from an era when SGI did many of its own demos, so we were allowed to distribute them. Another issue now is the size of the datasets -- I'd say 90% of our "modern" demos are interesting primarily because of the size (and therefore the detail) of their datasets. As an example IRIS Performer 2.2 (on IRIX) ships with a "Yosemite Demo" on a separate CD, roughly 1GB of data if extracted. This is (obviously) far too much to distribute in a web-based package, and to make it smaller would make it unimpressive -- "what, that's the edge of the dataset?". That 1GB is texture & terrain for only a 16 sq. km area.

Those of you who went to SIGGRAPH this year might have seen a demo of an F-117 stealth bomber flying around the Tonopah Test range in Nevada -- this demo is indicative of the capabilities today and is (honestly) far beyond the sort of fruity VRML & arcade-quality nonsense that gets shown in the Magic Bus. In this particular one the data from a 400x400 kilometer region in nevada -- that's 160,000 square kilometers -- in taken from satellite data & with texture sampled at varying resolutions, down to 0.5 meters per texel in the area right around the firing/target range. The simulation dynamics of the stealth bomber are recorded from actual missions. The texture, terrain, and cultural features (fancy term for trees & buildings) are paged into memory in real time by IRIS Performer, hundreds of megabytes per second flowing around in the system; the whole thing runs at a rock-solid 60Hz, which means you're golden in the world of vis-sim.

Here at I/ITSEC this week we're showing a few similar demos (but here the dataset spans ALL OF SPAIN) and a bunch of show-specific stuff like the DART. So I guess the best answer available for those of you seeking incredible demos is to come see us at a show, or visit one of the SGI RealityCenter facilities -- it's too hard to lug these big disk arrays around otherwise. :-)

No, it doesn't come with source; rather, it's distributed under a standard binary-only freeware EULA:

1. Grant Of Limited License; Software Use Restrictions In consideration for your acceptance of the terms and conditions of this Agreement, SGI will grant to you a personal, non-transferable and non-exclusive right to use and execute the Software, without right to sublicense the Software. You agree that you will not modify, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the Software.

Maybe we'll get some source in the future, but the clauses about reverse-engineering, modifying, decompiling and disassembling would seem to say, "Don't hope for it" :(

Correct me if I'm all washed up, but from the white papers it looks more like a math-like OpenGL renderer, maybe with some modeling capabilities? Where did you get the idea that it was a visual database?

I get a blank page when I hit the download link. It does not seem slashdotted, just that link won't work.

There aren't even screenshots, though I did find a gallery of images made with it here.

There are some tutorials with some partial shots, (like this one) they are here.

I get a blank page when I hit the download link. It does not seem slashdotted, just that link won't work.

There aren't even screenshots, though I did find a gallery of images made with it here.

There are some tutorials with some partial shots, (like this one) they are here.

I get a blank page when I hit the download link. It does not seem slashdotted, just that link won't work.

There aren't even screenshots, though I did find a gallery of images made with it here.

There are some tutorials with some partial shots, (like this one) they are here.

I get a blank page when I hit the download link. It does not seem slashdotted, just that link won't work.

There aren't even screenshots, though I did find a gallery of images made with it here.

There are some tutorials with some partial shots, (like this one) they are here.

If you do not have Motif already installed on your system, Lesstif will work just fine with IRIS Performer.

From http://www.sgi.com/software/ performer/linux-faq.html#7

See the FAQ.

Yep. Look here.

AdamL.
http://sprawl.net

This one is even cooler

Cool Baby

Things SGI are doing :
from oss.sgi.com/projects/

This list is hardly trivial...
And SGI are being a hell of a lot more linux-friendly than the distinctly ambivalent Sun.


The following projects have either originated within SGI, have SGI employees
coordinating the development and maintaining the master trees, or have SGI
employees as significant core contributors.

SGITM Linux® (for Intel ® based servers)

Version 1.1 - NEW 11/08/99
Version 1.0

Linux® Kernel Work

SGI kGDB (Remote host Linux kernel debugger via GDB)
NUMA (NUMA support in Linux)
Bigmem (Big Memory support for Linux)
Lockmeter (Linux kernel lock-metering)
Post/Wait (Post/Wait Synchronization)
SGI kdb (Linux kernel debugger)
Raw I/O (Enhancements to Linux raw I/O capabilities)
POSIX Asynchronous I/O (KAIO)
LKCD (Linux Kernel Crash Dumps)

Linux/MIPS (Indy etc.)
Linux on the SGI Visual Workstations
Samba for IRIX (Windows® / Unix® Interoperability)
Jessie (Cross-platform IDE)
NFSv3 (NFS Version 3 work for Linux)
XFS (high perf journalling file system)
CRCalc (Constructive Reals Calculator, Java Applet)
OpenVault (mass storage management and framework)
STL (C++ standard template library)
GLX (OpenGL extensions to X)

SGI does not plan to abandon IRIX. This is pure FUD spread by competitors. The future for SGI is IRIX on MIPS, Linux on IA-32 and IA-64, and adding highend and scalability features to Linux so it can do more and more of what our customers do on IRIX today.

Cute graphics - beats the standard web server error messages. Try http://www.sgi.com/company_info/investor s/ for their "real" investor relations page.

yup..

this one is my favorite.. :-)
--------------------------------

The SGI investor page says it all

www.sgi.com/investors

(press reload a few time for maximum effect)


--------------------------------

For those that don't know what it is it was suppose to be the next level to OpenGL, giving higher level scene control and incorparating in audio, input etc. to give one API for it all. It was a joint project between SGI and Microsoft (and maybe a few others) and was suppose to take the best from OpenGL and DirectX, and then add a bit more.

Anyway, I just noticed this message on the SGI site

Seems like it's one of the things SGI has 'thrown away' - hopefully they'll use what they've learnt and put it into something else...

Gotta have it! IVs work too.

Other than that . . . anything at http://www.thinkgeek.com/, RH stock, or that new O2

"And what the people but a herd confus'd,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol

(I presume you mean SGI)
You were obviously not looking very hard.
You can get some of the source from their web pages at oss.sgi.com.
They have lots of other interesting projects there also

Look at SGI's contributions. Linus nixed a few and incorporated others. No offense intended to Linus, but I'd certainly trust SGI to have a lot more knowledge of what makes an OS scalable compared to Linus. That's their territory. It's not his fault though. Those machines cost $$$, so no developer is going to independantly purchase one just to develop a more scalable SMP kernel.

In this respect, it'd be much more interesting to use the 3D accelerator for just console-based rendering.

One word: pbuffer. It's an SGI GLX extension, but it would be really cool to have...

Long live OpenGL!

Two big firsts on IA64 for Linux and I think it's a great indication that Linux will be the first released OS for IA64.

Some more info:

sgi's announcement

Project Trillian which is porting the linux kernel to IA64.

In an interview over at the ZDTV booth today, Linus was asked what the hardest task that he is planning on adding into the Kernel. He stated NUMA (Non-Uniform memory access), and who uses ccNUMA? SGI.

I've got the feeling that SGI and Linus are well in communication.

As an owner of a MIPS-based sgi, I don't think sgi is for linux/open source as much as they'd like us to think. I believe this for several reasons-for one, even on their older mips based sgis, they don't seem to want linux(with a working X) to be running on them. Also, beyond Jesse and the kernel dump analyzer tool, nothing has come out of them. Secondly, As several people have pointed out, it really is kind of stupid for sgi to sell linux-based supercomputers(see the other posts to clarify).

I hate to say it, I think sgi is using Linux as a advertising thing...

for those who say that this demonstrates sgi's deep commitment to Linux, think twice...look at the status page, and you'll see that it hasn't been updated in months! So no progress in the MIPS version of Linux.

just a little rant and raving to make me feel better...I've been really frustrated with my IRIX box the last couple months :-(

As an owner of a MIPS-based sgi, I don't think sgi is for linux/open source as much as they'd like us to think. I believe this for several reasons-for one, even on their older mips based sgis, they don't seem to want linux(with a working X) to be running on them. Also, beyond Jesse and the kernel dump analyzer tool, nothing has come out of them. Secondly, As several people have pointed out, it really is kind of stupid for sgi to sell linux-based supercomputers(see the other posts to clarify).

I hate to say it, I think sgi is using Linux as a advertising thing...

for those who say that this demonstrates sgi's deep commitment to Linux, think twice...look at the status page, and you'll see that it hasn't been updated in months! So no progress in the MIPS version of Linux.

just a little rant and raving to make me feel better...I've been really frustrated with my IRIX box the last couple months :-(

...household phrase?

It'd probably work well as a password without all the excess hash-functions :-)

It looks like a reference to Tolkien, so, without further adieu...

Here's my not current password suggestion... Use the Vax password setting program that chooses from random phonemes, such as co-di-th-me-ow-roh. Run it several times, since the default is to provide only three phonemes. You now have a pronouncable, pseudorandom, fairly random password, with a little more randomness than random text from a book.

Ignore that, and go to the lava-lamp random bits website. grab some hexadecimal bits, toss the high-order(eighth) bit, toss illegal characters, convert to ascii, and use them for your password. Choose bits from somewhere in the middle, as anyone can see the current random bits.

There you go... One of the world's most expensive password generation routines. (6 lava-lamps, digital camera, SGI O2 as server, world-wide network reccomended.)

It makes me very sad to see that people can be
this blatantly ignorant :\.. How about LEARNING
somthing about the topic befor you go making
yourself look like the clueless individual you
obviously are..

http://oss.sgi.com/

SGI has done FAR more innovating then the Linux
community.. and you should be happy that they are
supporting Linux now, because Linux is gonna get
some of those innovations (XFS as one poster
pointed out).

E

"Think for yourself, Question authority"

Toronto is a nice place (IMHO), and it does have Alias Wavefront.
Montreal has Softimage.

Both of these "near" New York...

• large memory facilities
• Async I/O
• Raw I/O
• journaling file system

• large memory facilities
• Async I/O
• Raw I/O
• journaling file system

• large memory facilities
• Async I/O
• Raw I/O
• journaling file system

• large memory facilities
• Async I/O
• Raw I/O
• journaling file system

Oracle has "teamed up" with other operating system vendors to do this in the past. For example, SGI has a partnership(s) with Oracle ( example ) to promote Oracle on IRIX.

All this allows Oracle to sell more licenses, which is what they want.

The win for Linux users is that Oracle seems (remember - this is a press release) to be pushing for more enterprise features in Linux.