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End Of reality For Silicon Graphics

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the end-of-an-era-you-didn't-know-we-were-in dept.

Zurk writes: "SGI is turning off its famous employee web server http://reality.sgi.com on August 15th. The machine has been running for nearly 10 YEARS and has resulted in a number of really kewl IRIX applications (and some linux ones as well) distributed from employee web pages at SGI. Games/source code/pictures/irix tips and examples of working life at this once great company will no longer be available." Seems like the sort of thing that every business ought to maintain, for employee sanity and general niceness -- too bad this one is about to go.

22 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. here we go! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    bash-2.03$ wget -r reality.sgi.com

    ~AC

  2. The WORST always rules... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    The REASON they're on life support is that IRIX is joke...

    Only partially true... each version of IRIX was always released *far* before it was ready (compared to other commercial Unicies, at least). IRIX has traditionally had poor security with its default installation (always assuming that good connectivity on a non-hostile network is also the default).

    But once patched and hardened, IRIX and MIPS hardware really shines. It's far smaller and more efficient than Slowaris and the memory bandwidth of even *ancient* Indigo2's is breathtaking, even by today's standards.

    Along with Compaq's recent statements regarding burying the DEC/Compaq Alpha CPU line and replacing it with Intel Itanium, it seems that the industry is heralding the supremacy of the crappiest, least efficient architectures (Sun USPARC, PowerPC-POWER, Intel Itanium) and the death of the best (MIPS, DEC Alpha).

    This proves that aggressive marketing/salesmanship will always reign supreme over superior engineering.

    :-/

  3. Re:End of reality??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    Nvidia is not a spin-off from SGI. Nvidia sure has a lot of ex-SGI employees, but it ain't a spin-off.

  4. "kewl appz" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    There is no reason that the word 'kewl' should appear in a writeup on /. You guys should reject articles when the writer is thick with the stench of suck.

  5. Sadder than employee pages. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4
    While a lot of the employee pages are going to be missed (for historical purposes if nothing else since geeks rarely have a chance to perform those sophmoric/MIT type stunts that SGI-ians are so famous for), there is another loss to more than just the SGI employees. All of the non-profit websites that SGI hosts (as long as you are sponsored by an SGI employee) will be lost, too:

    http://reality.sgi.com/csp/

  6. Hear, hear! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5

    In terms of having good product but poor marketing, SGI reminds me a lot of DEC, another three-letter acronym company. Alpha was way ahead of its time. There can be no doubt that hardware "creep" is hurting SGI (i.e. the gulf between low-end, commodity, hardware and high end SGI stuff is becoming smaller).

    Indeed! All of the companies that have extensive and solid marketing (Sun, Apple, Intel, Microsoft) are the ones with the worst technology.

    Unfortunately, it's the innovative, engineering-focused companies like DEC and SGI that have the worst marketing, hoping that the merits of their products will market themselves...

    In the fickle consumer-space dominated by MBAs and technically-deficient CIO/CTOs, companies like DEC and SGI lose.

    Who will play the role with SGI that Compaq played with DEC? IBM?

    If what Compaq did with DEC Alpha is any indicator, then any acquisition of SGI by [Sun,IBM] would also probably infer that the buyer will kill any innovative SGI technology because it would:

    • Cost too much to support in the short-term. In the example of Compaq and Alpha, Compaq's bean-counters probably deduced that they could increase quarterly earnings without Alpha development. However, they are also killing any opportunity to differentiate their high-end Tru64/VMS/Non-Stop products from anyone else producing Intel Itanium boxes.
    • NIH syndrome. Compaq is a PC company first and foremost, so this would probably not apply. To Intel who will be the benefactor of Alpha development/fab/compiler technology, they will absorb only what will benefit Itanium but discard anything else. They should be thankful they have one less established competitor in the 64-bit space.

    For SGI, an acquisition by Sun/IBM would result in much the same. SGI was already transitioning off MIPS anyways but ccNUMA, MIPSpro compiler and XFS/LVM technology would either be one less competitive threat or a technological advantage.

    As you can surmise, I have very little confidence in the technical expertise of Sun, Apple or IBM compared to SGI or DEC :-/

    Likewise, I also have very little confidence in MBAs, bean counters and those idiots who believe that market forces create anything innovative or intelligent ;-)

    Slashdot readers may appreciate this excerpt of Ken Olsen, founder and former CEO of Digital Equipment:

    OLSEN SPEAKS OUT

    Short-sighted investors will do anything to have $1 more at the end of the quarter, the ousted founder of Digital, Ken Olsen, told a forum of about 300 entrepreneurs in March 1994.

    Olsen, now 67, reminisced about Digital's early days and debunked conventional wisdom. He noted that most great revolutions in technology, such as the hand-held calculator or the Sony Walkman, were not predicted. "The worst thing one can do is read the front page of the business section of The New York Times to figure out what they are. I guarantee every one of those is a failure," he declared.

    No loyalty

    Nor did the stock market escape unscathed. "I say never go public with your company. The only trouble is there's often no choice," Olsen told the entrepreneurs. Going public, he says, means putting the company's fate in the hands of often short-sighted investors. "Owners today have no loyalty to the company. They don't care about the company or the country. They would do anything to have $1 more at the end of the quarter," he said.

    Nonetheless, even a privately held company should be accountable to someone, Olsen suggested. "Boards of directors can be a pain in the neck," with directors often "overpaid" and "underworked," he said. But company managers should prepare reports for them, perhaps monthly. "You need that discipline. If they don't know enough to ask those things, make believe they do."

    As for his tenure at Digital, Olsen said "I was beat up unmercifully" in the press and by analysts "for not having mass layoffs."

    The Boston Globe, 6-Apr-94

  7. Well.. we still have employees.org by davidu · · Score: 4

    At least we still have the resources of employees.org -- The Cisco employees web page.

    It's interesting to note that Cisco has said they are willing to work with other companies to make employees.org a _central_ employee web space but that has never happened.

    Here's an example of a great Employees.org web page: The CIDR Report by Tony Bates.
    -davidu
    --

    # Hack the planet, it's important.
  8. Same thing at SCO by Dicky · · Score: 4
    SCO has a server called scofolks.ocston.org (ocston = not SCO, backwards) which was set up a couple of years ago for similar reasons, except they had a bunch of silly rules like "You mustn't link to anywhere within sco.com from anywhere within ocston.org" - trying to maintain a separation between ocston and SCO.

    There was an announcement sent out a few weeks back:

    Tarantella Inc. and Caldera International have decided that neither company will support or provide the ocston service (including email and web pages). Ocston users are requested to remove their files from ocston by Thursday, June 28, 2001, as the server will be turned off on June 29th.

    The suggestion is that you use FTP to copy your files from ocston.org to your desktop or system at home. The copied files should not be placed on any SCO (Tarantella/Caldera) home servers.

    The machine is still up, but it's a sign of a very similar situation to that at SGI - or at least that's what it looks like.

    For the record - SCO laid me off over a year ago, but my account on ocston is still there. The machine isn't actually maintained by SCO, but they pay (paid?) for the hardware and bandwidth - when the layoffs happened, the ocston admins announced that they wouldn't be kicking people off who'd been laid off. Respect to them for that.

    --
    Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
  9. best answer yet... by cabbey · · Score: 5

    generated by http://lavarand.sgi.com/cgi-bin/corpspeak.cgi

    To: fans of reality.sgi.com
    From: bean counters
    Date: Sat Jul 7 13:09:57 PDT 2001
    Subject: immenent death/dismemberment

    An OEM scripting language negotiates the mergers, on a going-forward basis. For us to grow, we absolutely have to develop scripting languages. Due to the meta-services and paradigm shifts, what has changed is the pace of change.

    We absolutely have to develop a solution as well. Given current realities, communication empowers the Strategic Initiative. Having a plug-in that is fiscal, it follows that data disseminate a prominent suite of tools. As always, goals are the team.

  10. I don't quite get it. by daviddennis · · Score: 3

    It doesn't cost them any significant amount of money to keep up, so why are they doing this?

    Seems to me this is bad for employee morale, and that's going to be bad enough as it is :-(.

    D

    ----

    1. Re:I don't quite get it. by baptiste · · Score: 3
      It doesn't cost them any significant amount of money to keep up, so why are they doing this?

      Its the same reason they can pagers and cellphones as soon as earnings slip - they think it'll solve all their problems.

      Around 1994 or 95, I created and ran a central web server for NORTEL's Intranet in North Carolina up until late 1999. The web hit NORTEL like a ton of bricks to the point UC sent us threatening letters about our widespread use of Mosaic (Netscape didn't exist yet), We hosted about 800 websites, many for official projects but many for personal web pages as well. It was pretty wide open - just sign up for an account using your employee credentials and you got account space. Obviously folks who abused it were kicked off - but since your account was clearly tied to you, nobody did. I can't recall one instance of being asked pull down an offending site.

      Anyway - the web was a huge part of NORTEL's employee life. Web servers ran on lots of desktops or on central servers like the one I had deployed. We used the web to vastly improve our communication across labs in the US, Canada, the UK, and elsewhere. It also gave employees a place to express themselves. Heck - the server I ran was just an HP C Classs with 100GB of RAID-5 running HP-UX and Apache. It did great - even with folks adding all sorts of tools, database frontends, you name it.

      Well, sure enough, as you all know NORTEL stock has cratered like many other tech companies. Well, according to friends who still run teh server I created, NORTEL is now instituting a company wide policy where every website on the companies Intranet must be registered with a central authority. They will review what is submitted, accept what they find 'useful' and then will proceed to shutdown all other unapproved web sites and servers.

      Its funny because they will probably spend magnitudes more $$$ trying to reign in teh web on their INtranet vs what it really cost them. Again, a knee jerk reaction at cost cutting when the real problem is - lack of sales and too many employees (which they've resolved by cutting 1/3 of their workforce)

      So it shouldn't surprise you. Executives STILL don't realize that if you work your employees into the ground without giving them some outlets and places to express themselves and unwind, they'll be less productive and you'll lose even more money! I've always been amazed by it. Profits go down, they institute some stupid cost cutting policy (pagers, vacation carry-over, less health benefits, personal web pages, sports leagues, etc) and then they wonder why productivity is lower and they are losing even more money.

      Its too bad really, but I guess its a fact of life. If you aren't happy in your job, you'll just get fired and they'll hire someone else for half your salary to work into the ground who needs the paycheck badly (been there, still there :) )

      --
      Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
  11. Huge magnifying lens by MSG · · Score: 3

    Does anyone else remember a page on reality that had the details of an SGI employee purchasing an insanely large magnifying lens and using it to melt stuff? I thought I saw it about 3 years ago. That story was the basis for most of my opinions about SGI as a company. :-)

  12. What SGI now stands for by sien · · Score: 5

    Soon Going Insolvent.

  13. SGI at 1.14 ... by sg3000 · · Score: 4

    SGI has been hovering around around a dollar since May. They've been steadily eroding since their plan to make money building high-end NT/x86 workstations just isn't working out. I hate to say it, but reality.sgi.com may not be the only server they're turning off.


    --
    Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
    1. Re:SGI at 1.14 ... by eXtro · · Score: 4
      To bad, I could have told them that there isn't any money in NT unless your microsoft.
      I dunno, Dell seems to do OK selling NT. SGI also lost money on linux too, so its not fair to blame it on Microsoft. SGI only understands high profit margin computer systems. They tried to maintain an artificially high profit margin on boxes that were slightly better than other PCs on the market (at least in terms of graphics performance) and also tried to sell them through their normal (extremely pricey) sales channel.

      For PC boxes your margins need to be low to compete. Developing your own graphics board is a waste of time, to justify the expenditure in R&D the board has to be cutting edge for about a year. The SGI graphics board was only a tiny bit better than an nVidia at the release date.

      Selling commodity components through your own sales channel, salespeople who may have engineering degrees and enourmous salaries, is an indicator of mental retardation in somebodies thought processes. There should've been a secure web page that would take your address and credit card and ship it direct from the manufacturer to you. The only time a salesperson should've been involved is if there was a huge number of boxes involved.

      --

      Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware

  14. Like it matters.... by jonathan_atkinson · · Score: 4

    ...it'll be down in half an hour. The quickest way to kill a webserver; post a link on slashdot.

    --
    Cleanstick.org: Dumb weblog about nothing
  15. One cool employee page... by catch23 · · Score: 4

    I spent about 30 minutes on this page...

    http://reality.sgi.com/chinster_studio/html/photo_ essays.html

  16. classic lavarand site on reality is going away too by chongo · · Score: 5
    Not only are the employee home pages are going away, but so are the other services that are co-hosted on reality.

    The classic lavarand site (random numbers via Lava Lite Lamps), which is hosted on reality, is going away as well.

    We are planning to bring on-line a and improved version of LavaRnd (open sourced and patent-free) at www.LavaRnd.org hopefully before reality goes away.

    --
    chongo (was here) /\oo/\
  17. Why? by Jagasian · · Score: 5

    How about you tell us why its being taken down? I mean, is it because of budget problems, or is it due to a change in management?

  18. Re:Money Trouble ... by InsaneGeek · · Score: 5

    What exactly is the problem you are/were having. Using them for years I can say Irix is my favorite, as long as people are willing to *not* use the GUI for administration (elsewise you are really limiting yourself) it can't be beat (give me "inst" over any other rpm, aptget, pkgadd crap).

    Are you having a performance issue?? Memory, CPU, disk I/O? More than likely it's a simple thing that you don't know about, or has been fixed in the past 4 years.

    Irix must work properly/reliably for lots of people or else they wouldn't continue to sell their thousand proc plus single image configurations. You can't have downtime or not have it work exactly the way you want it when you are 30 days in to a 60 day calculation.

    The *REAL* reason SGI is floundering is because for years they could never market themselves out of a paper bag. You can have the best stuff in the world, but if your sales force doesn't quite get it...

  19. Good Customer Service = Bankruptcy by tenzig_112 · · Score: 5
    Yikes. I have so much of my career invested with these business school drop-outs it isn't even funny.

    It just goes to show you that full-service customer support will only get you in trouble. "Treat your customers like crap," I told them years ago. "They'll respect you more that way." But they wouldn't listen. You have a $15k graphics board go hinky on you? They'll drop ship it with a moment's notice.

    My hat is off to the beautiful people at sgi. They did the support thing right and are paying the price for it.

    When I die, I hope to go to the place most like sgi tech support.

  20. I asked LavaRand how it felt about the situation: by KupekKupoppo · · Score: 3

    KK: LavaRand, in haiku form, what do you think about the end of reality?

    LR: new stuff eternal /
    nuclear mighty jolt shy /
    fish ginormous wail

    KK: Beautiful words, LavaRand. Back to you, Taco.