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SGI Faces Bankruptcy
Richard Finney writes "
The stock chart tells the story: One time Silicon Valley high-flyer and contender for the Unix crown, SGI stock price dropped 20% on Friday ... deep into penny stock territory ... after releasing fiscal fourth quarter results. The Mountain View, California maker of high end computers is '
exploring financing alternatives with its lender and other sources.' With mounting losses and investors giving ol' Silicon Graphics the thumbs down, things aren't looking good."
It's a shame to see a company that had such interesting hardware and operating system going down. I used IRIX on an O2, and loved it. Was way ahead of its time.
They could always sue Linux.
And you lose. I'm pretty sure that SGI's downward spiral can be directly attributed to their little tangle with the Beast of Redmond.
The zombie corpse of SGI, stripped of its important 3D computing patents which went mostly to NVIDIA and Microsoft, has been shambling around for a while now, but it will take a miracle for it to pull back from the edge.
maybe nvidia will buy them (thereby fixing up lingering IP issues) and be able to open-source their video drivers.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
I hope someone buys them .. they've got good engineers. They introduced an affordable high quality LCD monitor before anyone else.
.. but Microsoft and others jacked some ideas from them like the login screen having users images etc.
SGI is responsible for evanglelizing visualization. (For example coming up with Open inventor and sponsoring Open GL etc)
Hope they stick around. Irix wasn't the best OS
The next story will be titled How Linux Killed An Industry. It will detail the besieging of Irix, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Unix and the ultimate demise of their parent companies. In the end there will be three operating systems, Linux, Windows, and an obscure novelty from Apple.
Linux is mean!
Unfortunately, when the hardware was new I was not able to afford it. Currently I own an Indigo, Indigo2, and an O2. They are very capable and suprisingly rounded machines. I was concerned with SGIs direction during their stint of windows clusters but with the linux superclusters they've been working on lately and some of the rekindled movement with the workstations, I have been very hopeful of a bit of an SGI revival. Hopefully, they will be able to recover from this. If not, I know that many people will be greatful for the contributions they have made.
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
But I have to ask, is there really any reason why to get an SGI today? I can see a company with an installed base of SGIs upgrading or what-not...but do they really offer anything new or different?
This is not a troll, it's an honest question. Back in the budding early days of the workstations sure, I could see getting these machines to work on 3D graphics etc etc. But now that 3D graphics cards are on regular PCs and Macs and both can run UNIX type operating systems, what does SGI or SUN for that matter have that you can't get elsewhere?
I'd be interested in knowing what others think about this or why they would keep going to SGI.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Sue IBM you mean, right?
The penguin got no cash. Just fish.
What competition? SGI has lost its innovation spirit a long time ago and banked on getting a free ride from Linux. It gets what it deserves.
Altix is paying the bills? I really think they have something going with these large scale, single image linux systems. From a technical viewpoint, they are very well designed. My understanding is that they are priced competitively for what is effectively the modern mainframe. When you need rediculous amounts of memory, that isn't segmented over many differant nodes, and gobs of IO power, these things are the way to go.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
...in Apple's belt?
...in Microsoft's belt?
...in Linux's belt?
or
I vote Apple.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
If you look back a few years ago (Around Sept of 2001) it has been there before. Why is it assured it will not go back up this time?
I think you are confusing SGI with Sun. SGI actually contributed quite a bit to Linux, second maybe to IBM.
Too bad though-- less competition is never good for the market.
SGI's demise is a result of the market, and a reduction in the # of players in the market does not necessarily mean there is reduced competition. It may mean, and in this case I think it does mean, mean that competition is so fierce that there is no room left in the market to sustain some of the players.
I have an Indy. I used in in college for CS work, and it was perfect. Learned OpenGL stuff, etc. I was the biggest SGI fanboy. evar.
I was actually at the event that started the complete destruction of SGI. It was summer 2000 in New Orleans. This would be SIGGRAPH 2000. I actually presented a paper, and was invited to the SGI party at Anne Rice's humble adobe. This was the day of a "big annoucement", and we were ALL expecting SGI PC graphics cards. Taking the SGI name and technology into the new up-and-coming PC graphics card market was the brilliant move we all expected. Compete with nVidia, and take names.
What did they announce? Some newer, bigger supercomputer thingy. You could taste the silence in the room.
That was the day, certainly in my book, that sealed the fate of SGI. After that, PC graphics cards just exploded onto the scene, and the whole reason for getting an SGI became moot.
I still love Irix, and can't believe how amazing the Indy is that I bought back in 1994. Still is a great machine, and it's a shame to see SGI finally near the end.
--- witty signature
Mean anything for the STL? I mean, is SGI still working on the STL, and will it continue to keep its excellent documentation publicly (freely) available, etc?
I said this years ago when working for a VR centre using SGI systems and saw the centre migrate more and more of their workstations to cost and performance effective NT systems.
NVIDIA were becoming a big player, yet SGI was responsible for the extremely popular 3D library we were using.
Their arrogance was partly to blame, they never did confess that the gaming industry would come to define the "3D graphics workstation" and that VR was fast becoming a ghost train. Instead they sent girls around in push-up bras selling upgrade licenses.
SGI makes/builds super computers for the National Weather Service, and the military that handle munching hundreds of terabytes of data a day.
Let's face it - what's SGI's real legacy to the computing world? OpenGL? Massive visualization platforms? NSA-grade supercomputers? IRIX? Naw...
SGI's real legacy is the attractive computer. Back when every other vendor was making wretched beige abortions (yes, Apple inlcuded, before they moved into the toy iCandy series), SGI made workstations with style.
Who could look at the clean, crisp edges and suave teal finish of the Indy series, and not drool. Or not have some desire to run up to an O2 and hug it?
Its a question they should've asked themselves six years ago.
Sun has the advantage of being the "standard" for enterprise Unix applications. They're hurting but thats sigificant.
SGI (aside from the Cray stuff) hasn't offered anything over other systems in half a decade.
I used to work for a SGI VAR, and even seven years ago, most of the customers with existing installations were already looking and moving off them. The issue was people generally hated Irix, and as non-Irix hardware got better, the pain of changing platforms was mitigated by the pleasure of getting away from Irix. I commented in the parallel with Apple in another reply. SGI made the switch to Intel (or attempted it, I have no idea these days if that stuck or not) but unlike Apple, they had nothing to offer when they moved off MIPS. People didn't like their OS anyway.
A more powerful PC, with high-end video card, easily outprices SGIs nowadays, so it's no surprise.
The next question is, with SGI on it's way out, where will Apple get it's new ideas from?
Torrent please.
...shut down their products and pocket the source code and patents.
... the loss of yet *another* innovative & powerful system architecture ... yet another victim of the cheap-ass & now all-conquoring x86.
PowerPC in Apple, SPARC in Sun, and now MIPS in SGI... one wonders how long PowerPC/POWER will last in IBM's workstations & servers...
I love commodity hardware from a social perspective -- cheap, standardized, capable hardware means access to vast quantities of information is becoming practically free for a rapidly increasing percentage of the world's population. On the other hand, I can't help but feel a substantial pang of loss as these non-standard platforms are, despite innovative and arguably superior design, destroyed only by the economy of scale. Alas.
RIP, SGI. You were damn cool while you lasted.
multifariam.net -- yet another nerd blog
Reading this article evokes a bit of a shock for me, so I go to the sgi site to check out what they are doing these days. I look at their workstations because thats what people used to buy, SGI workstations right?
700mhz or 800mhz MIPS processors?! 800mhz dual or quad processor boxes?! I see they have a whopping 4mb of cache these days but 800mhz MIPS processors were available in 2002. Even if $scientific_calculation function you want runs two or three times faster on MIPS than on a P4 you can get a 3ghz P4 for $285NZD these days. This is why SGI stock is tanking.
The only saving grace is that SGI still has a greater market cap than SCO ( 148.48M vs 70.44M ).
I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.
license its technology to other companies, and encourage customers to invest in it, like when Kmart started encouraging non investors to purchase KMart shares.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Back in the mid 90's, I wrote software for a commercial satellite imaging system (now part of Space Imagining). SGIs were the workstation of choice: Very high-end, graphics without compare, in-depth support for parallel processing, and relatively fast. Cheap they were not (not to mention a fairly buggy C++ compiler in IRIX that took up many hours of our time...usually very esoteric bugs that even stumped the SGI folks).
Back then, the rumor was always floating around that SGI was considering moving from Irix to Linux. (Did I hear correctly that they finally did, years later?) Amongst ourselves, we would talk about there was no way Linux would be able to replace Irix (remember, this was '96!), and that it would be a mistake for SGI to go this route.
How wrong we were...SGI, like Cray and some of the others mentioned, refused to give up their hold on proprietary high-end hardware, and have fallen hard. Now that the hardware market has become commoditized, with throw-away PCs, there's really no need for companies like SGI, Sun, etc. Sun, to their credit, has tried to bail from their sinking ship by making overtures to the OSS crowd and by delving into software, but they may have been too late to start manning the lifeboats. But it's my belief that Sun's days are numbered as well.
So a hearty farewell to SGI. I just hope they go down swiftly and silently.
after releasing fiscal forth quarter results
Forth???
Everyone knows that you need to release your results in Java or C# these days... *sigh*
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
SGI, make a laptop. Make a laptop. Make a laptop.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Drivers are assets now? That's like saying the menu of a DVD is an asset.
The hardware is the asset.
owned an indigo2 for a while, nice r10000 mips. nice having a 64-bit cpu and operating system back in 1999. well designed too.
the problem with sgi is that it's been living in the year 1995 since 1990, which was working well for it for a while, but when commodity gear just starts killing your performance and cost there comes a point where you have to move on to a new platform. this is like sun, except sun seems a little farther along and willing to keep pushing forward, while sgi just keep digging bigger and bigger holes for themselves.
sad, but the dot-com boom which fed these companies also birthed the commodity pc boom which killed them. i actually want to lump apple in that same catagory, but unlike the rest which stayed in their path and carved themselves farther and farther from the mainstream, apple kept pushing to keep their market position, and in pc's managed to keep their niche. surprising, but their success in the last few years had very little to do with their core pc business, and everything to do with i*'s keeping their brand warm.
just hope these same market forces end up killing the ms monopoly they created, an good open sourced os (not necc. linux) would make a lot of the hardware innovation that stopped post-lintel possible again.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
Sun will set next. Sun Microsystems goes down next.
Great Contribution.
the financial problems were from TiVo. Everybody thought that it was stupid, and their leadership had just left. Everybody mocked me, as I shoved otherwise unused 15,000 from my portfolio into them. I would like to say that right now, if I pulled it right now, I would gain significantly from it. I'm going to wait some more time. With SGI I'm not sure. Their market seems weak to me. They still make superb and beautiful hardware, but I am afriad it is nothing that in a corporate environment I couldn't duplicate. Not identically at any rate, but I could certainly grid the corporate work environment and achieve at least competative results...and I could do it cheaper. The major university number crunching has also been well proven to be able to be run on our 'limited' hardware we store under our desks. Now, don't flame me because I think this AMD and INTEL hardware under our desks is good. Far from it, SGI's hardware whips the poo out of them. But its kind of like this: Never get involved in a land war in asia.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
My SGI O2 system sheds a tear of abandonment...
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
The low-end has always, eventually, overtaken the high-end. Minicomputer became as powerful as mainframes, Workstations became as powerful as minicomputers, and PCs became as powerful as workstations. There will always be room for some high-end gear, but total marketshare for high-end stuff isn't growing and some of the high-end players have died.
The interesting question is when consumer electronics will replace PCs as the most ubiquitous computing device. They are not there yet, but I'd wager that next generation consoles could easily run most of the applications that most people currently use a PC for (web, email, office, and games). Of course some people will always seek out $2,000+ high-end PCs, but more and more people will opt for a $300-$500 unit like a game console (with disk) or something like a Apple's Mini.
I'm sure this is why MS has devoted so much money to XBox and Apple created the Mini. They learned the lesson (that DEC both epitomized but failed to learn) that the low-end rises and supplants the high-end.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You left out the all-powerful DEC/Alpha.
Gabriel Ricard
some interesting comments from an another discussion.e shold=0&commentsort=3&tid=139&tid=130&tid=218&mode =thread&pid=11072394#11072938 check out the parent comment
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=132599&thr
SGI was probably incapable of adapting.
My mother got into the stock market buying up Commodore stock just before it went into obilvion.
Now it's time for me to buy SGI stock. Just like my mother did.
I don't actually exist.
My coworker was the one who informed me of SGI's recent history. Based on that, I'm thinking would it be fair to say the decision of SGI to abandoned there MIPS processor in favor of the shitty original itanium that never took off help put the nail in the coffin?
http://cch.loria.fr/documentation/O2000/slides/To
to an utterly bland, vanilla logo:
http://truegrid.com/images/SGI_logo.gif
Well...they had it coming. [ shakes head ]
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
1. Make something that is X better than everything else.
2. Count on the fact that people will pay Y times the common average going rate for "the best".
3. Charge X*Y+Z where Z is an arbitrary high number chosen by management who are paying more attention to the stock prices than the computer science.
4. Neglect the fact that while many people will makes googly noises about "the best", they will go for "good enough" in proportion to the constant Z, and that this effect will increase over time.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
IRIX *was* way ahead of its time, back in 1995. It had some security issues, but they were eventually fixed too. But that's it folks, aside from new hardware support, IRIX has hasn't had many updates since it recieved the IndigoMagicDesktop and 64-bit support about 10 years ago.
SGI's MIPS hardware went on a similar path. The fastest SGI MIPS CPUs available today are 800 MHz and 1 GHz (and maybe 900 MHz?) these are called R16K but are based on the oldschool R12K design. Still very impressive in terms of performance per MHz and performance per watt, but they are far away from UltraSPARC III, Power5, and even PowerPC and Intel Pentium. The same can be said for SGI's graphics hardware, they lost their competitive advantage over the past ten years to the point where they just started using a bunch of ATI FireGL GPUs instead.
What's their future? Itanium2 and SuSE???
SGI has treated its largest customers well over the years, but those who buy less than $5 million of SGI gear a year have basiclly gotten the finger. Those who buy less than $100 thousand a year aren't even recognized.
Sure, SGI still has some good technology, like OpenGL Performer (which is perfect for multi-GPU simulators and can run on Windows and Linux, thankfully!!) but for the most part, the company is a has-been.
So SGI is about to tank. Does this surprise anyone? I think the only surprise is that SGI has remained in business for the past 10 years.
Their engineers and their software libraries alone should be worth quite a tidy sum and at least Apple would put the stuff to use in some or other product (some high end 3D package that does for 3D what FCP did for video). Microsoft would almost certainly mess it up if they bought them up.
That said, the fact that buyers are not exactly beating down SGI's door speaks volumes in itself.
Gave Linux XFS Scaled Linux beyond 32 CPUs In regards to OpenGL vs Direct 3D, I have heard that D3D has gotten way better since Carmack made those comments. HOWEVER, it's still just Microsoft that controls all of DirectX. But just look at the orgs and people that are on the OpenGL board, even their emails addresses are public: http://www.opengl.org/about/arb/overview.html http://www.opengl.org/about/arb/notes/meeting_note _2004-12-07.html
SGI is the inventor and care taker of OpenGL. Without OpenGL, desktop 3D graphics would be completely monopolised by Microsoft's Direct3D. If SGI goes down, what's going to happen to OpenGL and the OpenGL Architecture Review Board that's responsible for advancing OpenGL?
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
owned an indigo2 for a while, nice r10000 mips. nice having a 64-bit cpu and operating system back in 1999. well designed too. Indigo2 was a great machine for 1993 vintage. I think the R10000 CPU was added in 1995. They were cheap to be had in the used market in 1997 when the Octane replaced it. the problem with sgi is that it's been living in the year 1995 since 1990 Perfectly said, chap!
first off, Linux is doing more damage to Sun then to SGI.
SGI screwed up because:
1. They were not able to compete with Intel with their own custom made cpus.
2. They did some very asinine things business wise that would of screwed them over irregardless of the rest of the market.
3. They completely misjudged the Itanium market.
Look #3 is the biggy recently. Business number crunchers like the IDC over estimating the number of Itanium installs by 96% for 2004! SGI's business model now depends completely on Itanium sales!
Linux saved it's ass in one way as much as it hurt it. Without a free OS that has good NUMA support and can run 64 proccessors without any modifications (a stock 2.6.x-smp series kernel can do this no problem. Same exact vanilla kernels I use at home. FreeBSD can't do this, it can't come close.), SGI would be competely screwed.
SGI's IRIX may have been a head of it's time, but that's only because it was tied very closely into SGI's propriatory hardware. Now that SGI's propriatory hardware is slower and many times more expensive then stuff you can buy off of the shelf.
IRIX is non-portable, and SGI (thru bad business in the past) doesn't have the man power or the capability anymore of porting it.
However there is this ready-made and nearly compatable Unix-like OS for FREE. SGI has done a lot for Linux and Linux has a lot to do with any hope of SGI lasting past the next decade or so.
What SGI has to look forward to otherwise is dwindling sales, no more innovation, lost super computer contracts to IBM, lost high end market share to Itanium/Sparc/POWER machines, lost market mid-range share to Windows, no more new applications being programmed for their platform.
They would of survived for the next 10 years on legacy installments and people buying new hardware to run old applications (because new versions of the apps would of required new licenses and new non-compatable faster machines).
They would of been dead in the water without Linux. Just another legacy OS maker for a obsolete platform waiting to die.
It was more of the hardware that killed them, then the Linux 'revolution'. Without SGI Linux wouldn't be close to as capable in the high end as it is now. They contributed a lot of technology to it.
I worked at Videologic when 3dfx were in their ascendency (comprising a lot of SGI engineers). We were producing some fine graphics chips (yup, the dreamcast STILL looks damn good to me ;-) and so were they, nVidia were giving us the TNT and TNT2 and _STILL_ SGI were trying to charge mega-bucks for performance that could be got straight from the shelf at a fraction of the price & AGP was just around the corner. 3DLabs (worked there too!) whose chips _are_ very good at geometry - a corner stone of 3D rendering - started making serious efforts on windows drivers... and the game was over for SGI
.com boom is over a lot of people still made a lot of money in share option trading at that time.
Yup, they should've done graphics cards. At one time they had all the knowledge they needed but i guess someone high up the company didn't like the competition or cut throat margins so decided not to. A lot of engineers jumped ship to nVidia or 3dfx, I guess they realised the money was goning to be elsewhere.
3D software ended up running OGL or DX under Windows using cheap 3D hardware. Since then few have considered SGI.
So... who killed SGI? Lack of "vision" really causing engineers to jump ship when they soppted opportunities elsewhere. Let's not forget that althhough 3dfx are gone and the
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
A low end PC with a mid-price graphics card easily outperforms and outprices an SGI these days.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
One thing many traditional server&workstation companies such as SGI never realized is that, unless you're a high volume, low cost business such as Dell, hardware isn't enough to distinguish yourself from the pack. It's not hardware that people interact with, but software.
Apple succeeded spectacularly in that area by creating OS X with all the applications that go with it. Sun did something similar with Java, and to a lesser extent recent Solaris versions. SGI, on the other hand, hasn't had a modern OS in years. Irix has been left to rot, and Linux is something everybody else has. They don't have anything that would even come close to being a user interface that could enthuse their target audience.
The little pieces of software they had, which could have been part of a broader software strategy (( read Maya and Studio Tools )) got sold some time ago. Relying on 3rd party vendors to cover the software side of their business has turned SGI into a pretty faceless company.
Also, they completely underestimated the importance of things such as wireless technology, laptops, tablet computers etc to their market. In fact, with the right strategy, SGI could have done for for video what Apple and the iPod did for Audio, with the addition that SGI's lead in that area could have included the production side in addition to the consumer side. At least, plenty of the technology&creativity necessary to do this would have been in the company.
We've had an Altix at for work a couple years now, the thing is an animal, and SGI support is fantastic. The hardware bus bandwidth, and huge memory footprint (100's of GIGs) under a single kernel can't be beat.
Even when SGI were big time successful, it always seemed inevitable that they would go bankrupt. In fact it always seemed inevitable that many of these Unix vendors would go bankrupt or otherwise disappear. I mean when you have something like Unix with little differentiation, it is inevitable that one or two players would end up dominating. So we've seen DEC and a lot of players disappear.
So HP and Sun looked like to be the winners. But now HP has made a lot of mis-steps, and Sun isn't looking too healthy either. Linux will swallow their Unix businesses up as well unless they are nimble enough to reinvent themselves. Frankly I think that's unlikely. Apple looks like it has successfully reinvented itself, which is a huge rarity in the technology business.
I was at an SGI event about 2 years ago. I think it was a tour showing off their new graphics hardware. I met one of their higher up sales managers and talked with him for a while. Everything suggestion I made about trying to get into higher volume products got shot down with "SGI is not that type of company." He seemed fully aware that the number of customers for their products kept shrinking, but it seemed like they prefered it that way.
Oh, I also asked him if they had any plans of offering Opteron systems. He gave two reasons why they wouldn't. The first was that Itanium was capable of scaling up to around 100 processors in one system, whereas Opteron topped out at 8. The other reason was it would piss off Intel.
Their workstations are pretty much a dead weight. They don't really do anything you can't get from Dell, and they're x86 in any case.
On the other hand, their Altix line is really awesome. It's basically the world's biggest Linux box, and it's definitely a unique product. Unlike a cluster, it's ONE COMPUTER with one memory space. Really cool. The question is, is there a market for it? I would think so, but SGI seems to be suffering from bad management and a lack of focus. They might recover if they somehow manage to get cash and good management, but I think it's highly unlikely. They've been sinking since 1996 or so.
The headline is somewhat misleading. SGI has not declared bankruptcy. Sure they are not looking good, but that doesn't mean they are bankruptcy. They still have 65 million in cash/investments. If anything we are going to see them layoff a good number of people or just be bought outright. Right now their market cap is around 150 million. I can see a big player buying them out for that much. Might be worth it for all the experience sgi has in its nitch fields.
Linux is slowly killing off the UNIX competitors... it's killing competition, exactly what it's supposed to create. I hope you're all happy, you're getting exactly what you deserve. Eventually all the other Unices will disappear too, Sun will be the last one to go.
So Linux/free software has resulted in less, not more, competitors.
I remember masquerading as a vendor (ya, I must have fooled em at 18) and sneaking into a local tech show I'd heard had SGI in attendance back around 1989-90. Being an avid 3D amateur (on the ol'Amiga) without the means for the necessary hardware, I was totally blown away by the refrigerator sized 8-way gun metal grey Power Challenge doing multiple real time 24bit textured/shaded ray tracing demos. Even the slightly pointless 3D desktop with flying buttons impressed in that day. Well established in my morally devoid youth, I left that show thinking "If only I could steal that sucker", since I obviously didn't have the 6-figure sum to buy it. What could be cooler than that 5x3x3 foot box taking pride of place in the living room, I thought.
I rooted for them for quite a long time, but the O2 was expensive for what you got and by that stage the writing was on the wall anyhow. MIPs was gasping its last breaths, PC CPUs were on par in performance, OSS *nix was up to scratch, OpenGL was giving everyone a leg up, and the commodity 3D card market was finally coming into existence. It was confirmed when SGI started selling indigo coloured Intel boxes running Windows NT, but still selling them at workstation prices.
Ah well, an Iris 4D makes one seriously robust doorstop.
SGI's management from Thomas Jermoluk to Forest Baskett consistently made poor decisions. If they had listened to Clark, SGI could have owned the hardware market for the Internet explosion. But they were too obsessed with high margin computers for the government and their grantees. Now all they have are complex cache based Altix systems with substandard CPU's.
:-)
Now that Carly and Michael are gone, no one will buy them unless the government strong arms someone to. Maybe CRAY
another bout of job losses brought on by this silly "Open Source" movement that IBM (amongst others) promotes to encourage people to work for them for free. I have you "Linux Developers" have the decency to be ashamed when you think of the jobs at SGI that will be going and the effect this will have in terms of social costs and welfare to every tax payer in the country. When is Linux going to start compensating the computer industry its devestating in the name of being "hobbyists".
Too bad though-- less competition is never good for the market.
Depends.
What happens if competition means that prices drop to the point where research and development take a hit?
You end up sacrificing the future to survive the competition now.
SGI's business model involved selling you a hundred thousand dollar package of software and hardware to do 3D graphics. In the mid 90s you could put together a PC and software package that could do as well or better than the SGI for $10K. Now it's much less than that.
.com boom.
That's the long and short of it. No evil hand of MS needed here. If you want to blame someone, blame Matrox, NVidia or ATI. But personally, I blame SGI. They failed to adapt to the business environment, probably because the amount of belt-tightening required would have been so high their employees would rather leave for greener pastures. Especially during the
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I figured they were doomed after they decided to name their servers "Octane" - I mean, how stupid was that? I want a slower burning server? Duh. Seriously, I used their iron a lot in the late 90's at work. Good stuff, hate to see them go down.
If SGI goes under, does anyone know what this means to Discreet... I mean Automdesk Media and Entertainment.
They're facing bankruptcy. They're wasting too much money fighting the Goa'uld and Replicators. They need to hold a bake sale or something to raise extra money.
and how are you walking through rock?
Special race ability?
They were insane for not cranking out cheap, high end graphics cards for gamers. Instead they got some quick, cheap cash from Microsoft from the OpenGL API license for Windows. Then MS easily (and predictably) outcompeted SGI in every mass market, leaving them only narrowing niches.
SGI should have taken the opportunity to become the gold standard of PCI/AGP graphics cards, once Microsoft was committed to their API. A $100-300 plug-and-play OpenGL acceleration would have hitched their wagon to the MS juggernaut they created, without competing with MS in the OS/app SW that is MS's only strength. Then, if they opened the Irix source, or just rolled out GPL'd OpenGL libraries on Linux, they could have competed very well with MS, underwritten by their OpenGL licensing deal.
Instead their execs aimed for the high end: dedicated workstations and supercomputers. That's exciting, but imagine a beowulf cluster of SGI CPUs/GPUs (*ducks*). SGI had a perfect opportunity to jump ship from the huge, braggable, majestic Titanic, to the fleet of U-Boats that sank the Luisitania. Instead they got iced. And we never got that superior tech they could be improving even today.
--
make install -not war
that the one time SGI CEO, Rick Buzzo was courted into the M$ fold right after their deal with the devil. Anyone else remember the Fahrenheit partnership between M$ and SGI?
Funny how company after company dances with the likes of the Vole and the former ALWAYS ends up with their lifeblood drained. Unless of course said company is big and smart enough to have enough other things going on to sustain in.
M$ is bad for any business but its own.
While Linux is available for practically anything, including old SGI MIPs hardware, SGI never suggested people use anything other than IRIX on MIPs.
If you want to bitch to SGI about how well Linux runs on platfroms they don't support it for, while we're at it, let's give Microsoft a hard time about what a pain it is to run Linux on the xBox.
SGI's change to Linux is to support SGI's Altix line of Itanium based systems which inlcude the fastest commercially available supercomputer in the world (Number 2 on Top500 list - #1 one is a specialized IBM design that's not based a commercially available product like the SGI Altix)
Also, there are many spook agencies all over the world using SGI gear that you don't get very much publicity about. While these, unfortunately, are not changing the bottom line for SGI, I doubt that certain gov'ts - esp the US - will let SGI go into bankruptcy.
SGI has a proud history of innovation in graphics, microprocessors, operating systems, etc, but this post has to do with one other small part of that history... their cases.
Well before the iMac, SGI always had instantly recognisable hardware. I wish there were PC case manufacturers with the same vision, who would churn out something stylish and interesting that doesn't look like an Air Jordan.
My favourites: the Octane http://www.sgi.com/products/remarketed/octane/, and Tezro http://www.sgi.com/products/workstations/tezro/.
Yeah it's sad, but you can be sure any of the genius that was once SGI has long since moved into the active growth areas of the world. Just because SGI is about to die off doesn't mean that the giant brains that made it what it once was are waiting to be boxed up. They're already at the thinktanks at Sun, Apple, IBM and Intel, or Google! Who knows, all I am betting is if they were smart enough to make SGI big long long ago, they were smart enough to go have fun in a new sandbox once things got bleak at SGI.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Around 1997, I went down to Sony Imageworks in Hollywood to talk to them about physics engines. They were almost entirely an SGI shop back then, but had just purchased some NT systems running Softimage|3D. I was asked whether some NT software was going to be ported to SGI, and, realizing that was a dead end, replied "Resistance is useless. You will be assimilated".
Three years later, I visited again. Everything was NT except for some of the same SGI machines I'd seen three years ago.
SGI just couldn't cope with graphics becoming cheap. Around 2000, they dramatically announced some NT workstations, priced from $7000 upwards. They just didn't get it.
SGI's supercomputer side developed some interesting hardware, but there's no real market for supercomputers. It's all government, and mostly pork anyway. Lousy price/performance has forced them out of the server farm business. What's left?
about $0.38 per share. Almost took out a loan. Friend talked me out of it. Rose to nearly $4.00 a short while later..
I would be inclined to buy some anyway today. Bishop has a keen eye on SGIs core market:
Technical computing
IRIX is very good for this, MIPS is holding it back though. Their efforts on Linux will pay off, in my opinion. Linux is reaching the point where it will be possible to build an IRIX like system. Heck, you can today --it is only going to get easier.
SGI is one of the few companies to make a deal with Microsoft while still around to tell about it. (Legal won't, but many SGI folks will, if you catch them in the right mood.)
If that deal hadn't been the death of their 320 / 540 series machines, we would have great Linux technical workstations right now. I am not saying you cannot get a nice Linux workstation, but the SGI plan combined their engineering with custom Linux tweaks that would have made for nice boxes.
320/540 machines could support up to about 800Mb texture memory in a UMA design. Heavy texture models perform best in this configuration, because of the low latency bandwidth it provides to the graphics sub-system.
The Linux drivers were shown at Siggraph '99, I think. Microsoft and SGI had a little tiff shortly after that. Farenheit project --it seemed at the time, win32 was poised to take over that market since it had already made quite a dent. Gates knew about all the UNIX code that had to be rewritten. Direct X got good, thanks to SGI, but not good enough to justify all that work porting to a closed, hard to administer, expensive to cluster system with little ability to script or perform multi-user.
SGI legal scuttled the Linux drivers over win32 contract terms involving the ARC boot loader. It seems Microsoft has an interest in this that prevented SGI from providing machines with choices other than win32, or something like that. (Could never get the entire story.)
The series was canned. Generic PC machines running tweaked nVidia hardware replaced them to keep existing customers trying to leverage Linux happy. Their hardware had considerable advantages over the general purpose PC, so it only made sense for SGI to move away from the whole thing.
Today we see the Altix series machines along with high end SGI hardware on the desktop. The Altix, and high-end IRIX hardware is well positioned, while IRIX struggles at the workstation level. Linux is capturing applications far better than IRIX ever did.
(Which shows just how hard they got fucked over the Microsoft deal.)
Recovering from that and other blunders has taken a while. The new products are hitting their targets nicely. It is tough for them now, being late in the game. An SGI Linux workstation likely will not happen right away because of this. (We would have had them in '01, otherwise.)
SGI systems engineering is top notch, I hope they continue to improve and continue to develop their high bandwidth, single image designs. (They are the best, if you want a single OS image instead of a cluster.)
As for Alias, the organization beats to a different drum. The Maya side of things has been handled well. Can't say the same for their Studio product. Still high priced and no Linux --yet.
Maya is a hit in the entertainment business for obvious reasons. Their other product, Studio struggles in a niche status. Good for high end product design and styling, but poor at more mainstream applications. Traditional MCAD packages continue to consume many new potential Studio sales, while also chipping away at the established base of users.
I would not count the Linux version of Maya out. Alias knows better than that. There is no way the Studios are going to be pried back to win32. Going down that road proved expensive and problematic. Linux is the perfect fit. Alias would not be where they are today without having done that port.
OSS lets them (the studios) keep control of their tools and development in house, exactly where
Perhaps SGI should risk producing and manufacturing an open source graphics card like Tech Source (I think that's what they were called) were attempting to do a while back?
I know it sounds a pretty risky plan - but think about it:
1. They could enter the Windows graphics market (Yeah, I know they would face competition but it'd get them started)
2. Open Source developers would/could help them to write the drivers
3. They could keep their current business model
(-ish)
4. As long as it was reasonably priced, I'm pretty sure a lot of us would buy one just because of the ethics, even if it wasn't for our main machine (I sure as hell would)
I know Novell's case is different in many ways, but look how well they've adapted to a GNU/Linux model (I know software not hardware but still...)- and brought themselves back out of the dust. Surely SGI could do the same? I'd really hate SGI to go under for some reason.
PlasticMonkey.
I don't think we have to look hard to see companies that have declared bankruptcy, and therefore addressed all of their debtload at a far reduced rate, and been able to come back and be competitive.
And I don't think they use SGI software either. They use Maya and Renderman is my understanding.
As to SGI, there's just nothing left to buy except the name. Their technology is useless, their patents and other assets are sold off.
I've never publicly bitched about anything concerning SGI, and I always read a couple of threads in a newsgroup before posting. So I just sat back and watched. But a friend of mine had done the stupid thing, and posted a question. Result: hate-mail.
But notice: These people weren't SGI employees, they were users, participating in a SGI hardware newsgroup, and more vehemently hostile towards alternative OSes than any other sort of OS zealot than I've ever seen. And I did notice the Amiga fans in their prime.
Of course, the reason why people even want to run Linux on an SGI isn't so much their preference for Linux as it is caused by how hard it is to get hold of a legal or pirated copy of Irix (in addition to curiosity, of course: it's always interesting to try out exotic hardware). But for some reason, the SGI zealots choose to take this personally.
.. read that as 'SG-1 Faces Bankruptcy'?
Their current Linux on Altix hardware is at least an attempt by the company to bounce toward the Linux direction. But the way they are doing it is unbelievably risky.
They are taking the heart of the kernel portion, ripping it out and make it run on their SGI Altix hardware. In the end you really have nothing special but regular Linux and modified kernel. Basically you can now pay $$$$ for the same Linux OS on Altix hardware. Whereas the Linux x86 on PC is free. If PC become as powerful as Altix one day, they are toast.
Around the days of the sparc5/10/20 when Apache was a bunch of patches to the NCSA HTTPD, Sun was selling hardware that performed (for httpd server use) as well as an SGI machine of the same class, but costed half what SGI was asking for.
The PC alternative was a 486DX2-66 for nearly the same price if you got a mobo that had ECC RAM. IBM was still selling machines with Micro-Channel bus. Other PCs were 8 or 16 bit ISA busses. Sun machines had SBUS. Sun was simply the cheapest way to pipeline all of those early Internet bytes from the ethernet to RAM to disk, to RAM, and back out the ethernet. Never mind the balanced bus speeds of IO/RAM/CPU.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Shit! They had the best parties at Supercomputing.
Unfortunately Sun
- Charges about as much as a low-end PC for the SunRay thin client
- Charges about as much as a mid-range business PC for the SunRay thin client if you want little frills like, y'know, a monitor.
- More or less requires the use of Solaris to use Sunray, which makes quite a bit of sense when you consider SunRay necessarily requires a hugeass multiproc server stowed somewhere, but which, seriously, is not something many people would want to use as a desktop OS. You could maybe sell the end user on Linux, if you set it up quite specifically. Solaris, um, that's a lot harder. The upshot of this is that SunRay probably only appeals to that small number of companies where everyone is or can expected to be a UNIX user.
So between these things, the only places I've aware of in the entire world using SunRay in a way that demonstrates its potential are large universities with big Sun contracts, and, um, Sun itself. If there's another business using this system I don't know what it is.I think this is kind of representative of Sun as a whole right now. They've got a WHOLE bunch of promising ideas and services and products. But they're not quite where they can be useful in a real world situation-- there's just those two or three simple-but-difficult-to-solve issues that hold it back from people buying it. In every case Sun could probably address these issues if they thought really hard about exactly who they wanted to buy this and why-- that is, they've got the neat tech but they don't have a clear picture of exactly what (not "it could be used in a multimedia telecommunications infrastructure!", an actual exact product) this tech should be used for in the real world.
In the meantime, the energy that could be used on figuring out how to leverage or market the things that Sun offers but no one else does (SunRay-ish stuff) is all being diverted into fighting uphill battles, mostly trying to keep a market presence for Sun's not-so-unique products-- for example, the Solaris vs. Linux fight-- which are still the cornerstone of Sun's business, but aren't necessarily the company's strength anymore now that similar or interchangeable products have become more commonplace.
I'm sure they're trying to figure this out also, and I'm sure there's some way Sun can change this situation, but I don't know when or if it will happen.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
If SGI closes its doors, what impact will that have on OpenGL?
The other is "Core competency". Apple basically grew up dealing with the consumer market. SGI has always been a much higher market.
You can tell just by looking at the stock chart. The company peaked in '95, just as computer animation was starting to take off (with the release of Toy Story). From '95 to 2000, the decline was as sharp as their run-up. My question, How does a cutting-edge tech company manage to lose so much market value during an enormous tech bubble?
When was Studio Max 3D first released for the PC? I suspect that that had a huge impact on SGI. Management was completely unprepared for teh low-cost revolution.
Mainframes, minicomputers, workstations, and consumer electronics are designed by intelligent creators and are not evolved. Your Pentium 4 did not suddenly transmutate itself from a Pentium 3 one day. Engineers used their intelligence to carefully design the circuits in your computer!
I do remember the nice smooth graphics even when I was rotating a 500Mb CAE model.
The best thing that SGI did that is still valueble is release XFS to be used in Linux...
This is far scarier than the stock price right now. When they're carrying $264 million in debt, have $148 million in market cap, and only have $83 million in the bank that's a bad sign...
Key Statistics
Oh how the mighty have fallen...maybe somebody will buy them, but somehow I doubt it. The shared memory parallel systems market will have a gaping hole if SGI does fold. Could be a golden opportunity for someone new to enter the market.
Makes you wonder why a company going down the tubes is paying its top executives a combined $2.7m.
They are obviously dismal at their jobs and could have trimmed the company's losses by 12% if they were paid based on their performance.
I would love to see SGI, IBM, and Apple, work together - they could actually beat Microsoft at their own game.
Rationale: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
There's a market, but the people in that market (which is relatively small) can't pay the price it would cost to sustain an SGI.
Right now, if you're a small-time academic with a data analysis project that has to be carried out in RAM and you have about $25,000, you can buy yourself an 8-way Opteron with 32G of RAM. Often you only use 1 processor, since if you could parallelize the problem you could probably split it onto a commodity cluster at the same time (and scale indefinitely and cheaply).
If you need to go to 64G, you can still do that, though it's considerably more expensive (2G DIMMs vs. 1G DIMMs).
If you need to go larger than that, you need a budget to pay for a big machine like an Altix - and not an entry level one. That gets you into the multi-million dollar territory, and normal academics don't play there. Government agencies and the occaisional Fortune 500 aerospace/auto manufacturer do, but even they probably don't buy enough to keep an SGI afloat.
Some well-funded computer centers buy such machines, and then let 20 people use them simultaneously, giving each user effectively less than the individual, commodity 4-8 way Opteron systems. There aren't many computer centers run by such wasteful management left, but there are a few.
quit smoking, cashed in my retirement fund, put off buying a new car, told my wife she can't get her breasts augmented right now, and applied for a HELOC loan..
When & where will the asset auction going to be? I need to reserve my U-Haul
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
SGI's demise has little to do with Microsoft. SGI lost their edge in the mid nineties. They did not see the trend to cheap commodity hardware until it was too late. SGI made some fantastic technically excellent hardware without a market for it.
bring back MIPS boxes, sell them cheap (below cost) for a while, show many cpu 64 bit systems with mega number crunching for at or less than what sun sells for.. maybe could rekindle?
I just got a demo machine of a dual ia64 Deskside Prism machine. They say that this has the power, not so. It starts up for 1 1/2 minutes before starting the boot cycle. Then if finally gets to a graphic screen, the graphics lag (it has 2, dual ati dvi cards) just moving a terminal window lags. But forget all that I have other SGI machines Octanes Origins O2's, and they also shipped QuickTransit (software that lets you run legacy sgi apps including graphical ones on your prisim box). Could this be my answer to transitioning off the mips boxes, I sure hope so. Then I tested it. My first app did not because of some graphics call not supported, oh well let me try the next. This one crapped out due to an unsupported system call. Ok one more... crap another unsupported system call. Well this machine will be going back I have no use for it.
FYI swmgr did work, so you can install your apps you just can't run them!
SGI is is not a takeover target, and won't be turned around. SGI has some fantastic technology that they will sell off to pay the creditors. After that there is nothing left other then the name. The management isn't worth anything. The customer list is too short. The engineers can be picked up by headhunters on the cheap. There is a very limited market for a turn around. Few organizations need big single address space machines. Most have found that cheap clusters work almost as well for a lot less money.
i wonder what this means for the future of OpenGL... if DirectX becomes the leader, will MS try to make it more compatible? i strongly doubt that... wild idea here... google uses it, they tend to obtain things they like...
That's sad to hear. The Tezro's on ebay will make an excellent... SERVER! MUHHAHAHAH!!!
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
But SGI doesn't sell IRIX machines any more. Maybe that's why they're dying.
Here now, what's this, then? And this? Certainly, I don't have a use for an IRIX server/supercomputer, but they do indeed appear to be available.
I'm sure he'll get a huge bonus even if the company folds.
CEO's should get layed off first and paid last.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
The only real advantage they have left is thier high speed interconnect architecture. I don't know what Altix uses, but even the old Octane had a "crossbar" switching layout rather than a bus.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
O2 beside Next and an amiga 2000!
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
I find it sad that SGI is going through this situation and I hope they recover from it. But a deeper, darker side is satisfied with this outcome. I am a 3D graphic artist and tried for years to get into situations where I could work with an SGI. Every employer that I approached the idea of doing graphics on an SGI said they were just too expensive and to produce a cheaper solution--I always did but was disspointed that SGI made themselves so expensive and seemed to be an instrument of the elite. I was an SGI shareholder and would ask them why they weren't making plans to mass produce or attain a more competetive market. They never answered. I guess they were too busy to deal with the little guy. You can pick an Indy now for about $100 on eBay and I don't want one anymore. It's ironic that they're in this situation
- nightcrawler "Reality is an illusion, albeit a ver persistent one..." -A.Einstein
If you're in the oil/gis/structural biology/medical fields and you need to load gigabytes to terrabytes of volumetric data and visualize it in realtime you go SGI ..try doing that on a cluster of x86's
SGI had the most arrogant and expensive support in the industry. You HAD to have a support contract or they would cripple your box. Also IRIX didn't ship with a functioning compiler, you had to buy their overpriced development environment. They have noone to blame for this but themselvs. I won't miss 'em. My last Indy just died last week too. SGI, I warned you when we last spoke that this was going to happen but did you listen to your users? No.
I joined the company shortly after the "Gee-Whiz" article and after Jim Clark left.
4 _sales/ in which you find the seeds which made Forest Basket (now a VC) make the fatal decision to abandon the good stuff in favor of the good ship itanic.
... the Origin was in fact called a J90 killer, which it was). Rocket Rick's little jaunt into PCdom could have been successful as it turns out, as right when the units started getting traction, the plug was pulled.
...
In 1994++ SGI had some absolutely killer chips on the boards, code named Beast and Alien. Beast was a hellacious monster. About 5-6 Gigaflops, 6 GB/s main memory bandwidth (bad old memory giving up on me). Due out in 98 or so. Really insanely fast design. Alien made beast look like a game boy processor.
In 1998, with the company defocused from its mission by the unfortunate (and now effectively fatal indigestion due to the) purchase of Cray, it decided to pursue a new path to use the much hyped and over marketed "Merced" processor. Remember this? Have a good long look at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/28/itanium_0
If a long term SGI stock holder digs hard and far enough, they might find a really good reason to fire up a lawsuit against Intel for doing what IBM used to do many moons ago. Convince your potential competition to drop their products and use yours, by pre-announcing so far out, and claiming strong sales numbers that never materialize.
Rocket Rick, an accountant, completely defocused the company. The Cray indigestion was taking hold, Cray took over SGI (BTW Cray-Link was renamed from NUMA link right after the acquisition, it did not come from Cray, contrary to urban legend
Mis-step after mis-step after
The story of SGI is a sad sad tale of failed management, still largely in place, failed or completely neglected marketing, failed sales efforts, failed relationships.
In 2001, Warren Pratt killed off the linux cluster push that a few of us had been pushing hard. Warren only wanted to make MIPS based machines. He just sold off a bunch of shares in May 05. Know anything we don't there Warren?
Later in 2002/2003 they killed off Irix.
Before, during, and after the Rocket Rick fiasco, we had massive infighting between Crayons and SGIers. This infighting took the focus off the customers and placed it in the internicine battles. We had Crayons attend meetings with SGIers and customers, where the Crayons would shout down the SGIers in front of the customers (and vice versa).
Massive egos lay in the way of doing the right thing. In the end, many good people left. Many stayed, only to be rewarded with a RIF.
SGI is a great place to have been from. Many friends who left SGI tell me how much they miss it. The people were the best. Really, it is was honor to be an SGIer.
Just sucks to be here now.
SGI uses chips that show every likelyhood of being killed off by their supplier as a non-performer. They are costly to design and build, and they are not breaking even for Intel. The designs of machine are based upon 10+ year old ideas, and while that is not a bad thing, they are about to be massively eclipsed by other CPU vendors.
It pains me to say this, but this game is over. Linux won. X86, or more precisely, x86_64 won. There are some SGI management I would have sadly said "I told you so" to, but they have left a while ago.
Well, there are any number of reasons, but I think that the biggest "problem" that they had was that the rest of the world moved at a faster pace than SGI was able to. SGI was used to four year or more product cycles, and Microsoft/Intel and the rest of the PC juggernaut moved twice that fast. That kind of failure builds exponentially over time.
My first day at SGI in 1991 included the presentation to the company of what would become the Origin 3000 "brick", that would allow you to expand processors, memory, I/O by connecting boxes with thick cables. Unfortunately, I don't think that technology shipped until 1998 or so -- and you know that the engineers were working on it before 1991. Now, this was (and remains!) an amazing piece of technology (not in the Bruce Karsh sense) but anything that takes seven or eight years to produce is the wrong thing by the time it is finished. It has to be. Still, in the late 80's and early 90's, one could be forgiven for not noticing that the pace of change had increased.
I was elated in '92 when SGI introduced the Indigo. Almost immediately, though, I was horrified to learn that it had "special" designed-to-be-incompatible memory modules. It was almost (but not quite) cheaper to buy memory by buying whole Indigoes and throwing the box away.
I've always thought that it's not surprising when companies fail to adapt to change -- it's truly more surprising when they do.
Anyway, we have our shrine to SGI still at Hammerhead -- a bookshelf full of O2's that we can't bring ourselves to part with.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
SGI started vanishing in the 90's, around the same time their low end programmers left to become project managers at VA I.O.U. Then when they left VA I.O.U. to become directors at Google, VA I.O.U. disappeared. The real wealth is in the employees, not the companies.
Back in '99 I went to a military sim hardware show to find components for a real life C-130 flight sim. There I saw the coolest F-16 flight sim driven by a big-ass Indy box and flown by an F-16 fighter pilot. The visuals were done on a hemispherical front projection system that gave the pilot a truly immersive experience and very realistic. Maybe SCI should have sold a few of those to Dave & Busters.
Ask me about my vow of silence!
But notice: These people weren't SGI employees, they were users, participating in a SGI hardware newsgroup, and more vehemently hostile towards alternative OSes than any other sort of OS zealot than I've ever seen.
It took us a LONG time to convince our lead system engineer that Linux just might be an alternative to SGI and IRIX. After a couple of years of us solving problems using "test" Linux servers while SGI refused to address his help requests, our SE finally joined the Linux camp. Now, he acts like it was his idea. Go figure. People do convert from one religion to another, but don't ever confront them with their past beliefs if it was a painful conversion.
I use XFS on suse93, sles9, sles8 and mandrake10.
On around 30 computers the last 3 years I've had one corrupted filesystem I could not revive and that was a CVS-dump with a bug. I've never had problems restoring it from backup with xfs_restore, xfsdump etc. And many of my projects have started out without funding just to prove its reason to live, So I've run enterprise systems on all kinds of crappy hardware. My only complain is delete is slow if the files maste inodes are not cached in memory.
Apple could leverage much of the technologies available through this buyout.
As a reward from an old conusulting gig, I ended up getting options in SGI stock that I never traded in. I still have them sitting my brokerage account 11 years after I got them. I can't recall the last time they were worth more than a case of beer and a dvd. Sadly, almost every other large computer OEM has some kind of stockholder discount, except for SGI. I would have loved to have picked up a nice o2 for historical sake. I guess I'll have to wait until I win the lottery.
We tried to give them our business. We needed graphics workstations and web servers. We bought a few Indigo boxes and they did not do the job better than comparably priced PC's. We tried them as servers, but could not justify the enormous cost compared to commodity intel boxes running linux, or even comparably priced sun hardware. There was simply no benefit to justify the SGI brand; none whatsoever. This was as far back as 1995. When the vendors decided to act like pricks to our money people, dates which I notice happen to correspond with the peak on that stock chart, that was the end. If they treated all potential buyers like they did us, well, who is surprised?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
and more vehemently hostile towards alternative OSes than any other sort of OS zealot than I've ever seen
You've never seen OSX zealots then. They're far worse than amiga and sgi zealots.
If you really believe in the free market, then things like this will and should happen. There should be no government loans or anything else to bail these guys out. To put it another way, if you're in a business you can't hack (couched in whatever B-school circumlocution you like), well, get a job at Wal-Mart. That's what the rest of us are going to have to do if the Bushies get their way, and they appear to be getting it.
I remember a name....Mehdi Ali CEO of Commodore...a name that Commodore Amiga fans will curse from now until eternity. Strangely SGI seems similar. CEO's that seemingly purposely led their companies into ruin and then jumped out of the plane with a golden parachute.
...and then does it - at least twice (MS-DOS and OS/2) - is someone to be watched. Preferably from behind something solid, a fair distance away from ground zero.
Anyone who whines about piracy and about clones while they're still using the very same piracy as a market invasion tool and copying (e.g. from Apple and Lotus) for all they're worth is pretty much guaranteed to screw you over too, no matter how much (or little) you're worth.
Anyone who promises to flood the world with quality software and then actually tries to sell you things like MS-DOS 4, Blackbird and MS-Bob is going to be right at home with Matilda's dad.
Anyone who prates on about standards and then ships first FrontPage and then MS-Word as HTML editors is pretty much guaranteed to be as two-faced about money as well. "OK, boys, buy him out!"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I have. And I've complained again and again that they've destroyed Slashdot: All technical discussion has been replaced by people who set The Grandmother as the one true benchmark for usability, and usability as the one true benchmark for technical achievement. Back in the days when the Linux zealots ruled Slashdot, we liked the fact that we could look 'under the hood' of the OS. The Mac fans like the fact that they don't need to. They're interested in products, we old-fashioned nerds are interested in projects. It's consumerism vs DIY, and as they (almost) say: The consumer is always right.
All this is perfectly symbolized by the superficiality of the Mac interface, and the plethora of different and often overly complicated interfaces for GNU/Linux.
The Grandmother = Lowest Common Denominator
and with OSX, that's pretty damn low. OSX is like computing with a straitjacket on. you do things apple's way or not at all.
We have played with these for quite some time. They're a great way to minimze TCO, because you have only one (or a handful) of operating systems and system configurations to manage. You can also do "hotdesking" and clusters, so while you're patching one box, jobs keep running for everyone. It's sweet.
The ONLY limitation we have run into WRT SunRays were the Solaris, then Linux operating systems they depend on. While they're great for running SPSS/SAS and other Unix software, not to mention web browsers and OpenOffice, these platforms are truly horrendous at dealing with "multimedia," particularly MPEG-4 streaming. Yeah, yeah, there's open sorce stuff, but it all sucks relative to QuickTime, or even WIMP (ugh). We gave it a lot of work, far more than we typically do, because we truly dig the SunRay concept. The Solaris/Linux desktop just isn't there, for these applications. Yet. I keep crossing my fingers, hoping this will change.
We might still use a few in kiosks out in our halls/cybercafe. They're great for running a browser (and Flash support is getting better).
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom