Silicon Graphics To Be Delisted From NYSE

Dan Linder writes "Starting Monday, November 7th, Silicon Graphics will be delisted from the NYSE. The future of the graphics and supercomputing former-heavyweight has never been less certain. This is especially unfortunate given their ongoing commitment to Linux and other open-source projects." From the article: "The company's stock, which once traded at $50 per share, fell below NYSE's minimum standard for continued listing earlier this year. The move comes as little surprise. The company received a warning from the NYSE in May, when its share price dropped below the $1 barrier. Although it had dipped into sub-$1 territory in late 2001 and again in late 2002, the price on both occasions recovered within a month or two. "

Comments

Too bad about SGI

[2.7182]

They were great machines in the day. It was really easy to grab video with them back 10 years ago when other machines were such a pain to work with. Too bad they couldn't adapt to the changes of the computing world.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[Anonymous Coward]

Rocky Rhoades came and spoke in one of my graphics classes last semester. He seemed very unconvinced that they would bounce back, but pointed out that at least had the satisfaction of leaving his mark on the industry in the late 80s. He went back to work for SGI recently but doesn't hold the company anywhere near the level it used to be at.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[laptop006]

>Too bad they couldn't adapt to the changes of the computing world.
They tried, haven't you heard of the SGI 320 series, relativly nice machines, but they just got slaughtered by dell et al.

If SGI go it will mean that large scale SMP is essentially dead, I believe that they're the only people other then IBM doing systems > 64 CPU's at the moment, and IBM don't scale all the way up to 512 CPU's.

But I still love my pair of SGI trinitrons on my desk, the best monitors I've ever used, and that includes some of the best LCD's money can buy.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[LLuthor]

That work will still be done (perhaps not by the same people though) - the vanilla kernel goes to 128 already. 512 is not too far off.

AMD's next generation CPUs will essentially be a bunch of Opterons with a new generation of hypertransport to interconnect them. This will give commodity clusters machines with 16 or 32 CPUs, then scalability work will accelerate in the OSes.

512 is impressive, but not too difficult to attain given the right resources.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[sdpuppy]

>when other machines were such a pain to work with

We could say a lot about how they had great machines, etc. but the company itself was very difficult to work with. The few times that I had problems with SGIs I had unbelieveable difficulties with their support - even for something as simple as ordering a part (and of course their parts had special connectors so it was difficult to obtain third party sources).

Too bad. Until OSX came around, they had the best GUI for UNIX IMHO.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[Markus_UW]

I believe that Sun does up to 74 Dual-cores, so that's like 144 CPUs, but still, it is sad to see the death of SGI

Re:Too bad about SGI

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years ago? Try 15 years ago with an Amiga, if not sooner.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[Shinobi]

The Linux kernel reaches 128 CPU's just because of SGI. So, it's not as easy as you think. Also, there's the hardware to consider. Opterons aren't up to 32 yet, they are hoping that the new 3rd-party chipset will work well with that

Re:Too bad about SGI

[Anonymous Coward]

IRIX could handle 1024 processors. Linux and PC hardware has a long way to go.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[skarphace]

If SGI go it will mean that large scale SMP is essentially dead, I believe that they're the only people other then IBM doing systems > 64 CPU's at the moment, and IBM don't scale all the way up to 512 CPU's.

Well, no. There are plenty of other companies, they just aren't very well known. You have Unisys, Craig(I think they still exist), Fujitsu, and I'm sure there are others.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[ryanov]

I found their support to be excellent. Give them an error message, and chances are it was in their interna l knowledgebase already. I knew that if I didn't know the answer, they would, and in under 20 mins.

Now my support contract is cancelled, so I gotta work on my own.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[eXtro]

sgi's itanium based system has so far supported 10240 processors. They've already left irix in the dust.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[MaximvsG]

Yeah, I agree sad news indeed. Back in the early-mid 90's I managed many SGI workstations and servers when I worked at NASA (GSFC). The scientists loved them. Unlike the other Unix boxes (DEC OSF/ULTRIX and SUN SunOS) they could easily use the SGIs as their personal workstations. And they did. Most all scientists had an SGI as their primary workstation. Around this time, MS Office was becoming the defacto standard in documents and an increasing problem for SGI users was the inability to read attachments in their E-mail. About a year later, these scientists needed two computers, a PC for E-mail and such, and an SGI for work. About a year after that (95/96) the PC workstations were able to do some of the same graphics work as the SGIs at about a quarter of the price. Doesn't take long to see how this progresses.

In an attempt to stop the bleeding SGI partnered with Microsoft to sell NT on SGIs. I could see the writing on the wall right then. Since then, they've been barely staying afloat. Now they've hit an iceberg and are getting ready for the final sink.

Sad thing. They were great machines to manage. The only issues I remember were their internal IBM disk drives that used to freeze up. Remember the glue issue? We'd take them out of the machine and slam them on the desk, put them back in and they'd spin up. Make a backup and have the drive replaced.

Users like them too as we gave them some admin rights like the ability to back up their server, reboot their server, etc.. And the interface was awesome. I'll take the Irix interface over any other Unix interface, except the latest MACs that just look insanely great.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[TheScorpion420]

hmm 74 + 74 != 144 72 + 72 = 144 148 is the number your looking for I believe.

Re:Too bad about SGI

[Anonymous Coward]

3 words: Fuck Rick Belluzzo. That asshole killed SGI, much like that Fiorina idiot killed HP.

reverse split

[Anonymous Coward]

why did sgi not do a reverse stock split to avoid delisting? did they want to be delisted?

Re:reverse split

[Anonymous Coward]

Reverse splits are not done on the NYSE, only on NASDAQ and maybe some other markets outside the US. This goes back to the great crash in 1929, when everyone was doing this, and it caused a lot of confusion about what the stock was worth. Antiquated rule though.

Re:reverse split

[eln]

The NYSE charges a fee for reverse splits, but it can be done. The problem with reverse splits to avoid delisting is it's a very temporary measure, as stock prices will often fall even faster after a split. Many companies have tried reverse splits to prop up stock price only to be delisted anyway because the price quickly fell below $1 again.

Re:reverse split

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll. The NYSE hasn't allowed reverse splits since 1987, when they experimented with it for a year. And fee was never charged. (I think that would be illegal.)

Re:reverse split

[canuck57]

why did sgi not do a reverse stock split to avoid delisting? did they want to be delisted?

Good question. But I suspect management either was asleep or perhaps they are as good as bankrupt and want to make a buyout more attractive. Certainly wasn't for shareholder value.

Re:reverse split

[Skye16]

Troll???? Misinformed, maybe. But troll? I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Re:reverse split

[ben_white]

Inconceivable!!!!

Re:reverse split

[eln]

I got the information from the following Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/2002/10/18/1018lucent_print. html, which states in part:

To get to $20, Lucent would have to enact a 1-for-29 split, based on recent prices and its number of shares outstanding. According to the NYSE, a company must pay $5,300 for a reverse stock split.

I can't find any information that says reverse splits are illegal on the NYSE. Do you have a link?

Re:reverse split

[Famatra]

This didn't deserve a troll and if you metamoderate I hope the moderator is punished.

It's enough of an outrage that I feel the need to post :\.

Re:reverse split

[DeepRedux]

AT&T (symbol T) is listed on the NYSE. It did a reverse split (1 for 5) on 19-Nov-02.

Re:reverse split

[Anonymous Coward]

I have seen a few stocks do 20:1 reverse-splits to go back over $3 only to fall back under $1 over the next few weeks. When stock holders lose confidence and stocks start crashing, reverse-splitting will not do any miracles and from what I have seen, it often makes things worse.

Re:reverse split

[krbvroc1]

You are incorrect. Reverse splits are possible on the NYSE. Delisting is not automatic and there is discretion by the exchange. They would certainly see a last minute reverse split as suspect. Also keep in mind that a split / reverse split does not change the market capitalization of the stock (number of stocks outstanding x share price). The NYSE policy for delisting is for a stock to trade under $1 for 30 consecutive days. If you look at SGI its been closing under $1 for the past 6 months! AT&T did a reverse 5-to-1 split a few years ago.

Re:reverse split

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this BS get moderated as Informative. Of course NYSE allows reverse splits. You have to pay a fee to reverse split, but it's tiny compared to the yearly listing fee all companies pay.

err?

[Anonymous Coward]

What, again? (it was in the slashback )

so long and thanks for all the fish

[Anonymous Coward]

send regards to DEC !

NASDAQ?

[principor]

Can't they list on the NASDAQ? The NASDAQ requirements should be a better fit.

Re:NASDAQ?

[winkydink]

Nope. You can't be under $1.00/share on NASDAQ for more than a month without being delisted.

Re:NASDAQ?

[AKAImBatman]

Yes, but NASDAQ allows reverse stock splits. So SGI could easily (I say that with my tongue firmly in cheek) reintegrate its stocks to bring them back up to a level that NASDAQ would approve of.

It's probably necessary anyway. It's not that SGI isn't big enough to list, they simply don't have the market value they once had. Under NYSE rules, the dillution of their stocks is enough to get them kicked out. Under NASDAQ rules, they could continue on as a smaller company. (Question to the market geeks: Would SGI now be considered MidCap or SmallCap?) Or at least that's my understanding.

That being said, I'm not certain what SGI would hope to gain by relisting. Until they get their ducks in a row and stop hemorrhaging market capital, they'll be seen as nothing more than junk stocks. Very likely, they're looking to sell to a larger company right now. The purchasing company could then strip SGI bare and use their name for marketing clout.

Re:NASDAQ?

[nuggz]

SGI would be a smallcap/microcap.

Market cap is only $120 million, Redhat could buy them cash for 20% of their available cash.

Re:NASDAQ?

[AKAImBatman]

Thanks for that. Someone else pointed me to MorningStar Research. They have SGI listed as Small Value. (!) Talk about falling from grace.

Re:NASDAQ?

[micromuncher]

Well, they can be a NASD pink sheet. But NO ONE wants to be on NASD these days, as you can do reverse splits (destroy capital), and NASD allows shorting. Both of these are fatal to tech companies.

Re:NASDAQ?

[mev]

SGI also carries ~$265 million in debt. While not part of the purchase price, assuming this debt makes it a more expensive proposition for purchasers...

I think I'm having a flashback

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh right, because this is yet another dupe! Probably the most coverage SGI's gotten for anything they've done all year.

Consequences of delisting?

[PornMaster]

What are the consequences of delisting? Less access to raise capital by issuing new shares? Was that really gonna happen with their current financial situation, anyway?

Re:Consequences of delisting?

[KiloByte]

One of the consequences is, people will tend to format their partitions using JFS instead of XFS...

Re:Consequences of delisting?

[Funakoshi]

Once they have delisted, yes it will become harder to raise more capital. The bigger issue I think though is that the analysts do not look fondly on a stock that drops off of an exchange. The investing public's opinion will fall drastically and, as a result, the confidence in them will be basically gone. The ability to raise any form of capital (through equity or debt) will be very restricted and there is a likelihood that other companies with receivables out with them will come knocking for their money.

Re:Consequences of delisting?

[EmagGeek]

What's even more important that this is that, once a stock is delisted, the index funds MUST sell it. So, let's say for sake of example that 24.6% of SGI's stock is "institutional," and half of that institutional ownership is in index funds, then you have 12.3% of all outstanding shares that will be put on the sales block first thing Monday morning. IANAFA, but I think one might guess this would have a net downward effect on SGI stock price.

Re:Consequences of delisting?

[slashdot_commentator]

Its comparing apples with oranges. XFS has the advantage of design testing and disk throughput for real-time video streaming. I don't really see an advantage from using JFS. If JFS is not outstripping XFS for performance or reliability, there's no reason to dump XFS. If JFS was in the process of outstripping XFS for performance or reliability, it would be in a relatively unstable development state, thus less desirable from a reliability point of view. Why would one adopt JFS over reiserfs or e3fs, let alone discard the venerable XFS?

Re:Consequences of delisting?

[slew]

You missed one of the biggest factors, many mutual funds and institutions (e.g., retirement/pension investors) generally have rules which prohibit them from investing in OTC stocks with low market cap (share price * shares). This is why a reverse split doesn't help, it may increase the share price, but of course reduce the number of shares.

Mutual funds and institutional investors are highly desired as they tend to be stable stock holders which can reduce the volatility of a stock (once they decide to invest they hold large chunks of companies and hold them for a while to increase tax efficiency). Once you get into the open market, you get hedge funds, insiders, and day-traders manipulating your stock price which can cause other investors to flee for the woods.

They also haven't had any analysts covering them since the beginning of this year (nobody likes to cover OTC or penny stocks).

Moving to an OTC (over the counter) market means that there are only a couple brokers making a market in the stock and price reporting is really up to them to perform on a timely basis. This means your broker (unless they are the ones making the market in the stock) really has to try to find a buyer for any stock to you want to sell or will have to pay the market maker a fee and/or be subject to the price they report. In a "listed" stock there generally are several big brokerages that match buyers with sellers and with a big exchange like NYSE enough shares are traded on the floor to create a more continuous range of prices and fast execution of any retail sized trader order. As the price continues to fall, the OTC market maker gives up and demote the stock to the "pink sheets" where sales are reported on paper reports as trades occur. Then the stock isn't very liquid at all and the daily or weekly price report is fairly worthless as an indicator of the worth of the stock.

The long and the short of it is that this means giving stock options to the employees or the executives is really not very meaningful anymore (anytime they sell, they don't have a good idea of the price they will get and more likely they will "heisenberg" the stock because if they sell the price is likely to go down) meaning it's hard to motivate employees and executives with either their existing or any new stock options or grants. Companies like SGI are all about employees, the assets are basically worthless to the investors w/o the employees. Unable to motivate them with stock/ownership, they have to pay them more (e.g. bonuses), or likely suffer attrition.

It's a downward death spiral that almost no company can get out of. For example, SGI has already had to pledge assets (e.g., patents, trademarks, etc.) to get their latest operating loan. In bankrupcy this puts these new lenders in a primary position and the normal equity/stock holders and current bond holders in an inferior position making it less likely for people to invest in the stock (equity holders are the last to get paid back in a bankrupcy). This is what makes it hard to raise any captial, except by heavily mortgaging thier assets even further to the lenders.

Once one of the lenders decides that the company assets are worth more than the company itself it often just rips the company apart for a fire sale to an army of lawyers who snap up patents at fire sales in order to shake down large companies for a few quick bucks. It's a sad, sad day when that happens.

Re:Consequences of delisting?

[BreadMan]

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=SGI

Most institutional investors (Fidelity, TIAA-CREF and ilk) can't hold your shares when you're de-listed. SGI is 40% owned by institutions, which is within normal limits. I'm guessing this has already been priced into SGI.

Looking at the stats behind the share, SGI isn't in bad shape, but isn't the picture of health, either. They're bringing in decent money, but it looks like they need to reduce debt and trim expenses. I'm not sure what composes the sales (they could be selling assets) if they have product\consulting sales, better management combined with going into receivership may not be a bad idea.

Re:Consequences of delisting?

[Anonymous Coward]

awesome post. mod parent up.

More coverage on this breaking news story:

[AEton]

For another inside look at SGI's delisting, see also yesterday's article on sister site Slashdot (disclosure: Slashdot and Slashdot are both part of OSTG). Writes contributor ScuttleMonkey: "SGI, the former darling of the high-tech world, has been in trouble for a while, perhaps this is really the end."

Re:More coverage on this breaking news story:

[NewWazoo]

Holy cow. This is probably the best dupe-complaint post I've ever seen. If only I had teh mod pointz.

B

Re:More coverage on this breaking news story:

[just_another_sean]

That is perhaps the most polite post pointing out a dupe that I've ever read on /.
Nice.

Re:More coverage on this breaking news story:

[Bueller_007]

Why is this ranked as insightful? It's a dupe joke.

Re:More coverage on this breaking news story:

[Anonymous Coward]

you must be new here

Re:More coverage on this breaking news story:

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here.
You'll find Slashdot a lot more high-strung than AOL.

Re:More coverage on this breaking news story:

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it was funny, but that post deserves karma.

Re:More coverage on this breaking news story:

[Anonymous Coward]

Humor can't be insightful?

Why is this so unfortunate?

[antifoidulus]

A company that can't survive shouldn't survive just because it has a certain ideology or supports stuff that does. SGI can't figure out how to make money in todays environment, end of story. They had a wonderful go at it, but all great things must one day end.....

Re:Why is this so unfortunate?

[SydShamino]

Because normal humans grow sentimentally attached to things... ...even if those things are a distant, faceless corporation whose products were used years ago, or even just read about.

I worked for university network management in college, and for a year or two I had an SGI workstation before upgrading to a newer Sun station. It was something different, which made it memorable.

Re:Why is this so unfortunate?

[vertinox]

A company that can't survive shouldn't survive just because it has a certain ideology or supports stuff that does.

I think "shoulnd't" is too harsh of a word. It sounds like you are taking SGI out back to be shot rather than left to die on its own.

Re:Why is this so unfortunate?

[ultranova]

A company that can't survive shouldn't survive just because it has a certain ideology or supports stuff that does. SGI can't figure out how to make money in todays environment, end of story.

I don't own any SGI stock, so SGIs stock price doesn't matter to me.

On the other hand, I do use Linux. Having SGI contribute to Linux makes Linux a viable choice to more people, helping its userbase grow; having Linux's userbase grow increases the chance that a particular program will be ported to or a particular piece of hardware will be supported in Linux. This means that I benefit from SGI's continued existence.

Since I benefit from SGI's continued existence, it is unfortunate, for me, to see them go.

In other words: SGI might not make much money, but it benefits the community, so the community finds it unfortunate that SGI is having problems. Things have value beyond their monetary value; in fact, the non-monetary value is often far greater than the monetary value.

Did this answer your question ?

They had a wonderful go at it, but all great things must one day end.....

Perhaps, but does it absolutely have to be today ?-) Tomorrow would be so much better day ! And yes, I will give the same argument tomorrow too ;)...

Re:Why is this so unfortunate?

[xtracto]

SGI can't figure out how to make money in todays environment, end of story.

They should change their focus on making 3D Video cards and accesories (like nvidia and ATI). Making them really good AND 100% Linux/BSD/Win/etc compliant. This will allow them to exploit the OpenGL standard they somehow created.

Just a IMHO thought.

Re:Why is this so unfortunate?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, I do use Linux.

Fortunately you don't have to. God bless Apple for giving us operating-system choice!

Re:Why is this so unfortunate?

[connorbd]

Aren't they using third-party video cards now?

SGI has some good technologies that could be better served in other hands. MIPS is pretty good... sell it to Sony if they haven't cashed out on that already. Sony's probably the biggest user of the MIPS platform these days anyway. OpenGL? Apple could probably run with that. The supercomputer business... I don't know about that though. There hasn't been a substantial market for raw computing power in some years, or Thinking Machines and all them would still be in business. Irix? Open-source the good parts.

It's kind of a pity. Once upon a time an SGI Indy was the sexiest thing you could have on your desk -- I remember Yahoo ran a promo around '96 or so giving one away. And let us not forget the Nintendo 64, which was SGI Inside all the way. But you know, I took a look at SGI's website when I saw the original for this article and noted that their stuff doesn't top a gigahertz. Hardware is a commodity now and a cheap-to-midrange PC with a Celeron and a halfway decent GPU could blow the doors off what SGI's selling right now.

Re:Why is this so unfortunate?

[matfud]

Commodity PCs with comodity graphics boards can not compete with SGI products. SGI is marketing its products at companies that need very high quality visualization. They sell large computers with a unified shared memory architecture and graphics subsystems that can take advantage of that shared memory (although I think they now use commodity GPU chips). They are good for some simulation systems.

Unfortunately there does not appear to be a market for them.

Re:Why is this so unfortunate?

[Clod9]

It's unfortunate because SGI wasn't just any old company with generic products. Many SGI boxes have been amazing! If you had your hands on a few of them, it felt like managing a stable full of stallions. I'm not surprised that a whole lot of people are saddened by the company's current straits, whether deserved or not.

Around 1990 I administered machines from SGI, NeXT, Sun, IBM (RS 6000), DEC, and Apple Macintosh, Dell x86, and Compaq x86 systems. This list is in order of how interesting they were to have around, and none of the others came close to SGI -- they had rendering capabilities and raw compute power that was all out of proportion to the others.

Re:Why is this so unfortunate?

[xtracto]

Kind of reminds me of the Car companies buyout. IIRC some of the "deluxe" car companies like Jaguar and Renault being acquired by the "standard" companies like Nissan and Ford.

I think the same thing has been happening with computers. Of course SGI computers are better, but it seems the real money is in the standard cheap hardware.

Unfortunately there does not appear to be a market for them.
The reason may be that companies that once bought high end servers may be opting now for cheap clusters of low end machines (with free operating systems).

Re:Box office ran out?

[Anonymous Coward]

If SGI were bringing reasonable priced TCPA-Free linux workstations to market, I'd not only buy product but I'd buy stock. The rules of the game have changed, SGI has a great history and I'd prefer to see them prosper reselling commodity hardware than vermin like Sun.

OT: Is slashdot broken again?

[Onymous Hero]

From time to time I click on a comment or story link and the page renders strangely. Only noticed it today...

Example here

Re:OT: Is slashdot broken again?

[turbotalon]

I had the same thing happen to me twice today, the first time it has ever happened. Must be a Slashdot problem. Thats what they get for runnin' them there limnux thingy! :)

Re:OT: Is slashdot broken again?

[Virak]

It could be worse.

Re:OT: Is slashdot broken again?

[dptalia]

Same here. About 1 out of every 4 pages is rendering wierd. Maybe a bug from testing new site designs?

Re:OT: Is slashdot broken again?

[Vo0k]

Seems the external style sheet doesn't load.

Re:OT: Is slashdot broken again?

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of that, I see occasional 503 errors.
We have put it off for many years, but it appears the inevitable has finally happened. Slashdot has been Slashdotted.

Re:OT: Is slashdot broken again?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the symptom of a new deadly rootkit. Your computer must be infected.

Here is a quick solution on how to get the rootkit out.

1 - turn the power on and off very fast on your computer for 1 minute straight. this will confuse the rootkit andf allow you to attack it.

2 - boot the computer and look for files that end in ini and sys in your windows and system folders. if ther are any in there that is the rootkit. Delete every ini file and sys file on your computer (ntos.sys is the main one get that one too!)

3 - now to be sure you got it, as soon as your delete finishes, kill the power on your computer.

There you will now be safe from this evil rootkit.

have a nice day.

What the hell is wrong with Slashdot today?

[RandoX]

Is it hosed for anyone else or just me?

Re:What the hell is wrong with Slashdot today?

[Anonymous Coward]

Messed up for me too! I have to scroll 3/4 of the way down the page to see anything. Are they in the midst of changing the format?

Re:What the hell is wrong with Slashdot today?

[just_another_sean]

Yes, offtopic I know, but after clearing my FF cache 3 times and still getting the mess that is /. today I realize it is not my browser.

Death of SGI?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does NetCraft say?

Re:Article text for your convenience

[mpathetiq]

My tongue feels massive. Stupid hangover.

They violated a rule in Silicon Valley

[winkydink]

Never build a headquarters that is a monument to your success. It's the kiss of death.

Re:They violated a rule in Silicon Valley

[nganju]

Huh? Oracle? Cisco? Apple? Have you driven around Silicon Valley?

Re:They violated a rule in Silicon Valley

[connorbd]

Not sure I'd cite Apple for an example there -- before the days of funky design and squeaky-clean retail presence, they limped along for a good few years there and even fired a CEO for botching a merger with Sun (or so the rumor mill held at the time). And I don't know about the rest of the Mac fanboy world, but I'm holding my breath hoping that this upcoming Intel switch isn't their biggest mistake of all time.

Re:They violated a rule in Silicon Valley

[duffbeer703]

You can breathe again -- it most certainly is.

Re:They violated a rule in Silicon Valley

[winkydink]

What happened to Oracle after the opened their new HQ? Cisco's HQ is hardly "palatial" and that is by design.

More on the new HQ jinx

Re:They violated a rule in Silicon Valley

[sanosuke76]

Ever been to the Googleplex in Mt. View, CA? I have. Yes, it did feel like I was walking on hallowed ground... and no, they don't seem to be disappearing just yet. :)

Too ahead of it's time?

[d00ber]

SGI put out some increadibly cool technologies:

OpenGL - a very important 3D API

The Standard Template Library

VRML which gave rise to X3D Open Inventor which is a C++ wrapper around OpenGL.

Pretty purple boxen that were great in their day.

It seems that these came out years before the average user could really leverage them - years before anyone (including SGI it seems) knew what to do with them.

It seems a shame that such a brilliant company could have such a hard time making money. They made the world a better place though, IMHO.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[diegocgteleline.es]

They made the world a better place though, IMHO.

They made the OSS world a better place, at least. SGI is putting lots of resources in OSS software. They gave us things like XFS. Their engineers are part of the group of programmers who made (and are still making right now with patches being merged in each release) possible to make linux scalable in big SMP boxes (ie: their 512-CPU boxes). They gave us things like GLX (the opengl xservers glue)

Linux users owe SGI a lot. They're still not dead though, I hope they find a way to make SGI profitable again...

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[jandrese]

The problem is that the company stagnated. They found a niche that kept them going for years, but the niche closed up and they were never very successful moving beyond it. The stagnation also caused most of their best minds to flee for other companies and founding, among other things, nVidia.

I still have an old Indigo under my desk (with Elan graphics and everything), and it's a fun toy to pull out every now and again, but it's down to toy status. A niche company just can't compete directly with the massive R&D budget of someone like ATI or nVidia, and there is little you can do with an SGI big iron box these days that you can't do with one of the professional cards from ATI or nVidia for a whole lot less money.

The same thing happened to the processers SGI uses. MIPS processers were designed to be blazing fast and for awhile they were, but then Intel and AMD caught up and MIPS's relatively miniscule product development budget couldn't compete. SGI's desktop machines ended up being slower than contemporary PCs from about 1999 on.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what is going to happen to OpenGL. SGI technically owns the OpenGL trademark. I understand that the ARB will keep going even if SGI goes under, but I hope the ARB has the option to buy that name.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[timeOday]

Too ahead of its time? I'd say the opposite is true... SGI survived so long as they stayed ahead of the competition. Their customers paid through the nose for goods only SGI could provide. But when their tech. was rivaled by commodity PC hardware, it was all over.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[njcoder]

"It seems a shame that such a brilliant company could have such a hard time making money. They made the world a better place though, IMHO."

SGI machines are being replaced with cheap x86 clusters running Linux. In the race for GNU domination is this a case of friendly fire?

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[Jasper__unique_dammi]

What is going to happen to opengl then? I'm a bit worried about opengl, as far as i know it is the only competitor of directx. Opengl probably wont be supported (wel) on the OS vista, and microsoft has the Xbox. Sounds like microsoft has opengl by the balls. :(

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[fm6]

They found a niche that kept them going for years, but the niche closed up and they were never very successful moving beyond it.

It wasn't just that they had a market niche (graphic workstations). The real problem was that this niche was sexy. Lots of blockbuster movies were being made with mind-blowing effects generated on SGI hardware. That gave the company a lot of mind share with greedy investors looking for "the next Microsoft". So for years SGI had more investment capital than they knew what to do with. The result was a bloated corporate structure with no ability to control costs.

I spent 1999 contracting at SGI, and that was just about the time everybody figured out that the party was over. But retooling the company as a server/supercomputer provider was a painfully slow process — the basic organizational structures of a mature corporation just weren't there.

But even if they had somehow moved past these problems, I think it would have just delayed the inevitable. There's never been that big a market for high-end computers, and now they have to compete with cluster and grid technology based on cheap commodity computers. There's only room for so many players in that marketplace, and big players like IBM are the ones with the experience and savvy to dominate it.

SGI's desktop machines ended up being slower than contemporary PCs from about 1999 on.

You're making the usual mistake of equating clock speed with processing power. Consider two processors that were common in high-end workstations in 1999: a 450 MHZ Pentium and a 300 MHZ MIPS. The Pentium may generate 1 1/2 times the cycles as the MIPS, but it doesn't have 1 1/2 times the processing power. Depending on the application plan to run, you could argue that the two processors are almost equivalent — especially for graphics applications.

The real problem is that Intel has a lot better economies of scale than MIPS, so that Pentium cost maybe half has much as the MIPS. Economies of scale applied to the whole system, so you could count on spending something like $10K extra for the privilege of running on SGI hardware.

When I was at SGI, there was a lot of awareness of the need to move to commodity hardware. That's when SGI spun off MIPS, and started making Pentium and Itanium systems. Unfortunately, 1999 was way to late to make such a move.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[jandrese]

Actually, I had an O2 and played around with O200s and O2000s at work. MIPS processers were just slower. The architecture of the chips was very nice, and with a budget they probably could have kept ahead of the IA32 architecture for longer, but they just didn't have the volume to keep it up. Sure they sold a lot of chips to Sony for the Playstations, but those were fairly low margin compared to the PC market.

I even played around with one of the first PCs they made. It was a very nice machine, but it cost (IIRC) $5000 and offered only marginally better performance than its $2000 competitor.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[default luser]

Damn straight. They had a huge feature and performance advantage in the early 1990s, with powerful MIPS processors and their own custom 3D subsystems.

Under Jim Clark, SGI even proved they could create a powerful mass-market device by designing the N64, but then they dropped the ball and left Nintendo hanging on the next genration platform. They could have been huge as a console development house, but the company was unwilling to take such a risk.

They started using Intel processors and Windows NT for their workstations, just like everybody else. Then, they switched to using ATI graphics processors. Nobody was surprised when they couldn't compete with bigger players. SGI has just been waiting for a day to die.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[justins]

Linux users owe SGI a lot.

Too bad for SGI, a moral debt from Linux users and a pocketful of change will maybe get you a cup of coffee.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[Skowronek]

If a SMP machine can be efficiently replaced by a cluster, it should be replaced. It's that simple. They're simply different market niches.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[fusiongyro]

You're joking, right?

The standard template library is one of the reasons writing C++ looks like writing Perl. It's the perfect complement to a terrible language, the same way that a lice, flea and tick infestation is the perfect complement to the bed of a sleazy main-street motel with hourly rates.

VRML was one of the most ill-conceived ideas in the history of the web. The only time anyone brings it up is to make fun of it. A "cool technology" in the sense that, woo, we could have three dee websites, but an irrelevent technology because anyone with anything to say in the 3D medium would rather say it some other way and those people for whom it could have been an augmentative technology couldn't afford it in terms of development. Not to mention the accessibility fiasco.

Screw SGI. They made a really cool computer for a long time -- arguably the best in its niche -- but were continually losing, at first to a much older technology (the Amiga) and later to a much slower technology (the Mac). Being fastest isn't good enough. You also have to be good. They aren't.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah screw a company that was managed into the ground. Fuck their employees too! Who cares, right.

Yeah, being good, that's where it's at. All the good companies are good.

BTW, comparing an SGI to an Amiga is assinine. Plus you only seem to be aware of SGI desktop hardware, like most slashdotters. Yeah the Onyx really lost out *to* the Macs. Like Rolls Royce lost out to Bubble-Yum.

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[d00ber]

The standard template library is one of the reasons writing C++ looks like writing Perl.

You make that sound like a bad thing. =:o)

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[dwater]

I think you're right, mostly.

There was a point when the MIPS processors were faster than the typical IA32, and that did switch at some point.

However, a lot of the applications on SGI hardware didn't care about just the processor speed so much as the overall speed of the hardware. Most SGI applications cared more about moving data around (quickly) - or at least just as much as processor speed.

Also (often) the lack of processor speed could be made up for by adding more processors - many of the applications were designed to scale, which is something you still can't say about applications designed to run on IA32. Of course, on the SGI desktop systems, that ability was somewhat limited.

i.e., it's not just about processor speed (though that, admittedly, is important too, esp. in a psychological sort of way).

Re:Too ahead of it's time?

[jandrese]

True, the one area where SGIs really excelled was when they were hooked up to the massive tape robot cabinets that required a constant dataflow in the order of gigabytes per second to keep them running. The SGI boxes were the only thing around that could keep that up.

I'll have to add this to my day trading list

[kalbzayn]

"The company received a warning from the NYSE in May, when its share price dropped below the $1 barrier. Although it had dipped into sub-$1 territory in late 2001 and again in late 2002, the price on both occasions recovered within a month or two." Since it recovered twice before, what are the odds it won't happen again? After all, everything happens in threes. Now, where did I put my e-trade password...

Re:I'll have to add this to my day trading list

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do! Keep trading! It's people like you that make it possible for people like me to make money in the markets. Thanks!

Re:I'll have to add this to my day trading list

[kalbzayn]

Great now I don't know what to do. The rule of 3's tells me to buy. The anonymous coward on slashdot seems to be telling me not to. Now where did I put my astrologer's phone number? She can settle this.

Google should buy it

[tommyleebyron]

Google should buy it and make use and profit of their numerous patents and technology

Re:Google should buy it

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody should buy a company that is worth -250M$ And that worth include their immaterial assets such as patents...

Re:Google should buy it

[tommyleebyron]

You can deduct it from taxes

Slashdot currently looks like...

[MadMoses]

...it's been rendered by SGI, too.

Even Worse

[Anonymous Coward]

My view is even worse. Looks like Taco is playing with CSS.

Zonk did it again!

[iive]

Dupe.
I knew I had read this news. It is from http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/02/214725 8&tid=167

Re:Zonk did it again!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought maybe it was my imagination, but you've brought proof to me that I wasn't seeing double, but in fact dupe!

It was weird following that Slashback yesterday because everyone was on topic for the most part, but nobody was talking about the same thing

it's time ...

[Anonymous Coward]

to buy a cool logo!
dunno why, but SGI and nasa somehow fits :)
you don't want yor regular of the shelf
computers on the "next-spaceship", moon
and mars, mabe ...

Shocking!

[Oliver Defacszio]

"... will be delisted from the NYSE."

"... their ongoing commitment to Linux and other open-source projects."

Boy, now THERE are two clauses I never thought I'd see together.

Terrible management

[Anonymous Coward]

I have followed SGI's stock and conference calls very closely since 2001.. I have also Extensively used their product since 1993. I've made a lot of money trading the pops in the stock but those days seem over and the risk is too high.

They've had the Same CEO for 7 years. He is also the Chairman of the board. That makes it difficult for the board to remove him. The board should be sued. The executives should be sued. It is sad to watch those assclowns run the company into the ground. Their is no sense of urgency and there never has been.

No executives have been fired. Heads are rolling at Dell because of a single bad quarter. It is like that at most successful companies.. but not SGI..

On October 25, they had their quarterly CON call.. The CEO didn't even mention the impending delisting.. I figure he had to know that it would be announced to the public by the NYSE within days.

The story of SGI is that the best tech doesn't always win (though it is a bit hard to say that with Itanic in the picture).

Re:Terrible management

[nuggz]

Heads are rolling at Dell because of a single bad quarter. It is like that at most successful companies..

Yes you can always tell how good a job someone is doing in 3 months. That's the recipe for short term thinking and arguably what is wrong with most publicly traded companies.

Re:Terrible management

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you can always tell how good a job someone is doing in 3 months. That's the recipe for short term thinking and arguably what is wrong with most publicly traded companies.

It is rough at the top and they are well compensated. It is expected that they've been in those positions longer than a single quarter and that they failed to take necessary corrective action, etc. As a shareholder, I can't care about whiney execs and VPs who can't get results. I expect a return on my investment, otherwise I'd just spend the money on titties and beer. Well, okay, geek stuff and beer.

As far as it being wrong with 'most publicly traded companies'.. The hint is not to go public and ask people to buy into your company as an INVESTMENT.

Re:Terrible management

[Anonymous Coward]

Their problems go back to the day they bought Cray. They used essentially all of their cash reserves to purchase a company that hadn't been profitable in some time. They were then faced with the need to spend cash which they no longer had to overhaul their new acquisition - and keep their own product lines updated and technologically ahead of the Wintel juggernaut. They failed to do so. Their ultimate failure is the result.

Re:Terrible management

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as it being wrong with 'most publicly traded companies'.. The hint is not to go public and ask people to buy into your company as an INVESTMENT.

Well, the key is whether it is a long-term investment or a short-term investment. I think the complaint is that too many investors want to get rich quick, and demand growth right now. The company will often oblige these people (they are the shareholders, after all) and destroy its long-term viability, which puts people out of work, wipes out the supply chain for that company, and generally hurts the economy all around just so a handful of shareholders can make some quick money without doing anything.

There are a lot of reasons a company can have a bad quarter. External factors like 9/11 or Katrina. Consumer whims can change (Ooo, shiny!). The executive staff should compensate for these things, but it might take a little time. Or, maybe they expect things to return to normal quickly, so they shouldn't spend any money on compensating for a blip in the returns. They can also cause it internally. If they spend money re-tooling to be more competitive, they can lose money for a quarter in expectation of larger future gains.

Now, I don't know that any of those apply to SGI. Seems like they've let themselves get marginalized by better Windows machines, Linux farms, and powerful Macs that let most people do heavy graphics and workstation work without the premium pricetag. As much as I'd rather see certain other companies lose their market, SGI just hasn't found a new niche.

Re:Terrible management

[ceoyoyo]

The best tech doesn't always win if it's too expensive to justify. When SGI was unquestioned leader in graphics they could charge what they do and people would pay it, because there was no other way to get graphics like that. But SGI didn't progress much, and the rest of the world did. Consumer graphics and other projects caught up. But SGI was still charging their premium prices for little more than you could buy off the shelf for a fraction of the cost. Why buy an ATI card with an SGI sticker on it when you can just buy it direct from ATI for a tenth the cost? NUMA Link is cool, but it's not much faster than the recent iterations of Infiniband and will be slower than Inifiniband in not too long. If you can get a couple of hundred processor cluster from Apple, IBM or Dell for what it costs for six or eight processors from SGI, why would you, unless you really, really need the little bit of extra inter-link speed Numalink gives you (at the moment)?

SGI's solution was to market themselves out of trouble. What they should have done was taken their software (which is quite cool) and adapted it to commodity hardware. It would be great to be able to install SGI's proprietary Linux extensions on a commodity cluster and have a semi-shared memory machine.

Re:Terrible management

[kupci]

Probably one of the big mistakes they made was marginalizing Jim Clark, who founded the company. Michael Lewis's book on Clark, The New New Thing is well worth reading.

Silicon Graphics dying??? No way!

[Mjlner]

I don't believe it! Not until Netcraft confirms it!

Your sight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sight...

IS A BROKEN!

As the saying goes...

[lowry-kun]

I heard this at SC a couple of years back:

"There has never been a supercomputing company that the US National Labs couldn't drive out of business"

http://sc05.supercomputing.org/

What do they have going for them?

[Midnight Thunder]

SGI made some great machines both in the form of the hardware and the looks of the hardware. They also provided us with the likes of OpenGL.

The problem is that the market they once had, being high-end graphics workstations, is being eaten up by cheap MS-Windows based systems. They could try redefining themselves, but I not sure what form it could take. While their version of Unix had some nice additions, it was never really a selling point. Their cheapest systems start off at $9000, which more expensive than Apple, and they also have less technology diversity than a company like IBM to help buffer any slow growth of their hardware. Maybe if they offered a very capable $4000 machine, it might help them attract people who might have never considered them before?

BTW CATIA, which is a very important piece of CAD-CAM software in the automotive and aeronautical industry is actually Windows centric, so they benefits of a SGI machine there is zero.

Re:What do they have going for them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right Cause Alias Studio is not important to Auto at all.

They did offer cheap boxes Called the 02 They also sold these pretty bad ass windows boxest that had there graphics systems in them. NO ONE BOUGHT THEM even thought they rocked hard.

Re:What do they have going for them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you can build 5 machines that kick their machines butt for the price of one SGI box. Specifically their foray into the linux/intel world offering.

They have a dual itanium 1.6 box firthe price I can build a 4 processor Opteron that will kick it's ass from here to china and back.

Maybe if they focus on robust hardware that makes people drool instead of their current lame offerings they might make it.

I would never render in SGI anymore. they are so far behind the curve they simply look like a bad joke that will not go away.

Re:What do they have going for them?

[TheRaven64]

A few years back, a group of SGI employees approached the management with the idea of a graphics chip that could be made cheaply enough to be sold for gaming and low-end CAD-type things for going in PCs. It would be slower than the rest of the SGI products, but `good enough' for a lot of their potential customers.

Management decided not to pursue this - they didn't want to cannibalise their workstation sales. The employees shrugged, left, and set up a new company of their own - you may have heard of it, it is called nVidia.

The moral of this story? Never avoid creating a market just to avoid destroying your existing market. If you do, then you will find that you have a competitor who wasn't even in your original market.

Re:What do they have going for them?

[BlueStraggler]

The problem is that the market they once had, being high-end graphics workstations, is being eaten up by cheap MS-Windows based systems.

The SGI market wasn't 1337 gamerz machines, and not even CAD visualization (which was more of a general Unix workstation market segment originally), which is where cheap Windows PCs took over. SGI had cornered high-end rendering, and that kind of work is now done on massively parallel Linux clusters.

Re:What do they have going for them?

[Trogre]

They also provided us with the likes of OpenGL.

So what's going to happen to the OpenGL trademark if SGI do go under?

Who would stand the most to gain from buying it? I would suggest MS would try to get its greasy fingers on it and sit on it.

Perhaps the FSF or the EFF should start a fund to buy the OpenGL trademark to secure its future in Open Source software.

Re:What do they have going for them?

[Midnight Thunder]

Something like OpenGL would probably benefit more from a consortium of interested companies, than any one company owning it. OpenGL is not a technology implementation, it is a technology specification, which everyone is free to implement in any which way they please, as long as it adheres to the specification. While I am a big fan of Open Source, I don't see limiting OpenGL to this philosophy a wise idea, since there are many valid closed source and open source solutions. The next best thing to a consortium would be a foundation, for managing the future of the specification.

Quite honestly I would like to see SGI reinvent themselves, since they have potential, but its just not being realised. Maybe they need someone akin to Steve Jobs to come in and do what the current management is not willing to do, or doesn't realise needs to be done?

Re:What do they have going for them?

[Trogre]

Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not trying to suggest that OpenGL should be limited to FOSS implementations. I'm just trying to prevent commercial interests from stopping FOSS implementations. While nothing will stop FOSS software implementing the OpenGL spec, they can be stopped from calling it 'OpenGL'.

I guess I'm more referring to the trademark 'OpenGL', which I think can be owned by one entity, but one that will not restrict it's use.

I'm suggesting a defensive trademark, similar to Linux(tm).

What happened ti IRIX?

[thanasakis]

When I read the comment about the commitement of SGI to linux, I couldn't help but think of Sun which gets a lot of bashing because they insist on Solaris instead of commiting itself to linux. Now, SGI's future is uncertain although they "commited" to the supposedly right choice.

IMHO Irix was great and they should commit to their own child. Who knows, today we might had yet another choice if they did.

Re:What happened ti IRIX?

[ak3ldama]

I don't think that is the problem. Irix seemed a lot like Solaris/HP-UX/AIX at the time, but they want to spend the money to keep going with Irix. Management made other blunders (Itanium 2?) that caused worse harm then supporting Linux. Not to mention their product line stagnated for about 5 years.

Just so you know....

[gatkinso]

...anyone that uses the term "boxen" in a post is automatically suspect.

Carry on.

Re:Just so you know....

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the first intelligent comment I've read all day.

Sad...

[ByrneArena]

They made great looking boxes with damn good hardware inside and even better software loaded. Problem was it held on too long to an antiquated model which was control everything from the box to the OS to the software on the OS. I hope they can bounce back... but it doesn't look or sound good.

Re:Sad...

[Private Taco]

This is different from Apple how?

Re:Sad...

[ByrneArena]

Was going to make a point about Apple but it seemed trollish. Apple was at least open and enthusiastic about outside companies developing software for their platform. But short of the iPod I wonder if we'd be looking at the same thing with Apple. Apple always had the fallback of having made a ton of money in the 80s and early 90s that kept them from being where SGI is now... Well that and Steve Jobs.

Is it possible.......

[8127972]

.... That SGI could survive by being bought in whole or in part by someone else? I'm assuming that there are some technologies that would be of interest to some company out there.

It would be a shame to simply see them disappear.

Possibly good news?

[ajs318]

AFAICT it is the fact that nVidia graphics cards contain some so-called "intellectual property" claimed to belong to SGI {as if ideas could ever belong to anyone} that is preventing nVidia to release a true open-source driver enabling them to be used to the fullest extent under the popular GNU/Linux operating system and others.

If SGI are bought out, the purchaser might be more keen to release the necessary information. Alternatively, if SGI are wound up, then the information might effectively revert to the public domain by default {since there will be no party in a position to assert a claim over it}.

{Of course, it's also possible that nVidia are using the egregiuous technique of "crippling" a "£200" graphics card by making a slight change to the firmware [so the driver for the £200 card won't work with it] and selling it for £30. If they can make a profit selling the card for £30, then why should they get away with charging £200 for it? An open-source driver would reveal this blatant deception and dog-in-the-mangerism for what it is.}

Re:Possibly good news?

[Svartalf]

"If SGI are bought out, the purchaser might be more keen to release the necessary information. Alternatively, if SGI are wound up, then the information might effectively revert to the public domain by default {since there will be no party in a position to assert a claim over it}."

The rules of how things are handled in a dissolution of the company doesn't automatically move Patents and Copyrights to the Public Domain. If the company doesn't place the stuff in the Public Domain or under a suitable license that effectively does this before the dissolution of the company as an entity, the ownership in interest simply reverts to the artist/inventor if the primary shareholders or creditors do not have title to it. Simply put, the main shareholders (Typically the BoD members...) end up owning it first, if the company owes creditors, then the "IP" is either liquidated or handed over to the said creditors if they so seek it.

Simply put, it doesn't go into the Public Domain unless the Patent/Copyright expires either via a failure to maintain the Patent (i.e. not paying the requisite fees to maintain the same) or via the statutory expiration of the Copyright or Patent- OR the owner of the "IP" puts it there or under some license (like the GPL...) that effectively does the same thing.

Re:Possibly good news?

[alienw]

Why are some people (like you) so damn stupid? Nvidia will never release an open-source driver for the same reason it will never release the blueprints for its chips, and the same reason GM won't give you a car for free. The drivers are a crucial part of the videocard. They are valuable intellectual property. There is nothing for nVidia to gain by releasing them as open-source, and everything to lose. Therefore, they will never do that.

You are making an idiotic assumption that nVidia actually wants to release the drivers as open-source and someone else keeps them from doing it. That is not the case at all.

Not to mention, property can never enter the public domain as a result of bankruptcy. If a company goes bankrupt, all assets are sold to the highest bidder, they aren't just given away for free.

Re:Possibly good news?

[ajs318]

Copyrights and patents owned by a real person usually don't immediately expire when that person dies: they can be passed on to next-of-kin, unless they made a specific provision in their will. But when a company "dies" it may not necessarily have a "next-of-kin". Or it may take so long to find exactly who owns the rights in question that they expire in the meantime. Breach of copyright is a civil offence, and only the copyright holder can take you to court.

If you live on a piece of land for twelve years, and during that time nobody tries to evict you or charge you rent, you own it. The same doctrine probably could be held to cover the legal fiction of "intellectual property", especially as there is now precedent for compulsory purchase of IP.

Beside which, nVidia is not innovating much nowadays. It's a matter of time now before either their graphics cards are reverse-engineered, or a law is passed somewhere in the world making full disclosure mandatory.

Re:Possibly good news?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand your crazy moon-currency. Please use euros or dollars.

k thx bye

Re:Possibly good news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong...
I just had a briefing from SGI (VP of Technology) less than a month ago and asked him this questions. His response was they use STANDARD nVidia cards in the basic configuration. The only difference is these cards get a bit more QA testing to make sure they are meeting the thruput specs.

SGI Linux is not special. It's Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

They mentioned some interesting new machines they have releases to lower the SGI price point w/o a performance hit and still keeping the memory architecture that makes them superior. IIRC, you could get an Opteron SGI for about 3-5K.

Re:Possibly good news?

[Svartalf]

And you're making an assumption that the Trustee can find a buyer for the IP. Honestly, that's all it is, an assumption.

Several things can actually happen when a company goes bankrupt...

The IP could be licensed in perpetuity under an Open License like the GPL.
The IP could be sold to the highest bidder (Like you indicate...).
The IP could be claimed by one of the creditors.
The IP could be claimed by private shareholders if there's no further creditors in line.
The IP could revert to the artist/inventor or their surviving family members.

You're right that it won't automagically go into the Public Domain, but your assertion that it'll just be sold is incorrect. It doesn't always work that way- and I know, I'm an inventor with Patents pending. I know precisely how things work out and how they'll go down in case the startup I'm working for doesn't get out of the gate or fails to execute (Not likely if we get the funding round we're expecting...). I wanted to know because it IS my Patents involved with my situation.

Re:Possibly good news?

[alienw]

But when a company "dies" it may not necessarily have a "next-of-kin".

Companies don't "die", there is no "next of kin", and everything you said is completely wrong. A company can go bankrupt, which means it liquidates. Liquidation consists of selling its assets to whoever wants to buy them in order to settle the company's debt to its creditors.

If you live on a piece of land for twelve years, and during that time nobody tries to evict you or charge you rent, you own it.

Maybe in the UK, but the UK has a fucked-up legal system. Not true practically anywhere else in the world, especially in the US.

The same doctrine probably could be held to cover the legal fiction of "intellectual property", especially as there is now precedent for compulsory purchase of IP.

What the hell are you talking about? The whole concept of 'property', intellectual or otherwise, is a legal fiction.

Beside which, nVidia is not innovating much nowadays.

Really? It would be hard to find a company which innovates _more_.

It's a matter of time now before either their graphics cards are reverse-engineered, or a law is passed somewhere in the world making full disclosure mandatory.

Yeah, right when the government makes Microsoft release the source code for Windows and prohibits making money off of software.

Re:Possibly good news?

[bluGill]

I have the manual for my GM car. Not the owners manual, the official maintenance that tells me everything about the car (except the source code to the computer, an oversite in my opinion). I do all my own work on my cars, so it is important to me that I have this book.

I'm not asking for a free car or video car (though of course I'd like to have one), I'm asking for the information I need to make it work. Nvidia will not give me that information so I don't have a Nvidia card.

There are efforts to make an open source video card, but they have not yet produced.

Re:Possibly good news?

[RageEX]

Yeah I can see that you've talking to a VP ... Opteron, SGI, $3-5K ... poor schmuck probably thinks SGI sells vacuums and wonders why his stock options are worth so little ...

Re:Box office ran out?

[slashdot_commentator]

Vermin like Sun? Pray tell, what horrific things has Sun done to deserve such condemnation? What made SGI an angel by comparison?

Art vs Technology

[mcraig]

IMHO its a shame because SGI have always been visionaries in computing architecture, and if you look at a modern PC alot of what it is doing for the 'first' time was done years ago by SGI. I think I'm right in saying that many of the people working for ATi/Nvidia/Microsoft etc. are ex SGI guys and have carried the seeds of great ideas to places that are perhaps better at executing commercial designs.

I'll be sad to see SGI go because they've never seemed as tied to consumer demands and as such look to be a place where elegant/correct designs are valued over whatever can be thrown together in six months and stamped out on a production line to make some quick bucks.

Perhaps I'm just getting older but it seems like a modern version of an older problem, namely that we no longer value artisans. We value mass production and whats cheap, we live in carbon copy houses (watch MTV cribs for a few minutes) and buy the same mass produced items. Though there are some inklings that we are starting to get fed up of it with more people these days focusing on individual fashion and customising everything to their own tastes. What were really saying is we want something unique/crafted/personal just look at all the case modding going on.

Sadly by the time we value something it can be lost for good, many old techniques have been lost over the ages only for modern historians to bemoan and endeavour to recover. And even if we can flawlessly record the techniques used does that prevent them dying out, I'm thinking of bruce lee recording the techniques he used or a japanese sword maker recording his techniques. When not practiced these techniques become 'sterile' and are much better passed on to an apprentice. Maybe it doesn't matter if these techniques die out after all who needs japanese swords and martial arts? Though you can't help feeling the world is a poorer place without them.

I don't know I could be way off the mark and if so I'm sure someone will shortly correct me, but I for one would be sad to see SGI go (looks around and steps down off soapbox wondering how he got up here).

Re:Art vs Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

SGI will end up like Be did - dead commercially, but with many people creating things that would never, ever have existed without them.

I really want SGI to make a comeback, as they made good, interesting, non-IBM-PC hardware, alongside the likes of Sun and Apple. Sadly high-quality computing is an expensive niche and SGI are simply too cumbersome to survive much longer.

Re:Art vs Technology

[WinterSolstice]

I was an SGI systems admin at a Uni in 95 and 96. I really miss the old indy boxes we had there. That was from my personal favorite era of computing. NeXT, SGI, Apple, Sun, DEC, Cray, Amiga... it just seemed like the world was full of exciting new toys, amazing new technology, and that the future was wide open.

Here I am, 10 years later, a cynical and bitter admin running Solaris at work and Apple at home. It seems (to me, at least) that most of the 'wow' has gone out of it all. CS now is a joke, the computing giants are all re-sellers and mass-production zones (Dell? HP? Give me a break).

I don't think the industry is dead, but I really do worry for its future. My kids couldn't even care less about computers, and many kids I see these days are the same. Where have the dreamers and the innovators gone? Where is the next OpenGL type tech coming from?

-WS

Re:Art vs Technology

[cybpunks3]

Their hardware design was cool, but their business approach sucked.

They were selling computers at Rolls Royce pricepoints without delivering enough of a ROI to their corporate clients. How different is this from the old mainframe days when computer users were only found in big corporations, government, or higher education? Only when computing is released to the mainstream does it really have an important social impact.

They had the gall to market their O^2 as an entry level machine in the late 90s with a $5K pricepoint!

Companies that have pioneered in making computers more _affordable_ should be applauded, not SGI.

Re:Art vs Technology

[linguae]

Yeah, that's the sad thing with computers now. We have no more diversity in platforms. Everything is an x86 (except for high end IBM POWER and Sun SPARC workstations, which may be dying too; embedded machines don't count). The days of choosing from a wide range of platforms are dead. Everything, from 2007 onward, will be an el-cheapo x86 box. Operating systems and environments are still improving (OS X is still adding nice features, and development with GNUstep still shows just how ahead NEXTSTEP was back in the day), but nothing's happening to the core of the operating system. Where is my exokernel OS? Heck, we don't really have a pure microkernel OS in wide usage now, and that's 80's research.

There needs to be a company that pushes computer science research forward, with new ideas for operating systems, architectures, languages, and other areas of computer science. We need that excitement to come back to computing.

Re:Art vs Technology

[ceoyoyo]

They went the same place as all the HAM radio guys went.

Computers were cool... things you cobbled together in your garage. Then corporations took over. Now you buy them at Wal-Mart. Soon, unless we get the same legal protections HAMs have, we won't be able to code any more (just like regular people without licenses can't build big radio transmitters any more, except the licenses won't exist).

Re:Art vs Technology

[pgriff]

"I'll be sad to see SGI go because they've never seemed as tied to consumer demands "

Perhaps that's why they are getting delisted.

Re:Art vs Technology

[Derleth]

Everything is an x86 (except for high end IBM POWER and Sun SPARC workstations, which may be dying too; embedded machines don't count). The days of choosing from a wide range of platforms are dead.

First off, I disagree that embedded platforms 'don't count': You can do increasing amounts of cool stuff with things like cell phones and gaming consoles (which are practically non-IBM-clone PCs anyway at this point), a pursuit which even includes real hardware modifications (essentially a dead hobby in the card-centric PC world).

Second, the chips made by Intel and AMD are x86 in name and ISA only. 64-bit is already a reality (albeit an expensive one) for the average non-übergeek, and dual-core is either already available or will be shortly. SIMD ISAs have been a standard on-chip component for about a decade (give or take) and modern x86 chips have been RISC in CISC clothing for even longer.

Operating systems and environments are still improving (OS X is still adding nice features, and development with GNUstep still shows just how ahead NEXTSTEP was back in the day), but nothing's happening to the core of the operating system. Where is my exokernel OS? Heck, we don't really have a pure microkernel OS in wide usage now, and that's 80's research.

Again, it may well seem that way, but look beneath the POSIX-compatible surface and you'll find unsuspected complexity and, yes, innovation. Xen, something that either is an exokernel or simply acts like one, is going to be a standard part of new Red Hat releases quite shortly now. (Slashdot had an article on this yesterday or so.) Microkernels, while they don't seem to be practical in desktop systems, have generated plenty of research on important OS topics that can be applied to more conventional kernels. Loadable modules, anyone? Linux even has userland filesystems now (the FUSE project is in the official kernel now (2.6.14-rc1)). (As an aside, look at QNX if you want to see a real-world microkernel that even runs on a variety of non-x86 hardware, to boot.)

My point in all this is that things only stay the same on the surface, largely for compatibility reasons. Compatibility is a necessary evil in an industry as large as IT has become, but it does not preclude innovation. It simply forces it to areas just beneath the surface.

Re:Art vs Technology

[WinterSolstice]

Those are some interesting points. I will check these out!

-WS

Eh Big Deal

[doctorjay]

They will cancel their shares and come out with an IPO, just like KMART and so many others did. Just watch. The whole stock market is one big fraud.

The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[Darius Jedburgh]

...incompetence ever told. It's astonishing that a company that made the best computers in the world for 3D graphics can have fared so badly in a world where even your cell phone is a computer supporting 3D graphics. They had the world handed to them on a plate and they simply threw their hands in the air, the plate with it. Astonishing. And so depressing. I'd really ike to try to understand how the likes of nvidia took the laurel from them. I remember nvidia's very first '3D' card (you probably never saw it, I helped develop drivers for it many many years ago). It was the biggest pile of crap ever developed. Never in a million years would I guess that a few years later these guys would be blowing away SGI and hiring half of their staff.

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[lmlloyd]

You are certainly right about the level of incompetence, but in some ways it even goes beyond incompetence, to what almost seemed like a willful destruction of the company by Richard E. Belluzzo. During his tenure at the helm of SGI, they made several decisions that doomed the company to ultimate failure. The first and foremost being that Silicon Graphics would change its name to SGI, stop focusing on graphics, and focus on internet and database servers. The next suicidal decision was that SGI would dump a lot of money into porting their flagship software graphics software (Maya) to Windows. The most crippling blow was that since they were no longer focusing on graphics, they would actively lobby a PC card manufacturer (Nvidia) to hire their engineering staff, and sell them their IP. Then they decided that they would abandon their own OS, and instead make components of their OS available to the Open Source community and put out machines with Linux and Windows. By the time SGI workstations were just PCs running Windows, using Nvidia graphics cards, it was clear the company was dead.

Of course, after making all these ruinous decisions, Belluzzo immediately quit to take a job at Microsoft. I have never been able to figure out if his job at MS was his reward for scuttling SGI, or if after what he did at SGI, MS was the only company that would hire him! Either way, it was SGI itself (under Belluzzo's leadership) that opened the door for Microsoft to walk into the high-end 3D market. Before Maya was ported to Windows, and before Nvidia came out with their Quadro cards, the idea of doing film-quality animation on a PC (while possible) was not taken seriously by anyone in the industry. 90% of the production tools were SGI-only programs written for Irix.

All in all, I think the market is probably better for it, since now you can buy a $100 motherboard using SGI's crossbar architecture (now called the Nvidia Hypertransport), and $300 graphics cards using SGI graphics processors, instead of having to shell out $10,000 for a workstation. None the less, it is a coffin SGI made for itself.

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[Darius Jedburgh]

To add to the MS/SGI conspiracy theory: many people felt that the MS/SGI Fahrenheit 3D library was a deliberate attempt by Microsoft to drain resources from SGI into a fruitless project (Many of the people saying this were working on Fahrenheit and are now colleagues or ex-colleagues of mine). When the project was canned this is exactly what it turned out to be: a fruitless waste of resource. The direct assault on OpenGL by MS is also well documented.

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[Physics Nobody]

"SGI's crossbar architecture (now called the Nvidia Hypertransport)"

Um...Hypertransport is an original technology developed by AMD and licensed by Nvidia (and others). It doesn't have a thing to do with SGI.

"and $300 graphics cards using SGI graphics processors"

While aspects of the technology are similar (which really is kind of inevitable), again Nvidia's cards are very much original designs.

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, that rendering with quads as a primitive thing really took off. To this day nobody uses triangles. And hooking themselves up with the Sega Saturn is paying dividends to this day...

Umm... OK, at least the integrated sound eventually lead to the excellent onboard sound solution available in the nForce/nForce2

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[lmlloyd]

The first time I ever heard about Hypertransport (long before it was available on any motherboards) it was from a friend of mine who works on drivers at AMD. His exact words were "you are going to be happy, the upcoming Nvidia motherboard is going to use the same architecture as your O2."

I asked him "they are putting a crossbar in a PC motherboard?"

He responded "they are calling it hypertransport, but it is the exact same thing. We have been working with them on it, and it is going to be the center of their new Nforce boards."

All press releases aside, AMD was well aware of the SGI crossbar, and Nvidia had the rights to the technology to make it happen on a PC.

As far as the Nvidia cards go, of course they are original designs. I'm not saying they aren't. However, they are original cards being designed by ex-SGI engineers, with access to over a decade of SGI graphics research. Just look at the huge difference between the TNT line of cards (before they acquired SGI's resources) and the Geforce/Quadro line of cards (after they acquired SGI's resources).

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[Darius Jedburgh]

Aha! Someone who knows what I'm talking about :-) The problems were pretty unbelievably bad, for example I seem to remember that clipping was impossible - after all, a clipped quad is no longer a quad. Still, what it did might have been a bit weird, but at least it did what it did faster than the PC could do it in software, a trait not shared by many other 3D cards at the time (many of which never reached market).

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[RageEX]

O2 doesn't have a crossbar, you must mean Octane? The heart of an Octane system is a large XBOW (pronounced cross-bow) chip which is an 8-port high speed (1.6Gbs/port I think) non-blocking crossbar.

One thing that I've heard about nVidia/SGI is that the Geforce chips are pretty much a single chip implementation of the mulit-board RealityEngine graphics from an SGI Onyx. I beleive that SGI sued nVida around 1999/2000 and either won or settled. One of the results of the suit was that nVidia would provided tweaked graphics boards based on the Quadro (V3/VR3, V5, V7/VR7) to go into their god-awful NT-PC clones (models 230/330/550).

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[Skuld-Chan]

The story of SGI is the greatest story of incompetence ever told.

I don't think your giving Commodore Amiga enough credit ;). A lot of people from Commodore when they went away ended up designing things like 3do - while it was a bust, it showed design improvements over existing game consoles - including the ill fated CD-32 (worlds first all 32 bit game console).

Plus there are several things on the Mac and Windows that we take for granted like real time multitasking, app specific volumes (assigns on the Amiga), scripting built into the OS (I actually used this all the time with the Toaster and Amilink), OS driven datatypes - which the Amiga has had since day 1 or near day 1 and plug and play hardware (called autoconfig on the Amiga).

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[lmlloyd]

Did the O2 not have the crossbar? Right, it had something they called UMA, that was kind of like the crossbar, but somehow different. It was a long time ago now. Their NT boxes used a version of the crossbar, didn't they, or was it the same UMA as the O2? And then there was that short-lived upgraded O2 (I can't remember what it was called, maybe something stupid like O2+) that was right before their current Fule and Tezro systems. I think that might have been the one that had a crossbar.

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[Physics Nobody]

Either your memory is clouded or your friend is an idiot. Hypertransport is 100% AMD technology. Sure, they may have worked with Nvidia for the purpose of Nvidia's particular implementation of it (AMD is very good at working with their technology partners), but Nvidia did not have a thing to do with the creation of Hypertransport. AMD based their entire K8 architecture around Hypertransport. You seem to imply that Hypertransport depends on IP rights that Nvidia owns, which is laughable. Hypertransport is an open standard managed by the Hypertransport Consortium. If Nvidia owned the rights to the technology then how come ATI, their biggest competitor, is also using it?

But since I don't expect you to take my word for it, here are some links:

"HyperTransport technology was invented at AMD"

AMD products that use Hypertransport

Consortium Members

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[lmlloyd]

You are either very young, or very naive. The HyperTransport Technology Consortium was founded in what, late 2001-early 2002? It's charter members included AMD, NVIDIA, and SGI, as well as several other companies like Apple, Cisco and Sun. SGI came to the table already having the crossbar architecture, which they had been using in the late '90s, and which they got from Cray when they acquired them. NVIDIA already had most of SGI's engineering staff by the time the consortium was formed, and while ATI might well be a member of the consortium today, they certainly weren't one of the charter members, and certainly didn't have any HyperTransport products out back in 2002. You know, just because a company says "we invented that" on their webpage doesn't mean they really did, or every computer advancement ever would have been done by Microsoft. I hate to step on the image you have of your heroes over at AMD, but I have worked with people at AMD, I have trained with people over at AMD, and I have had a lot of friends who worked at AMD over the years. I assure you, no one at AMD woke up one day in 2001 and said "hey, I have a completely new idea for how to design system architecture. Let's start a consortium and make this an industry standard." Someone at NVIDIA said "hey, we have these guys from SGI who have this really neat architecture, and SGI says they are cool with us using it, so why don't we start up a working group and figure out how to get this to work with a PCI bus." My memory is neither faulty, nor are any of the people I know at AMD idiots. The name HyperTransport might well have been 100% AMD, but the technology isn't.

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[smash]

No, that would be C= ..Commodore :)

Brilliant hardware with the Amiga in 1985... and then they just.... stopped development and stayed at 7.14mhz.

A couple of over-priced high performance machines, (A3000/A4000/etc), but nothing cheap enough to get any market penetration... hence everyone just wrote for the base model anyway.

They rectified this somewhat in the early-mid 90s with the A1200, but it was too late - 5 years is a long time in the computing world and leaving it 8-9 years before updating your core hardware is retarded...

I remember checking out Wing Commander on the PC in 1991 and being blown away. Ditto for the framerate PCs were getting with stuff like Indy500, F1GP, etc.. the writing was on the wall and Commodore did nothing about it.

3D games killed the Amiga - simply not enough CPU power and/or no 3d processor... all it's funky custom hardware for dealing with sprites and 8 bit audio became fairly irrelevant :-\

I still miss mine *sniff*...

smash.

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[sjames]

change its name to SGI, stop focusing on graphics, and focus on internet and database servers.

This was the crux of their demise. Their systems no longer had significan tly more processing power than a really nice PC (which cost 1/4 as much as the SGI box). The big advantage they had was a high bandwidth connection to the graphics card, and a filesystem capable of handling high bandwidth read/writes.

None of those advantages really mattered to an internet server that would more than likely (especially at that time) have no more than a 100Mbps pipe to serve. Thus, they were more expensive for no good reason.

They could have switched to Linux, including the release of XFS. Had they done that, but continued to focus on graphics, they would have remained the workstation of choice for any professional video or animation shop, particularly if they had kept up their development efforts on GPU technology. That move would have allowed them to focus on their core competance without giving the farm away.

Instead, they frustrated their best engineers at every turn trying to cram a square peg into a round hole, eventually driving them to form nVidia. Then, they decided they needed to climb into bed with MS. Without their top engineers, they couldn't continue to compete in graphics, and without their OS, they couldn't even pursue vendor lock-in.

All of this underlines the point that no company, no matter how large or small, no matter how advanced or highly esteemed EVER comes out for the better by working with MS. Most eventually die. IBM only survived their 'deal with the devil' because of sheer bulk and momentum.

As for Cray, they had the opportunity to merge the best of both worlds based on technical merit, but instead, allowed political turf wars to turn the whole thing into a disaster. The only reason Cray seems to be recovering is bthat they were spun off again just in time (of course, that doesn't help SGI).

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[lmlloyd]

I agree that in the case of SGI, working with MS played a big role, as did working with Intel, in their eventual demise. However, I don't agree with your generalization as a whole that working with MS is never a good thing. Adobe, Macromedia, and Avid have all grown exponentially in the years they have been working with MS as opposed to just Apple. Even Apple has been helped out several times over the years by influxes of money from MS. For that matter, while porting Maya to Windows was a huge mistake for SGI, it has been quite a boon for Alias.

I think what the real mistake would be working with MS on one side of the company, while trying to compete with them on the other. That pretty much seems to be a disaster, just look at Apple. They are making more money than they have ever made before, all off of a product that has nothing to do with computers, and doesn't directly compete with MS on any front, and in fact supports Windows. Meanwhile, their ever-languishing computer market share has less and less to do with the health of the company, to the point that they pretty much just offer a computer line out of vanity.

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[Physics Nobody]

'I assure you, no one at AMD woke up one day in 2001 and said "hey, I have a completely new idea for how to design system architecture. Let's start a consortium and make this an industry standard."'

When the hell did I ever claim that?

AMD was working on Hypertransport technology for years before any products were ever released, originally under the name Lightning Data Transport. Here's a random press release from '99 (that took approximately 5 seconds of googling...)

For the record I never claimed anything about whether SGI people are working for Nvidia or not. It's irrelevant. You said Nvidia created Hypertransport, which is just plain untrue so I felt I should correct you. Yes, there are similarities between crossbar. It's simply a case of convergent design, not grand conspiracies. And yeah, the consortium was formed later. I never said it wasn't. But again you missed the point (namely that it's not Nvidia's technology, as you claimed).

But you continue to respond with absurd strawman arguments and a whole lot of 'I know a guy' crap and this simply isn't worth any more of my time. I at least attempt to provide sources, which is apparently beneath you. Or maybe you realize that if you actually did some research you'd be proven wrong.

Just for fun, Wikipedia

Re:The story of SGI is the greatest story of...

[sjames]

However, I don't agree with your generalization as a whole that working with MS is never a good thing. Adobe, Macromedia, and Avid have all grown exponentially in the years they have been working with MS as opposed to just Apple.

I suppose I really should narrow that a bit. Becoming dependant on MS is very nearly a death warrant. IBM suffered badly, Stacker died, Kodak got beaten out of computers before it even had it's feet wet DR didn't directly depend on MS, but did have to be compatible with won3.1 (ugly story). Lotus did really well w/ MS in the short term... Netscape only survived (sort of) as a shadow of itself because it could run on other platforms.

Re:Article text for your convenience

[jeff_schiller]

Think about how big your tongue feels in your mouth.

WTF?!?

STL from SGI?

[sacrilicious]

SGI put out some increadibly cool technologies [including] The Standard Template Library

As far as I know, Alexander Stepanov was the party responsible for STL, and (as noted here) he worked by turns at General Electric, AT&T Bell Labs, and HP. What is the relationship between STL and SGI?

Re:STL from SGI?

[d00ber]

I know General Electric, AT&T Bell Labs, and HP all chipped in but SGI did too. I didn't mean to suggest they invented it though.

They also have extensions for singly linked lists and hashes which will - in some form - make it into C++-0X. Boost deserves a lot of credit for that as well.

There is a lot of SGI template code donated to GCC also.

Re:STL from SGI?

[pavon]

Alexander Stepanov went onto SGI after HP and continued his work with implementing and extending the STL while there. It improved many implementation details (the HP version was not thread safe for example), as well as adding several templates (hash'es etc) that did not get into the standard for political reasons. Like the HP version, the SGI code was freely available (BSD-like license).

The SGI implementation of STL has pretty much become the defacto-standard implementation. It is definately the most widely used implementation in the open source world and probably in the proprietary world as well.

On a related note, this is a pretty interesting interview with Stepanov.

Re:STL from SGI?

[Waffle Iron]

What is the relationship between STL and SGI?

The answer is right there in your local header file. From <vector>:

// Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
...
* Copyright (c) 1994
* Hewlett-Packard Company
...
* Copyright (c) 1996
* Silicon Graphics Computer Systems, Inc.
...

reverse split

[Johnny Mnemonic]

I expected SGI to do a reverse split and bring their stock back above the $1 mark. To save me the googling, can someone explain why a company would rather be de-listed than reverse split?

Also, I have some friends that work there. How many companies recoup after a de-listing? I would guess not many.

Sun Micro is Next

[Anonymous Coward]

Several factors contributed to this.

- Uncompetitive hardware per price/performance.
- Microsoft Windows has more high end applications available for Engineering and Grahpics productions, Pro E and so forth
- Unix has not evolved in terms of its desktop and ease of use
- Lack of end user application development like a decent office suite and integrated groupware.
- The linux factor keyed onm those aspects via openoffice, kde/gnome moving toward a better more userfriendly desktop
- IBM overtook Sun's unix market.

If you look at Sun hardware, they are pricing themselves right out as well even with their x32/64 hardware, more than 60% higher. Sun is stuck giving away solaris, no one will buy star office as long as openoffice is around and their hardware is insanely over priced.

Recipe for disaster.

Solaris can't compete with linux in the general market cornering them into a very small nich market.

ZFS and dtrace and linux interoperability will not save Solaris.

Sun micro will suffer the same fate within 5 - 10 years, probably sooner than later.

SGI: MAKE A LAPTOP DAMNIT!!

[torpor]

you guys were sooooo cool in the 90's, if you'd only get your head out of the sand and realize that people do want cool hardware, and then you actually engineered a laptop worth owning, then i could stop smoking the powerbook crackpipe and return to the hardware vendor i adored .. in the 90's ..

sheesh. you guys. MAKE A LAPTOP DAMNIT.

Re:SGI: MAKE A LAPTOP DAMNIT!!

[uccemebug]

Wasn't this SGI laptop of which you speak foretold in the movie "Twister"? I seem to recall being surprised at spotting an SGI logo on what appeared -- from its off-white colour -- to be a Toshiba laptop in one scene in that movie. (I spent the rest of the movie being surprised at how astonishingly bad the movie was....)

Too expensive, too hard to buy

[Anonymous Coward]

I have two SGI machines. They were great at what they did, but were too expensive and too hard to purchase. Typical proprietary hubris.

Re:I submitted this story yesterday!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody cares, dmuth. Deal with it.

Not supposed to say this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is in the process of buying them.

Re:Not supposed to say this...

[hpavc]

Awesome

Re:Not supposed to say this...

[connorbd]

Would be nice if true, but I'm not opening an e*trade account based on the words of an AC.

Re:Not supposed to say this...

[jcr]

Apple is in the process of buying them.

Whatever for?

The idea of Apple buying SGI was floating around the whole time I was there, and the consensus was that there's no point to it.

Apple can get everything they want from SGI (that is, the people they have left), without assuming the debts. All they have to do is continue to hire them as they get fed up with SGI and leave. The patents that MS licensed from SGI are covered by Apple's cross-license agreeement with MS.

-jcr

Re:Not supposed to say this...

[TRRosen]

I think SGI's standing in the hollywood's post-production/FX area is enough to get Steve to write a check. and lets face it it wouldn't be a very big check (120 million) just a drop in the bucket for Apple.

now that just leaves Novell, Autodesk, Adobe and Sun to buy up and the great empire will be complete!!!

Re:Not supposed to say this...

[jcr]

I think SGI's standing in the hollywood's post-production/FX area is enough to get Steve to write a check.

There's rather more to it than just writing a check for $120M. SGI comes with not only a lot of debt, but a lot of existing service obligations to government and other customers. Add in the cost to Apple of executives' time to deal with the merger, and it's not a good deal.

that just leaves Novell, Autodesk, Adobe and Sun to buy up and the great empire will be complete!!!

The only one of those that would make any sense for Apple to buy would be Adobe, and that would just be to make them use CoreImage. As a shareholder, I'd much rather see Apple spend four or five million developing replacements for Photoshop and InDesign.

-jcr

*sniff*

[Dadoo]

This article made me all misty-eyed. My very first Unix machine was an IRIS 3130.

Is it really a dupe?

[SpaceTaxi]

SGI put out their quarterly results last week, which prompted the first article. Stock delisting this week. Just a lot of bad news for SGI.

Even id Software have sold out

[Zog The Undeniable]

Quake 4 uses DirectX (Direct3D), not SGI's OpenGL. A shame, because OpenGL was independent of Microsoft as well as looking better IMO. DirectX gives a cheesecloth effect on underpowered systems - Quake 4 looks as bad on my PC as Unreal did all those years ago. I wonder if the loss of big names like this has hit royalties, or was OpenGL free as in beer?

Re:Even id Software have sold out

[WWWWolf]

Errrrrmmmm... I was under impression iD games used still OpenGL rather than Direct3D.

The Windows versions probably do use DirectX, but remember that DirectX is a lot more than just Direct3D - DX is probably used for keyboard and mouse support.

I don't have Q4 yet, but my package of Doom 3 has absolutely no mention of OpenGL even when it definitely uses OpenGL extensively - and the iD software's Linux page definitely says that Q4 needs working OpenGL!

Re:Even id Software have sold out

[Dr.Syshalt]

That's not even funny. Check the dependencies for quake4.exe. It does depend on opengl32.dll. The executable has a lot of references to glXXX functions inside. There are no D3D references or dependencies. Is it enough for you to figure out which API it uses?

Re:Even id Software have sold out

[Anonymous Coward]

John Carmack (and Id coders) are clever, they won't rely on directx. Same goes for Blizzard etc.

Some part of directx is used even on Quake III, especially directsound and directinput but it does not mean it's a directx game. They were serving their needs better on windows. I can't agree more since we live a nightmare as a whole mac gaming community because of a game did the fault to trust OpenAL for sound. I am not naming the game. It's just Apple/Creative does not care to fix a stupid bug for years!

If they rely on DirectX, only XBox and Win32/64 has the game. Simple as that. OpenGL is the way to go. The game I don't mention its name moved to directsound on windows platform since it was much less buggy.

Re:Even id Software have sold out

[IntergalacticWalrus]

No, Quake 4 still uses OpenGL.

I bet you were confused by the recommended specs mentionning a "DirectX 9.0c compatible 3D card". Doom III had those same retarted specs, too.

Re:Even id Software have sold out

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? What the hell are you talking about? Quake 4 uses OpenGL or else I wouldn't be playing it in linux.

Can someone explain their market strategy for XFS?

[slashdot_commentator]

Can anyone explain the SGI's decision to open source XFS? What did they envision the results, from a marketing point of view? Were they sucessful in their goal?

Your spelling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your spelling... My God...

IS A RETARDED!

But if they vanish...

[Samurai Cat!]

...who's going to make all those cool displays for the Jupiter II in the future??? :P

Re:Can someone explain their market strategy for X

[Anonymous Coward]

they wanted to sell big linux boxes (because of linux's momtentium... they needed a big-time clustering FS (the are 2 versions of linux xfs, the commercial one does clustering)

more karma

[SethJohnson]

If a post is moderated 'funny' there's no boost to the poster's karma. Insightful, and there is. These are thoughtful mods.

Seth

Re:more karma

[Newtonian_p]

You're right. I didn't know that but looking in to the FAQ, confirms what you said:

Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass.

Re:I submitted this story yesterday!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you go cry and post about it on your livejournal, emo kid.

Re:Can someone explain their market strategy for X

[slashdot_commentator]

Thanks. Funny, I was following up more questions, and then it hit me. Dunno why you posted AC...

IBM should buy them instead

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM should assimilate them and add them to their collective.

fond memories

[axiome]

I'm not a graphics professional, but my entire college went SGI when I entered freshman year back in 94.

I remember touring the campus to decide where I wanted to go and entering the Unix Lab which was full of SGI Indy workstations. I remember someone showing me a shark swimming through the water, rendered in real time! This was amazing back then before the era of our high powered GPU cards. When I finally was taking classes there, we replaced entire VAX Clusters with a "little" SGI 6-CPU Challenge L. I also had the chance to relax and goof off with friends junior year playing GL-Quake multiplayer on Indys and Indigos with 20" monitors which was just incredible.

Goodbye SGI.. in your heyday, you were an even cooler computer than a Mac. They were more exclusive and had cooler looking case/keyboard designs.

bad ventures

[namekuseijin]

In the 1990's, soon after their great success at Hollywood blockbusters, they ventured into the videogames business with Nintendo in the form of the Nintendo64 console. Unfortunately, a more modest machine won the hearts and minds of videogames enthusiasts all over: Sony Playstation.

Then, regular PCs, with very powerful and cheap 3D video cards began eat their Workstation lunch. Linux clusters of common pc hardware substituted their costly hardware in the making of Hollywood flicks.

Now, the end is near for the once king of rendering...

Re:bad ventures

[Anonymous Coward]

You bring up a good point about them being "the once king of rendering." If they had thought of themselves in those terms instead of as a high-end workstation supplier they'd still have their listing and maybe some reasonably contented shareholders.

I loved their machines in the early 90's, but I was always wary of their stock. I guess I sensed that while they made cool stuff they only knew how to sell to Hollywood and computer labs, and they had saturated those markets.

I Owe My Career To SGI

[SavoWood]

A while back, I had to change careers. The bottom fell out of the market for what I was doing before (audio engineering). I was able to take my UNIX skills and pick up a new career where I left off.

About 15 years ago, I was living in Germany working at a post production studio. The graphics department used SGI hardware along with some amazing software. One Friday evening, as I was finishing up and about to go home, someone stuck their head in the control room where I was cutting some ADR for a film (German voices to replace the English). They asked me if I spoke English. Having lived in the US for about 18 years prior to that, I was able to say I was extremely comfortable with the language. Luckily, I also could speak some "tech". SGI's office was closed for the weekend, and they didn't know how to get any other tech support. I sat down with the manual (in English) and fixed the problem with the machine. From then on, I was hooked.

I started learning about all sorts of UNIX-like systems, but SGI is what saved me. When the bottom dropped out of the market, I was able to take my skills in UNIX and experience with SGI systems (albeit in broadcast facilities), and get a job working as a contractor at the NIH on a project where they had about 10 SGI systems ranging from an Origin 3400 to a little O2. I even have an O2 at home on my network there just so I could break it there before I screwed it up at work. =-)

I've been watching this Titanic go down for several years. It has been a long slow death. Now, I hope someone like Apple picks them up and uses their technologies to help better their own products. I'd love to see the Apple Store with a new listing next to the Xserve; the Gserve. 512 POWER5 (yeah yeah...Intel, blah blah) processors, massive disk array, and three steps to get it working:

1. Deploy it in your server room.

2. ????

3. Arrrrrrrrrrgh...I can't do it!!!

Seriously, I'd love to see something like this. It could really help to boost Apple and keep the "legend" of SGI around for a long time to come.

I wonder if I should be scooping up some SGI stock about now so I can sell it to Apple for the buyout. Now, where did I put that crystal ball?

Re:I Owe My Career To SGI

[grumpyman]

Seriously, I'd love to see something like this. It could really help to boost Apple and keep the "legend" of SGI around for a long time to come.

Apple is yet again the darling of innovative world and stock market. Apple's mentality does changed much since day 1 - either they totally win out or crap out. Now that majority of revenue is based on a series of MP3 players (is it just me? it sounds scary). If they're going to pick up SGI, then I'm selling Apple in a snap.

Re:Can someone explain their market strategy for X

[Anonymous Coward]

The management story I was told was to offer up XFS on *every* platform, then sell this CXFS solution, a clustered [1] XFS. Where I got mixed stories was where CXFS would be available. Some said the hooks would be in all version of XFS, while others claimed CXFS would only be available on Irix.

This was further confused with refering to the either the whole sha-bang, or just XFS as an *appliance*. I recall asking at the time "Oh, you mean like Tivo?" The response was similiar to the adage about Radio Shack: "You got questions? We have blank stares."

In a similiar vein, I really haven't answered your question, other than to provide a little perspective. I do suspect the story itself puts insight into the last question...

[1] having come from an automotive background, and having friends in the military, this one did cause projectile coffee..... [2]

[2] and, I guess, gives some insight into what passes for marketing at SGI.

Here's the plan...

[neongenesis]

Our stock just dipped below $1.00. What to do?? What to do?

1. Call this guy I know named Darl.

2. Find a bunch of our 3D graphics code that has somehow gotten into Linux.

3. Find some deep pockets; maybe IBM... and sue them for giving our secrets to the great unwashed masses

4. PROFIT!!! It Can't fail!!!

SGI non-entity since 1988

[micromuncher]

I remember when our computer science dept. bought some real expensive SGI boxes. Only a couple people were allowed to use them. They were used for one purpose only; rendering fluid simulations. So, the rest-of-us never really got excited about the hardware.

SGI never got mind share. Even in the 3D world where they had an opportunity. MacOS briefly had a toe hold that was quickly surpased by PCs in the modelling and rendering world. Both were a fraction of the price of the SGI. Suffices to say desktop Wintel owned the market by 1995.

I don't think its fair to say SGI was the Doyenne of computer graphics systems. I don't think any of the players are bitches and SGI was the alpha female...

Re:SGI non-entity since 1988

[Anonymous Coward]

> SGI never got mind share.
Where were you?

Re:SGI non-entity since 1988

[micromuncher]

I was there. But by 1990 the AV shops around here were already using Avid and strata 3d (both of which started about 1988) to do it all. If I remember, strata even support render farms. Later studio pro and maya walked over, facilitated by Windows... by '96 most AV/3D was Windows based.

Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lemme look 'em up...

Logo change..

[xtal]

SGI effectively died (to me) when they dropped their signature logo, the one that Slashdot still uses.

It's a shame to see them be delisted, but in the world of Nvidia and ATI graphics cards, cheap unix.. not sure where they would fit.

Shame. The first "real" computer I ever used was a SGI Indigo box.

Re:Logo change..

[FooGoo]

I agree...this all started with the logo change. It was the worst idea ever.

Re:What happened to IRIX?

[fgodfrey]

SGI definitely would not be in better shape if they'd stayed with Irix. Irix is, internally, quite difficult to port to new architectures. In particular, changing it from big endian (MIPS) to little endian (IA64) would have been a challenge, at best. Even moving it to another 64 bit big endian platform (the Cray X1) took awhile. It also has other "issues" like a somewhat outdated IP stack (though SGI may have fixed that also).

SGI's problem is that they've made way too many mistakes and missed too many boats. They should have released a PC graphics card in the mid 90's. Instead, that group went to nVidia. They should have allowed Cray (who they owned) to continue with the (quite successful) T3E line. Instead they pushed Origin which, at the time, was barely working. They should never have built a PC that didn't have a standard BIOS and couldn't run a standard version of Windows. They should have never built PC's, period. They should have not tried to commit to shipping Windows on every platform they built (this was a late 90's thing which, fortunately, died). They should have actually used the people and technology that they bought when they bought Cray. Instead, it took 6 years of political infighting before the companies were really merged (a large part of what was Cray Research is still part of SGI). They should have put effort into stabalizing and securing Irix back in the mid 90's when it was swiss cheese. They *owned* the webserver market at one point. Sun anhialated them. They shouldn't have sold the Cray SuperServer to Sun for $56 million. It became the Sun Ultra Enterprise and Sun has made billions on it. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, they shouldn't have driven off their best employees because of poltical infighting and starting, but not finishing, far too many projects.

You can't make that many *major* errors and stay alive. Honestly, I'm surprised they've managed to last as long as they have. I thought they were dead 4 years ago when I quit.

they're not in a too bad shape

[halfelven]

Their stock traded below $1 before a couple times and they recovered.
What the public doesn't know, though, is that they're taking serious steps to change course. The company has enough cash to survive for quite a while and they're moving in directions they never moved before. It is quite likely that by the next summer they'll be quite profitable again.

Solution..

[Anonymous Coward]

Sue SCO and artificially pump up their value for four years.

What goes around should come around.

Source of their Downfall?

[dcw3]

I recall attending a briefing given by SGI reps several years back. They were explaining to us how they were getting in bed with Intel, and planned on producing top notch windows machines. Many of us left that meeting shaking our heads. Among our many concerns was, how do you expect to take a company full of *NIX geeks, and make them work on MS stuff? Also, how could we continue to use their products for our mission critical applications (we knew Windows wasn't up to it)? I don't know, and maybe someone can fill in the gaps here, how long they spent on this experiment before falling back to what they did, and did well (and hopefully, it's not too late).

So sad...

[monkeyfarm]

SGI, back in the early and mid 90's was the best place I've ever worked, or could imagine working. SO many cool, fun, and super intelligent people. Of course that was before TJ thought he was a rock star and various other blunders caused it to implode.

Very sad passing of an amazing company.

Blame the executives, cheer the workers.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still the best place I ever worked.

They never should have given everybody Tag Heuer watches, TJ predicting 50% growth (then hitting 35%), then buying Cray, and then their worst mistake, selling Cray's competing SMP product to Sun which they turned into the E10K. Who made that decision? Ouch.

Re:Box office ran out?

[ryanov]

My experiences with Sun have been rather negative. They have a great chance at having a good OS, and their hardware is interesting. However, their support is awful, and adoption of Solaris 10 has been more like a beta in quality and in support tools than a production OS. They are a waste of my time.

More expensive than Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their cheapest systems start off at $9000, which more expensive than Apple

You don't say?

Mac mini: $500
Quad-core Power Mac G5 with 4GB ECC memory, dual hard drives, and workstation graphics: $7000

Yeah, just a little more expensive.

As an investor

[nuggz]

As an investor/shareholder I am also a partial owner of these companies.

I want sustainable long term performance, I don't care about an off quarter or even an off year, they happen I accept it. I want management to take the long term view and build a profitable company that will still be making me money in 20-30 years.

SGI is dying

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

It's official; NYSE now confirms SGI is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *SGI community when NYSE confirmed that *SGI market share price has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 dollar per share. Coming on the heels of a recent stock filing which plainly states that *SGI has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *SGI is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent investor confidence test.

...boy, this sounds familiar....

Cool stuff from SGI

[Nick Driver]

SGI put out some increadibly cool technologies:
 
...not to mention what many consider to be probably the absolutely coolest logo ever to come from a tech company... that is, the famous chrome cube, still seen here on /.

I'd love to get my hand on one of the real chrome-plated die-cast metal cubes that were to be available as paperweights, desk ornaments to a privileged few people back in the mid-late 1990's.

SGI Magic Bus

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember the SGI Magic Bus? When my brother worked at SLAC, we toured the bus when it was paying a visit. There were some cool demos inside, but now you can get the same quality graphics on a cheap PC. SGI had cool industrial design and great branding, but as others have said, it's been dying a slow death all these years.

Hey numbnuts!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not a single image/kernel machine. It's 20 nodes of 500 processors each! That is to say well within the reach of Irix. It's a huge cluster of slightly less huge super computers!

truth is that linux kills companies

[Anonymous Coward]

Not windows. Linux is devil.

Your prose is wonderful

[Bozdune]

Who knows if you're right or not, and who cares? You made me laugh out loud.

"the same way that a lice, flea and tick infestation is the perfect complement to the bed of a sleazy main-street motel" -- fantastic.

Re:Box office ran out?

[slashdot_commentator]

They have a great chance at having a good OS, and their hardware is interesting.

You see, its ignorant statements like this that make me think you're a primadonna poser. No operating system better supports threaded coding, SMP, and user mode applications (on a predominant commercial level) for HIGH RELIABILITY. (There might be something from SGI that could be described as more desirable.) Anything with higher availablity, you're going to have to go to mainframes. (Yeah, go do cutting edge stuff with that.) As for their SPARC hardware, it actually beats out Apple in putting out slow, obsolete, putrid crap.

Name one other large scale computer services company with better technical support (for administrators). HP??? I'd rather deal with Indian subcontinent natives. Granted, if you need something resolved in ten minutes, its not going to happen. But I'm not aware of any technical support service on their scale that fixes it in ten minutes. You start out with the tier 1 losers, and work your way up. If all the components came from Sun or their partners, and you're not running the bleeding edge, you will eventually get someone who can fix your problem.

There's nothing about Solaris 10 that would make me think I'd be better off with 9 or 8. (Then again, I don't work with highly-scaled platforms.) If anything, I'm disturbed at how infrequently I'm seeing patches released for Slowlaris 10.

Now if you're a developer, that's a different story. Crappy development tools, yes. Unless you're running something so esoteric you actually need DTRACE to help figure out the problem. Then there is no substitute. Awww, you have to use a CLI? If you bitch about that, you're not a competent developer. Go back to your windoze box and write graphics games. Its not about the size of the box, its the size of the man.

Compatibility

[dimension6]

One big problem SGI has is that very little software is designed solely for IRIX. Most software available on IRIX is also available on an x86 machine (usually as a Windows program)...

Kiss of GPL ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Novell the next ?

Prime Example...

[Anonymous Coward]

...indicating how open source tends not to pay the bills.

they needed/wanted it for their altix machines

[barutanseijin]

I'm guessing of course, but they probably figured that their high end linux machines wouldn't be worth much without a very robust file system.

With IE, hit F11 and go to Full Screen mode.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

From time to time I click on a comment or story link and the page renders strangely. Only noticed it today...

I don't know what it's like on Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/whatever, but on IE, the pages often appear to have empty content. I discovered the other day that if I hit F11 and go to Full Screen mode, then the contents of the pages suddenly appear as if by magic.

My guess would be that they've got the CSS/DOM stuff all screwed up, and somewhere an ancillary table is overlaying the main content table.

But, again, that's just a guess, 'cause I'm WAAAAYYYYY too lazy to do Taco's homework for him. [Well, certainly not for free.]

Richard Belluzo

[IvyKing]

...but in some ways it even goes beyond incompetence, to what almost seemed like a willful destruction of the company by Richard E. Belluzzo.

Before he laid waste to SGI, Belluzo was responsible for HP scaling back on the 9000/700 series desktops (HP-UX). In the early 90's, HP had Lotus 123 and Ami-Pro ported to run on HP-UX and VUE was a much nicer looking windowing system than Windblows 3.1. Belluzo convinced HP's management to drop efforts on HP-UX for the desktop and move to Win NT (which really didn't fulfill the promise until Win2k).

Re:Box office ran out?

[ryanov]

I'm really not sure whether you're agreeing with me or disagreeing. The only clue you've given me is that you've called me a primadonna poser. You've said Sun is great, and then insulted Solaris 10. Then you've said that you can use any OS... but then you might want Solaris 10 for dtrace. Then you talk about shitty hardware while saying that no one has better support. Your post is lame and all over the place. Back to try to answer that which I could decipher:

1) So far I've dealt with support from Sun, HP, sgi, and Dell. sgi's has been the best. They call back, and quickly, if they need to. Generally the problem is solved right away. They don't fight with me over what hardware I need, and they typically send the right part. HP, I hear, USED to be excellent. These days the people they send don't seem to be trained... nice guys, and the hardware people follow up pretty well... however, it's almost as if they sent me a couple more people to puzzle over the problem and read the manual, not experts. Sun has been very bad about calling me back (their favorite was calling me at 6:00a, or 7:00p), they didn't really know what I was talking about when I asked them questions, and they knew less than the documentation did. I always got "oh, I'll look into that," and then an eventual call back to see if I'd made any progress. Thanks. sgi starts you out with tier 1 (note that tier 1 actually knows something as well -- unlike a lot of places)... but they get you quickly to tier 2. Maybe because they have no customers -- I don't know. They help me get my job done, and that's what I care about.

2) Solaris 10 introduced a lot of interesting things... true, not stuff that wasn't available elsewhere (in the form of sudo, /etc/init.d, etc.), but it was interesting stuff. It's a lot easier to hand out privileges to people on a stock system, or to run things with only certain elevated privileges (Apache2, or others that need to bind to low ports, etc.)... The containers thing is interesting.. it allows you to isolate the software that is outward facing from the REAL OS, making it harder to break in. ...however, a lot of this stuff is half baked. Having an interface only in a local zone and not in the global zone is not possible without playing tricks (or wasn't when I attempted to set it up months ago). Patching and installing software only in a local zone was also tricky. Sun admitted it hadn't gotten the kinks out, really, and that it would be more possible in later releases. I stopped following the situation somewhat, but my understanding is that things have not improved much. The patch manager is finally out, but it was not out for Solaris 10 for months after it was available to install. There was also spotty x86 support for random tools (SunNetConnect still doesn't work on x86 as far as I know, or maybe that wasn't it -- my memory is hazy on this one). I'm not talking x86 as in your average white-box, this is their own hardware... V20z's! I don't know too much about Solaris 9, as I've only started to be responsible for a couple of boxes running 9 (most of our production software runs on 8 right now), but I know this stuff exists for 9. If an OS is out of beta, you'd better support it with your own tools -- tell me THAT inspires vendor support when you don't even take care of support for your own new OS.

I'm not a developer, so none of that applies, however, nothing I said would indicate that I am a VB programmer that needs a GUI.

You were looking to pick a fight, and you didn't know what the fuck you were talking about. Then you had even less of an idea of how to get that drivel out of your head and into the text box. Way to be.

Fine, you are the idiot, and have no memory.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right in that no one at AMD woke
up in 2001 with the idea. AMD made it
public in October of 1999 - then under
the name "Lightning Data Transport".

They later decided to try to make it
a widely deployed standard, and the
"Hypertransport Consortium" was
established for that purpose. A little
company called "API" (which I think AMD
later bought) had some early influence
on the standard, but I don't think SGI
ever did. API were the US remanants of
Samsung's involvement with DEC's Alpha
processor and platforms, in case you
were wondering who they were. They
actually made a Alpha motherboard based
on AMD's 750 chipset. Which could work
bacause Athlons used the same EV6 bus
as the Alpha processor did. At least,
they did until Opteron and Athlon64
came on the scene using Hypertransport.

And by the way, you do know that nVidia's
southbridge for the first nForce was
basically a AMD design, right? Several
blocks, like the IDE controller have the
same register layout, and even use the
same drivers under Linux. And that was,
incidently one of the first two products
on the market that used LDT. (In the
original Xbox, which was slated at one
time to have a 650MHz AMD Athlon inside.)

I still miss mine *sniff*...

[Darius Jedburgh]

Funnily enough I just acquired one for the first time in my life. I found an Amiga 500 ('plus' I think) while going through the garbage thrown out by my old employer when they closed down(!!!). I opened the case, washed everything that was washable, and now it looks and functions as good as new. I have to admit to not enjoying Marble Madness as much as I had hoped. And I wish I had a BASIC interpreter for it. But some of the 2D graphics are damn fine stuff. I'm also pretty impressed with the 3D graphics in the game Frontier though as a game it's unplayable.

Re:I still miss mine *sniff*...

[smash]

Frontier was a 3D PC game, and one of the genre that killed the Amiga off (way too slow due to not enough CPU power or a dedicated 3d processor). It's not really a good demonstration of the Amiga's abilities. If you're after some decent Amiga games, check out:

• Turrican 1/2 (3 is crap, imho)
• Xenon 2 - Megablast
• Stunt Car Racer
• Wolfchild
• Zool (Mario on steroids, with Ninja swords)
• Deuteros
• Speedball 2

Etc... there's many more. Marble Madness came out very early in the Amiga's history and didn't really push the machine that hard at all :) Look for titles from the late 80s or early 90s to get a better idea :)

smash.