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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. "
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.
Can't they list on the NASDAQ? The NASDAQ requirements should be a better fit.
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?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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."
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
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.
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.
Never build a headquarters that is a monument to your success. It's the kiss of death.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
...it's been rendered by SGI, too.
Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.
Dupe.5 8&tid=167
I knew I had read this news. It is from http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/02/21472
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).
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/
I no longer need to punish, deceive, or compromise myself. Unless, of course, I want to stay employed.
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.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
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?
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.}
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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).
...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.
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.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
AT&T (symbol T) is listed on the NYSE. It did a reverse split (1 for 5) on 19-Nov-02.
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.
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.
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!
If a post is moderated 'funny' there's no boost to the poster's karma. Insightful, and there is. These are thoughtful mods.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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...
I don't feel like it...
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?
Plant a tree in a developing country.
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?
The answer is right there in your local header file. From <vector>:
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...
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
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.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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.
What I don't know I just fake...
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.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon