I created my Digital Video pages in the last year or so, and they've certainly been successful and gained a quite loyal audience [ http://www.amazing.com/dv/dv-faq.html ]. My fruutydates dating service [ http://207.151.18.18 ] seems to have attracted a nice niche of cool people.
In the first case, I wrote about a technology when it was starting to become popular and there were few net resources around. In the latter case, I got most of my users by latching on to the traffic from a web site whose owners spent substantial money on promotion.
So I wouldn't give up - new resources have a good chance of surviving and even thriving, as long as you put some kind of unique spin on your subject. And if you can't, why are you bothering?
Remember, if you're an individual setting up a site on some hot topic, people will find you - and you don't need billions of viewers to produce a useful resource people will enjoy.
Wasn't ActiveX no more and no less than OLE with a shiny new name? OLE isn't going away, certainly. Frankly, my distinct impression is that it stinks, being incredibly sluggish and bloated, and that's one reason it's been renamed so many times.
If you consider the hard work of virus writers and the difficulty of making ActiveX safe, I would be quite surprised if ActiveX caught on in the web at large.
I think it was JWZ who said something like "Unix sucks. But it sucks less than anything else." The PC did pioneer the use of an attractive and readable 24x80 display, while Radio Shack stuck with crummy tubes and Commodores were generally plugged into cruddy TVs. The PC had an excellent keyboard and an overall well-made feel that I appreciated at the time (having bought one of the first ones, for circa $ 4k - ouch!).
I remember liking a lot of the features of Microsoft Basic compared to the competition. True, MS Basic was pretty sluggish at garbage collection, but generally it seemed pretty well thought out. Funny, I don't remember many crashes in the old Basic days; now our software is infinitely more complex, infinitely more sophisticated, but infinitely less reliable, too.
I also remember genuinely liking the early versions of Microsoft Word for DOS. They were... well... different. Since I hated WordPerfect's "Memorize a billion function key combinations with no easy neumonic", Word's alphabetic commands seemed a lot better. And it was the first PC word processor to have nice proportional font support - the WordPerfect font support seemed tacked on and ugly.
So no, I'd say Microsoft did make some good products - or at least some interesting ones - before the "bad new days" of Windows. I actually had a fairly positive image of the company before Windows blew it away.
For what it's worth, I think Netscape runs significantly better under Irix than Linux - it does crash, but it crashes less often.
I've used Netscape 4.x under Irix for well over a year now, and it's never brought down X. I turn off Java because Java does seem to crash it - but it crashes IE under Windows too.
However, I do agree that it's pretty horrible in its rate of freezing up the machine for agonizing minutes as it does its DNS lookup.
As others have mentioned, Mozilla is a complete rewrite, and I think you've explained quite well why that was necessary. Let's just hope it winds up working well.
Hunger exists nowadays primarily due to government mishandling of farm policy. Just read what happens in the field when price controls are imposed, or when food aid is handled by governments, and you'll get the idea.
War is created by an urge to obtain power. We're much more sophisticated in trying to obtain power nowadays; only poor desperate countries are directly involved in wars. It used to be that industrial powers like Germany got in wars; now they send us high-quality luxury cars, we send them dollars and everyone's happy.
Now, true, the industrialized nations sometimes get involved in scrapes such as Iraq/Kuwait, but we don't cause them. Saddam of Iraq was desperate for something to make his country sound puffed-up and powerful; as a result, he went to war.
The trend definitely seems like it's towards countries overall getting richer from international trade, and the more this happens, the less important war seems to be.
So I'm guardedly optimistic. I'm not saying we've eliminated war, but we've certainly reduced a lot of the factors that promote it over the years. Hopefully this trend will continue.
I think Imagine Media, the parent company, runs the server, not MacAddict magazine itself. So they can run whatever server they want. Personally, I think they have good taste:-).
The market for domain names is pretty interesting. You hear about these sales for fabulous amounts of money, but for the most part it seems to be all sellers and no buyers.
I have one worthwhile domain name, amazing.com. The GreatDomains.com valuation page claims it's worth "between $ 50,000 and $ 1 million". At the same time, it sure looks to me like most of the domains on there sit for a long time without a single offer. Once someone gets interested, they hold an auction and get the big bucks; but the majority of name holders get basically ignored by the company, as far as I can tell. Personally, I've never received an offer (directly, without their help) over circa $ 10k, which probably doesn't even represent the value (for me, anyway) of my present search engine positions.
Truth to tell, I'm really ambivalent about selling. I like having the name. It's certainly prestigous. I don't have to tell people how to spell it. I like to think I've built a "personal brand" around the name that a lot of people enjoy. At the same time, if it could give me the kind of money that would change my life... I'd probably sell.
Any thoughts about how to get the best possible price for my name? Anyone been through the procedure of selling a name for serious money?
Well, they're not available at all, but if you have $2,500 it looks like eBay prices have settled down a bit, you might be able to get one for around that, or for a very slight premium.
When you try to suppress something on the Internet, it just gets stronger. The horrible publicity created by the suppression attempts overwhelms any advantage suppressing the information might give -- because the information never really disappears. This is such a well-known principle nowadays that I'm amazed people are still trying to suppress critical web sites.
The Church of Scientology cases are the most obvious example - the organization got a lot of publicity out of their ham-handed attempts to suppress information, and I'm sure in the end it lost lots more members than it would have if they had left the anti-CoS brigade alone.
Now George W Bush is doing the same thing. It's a pity, since I was beginning to think he was a half-decent candidate even though I like Steve Forbes' positions the best. Well, good ol' Steve may be a wooden speaker, but he would never do anything this dumb.
I think George W will get what he deserves out of this - he'll lose a ton of votes from people who would have otherwise been sympathetic towards him.
His best damage control now is probably to heave a heavy sigh, pay the $ 80k for the domain name and hope the whole mess goes away. The only problem is that I'm betting the protestor will just grab a new name -- and now his PAC has enough money for at least one late-night TV ad, or a barrage of local ads in major markets or a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal or... . A new domain name is just $ 70 and a little imagination away, and I don't think a "non-compete" agreement would stick in the courts.
Big loss for George. Let's see how he handles it now.
Realistically, I don't think Corel has anywhere else to go - if they are to extend their Office suite and other mainstream software, they need to do it on a mass-market platform other than Windows.
For some reason, despite putting links in the article, they vanished. Could some kind soul tell me how to put a link in an article here? I know people are doing it, but it seems to elude me:-(.
Anyway, the links:
CapAlert: http://www.capalert.com
Their Toy Story II Review http://www.capalert.com/capreports/toystory2.htm
A few months ago, Slashdot linked to these people. I get a bit of a laugh out of their single-minded perspective, but I was surprised to see that even they liked Toy Story II, they even gave it the coveted "Yellow Light" rating. This valuable rating means that the film is only somewhat dangerous to children! (I think there are about three films ever made that got the coveted "Green Light").
All kidding aside, I'm their sworn enemy personally, but I find their reviews and analysis amusing, so if you want a laugh or want to see the real Christian perspective on Toy Story II, by all means check out their review.
existed as a much-loved creation between 1987, when I bought an already ageing 286 with 4MB RAM and Microport Unix and 1991, when the hard drive finally gave up the ghost.
The best thing about it is that we had user meetings, everyone could get together, and I met enough women through it to make my life interesting. Now, the most interesting women I encounter are not just in other cities, try other countries!
On the other hand, I was always trying to figure out a good balance between free speech and censorship. I believe in free speech; many of my users hated the consequences, because one or two disruptive people can really do bad things to the system. I have to say that Slashdot has a better compromise between the two ideals than anything I've seen, and if I were running a large-scale message board system, I'd take many of the ideas to heart.
I always liked fooling around with the technology of online matchmaking - it's always been something I've been passionate about, considering that people are increasingly paranoid and disassociated from their communities. I think that's a lot of what caused BBSes to decline in such dramatic terms when the Internet came to town.
But still, come visit my latest matchmaking experiment if you feel in the mood - it's at http://207.151.18.18/ and it uses a lot of the same ideas I first hatched when I had my BBS years ago. Incidentally, if you tried this when I last announced it, I've had a bit of a technical goof and you'll have to go through a quick procedure to re-find your account.
If they can legally change any information on your computer, clearly they can already restrict criticism of their policies - and anything else they might want to, too.
I have a friend who thinks the same thing about Y2k, so no, you're not alone.
But I wouldn't be so happy about living in Canada. I knew a wonderful Canadian woman once, and one of the few disagreements we had was about freedom. She really believed (and still believes, as far as I know) in government serving the public interest, and told me it's a common Canadian attitude. Bad in many respects as the situation in the US is, at least we have a large number of people who really distrust government, period. I think that helps counterbalance the censors, even though eternal vigilance is still unfortunately necessary.
Well, sometimes people who insist on using Windows for their projects throw money at me, and so I use Windows on their behalf. However, except for those cases, I've been completely Windows-free for years.
I use MacOS and BeOS for graphics and video, Irix and Linux for everything else. And I'm happy as a clam as long as I don't need to use Windows:-).
Now, in terms of Windows unfortunately ruling the PC world, of course it does. I liked that Motley Fool article from yesterday. Its key statement in my eyes is that any alternative to an existing dominant system has to find a niche where it can grow more or less undisturbed until it finds critical mass. That niche has been the server.
Remember how long it took for Windows to completely win over DOS? Even now, I'll bet there are a million or two DOS machines still out there in active use. Linux could eventually dominate in the same way, slowly but surely.
A good, intelligent reply except for one thing. You go to the wrong bricks and mortar stores. I've found Samy's Camera in Hollywood to never be less than totally helpful, and they're great folks who love cameras. And, incidentally, contrary to what you'd probably expect, they undercut Good Guys et al on price.
People who buy cameras at places like Circuit City or Fry's get what they deserve.
Otherwise, what your response proves is that people have widely divergent shopping styles. At the same time, if you buy the XL1 via the net now, you probably would have bought it via mail order two years ago. Retail sales at a local level haven't changed.
(1) I'm about to grab a bite to eat and I want something to read while I'm eating. I go to the bookstore, find something that suits my current mood, and go to lunch. 0% chance I'd switch that to an online transaction.
(2) Someone tells me that I have to read this book. It's much cheaper online than it would be in the local bookstore, but if I go to my local bookstore I could have it right now. 50% chance I'll buy it online, increasing dramatically if it's a particularly expensive book, decreasing to zero if it's below, say, $ 15.
(3) There is a subject I've been curious about that's rather obscure. I go to amazon.com and find a book on that subject with favourable customer reviews. 100% chance I'll buy online. But I'll go to the bookstore too and I have a nearly 100% chance that I'll buy what I see there, too.
(4) I want a Canon XL1 MiniDV camcorder, a product which, at the time I bought it, sold for about $4,400. I could get it more cheaply via mail order or online, but if there was a problem it would be a hassle to return, and I don't really know if the online store I see has it in stock. 0% chance I'll buy online; I want customer service.
In general, what I've found out is that I'll spend more on books overall than I did before online book retailers. Instead of passing up a $50 book because I can't afford it, I'll buy it online and get a good discount. But I'll still buy that $5-20 book or magazine and read it during lunch. I don't think bricks and mortar bookstores have much missed me, since I still buy from them all the time; there's nothing like being able to see and read what you're buying before you plunk down your money.
So in sum, I really don't think bricks and mortar are on their way out. In fact, I think online retailing expands the total market more than it crowds out offline stores. In my case, that's certainly been true.
I don't think it's too fair to criticise SGI so heavily for a policy that's been corrected since Irix 6.x was introduced some years back.
I will admit that SGI's price list is fun to read for sheer laugh value - just check out their prices for external disk drives if you want proof. Of course this may be one reason companies have been moving towards NT. SGI may well have been penny wise and pound foolish here.
That aside, I'd say the IDO for any version of Irix is one of the most frequently pirated pieces of software in the workstation world. Ask for a copy when you buy your next SGI machine; odds are that you'll get it. SGI seems to be turning a tactful blind eye to this sort of thing, so I wouldn't be so snippy towards them.
I think it's important to note that their MIPS line of workstations, such as the O2, Octane, etc is still being sold. They're out of the NT workstation biz, but not out of the workstation biz period.
About a year ago when they introduced the NT line, I predicted that they would be unable to sell into what is largely a commodity market. Clearly, I was right.
Personally, I think they should abandon their plans to abandon Irix, which makes their high-end hardware feel distinctly orphan-ish. Either do that, or port Linux to the old machines so they won't become obsolete quickly.
Of course I'm still using my circa 1994 Indigo2, and I still love it. If SGI depreciation in the marketplace continues at this pace, I'll be able to afford a dual-processor Octane soon. But I'll cry for the company as I sign the check.
Slashdot Mirror
I created my Digital Video pages in the last year or so, and they've certainly been successful and gained a quite loyal audience [ http://www.amazing.com/dv/dv-faq.html ]. My fruutydates dating service [ http://207.151.18.18 ] seems to have attracted a nice niche of cool people.
In the first case, I wrote about a technology when it was starting to become popular and there were few net resources around. In the latter case, I got most of my users by latching on to the traffic from a web site whose owners spent substantial money on promotion.
So I wouldn't give up - new resources have a good chance of surviving and even thriving, as long as you put some kind of unique spin on your subject. And if you can't, why are you bothering?
Remember, if you're an individual setting up a site on some hot topic, people will find you - and you don't need billions of viewers to produce a useful resource people will enjoy.
D
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Wasn't ActiveX no more and no less than OLE with a shiny new name? OLE isn't going away, certainly. Frankly, my distinct impression is that it stinks, being incredibly sluggish and bloated, and that's one reason it's been renamed so many times.
If you consider the hard work of virus writers and the difficulty of making ActiveX safe, I would be quite surprised if ActiveX caught on in the web at large.
D
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I think it was JWZ who said something like "Unix sucks. But it sucks less than anything else." The PC did pioneer the use of an attractive and readable 24x80 display, while Radio Shack stuck with crummy tubes and Commodores were generally plugged into cruddy TVs. The PC had an excellent keyboard and an overall well-made feel that I appreciated at the time (having bought one of the first ones, for circa $ 4k - ouch!).
... well ... different. Since I hated WordPerfect's "Memorize a billion function key combinations with no easy neumonic", Word's alphabetic commands seemed a lot better. And it was the first PC word processor to have nice proportional font support - the WordPerfect font support seemed tacked on and ugly.
I remember liking a lot of the features of Microsoft Basic compared to the competition. True, MS Basic was pretty sluggish at garbage collection, but generally it seemed pretty well thought out. Funny, I don't remember many crashes in the old Basic days; now our software is infinitely more complex, infinitely more sophisticated, but infinitely less reliable, too.
I also remember genuinely liking the early versions of Microsoft Word for DOS. They were
So no, I'd say Microsoft did make some good products - or at least some interesting ones - before the "bad new days" of Windows. I actually had a fairly positive image of the company before Windows blew it away.
D
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For what it's worth, I think Netscape runs significantly better under Irix than Linux - it does crash, but it crashes less often.
I've used Netscape 4.x under Irix for well over a year now, and it's never brought down X. I turn off Java because Java does seem to crash it - but it crashes IE under Windows too.
However, I do agree that it's pretty horrible in its rate of freezing up the machine for agonizing minutes as it does its DNS lookup.
As others have mentioned, Mozilla is a complete rewrite, and I think you've explained quite well why that was necessary. Let's just hope it winds up working well.
D
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Hunger exists nowadays primarily due to government mishandling of farm policy. Just read what happens in the field when price controls are imposed, or when food aid is handled by governments, and you'll get the idea.
War is created by an urge to obtain power. We're much more sophisticated in trying to obtain power nowadays; only poor desperate countries are directly involved in wars. It used to be that industrial powers like Germany got in wars; now they send us high-quality luxury cars, we send them dollars and everyone's happy.
Now, true, the industrialized nations sometimes get involved in scrapes such as Iraq/Kuwait, but we don't cause them. Saddam of Iraq was desperate for something to make his country sound puffed-up and powerful; as a result, he went to war.
The trend definitely seems like it's towards countries overall getting richer from international trade, and the more this happens, the less important war seems to be.
So I'm guardedly optimistic. I'm not saying we've eliminated war, but we've certainly reduced a lot of the factors that promote it over the years. Hopefully this trend will continue.
D
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I think Imagine Media, the parent company, runs the server, not MacAddict magazine itself. So they can run whatever server they want. Personally, I think they have good taste :-).
D
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Actually, I found that I could get individual copies from CheapBytes for about the price of a subscription copy.
D
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Nice site - thanks for letting me know about it.
D
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The market for domain names is pretty interesting. You hear about these sales for fabulous amounts of money, but for the most part it seems to be all sellers and no buyers.
... I'd probably sell.
I have one worthwhile domain name, amazing.com. The GreatDomains.com valuation page claims it's worth "between $ 50,000 and $ 1 million". At the same time, it sure looks to me like most of the domains on there sit for a long time without a single offer. Once someone gets interested, they hold an auction and get the big bucks; but the majority of name holders get basically ignored by the company, as far as I can tell. Personally, I've never received an offer (directly, without their help) over circa $ 10k, which probably doesn't even represent the value (for me, anyway) of my present search engine positions.
Truth to tell, I'm really ambivalent about selling. I like having the name. It's certainly prestigous. I don't have to tell people how to spell it. I like to think I've built a "personal brand" around the name that a lot of people enjoy. At the same time, if it could give me the kind of money that would change my life
Any thoughts about how to get the best possible price for my name? Anyone been through the procedure of selling a name for serious money?
D
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Well, they're not available at all, but if you have $2,500 it looks like eBay prices have settled down a bit, you might be able to get one for around that, or for a very slight premium.
D
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Strange, "The system cannot find the file specified", but it's not formatted like any web error message I've ever seen.
D
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Hmm, nobody's looking at this thread, I'm pretty sure, so I'll try it here :-) I did that before but left out the quotes, maybe it needs them.
amazing.com is my web site!
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When you try to suppress something on the Internet, it just gets stronger. The horrible publicity created by the suppression attempts overwhelms any advantage suppressing the information might give -- because the information never really disappears. This is such a well-known principle nowadays that I'm amazed people are still trying to suppress critical web sites.
... . A new domain name is just $ 70 and a little imagination away, and I don't think a "non-compete" agreement would stick in the courts.
The Church of Scientology cases are the most obvious example - the organization got a lot of publicity out of their ham-handed attempts to suppress information, and I'm sure in the end it lost lots more members than it would have if they had left the anti-CoS brigade alone.
Now George W Bush is doing the same thing. It's a pity, since I was beginning to think he was a half-decent candidate even though I like Steve Forbes' positions the best. Well, good ol' Steve may be a wooden speaker, but he would never do anything this dumb.
I think George W will get what he deserves out of this - he'll lose a ton of votes from people who would have otherwise been sympathetic towards him.
His best damage control now is probably to heave a heavy sigh, pay the $ 80k for the domain name and hope the whole mess goes away. The only problem is that I'm betting the protestor will just grab a new name -- and now his PAC has enough money for at least one late-night TV ad, or a barrage of local ads in major markets or a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal or
Big loss for George. Let's see how he handles it now.
D
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Realistically, I don't think Corel has anywhere else to go - if they are to extend their Office suite and other mainstream software, they need to do it on a mass-market platform other than Windows.
So I think they are committed, like it or not.
D
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For some reason, despite putting links in the article, they vanished. Could some kind soul tell me how to put a link in an article here? I know people are doing it, but it seems to elude me :-(.
m
Anyway, the links:
CapAlert:
http://www.capalert.com
Their Toy Story II Review
http://www.capalert.com/capreports/toystory2.ht
D
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A few months ago, Slashdot linked to these people. I get a bit of a laugh out of their single-minded perspective, but I was surprised to see that even they liked Toy Story II, they even gave it the coveted "Yellow Light" rating. This valuable rating means that the film is only somewhat dangerous to children! (I think there are about three films ever made that got the coveted "Green Light").
All kidding aside, I'm their sworn enemy personally, but I find their reviews and analysis amusing, so if you want a laugh or want to see the real Christian perspective on Toy Story II, by all means check out their review.
D
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existed as a much-loved creation between 1987, when I bought an already ageing 286 with 4MB RAM and Microport Unix and 1991, when the hard drive finally gave up the ghost.
The best thing about it is that we had user meetings, everyone could get together, and I met enough women through it to make my life interesting. Now, the most interesting women I encounter are not just in other cities, try other countries!
On the other hand, I was always trying to figure out a good balance between free speech and censorship. I believe in free speech; many of my users hated the consequences, because one or two disruptive people can really do bad things to the system. I have to say that Slashdot has a better compromise between the two ideals than anything I've seen, and if I were running a large-scale message board system, I'd take many of the ideas to heart.
I always liked fooling around with the technology of online matchmaking - it's always been something I've been passionate about, considering that people are increasingly paranoid and disassociated from their communities. I think that's a lot of what caused BBSes to decline in such dramatic terms when the Internet came to town.
But still, come visit my latest matchmaking experiment if you feel in the mood - it's at http://207.151.18.18/ and it uses a lot of the same ideas I first hatched when I had my BBS years ago. Incidentally, if you tried this when I last announced it, I've had a bit of a technical goof and you'll have to go through a quick procedure to re-find your account.
Hope you'll visit!
D
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If they can legally change any information on your computer, clearly they can already restrict criticism of their policies - and anything else they might want to, too.
D
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I have a friend who thinks the same thing about Y2k, so no, you're not alone.
:-) ).
But I wouldn't be so happy about living in Canada. I knew a wonderful Canadian woman once, and one of the few disagreements we had was about freedom. She really believed (and still believes, as far as I know) in government serving the public interest, and told me it's a common Canadian attitude. Bad in many respects as the situation in the US is, at least we have a large number of people who really distrust government, period. I think that helps counterbalance the censors, even though eternal vigilance is still unfortunately necessary.
D
(I gotta get back on Fight-Censorship
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Well, sometimes people who insist on using Windows for their projects throw money at me, and so I use Windows on their behalf. However, except for those cases, I've been completely Windows-free for years.
:-).
I use MacOS and BeOS for graphics and video, Irix and Linux for everything else. And I'm happy as a clam as long as I don't need to use Windows
Now, in terms of Windows unfortunately ruling the PC world, of course it does. I liked that Motley Fool article from yesterday. Its key statement in my eyes is that any alternative to an existing dominant system has to find a niche where it can grow more or less undisturbed until it finds critical mass. That niche has been the server.
Remember how long it took for Windows to completely win over DOS? Even now, I'll bet there are a million or two DOS machines still out there in active use. Linux could eventually dominate in the same way, slowly but surely.
It's happening; just have patience.
D
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A good, intelligent reply except for one thing. You go to the wrong bricks and mortar stores. I've found Samy's Camera in Hollywood to never be less than totally helpful, and they're great folks who love cameras. And, incidentally, contrary to what you'd probably expect, they undercut Good Guys et al on price.
People who buy cameras at places like Circuit City or Fry's get what they deserve.
Otherwise, what your response proves is that people have widely divergent shopping styles. At the same time, if you buy the XL1 via the net now, you probably would have bought it via mail order two years ago. Retail sales at a local level haven't changed.
D
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Work with me a bit here, because as you probably know I'm a real SGI booster most of the time.
But what of the announcement that they plan to keep Irix going until 2006? That would seem to indicate Irix is on the way out.
D
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Here are a few scenerios to think about:
(1) I'm about to grab a bite to eat and I want something to read while I'm eating. I go to the bookstore, find something that suits my current mood, and go to lunch. 0% chance I'd switch that to an online transaction.
(2) Someone tells me that I have to read this book. It's much cheaper online than it would be in the local bookstore, but if I go to my local bookstore I could have it right now. 50% chance I'll buy it online, increasing dramatically if it's a particularly expensive book, decreasing to zero if it's below, say, $ 15.
(3) There is a subject I've been curious about that's rather obscure. I go to amazon.com and find a book on that subject with favourable customer reviews. 100% chance I'll buy online. But I'll go to the bookstore too and I have a nearly 100% chance that I'll buy what I see there, too.
(4) I want a Canon XL1 MiniDV camcorder, a product which, at the time I bought it, sold for about $4,400. I could get it more cheaply via mail order or online, but if there was a problem it would be a hassle to return, and I don't really know if the online store I see has it in stock. 0% chance I'll buy online; I want customer service.
In general, what I've found out is that I'll spend more on books overall than I did before online book retailers. Instead of passing up a $50 book because I can't afford it, I'll buy it online and get a good discount. But I'll still buy that $5-20 book or magazine and read it during lunch. I don't think bricks and mortar bookstores have much missed me, since I still buy from them all the time; there's nothing like being able to see and read what you're buying before you plunk down your money.
So in sum, I really don't think bricks and mortar are on their way out. In fact, I think online retailing expands the total market more than it crowds out offline stores. In my case, that's certainly been true.
D
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I don't think it's too fair to criticise SGI so heavily for a policy that's been corrected since Irix 6.x was introduced some years back.
I will admit that SGI's price list is fun to read for sheer laugh value - just check out their prices for external disk drives if you want proof. Of course this may be one reason companies have been moving towards NT. SGI may well have been penny wise and pound foolish here.
That aside, I'd say the IDO for any version of Irix is one of the most frequently pirated pieces of software in the workstation world. Ask for a copy when you buy your next SGI machine; odds are that you'll get it. SGI seems to be turning a tactful blind eye to this sort of thing, so I wouldn't be so snippy towards them.
D
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I think it's important to note that their MIPS line of workstations, such as the O2, Octane, etc is still being sold. They're out of the NT workstation biz, but not out of the workstation biz period.
About a year ago when they introduced the NT line, I predicted that they would be unable to sell into what is largely a commodity market. Clearly, I was right.
Personally, I think they should abandon their plans to abandon Irix, which makes their high-end hardware feel distinctly orphan-ish. Either do that, or port Linux to the old machines so they won't become obsolete quickly.
Of course I'm still using my circa 1994 Indigo2, and I still love it. If SGI depreciation in the marketplace continues at this pace, I'll be able to afford a dual-processor Octane soon. But I'll cry for the company as I sign the check.
D
PS Happy Thanksgiving, Slashdot!
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