Netscape 7 for Solaris is available for download deep within Sun's site. You should be able to find it with a Sun Solaris Netscape google search string.
SGI no longer ports Netscape, 4.80 was their last version. They now port Mozilla instead. There are three places to get Mozilla for IRIX: * The latest IRIX Applications CD (ships with each quarterly IRIX update) has the oldest supported version (currently 1.0.2 -- same version that Netscape 7.02 uses). * The IRIX Freeware Collection (http://freeware.sgi.com) has a more recent version, but can be as much as 4 months old. * The SGI OSS Site (http://oss.sgi.com) has sporadic builds. Though the front page mentions 1.4a, if you surf you way to the Mozilla Download section you'll find 1.4rc1. I've been told indirectly that 1.4 final will be posted soon.
For IRIX, the easiest way to install Mozilla is to fire up Software Manager and tell it to look at the freeware collection. Deselect everything ("unmark all") and then select just Mozilla (or Phoenix, or Evolution, or whatever you really want to install...). You may have to click the conflicts button and work out any dependencies that arise. The magic command is: swmgr -f http://freeware.sgi.com/Inst/ (you need that trailing slash, and give it plenty of time to load... it takes about 2 minutes on an O2 R10K/250 on a decent DSL connection).
In the case of IRIX, SGI is just facing reality: they've never made a dent in the desktop market, and it's not worth spending money to make their workstations do things people can do more cheaply with Wintel systems. When I worked there, they didn't even have up-to-date Quicktime codecs!
This is somewhat true. However, SGI does work on an IRIX port of Mozilla. Their OSS site has some builds of Mozilla, as does their Freeware site. The most recent available now is 1.4rc1, but 1.4 will be in the next quarterly Freeware update. Mozilla 1.02 currently ships with the most recent version of IRIX and will be replaced with 1.4 (or maybe 1.4.1) later this year.
Heck, if you want to dig thru even more of their freeware collection, visit the site or use the following exact string to have Software Manager connect to it directly: swmgr -f http://freeware.sgi.com/Inst/ (you -do- need that tailing slash)
As far as the Quicktime codecs, that's more of a matter of customer demand. Most of SGI's customers use their machines to work on uncompressed HD video with software like Discreet Inferno or IFX Piranha. True, it would be nice to be able to view modern compressed Quicktime video on an IRIX box, but it's not needed by most of their customers. They are slowly supporting more off the shelf hardware, which is nice. IRIX 6.5.20 and newer support the Revolution 7.1 PCI sound card, which is waaaay cheaper than using SGI's digital audio card and a breakout box or mixer.
Next week: proper use of "AKA"
on
Isn't It Ironic?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If there's one term that, when used incorrectly, bugs me more than "irony", it's "AKA". I've often seen it misued as a replacement for "i.e." or "e.g." but there have been some worse offenders.
Example: There are some OSes out there that really suck... AKA Windows 95
Or worse yet: Man I'm tired from all of that work, AKA I partied all night.
You've conveniently left out the fact that iChat sucks up a whopping 600 kbps for its stream.
That can be adjusted with the pointy-clicky GUI, I use 400 kbps and it looks just fine.
If the opposite was the case, and GnomeMeeting used 600 kbps and I were complaining, I'd probably be flamed by being told to get with the times and upgrade to a faster form of "broadband".
No, that would apply to the G4, too. There isn't much difference between the two. G4 == G3 + altivec.
This is correct for straight integer and some floating point. The G4 uses its much faster AltiVec unit for FP wherever possible. Also, most graphical routines in OS X (including the codecs used by Quicktime and iChat) make heavy use of AltiVec. Generic int+fp non-graphical benchmarks show the G4 to be very similar to the G3, but real world use is far different. Photoshop, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, as well as the overall feel of OS X is far better on a G4, so long as there's not a huge difference in clockspeed. My own example is with a G4/400 tower and a G3/600 iMac. For most tasks, the G4 feels much faster. Compiling with Apple's version of gcc, the iMac's G3 is faster.
A 600 MHz G3 would smoke a 350 MHz G4.
Your use of the word "smoke" suggests that you have not yet finished junior high and spend far too much time at hardocp.com.
Another thing that should be noted is iChatAV requires at least a 600mhz machine in order to send video.
This is partially due to the very high quality codec being used. However, it will work on slower processors if the bandwidth limit is turned on. Without bandwidth limitations, the app brought my G4/400 to a crawl. With the limit turned on to 400kbps, it runs just fine and the quality is still very nice.
The only other modern compilers Apple could have used are 32-bit compilers... Motorola's MrC and Metrowerks' CodeWarrior.
Metrowerks is owned by Motorola!
However, IBM does write their own commercial (read: not gcc) compiler for the Power4, from which the PowerPC 970 is based. Perhaps Apple could have overhauled and used that compiler.
Re:This will be another solid update
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 2, Interesting
MS may be evil, but they never forced me to buy a new version of windows to get the latest web browser.
You will now. MSIE 6.0 SP1 was the last release for Win98/Me/2K. Future versions will require a full OS update.
Also, there's nothing keeping you from running Firebird or Camino on your Mac.
As a few other folks have pointed out on the usenet, there doesn't seem to be any new IRIX nightlies. While the other platforms have binaries built about once a day, the most recent IRIX nightly is from late May.
Does anyone from the Mozilla project happen to know what the problem is? Is there something that we IRIX users/developers can do to help? If it's a hardware need, I can probably spare an Octane or two to help the Mozilla project.
Re:For those unfortunate times...
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
they haven't solved all the problems with things like headlights, which work quite a bit better at 12 Volts than at 42
My guess is that most 36/42 volt cars will have xenon-arc HID lamps. The retail cost on those has gone from $5K - $500 in a very short period of time and will probably keep dropping. A typical Kia may never have HIDs, but most cars probably will. Now if only folks will keep their damned lenses clean and reflectors balanced to cut down on the glare!
There are a lot of other parts that will have to change with the times soon, such as all of the little motors (blowers, seat motors, trunk/door closers, etc).
Re:Many existing vehicles have parallel 12v batter
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
Most diesel pickup trucks have two 12v batteries wired in parallel to help crank the starter (diesel engines have a much higher compression ratio than gasolines). Some gasoline cars do too, one such example is the previous generation BMW 750i V12.
I should clarify... the previous generation BMW 750i (1995 - 2001) used two 12v batteries in parallel for more amperage to its 12v electrical system. It was not a 24v setup.
I have no idea what current BMWs use, for all I know, they could be using 440v three phase AC.
Many existing vehicles have parallel 12v batteries
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
What is really needed more is a 12 volt battery that can provide current for longer periods of time. I would rather see a parallel system. 2 12 volt batteries with either 2 alternantors (one for car and all of it's internal acessories and one for the external plugin ones. Also, the second battery could also be charged off of regenerative brakes and or solar cells as well as a alternator.
Most diesel pickup trucks have two 12v batteries wired in parallel to help crank the starter (diesel engines have a much higher compression ratio than gasolines). Some gasoline cars do too, one such example is the previous generation BMW 750i V12.
Most large trucks and tractors use batteries in parallel, though they're not all wired exactly the same (some use two 12v batteries in series for 24v, others use two 12v batteries in parallel for more amps at 12v.... and some use three, four, or six batteries).
Many motorhomes (self propelled RVs) have two banks of batteries, one for starting the engine and one for all of the accessories. The engine battery is usually a typical "lots of amps for a few seconds" cranking type, and the accessory batteries are usually "fewer amps, but for a longer duration" deep cycle type.
dang, I need a jumpstart...
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This will be really nice when I find myself needing a jump... now I'll need three or four 12v batteries daisy chained to do a jumpstart.
Not to mention the other downsides (easier to get shocked from 36+ volts, easier for the electrical system to fry itself in a flood situation, etc).
Is it just me, or is the automotive industry quickly moving to purely disposable/recycleable cars? When I look at a 2003 model car, I have a hard time picturing it still running and still together in 15 years. Really makes me wonder what a 2010 model car will be like.
Great song, just bought it via iTunes. "C W McCall" had some great music, I loved the one about the Willys Jeep. Bill Fries did the singing and Chip Davis composed the music (Davis is also the fellow behind Manheim Steamroller).
As far as I know, John Deere paints everything they sell green.
John Deere agriculture equipment is green (with yellow trim and rims), though Deere industrial equipment (dozers, road graders, payloaders, etc) is painted solid yellow.
Funny thing is, the original piece of Deere equipment was painted red (Mr. John Deere's original horse-drawn self-cleaning plow).
IRIX version information?
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Perhaps someone from the Mozilla project will read this...
I notice that there's an IRIX version of Mozilla available from the nightly build collection, yet there is no IRIX version on the offical releases page. I know SGI maintains a port of IRIX on their OSS and freeware sites, but these are usually out of date. I think it would be nice to see an IRIX download of the final releases on the actual Mozilla site. If the hardware already exists to build the nightlies, I wouldn't imagine it would take much time or effort to build and tar up the final versions for download as well.
Or at the very least, how about add the links to SGI's two download sites to the Mozilla release notes. OpenVMS is even listed!
Just my $0.02. I've been using the nightlies for a few weeks now and am very happy with the progress that has been made since Mozilla 1.0.
Re:fvwm allowed me to make my perfect linux deskto
on
fvwm Turns Ten
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· Score: 1
To answer a question my smartass roommate asked... yes I do have a nice background "wallpaper" image... I'm not so hardcore that I use a solid color or worse yet, greyweave as my root image.
(Bonus points to those that have mucked around with X11 enough to know what greyweave is).
fvwm allowed me to make my perfect linux desktop
on
fvwm Turns Ten
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
After trying out kde, gnome and xfce, I went back to fvwm and couldn't be happer with my current setup. The only thing on my desktop when I login is a single xterm. I can launch anything I need from there, but I also spent some time to customize my root menu (right-click on desktop) to give me quick access to the apps and scripts I use the most (including xterm -- I forgot to put that in their the first time around... didn't notice it until I accidently closed my one and only xterm -- oops!)
Is it true that Steve Jobs has a Dell PC on his desk?
This has been discussed several times before. Up until just recently, Steve Jobs had a Dell PC on his desks at both Pixar and Apple. These machines were not running Windows, but rather OpenStep, the OS made by NeXT, his former company. He was also known to have Toshiba and IBM laptops running NeXTstep and OpenStep as well. In fact, Jobs' presentations were originally done off his OpenStep laptop running what later became Keynote for Mac OS X.
He now uses a G4 minitower, apparently Mac OS X is now up to his standards.
It's no longer online, but OmniGroup (makers of OmniWeb for NeXTstep, OpenStep, and now, Mac OS X) once had a quote from a Pixar sysadmin on their Raves & Reviews page. Something like this: "I need to renew our OmniWeb license for Steve Jobs. He loves your application, but the current license is set to expire about a day before he returns, please send me the updated license so I don't have to fear for my life". =)
You're talking about CrayLink [ibm.com], which is the memory sharing technology in SGI MIPS supers. Supposedly SGI bought Cray just to get the patent--a purchase that cost them a lot of money, very little of which they got back when they sold Cray off again. But IBM and Sun have similar technologies. Whether they're as good as CrayLink, I couldn't say. Still, SGI Origin series no longer dominates the supercomputer market [top500.org].
SGI's scalable numa architecture is an offshoot of Stanford University's DASH project. The "Cray" in CrayLink was done for marketing reasons. The original productized version of the Cray Link interconnects was in the Origin 2000 (SN0), at 1.6 GByte/sec per cable with up to six cables to each node. In Origin 3000 (SN1) it's 3.2 GByte/sec. In Altix(SN2) it's up to 6.4 GByte/sec. SGI has put a lot of work into keeping the latency of both the NumaLink architecture and its software very low... even on a 1024 processor machine.
The ranking on Top500 is mostly CPU-based. Cluster-type machines tend to score very well as I/O thruput isn't reflected very well in the benchmark. Most users need all the CPU they can get, but there are still many that need insane amounts of I/O... for those sorts of people, there's the Origin and Altix.
Altix is a great machine... currently 64 processors in a single machine (not a cluster) with insanely high I/O (over an order of magnitude faster than the nearest "competition" and almost an order of magnitude less latency).
The problem with Altix is finding users for the machine. Traditional supercomputer users are buying Origins, Crays, or even IBM Power4 clusters. The Linux HPC world is mostly ethernet or myrinet cluster based and not used to the higher prices of systems like the Altix.
The only thing that's suprising is that they still have 400 people left to layoff!
After this layoff, SGI is down to 3600 employees.... which is much for a company has needs to maintain and continue building machines like the Origin 3900 (up to 512 processors in a single image machine, not a cluster)... the Altix (Linux / Itanium version of the Origin) and the kernel patches needed to scale Linux.... graphics like Infinite Reality 4 (11 GB of gfx ram and insane texturing hardware).
SGI's lack of employees is already showing, with the V12 graphics of the Fuel and Octane2 starting to lag behind as you pointed out....
V12 is more than enough for real-time HD video editing and compositing (provided you have enough ram and a large, fast set of fibrechannel disk arrays plugged into your Octane2).... but the card isn't designed for VisSim or Modeling tasks.... a dual Xeon and a Wildcat 7210 would be a better choice for Maya.
Slashdot Mirror
Netscape 7 for Solaris is available for download deep within Sun's site. You should be able to find it with a Sun Solaris Netscape google search string.
SGI no longer ports Netscape, 4.80 was their last version. They now port Mozilla instead. There are three places to get Mozilla for IRIX:
* The latest IRIX Applications CD (ships with each quarterly IRIX update) has the oldest supported version (currently 1.0.2 -- same version that Netscape 7.02 uses).
* The IRIX Freeware Collection (http://freeware.sgi.com) has a more recent version, but can be as much as 4 months old.
* The SGI OSS Site (http://oss.sgi.com) has sporadic builds. Though the front page mentions 1.4a, if you surf you way to the Mozilla Download section you'll find 1.4rc1. I've been told indirectly that 1.4 final will be posted soon.
For IRIX, the easiest way to install Mozilla is to fire up Software Manager and tell it to look at the freeware collection. Deselect everything ("unmark all") and then select just Mozilla (or Phoenix, or Evolution, or whatever you really want to install...). You may have to click the conflicts button and work out any dependencies that arise.
The magic command is:
swmgr -f http://freeware.sgi.com/Inst/
(you need that trailing slash, and give it plenty of time to load... it takes about 2 minutes on an O2 R10K/250 on a decent DSL connection).
In the case of IRIX, SGI is just facing reality: they've never made a dent in the desktop market, and it's not worth spending money to make their workstations do things people can do more cheaply with Wintel systems. When I worked there, they didn't even have up-to-date Quicktime codecs!
This is somewhat true. However, SGI does work on an IRIX port of Mozilla. Their OSS site has some builds of Mozilla, as does their Freeware site. The most recent available now is 1.4rc1, but 1.4 will be in the next quarterly Freeware update. Mozilla 1.02 currently ships with the most recent version of IRIX and will be replaced with 1.4 (or maybe 1.4.1) later this year.
Heck, if you want to dig thru even more of their freeware collection, visit the site or use the following exact string to have Software Manager connect to it directly:
swmgr -f http://freeware.sgi.com/Inst/
(you -do- need that tailing slash)
As far as the Quicktime codecs, that's more of a matter of customer demand. Most of SGI's customers use their machines to work on uncompressed HD video with software like Discreet Inferno or IFX Piranha. True, it would be nice to be able to view modern compressed Quicktime video on an IRIX box, but it's not needed by most of their customers. They are slowly supporting more off the shelf hardware, which is nice. IRIX 6.5.20 and newer support the Revolution 7.1 PCI sound card, which is waaaay cheaper than using SGI's digital audio card and a breakout box or mixer.
If there's one term that, when used incorrectly, bugs me more than "irony", it's "AKA". I've often seen it misued as a replacement for "i.e." or "e.g." but there have been some worse offenders.
Example:
There are some OSes out there that really suck... AKA Windows 95
Or worse yet:
Man I'm tired from all of that work, AKA I partied all night.
Ugh.
You've conveniently left out the fact that iChat sucks up a whopping 600 kbps for its stream.
That can be adjusted with the pointy-clicky GUI, I use 400 kbps and it looks just fine.
If the opposite was the case, and GnomeMeeting used 600 kbps and I were complaining, I'd probably be flamed by being told to get with the times and upgrade to a faster form of "broadband".
No, that would apply to the G4, too. There isn't much difference between the two. G4 == G3 + altivec.
This is correct for straight integer and some floating point. The G4 uses its much faster AltiVec unit for FP wherever possible. Also, most graphical routines in OS X (including the codecs used by Quicktime and iChat) make heavy use of AltiVec. Generic int+fp non-graphical benchmarks show the G4 to be very similar to the G3, but real world use is far different. Photoshop, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, as well as the overall feel of OS X is far better on a G4, so long as there's not a huge difference in clockspeed. My own example is with a G4/400 tower and a G3/600 iMac. For most tasks, the G4 feels much faster. Compiling with Apple's version of gcc, the iMac's G3 is faster.
A 600 MHz G3 would smoke a 350 MHz G4.
Your use of the word "smoke" suggests that you have not yet finished junior high and spend far too much time at hardocp.com.
Another thing that should be noted is iChatAV requires at least a 600mhz machine in order to send video.
This is partially due to the very high quality codec being used. However, it will work on slower processors if the bandwidth limit is turned on. Without bandwidth limitations, the app brought my G4/400 to a crawl. With the limit turned on to 400kbps, it runs just fine and the quality is still very nice.
The only other modern compilers Apple could have used are 32-bit compilers... Motorola's MrC and Metrowerks' CodeWarrior.
Metrowerks is owned by Motorola!
However, IBM does write their own commercial (read: not gcc) compiler for the Power4, from which the PowerPC 970 is based. Perhaps Apple could have overhauled and used that compiler.
MS may be evil, but they never forced me to buy a new version of windows to get the latest web browser.
You will now. MSIE 6.0 SP1 was the last release for Win98/Me/2K. Future versions will require a full OS update.
Also, there's nothing keeping you from running Firebird or Camino on your Mac.
As a few other folks have pointed out on the usenet, there doesn't seem to be any new IRIX nightlies. While the other platforms have binaries built about once a day, the most recent IRIX nightly is from late May.
Does anyone from the Mozilla project happen to know what the problem is? Is there something that we IRIX users/developers can do to help? If it's a hardware need, I can probably spare an Octane or two to help the Mozilla project.
they haven't solved all the problems with things like headlights, which work quite a bit better at 12 Volts than at 42
My guess is that most 36/42 volt cars will have xenon-arc HID lamps. The retail cost on those has gone from $5K - $500 in a very short period of time and will probably keep dropping. A typical Kia may never have HIDs, but most cars probably will. Now if only folks will keep their damned lenses clean and reflectors balanced to cut down on the glare!
There are a lot of other parts that will have to change with the times soon, such as all of the little motors (blowers, seat motors, trunk/door closers, etc).
Most diesel pickup trucks have two 12v batteries wired in parallel to help crank the starter (diesel engines have a much higher compression ratio than gasolines). Some gasoline cars do too, one such example is the previous generation BMW 750i V12.
I should clarify... the previous generation BMW 750i (1995 - 2001) used two 12v batteries in parallel for more amperage to its 12v electrical system. It was not a 24v setup.
I have no idea what current BMWs use, for all I know, they could be using 440v three phase AC.
What is really needed more is a 12 volt battery that can provide current for longer periods of time. I would rather see a parallel system. 2 12 volt batteries with either 2 alternantors (one for car and all of it's internal acessories and one for the external plugin ones. Also, the second battery could also be charged off of regenerative brakes and or solar cells as well as a alternator.
Most diesel pickup trucks have two 12v batteries wired in parallel to help crank the starter (diesel engines have a much higher compression ratio than gasolines). Some gasoline cars do too, one such example is the previous generation BMW 750i V12.
Most large trucks and tractors use batteries in parallel, though they're not all wired exactly the same (some use two 12v batteries in series for 24v, others use two 12v batteries in parallel for more amps at 12v.... and some use three, four, or six batteries).
Many motorhomes (self propelled RVs) have two banks of batteries, one for starting the engine and one for all of the accessories. The engine battery is usually a typical "lots of amps for a few seconds" cranking type, and the accessory batteries are usually "fewer amps, but for a longer duration" deep cycle type.
This will be really nice when I find myself needing a jump... now I'll need three or four 12v batteries daisy chained to do a jumpstart.
Not to mention the other downsides (easier to get shocked from 36+ volts, easier for the electrical system to fry itself in a flood situation, etc).
Is it just me, or is the automotive industry quickly moving to purely disposable/recycleable cars? When I look at a 2003 model car, I have a hard time picturing it still running and still together in 15 years. Really makes me wonder what a 2010 model car will be like.
http://www.narrowgauge.org/4x4/cw_pages/lyrics/rea l/convoy.html
Great song, just bought it via iTunes. "C W McCall" had some great music, I loved the one about the Willys Jeep. Bill Fries did the singing and Chip Davis composed the music (Davis is also the fellow behind Manheim Steamroller).
With appologies to Joe Diffie...J /johndeeregreen.html
http://members.ispwest.com/queenaggravain/lyrics/
As far as I know, John Deere paints everything they sell green.
John Deere agriculture equipment is green (with yellow trim and rims), though Deere industrial equipment (dozers, road graders, payloaders, etc) is painted solid yellow.
Funny thing is, the original piece of Deere equipment was painted red (Mr. John Deere's original horse-drawn self-cleaning plow).
http://www.deere.com
Perhaps someone from the Mozilla project will read this...
I notice that there's an IRIX version of Mozilla available from the nightly build collection, yet there is no IRIX version on the offical releases page. I know SGI maintains a port of IRIX on their OSS and freeware sites, but these are usually out of date. I think it would be nice to see an IRIX download of the final releases on the actual Mozilla site. If the hardware already exists to build the nightlies, I wouldn't imagine it would take much time or effort to build and tar up the final versions for download as well.
Or at the very least, how about add the links to SGI's two download sites to the Mozilla release notes. OpenVMS is even listed!
Just my $0.02. I've been using the nightlies for a few weeks now and am very happy with the progress that has been made since Mozilla 1.0.
To answer a question my smartass roommate asked... yes I do have a nice background "wallpaper" image... I'm not so hardcore that I use a solid color or worse yet, greyweave as my root image.
(Bonus points to those that have mucked around with X11 enough to know what greyweave is).
After trying out kde, gnome and xfce, I went back to fvwm and couldn't be happer with my current setup. The only thing on my desktop when I login is a single xterm. I can launch anything I need from there, but I also spent some time to customize my root menu (right-click on desktop) to give me quick access to the apps and scripts I use the most (including xterm -- I forgot to put that in their the first time around... didn't notice it until I accidently closed my one and only xterm -- oops!)
Is it true that Steve Jobs has a Dell PC on his desk?
This has been discussed several times before. Up until just recently, Steve Jobs had a Dell PC on his desks at both Pixar and Apple. These machines were not running Windows, but rather OpenStep, the OS made by NeXT, his former company. He was also known to have Toshiba and IBM laptops running NeXTstep and OpenStep as well. In fact, Jobs' presentations were originally done off his OpenStep laptop running what later became Keynote for Mac OS X.
He now uses a G4 minitower, apparently Mac OS X is now up to his standards.
It's no longer online, but OmniGroup (makers of OmniWeb for NeXTstep, OpenStep, and now, Mac OS X) once had a quote from a Pixar sysadmin on their Raves & Reviews page. Something like this: "I need to renew our OmniWeb license for Steve Jobs. He loves your application, but the current license is set to expire about a day before he returns, please send me the updated license so I don't have to fear for my life". =)
http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html
SGI's biggest enemy is itself.
You're talking about CrayLink [ibm.com], which is the memory sharing technology in SGI MIPS supers. Supposedly SGI bought Cray just to get the patent--a purchase that cost them a lot of money, very little of which they got back when they sold Cray off again. But IBM and Sun have similar technologies. Whether they're as good as CrayLink, I couldn't say. Still, SGI Origin series no longer dominates the supercomputer market [top500.org].
SGI's scalable numa architecture is an offshoot of Stanford University's DASH project. The "Cray" in CrayLink was done for marketing reasons. The original productized version of the Cray Link interconnects was in the Origin 2000 (SN0), at 1.6 GByte/sec per cable with up to six cables to each node. In Origin 3000 (SN1) it's 3.2 GByte/sec. In Altix(SN2) it's up to 6.4 GByte/sec. SGI has put a lot of work into keeping the latency of both the NumaLink architecture and its software very low... even on a 1024 processor machine.
The ranking on Top500 is mostly CPU-based. Cluster-type machines tend to score very well as I/O thruput isn't reflected very well in the benchmark. Most users need all the CPU they can get, but there are still many that need insane amounts of I/O... for those sorts of people, there's the Origin and Altix.
Altix is a great machine... currently 64 processors in a single machine (not a cluster) with insanely high I/O (over an order of magnitude faster than the nearest "competition" and almost an order of magnitude less latency).
The problem with Altix is finding users for the machine. Traditional supercomputer users are buying Origins, Crays, or even IBM Power4 clusters. The Linux HPC world is mostly ethernet or myrinet cluster based and not used to the higher prices of systems like the Altix.
The only thing that's suprising is that they still have 400 people left to layoff!
After this layoff, SGI is down to 3600 employees.... which is much for a company has needs to maintain and continue building machines like the Origin 3900 (up to 512 processors in a single image machine, not a cluster)... the Altix (Linux / Itanium version of the Origin) and the kernel patches needed to scale Linux.... graphics like Infinite Reality 4 (11 GB of gfx ram and insane texturing hardware).
SGI's lack of employees is already showing, with the V12 graphics of the Fuel and Octane2 starting to lag behind as you pointed out....
V12 is more than enough for real-time HD video editing and compositing (provided you have enough ram and a large, fast set of fibrechannel disk arrays plugged into your Octane2).... but the card isn't designed for VisSim or Modeling tasks.... a dual Xeon and a Wildcat 7210 would be a better choice for Maya.