If you decided to create a Windows clone, what would be the first thing you'd do? Maybe some general architecture specs? Maybe start on some code? Well, according to their page, the first thing that these guys are doing is working on the startup and shutdown screens!
Attention would-be artists. OW is looking for artwork. We want your ideas for startup/shudown and off screens. We will accept submissions until 15 August. At that time the public will vote on the winning screens.
Aren't we getting just a wee bit ahead of ourselves here? To top it all off, their website has already been redesigned with "a cleaner look and a greater public face for the project".
This article is very interesting because news of Espy's passing apparently made it to his Debian and Internet friends quite quickly.
However, many of us, such as myself have electronic and "real" lives that are very separate. I have some great friends on IRC and what not that have never met me in real life and probably don't even know my phone number. If I were to pass on today, would they ever find out? I suppose if you are famous, word gets around quickly, but what about the not-so-famous?
Using IRC as an example, I wonder how many people have died and disappeared from a channel only to have the regulars assume that they just got sick of IRC and quit.
Well said. I think all of the *nix'es have their specialties. I use Linux on my laptop, FreeBSD on my desktop and web servers, and OpenBSD on my firewall.
I will say this, though. New Linux users need to be very careful in their choice of distributions. You'll find that the security, performance, and reliability does vary from Linux distribution to distribution.
Am I going blind or are all those graphs damned near impossible to read? They were done in JPEG format which is sub-optimal for graphs and text. I found it almost impossible to correlate the legend with the data points. It sure would be nice to see them in PNG format.
200ppi sounds nice. It's certainly more than the 110ppi I get with my SGI 1600SW flatpanel. Still, I think I'll stick with my SGI. First of all, you can pick up one for around $3000 mas o menos. Secondly, the "sexiness" of this monitor is second-to-none. SGI did a beautiful job styling this flatpanel. The lines are just as nice when viewed from behind as they are from the front. I've also noticed that, unlike the Sony GDM-F500R monitor (which is Sony's top-end) that sits next to it on my desk, the SGI flatpanel is polarized. I noticed this when I wore my polarized shades into my office one day and saw the screen turn black when I cocked my head 45 degrees to either side. I'm wondering why Sony isn't doing this with their monitors. I think the polarization is what gives the SGI flatpanel its extraordinary anti-glare ability. My office has several large windows behind the desk and in the early afternoon (like right now), it's almost impossible to see the Sony monitor without the blinds closed. Even with the blinds open, the SGI flatpanel is as bright and contrasty as always.
For a while, the big let-down about this flatpanel was SGI's use of the (now defunct) #9 Revolution IV graphics card and the so-called "OpenLDI" digital interface. Basically, it meant that one card and one card only worked with this monitor. But recently, SGI has released a VGA-to-LDI adapter that lets you hook any video card up to the flatpanel. The question I have is: what video card (besides the #9) supports the SGI's funky (yet wonderful) 1600x1024 resolution?
Yeah, the IBM flatpanel sounds nice, but I think I'd take three SGI flatpanels on my desk instead.
Sorry to burst your bubble CmdrTaco, but the "Pinball Wizard" trademark is perfectly acceptable, even though there was an old song by the same name. Two companies may trademark the same word as long as their customers could not potentially confuse the two products. Here's a quote from the USPTO's Basic Facts About Trademarks:
To determine whether there is a conflict between two marks, the PTO determines whether there would be likelihood of confusion, that is, whether relevant consumers would be likely to associate the goods or services of one party with those of the other party as a result of the use of the marks at issue by both parties. The principal factors to be considered in reaching this decision are the similarity of the marks and the commercial relationship between the goods and services identified by the marks. To find a conflict, the marks need not be identical, and the goods and services do not have to be the same.
If you're sailing in the Gulf of Mexico, there's a decent chance that your regular old digital cellphone will work. Apparently, some enterprising companies have set up a lot of cell towers near/on oil rigs for the offshore employees to call home with. I'm not sure how far out you can go and still get signals. We were about 60 miles out when I found out about this. The good thing is, line of sight on the ocean is pretty damned far!
A lot of comments so far have brought up a good point, though. You're sailing! What the hell do you need e-mail for?!?! Me, I'm tied to this damned computer/laptop/cellphone for about 50 weeks a year. During the couple of weeks that I'm on vacation, I like to get as far away from this crap as I possibly can. I don't really miss it, either. Sure, it's always nice to come back home and have a mailbox full of messages from friends and family and to catch up on/. or whatever... When I'm out at sea, the only think electronics that I want to mess with is the GPS and the radar.
There's nothing like grilling up some kingfish that you caught earlier in the day with some italian salad dressing marianade and a nice plate of rice. Sit and watch the sun set while sipping on a Myers and Coke, while listening to some Jimmy Buffett. Why would you want to screw that up by reading e-mail from work?
Why does everyone make such a big deal about their hardware/software supporting XML? XML IS A DAMNED TEXT FILE! You can code a good XML parser in about 20 minutes.
"Check out our new server line, the Whizbang Series! The Whizbang 3000 has hardware level support for comma-delimited ASCII, which will revolutionize the way your company does B2B transactions! Never again will you sit for hours, waiting for that Purchase Order to be processed!"
Regardless of which IMAP server you use, I would reccomend that you still make a POP3 server available. If you go with Cyrus, I'm not sure if this is possible but I know you can mix UW IMAPd and other POP3 servers.
For POP3, I highly, highly reccomend cucipop. Search for it on Freshmeat. If you're commercial though, you might want to review its licensing terms. Cucipop's advantage over qpopper is that Cucipop runs as a standalone daemon. This makes a *huge* speed difference on lightly loaded POP3 servers and an unbelievable speed difference on a heavily-loaded server. When I switched to cucipop, I actually got comments from users who noticed how much faster "netscape checked mail".
As far as Windows-based clients go... I like Eudora myself. It's IMAP support is kinda funky--it stubbornly insists that each server be a subfolder of your main inbox folder. I don't like huge nests of mail folders so I find this annoying. To get around this, I just use POP3. Outlook is a bloated pig and seemed difficult to customize. Outlook's calendaring is nice but there's probably a standalone calendaring app that does just fine. Netscape Communicator does IMAP nicely but I don't like the lack of customization options.
For *nix clients, pick your poison. I'm sure some folks here will flame this but if your *nix clients have good NFS file locking support, you can't beat exporting/var/mail to your local network and letting people mount and read mail from this partition. If you don't want to do that, POP3 retreival to users' local machines with fetchmail works nicely.
For MTAs, take a look at Exim. Exim is very fast and I found it a bit easier to configure than Sendmail. Exim's filtering capabilities are top-notch and you don't have to have a PhD to implement them.
For OSes, I'm a FreeBSD bigot so I'd urge you to give FreeBSD a try. I used Linux starting in 1994 but switched to FreeBSD when I got tired of patching up the million and one r00t exploits that my Linux boxes were vulnerable. FreeBSD is fast and very stable--our boxes have 300+ day uptimes. They would have 700+ day uptimes had we not brought them down for RAM upgrades last year.
I wrote my first CGI script during, I think, 1995 or 1996. I got the original idea from this student at gatech.edu named Chris Gregg who was doing the same thing. It was a little bourne shell script to display what was playing in my cd player. The viewer could also change tracks if they felt like it.
It was written in Bourne Shell and used cda (part of the xmcd distribution) to control the CD. cda had CDDB capability and this is where it got the track and album information. It used awk to do the CGI arg parsing and 'echo' to do most of the output. It ran on my 486/66 running SLS Linux (remember SLS?:)
4PRINT was a pretty nifty utility that I used to use back in my BBS days. It was quite similar to enscript/a2ps in that it took a text file and printed several pages worth of text onto a single peice of paper.
The really neat thing about 4PRINT, however, was its usefulness for printing documentation. You would print a stack of paper and then go to your printer and flip/rotate the sheets and then go back to 4PRINT and tell it to continue. When you were done, you had this neat little booklet that you could staple together. 4PRINT would generate these cool cover pages that had the title of the book (specified by the user) done up in ANSI graphics lettering (ala BBS style).
I was searching through my old room at my parent's house the other day and found a drawer filled with stacks of 4PRINT'ed documentation for everything from the RemoteAccess BBS to GoldED (still around!!!) and BinkleyTerm.
Bikeworld.com/weathertools.com/gpstools.com did over $4M in sales last year ($1M in December alone) and we've never had an unprofitable year.
How do we do it? The formula is quite simple:
1) Don't piss away money. We don't have fancy-shmancy offices with pinball machines and conference rooms full of $900 Herman Miller chairs. Nope, we build most of our own office furniture.
We don't waste tons of cash on super-duper high availability server solutions. We don't have fibre-channel disk arrays and loads of CPU power? Why not? Because we don't need them. You don't need a highly dynamic, CPU intensive e-commerce application to sell a lot of product. We use static HTML for the most part, which helps us save on equipment costs.
We don't hire five people to do one person's job. You see this all-too-often at internet startups. When you hire tons of people, they tend to get *less* work done. They spend most of their day in meetings argueing about trivial things.
2) Pick a business model that actually has a chance of selling something.
If your business model relies on advertising for revenue, give up now.
That blowthedotoutyourass.com thing had it right on the dot (no pun intended). "ButIdontwantmytoothpastedelivered.com". The only things that people will buy on the Web are things that are not readily available in their local market. Amazon does so well because comprehensive book and music stores are still somewhat of a rarity. We do well because most local bicycle shops have very small inventories and ridiculously high prices.
3) Never forget that you make money one sale at a time. Every sale and every customer counts. Unless you deliver customer service that is ABOVE AND BEYOND the ordinary, your customers will shop elsewhere.
4) Be weary of outside investment. It's a lot easier to piss away someone else's money than your own.
This would work, except that Ticketmaster wants certain approved sites to be able to link to their events. To implement encrypted URLs, morphing URLs, etc, would require implementation on the side of the Ticketmaster partners. Apparently, this was farther than Ticketmaster wanted to push its partners.
See for yourself. Go to tickets.com, search for San Antonio Spurs, and look at the first event. Look at the URL. Now modify the URL to go through your web server and you will notice the lack of a referrer.
Tickets.com sends the deep link through a URL rewriter which nullifies the referrer header. It's not a good idea to block everyone with null referrer headers because many corporate browsers and proxies strip these headers.
Ticketmaster is not using your internet for their own ends. They *DID* help create a global communication system--they pay for their colocated connections just like nearly every other commercial online venture. They should be able to do as they please with their own site.
How much did YOU contribute to a backbone provider last year?
I remember back in '93 or so that Australia had banned online gaming and what not because it was saturating their external connections to Internet. I also remember that Australia's connection has always seemed pretty slow from a US user's perspective. Does AU have the external connectivity to support DSL when it finally happens for them? Have things improved?
This is pretty lame. When I was a student at the University of New Mexico, I did the same thing to get ethernet into my dorm. Nobody ever noticed and nothing was ever done about it. Technically, it *is* wrong but it seems like a more appropriate punishment would be a visit to the Dean of Student Affairs' office or something like that. My suggestion to the four students: find another school. Schools with ethernet are a dime a dozen. University of New Mexico has ethernet pretty much everywhere now. I think you might even be able to get in-state tuition if you lived close to the New Mexico side of Oklahoma. If you have a 2.5 GPA, I think you can get in-state tuition with their Amigo scholarship, if they still offer it. Anyway, pack your stuff up and leave OSU. They don't deserve your tuition.
Not scalable? Look at their ccNUMA and CrayLink stuff. Need I say more? Sorry, but your Linux box cannot touch SGI's clustering ability. Maybe in a year or two but not right now.
Not secure? Again, rubbish. IRIX did have some security problems in the past related to its suid root GUI system administration tools. The simple fix was to not install them. As for newer versions of IRIX, they'll blow the average RedHat box away in terms of security. Go to securityfocus.com and count the exploits for yourself.
IRIX is not stable? I recently left Ticketmaster Online - CitySearch, where we were ran two large datacenters full of Sun, SGI, and VA Linux systems. I don't think there was a sysadmin among us who would say that our SGI Origin200 servers were not the most stable of the bunch. They've been up for hundreds of days, sending out many gigabytes of web content and running high-traffic Oracle databases.
Stop being a drone and following your penguin-obsessed friends. Do some comparison shopping and I don't mean read the latest/. posts.
Slashdot Mirror
If you decided to create a Windows clone, what would be the first thing you'd do? Maybe some general architecture specs? Maybe start on some code? Well, according to their page, the first thing that these guys are doing is working on the startup and shutdown screens!
Attention would-be artists.
OW is looking for artwork. We want your ideas for startup/shudown and off screens. We will accept submissions until 15 August. At that time the public will vote on the winning screens.
Aren't we getting just a wee bit ahead of ourselves here? To top it all off, their website has already been redesigned with "a cleaner look and a greater public face for the project".
Yeah, great work, guys!
This article is very interesting because news of Espy's passing apparently made it to his Debian and Internet friends quite quickly.
However, many of us, such as myself have electronic and "real" lives that are very separate. I have some great friends on IRC and what not that have never met me in real life and probably don't even know my phone number. If I were to pass on today, would they ever find out? I suppose if you are famous, word gets around quickly, but what about the not-so-famous?
Using IRC as an example, I wonder how many people have died and disappeared from a channel only to have the regulars assume that they just got sick of IRC and quit.
Well said. I think all of the *nix'es have their specialties. I use Linux on my laptop, FreeBSD on my desktop and web servers, and OpenBSD on my firewall.
I will say this, though. New Linux users need to be very careful in their choice of distributions. You'll find that the security, performance, and reliability does vary from Linux distribution to distribution.
Am I going blind or are all those graphs damned near impossible to read? They were done in JPEG format which is sub-optimal for graphs and text. I found it almost impossible to correlate the legend with the data points. It sure would be nice to see them in PNG format.
200ppi sounds nice. It's certainly more than the 110ppi I get with my SGI 1600SW flatpanel. Still, I think I'll stick with my SGI. First of all, you can pick up one for around $3000 mas o menos. Secondly, the "sexiness" of this monitor is second-to-none. SGI did a beautiful job styling this flatpanel. The lines are just as nice when viewed from behind as they are from the front. I've also noticed that, unlike the Sony GDM-F500R monitor (which is Sony's top-end) that sits next to it on my desk, the SGI flatpanel is polarized. I noticed this when I wore my polarized shades into my office one day and saw the screen turn black when I cocked my head 45 degrees to either side. I'm wondering why Sony isn't doing this with their monitors. I think the polarization is what gives the SGI flatpanel its extraordinary anti-glare ability. My office has several large windows behind the desk and in the early afternoon (like right now), it's almost impossible to see the Sony monitor without the blinds closed. Even with the blinds open, the SGI flatpanel is as bright and contrasty as always.
For a while, the big let-down about this flatpanel was SGI's use of the (now defunct) #9 Revolution IV graphics card and the so-called "OpenLDI" digital interface. Basically, it meant that one card and one card only worked with this monitor. But recently, SGI has released a VGA-to-LDI adapter that lets you hook any video card up to the flatpanel. The question I have is: what video card (besides the #9) supports the SGI's funky (yet wonderful) 1600x1024 resolution?
Yeah, the IBM flatpanel sounds nice, but I think I'd take three SGI flatpanels on my desk instead.
Chris
Yeah, I guess I didn't give her enough credit. She's a pretty good plagarist.
Sublime_-_11_-_Courtney.mp 3
For those interested, this is a tape from (I believe) Brad Nowell's answering machine. Brad is the now deceased former frontman of Sublime.
Great speech. I didn't know the girl had it in here, especially after listening to this gem:
:-)
Sublime_-_11_-_Courtney.mp3
Enjoy!
Sorry to burst your bubble CmdrTaco, but the "Pinball Wizard" trademark is perfectly acceptable, even though there was an old song by the same name. Two companies may trademark the same word as long as their customers could not potentially confuse the two products. Here's a quote from the USPTO's Basic Facts About Trademarks:
To determine whether there is a conflict between two marks, the PTO determines whether there would be likelihood of confusion, that is, whether
relevant consumers would be likely to associate the goods or services of one party with those of the other party as a result of the use of the marks at
issue by both parties. The principal factors to be considered in reaching this decision are the similarity of the marks and the commercial relationship
between the goods and services identified by the marks. To find a conflict, the marks need not be identical, and the goods and services do not have
to be the same.
If you're sailing in the Gulf of Mexico, there's a decent chance that your regular old digital cellphone will work. Apparently, some enterprising companies have set up a lot of cell towers near/on oil rigs for the offshore employees to call home with. I'm not sure how far out you can go and still get signals. We were about 60 miles out when I found out about this. The good thing is, line of sight on the ocean is pretty damned far!
A lot of comments so far have brought up a good point, though. You're sailing! What the hell do you need e-mail for?!?! Me, I'm tied to this damned computer/laptop/cellphone for about 50 weeks a year. During the couple of weeks that I'm on vacation, I like to get as far away from this crap as I possibly can. I don't really miss it, either. Sure, it's always nice to come back home and have a mailbox full of messages from friends and family and to catch up on
There's nothing like grilling up some kingfish that you caught earlier in the day with some italian salad dressing marianade and a nice plate of rice. Sit and watch the sun set while sipping on a Myers and Coke, while listening to some Jimmy Buffett. Why would you want to screw that up by reading e-mail from work?
Ugh.
Why does everyone make such a big deal about their hardware/software supporting XML? XML IS A DAMNED TEXT FILE! You can code a good XML parser in about 20 minutes.
"Check out our new server line, the Whizbang Series! The Whizbang 3000 has hardware level support for comma-delimited ASCII, which will revolutionize the way your company does B2B transactions! Never again will you sit for hours, waiting for that Purchase Order to be processed!"
Nice post.
/var/mail to your local network and letting people mount and read mail from this partition. If you don't want to do that, POP3 retreival to users' local machines with fetchmail works nicely.
Regardless of which IMAP server you use, I would reccomend that you still make a POP3 server available. If you go with Cyrus, I'm not sure if this is possible but I know you can mix UW IMAPd and other POP3 servers.
For POP3, I highly, highly reccomend cucipop. Search for it on Freshmeat. If you're commercial though, you might want to review its licensing terms. Cucipop's advantage over qpopper is that Cucipop runs as a standalone daemon. This makes a *huge* speed difference on lightly loaded POP3 servers and an unbelievable speed difference on a heavily-loaded server. When I switched to cucipop, I actually got comments from users who noticed how much faster "netscape checked mail".
As far as Windows-based clients go... I like Eudora myself. It's IMAP support is kinda funky--it stubbornly insists that each server be a subfolder of your main inbox folder. I don't like huge nests of mail folders so I find this annoying. To get around this, I just use POP3.
Outlook is a bloated pig and seemed difficult to customize. Outlook's calendaring is nice but there's probably a standalone calendaring app that does just fine. Netscape Communicator does IMAP nicely but I don't like the lack of customization options.
For *nix clients, pick your poison. I'm sure some folks here will flame this but if your *nix clients have good NFS file locking support, you can't beat exporting
For MTAs, take a look at Exim. Exim is very fast and I found it a bit easier to configure than Sendmail. Exim's filtering capabilities are top-notch and you don't have to have a PhD to implement them.
For OSes, I'm a FreeBSD bigot so I'd urge you to give FreeBSD a try. I used Linux starting in 1994 but switched to FreeBSD when I got tired of patching up the million and one r00t exploits that my Linux boxes were vulnerable. FreeBSD is fast and very stable--our boxes have 300+ day uptimes. They would have 700+ day uptimes had we not brought them down for RAM upgrades last year.
buena suerte!
chris
Were we really THAT hard-up for news today that we had to post this story?
Linux is just one of the many Unices that were unaffected by ILOVEYOU but of course, this being slashdot, Linux gets the mention.
And how about that plug for Communigate?
And BTW, the RBL has nothing to do with why this user got no ILOVEYOU junk.
Excuse my grumpy attitude this morning. The coffee machine is broken.
I wrote my first CGI script during, I think, 1995 or 1996. I got the original idea from this student at gatech.edu named Chris Gregg who was doing the same thing. It was a little bourne shell script to display what was playing in my cd player. The viewer could also change tracks if they felt like it.
:)
It was written in Bourne Shell and used cda (part of the xmcd distribution) to control the CD. cda had CDDB capability and this is where it got the track and album information. It used awk to do the CGI arg parsing and 'echo' to do most of the output. It ran on my 486/66 running SLS Linux (remember SLS?
Ahhhh the memories...
chris
Does anybody remember 4PRINT?
4PRINT was a pretty nifty utility that I used to use back in my BBS days. It was quite similar to enscript/a2ps in that it took a text file and printed several pages worth of text onto a single peice of paper.
The really neat thing about 4PRINT, however, was its usefulness for printing documentation. You would print a stack of paper and then go to your printer and flip/rotate the sheets and then go back to 4PRINT and tell it to continue. When you were done, you had this neat little booklet that you could staple together. 4PRINT would generate these cool cover pages that had the title of the book (specified by the user) done up in ANSI graphics lettering (ala BBS style).
I was searching through my old room at my parent's house the other day and found a drawer filled with stacks of 4PRINT'ed documentation for everything from the RemoteAccess BBS to GoldED (still around!!!) and BinkleyTerm.
ahhhh the memories
My post was not intended to be an advertisment. Sorry you took it that way.
Bikeworld.com/weathertools.com/gpstools.com did over $4M in sales last year ($1M in December alone) and we've never had an unprofitable year.
How do we do it? The formula is quite simple:
1) Don't piss away money. We don't have fancy-shmancy offices with pinball machines and conference rooms full of $900 Herman Miller chairs. Nope, we build most of our own office furniture.
We don't waste tons of cash on super-duper high availability server solutions. We don't have fibre-channel disk arrays and loads of CPU power? Why not? Because we don't need them. You don't need a highly dynamic, CPU intensive e-commerce application to sell a lot of product. We use static HTML for the most part, which helps us save on equipment costs.
We don't hire five people to do one person's job. You see this all-too-often at internet startups. When you hire tons of people, they tend to get *less* work done. They spend most of their day in meetings argueing about trivial things.
2) Pick a business model that actually has a chance of selling something.
If your business model relies on advertising for revenue, give up now.
That blowthedotoutyourass.com thing had it right on the dot (no pun intended). "ButIdontwantmytoothpastedelivered.com". The only things that people will buy on the Web are things that are not readily available in their local market. Amazon does so well because comprehensive book and music stores are still somewhat of a rarity. We do well because most local bicycle shops have very small inventories and ridiculously high prices.
3) Never forget that you make money one sale at a time. Every sale and every customer counts. Unless you deliver customer service that is ABOVE AND BEYOND the ordinary, your customers will shop elsewhere.
4) Be weary of outside investment. It's a lot easier to piss away someone else's money than your own.
This would work, except that Ticketmaster wants certain approved sites to be able to link to their events. To implement encrypted URLs, morphing URLs, etc, would require implementation on the side of the Ticketmaster partners. Apparently, this was farther than Ticketmaster wanted to push its partners.
See for yourself. Go to tickets.com, search for San Antonio Spurs, and look at the first event. Look at the URL. Now modify the URL to go through your web server and you will notice the lack of a referrer.
Tickets.com sends the deep link through a URL rewriter which nullifies the referrer header. It's not a good idea to block everyone with null referrer headers because many corporate browsers and proxies strip these headers.
Ticketmaster is not using your internet for their own ends. They *DID* help create a global communication system--they pay for their colocated connections just like nearly every other commercial online venture. They should be able to do as they please with their own site.
How much did YOU contribute to a backbone provider last year?
> If you cant do business here on the pre
> established ground rules, then dont do busines
> here
HUH? Since when are there pre-established ground rules for hyperlinking on the Internet? Establishing rules is the whole point of this case.
> Do your reserch, then do some more research,
> then start working on your idea, then do a
> little more research.
I couldn't agree more. Did you do YOUR research?
I remember back in '93 or so that Australia had banned online gaming and what not because it was saturating their external connections to Internet. I also remember that Australia's connection has always seemed pretty slow from a US user's perspective. Does AU have the external connectivity to support DSL when it finally happens for them? Have things improved?
Chris
This is pretty lame. When I was a student at the University of New Mexico, I did the same thing to get ethernet into my dorm. Nobody ever noticed and nothing was ever done about it. Technically, it *is* wrong but it seems like a more appropriate punishment would be a visit to the Dean of Student Affairs' office or something like that. My suggestion to the four students: find another school. Schools with ethernet are a dime a dozen. University of New Mexico has ethernet pretty much everywhere now. I think you might even be able to get in-state tuition if you lived close to the New Mexico side of Oklahoma. If you have a 2.5 GPA, I think you can get in-state tuition with their Amigo scholarship, if they still offer it. Anyway, pack your stuff up and leave OSU. They don't deserve your tuition.
Your comment is 100% rubbish.
/. posts.
Not scalable? Look at their ccNUMA and CrayLink stuff. Need I say more? Sorry, but your Linux box cannot touch SGI's clustering ability. Maybe in a year or two but not right now.
Not secure? Again, rubbish. IRIX did have some security problems in the past related to its suid root GUI system administration tools. The simple fix was to not install them. As for newer versions of IRIX, they'll blow the average RedHat box away in terms of security. Go to securityfocus.com and count the exploits for yourself.
IRIX is not stable? I recently left Ticketmaster Online - CitySearch, where we were ran two large datacenters full of Sun, SGI, and VA Linux systems. I don't think there was a sysadmin among us who would say that our SGI Origin200 servers were not the most stable of the bunch. They've been up for hundreds of days, sending out many gigabytes of web content and running high-traffic Oracle databases.
Stop being a drone and following your penguin-obsessed friends. Do some comparison shopping and I don't mean read the latest