That's a 10 year old architecture that never really excelled at crunching geometry. It was more of a video/imaging/texturing/realtime graphics box. The weather channel and pretty much every local news channel used to use them for on air graphics.
Here's a little article I'd like to share on the scope of the NSA 'wire tapping'. It's titled: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report if you want to google it. It's originally from the NY Times but they like to lock up articles and make you pay for them. The original popped up in an obscure corner of the times on Christmas Eve. What great timing for such a story...
I think that the reason they didn't bother with warrants is that the (probably) huge amount of information (transaction and content?) they're collecting for data mining would require about 300 million warrants. And who has time for that kind of paper work.
ASUS seems to be working on something very similar but in a smaller package (2 PCB each with 2 GPUs and ugly external PSUs).
Sigh, it looks like the majors are finally catching up with my Onyx2. I remember back in the day seeing Indigo2 systems with Extreme (funny how SGI was even ahead of the curve on over using the word 'extreme' and the letter 'x') graphics which has 8 GEs on two multi-chip modules. Well though they're slow today they're still built like tanks, fun to use, and pretty as hell.
I say hell yeah to multiple GPUs! Finally. I hope they'll make Quadros for us 'professional users' which won't have Xs in the model name and will be on plain green PCB with regular heatsinks (remember the ones without the LEDs and holograms?).
A lot of fat Ameircan kids get very early access to computers, what good does it do them? Seems like we still have a problem with math, reading, and reasoning in this country and throwing money at it doesn't necessarily help.
I'll repeat myself, I'm sure it's a great idea on some level. But will spending all this money on technology ahead of treating disease, famine, poverty etc. produce results? These machines can't teach a child to read or write can then? Will they just become a fancy Feynman-eque abacus?
Why is everyone so sure that putting a laptop in a kids hand will help them that much? I'm sure it's a great idea on some level but what about starving illiterate kids, wouldn't food and teachers be a better investment?
Well duh. Everyone knows the 4th Amendment is almost totally destroyed. It's just sad and surprising to see the other shoe drop. I mean anyone with any inteligence has just been waiting to hear something like this confirmed in the mainstream news. And are we really at war, yada yada yada? And lastly, yeah you see no evidence that the current administration is spying for its own benefit. No need for an investigation or accountability. I'm sure we can just turn our eyes away now that they have this system setup and running, there doesn't seem to be anything going on here now so let's just lay the matter of abuse to rest...
I'd like to add to this. I hear this meme (the innocent have nothing to fear/etc.) again and again and it is utterly wrong. If you are doing no wrong you still have a great deal to fear, from the loss of your privacy to the loss of your life. In an effort to make this post short I'll refer everyone to their history books, especially the Jews in WWII, the purges under Stalin, the black listing and witch hunting of the Red Scare in America, and the harrassment of civil rights leaders by local and federal law enforcement in America. I'm sure someone more intelligent than myself can provide further examples. Stop this meme.
"To thoose that hate the country, leave," said the colonial British Loyalist. "Do you suppose me to be a coward? No I think I will stay and fight," replied the American Revoltionary.
So my O2 is now illegal? I can't convert my old analogue video tapes to MPEG? Can't convert LPs to MP3? F' that! I don't see any big good trends happening in this country. I should go out and get my passport so when the time comes to jump ship I'll be ready.
This argument is refered to as 'God of the gaps.' Basically it uses the explanation 'God' to fill in any area that we don't know about, for instance the weather, or eclipses. Then when science finds an explanation 'God' is removed from the gap, and his domain shrinks. I believe this argument is considered blasphemous in certain religions (Catholocism?) because it makes 'God' so small (eventually) and his role in the universe subject to human knowledge. That someone would use it to further their religious agenda is simply ironic.
Yeah I can see that you've talking to a VP... Opteron, SGI, $3-5K... poor schmuck probably thinks SGI sells vacuums and wonders why his stock options are worth so little...
O2 doesn't have a crossbar, you must mean Octane? The heart of an Octane system is a large XBOW (pronounced cross-bow) chip which is an 8-port high speed (1.6Gbs/port I think) non-blocking crossbar.
One thing that I've heard about nVidia/SGI is that the Geforce chips are pretty much a single chip implementation of the mulit-board RealityEngine graphics from an SGI Onyx. I beleive that SGI sued nVida around 1999/2000 and either won or settled. One of the results of the suit was that nVidia would provided tweaked graphics boards based on the Quadro (V3/VR3, V5, V7/VR7) to go into their god-awful NT-PC clones (models 230/330/550).
I'd like to know the specifics, especially what OS version and the method used. Most of the major remote exploits in IRIX are from versions before 6.2 (e.g. versions from the mid 90s and before) and they all have patches.
If you have physical access to a machine it is typically trivial to break into it. All you need to get into any SGI is an IRIX boot disk. Or you could yank the disk and mount it in another SGI system or a Linux system with XFS. You can crack any OSX machine by just rebooting and holding down a few keys. Windows falls with just a bootable floppy and some work.
The Origin line was being developed before they bought Cray. Apparently the Cray guys really resented SGI, it was a class of cultures and it was also a bad purchase. Some SGI developed products were given Cray branding for marketing reasons. CrayLink was the name given to the switched node interconnect on the Origins. It had nothing to do with Cray really. Later when they resold Cray they renamed the interconnect/architecture NUMAlink.
Oh man don't just chuck those systems when their production life is over! Depending on what you have you could be throwing many thousands of dollars into the trash. I guess many large companies don't care, I've seen photos of entire Onyx rack systems waiting by the dumpster. Heck at the time that system was trashed it was probably worth almost $10K in parts.
If someone's chucking something out hit the groups or nekochan.net with a quick post. It's more than likely someone will come out and pick them up.
It is kind of odd but I think the reason is that for a long time SGI's main business has not been graphics or workstations. Most people think of them as a graphics company because of all the movies and stuff. Actually most of their business is server sales, and their main customers are science research, industry, and goverment.
So perhaps they've kept the installer text based because most of their customers have servers anyway.
The installer for the OS (inst) is the same used to install programs once the system is booted. But when the system is booted you can use a graphics front end to inst called Software Manager, and it's quite good.
O2s, though much slower than Octanes, seem to still be a bit pricey. Probably because O2s with AV cards can capture, compress, and output video. They can also do SDI with a dongle and there's a great little webcam too.
I got my O2 for $350 + $50 shipping. It came with IRIX and MIPSpro compilers installed. A 9GB disk, the AV card (I use it like a TiVo), the fastest CPU SGI offered in the O2 (R12K @ 400MHz 2MB L2) and 256MB RAM (which I want to upgrade to 1GB), and a FireWire card. So it's close to a maximum configuration.
You can get a good O2 for around $200 on eBay and tehy're lots of fun. Definitely check them out!
I think an entry level Indy with 8-bit graphics, no L2 cache, and a small amount of RAM would have cost half that in the US. But still unless you needed some of the built in features it was too much money to pay for just a desktop computer.
For an arm and a leg you could get a faster CPU with L2 cache and 24-bit graphics (24XL). For another arm and a leg you could get an Indy 24-bit color and hardware accelerated 3D appropriate for running 3D CAD (XZ).
I have an Indy XZ now and it runs an older version of Pro/ENGINEER surprisingly well.
Here's a great article from PCW in 1993 about the Indy.
For a long time SGI was the Ferrari of computer makers and it is sad that no one seems to have that title anymore.
Heh, he's one of those guys that is in the professional/hobbiest category, I think he does rendering and film/video stuff. His avatar on nekochan.net is a serious rack Onyx2.
Bigger isn't always better though, www.nekochan.net runs on a little O2;)
I didn't know that. It's a problem, though it doesn't make the machine completely useless. You'll loose any node locked software, and the machine will fail diagnostics but it should still boot. You'll also loose networking but you can set the eaddr after the machine boots and get it on a network.
There is a hack, and I've never done it on Indigo but I've done it with 2 Indys, to reset the eaddr. But at this point the fix is getting pretty extreme and I see where you're comming from. Too bad it wasn't an Indigo2 instead!
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Weird shape ... purple mini tower ... sound like an O2 or O2+: http://www.sgi.co.jp/workstations/o2plus/images/o2 plus_home.jpg
That's a 10 year old architecture that never really excelled at crunching geometry. It was more of a video/imaging/texturing/realtime graphics box. The weather channel and pretty much every local news channel used to use them for on air graphics.
Here's a little article I'd like to share on the scope of the NSA 'wire tapping'. It's titled: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report if you want to google it. It's originally from the NY Times but they like to lock up articles and make you pay for them. The original popped up in an obscure corner of the times on Christmas Eve. What great timing for such a story...
I think that the reason they didn't bother with warrants is that the (probably) huge amount of information (transaction and content?) they're collecting for data mining would require about 300 million warrants. And who has time for that kind of paper work.
I hope he's prepared to loose his house, wife, current job, sanity, life in general. Hopefully something good will come of it.
Sigh, it looks like the majors are finally catching up with my Onyx2. I remember back in the day seeing Indigo2 systems with Extreme (funny how SGI was even ahead of the curve on over using the word 'extreme' and the letter 'x') graphics which has 8 GEs on two multi-chip modules. Well though they're slow today they're still built like tanks, fun to use, and pretty as hell.
I say hell yeah to multiple GPUs! Finally. I hope they'll make Quadros for us 'professional users' which won't have Xs in the model name and will be on plain green PCB with regular heatsinks (remember the ones without the LEDs and holograms?).
Who said Africa?
A lot of fat Ameircan kids get very early access to computers, what good does it do them? Seems like we still have a problem with math, reading, and reasoning in this country and throwing money at it doesn't necessarily help.
I'll repeat myself, I'm sure it's a great idea on some level. But will spending all this money on technology ahead of treating disease, famine, poverty etc. produce results? These machines can't teach a child to read or write can then? Will they just become a fancy Feynman-eque abacus?
Why is everyone so sure that putting a laptop in a kids hand will help them that much? I'm sure it's a great idea on some level but what about starving illiterate kids, wouldn't food and teachers be a better investment?
Well duh. Everyone knows the 4th Amendment is almost totally destroyed. It's just sad and surprising to see the other shoe drop. I mean anyone with any inteligence has just been waiting to hear something like this confirmed in the mainstream news. And are we really at war, yada yada yada? And lastly, yeah you see no evidence that the current administration is spying for its own benefit. No need for an investigation or accountability. I'm sure we can just turn our eyes away now that they have this system setup and running, there doesn't seem to be anything going on here now so let's just lay the matter of abuse to rest...
Parent post is dead on right.
I'd like to add to this. I hear this meme (the innocent have nothing to fear/etc.) again and again and it is utterly wrong. If you are doing no wrong you still have a great deal to fear, from the loss of your privacy to the loss of your life. In an effort to make this post short I'll refer everyone to their history books, especially the Jews in WWII, the purges under Stalin, the black listing and witch hunting of the Red Scare in America, and the harrassment of civil rights leaders by local and federal law enforcement in America. I'm sure someone more intelligent than myself can provide further examples. Stop this meme.
"To thoose that hate the country, leave," said the colonial British Loyalist.
"Do you suppose me to be a coward? No I think I will stay and fight," replied the American Revoltionary.
So my O2 is now illegal? I can't convert my old analogue video tapes to MPEG? Can't convert LPs to MP3? F' that! I don't see any big good trends happening in this country. I should go out and get my passport so when the time comes to jump ship I'll be ready.
So by your logic NASA shouldn't hire a Galileo ...
History ... American History. Try reading it. If you've done nothing wrong you still have plenty to fear.
This argument is refered to as 'God of the gaps.' Basically it uses the explanation 'God' to fill in any area that we don't know about, for instance the weather, or eclipses. Then when science finds an explanation 'God' is removed from the gap, and his domain shrinks. I believe this argument is considered blasphemous in certain religions (Catholocism?) because it makes 'God' so small (eventually) and his role in the universe subject to human knowledge. That someone would use it to further their religious agenda is simply ironic.
I hope this isn't true in the US. Hopefully refusing to give passwords is covered under the 5th admendment.
Yeah I can see that you've talking to a VP ... Opteron, SGI, $3-5K ... poor schmuck probably thinks SGI sells vacuums and wonders why his stock options are worth so little ...
O2 doesn't have a crossbar, you must mean Octane? The heart of an Octane system is a large XBOW (pronounced cross-bow) chip which is an 8-port high speed (1.6Gbs/port I think) non-blocking crossbar.
One thing that I've heard about nVidia/SGI is that the Geforce chips are pretty much a single chip implementation of the mulit-board RealityEngine graphics from an SGI Onyx. I beleive that SGI sued nVida around 1999/2000 and either won or settled. One of the results of the suit was that nVidia would provided tweaked graphics boards based on the Quadro (V3/VR3, V5, V7/VR7) to go into their god-awful NT-PC clones (models 230/330/550).
I'd like to know the specifics, especially what OS version and the method used. Most of the major remote exploits in IRIX are from versions before 6.2 (e.g. versions from the mid 90s and before) and they all have patches.
If you have physical access to a machine it is typically trivial to break into it. All you need to get into any SGI is an IRIX boot disk. Or you could yank the disk and mount it in another SGI system or a Linux system with XFS. You can crack any OSX machine by just rebooting and holding down a few keys. Windows falls with just a bootable floppy and some work.
A remote exploit is much rarer.
The Origin line was being developed before they bought Cray. Apparently the Cray guys really resented SGI, it was a class of cultures and it was also a bad purchase. Some SGI developed products were given Cray branding for marketing reasons. CrayLink was the name given to the switched node interconnect on the Origins. It had nothing to do with Cray really. Later when they resold Cray they renamed the interconnect/architecture NUMAlink.
Oh man don't just chuck those systems when their production life is over! Depending on what you have you could be throwing many thousands of dollars into the trash. I guess many large companies don't care, I've seen photos of entire Onyx rack systems waiting by the dumpster. Heck at the time that system was trashed it was probably worth almost $10K in parts.
If someone's chucking something out hit the groups or nekochan.net with a quick post. It's more than likely someone will come out and pick them up.
It is kind of odd but I think the reason is that for a long time SGI's main business has not been graphics or workstations. Most people think of them as a graphics company because of all the movies and stuff. Actually most of their business is server sales, and their main customers are science research, industry, and goverment.
So perhaps they've kept the installer text based because most of their customers have servers anyway.
The installer for the OS (inst) is the same used to install programs once the system is booted. But when the system is booted you can use a graphics front end to inst called Software Manager, and it's quite good.
O2s, though much slower than Octanes, seem to still be a bit pricey. Probably because O2s with AV cards can capture, compress, and output video. They can also do SDI with a dongle and there's a great little webcam too.
I got my O2 for $350 + $50 shipping. It came with IRIX and MIPSpro compilers installed. A 9GB disk, the AV card (I use it like a TiVo), the fastest CPU SGI offered in the O2 (R12K @ 400MHz 2MB L2) and 256MB RAM (which I want to upgrade to 1GB), and a FireWire card. So it's close to a maximum configuration.
You can get a good O2 for around $200 on eBay and tehy're lots of fun. Definitely check them out!
I think an entry level Indy with 8-bit graphics, no L2 cache, and a small amount of RAM would have cost half that in the US. But still unless you needed some of the built in features it was too much money to pay for just a desktop computer.
For an arm and a leg you could get a faster CPU with L2 cache and 24-bit graphics (24XL). For another arm and a leg you could get an Indy 24-bit color and hardware accelerated 3D appropriate for running 3D CAD (XZ).
I have an Indy XZ now and it runs an older version of Pro/ENGINEER surprisingly well.
Here's a great article from PCW in 1993 about the Indy.
For a long time SGI was the Ferrari of computer makers and it is sad that no one seems to have that title anymore.
Heh, he's one of those guys that is in the professional/hobbiest category, I think he does rendering and film/video stuff. His avatar on nekochan.net is a serious rack Onyx2.
;)
Bigger isn't always better though, www.nekochan.net runs on a little O2
I didn't know that. It's a problem, though it doesn't make the machine completely useless. You'll loose any node locked software, and the machine will fail diagnostics but it should still boot. You'll also loose networking but you can set the eaddr after the machine boots and get it on a network.
There is a hack, and I've never done it on Indigo but I've done it with 2 Indys, to reset the eaddr. But at this point the fix is getting pretty extreme and I see where you're comming from. Too bad it wasn't an Indigo2 instead!