Assuming that this isn't just a matter of mistaken facts, there's an interesting mental chain between PKD's work and Gibsons. A lot of similar elements show up in both authors work. PKD may not have had terms like "Virtual Reality" and "Cyberspace" to work with, but the idea of VR is in Androids (in the form of Mercerism). Of course, I like PKD and Gibson, so maybe I'm making the chain myself...
I spoke to an SGI insider about this a while back. His comment (anonymously) was that the issues that hold back an SGI "workstation" (ie., X with accelleration for the Visual Workstation) are mostly legal; apparently, SGI had to sign some agreement with Microsoft in order to get the information they needed to get NT working on the box.
According to this person, (Surprise!) Microsoft insisted on language to the effect that SGI wouldn't support a competing OS environment on the same hardware. SGI's strategy for getting around this is supposed to be to focus their Linux efforts on things that can be branded "servers" until the agreement runs out.
I don't know how true any of this is (I don't have enough contact with the source to establish how accurate their statements are), but it may well be that the technical issues in getting X working right on the Visual Workstation aren't the only problems that SGI faces.
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Assuming that this isn't just a matter of mistaken facts, there's an interesting mental chain between PKD's work and Gibsons. A lot of similar elements show up in both authors work. PKD may not have had terms like "Virtual Reality" and "Cyberspace" to work with, but the idea of VR is in Androids (in the form of Mercerism). Of course, I like PKD and Gibson, so maybe I'm making the chain myself...
I spoke to an SGI insider about this a while back. His comment (anonymously) was that the issues that hold back an SGI "workstation" (ie., X with accelleration for the Visual Workstation) are mostly legal; apparently, SGI had to sign some agreement with Microsoft in order to get the information they needed to get NT working on the box.
According to this person, (Surprise!) Microsoft insisted on language to the effect that SGI wouldn't support a competing OS environment on the same hardware. SGI's strategy for getting around this is supposed to be to focus their Linux efforts on things that can be branded "servers" until the agreement runs out.
I don't know how true any of this is (I don't have enough contact with the source to establish how accurate their statements are), but it may well be that the technical issues in getting X working right on the Visual Workstation aren't the only problems that SGI faces.
Um, it is here. Try something like cp foo.mp3 bar.mp3. Unless your hardware is ancient, it shouldn't take as long as playing foo.mp3.