I was talking to someone about this at the kit meet (sorry I forget who) Whoever it was, Your prediction was pretty much spot on.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060508/sfm098.html?.v=45
Tis a sad day even if you didn't like SGI kit, If they weren't so broken as a company then they would be a good example of how a company in the Unix world embraced Open Source rather than being threatened by it.
I don't know how much input SGI has on OpenGL and XFS now..I presume these projects will continue without them should they vanish or be bought up ?
I wish I still had my Indy so I could give it a hug.
On Tuesday 09 May 2006 02:03, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I was talking to someone about this at the kit meet (sorry I forget who) Whoever it was, Your prediction was pretty much spot on.
It's ostensibly not the death of the company, which rouses the cynic in all of us, I expect.
Particularly worrying was the CEO's message. It was the kind of "don't worry, this is damage limitation, everything's groovy, everyone's getting paid" message you always see before a company goes down the tubes, nobody gets paid, and severe ungrooviness sets in.
Tis a sad day even if you didn't like SGI kit,
...and my, what beautiful kit it is. At this stage, even the possibility of cheap SGI wares in the near future can't compensate for the fact this company may disappear.
If they weren't so broken as a company then they would be a good example of how a company in the Unix world embraced Open Source rather than being threatened by it.
Sadly, that's a double-edged sword.
I'm sure there will be plenty ready cite SGI as an example of a different sort.
I don't know how much input SGI has on OpenGL and XFS now..I presume these projects will continue without them should they vanish or be bought up ?
I think both projects are so well supported, well-used and such good tech that the beauty of oss really has a chance to shine through.
I wish I still had my Indy so I could give it a hug.
Here's hoping that SGI isn't dead.
Ten
On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 02:03:22AM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I was talking to someone about this at the kit meet (sorry I forget who) Whoever it was, Your prediction was pretty much spot on.
Ummm, it might have been me? I've been worried about SGI ever since I went for a meeting at their HQ about 6 years ago. They seemed to do everything on a very expensive/ostentatious basis, I'm guessing using the money they made in the late 80's early 90's doing visualisation stuff. I could just see at the time that cheap Linux clusters were going to give them a good stomping in time.
I wish I still had my Indy so I could give it a hug.
I want an SGI Origin 2000 with lots of cpus and ram, I absolutely love their kit (even though it did run Irix) it was really good stuff and the cases are the coolest and most stylish in the business, people may say how cool Macs look but compared to the SGI stuff they don't even figure on the cool hardware radar.
I hope they pull it all back together, I really do.
Thanks Adam
On Wed, 2006-05-10 at 00:04 +0100, Adam Bower wrote:
I want an SGI Origin 2000 with lots of cpus and ram, I absolutely love their kit (even though it did run Irix) it was really good stuff and the cases are the coolest and most stylish in the business, people may say how cool Macs look but compared to the SGI stuff they don't even figure on the cool hardware radar.
Even down to the Indys Jazzy rift start up tune rather than the Mac's "Boooing" :-)
It was quite nice kit, not without fault (remembering the stories of the MAC Address being held in battery backed ram on the Indys) but nice kit.
The trouble was that they were quickly outpaced (at the workstation level) by PC's and as you say Linux clusters provide an alternative at the high end (although there are still a few tricks up the sleeve of SGI node clustering that I don't think can be so easily done with Linux)
In my opinion the biggest mistake they made was to not get onto the PC 3D expansion card bandwagon, with hindsight they could have been Nvidia (but probably better). They would have killed their own 3D workstation market but again with hindsight that was going to die sooner or later anyway.
A lot of Nvidia's technical staff came from SGI so if they had done this in the late 90's early 2k when the consumer GFX market was really exploding we would have pretty much the same tech as Nvidia but with the SGI logo (and probably open source drivers) Given the mindshare SGI had (at the time) they could have pretty much sold as many 3D cards as they could make.
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Adam Bower -
Ten -
Wayne Stallwood