Rackable Buying SGI Assets For $25M? 159
UnanimousCoward was one of many people to submit a story that might be an April Fools day joke, except that I don't think it is. Rackable Systems has announced that it is buying SGI for the bargain basement price of $25M. Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation. And note to Rackable's PR: Either this was a genius joke, or a terrible day to announce huge news. Someone either deserves a promotion or a firing.
Head hurts parsing this sentence... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation."
My head hurts trying to parse that sentence. Is there some grammatical rule that I don't fully understand or was that just a mistake in the summary?
I kind of understand it to mean -
"There was a time when there was little cooler than an SGI workstation."
Though I could be wrong.
The Natural Rise & Fall of Empires (Score:4, Insightful)
Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation.
Time was that there was little cooler than your company having its own Cray [wikipedia.org] machine.
... Wait, I'm sorry, what was the point of this exercise again? To wax nostalgic about the inevitable fall of empires?
Time was that there was little cooler than having the latest Sega game system [wikipedia.org] in your home.
Time was that there was little cooler than to puts around on a BSA motorcycle [wikipedia.org] in front of your friends.
Time was that there was little cooler than to be a citizen of Rome
They may be spending $25mil ... (Score:3, Insightful)
it was the logo wot killed it (Score:4, Insightful)
It was obviously going to be all downhill for SGI when they replaced their cool cube logo with the useless text logo....
Re:Wouldn't surprise me if it were true. (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW. I hear you can pick up killer SGI MIPS equipment on eBay for a song.
'Killer' is debatable. The fuel is the entry level one you'd want to be buying, and even then you'd be stupid to put any money down for one. I was tempted to buy one a year or two ago, however the reality is that you'll get a useless machine, with crap OS, a limited supply of (dubious quality) software, all contained in a pretty case. I'd imagine it'd take you at least 6 months just to get firefox compiled and running on it (and that's after you take a 6 month sabbatical from your job just to re-install the OS).
These machines are still workhorses for 3D rendering, audio and video production.
Not for years. We threw all of ours out when the pentium 2 hit 450Mhz. At any point since then, you'd have been mental to buy an SGI workstation, when for the same price you could have bought 2 top spec dual Xeon workstations, the performance of which, would have crapped all over SGI's offerings. Even SGI had to concede the fact at the time, and switch to Intel chips.
They were beautiful machines in their day, if a little overpriced, but now the only place for them is in a museum.
The decay of workstations. (Score:3, Insightful)
Workstations died because all the PC hardware and software got better, and by leaps and bounds.
I think it started with the discovery that people could buy server motherboards and put them into desktops. Workstations were always about multiple processors and big bandwidth, and you could get there with a PC by buying a server motherboard. AMD + Intel's Mhz war just rocketed x86 way past where the likes of MIPS and Alpha could go through sheer brute force.
Even in the late 1990s, I had a dual Pentium II that was pretty competitive with a Sun workstation and for a lot less money. Better graphics cards, integrated SCSI, and AGP were the body blow. I'd say SATA and PCI-Express have just doomed the whole genre of proprietary hardware computers.
Finally, on the o/s side, Windows 2000 came out and was a lot sexier than existing proprietary unixes and at the same time, a bit more functional than the still newish Linux. Proprietary unix vendors could laugh at DOS and Windows 3.1, disparage Windows 95, and criticize Windows NT, but every release from MS just closed the big criticisms - first real multithreading, process isolation, auditing, remote management, all those features gradually were attacked in successive Windows releases. I remember people doing X remotely and saying "hah, Windows can't to that", and today even Linux uses Windows remote desktop protocol RDP, even if only to run VNC over it.
Re:Surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
Generally correct, although a few things that I would argue.
#1: IBM and HP are both companies that do something other than Unix. SGI quit selling MIPS gear and had announced the end of the road for Irix a while back. That means that Sun is the only pure Unix company left standing--and the idiotic BoD is trying to get bought by anyone willing to fatten their wallets.
Interestingly, Apple's OS X and Sun's (Open)Solaris are the only Unixes that are (a) available on commodity hardware, and (b) actively being developed. They're the only commercial competition to Linux, and Sun is the only one trying to compete on the "new model" of FOSS software and paid services.
But MIPS is dead. Alpha is dead, PA-RISC is dead, and in five years, I suspect SPARC will be dead. IRIX is dead, OSF/1 is dead, HP-UX is dying, AIX is dying, and Solaris 10 is looking shaky.
The problem I have with all of this is that for the 'outdatedness' of these old systems, Linux still behaves like a hack-job. Documentation is spotty, software development stability is questionable, and it's very clear that different parts of it were written by different people with no coherency between them.
If the old systems were disappearing because of something better coming along, I'd be happier. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily better--just faster to change.
Re:could I ask (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's an alternative interpretation: Author writes sentence as intended, and it doesn't mesh w/ readers' default mental vocabulary.
Re:Repurchase vs Acquisition (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that stock buybacks boost the returns on stock option plans has absolutely nothing to do with their popularity among management of course.