You've got to be joking. Irix is the Windows ME of *nix operating systems. It was a running joke with everyone I ever met that was using an SGI box. We used to get os/tool distributions every couple of weeks, ostensibly 'updates to increase the productivity of the system' - but in fact emergency crash patches.

Ignoring the fact that I've seen SunOS/Solaris core dump its own utilities and X windows implementation HUNDREDS of times, Irix 5.x and 6.x crashed all the time during the whole of the 90's (I haven't used it since 1999.)

I'm sorry, but if you didn't experience an Irix crash daily in the 90's then you weren't using your IR/IR2/Indy/O2/Octane for much more than running a single tool.

It is impossible for you to have ever used an Irix 5.0 machine and not experience routine crashing.

Well, you haven't used Irix, SunOS/Solaris, HP-Unix/UX, or several other distros of Linux - as these also exhibit various levels of instability from crashing several times a day to just daily.
  Have an OSX box that has crashed several times in the past few months, an OpenSUSE box where the window managers (more than one) crash periodically, and a Windows 7 box that has never crashed.

I also have boxes that exhibit strengths the other way. I have CentOS boxes in the QA cloud thathave never been down, and WS 2003 boxes that fragment memory when they shouldn't (only crashing a process, but I count that when the cause is memory fragmentation and the process is carefully and strictly engineered to account for this.

Funny, I can crash our CentOS servers by making some minor changes to our firewall...

The point being that I've seen Windows servers that were up for years (especially back in the Windows 2000 days) and *nix boxes that crash all the time. I've also seen the reverse.

...outside of static target shooting, it doesn't appear to be of much use; and, for static target shooting it is only of value as an evaluation tool.

Actually, according to the article you supplied a link for, the sticking point that Google failed upon was part of the original requirements. There were changes to some of the FBI's requirements after the signing in 2009, but the changes were not those that Google has failed to deliver upon.

...whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think about if they should.

Talk about a technology ripe for abuse/hacking/et cetera.

Damn, that sounds rough. I think when I was 10 I could stay up to 9PM.

...kids, is that many parents don't put their kids to sleep the same way they did when I was a child (70's/80's.)

My kids go to sleep between 7:30PM and 8:30PM depending upon their ages (ranging from 5-9.)

At 9PM at night during the week I'll hear quite a lot of our neighbors' kids still playing outside, much less getting ready for bed.

School starts VERY early here as well (kids have to be at school by 7:30AM.)

Now, some of these kids who are staying up later are doing quite well in school, so who knows. It's just different from when I was a kid and it seemed to be a pervasive adult conspiracy to put all children to bed early...

...their:

          Experience
          Work ethic
          Ability to work with others
          Software ENGINEERING capabilities (not to be confused with 'programming')
          Et cetera...

...on things other than salary.

Depending on the market you are in, I would very much expect your non-labor expenses in Sales and Marketing to vastly outweigh your engineering non-labor costs.

If I work at a company with 1 marketing guy/gal and 10 engineers, and I spend 1 dollar on marketing non-labor expenses and $0 on engineering non-labor expenses I would be spending an infinite amount of money more on non-marketing expenses but I'd still be clearly focused on engineering.

Yay! They picked one :).

I was wondering if it would be Google's (which it is) or Mozilla's (they had a good low level proposal as well.)

Thanks, I haven't evaluated it for a year, great to know I can finally manage the buffers myself.

Cheers!

Just for the sake of clarity.

It would be nice if a low level audio system WAS part of HTML5 though.

Then we could really game game game away...

I had one of the first O2s in Silicon Valley and the thing was crap, always was. You might be remembering the Octane. But as for OpenGL being crap in the 90's - that's crazy talk.

I remember a 24 proc 6 pipe IR2 at NASA's Ames Research Center that was UNGODLY AWESOME... Hell, I had a base model IR2 in my office in 1996 just before they were being released and I slept in my office more often that summer just to be near it.

Too bad Irix is the worst operating system in history (I never used Windows ME but I can't imagine something crashing more than Irix...)

...when animals were created - before or after man...

Rather a stupid bet.

If I was the feds, that's exactly what I would 'leak' were it easy for me to read iMessages...