The always non-political Tom Christiansen has written in with a nice little satire piece that you might want to read. I'll spare my own commentary on the piece.

Twenty years ago, people were delighted to discover "Star Wars" an original movie fueled by the power of mythology and some great effects. This isn't a review (I haven't seen the movie yet) but times have sure changed. "Phantom Menace" is being launched in a cloud of greedy, obnoxious, even shameless hype. Lucas, a self-styled Hollywood rebel, is proving himself to be yet another sell-out, his hypocritical posturing collapsing under the weight of countless toy store tie-ins and inter-galactic pizza and soda promotions.

More stories from the Hellmouth that is High School for many bright, individualistic American kids continued to pour in yesterday. They are jarring testimonials from kids, adults, men and women. In the past four days, I've gotten well over 2000. These stories, many of them painful and engraged, tell us more about what happened in Littleton, Colorado -- a lot more -- than the dumb, exaggerated, frightening alarms about video games, Goths and geek monsters pouring out of much of the mainstream media. Update: 04/27 07:44 by CT : Sharon Isaak from Dateline NBC wants to get in touch with folks to do a story on this subject for this show. She's specifically seeking Jay of the Southeast, Anika78 of suburban Chicago, ZBird of New Jersey, Dan in Boise, Idaho, but he'd also like anyone who's been targetted as a result of this thing to contact her. Wonder if they make ya wear pancake makeup...

Roger Bolton wrote in to complain that we ran a bit on SGI dropping MIPS, and unfairly neglected the good stuff happenin'. Specifically he says " a) SGI is porting IRIX to IA-64, IRIX will continue to be developed for high scalability, true 64 bit, fault tolerant systems. b) SGI has teamed up with Intel to develop new high bandwidth architectures and graphics pipes for IA machines. c) As well as Windows NT IA-32 (Pentium II) machines, SGI will release IA-64 workstations which can dual boot IRIX or Windows NT. d) SGI's servers with IA-64 processors will only run IRIX and will scale to 128+ CPUS using SGI's ccNUMA architecture."

I had high hopes for SGI, but it just doesn't seem like they are really going to matter now that they are trying to just be an uber clone maker with a few extra spiffy technologies. They should ditch IRIX, endorse Linux, and concentrate on awesome hardware and software. High end SGI Hardware/Software running an optimized, open Linux? It would fly! I'd prefer an SGI running Linux to an x86 box any day, they just need to throw their weight behind it and make it cost effective. It would be an excellent alternative to Wintel.