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Silicon Graphics

End Of reality For Silicon Graphics 130

Posted by timothy from the end-of-an-era-you-didn't-know-we-were-in dept.
Zurk writes: "SGI is turning off its famous employee web server http://reality.sgi.com on August 15th. The machine has been running for nearly 10 YEARS and has resulted in a number of really kewl IRIX applications (and some linux ones as well) distributed from employee web pages at SGI. Games/source code/pictures/irix tips and examples of working life at this once great company will no longer be available." Seems like the sort of thing that every business ought to maintain, for employee sanity and general niceness -- too bad this one is about to go.
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End of reality for Silicon Graphics.. More

End of reality for Silicon Graphics..

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  • Re:Mirrors of important content? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Of course they're keeping the content. It's just that "nerds" and "geeks" grow more attached to hardware than people. So tears are being shed over its processor, motherboard, and SCSI controller, primarily.

    Cuz they're good shit.

  • another cool machine (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    memachine [mikegallay.com]

  • Re:Why? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How about you tell us why its being taken down?

    That would just make too much sense.

  • It was never funded and system administration was handled on a volunteer basis. The only funding would be a) power and b) whatever fraction of the sgi bandwidth it consumed. Both were pretty negligible. Item b is actually zero if they still purchase the bandwidth.

  • Re:Good Customer Service = Bankruptcy (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Agreed.... SGI has made so much, and gotten no respect... it is really sad...

    There was a beutifully voiced tech support operator named Melissa maybe, or Sally, i do not remember... I cannot in words express how sweet of a voice she had... she sounded like she was in bed, under the sheets... a sultry soft voice...

    Anyhow, she was glad to replace and ship and handle any problem.

    I still remember that to this day... it was crazy...

  • Re:D'oh (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Okay, the question is begging to be asked.

    Why exactly did you flop an Indy over the roof? I mean, were you joking, and accidently let it go? Were you threatening your boss - "Come one step closer and Mr. Workgroup server flies!"? I can find no good reason logically to have an Indy anywhere near a ledge. Yes, they are aging a bit, but are still good machines. Why not donate it to a school, or something? (Or some sgi freak like me!) Please, please enlighten us!

  • Last one out, turn out the lights (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Look at their 10-Q statement. Best guess is that they have 2 quarters of operation left. No one is buying their stuff. They are abandoning markets that they led a year ago.

    This change was known inside for several months. This is only a symptom of the major necrosis that is rapidly overwhelming them. Think of them as a company with Ebola.

    To quote that grisled philosopher, Bones McCoy.

    She's gonna die Jim, and there is nothing I can do about it.

    Goodbye SGI, it has been real.

  • Hehe (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SHI may be turning off the server on the 15th of August, but posting the link on /. is going to guarantee it being turned off today :P

    looks like it wont meet the 10 year uptime...

  • Look at their stock value (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SGI&d=c [yahoo.com]

    That's worse than the Linux companies are doing, isn't it?

  • Give me your junk ... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've been using IRIX (4D25, Indy, Indigo2) desktops nearly exclusively for 10 years - rock solid performers that are nearly trouble free (blow the dust out every other year or so). It's the only system I've used that I can leave running on my desktop and get 500-600 day uptimes. A few Solaris desktops have almost done as well. It's only the last year or so that the X86 Linux desktops are stable for that long, mostly due to the NSF and X server coding finally getting a lot better, but still not as stable as IRIX.

    Any unix wannabe sysadmin can administer these systems - they have had easy GUI admin for years, long before the rest. Only WinDoze admins have problems with systems this easy to admin, as well as being able to RTFM.

  • Re:NO. use reality-closure@sgi.com (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    the feedback page goes to the old admin for reality who was laid off. use : reality-closure@sgi.com

  • Re:PPC + OS X rules (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "The G4 is one of the BEST processors out there.
    Have you ever heard of Altivec?"

    Despite what Apple marketing tells you, there is more to a CPU than just a vector unit. Altivec is a pretty good example of a vector unit, but its hardly a revolutionary feature.

    "(where's Photoshop for SGI?)"

    Right here on the Indy I'm typing this on, actually. Pretty moronic choice of examples there. What's your next question? Where is Maya for SGI?

    Despite your breathless and uninformed Mac cheerleading, I still can't purchase a G4 mac that is even remotely comparable to SGI's higher end visualization systems. And the vast majority of ex-SGI shops are moving to Linux, not OSX.

    But I suppose I really shouldn't expect some junior photoshop jockey to know much about hardware.

  • Why it's going away (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Reality has always been maintained by volunteers. Recently admining the thing has become an enormous hassle and nobody seems willing to do the job for very long. This is the reason I'm told that Reality is being brought down.

  • memtest86 moved to www.MemTest86.com (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    memtest86 has been moved.

    It no longer exists at http://Reality.SGI.com/cbrady_denver/memtest86/ [sgi.com]

    Now it lives at www.MemTest86.com [memtest86.com]

    Thanks Chris,
    Ken Hendrickson

  • here we go! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07, 2001 @12:05PM (#101416)

    bash-2.03$ wget -r reality.sgi.com

    ~AC

  • The WORST always rules... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07, 2001 @12:22PM (#101417)

    The REASON they're on life support is that IRIX is joke...

    Only partially true... each version of IRIX was always released *far* before it was ready (compared to other commercial Unicies, at least). IRIX has traditionally had poor security with its default installation (always assuming that good connectivity on a non-hostile network is also the default).

    But once patched and hardened, IRIX and MIPS hardware really shines. It's far smaller and more efficient than Slowaris and the memory bandwidth of even *ancient* Indigo2's is breathtaking, even by today's standards.

    Along with Compaq's recent statements regarding burying the DEC/Compaq Alpha CPU line and replacing it with Intel Itanium, it seems that the industry is heralding the supremacy of the crappiest, least efficient architectures (Sun USPARC, PowerPC-POWER, Intel Itanium) and the death of the best (MIPS, DEC Alpha).

    This proves that aggressive marketing/salesmanship will always reign supreme over superior engineering.

    :-/

  • Re:End of reality??? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07, 2001 @12:49PM (#101418)
    Nvidia is not a spin-off from SGI. Nvidia sure has a lot of ex-SGI employees, but it ain't a spin-off.

  • "kewl appz" (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07, 2001 @01:35PM (#101419)
    There is no reason that the word 'kewl' should appear in a writeup on /. You guys should reject articles when the writer is thick with the stench of suck.

  • Sadder than employee pages. (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07, 2001 @02:48PM (#101420)
    While a lot of the employee pages are going to be missed (for historical purposes if nothing else since geeks rarely have a chance to perform those sophmoric/MIT type stunts that SGI-ians are so famous for), there is another loss to more than just the SGI employees. All of the non-profit websites that SGI hosts (as long as you are sponsored by an SGI employee) will be lost, too:

    http://reality.sgi.com/csp/ [sgi.com]

  • Hear, hear! (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07, 2001 @09:58PM (#101421)

    In terms of having good product but poor marketing, SGI reminds me a lot of DEC, another three-letter acronym company. Alpha was way ahead of its time. There can be no doubt that hardware "creep" is hurting SGI (i.e. the gulf between low-end, commodity, hardware and high end SGI stuff is becoming smaller).

    Indeed! All of the companies that have extensive and solid marketing (Sun, Apple, Intel, Microsoft) are the ones with the worst technology.

    Unfortunately, it's the innovative, engineering-focused companies like DEC and SGI that have the worst marketing, hoping that the merits of their products will market themselves...

    In the fickle consumer-space dominated by MBAs and technically-deficient CIO/CTOs, companies like DEC and SGI lose.

    Who will play the role with SGI that Compaq played with DEC? IBM?

    If what Compaq did with DEC Alpha is any indicator, then any acquisition of SGI by [Sun,IBM] would also probably infer that the buyer will kill any innovative SGI technology because it would:

    • Cost too much to support in the short-term. In the example of Compaq and Alpha, Compaq's bean-counters probably deduced that they could increase quarterly earnings without Alpha development. However, they are also killing any opportunity to differentiate their high-end Tru64/VMS/Non-Stop products from anyone else producing Intel Itanium boxes.
    • NIH syndrome. Compaq is a PC company first and foremost, so this would probably not apply. To Intel who will be the benefactor of Alpha development/fab/compiler technology, they will absorb only what will benefit Itanium but discard anything else. They should be thankful they have one less established competitor in the 64-bit space.

    For SGI, an acquisition by Sun/IBM would result in much the same. SGI was already transitioning off MIPS anyways but ccNUMA, MIPSpro compiler and XFS/LVM technology would either be one less competitive threat or a technological advantage.

    As you can surmise, I have very little confidence in the technical expertise of Sun, Apple or IBM compared to SGI or DEC :-/

    Likewise, I also have very little confidence in MBAs, bean counters and those idiots who believe that market forces create anything innovative or intelligent ;-)

    Slashdot readers may appreciate this excerpt of Ken Olsen, founder and former CEO of Digital Equipment:

    OLSEN SPEAKS OUT

    Short-sighted investors will do anything to have $1 more at the end of the quarter, the ousted founder of Digital, Ken Olsen, told a forum of about 300 entrepreneurs in March 1994.

    Olsen, now 67, reminisced about Digital's early days and debunked conventional wisdom. He noted that most great revolutions in technology, such as the hand-held calculator or the Sony Walkman, were not predicted. "The worst thing one can do is read the front page of the business section of The New York Times to figure out what they are. I guarantee every one of those is a failure," he declared.

    No loyalty

    Nor did the stock market escape unscathed. "I say never go public with your company. The only trouble is there's often no choice," Olsen told the entrepreneurs. Going public, he says, means putting the company's fate in the hands of often short-sighted investors. "Owners today have no loyalty to the company. They don't care about the company or the country. They would do anything to have $1 more at the end of the quarter," he said.

    Nonetheless, even a privately held company should be accountable to someone, Olsen suggested. "Boards of directors can be a pain in the neck," with directors often "overpaid" and "underworked," he said. But company managers should prepare reports for them, perhaps monthly. "You need that discipline. If they don't know enough to ask those things, make believe they do."

    As for his tenure at Digital, Olsen said "I was beat up unmercifully" in the press and by analysts "for not having mass layoffs."

    The Boston Globe, 6-Apr-94

  • Well.. we still have employees.org (Score:4)

    by davidu ( 18 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @11:52AM (#101422) Homepage Journal

    At least we still have the resources of employees.org [employees.org] -- The Cisco employees web page.

    It's interesting to note that Cisco has said they are willing to work with other companies to make employees.org a _central_ employee web space but that has never happened.

    Here's an example of a great Employees.org web page: The CIDR Report [employees.org] by Tony Bates.
    -davidu
  • That's what I thought when i first read the /. story, but the Machine Info page said it had recently been upgraded, so i doubt its uptime is actually 10 years...

    ---
  • If so, what's the chances of getting a few CD-ROM's of it... it'd be definitely something I'd want to hang on to, personally.

    reality.sgi.com has been a friend of mine.
  • The cube means that it's a nice UNIX workstation.

    Exactly. The new logo means it's probably a piece of crap. If it has the new logo but isn't a piece of crap, you'll know because it takes up your entire machine room.

  • Same thing at SCO (Score:4)

    by Dicky ( 1327 ) <slash3@vmlinuz.org> on Saturday July 07, 2001 @12:23PM (#101426) Homepage
    SCO has a server called scofolks.ocston.org (ocston = not SCO, backwards) which was set up a couple of years ago for similar reasons, except they had a bunch of silly rules like "You mustn't link to anywhere within sco.com from anywhere within ocston.org" - trying to maintain a separation between ocston and SCO.

    There was an announcement sent out a few weeks back:

    Tarantella Inc. and Caldera International have decided that neither company will support or provide the ocston service (including email and web pages). Ocston users are requested to remove their files from ocston by Thursday, June 28, 2001, as the server will be turned off on June 29th.

    The suggestion is that you use FTP to copy your files from ocston.org to your desktop or system at home. The copied files should not be placed on any SCO (Tarantella/Caldera) home servers.

    The machine is still up, but it's a sign of a very similar situation to that at SGI - or at least that's what it looks like.

    For the record - SCO laid me off over a year ago, but my account on ocston is still there. The machine isn't actually maintained by SCO, but they pay (paid?) for the hardware and bandwidth - when the layoffs happened, the ocston admins announced that they wouldn't be kicking people off who'd been laid off. Respect to them for that.

  • To bad, I could have told them that there isn't any money in NT unless your microsoft.

    Umm, SGI jumped on the Linux bandwagon [sgi.com] too, for example their work on a journalling file system. That hasn't paid off for them either. It remains to be seen if IBM will make any money there either.

  • What are you smoking? Only reality.sgi.com is going away.
  • We really need the http://webmuseum. Now! not .com., .now.!
  • Tell me about it. My college just bought two labs of those workstations for 3d modelling work. They're basically just PCs with fancy graphics hardware. Very nice hardware, but they cost far too much for what they do.
  • For the record - SCO laid me off over a year ago, but my account on ocston is still there. The machine isn't actually maintained by SCO, but they pay (paid?) for the hardware and bandwidth - when the layoffs happened, the ocston admins announced that they wouldn't be kicking people off who'd been laid off. Respect to them for that.
    I would have thought that many companies would want to kick laid-off employees off this sort of thing straight away - it would be a pretty embarrassing place for someone to put up a page with some pointed comments.

    Given SGI's situation, maybe they are acting in advance :-(

  • It took a bit of digging but I found a page [frontwheeldrive.com] with this explanation:

    Will we ever see your homepage return, more specifically the "fire, explosions, and antics" section? I'd be glad to put a mirror of it on the extra space I have in my home account...

    I'm not sure... maybe but honestly it was really out of date. It was kind of funny originally but it's over 4 years old now...




    --
  • The *REAL* reason SGI is floundering is because for years they could never market themselves out of a paper bag. You can have the best stuff in the world, but if your sales force doesn't quite get it...

    Damn straight! Another excellent example: NeXT--they made the absolute *best* development environment, APIs, and user environment in the world but couldn't sell it. They live on in Apple, of course, but they've got that godawful Aqua interface and a bunch of Mac zealots who refuse to accept superior solutions on the basis of, "But...but...but that's not the way the OLD Mac OS does it!"

  • hehe, and gnustep is your homepage. :)

    Yep. "Keepin' the dream alive." ;-)

  • best answer yet... (Score:5)

    by cabbey ( 8697 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @12:14PM (#101435) Homepage
    generated by http://lavarand.sgi.com/cgi-bin/corpspeak.cgi

    To: fans of reality.sgi.com
    From: bean counters
    Date: Sat Jul 7 13:09:57 PDT 2001
    Subject: immenent death/dismemberment

    An OEM scripting language negotiates the mergers, on a going-forward basis. For us to grow, we absolutely have to develop scripting languages. Due to the meta-services and paradigm shifts, what has changed is the pace of change.

    We absolutely have to develop a solution as well. Given current realities, communication empowers the Strategic Initiative. Having a plug-in that is fiscal, it follows that data disseminate a prominent suite of tools. As always, goals are the team.
  • Maybe they need to look at becoming a service company and produce machines that use the latest Linux X-servers and broadcast quality software preconfigured for use by 3d designers and animators and start sorting out suppling render farms for the new breeds of movies coming out. This really seems like the next big thing for the movie industry and even TV and this would be a good place to be supplying high end Linux machines and services keeping the state of the art.
  • Maybe they should run it from the International Space Station instead.
  • we'd be happy to host your site and any other not-for-profit information sharing site (.org but not .com) on http://ibiblio.org/ [ibiblio.org]

  • I don't quite get it. (Score:3)

    by daviddennis ( 10926 ) <david@amazing.com> on Saturday July 07, 2001 @12:54PM (#101439) Homepage
    It doesn't cost them any significant amount of money to keep up, so why are they doing this?

    Seems to me this is bad for employee morale, and that's going to be bad enough as it is :-(.

    D

    ----
  • This is typical of most companies right now. They couldn't give a rats ass about employee morale just the bottom line. (although anyone with 1/3 of a brain knows that happy employees are productive employees. and the best way to kill profits is to piss off your entire workforce, but I digress)

    Many Many companies are doing this, taking away benefits and perks from employees that will make no visible change in the bottom line just to make bean counters happy, or the standard CYA (Cover you ass) attitude...

    Although It's interesting how we cut staff, and cut basically free to give employee benefits, but the General manager gets a brand new Giant SUV (Lexus) with leather and all the goodies, and new furniture, oh and we're moving to a new office where the server room is 1/5th the size with no dedicated A/C so she can get a bigger office...

    yup, WE gotta Buck up and suffer during these hard times, how about working late tonight guys? no pay... oh and we've replaced the coffee station with a vending machine.... no more free coffee.
  • Oh, man... That's so disappointing to hear. I've been wondering for quite a while where that page was at. I wanted to read one more time about those guys trying to heat a coffee pot only to watch the glass pot itself melt. Made me want one of those lenses.

  • Huge magnifying lens (Score:3)

    by MSG ( 12810 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @12:47PM (#101442)
    Does anyone else remember a page on reality that had the details of an SGI employee purchasing an insanely large magnifying lens and using it to melt stuff? I thought I saw it about 3 years ago. That story was the basis for most of my opinions about SGI as a company. :-)
  • Due to the meta-services and paradigm shifts, what has changed is the pace of change.

    This really sounds like it was mistranslated severely at some point. I expected the next phrase to be "You have no chance to survive make your time".

  • A non-correctable (transient) memory error doesn't necessarily take your system down, though. Unless you mean it's a stuck bit (a permanent problem), but every couple months seems pretty frequent for something like that to happen.

  • Remember that SGI's silly CEO during this period is now in Microsoft...

    Well, at least this story has a silver lining :)

  • Wow, an accountant's joke.

    So two percentages walk into a pub. says one to the other: 'hey buddy how are you'. The other replies 'raised'.

    I guess I suck at accountant jokes ;-)

    Back to creating stuff.
  • So I am looking for visualization solutions and
    it ain't gonna be SGI 'cause they may not be there
    in ten years. So who else can render 120 million
    triangles per second (that's real, not zero pixel
    triangles, shaded, lit by four lights or more and
    textured with 1024x1024 texture)?
  • "Treat your customers like crap"

    THAT must be why Wal-Mart is doing so good!

    --

  • tip to the author of the photo gallery web pages: put the navigation -/+ buttons at the TOP of the pictures, where they won't move. The buttons are currently located at the bottom of the pictures and they jump around the page as each differently sized photo is loaded. I really want to see your photos, so don't make it annoying or slow for your viewers. :-(
  • When employees start posting their CVs and Resumes (1 [sgi.com], 2 [sgi.com], 3 [sgi.com])on company sites run by their employers then either the site has to go or the employees have to go... or both.
  • The moderator who moderated this is a bit of an idiot.

    - Just my opinion -

  • Silicon Graphics still develops IRIX and MIPS processors.

    Actually, Silicon Graphics has nothing to do with MIPS anymnore, other than perhaps being one of MIPS' best customers. Around a year ago SGI got rid of its remaining stake in MIPS Technologies Inc. [mips.com].

  • Perhaps SGI designed the processor itself, but I believe the intellectual property does actually belong to MIPS. Just as LSI, QED (now PMC Sierra), IDT, etc. design MIPS based processors with MIPS IP. (MIPS does not, of course, actually manufacture any processors; it's an IP only company.)

    I did find this page of "MIPS-Based(TM) Products [mips.com]" at MIPS, which lists SGI's machines. That page states "Design efforts utilizing MIPS® intellectual property are continuing for the system and server markets by Silicon Graphics."

    Also notice that SGI's R10000 processor [sgi.com] page includes the following at the bottom: "R10000, ANDES, and Avalanche are trademarks of MIPS Technologies, Inc."

    To me it looks like SGI behaves like any of MIPS licensees; they use intellectual property that (now) belongs to MIPS Technologies Inc., and design their processors using that. Perhaps there is an agreement between MIPS and SGI, but I couldn't find details of it. I'd be very appreciative (really) if you can show evidence to the contrary. I'm not trying to be argumentative; I would actually like to know how this is set up.

  • What SGI now stands for (Score:5)

    by sien ( 35268 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @12:17PM (#101454) Homepage
    Soon Going Insolvent.
  • Actually, it depends upon how you count... over the last year [yahoo.com], SGI's stock has done considerably better than RHAT's... they've also done better over two years, when you take into consideration the MIPSB spinoff...

  • Thats how I read this as well. Time to unload sgi stock.
  • I guess you haven't seen to many compaines die have you? This is an early sign of impending doom.

  • Re:D'oh (Score:1)

    by gej ( 46661 )
    This was part of the standard testing process:-) I worked support for the manufacturing division at sgi from '93 to about '96. We had lifts at various points in the conveyor to raise systems up to move them to various other places. One lift was notorious for getting confused and once every couple of months or so would just dump a system into space.

    Made a great noise.
  • From the Stats Page: [sgi.com]

    "Automaticly Updated on: 07/09/19101 01:43:07"

    As we can see, this is future Reality. 17,100 years from now. SGI has relized the paradox this can create, when we know what will be Reality in the future (we can steer circumstances to modify the future), and they are just tired of rewriting future Reality every time someone goes against The Plan.

  • In 1999, I contracted at SGI for a few months. Since I had an Indy R5K with a webcam, I took the opportunity to post a little "Ciannait's office" page on reality.

    Ever since I contracted there, I've been known to reference The Annotated Aerial View of the Cray Research Park [sgi.com] as evidence that yes, I worked there. I was in Building F, in the supercomputing department.

    Despite my waste of bandwidth site on reality, the creative and intelligent people at SGI used it for all sorts of things. SGI folks are demoralized enough as it is, and I feel for them, considering that this resource is being taken away. What's next, the end of Ducky Day [pipex.com]?


    "During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I was riding the pogostick."
  • Its cooler. Thats why.

    Looking at the new SGI logo is like having a 10 pound roast pulled out of your ass with a plastic fork.

  • SGI at 1.14 ... (Score:4)

    by sg3000 ( 87992 ) <<sg_public> <at> <mac.com>> on Saturday July 07, 2001 @11:42AM (#101462)

    SGI has been hovering around around a dollar since May. They've been steadily eroding since their plan to make money building high-end NT/x86 workstations just isn't working out. I hate to say it, but reality.sgi.com may not be the only server they're turning off.


  • ...it'll be down in half an hour. The quickest way to kill a webserver; post a link on slashdot.
  • Another area where SGI hardware is the industry standard is movie/broadcast post production. With the necessary cards, SGI's hardware (Onyx [sgi.com] and Octane [sgi.com]) are the only boxen that'll give you realtime HD (1920x1080) video editing. Coupled with Discreet's [discreet.com] software and ultra-fast HIPPI [hippi.org] networking, the post production houses of the world can get their customers in and out quick. Post production houses make an obsene amount of money, charging approximately $1500USD per hour for an Inferno [discreet.com] suite, so I guess they can afford the high prices of SGI's hardware.

    ----------------------------
  • The page says that content should be moved prior to the shutdown. Perhaps some of these interesting projects can be mirrored/hosted elsewhere? It would be a shame to see it all just disappear. I'm not sure how much disk space would be needed or if the FTP archives are going to go down as well, but certainly the most important projects could find a new home.
  • Yea. Im dismayed about that too. But the information on how to make your own is there and the process needed
  • You da man. Thanks. I didn't not know that site existed.
  • This reminds me of This past 4th of july. We threw an SGI Indigo 2 out of a third story window onto concrete. That glorious box just dented and bounced!!!! If their staff can build such rock stable pieces of equipment then dammit. Oh well.... Atleast SGI will still have their Lava Lamp Random Number generator page up. http://lavarand.sgi.com !!!!
  • I just did it.


    101 oso:~ > du -sk reality.sgi.com/
    463191 reality.sgi.com
    102 oso:~ > ls -l reality.sgi.com |wc -l
    775
    105 oso:~ > ls -l reality.sgi.com.tar.gz
    -rw-r--r-- 1 matt users 281182058 Jul 8 03:52 reality.sgi.com.tar.gz


    I wonder if it'll change at all between now and aug 15.
  • And to think all this time I thought it was "Soylent Green is . . ."
  • You mean the name change from Silicon Graphics Inc. to SGI didn't fix all their problems???

  • One cool employee page... (Score:4)

    by catch23 ( 97972 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @12:12PM (#101472)
    I spent about 30 minutes on this page...

    http://reality.sgi.com/chinster_studio/html/photo_ essays.html [sgi.com]
  • The problem Im having right now -- is I can't get anything to compile on them ... we spent 27,000$ on the machine (An octane in 1997) and have no media kit, no compiler, and scant manuals ...

    I installed gcc and simple programs will compile, but just about anything that needs kernel headers -- won't compile ...

  • Nice tidbit of info, but what is the reason(s) they are turning off the machine?

    It's hyperbole to say that this is bad when it may be the case that SGI is going to replace it with a better machine or an improved program...

    People say, "Jimmy, are you mad God created retarded people?", and i say, "No, i like President Bush." - SouthPark
  • If so, I would like to try them out myself.
  • Urhm.. yeah I mirrored it, I'm sure it's illegal and all because of the copyright issues, but oh well. I suppose If I get a notice telling me to remove it, I will.

    mirror [indstate.edu].

    "Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
  • It was grand--he made a four foot by three foot refracting lens out of a block of glass. I don't know how he ground and polished that huge hunk of glass, but he made a rather odd-looking rectangular refracting lens mounte quite high in a mobile wooden frame, with the point of convergence far enough from the ground to keep it from starting fires when out in the sun. Our astronomy class got to play with it on a bright day, and it's amazing what a large refractor can do. We got a can of Mountain Dew to come to a quick boil, and of course the refractor vaporized the coloring from the outside of the aluminum can in short order. Lighting my cigar in it was instantaneous of course, though I did manage to scorch my knuckles painfully in the process (no real damage, but--ouch!).

  • Not only are the employee home pages are going away, but so are the other services that are co-hosted on reality [sgi.com].

    The classic lavarand [sgi.com] site (random numbers via Lava Lite Lamps), which is hosted on reality, is going away as well.

    We are planning to bring on-line a and improved version of LavaRnd [lavarnd.org] (open sourced and patent-free) at www.LavaRnd.org [lavarnd.org] hopefully before reality goes away.

  • My SW1600 was the last batch made with the old cube logo... the new ones have the new logo on 'em it seems. Guess this makes it more valuable! ;o)
  • SGI is having a hard time because they are selling computers like the OCtane 2 (400 Mhz MIPS) for $28,000. Yes I know that a current MIPS proc is much faster per Mhz than almost any other proc and that there is alot of bandwidth inside those sweet looking cases, but what is going to have more power, 1 Octane, or an entire lab of Athalon + Geforce 3's ?

  • Why? (Score:5)

    by Jagasian ( 129329 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @11:40AM (#101485)
    How about you tell us why its being taken down? I mean, is it because of budget problems, or is it due to a change in management?
  • Why does Slashdot keep using the old cube logo for SGI? The glory days of SiliconGraphics (and thus, the cube logo) are long gone. The x86/PC days are here along with the fitting 'sgi' logo. Quit using the cube.
  • (6.4 was almost a rogue port of 6.2 to support the 10k proc)

    The R10K (MIPS R10000) was supported as far back as "IRIX 5.3 Including R10K" in 1995. But I agree about 6.4 (as well as 6.3 for O2)... rogue port indeed. Luckilly 6.5 has been great, especially the quarterly updates that slowly roll in new features and fix the bugs. Heavily tested, too (SGI stays about 1.5 quarters ahead of their users, heavily testing each new release on their own machines first).

    I [heart] IRIX 6.5
    (now at 6.5.12!)

  • 97... are you running 6.4?? I don't believe 6.2 supported the Octane 10k procs, and 97 would be pretty early for 6.5.

    On freeware.sgi.com under gcc they have a link to a page on Developer Central (http://www.sgi.com/developers/devtools/apis/irix. html) that should give you everything that you might need outside of gcc (linker, header files, etc).

    If you aren't there already, you really should see about getting Irix 6.5; SGI cleaned up lots of messes (and added a few.. nsd). But you get snmp, file ACL's, NFS, etc. there are just lot's of enhancements in 6.5 (6.4 was almost a rogue port of 6.2 to support the 10k proc). It's only 600 bucks, you get lots of stuff for you money. But if possibly you check out the above you should be able to do pretty much anything you need to.

    As a side note, if a compile fails, I've had best luck getting it to go by adding a couple of CFLAGS when using 3rd party apps from the -n32 (or -64 depending upon CPU) & -cckr; I normally use these on the Irix cc compiler but should also work on gcc.

    Good luck, happy compiling

  • Re:Money Trouble ... (Score:5)

    by InsaneGeek ( 175763 ) <slashdot@insanegeek s . com> on Saturday July 07, 2001 @12:55PM (#101491) Homepage
    What exactly is the problem you are/were having. Using them for years I can say Irix is my favorite, as long as people are willing to *not* use the GUI for administration (elsewise you are really limiting yourself) it can't be beat (give me "inst" over any other rpm, aptget, pkgadd crap).

    Are you having a performance issue?? Memory, CPU, disk I/O? More than likely it's a simple thing that you don't know about, or has been fixed in the past 4 years.

    Irix must work properly/reliably for lots of people or else they wouldn't continue to sell their thousand proc plus single image configurations. You can't have downtime or not have it work exactly the way you want it when you are 30 days in to a 60 day calculation.

    The *REAL* reason SGI is floundering is because for years they could never market themselves out of a paper bag. You can have the best stuff in the world, but if your sales force doesn't quite get it...
  • Check out the Segfault story about this [segfault.org] too.
  • Well, yeah, it is really strange, considering that people tend to use huge e-mail attachments, when it would save a lot of resources dumping it on an URL (behind basic authentication if needed), and send the URL instead. If this had been practiced, most companies could save a lot. So, closing down the employee webserver just don't make any sense from a resource management perspective either.
  • Yeah,, there are many good pages there. I discovered the shutdown yesterday when I visited http://reality.sgi.com/btd/kate-bush/ [sgi.com]. It's a really good page about the music of Kate Bush, with quite a few rare recordings.

  • What version of Irix are you running?

    Irix 6.5 comes with the kernel headers that you need for free.

    maybe you could contact your local SGI office to see if that machine is entitled to run Irix 6.5, and if it is, where to get a media set from.

    Once you have that, then you can use GCC to compile whatever you need.Alternatively, there is a good selection of freeware for SGIs at http://freeware.sgi.com [sgi.com]

    That includes a quite large amount of GPL software in binary form for you to download and install

  • Good Customer Service = Bankruptcy (Score:5)

    by tenzig_112 ( 213387 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @01:51PM (#101499) Homepage
    Yikes. I have so much of my career invested with these business school drop-outs it isn't even funny.

    It just goes to show you that full-service customer support will only get you in trouble. "Treat your customers like crap," I told them years ago. "They'll respect you more that way." But they wouldn't listen. You have a $15k graphics board go hinky on you? They'll drop ship it with a moment's notice.

    My hat is off to the beautiful people at sgi. They did the support thing right and are paying the price for it.

    When I die, I hope to go to the place most like sgi tech support.

  • Sgi has been nice enough to give the lavarand systems to the inventors (thank you very much). Check out http://www.lavarand.org. We hope to have a copy of the classic lavarand setup running in the not too far future (Even if I have to turn my Indy on to do it). Lavarand is not dead yet...

  • Let's not forget another SGI-boosted website that originally started up at reality.sgi.com which is the International Obfuscated C Contest [sgi.com]. The contest has now moved from SGI to its own domain www.ioccc.org [ioccc.org] hosted by Plaidworks(??).

  • It doesn't cost them any significant amount of money to keep up, so why are they doing this?

    Its the same reason they can pagers and cellphones as soon as earnings slip - they think it'll solve all their problems.

    Around 1994 or 95, I created and ran a central web server for NORTEL's Intranet in North Carolina up until late 1999. The web hit NORTEL like a ton of bricks to the point UC sent us threatening letters about our widespread use of Mosaic (Netscape didn't exist yet), We hosted about 800 websites, many for official projects but many for personal web pages as well. It was pretty wide open - just sign up for an account using your employee credentials and you got account space. Obviously folks who abused it were kicked off - but since your account was clearly tied to you, nobody did. I can't recall one instance of being asked pull down an offending site.

    Anyway - the web was a huge part of NORTEL's employee life. Web servers ran on lots of desktops or on central servers like the one I had deployed. We used the web to vastly improve our communication across labs in the US, Canada, the UK, and elsewhere. It also gave employees a place to express themselves. Heck - the server I ran was just an HP C Classs with 100GB of RAID-5 running HP-UX and Apache. It did great - even with folks adding all sorts of tools, database frontends, you name it.

    Well, sure enough, as you all know NORTEL stock has cratered like many other tech companies. Well, according to friends who still run teh server I created, NORTEL is now instituting a company wide policy where every website on the companies Intranet must be registered with a central authority. They will review what is submitted, accept what they find 'useful' and then will proceed to shutdown all other unapproved web sites and servers.

    Its funny because they will probably spend magnitudes more $$$ trying to reign in teh web on their INtranet vs what it really cost them. Again, a knee jerk reaction at cost cutting when the real problem is - lack of sales and too many employees (which they've resolved by cutting 1/3 of their workforce)

    So it shouldn't surprise you. Executives STILL don't realize that if you work your employees into the ground without giving them some outlets and places to express themselves and unwind, they'll be less productive and you'll lose even more money! I've always been amazed by it. Profits go down, they institute some stupid cost cutting policy (pagers, vacation carry-over, less health benefits, personal web pages, sports leagues, etc) and then they wonder why productivity is lower and they are losing even more money.

    Its too bad really, but I guess its a fact of life. If you aren't happy in your job, you'll just get fired and they'll hire someone else for half your salary to work into the ground who needs the paycheck badly (been there, still there :) )

  • Wrong.

    Before being spun off MIPS became the development arm for embedded processing MIPS cpus. So what SGI did was spin off its piece of the embedded market, a market it had no interest in since the Nintendo 64. SGI still employs engineers to produce MIPS processors for use in the server and technical computing market. Any MIPS processor you see in an SGI product has been developed in house by SGI, just as any future processors will also be developed in house.

  • Re:SGI at 1.14 ... (Score:4)

    by eXtro ( 258933 ) on Saturday July 07, 2001 @02:53PM (#101511) Homepage
    To bad, I could have told them that there isn't any money in NT unless your microsoft.
    I dunno, Dell seems to do OK selling NT. SGI also lost money on linux too, so its not fair to blame it on Microsoft. SGI only understands high profit margin computer systems. They tried to maintain an artificially high profit margin on boxes that were slightly better than other PCs on the market (at least in terms of graphics performance) and also tried to sell them through their normal (extremely pricey) sales channel.

    For PC boxes your margins need to be low to compete. Developing your own graphics board is a waste of time, to justify the expenditure in R&D the board has to be cutting edge for about a year. The SGI graphics board was only a tiny bit better than an nVidia at the release date.

    Selling commodity components through your own sales channel, salespeople who may have engineering degrees and enourmous salaries, is an indicator of mental retardation in somebodies thought processes. There should've been a secure web page that would take your address and credit card and ship it direct from the manufacturer to you. The only time a salesperson should've been involved is if there was a huge number of boxes involved.

  • KK: LavaRand, in haiku form, what do you think about the end of reality?

    LR: new stuff eternal /
    nuclear mighty jolt shy /
    fish ginormous wail

    KK: Beautiful words, LavaRand. Back to you, Taco.

  • ... find it odd that Segfault [segfault.org] got the scoop on this little tidbit [segfault.org] 3 days in advance of slashdot :-D
  • I kinda sad to see SGI starting to turn out the lights. I have an old Indy system that still kicks ass, got the kwel little camara and a built in ISDN modem. Its been serving up webpages for 6 years with about 97% uptime!
  • What you said was totally ridiculous. The world needs more SGIs (the "old" one at least), not more Dells.

    We don't need yet another vendor bundling a bunch of off the shelf crap for a margin. The whole NT/Linux adoption thing only happened because they probably couldn't afford the development of IRIX and the chips it ran on...

    If you had experienced a SGI machine say, 5-6 years ago, way before the 3D craze reached the desktop PC, you would understand... They really had something special, but unfortunately, the company began to crumble (mismanagement) at the same time 3D hardware became cheaper and cheaper...

    Remember that SGI's silly CEO during this period is now in Microsoft...
  • Heh, not bad.

    I've thrown a mini tower with a P200 system in it out of a 3rd story window. It landed on a concrete pavement... *CRUNCH*. The case was a total writeoff - looking at it from the side, it was no longer a rectangle, it was a parallelogram. The hard drive was also completely knackered and the PSU mysteriously failed to work (yet showed no signs of physical damage). The CPU and RAM was fine, and a couple of expansion cards survived, with minor (well, quite major actually, but repairable) denting. The mobo worked again once a damaged capacitor had been replaced.

    Still, the box was running Windows 98... no wonder it crashed so badly.
  • While looking around reality.sgi.com, i bumped into this [sgi.com] page...

    Nichice disk usage meter, but check out the date marked on the top of the page, when I read it, it said 07/07/19101, SGI still hasnt got the Y2K bug sorted out? TWO years late?

    It's a wonder they're still going :)

    Mark.
    --

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