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.
Unless the SEC's in on It ... (Score:5, Informative)
a story that might be an April Fools day joke
Hey I myself enjoy taking a joke too far but if this is an April Fool's Day joke, I must confess I would have jumped out and yelled "surprise" before filing a merger and acquisition notice with the Security and Exchange Commission of the United States Government [sec.gov]. I hear they don't take too kindly to joke 8-Ks.
From the SEC Filing:
On April 1, 2009, Rackable Systems, Inc. ("Rackable"), a Delaware corporation, announced that it had signed an Asset Purchase Agreement (the "Agreement") to acquire substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc., a Delaware corporation ("SGI"), including SGI's non-U.S. subsidiaries and operations, other than certain assets unrelated to the ongoing business. The Agreement, dated March 31, 2009, was made and entered into by and among Rackable, SGI and certain SGI subsidiaries. The Agreement has been approved by the respective boards of directors of Rackable and SGI.
Under the terms of the Agreement, Rackable or a subsidiary of Rackable, will acquire the assets for a purchase price of approximately $25 million in cash, $10 million of which will be placed in escrow and available to Rackable following the closing to reimburse Rackable for payments and expenses made or incurred in connection with certain tax matters. In addition, Rackable will assume certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets. Following the signing of the Agreement, SGI and certain of its affiliated entities located in the U.S. filed a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition and motions to approve the Agreement.
Also note that they had planned to repurchase up to $40 million worth of shares but it looks like instead they're opting to acquire SGI. What that means to you day traders and quant fund managers, who knows?
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.
The world doesn't screech to a halt because a bunch of nerds are slapping their knees and pulling pranks; here's evidence someone got something done yesterday.
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One might also visit SGI's investor relations page to witness their release on the subject [sgi.com]. I'm subscribed to the conference call, and if windows and firefox both stay running until 2:00 PM I expect to have some suits blathering in the background.
should really have waited to submit (Score:5, Informative)
Not that I didn't preview or anything, but I could have also linked in the SGI customer letter. [sgi.com] Rackable is getting SGI without getting their debt.
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You beat me to the punch. I was just going to point out that SGI is also in on the joke [sgi.com].
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The fact that stock buybacks boost the returns on stock option plans has absolutely nothing to do with their popularity among management of course.
"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." (Score:5, Interesting)
Right up until you found out how bad Irix could be ;)...
Very sexy hardware, terrible *nix implementation. I once had (sigh) an IR2 in my office for 6 months. I don't think I slept at home the entire time.
Re:"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." (Score:5, Informative)
Even now, Maya still has some legacy hangovers from those days: Ctrl+Space to remove the GUI. Ctrl+M to remove the menus. Space to bring up the 'hotbox', which is basically a menu rendered using openGL (about the only thing Sgi's could do really well).
Even now, I'm still staggered by how far Sgi managed to fall from grace. Mind you, i think Apple learnt a lot from SGI about how to switch to Intel processors successfully. The way SGI did it made every single one of their existing clients run to the hills, and they never looked back.
Re:"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." (Score:4, Interesting)
The only IRIX I ever installed was 5.3 on an Indigo R3000 that I got with the 17" trinitron and entry graphics for $500, and sold a few months later for the same price. The patch set was literally bigger than the OS. IIRC it took considerably longer to install, too.
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Lol, I used to absolutely DREAD getting Irix updates from SGI. Every few months a batch of CDs with 5.x/6.x on them would show up and I'd be the poor bastard going through the Indys (we had one for testing purposes), O2s (testing), Octanes (work stations), and our IR2. Made NT4.0 look good, Irix did...
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Made NT4.0 look good, Irix did...
Lol. sad, but so very true....
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I don't know quite what you were doing, but I think odds are You're Doing It Wrong.
Whack the images onto a dist server and use inst's selections file format to specify the locations. Piece of cake.
And installing IRIX (as complained about in a sibling post) consists of copying about 10 lines of source locations into your serial terminal emulator and something like:
install *
keep conflicting
go
It used to take me about five minutes from turning the machine on until IRIX was happily instal
Re:"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." (Score:4, Informative)
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If you liked it, perhaps you should checkout Maxxdesktop [maxxdesktop.com].
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Oh, and re-installing irix was as simple as constructing an atomic bomb in your garden shed, from 2 paperclips, some woodglue, and a dead panda, whilst your arms are tied behind your back.
So you need to be McGyver?
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I loved the SGI UI...so much so that I can't wait for to get it on Linux [maxxdesktop.com] too. I tried aqua and hated that, and gnome ain't much better.
I hope this doesn't affect that effort.
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Actually, SGI's X-server and Window Manager are the only ones I've used I've felt have been decent, especially when working with graphics.
Personally, I'd just like to see anyone associated with X development(No matter which project) dragged out to a dump and shot, for perpetrating a serious crime against computing .
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I wouldn't knock X too much - X was designed for a different audience than other windowing systems - specifically, it was designed for the model where an expensive server sits in one location and lots of cheap terminals lie around and connect to that server. It is actually a good design for what it was intended for. The problem is, almost nobody uses setups like that these days (though it's coming back... see OnLive), and it also lacked a number of "essential" features like security since the devs made th
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Yeah, they missed some awesome opportunities. They created the amazing N64 hardware (33 million sold), then failed to turn it into a real consumer powerbase. Thus, several engineers left to form Nvidia, and Nintendo went to ArtX/IBM for their next console.
The capability of the N64 proves they could have created a competitive card the same year the Voodoo Graphics was released for PCs (1996). All they had to do was rip-out the MIPS processor and sound hardware, tack-on a PCI interface, and write some driv
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Apple switch to Intels (Score:2)
The Apple switch to Intel was more about logistics than anything else. Apple realized that they were constantly at the mercy of their CPU supplier (IBM, Motorola) for a custom chip.
This may be part of the reason for the Intel switch. But another reason was that IBM and Freescale didn't have a low power G5 processor for laptops. I waited for more than a year after the G5 came out for one to be put into a laptop. Apple couldn't get one to run cool enough. As it is after the switch many people complained t
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The panda is unnecessary. You're working from the old instructions. :)
I know your pain though. I had an SGI Indy, and an SGI Origin 200. As I recall, the Indy wasn't so bad, but the Origin was almost like black magic to upgrade the OS on. I do recall a lot of chanting, and several virgin sacrifices to get it right.
The Indy wasn't amazing either. I compared various tasks run on both the Indy and a 133Mhz Intel Linux machine on the same desk. The Linux machine was blazing
Re:"little cooler than an SGI workstation..." (Score:5, Informative)
This is why SGI finally fell apart; you guys are all talking about SGI workstations. SGI hasn't been in the workstation business for years. There hasn't been a workstation business for years. HP,IBM,Sun sell workstations, but they are just rebranded PCs. Dec,DG,EnS,Intergraph,Appalo: all defunct.
Lately SGI has been selling low-end HPC clusters and a few mid-range altix machines. (and one really big one at nasa) The HPC business is a really difficult place to make money. SGI has never been good at keeping their operating costs down. Compared to their competition, they always seemed to employ a lot of people, and have a lot of irons in the fire, most of which never panned out.
SGI has always loved to engineer their way around problems; In a mature market one makes money by engineering a solution to a problem and then licensing it out to the rest of the world until it becomes an industry standard. Numalink could have been what infiniband is now. Infinitereality could have been what geforce is now. CXFS could have been what lustre is. XIO could be PCIe. SGI wanted to control it though. They tried to keep it all under the tent.
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We have a couple of SGI machines and the real value add of having SGI is the support.
Some hardware breaks, and unless it needs to be shipped from the US it is fixed within hours.
Some software breaks, and you get a full diagnosis on what the problem was and options to choose from on how you'd like to fix it.
Some researcher has code that runs like a dog, they'll tune and parallelise it for the appropriate system.
I hope our local guys are fine with this news. They are worth their weights in gold. I can't say
Innovators dillema. (Score:2)
SGI has long suffered from the classic theme of the innovator's dilema. They invented really cool graphics technology in the 80s and early 90s. It performed very well, but they charged an enourmous amount of money for it. Along comes the first generation of 3D graphics cards for PCs. At that point, SGI had the option of putting out a top notch PC graphics card. They could have become a dominant player in that market. Some business unit at SGI would sit in the place now occupied by nvidia. That's hard to do,
I think you are mistaken about lustre. (Score:2)
actually, I know you are mistaken about lustre. Lustre is a regular kernel filesystem just like CXFS, stornext, GFS, or GPFS. In the case of puma or bluegene you have to link it into the application, but not on linux. The point, however, remains. SGI has used CXFS to sell its hardware, which was awesome at the time, but it limits the ability of rackable to make a business out of selling CXFS as a stand-alone product. IDeally you would want to sell CXFS licenses on every commodity cluster out there, your own
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I'm sure that when I'm a pensioner, I'll be the only one in the old folk home that has a mantle piece ornament that can play BZ flag!
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I once had (sigh) an IR2 in my office for 6 months. I don't think I slept at home the entire time.
The nightmares of switching between streams were that bad huh?
Not An April Fool's Joke (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Head hurts parsing this sentence... (Score:5, Informative)
You have parsed the sentance correctly. The construction is an idiomatic one, typically used by older folks looking back on how times have changed or younger folks affecting a similar attitude.
Re:Head hurts parsing this sentence... (Score:4, Interesting)
"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?
Building target "quote"...
0 errors, 0 warnings
Build complete.
The sentence is old-fashioned, but lexically correct. In plainer English it basically means "There was a time when an SGI workstation was really cool and there was little else that was cooler".
could I ask (Score:3, Informative)
How old are you, where did you learn to speak English, and is it your native language?
Serious questions - I found the sentence mostly unexceptional (I'd probably have left out "that"), and I'm curious about the difficulty you had in parsing it.
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I had similar trouble figuring out exactly what it meant, though, like him, I guessed well enough.
I'm 43 and English. Yes, the English language is my first language, and, no, the sentence doesn't make much sense (to me). Maybe it would help to be familiar with the American off-shoot.
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The journalist was trying to be "folksy" by imitating the speech patterns of the poorly educated.
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Here's an alternative interpretation: Author writes sentence as intended, and it doesn't mesh w/ readers' default mental vocabulary.
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The earlier poster did not have the benefit of being exposed to the same slang you are and lives in a culture where journalists (and English tutoring in general) are very strongly discouraged from putting local slang in their articles. So to sum up the AC above is both insulting the intelligence of people that don't know his local slang, is using the playground attack of going for the man and not the ball, and has failed in reading comprehension in this instance so badly
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Yeah, College educated white male American in his 30's from the Northeast US is pretty much me, and I've definitely heard that used before. Are you west or east of the Appalachians?
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Now get off my lawn :)
Yes I know, they guy with cards could only dream of using a teletype terminal so there are far better established lawns out there.
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
Re:The Natural Rise & Fall of Empires (Score:4, Interesting)
The question is why do empires fall? Usually because they run out of lands to conquer. Or they lose their strategic advantage in technology (transportation, resources).
SGI was cool at the time, but their executive had a fatal flaw - they believed that the marketplace would always be willing to pay premium prices simply for the cool silver SGI badge on the monitor and desktop unit. Back then, anything that connected to a UNIX system would have a UNIX markup price; a UNIX RS232 or monitor cable would cost two or three times as much as a regular PC cable. Just to make sure no-one attempted to use a regular PC cable, an additional pair of pins would be used simply as a loop-back. Other vendors charged site licences by the maximum number of user accounts, the amount of memory, or the number of CPU's in the system.
Even though their engineers could see that PC's were catching up to workstation standards of CPU performance, SGI's executive board refused to develop for the PC platform, as they feared that they would have one half of the company attempting to undercut the profit margins of the other half.
By 1995, Microsoft had brought out Windows NT and other 3D vendors were providing professional graphics accelerator boards supporting texture mapping, SGI's engineers had left to form Nvidia. Then SGI sold all their graphics patents to Microsoft. SGI also bought out part of Cray in an effort to remain in the high-end visualisation market, but as PC clusters keep creeping upwards in performance that didn't work.
If SGI had been willing to provide 3D graphics technology to every possible marketplace, they would have probably been able to retain control rather than Microsoft to dominate.
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If SGI had been willing to provide 3D graphics technology to every possible marketplace, they would have probably been able to retain control rather than Microsoft to dominate.
SGIs could do more than 3D graphics. It's possible that they made a mistake emphasizing so much on 3D, resulting in customers thinking of SGI as a high tech company and going to Sun and IBM for servers.
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SGIs could do more than 3D graphics.
I guess that is true - back then, a server was really seen as a workstation without the graphics card and some additional space for a large hard disk drive.
There was always this perception of SGI being the high-end visualization company. All the UNIX vendors took great pride in being the chosen supplier for a particular Pixar/Disney movie or new visualization center. You went to Cray for the supercomputer, storage and high speed networking, and SGI for the visualization a
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If you call your company Silicon Graphics Inc, it is understandable if your customers think of you as a 3D graphics company.
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They may be spending $25mil ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Under the terms of the Agreement, Rackable or a subsidiary of Rackable, will acquire the assets for a purchase price of approximately $25 million in cash, $10 million of which will be placed in escrow and available to Rackable following the closing to reimburse Rackable for payments and expenses made or incurred in connection with certain tax matters. In addition, Rackable will assume certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets. Following the signing of the Agreement, SGI and certain of its affiliated entities located in the U.S. filed a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition and motions to approve the Agreement.
So, if i'm reading this right, they bought the assets for $25mil, and immediately after SGI went into Chapter 11. Not sure what those liabilities are, but I'd assume it's more to do with maintaining the existing SGI customers out there rather than incurring all of their depts. I can't imagine SGI would need chapter 11 if Rackable had picked up the full $500mil of dept. Sounds like they put all the crap in one place and scuttled SGI....
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Each of these has its advantages and its disadvan
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As I understand it, SGI went into Chapter 11, and then immediately after, they bought the assets for $25m.
In England, this process is called a "prepack bankruptcy".
Surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was younger, I could have only dreamed of having one of these venerable Unix systems. But now that they're finally cheap and I can afford them, Linux now makes them seem very outdated and proprietary in nature. Kind of a sad thing to see old dreams die, but in this case I think it's also a step forward.
It's always seemed like such a shame to see old well-designed machines built around Unix (rather than just generic PC's) become a thing of the past, though. Good quality hardware and a machine that looked and ran like it meant business, with fast disks and lots of RAM...
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Sun not so much, rumors are that IBM may buy them... HP is only alive b/c people are still using HP/UX and Tru64 for things.
IBM learned long ago the money is in selling support contracts. None of the other vendors ever seemed to really grasp that idea.
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IBM learned long ago the money is in selling support contracts. None of the other vendors ever seemed to really grasp that idea.
Actually, it's a lesson that HP has learned also (witness their growing services arm).
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oh no, HP is not alive because of their crappy Unixes, imaging and printing and networkig is practically carrying the company. In fact, the turd that is HP's Itanic er Itanium2 processor helped bring down sgi and
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yeah I was ignoring their printing business and just thinking of their unixes... I had forgotten about the Itanics though... like most of the world !zing!
Re:Surprised? (Score:4, Informative)
HP? They're not alive because of people using HP-UX, they're alive because HP-UX is a trivial part of their business. They make laptops and printers, and that (especially the printers) is why they're alive.
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 wa
Re:The decay of workstations. (Score:5, Interesting)
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No, workstations died because all the PC hardware and software was both cheaper and easier to buy. Quality and features had little to do with it. (You still can't get a 15k RPM drive unless you buy or build your own workstation, for example. Nor tape backup.)
What is the point of SPARC these days. (Score:3, Interesting)
You are so right.
Like, right now, I have to ask myself, what exactly does a SPARC or even POWER do that an AMD64 cannot? I just don't know now, and the differences used to be much more clear cut.
IT used to be floating point and registers that set the workstation cpu apart and both of those advantages are gone. Both AMD and Intel have made a lot of strides in floating point and then AMD64 added a lot of registers.
x86 assembly went from torture to kinda fun. I don't lust after a POWER chip the way I used t
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For SPARC, awesome parallelism
Interesting.
How good is it at divvying up memory among threads? Like, if I have a big old rectangular chunk of RAM, can I slice it in some way so that all 64 CPUs aren't stepping on each other trying to get at the memory? For that matter, is the RAM fast enough to feed all these CPUs?
Apple (Score:2)
The only ones that are still around and thriving are Sun, IBM, and HP.
You forgot Apple - OS X is a certified Unix after all.
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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 dev
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IBM and HP as still surviving. They diversified into other markets though. IBM sells service more these days. Also not in your list is Apple. All Macs are Unix machines and they even sell workstations (MacPro) and servers (Xserve). I think in terms of sheer sales, Apple sells more Un
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HP make most of their money from printers, which have nothing to do with Unix other than that some of them might work with Unix computers.
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ARM is a really neat instruction set, and the architecture is very efficient, but there are/were some weaknesses.
The main one was that the cache was on the wrong side of the MMU and ran at a very low clock frequency. Have they fixed this yet?
The other one, as you mention in your post, is the lack of floating-point. Are there any main-stream ARM implementations with hardware floating-point nowadays?
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All recent ARM chips except the very cheapest have the NEON instruction set. This is a set of SIMD instructions for integer and single-precision floating point. If you're only using floats, then it can do two or four operations at once, but it lacks support for double-precision floating point. There is an FPU core available from ARM that does 64-bit (double) and 128-bit (long double) floating point operations, but I don't know of any chips that incorporate it.
Most ARM SoCs include a DSP as well as the A
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Not that ironic, considering the GNU project was originally started up to replace... proprietary Unix.
$25M seems like a lot (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember when Everex and Kodak (and Dell too?) all got out of the Unix/SVR4 business. Kodak got out by selling to Sun. I seem to recall that Everex sold off their Unix operation for a paltry $100K.
I really wonder why Rackable is even bothering? Do they think the companies using SGI iron today will keep buying more stuff an SGI label on the front?
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Kodak bought ISC [wikipedia.org] in 1988.
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I didn't know that Kodak was in the Unix business. (Score:2)
Neither did I but Kodak does have patents [cnet.com] on some technology in Sun's Java.
Falcon
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....
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It was obviously going to be all downhill for SGI when they replaced their cool cube logo with the useless text logo....
Boring sells in business.
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Apparently not considering the current state of SGI.
It's real (Score:4, Informative)
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from the press release on SGI's site:
Rackable Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:RACK), a leading provider of servers and storage products for medium to large-scale data centers, today announced its agreement to acquire substantially all the assets of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (NASDAQ: SGIC) for approximately $25 million in cash, subject to adjustment in certain circumstances, plus the assumption of certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets.
Note the statement about assumption of liabilities. They may not end up with all of SGI's debt. According to Bloomberg
The new Chapter 11 petition, filed today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, listed assets of $390 million against debt of $526 million. Liabilities include $141.5 million on a secured term loan and $20.7 million on a secured revolving credit.
The assets cannot be sold without the secured debt holders being satisfied. They may not end up with all of the debt. In the past bankruptcy SGI's unsecured debt was reduced to 26 cents on the dollar. A similar reduction may occur this time.
Re:It's real (Score:4, Interesting)
SGI bought out part of Cray, the supercomputing/interconnect part. Sun bought out the other part of Cray, the storage systems part. Even if a company is in debt and has no sales, the patent portfolio is worth something even if it is for counter-litigation purposes.
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Many of the old cray patents are expired, and some have gone to the new Cray Inc.
The problem on the IP front is that SGI already leveraged most of their IP a long time ago. Most of it is already sold, cross-licensed, or expired.
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SGI bought out part of Cray, the supercomputing/interconnect part. Sun bought out the other part of Cray, the storage systems part. Even if a company is in debt and has no sales, the patent portfolio is worth something even if it is for counter-litigation purposes.
No, Sun bought the interconnect (it was eventually sold as the E10k series and made a ton of money outside the supercomputing space). SGI bought the nameplate, the legacy systems (you could buy a Cray T3E or SV1 from SGI and it would come with a Sun workstation to boot it up), and entry into a shrinking market. SGI never made any money on their purchase and ended up selling it for a loss. This kind of brain dead management is why SGI is in the trouble it is in.
SGI's storage systems came from its StorageTek
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I'm sure they're not picking up the debt. Rackable doesn't have the assets to pick up that debt. They are picking up the company for essentially nothing, but SGI has lost money every quarter for years. So they can expect to take on those loses for at least a couple of quarters. They won't owe the creditors, but they still have to pay some sort of severence to all the people they let go, and figure out how to do something with SGI's customer list and try to turn it into new rackable business.
There are valuab
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SGI's debt (Score:2)
It doesn't sound like Rackable is paying much for SGI's assets; but, they are picking up SGI's considerable debt, several hundred million dollars, in the deal.
No, Rackable isn't picking up all of SGI's debt. TFA [rackable.com] says Rackable is assuming certain liabilities relating to the assets.
Falcon
O2 (Score:2, Informative)
My O2 is running OpenBSD, now. Too bad I can't get the latest versions of IRIX. It was pretty impressive what that little O2 could do.
My Octane does a pretty good job of holding the carpet down.
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My Octane does a pretty good job of holding the carpet down.
Stupid uppity carpets
Old friends (Score:4, Interesting)
It almost broke my heart when during the remodeling I finally decided to put my old Sun workstation out to pasture - literally, into the backyard, to be picked up by trash folks later. It looked at me with that big monitor, "is that what you do to your elders?". A few years back it was my first Pentium, all SCSIed up and nowhere to go. Then it was my first 386, with extra drives hanging on ribbons out of a half-opened case. Before that it was my XT, along with its sharp yellow Casper monitor. I couldn't bear even to look at it. We spent so much time together. The only thing that remains from those days is my VT220 terminal which I used to log in to work through a modem to work remotely.
I never owned an SGI machine, but I knew people who worked there. SGI was in my back yard, so to speak. We were all so proud or "our" companies and "our" valley. There was no cooler place to live on the planet.
I also remember when Computer Literacy Bookstore closed down. I remember looking into the empty space at North First St. I remember when Kim Vestal's "Get your buns out of bed!" did not ring out in the morning.
Our friends leave us every day. Every time the world gets a little grayer. When it's all colorless, it may be time for us to go.
SGI was great (Score:2)
as was HP and Sun, until Linux and OpenBSD Unix took away a lot of their marketshare by allowing cheaper Unix boxes based on Intel X86 PC systems to exist.
Who needs an expensive SGI Irix box when you can build a Linux box a lot cheaper?
The same thing happened to Amiga, Inc. and Be, Inc. when Windows 95 and Linux showed that they could compete with AmigaOS and BeOS on cheaper Intel X86 PC clones.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wouldn't surprise me if it were true. (Score:5, Informative)
BTW. I hear you can pick up killer SGI MIPS equipment on eBay for a song. These machines are still workhorses for 3D rendering, audio and video production.
These machines suck down the power like motherfuckers by today's standards. You can get more power in a refurb laptop. Mine allegedly costs around $1200 that way and has a Quadro 2700M 512MB with absolutely absurd memory bandwidth... the machine itself has T9400, 2GB exp. to 4GB, 250GB 7200RPM, DVD+/-R/W w/LS, 1680x1050 17", VGA+HDMI, 24bit/96khz audio, super pissed off ricoh SD/etc reader... How much will you pay for electricity in the summer months? I can run my system on one of those harbor freight solar panel setups and a $20 inverter (Thanks for the heads up Lumpy.)
Please, people, I know the love of antique hackery but let those systems die. They aren't going to save you anything in the long run. Speaking as someone who has owned SGI machines, VME suns, an Alphastation, and whole herds of Apollo DN-series and IBM RT-series machines, let them go on to that great goodnight at the recycler. As it is I still have an Indy R4400SC with a marginal power supply (or something) and a camera cluttering up my storage area. Even that thing draws more than my laptop. Food for thought.
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Up until last year I was *still* supporting IRIX customers of my employer's software, and I used an Iris Indigo R3000 and an Octane to do it. The scientific, engineering, and academic worlds of computing still routinely uses old SGI hardware. At the local university, they still have an 8-node Origin2000 in the datacenter, but I think it has outlived the IT staff that was supposed to run it.
Also, the Iris Indigo I used was bought in 1991 and still works great, the only repair needed was to replace it's bat
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Tell me, do you think your super-duper laptop is going to be alive in 18 years? I'll take not *needing* to replace a computer for nearly 20 years over a slightly cheaper energy cost any day.
Peak draw of my laptop: under 150W, which includes its display. Compare to some power consumption figures for SGI systems [g-lenerz.de]. In order to even get a machine which has the power to run modern software (which it won't be able to do anyway unless the software is FOSS because nobody is using MIPS for Workstations or Servers or even video games any more, only for little-adopted netbooks) you have to get your power consumption up over my chest freezer.
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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
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Yep--half a billion worth.
Basically, they said "We'll take over your company and assume your debt." The $25M was almost a token sum.
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SGI claimed $526M in debt in their bankruptcy filing. However, Rackable apparently WON'T be assuming this debt! Go figure. Here's an explanation. [insidehpc.com]
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I have a dream and it's called crossbar switch.