Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 9th Feb 2006 19:10 UTC
SGI issued its most ominous regulatory filing to date, warning that a bad 2006 could force the former high-flyer into bankruptcy. In order to improve its business, SGI will consider measures ranging from axing or selling off product lines to pursuing 'a strategic partner or acquirer.' The hardware maker will basically look at anything and everything to remain a going concern.
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Member since:2005-07-06
SGI should have diversified their offer. They could have pushed x86 servers and workstations with the SGI brand to keep HP at bay.
They did try that Visual Workstation stunt, but that had a couple of problems: they had an x86 inside, but they were different enough to not be a PC and have big price tag. The idea was there, and it was good, but the implementation sucked.
Yes, that might have worked. After all, Apple and Sun are doing the same: Taking off the shelf components, putting them together in a design without out 8088 backwards compatibility, put them in a pretty case and install a decent Unix. Imagine a dual Opteron with a Quadro FX card in a Tezro case running Irix 
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/08/10 23:34 UTC
"The 'Llano' processor that AMD described today in an ISSCC session is not a CPU, and it's not a GPU - instead, it's a hybrid design that the chipmaker is calling an 'application processor unit', or APU. Whatever you call it, it could well give Intel a run for its money in the laptop market, by combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four out-of-order CPU cores on a single, 32nm processor die."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/08/10 19:38 UTC
"The scuttlebutt is that IBM seemed perfectly content to wait until May to launch the Power7-based Power Systems servers, but something changed and compelled the company to move up the announcement of its first machines using the eight-core processor to today. Big Blue is not in a habit of explaining its motives or its timing for product launches, but it seems clear that IBM wanted to get out in front of a whole lot of processor and systems launches that are expected between now and the summer."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/08/10 19:33 UTC
Mozilla has announced that they are going to drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger definitively. "Mac OS X 10.4 was released in April of 2005 and a lot has changed since then," Josh Aas writes, "We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X and 10.4 support has been a hindrance. Where we can work around supporting 10.4, doing so consumes valuable time and effort. Neither Chrome nor Safari has to deal with this."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/05/10 23:46 UTC
"The ancient bug was discovered by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy in January 2010 and involves a utility that allows newer versions of Windows to run very old programs. Mr Ormandy has found a way to exploit this utility in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7. The patch for this vulnerability will appear in the February security update. Five of the vulnerabilities being patched at the same time allow attackers to effectively hijack a Windows PC and run their own programs on it."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/05/10 21:50 UTC, submitted by tyrione
"Today, Clang completed its first complete self-host! We built all of LLVM and Clang with Clang (over 550k lines of C++ code). The resulting binaries passed all of Clang and LLVM's regression test suites, and the Clang-built Clang could then build all of LLVM and Clang again. The third-stage Clang was also fully-functional, completing the bootstrap."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/05/10 21:43 UTC
With all the virtualization schemes running on top of Linux, how do they exploit the underlying kernel for I/O virtualization? The answer is virtio, which provides an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Discover virtio, and learn why Linux will soon be the hypervisor of choice.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/05/10 21:41 UTC
"The Mono Project releases the first preview of Moonlight 3.0, giving application developers a first look at the open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight 3 technology for the Linux platform." Sadly, it's still Firefox-only.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/04/10 23:13 UTC
"In a definitive defeat for film studios - and in a first case of its kind worldwide - Australia's Federal Court has ruled that ISPs have no obligation to act on copyright infringement notices or to disconnect subscribers after receiving multiple letters. If copyright holders want justice for illegal file-sharing, they need to start by targeting the right people: those who committed the infringement."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/04/10 23:12 UTC
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, an advocate of Web 2.0, used Twitter early Thursday to announce his resignation. He was named CEO in 2006 as Sun faced a switch in strategic direction away from proprietary systems and toward open source code, including its valued Solaris 10 operating system. "Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it", he said in a tweet to his followers, reported the New York Times on its Web site at 1:12 a.m. Thursday. He added a bit of haiku: "Financial crisis, Stalled too many customers, CEO no more."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 02/04/10 17:18 UTC
"The venerable GNU Image Manipulation Program is undergoing a significant transformation. The next major release, version 2.8, will introduce an improved user interface with an optional single-window mode. Although this update is still under heavy development, users can get an early look by compiling the latest source code of the development version from the GIMP's version control repository."
Member since:
2006-01-03
Every time an SGI article pops out, there come the whiners, blabbing how SGI screwed itself by dopping MIPS/Irix and going to Linux/Itanium...
SGI screwed itself when it didn't realize that the x86 camp was eating their cake. SGI was used to selling expensive machines to the graphics folks, and then those folks found out that a pile of cheap boxes with Linux could do the same work as a pile of expensive (albeit good looking) boxes from SGI, coupled with a pile of licenses for IRIX.
SGI should have diversified their offer. They could have pushed x86 servers and workstations with the SGI brand to keep HP at bay.
They did try that Visual Workstation stunt, but that had a couple of problems: they had an x86 inside, but they were different enough to not be a PC and have big price tag. The idea was there, and it was good, but the implementation sucked.
But the real mistakes were the selling of MIPS and Alias.
MIPS had no future in servers or workstations, but it is very popular in the embedded space. They could have been designing embedded processors, and collecting royalties from every one of the millions of appliances out there (just imagine how many Linksys routers there are).
Alias, well, that seems to keep being profitable.
And they could keep selling supercomputers... But since that's their only business right now, if it fails, they're dead.