A few days past, we solicited questions from you folks to ask QuakeLaird John Carmack ^[?] . We sent the questions over to him, and he answered. A lot. It's definitely one of the best interviews we've had yet - click below to read more.

John R. Zedlewski has contributed an excellent feature entitled 'Free Software and the Innovators Dilema'. Talks a lot about how industries tend to shift, and what happens when a new low end/low cost technology wrecks the margins. Its worth a read. Check it out.

Anonymous Coward writes "According to this News.com article. VA Linux Systems, O'Reilly and Associates, and SGI. Will be co-sponsoring a retail box version of Debian GNU/Linux. In addition VA will be helping to setup toll free technical support for Debian."

haakon writes "The New scientist have a story about getting LCD screens to produce sound. I wonder if I can hack a X server to do that on my laptop? " Mmm...with this SGI flatscreen, and Rob's as well, I think we're to be having a concert - tickets go on sale Friday.

This week's interview guest with Eric S. Raymond. We got a *lot* of good questions, forwarded the moderators' favorites to Eric, and he not only answered the ones we sent him but - extra cool - picked some more out of the crowd and answered them, too. Read the complete session (below) and if you have something you want to add, go ahead. If Eric has time, he'll jump in and respond, because, well, he's just that kind of guy. ;) Note: questions marked with * are the ones Eric added to the moderators' selections.

Durinia writes "SGI has announced a few details on their next Cray vector supercomputer. The press release is mostly about them getting government support for the R&D. It does, however, mention that it will be combining the powerful Cray vector processors with SGI's ccNUMA architecture for big-time scalability."

johnrpenner writes " SGI has released "Jessie" - an open source development environment for Linux. It provides an advanced IDE (integrated application environment) with comprehensive debugging tools and a highly graphical interface that eliminates the need for employing older command-line tools." However there doesn't seem to be linkage to anything more than a press release.Update: 09/21 11:41 by H : Check SGI's Jessie site for more information.

A couple months ago, SGI announced that they would be porting IRIS Performer to Linux. Thanks to Allan Schaffer for pointing us over to the first beta version that's ready for the public.

A reader wrote to us with the news that SGI has doubled their original August estimates for # of layoffs, bringing the probable number to roughly 3000. However, SGI is seeing a return to profitability. The additional 1500 are not actually being laid-they are being offered new jobs with the new NT/Visual Workstations and Cray units, leading to the above erroneous information.

An anonymous reader sent us an interesting linke over to SGI on their new Linux/OpenGL Base. Its a project to standardize OpenGL on Linux, but Mesa Compatibility is actually part of the plan. Nice strong Linux push for one of SGIs most important technologies. Very cool. Also, but not linux related, is their new Reality Center. Dibs on one of those "Walls".

Monday we asked you to post questions for Alan Cox. We got so many good ones that only those moderated up to five were sent to him! Alan's answers are as great as you'd expect from one of the world's greatest kernel hackers. Read the full Q&A session below.

Hah! Apple has announced a new flat screen. Colm@TCD sent us the linkage but check out the numbers: 1600x1024 (same as a widescreen TV, or the SGI flat panels) but its 22 inches! Holy yummyness batman! Bet ya gotta mortgage your home. (insert sounds of drooling here)Update: 09/03 08:50 by H :We originally touched on this while talking about the G4

Thanks to Scott Elyard, who has returned and has written a "second chapter" to his original piece about SGI. Once again he's debunking mysteries, and discussing changes within SGI. Click below to read more.

SGI has released "Jessie" to the Open Source World. Jessie is an IDE for use on top of current development tools in the Linux OS. Here is a screenshot of Jessie. Note: The page is a bit outdated (it doesn't mention that there are some IDE for Linux such as CodeWarrior of CodeFusion). Thanks for Linux Today for the story.

Well, it apparents that on the heels of yesterday's announcement about resigning as CEO of SGI, Belluzzo will be reportedly joining Microsoft's interactive operations units.

dpreformer writes "Belluzzo has resigned and Bob Bishop is now acting head of SGI. We copuld probably all see this coming with the recent news of SGI spinning off its NT workstation and Cray divisions. Morale at SGI must be pretty low about now. 1500 layoffs, another couple of thousand working for spinoffs." A lot of good engineers over there, ya gotta hope things can be sorted out soon.

VJ writes "Intel just announced their new 8 way SMP chipset for use with PentiumIII-Xeons. A summary of features: 3X100 buses (2 for CPU's, and 1 for I/O. (The chipset appears to function to some degree as a crossbar switch, between the three buses) Cache coherencey features allow better utilization of L2 cache, other stuff too..) We'll have to wait and see, but this might be a relatively cheap way to get raw CPU for enterprise environments.. (Relative to Sun or HP or SGI)"

ESR has written a piece about the re-unification of the fragmented Unix world, as seen in the growing position of Linux. Click below to get the full read.

anaZ writes " SGI today announced that it will install the company's first 128-processor Linux(R) cluster at the Ohio Supercomputer Center." It seems SGI will be using 32 Quad Xeon boxes (1400L). I wonder (and hope!) it is just the first of many.

hedonick wrote in to let us know that SGI will be releasing XFS under the terms of the GPL. It looks like they want to use it to replace ext2 under Linux. Since XFS is a journaling filesystem, this is something I'm personally looking forward to.