windows bios world writes: "Compaq, Sun, SGI, and IBM are releasing new machines running Unix. From cnet.com: 'Compaq has begun shipping test versions of a new line of AlphaServer Unix servers using the EV7 "Marvel" version of the company's Alpha processor. ... As expected, IBM released on Monday its p670, a 16-processor machine that's essentially a smaller version of Big Blue's top-end 32-processor p690 "Regatta" server introduced in late 2001.' Also, Sun teamed up with Sony to release video-on-demand servers." And of course, there's OS X.

An anonymous reader "Sun Microsystems has released the Sun Blade 2000 workstation, along with a new graphics accelerator, the XVR-1000. This could very well give SGI's lineup a run for its money in the CAD and Visualization fields, although its fillrate and 38-bit colour may make it less desirable for animation. Make sure to check out Ace's article. " (page down a couple times to read it)

b-side.org writes "As a fine testament to how quickly linux is absorbing technology formerly available only to the computing elite, an LKML member posted a 23 second kernel compile time to the list this morning as a result of building a 16-way NUMA cluster. The NUMA technology comes gifted from IBM and SGI. Just one year ago, a Sequent NUMA-Q would have cost you about USD $100,000. These days, you can probably build a 16-way Xeon (4X 4-way SMP) system off of ebay for two grand, and the NUMA comes free of charge!"

James Palmer writes: "I have always been enamored with SGI's Iris Indigo. Recently I resurrected an old Iris Indigo by retrofitting it with an ATX motherboard and powersupply." Lots of gruntwork here for a very impressive result.

Dina's Dream points out two interesting articles currently running on LinuxPower, and linked from Gnotices (GNOME news site) as well. "The first article is a really good summary of the current state of affairs of video under Linux and the direction we should take. Questions are bounced back between a few very knowledgeable people, including GStreamer developers, SGI people and Alan Cox. The second article is a set of lessons learned by Chris Pirazzi while working at SGI. Chris was involved in a lot of Video API programming at Silicon Graphics, and raises a few very good points based on his experience. All people even remotely working on video drivers or software should read these points and take them to heart."

Sim asks: "I currently work for a company which has used Frame Maker on SGI/IRIX systems for almost 10 years (meaning they have roughly 10 years worth of FM documents/reports/technical narratives/etc). It appeared that there would be a clean sweep of old SGI's out the door in favor of PC's running Linux, until a very nasty glitch got in the way: Adobe discontinued it's work on a Linux version of Frame Maker -- leaving the project in a beta format. The unstable format of the current Frame Maker version makes putting it into a production environment nearly impossible. I was hoping someone out there might know of a really powerful Frame Maker substitute."

Figured I'd take a moment now that I've caught up on most of my post-LWCE email buildup to mention a few things that caught my eye at the Javitz Center this year. Hit the link below to get bits on PS/2 Linux, the Sharp Zaurus, and whatever else I remember before I click 'save.'

dmendesf asks: "The Octane2 workstation from SGI has a neat trick called PowerDuo that enables a single station to be driven by 2 keyboards, 2 mice and 2 monitors. Is it possible to do the same with Linux and USB mice, keyboards plus Dual Head videoboards?" How difficult would it be to develop an X11 solution to do this? Now take this a step further: could this be done with the secondary machine a network connection away?

Jonathan C. Patschke writes: "SGI have finally unveiled their newest-generation visual workstation, the Silicon Graphics Fuel. Features include a MIPS R14k CPU, Vpro graphics, and a PCI bus (finally)." As you would expect from SGI, it looks good, and the specs are impressive. I only see IRIX listed, but with the specs on this thing, it may not be slow :)

HawaiianMayan asks: "Sure, if you're a collector you might have a working computer from the 60s or even the 50s in your basement or garage. But what about from the 20s or 30s? Lately I've been dreaming of a retro-futuristic computer, with all the convenience of a modern desktop (I don't want to deal with punchcards!), but styling from the early part of the 20th century. I'm wondering if any of the hardware hackers out there are working on anything like this. It would need an appropriate case, a manual typewriter keyboard, a black and white screen, preferably enlarged by a nice freznel lens, and lots and lots of nixie tubes, knobs, and blinkenlights. Would it be too much if the numeric keypad was a rotary dial?" Think about the computer props used from such classics like Max Headroom (both the movie and the TV series) and Brazil, and you'd be very close to what the submittor is looking for. I must admit, making a computer in this fashion would certainly be a break from the beige box and monitor!

FatRatBastard writes "The Reg. is reporting that Microsoft has purchased the rights to most of SGI's 3D patents. Speculation from the Reg hacks is that MS may want the patents more for crushing OpenGL support than for technology they're building inhouse." Well, crush is strong - but it would give them more leverage with some hardware vendors for sure.

grub wrote to us about an article about SGI, and its ongoing battles to turn its corporate fortunes around. The company's been doing interesting stuff for a long time - here's to hoping they stay around.

bapya asks: "I am a PhD student working on CFD ^? at National Chemical Laboratory, India. We mainly use commercial CFD code (Fluent from Fluent Inc.) and some inhouse codes. Currently we use SGI machines (Origin 200 and O2 family running IRIX), single and dual processor NT machines, DEC alpha and dual processor Linux (running RH 6.2) machines. Now we are planning to upgrade/expand our computational facilities. For the same amount of money (about 25000$), we can buy either a decent unix(IRIX) server (origin 200 dual cpu) or build a much better performing Intel system (either NT or Linux). My professor is in favor of IRIX system. What I would like to ask is what are the criteria for selecting hardware for such a job? and How can one justify the high prices of branded UNIX systems when other systems of same performance level can be built at much lesser costs?"

It seems the folks down at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a 6-sided CAVE like system called ALICE. But, instead of running it off of a SGI Onyx, they've developed a distributed environment for visualization called Syzygy. Slap a few computers together and make your own holodeck!

thryllkill writes: "GameSpot currently has an excellent article posted about the history of SquareSoft. As most /.ers know Square is responsible for bringing console RPGs to the mainstream, and some claim brought the PlayStation the success it needed to dominate the late 90s video game market. The article is light on corporate info, but a great rundown of Square's contributions. The only error I noted was the omission of Final Fantasy SGI." And FFX is supposed to ship next week.

Now that Linux kernel 2.5 is under development by Linus and others, the all-important job of maintaining and updating the "old" kernel series (the one that people rely on in day-to-day use) has fallen to 2.4 maintainer Marcelo. You asked Marcelo about everything from the influence of politics (age and otherwise) to his working enviroment and approach to maintainership; his answers are below.

BoarderPhreak was among the several readers who pointed out "an interesting article on the various alternatives to storing your files using a 'desktop' metaphor" at TechReview.com. "New styles like time-indexing, 3D sphere ala SGI's file manager, and even a 3D virtual 'task gallery' from Microsoft. Screenshots available in the article." All of these have been floating around for a while; hopefully soon some radically different interfaces will actually gain widespread acceptance.

Daniel writes: "Apple has a patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,379,129) on compositing a source and destination image using a mask image. This patent appears to read on alpha channel transparency, which the PNG and MNG file formats use. APPLE has declared in their patent statement to the Scalable Vector Graphics Working Group that their patent is only available for RAND Licensing. Since this patent appears to read on the PNG file format, Apple is hampering work on the PNG and MNG file formats. Perhaps Apple would like to clarify this situation by explicitly stating that this patent does not cover the PNG and MNG file formats or by RF Licensing their patent to the PNG and MNG development groups. Alternatively, the PNG and MNG developers are asking people to submit prior art in order to invalidate Apple's patent. SGI in particular appears to have prior art with their 'blendfunction.' Make sure the prior art you submit is older than May 08, 1992, the filing date of Apple's patent."

3141592654 asks: "I've been doing a little experiement to compare Ext2, ReiserFS, and SGI XFS. The experiment (LFS Sprite benchmark for small files) involves tight loops of creating 10,000 1K files spread equally among 100 directories, reading them back in order, and deleting them. On a 1GHz processor with plenty of RAM running Linux 2.4.2, with matching versions of file systems in default configurations (no debugging and no internal checks). In our tests, EXT2 turned out to be faster than both ReiserFS and XFS. We had been led to believe by other published results that XFS would be much faster than Ext2, and ReiserFS would run just about as fast. Have any slashdot readers had experienced similar results with these filesystems? Or have we simply overlooked a major factor in our tests?"

Keith Russell writes: "Looks like Sen. Hollings' uphill climb just got a little bit steeper. The Computer Systems Policy Project, a trade group which includes IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Compaq, Dell, and Motorola, has officially stated their opposition to the SSSCA, calling it "an unwarranted intrusion by the government." The ZDNet article also indicates that Big Media isn't quite behind it themselves. Disney's support is well-documented, and Fox seems to like it, but AOL Time Warner and the MPAA, while keen to the idea, don't like this bill in particular." Read the entire article - not supporting this proposal "in its current form" is not very strong opposition.