An era ends...

It was Monday morning, and I was going through my usual routine of hitting various industry and geek news sites; I finally stumbled upon the entry I'd been waiting half a decade to see. It was on The Register. It would seem that my favorite Unix vendor and hardware manufacturer has come off of life support.

I'm curious how this will play out. When your corporate logo graces one third to one half of the top one hundred fastest computers on the planet (at least, the ones people are allowed to talk about), and six of the top ten, there are some very specialized three letter agencies who have a very vested interest in you (they own the computers people aren't allowed to talk about).

SGI has been dying since the late 90s. Everyone knew it. They were living on the cash reserves they'd built up in the 80s and early 90s while trying to re-establish relevence in the market. They took longer to die by half a decade than anyone gave them. I have Irix 6.5.29 currently living on all my SGI/MIPS4 systems. Will it be the last release we ever see?

With Sun also looking really iffy these days, and with my resume being primarily Irix and Solaris for the last eight years, it's kind of depressing. As much as I can't stand Linux (and boys and girls, don't talk to me about how closed source is evil, I don't fucking care, I just want shit to work, and compared to real Unix workstations, Linux doesn't. Outdoing Windows isn't a challenge. Here's a nickel kid, go buy yourself a real computer), compared to real Operating Systems, it seems that it's the future of my career unless I take up mowing lawns.

Thank you Rick Belluzo. You damn near killed HP (and the long term effects of your management there are STILL slowly killing them), and you followed up by taking the world's premier graphics and simulation computing platform and attempting to turn the company that designed and built it into a commodity PC reseller. I never understood why SGI hired him after the HP fiasco, but for some reason, the larger your fuckups as a CEO, the more desireable you become. These days he's killing Quantum, once a competitor of Seagate, Fujitsu, Western Digital, IBM, and Maxtor in the storage market (IBM is no longer in that market, having sold that division to Fujitsu, and Maxtor, having been bought by Seagate, is now just a brand), and once king of the market for tape drives. At present, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to get replacement drives for my DLT based tape library. I wonder who he'll be hired to destroy when he's done with them?

I can kill a company faster than he can. Who'll hire me for the CEO job for a few tens of million per annum, and then pay me five years salary to go away when I'm done?

An era ends...

It was Monday morning, and I was going through my usual routine of hitting various industry and geek news sites; I finally stumbled upon the entry I'd been waiting half a decade to see. It was on The Register. It would seem that my favorite Unix vendor and hardware manufacturer has come off of life support.

I'm curious how this will play out. When your corporate logo graces one third to one half of the top one hundred fastest computers on the planet (at least, the ones people are allowed to talk about), and six of the top ten, there are some very specialized three letter agencies who have a very vested interest in you (they own the computers people aren't allowed to talk about).

SGI has been dying since the late 90s. Everyone knew it. They were living on the cash reserves they'd built up in the 80s and early 90s while trying to re-establish relevence in the market. They took longer to die by half a decade than anyone gave them. I have Irix 6.5.29 currently living on all my SGI/MIPS4 systems. Will it be the last release we ever see?

With Sun also looking really iffy these days, and with my resume being primarily Irix and Solaris for the last eight years, it's kind of depressing. As much as I can't stand Linux (and boys and girls, don't talk to me about how closed source is evil, I don't fucking care, I just want shit to work, and compared to real Unix workstations, Linux doesn't. Outdoing Windows isn't a challenge. Here's a nickel kid, go buy yourself a real computer), compared to real Operating Systems, it seems that it's the future of my career unless I take up mowing lawns.

Thank you Rick Belluzo. You damn near killed HP (and the long term effects of your management there are STILL slowly killing them), and you followed up by taking the world's premier graphics and simulation computing platform and attempting to turn the company that designed and built it into a commodity PC reseller. I never understood why SGI hired him after the HP fiasco, but for some reason, the larger your fuckups as a CEO, the more desireable you become. These days he's killing Quantum, once a competitor of Seagate, Fujitsu, Western Digital, IBM, and Maxtor in the storage market (IBM is no longer in that market, having sold that division to Fujitsu, and Maxtor, having been bought by Seagate, is now just a brand), and once king of the market for tape drives. At present, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to get replacement drives for my DLT based tape library. I wonder who he'll be hired to destroy when he's done with them?

I can kill a company faster than he can. Who'll hire me for the CEO job for a few tens of million per annum, and then pay me five years salary to go away when I'm done?

An era ends...

It was Monday morning, and I was going through my usual routine of hitting various industry and geek news sites; I finally stumbled upon the entry I'd been waiting half a decade to see. It was on The Register. It would seem that my favorite Unix vendor and hardware manufacturer has come off of life support.

I'm curious how this will play out. When your corporate logo graces one third to one half of the top one hundred fastest computers on the planet (at least, the ones people are allowed to talk about), and six of the top ten, there are some very specialized three letter agencies who have a very vested interest in you (they own the computers people aren't allowed to talk about).

SGI has been dying since the late 90s. Everyone knew it. They were living on the cash reserves they'd built up in the 80s and early 90s while trying to re-establish relevence in the market. They took longer to die by half a decade than anyone gave them. I have Irix 6.5.29 currently living on all my SGI/MIPS4 systems. Will it be the last release we ever see?

With Sun also looking really iffy these days, and with my resume being primarily Irix and Solaris for the last eight years, it's kind of depressing. As much as I can't stand Linux (and boys and girls, don't talk to me about how closed source is evil, I don't fucking care, I just want shit to work, and compared to real Unix workstations, Linux doesn't. Outdoing Windows isn't a challenge. Here's a nickel kid, go buy yourself a real computer), compared to real Operating Systems, it seems that it's the future of my career unless I take up mowing lawns.

Thank you Rick Belluzo. You damn near killed HP (and the long term effects of your management there are STILL slowly killing them), and you followed up by taking the world's premier graphics and simulation computing platform and attempting to turn the company that designed and built it into a commodity PC reseller. I never understood why SGI hired him after the HP fiasco, but for some reason, the larger your fuckups as a CEO, the more desireable you become. These days he's killing Quantum, once a competitor of Seagate, Fujitsu, Western Digital, IBM, and Maxtor in the storage market (IBM is no longer in that market, having sold that division to Fujitsu, and Maxtor, having been bought by Seagate, is now just a brand), and once king of the market for tape drives. At present, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to get replacement drives for my DLT based tape library. I wonder who he'll be hired to destroy when he's done with them?

I can kill a company faster than he can. Who'll hire me for the CEO job for a few tens of million per annum, and then pay me five years salary to go away when I'm done?

Talk to me...

So, I bought a new phone a few weeks back when our VZW contract came up for renewal. With a $50 rebate from Motorola, VZW having them on sale, and me having a $100 credit for renewing for another two years, I got a Razr for $30. I went ahead and sprung for the bluetooth kit, which came with the HS850 bluetooth ear doodad, a car charger for the phone, and a belt clip for $99.

The phone, the BT ear thingy, and the car charger are all great. The belt clip is another story. This is a flip phone. I am not a fan of flip phones. At all. I liked my Nokia phones. They were in a nice leather holster with a flange on the back that slid into a locking clip. When the phone rang, I just thumbed the release and put it to my ear while hitting the Any Key. They were open face phones. VZW only carries one or two of the current Nokia line, and they are low end garbage. My 3589i wasn't the top of the line, but neither was it what Nokia gives away on the street for free. Buying a top end phone directly from Nokia would cost me multiple hundreds of dollars, and there's no guarantee VZW would be willing to activate it on their network (and in all likelihood, they would not since they wouldn't be able to cripple it, forcing me to buy ringtones and applications through their VCAST service).

To get back to my neglected, and now sulking dejectedly in the corner, point, I have a flip phone, which requires me to remove it from the belt clip to do most of the things I did with my Nokias still secure in theirs (like, oh, charging the battery). The belt clip is a rigid plastic thing with a couple of teeth that 'flex' when the phone is inserted or removed. Since I have to take the phone out of it to do anything other than answer an incoming call (which I can do with the earpiece), the clip sees a lot of use. The first of the two teeth that hold the phone in came off in less than a week. The other came off just a little while ago.

My options are now to carry it around, which is impractical and annoying, put it in my pocket, which will lead to me forgetting it's there until I sit down and break it, or not carry it, which sort of negates the whole fucking point. I could give VZW another $20 for a leather carrying case that doesn't require removal, but fuck them, I'll order one direct from Motorola.

The sad thing is, they could have bundled the leather case with the BT headset instead of the plastic one. They charge the same for both (although I don't know if they were offering it yet at that point since VZW had only just started carrying the Razr when I bought it, and I see they've gone to a lower grade headset bundle in the interim as well).

Talk to me...

So, I bought a new phone a few weeks back when our VZW contract came up for renewal. With a $50 rebate from Motorola, VZW having them on sale, and me having a $100 credit for renewing for another two years, I got a Razr for $30. I went ahead and sprung for the bluetooth kit, which came with the HS850 bluetooth ear doodad, a car charger for the phone, and a belt clip for $99.

The phone, the BT ear thingy, and the car charger are all great. The belt clip is another story. This is a flip phone. I am not a fan of flip phones. At all. I liked my Nokia phones. They were in a nice leather holster with a flange on the back that slid into a locking clip. When the phone rang, I just thumbed the release and put it to my ear while hitting the Any Key. They were open face phones. VZW only carries one or two of the current Nokia line, and they are low end garbage. My 3589i wasn't the top of the line, but neither was it what Nokia gives away on the street for free. Buying a top end phone directly from Nokia would cost me multiple hundreds of dollars, and there's no guarantee VZW would be willing to activate it on their network (and in all likelihood, they would not since they wouldn't be able to cripple it, forcing me to buy ringtones and applications through their VCAST service).

To get back to my neglected, and now sulking dejectedly in the corner, point, I have a flip phone, which requires me to remove it from the belt clip to do most of the things I did with my Nokias still secure in theirs (like, oh, charging the battery). The belt clip is a rigid plastic thing with a couple of teeth that 'flex' when the phone is inserted or removed. Since I have to take the phone out of it to do anything other than answer an incoming call (which I can do with the earpiece), the clip sees a lot of use. The first of the two teeth that hold the phone in came off in less than a week. The other came off just a little while ago.

My options are now to carry it around, which is impractical and annoying, put it in my pocket, which will lead to me forgetting it's there until I sit down and break it, or not carry it, which sort of negates the whole fucking point. I could give VZW another $20 for a leather carrying case that doesn't require removal, but fuck them, I'll order one direct from Motorola.

The sad thing is, they could have bundled the leather case with the BT headset instead of the plastic one. They charge the same for both (although I don't know if they were offering it yet at that point since VZW had only just started carrying the Razr when I bought it, and I see they've gone to a lower grade headset bundle in the interim as well).

Talk to me...

So, I bought a new phone a few weeks back when our VZW contract came up for renewal. With a $50 rebate from Motorola, VZW having them on sale, and me having a $100 credit for renewing for another two years, I got a Razr for $30. I went ahead and sprung for the bluetooth kit, which came with the HS850 bluetooth ear doodad, a car charger for the phone, and a belt clip for $99.

The phone, the BT ear thingy, and the car charger are all great. The belt clip is another story. This is a flip phone. I am not a fan of flip phones. At all. I liked my Nokia phones. They were in a nice leather holster with a flange on the back that slid into a locking clip. When the phone rang, I just thumbed the release and put it to my ear while hitting the Any Key. They were open face phones. VZW only carries one or two of the current Nokia line, and they are low end garbage. My 3589i wasn't the top of the line, but neither was it what Nokia gives away on the street for free. Buying a top end phone directly from Nokia would cost me multiple hundreds of dollars, and there's no guarantee VZW would be willing to activate it on their network (and in all likelihood, they would not since they wouldn't be able to cripple it, forcing me to buy ringtones and applications through their VCAST service).

To get back to my neglected, and now sulking dejectedly in the corner, point, I have a flip phone, which requires me to remove it from the belt clip to do most of the things I did with my Nokias still secure in theirs (like, oh, charging the battery). The belt clip is a rigid plastic thing with a couple of teeth that 'flex' when the phone is inserted or removed. Since I have to take the phone out of it to do anything other than answer an incoming call (which I can do with the earpiece), the clip sees a lot of use. The first of the two teeth that hold the phone in came off in less than a week. The other came off just a little while ago.

My options are now to carry it around, which is impractical and annoying, put it in my pocket, which will lead to me forgetting it's there until I sit down and break it, or not carry it, which sort of negates the whole fucking point. I could give VZW another $20 for a leather carrying case that doesn't require removal, but fuck them, I'll order one direct from Motorola.

The sad thing is, they could have bundled the leather case with the BT headset instead of the plastic one. They charge the same for both (although I don't know if they were offering it yet at that point since VZW had only just started carrying the Razr when I bought it, and I see they've gone to a lower grade headset bundle in the interim as well).