I have to agree with a lot of what Jeremy is saying here-

     After reading the article, it looks as though Hendrickson is a bit of
an Intel bigot, he even goes on about how much of a travesty it is that SGI
doesn't have an Intel chip in their lineup, and how that is, somehow, their
downfall.  For being an "R-n-D" guy, he sure seems a bit commodity based,
he seems much more motivated by the savings here than the performance.  Can
he tell me why the NSA and many other large industries, (Pixar, GM, Ford,
etc.) that do large scale graphical models and put a LOT of time and money
into visualization are still using the SGIs?  ILM is feeling the squeeze
like anyone, and they need to make changes to suit their interests, and
they need to make those changes look good, despite what the internal
motivations in the company might be.  Maybe they found some miracle in
Linux tha tdoes what their SGIs can't, but I doubt that, I think it looks
more like a monetarily motivated move, and that is fine.  I also have every
confidence that they'll still use SGI in some capacity, there are some
things you just can't do elsewhere.
     In all, I think that if ILM is making a choice for the bottom line,
good for them, I like the Effects, and I'm a HUGE Harry Potter fan, if this
makes the next movie even better, I'll jump for joy, but if it's purely
based on technology and is a pure R and D decision, I have to wonder who is
doing their R and D, maybe I need to get out my resume...  Regardless, I'm
eager to see what happens here, you have a number of people working in a
specialized environ on a given set of tools for a long period of time, now
you're changing that, how do you think they're going to react?  Will this
effect their work?  After all, it's not like your changing their file
server, this is what they work on everyday.....


                    donning flame resistant pajamas (oof!),



                         mbutler



On Wednesday 21 November 2001 01:36, jshawley wrote:

Can you give some reasons why you will be happy when they will be gone? I
hope you can come up with something better than "It doesn't run linux". If
you are going to say things like this, please make some justifications.

The fact is that IRIX is an incredable OS, it does have it's issues, but
what
OS doesn't.  If I was in a business position, I would choose IRIX over
linux
in just about every case. And talk about some amazing hardware. If anyone
on
this list has ever seen a 1024 processor Origin 3800, you know what I mean.
I
don't see linux scaling to 1024 processors as a single image system, hell I
don't even see solaris doing that.