[rescue] UnOracle patches for Solaris

[Ethan O'Toole]

> SGI's problems went far beyond any good faith lost in the logo change. They
> were caught in technological change (proprietary custom microprocessors and
> graphics sets were starting to be too much $$ investment for the improved

Oh yea.

I actually bought Jim Clark's book "Netscape Time" and in the beginning he 
talks a bit about SGI. He says that it was his desire to basically go the 
NVidia route, building 3d accellerators for standard PCs and such more so 
than the crazy expensive workstations. But management wanted the huge 
profit margins.

I remember pontificating about how many of the big iron companies seem 
basically socialized off of the US Gov't. In our particular area, the 
majority of the big iron is all owned by the gov't. It's the DoD who drops 
$1,000,000 on a Sun box with 28 processors to run Sendmail, in front of a 
cluster of exchange machines. The job, to que mail when exchange is down, 
and to strip off the attachments that kill the exchange server. Oh, and 
unwilling to run the free version of sendmail, they buy a commercial 
version that has a license that only supports 8 processors. So the fix is 
to turn off 20 of the CPUs in the system. Granted, it looked like you 
could take the normal copy of Sendmail and gave it the config file from 
the commercial sendmail product, it'd just run, with all of the CPUs.

I used to think about the ROI of the stuff, and the sheer high dollar 
amounts of money spent on the systems, and if the companies behind those 
systems could exist without the gov't buying it all.


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