[rescue] What job does your SGI do at home?

[Jonathan C Patschke]

On Monday, November 4, 2002, at 03:19 PM, Todd Killingsworth wrote:

> Aside from the Ubergeek chic  and cool factor of using the same 
> machines
> that Hollywood uses,

Hollywood?  Wazzat? :)  I just like Machines That Work and Machine That 
Move Big Rocks(tm).

> what do list-members use their
> Indigo/I2/Octane/O2/Crimsons for?  Web services, visualization, games, 
> ...?

I used an Indigo2 and later an Octane as my primary workstation for the 
roughly three years.  That means I used it for just about everything: 
code (including some minor OpenGL stuff), word processing, web 
browsing, MP3s, piddling around in GIMP, and server things.  I have an 
Indigo2 as my web/mail/everything server, and I still use the Octane 
for interactive tasks and for PostgreSQL work.  Something like an 
Indigo or Crimson is a bit long in the tooth for heavy work, but they 
still make respectable desktops for light work like LaTeX and HTML 
document processing.

<flamebait>
   I use an Indy as an alarm clock, because it's the smallest machine I 
have with decent onboard sound.  Now that it has a VT420 on it, it 
doubles as a workstation, so it's not -entirely- an insult.
</flamebait>

> My wife works for Sun, and normally I work with my PCs or SS10.  I 
> don't get
> out much :)

An SS10 is still quite a respectable machine.  It's painful for 
interactive work (unless you have the 10SX with a VSIMM), but it can 
move an impressive amount of mail and/or web pages in a day.

> Are they just neat to play with?  How do you make them earn their keep?

They're neat to play with, and do -tremendously- well with 
bandwidth-limited tasks (intense file I/O, databases, etc.).  The CPUs 
tend to lag behind what Sun sells, but an entry-level Octane will most 
Sun desktops silly in a throughput-heavy task.

--
Jonathan C. Patschke
Celestrion Information Systems
Thorndale, TX