[rescue] SGI Indigo2 & IRIX 6.5

[Robert Darlington]

Thank you.  As a former admin of Blue Mountain (biggest baddest SGI cluster
ever built), I have to say you brought a tear to my eye.  Granted, it was
because I was laughing at the short list of problems with Linux!

-Bob

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 3:01 AM, Jonathan C. Patschke <jp at celestrion.net>wrote:

> On Sun, 30 Nov 2008, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
>
>  Anyone thinking of running a common, hackish, OS instead of the
>>> amazingly wonderful, snappy, well-optimized and all-around cool
>>>
>>
>> Yeah, why would anyone want to run Irix instead of Linux?
>>
>
> Superior native hardware support, better interactive performance, an X
> server that actually works (with hardware-acceleration), one
> well-integrated journaled FS with GRIO instead of 20-something
> bag-on-the-side filesystems with patented "LOL, WTF, whenever" IO
> scheduling, context-sensitive help facilities that are actually relevant,
> accurate man pages, support for possibly the best optimizing compiler ever
> written, ONE snappy interactive desktop environment instead of eleventy
> competing ones that share neither config data nor system resources very
> well, solid System V and UNIX 95 API support, and I/O throughput Linux
> could only dream of?
>
> Plenty of performance-enhancing features that other OSes are just
> -finally- starting to implement were in IRIX years ago; "quickstarting"
> comes to mind.  OS X does it, and I seem to recall that AIX does it in v6.
> Whatever the current ld.so that Linux uses might finally have support for
> it; who knows?
>
>  Irix on a vintage SGI deserves to be drawn and quartered.
>>>
>>
>> Oh, wait, you're trying to say that _Irix_ isn't the "hack".
>>
>
> One could ask for no better example of "more is less" than your typical
> Linux distribution.  Want 17 different print-queue managers?  There you
> go!  Want -one- that does what you need and is well-supported by the
> entire rest of the system?  Well, err....you can't have -everything-, but
> there's probably a tarball of shell scripts on some web forum that will
> fake out your system into printing consistently using an unholy toolchain
> made of ghostscript, netpbm, groff, and transfig.
>
> Linux will always be a hack.  It's always been one, and it used to be
> content with being a hack.  Nowadays, it goes around in a sandwich board
> reading "I am not a hack" passing out business cards saying "Linux, like
> Windows, only better!" on one side and "2005^W2006^W2007^W2008^W2009 will
> be the year of Linux on the desktop!" on the back.
>
> It's really quite sad, because, as hacks go, it's a good one.  But, don't
> try to confuse it with a coherent operating system product.
>
> --
> Jonathan Patschke < "There is great satisfaction in building good tools
> Elgin, TX          > for other people to use."
> USA               <                                     --Freeman Dyson
>
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