Two short memories related to this topic: 1) Back in about 1996 or so, I interviewed at Pixar for a system management job. One of the people who interviewed me was one of their hot graphics programmers. He dressed in all black and even had black fingernail polish. During the interview I suggested that all the expensive SGI hardware that Pixar was using at the time would become less and less competitive because of the clear direction that desktop PC hardware (both graphics and general purpose) was taking. He told me I was full of it. I didn't get the job.
2) Back in the mid 1990s I worked as a combination programmer and system manager for the Postgres group at UC Berkeley. One of my projects was to port Postgres to platforms other than Solaris/Sparc and DEC OSF. One of the platforms that caused me no end of grief was Solaris/x86. I couldn't even install the OS on the hardware that I had. Everything else, including all Microsoft's stuff, Novell, Linux, and SCO Unix, worked fine. Every time I mentioned this to Sun they'd say that the current release was poorly done and that I should wait for the next release. It was really a good example of a company without a clear OS direction. As we know, it only got worse. To their credit, Sun has lasted longer than DEC, which had an even more severe lack of OS direction. Cordially, -- Jon Forrest Research Computing Support College of Chemistry 173 Tan Hall University of California Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-1460 510-643-1032 jlforr...@berkeley.edu _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
