Pointy hair 101

[unixronin]

Somebody I know was just offered a SunFire 6800, free and gratis, on the condition that he take the Sun enterprise rack it's housed in as well (as shown in the photo).

Why?

"The rack doesn't match our new corporate color scheme."

I shit you not.

And, on a related subject, another acquaintance just found an SGI 1600SW LCD monitor (17", 16:9, 1600x1024, 24-bit color, .23mm dot pitch) sitting in a box on a street corner in Mountain View.  The monitor was marked as an engineering sample and not for sale, and the sign taped to the box said "FREE, WORKS".

Only in Silicon Valley....

Comments

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

I like what you've done with your layout. Changing the colour of the quoted text.

Don't forget all of the free Sun stuff we got because we were in SiliValley.

(It's dark and misty outside. Temperature inversion? And I need to figure out a way to actually sleep on Sunday nights.)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"It grows like mushrooms in the back hallways." :)

[laurarey.livejournal.com]

...corporate color scheme...

There are some seriously stupid people in the world.

[arasirsul.livejournal.com]

Sad thing about the 6800 is if someone offered it to me, unless I thought I had any real chance of ebaying it for more than it cost me to ship it, I'd have to turn 'em down.

I simply can't feed it that many 240V power circuits...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that class of hardware is the sort that makes your electric meter briefly shriek in mingled ecstasy and despair before the magic smoke escapes from your main service panel. About the biggest you can really run on an unmodified household electrical service is probably my E3000, and at that, it pretty much takes a circuit to itself. I had to install a dedicated 30A line just to run the SU3000RM UPS in my rack, which has nothing bigger in it than an Ultra 30.

The frightening thing is I know people who run, in their homes, such things as SGI Origin 2000s, Vaxen, and Crays. (Dave McGuire had four Crays, at last count.)

[gdmusumeci.livejournal.com]

I could go for a Cray....

[tomatoe333.livejournal.com]

If you know anyone who wants an Enterprise 5000, I know of one that'll be available soon...

It'd heat your house pretty nicely. :-)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oooh, don't tempt me .... I don't know where I'd put it :p

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

ooh on the 1600SW.

and I even have the hardware to plug it into (an SGI Visual WorkStation 320, speaking of which, I should submit some kernel patches since a commit recently broken it's kernel compile).

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

The right accessory is the "multilink adapter" so that you can attach the 1600SW to an RGB HD-15 or DVI-D source; there's one on my desk right now, attached to an old dual 533 MHz G4 PowerMac...

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

actually I was referring to the fact that I had an SGI Visual Workstation 320, with native DFP connector for the display, since the 1600SW was originally designed to go with the VisWs320 and O2 machines.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

I would argue that the display's usefulness will long outlive the computer's, though.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

sure, this VisWS320 is already a franken-box, combining the working bits from two of them.

[tomatoe333.livejournal.com]

I am jealous. The DVI adapters are more expensive than the damn monitors.
My 1600SW is running on a #9 card in my old dual P-II Linux server, since I can't color-calibrate it on the windoze box where I do my photo work. Damn shame too. It's still a nice monitor.

[ehintz.livejournal.com]

Heh. Gotta love the SFBA.

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

That reminds me. I have some hardware I need to get rid of.

[unix-jedi.livejournal.com]

Back in a prior life, when I was but a Unix-Padwan...

I worked for a Mortgage company. They were incestuously tied into Digital soon after I arrived, and many derogatory comments were made about the x86 state of the art Compaqs that made up the main backbone.

(Yes, Compaq bought Digital while I was there. It was beautiful from a humor standpoint.)

The one thing Digital had was the Alphas. And they were some hosses. We had one running sExChange (barely), and bought 2 of their biggest, baddest for Oracle. The engineers setting them up told us we got some of the first production of that model, it had been commendeered internally for design work.

CIO walks in, as we're installing, and starts screaming. (We called him Ike. For Ike Turner. Cause you never knew if you were getting roses or slapped. It was 50/50, and the context of the situation was irrelevant).

He was pissed that the "Enterprise class" rack was Gray. As opposed to the Black that they were sending us for the x86s.

He literally had us start disconnecting them - and was going to send them back (And replace them with what, damnifiknow), before somebody above him I think said "are you nuts?". Meanwhile, we found companies that would paint the racks whatever color.

My contribution: Gimme $30 outta petty cash, and haul 'em to the loading dock. Krylon. No runs, drips, or errors.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"Soon, the power of the rattle-can you will see, hmm?"