Whither SGI?

by blakespot
Industry watching: Is this the end?:
[Via business|bytes|genes|molecules]

One wouldn’t have been able to tell looking at the huge Supercomputing booth, but SGI has been struggling for years. The company, whose machines were the mainstay of computational science, especially life science back in the day, and got this blogger through grad school, might just be on its final legs. Today, they received a delisting notice from the Nasdaq. Now, this is not the first time they’ve been in trouble, having filed for Chapter 11 in the past following delisting from the NYSE, so it’s entirely possible they will come out of it, but with the economy the way it is, and no real market for what they offer, I am not so sure. If it is the beginning of the end, it will be the end of a proud company that was once the epitome of visualization technology and built some of THE best computers ever made.

This is a shame. I go back to when Evans and Sutherland were the big computers used for visualizing all sorts of things. An old LDS-1 was the first ‘graphics’ computer I ever used, although the ‘pictures’ it showed were made up of many vector lines, not the smooth color-filled shapes we have today.

The Silicon Graphics came along, with its raster-based graphics and really fine looking representation of protein structure. While there was some competition with E&S systems, SGI was always the coolest. Great programs for representing biological structures and nice looking machines (colored plastics long before Apple). At one point in my career, I had a Mac as my regular computer and an old Indigo2 that the protein structure people gave me as a hand-me-down.

It was really sweet to have both computers working on structural problems at the same time.

Now it may be gone. E&S long ago left biological market, now making digital theaters and such.

Memories. E&S and SGI back when structural programs had great names like FRODO (I learned about this while at Rice from Jim Pflugrath who helped port it to an E&S PS300 while in Flo Quicho’s lab) and mice all had 3 buttons. #-D representations using blinking goggles synched to the monitor.

Now it can all be done by desktops. I do feel old.

Technorati Tags: Biology, Science, Technology

Some useful reading

Giving Back, And A Request For Help:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]

Hi everyone!

We’ve been asked over and over again for some sort of white paper overview on our whole social media proficiency experience.

Well, I’ve finally taken the time to write one.

It’s not perfect, but maybe you could help to make it better?

CAVEATS

Every document needs a use case. Here’s the one I have in mind.

Typically, I’m talking to an IT group about various technology topics. I touch on what we’re doing here with social media proficiency, and they really want to talk about it. It’d be nice to send them some sort of writeup or guidebook as to what we did and how we did it.

Some things to keep in mind?

First, it’s a DRAFT. There are no pictures, graphs, footnotes, references, etc. I bet there are some typos as well.

Second, if you just want to download this and put it to use, feel free. I’d appreciate a note in the comments from you with any general reactions and/or uses you plan to put it to.

Third, if you REALLY want to help, please dissect it. Imagine you’re working for a large organization, you want to do this whole social media proficiency thing, and you’re reading this white paper. What would you add? What would you delete? What would you change or improve?

Finally, I’d appreciate it if everyone would respect EMC’s copyright here. Linking to this post and/or document is AOK, but please don’t redistribute without permission.

Here you go …

Let me know what you think, OK?

A great example of the Web 2.0 approach. Let the community have its say on a subject. One person can produce some very focussed work but a community can help elevate the work by providing insights and viewpoints unattainable to a single person.

But this is more than just a simple draft document. There is a lot of meat here with some very profound lessons learned. It looks to me like it already has had a lot of input, even if it is just the lessons that come from experience. Chuck did not discover all this by himself. He has already had a lot of help from those inside his community

Now those of us outside can add our viewpoints and make this something that could work anywhere, not just EMC.

This is humorous

by fdecomite
Oh dear:
[Via Bench Marks]

Well, at least I can assure you that this is one mistake that CSHL Press has never made:
“Science journal mistakenly uses flyer for Macau brothel to illustrate report on China” (link via BoingBoing)

While the letters look dramatic, the text appears to be like something from the red light district. I wonder how many other jokes are being played on us? I’d be very careful about getting some Chinese characters as a tattoo.

Technorati Tags: Entertainment, Science