BilikFamily.com

Not much family news to discuss, but I will do a bit of reminiscing technology lane.

SGI - This past week Silicon Graphics announced the end of their MIPS IRIX products. For 99% of the public this would go into the "never heard of 'em" category. When I first entered the USAF, I managed 13 Silicon Graphics workstations based on the MIPS IRIX combination. At that time they were screamers! Our low end model was an 8MHz machine with 8MB of memory and 180MB hard drive. Our high end (costing about $100K at the time) was a 4 processor machine, each 33MHz, with 32MB of memory and 1GB hard drive. They were all kept in a typical computer room with raised floors, heavy duty power supplies, and air conditioned. I type this memory from my low end iBook — with a 1.33GHz G4 PowerPC, 1GB of memory, and 40GB hard drive, all running off of battery power with the fan rarely kicking in once in a while.

Segway - This past week also noted the upcoming five year anniversary of one of the most hyped yet disappointing bits of technology to come from my neck of the woods: The Segway. That idea of a self balancing scooter was supposed to totally transform local area transportation within the marketing euphemism known as "personal transport". But at around $5000, it was too rich for most folks' blood, myself included. In the "it's a small world" department, my neighbor works for Segway so we often so the new models zipping around the neighborhood. Yet somehow, I still could care less about buying one. So much for Dean Kamen's supposed Segway revolution.

AMD - I read a few encouraging things about AMD this past week. Apparently, they kick butt if you're looking for a desktop PC that doesn't consume a lot of electrical power. That was one aspect I always liked about the Apple iMac/iBook line: they were quiet and low wattage. The iMac doesn't even have a fan. The iBooks' fan only kicks in if I do heavy computation (or accidently block the vents — oops!).

Second, apparently the legal considerations of the AMD/ATI merger from an anti-trust perspective seemed to have been green lighted in the US, Canada, and Germany. I think those were the main ones which could have caused a legal roadblock. So in another couple of months my work email will change by two letters… again. So let's see… I've had sbilik at arc.com, sbilik at ati.com, and soon sbilik at amd.com. ARC, ATI, AMD... You'd think I was allergic to long work email addresses, especially if they don't start with an 'A' for the domain name. *smirk*