End of General Availability for MIPS IRIX Products:

SGI launched the MIPS IRIX family of products in 1988. Since then, this technology has powered servers, workstations, and visualization systems used extensively in Manufacturing, Media, Science, Government/Defense, and Energy. After nearly two decades of leading the world in innovation and versatility, the MIPS IRIX products will end their general availability on December 29, 2006.

Of course, SGI is replacing IRIX in its systems with… Linux. (I don’t know what happened to the great NT experiment.) So it’s hard to say whether this constitutes an actual improvement or not, though it does bring to mind jwz‘s comment about “being fucked over merely by a soulless megacorp, rather than a bunch of teeangers who think my desktop is their learning experience.”

Then I think about IRIX 5.x (“yeah, you shouldn’t use the version of cc that came with the operating system, because it’s really buggy, and good luck getting gcc installed, okloveyoubye!”), and shudder.

Am I a bad person for reaching the point where I like my Windows laptop more and more?