Greg Ercolano

An interesting tidbit; the list is compiled by Greg Ercolano, author of the render queue software Rush[1], for which he received an Academy Award in 2011[2]. It's a great piece of software for the VFX/post-production industry, and he's by far the best software vendor I've ever worked with. [1] http://seriss.com/rush/ [2] http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2011/20110107.html

> Features are celebrated and make money - whereas performance can be gradually salami-sliced away, with nobody advocating for it. - Optimists tend to be promoted, so the higher up in the organization you are, the more optimistic you tend to be. If one manager says "I can do that in 4 months", and another only promises it in 6 months, the 4 month guy gets the job. When the software is 4 months late, the overall system complexity makes it easy to assign blame elsewhere, so there's no way to judge mis-management when it's time for promotions. - There's a disconnect between engineering and marketing. It's not surprising -- marketing wants all the whiz-bang features, it wants to run in 16 megabytes, and it wants it yesterday. Although engineering would like the same things, it is faced with the reality of time limits, fixed costs, and the laws of nature. - The complexity of our system software has surpassed the ability of average SGI programmers to understand it. And perhaps not just average programmers. Get a room full of 10 of our best software people, and you'll get 10 different opinions of what's causing the lousy performance and bloat. What's wrong is that the software has simply become too complicated for anyone to understand. - There was never an overall software architect - We should sell 'bloat credits', the way the government sells pollution credits - SGI software has a cracked engine block, and we're…

They famously did better than the proprietary shell tools in the original fuzzpocalypse https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~robby/courses/395-495-2009-fall/fuz… . I also think I recall reading, somewhere on jwz dot org, something which purported to be an internal SGI email giving a dismal account of the quality of the Irix tools. GNU tools often have expanded feature sets, too. But I think that GNU-tools adopters were probably also driven by a standardisation impulse to at least have the same bugs and quirks as everyone else. Yes, here it is: “Software Usability II” by Tom Davis, the “Irix bloat memo” https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/sgi-irix-bloat-document.txt . Mind you, that bloat would probably look very modest nowadays.

There's the "SGI Irix bloat" internal email that got posted to Usenet. Took me awhile to find a copy on the net, https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/sgi-irix-bloat-document.txt Here's a formatted-for-HTML version: http://www.art.net/%7Ehopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.…

Some brutalist architecture is just a can of spray paint and pair of googley eyes away from beauty. http://seriss.com/people/erco/fovicks/roll1/pic00026-mod.jpg

Stanley Kubrick used a slitscan technique for the famous star sequence at the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey" Here's the 2001 sequence reversed into normal pictures/patterns: http://seriss.com/people/erco/2001/

This list of hostnames comes to mind from an older thread: http://seriss.com/people/erco/unixtools/hostnames.html

Interestingly, those shots were filmed using a technique called slit scan photography. Though not quite what you were asking for, someone has reversed that process in order to reveal the original images used to create the effect: http://seriss.com/people/erco/2001/