[vishnu]

Couple things to say here, and I'll try for brevity. hamei is kinda right and kinda wrong. I think applications like Shake, Pro/E, and Maya running on a higher end IRIX workstation all still have great validity. Go price out recent versions of any of that software, do you really want, as a hobbyist, to pay 10's of thousands of dollars for their so-called "modern" equivalents? At my place of employ, we use Pro/E - no wait - Wildfire - no wait - Creo, or whatever the hell the idiots at Parametric Technology have decided to rename essentially the same codebase over the years, and you know what? The version of Pro/E 2.0 that I have on my SGI's is no less capable than anything Parametric has dumped on the market since 2006. The problem with engineering, at least from my viewpoint as an admittedly "old fart," is that young engineers can't do anything using their own brainpower. They need Labview, they need Mathworks, they need Creo. Those applications do *everything* for them. Engineers I work with today talk about "my code," and I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? You didn't write a single line of code, you used a drag 'n drop GUI builder that generated all the code for you! Sadly, none of them could write "hello world" in code, not even with a gun pointed at their heads. Basically, I weep for the future.