[a little advocacy] Selling point of SPARC vs. Intel or AMD

I'd just use the angle that look how long SPARC machines last: they
are usable for many years, and use high-quality components and a very
sturdy, albeit sometimes bulky, chassis. PC's typically fall apart
and have fans that whine and groan after a mere 3 years. These
usually have a slight to moderate amount of flimsy feel to them. My
Ultra II is still going very strong, and is still pretty quiet. It's
also well-built. Imagine a PC that is as old as my Ultra II, how it
would look, sound, and perform.

That's why I feel PC's are so "dangerous": you can get some pretty
good uptimes and mean time between failures with BSD, Linux, and
Solaris x86. But these require a lot more maintenance in return for
their low cost. So you basically have that "hidden" cost there. Had
Digital not gone belly-up, I think the Sparc would be in better shape
today.

PC's can be extremely reliable when you chose the right components,
but they still have a sort of feel about them that takes away from the
UNIX experience. I've run Linux and OpenBSD on Sparcs, and they still
have a proper unix "feel" to them because the machines they were
running on are designed to run unix. For some reason "init 0" on PC's
feel out of place. PC's seem to have that "Wintendo" feel about them
no matter what you're running on them.

DMM
.

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