Hi list,

Sean Caron wrote:
> hi miles -- i definitely feel what you're saying. [...]

And of course I do too.

> [...] but a lot of people would think i'm straight up out of
> my mind to waste my time with this old stuff...

Maybe, but why care? We're determined and gather up, that's enough.

> commercial apps.. yeah, that's hopeless.

We can certainly live without any of them for general purpose.

> its sad, but you're entirely right. x86 won. [...]

I'll skip the rest; winter's almost here but I think there's better to
do than depressing. I think we should just go on. We like this hardware
and software for various reasons, and we want to learn more, so let's
just do it. Let's try to have fun finding and fixing the issues. Let's
try to have fun participating or even re-engineering the software that
s*cks so much.
It takes time, and sometimes significant knowledge, but we can all gain
from continuing to work on this architecture. NetBSD got the noble
reputation of being portable, and I think what's important is old
architectures still get patched and current software still runs.
And by the way, not everything is dark for UltraSparc:
- the architecture is opened so we may get new vendors implementing it;
- Sun still produces sparc-based hardware for entry-level workstations
and servers, and even goes embedded now;
- there is also OpenSolaris to work together with.

Solaris could let people surf the web, read their mails, chat, play
music and games, program, or serve crazy amounts of data on these
machines. That's still what I need. We can fix it and do even better.

Let's just not waste the hard work that was already done so far.
-- 
khorben