A company must defend their trademark or they lose it.

Someone who is not interested in supporting Open Source processors?

SPARC is an organization that licenses processor designs (Scalable Processor ARChitecture), provides docs, and even licenses a keyboard interface design (this part is low cost). I'm not sure what they charge, it may be just a fee for making sure your processor conforms to the sparcv9 spec or similar and you can put the SPARC stamp on your box. I have not heard of them being unreasonable before. It's an independent body. Sun and Fujitsu/Siemens happen to be a couple of the companies that use the processor design (modified for thier use). Probably similar to ARM in this case, but I will freely admit I do not know many details about the subject. I do know that one can download the designs and source code for the OpenSPARC T1 and T2 series processors from http://www.opensparc.net./

I hear that someone has a design that runs an OpenSPARC on a FPGA (granted, single core, but still cool).

So if you care about having an "Open" CPU design in your system, then you'll be missing out by avoiding SPARC.

Alas I do not have many facts available to back this up. www.sparc.org has been blocked by firefox or my antivirus somehow...perhaps someone is attacking it out of badwill or they got owned independently.

Regards

BTW: I've run gentoo on 'sun4u' SPARC processors, and hear that the kernel has lots of support for the 'Open' T1/T2 line and hypervisor, etc.

Perhaps on his end, yes; but the physical floppy drive used to load instructions/firmware on the legacy hardware device is still going to be present.

I personally have an early 80's Ensoniq Mirage 8-bit sampler that needs to load its OS (16kb) and initial sample set off of low-density 3.5" floppy disks with a specific format.

Presumably someone who still has to run Windows 98 bare-metal for very specialized compilers tied to old systems would also have a use for a floppy drive. I seem to recall some very specialized systems that would only work with odd software on a special laptop with very specific peripherals, and often required use of a floppy drive for firmware, configuration dumps, or similar. That, or I could be misremembering.

No, but I think they did some work once for Spinal Tap.

off-topic: One of many reasons IRIX was cool -- run audiopanel with the -spinaltap option. All volume controls go to 11! There. I have given away my big secret.

btw if my sig doesn't make sense try it on HP-UX 10.20 or so.

The desktop switching and automatic different default wallpapers for CDE (the Common Desktop Environment) was one of my favourite features. There was basically nothing worth configuring, and it was so dead simple. The terminals like dtterm were wicked fast, the window manager was light and worked ok with 8bit colour....and it was on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX....an actual 'common desktop environment'. Most of the time, all I need are about four fast raster-font terminals anyhow.

But the automatic different backgrounds (albeit ugly) were great.

NEMA L6-30R

They seem darn near ubiquitous for average-density rack power distribution units. Denser systems may well use the 50A twist-locks and have several per cabinet.

Harting HAN 6b

Most commonly seen in the bottom of Sun StorEdge racks, one for each PDU. Those racks have to be some of the best engineered that I've ever seen. Probably done around the era of the Ultra-60/220R...rugged and damn near indestructible. The only down-side (to some) was that they were pre-threaded instead of having square holes. While being a seemingly much more solid design, this prevented use of the current type of rapid-deploy rails.

I'm sure I will get modded to heck for this, but I think it is in the best interests of our country to try and keep the automakers afloat.

Not for jobs, or iconic brands, or saving face; those are good side effects if they work.

Think about what the big automakers produced during the late 1930s to mid 1940s.

Making cars is just something to keep the plants busy and keep a skilled manufacturing force around should we ever need to ramp up quickly again.