A similar system to the one in my OP
Yes they are cheaper but still way overpriced compared to commodity x64 hardware and I don't know what preformance gains you get from 4x450Mhz over 1x1.8Ghz.
I'd love to try out Solaris on SPARC and get geek points for having obscure hardware but not at those prices.

I'm not denigrating it, I would love to run Linux or OpenSolaris on an OpenSPARC but I don't have the time to solder that many transistors together, anyway the OpenSPARC documentation is in a hardware description language not the traditional logic-gated schematic that I was expecting.

Yeah,SUN ENTERPRISE 450 DUAL 300MHz SERVER WITH WARRANTY
A snip at £1,695.00 (although prices on Sun hardware do seem to have come down a bit)

The OpenSPARC certainly serves a niche market, those with fab plants who are able to fabricate enough cpu's so that the per-cpu cost is cheaper than buying them from $cpu_mftr

A government dept considering a thing is far from the same thing as doing it....

I think they leaked the proposal to gauge the public's appetite for taxing on-line ads.
They don't have the balls to come out with something just in case they look foolish so they leak, gauge reaction then decide wether to go with it.

why should they not consider all options, even the stupid ones like this one?

I thought my taxes were for the underprivileged and less-well-off, the BBC doesn't strike me as such.

Where did you get it? whats your email on the lists? are there any good points about it? You seem to have just registered on slashdot, was it to troll on the neo freerunner? I call BS on that post