There are far better SPARC64 servers available, but many are so incredibly loud (looking at you SunFire T1000) that running them outside a dedicated area is not practical.
...but yeah, the slow factor means it doesn't get bench time, the 3/160 almost always gets picked over the 3/50 for hacking. I'd still like to do a dataless install for the 3/50, I recently refurbished a Sun SCSI shoebox with an 80 MB MFM drive on an Adaptec ACB-4000 and that'd probably be the "best" use for it.
In general, OpenBSD/sparc64 support is excellent. Up until a few years ago, we were still maintaining high security routers running OpenBSD/sparc64 on various SPARC64 products (mostly SunFire T1000 1U boxes). Even with the additional hardening, it's often faster than even NetBSD.
Probably not especially difficult to port the platform-specific bits from OpenBSD to NetBSD, but also not trivial.
A lot of the "wow, this actually Just Works on OpenBSD!" support is because one or more OpenBSD developer actually runs the given system. Supposedly that's why there's really good support for a large number of laptop peculiarities that NetBSD lacks -- OpenBSD devs are actually dailying OpenBSD on those machines.
I greatly enjoy the Sun3 and Sun4c/Sun4m era, always under SunOS 4. Probably because that's what I started on with my first UNIX account (Grex). Probably why I still prefer the BSD-style distros nowadays.
This was especially true for workloads that were hard to parallelize. Stuff that lent itself well to parallel execution was sometimes faster, though hyperthreads and multicore single-package CPUs took care of that a few years later.
Indeed, these were the machines to have for a long time! My first UNIX account was on a SPARCserver 670MP (Grex, if anyone remembers that) and definitely colored my opinion of what a "real computer" was.
This is often the exact reason I give to people when they don't understand why Amy and I don't think "everyone should be a 'coder!'" should be pushed in schools, heh.
When you're graduating students from high school who go into college as engineering hopefuls who can't solve X - 2 = 0 for X, what hopes does the average individual have for solving programming problems?
I've actually done very little research on it, other than the mandatory "make sure your doctor isn't a pill pusher" kind of research. Mostly I figure they don't try and tell me how to fix hardware or software so I don't tell them how to fix meat :P
As a heavy caffeine consumer since at least middle school (I'm 37 currently): consider why you're wanting so much and maybe talk to your doctor about it. Turns out I was dealing with ADHD probably my whole life and caffeine abuse was a cope.
I went cold turkey after developing a facial tic and realizing I was consuming 1000 - 1200 mg of caffeine a day (mostly coffee, French press and canned, with some energy drinks too). I was 100% not aware that caffeine is physically addictive and causes receptor changes in your brain. Aside from withdrawal symptoms (joint aches and pains for me), the fatigue didn't fully go away after several months.
What did "fix" it was bringing it up to my doctor at my yearly checkup -- I explained that my mystery joint pains from a few years ago were almost certainly physical symptoms of caffeine withdrawal. This led to "why in the world were you consuming that much?!" questions and an eventual diagnosis of adult ADHD (likely lifelong and never diagnosed). 10 mg of generic ritalin twice a day and not only is the no-caffeine fatigue gone, but I basically don't tolerate caffeine anymore and have zero desire to consume it. Fortunately the local coffee roaster has a decaf :P I love coffee with or without the caffeine.
Indeed, the only common issue we have on BGA rework is bridged balls. If it's on the edge and it's a larger BGA, we can often wick it out with desoldering braid, cut up some fine solder wire, push it under, and "reball" it in-place. If it's on an inner row you're removing the BGA.
That is our current main issue with FreeCAD, we have to manually create fully dimensioned drawings for our sheet metal shops, and they pull it into whatever they use. Can't just give them a drawing file, CAM export, etc.
The changes from KiCAD 3 => 4 got me to finally switch off EAGLE CAD, for which I had a $1600 license, but could see the looming subscription nonsense coming with Autodesk's interest in EAGLE. IIRC that was the first release after CERN took on development and had been dogfooding it. Every release since then has been a major improvement, and we've converted several customers from Altium to KiCAD in that time.
I can make FreeCAD go, but we still have to manually create dimensioned printsets for our sheet metal shops, rather than just being able to hand off a drawing file. I feel like when we get to the point of just being able to hand off a drawing file, it'll be in a much better place.
Always nice to see a project choosing NetBSD! It's pretty easy to manage with Ansible too, so we sometimes rotate it in on "this could be any *NIX" projects and services.
It seems many things have officially changed-but-always-been-that-way :P Everyone's got old-timey atlas prints of central America instead of upstate NY now.
Seems to be, at least with some of the families around here! A bunch of them also get together and do caroling around the holidays, so maybe it's related to that?
I had no idea there was withdrawal, and I have no psychological addiction to it, so I just switched to decaf not thinking anything of it, other than that I'd probably be more tired for a while.
Oh I can drink a quart or two of regular coffee and still sleep like a rock, not get the jitters, etc. Pretty much my mom's entire side of the family is like that. Switching to decaf got rid of the facial twitch, but even after two months (in between projects) I was basically completely ineffective at even personal projects. I told the doctor about it and it's apparently likely I have adult ADHD.
Most of them seem to drink soda here; in fact, we have a Mormon-owned soda shop in town that a lot of the school-age Mormon kids seem to hang out at! I've been told it's often a regional thing, that they're less "Mormon-y" (their term, not mine) if there's a community of them in the area. I suppose it's probably like any other group, and they feel less like outsiders.
Kinda interesting being somewhat immersed in what's effectively a conservative subculture that's supposed to not shun folks who aren't part of it. We have some weird conversations.
I think this is really understated. After developing a facial twitch and realizing I was consuming more than 1000 mg of caffeine a day, I switched to decaf once the particular project was over. No one told me it's physically addictive and has withdrawal symptoms! It's the only thing that would keep me functional and able to drive on with a project though.