I apologise for not responding to this earlier. I didn't give this thread the attention it deserved.
Unfortunately, sir, the Bush regime does not recognize the proper definition of the term terrorist. If you will examine the list of known "terrorist" organizations they released, you will see quite a few political groups that have never been involved in acts of terror, nor advocated them.
In your opinion, I suppose. I'm sure you have the full resources of the NSA, CIA and FBI at your disposal...as the president does.
Furthermore, your suggestion that America is right to attack Iraq is ludicrous. There are only two types of people dying in Iraq: children who die because we have imposed harsh restrictions on the nation of Iraq, and criminals who die for violating the laws of Iraq.
Sure. Tell that to the 5,000+ Kurds, men, women and children, who were gassed (by WMD) in one incident in northern Iraq by Hussein's henchmen.
Just today I was hearing about numerous Iraqis being fed through large-scale shredding machines for Hussien's amusement...but I'm sure all those stories are made up...don't you think?
Despite your concerns about the loss of our civil liberties, you nonetheless advocate war with Iraq. I promise you that, once Iraq has been bombed and Saddam killed/deposed, that the loss of our liberties will continue, but at an increased rate, for the invasion of Iraq would further strengthen the resolve of the many anti-American rebels who remain in this world.
Yes, all those rebels which have been so successful here in the States since 9/11...right?
undemocratic countries around the world are using exactly the same trick to get rid of everybody who talks about free elections too loudly. Let's shoot the suckers, we're fighting terrorism!
Sure. Care to share an example?
Further, regimes like that have always existed - and everyone knows they use the flimsiest of excuses to justify their dirty work. Welcome to the real world. At least the US is trying to clean up one of the worst offenders.
It has been 1 1/2 year since 9/11 and the Bush administration still has no exact definition of the word "terrorist".
Try Webster's Unabridged:
"a person who uses or favors terrorizing methods"
I hope that cleared things up for you.
(BTW, don't get me wrong, I have issues with the 'war on terror'. For instance, when will 'terror' surrender or sign an armistice? This could be the modern version of the 100 Years War, which can't be a good thing. Our 'temporary' loss of civil liberties could turn out to be as 'temporary' as income tax.)
My feeling is that a small or one-person team can do a lot given current tools (granted there is a lot for one person to cover) and at least will not fall into a bunch of backbiting and/or large scale corporate stupidity. Too many "big shop" games are either knock-offs, or without any real playability.
I have a terrific concept for a commercial game I'm trying to develop, so we'll see how the small fish does in my case...;-)
You're a pathetic troll..so naturally I'll respond.;-)
How long will it be before the USA uses this to fry innocent children in Iraq
Oh, about never. One of the best points about these directed energy weapons is that they're very much precision weapons. The US goes more out of its way to avoid civilian casualties than any military in history, so I expect little civilian fallout from a system that's almost entirely air-to-air. (By the way, it'd be interesting to know what the performance of this is as an ASAT device - I'd guess it can take out the lowest ones at a minimum...)
(oh wait they are just 'casualties' of the OIL war)
Right, let's just forget about Saddam gassing thousands of his own citizens and hoarding enough bio and chem agents to take out a significant fraction of the US population (if not all of it).
Personally I trust that the Iraqis newfound "active" cooperation with inspectors will reveal every banned weapon they possess - don't you? Not.
The French are either naive, in bed with Iraq, or spineless. You pick.
why is this +4? it certainly isn't informative, insightful, underrated or funny. Really, its just political bashing with baseless facts. Absolutely baseless.
It is +4 because 4 people with moderator points didn't bother to check the facts. Shocking.;-)
I mean, nobody just bashes the President as a knee-jerk reaction - do they?
1) You're limited by how much RAM you have on your server, not how much disk space you have
True, however (for fairly big $$$, granted) I could pick up something like a Sun Fire 6800 server, with up to 24 processors and 192 GB of RAM. I would at least be saving on a REAL expensive Oracle license.;-)
Granted, its not terabytes - however access should be blazingly fast, and you have all the advantages of a fully OO approach, with general purpose languages. I could see LOTS of uses for this, particularly on highly reliable hardware. (You know, in fact, with RMI you aren't limited to a single machine either.)
Great stuff once again coming from the Open Source camp - and nice and tight as well at only 350 lines of code!
That's what I call programming!
(One last thought - 4 processor Opteron servers will be relatively inexpensive, and should support 64 GB RAM.)
For OS X? The SourceForge page says "Linux", and the dvbackup page makes no mention of anything except "Unix". I just downloaded and it built OK on RH 8.0.
Firewire isn't available under Linux (AFAIK) with my Asus A7N8X MB (NFORCE2), and I don't yet have an appropriate camcorder anyhow. I may have to get one to check this out.;-)
Apparently, just go to one of the various Internet
smoke shops he shut down yesterday. You'll be redirected to the DEA (or at least that was the plan) and warned that your identity is being tracked, and that you might be prosecuted. Don't worry, I only linked an article about the whole thing above.
I'm sure glad my tax money is going to such critical
uses in these trying times. Give me a break.
"the whole pc architecture should ideally be replaced."
It has been. What, pray tell, does a modern PC have in common with the original IBM PC except a similar instruction set?
ISA bus is completely gone on most new machines. Memory and bus architecture have changed completely (though still little endian;). Plug and play is almost working perfectly. The graphics interface has gone through many iterations. I/O is almost completely different and updated (though RS232 and printer ports are still on many machines - those both serve their purpose fine).
Hammer looks like great processor, regardless of x86 backwards compatibility. Throughput will tell the story. x86(-64) has a long way to go yet.
I sent the author a correction two days ago about this statement:
Currently, desktop and notebook processors like the Pentium 4 are 32-bit chips, meaning that they process data in 32-bit chunks; 64-bit chips can process data in 64-bit chunks.
Nope. The only thing that makes a 64-bit processoor "64-bit" is a flat 64 bit memory address space (in practice some subset of 64 bit). P3, P4 and Athlon all have many 64+ bit features, including instructions, registers, and memory transfers (data, not address).
Pretty sad that the article hasn't been fixed by now.
You might point out that we have had no real acts of domestic terrorism since September 2001. True. But how often did we experience such attacks *prior* to the WTC attack? And, even if we *did* expect something since that time, why would anyone bother? Ever seen the Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters are Coming to Maple Street"? That about covers it.
Exactly. Further, the lack of attacks to this point has pretty much been without the various draconian surveillance measures now being considered.
In my view, there have been two distinct categories of security measures enacted:
Good measures, which don't impact American citizens appreciably, don't erode rights, and are most likely extremely effective against terrorism:
Reenforced cockpit doors.
More armed marshals on flights and in airports.
Foriegn surveillance and operations.
Law enforcement against suspicious foreign nationals.
Increased border enforcement.
Increased law enforcement attention to terrorist issues/targets.
Bad measures, which inconvenience us, are eroding rights, and are most likely ineffective against terrorism:
"Increased" airport security. More inconvenient, yes. More effective, probably not. The one I can't really argue with here, though I don't like it, is X-raying all luggage.
Massively increased surveillance of American citizens, often without warrants (IMO). Without a doubt a knee-jerk reaction, unwarranted and just indefensible. There is no evidence that increased surveillance of this nature would have stopped a single terrorist attack.
Further measures now being considered impact our Constitutional rights unacceptably, especially given the complete lack of success the terrorists have enjoyed to this point.
The use of this issue to increase government search & seizure operations: "I'm sorry sir, but we found these banned Cuban cigars when we examined your luggage. Please come with us."
Yes, we computer folk are (or should be) constantly reminded that "if ain't broke don't fix it" (or pay for it!) is a good axiom for most people.
I think some of the points you made directly apply to the rush to get EE oriented tools onto Linux. No one can ever declare an old version "obsolete", and I'm pretty sure you'll be able to get x86 hardware to run it for many, many years (i'd guess at least 50, and perhaps 100,000;).
Contrast that to Windows where "OS Design du Jour" is the rule...and there is a constant commercial push to generate churn.
A better Idea would be a port that can be easily accessed that can support future upgrades without surgery.
Like many such devices, a port requires an interface between two different kinds of signals, in this case a signal coming from the computer, and the signals that the neuron understands in the form of weak electrical currents (or chemicals) hitting the right spots in the neurons (to sum up my knowledge on THAT subject;).
This chip provides a form of that interface, in that it can detect neural activity (I doubt this chip can stimulate activity in the other direction). In a sense you're right in that there will be a progression in the development of these chips and their implementation/implantation in animals, and then humans (this is probably a textbook case of the value of animal research). The trick is really to provide some kind of interface that provides communication with the computer without damaging existing biological structures. It might take more than one implant in order to achieve holodeck-like full sensory immersion (although this is one of the few ways to believably achieve it).
I'm sure there would be the usual bandwidth issues and so on. Perhaps (as an earlier post suggested) a simple voice interface would be easier to implement. Then we could all experience schizophrenia.;-)
[voice from nowhere interrupting sex]
"This is Bill Gates IVclone. You MUST INSTALL THIS CRITICAL WINDOWSISME SECURITY UPDATE NOW! YOU CAUGHT A V-MAIL INLOOK DISTRIBUTED VIRUS AND ARE FLOODPINGING OUR HEADQUARTERS!"
Ah, the wonderful world of the future. I can hardly wait.;-)
To assume that we could understand the whole shebang from this vantage point is like the flea declaring the universe is made up of large hair-like columns which extend upwards forever and soft skin-like ground which stretches forever in all directions.
Obviously the fleas needed better telescopes, not to mention a space program.
You should remember a fine saying I've always enjoyed:
"Better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool, rather than opening it and removing all doubt."
Yes, be glad you have a job... then in 15 years after y'all are continually 'glad just to have a job' and being paid less and less, working longer hours, with less benefits and worse conditions... it gets closer and closer to not having a worthwhile job at all
Yes, or until you get laid off and never rehired due to age discrimination that officially doesn't exist.
Self employment is the only way to go after awhile...and you can yell at the boss all you want.;-)
Back working on my undergrad (computer engineering) I remember getting frustrated at the comp-sci profs that insisted machines were simply 'black boxes' and the underlying hardware need not be a concern of the programmer.
I'm not sure if there was a lack of communication with your prof, but the concept should have been "SOFTware as black boxes". This is the concept of data hiding, which is a good thing. The cornerstones of software engineering are abstraction and encapsulation, and data hiding is a big part of encapsulation.
The hardware is (to an extent) a "black box" from the standpoint of any higher-level language, including C and Ada. That is the whole point of software portability, which is also a good thing. Both of those have been used for a tremendous number of embedded systems (particularly Ada, which is used for quite a lot of the space shuttle software). One must know that one's algorithms will execute deterministically in the required time, but knowing in detail how the data and instructions flow from memory though cache and processor is emphatically not required in 99% of cases.
Detailed knowledge of computer hardware is helpful to software engineers, but by no means essential. Talk to the hardware folks if you have a question.;-)
We do not believe these flaws are inherent in the Java platform but that they relate to difficulties in our Solaris implementation.
Also, many of the stated problems are slated to be fixed in Java 1.5...we'll see.
In the meantime, support gcj or the IBM implementations...on other platforms.;-)
Another snippet:
We all agree that the Java language offers many advantages over the alternatives. We would generally prefer to deploy our applications in Java but the implementation provided for Solaris is inadequate to the task of producing supportable and reliable products.
Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
And of course, now that I read some of the replies, I see it may well be a hoax regardless. Sigh. (Disclaimer: I've never used Java on Solaris, only Linux and Windows.)
If they had higher-end NVIDIA graphics cards, they could also be very good OpenGL development/visualization stations, using Linux. Port all that SGI code with very little effort...
Biggest problem I'm still having is the system sounds like a 747 taking off and I've had official AMD CPU fans burn out on me. I would still love to get a bit more oomph out of this though if there are any suggestions.
I'd use aftermarket fans, I thought AMD's fans were cheesy (to use a technical term;). If you want a good product, I recommend the PC Power and Cooling Athlon CPU cooler. PCP&C generally has top-quality products (great choice for power supplies as well).
You should probably start going for DVD/RAM drives also, lots more capacity for backups...
One final thought on numerics - you might want to compare some of the commercial compilers with gcc. For instance, Microway resells a strong line of commercial compilers. The Portland Group compilers, in particular, look promising.
If by "equivalent" you mean "50% slower" than you are correct.
Well, no. According to the article you linked, the Mac was 56% as fast as the P4. Pretty bad on the face of it, but those programs are most likely testing the parallel processing functionality of those processors (Altivec, SSE2 etc.) as opposed to general purpose computing power. It is also not at all clear which of those functions (if any) took advantage of the second CPU in the Mac.
Unfortunately, no one seems to be posting SPEC results for G4 systems these days. The closest I can find is for a 1.45 GHz. Power4 system from IBM, which most likely has similar IPC. It comes in at an impressive 909/
1251 SPECint/SPECfp, vs. 1085/1092 for the 3.06 GHz. P4 from Dell (Precision Workstation 350). Note that the IBM system outperforms the P4 at floating point at less than 1/2 the clockspeed.
I'm not claiming that the Apple machines are as fast as the IBM implementation, but I also wouldn't expect them to be all that much slower. Anyone willing to post SPEC numbers for the new Apple boxes?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I apologise for not responding to this earlier. I didn't give this thread the attention it deserved. Unfortunately, sir, the Bush regime does not recognize the proper definition of the term terrorist. If you will examine the list of known "terrorist" organizations they released, you will see quite a few political groups that have never been involved in acts of terror, nor advocated them.
In your opinion, I suppose. I'm sure you have the full resources of the NSA, CIA and FBI at your disposal...as the president does.
Furthermore, your suggestion that America is right to attack Iraq is ludicrous. There are only two types of people dying in Iraq: children who die because we have imposed harsh restrictions on the nation of Iraq, and criminals who die for violating the laws of Iraq.
Sure. Tell that to the 5,000+ Kurds, men, women and children, who were gassed (by WMD) in one incident in northern Iraq by Hussein's henchmen.
Just today I was hearing about numerous Iraqis being fed through large-scale shredding machines for Hussien's amusement...but I'm sure all those stories are made up...don't you think?
Despite your concerns about the loss of our civil liberties, you nonetheless advocate war with Iraq. I promise you that, once Iraq has been bombed and Saddam killed/deposed, that the loss of our liberties will continue, but at an increased rate, for the invasion of Iraq would further strengthen the resolve of the many anti-American rebels who remain in this world.
Yes, all those rebels which have been so successful here in the States since 9/11...right?
ROFL.
Sure. Care to share an example?
Further, regimes like that have always existed - and everyone knows they use the flimsiest of excuses to justify their dirty work. Welcome to the real world. At least the US is trying to clean up one of the worst offenders.
It has been 1 1/2 year since 9/11 and the Bush administration still has no exact definition of the word "terrorist".
Try Webster's Unabridged:
"a person who uses or favors terrorizing methods"
I hope that cleared things up for you.
(BTW, don't get me wrong, I have issues with the 'war on terror'. For instance, when will 'terror' surrender or sign an armistice? This could be the modern version of the 100 Years War, which can't be a good thing. Our 'temporary' loss of civil liberties could turn out to be as 'temporary' as income tax.)
My feeling is that a small or one-person team can do a lot given current tools (granted there is a lot for one person to cover) and at least will not fall into a bunch of backbiting and/or large scale corporate stupidity. Too many "big shop" games are either knock-offs, or without any real playability.
I have a terrific concept for a commercial game I'm trying to develop, so we'll see how the small fish does in my case... ;-)
I wonder if Microsoft still holds SCO stock. They were a major SCO investor many years ago.
I wouldn't worry too much about this lawsuit though - IBM will cream SCO I think. :-)
How long will it be before the USA uses this to fry innocent children in Iraq
Oh, about never. One of the best points about these directed energy weapons is that they're very much precision weapons. The US goes more out of its way to avoid civilian casualties than any military in history, so I expect little civilian fallout from a system that's almost entirely air-to-air. (By the way, it'd be interesting to know what the performance of this is as an ASAT device - I'd guess it can take out the lowest ones at a minimum...)
(oh wait they are just 'casualties' of the OIL war)
Right, let's just forget about Saddam gassing thousands of his own citizens and hoarding enough bio and chem agents to take out a significant fraction of the US population (if not all of it).
Personally I trust that the Iraqis newfound "active" cooperation with inspectors will reveal every banned weapon they possess - don't you? Not.
The French are either naive, in bed with Iraq, or spineless. You pick.
It is +4 because 4 people with moderator points didn't bother to check the facts. Shocking. ;-)
I mean, nobody just bashes the President as a knee-jerk reaction - do they?
True, however (for fairly big $$$, granted) I could pick up something like a Sun Fire 6800 server, with up to 24 processors and 192 GB of RAM. I would at least be saving on a REAL expensive Oracle license. ;-)
Granted, its not terabytes - however access should be blazingly fast, and you have all the advantages of a fully OO approach, with general purpose languages. I could see LOTS of uses for this, particularly on highly reliable hardware. (You know, in fact, with RMI you aren't limited to a single machine either.)
Great stuff once again coming from the Open Source camp - and nice and tight as well at only 350 lines of code!
That's what I call programming!
(One last thought - 4 processor Opteron servers will be relatively inexpensive, and should support 64 GB RAM.)
For OS X? The SourceForge page says "Linux", and the dvbackup page makes no mention of anything except "Unix". I just downloaded and it built OK on RH 8.0.
Firewire isn't available under Linux (AFAIK) with my Asus A7N8X MB (NFORCE2), and I don't yet have an appropriate camcorder anyhow. I may have to get one to check this out. ;-)
At any rate thanks for the interesting link!
Not entirely, Orthanc, Minas Tirith and the various Dwarven works show that the "good guys" could do large scale engineering as well.
Of course, in Middle Earth they have flamin' magic to get things done...no such panacea here. ;-)
Apparently, just go to one of the various Internet smoke shops he shut down yesterday. You'll be redirected to the DEA (or at least that was the plan) and warned that your identity is being tracked, and that you might be prosecuted. Don't worry, I only linked an article about the whole thing above.
I'm sure glad my tax money is going to such critical uses in these trying times. Give me a break.
It has been. What, pray tell, does a modern PC have in common with the original IBM PC except a similar instruction set?
ISA bus is completely gone on most new machines. Memory and bus architecture have changed completely (though still little endian;). Plug and play is almost working perfectly. The graphics interface has gone through many iterations. I/O is almost completely different and updated (though RS232 and printer ports are still on many machines - those both serve their purpose fine).
Hammer looks like great processor, regardless of x86 backwards compatibility. Throughput will tell the story. x86(-64) has a long way to go yet.
Currently, desktop and notebook processors like the Pentium 4 are 32-bit chips, meaning that they process data in 32-bit chunks; 64-bit chips can process data in 64-bit chunks.
Nope. The only thing that makes a 64-bit processoor "64-bit" is a flat 64 bit memory address space (in practice some subset of 64 bit). P3, P4 and Athlon all have many 64+ bit features, including instructions, registers, and memory transfers (data, not address).
Pretty sad that the article hasn't been fixed by now.
Exactly. Further, the lack of attacks to this point has pretty much been without the various draconian surveillance measures now being considered.
In my view, there have been two distinct categories of security measures enacted:
Good measures, which don't impact American citizens appreciably, don't erode rights, and are most likely extremely effective against terrorism:
Bad measures, which inconvenience us, are eroding rights, and are most likely ineffective against terrorism:
i.e. good fscking luck.
It could be done under Fair Use, IMO.
However, it would probably be better to do a Bored of the Rings type satire, with Frito, Pepsi, Gimlet, Legolam, Goodgulf and the rest. ROFL.
Here's a pretty good Bored of the Rings page.
Yes, we computer folk are (or should be) constantly reminded that "if ain't broke don't fix it" (or pay for it!) is a good axiom for most people.
I think some of the points you made directly apply to the rush to get EE oriented tools onto Linux. No one can ever declare an old version "obsolete", and I'm pretty sure you'll be able to get x86 hardware to run it for many, many years (i'd guess at least 50, and perhaps 100,000;).
Contrast that to Windows where "OS Design du Jour" is the rule...and there is a constant commercial push to generate churn.
Linux rocks!
Like many such devices, a port requires an interface between two different kinds of signals, in this case a signal coming from the computer, and the signals that the neuron understands in the form of weak electrical currents (or chemicals) hitting the right spots in the neurons (to sum up my knowledge on THAT subject;).
This chip provides a form of that interface, in that it can detect neural activity (I doubt this chip can stimulate activity in the other direction). In a sense you're right in that there will be a progression in the development of these chips and their implementation/implantation in animals, and then humans (this is probably a textbook case of the value of animal research). The trick is really to provide some kind of interface that provides communication with the computer without damaging existing biological structures. It might take more than one implant in order to achieve holodeck-like full sensory immersion (although this is one of the few ways to believably achieve it).
I'm sure there would be the usual bandwidth issues and so on. Perhaps (as an earlier post suggested) a simple voice interface would be easier to implement. Then we could all experience schizophrenia. ;-)
[voice from nowhere interrupting sex]
"This is Bill Gates IVclone. You MUST INSTALL THIS CRITICAL WINDOWSISME SECURITY UPDATE NOW! YOU CAUGHT A V-MAIL INLOOK DISTRIBUTED VIRUS AND ARE FLOODPINGING OUR HEADQUARTERS!"
Ah, the wonderful world of the future. I can hardly wait. ;-)
Heh, wireheads unite! I wonder when the organ-legging will begin...oh wait it already has.
Obviously the fleas needed better telescopes, not to mention a space program.
You should remember a fine saying I've always enjoyed:
"Better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool, rather than opening it and removing all doubt."
Yes, or until you get laid off and never rehired due to age discrimination that officially doesn't exist.
Self employment is the only way to go after awhile...and you can yell at the boss all you want. ;-)
I'm not sure if there was a lack of communication with your prof, but the concept should have been "SOFTware as black boxes". This is the concept of data hiding, which is a good thing. The cornerstones of software engineering are abstraction and encapsulation, and data hiding is a big part of encapsulation.
The hardware is (to an extent) a "black box" from the standpoint of any higher-level language, including C and Ada. That is the whole point of software portability, which is also a good thing. Both of those have been used for a tremendous number of embedded systems (particularly Ada, which is used for quite a lot of the space shuttle software). One must know that one's algorithms will execute deterministically in the required time, but knowing in detail how the data and instructions flow from memory though cache and processor is emphatically not required in 99% of cases.
Detailed knowledge of computer hardware is helpful to software engineers, but by no means essential. Talk to the hardware folks if you have a question. ;-)
By the way, don't forget another important axiom:
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Right, Microsoft won't do that. It'll just sue.
We do not believe these flaws are inherent in the Java platform but that they relate to difficulties in our Solaris implementation.
Also, many of the stated problems are slated to be fixed in Java 1.5...we'll see.
In the meantime, support gcj or the IBM implementations...on other platforms. ;-)
Another snippet:
We all agree that the Java language offers many advantages over the alternatives. We would generally prefer to deploy our applications in Java but the implementation provided for Solaris is inadequate to the task of producing supportable and reliable products.
Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
And of course, now that I read some of the replies, I see it may well be a hoax regardless. Sigh. (Disclaimer: I've never used Java on Solaris, only Linux and Windows.)
If they had higher-end NVIDIA graphics cards, they could also be very good OpenGL development/visualization stations, using Linux. Port all that SGI code with very little effort...
Biggest problem I'm still having is the system sounds like a 747 taking off and I've had official AMD CPU fans burn out on me. I would still love to get a bit more oomph out of this though if there are any suggestions.
I'd use aftermarket fans, I thought AMD's fans were cheesy (to use a technical term;). If you want a good product, I recommend the PC Power and Cooling Athlon CPU cooler. PCP&C generally has top-quality products (great choice for power supplies as well).
You should probably start going for DVD/RAM drives also, lots more capacity for backups...
One final thought on numerics - you might want to compare some of the commercial compilers with gcc. For instance, Microway resells a strong line of commercial compilers. The Portland Group compilers, in particular, look promising.
I read the rest of the replies, but didn't see one major area mentioned: CAD/CAM. There are many CAD users today that could use >>4 GB of RAM.
Other potential users are numeric code crunchers and gamers...I can't wait for the first virtual scene >>4 GB.
Well, no. According to the article you linked, the Mac was 56% as fast as the P4. Pretty bad on the face of it, but those programs are most likely testing the parallel processing functionality of those processors (Altivec, SSE2 etc.) as opposed to general purpose computing power. It is also not at all clear which of those functions (if any) took advantage of the second CPU in the Mac.
Unfortunately, no one seems to be posting SPEC results for G4 systems these days. The closest I can find is for a 1.45 GHz. Power4 system from IBM, which most likely has similar IPC. It comes in at an impressive 909/ 1251 SPECint/SPECfp, vs. 1085/1092 for the 3.06 GHz. P4 from Dell (Precision Workstation 350). Note that the IBM system outperforms the P4 at floating point at less than 1/2 the clockspeed.
I'm not claiming that the Apple machines are as fast as the IBM implementation, but I also wouldn't expect them to be all that much slower. Anyone willing to post SPEC numbers for the new Apple boxes? :-)