I had a really interesting post about last weekend about halfway done and ready to post when the worst of all possible things happened: My workstation at work flamed out in a serious way. It's still in pieces all over the office and not operating because the RAID array - the disk mirror set up to prevent data loss in the event of a failure - blew up along with everything else. Systemware all over the place is corrupt, and I can't do much else other than log in as the root user and try to track down everything that's been damaged …

Yesterday Apple Computers announced the release of its latest Mac Pro workstation - an eight-CPU beast running Intel cores at 3.0 GHz. That's right.. two quad-core Xeon processors with 2 MB of level-2 cache each supporting up to 16 GB of RAM.

There are servers that have less horsepower in them.

You can find these monsters in their online catalogue at this time; prices start at $4kus.

There has been no word yet if Apple will be re-incorporating under the name Ono-Sendai.