Sun have Solaris working on the 32 "core" Niagara (depending on how you count; 8 4-way cores)

See http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/ - outstanding.

More within my price range is a dual socket-f athlon board with 2 dual core cpus for now, ready to go to 2 quad core.

From a video presentation by Bill Moore on ZFS (see http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs_learning_center.jsp ) I get the impression Sun have been thinking about concurrency for some time in their kernel.

I'm waiting till www.gnusolaris.com stops being alpha and then I should have most of debians tools and the SunOS kernel.

http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/articles/erlang.html

Very interesting, I'm certainly getting involved.

Thing is I dont think there is any restriction on saying

A market leader in X ("A" being the weasel word here)

or

One of the best X in the galaxy.

Meaningless phrases,

I am one of the sexiest men in Britain for sure, perhaps the 20 millionth.

They stopped me saying something along the lines of

"compatible with Windows/Apple/Linux"

because of the word Apple.

Why only protect apple?

I stumbled across this the other day

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/1593270658/

Write Great Code Volume I: Understanding the Machine

Write Great Code, Volume II: Thinking Low-Level, Writing High-Level

Cant give a full blown recommendation as I'm just starting as a programmer.

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/

works pretty well in linux, may be worth a look.