That's a pretty reasonable machine at a very reasonable
price. I know it's a little ahead of what some people might
have, but I think it is still a reasonable benchmark machine.
There are many people running *BSD and Linux machines who may
not be doing heavy development, but still need to compile the
latest mplayer or Mozilla sources. Some of them are students
who have a completely working machine, virtually no income
and no need to buy a new computer besides GCC. GCC and mplayer
are the only two programs which tax my five year old CPU over
twenty seconds. Saying I should just spend $400 to upgrade
a machine that works just fine to support an application which
ran on a VAX just fine at one point in time seems a little
unreasonable.