This article is an enormous pile of crap.
It’s talking about a problem that has no practical significance.
ANY excuse to beat up on Unix, because there are FREE versions of it.
The real problem is from a business point of view. Computers are so fast today that massive applications can be run on a $500 PC. Well, IF (big IF) they are well-written.
We find business customers simply NOT NEEDING more computing power.
What to do ?
Create new buzzwords, create new things for them to do.
Everyone needs a “data warehouse”.
Buy new servers, create copies of your database on them in different forms. Mix and mash the data 6 ways to Sunday. Write all sorts of reporting tools, do all sorts of analysis (business intelligence buzzword). Spend millions on hardware and consultants to do things like tweek your pricing structure. Now to customer can come up with math to verify for senior management that they are improving top and bottom line results. And global warming is definitely man made.
Back to just how fast computers now are.
Let’s say you have a machine that executes a BILLION instructions every second. Oh, and it has 4 of those processors on its one chip.
It has a network card that will transfer a GIGABYTE every second.
It has 96 GIGABYTES of main memory, i.e., RAM.
It has a TERABYTE of disk storage and can transfer HUNDREDS of MEGABYTES per second to and from it.
And the dang machine costs $600.
Sounds like to me a single person could write ridiculously high-volume applications compared to even ten years ago, and run them on their PC.
Once you get into the realm of businesses that have some capital to throw around, and you can EASILY and CHEAPLY have racks of servers, with LOAD BALANCING, to support millions of simultaneous online users.
Now, if your programming staff is a bunch of FREAKING MORONS, you’ll be buried in problems, to be sure. But then again, that’s always been true and always will be.
But if you have a small team of SMART PEOPLE, who RTFM and program accordingly, performance SHOULD BE a non-issue.
It boggles the mind how stupid people can be.
Damn straight! Pounding my fist on the desk in agreement.
How smart is an industry which uses C/C++ for systems programming instead of Ada... or even LISP... or FORTH...?*
There is honestly no good reason that Systems should be written in C/C++, especially given the number of items that are implementation dependent.
* -- Being commissioned by the DOD, Ada was designed to allow exact representations so it could interface with hardware that had no standard. LISP was the system-language of the LISP-Machine, which had the ability to debug while running, even the system routines. FORTH is actually pretty amazing, allowing for entire systems to be built "in a matchbox".
UNIX is no longer any one kernel, it’s a philosophy. A philosophy that has been tested, tweaked, broken, fixed, and pounded upon for decades.
It’s strength is in it’s diversity and easy modification.
Maybe in ten years we’ll all be using GNU’s HURD, but we’ll still call it all “UNIX”.
All you haters better jump on the train.