I still prefer ssh access to a nicely configured Unix box though ...

Drugged out of his mind, offering vague advice which, when followed, lead to certain disaster?

Yeah. There hadn't been any for a while in the late 1990s. People didn't yet take scripting languages seriously, and trying to use pre-standard C++ (without a standard library!) as if it was Smalltalk had failed some years earlier.

Also, those of us who didn't take Microsoft seriously were impressed that Java came from Sun, the brave defender of the Unix legacy.

Ok. My posting was based on experiments with Linux where (at least in 2.6.x kernels) there's a fixed cost for accepting an Ethernet frame, feeding it into the IP stack and to a socket queue. This cost counts as "softirq" time, and cannot be spread across cores. I don't recall exactly which frame size I used, but in my experiments that core became the bottleneck at a few gigabits.

Somewhere between the system you describe and the one I describe, there's a significant difference. If it's not about heavy customizations and proprietary stacks, then I'm happy to be proven wrong! Even if it turns out that FreeBSD has a better networking subsystem than my beloved Linux.

Haven't checked 6Windgate, but Intel DPDK bypasses the IP stack and (as I understand it) pretty much turns the whole machine into an extension of the Intel NICs. Aren't your machines quite unlike traditional servers? E.g. in O&M and in networking APIs? But yes, I should not claim the only thing you can use 10Gbit for is to forward it using dedicated hardware.

More importantly, you can't make an IP stack consume or generate 10Gbit on any hardware I know of, even if the application is e.g. a TCP echo client or server where the payload gets minimal processing. The only use case is forwarding, in dedicated hardware, over 1Gbit links. 10Gbit is router technology, until CPUs are 5--10 times faster than today, i.e. forever.

The "Copyright (c) 2013 Errol Backfiring" comment is a useful one, though -- if copyright is indeed yours.

Other than that, I tend to agree.

There's a documentary about that one; it was on .se television a while ago. Hailed as a precursor to the home computers. But it's spelled "Olivetti".

If that's true, now is the best time to switch. Not when/if the vendor starts squeezing your balls.

Politeness and respect when asking favors from people who don't know you, that's arcane rules these days? Wow ...

I'm with the grandparent. People claiming "I was badly treated by an OSS project" without even naming the project are at least as likely to have been the one who were at fault themselves. That also goes for "I was once badly treated by a Wikipedia editor" people.

That makes sense; when I read your first posting praising the quality of proprietary software, my reaction was "that's funny; most proprietary software I've used sucked much worse than the free ones, had lower-quality documentation and everything". Microsoft's flagship products are an exception (although of course they don't do what I need, at least they are coherent and polished).

I haven't used an iPad or Photoshop, but they are also among the very few flagship products which get money and talent thrown at them.

Actually, he doesn't. He's talking about "talent or desire for college".

"Field" as in "database field"? They have no business storing cleartext passwords in a database.

But /etc *is* the central repository for application and kernel settings you're talking about.

(Except the user-specific settings. It's unfortunate that ~/.??* doesn't cover all such settings and nothing *but* such settings. In retrospect it should have been ~/etc/ or something.)

Yes, but it's a reason which often is not valid. I bet I can cover any modern Unix which has gcc and Gnu make with one simple Makefile. (Using the native toolchains, especially the native make, would be significantly harder.) Windows is quite a different thing, and few Unix programmers care about it. There's no decent make there by default anyway.

Clang ... isn't it just another set of $(CC), $(CFLAGS) and $(CPPFLAGS)? Although I admit I'd want a separate "./configure --use-clang" step for that rather than "make USE_CLANG=yes clean all".