I cannot take a claim of 50 times higher productivity seriously. But, finally real examples! Here's my take, as an "Unix is my IDE" user:

Ok, the systems I use mostly don't require a checkout. Still 30 seconds is hard to explain; I'd do it in 2--3 seconds from Emacs or the shell, if there's no need for a checkout comment. But for systems which do require an explicit checkout, I'd prefer to do it explicitly: plan my work so that I check out roughly the right files with the right comments before I start editing.

That's not even the same task, so I fail to see the point. Diffing is indeed something you need to do to be efficient. I like to do simple diffs from Emacs, but often you want something more like "what's my current delta against what's checked out, across the whole project?" and that's better done from the shell.

For (manual) merging, I find GUI merge tools terribly inefficient compared to the "merge and leave both versions of conflicts in the file" strategy of diff3/CVS/Git ... I helped introduce that as an alternative at work (where we used to have only GUI 3-way, sequentially over each conflicting file, in a fixed order).

If you have coworkers who believe that's magic, you do have a problem.

But you also have a point here: etags/ctags don't play well with "overloaded" names. Fine with C, not so fine with C++ and possibly worse with Java (since you don't have header files which summarize interfaces). As a C++ guy, I admit that is a weakness of my environment, and it does hurt my productivity somewhat.

Hm, my experience is the same, but my theory of what's going on is different.

I use Linux at home (no anti-virus) but Windows with encrypted file system and anti-virus (forget which) at work. Seems to me the problem is I/O load when the anti-virus software decides to rescan everything. There's little CPU load, but everything else slows to a crawl anyway because disk access becomes almost ... inaccessible.

A fast CPU or gigabytes of RAM won't help that scenario. Perhaps it's possible to write or tune the anti-virus software to use a lower I/O priority -- but if so I don't understand why they don't do that!

Right, like people are going to know/care the kernel version their smartphone is using. Come on! I've been working and developing software for/on Linux for 15 years and I don't know the version of the kernel I'm running. Hell, I didn't even know kernel versions had names.

They don't; not in any meaningful way anyway. There's a $(NAME) tucked away in the Makefile, and that's what changed from "Unicycling Gorilla" (never heard of it) to "Linux for Workgroups" in commit ad81f0545e. As far as I can tell, this string is not even included in a built kernel. You certainly can't make uname(1) or /proc/sys/kernel/ emit this name.

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".