Well, that's where I respectfully disagree! PCs might be cheaper but I have yet to find a PC that is "just as good" as a Mac, hardware-wise. For instance, I find the trackpads on Macs highly superior than those on PCs. Also, display quality is unparalleled, IMHO

I couldn't agree more. In my previous job, I had a colleague who wanted to convert me from SVN to Bazaar (http://bazaar-vcs.org/).

He told me "it was very simple to use, you only have to..." and then started drawing a very complicated diagram on my whiteboard.

Personally, I thought it was complete overkill for the two-man project we were working on.

No one is saying that device drives will magically start working flawlessly because their source code is open, although it will make it easier to track down bugs (see Linus Torvalds' quote about the number of eyeballs).

The main point, however, is that now Linux distributions can ship these drives out of the box, so wireless devices will work straight away. Until now the biggest (and dare I say only?) problem I've had with installing Linux on a laptop is finding and installing the right drivers for wireless network cards.

I didn't (want to) say that all RDBMS won't cut it. The only point I wanted to make was that while I can see the point of the author that solutions like Cassandra are a bit overrated for most business applications, for other applications domains they are becoming a viable solution.

I think the author of TFA is missing something: not all databases / datastores are developed for businesses to keep track of their inventories. These days, many scientific disciplines, such as bioinformatics, rely heavily on databases as well.

The latest experimental techniques produce so much data such that "old-fashioned" RDBMSs just don't cut it anymore. So, for certain application domains, NoSQL seems to be at the moment the way forward. I'm afraid the author can wish all the he wants but NoSQL is gonna be around for a while. Until something better comes up, that is.

I don't think the parent's point about handling 10k lines of code has to do with with ability to load these files into memory but rather about managing the complexity of such projects. When a program becomes this big, it becomes harder to keep track of all the names of variables, the argument types of subroutines etc. IDEs like Netbeans or Eclipse have autocompletion functionality that make your life as a developer at lot easier.

It's possible of course that Emacs or vi provide similar functionality but the main point is that you need some type of IDE when managing a large, complex development project.

I have to disagree. A year or so ago my uncle asked me to transfer some files from/to his old 386. After typing 'win' as the DOS prompt, Windows was up and running in literally one second! All the apps that I opened were very responsive.