This is the most acute and visible side effect of globalization. As people who have travelled to US know, multiple nationalities, religions, and ethnical backgrounds do not mean diversity. Actually, after one generation, the diversity is less than what you would see in many other nations, even taken independently.
People associate anti-globalism with fundamentalism, or being against democracy, or being rooted in envy towards western way of life(consumption slavery) or towards material abundance. In fact what one feels most is the tide of low quality TV and films, the swamping of industrially manufactured and processed fast food, local governments playing into the global agendas of IMF and WB. What this means in the end is loss of diversity - everybody watching the same channels, wearing the same clothes and speaking the same language everywhere!
I am sure there are people saying that this wouldn't be a bad thing (after all, the world spoke one language before Babel), but the (debatable) truth IMHO, is that it is diversity, not uniformity that breeds innovation and growth, and perhaps that's why it is harder to preserve.
You are right on most points, but slightly offtopic. The problems you mention pertain to the (cheap) PC architecture, which you compare to (expensive) mainframes. Also, the tasks most workstations and servers have to face are "online", so there is not much scheduling ahead for the entire night to be done.
I think unix does a more than decent job for the given hardware and for the given problems. If you knew ahead all the jobs and their requirements, there are a hundred algorithms in any OS book on how to attain optimality - it is a solved problem, really. Compare this with "online" problems, when the OS gets the request that has to be answered ASAP, and the best you can do is multiplex everybody.
Modern unices do not spend more than 0.1% on task switching. I also do not believe your figure of long term average of 30% machine utilization under unix. If you mean that the rest is spent thrashing the swap, then this is part of the problem to be sold, on the existing hardware. It is physically impossible to serve, say random 20M requests from a 1000M disk using 8M of RAM, without thrashing the disk (if you want the illusion of responsiveness, which means multiplexing). The mainframe is not the silver bullet, you are just applying today's comparative power to 20yr ago problems. The mainframes are still out there, in the number crunching community, overnight database jobs, etc, but your average office, home, university, company lab relies on unix/windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, slashdotted already!
Self referencing pointer: slashdot slashdots itself into the blackhole of infinite loop.
This is the size of a fingernail! It must be a Micro Mac Mini...
People associate anti-globalism with fundamentalism, or being against democracy, or being rooted in envy towards western way of life(consumption slavery) or towards material abundance. In fact what one feels most is the tide of low quality TV and films, the swamping of industrially manufactured and processed fast food, local governments playing into the global agendas of IMF and WB. What this means in the end is loss of diversity - everybody watching the same channels, wearing the same clothes and speaking the same language everywhere!
I am sure there are people saying that this wouldn't be a bad thing (after all, the world spoke one language before Babel), but the (debatable) truth IMHO, is that it is diversity, not uniformity that breeds innovation and growth, and perhaps that's why it is harder to preserve.
-naspa
You are right on most points, but slightly offtopic. The problems you mention pertain to the (cheap) PC architecture, which you compare to (expensive) mainframes. Also, the tasks most workstations and servers have to face are "online", so there is not much scheduling ahead for the entire night to be done.
I think unix does a more than decent job for the given hardware and for the given problems. If you knew ahead all the jobs and their requirements, there are a hundred algorithms in any OS book on how to attain optimality - it is a solved problem, really. Compare this with "online" problems, when the OS gets the request that has to be answered ASAP, and the best you can do is multiplex everybody.
Modern unices do not spend more than 0.1% on task switching. I also do not believe your figure of long term average of 30% machine utilization under unix. If you mean that the rest is spent thrashing the swap, then this is part of the problem to be sold, on the existing hardware. It is physically impossible to serve, say random 20M requests from a 1000M disk using 8M of RAM, without thrashing the disk (if you want the illusion of responsiveness, which means multiplexing). The mainframe is not the silver bullet, you are just applying today's comparative power to 20yr ago problems. The mainframes are still out there, in the number crunching community, overnight database jobs, etc, but your average office, home, university, company lab relies on unix/windows.