North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Slashdot: Providers Ignoring DNS TTL?
On Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:13:22 EDT, Dean Anderson said: > I'm reminded of the arguments in the late 80's about threading: People > (like you) said there are no multithreading operating systems, and > multiprocessor systems existed only in labs. So designing threadsafe > libraries or writing multithreading capable languages was a total waste of > time. And they showed as evidence all the programs written from 1975 to > 1985. Odd, seeing how IBM's OS/360 supported multithreading in the mid-60s (well, OK, only the MVT variant did it really well - MFT had some restrictions, and PCP was basically a program loader on steroids), as did Multics, early Unix, the various PDP-8/11 and DEC-10/20 operating systems, and most supported multiprocessor systems before 1970. What you're actually talking about is the "I don't have to worry about *THAT*" syndrome that's always been the bane of program portability. Those of us who were around at the time remember all too well "Not all the world's a VAX" when programs that ran fine under BSD on a VAX would bomb out under SunOS 3.2 - because the VAX allowed dereferencing a NULL pointer and SunOS didn't. And anyhow, you're looking at it totally backwards - things like system libraries didn't support multithreading well at first because nobody was *interested* in doing it. The support did happen once there was an actual demand for it. Remember that there's a *cost* to supporting multithreading - you have to drag along all this ugly locking code and stuff like that. It's really hard to justify putting in code that slows down the 95% of the applications that are single-threaded for the 5% that are multi-threaded, and even harder to justify putting the support in the library "just in case somebody wants to use it in the future". > Well, PPLB isn't the end of the world. But PPLB is coming, and the smart > people will be prepared for it. They dumb people, well, they're dumb. > What can be expected from dumb people? What you seem to be missing is that the *really* smart people will be prepared for it when it actually gets here - and will take advantage of it's lack of arrival in the meantime. Attachment:
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