So if you want maximum love and compatibility, you will use MacOS clients in an enterprise environment with MacOS X Server, and use Appleshare to access files, using Apple File Protocol (AFP).

Which runs as two threads. For all the clients a XServe may handle, there are just two threads, of which only one actually does IO. Let's say you have a lot of files in a directory, like, say, Mail.app's Mail folder. Opening one of those STOPS IO for everyone else while it's traversing it.

God I hate my job sometimes..

Most considered memory allocation hard. That is how we ended up with perl, python, and Java.

Threads? Welcome to the concept of map/reduce. Now we just need a language to wrap it in.

Just use streaming:

http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/HadoopStreaming

;-)

I hate managing Java frameworks :(

This though doesn't solve the problem that I just bought a bunch of 8 way machines and I need to scale a process...

fork() is a crummy answer BTW.

i blame your rick astley collection

Every time I talk about AOLserver employing both threads and event loops, and I get "you never need threads" in response, my knee jerk reaction has become to respond with "you mean you're just too stupid to use threads properly."

Yeah. "Threads are hard!" This is why it's critical to hire smart people.

iTunes has always been annoyingly slow for me. I'd be afraid to try all of those things at once :P

I once dared to sync three iPods at one time and it actually worked just fine. I was pretty impressed.