Mark Burgess' talk at LISA 11

I've bene catching up on the talks at LISA last year, and one of them was Mark Burgess' talk "3 Myths and 3 Challenges to Bring System Administration out of the Dark Ages". (Anyone else reminded of "7 things about lawyers the occult can't explain?") If I was there, I'd've made this comment; as it is, I'll leave it here.

One of this points was that in this brave new world, we need to let go of serialism ("A follows B follows C, and that's Just The Way It Is(tm)"). That's the old way of thinking, he said, the Industrial way; we can do much more in parallel than we ever could in serial.

It occurs to me that it might be better to say that needless serialism can be let go of. Like a Makefile: the final executable depends on all the object files; without them, there's no sense trying to create it. But the object files typically depend on a file or two each (a .c and .h file, say), and there's no reason they can't be compiled in parallel ("make -j9"). Dependencies are there for a reason, and it is no bad thing to hold on to them.

(Kinda like the misquoting of Emerson. Often, you hear "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." But the quote actually begins "A foolish consistency..." And now, having demonstrated my superiority by quoting Wikipedia, I will now disappear up my own ass.)