6 ms·

Dead ends of information technology

46 points by peterhunt 5y ago

merb 5y ago
> There are still a lot of NFS based solution for server-to-server communication, but I would use a Ceph-based solution, if I could start from scratch. srsly? as if the two have anything in common and the same complexity?
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Exactly. NFS takes a couple of lines in /etc/exports. Ceph is large, scary, and multi-node.
- Spivak 5y ago
  They solve all the same operational problems — how do I access these files on multiple machines but NFS is strictly worse in pretty much every way to GlusterFS and Ceph. NFSs HA story is almost nonexistent and comes with list of buts that’s longer than the positives. As a technology it’s dead for anything other than the tiniest of internal IT use cases.
mikewarot 5y ago
Microkernels are necessary if you ever hope to secure a machine exposed to the internet. Linux can't be made secure. However, with the knowledge that DRAM isn't secure thanks to rowhammer, etc... nothing will ever be secure again, unless it uses Static Ram, which is too damned expensive. Computers are just going to get less and less usable as everyone forces the user interface into smartphones.
gnabgib 5y ago
Choose 2: Born in 1976, 43 years old (at time of writing), document was updated 2021-Oct-29
- wyrm 5y ago
  It was written in 2019. He even mentions that at a few points. > Today in 2019... > Now, in the year 2019... > Up to now (2019)...
  - wyrm 5y ago
    Correction: it's been continually updated since 2019. I'm not sure how to judge that one. But given the uselessness of his git commit messages, I'm not inclined to judge leniently.
    - jaredsohn 5y ago
      If you click on blame, it shows that he wrote '43 years old' 3 years ago and hasn't edited that line since. https://github.com/guettli/deadends-of-it/blame/master/README.md#L5 https://github.com/guettli/deadends-of-it/blame/master/READM...
coolgeek 5y ago
There's a lot to quibble with, here. But I find this interesting/worthwhile overall because it demonstrates just how broad and deep the landscape of dead ends is.
- dnautics 5y ago
  Even Ansible is dead by now.
  - sorum 5y ago
    Who (or what) is the contender to replace Ansible?
    - dnautics 5y ago
      Containerization in general?
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        Who configures and installs software on the container hosts? How do you deploy applications directly on bare metal or VMs? Those are still sometimes required or preferred for various reasons. IMO, you can speak about the death of bare metal (which is slowly happening), but definitely not tools like Ansible. They've found their niche.
    - chucky_z 5y ago
      I think Nix is most poised. If you don’t have a way to do immutable infrastructure, Ansible is still extremely alive.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Extremely, absolutely, definitely no. It's alive and well, and still being used for new deployments.
    - dnautics 5y ago
nobodyandproud 5y ago
> If you don't need a network drive any more (since you use GSuite, Office 365 or Nextcloud), then it is likely that you don't need a VPN any more. Leaving a very skinny almost serverless LAN. As content providers becomes more regionalized; I find VPNs becoming more (and not less) necessary.
- alerighi 5y ago
  A VPN also usually let's you bypass restriction on firewalls, especially with Wireguard protocol that is fairly new and it's over UDP. Especially in shared Wi-Fi networks that means usually better performance, and less problems with rejected connections to whatever service, or certain type of traffic not permitted, DNS requests that are redirected, and so on. I don't usually use VPN for privacy, since these days you have HTTPS that protects the communication, but they are super useful if you want to use a network that is not yours without issues. Beside that these days we may not have a file server, but we have a ton more of devices that we want to access when we are not in our network, without relying on a cloud (and thus giving away our privacy): IP cameras are the perfect example, I don't want the video stream to pass trought the cloud, I can connect in VPN to my home network and access the video stream. Beside that there are a ton of "smart" devices inside your home these days.
  - nobodyandproud 5y ago
    > I don't usually use VPN for privacy, since these days you have HTTPS that protects the communication, but they are super useful if you want to use a network that is not yours without issues. https doesn’t protect against URL snooping, so privacy is only as good as the request. Not that VPN is a real solution, but I find the GP/source’s thought process on this as sloppy.
riskneutral 5y ago
Are native GUIs really a dead end?
- krapp 5y ago
  Unfortunately, it seems that way. If it isn't dead then it's on the endangered species list. Electron / web-as-native has clearly won and it seems like no one is even attempting to improve the state of native GUI development as a result.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    > it seems like no one is even attempting to improve the state of native GUI development as a result. Who do you include as “no one”? Apple for example is going full steam ahead with its native GUI frameworks.
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      Aye, but in the broader landscape, they're a bit player. The average person's exposure to Apple GUIs will be on their phones.
  - ushakov 5y ago
    > no one is even attempting to improve the state of native GUI development as a result SwiftUI, React Native, Flutter disagree with you
    - nicce 5y ago
      I am not so sure about React Native. Like Electron, it is framework for people with web developer skill, missing a lot what real native frameworks can do.
- hgamaral 5y ago
  Not on mobile...
  - 5y ago
psim1 5y ago
> Parsing text with regular expressions is like eating rubbish. In the 21 century, we send and receive data structures. Of course you do, if you're starting from scratch. But since we tend to work on the Internet, which has a long history and myriad data formats and protocols, we often (rightly) use regex to validate and parse.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  In the Unix philosophy, that means you have a series of tools that each deal with one of these protocols. If you do one job, do it well - and regex is a bad, if very quick, solution to structured data parsing problems.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
senectus1 5y ago
ha! I'm outraged that RSS doesn't make a mention on this page... it seems to be dead every week or two here :-)
- VMtest 5y ago
  Sarcasm much huh? I reached this post from an rss reader
  - rout39574 5y ago
    I think that's exactly his point.
    - senectus1 5y ago
      yeah it was. Especially given how contentious some of his points are.. RSS really does belong on that page...
smitty1e 5y ago
> It is very uncommon to automate MS-Word or Excel via COM these days. I am happy. Yeah, but I have a few bazillion lines of .bas that I'm not afraid to dip into on occasion for purely internal reasons.
wyrm 5y ago
A lot of this is incredibly myopic. The author seems to think that because a tool isn't useful to him that it isn't used at all. Also, there's the repeated notion that some currently-popular new toy has "won" and forever displaced everything before it. Nothing really works that way.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Yep... "tech of the week has won", until next week, when "tech of that week has won", and most of the stuff declared 'dead' will still be working and in use pretty much everywhere. C dead? XML dead? GUIs dead? Regex dead? .... yeah... no.
  - djbusby 5y ago
    Cobol, so dead. Perl, dead. Remember when PHP was dead? And there were two things on the front page today about PHP ;). No death, only zombies.
elchief 5y ago
Relying on google trends is the dumbest things I can think of Almost everything declines over time on google trends PostgreSQL is hotter than it's ever been, and is "declining"
- RichardHesketh 5y ago
  Absolutely this. The past is not a guide to the future, at least in this sense. A lack of buzz does not mean something is dying; more often, it means that it is mature and well-understood, with much of the necessary supporting information already out there and readily discoverable. It’s useful to summarise the leading solutions at a moment in time, but nothing ‘has won’ - it is only ‘winning for now’. That is the insight/hindsight that is missing from this borderline-obnoxious opinion piece.
jnwatson 5y ago
Surprisingly microkernels seem to be coming back. Google has Fuschia, Facebook has Reality OS.
- nicce 5y ago
  It a lot about the control. Big companies have noticed that they can’t get everything they want into upstream.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  Mobile is the future - Mobile code, the interface it runs on will be local, not served via the strings and tin cans that is http(s). Code written by someone else, in whatever language, using whatever methodology, no matter how unsafe, needs to be run in a secure manner, given only the capabilities required to do the job. The OS needs to default to NO access, and stop malicious code, and confused deputies, from breaking things. If your OS can't run a chunk of code that uses GUI gadgets directly, you don't get to play. The desktop is back, but not really the way you think. The metaphor of directly manipulating UI bits with code is what we get to keep. Direct access to the file system is right out. Linux won't get to play, because it can't run mobile code without giving away the store. Neither can Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, etc. This is why we have an interest in Microkernels.
aero-glide2 5y ago
Native Android apps perform much better than web apps.
fnord77 5y ago
> The bash is the default shell, not on macos it is not. > Emacs I can assure you, the people who used emacs 20 years ago are still using emacs. > Desktop office: MS-Office, Libreoffice. These programs were very important in the past. Today most people learned, that you can write the text directly into the mail body. lolwut > Nobody wants to call malloc() and free() any more. um, embedded? > Parsing text with regular expressions is like eating rubbish. ok, I stopped here. This guy is a clown.
- OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
  > I can assure you, the people who used emacs 20 years ago are still using emacs And there's new users too! I for one am only about 20 years old :)
errcorrectcode 5y ago
Hindsight is 20/20. Nuanced toolbox for the real world > absolutist myopia. Whenever someone claims years of experience, they've given up on mastery. Native produces better, faster apps than introducing abstraction layers. Electron and Atom are resource hogs that force you into wasting resources. Appcelerator, Phone Gap, Gtk+, and Qt are for when you don't have the time or money to make something quality. Saying NFS isn't used anymore is ridiculous. Modern NFS 4.2 with pNFS features is badass.
- p2t2p 5y ago
  > Electron and Atom are resource hogs that force you into wasting resources You can repeat it as much as you want but poke any modern laptop, how many native apps and how many electron apps are there? Spotify, VSCode, bunch of note taking stuff, trello for desktop? And those that are not electron-based, they are simply running in browser. In other words - who cares what you think about performance? > Saying NFS isn't used anymore is ridiculous. Modern NFS 4.2 with pNFS features is badass. Again, nobody cares that you think it is badass. My work is still on NFS 3-something because NFS 4 introduced performance issues and restrictions that make it impossible to use. And you know the way to upgrade? Yeah, get rid of NFS and develop a cluster of independent agents that talk over grpc.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    Yeah, and as the user of an older, "underpowered" device, I'm excluded from all these "modern" apps because they either freeze up as a desktop app or freeze up as a JS app with no fallback, and I'm unable to participate in many of the groups which use them for communicating. But, of course, who cares about me, I should just buy a new computer, right?
    - p2t2p 5y ago
      > But, of course, who cares about me, I should just buy a new computer, right? Unfortunately it is not only you. _A lot_ of my employer's customers complain about frontend performance and the fact that the UI is generally made with assumption of fairly large display (almost everyone in the company has got 27"+ monitor whilst our customers are often on 2-3 years old business-versions of Lenovo or something similar with 14 inch of screen and 8gb of RAM top). And yes, that's right, who cares. People like you are minority (people on phones are majority), people in enterprise settings don't have a voice and choice, and economy drives everyone towards using web stacks. Also I guess my expression wasn't exactly clear. What I'm trying to convey is that technical superiority doesn't matter and users don't care about technical superiority. They care that music plays right away when they tap "play". And it is way easier to deliver that experience using web stack than any kind of native stuff.
MonaroVXR 5y ago
Kinda scared, I didn't know a lot of those old things, since I'm kinda young and I wasn't into computers.
- herval 5y ago
  Don’t worry, 10-20 years from now, you’ll know all of the things folks will be proclaiming as dead, and younger folks will tell you they never heard of most of them :-)
1970-01-01 5y ago
>https exists. Why a second security layer? Of course there are a lot of use-cases where you need more than one layer. But for most cases https is enough. Https isn't everywhere you think it is. (e.g. Linux and mobile): https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  HTTPS also locks out access in a whole slew of scenarios.
emerged 5y ago
Curmudgeon rants in markdown format. Coming from this 40+ yr old, yawn. This is like reading the diary of our worst performing engineer.
p2t2p 5y ago
I disagree with some of the things on that list but generally I like the list.
raspyberr 5y ago
Isn't this just saying yesterday's fads have been replaced by today's fads and you should use today's fads instead.
thefz 5y ago
> today NFS (Network File System) in a PC LAN does not make much sense any more. > Today people either use SMB to access files on a network share, or they use a web-based file service What? Properly configured NFS is blazing fast. And why would I use a cloud if I have some files locally? > The winner takes it all: Linux FreeBSD is still used by one of the largest CDNs, Netflix. > If I would be one of them, then I would try to find a new job with a better prospects for the future. Yeah, automate that with a web-based frontend. I don't agree with almost anything this guy says. You can't derive general laws from just one person's experience.

46 points by peterhunt 5y ago

merb 5y ago

> There are still a lot of NFS based solution for server-to-server communication, but I would use a Ceph-based solution, if I could start from scratch. srsly? as if the two have anything in common and the same complexity?

selfhoster11 5y ago
Exactly. NFS takes a couple of lines in /etc/exports. Ceph is large, scary, and multi-node.
Spivak 5y ago
They solve all the same operational problems — how do I access these files on multiple machines but NFS is strictly worse in pretty much every way to GlusterFS and Ceph. NFSs HA story is almost nonexistent and comes with list of buts that’s longer than the positives. As a technology it’s dead for anything other than the tiniest of internal IT use cases.

mikewarot 5y ago

Microkernels are necessary if you ever hope to secure a machine exposed to the internet. Linux can't be made secure. However, with the knowledge that DRAM isn't secure thanks to rowhammer, etc... nothing will ever be secure again, unless it uses Static Ram, which is too damned expensive. Computers are just going to get less and less usable as everyone forces the user interface into smartphones.

gnabgib 5y ago

Choose 2: Born in 1976, 43 years old (at time of writing), document was updated 2021-Oct-29

wyrm 5y ago
It was written in 2019. He even mentions that at a few points. > Today in 2019... > Now, in the year 2019... > Up to now (2019)...
- wyrm 5y ago
  Correction: it's been continually updated since 2019. I'm not sure how to judge that one. But given the uselessness of his git commit messages, I'm not inclined to judge leniently.
  - jaredsohn 5y ago
    If you click on blame, it shows that he wrote '43 years old' 3 years ago and hasn't edited that line since. https://github.com/guettli/deadends-of-it/blame/master/README.md#L5 https://github.com/guettli/deadends-of-it/blame/master/READM...

coolgeek 5y ago

There's a lot to quibble with, here. But I find this interesting/worthwhile overall because it demonstrates just how broad and deep the landscape of dead ends is.

dnautics 5y ago
Even Ansible is dead by now.
- sorum 5y ago
  Who (or what) is the contender to replace Ansible?
  - dnautics 5y ago
    Containerization in general?
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      Who configures and installs software on the container hosts? How do you deploy applications directly on bare metal or VMs? Those are still sometimes required or preferred for various reasons. IMO, you can speak about the death of bare metal (which is slowly happening), but definitely not tools like Ansible. They've found their niche.
  - chucky_z 5y ago
    I think Nix is most poised. If you don’t have a way to do immutable infrastructure, Ansible is still extremely alive.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Extremely, absolutely, definitely no. It's alive and well, and still being used for new deployments.
  - dnautics 5y ago

nobodyandproud 5y ago

> If you don't need a network drive any more (since you use GSuite, Office 365 or Nextcloud), then it is likely that you don't need a VPN any more. Leaving a very skinny almost serverless LAN. As content providers becomes more regionalized; I find VPNs becoming more (and not less) necessary.

alerighi 5y ago
A VPN also usually let's you bypass restriction on firewalls, especially with Wireguard protocol that is fairly new and it's over UDP. Especially in shared Wi-Fi networks that means usually better performance, and less problems with rejected connections to whatever service, or certain type of traffic not permitted, DNS requests that are redirected, and so on. I don't usually use VPN for privacy, since these days you have HTTPS that protects the communication, but they are super useful if you want to use a network that is not yours without issues. Beside that these days we may not have a file server, but we have a ton more of devices that we want to access when we are not in our network, without relying on a cloud (and thus giving away our privacy): IP cameras are the perfect example, I don't want the video stream to pass trought the cloud, I can connect in VPN to my home network and access the video stream. Beside that there are a ton of "smart" devices inside your home these days.
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  > I don't usually use VPN for privacy, since these days you have HTTPS that protects the communication, but they are super useful if you want to use a network that is not yours without issues. https doesn’t protect against URL snooping, so privacy is only as good as the request. Not that VPN is a real solution, but I find the GP/source’s thought process on this as sloppy.

riskneutral 5y ago

Are native GUIs really a dead end?

krapp 5y ago
Unfortunately, it seems that way. If it isn't dead then it's on the endangered species list. Electron / web-as-native has clearly won and it seems like no one is even attempting to improve the state of native GUI development as a result.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  > it seems like no one is even attempting to improve the state of native GUI development as a result. Who do you include as “no one”? Apple for example is going full steam ahead with its native GUI frameworks.
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    Aye, but in the broader landscape, they're a bit player. The average person's exposure to Apple GUIs will be on their phones.
- ushakov 5y ago
  > no one is even attempting to improve the state of native GUI development as a result SwiftUI, React Native, Flutter disagree with you
  - nicce 5y ago
    I am not so sure about React Native. Like Electron, it is framework for people with web developer skill, missing a lot what real native frameworks can do.
hgamaral 5y ago
Not on mobile...
- 5y ago

psim1 5y ago

> Parsing text with regular expressions is like eating rubbish. In the 21 century, we send and receive data structures. Of course you do, if you're starting from scratch. But since we tend to work on the Internet, which has a long history and myriad data formats and protocols, we often (rightly) use regex to validate and parse.

selfhoster11 5y ago
In the Unix philosophy, that means you have a series of tools that each deal with one of these protocols. If you do one job, do it well - and regex is a bad, if very quick, solution to structured data parsing problems.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

senectus1 5y ago

ha! I'm outraged that RSS doesn't make a mention on this page... it seems to be dead every week or two here :-)

VMtest 5y ago
Sarcasm much huh? I reached this post from an rss reader
- rout39574 5y ago
  I think that's exactly his point.
  - senectus1 5y ago
    yeah it was. Especially given how contentious some of his points are.. RSS really does belong on that page...

smitty1e 5y ago

> It is very uncommon to automate MS-Word or Excel via COM these days. I am happy. Yeah, but I have a few bazillion lines of .bas that I'm not afraid to dip into on occasion for purely internal reasons.

wyrm 5y ago

A lot of this is incredibly myopic. The author seems to think that because a tool isn't useful to him that it isn't used at all. Also, there's the repeated notion that some currently-popular new toy has "won" and forever displaced everything before it. Nothing really works that way.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Yep... "tech of the week has won", until next week, when "tech of that week has won", and most of the stuff declared 'dead' will still be working and in use pretty much everywhere. C dead? XML dead? GUIs dead? Regex dead? .... yeah... no.
- djbusby 5y ago
  Cobol, so dead. Perl, dead. Remember when PHP was dead? And there were two things on the front page today about PHP ;). No death, only zombies.

elchief 5y ago

Relying on google trends is the dumbest things I can think of Almost everything declines over time on google trends PostgreSQL is hotter than it's ever been, and is "declining"

RichardHesketh 5y ago
Absolutely this. The past is not a guide to the future, at least in this sense. A lack of buzz does not mean something is dying; more often, it means that it is mature and well-understood, with much of the necessary supporting information already out there and readily discoverable. It’s useful to summarise the leading solutions at a moment in time, but nothing ‘has won’ - it is only ‘winning for now’. That is the insight/hindsight that is missing from this borderline-obnoxious opinion piece.

jnwatson 5y ago

Surprisingly microkernels seem to be coming back. Google has Fuschia, Facebook has Reality OS.

nicce 5y ago
It a lot about the control. Big companies have noticed that they can’t get everything they want into upstream.
mikewarot 5y ago
Mobile is the future - Mobile code, the interface it runs on will be local, not served via the strings and tin cans that is http(s). Code written by someone else, in whatever language, using whatever methodology, no matter how unsafe, needs to be run in a secure manner, given only the capabilities required to do the job. The OS needs to default to NO access, and stop malicious code, and confused deputies, from breaking things. If your OS can't run a chunk of code that uses GUI gadgets directly, you don't get to play. The desktop is back, but not really the way you think. The metaphor of directly manipulating UI bits with code is what we get to keep. Direct access to the file system is right out. Linux won't get to play, because it can't run mobile code without giving away the store. Neither can Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, etc. This is why we have an interest in Microkernels.

aero-glide2 5y ago

Native Android apps perform much better than web apps.

fnord77 5y ago

> The bash is the default shell, not on macos it is not. > Emacs I can assure you, the people who used emacs 20 years ago are still using emacs. > Desktop office: MS-Office, Libreoffice. These programs were very important in the past. Today most people learned, that you can write the text directly into the mail body. lolwut > Nobody wants to call malloc() and free() any more. um, embedded? > Parsing text with regular expressions is like eating rubbish. ok, I stopped here. This guy is a clown.

OrderlyTiamat 5y ago
> I can assure you, the people who used emacs 20 years ago are still using emacs And there's new users too! I for one am only about 20 years old :)

errcorrectcode 5y ago

Hindsight is 20/20. Nuanced toolbox for the real world > absolutist myopia. Whenever someone claims years of experience, they've given up on mastery. Native produces better, faster apps than introducing abstraction layers. Electron and Atom are resource hogs that force you into wasting resources. Appcelerator, Phone Gap, Gtk+, and Qt are for when you don't have the time or money to make something quality. Saying NFS isn't used anymore is ridiculous. Modern NFS 4.2 with pNFS features is badass.

p2t2p 5y ago
> Electron and Atom are resource hogs that force you into wasting resources You can repeat it as much as you want but poke any modern laptop, how many native apps and how many electron apps are there? Spotify, VSCode, bunch of note taking stuff, trello for desktop? And those that are not electron-based, they are simply running in browser. In other words - who cares what you think about performance? > Saying NFS isn't used anymore is ridiculous. Modern NFS 4.2 with pNFS features is badass. Again, nobody cares that you think it is badass. My work is still on NFS 3-something because NFS 4 introduced performance issues and restrictions that make it impossible to use. And you know the way to upgrade? Yeah, get rid of NFS and develop a cluster of independent agents that talk over grpc.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Yeah, and as the user of an older, "underpowered" device, I'm excluded from all these "modern" apps because they either freeze up as a desktop app or freeze up as a JS app with no fallback, and I'm unable to participate in many of the groups which use them for communicating. But, of course, who cares about me, I should just buy a new computer, right?
  - p2t2p 5y ago
    > But, of course, who cares about me, I should just buy a new computer, right? Unfortunately it is not only you. _A lot_ of my employer's customers complain about frontend performance and the fact that the UI is generally made with assumption of fairly large display (almost everyone in the company has got 27"+ monitor whilst our customers are often on 2-3 years old business-versions of Lenovo or something similar with 14 inch of screen and 8gb of RAM top). And yes, that's right, who cares. People like you are minority (people on phones are majority), people in enterprise settings don't have a voice and choice, and economy drives everyone towards using web stacks. Also I guess my expression wasn't exactly clear. What I'm trying to convey is that technical superiority doesn't matter and users don't care about technical superiority. They care that music plays right away when they tap "play". And it is way easier to deliver that experience using web stack than any kind of native stuff.

MonaroVXR 5y ago

Kinda scared, I didn't know a lot of those old things, since I'm kinda young and I wasn't into computers.

herval 5y ago
Don’t worry, 10-20 years from now, you’ll know all of the things folks will be proclaiming as dead, and younger folks will tell you they never heard of most of them :-)

1970-01-01 5y ago

>https exists. Why a second security layer? Of course there are a lot of use-cases where you need more than one layer. But for most cases https is enough. Https isn't everywhere you think it is. (e.g. Linux and mobile): https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en

forgotmypw17 5y ago
HTTPS also locks out access in a whole slew of scenarios.

emerged 5y ago

Curmudgeon rants in markdown format. Coming from this 40+ yr old, yawn. This is like reading the diary of our worst performing engineer.

p2t2p 5y ago

I disagree with some of the things on that list but generally I like the list.

raspyberr 5y ago

Isn't this just saying yesterday's fads have been replaced by today's fads and you should use today's fads instead.

thefz 5y ago

> today NFS (Network File System) in a PC LAN does not make much sense any more. > Today people either use SMB to access files on a network share, or they use a web-based file service What? Properly configured NFS is blazing fast. And why would I use a cloud if I have some files locally? > The winner takes it all: Linux FreeBSD is still used by one of the largest CDNs, Netflix. > If I would be one of them, then I would try to find a new job with a better prospects for the future. Yeah, automate that with a web-based frontend. I don't agree with almost anything this guy says. You can't derive general laws from just one person's experience.