From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@9fans.net From: erik quanstrom Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 09:27:21 -0500 In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] How to implement a moral equivalent of automounter Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5bf428b4-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > To some extent, the popularity of NFS (is there any NAS box > that talks AFS?) and Linux is one big testament to the > power of "good enough" or "worse is better". i really hate this meme. it doesn't mean anything. imho, the reasons nfs is popular are mostly political and logistical rather than technical. sun pushed nfs, and in the days when nfs became popular, it was difficult to add a fs to your closed-source, no compiler operating system. so saying calling nfs an example of "worse is better" implies that using nfs is a technical decision. i don't think that it is. even in the cannonical usage, "worse is better" is a parody of the idea that complexity is expensive and adding complexity needs to be motivated by a real problem and a real solution. i believe rob said (but can't find a reference) fancy algorithms are slow when n is small. n is usually small. the opposing idea, "better is better" of course is tautology. unless you use bill clintonesque definitions. so perhaps we should call this the "bill clinton" philosophy. - erik