However it is unrealistic to expect support for DRM’d AAC files or HFS+ file systems, but then Joe Blogs user ( pun intended ) with no real technical know how, who just wants email, web and iPod syncing is not going to see it that way.

WiFi is a mixed bag, what he discovered was that it worked in one distro off the bat and not in another and he was stuck without the correct incantation that he had to obtain from elsewhere, which he had to pay for. Thats an Ubuntu problem.

One thought: I don’t actually think of actors as the antithesis of threads as much as a melding of threads with objects (where I usually end up saying “a chimera”). That makes actors more a higher-level model than a replacement, just as our dynamic languages represents a higher level abstraction than the raw machine we’re running. Dramatis is itself a library based in part on shared memory threading.

I think you’re pretty right on threads vs. actors: threads can work fine in very constrained/regular problems, but get much more difficult in larger applications. I tend to default to actors and use threads only if I need to (just as I default to Ruby and Python and code into C++ only if performance requires it.)

I actually got footage of the end of the Tim Bray battle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BAJYCKex1M