> What it doesn't have is any major character questioning the state that they are living under - but then looking around today, sometimes that seems pretty accurate as well.

One scene I liked is when the only person in the film questioning the state, a TV reporter, is saying something like 'maybe this war wouldn't have started if we didn't attack them first, so maybe should we leave them in peace' and is promptly interrupted by zealous marines

Not the first distortion but the first 'fuzz'. Distortion is created by amp saturation at high levels while fuzz is created trough transistors which produce nearly square waves (http://www.geofex.com/effxfaq/distn101.htm fig.4)

Another accidental discovery of distorted guitar sound was made by Dave Davies of the Kinks in 1964, who says he sliced is amp with a razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Davies#Early_years_.281963...)

The Kinks - You Really Got Me : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXWKowSK3yY

Reverse reverb was also used by Jimmy Page on several Led Zeppelin tracks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_echo)

A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett is usually for me a good way to step back from everyday life and work. It's funny, there are many references to scientific and nerd culture and it helps to reconsider some "serious" things...

1. I disagree, on many ERP the DB is totally overloaded and the middleware is sleeping (and/or easier to scale). I think this is the kind of case where the ideal architecture paradigm has to be bent.

Your others points are really informative thanks.

I'll make a qualified concur with you. Order by and group by are often best lest to the database, where (proper) indexing can provide streamed access to large sets of data. Relatively static lookup value substitution and security checks (via permissions/user tables) are best moved closer to the user.

I'm also a big fan of building transactional updates in "service-space" and using transactional coordination to ensure ACID, rather than making bulky stored procedures to churn over bits of procedural data.

I concur. Exadatas ain't cheap and they're selling like hot cakes. It's cheaper and quicker to scale horizontally than vertically and that is particularly true when the database becomes a huge performance bottleneck taking several DBAs' full attention trying to deal with I/O contention.

I agree - on the majority of entreprise system (ERP) I have worked this was the case. I can confirm that GROUP BY are huge performance killers and sometimes the simplest solution is to avoid them by slightly changing the business logic if possible.

Very interesting! But isn't there a disavantage for node.js considering it's single threaded? Did you cluster it to use every core on the box ? (http://stackoverflow.com/a/8685968/1909827 - "Scaling throughput on a webservice")

From the OP's response to a similar question:

>We attempted to take advantage of threading/multiple-processes as best we could (see the nodejs code for an example of using the cluster module). But we suspect there are additional areas of improvement here.

Thanks