From: Randy Kramer <rhkramer@...>
Date: 2005-09-18T05:15:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Some interesting criticisms of rails

On Saturday 17 September 2005 05:51 am, Robert Klemme wrote:
> First of all it's five philosophers (i.e. as far as I remeber it's
> important that the number of resource aquisitors is odd).  Then of course
> this just serves as an illustrating example.  The problem of shared
> resource access is all too common in CS (for example in databases).  You
> cannot solve it by introducing a centralized server because that creates a
> bottleneck which defies the purpose of parallel processing.  Your waiter is
> not the best solution.  If you're interested in more details about how for
> example RDBMS solve this there's a lot of resources out there to read on.

Just replying for "fun", iirc, when I went to school it didn't make any 
difference whether the number was odd or even--there was one fork for each 
philosopher but he could only eat if he had two forks.  (Sounds odd, now.)

But +1 on everything else in your post.

regards,
Randy Kramer