I am a US citizen married to a Canadian citizen. We lived in Toronto for a number of years. One funny thing you notice is that when the government or media refers to what in the US would be "the public" or "the people" or "the voters" or "the general public" or what have you, often the actual expression used is "Canadians", as if nobody other than Canadians resided in Canada and/or had any reason at all to pay attention to what was being said. It smacks of some kind of vague provincialism, unsurprising I suppose, given their neighbors.
Eric's ego is apparently way ahead of his actual self-promotion skills. If he's so important to everything, why hasn't he been on staff at red hat or the linux foundation or google or some such for the last, oh, 15+ years?
Also, most of the functionality behind all of the services he names is implemented by people doing regular jobs at technology companies.
Meh. For > 15 years I have been architecting I/O intensive server products (web caches, wan optimization, filesystems) and unless it is crashing, we mostly don't worry about the operating system. Our performance issues are of our own doing, and are dealt with in user space, as with nearly everything we do.
I thought this paper was kind of silly when it came out, and still think it is.
Also, while I'm piling on Ousterhout, Tcl has got to be the most overrated winner of the ACM system software award.