I wouldn't use this to NOT give Node a try. It's a great system for teaching yourself event-driven execution. The scale at which this paper is talking about won't be hit by most people playing with Node (from how I've read the paper so far).

Being familiar with thread and events makes you a better programmer, so go forth and learn! As I see it, scalable concurrency is far from a solved problem, so it's good to see people pushing both sides of the equation.

Plus, node is fun, and has a very nice community. I've been pushing threads in this discussion, but don't let that discourage anybody from playing with node.

The changes in technology since then have made the paper's point more relevant. Threaded servers can exploit multicore processors, and if they're preemptively scheduled, you can write threaded server code without worrying too terribly much about taking excessive CPU time -- not something you want to do in an event handler on a single thread. Some really solid software implementations of lightweight threading have been made, and they work great.

So, what hardware and software changes were you thinking of?