Quotes of the week

"And exactly as in the theory of relativity, two people on different CPU's can actually validly _disagree_ about the ordering of the same event. There are things that act as "light-cones" and are borders for what everybody can agree on, but basically, in the absence of explicit locks, it is very possible that no such thing as "ordering" may even exist. "

There's a famous paper that Linus may be referring to.. Leslie Lamport's "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System"

http://lass.cs.umass.edu/~shenoy/courses/spring05/reading...

is one place where you can pick it up.