A system must be configurable...

After reading Stonebraker articles, like this one. I can't decide if knobs are so bad. I tend to agree with this post... A system must be configurable, whatever other people think. I do like to have 1000 knobs in my application (or in system I support). It doesn't mean that I'm happy to tune them all, but I'd like to have a possibility of tuning them when something goes wrong. And I hate applications which try to be more clever than me....