Summary of threading for experienced non-Python programmers?

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Paul Rubin schrieb:
> Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic at xemacs.org> writes:
>> Note that I said "*file* input/output".  Twisted and asyncore are
>> about asynchronous socket programming that polls over nonblocking file
>> descriptors such as found in socket programming, not about wrapping
>> aio(3) and the equivalent Windows APIs.
> 
> aio is also used for sockets, while twisted and asyncore use select or
> something similar.  That is asynchronous but in a different sense of
> the word.  See also: http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html

In which sense is that different? AFAIK select lets you avoid polling 
and provides notifications (possibly with timeouts) for IO-events. So 
where exactly is the difference? I read TFA, and it does mention that 
select/poll have potential for optimization, but not something that 
disqualified them (or rather select) as being not async.

Diez