A very interesting and thought provoking article. Thank you!

On actually making your application more resistant to locking, the careful use of the "with (nolock)" query hint can improve performance on a server with a lot of locking tremendously.

Of course, I cannot overemphasize the fact that developers should be careful and thoughtful in using it since it risks dirty reads. But there are times when a dirty read is acceptable, such as when you can known with great confidence that the records you are selecting are not being modified at that moment or when all you really care about is rough approximations of aggregate values. In those cases, it can be tremendously helpful.