With respect to your comment that this is a logical fallacy - its not so. The pitot tubes have been for the past two years the #1 reason put forward as the cause - by a wide margin. There have been no alternative theories so widely championed. Go back through the news articles and see for yourself. If you find that too difficult, you can use the wikipedia page on this disaster (look at the page history).
And if one did flip this around, one would be wrong. The characteristic of a common failure mechanism is that it is common. As such, it gets addressed by virtue of its repeated occurrence during repeated tests. If it does not occur frequently, then it simply isn't common.
I don't understand what you are trying to say here. You seem to be conceding that this was a commonly occurring failure, and don't dispute that this wasn't fixed (i.e it was ignored), so why am I wrong?
Not quite free fall. My back of the envelope calcuations (38000 feet in 3 mins 30 secs) shows that assuming constant acceleration, the descent acceleration would have been approx.5 m/s^2 . This is about what you would experience in an elevator going down before the elevator reaches constant speed.
What seems to be remarkable is that the trigger to the catastrophe has indeed been revealed to be the pitot tubes - something that was suspected very soon after the flight went down. To a layman like me, it is amazing that without the benefit of all the data that has been recovered from the flight data recorders, experts were able to get so close to the mark.
Now, one could flip this around and also say that given that so many observers were able to so accurately get to the initial trigger for the failure in the absence of hard data, it must mean that this was a really common failure mechanism that should occurred in the field only as a result of the problem being repeatedly ignored.
It is a triumph of technology that the flight data recorder survived under such extreme conditions for so long. It was a triumph of technology, that it was located and retrieved from such an extreme location. Surely, a species with such (magical?) technical expertise could have expended the effort into preventing such a failure?
This location makes more sense. According to other sources, the intersection of Awami road and Kakul road (the spot where it says "PMA Kakul") is approximately where the helicopter went down. This would make it in the flight path to / from the Afghan border, rather than the swing-around-and attack from the South implied by the other location.
The dojo library undeservedly is rather unknown...
Quite the contrary, it is deservedly unknown. Have you tried to do programming with Dojo? The documentation is terrible. You can never figure out how to accomplish even the most trivial of tasks if you even wander an inch off the beaten path shown in the examples. Ever heard of the phrase "An undocumented feature is a feature that doesn't exist"? By that token, Dojo is the javascript framework that has the least set of features.
I also have a problem with the way the library is structured - it is painfully hard to extend the library. For example, one of the "dijits" provided is a tree widget. Instead of a "normal" node, I wanted to extend the widget by having each non-leaf tree node be a checkbox, but doing this turns out to involve putting out huge chunks of code.
Obama was for the bailouts even when he was a presidential candidate. He actively campaigned for it in the senate and helped Bush pass the TARP bill. There was no shift in his policy once he assumed office because from day one he had said that while it was evil, it was a necessary evil.
I think you have a very limited view of what kind of programming folks do. Only a small percentage of folks do programming at the level where they need to know how a processor works. The vast majority of programmers out there work in high level languages like Java or SQL or XSLT where the nature of the processors capabilities, whether it is RISC or CISC or whether it is a multi-processor or uni-processor systerm doesn't matter a bit to what they are delivering. A lot of times you have assembler bigots on/. spouting things like "...you can write fast / efficient code if you don't understand how the processor works" or if you haven't programmed in assembler. I don't believe this. In the real world out there, what matters most in a huge percentage of projects speed of delivery of function points. If one has to compromise between a 30% efficiency improvement by using a lower level language, vs a 50% improvement delivery time by using a higher level programming language, then that 50% improvement will be the deciding factor in your company making a profit and therefore keeping you employed.
I have done programming in assembler. I have done programming C, C++, COBOL, VisualBasic, Lisp, and a whole bunch more languages for over 20 years. And my experience is that knowing how the processor works or a stack works, isn't helpful in 99% of cases..
I don't deny that in the embedded space, or to system programmers, that these details aren't important. But those programming spaces are a small portion of the programming market.
Did you read the Foundation series? His "seeing-the-future" was based on large groups of people having a predictable history - never the individual. In fact, when the "Mule" appears, that event completely throws off the predictions of psychohistory. The "seeing-the-future" in the Minority Report is specifically about the future history of individuals. Azimov gave a plausible explanation of how psychohistory might work. The Minority Report gives an explanation, but believing in it requires the suspension of a scientific mind. And thats my point - the film may be entertaining, but based on solid science isn't something one can say about it.
Aw...come on. Seriously - the "Minority Report"? The ability of people to see the future is based on solid science? This must be some new definition of the word "science" that I wasn't aware of.
There are other science glitches in the other movies too. For example, in "The Abyss", the underwater creatures miraculously rewire human physiology to not require decompression chambers when the entire diving platform is lifted up to the surface. But I'll let those slide in the name of dramatic license. But the ability of those three "precogs" to see the future is central to the plot of the story and its hard to ignore that gaping scientific hole in the plot of the Minority Report.
When I used "Katrina" as a comparison point, my intention wasn't to compare the physical damage (and you're probably right - the physical damage is probably more than Katrina) but the complete mismanagement of the problem.
As reported in the NY Times - it looks like this is Japan's Katrina. From reading the article, I get a sense that this is worse than what happened with Katrina in the US. Any readers from Japan care to comment? It seems like, even if there are very dedicated and smart people working the problem, this wouldn't be something that can be handled simply by nuclear experts. Effective management of this as a crisis is needed, and the people in charge need to work together as a team to solve a national crisis. Neither of which seem to be happening.
Debian would be the most important if the most number of users depended on it. If the 63% of distributions that depended on Debian had a total base of 5%, then it would be ridiculous to claim that Debian is the most important. This number is missing. Maybe the user base for Debian and its derived distributions is a lot higher and Debian is indeed the most important distro out there. This article certainly doesn't make its case for that statement.
No - you are missing the point. I am not preaching security through obscurity. What I am saying though, is that if a security hole is discovered, obscurity, not open-ness is the right course of action until the problem is fixed. To expose a security hole as soon as it is identified is foolish.
I don't subscribe to the general/. view that exposure of problems is a good thing - if only to force the hand of the person who should be fixing things. And as you can tell from my uid, I've been around on/. for a while. Lives can be ruined / terminated by this course of action, and only the naive can fool themselves into thinking that such actions are always moral or justified.
You are missing the point. Its not that Mo-99 is produced in Canada, but that its production requires weapons grade uranium, and that its produced in civillian facilities that is the salient piece of information. The combination of those two pieces are not widely known. Or rather, was not widely known.
Most likely true. But this isn't a justification for leaking the list. There is immense value in a consolidated list of security vulnerabilities because the effort and expertiese needed to build this list (which is not inconsiderable) no longer needs to be spent by a terrorist. In an organization that breeds suicide bombers, the people who can build such a list are a going to be a rarity. And even if there are one or two people like this in the organization, they are very unlikely to have the wide range of knowledge that could produce the entirety of such a list. Not to mention that going through such a list, and examining the reasons why an item on the list is a part of it, can help identify more vulnerabilities that perhaps aren't on the list.
I don't want to give the impression that the Molybdenum-99 story is one of the wikileaks leaks. It may be, but I don't know. The story I head on the radio had to do with the fact that some team in South Africa invented a way to produce Molybdenum-99 without needing to use highly-enriched uranium.
Security through obscurity doesn't work in the long-term. In the meantime, in the real world, if someone has made a mistake and introduced a security hole, the hole needs to be obscured until a fix is in place. The nature of this fix can range from the easy to the excruciatingly painful, and isn't always feasible in a short amount of time. Exposing such weaknesses helps nobody. All that has been done is to expose a set of targets now.
To quote from the reporting over at CNN on this story:
The list is part of a lengthy cable the State Department sent in February 2009 to its posts around the world. The cable asked American diplomats to identify key resources, facilities and installations outside the United States "whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the United States."
Isn't it naive to assume that exposing this information is better than keeping it secret? I don't know where this list is, but if some of these targets are owned by allies, the United States won't control the timeframe in which a fix for this security hole is implemented. Take for instance, a story I heard this morning on the radio where they mentioned that medical imaging for oncology tests are heavily dependant on Molybdenum-99 - the production of which requires highly enriched uranium - weapons grade in fact. The source of all the Molybdenum-99 in the US comes from two civillian facilities - one in Canada and one in the Netherlands. Exposing security vulnerabilities at these installations would be highly irresponsible.
What you are perhaps not seeing is that the embarassment might not be that of the US government. Take for instance the case of the Yemen president (prime minister?) saying that he would tell his countrymen that the missiles that were used on the attack in Yemen were Yemeni missiles, not American. Is the US the embarassed party here? No - its the Yemeni government. But now that this is out there, the US - Yemeni relationship will have cool, and this hurts American interests.
As an American, I think Wikileaks screwed my country. I applaud Amazon's action on this - whether they did it on moral or business principles.
Thats not the way the justice system is supposed to work: the punishment must fit the crime. For example, one could mandate the death penalty for something like littering in order to deter even the rich from littering. This would certainly meeting the criteria of being equally unfair to everyone, but it isn't justice. Justice is about being fair to everyone - not the opposite.
I'm chipping in with a "me too" in that the corny, screwed up finale of BSG is what made me lose interest in Caprica. It took a serious, thought provoking series and made a farce out of it. The worst part about BSG had always been for me the "head-Six" or the "head-Balthar", and I kept hoping for a better explanation than the mystical non-explanation that they came up with. Also, there were so many gaping holes. As has been pointed out by many people, if the child skeleton of Hera had been discovered in the future, how could she have been an ancestor of people in the future? Why did Cavil kill himself - that wasn't believable at all. The whole Angel - Kara - nonsense was too much to believe in either. I like science fiction. Science fantasy has a place too. But a show positioned as science fiction using fantasy plot lines? Garh - can't stand it.
This is an uneasy truce where two competitors agree to not put pressure on the swords that they have at each others throats. Oracle invested considerably in Sun, and knows that the biggest asset that Sun brings to the table is their Java related people and knowledge-base (and not Sun's proprietary hardware). Java is incredible valuable to Oracle since they have also bought up BEA Systems (who produced WebLogic - leading J2EE container) and are using this acquisition to position them as a vendor that can do everything and anything in software space (like IBM). IBM can jeopardize this by splintering the Java brand and developing OpenJDK further. Conversely, IBM doesn't want Oracle to spike its Java food pool with Oracle poison, and sees this initiative as a way to not expend resources on an all-out war with Oracle. If anything, IBM is much more invested in Java, and stands to lose a lot more with Java splintering.
Of course, both these companies don't want the open source world to take Java away from them either. This is also a "both of us against the rest of the world" posture, which seems to smack of anti-competitive behavior.
It is unreasonable to expect that any secret that is published will be kept a secret for any length of time. It is true that people had been remarkably good-natured about keeping the plot-twist of the Mousetrap to themselves. But had they gone the other way, Agatha Christie would have no grounds to complain. That is the nature of the beast: a secret that is told, is no longer a secret. I don't see why this would impact the arts. After all, people still read Shakespear even after knowing that Macbeth turns evil (yes - sue me), and read "The wizard of Oz" even after knowing that the Wizard is an old man from Omaha (again - sue me), and watch Friends reruns on TV even after knowing that Rachel and Ross get together in the end (once again - sue me). People still go to see the Mona Lisa, climb the Eiffel, visit the Sistine Chapel, even though they know full well what they will see. In most of the arts, its the journey that matters - not the punch line at the end.
I do appreciate that some stories are fully about the plot twist. To take an example from Christie's work - nobody can forget who the murderer is, once they know who killed Roger Ackroyd. But publishing a work of art does not give one a license to muzzle one's audience. So, while Agatha Christie (and her descendants) may politely request people to refrain from spoiling details, they should shut up when people excercise their freedom of expression.
Actually, they aren't even paid to do that. Their job is not to fix someone but to stabilize them enough to take them out of crisis mode. Fixing is done by regular physicians.
...are doomed to reinvent J2EE. Badly
I confess that I haven't tried any of the frameworks mentioned by the parent. But I have had conversations with people who have, and here are some questions that I have for the folks who think that the people who came before them (and invented J2EE) are stupid:
Can your framework handle two-phase transactional commits when it interfaces to other applications?
How well does it support single-sign across apps deployed across different servers but behind a reverse proxy that unifies them under a single domain?
Can you cluster multiple hosting servers for your app to minimize downtime during app upgrades? Does your application sessions failover to the other members of your cluster correctly, if so?
Can you take legacy code and layer your app around it without needing to rewrite the legacy app? Can you do this even if the programming team who wrote the legacy app is no longer around?
When you discover that you are having intermittent glitches (slow responses / server 500 response codes/etc), do you (a) reinstall (b) upgrade to a newer version of your framework / OS / whatever (c) Troll the user forums for your product / framework and hope that someone has seen your problem before. (d) Pull three all-nighters reading the source code to your product / framework?
[Hint. The right answer is (e) Put your product into a supported trace mode and get your vendor to support you]
IMHO, programming language wars are silly. The proof of the pudding is in what you can achieve with the framework of choice. After many years of observing the competitors to J2EE, I have yet to see a professional grade alternative to it.
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With respect to your comment that this is a logical fallacy - its not so. The pitot tubes have been for the past two years the #1 reason put forward as the cause - by a wide margin. There have been no alternative theories so widely championed. Go back through the news articles and see for yourself. If you find that too difficult, you can use the wikipedia page on this disaster (look at the page history).
And if one did flip this around, one would be wrong. The characteristic of a common failure mechanism is that it is common. As such, it gets addressed by virtue of its repeated occurrence during repeated tests. If it does not occur frequently, then it simply isn't common.
I don't understand what you are trying to say here. You seem to be conceding that this was a commonly occurring failure, and don't dispute that this wasn't fixed (i.e it was ignored), so why am I wrong?
Not quite free fall. My back of the envelope calcuations (38000 feet in 3 mins 30 secs) shows that assuming constant acceleration, the descent acceleration would have been approx .5 m/s^2 . This is about what you would experience in an elevator going down before the elevator reaches constant speed.
What seems to be remarkable is that the trigger to the catastrophe has indeed been revealed to be the pitot tubes - something that was suspected very soon after the flight went down. To a layman like me, it is amazing that without the benefit of all the data that has been recovered from the flight data recorders, experts were able to get so close to the mark.
Now, one could flip this around and also say that given that so many observers were able to so accurately get to the initial trigger for the failure in the absence of hard data, it must mean that this was a really common failure mechanism that should occurred in the field only as a result of the problem being repeatedly ignored.
It is a triumph of technology that the flight data recorder survived under such extreme conditions for so long. It was a triumph of technology, that it was located and retrieved from such an extreme location. Surely, a species with such (magical?) technical expertise could have expended the effort into preventing such a failure?
This location makes more sense. According to other sources, the intersection of Awami road and Kakul road (the spot where it says "PMA Kakul") is approximately where the helicopter went down. This would make it in the flight path to / from the Afghan border, rather than the swing-around-and attack from the South implied by the other location.
The dojo library undeservedly is rather unknown...
Quite the contrary, it is deservedly unknown. Have you tried to do programming with Dojo? The documentation is terrible. You can never figure out how to accomplish even the most trivial of tasks if you even wander an inch off the beaten path shown in the examples. Ever heard of the phrase "An undocumented feature is a feature that doesn't exist"? By that token, Dojo is the javascript framework that has the least set of features.
I also have a problem with the way the library is structured - it is painfully hard to extend the library. For example, one of the "dijits" provided is a tree widget. Instead of a "normal" node, I wanted to extend the widget by having each non-leaf tree node be a checkbox, but doing this turns out to involve putting out huge chunks of code.
Obama was for the bailouts even when he was a presidential candidate. He actively campaigned for it in the senate and helped Bush pass the TARP bill. There was no shift in his policy once he assumed office because from day one he had said that while it was evil, it was a necessary evil.
I think you have a very limited view of what kind of programming folks do. Only a small percentage of folks do programming at the level where they need to know how a processor works. The vast majority of programmers out there work in high level languages like Java or SQL or XSLT where the nature of the processors capabilities, whether it is RISC or CISC or whether it is a multi-processor or uni-processor systerm doesn't matter a bit to what they are delivering. A lot of times you have assembler bigots on /. spouting things like "...you can write fast / efficient code if you don't understand how the processor works" or if you haven't programmed in assembler. I don't believe this. In the real world out there, what matters most in a huge percentage of projects speed of delivery of function points. If one has to compromise between a 30% efficiency improvement by using a lower level language, vs a 50% improvement delivery time by using a higher level programming language, then that 50% improvement will be the deciding factor in your company making a profit and therefore keeping you employed.
I have done programming in assembler. I have done programming C, C++, COBOL, VisualBasic, Lisp, and a whole bunch more languages for over 20 years. And my experience is that knowing how the processor works or a stack works, isn't helpful in 99% of cases..
I don't deny that in the embedded space, or to system programmers, that these details aren't important. But those programming spaces are a small portion of the programming market.
Did you read the Foundation series? His "seeing-the-future" was based on large groups of people having a predictable history - never the individual. In fact, when the "Mule" appears, that event completely throws off the predictions of psychohistory. The "seeing-the-future" in the Minority Report is specifically about the future history of individuals. Azimov gave a plausible explanation of how psychohistory might work. The Minority Report gives an explanation, but believing in it requires the suspension of a scientific mind. And thats my point - the film may be entertaining, but based on solid science isn't something one can say about it.
Aw...come on. Seriously - the "Minority Report"? The ability of people to see the future is based on solid science? This must be some new definition of the word "science" that I wasn't aware of.
There are other science glitches in the other movies too. For example, in "The Abyss", the underwater creatures miraculously rewire human physiology to not require decompression chambers when the entire diving platform is lifted up to the surface. But I'll let those slide in the name of dramatic license. But the ability of those three "precogs" to see the future is central to the plot of the story and its hard to ignore that gaping scientific hole in the plot of the Minority Report.
When I used "Katrina" as a comparison point, my intention wasn't to compare the physical damage (and you're probably right - the physical damage is probably more than Katrina) but the complete mismanagement of the problem.
As reported in the NY Times - it looks like this is Japan's Katrina. From reading the article, I get a sense that this is worse than what happened with Katrina in the US. Any readers from Japan care to comment? It seems like, even if there are very dedicated and smart people working the problem, this wouldn't be something that can be handled simply by nuclear experts. Effective management of this as a crisis is needed, and the people in charge need to work together as a team to solve a national crisis. Neither of which seem to be happening.
Debian would be the most important if the most number of users depended on it. If the 63% of distributions that depended on Debian had a total base of 5%, then it would be ridiculous to claim that Debian is the most important. This number is missing. Maybe the user base for Debian and its derived distributions is a lot higher and Debian is indeed the most important distro out there. This article certainly doesn't make its case for that statement.
No - you are missing the point. I am not preaching security through obscurity. What I am saying though, is that if a security hole is discovered, obscurity, not open-ness is the right course of action until the problem is fixed. To expose a security hole as soon as it is identified is foolish.
I don't subscribe to the general /. view that exposure of problems is a good thing - if only to force the hand of the person who should be fixing things. And as you can tell from my uid, I've been around on /. for a while. Lives can be ruined / terminated by this course of action, and only the naive can fool themselves into thinking that such actions are always moral or justified.
You are missing the point. Its not that Mo-99 is produced in Canada, but that its production requires weapons grade uranium, and that its produced in civillian facilities that is the salient piece of information. The combination of those two pieces are not widely known. Or rather, was not widely known.
Most likely true. But this isn't a justification for leaking the list. There is immense value in a consolidated list of security vulnerabilities because the effort and expertiese needed to build this list (which is not inconsiderable) no longer needs to be spent by a terrorist. In an organization that breeds suicide bombers, the people who can build such a list are a going to be a rarity. And even if there are one or two people like this in the organization, they are very unlikely to have the wide range of knowledge that could produce the entirety of such a list. Not to mention that going through such a list, and examining the reasons why an item on the list is a part of it, can help identify more vulnerabilities that perhaps aren't on the list.
I don't want to give the impression that the Molybdenum-99 story is one of the wikileaks leaks. It may be, but I don't know. The story I head on the radio had to do with the fact that some team in South Africa invented a way to produce Molybdenum-99 without needing to use highly-enriched uranium.
Security through obscurity doesn't work in the long-term. In the meantime, in the real world, if someone has made a mistake and introduced a security hole, the hole needs to be obscured until a fix is in place. The nature of this fix can range from the easy to the excruciatingly painful, and isn't always feasible in a short amount of time. Exposing such weaknesses helps nobody. All that has been done is to expose a set of targets now.
To quote from the reporting over at CNN on this story:
The list is part of a lengthy cable the State Department sent in February 2009 to its posts around the world. The cable asked American diplomats to identify key resources, facilities and installations outside the United States "whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the United States."
Isn't it naive to assume that exposing this information is better than keeping it secret? I don't know where this list is, but if some of these targets are owned by allies, the United States won't control the timeframe in which a fix for this security hole is implemented. Take for instance, a story I heard this morning on the radio where they mentioned that medical imaging for oncology tests are heavily dependant on Molybdenum-99 - the production of which requires highly enriched uranium - weapons grade in fact. The source of all the Molybdenum-99 in the US comes from two civillian facilities - one in Canada and one in the Netherlands. Exposing security vulnerabilities at these installations would be highly irresponsible.
.... This sort of reasoning rarely holds up to careful examination.
...and that is an assertion of your own. Where is your reasoning / evidence to show that this assertion is true?
What you are perhaps not seeing is that the embarassment might not be that of the US government. Take for instance the case of the Yemen president (prime minister?) saying that he would tell his countrymen that the missiles that were used on the attack in Yemen were Yemeni missiles, not American. Is the US the embarassed party here? No - its the Yemeni government. But now that this is out there, the US - Yemeni relationship will have cool, and this hurts American interests.
As an American, I think Wikileaks screwed my country. I applaud Amazon's action on this - whether they did it on moral or business principles.
Thats not the way the justice system is supposed to work: the punishment must fit the crime. For example, one could mandate the death penalty for something like littering in order to deter even the rich from littering. This would certainly meeting the criteria of being equally unfair to everyone, but it isn't justice. Justice is about being fair to everyone - not the opposite.
I'm chipping in with a "me too" in that the corny, screwed up finale of BSG is what made me lose interest in Caprica. It took a serious, thought provoking series and made a farce out of it. The worst part about BSG had always been for me the "head-Six" or the "head-Balthar", and I kept hoping for a better explanation than the mystical non-explanation that they came up with. Also, there were so many gaping holes. As has been pointed out by many people, if the child skeleton of Hera had been discovered in the future, how could she have been an ancestor of people in the future? Why did Cavil kill himself - that wasn't believable at all. The whole Angel - Kara - nonsense was too much to believe in either. I like science fiction. Science fantasy has a place too. But a show positioned as science fiction using fantasy plot lines? Garh - can't stand it.
This is an uneasy truce where two competitors agree to not put pressure on the swords that they have at each others throats. Oracle invested considerably in Sun, and knows that the biggest asset that Sun brings to the table is their Java related people and knowledge-base (and not Sun's proprietary hardware). Java is incredible valuable to Oracle since they have also bought up BEA Systems (who produced WebLogic - leading J2EE container) and are using this acquisition to position them as a vendor that can do everything and anything in software space (like IBM). IBM can jeopardize this by splintering the Java brand and developing OpenJDK further. Conversely, IBM doesn't want Oracle to spike its Java food pool with Oracle poison, and sees this initiative as a way to not expend resources on an all-out war with Oracle. If anything, IBM is much more invested in Java, and stands to lose a lot more with Java splintering.
Of course, both these companies don't want the open source world to take Java away from them either. This is also a "both of us against the rest of the world" posture, which seems to smack of anti-competitive behavior.
It is unreasonable to expect that any secret that is published will be kept a secret for any length of time. It is true that people had been remarkably good-natured about keeping the plot-twist of the Mousetrap to themselves. But had they gone the other way, Agatha Christie would have no grounds to complain. That is the nature of the beast: a secret that is told, is no longer a secret. I don't see why this would impact the arts. After all, people still read Shakespear even after knowing that Macbeth turns evil (yes - sue me), and read "The wizard of Oz" even after knowing that the Wizard is an old man from Omaha (again - sue me), and watch Friends reruns on TV even after knowing that Rachel and Ross get together in the end (once again - sue me). People still go to see the Mona Lisa, climb the Eiffel, visit the Sistine Chapel, even though they know full well what they will see. In most of the arts, its the journey that matters - not the punch line at the end.
I do appreciate that some stories are fully about the plot twist. To take an example from Christie's work - nobody can forget who the murderer is, once they know who killed Roger Ackroyd. But publishing a work of art does not give one a license to muzzle one's audience. So, while Agatha Christie (and her descendants) may politely request people to refrain from spoiling details, they should shut up when people excercise their freedom of expression.
Actually, they aren't even paid to do that. Their job is not to fix someone but to stabilize them enough to take them out of crisis mode. Fixing is done by regular physicians.
IMHO, programming language wars are silly. The proof of the pudding is in what you can achieve with the framework of choice. After many years of observing the competitors to J2EE, I have yet to see a professional grade alternative to it.