You're right, but I think it's alot more than just rural America that responds well to the GOP line. And I think the Democrats don't have a gameplan, much less even understand the game at this point, to get out of this mess.
And no, I don't think the GOP decided to play nice in '64. I think they got their asses whipped much like last night, sat down and said "what we're doing won't work any more", and figured out how to create a common GOP core value set to bridge their internal factions that we just saw work brilliantly last night.
James Carvelle last night said something like if the Democratic party can't win when the president didn't receive the popular vote to get the presidency, started an unpopular war with no exit strategy, ran up a massive deficit that threatens social security, started the end of medicare and medicaid, gave large corporations their run of taxes and regulations, lost three debates, does not speak English all that well, and make absolutely no attempt to include the other party in any reindeer games, the Democratic party has some huge, fundamental issues.
I think he's right.
The GOP has controlled both sides of the legislative branch for 12 years straight now. They've won 5 of the last 7 executive branch elections, and Clinton only won because he co-opted their style and issues. This last election should have broken at least one of their holds on either the house, senate, or presidency. In the next four years the liberal supreme court will fall after a 50 year reign starting with FDR's appointees. For this election, the timing was right, the issues were right, and the Democratic faithful all rallied as a united party.
But it wasn't enough and I really don't think it can be as easy to explain by saying the NASCAR hicks were duped. It's been going on too long and too well executed for that.
"I believe Poor people, uneducated, mostly white as well as blue collar americans decided to stay the course with their president."
That sort of patronizing bulls1t that is why the Dems lost the election and exactly what they need to fix. I could believe that for maybe one election or two, but the GOP has controlled the legislative branch for 12 years now and won 7 of last 11 executive branch elections.
The Democratic party platform has a fundamental problem in that it cannot connect with the majority of American voters.
This is evident by the last 30 years of American politics, starting with Nixon. It's not because people who vote the GOP line are ignorant hicks, that is a huge error in judgement. It goes well beyond that and until the Dems realize and fix their core problems they will contine to lose. Remember, after the GOP lost the Goldwater election in '64, they spent a lot of time and money on what it means to be a Republican. The strategy that came out of that is what the Dems are fighting now.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about and care, please read George Lakoff's "don't think of an elephant" booklet. Dean and Soros both feel this book has very important things for Dems to think about.
"The Democratic party seems more and more elitist, belonging to the yuppies, caring more about tree huggers than about the loggers and their jobs,"
Yes, and remember that when you trivialise your fellow citizens and ignore fundamental problems you perpetuate the problem. If rather than firefighting issues and losing, you present a unified ideology like the GOP, things will get better.
Music for mass consumption has always sucked. Once in a great while this is untrue (U2, Beatles, Elvis, Duke Ellington, Nirvana, etc), but for 95% of the time, most everything on the charts is shite because it's generalized for mass consumption. For example, in the 70s you had Leif Garrett, The Osmonds, David Cassidy, and the like. Artists like David Bowie (and Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and The Pixies and New Order and The Cure...) were ignored by the mainstream media. This happened in the 60s as well, just take a look at the productized crap that was filling the charts along with the Beatles.
People seeking substance ususally have to dig a little to find music with real feeling.
Your problem is that you're judging the current music crop soley based on the mainstream outlets. That's like judging the late 60s by Lawerence Welk or Dick Clark's show.
Go to a non-chain local music store and talk to some of the people who work there. They will help you find better music...and in a few years when one of these mostly unknown but great bands is considered an influencial legend someone will complain that 'nobody makes music like that anymore.'
There is so much great music out there right now it's scarey. The productized music crap should be largely ignored. Find the real artists...and BTW, hiphop is alive and well, just check out The Roots.
PS: There's nothing wrong with listening to old music. When I was in high school in the mid-80s, I was listening from everything from Depeche Mode to Jaco Pastorius to Bach to AC/DC to Linton Kwesi Johnson.
My only regret is not finding the Pixies until after they'd broken up:(
Like I said, I left 2 weeks after the AOL deal closed. At that point my friends in IS had been working with the AOL IS people to get everyone running the AOL client to access the AOL HR stuff.
And when I had to do some final HR stuff I had to either call the AOL HR group or use the AOL client and special login.
I guess that changed, sorry for the mis-information...
In order to access any sort of internal AOL functionality, you have to use the AOL client and login as a 'special' employee accout.
I worked at Netscape and when AOL took over, they forced everyone, including Unix developers, to use the AOL client to get to HR forms, 401K info, corporate email, etc.
Netscape had spent 5 years getting every sort of internal functionality on the Net. All HR, 401K, Medical stuff, email, directory, whatever, was _all_ on the Net. Then AOL came in and mandated it all go away to be replaced by the fucking pathetic AOL client.
The big religion of Avon is the almighty dollar. It's a high-end ski/mountain town made up mostly of huge vacation homes for obscenely rich people.
You're thinking of Colorado Springs, where 'Focus on the Family' is headquartered. It's mainly a bunch of ex-Orange Country suburban types who bailed from S. Cal. because reality encroached.
Colorado overall seems to be mostly anti-tax and anti-government. At election time this falls into the Republican camp, although it seems more Libertarian than anything else to me.
That is, except Denver and Boulder, which are tax happy and government happy:)
Things are bad here on the Front Range, but the jobs are still here...at least, if your skills are fairly mainstream (Java/C++/VB, Oracle/MSSQL, Sun/NT seem to be your best bets).
I was laid off last April, took a 'sabbatical' and some courses at DU until August, then bought a new shirt and started looking. Within a month or so I had a senior Java coding job downtown. It was quite a change from a year ago when people were aggressively recruiting me on a regular basis.
Now, I did take a salary cut, but my income was pretty overinflated and I knew it. Having friends with VC money hiring you creates some wacked numbers:)
I took the risk on some startups, pretended like I was living on my pre-boom salary, and things turned out OK.
My advice would be:
- Recognize that you now have to work for an interview and be grateful when you get one.
- Work on your interview skills (people and techinical). Be ready for the generic, stupid interview questions with thoughtful (but not rehearsed) answers. Mock interviews do the jobs pretty well.
- Lower your salary expectations, assume there are people with a lot more experience than you going for the same position ('cause that's the case).
- Get your resume professionally done.
The company I'm at now just went through a hiring phase and we had guys with 15 years experience looking for entry level jobs. A year ago they said they couldn't even find resumes.
Sounds to me like someone ripped apart your work lately. Well, code reviews are important because a good codebase and product are more important than the developers feeling good about themselves.
What's the difference between a computer engineering degree and a CS/MIS degree? Last I heard, CS == Computer Science and even a B.A in C.S. will get you a job.
Of course, getting housing in Sucka Freaks is pretty much impossible no matter what you do.
And I don't know what kind of area you work in, but the top end DBAs I work with make up to $300K/year. Of course, if they screw up, certain phone companies and cable providers would lose their customer databases...
Use the 1.3 JVM for Swing apps, anything lower is a waste of time.
Learn how to tune Java code. The Java Performance Tuning book by J. Shirasi is a good start.
I use Forte for Java v2, Internet Edition, every day for hours on end to earn my living. It's a 100% Swing based app that runs on a 1.3 JVM. It isn't as fast as a native app, but it's the most responsive and useable Java GUI app I've ever seen.
This, by way, is Win2k on a 800MHz Athlon w/512M RAM. The most memory I've seen Forte use is ~150M RAM, and I had the servlet/jsp engine running in debug mode with 25 or so source files open.
Oh, and Forte has a pretty nice debugger, certainly worth checking out (especially for JSP debugging). You can set breakpoints, step through code, set watches, look at the threads, look at the callstack, and look and change variables currently in scope. It's stable and extremely useful, certainly the best Java debugger I've used.
And Forte is based on the open-source NetBeans project, so you can even check out the source if you're so inclined.
There's no clear cut answer to that question. It depends on what your app is doing and how your code is written and what your data looks like and the like.
You need to to prototype your app in your env to see if it'll work for you. I would suggest either the latest version of iPlanet, Apache's JServ, or JRun. You also need JDK 1.3, it has _major_ speed increases over 1.2 and is quite stable.
AOL has an agreement with M$ that keeps an AOL sign-up shortcut in the Online Services folder of all consumer Windows installs if AOL uses IE as it's browser.
Last I heard, AOL gets about 1 to 2 million new subscribers from that placement.
AOL is investing in Gecko and Mozilla, which are slated to be replacements for IE in the AOL client. But they won't show up until the agreement with M$ expires.
Which I think is in a few years? They renewed it recently...
The Penninsula and The South Bay is where all the real geeks and big time geek companies live. SOMA only became tech-cool after SF-MOMA drove all the bums out and the Net went commercial.
Before that, all the big tech happenings were down south and not cool enough for SF. First there was HP in the 30s, in Palo Alto because those guys came from Stanford. In the late 60s, it was Fairchild & National Semi in Mountain View/Sunnyvale. After the recession in the early 70s, it was Apple and Intel in Cupertino and Santa Clara. Then in the 80s, 3Com, Oracle, Sun, Cisco, started down there. The latest tech boom also began in the Valley, not SF. SGI & Netscape both started in Mountain View (because it was close to Jim Clark's house in Los Altos). Yahoo, E*Trade, VAResearch and most of the big dot coms are in the south valley as well. SF did have a good number of dot-coms, but they were mostly all flash and no cojones.
So really, I think of SF as the city of the geeks-because-it's-cool-right-now and where young single geeks might go to live. Santa Clara, San Jose, Cupertino, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale are where the guys with big bushy beards and slide rulers live and change the world.
AOL controls all decisions from the top down. It's not like Netscape is still it's same old self, nice and independent within AOL. AOL management moved in and they run _everything_.
The idea is make Netscape appeal to the people who don't use AOL, but keep the users in the family. These users are techie weenies who don't want to be coddled by the AOL client.
So rather than the old 'What's Cool' stuff that went all over the web. They need to keep the users on their web site (because that's how they make money).
Personally, I like Netscape 6, but it's not stable enough for me just yet. It's just like _any_ major product release; stay away from the first version!
I'm running it on an iMac DV+ 450Mhz G3 with MacOS 9.0.4. The customize sidebar feature works fine for me, and it takes about 7 seconds to start and another 3 seconds to display www.cnn.com. A local file cuts that down (you might want to try that to see if it's a network issue)
The big complaint I have is that the Java Console doesn't work on Mac or Linux. You have to look at the MRJAppletOutput file to see the stdout/stderr streams...
They're losing money like crazy, they haven't been profitable in a while. They dumped a ton of money on Dreamcast and didn't make any money off of it. Every Dreamcast they sell they lose money, as they're subsidizing it's low cost.
In a script, the worst that can happen is a bad page, the server itself is fine and continues. In a compiled module, the worst that can happen is that the server core dumps and dies.
In a production site, uptime is the key. A bad page keeps your uptime going, a core dump means people in suits come and ask you questions.
I take it you've never worked on a big software project? Every big piece of software I can think of has been late, including the ones I've been on.
My theory is that you initally can't see all the problems you're going to hit in software development. So the first schedule is never right, because nobody can truely estimate what it takes to ge the job done. And once the first date is off, then you're slipping and the pressure is on to bring in the dates. But that just makes things worse because now people get burnt and hurried.
It comes down to the fact that unlike other engineering efforts, nobody can accurately estimate software development.
It has little to do with open source v. closed source, IMHO.
Missed out on a market with next to zero profits? While focusing on machines that have huge profit margines? Wow, Sun really blew that one, because now they have enough money to buy a leader in the low end market...oh wait.
Sun a non-entity?
Oh man...
That's funny.
Look for a job lately? Notice how the 'non-entity' Sun is all over? Jeez...
In non-ISP 'net markets, Sun is huge, at the expense of HP, SGI, and IBM. Sun is the only non-open source based Unix vendor to grow their market share lately.
Not sure what you're talking about in regards to Java. Sure, Java's client side market didn't take off like it's server side has, which is huge now. And guess what all these server side Java programs run best on? Why, that'd be Solaris on a sparc! And Sun is basically the Linus on the Java world, the benevolent dictator who calls the shots.
Need a sturdy web application built in the shortest time? You're hard pressed to beat Java on a Sun. And yes, I know Perl/PHP on Linux is close, but the fact is that Java is a cleaner language. When you have a team of coders at different levels trying to hit impossible deadlines, Java forces everyone to write decent and maintainable code.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, but I think it's alot more than just rural America that responds well to the GOP line. And I think the Democrats don't have a gameplan, much less even understand the game at this point, to get out of this mess.
And no, I don't think the GOP decided to play nice in '64. I think they got their asses whipped much like last night, sat down and said "what we're doing won't work any more", and figured out how to create a common GOP core value set to bridge their internal factions that we just saw work brilliantly last night.
James Carvelle last night said something like if the Democratic party can't win when the president didn't receive the popular vote to get the presidency, started an unpopular war with no exit strategy, ran up a massive deficit that threatens social security, started the end of medicare and medicaid, gave large corporations their run of taxes and regulations, lost three debates, does not speak English all that well, and make absolutely no attempt to include the other party in any reindeer games, the Democratic party has some huge, fundamental issues.
I think he's right.
The GOP has controlled both sides of the legislative branch for 12 years straight now. They've won 5 of the last 7 executive branch elections, and Clinton only won because he co-opted their style and issues. This last election should have broken at least one of their holds on either the house, senate, or presidency. In the next four years the liberal supreme court will fall after a 50 year reign starting with FDR's appointees. For this election, the timing was right, the issues were right, and the Democratic faithful all rallied as a united party.
But it wasn't enough and I really don't think it can be as easy to explain by saying the NASCAR hicks were duped. It's been going on too long and too well executed for that.
"I believe Poor people, uneducated, mostly white as well as blue collar americans decided to stay the course with their president."
That sort of patronizing bulls1t that is why the Dems lost the election and exactly what they need to fix. I could believe that for maybe one election or two, but the GOP has controlled the legislative branch for 12 years now and won 7 of last 11 executive branch elections.
The Democratic party platform has a fundamental problem in that it cannot connect with the majority of American voters.
This is evident by the last 30 years of American politics, starting with Nixon. It's not because people who vote the GOP line are ignorant hicks, that is a huge error in judgement. It goes well beyond that and until the Dems realize and fix their core problems they will contine to lose. Remember, after the GOP lost the Goldwater election in '64, they spent a lot of time and money on what it means to be a Republican. The strategy that came out of that is what the Dems are fighting now.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about and care, please read George Lakoff's "don't think of an elephant" booklet. Dean and Soros both feel this book has very important things for Dems to think about.
"The Democratic party seems more and more elitist, belonging to the yuppies, caring more about tree huggers than about the loggers and their jobs,"
Yes, and remember that when you trivialise your fellow citizens and ignore fundamental problems you perpetuate the problem. If rather than firefighting issues and losing, you present a unified ideology like the GOP, things will get better.
Music for mass consumption has always sucked. Once in a great while this is untrue (U2, Beatles, Elvis, Duke Ellington, Nirvana, etc), but for 95% of the time, most everything on the charts is shite because it's generalized for mass consumption. For example, in the 70s you had Leif Garrett, The Osmonds, David Cassidy, and the like. Artists like David Bowie (and Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and The Pixies and New Order and The Cure ...) were ignored by the mainstream media. This happened in the 60s as well, just take a look at the productized crap that was filling the charts along with the Beatles.
People seeking substance ususally have to dig a little to find music with real feeling.
Your problem is that you're judging the current music crop soley based on the mainstream outlets. That's like judging the late 60s by Lawerence Welk or Dick Clark's show.
Go to a non-chain local music store and talk to some of the people who work there. They will help you find better music...and in a few years when one of these mostly unknown but great bands is considered an influencial legend someone will complain that 'nobody makes music like that anymore.'
There is so much great music out there right now it's scarey. The productized music crap should be largely ignored. Find the real artists...and BTW, hiphop is alive and well, just check out The Roots.
PS: There's nothing wrong with listening to old music. When I was in high school in the mid-80s, I was listening from everything from Depeche Mode to Jaco Pastorius to Bach to AC/DC to Linton Kwesi Johnson.
My only regret is not finding the Pixies until after they'd broken up:(
That's good to hear!
Like I said, I left 2 weeks after the AOL deal closed. At that point my friends in IS had been working with the AOL IS people to get everyone running the AOL client to access the AOL HR stuff.
And when I had to do some final HR stuff I had to either call the AOL HR group or use the AOL client and special login.
I guess that changed, sorry for the mis-information...
In order to access any sort of internal AOL functionality, you have to use the AOL client and login as a 'special' employee accout.
I worked at Netscape and when AOL took over, they forced everyone, including Unix developers, to use the AOL client to get to HR forms, 401K info, corporate email, etc.
Netscape had spent 5 years getting every sort of internal functionality on the Net. All HR, 401K, Medical stuff, email, directory, whatever, was _all_ on the Net. Then AOL came in and mandated it all go away to be replaced by the fucking pathetic AOL client.
Now I'm pissed just thinking about it.
(BTW, I worked for AOL for 2 weeks.)
The big religion of Avon is the almighty dollar. It's a high-end ski/mountain town made up mostly of huge vacation homes for obscenely rich people.
You're thinking of Colorado Springs, where 'Focus on the Family' is headquartered. It's mainly a bunch of ex-Orange Country suburban types who bailed from S. Cal. because reality encroached.
Colorado overall seems to be mostly anti-tax and anti-government. At election time this falls into the Republican camp, although it seems more Libertarian than anything else to me.
That is, except Denver and Boulder, which are tax happy and government happy:)
Things are bad here on the Front Range, but the jobs are still here...at least, if your skills are fairly mainstream (Java/C++/VB, Oracle/MSSQL, Sun/NT seem to be your best bets).
I was laid off last April, took a 'sabbatical' and some courses at DU until August, then bought a new shirt and started looking. Within a month or so I had a senior Java coding job downtown. It was quite a change from a year ago when people were aggressively recruiting me on a regular basis.
Now, I did take a salary cut, but my income was pretty overinflated and I knew it. Having friends with VC money hiring you creates some wacked numbers:)
I took the risk on some startups, pretended like I was living on my pre-boom salary, and things turned out OK.
My advice would be:
- Recognize that you now have to work for an interview and be grateful when you get one.
- Work on your interview skills (people and techinical). Be ready for the generic, stupid interview questions with thoughtful (but not rehearsed) answers. Mock interviews do the jobs pretty well.
- Lower your salary expectations, assume there are people with a lot more experience than you going for the same position ('cause that's the case).
- Get your resume professionally done.
The company I'm at now just went through a hiring phase and we had guys with 15 years experience looking for entry level jobs. A year ago they said they couldn't even find resumes.
Well, Qwest is their biggest competitor.
Sounds to me like someone ripped apart your work lately. Well, code reviews are important because a good codebase and product are more important than the developers feeling good about themselves.
What's the difference between a computer engineering degree and a CS/MIS degree? Last I heard, CS == Computer Science and even a B.A in C.S. will get you a job.
Of course, getting housing in Sucka Freaks is pretty much impossible no matter what you do.
And I don't know what kind of area you work in, but the top end DBAs I work with make up to $300K/year. Of course, if they screw up, certain phone companies and cable providers would lose their customer databases...
It's not a new HTTP header. It's an addition to the existing User-Agent header.
I use Forte for Java v2, Internet Edition, every day for hours on end to earn my living. It's a 100% Swing based app that runs on a 1.3 JVM. It isn't as fast as a native app, but it's the most responsive and useable Java GUI app I've ever seen.
This, by way, is Win2k on a 800MHz Athlon w/512M RAM. The most memory I've seen Forte use is ~150M RAM, and I had the servlet/jsp engine running in debug mode with 25 or so source files open.
Oh, and Forte has a pretty nice debugger, certainly worth checking out (especially for JSP debugging). You can set breakpoints, step through code, set watches, look at the threads, look at the callstack, and look and change variables currently in scope. It's stable and extremely useful, certainly the best Java debugger I've used.
And Forte is based on the open-source NetBeans project, so you can even check out the source if you're so inclined.
The Win95 stack was written by Shiva and licensed to M$.
You need to to prototype your app in your env to see if it'll work for you. I would suggest either the latest version of iPlanet, Apache's JServ, or JRun. You also need JDK 1.3, it has _major_ speed increases over 1.2 and is quite stable.
AOL has an agreement with M$ that keeps an AOL sign-up shortcut in the Online Services folder of all consumer Windows installs if AOL uses IE as it's browser.
Last I heard, AOL gets about 1 to 2 million new subscribers from that placement.
AOL is investing in Gecko and Mozilla, which are slated to be replacements for IE in the AOL client. But they won't show up until the agreement with M$ expires.
Which I think is in a few years? They renewed it recently...
The Penninsula and The South Bay is where all the real geeks and big time geek companies live. SOMA only became tech-cool after SF-MOMA drove all the bums out and the Net went commercial.
Before that, all the big tech happenings were down south and not cool enough for SF. First there was HP in the 30s, in Palo Alto because those guys came from Stanford. In the late 60s, it was Fairchild & National Semi in Mountain View/Sunnyvale. After the recession in the early 70s, it was Apple and Intel in Cupertino and Santa Clara. Then in the 80s, 3Com, Oracle, Sun, Cisco, started down there. The latest tech boom also began in the Valley, not SF. SGI & Netscape both started in Mountain View (because it was close to Jim Clark's house in Los Altos). Yahoo, E*Trade, VAResearch and most of the big dot coms are in the south valley as well. SF did have a good number of dot-coms, but they were mostly all flash and no cojones.
So really, I think of SF as the city of the geeks-because-it's-cool-right-now and where young single geeks might go to live. Santa Clara, San Jose, Cupertino, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale are where the guys with big bushy beards and slide rulers live and change the world.
Netscape is a brand in the AOL family.
AOL controls all decisions from the top down. It's not like Netscape is still it's same old self, nice and independent within AOL. AOL management moved in and they run _everything_.
The idea is make Netscape appeal to the people who don't use AOL, but keep the users in the family. These users are techie weenies who don't want to be coddled by the AOL client.
So rather than the old 'What's Cool' stuff that went all over the web. They need to keep the users on their web site (because that's how they make money).
Personally, I like Netscape 6, but it's not stable enough for me just yet. It's just like _any_ major product release; stay away from the first version!
Netscape doesn't exist anymore.
Netscape is now merely a brand name owned by AOL.
AOL has a huge market cap and is a very profitable company.
I'm running it on an iMac DV+ 450Mhz G3 with MacOS 9.0.4. The customize sidebar feature works fine for me, and it takes about 7 seconds to start and another 3 seconds to display www.cnn.com. A local file cuts that down (you might want to try that to see if it's a network issue)
The big complaint I have is that the Java Console doesn't work on Mac or Linux. You have to look at the MRJAppletOutput file to see the stdout/stderr streams...
If you want that, get out of New York. Most companies in The Valley provide concierge services now.
Of course, they require your life in return. Those 7am to 11pm days will turn into years...
Sega is far from doing great.
They're losing money like crazy, they haven't been profitable in a while. They dumped a ton of money on Dreamcast and didn't make any money off of it. Every Dreamcast they sell they lose money, as they're subsidizing it's low cost.
You answered your own question.
In a script, the worst that can happen is a bad page, the server itself is fine and continues. In a compiled module, the worst that can happen is that the server core dumps and dies.
In a production site, uptime is the key. A bad page keeps your uptime going, a core dump means people in suits come and ask you questions.
JDBC sucks, but if you're using Oracle, I would highly recommend you use SQLJ.
I take it you've never worked on a big software project? Every big piece of software I can think of has been late, including the ones I've been on.
My theory is that you initally can't see all the problems you're going to hit in software development. So the first schedule is never right, because nobody can truely estimate what it takes to ge the job done. And once the first date is off, then you're slipping and the pressure is on to bring in the dates. But that just makes things worse because now people get burnt and hurried.
It comes down to the fact that unlike other engineering efforts, nobody can accurately estimate software development.
It has little to do with open source v. closed source, IMHO.
Dude, I want some of what you're smoking.
Missed out on a market with next to zero profits? While focusing on machines that have huge profit margines? Wow, Sun really blew that one, because now they have enough money to buy a leader in the low end market...oh wait.
Sun a non-entity?
Oh man...
That's funny.
Look for a job lately? Notice how the 'non-entity' Sun is all over? Jeez...
In non-ISP 'net markets, Sun is huge, at the expense of HP, SGI, and IBM. Sun is the only non-open source based Unix vendor to grow their market share lately.
Not sure what you're talking about in regards to Java. Sure, Java's client side market didn't take off like it's server side has, which is huge now. And guess what all these server side Java programs run best on? Why, that'd be Solaris on a sparc! And Sun is basically the Linus on the Java world, the benevolent dictator who calls the shots.
Need a sturdy web application built in the shortest time? You're hard pressed to beat Java on a Sun. And yes, I know Perl/PHP on Linux is close, but the fact is that Java is a cleaner language. When you have a team of coders at different levels trying to hit impossible deadlines, Java forces everyone to write decent and maintainable code.