Why the heck did Sun's offering get thrown in there? For variety? The Efficeons look awful nice...
"I don't like or use it so one else does"
Real smart.
Any idea the amount of Sun systems are out there? People who use Sun hardware and software, and *gasp*, like it?! Should we only evaluate chips that currentlydo ok in the slashdot market?
could someone name one commercial app...
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 1
...which has strong sales on Linux?
I don't think Linux was Kylix's problem, I think.NET and Java is Kylix's problem.
But still, I can't think of a commercial application that seems to have strong sales on linux. Either the desktop or server.
Anyone?
seen the price of VS.NET?
on
Kylix in Limbo
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· Score: 1
Maybe it had something to do with the 1000+ price you had to pay for the full developer version? You think?
Isn't that about the price of many of the more popular IDEs? VS.NET Professional sticker price is also $999 ( check amazon for instance ).
Oh yes, Borland has come a long way since Phillipe's idea of a full blown compiler as good (if not better) than anything on the market for 99 bucks.
Borland has one of the best IDEs I've used, definately the best Java IDE I've used as a *free* download. I have never needed to use anything that's not available in the JBuilder Personal edition.
At present, the development environment is Jbuilder...perhaps a seperate slashdotting can happen and convice them to move to Eclipse?
JBuilder to Eclipse? That would be a good thing?
JBuilder Personal is a free download and is the best IDE I have ever used, bar none. It comes with a GUI builder and a graphical debugger. It is a *hell* of a lot faster than eclipse, whose editor is unbareably slow on by 1.3GHz machine. JBuilder is the faster Java application I have ever used.
Not because eclipse is open source does it mean it's better. I am not in anyway associated with Borland, but I have to say moving from JBuilder to eclipse would be a significant downgrade.
I know I may sound like a fan boy, but I have been very impressed with JBuilder.
You see, I too was curious. I kept hearing about this 'goatse' guy, I figure I should go check the link myself. After all, I though, what can be that bad? I've seen all there was to see on the web.... right??
Boy was I wrong. That man not only shocked the hell out of me, he made me re-think the bounds of the human anatomy. I remember calmly closing my browser and walking out of the office in a daze.
You have been warned, but due to our inquisitive nature, I bet you'll probably go investigate anyway.
i assume like the N-Gage and 3300 you have to remove the back and the battery to swap cards.
To swap memory you mean?
I played with an N-Gage once. Note, you do not have to remove the battery to swap a game. You had to remove the back and battery IIRC to change the memory card. The the memory I think is understandable since I guess you'd only swap memory cards once in a while.
All in all, the machine was a lot cooler than the impression I got from slashdot.
I know this for a fact because a couple of months ago I enterviewed for a job building a Dristro for Cisco under a IBM contract.
Sadly they hired some one else:(
Maybe you should have interviewed for the job instead?
Just pulling your leg, I am not to good at that spalling thing either.
P2P in calendaring very often means that the central server is not active, ie. does not do schedule conflict resolution, etc.
For instance Exchange, until a few versions ago was considered P2P, because all it did was store the outlook calendar info. I have never managed exchange but I believe people who have for a while may remember a time when you use to be able to use calendar on outlook without exchange. This has changed recently ( I've been investigating calendar apps and that was what I was told )
At any rate; If you create an application that uses IMAP to store the calendar info in a special calendar folder, and you have the clients themselves check and resolve conflicts, then your calendar app is P2P.
I'm guessing they're applying the same definition to addressing as well.
Rsync is overrated. It's useful for files with local edits (eg, text and source code), but performs poorly on files which tend to have global, sparse, changes (eg, most data files, and all executables). Changing one character will result in an entire block being transmitted -- put another way, the bandwidth usage is O(n/k+kD), where n is the file size, D is the edit distance, and k is a parameter (the block size).
I found it cool that you busted out big-O, so I tried to make some sense of your argument but failed.
Could you explain why 'kD=kI+S'? You're saying that substitutions can be done in constant bandwith inpendent of the file size?!
Where is the 'n/k' bandwidth going to? Is that protocol overhead? If so how did you conclude its equal to n/k?
i saw rasmus lerdorf's intro to php at the mysql conference... he takes a whole different view to web development that makes java's claims of speed, stability, scalability ect almost moot.
I'd love to hear these arguments.
I don't see how one can counter that PHP forces developers to rely very heavily on database for persistants since it does not have in process persistance like JSP and ASP.NET.
I don't see how one can counter that using 'include()' and 'include_once()' functions as the only way to write same-language application extensions (loosely, libraries) quickly creates code that is very difficult to maintain. We have known this from C for years. Why do you think you never put code in.H files?
Sure accelerators exist, but how many people know enough to install one? And why isn't one built into the default engine?
Maybe we should spend less time defending PHP's flaws, and try fixing them?
Try discussing something 'racial', you will be charged with a hate crime.
Do you even know what a 'hate crime' is??? Hate crimes stem from the fact that killing someone, eg. say a jewish person, simpley because they're jewish has the effect that of scaring the entire jewish community out of their wits. At any rate, KKK is at kkk.com, and has been for years. Lots of other hate groups have operations on the internet and have had them for years.
Discuss the overthrow of your government. ( which should be allowed under free speech, remember its how the US got here in the first place ) and you will be jailed for terrorism.
Still not convinced? Consider JSR 223, the effort to turn PHP into the front end for J2EE by porting it to Java. If PHP on top of Java is scalable, then why isn't PHP on top of C?
...I had a hard time figuring out if this was a joke article or not.
Language syntax does not count for much, nowadays since everyone has everyone elses best features. Library and runtime is what really counts. That's the point behind JSR223, and even.NET to a large extent. They've realized that in the end, it's all bytecode anyway. If the author doesn't understand that, well I dunno.
...before you remove the speck in your brothers eye.
I'm all for the Chinese entering space, but like the Soviets before and after the Second World War and the reconstruction of Germany in the 30s these technological and engineering feats have been accomplished through social and political changes which lead to the deaths of millions and the destruction of cultural identities for millions more.
I can't stand the hipocrisy any more. China is killing their citizens, but the G8 causing economical turmoil in many, many nations
I grew up watching the damage the G8 nations trade policies do.
I watched, over the years, a small country lose 10% of their GDP annually for several years, because the Clinton administration put pressured Europe to remove favorable trade relations with islands that earn a whooping $50MIL/year from all their endeavors. The companies represented, Dole, could have bought those entire countries 10s of times over.
African farmers can not compete against against the heavily subsidized G8 farmers in the global market. These people are starving to death!!!
I'm not going to defend China. But please don't come off all high and mighty because the damage that the G8 countries are doing is not making the headlines.
Re:Mono - the most important OS project currently
on
Mono 2.8 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I have worked with Microsoft/C++/COM, Unix/C++, Java, ruby and C#/.net. My favorites are ruby and C#/.net and they compliment eachother so well.
Congratulations.
My favorites are ruby and C#/.net and they compliment eachother so well.
I'm curious, care to explain how these languages compliment each other??
I think Mono is the most important open source project second only to linux, because it will make the most advanced software platform in existence available for free on unix and windows.
Saying.NET is the most advance software platform in existence does not magically make it so. I can come after and say "no, you wrong, Java is the most advance platform", and we would have gotten absolutely nowhere.
I disagree with your assertion, by the way. And I have a few hundred JSRs at JCP.org to back me up.
Most of Java's development is done in the open. Which means tool developers have a heads up on what changes are coming and even have a say in it too boot.
It is also interesting that it is a useful tool for identifying those among us that are zealots and not software idealists.:-)
(i)I don't think that Mono makes much sense currently because it's a implementation of a development platform specifically designed to increase Microsoft's market share at the expense of everyone else.
(ii)Because Mono does not have any say in the spec it is implementing *and* the writer of the spec is historically hostile.
If that makes me some type of "zealot", I'll accept my title:)
The result of this of course is that every journalist sued for not turning documents over as a result of the unconstitutional subpoena can be considered to have integrity, and is someone that you will want to watch in the future.
Um, yeah, it's easy to put the responsibility on someone else whilst we sit back in our comfy chairs.
This journalist should break the stupid law that elected officials signed in, and the general public has done very little about?
PATRIOT Act is the law, as dumb as it may be. And it is the citizen's of this country that allow it to exist in the books, not just the journalist.
I'm curious why you'd want to do this. Surely the whole point of sessions is to record things like key IDs to account numbers etc.
No, not at all.
Classic example that has caused me, and probably many others lots of pain is the web mail clients written in PHP, eg. squirrelmail. These clients have no choice but to open an IMAP connection on *every* page view. An app server based web client only opens an IMAP connection once for the *entire* session, since the app server can cache that connection.
I installed a webmail system for my college, we had a bit over 4000 accounts. We got a bit over 1000 visits a day, which translated to about 50,000 hits a day. I estimate about 10,000 were probably hits to PHP pages which accessed IMAP.
The result, I estimate is that we are causing 10,000 hits on our IMAP mail server a day when all we needed with a app server solution, eg. JSP, is 1000 ( ie. the number of sessions ).
You mean like Slashdot, which is larger than 90% of these "professional applications", more reliable than your shitty JSP websites and hacked together by a few kids in Perl? The very site you are using would never have been possible in Java, because it never would have scaled to its present usage on the handful of low-end servers it is based on. Slashdot is a real-word application with impressive scalability and minimal implementation cost;
With enough effort/resources you can make *any* language and runtime scale. The issue is how much help does the language and runtime give you.
Slashdot probably uses common language independent algorithms to get it to perform well under such load. For example, generating static pages from dynamic data at short intervals and serving those instead, can be done in any language. Heck you can accomplish that using bourne shell script and SHTML.
If Slashdot used JSP or ASP.NET they'd be able to significantly decrease the load on their MySQL database. It's a feature of web applications written using Perl, PHP, on non application-server runtimes. They rely heavily on databases for persistance, thus driving up the cost of deployment. And their performance suffers as well.
Web Apps built on application servers usually scale better than those built on scripts; As far as I've seen.
It's disgraceful how much of the tech community keeps reproducing all propaganda that the impressive Sun hype machine keeps churning out.
It's disgraceful that people don't check they facts very labeling information propaganda.
Meanwhile, Sun sends millions of dollars in "license money" to SCO, and keeps spreading FUD about Linux to promote its own OS offering, Solaris.
True. But this is business kid. It's not black and white, good versus evil. Sun has a competing operating system that they've spent a lot of money in developing. They aren't going to concede the market without a fight. That's logical and to be expected.
Even Sun's own employees know that Java is a piece of crap,...
internalmemos.com? Your proof is from internalmemos.com? I take it you also read the Enquirer and Weekly World News to stay informed, don't you?
Yes, Java can be used for server applications (a claim which Java proponents ridiculuously uphold to demonstrate that Java is good technology -- if it couldn't, it would be quite useless, wouldn't it?), but so can Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby,....
This argument right here tells me you don't really know much about professional web application development.
J2EE is one of the biggest things pulling linux into the mid to large webapp/middleware market! Unfortunately, we don't have an application server that quite matches J2EE application servers in OS; except OS/J2EE based servers, of course. I wish people would try to write a few decent sized web applications before they decided that *they-favorite-language* was good enough for everyone.
Sun has partially funded Tomcat development for a while, also making tomcat the reference implementation for JSP. Those programming languages you mentioned are scripting languages, not web application servers. They don't provide much of the functionality true web application servers eg. Tomcat, JBoss, etc provide.
Sun bought StarOffice and released it as OpenOffice. Sun continues to fund OO/SO development. Sun put much needed people on the GNOME usuability project. Sun has been marketing Gnome to its customers, exposing it to thousands of conservative businesses who would never have looked at it otherwise. And Sun have probably done a lot more I can't remember right now.
The world is not separated clearly between good and evil. Get over it.
s the prime enterprise use example (although they still use legacy, prepritary web programming based on C, all their new developments are run on PHP and BSD, correct me if i'm wrong)
Problem with using Yahoo and Amazon as case studies is that they any but typical applications. Very few people can, or should try to, identify with them.
Yahoo, as you said puts a lot of their business logic in C code. Amazon probably does something similar. They have to, because it would be difficult for them to put the massive amount of business logic that these sites need in PHP efficiently.
The problem is PHP's runtime. Do you think Yahoo uses PHP's builtin session management? They could, but I very much doubt it. PHP uses a files to serialize session variables, and the session may be resumed on a different process. This means that PHP can't save any variables that can't be serialized eg. some complex objects, or resources that are tied to a process by the OS usually, eg. IMAP, LDAP, or any socket connections, file ids, etc.
Another example is performance. Sites like yahoo and amazon do things such as decoupling database access from page views, instead generating static pages or almost complete static pages and serving those; or they cache html output agressively; They have huge server farms and they rather take a performance hit instead of paying enterprise wide licenses. etc., etc.
In other words, they're trying to solve a much different problem than what most of us are solving.
PHP is a great language, but personally, I don't see it being well suited for medium to large web applications at all.
What do we think about PHP as compared to Java and.net? What do we think about an grape as compared to a basketball and an egg? These are 3 quite different things.
Umm, these 3 platforms have significant overlap in the market they target, even if their niches aren't exactly equivalent.
Take a random example. Lets say a CMS packages. You can get quite a few done in PHP, in J2EE, and.NET. The language your CMS choice uses does have significant effects on the package. The PHP solution may not scale well, the J2EE package may be very difficult to deploy, the.NET package forces you to tie yourself with one vender's dodgey OS/Web Server/etc. These are all common failures of the different platforms I think.
Comparing them to try to figure out which failures your company can most tolerate makes sense to me.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't like or use it so one else does"
Real smart.
Any idea the amount of Sun systems are out there? People who use Sun hardware and software, and *gasp*, like it?! Should we only evaluate chips that currentlydo ok in the slashdot market?
I don't think Linux was Kylix's problem, I think .NET and Java is Kylix's problem.
But still, I can't think of a commercial application that seems to have strong sales on linux. Either the desktop or server.
Anyone?
Isn't that about the price of many of the more popular IDEs? VS.NET Professional sticker price is also $999 ( check amazon for instance ).
Oh yes, Borland has come a long way since Phillipe's idea of a full blown compiler as good (if not better) than anything on the market for 99 bucks.
Borland has one of the best IDEs I've used, definately the best Java IDE I've used as a *free* download. I have never needed to use anything that's not available in the JBuilder Personal edition.
JBuilder to Eclipse? That would be a good thing?
JBuilder Personal is a free download and is the best IDE I have ever used, bar none. It comes with a GUI builder and a graphical debugger. It is a *hell* of a lot faster than eclipse, whose editor is unbareably slow on by 1.3GHz machine. JBuilder is the faster Java application I have ever used.
Not because eclipse is open source does it mean it's better. I am not in anyway associated with Borland, but I have to say moving from JBuilder to eclipse would be a significant downgrade.
I know I may sound like a fan boy, but I have been very impressed with JBuilder.
You do not want to know!
I repeat, You do not want to know!!
You see, I too was curious. I kept hearing about this 'goatse' guy, I figure I should go check the link myself. After all, I though, what can be that bad? I've seen all there was to see on the web.... right??
Boy was I wrong. That man not only shocked the hell out of me, he made me re-think the bounds of the human anatomy. I remember calmly closing my browser and walking out of the office in a daze.
You have been warned, but due to our inquisitive nature, I bet you'll probably go investigate anyway.
To swap memory you mean?
I played with an N-Gage once. Note, you do not have to remove the battery to swap a game. You had to remove the back and battery IIRC to change the memory card. The the memory I think is understandable since I guess you'd only swap memory cards once in a while.
All in all, the machine was a lot cooler than the impression I got from slashdot.
Maybe you should have interviewed for the job instead?
Just pulling your leg, I am not to good at that spalling thing either.
For instance Exchange, until a few versions ago was considered P2P, because all it did was store the outlook calendar info. I have never managed exchange but I believe people who have for a while may remember a time when you use to be able to use calendar on outlook without exchange. This has changed recently ( I've been investigating calendar apps and that was what I was told )
At any rate; If you create an application that uses IMAP to store the calendar info in a special calendar folder, and you have the clients themselves check and resolve conflicts, then your calendar app is P2P.
I'm guessing they're applying the same definition to addressing as well.
Also, what's an "overarching storyline"? I did a search on google and it's funny that it is used almost exclusively in game reviews.
I found it cool that you busted out big-O, so I tried to make some sense of your argument but failed.
Could you explain why 'kD=kI+S'? You're saying that substitutions can be done in constant bandwith inpendent of the file size?!
Where is the 'n/k' bandwidth going to? Is that protocol overhead? If so how did you conclude its equal to n/k?
I'd love to hear these arguments.
I don't see how one can counter that PHP forces developers to rely very heavily on database for persistants since it does not have in process persistance like JSP and ASP.NET.
I don't see how one can counter that using 'include()' and 'include_once()' functions as the only way to write same-language application extensions (loosely, libraries) quickly creates code that is very difficult to maintain. We have known this from C for years. Why do you think you never put code in .H files?
Sure accelerators exist, but how many people know enough to install one? And why isn't one built into the default engine?
Maybe we should spend less time defending PHP's flaws, and try fixing them?
How on earth did they get a laser to engrave glass?
http://directory.google.com/Top/Science/Technology /Pyrotechnics/Explosives/?tc=1 - Google directory category on the subject. Also try searching google itself, couple hundred thousand hits.
Try discussing something 'racial', you will be charged with a hate crime.
Do you even know what a 'hate crime' is??? Hate crimes stem from the fact that killing someone, eg. say a jewish person, simpley because they're jewish has the effect that of scaring the entire jewish community out of their wits. At any rate, KKK is at kkk.com, and has been for years. Lots of other hate groups have operations on the internet and have had them for years.
Discuss the overthrow of your government. ( which should be allowed under free speech, remember its how the US got here in the first place ) and you will be jailed for terrorism.
How about http://www.overthrowthegovernment.org/ or the book How to overthrow the government
Seriously, do people even think before they talk anymore?
Still not convinced? Consider JSR 223, the effort to turn PHP into the front end for J2EE by porting it to Java. If PHP on top of Java is scalable, then why isn't PHP on top of C?
...I had a hard time figuring out if this was a joke article or not.
Language syntax does not count for much, nowadays since everyone has everyone elses best features. Library and runtime is what really counts. That's the point behind JSR223, and even .NET to a large extent. They've realized that in the end, it's all bytecode anyway. If the author doesn't understand that, well I dunno.
It has absolutely nothing to do with scaling.
...before you remove the speck in your brothers eye.
I can't stand the hipocrisy any more. China is killing their citizens, but the G8 causing economical turmoil in many, many nations
I grew up watching the damage the G8 nations trade policies do.
I watched, over the years, a small country lose 10% of their GDP annually for several years, because the Clinton administration put pressured Europe to remove favorable trade relations with islands that earn a whooping $50MIL/year from all their endeavors. The companies represented, Dole, could have bought those entire countries 10s of times over.
African farmers can not compete against against the heavily subsidized G8 farmers in the global market. These people are starving to death!!!
I'm not going to defend China. But please don't come off all high and mighty because the damage that the G8 countries are doing is not making the headlines.
Here's one article http://www.redpepper.org.uk/intarch/x-life-and-deb t-review.html
on Jamaica's situation. There are lots of others in the same situation.
Congratulations.
My favorites are ruby and C#/.net and they compliment eachother so well.
I'm curious, care to explain how these languages compliment each other??
I think Mono is the most important open source project second only to linux, because it will make the most advanced software platform in existence available for free on unix and windows.
Saying .NET is the most advance software platform in existence does not magically make it so. I can come after and say "no, you wrong, Java is the most advance platform", and we would have gotten absolutely nowhere.
I disagree with your assertion, by the way. And I have a few hundred JSRs at JCP.org to back me up.
Most of Java's development is done in the open. Which means tool developers have a heads up on what changes are coming and even have a say in it too boot.
It is also interesting that it is a useful tool for identifying those among us that are zealots and not software idealists. :-)
(i)I don't think that Mono makes much sense currently because it's a implementation of a development platform specifically designed to increase Microsoft's market share at the expense of everyone else.
(ii)Because Mono does not have any say in the spec it is implementing *and* the writer of the spec is historically hostile.
If that makes me some type of "zealot", I'll accept my title :)
Um, yeah, it's easy to put the responsibility on someone else whilst we sit back in our comfy chairs.
This journalist should break the stupid law that elected officials signed in, and the general public has done very little about?
PATRIOT Act is the law, as dumb as it may be. And it is the citizen's of this country that allow it to exist in the books, not just the journalist.
So what should they do? Shut-up about it?
Come on people, apple is a cool company but you don't have to make excuses for their mistakes.
copper with the same bandwidth as fiber optics.
...
Either this statement needs some qualifying or the laws of physics have changed since the last time I studied them.
No, not at all.
Classic example that has caused me, and probably many others lots of pain is the web mail clients written in PHP, eg. squirrelmail. These clients have no choice but to open an IMAP connection on *every* page view. An app server based web client only opens an IMAP connection once for the *entire* session, since the app server can cache that connection.
I installed a webmail system for my college, we had a bit over 4000 accounts. We got a bit over 1000 visits a day, which translated to about 50,000 hits a day. I estimate about 10,000 were probably hits to PHP pages which accessed IMAP.
The result, I estimate is that we are causing 10,000 hits on our IMAP mail server a day when all we needed with a app server solution, eg. JSP, is 1000 ( ie. the number of sessions ).
With enough effort/resources you can make *any* language and runtime scale. The issue is how much help does the language and runtime give you.
Slashdot probably uses common language independent algorithms to get it to perform well under such load. For example, generating static pages from dynamic data at short intervals and serving those instead, can be done in any language. Heck you can accomplish that using bourne shell script and SHTML.
If Slashdot used JSP or ASP.NET they'd be able to significantly decrease the load on their MySQL database. It's a feature of web applications written using Perl, PHP, on non application-server runtimes. They rely heavily on databases for persistance, thus driving up the cost of deployment. And their performance suffers as well.
Web Apps built on application servers usually scale better than those built on scripts; As far as I've seen.
It's disgraceful that people don't check they facts very labeling information propaganda.
Meanwhile, Sun sends millions of dollars in "license money" to SCO, and keeps spreading FUD about Linux to promote its own OS offering, Solaris.
True. But this is business kid. It's not black and white, good versus evil. Sun has a competing operating system that they've spent a lot of money in developing. They aren't going to concede the market without a fight. That's logical and to be expected.
Even Sun's own employees know that Java is a piece of crap,...
internalmemos.com? Your proof is from internalmemos.com? I take it you also read the Enquirer and Weekly World News to stay informed, don't you?
Yes, Java can be used for server applications (a claim which Java proponents ridiculuously uphold to demonstrate that Java is good technology -- if it couldn't, it would be quite useless, wouldn't it?), but so can Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby,....
This argument right here tells me you don't really know much about professional web application development.
J2EE is one of the biggest things pulling linux into the mid to large webapp/middleware market! Unfortunately, we don't have an application server that quite matches J2EE application servers in OS; except OS/J2EE based servers, of course. I wish people would try to write a few decent sized web applications before they decided that *they-favorite-language* was good enough for everyone.
Sun has partially funded Tomcat development for a while, also making tomcat the reference implementation for JSP. Those programming languages you mentioned are scripting languages, not web application servers. They don't provide much of the functionality true web application servers eg. Tomcat, JBoss, etc provide.
Sun bought StarOffice and released it as OpenOffice. Sun continues to fund OO/SO development. Sun put much needed people on the GNOME usuability project. Sun has been marketing Gnome to its customers, exposing it to thousands of conservative businesses who would never have looked at it otherwise. And Sun have probably done a lot more I can't remember right now.
The world is not separated clearly between good and evil. Get over it.
They're comparing it it J2EE/JSP, which is a ver y reasonable comparison.
PS, the new Cold Fusion, CF MX, is technically J2EE I believe. They implement CF on J2EE App Server I've heard.
Problem with using Yahoo and Amazon as case studies is that they any but typical applications. Very few people can, or should try to, identify with them.
Yahoo, as you said puts a lot of their business logic in C code. Amazon probably does something similar. They have to, because it would be difficult for them to put the massive amount of business logic that these sites need in PHP efficiently.
The problem is PHP's runtime. Do you think Yahoo uses PHP's builtin session management? They could, but I very much doubt it. PHP uses a files to serialize session variables, and the session may be resumed on a different process. This means that PHP can't save any variables that can't be serialized eg. some complex objects, or resources that are tied to a process by the OS usually, eg. IMAP, LDAP, or any socket connections, file ids, etc.
Another example is performance. Sites like yahoo and amazon do things such as decoupling database access from page views, instead generating static pages or almost complete static pages and serving those; or they cache html output agressively; They have huge server farms and they rather take a performance hit instead of paying enterprise wide licenses. etc., etc.
In other words, they're trying to solve a much different problem than what most of us are solving.
PHP is a great language, but personally, I don't see it being well suited for medium to large web applications at all.
Umm, these 3 platforms have significant overlap in the market they target, even if their niches aren't exactly equivalent.
Take a random example. Lets say a CMS packages. You can get quite a few done in PHP, in J2EE, and .NET. The language your CMS choice uses does have significant effects on the package. The PHP solution may not scale well, the J2EE package may be very difficult to deploy, the .NET package forces you to tie yourself with one vender's dodgey OS/Web Server/etc. These are all common failures of the different platforms I think.
Comparing them to try to figure out which failures your company can most tolerate makes sense to me.