Once it comes to billing and shipping (electronically or physically) a product, you can't claim that international clients _must_ be supported. Apple doesn't have the swing to convince the labels to deliver to non-US customers.
The reason? This is NOT an effective DRM scheme, and the labels and Apple know this. Burn to CD, rip back to MP3, share on Gnutella - that's a big hole. But, if they watermark the songs somehow, they could tell for a given mp3 if it came from their AAC reference copy. Heck, they might even be able to tell WHO they gave it to if they watermark the songs per-delivery. They do own the AAC/MP3 conversion in iTunes as well.
Now, if we find an MP3 running around the net that bears such a watermark, we know who leaked it. And under the DMCA, which only has US jurisdiction (and thats the key here), Apple/et al can prosecute that individual. But, if they open the service to non-US customers, they can't. Thus, you folks outside the US won't be seeing this service.
I bet Apple would be happy to open it up to you - but not the labels, and they're the ones providing the music.
I haven't RTFA yet, but it seems that for this to really take off and reach the critical mass that it needs to enact a fundamental change in the way we all buy music, there needs to be a Windows client. It needn't be feature-wise equivalent, but it DOES need to be capable of buying songs, if not sharing them in a limited manner as well.
More potential users -> more artists/labels -> more users. And more money for Apple, of course, which is definitely in their interest.
A consultants job is to tell their client what they think is the best way to solve a problem. A contractor's job is to do the work they've been assigned by their client. Sometimes you end up playing both roles.
If you tell your client "we should build it this way", and they tell you "No, we'll build it this way", then you're not a consultant, you're a contractor, and should do as you're told, like any other code monkey, after raising your concern once to the appropriate folks.
If you're a permanent hire (not a contractor, temp, or consultant), then you have more say in how things should be done because you might be supporting it for a while. It doesn't mean management will listen, but (IMO) it does give you a right to bitch and yell more than the contractor.
If you care this much about doing things the right way, and the long term health of the company that's currently paying your bills, you're in the wrong line of work. Find a company you want to work for in a long-term role and stay with them.
Open Source (BSF, GPL, or whatever) != unpaid developers. I see no reason that DARPA (or anyone else) shouldn't be allowed to pay developers to write code that they will release under GPL.
Open source implies that using the code is free (liberty, beer, etc.) It says NOTHING about compensation for the developers, and if DARPA paying some BSD developers gets the product quality up, then I'm all for it. Open source developers have to eat too, and if they can do it without taking another job, and thus spending their working hours on OSS stuff, then a) we get better free software, and b) they don't have to sacrifice their family life to work on open source software.
Your point still stands that the cash could be mis-managed. However, you can't pay people in hardware, and "other expenses" could consist largely of wages to paid developers, at which point it's easier to give the cash to the group and let them dole it out as needed.
I'm a software developer too, and I have some huge sets of software to build. The difference between a P3-933 and a P4-2.8 is huge for me. It cuts testing cycles down by about a factor of 2, and some builds down by a factor of 8. Linking is the biggest speedup, and I'm not sure if it's the memory space or the CPU speed, but it's by far the most noticeable change. Of course, this is because of a) the language the code is in, and b) the sheer amount of code. But there are people out there that really do benefit from faster CPU/more mem because their datasets are that large.
For a desktop system, the amount of RAM is basically a function of how you use the computer. Do you keep a lot of brower windows open, play mp3s, run any servers, what window manager you use. That can really drive up the memory usage. Also, any machine will crawl once you start paging non-stop, since hard disks are about the same speed everywhere in consumer hardware.
This is why you need to get into progressive rock. Longer songs = cheaper albums at $.99 / song.
I could see this as a great way to make your own "Greatest Hits" compilations. For instance, I want a GH of Queen. But the stuff I want would be only one disc, and it's currently split about 50/50 across their two retail Greatest Hits discs - volume's 1 & 2. I could pick and choose the stuff I wanted, get it on one disc legitmately.
In the long run, I'm more than happy to buy physical media for my music as long as I can do what I please with it. This includes making a copy for use in my car, and keeping mp3's of it on my work machine. I only use one copy at a time, I just don't have to carry the CD around with me. I don't want to download music. I'd rather buy a mastered CD at full quality, with liner notes, disc image, and all the bells and whistles. I'll make the MP3's of it myself for my personal use. I'll get compilations for the one-hit-wonder stuff IF I still want to own it after a few years.
I don't think there's a price point at which I'd settle for purchased mp3's over a regular store-bought CD with liner notes. Arguably, I can find music free right now if I want to - just pirate it - but I still buy CD's. If I really like an album, I want the physical product. Otherwise, I dont' want to listen to it and the price doesn't matter. I realize I'm not the norm here, but I do spend more money on music than the majority of the population, and I'm the one getting shafted if the labels move away from physical media.
There's so much good music out there if you get out of the crap that's force-fed to the general public, and most of it is on independent labels with distribution through bigger labels. Buy direct from the labels, they make more money, you support your favorite bands, and you give less money to the money-grubbers.
Of course Catholicism is better; it's not divided like the Protestant camp!
But seriously, there's enough variations of Unix (and Linux) that making something work for all of them is non-trivial (unless it's perl, or maybe java). It's really a fair comparison.
Microsoft = Catholicism. Solidarity, well organized.
*nix = Protestant denominations. Tons of them, all slightly different, just enough to be incompatible unless you stick to the basics.
I think he meant links whose href's say to open in new window (source driven), not the open-in-new-window click modifier (user driven).
I wonder how long until we see tab-aware HTML source and support from browsers. My guess is that once IE DOES support tabs, it will also extend it's notion of HTML to support open-in-new-tab semantics for unmodified clicks.
The more a device tries to do, the more likely it will have trouble and/or fall short. There's a lot to be said for custom hardware/firmware, instead of solving everything in software.
Convergence is a good way to solve some problems - cell phone + pager + PDA, for example. However, a functional laptop will never fit in your pocket, and a phone will never display enough to substitute for your laptop. So you'll have both and use/carry when appropriate.
I like having a separate device for games (aka, my GBA with afterburner). If it gets outdated, I replace it, and keep my phone. Likewise for the phone, I can replace it at will.
I imagine the market would get pretty saturated if you made every permutation of convergence devices for sale, and you'd still have to address the problems of battery power as you throw more processor to do things in software, or just add more hardware into a device and make it larger.
Then there's 8 year olds with GBAs - they probably don't need/want a cell phone and PDA.
In my opinion, the Xbox hardware is better console than the PS2. I prefer the Xbox controllers for FPS-type games, I don't need memory cards, I have networking right out of the box. Many games that are on both, I buy on Xbox to a) save to HD, and b) use the (arguably) nicer controllers.
However, this is not an incentive to buy an xbox. It's an incentive to buy the games FOR xbox if you own both. Of the xbox-exclusives that I've bought (Halo, Gunvalkyrie, SplinterCell), only one of them was a must-have (Halo), and that was just for me. I don't think it's a must-have like Metroid Prime, Zelda: Wind Waker, FFX, or MGS2.
While getting games to come out FOR xbox is important from a revenue point of view, it's also important to make sure that some high-profile titles come out ONLY for xbox, to drive up the incentive to own an Xbox, and thus drive sales of the cross-platform games as well.
MS hasn't done so well on the xbox-exclusives front, but in buying Rare, Bungie, and (possibly...) Vivendi gaming division, they will get there. All it takes is money and balls, of which they have ample amounts.
If YOU write the first one, throw it away, and write the second one, then yes, you may be on to something. However, if someone else writes the first one, and you can't understand it/use it, it doesn't that the first solution wasn't good. Maybe the problem lies somewhere else?
You don't learn as much from reading someone else's code as they did from writing it. Don't try mis-quote Brooks to justify not understanding an existing product. Brooks was referring to large-scale team oriented development (like the System 360, or IBM 650 probjects). He wasn't claiming that you should throw out someone else's code because it was the first solution to a problem.
This is the way that software should be done - open source foundations and tools, and the options of commercial and free software for things the users (well, non-coding users) interact with. You as a user choose software that has a payment model and source license model that works for you. The developer does the same, and everyone is happy.
There should be free (as in beer and liberty) tools and OS's, but to claim that everything on a system should be OSS, thats just silly. If you want it personally for your machines, that's fine. But don't preach it to everyone else, because OSS doesn't imply usable; it doesn't imply reliable, or secure, or any other part of what makes a piece of software great, except for price and extensibility. And the truth is, extensibility means next to nothing to most people, as they don't have the slightest idea how to modify source code.
Scoot your desk out from the wall, let the monitor hang of the back. They're front heavy, and the rear third of the monitor depth (including cable relief) isn't touching the desk anyways.
Granted, 28" is deep. My desk is 3feet deep, with a ViewSonic 19" flat. No depth problems at all.
Get a deeper desk, or scoot it out from the wall. Another interesting solution is a multi-level desk and/or under-desk keyboard tray. These will let you place the keyboard lower / under the monitor, at at least give you the extra 4-8 inches of depth you need to type comfortably.
You make valid points. I just want to recall that when the rumors about Apple charging for iApps came out (just before MWSF),/.'ers were very vocal about Apple supposedly 'baiting the market' by getting people hooked on the apps and then charging for them'.
As far as I know, the iApps aren't integrated with the OS. Unless they are using un-documented APIs, you can't really claim that Apple is playing unfair. Sure, they could distribute the iApps separately, or maybe put them on another CD that you install after the fact, but we'd bitch at them for that too.
It's a no-win situation. They have to make them free, since they're are a fairly integral part of making the OS functional. Sure, you could go download replacements from here and there, but you should have decent ones on the system.
The only problem, as I see it, is that they are too good. Maybe it should be like iDVD. A free/slim-featured iApp, and a payware full-featured. It would help your position in terms of competition, but I'm happy to just get the iApps the way they are - feature-rich and free. Safari is the only one that doesn't do all that I want - only Mozilla does that.
Chimera is seriously missing some features (cookie manager is broken, for one thing - try removing a site from your block list in the GUI in 0.6). Safari is too - try managing cookies at all.
I think history has shown that certain individuals HAVE had that much power. Some crews are fiercely loyal to their captains. No computer will ever have control of an entire universe, so that leaves the planet scope to consider.
You could argue that Hitler had a third of the planet. In terms of industrialized nations, he did. Whether you think he had sufficient influence over that third (ie, was his army loyal) is up for grabs.
In some sense, the president of the US has such power. He may not be able to inflict his will with that power, but he can embarass and ruin the country on a grand scale.
The simple truth is that with enough money, you can buy some nukes. With enough nukes, you can take out a country. If you're smart in choosing, you can cripple a country/region that is vital to the global economy (like taiwan/korea for electronics, or the middle east for oil. You could also piss off a well armed and volatile nation, and launch the world on it's way to nuclear winter.
History has shown that money is some amount of power, and there are some extremely rich people. You can buy off law enforcement, even governments. Thank god they're mostly benevolent and/or indifferent.
He's got a great point. Not about backing up 1TB (just double your cost and buy another disk for RAID mirroring), but about the possible widespread loss of information from EMP sources. We'd literally be in the stone age.
The only reason nobody is addressing the problem is that if you make sure that you personally have non-magnetic versions of your data, it won't matter unless the rest of the fricking world doesn't lose theirs and grind to a halt/panic/start looting the planet.
Since Rendezvous is implemented as multicast MAC-level transport, and most ISP's don't pass anything but unicast OUT from your link, the answer is probably no if you're on DSL. Cable modem users with no or properly-configure firewalls/routers may work though.
If you don't have the same ISP as your neighbor, then don't count on this at ALL. No consumer ISP is going to route multicast out of/into their domain, especially not the subrange that rendezvous uses.
You're absolutely right. I use three languages regularly at work (C++, Java, Perl) and I'm expected to pick up new languages on demand.
It's usually easier to learn a language than to learn the 'way things are done' at a new company. You'll learn it if you have to.
Languages should be nothing more than a context for evaluation (can't judge detailed coding tests in pseudo code) and a medium for solving problems. Use the one that fits.
Say I'm an employer, and I need a programmer to do an application on top of libraries in language X. I have two candidates, one guy who knows language X pretty well, but only language X, and has a year or so work experience. I have another guy with 5 years experience, knows W, Y, and Z. I'll probably take the second. If he knows three languages already, he can learn a 4th quickly, and his work experience is valuable.
Also, the bigger companies have software in multiple languages. And as such, they sometimes code the same business logic/policies into multiple languages. Chances are better of getting it right if one person/team codes both instead of giving one to the Java-head and another to the C-head. Let code reviews pick up the subtle language bugs, the business logic is the tricky part.
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"He doesn't know how to use the seashells!
Once it comes to billing and shipping (electronically or physically) a product, you can't claim that international clients _must_ be supported. Apple doesn't have the swing to convince the labels to deliver to non-US customers.
The reason? This is NOT an effective DRM scheme, and the labels and Apple know this. Burn to CD, rip back to MP3, share on Gnutella - that's a big hole. But, if they watermark the songs somehow, they could tell for a given mp3 if it came from their AAC reference copy. Heck, they might even be able to tell WHO they gave it to if they watermark the songs per-delivery. They do own the AAC/MP3 conversion in iTunes as well.
Now, if we find an MP3 running around the net that bears such a watermark, we know who leaked it. And under the DMCA, which only has US jurisdiction (and thats the key here), Apple/et al can prosecute that individual. But, if they open the service to non-US customers, they can't. Thus, you folks outside the US won't be seeing this service.
I bet Apple would be happy to open it up to you - but not the labels, and they're the ones providing the music.
I haven't RTFA yet, but it seems that for this to really take off and reach the critical mass that it needs to enact a fundamental change in the way we all buy music, there needs to be a Windows client. It needn't be feature-wise equivalent, but it DOES need to be capable of buying songs, if not sharing them in a limited manner as well.
More potential users -> more artists/labels -> more users. And more money for Apple, of course, which is definitely in their interest.
The difference is that most people don't have to use a cello at work.
Computers should be (optionally) easy to use, given how prevalent they are.
A consultants job is to tell their client what they think is the best way to solve a problem. A contractor's job is to do the work they've been assigned by their client. Sometimes you end up playing both roles.
If you tell your client "we should build it this way", and they tell you "No, we'll build it this way", then you're not a consultant, you're a contractor, and should do as you're told, like any other code monkey, after raising your concern once to the appropriate folks.
If you're a permanent hire (not a contractor, temp, or consultant), then you have more say in how things should be done because you might be supporting it for a while. It doesn't mean management will listen, but (IMO) it does give you a right to bitch and yell more than the contractor.
If you care this much about doing things the right way, and the long term health of the company that's currently paying your bills, you're in the wrong line of work. Find a company you want to work for in a long-term role and stay with them.
Just to be nit-picky:
Open Source (BSF, GPL, or whatever) != unpaid developers. I see no reason that DARPA (or anyone else) shouldn't be allowed to pay developers to write code that they will release under GPL.
Open source implies that using the code is free (liberty, beer, etc.) It says NOTHING about compensation for the developers, and if DARPA paying some BSD developers gets the product quality up, then I'm all for it. Open source developers have to eat too, and if they can do it without taking another job, and thus spending their working hours on OSS stuff, then a) we get better free software, and b) they don't have to sacrifice their family life to work on open source software.
Your point still stands that the cash could be mis-managed. However, you can't pay people in hardware, and "other expenses" could consist largely of wages to paid developers, at which point it's easier to give the cash to the group and let them dole it out as needed.
I'm a software developer too, and I have some huge sets of software to build. The difference between a P3-933 and a P4-2.8 is huge for me. It cuts testing cycles down by about a factor of 2, and some builds down by a factor of 8. Linking is the biggest speedup, and I'm not sure if it's the memory space or the CPU speed, but it's by far the most noticeable change. Of course, this is because of a) the language the code is in, and b) the sheer amount of code. But there are people out there that really do benefit from faster CPU/more mem because their datasets are that large.
For a desktop system, the amount of RAM is basically a function of how you use the computer. Do you keep a lot of brower windows open, play mp3s, run any servers, what window manager you use. That can really drive up the memory usage. Also, any machine will crawl once you start paging non-stop, since hard disks are about the same speed everywhere in consumer hardware.
This is why you need to get into progressive rock. Longer songs = cheaper albums at $.99 / song.
I could see this as a great way to make your own "Greatest Hits" compilations. For instance, I want a GH of Queen. But the stuff I want would be only one disc, and it's currently split about 50/50 across their two retail Greatest Hits discs - volume's 1 & 2. I could pick and choose the stuff I wanted, get it on one disc legitmately.
In the long run, I'm more than happy to buy physical media for my music as long as I can do what I please with it. This includes making a copy for use in my car, and keeping mp3's of it on my work machine. I only use one copy at a time, I just don't have to carry the CD around with me. I don't want to download music. I'd rather buy a mastered CD at full quality, with liner notes, disc image, and all the bells and whistles. I'll make the MP3's of it myself for my personal use. I'll get compilations for the one-hit-wonder stuff IF I still want to own it after a few years.
I don't think there's a price point at which I'd settle for purchased mp3's over a regular store-bought CD with liner notes. Arguably, I can find music free right now if I want to - just pirate it - but I still buy CD's. If I really like an album, I want the physical product. Otherwise, I dont' want to listen to it and the price doesn't matter. I realize I'm not the norm here, but I do spend more money on music than the majority of the population, and I'm the one getting shafted if the labels move away from physical media.
There's so much good music out there if you get out of the crap that's force-fed to the general public, and most of it is on independent labels with distribution through bigger labels. Buy direct from the labels, they make more money, you support your favorite bands, and you give less money to the money-grubbers.
Of course Catholicism is better; it's not divided like the Protestant camp!
But seriously, there's enough variations of Unix (and Linux) that making something work for all of them is non-trivial (unless it's perl, or maybe java). It's really a fair comparison.
Microsoft = Catholicism. Solidarity, well organized.
*nix = Protestant denominations. Tons of them, all slightly different, just enough to be incompatible unless you stick to the basics.
I think he meant links whose href's say to open in new window (source driven), not the open-in-new-window click modifier (user driven).
I wonder how long until we see tab-aware HTML source and support from browsers. My guess is that once IE DOES support tabs, it will also extend it's notion of HTML to support open-in-new-tab semantics for unmodified clicks.
>>8. Girls come and go, don't get to wound up in a 17 year old chick
The best part is that even though you're much older now, 17 year old chicks are always 17. Is this advice for you now and for you when you were 12?
Missing a loop update in your .sig. Have a fun life.
Sign in, and turn off the category in your filters. Problem solved.
It's sad that the people who aren't into anime always post in the anime threads about how they don't like anime; just filter it out guys.
The more a device tries to do, the more likely it will have trouble and/or fall short. There's a lot to be said for custom hardware/firmware, instead of solving everything in software.
Convergence is a good way to solve some problems - cell phone + pager + PDA, for example. However, a functional laptop will never fit in your pocket, and a phone will never display enough to substitute for your laptop. So you'll have both and use/carry when appropriate.
I like having a separate device for games (aka, my GBA with afterburner). If it gets outdated, I replace it, and keep my phone. Likewise for the phone, I can replace it at will.
I imagine the market would get pretty saturated if you made every permutation of convergence devices for sale, and you'd still have to address the problems of battery power as you throw more processor to do things in software, or just add more hardware into a device and make it larger.
Then there's 8 year olds with GBAs - they probably don't need/want a cell phone and PDA.
In my opinion, the Xbox hardware is better console than the PS2. I prefer the Xbox controllers for FPS-type games, I don't need memory cards, I have networking right out of the box. Many games that are on both, I buy on Xbox to a) save to HD, and b) use the (arguably) nicer controllers.
However, this is not an incentive to buy an xbox. It's an incentive to buy the games FOR xbox if you own both. Of the xbox-exclusives that I've bought (Halo, Gunvalkyrie, SplinterCell), only one of them was a must-have (Halo), and that was just for me. I don't think it's a must-have like Metroid Prime, Zelda: Wind Waker, FFX, or MGS2.
While getting games to come out FOR xbox is important from a revenue point of view, it's also important to make sure that some high-profile titles come out ONLY for xbox, to drive up the incentive to own an Xbox, and thus drive sales of the cross-platform games as well.
MS hasn't done so well on the xbox-exclusives front, but in buying Rare, Bungie, and (possibly...) Vivendi gaming division, they will get there. All it takes is money and balls, of which they have ample amounts.
If YOU write the first one, throw it away, and write the second one, then yes, you may be on to something. However, if someone else writes the first one, and you can't understand it/use it, it doesn't that the first solution wasn't good. Maybe the problem lies somewhere else?
You don't learn as much from reading someone else's code as they did from writing it. Don't try mis-quote Brooks to justify not understanding an existing product. Brooks was referring to large-scale team oriented development (like the System 360, or IBM 650 probjects). He wasn't claiming that you should throw out someone else's code because it was the first solution to a problem.
This is the way that software should be done - open source foundations and tools, and the options of commercial and free software for things the users (well, non-coding users) interact with. You as a user choose software that has a payment model and source license model that works for you. The developer does the same, and everyone is happy.
There should be free (as in beer and liberty) tools and OS's, but to claim that everything on a system should be OSS, thats just silly. If you want it personally for your machines, that's fine. But don't preach it to everyone else, because OSS doesn't imply usable; it doesn't imply reliable, or secure, or any other part of what makes a piece of software great, except for price and extensibility. And the truth is, extensibility means next to nothing to most people, as they don't have the slightest idea how to modify source code.
Obviously, Joe Fourpack drinks Guiness by the can.
Scoot your desk out from the wall, let the monitor hang of the back. They're front heavy, and the rear third of the monitor depth (including cable relief) isn't touching the desk anyways.
Granted, 28" is deep. My desk is 3feet deep, with a ViewSonic 19" flat. No depth problems at all.
Get a deeper desk, or scoot it out from the wall. Another interesting solution is a multi-level desk and/or under-desk keyboard tray. These will let you place the keyboard lower / under the monitor, at at least give you the extra 4-8 inches of depth you need to type comfortably.
You make valid points. I just want to recall that when the rumors about Apple charging for iApps came out (just before MWSF), /.'ers were very vocal about Apple supposedly 'baiting the market' by getting people hooked on the apps and then charging for them'.
As far as I know, the iApps aren't integrated with the OS. Unless they are using un-documented APIs, you can't really claim that Apple is playing unfair. Sure, they could distribute the iApps separately, or maybe put them on another CD that you install after the fact, but we'd bitch at them for that too.
It's a no-win situation. They have to make them free, since they're are a fairly integral part of making the OS functional. Sure, you could go download replacements from here and there, but you should have decent ones on the system.
The only problem, as I see it, is that they are too good. Maybe it should be like iDVD. A free/slim-featured iApp, and a payware full-featured. It would help your position in terms of competition, but I'm happy to just get the iApps the way they are - feature-rich and free. Safari is the only one that doesn't do all that I want - only Mozilla does that.
Chimera is seriously missing some features (cookie manager is broken, for one thing - try removing a site from your block list in the GUI in 0.6). Safari is too - try managing cookies at all.
I think history has shown that certain individuals HAVE had that much power. Some crews are fiercely loyal to their captains. No computer will ever have control of an entire universe, so that leaves the planet scope to consider.
You could argue that Hitler had a third of the planet. In terms of industrialized nations, he did. Whether you think he had sufficient influence over that third (ie, was his army loyal) is up for grabs.
In some sense, the president of the US has such power. He may not be able to inflict his will with that power, but he can embarass and ruin the country on a grand scale.
The simple truth is that with enough money, you can buy some nukes. With enough nukes, you can take out a country. If you're smart in choosing, you can cripple a country/region that is vital to the global economy (like taiwan/korea for electronics, or the middle east for oil. You could also piss off a well armed and volatile nation, and launch the world on it's way to nuclear winter.
History has shown that money is some amount of power, and there are some extremely rich people. You can buy off law enforcement, even governments. Thank god they're mostly benevolent and/or indifferent.
He's got a great point. Not about backing up 1TB (just double your cost and buy another disk for RAID mirroring), but about the possible widespread loss of information from EMP sources. We'd literally be in the stone age.
The only reason nobody is addressing the problem is that if you make sure that you personally have non-magnetic versions of your data, it won't matter unless the rest of the fricking world doesn't lose theirs and grind to a halt/panic/start looting the planet.
Since Rendezvous is implemented as multicast MAC-level transport, and most ISP's don't pass anything but unicast OUT from your link, the answer is probably no if you're on DSL. Cable modem users with no or properly-configure firewalls/routers may work though.
If you don't have the same ISP as your neighbor, then don't count on this at ALL. No consumer ISP is going to route multicast out of/into their domain, especially not the subrange that rendezvous uses.
You're absolutely right. I use three languages regularly at work (C++, Java, Perl) and I'm expected to pick up new languages on demand.
It's usually easier to learn a language than to learn the 'way things are done' at a new company. You'll learn it if you have to.
Languages should be nothing more than a context for evaluation (can't judge detailed coding tests in pseudo code) and a medium for solving problems. Use the one that fits.
Say I'm an employer, and I need a programmer to do an application on top of libraries in language X. I have two candidates, one guy who knows language X pretty well, but only language X, and has a year or so work experience. I have another guy with 5 years experience, knows W, Y, and Z. I'll probably take the second. If he knows three languages already, he can learn a 4th quickly, and his work experience is valuable.
Also, the bigger companies have software in multiple languages. And as such, they sometimes code the same business logic/policies into multiple languages. Chances are better of getting it right if one person/team codes both instead of giving one to the Java-head and another to the C-head. Let code reviews pick up the subtle language bugs, the business logic is the tricky part.
Given that the lowest-priced Mac that can burn DVD's is selling like hotcakes, maybe they want you buying a PowerMacG4 + SuperDrive instead?
You'd be surprised what people will jump for to get that one feature they want.