What they really need, IMO, is someone who represents the "professional IT" side of the company in a more public manner.
Something along the lines of a CTO/CIO that is much more public.
(Typically, a CTO deals with inward facing technology, while the CIO deals with client-facing technology, but I know a lot of guys who think it sounds better to be a CTO than a CIO).
Sure, Jobs is THE guy when it comes to announcing the latest iPod case, etc., but more and more Mac's are being positioned and used in high-end situations where it has to do more than "just work" and "look cool".
They need someone to head up the public side of THAT portion of the company... someone that I, as an IT Professional, can relate to and drink Cool-Aid from. This same person could then also deal with any "techie" issues, such as security, etc.
I just wouldn't believe Jobs if he started talking about how they've secured the box... he's reading some marketing talk-point that's been compiled for him.
Maybe that's the problem... they're public face is too much slick marketing for me, not enough tech. Now that they're moving into more of a commercial environment, they need a "second" public face, with a tech to lead that PR... someone that has some tech street cred, and someone my inner-techie won't immediately discount as being a marketing parrot. (Yes, I hate Marketing types, but I also understand their necessity).
It seems to me that the only people I hear of talking about this are some schools that have rolled out 1,000 G5's in a cluster, etc.
Why? Because even the wineries agree the cork says nothing.
This makes no sense. The wineries are not saying anything about "what the cork says".
Wineries are going to synthetics and screw-caps because they recognize the losses than can result in using cork... 90% of their losses due to "corked" wines come from, well, the cork. There is no way for them to analyze real cork and tell whether or not it's going to be bad, or cause the wine to go bad. For that matter, "treated" cork isn't anywhere near as successfull or beneficial as some people believe, and is mostly being abandoned.
The use of synthetics and screw-tops is a business decision for the wineries... it ensures the quality of their wine, and helps to improve the integrity of their reputation. Nothing like seeing an incredibly good/old case of wine go up for auction and be sold for insane money, only to find that it's corked. One such case and the word can spread like wild-fire, and that can translate to HUGE financial losses.
The push-back is from the "snobbish" wine drinker that doesn't like the concept of using untraditional bottle stopping techniques or materials... synthetics and/or screw-tops aren't traditional, and removes some of the "elitist" attitude that a lot of people assume comes from drinking "fine" wines. And, some people like the ritual that they partake in when having a nice bottle of wine almost as much as the wine itself... and more power to them. I could care less.
At the end of the day, most wineries realize that the quality/integrity of their wine and reputation is worth more than the "snobs" desire to maintain tradition.
Their decision has got nothing to do with what the "cork tells you".
PS: My brother-in-law is a sommelier, and I'm practically an alcoholic. We've gone to a number of well-known wineries here in BC, in California, France, Italy, and Australia over the past 3 years, and almost every vintner I've watched uncork a bottle of wine that they've ordered at a meal has smelled the cork. The only time that I've not seen them do this is when they're opening their own wine from a known case-lot.
Just to clarify, if the cork is off (musty, moldy smell) I won't taste the wine.
Usually, when the server brings and uncorks the wine, they hand it to you while they get ready to decant the wine. It takes 2 seconds to smell the cork. This isn't taking any time out of the process, is not some snobby ritual, etc. It is something you can do that provides you useful information about the wine, while waiting for the wine to be provided. It's not some fancy "snobbish" ritual
Most definitely. There are even "aerators" (sp?) that can be used to maximize the exposure to air as it is poured into a decanter. That is also why most decanters usually have a very large base to them, so that it exposes the most amount of surface area of wine to the air.
Actually, I routinely smell the cork of a bottle to see if it's been "corked". A "corked" bottle of wine is one that suffers from TCA contamination, which is most likely to come from the cork. (It can come from other sources, but those are very rare).
Basically, a "corked" bottle of wine tends to smell very musty, and smelling the cork will tell you right away if it is "corked".
The biggest "show" of wine drinkers are those that swirl the wine around the glass and make a big show of holding the wine up to the light and laboureously tasting the wine in front of the server... all you really have to do is give it a quick swirl and then smell it. That will tell you all you need to know when it comes to sending it back or keeping it.
Anything else you do with a glass of wine (swirling, etc) is pretty well for the wine-snobs that want to classify the wine and analyze it in more depth, or to look like you think you know what you're doing.
"Corking" is also a primary reason for real cork being replaced by synthetics. For that matter, there's a movement to switch to screw-caps as they provide a much better seal with none of the drawbacks of cork (drying out, turning, etc).
On top of that, some older wines taste like absolute shit unless they're allowed to "breathe" for a while. An hour or more in a decanter will result in a drastically different taste, finish, etc., in most cases.
It's amazing how much people "learn" from watching some stupid episode of Fraser or a movie. For instance, there was a marked 30% drop in the sale of Merlot after Sideways came out.
At the end of the day, the only thing to remember about wine is that if YOU like it, then it's good. Price, vintage, varietal, etc., has absolutely nothing to do with it. People just tend to feel pressured into buying expensive wines and doing stupid human tricks at the table for fear of looking stupid.
Personally, I'm a big Barossa Valley shiraz fan, but I've been pleasantly surprised by a nice Meritage now and then.:P
Also, we mostly do contract work (application/system development and handoff), so it's not like it's some internal system that's being developed/admin'd... our jobs involve a lot of interaction with clients, etc.
I've tried hiring based on chops alone, and have been bitten in the ass because of it.
Not for us... I don't care if you INVENTED Unix, if you can't communicate verbaly and in writing with the rest of the team, then you don't get hired.
I've just gone through a hiring phase, and have turned down quite a few people that had their chops, but we couldn't easily understand them... either they had very rough accents (East Indian in this case) or they couldn't write cohesively (Chinese).
We have run into too many problems where time/effort is wasted in meetings and trying to meet deadlines by a lack of understanding because of poor communication.
That's for sure! When we let someone go, there's no "2 weeks" or anything... they come and see me when "my email stopped working".
"Yeah, about that... here's your severence cheque, a box for your stuff, and this guy will watch you pack up your shit and then escort you from the building."
Just had to do this about 2 weeks ago with a programmer.
Too bad Google doesn't offer an RBL lookup... I have a Barracuda Spam Firewall (which is AWESOME!! 4.5 million spam stopped in the last year, excellent results), and it allows for remote RBL servers.
I'd pay for that service, based on their gmail performance.
Also, they're very well positioned to pick up spammers very quickly.
I'm an Oracle consultant and occasionally do work for a Canadian provincial government.
They are idiots.
The "OS" guys walk around with cendescending, power tripping egos and do not allow root out to anybody not in their group.
Meanwhile, they are running stupidly unpatched Solaris boxes with tons of old, unpatched code.
We were doing some late-night failure recovery stuff, and the OS guys weren't around, and we needed root to do some stuff. We paged them at 1am. By 3am, still no call, after 4 more pages. We eventually said "screw this", and TOOK root. (The easiest way was to modify a script they'd left as setuid, but left it world changeable.... how moronic!) After dealing with this problem for almost 20 hours, I was feeling a little pissy, and changed the root password on them. They came in later on in the morning, and next thing you know, a whole gaggle of them are walking over to us, demanding to know what was going on, as they couldn't log into any of the 5 boxes in the cluster we were working on.
I proceded to give them shit for being idiotic, lazy government workers that didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. They had a whack of code that was running that had known exploits, and their only reason for not upgrading was because it hadn't been tested and approved yet. (For months and months, it seems). To top it off, the head of the entire IT department was sitting in the cube next to us, and wasn't impressed. He gave me crap for it, but later thanked me for pointing out the issues. Since then, they've called me back to perform periodic security audits.
Not the most comfortable of situations (those guys are NEVER going to like me), but at least they learned something.
It's depressing and somewhat pathetic that the political environment breeds the kind of shoddy, "investigative" journalism that seems to be running rampant, all in the hopes of gaining market share.
I really feel for this guy and the situation he was thrown into, and I hope he gives the "journalist" a nice swift kick in the sack.... financially speaking, of course.
Sounds like someone is getting ready for a nice, big lawsuit.
"They posted all this crap about me, it wasn't true, I had to quit, I couldn't find a job, and by the time I could, I was out of touch and not hireable... gimme $8 million".
So, would it be better to say that money better enables competitive advantages?
Let's face it, two companies may be doing marketing, but the large multi-national with a $5 million global marketing budget will have a huge advantage over the home-based company with $5k.
The end result is that the smaller company, due to lack of funds, cannot implement the same marketing strategy as the larger, well-funded company. Is this not a competitive advantage?
Sure, the marketing itself is the advantage, but it is a direct result of budget.
(not arguing, just looking for clarification and seeking enlightenment)
No, I don't think Google is redefining the "law" of demand and answer... they are just better set up to take full advantage of it.
And I don't see anything wrong with this.
Sure, in some cases, larger companies have a competitive advantage when it comes to this.
Mind you, larger companies also have a competitive advantage when they have a crap-load more money than smaller companies... they can hire a boat-load of top-knotch engineers, spend way more on advertising, etc. Does this mean it's unethical? No. That's the way it works.
Of course, there could be Monopoly issues, but I doubt that they are of issue in this case.
So, do we need an ethical framework? No. The smaller company needs a better negotiator to enter into the agreement and get the better rate and the service they want.
I guess they may have to have that attitude that it's the one true tool, but, as far as I'm concerned, any reasonable or knowledgeable end-user will understand that their position would be pure marketing BS and rather unrealistic. So, I don't think their attitude will really change things for them, unless it's to pander to the devs that already think it's ALWAYS the right tool.
My requirements, in this particular case, are for a simple-to-run end-user client application. That's quite trivial to do with InstallAnywhere (the packaging tool we use) as it includes a JRE for each of the 8+ platforms we deploy onto.
Other than one small issue we had with Win32 printing, there have been no problems whatsoever with respect to the same code running on multiple platforms.
Once again, I think it's a case of right tool for the job at hand.
Case in point, my own company's website T-SWAT is done in PHP.;)
Tried the latest, much hyped Zend release, still no love. We even tried looking into the CVS HEAD of the latest release to see what's going on, and were contemplating fixing it, but in the end we couldn't justify it.
Believe me, we WANTED to use these collection types in the worst way, and tried and tried... even posted a whack of stuff on the OTN forums... just wouldn't work.
At least not on Solaris or Linux. The stuff we needed would only work on Win32. (That kind of annoyed the *nix admin in me).
Instead, we developed a quick hack/work-around to using the types of collections we wanted to (did everything with REF CURSORS). Not ideal, but it does the job.
I could port a C app between Mac OSX and Linux and Solaris, sure, but that's way more overhead and work.
As to the portability of things like PHP, that's very problematic in some cases, as it depends highly on the environment you're working in. Sure, for a web-delivered app it might make sense to use PHP, but portability can be very problematic.
As an aside, I'm an "Oracle Guy". I have a services company that does a LOT of high-end Oracle stuff, including distributed PHP/Java apps with an Oracle back end.
We've had nothing but problems getting PHP on different platforms (Win32, Solaris, Linux) communicating the same way with Oracle. Some things will work in Win32 PHP, while different ones will only work on Solaris, etc. (These are specifically related to the complex collections that are passed in procedure params).
I have yet to have this kind of problem with Java. We can do an Ant build on Linux, Solaris, Win32, or OSX, and have the identical results. This has NOT proven to be the case with using Apache, PHP, etc.
For that matter, the way MySQL works on OSX is different than how it does on Linux (specifically tried to convert an existing SCARAB system from Linux to OSX, and the case sensitivity is different on each).
In short, my experience has shown that I can achieve much better/truer portability using a 100% Java stack (Jboss, etc.) with an Oracle back-end than Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc.
I'm just saying what works for me, in my experience... your mileage/requirements/demographics may (and probably do) differ.
Re:It is to laugh
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Seriously, if you were going into business for yourself, would you base your application on Java? I sure wouldn't.
Well, I would, and I did. What other language is going to give you the ability to write one hunk of code that will act as a client and/or a server from Linux/Aix/Solaris/HPux/Windows/Mac/etc?
For us, the best tool for the job was Java. Period. End of subject.
But that's what it's all about... determining the best tool for the job, and dealing with the inherent trade-offs.
To say that one language is better than another, without context, is meaningless.
I tried... believe me. I was there for 15 minutes, figured it out, and that's all they wanted to hear.
I showed them the stats, ran stuff from the main DB quite well, etc. UNfortunately, they weren't complete idiots when it came to the RDBMS side of things, so I couldn't blatently lie to them. Besides, not sure I'd ever want to do that, as tempting as it is sometimes... ethics and all. That, and the ONE person there with a brain might get the impression I didn't know what the hell I was talking about, and we couldn't have that!;)
At the end of the day, it's not my goal in life to help them... they requested my help, I provided, they refused to accept, so no skin off my back.
Just another good "what a bunch of morons these clients turned out to be" story.;)
Slashdot Mirror
What they really need, IMO, is someone who represents the "professional IT" side of the company in a more public manner.
Something along the lines of a CTO/CIO that is much more public.
(Typically, a CTO deals with inward facing technology, while the CIO deals with client-facing technology, but I know a lot of guys who think it sounds better to be a CTO than a CIO).
Sure, Jobs is THE guy when it comes to announcing the latest iPod case, etc., but more and more Mac's are being positioned and used in high-end situations where it has to do more than "just work" and "look cool".
They need someone to head up the public side of THAT portion of the company... someone that I, as an IT Professional, can relate to and drink Cool-Aid from. This same person could then also deal with any "techie" issues, such as security, etc.
I just wouldn't believe Jobs if he started talking about how they've secured the box... he's reading some marketing talk-point that's been compiled for him.
Maybe that's the problem... they're public face is too much slick marketing for me, not enough tech. Now that they're moving into more of a commercial environment, they need a "second" public face, with a tech to lead that PR... someone that has some tech street cred, and someone my inner-techie won't immediately discount as being a marketing parrot. (Yes, I hate Marketing types, but I also understand their necessity).
It seems to me that the only people I hear of talking about this are some schools that have rolled out 1,000 G5's in a cluster, etc.
Nope.
I think it's a great way to introduce people to Linux and the concept that there is something other than the "Microsoft Way".
Those of us that know what it means will chuckle, those of them that don't will ask "where'd the names come from?".
I think it's fantastic.
Sure as hell beats the standard marketing bullshit naming schemes that seem to be everywhere, IMO.
I agree. The new "corks" will tell you nothing.
Why? Because even the wineries agree the cork says nothing.
This makes no sense. The wineries are not saying anything about "what the cork says".
Wineries are going to synthetics and screw-caps because they recognize the losses than can result in using cork... 90% of their losses due to "corked" wines come from, well, the cork. There is no way for them to analyze real cork and tell whether or not it's going to be bad, or cause the wine to go bad. For that matter, "treated" cork isn't anywhere near as successfull or beneficial as some people believe, and is mostly being abandoned.
The use of synthetics and screw-tops is a business decision for the wineries... it ensures the quality of their wine, and helps to improve the integrity of their reputation. Nothing like seeing an incredibly good/old case of wine go up for auction and be sold for insane money, only to find that it's corked. One such case and the word can spread like wild-fire, and that can translate to HUGE financial losses.
The push-back is from the "snobbish" wine drinker that doesn't like the concept of using untraditional bottle stopping techniques or materials... synthetics and/or screw-tops aren't traditional, and removes some of the "elitist" attitude that a lot of people assume comes from drinking "fine" wines. And, some people like the ritual that they partake in when having a nice bottle of wine almost as much as the wine itself... and more power to them. I could care less.
At the end of the day, most wineries realize that the quality/integrity of their wine and reputation is worth more than the "snobs" desire to maintain tradition.
Their decision has got nothing to do with what the "cork tells you".
PS: My brother-in-law is a sommelier, and I'm practically an alcoholic. We've gone to a number of well-known wineries here in BC, in California, France, Italy, and Australia over the past 3 years, and almost every vintner I've watched uncork a bottle of wine that they've ordered at a meal has smelled the cork. The only time that I've not seen them do this is when they're opening their own wine from a known case-lot.
Just to clarify, if the cork is off (musty, moldy smell) I won't taste the wine.
Usually, when the server brings and uncorks the wine, they hand it to you while they get ready to decant the wine. It takes 2 seconds to smell the cork. This isn't taking any time out of the process, is not some snobby ritual, etc. It is something you can do that provides you useful information about the wine, while waiting for the wine to be provided. It's not some fancy "snobbish" ritual
Most definitely. There are even "aerators" (sp?) that can be used to maximize the exposure to air as it is poured into a decanter. That is also why most decanters usually have a very large base to them, so that it exposes the most amount of surface area of wine to the air.
Hmmm... seems like you're an idiot. ;)
:P
Actually, I routinely smell the cork of a bottle to see if it's been "corked". A "corked" bottle of wine is one that suffers from TCA contamination, which is most likely to come from the cork. (It can come from other sources, but those are very rare).
Basically, a "corked" bottle of wine tends to smell very musty, and smelling the cork will tell you right away if it is "corked".
The biggest "show" of wine drinkers are those that swirl the wine around the glass and make a big show of holding the wine up to the light and laboureously tasting the wine in front of the server... all you really have to do is give it a quick swirl and then smell it. That will tell you all you need to know when it comes to sending it back or keeping it.
Anything else you do with a glass of wine (swirling, etc) is pretty well for the wine-snobs that want to classify the wine and analyze it in more depth, or to look like you think you know what you're doing.
"Corking" is also a primary reason for real cork being replaced by synthetics. For that matter, there's a movement to switch to screw-caps as they provide a much better seal with none of the drawbacks of cork (drying out, turning, etc).
On top of that, some older wines taste like absolute shit unless they're allowed to "breathe" for a while. An hour or more in a decanter will result in a drastically different taste, finish, etc., in most cases.
It's amazing how much people "learn" from watching some stupid episode of Fraser or a movie. For instance, there was a marked 30% drop in the sale of Merlot after Sideways came out.
At the end of the day, the only thing to remember about wine is that if YOU like it, then it's good. Price, vintage, varietal, etc., has absolutely nothing to do with it. People just tend to feel pressured into buying expensive wines and doing stupid human tricks at the table for fear of looking stupid.
Personally, I'm a big Barossa Valley shiraz fan, but I've been pleasantly surprised by a nice Meritage now and then.
I hear you.
Also, we mostly do contract work (application/system development and handoff), so it's not like it's some internal system that's being developed/admin'd... our jobs involve a lot of interaction with clients, etc.
I've tried hiring based on chops alone, and have been bitten in the ass because of it.
Not for us... I don't care if you INVENTED Unix, if you can't communicate verbaly and in writing with the rest of the team, then you don't get hired.
I've just gone through a hiring phase, and have turned down quite a few people that had their chops, but we couldn't easily understand them... either they had very rough accents (East Indian in this case) or they couldn't write cohesively (Chinese).
We have run into too many problems where time/effort is wasted in meetings and trying to meet deadlines by a lack of understanding because of poor communication.
That's for sure! When we let someone go, there's no "2 weeks" or anything... they come and see me when "my email stopped working".
"Yeah, about that... here's your severence cheque, a box for your stuff, and this guy will watch you pack up your shit and then escort you from the building."
Just had to do this about 2 weeks ago with a programmer.
Too bad Google doesn't offer an RBL lookup... I have a Barracuda Spam Firewall (which is AWESOME!! 4.5 million spam stopped in the last year, excellent results), and it allows for remote RBL servers.
I'd pay for that service, based on their gmail performance.
Also, they're very well positioned to pick up spammers very quickly.
I'm an Oracle consultant and occasionally do work for a Canadian provincial government.
They are idiots.
The "OS" guys walk around with cendescending, power tripping egos and do not allow root out to anybody not in their group.
Meanwhile, they are running stupidly unpatched Solaris boxes with tons of old, unpatched code.
We were doing some late-night failure recovery stuff, and the OS guys weren't around, and we needed root to do some stuff. We paged them at 1am. By 3am, still no call, after 4 more pages. We eventually said "screw this", and TOOK root. (The easiest way was to modify a script they'd left as setuid, but left it world changeable.... how moronic!) After dealing with this problem for almost 20 hours, I was feeling a little pissy, and changed the root password on them. They came in later on in the morning, and next thing you know, a whole gaggle of them are walking over to us, demanding to know what was going on, as they couldn't log into any of the 5 boxes in the cluster we were working on.
I proceded to give them shit for being idiotic, lazy government workers that didn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. They had a whack of code that was running that had known exploits, and their only reason for not upgrading was because it hadn't been tested and approved yet. (For months and months, it seems). To top it off, the head of the entire IT department was sitting in the cube next to us, and wasn't impressed. He gave me crap for it, but later thanked me for pointing out the issues. Since then, they've called me back to perform periodic security audits.
Not the most comfortable of situations (those guys are NEVER going to like me), but at least they learned something.
That's exactly what I was inferring.
It's depressing and somewhat pathetic that the political environment breeds the kind of shoddy, "investigative" journalism that seems to be running rampant, all in the hopes of gaining market share.
I really feel for this guy and the situation he was thrown into, and I hope he gives the "journalist" a nice swift kick in the sack.... financially speaking, of course.
Sounds like someone is getting ready for a nice, big lawsuit.
"They posted all this crap about me, it wasn't true, I had to quit, I couldn't find a job, and by the time I could, I was out of touch and not hireable... gimme $8 million".
So, would it be better to say that money better enables competitive advantages?
Let's face it, two companies may be doing marketing, but the large multi-national with a $5 million global marketing budget will have a huge advantage over the home-based company with $5k.
The end result is that the smaller company, due to lack of funds, cannot implement the same marketing strategy as the larger, well-funded company. Is this not a competitive advantage?
Sure, the marketing itself is the advantage, but it is a direct result of budget.
(not arguing, just looking for clarification and seeking enlightenment)
No, I don't think Google is redefining the "law" of demand and answer... they are just better set up to take full advantage of it.
And I don't see anything wrong with this.
Sure, in some cases, larger companies have a competitive advantage when it comes to this.
Mind you, larger companies also have a competitive advantage when they have a crap-load more money than smaller companies... they can hire a boat-load of top-knotch engineers, spend way more on advertising, etc. Does this mean it's unethical? No. That's the way it works.
Of course, there could be Monopoly issues, but I doubt that they are of issue in this case.
So, do we need an ethical framework? No. The smaller company needs a better negotiator to enter into the agreement and get the better rate and the service they want.
I guess they may have to have that attitude that it's the one true tool, but, as far as I'm concerned, any reasonable or knowledgeable end-user will understand that their position would be pure marketing BS and rather unrealistic. So, I don't think their attitude will really change things for them, unless it's to pander to the devs that already think it's ALWAYS the right tool.
I hear you.
;)
My requirements, in this particular case, are for a simple-to-run end-user client application. That's quite trivial to do with InstallAnywhere (the packaging tool we use) as it includes a JRE for each of the 8+ platforms we deploy onto.
Other than one small issue we had with Win32 printing, there have been no problems whatsoever with respect to the same code running on multiple platforms.
Once again, I think it's a case of right tool for the job at hand.
Case in point, my own company's website T-SWAT is done in PHP.
Tried the latest, much hyped Zend release, still no love. We even tried looking into the CVS HEAD of the latest release to see what's going on, and were contemplating fixing it, but in the end we couldn't justify it.
Believe me, we WANTED to use these collection types in the worst way, and tried and tried... even posted a whack of stuff on the OTN forums... just wouldn't work.
At least not on Solaris or Linux. The stuff we needed would only work on Win32. (That kind of annoyed the *nix admin in me).
Instead, we developed a quick hack/work-around to using the types of collections we wanted to (did everything with REF CURSORS). Not ideal, but it does the job.
Porting is not the same thing.
I could port a C app between Mac OSX and Linux and Solaris, sure, but that's way more overhead and work.
As to the portability of things like PHP, that's very problematic in some cases, as it depends highly on the environment you're working in. Sure, for a web-delivered app it might make sense to use PHP, but portability can be very problematic.
As an aside, I'm an "Oracle Guy". I have a services company that does a LOT of high-end Oracle stuff, including distributed PHP/Java apps with an Oracle back end.
We've had nothing but problems getting PHP on different platforms (Win32, Solaris, Linux) communicating the same way with Oracle. Some things will work in Win32 PHP, while different ones will only work on Solaris, etc. (These are specifically related to the complex collections that are passed in procedure params).
I have yet to have this kind of problem with Java. We can do an Ant build on Linux, Solaris, Win32, or OSX, and have the identical results. This has NOT proven to be the case with using Apache, PHP, etc.
For that matter, the way MySQL works on OSX is different than how it does on Linux (specifically tried to convert an existing SCARAB system from Linux to OSX, and the case sensitivity is different on each).
In short, my experience has shown that I can achieve much better/truer portability using a 100% Java stack (Jboss, etc.) with an Oracle back-end than Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc.
I'm just saying what works for me, in my experience... your mileage/requirements/demographics may (and probably do) differ.
Seriously, if you were going into business for yourself, would you base your application on Java? I sure wouldn't.
Well, I would, and I did. What other language is going to give you the ability to write one hunk of code that will act as a client and/or a server from Linux/Aix/Solaris/HPux/Windows/Mac/etc?
For us, the best tool for the job was Java. Period. End of subject.
But that's what it's all about... determining the best tool for the job, and dealing with the inherent trade-offs.
To say that one language is better than another, without context, is meaningless.
ahh... calculators... much like computers...
garbage in, garbage out
Sure glad this hasn't been covered before!
which is why I'm glad I snagged that easy-to-remember 10.10.10.10 ;)
I tried... believe me. I was there for 15 minutes, figured it out, and that's all they wanted to hear.
;)
;)
I showed them the stats, ran stuff from the main DB quite well, etc. UNfortunately, they weren't complete idiots when it came to the RDBMS side of things, so I couldn't blatently lie to them. Besides, not sure I'd ever want to do that, as tempting as it is sometimes... ethics and all. That, and the ONE person there with a brain might get the impression I didn't know what the hell I was talking about, and we couldn't have that!
At the end of the day, it's not my goal in life to help them... they requested my help, I provided, they refused to accept, so no skin off my back.
Just another good "what a bunch of morons these clients turned out to be" story.