I wonder if "poor" is everything you do not agree with. For me, poor is something that is not well justified. You should also look into the very reason openleaks will come online.

http://epistolatory.blogspot.com/2010/12/julian-assange-theater-from-it-security.html worth thinking about these issues.

OK, recently (8.3?) I have tried to test postgres with bulk query loading. Something similar to this, not exactly identical: http://forums.pentaho.org/showthread.php?t=72863 To make the long story short, the performance was not the best I have seen. Why do I need the bulk loader? Well, we have an app where people like to load large amount of numbers and text. So, it is the easiest way. Maybe I should blog them one day...but where can I find time?

I have worked on projects that have thrown out Oracle in small/medium business setups (before the acquisition) in favor of MySQL. And yes, I do believe that MySQL clustering can be a well performing product. Now, the mistake started with the reliance of the InnoDB engine. What I will miss is the skill of the core MySQL developers (?) to work on non standard engines (like the Federated engine). Oracle makes the big money from large installations. Small to Medium sized demanding businesses have still a lot of ground to cover....And no, unfortunately, I have seen Postgres going horribly wrong, so it is not an option for my production environment.

and the year 2000, when IBM decided to acquire Sequent and Sequent under the pressure of investors gave in. Although they had a good product line, sales were questionable compared to a global competitor. I think that Sun is undervalued in that price. They can certainly push the envelope a lot higher, but will they given the tough times and the sales of their chipset flagship. The thing is, I hate to see Solaris having the faith of DYNIX PTX :-( , as a technologist/engineer.

Your question has three blocks of scope in programming terms: 1)The philosophical one: No, you should not suck it up and unlearn what you have learnt. Scripting and esoteric languages are here to stay. And if it wasn't the fact that some 'academic' environments tend to snob them, the situation would be better (the academic in quotes is meant as a criticism). 2)The toolkit enabling one: Apart from higher level architectures that support multi language development (Mono .Net, etc), the multi language programmer needs more effective IDEs for support. I tend to use the Eclipse platform, but a tool that handles the 'pipeline' aspect of multi-language programming integgrated in such an IDE is a must. 3)The language glue aspect:Many popular languages such as Python and Perl have specific dedicated mechanisms to use/call C++/Java. Number 3 means that using C++/Java from Python/Perl and perhaps other languages has never been out of the question. For more info, shout and I shall discuss details.

Come on! Be a little bit inventive. They assume that the people who pay the cash to buy such a thing will find solar recharge stations that give multiple 55 KW plugs in the middle of nowhere! :-)

"To say that Shelby Supercars are trying to beat Tesla would be an understatement." Ahmm! For the amount of money they ask for the Tesla, ANYTHING will beat the Tesla in terms of reliability. What was in "Top Gear"; Ehmm, structural panel failure, break failure, and then a short circuit..... I sincerely hope that Shelby will make something better than the Tesla.

The temperature 30+ says nothing to me. If I know the area of your machine room, the total number of watts from your equipment, maybe I can be more specific. FYI, I have eliminated the drainage issue by installing a small 12V pump myself and getting the pipes to the nearest kitchen sink, so no drilling on external walls.