The spirit is will but the flesh is weak.
Other systems in the past has translated this English idiom into all sorts of laughable text but my favorite is
The vodka is tempting, but the meat's a bit suspect
There are many other famously wrong translations of idioms Admittedly, idioms are difficult to translate, but its not like the users will understand this or care. They just want a reasonable translation so they don't end up looking like an idiot to the cute foreign girl they are trying to bed.
I find much of this behavior stems from one source, anthropomorphization of animals due to most people only experiencing them as pets. People project human emotions and reasoning on their pets and in many cases treat them as children. Animals are not people and do not behave as such. Nor do they really want to be treated as such. Consider how miserable most dogs look when put in sweaters that people think are cute. Not to mention the monkeys in commercials. Eating animals isn't cruel, its part of nature. Dressing a dog up in a sweater and a cap to make it look more like a human baby everyday however is torture I think.
But here's the catch, someone must write the code in the end. And someone must maintain it. And the code that is written is of varying quality. If someone is simply a better, faster programming, then their code will be cheaper to maintain because it will break less often and scale better (or whatever your metrics are for code quality). I find that a "nice programmer" might be easier to work with, but those Saturday night production outages make me hate that person all the same. And I'm much more likely to fire him at that point because I think that person is unlikely to have to skills to keep the code working.
Finally, I think this entire argument is a bit of a crutch. I've seen people who match Josh's description, but usually the best programmers are just crabby because so much of the work falls to them. Then they get painted with "Josh's brush" and labeled as having bad people skills. When really, they are just tired and overworked. If the people with "people skills" had to deal with even 1/10th the work, they would go on a killing spree within a week.
I don't see why web clients being transient is a problem. The whole point of the MapReduce algorithm is that each worker (the web clients in this case) don't need to know anything about what the other worker is doing, what the system as a whole is doing, nor what it had done with any past job.
Which is why Map-Reduce is only suitable for "easily" distributed problems. Lucky for Google that almost all their computational problems fit into this mold. But in the rest of the world, this just isn't the case. Which is why Map-Reduce is more interesting and trendy than a solid change in how distributed systems are designed.
I'm skeptical of that claim, but I don't know. What I do know for a fact is, they do ship products that use undocumented features of "documented" API's. (i.e. they pass in undocumented values for control parameters that completely change what the function does.) I've seen it first hand.
They were called the Z APIs because all the functions began with the letter Z. There is now a book on them but they were hidden calls available from the kernel and userland DLLs in windows. They are no longer there (the normal APIs now subsume them).
Its not our fault that you don't know anything about the history of this issue. These things are well documented and if you don't know about them, you only make yourself look foolish and uninformed.
Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer.