That's a very popular tone of those who read and write The Register :-). Remember, they were among the first to identify Itanium as the "Itanic", and have along lineage going all the way back to Charlie Matco. If you earned a Charlie Matco coffee mug, then by definition you knew how things really went down. My favorite Register contributor by far in the past couple years (way post Charlie Matco), is Ted Dziuba. E.g. "Google releases serialization scheme: Pedantic programmers hold love-in". http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/14/dziuba_google_protocol_buffer/page2… choice quotes include: * Unfortunately, because of heavy inbreeding within Silicon Valley * engineering teams, the two products, although functionally * similar, are not compatible with one another. * If you want to do it, writing your own RPC layer isn't a herculean * task. I managed to hack something together on top of Tomcat * in a couple of hours. It didn't make me feel as manly as I * hoped it would, so to supplement, I suggest you have two * cigars, a glass of Maker's Mark, no ice, and a copy * of The Godfather trilogy within reach. * The Web 2.0 startup circle, being mostly composed of pretentious * little shits, is likely to adopt protocol buffers as a first-class * data interchange format. And my favorite of all time: * Think of how scalable that shit's gonna be. You'll put a real hurt * on all that imaginary load your system is taking. Then, you get * to go home and fuck the prom queen. Tim.