The other day I posted about upgrading my mobile phone. I had originally decided to dump Cingular and go with Alltel so that I could get the latest Motorola RAZR, but I’ve had a change in thinking.
Currently, there are three RAZR models — the V3, the V3c, and the V3i. The V3 is the current generation GSM phone, offered by Cingular and T-Mobile for $99.99 (with a two year contract). The V3c is CDMA version of the RAZR, with some next generation features. It’s offered by Verizon and Alltel for $199.99 with a two year contract. Verizon installs their own (reportedly bad) software on the phone and cripples the Bluetooth support. The V3i is the next generation GSM RAZR. Neither T-Mobile or Cingular offer the phone yet, but it’s supposed to be released before the end of the year. My hunch, given that the V3c is already available and Cingular and T-Mobile have halved the price on the RAZR V3, is that the phone is ready and Cingular and T-Mobile are trying to clear out their RAZR V3 inventories before offering it. I suspect that after the Christmas rush, they’ll roll out the V3i. I haven’t read anything to this effect, it’s just conjecture on my part.
Anyway, my plan now is to wait for the V3i and stick with Cingular rather than switching to Alltel. This has nothing to do with the phones — rather it’s due to differences in calling plans. Cingular offers 450 minutes for $39.99 a month with 5000 night and weekend minutes, with no roaming charges nationwide and no long distance charges. Alltel offers 500 minutes a month with unlimited night and weekend minutes for $39.99 a month. And while their plan offers free long distance nationwide, their play says, “Free roaming near major cities.” I don’t travel all that much, but I still feel more comfortable knowing that I’ll never get dinged with a roaming charge.
I can stick with my current phone until I can get a V3i from Cingular, I think. (If you’re wondering why T-Mobile never enters into the calculation, it’s because they don’t offer service in my area.)
Language wars
Bruce Eckel has a good essay on language wars. He starts out talking about how hyper-enthusiasts from the Java world have migrated to Ruby on Rails and winds up asking whether Ruby is really better than Python or not.
From my own perspective, I can say that the days of hyper-enthusiasm are behind me. When it comes to picking tools to get things done, I use one of the XP maxims — use the simplest thing that could possibly work. There are two important attributes of environments for developing Web applications as far as I’m concerned. Simplicity and structure. PHP wins the simplicity fight. If you need to pull stuff out of a database and print it on a Web page, you can do it in PHP with almost no code wasted on structure. Java wins the structure fight. You can make things as structured as you like, to the point of absurdity. Ruby on Rails, right now, represents the best compromise between structure and simplicity for a huge portion of the Web application problem space.
I started building the last application I wrote in Java before Ruby on Rails existed, but if I had to do it over again, I’d still use Java. On the other hand, for the content management system/knowledge management system I’m working on right now, Ruby on Rails is the better choice. Django would certainly have been fine as well, but I picked Ruby on Rails, and I’m not regretting it. The idea that one language or platform can be all things to all people or somehow makes everything before it obsolete is absurd. Fervor can be good thing in that it can encourage productivity, but don’t let it blind you.