TomsTechBlog.com: Free and far too expensive

Before I get right into it, I found a serious bug in Google tonight: I searched for something, and this post came up. I don't care what I'm searching for, there's no search terms on earth that should bring this crap to light.

As for the post, it's essentially a handful of thinly veiled rants about how sad Tom is that he doesn't work at Google. I'll quote parts of the post here, with my comments in italics.

Google App Engine is essentially just a free web host. Google.com is essentially just a free search engine.

Given that, I made a quick chart comparing Google App Engine to a popular shared hosting company (for the record, I've never done business with this company). I compared Google's free service to the other company's $5.95 per month service...

	Average Webhost	Google
Data Transfer per Month	15,000Gb	300-310Gb (10Gb per day
Setup	Free	Free
Database	(Open) MySQL	(Proprietary) BigTable
PHP	Yes	No
Ruby	Yes	No
Python	Yes	Yes
Perl	Yes	No

As you can see, Google falls behind in every single category. So the question becomes this: is there really anyone who can't afford $6 a month?

Despite drastically missing the meaning of 'every', this comparison has some built-in assumptions that were formed with the aid of a giant bucket of fail. Do you think Google would spend centuries worth of labor of the smartest programming minds of our era building something that wasn't as good as fucking MySQL? Neither do I.

Google App Engine's ability to scale depends on how much server resources Google is willing to dedicate to the task of running these applications. Google is not going to risk slowing down their primary services for a Google App Engine application. So their ability to scale could very well be less than other companies, we just don't know.

Alright Tom, here comes the enlightenment, are you ready for this? Sitting down? GOOGLE APP ENGINE ISN'T MEANT TO BE A FREE SERVICE! Sure, it's free for the "small fish", but that's not who Google cares about. Google has some of the industry's the smartest people, and as an application developer, I'm ecstatic to be able to send them my hugely popular python web app and have them scale it to kingdom come. If this strikes you as wrong, you should go back and re-read Adam Smith.

The Google App engine may some day be worth mentioning but as of right now its nothing short of comical. Essentially Geocities 2.0. I don't know what internet you remember, but Geocities was a joke of a website where people were forced into contrived communities in order to create a free small website. Google is offering their infrastructure and expertise. Focusing on the free website aspect just enlightens the world to your myopia.

I can't imagine any serious developer signing up for this under the current circumstances. I can't imagine you commenting about serious topics.

Congratulations Tom, you utterly fail.

An angle bracket tax?

You ever hear that the lottery is an "idiot tax"? Angled brackets in the realm of programming are exactly the same thing. That's why I had to laugh out loud when I read the latest post on the Coding Horror about XML. It takes a special kind of idiot to admit that he's using XML for anything, and an even more special kind of idiot to write an entire blog post about it. This sentence struck me as especially relevant: "if it's stored in a text file and needs to be retrieved and parsed, it's probably XML.". I would word that a different way: "if it's stored in a text file and it's XML, you've got a shit career.". But that's just me; after all, all of the text stored in my /etc folder is in XML right? Oh shit, it's not? Nor are any of my application configs for that matter; I've been using YAML for five-plus years like any sane person. As for the "hot debates" over JSON and alternative formates, the crowd that has been fawning over Ruby on Rails, trend whores as they are, have already made this decision for you. Fight it all you want, but only Microsoft losers will be using XML in 2009. As a parting note, I'd like to suggest that if you're still using SOAP, you drop whatever you're doing right now and practice saying "Would you like fries with that?", you're gonna need it.