Hypothetical carrotsMy daughter is a senior in high school, but this isn't really about her. She is a vegetarian, which for her means no meat more than it implies anything about vegetables. When she makes her lunch, she always packs hypothetical carrots, meaning that she means to pack carrots, and says that she packs carrots, but the carrots aren't really there unless I pack them. They are just hypothetical.
She believes somehow that hypothetical carrots will keep her healthy (along with the hypothetical hard boiled eggs she eats after school and the hypothetical orange juice that she drinks for snack). I would think that this was a great failing of her age or generation or even her personally, except that it reminds me so much of the hypothetical standards and hypothetical efficiencies to be found in J2EE and Java and Websphere.
Hypothetical standardsFrom a hypothetical point of view, going with standards based systems such as J2EE will save you dollars, real dollars, not just hypothetical ones. People believe that just "adopting J2EE as their corporate standard", or buying into the "Websphere portal concept" will save those real dollars, or somehow help them make more real dollars in the future, but it seems a lot like the hypothetical carrots to me. J2EE or Java or Linux or OO programming or .Net are not how you save or make money, they are methods or frameworks which can be applied through a lot of hard work and design and training and planning, at the end of which there might be some real dollars, but if you think they are magic and will simply save or earn you those real dollars by adopting and proclaiming them, you are just packing hypothetical carrots.
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