And do you argue that those things havent happened?
They happened but the question is whether they are poor foreign policy. Clearly the writer thinks they are but he thinks it is sufficient simply to describe the policy for everyone to recognize that the policies are poor. Not everyone agrees the policies are poor. U.S. foreign policy is widely admired in Europe, for instance, where the demand to be admitted to NATO is high. In fact, an alliance with the U.S. is the most desired alliance in the world. Nobody wants to be allied with Russia or China, for instance.
most people in america are blissfully ignorant about foreign policies here.
If the terrorists are trying to get Americans to think about their foreign policy, their tactics have had exactly the opposite effect. If there is any discussion, it not about the justice of American foreign policy but about the justice of the tactics of the terrorists.
The only foreign policy Americans want to hear about is reprisal. European countries have endorsed reprisals. Sympathy for the terrorists' cause, whatever it is, is at an all-time low among countries that might influence U.S. foreign policy.
The terrorists have increased the number of enemies they have in the world, not decreased it.
One can see this writer's prejudice in his summary of current events:
Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
Even allowing for some rhetorical overstatement, this description outrageously distorts every U.S. action. He is building a case that the U.S., supported by Britain, is to blame for all the evil in the world.
His belief that the U.S. has infinite power to make things right or wrong is revealed in his conclusion: But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed
The U.S., for all its power, cannot correct all the injustices and inequalities in world. It cannot even correct all the injustices and inequalities within its own borders. If terrorists are attacking the U.S. because they believe it can, they are simply wrong.
According to seminal urbanologist Jane Jacobs, cities are inherently resilient to catastrophe. More damage is done by misguided urban planning.
The World Trade Center, as its name suggests, serves a national and international market. The demand for the products and services that the companies in the World Trade Tower provided is still there. Compared to the damage caused by hurricanes in Florida, the cost to rebuild is manageable.
If New York could thrive despite a crime rate that killed many more people than the terrorist over the last 10 years, it can survive this single event.
I suspect that the most lasting effect is that architects will reconsider the need for 110 storey buildings.
He says: I believe that a school teacher today is so outgunned in this world of competition for ideas. Think about a school teacher with a piece of chalk and a blackboard competing with the minds of children inundated with commercials that have million dollar production values... The immature mind I don't believe can distinguish from good ideas that are poorly produced and bad ideas that are well produced. And so I feel like we need to get media systems into the educational process and to fail to do so is to fail.
Wrong for two reasons:
1. His solution perpetrates the very evil that it seeks to combat. Students need to be able to distinguish bad ideas from good ideas. Meerly packaging good ideas in the same manner as bad ideas further blurs the distinction. You would almost be better off presenting good ideas in an a delibertely understated manner to distinguish them from fatuous nonsense.
2. Education can never hope to compete in glitz with advertising. Educational materials will always look shoddy compared to advertising.
One should keep a clear distinction between games and education. Games are supposed to be fun, pure and simple. They can only incorporate education to the extent that education is fun.
Education, however, is often frustrating and ultimately hard. Where interactive multimedia can make it easier, it has a role. But at some point, it's just your brain and an idea with no intervening media whatsoever. That point is where education begins and the sooner you get to that point, the better.
since we do find this evidence for life, we need some sort of explanation for why we see this sign but not that sign of life
We're probably basically in agreement. However, we need more than an explanation.
It is not sufficient for a theory to account for a set of fact. If it were, you could never decide between competing theories. Generally theories should predict something that is verifiable.
In this case, the theory is that the discoloration is caused by photosynthesis, which would predict the presence of oxygen.
While you can explain the absence of oxygen by the resort to other theories, you are, in effect, substituting theories for evidence. At some point you have to come up with evidence, not theories.
For instance, before considering the theory that the surface of Mars absorbes oxygen at high enough rate, that theory should predict something as a test to see if it has any merit at all.
How ever one shores up a theory with more theories, at some point you have to come up with a prediction that matches some facts. The discussion should start there, at the prediction and the fact.
Today's space craft sent to other planets or other outer space bodies are our equivalent of the voyages of Zheng He.
Leaving aside the Cold War competition, space exploration has always been pure science, that is, science practiced for the sake of knowledge without any expectation of commericial application.
In so far as space exploration is pure science, it is not analogous to of the voyages of Zheng He. They appear to be some combination of promoting national glory and establishing trade routes. Pure science is a higher aspiration, perhaps the highest. Although I have nothing against national glory and trade routes, their motivations are pretty conventional compared to pure science.
Spending on pure science in general is therefore the measure of a society, not spending in one particular area like space exploration. Space exploration has to compete with other forms of pure science for funds. The question can legitimately be asked whether the discoveries in extraterrestrial geography are as important as, say, other forms of astronomy.
There is a case to be made that space exploration can wait until it is cheaper and safer. The money now invested in the space station should lead to cheaper space travel eventually. I think we can hold off on a trip to Mars until then without talking about degeneration and collapse.
Seems to me that if there is life on Mars; it's pretty sparce at best.
I am dubious about the line of reasoning that says that there is life on Mars but that there is so little that you can't detect it with the usual indicators of the existence of life.
If there is life, it almost certainly is a survivor of the period 3 billion years ago when there was free water and an atmosphere. It is unlikely that life would have evolved on Mars under the current conditions when it was unable to evolve in the earlier, more favorable conditions.
So if the current life on Mars has been there in some form for 3 billion years, it would have adapted to the hostile conditions and started to spread. The spread would be slow the way Arctic lichen's growth is slow but it has 3 billion years, which is a lot of time even for the slowest growing organism.
Therefore, the processes of evolution suggests that there would be a lot of life rather than a very little, given the 3 billion years, if there is any life at all.
One can of course imagine scenarios that would thwart the evolutionary tendencies of life to adapt and spread, but those same scenarios are more likely to exterminate life altogether.
What we need is evidence of life on Mars, not explanations for why we can't detect it. The most likely reason we can't detect it is because it isn't there.
Remember, we are looking for evidence of life here, not for explanations for why evidence is missing.
The existence of life implies an ecosystem which implies circulation of oxygen and carbon dioxide. If there is no oxygen, you could explain it by oxidation or you could explain it by the fact there is no life.
The scientists in this article see the discolorations as evidence of life because it occurs in conditions that could support life on earth. If the life we are talking about occurs in those conditions, we would expect that the rules are more similar than not.
If the rules are very different, then we should theorize what those rules are and look for evidence of life under those conditions. We would then not have to worry so much about conditions that make Mars inhospitable for life as we know it on Earth.
If there was photosynthesis there should be measurable amounts of oxygen. However, the fact is that the Martian atmosphere contains about 95.3% carbon dioxide and 2.7% nitrogen, with the remainder a mixture of trace gases.
Even if the life processes were quite different from those on earth, you would expect a different mix of gasses than this one.
As before, the discussion founders on variable definitions of what makes one language better than another and the fact the skill of the programmer is more important than the features of the language.
The usefulness of a programming language is partially determined by non-technical issues. From the corporate point of view, the issue is the availability of qualified programmers. From the programmer point of view, it's the demand for people with that programming skill. These two complimentary forces tend to concentrate skills in a narrow range.
Typically, what broadens the playing field is a killer app. Does List have such an application?
In some data management scenarios, using Zope obviates the need for XML markup. In practice, content management issues like security, revision control, and online access through a browser are bigger issues than markup. Zope provides solutions to all these problems.
My main caveat in using Zope is that finding all the relevant documentation for XML or anything else is a veritable Easter egg hunt. The Zope API doesn't seem to be documented in one place. More than once a Zope tutorial seriously proposed that the reader read the Python source code for further information.
The key point is that the best approach depends upon how the data will be accessed, used and updated. There does not appear to be an off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solution, even if you go to a commercial platform.
The advantage of XML is that you can start with a simple approach and migrate to a more complex approach without having to do an expensive data conversion.
The disadvantage is that XML can be quite expensive to set up on legacy documents and expensive to maintain as well. For documents that change frequently, have multiple uses, or require precise retrieval strategies, XML is the way to go. It's particularly useful when version control must be tracked at the paragraph level.
If version control takes place at the level of the whole document, retieval is done by keyword, and documents are displayed in one form only, XML may not add anything but trouble.
The author of the quote "Because it's there" was George Mallory, not Sir Edmund. Mallory died trying to climb Mt. Everest in 1924.
A complete statement of Mallory's view suggests that it does not really apply to writing software: "The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest ?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is no use'.
Software is primarily and above all, useful.
However, Mallory also says: What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.
Sometimes I think this view applies to writing software and sometimes I don't.
In so far as programming is an art it is the art of the tradeoff. As the old saying goes: You can have it fast, you can have it good, you can have it cheap. Pick one.
Among the issues that a programmer has to balance are:
features
reliability
maintainability
efficiency
development time
To a great extent, satisfying any one of these requirements means shirking the others. The resulting work is a compromise that will annoy and offend most of its constituents to some degree.
The art, therefore, is in the process, not the result. As such, programming resembles politics in that a deal must be worked out between conflicting interests.
A programmer can be artist but what he produces will rarely look like a work of art.
Because programming is an art, it's the creation of something from your own imagination, not like engineering which is simply applying rules. And once created, any large application behaves far more like a living organism than a machine, it grows, it evolves and (often) it gets ill.
The more something behaves like a living organism the less it looks like a work of art.
Art:
Judged by aethetic values not by function
Immutable
Detached from its environment
Programs:
Judged first by how well they function
Change frequently
Highly sensitive to environment
I would suggest that programs have very little resemblance to a work of art, except that they are both created by human intellect.
Programs have more of a resemblance to biological processes, given than they change but the differences are more striking than the similarities.
Biological processes:
are self-replicating
without food they deteriorate and die.
once they die they cannot be revived.
A program that accomplishes a specific industrial task does not need these features to get its job done.
I think you can exalt any work by doing it well on its own terms without comparing it to art, biology or anything else.
It would be interesting to know. The cost of support can be much larger than licensing fees. You would expect introducing a new network operating system to add to support cost.
These new costs might be more than offset by reduced support costs elsewhere plus the reduced costs in licensing fees and lower hardware costs. However, when properly itemized, these types of before-and-after savings often turn out to be so small in total that management could have spent its time better cutting costs elsewhere.
Besides, this NT system was created during good economic times. There might have been some cost savings to be had by scaling back on the size of the operation or consolidating servers on newer, more powerful platforms or outsourcing some of the big subsystems like accounting.
Cost cutting in IT is riddled with politics and deception so that it is not surprising that this case study has a happy ending. Cost-cutting yarns usually do.
There were a couple of striking fairy tale aspects to the story.
First there was the supreme rationality of the IT people and management as they considered their options. I would have expected those who had invested years in learning NT to put up a big fight to protect their turf. I would have expected management to issue some threats before IT considered some alternatives. I would also have expected some more transition problems. There should have been some retraining or hiring of new staff with Unix skills. There should have been some dissidents leaving in a huff.
I would have expected stories of conflicts between the Linux culture and the NT culture. I would have expected the NT people to be fighting a rear-guard action against Linux.
I would have expected the Linux supporters to be taking aim at Oracle on NT and the Oracle DBAs and developers getting snarky. I would have expected a story of how the Linux proponents had won the favor of upper management and were displacing NT people in senior positions.
Second, I would have expected some layoffs in IT as part of cost-cutting. In fact, if Linux did cut the administration efforts in a system of this size, there should have been some layoffs.
Finally, I would have expected someone to point out that if they wanted to save money, they could replace a whole whack of Intel boxes with Sun boxes.
The story ends with: Because they were willing to open their eyes to new ideas and challenge convention, they have been able to hang on where others have not. A true fairy tale would have said "And they lived happily ever after" but this statement is close enough.
Let us isolate some of his specific allegations and see if they are, on balance, true:
Linux skepticism is long overdue, but the missionary ideologues jump on your back and kick you in the balls. The kind of independent tech journalism needed to cover Linux doesn't exist.
If Oracle could run MS into the ground today, they would do it. Taking sides in such a battle is a core betrayal of everything journalism should stand for.
Consumer Reports has the right idea, but they are so stodgy that they are nearly useless to the average consumer.
Take Windows ME. What a piece of crash-daily crap. ME was a horrible OS. It barely worked...
Many dotmags were as ethically challenged as a Mexican policeman.
Now the San Jose Mercury News... is run by some of the most gutless people ever to call themselves journalists
The reality is that everyone had their heads up their asses because they thought they were going to be rich.
Hell, there would be no Microsoft without the feds investing trillions in technology.
Do these statements sound like neutral and detached coverage that he extolls? Given the hyperbole, are his conclusions likely to be sound?
His point seems to be: The one lesson that all these online rags never got is that if you are a pimp today, when things get shitty, people will turn on you.
What perhaps he should explain is why the market place sometimes punishes the publications he calls unreliable and sometimes it doesn't.
And I can't let this overwrought assertion pass: Journalism is a noble profession when done right. And people get killed doing it every year.
Nobody gets killed writing about technology either truthfully and not. The worst that happens is that they get their backs jumped on or kicked in the balls by Linux zealots, who are a notoriously mean and ornery bunch.
The U.S. Attorney's press release, to which West's lawyers are replying, says:
The question under investigation is whether valuable intellectual property has been improperly converted.
Which is much more than bumping into things that are not supposed to be there.
If West were innocent, one would expect his attorneys to present some evidence to contradict the allegation or at least deny it.
Instead West's lawyers say: it appears that Microsoft's software may have caused this unfortunate situation to occur.
One implication is that West's lawyers are conceeding that something wrong did occur but the blame should be shared by Microsoft, which, they say, is "a possible co-defendant or party to the case."
Naming one's accomplice is hardly a defense.
The lawyers further claim that West's acts weren't illegal because they occurred 9 months before DMCA was passed. Once again, this statement implies that the alleged events occurred. The U.S. Attorney's press release doesn't mention the DMCA.
Finally, the U.S. Attorney's press release says: A suspect's intent, the amount of loss occasioned by the behavior, and the
context of the alleged offense are among many factors that are within the scope of the investigation and weighed in such prosecutorial decisions.
None of West's lawyers statements address these issues directly even though the U.S. Attorney is outlining a straightforward and conventional line of defense for them.
By replying to the U.S. Attorney's press release but ignoring the substantive issues contained in the press release raises suspicions rather than allays them.
West's lawyers state: If this case goes to trial, the Microsoft personnel who developed these programs will likely be subpoenaed as witnesses by Mr. West's defense team. Or if it is found that this software contributed to, participated in or caused the events under investigation to occur, Microsoft could be indicted under the same statute.
That should rack up some billable hours for West's defense team.
Trying to distract from the facts of the case by raising the issue of Microsoft's complicity suggests that the West may not have such a strong case. It's as if an accused murder based his defense on the fact that handguns are dangerous and called a handgun manufacturer as his star witness.
Software doesn't break the law. People break the law.
progress may not be easy or clean, but it's better than stagnation.
Here we have a classic example of the False Dilemma Fallacy. You've arbitrarily limited the range of choices to two with one of them clearly unacceptable.
There's nothing about the theory of progress that requires:
child labour
environmental pollution
graft and corruption
unsafe working conditions
These are all characteristics of callousness and greed, which are constants in human affairs and exist during progress, stagnation and decline.
Industrialization certainly disrupted the existing social order. It thereby provided some new opportunities for callousness and greed to assert themselves that weren't regulated by existing social conventions.
Progress can continue, even accelerate, while regulation protects the health and safety of the population. No one suggests that the airline industry has been hampered by the stingent safety requirements imposed by regulators.
A better argument is that progress is actually advanced when the government acts to limit the resulting dislocation. Apologists for the historical cruelty and destruction of industrialization seem to have only a partial understanding of the way the engine of progress works.
Slashdot Mirror
And do you argue that those things havent happened?
They happened but the question is whether they are poor foreign policy. Clearly the writer thinks they are but he thinks it is sufficient simply to describe the policy for everyone to recognize that the policies are poor. Not everyone agrees the policies are poor. U.S. foreign policy is widely admired in Europe, for instance, where the demand to be admitted to NATO is high. In fact, an alliance with the U.S. is the most desired alliance in the world. Nobody wants to be allied with Russia or China, for instance.
most people in america are blissfully ignorant about foreign policies here.
If the terrorists are trying to get Americans to think about their foreign policy, their tactics have had exactly the opposite effect. If there is any discussion, it not about the justice of American foreign policy but about the justice of the tactics of the terrorists.
The only foreign policy Americans want to hear about is reprisal. European countries have endorsed reprisals. Sympathy for the terrorists' cause, whatever it is, is at an all-time low among countries that might influence U.S. foreign policy.
The terrorists have increased the number of enemies they have in the world, not decreased it.
One can see this writer's prejudice in his summary of current events:
Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
Even allowing for some rhetorical overstatement, this description outrageously distorts every U.S. action. He is building a case that the U.S., supported by Britain, is to blame for all the evil in the world.
His belief that the U.S. has infinite power to make things right or wrong is revealed in his conclusion: But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed
The U.S., for all its power, cannot correct all the injustices and inequalities in world. It cannot even correct all the injustices and inequalities within its own borders. If terrorists are attacking the U.S. because they believe it can, they are simply wrong.
If you love New York, your heart will break when the smoke clears. Something about the city is busted for good, no matter what the mayor says.
One has only to think of London under the blitz or the San Francisco earthquake to know that great cities can recover from great disasters.
According to seminal urbanologist Jane Jacobs, cities are inherently resilient to catastrophe. More damage is done by misguided urban planning.
The World Trade Center, as its name suggests, serves a national and international market. The demand for the products and services that the companies in the World Trade Tower provided is still there. Compared to the damage caused by hurricanes in Florida, the cost to rebuild is manageable.
If New York could thrive despite a crime rate that killed many more people than the terrorist over the last 10 years, it can survive this single event.
I suspect that the most lasting effect is that architects will reconsider the need for 110 storey buildings.
Are you really suggesting that the poor packaging of good ideas is a good thing..."
Truth needs no adornment.
As for educational materials, compare computer advertising with computer manuals. I rest my case.
He says: I believe that a school teacher today is so outgunned in this world of competition for ideas. Think about a school teacher with a piece of chalk and a blackboard competing with the minds of children inundated with commercials that have million dollar production values... The immature mind I don't believe can distinguish from good ideas that are poorly produced and bad ideas that are well produced. And so I feel like we need to get media systems into the educational process and to fail to do so is to fail.
Wrong for two reasons:
1. His solution perpetrates the very evil that it seeks to combat. Students need to be able to distinguish bad ideas from good ideas. Meerly packaging good ideas in the same manner as bad ideas further blurs the distinction. You would almost be better off presenting good ideas in an a delibertely understated manner to distinguish them from fatuous nonsense.
2. Education can never hope to compete in glitz with advertising. Educational materials will always look shoddy compared to advertising.
One should keep a clear distinction between games and education. Games are supposed to be fun, pure and simple. They can only incorporate education to the extent that education is fun.
Education, however, is often frustrating and ultimately hard. Where interactive multimedia can make it easier, it has a role. But at some point, it's just your brain and an idea with no intervening media whatsoever. That point is where education begins and the sooner you get to that point, the better.
since we do find this evidence for life, we need some sort of explanation for why we see this sign but not that sign of life
We're probably basically in agreement. However, we need more than an explanation.
It is not sufficient for a theory to account for a set of fact. If it were, you could never decide between competing theories. Generally theories should predict something that is verifiable.
In this case, the theory is that the discoloration is caused by photosynthesis, which would predict the presence of oxygen.
While you can explain the absence of oxygen by the resort to other theories, you are, in effect, substituting theories for evidence. At some point you have to come up with evidence, not theories.
For instance, before considering the theory that the surface of Mars absorbes oxygen at high enough rate, that theory should predict something as a test to see if it has any merit at all.
How ever one shores up a theory with more theories, at some point you have to come up with a prediction that matches some facts. The discussion should start there, at the prediction and the fact.
Today's space craft sent to other planets or other outer space bodies are our equivalent of the voyages of Zheng He.
Leaving aside the Cold War competition, space exploration has always been pure science, that is, science practiced for the sake of knowledge without any expectation of commericial application.
In so far as space exploration is pure science, it is not analogous to of the voyages of Zheng He. They appear to be some combination of promoting national glory and establishing trade routes. Pure science is a higher aspiration, perhaps the highest. Although I have nothing against national glory and trade routes, their motivations are pretty conventional compared to pure science.
Spending on pure science in general is therefore the measure of a society, not spending in one particular area like space exploration. Space exploration has to compete with other forms of pure science for funds. The question can legitimately be asked whether the discoveries in extraterrestrial geography are as important as, say, other forms of astronomy.
There is a case to be made that space exploration can wait until it is cheaper and safer. The money now invested in the space station should lead to cheaper space travel eventually. I think we can hold off on a trip to Mars until then without talking about degeneration and collapse.
Seems to me that if there is life on Mars; it's pretty sparce at best.
I am dubious about the line of reasoning that says that there is life on Mars but that there is so little that you can't detect it with the usual indicators of the existence of life.
If there is life, it almost certainly is a survivor of the period 3 billion years ago when there was free water and an atmosphere. It is unlikely that life would have evolved on Mars under the current conditions when it was unable to evolve in the earlier, more favorable conditions.
So if the current life on Mars has been there in some form for 3 billion years, it would have adapted to the hostile conditions and started to spread. The spread would be slow the way Arctic lichen's growth is slow but it has 3 billion years, which is a lot of time even for the slowest growing organism.
Therefore, the processes of evolution suggests that there would be a lot of life rather than a very little, given the 3 billion years, if there is any life at all.
One can of course imagine scenarios that would thwart the evolutionary tendencies of life to adapt and spread, but those same scenarios are more likely to exterminate life altogether.
What we need is evidence of life on Mars, not explanations for why we can't detect it. The most likely reason we can't detect it is because it isn't there.
Perhaps they process some kind of material with sunlight and produce carbon dioxide?
And the carbon would come from where?
In other words, the rules there are different.
Remember, we are looking for evidence of life here, not for explanations for why evidence is missing.
The existence of life implies an ecosystem which implies circulation of oxygen and carbon dioxide. If there is no oxygen, you could explain it by oxidation or you could explain it by the fact there is no life.
The scientists in this article see the discolorations as evidence of life because it occurs in conditions that could support life on earth. If the life we are talking about occurs in those conditions, we would expect that the rules are more similar than not.
If the rules are very different, then we should theorize what those rules are and look for evidence of life under those conditions. We would then not have to worry so much about conditions that make Mars inhospitable for life as we know it on Earth.
If there was photosynthesis there should be measurable amounts of oxygen. However, the fact is that the Martian atmosphere contains about 95.3% carbon dioxide and 2.7% nitrogen, with the remainder a mixture of trace gases.
Even if the life processes were quite different from those on earth, you would expect a different mix of gasses than this one.
It seems Slashdot hosted an almost identical discusion back in May.
As before, the discussion founders on variable definitions of what makes one language better than another and the fact the skill of the programmer is more important than the features of the language.
The usefulness of a programming language is partially determined by non-technical issues. From the corporate point of view, the issue is the availability of qualified programmers. From the programmer point of view, it's the demand for people with that programming skill. These two complimentary forces tend to concentrate skills in a narrow range.
Typically, what broadens the playing field is a killer app. Does List have such an application?
Three relevant links to read in considering Zope for XML are:
Creating XML Applications With Zope
Create a XML Based Document Repository
Cant Handle Humongous XML
In some data management scenarios, using Zope obviates the need for XML markup. In practice, content management issues like security, revision control, and online access through a browser are bigger issues than markup. Zope provides solutions to all these problems.
My main caveat in using Zope is that finding all the relevant documentation for XML or anything else is a veritable Easter egg hunt. The Zope API doesn't seem to be documented in one place. More than once a Zope tutorial seriously proposed that the reader read the Python source code for further information.
A good place to start is Open Source XML Database Toolkit by Liam Quin.
The key point is that the best approach depends upon how the data will be accessed, used and updated. There does not appear to be an off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all solution, even if you go to a commercial platform.
The advantage of XML is that you can start with a simple approach and migrate to a more complex approach without having to do an expensive data conversion.
The disadvantage is that XML can be quite expensive to set up on legacy documents and expensive to maintain as well. For documents that change frequently, have multiple uses, or require precise retrieval strategies, XML is the way to go. It's particularly useful when version control must be tracked at the paragraph level.
If version control takes place at the level of the whole document, retieval is done by keyword, and documents are displayed in one form only, XML may not add anything but trouble.
The author of the quote "Because it's there" was George Mallory, not Sir Edmund. Mallory died trying to climb Mt. Everest in 1924.
A complete statement of Mallory's view suggests that it does not really apply to writing software: "The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest ?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is no use'.
Software is primarily and above all, useful.
However, Mallory also says: What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.
Sometimes I think this view applies to writing software and sometimes I don't.
A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
--Paul Erdös. He died of a heart attack at 83.
In so far as programming is an art it is the art of the tradeoff. As the old saying goes: You can have it fast, you can have it good, you can have it cheap. Pick one.
Among the issues that a programmer has to balance are:
features
reliability
maintainability
efficiency
development time
To a great extent, satisfying any one of these requirements means shirking the others. The resulting work is a compromise that will annoy and offend most of its constituents to some degree.
The art, therefore, is in the process, not the result. As such, programming resembles politics in that a deal must be worked out between conflicting interests.
A programmer can be artist but what he produces will rarely look like a work of art.
Because programming is an art, it's the creation of something from your own imagination, not like engineering which is simply applying rules. And once created, any large application behaves far more like a living organism than a machine, it grows, it evolves and (often) it gets ill.
The more something behaves like a living organism the less it looks like a work of art.
Art:
Judged by aethetic values not by function
Immutable
Detached from its environment
Programs:
Judged first by how well they function
Change frequently
Highly sensitive to environment
I would suggest that programs have very little resemblance to a work of art, except that they are both created by human intellect.
Programs have more of a resemblance to biological processes, given than they change but the differences are more striking than the similarities.
Biological processes:
are self-replicating
without food they deteriorate and die.
once they die they cannot be revived.
A program that accomplishes a specific industrial task does not need these features to get its job done.
I think you can exalt any work by doing it well on its own terms without comparing it to art, biology or anything else.
Calling Brian K West guilty is like saying a guy who sits on a whoopie cushion lacks manners.
You're doing a better job of defending him than his lawyers.
It would be interesting to know. The cost of support can be much larger than licensing fees. You would expect introducing a new network operating system to add to support cost.
These new costs might be more than offset by reduced support costs elsewhere plus the reduced costs in licensing fees and lower hardware costs. However, when properly itemized, these types of before-and-after savings often turn out to be so small in total that management could have spent its time better cutting costs elsewhere.
Besides, this NT system was created during good economic times. There might have been some cost savings to be had by scaling back on the size of the operation or consolidating servers on newer, more powerful platforms or outsourcing some of the big subsystems like accounting.
Cost cutting in IT is riddled with politics and deception so that it is not surprising that this case study has a happy ending. Cost-cutting yarns usually do.
There were a couple of striking fairy tale aspects to the story.
First there was the supreme rationality of the IT people and management as they considered their options. I would have expected those who had invested years in learning NT to put up a big fight to protect their turf. I would have expected management to issue some threats before IT considered some alternatives. I would also have expected some more transition problems. There should have been some retraining or hiring of new staff with Unix skills. There should have been some dissidents leaving in a huff.
I would have expected stories of conflicts between the Linux culture and the NT culture. I would have expected the NT people to be fighting a rear-guard action against Linux.
I would have expected the Linux supporters to be taking aim at Oracle on NT and the Oracle DBAs and developers getting snarky. I would have expected a story of how the Linux proponents had won the favor of upper management and were displacing NT people in senior positions.
Second, I would have expected some layoffs in IT as part of cost-cutting. In fact, if Linux did cut the administration efforts in a system of this size, there should have been some layoffs.
Finally, I would have expected someone to point out that if they wanted to save money, they could replace a whole whack of Intel boxes with Sun boxes.
The story ends with: Because they were willing to open their eyes to new ideas and challenge convention, they have been able to hang on where others have not. A true fairy tale would have said "And they lived happily ever after" but this statement is close enough.
Let us isolate some of his specific allegations and see if they are, on balance, true:
Linux skepticism is long overdue, but the missionary ideologues jump on your back and kick you in the balls. The kind of independent tech journalism needed to cover Linux doesn't exist.
If Oracle could run MS into the ground today, they would do it. Taking sides in such a battle is a core betrayal of everything journalism should stand for.
Consumer Reports has the right idea, but they are so stodgy that they are nearly useless to the average consumer.
Take Windows ME. What a piece of crash-daily crap. ME was a horrible OS. It barely worked...
Many dotmags were as ethically challenged as a Mexican policeman.
Now the San Jose Mercury News ... is run by some of the most gutless people ever to call themselves journalists
The reality is that everyone had their heads up their asses because they thought they were going to be rich.
Hell, there would be no Microsoft without the feds investing trillions in technology.
Do these statements sound like neutral and detached coverage that he extolls? Given the hyperbole, are his conclusions likely to be sound?
His point seems to be: The one lesson that all these online rags never got is that if you are a pimp today, when things get shitty, people will turn on you.
What perhaps he should explain is why the market place sometimes punishes the publications he calls unreliable and sometimes it doesn't.
And I can't let this overwrought assertion pass: Journalism is a noble profession when done right. And people get killed doing it every year.
Nobody gets killed writing about technology either truthfully and not. The worst that happens is that they get their backs jumped on or kicked in the balls by Linux zealots, who are a notoriously mean and ornery bunch.
The U.S. Attorney's press release, to which West's lawyers are replying, says: The question under investigation is whether valuable intellectual property has been improperly converted.
Which is much more than bumping into things that are not supposed to be there.
If West were innocent, one would expect his attorneys to present some evidence to contradict the allegation or at least deny it. Instead West's lawyers say: it appears that Microsoft's software may have caused this unfortunate situation to occur.
One implication is that West's lawyers are conceeding that something wrong did occur but the blame should be shared by Microsoft, which, they say, is "a possible co-defendant or party to the case."
Naming one's accomplice is hardly a defense.
The lawyers further claim that West's acts weren't illegal because they occurred 9 months before DMCA was passed. Once again, this statement implies that the alleged events occurred. The U.S. Attorney's press release doesn't mention the DMCA.
Finally, the U.S. Attorney's press release says: A suspect's intent, the amount of loss occasioned by the behavior, and the context of the alleged offense are among many factors that are within the scope of the investigation and weighed in such prosecutorial decisions.
None of West's lawyers statements address these issues directly even though the U.S. Attorney is outlining a straightforward and conventional line of defense for them.
By replying to the U.S. Attorney's press release but ignoring the substantive issues contained in the press release raises suspicions rather than allays them.
West's lawyers state: If this case goes to trial, the Microsoft personnel who developed these programs will likely be subpoenaed as witnesses by Mr. West's defense team. Or if it is found that this software contributed to, participated in or caused the events under investigation to occur, Microsoft could be indicted under the same statute.
That should rack up some billable hours for West's defense team.
Trying to distract from the facts of the case by raising the issue of Microsoft's complicity suggests that the West may not have such a strong case. It's as if an accused murder based his defense on the fact that handguns are dangerous and called a handgun manufacturer as his star witness.
Software doesn't break the law. People break the law.
progress may not be easy or clean, but it's better than stagnation.
Here we have a classic example of the False Dilemma Fallacy. You've arbitrarily limited the range of choices to two with one of them clearly unacceptable.
There's nothing about the theory of progress that requires:
child labour
environmental pollution
graft and corruption
unsafe working conditions
These are all characteristics of callousness and greed, which are constants in human affairs and exist during progress, stagnation and decline.
Industrialization certainly disrupted the existing social order. It thereby provided some new opportunities for callousness and greed to assert themselves that weren't regulated by existing social conventions.
Progress can continue, even accelerate, while regulation protects the health and safety of the population. No one suggests that the airline industry has been hampered by the stingent safety requirements imposed by regulators.
A better argument is that progress is actually advanced when the government acts to limit the resulting dislocation. Apologists for the historical cruelty and destruction of industrialization seem to have only a partial understanding of the way the engine of progress works.