Lawyers, Guns, and Money

[Bill Stewart]

At 02:54 PM 08/22/2001 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:


>(and why does a *database* have XML-conversion functions??)

XML's a decent match with tuples, and providing an easily
standardized and malleable data interchange format is not only
an easy thing to bolt on but a potentially big win for usability,
as well as providing the lastest buzzword compliance.
Of course, just because you *can* use it to make things cleaner
instead of uglier and more complex doesn't mean you have to.

>I see a lot of engineering effort wasted on silly fads. Good
>people spending days and sometimes weeks reinventing wheels
>that represent problems that were solved decades ago, just
>because the solutions developed then, despite being proven
>and correct, are presently out of style. It's a waste of
>resources and it pisses me off.

Lots of the recent user interface trends are a waste of, umm, skins.
A certain 3.5-letter-acronym company or its suppliers recently
put lots of effort into enhancing its secure VPN dialer product,
and I *wish* they'd focused on testing the Mac product instead of
doing customizable look&feel for the Windoze versions...