Re: what does "serialization" mean?

From: Corey Murtagh (emonk_at_slingshot.no.uce)
Date: 07/05/04 

Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2004 21:36:28 +1200

Edward G. Nilges wrote:

> Corey Murtagh <emonk@slingshot.no.uce> wrote in message news:<1088977185.694628@radsrv1.tranzpeer.net>...
<snip>
>>In other words you made your normal assumption that anything you don't
>>already know about a topic isn't worth knowing. The sheer arrogance of
>>that would have stunned me speechless coming from any other poster. For
>>you however it's the norm.
>
> No, I considered instead that Mr. Howard is not a trustworth source,
> or, even if he is, I have an ethical repugnance to using his link. I
> prefer my own searches, that of trusted and ethical people, the New
> York Times, and books because the ease at which unethical people
> fabricate information on the Web.

Randy provided, in commonly accepted fashion, the information you
apparently lacked. That you were unable to bring yourself to read that
information is your own problem, not his, not mine.

You could learn from his example, by the way. It is far more acceptable
to link to a source, or sources, rather than make pompous presentations
that few people have the stomach to read.

>>>Furthermore, I did not request you use a new insulting label. I
>>>pointed out that the tribal label is akin to racism. Here, you back up
>>>to that form of one on one bullying that racists and sexist use for
>>>target practice. I again ask that you desist and conform to
>>>long-established Internet courtesy norms.
>>
>>Norms of courtesy which you consistently ignore, except when you think
>>you can use them to your own benefits. You've demonstrated time and
>>time again that you care not one whit for courtesy in your own missives.
>> As a result you forsake any right to demand that others use it in
>>their correspondence with you.
>
> You have considered each discourtesy event outside of a moral grammar.
> For example, recently, I posted a long, sourced and I think thoughtful
> article in this ng about the FBI's Virtual Case File. To which a
> poster replied "shut up".

Considering your history, I was completely unsurprised. Your post was
in no way on topic - it did not discuss programming, it was merely
another of your long-winded political/philosophical rants. I applaud
the brevity of the anonymous John Smith... after all, it seems to be the
first thought in the minds of most people when your drivel arrives.

> I posted a long, thoughtful reply, but at the end, and in summary, I
> said "shut me up, punk".
>
> Here's the "formal grammar":
>
> shut up => shut me up, punk

Yeah, I can see how that makes you real grown up and civil.

[Since you seem to be immune to it, I should point out that the above is
sarcasm. Just so you understand, it should be interpreted as meaning:
"The above shows that you are immature and ill-mannered."]

> I find that for many attention disordered readers a crisp summary is
> required and you have failed, I think, to consider that ALL of my
> discourtesy is in response to thuggishness which has rendered this ng
> useless, with malice aforethought, for its intended purpose.

You are wrong, as usual.

I draw your attention to the very beginning of your interaction with
Richard Heathfield. When you originally posted flawed code, Richard
quite nicely pointed out the flaws in it. You responded by attacking
Richard, and anyone else who agreed with him.

He remained civil far past the point when others would have been frying
you in your own fat. Your subsequent attempts to besmirch him,
assassinate his character and manipulate reality have never managed to
change the fact that /you/ started that flamefest, not Richard.

Once again, why should I let your lies stand?

>><snip>
>>
>>>>As already explained, it wasn't my invention. I wish it were, Nilgewater
>>>>is by far the best description of any single individuals discourse I
>>>>have ever heard.
>>>
>>>Here you return to a practise that I have said approaches racism.
>>
>>Here's another example of your reliance on trite personal
>>interpretations. The term 'nilgewater' is a /personal/ insult, not a
>>racist one. Had your name been of 'traditional' anglo-saxon descent I'm
>>absolutely certain another term would have been found. It just so
>>happens that your surname lends itself so well to such an apt parody.
>
> I think it goes deeper than this. There is, I have concluded, a
> mainstream empiricism in applied computer science in which theory in
> excess of the scientific method is suspect whence the charge I am
> prolix. But if my Roman Catholic tradition, which if you go far back
> enough is alien to the US, taught me anything it is that mere
> empiricism is content free.

Ah, a correct usage of a pretentious word for once. Just for those who
aren't familiar with it, a definition of prolix:

"Indulging in protracted discourse; tedious; wearisome."

Additionally:

"A prolix writer delights in circumlocution, extended detail, and
trifling particulars. A diffuse writer is fond of amplifying, and
abounds in epithets, figures, and illustrations. Diffuseness often
arises from an exuberance of imagination; prolixity is generally
connected with a want of it."

You are prolix indeed, in the extreme.

> I thus regard some of the critique as nativism which refuses to
> entertain the very idea that we should do anything other than push
> bits and it is from this view that I think that the vile personal
> abuse has a broader context.
>
> You are free to regard it as so much "Nilgewater". However, I would
> have thought that "free" discussion would be encouraged without
> creating an atmosphere of racist criticism. I am not so naive not to
> recall that since I started reading Usenet posts in 1969 that women
> and people of color are regularly abused in Usenet but there is no
> appeal, I think, to its original norms of tolerant by people who are,
> like Randy Howard, intolerant.

Randy doesn't suffer fools lightly, and there's no good reason I can see
why he should.

Why should we let you get away with posturing and lies? Why should we
stand idly by while you defame, besmirch and attack as you please? Why
in fact should we just shut up and let you go on being an arrogant,
overbearing, pretentious windbag?

I'm sorry, but Arthur's request is not reason enough. He may have been
trying to restore some peace to this battleground, but until and unless
you agree to maintain that peace, the battle continues.

<snip>
>>>Arthur didn't call for "censorship". He called instead for people like
>>>you to exercise a self-discipline which we now know you do not have.
>>>He explicitly exempted me from the call for as he correctly saw, I do
>>>not initiate these exchanges: I only respond with vigor.
>>
>>I think it's far more likely that Arthur didn't bother to ask you to
>>quit because he's well aware that you would not, and in fact that you'd
>>meet such a request with your standard hostile monologue about whatever
>>bit of philosophy and political nonsense you thought applied.
>
> Perhaps. But that's not what he said.

Nor did he say that you "do not initiate these exchanges", nor support
you in any fashion. Unless he chooses to respond to this thread (which
seems unlikely), I doubt we will ever know for certain /what/ he was
thinking. Unlike you I won't make any claims about his motivation. I
only present what appears to me to be a reasonable interpretation, but I
present it as a /guess/, where you claim your 'guesses' - which are
terribly innacurate - as fact.

This is not reasonable behavior. The fact that you give every
appearance of believing that it /is/ reasonable behavior is yet more
indication that you are not a civilised entity.

>>That's just a guess. Unlike you I don't pretend to have complete
>>knowledge of the minds and motives of everyone else in the world.
>
> He did say that he had observed that I desist when the bullying
> desists, in so many words. As I do.

All the while, I suspect, patting yourself on the back for sending yet
another peon packing.

I won't be bullied into going away, eddie. I /won't/ stand by and watch
you peddle your lies and insults.

>>>>>but after taking a sabbatical you returned
>>>>
>>>>I did not take a sabbatical. Why is that so hard for you to comprehend?
>>>
>>>OK, your wife made you clean the garage, and get rid of those back
>>>numbers of Bow Hunting with Ted Nugent, as well as those carcases of
>>>small animals you have tortured to death. You returned and immediately
>>>made up for lost time in the manner of the addict.
>>
>>More utter fabrications. Randy stated that he was offline because of
>>lightning damage to his equipment. Your repeated insults are peurile
>>and merely serve to demonstrate how little regard you have for the
>>courtesy you demand from others.
>
> Didn't see that. So he's pissed off Zeus? Still, an addictive pattern
> is indicated, and Randy said at another location that he'd acceded to
> Arthur's request. Which are we to believe?

For all I know, Randy just couldn't stomach your bull*** any more than
I can.

>>How the hell do you justify this eddie? You /demand/ courtesy and
>>respect, then sink to the gutter and spew mindless insults and character
>>slurs, in the same breath. You are a stain on the moral fabric of the
>>entire /species/.
>
> Splutter, splut.
>
> No, I simply respond to insult and abuse like a man and not a boy. Too
> many techie men have been in fact socialized by the employment
> relation to fail to accomplish the grown-up task of responding to what
> is in fact abuse.

Ah, so when you abuse, debase, denigrate and outright lie about others,
you expect them to stand meekly by and take it? But if someone so much
as /doubts/ your veracity, you respond with a flamefest. Do you
honestly believe that you alone have the right of response?

I ask again, since you failed to respond: how the hell do you justify this?

<snip>
>>>I am not, of course, posting as a professional psychologist. I am
>>>instead making a layperson's intervention in the interest of people in
>>>your community.
>>
>>No, you are making up lies and trying to pass them off as fact. This
>>applies to so much of your content that even a cursory scan of your
>>posts will show this to anyone who is interested.
>>
>>And as long as you continue to present lies as facts, we will continue
>>to refute those lies.
>
> In this kind of intervention, all I really have to go on is the
> phenomena I experience and the phenomena I experience is that I cannot
> post initial ideas, trial balloons for the most part, without seeing
> Randy Howard in the response set. When I open the post I find global
> challenges to my professionalism and credibility which are actionable
> in a court of law.

This is a claim you've made repeatedly over a number of months. You've
been invited by several people to test your claim in court.

Put up or shut up.

> When people are subject for a long period of time to this kind of
> abuse at home or on the job, they don't have to be a professional
> psychologist to sit down with the problem person and say "this is how
> it affects me" and ask the person to change. That is what I have done.

No, it is not. You've attacked, besmirched and belittled anyone who
disagrees with you. I have yet to see you /once/ attempt to resolve the
problems you've experienced here in a reasonable, /civilised/ fashion.

> And note that this response is nuanced and has only been made to Mr.
> Howard's behavior.

> Richard Heathfield until March of this year repeatedly harassed me in
> a different way. He repeatedly and in a far less passionate fashion,
> from December 2000, posted flames most of which declared my initiated
> topics to be off-topic.

Which, of course, they were. I supported Richard in his attempts to
convince you of this fact. You, of course, responded by initiating your
standard flame-fest, accusing Richard of being a puppet of some shadowy
government or commercial agency, and of playing puppet-master over the
other people who opposed you at that time. You stated these paranoid
fantasies as fact time and time again, and earned yourself a permanent
place in many killfiles as a result.

I don't killfile.

> Heathfield did make several global and actionable claims about my
> competence. But they were always phrased in a nonemotional tone. In
> fact, I claimed on this basis, and continue to claim, that given this
> tone and the repetitive nature of Heathfield's behavior to March of
> this year, that I believed he was working for a corporate or
> government agency as a planted stooge whose mission was to silence any
> technical discussion with a political aspect.

See what I mean? Your paranoid delusions are showing.

> Chris Sonnack has also replied with actionable libel but in a more
> varying fashion and when both Heathfield and Howard "leave the room",
> Chris's behavior improves.

Chris Sonnack, aka Programmer Dude, has often engaged you in flamefests
without any sight of Richard or Randy. Your assertion that he is merely
a pawn of either one of those two is both blatantly false and incredibly
insulting... as you are well aware.

Your continued libel of Richard, Randy, Chris and many others is yet
more proof - unnecessary as it is - of your complete disregard for
common courtesy, ethics, morality and indeed law. You prattle on and
on, demanding respect, courtesy, etc. You threaten. You lie and you
insult. You present your sad little delusions and flights of fantasy as
fact. You fail consistently and, apparently, /intentionally/ to adhere
to a very simple topicality.

All this is not symptomatic of a sane and healthy mind. It comes across
as the ravings of a monomaniac /madman/.

> I have in fine a nuanced and informed view of this behavior and I
> don't blow smoke out my ass when in response to Howard's behavior my
> response, to Howard, is "get help".

You're projecting, eddie. Your own personality flaws need to be
addressed before you even /think/ about recommending treatment to others.

You may have noticed that I often tell you to up the dosage. I'm not a
psychiatrist, and have no desire to be one. Your behavior is so far
outside the accepted norms however that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend
that you seek a professional assessment.

In short, you're a kook. It's probably treatable.

<snip>
>>>Same *** different day. I'm not deluded as you are deluded by Linux
>>>because I am talking about greedy and selfish human behavior which you
>>>may be sure is independent of technology.
>>
>>Or they can invest the same amount of money in Microsoft Windows and
>>various software licenses for each machine and pay someone with a MS
>>qualification to look after those installations. Oh, and did we mention
>
> Damn straight and why the hell not? Entire businesses such as Wal
> Mart, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and countless others did not exist
> prior to the availability of powerful servers powered mostly by
> Microsoft software, and not incompatible versions of Linux.

Strangely, a large number of businesses are turning to Linux to provide
the stability and maintainability they require in their servers.

But apparently you wouldn't know a fact if it turned around and bit you
in your the arse. Just so you know, your opinions and conjectures are
/not/ facts, no matter how often you present them as such.

> These companies have made millions for their owners and shareholders
> while destroying small businesses nationwide and world-wide.

Oh, how nice for them. And of course, Microsoft helped them do that,
right? Couldn't have been done any other way, right? After all,
without Microsoft they'd never exist... right?

Wrong, on all counts.

> Therefore I conclude that it is quite fair for them to pay someone
> money. Inversely, I refuse to "go to bat" for any putative right on
> their part to always and everywhere get free rides.

Oh, so now you're saying that Microsoft /isn't/ less expensive than Linux?

> The false promise of Linux is that there will be a dramatic savings in
> hard dollars and that Linux will give these companies a competitive
> edge. What it will do is the same job MS software does, perhaps in
> some ways better, but precisely because it's "open", in other ways
> worse.

And yet the capital outlay and continuing costs of maintaining a
Microsoft system is still greater than the equivalent Linux system. You
claimed otherwise, and have failed - as predicted - to prove it. You've
conjectured, waffled and used the rest of your standard bag of tricks to
try to obfuscate that point.

Well, it ain't working. You're once again revealed as the fraud you are.

>>purchasing upgrades? And the costs of viral infection? Oh, and don't
>>forget the cost of lost time and output when the OS dies, or one of MS's
>>apps has a brainfart and fails.
>>
>>Linux is no more expensive to use than Windows. For a lot of cases it's
>>much cheaper. Feel free to present verifiabl /facts/ to refute that
>>claim... if you're capable.
>
> I already have. The hidden cost is primarily the openness of the
> source which MEANS that every installation of Linux, in years to come,
> may be unique (in the same way IBM's Conversational Monitor System, 20
> years ago available in source form and customer modifiable in source
> form, was unique). It is also (and unlike IBM CMS) the fact that at
> any time, the company's title to Linux can be challenged by a third
> party in court.

Challenged, right. And what's come of that so far other than a few
cautious companies paying for licences just in case? Nothing. Flat
zero. The Linux community has stuck out its collective tongue and
continued.

> Furthermore, I am unimpressed by the technical quality of Linux as a
> user. I am WAY unimpressed by the cute *** that I see streaming by in
> messages which is nothing more than unix. I don't think regular
> expressions are a great way to parse information in a documented
> fashion, and I don't think C should be used to create software for
> grown-ups.

Regardless of /your/ personal opinion of C - a language, I might add,
which you have time and again shown little actual ability with - the
fact remains that it /is/ used, and will continue to /be/ used for the
forseable future.

Get over it.

While you're at it, get over yourself.

> Furthermore, the "culture" of Linux is ingroup, exclusionary, and
> indisciplined in its response to real problems. Microsoft may deliver
> software with bugs as did IBM in the mainframe era because nobody has
> yet found a way NOT to deliver large software systems, in a timely
> fashion. But because at Microsoft people show up for work in a
> disciplined fashion, Microsoft also responds to bug reports in a
> disciplined fashion.

Linux people hate Microsoft. Microsoft hates Linux. Big deal. Doesn't
change the fact that you were /dead wrong/ about Linux being more
expensive than equivalent Microsoft installations.

> How has the Linux community responded to the most serious "bug" in
> Linux, which is that its code may have been stolen from Bell Labs and
> Lucent, a legal showstopper?

See above. Feel free to make up more lies and present them as facts, if
you like, but the /fact/ is that Linux is still here. It's not going
away, it's not being stopped, it's not even slowing down. The legal
wrangles are, in fact, having very little effect.

> It has responded with a lot of New Age BS as if coders had some
> "right" to be oh so very "free" when the people who pick up their
> trash don't have that freedom.

On the contrary, they have ignored the apparently spurious claims made
by a company which is quite obviously manipulating stocks and trying to
steal a quick buck in litigation.

That's the outsiders view from where I stand anyway. Sure, a lot of
Linux users are posturing and grandstanding, but the bottom line is that
Linux has gone on with barely a hitch.

Keep going, eddie. You're fighting a losing battle, but you're amusing
enough for the moment. You're nothing more than that, so far as I can tell.

Blow wind, blow. 

-- 
Corey Murtagh
The Electric Monk
"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur!"