Corrupting Web 2.0: High Tech Zen -{

[Disbasing Zen Stories]

High Tech Zen: Corrupting Web 2.0 (News Flash) ... We survived another
Zen man ...

First, in the late 1990's Larry Ellison, the Zen man of Oracle leapt
to the top of the world's richest men, passing Bill Gates due to his
large fraction of Oracle stock with a market cap of $100B.

As Larry the Zen man was lifted up to the heights of wealth, the
market simultaneously inverted the dot-com boom into the dot-com bust.

Lifting aloft such a profound enemy of the Lotus Sutra is a cause for
great misery ...

From "The Opening of the Eyes", Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, p.
276 ...

http://www.sgilibrary.org/view.php?page=276

. The seventh volume of Great Concentration and Insight
. states: "In the past, the Zen master of Yeh and Lo [Note
. 200] became renowned throughout the length and breadth
. of China. When he arrived, people gathered around him
. from all directions like clouds, and when he left for
. another place, they formed a great crowd along the
. roads. But what profit did they derive from all this
. bustle and excitement? All of them regretted what they
. had done when they were on their deathbed."
.
. [Note 200: Later commentators identify the "Zen master
. of Yeh and Lo" with Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen in
. China. T'ien-t'ai, however, does not mention him or any
. other contemporary figure by name.]

Of course, no one actually liked Larry, his only claim to fame was his
stock-price wealth, which vanished with the stock market. Along with
that paper-prosperity departed any recognition, praise or honor and
glory he might have received. So, most of the market and general
prosperity recovered quickly (although Silicon Valley was never the
same again.)

Having survived that debacle, starting in 2007, Wall Street started to
worship the Zen man of Apple, Steve Jobs. They held him aloft,
parading him up and down Wall Street as the inventor of everything
that was good, the greatest genius of the age. He was the new Zen-
manGod.

The result of this evil cause was in direct relation to the
recognition, honor and praise bestowed upon Zen-manGod Steve Jobs. The
twin towers of the real estate and stock markets fell as abruptly as
the twin towers seven years before, to the tune of 15 trillion dollars
of combined loss: pfffttt !!! Up in a cloud of smoke and dust.

Because the honor and glory of Zen-manGod Jobs rested not upon mere
money, he remained magically aloft on a magic cloud of product
innovation. What a genius !! He was a one-man focus group for
marketing innovation: he could tell what people wanted !!

Actually, he was a cult leader who knew that his followers (who shared
his mind) would pay any amount and line up to buy anything he made,
and never subject it to the critical review that other products get:
witness the problems with the IPhone connectivity, case shorting when
you held it in a certain way, and other problems that would have
doomed other products lacking the cult charisma of the founder.

But the charisma of the founder that binds the cult together never
survives the founder's death. And finally that slanderous worship of
the Zen-man Steve Jobs has passed on, and magically: the economy is
improving rapidly, Black Friday and Internet Monday blew through
records and the stock market is responding wildly in spite of European
crises. And those unemployment numbers that were also magically
suspended and resistent to any remedy have dropped precipitously, even
the jobs numbers in the past have been recalculated to be better.

I wonder who is the next Zen-manGod and what HIS catastrophe will be?

____ Background for Toxic Zen Stories ______________________

https://groups.google.com/group/alt.zen/msg/b4ad0ce368728934?hl=en

____ Oracle Zen ____________________________________________

1. Oracle's Zen founder Larry Ellison had a house built in Woodside by
a Zen priest named Paul Discoe to look like a Zendo. The original
house was a historic treasure designed by architect Julia Morgan in
1913. She also designed Hearst Castle, but Larry 'deconstructed' that
beauty and consigned its works to the dustbin, choosing instead cheesy
modernized-'authentic' Japanese styling a la Epcot (a wooden flute
plays in the background).

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/c/a/2001/03/27/MN112442.DTL
http://docs.newsbank.com/g/GooglePM/SJ/lib00188,103CE79D9982F052.html

It cost him $60M+ and was scheduled to be complete in 2001 ... and may
not have actually been completed when he put it on the market for sale
in 2005, asking for $25M. Nice discount, has it sold? Who would buy
this cursed, evil Zen castle?

His office in the emerald city towers looks like the martial-arts-
bakufu fantasies of a self-styled Shogun. Next thing you know, he'll
be taking hostages like Nobunaga and Hideyoshi did ... well, actually
his acquisitions are kind of like that. Maybe now there will be Sankin
Kotai-styled processions to his shrine in Woodside, like the Ieyasu-
cult worshiping at the Nikko shrine (just North of Edo) during
Tokugawa Iemitsu's reign.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worldbiz/archives/2003/06/17/2003055631/print

Oracle continually loses the juicy, high-visibility, critical
computing accounts, because of this Zen connection. It is an all-
marketing outfit with perpetually flawed technology (for some
reason ...). The licensing contract with the users absolutely
prohibits any performance testing, to prevent any comparisons to
better performance, and to prevent the dissemination of info on how
Oracle performs if you don't do benchmarketing cheats. Because of
this, when users do compare serializable and reliable operations
platform to platform, Oracle doesn't look like such a prize. Some
stories on this ...

_ _ Oracle Zen Stories _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

[a.] When Target's (Compaq Nonstop) and Mervyn's (Oracle) CRM
databases were compared by Dayton-Hudson (who owned both companies),
they found that the Oracle systems were far more expensive to operate
because an army of operators had to continually build indexes to
support sales queries, because the Oracle query engine did not perform
well against the base tables. Not only that, but it took an hour to
build these indexes, so that queries were always against a fuzzy one-
hour-plus old dataset. Like any mainframe, the Nonstop SQL queries
went against the base tables and the results were never older than
when the query was started. The rumor was that Mervyn's CRM database
was ultimately recoded away from Oracle. (News Flash: actually it
appears they didn't change away from Oracle, and now Mervyn's is
bankrupt.)

[b.] In 2001, EBay's IT leadership begged a prominent transaction
performance conference for help, because their Oracle database
required an hour to rebuild indexes, and so users could only find the
auctions they were seeking based on data that was between one hour and
two hours old. This had a deleterious effect on finding those auctions
based on last minute activity, because changes to user-facing data are
bothersome when you don't see them reflected in the system for over an
hour. The rumor was that IBM's mainframe DB2 guys came in and saved
them from this cognitive dissonance, but that turned out to be untrue.
Ebay suffers from this problem.

[c.] When Citibank wanted to build a Worldwide Funds Transfer system,
a competition was held between three competitors: IBM Z/OS Sysplex
Mainframe DB2, HP 9000 Superdomes using Oracle, and Compaq Nonstop.
Within minutes of the beginning of the competition, the HP/Oracle team
was called in, and after a brief Q&A they were summarily dismissed
from the competition. No one outside of that office knows precisely
what was asked and answered. Was it something about having to bring
Oracle down to take database and catalog dumps before and after
changing the schema DDL (or doing just about anything?). Was it
something about the fact that after a crash, database integrity was
always lost, because they didn't do things correctly while they were
still in the steady state of 'up for business'? Was it that they
occasionally threw a redo record into the log to allow them to
summarily drop a pesky lock before commit, as a performance cheat?
Only Oracle knows - which piece of Zen logic was at fault.

[d.] While banks, exchanges and critical computing have been largely
smart enough to learn from their mistakes in selecting Oracle, run-of-
the-mill Fortune-500s and the government are not so smart. So you get
the churning of failed systems development with Oracle at the center
of it, irregardless of all the other variables: agency, contractor or
type of system. The pattern is that if Oracle is involved, tax dollars
go up in smoke with drastically reduced expectations in the end. The
FBI and the Virtual Case File system (VCF), the IRS and Tax Systems
Modernization (TSM) and many others have crashed and burned using
Oracle systems to the tune of billions wasted.

"The FBI spent $170 million on a 'Virtual Case File' system that does
not operate as required. After three years of work under a cost-plus
contract failed to produce a functional system, the FBI scrapped the
program and began work on the new 'Sentinel' Case File System...."

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/65108

"In the mid-'90s, you couldn't swing an embattled CFO without hitting
a public company that blamed its disappointing financials on an ERP
implementation gone bad, but vendors SAP (NYSE: SAP) and Oracle (NSDQ:
ORCL) were often made the scapegoats, not the companies' own IT
organizations."

http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192202116

And that is true, the IT organizations WERE at fault in their
selection of Oracle Zen.

[e.] How many of those dimly-understood financial systems tracking and
maintaining the subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligations and
the credit default swaps insuring them at Bear Stearns, Morgan
Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and AIG, and
their associated networks in the major banks and hedge funds ... how
many of those financial systems were based on Oracle Zen? Can you
guess? Could it have been less than 95%? I don't think so.

How about the systems supporting the ARMs and ALT-A adjustible rate
mortgage securitization business, that will be depressing mortgage
values for years. Can you guess how many are based on Oracle Zen??

And the credit rating systems tracking all these 'triple AAA'
evaluations at credit rating agencies such as Moody's, Standard &
Poor's, and Fitch Ratings? Can you guess how many are based on Oracle
Zen???

[f.] Financials like Bear Stearns, that lost their shirts, but
survived, have switched from betting the business on subprimes to
gambling on oil futures. This will finish off those rank and file
American families whose homes are now worth less or are in the red
against their sagging bank loan. Now these beleaguered people can no
longer afford to eat or go and take the kids to the doctor, because
the speculation on oil has meant that the entire family budget now
goes into the car's gas tank or the house's heating oil tank.
Amazingly, one of the two exchanges which determines oil futures is
the ICE Futures Europe (London), which is the only major exchange in
the world (that I know of) based on ... you guessed it ... Oracle. I
sense a coming peripeteia (reversal of fortune) for the oil gamblers
who believe they cannot possibly lose using Oracle technology.

"... leaders of the world's two leading oil exchanges, the New York
Mercantile Exchange and the ICE Futures Europe, based in New York and
London, respectively"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121426978977398795.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

[g.] Waste Management had Oracle build their legacy systems, then had
enough of Oracle and switched their apps over to SAP's TomorrowNow
subsidiary. TomorrowNow, it turned out, had used stolen logons and
passwords from BEAR STEARNS to extract information from Oracle
accounts to steal a large portion of the Oracle customer base. Oracle
sued, the truth was revealed and SAP distanced themselves from
TomorrowNow at warp speed. The moral of the story is: you don't want
to be an Oracle customer, you don't want to maintain Oracle legacy,
and you don't even want to steal Oracle customers and maintain Oracle
legacy. Toxic Zen shock !!!

"SAP said more than 200 companies were taking advantage of its Safe
Passage program to move off apps acquired by Oracle." May 22, 2006

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/webdev/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=188100623

"... Oracle's allegation that SAP employees pretended to be Oracle
customers to log on to its Web site and copy proprietary technical and
customer-support data so it could provide lower-cost services to those
customers, with the eventual goal of luring them over to competing SAP
products." Nov 20, 2007

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/11/sap_hopes_to_se.html

"While Waste Management didn't provide details of its legacy systems,
it appears some were developed by Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL)-owned companies.
Waste Management used the services of SAP's TomorrowNow, a company
that provides third-party support for Oracle software such as Siebel
and JD Edwards, and is the subject of a lawsuit Oracle filed against
SAP last year." March 27, 2008

http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/trends/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207000149

[h.] Some years ago, a company called Innobase, with a product called
Innodb, did some very cute performance work based on MySQL. By
creating a new version of the storage/query engine for MySQL, which
did vertical partitioning, this meant that the index and database
blocks only contained info for one field (as opposed to the entire
record) against the primary record key, seriously reducing the numbers
of blocks fetched to do a partial scan for selects or nested loop
joins. Typically, database query plans are composed of sequential
table and index scans, selects, projects, sorts and joins and hash
equijoins on indexed keys (there are many variations on these) ... but
the partial table and index scans tend to precede the others in the
order, so this means something fundamental to the start-up time before
parallelism kicks in. You pay a price getting the pipelines
flowing !!! Cutting that fixed start up price substantially makes
shorter work of the whole business. For small queries this becomes an
even bigger deal. At the ends of query plans, the dataset sizes are
smaller, so they are equivalent to small queries and benefit from this
as well.

As soon as Innodb started to look to have potential, Oracle snapped
them up in 2005.

Amazingly, they recently compared their database against Oracle (not
listed as 'other'), PostgreSQL, and Microsoft (listed as 'other',
because they also do not allow users to print benchmark results).
... some of this is at

http://www.innodb.com/innodb/benchmarks/

Basically, Innodb killed the competition!!! But wait, it seems that
they ran the other databases without consulting the other vendors
(listing Microsoft as 'other' implies that). Oh, and the Innodb index
and data blocks were compressed (according to a presentation by J.D.
Duncan). So, you ask what about updates? It turns out the engine
somehow doesn't support them with compression, but they say that's
coming in a later release. (Hmmm.)

At that point, presumably, the update operation will decompress the
block, then update a row and recompress the block? Or maybe the
compression is only for part of the block. Since you need to read the
first part to find the things you need for a scan, or sometimes you
need the last part (offsets or pointers) to do a binary search, what
part would you compress? When you are doing a scan, and you fetch the
leading part of the block into the initial 2nd level cache line, then
you want to pull out the fields in it while cache prefetch is putting
the rest of the block into the following 2nd level cache lines, you DO
NOT want to stall for the VERY LAST 2nd level cache line in the block
to get filled so that you can decompress the block to look at that
initial 2nd level cache line you got ages ago. Finally, fast databases
use bigger block sizes (because you pay the I/O cost for the first 500
bytes and the rest is pretty much free, DMA-wise and 2nd level cache
prefetch wise), thus increasing the overhead and stall-time for
decompressing/recompressing the deluxe-sized index and data blocks.

Usually, naive users that deploy databases that support compression
for index and data blocks will turn on compression for both, then
immediately turn off index block compression due to the performance
hit, and somewhat later on, turn off data block compression. That is,
if they actually USE the database for something and want to USE the
indexes to find what they just did, which implies a moderate to heavy
update load during peak business hours when response time actually
matters. So block compression is anathema for the real-time or even
just online databases that people actually use and want to actually
see the results of their work, now.

So Innodb's block compression performance numbers are a crock.

But what about the improvements in the insert rate in that one
database test against PostgreSQL? Note that when compared to MyIsam of
MySQL, inserts on primary key were only a half a percent better. So,
no magic is involved. Basic MySQL beats PostgreSQL in some tests, too.
It's all in what tests you run, and how you set up the competition as
a straw man to beat the crap out of.

In a completely proctored TPC-C run (proctored by someone that
everyone could trust such as Chris Date, who used to proctor some of
these in the early days), there is a step where the fully running test
configuration, without ANY configuration or switches being changed, is
crashed and then brought back up to see if the database integrity is
correct to the last committed transaction before the crash. Doing as
the Innodb article suggests, and running some 'TPC-A-like' tests, non-
proctored, without the TPC-C crash test, means that any kind of funny
business can be happening.

In the old days, there were a multitude of rumors about this kind of
funny business from Innobase's new daddy, Oracle. Oracle has redo logs
which add redo records for every transaction, only to be used in
recovery after commit, and undo logs which add undo records only to be
used for uncommitted transaction recovery. Never the twain shall
meet ... mostly.

http://www.juliandyke.com/Presentations/TransactionInternals.ppt

In fact, if there were hotspots in the database during a benchmark,
Oracle (as rumor has it) would summarily drop the lock most
responsible for critical transaction rate slowdown (like the bank
branch balance in a TPC-C test) and add a redo record (something like
"no integrity for this record"), and sometime way later get around to
writing the transaction commit record, after which the pre-released
locks should have actually been released.

This violates the third letter of the ACID word, which is 'I' for
Isolation. It also violates the 'Log Serializability' part of
'C' (Consistency), in that you cannot sort the log by transaction
timestamp, replay it and end up with the same database, which is a
constraint known as 'Write Skew-Free Transaction Histories' from Jim
Gray/Andreas Reuter's transaction processing book. (My German
colleagues call this book 'de berbel'.)

Why does the log matter? Because the log IS the database, the database
disk itself is never correct, and is mostly more than 5 minutes old,
due to the '5 minute rule' from the same book. And because (1) the
serializability of the log is broken from the lock release before the
commit record is written, and (2) the database disk never being right,
then the potential recovery of the database as a whole is never right:
a crash only reveals the truth of this. In a benchmark, you can take
measures in the application to make up for the broken reliability of
the RDBMS. In real life, application writers can rarely keep it
together to make these tricks work. This is why it is called a
'Benchmarketing Cheat', because regular users cannot make reliable use
of the vendor's published database 'performance'.

Oracle was rumored widely to be extremely crafty at these tricks,
called 'Benchmarketing', and this heritage has had time to be
transmitted into Innodb development since their purchase in 2005.

Innodb developers should beware this corruption of their personal
integrity (and the much worse Zen corruption of their lives) and run
for the hills !!!
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In the summer and fall of 1999, Bill Gates was finally, but briefly
surpassed as the richest man in the world as the stock price of Oracle
soared. Larry Ellison was crowned king, lifted aloft by Wall Street,
and the Zen-manGod Larry was finally paramount over a prostrate
humanity.

The market immediately took a nose-dive in response to this evil
anomaly, and in the early spring of 2000 the Dotcom Bust was upon us.
Ellison's preeminence was brief, his plummet swift, and Larry's
leisure suit has never regained its luster since.

The void beckons with a rapture ... the minions of Tenshi-ma (Heavenly
Devil) seek that heaven, and focus on it with all their mind and
actions, taking all their friends and followers and supporters and
admirers with them into the abyss that unfolds before them.

From "The Opening of the Eyes", Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, p.
276 ...

http://www.sgilibrary.org/view.php?page=276

. The seventh volume of Great Concentration and Insight
. states: "In the past, the Zen master of Yeh and Lo [Note
. 200] became renowned throughout the length and breadth
. of China. When he arrived, people gathered around him
. from all directions like clouds, and when he left for
. another place, they formed a great crowd along the
. roads. But what profit did they derive from all this
. bustle and excitement? All of them regretted what they
. had done when they were on their deathbed."
.
. [Note 200: Later commentators identify the "Zen master
. of Yeh and Lo" with Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen in
. China. T'ien-t'ai, however, does not mention him or any
. other contemporary figure by name.]

Historically, after Oda Nobunaga was betrayed by Matsuhide and burned
alive with his son and heir in a temple, his abomination of a mixed
Buddhist-Shinto-bakufu-Gozan-Rinzai castle at Azuchi was put to the
torch almost immediately. Will there be a fire-sale in Woodside?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In the late Spring of 2009, Oracle-Zen has bought Sun Computers, in a
sneak attack against the world's computer systems, both internet and
enterprise. Both IBM and Microsoft were caught completely by surprise.
Now the world's best cross platform application systems will be based
on Larry Ellison Zen distortions.

As Nichiren says, from On Curing Karmic Disease, WND p. 634,
<http://www.sgilibrary.org/view.php?page=634>

"Contamination at the source of a river will pollute its entire
length."

And effectively, if the contamination is upstream from you, it's
polluted where you are.

Now, that pollution will be everywhere.


____ Mac Zen _______________________________________________

2. Steve Jobs is another Zen guy. Apple rid themselves of his
undermining presence in 1985, and later under Gil Amelio were
attempting to make the Macintosh an open hardware platform so that
they would be able to compete with the PC.

At one time in the past the Mac really threatened the PC and had over
10% market share. Then the fact that they never opened up the platform
so that many potential Mac-manufacturers could compete on price began
to bite into that. As of Q1 2008, in Gartner and IDC figures, even as
there is a 'huge growth' of Mac popularity, Macs only have "3.26
percent of the worldwide market for PCs and 6.26 percent of the US
market for PCs."

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2008/04/24/mac-q1-2008-market-share-3-26-percent-worldwide-6-26-percent-in-the-us.aspx

And that is a local maxima, the Mac market share has been much lower
than that tiny resurgence !!

__________________________________________________________________
>> >> >> >> >> UPDATE >> >> >> >> >> UPDATE >> >> >> >> >> UPDATE

Form Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Usage_share_of_operating_systems> it appears that for web clients
(which are the vast majority of platforms that matter, embedded
software operating systems for computer controls vary, many are single
threaded applications themselves) ...

For web client market (from the most widely reputed NetMarketShare,
StatCounter and ATInternet): Microsoft still has between 84.6% to
86.1% of the market share, Mac OSX has between 6.54% to 6.71%, Linux
has from 0.79% to 1.12% and the various mobile devices have the rest
of the 6%.

For the mobile device market alone (Gartner): Android has 43%, Symbian
(Nokia) has 22%, Apple has 18% (which seems larger because of the
elevated prices that the cult followers will pay), RIM has 12% and the
other 5% to Samsung's Bada, Microsoft and others.

For the server market (small numbers of computers: Linux has 60%,
Microsoft has 36.1% and the other four percent to Unix, mainframes and
a tiny fraction of .0x% to Mac OSX.

So, Apple is only "Winning!" in the Charlie Sheen sense of the phrase
(where getting out of a bad situation is a win.)

__________________________________________________________________
<< << << << << << << << << << << << << << << << <<
<< << <<

At one time, Apple CEO Gil Amelio wanted to open the Mac platform and
sell software like Bill Gates does on many hardware platforms, and
compete with Gates directly. He was undermined by employees who were
threatened by that change, and in 1996 Jobs came sailing back into
Apple on Pixar mojo and killed the open Mac platform move. Without
opening the hardware platform, the Mac will never get out of small
single digits, BECAUSE MOST PEOPLE AREN'T THAT FOOLISH ABOUT SINGLE-
SOURCE VENDOR LOCK-IN.

They are learning this same lesson again with the iPod, which now is a
loser.

http://cultofmac.com/the-reason-behind-apples-stock-slide-the-ipods-zero-growth/1695

The iPhone, ITunes and followons are suffering a similar fate. The
IPad 1&2 will now lose to Kindle, etc.

Why? Because product innovation and marketing will get you only so
far, if you stick to a completely closed-platform legacy product (one
which cannot be purchased from someone else for cheaper).

The open-est is the best, and will win in the end.

Ultimately, all hardware platforms will be open hardware platforms.
That includes cash registers, autos and auto parts and refrigerators.
This is because future-users will want to upgrade their own software
into an open platform and integrate all their hardware into their cell
or wristwatch. Future-users will actually think this is baseline
behavior.

And then, ultimately, all software will become open and free (as in
freedom, not as in free beer). The Free Software Foundation describes
this in Richard Stallman's Four Freedoms: "Free software is a matter
of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and
improve the software."

http://fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Free software, under the GNU licensing and others which keep pace with
it, will allow you to do whatever you want with all of your open
platform hardware. What that means is that you own your stuff and
control it, and you are not at the mercy of someone else's software
legacy or closed hardware platform.

The Apple Mac is a great CONSUMER of open source in the form of Mach
and much other Unix software from his failed venture into the NeXT
workstation (sold a whopping 58,000 units), but the great majority of
Apple-provided software is not in any way open source or free.

What fascinates me is the attraction of this completely closed-
platform and legacy software of Apple products to the open source and
free software community. It is so schizophrenic as to be impossible to
comprehend. And if you talk about it openly, they will defend Apple as
open and free !! Unbelievable.

Steve Jobs acquired Pixar, because the founder of Muppet Zen, George
Lucas, had his beloved wife Marcia betray him and turn on him, and
then demand everything in the divorce. That pressure left him
incapable of giving his animation unit the start it deserved, so he
passed it to Apple Zen-master Steve, who used Pixar to become a
billionaire. Thanks, Marcia !!

Steve Jobs' rise with Pixar from 1986 was aided by his collaboration
with Michael Eisner at Disney. Michael Eisner paid the price of
lifting the Zen-manGod back into prominence after Jobs' ousting from
Apple in 1985. As a reward, Eisner was ultimately turned out of Disney
after he lifted Disney into unprecedented corporate supremacy. A
magnificent Eisner castle was built with great effort, but was
undermined by that single nest of Zen-Jobs termites. Thanks,
Michael !! Enjoy the gratitude of Zen.

In the last few years Steve Jobs has been borne aloft yet again by
Wall Street as their favorite son, their anointed one. He has been
celebrated from one end of Wall Street to the other, as the Zen master
of innovation. As this was occurring, in the same way it happened with
Larry Ellison 10 years before, Wall street was digging the hole under
the foundations of their collective houses, into which vast abyss the
economy is now falling. The new iPhone is Jobs' last gasp ... will the
masses buy in to yet another of the Zen-man's innovations? That dread
choice is theirs to make.

__________________________________________________________________
>> >> >> >> >> UPDATE >> >> >> >> >> UPDATE >> >> >> >> >> UPDATE

With the final exit of of the Zen-manGod, immediately the unemployment
numbers dropped to 8.6% and the Black Friday and other holiday sales
numbers have soared.

Over time, Job's shadow over Wall Street will fade and the sun will
come out (as mistakes are made at Apple and the Zen-manGod's product's
shining darkness winks out, that cult will slide into the ash-heap of
history.)

Other self-promoting Zen-manGods will seek to replace Jobs in the
minds of the public, such as the martial arts Hollywood stars like
RObert Downey, Jr.'s Zen-Sherlock Holmes and Zen-Iron Man, the Zen-
Greek myth movies (more like UFC matches than anything Homer), Zen-
Coach Phil Jackson and many others.

But Wall Street cares little for Hollywood's weak ticket sales, the
NBA's death-throes and the rest.

So, after some detachment haS occurred from the freshly-deceased Zen-
manGod, things will get better. Maybe not in time to save Barack
Obama's presidency, but also maybe just in time.

__________________________________________________________________
<< << << << << << << << << << << << << << << << <<
<< << <<

____ Creative Zen __________________________________________

3. Creative's Zen Micro ... Give me a break. Is this a Zen plot to
force people to buy the iPod? Talk about a false choice.


____ Novell Zen ____________________________________________

4. If you sat down at a workstation in schools, or libraries, or
government institutions all over the world ... and as the desktop
management system started up (the DMS keeps the public from hijacking
the PC in some nefarious way) and the splash screen declared ...

| JESUSSAVES DESKTOP MANAGEMENT

... then anyone and everyone would immediately recognize an intent to
openly propagate the Christian religion using a user interface on a
workstation paid for by public money. However, because it is a Novell
product, it comes up and instead declares ...

| ZENWORKS DESKTOP MANAGEMENT

... which IS more subtle and subliminal, and while it is perhaps more
effective than the in-your-face Christian form, it nevertheless
consists of an inappropriate religious propagation by use of the tax-
supported infrastructure of the government.

Independent of the question of whether Zen works and how and what it
actually produces, the declarative statement that it indeed does work,
with the positive implication that it brings benefits, does not belong
on any splash screen in a government supported facility anywhere
inside the United States, and certainly not in front of the eyes of
young impressionable students, over and over every time they log on.

Zen is a religion, with priests and temples, and Zendos (community
centers), that has more than one tax-ID for making tax-exempt
donations, and its own head temples in Japan.

Either each public institution supporting the workstation needs to
kill the splash screen, or Novell needs to change it in their product.

Were I a Christian, this posting might seem more obviously predictable
in motive, but in fact I am a Nichiren Buddhist with the SGI.
Christians might be somewhat more unpleasant in pointing out this
anomaly, had it occurred to them what is happening.

Whatever one's religious bent, the First Amendment to the Constitution
states:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Establishing that 'Zen works' is not the right of any public
institution to make using tax dollars.

Now to address the context of the message implying that 'Zen works'.
Zen does indeed work, but perhaps not happily for humanity.

Zen philosophy and the religious control of Japan's military from
First World War forward, engineered the aggressive military wartime
machine, and guaranteed the fanatical support of the Japanese people
by hijacking all of Japanese Buddhism into an Imperial Way Buddhist
structure under the military regime of Tojo (who was executed as a war
criminal).

From Pearl Harbor, through Iwo Jima and the bombings at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the fanatical nature of the Japanese side of the conflict
pretty much guaranteed the miserable outcome of that war. Zen does
indeed, work, like crazy. Incalculable misery was inflicted on our
Allied military soldiers, sailors and airmen who had the misfortune to
encounter the business end of Bushido in all of its forms, defeating a
fanatical enemy on one island after another. Their suffering means
something. Are we to remember their valor by propagating that which
was the true source of their suffering? They deserve better from their
tax-sponsored public service, than this.

There is book by Iris Chang, called "The Rape of Nanking : the
forgotten holocaust of World War II", which describes how the Imperial
army brought along Zen priests to Nanking, where they instructed the
soldiers and officers as they used tens of thousands of captives and
innocents for beheading swordsmanship practice, and with the victim's
hands tied in ditches that they could not escape for bayonet practice
- while screaming their war-cries in mock heroics, and for general
mayhem and sport. Zen worked pretty well for those perpetrators, but
not for their Holocaust victims.

There is a companion book by James Lin, called "The rape of Nanking :
an undeniable history in photographs", and this has to be seen to be
believed. Apparently all the Japanese soldiers brought their cameras
and gleefully snapped atrocity after atrocity with thousands of
pictures. So, it's not a Holocaust that can be effectively denied,
although the Zen infrastructure still in place in Japan has somehow
successfully denied what the Nazis could not conceive of denying. So,
Zen has worked for that purpose of criminal amnesia, too.

Novell should carefully consider its motives for propagating Zen in
schools and libraries across the nation.


____ Xen Zen _______________________________________________

5. Sometimes the Zen people in a company are not famous or
identifiable, and the Zen influence is only made obvious by cryptic
references. One way is to use a company or product name that contains
the word 'Zen' or a soundalike to 'Zen', such as we've just seen in
Novell Zenworks.

Another way is in the construction of marketing, documentation
materials or the product website to use identifiable Zen objects, like
a miniature raked Zen sand garden, with a tiny rake, or by using a
Daruma doll with those huge lidless eyes and withered limbs (modeled
after Bodhidharma himself, after 11 years meditating in the cave near
the Shaolin monastery in Lo-Yang), or by using one of those piles of
four, five or six flat stones laid on each other in an orderly way, or
by using a Bushido martial arts motif (Bushido and Gozan Rinzai Zen
were wedded in the Bakufu during the Ashikaga Shogunate from the early
14th to late 16th centuries in Kyoto, and then the dedicated slave-
mindedness was set in stone under the Tokugawas by Zen monk Suzuki
Shosan in the 17th).

Cloud computing, for the moment, seems to have become dominated by
Xen, which seems to be the virtualization of choice.

The Xen books have those characteristic flat stones piled, just so, on
their covers.

Let's talk about simulation, which is at the core of how
virtualization works.

Every flight module or payload that launches from Cape Canaveral goes
through 7 levels of integration and test, the final level being the
payload bay of the shuttle, or the payload package of another space
vehicle. If the payload is to be integrated onto a platform on-orbit
such as the Space Station (ISS) or the Hubble (HST), then there is an
eighth level of integration on-orbit. In the case of the ISS, the
pieces to be integrated may never have been on the same continent at
any time before on-orbit, and yet everything must hook up and work
correctly.

With that many steps, there are many times where flight modules need
to be tested against hardware and software interfaces which are not
immediately present at the integration testing facility of that
moment: University, Corporate, other NASA, ESA, Russian or Japanese
Space Center, Payload Integration Facility (PIF), Vertical and
Horizontal Payload Facilities (VPF, HPF), Vehicle Assembly Building
(VAB), and the vertical payload canisters being integrated into the
Payload Changeout Room (PRC) on the Rotating Service Structure (RSS)
of the launch pad, finally swiveling over the flame trench to
integrate the vertical payload directly into the payload bay of the
shuttle.

In all those places simulations or emulators are necessary for
integration and testing procedures (I&T) to execute AT ALL, or
optimally, to execute and render a useful test result for verification
and validation (V&V).

Hence, NASA and its contractors, I submit to you, are the true masters
of the engineering, science and art of simulation. And at NASA, the
fidelity of any simulation is a critical characteristic.

The lowest fidelity simulation is a software interface or stub
returning some values that the I&T suite will tolerate without
reducing V&V.

The highest fidelity simulation is an identical piece of the hardware
that the flight module under test will ultimately be mated with. Of
course this 'hardware simulation' will not be flight-ready, will not
have paid the human cost of I&T and V&V up the chain to this point
(which is most of the cost in the long run), and only has to be solid
enough not to corrupt the flight hardware with outgassing, or fluids,
or whatever mechanical foul-ups can occur to render the flight module
not flight-ready anymore.

Viewed through the lens of actual professional simulation, the highest-
fidelity simulation for a PC operating system would be the hardware
itself: a high end PC. Maybe it would have a digital scope or data
analyzer or another computer attached for catching traces of
execution. This would allow you to get the same performance on the
disk, network and graphics data transfers, and also get the native
timing characteristics to catch those rotten race conditions that are
hard to catch in any other way. Whatever expected or surprising
synchronization issues are the property of the operation system, you
would want to see them in the highest-fidelity simulation.

A high-fidelity simulation for a PC O/S is called 'native
virtualization', where the unadulterated operating system can run out
of the box against a hardware/software interface and experience the
same or 'native' performance - not just in execution, but also in the
disk, network and graphics I/O. This you get in an unrestricted way
(SMPs, any arbitrary OS, etc.) only from some IBM's PowerVM and z
LPARs, and the RTS Hypervisor. Possibly, when IBM's 'Blue Cloud' cloud
computing facility gets rolling, it will support this kind of
'software as a service' (SAAS) platform. Microsoft is rumored to be
hatching something like this as well, which will probably be more like
Google's hosting service, but with a more 'enterprise' focus.

A medium-fidelity simulation for a PC O/S is called a 'near-native
virtualization', where the unadulterated O/S can run out of the box
against a hardware/software interface and experience decent
performance with some drop-off, but the relative I/O speeds are not so
far off that the software does not function normally. This you get in
an unrestricted way from Integrity Virtual Machines, Linux KVM,
Virtual Iron, VMWare ESX Server, and IBM's z/VM.

A low-fidelity simulation for a PC O/S is called a
'paravirtualization' (or mixed p&v), where the O/S must be modified to
run against the 'hypervisor' (they make this sound like a 'cool'
feature), and where there is substantial reduction in performance
especially where disk, network and graphics I/O are concerned. This
you get in an unrestricted way from Sun xVM, Trango, VirtualLogix VLX,
VMWare Fusion/Server/Workstation/Player and Xen.

Then there's the bottom of the barrel using 'emulation' such as Bochs,
Dosbox, PearPC, QEMU (dynamic recompilation IS emulation), Virtual PC
(same). Stay away from the free toys, your time is not free.

Xen, which is a lo-fi simulation of a PC, has become the favorite of
the early cloud computing alternatives like Amazon Web Services (AWS),
3tera, nirvanix, zmanda, heroku, joyent, etc. So, disk and network
performance will suck, for as many servers as you want to start. Xen
is popular, because it is free. However, free Zen is not really free.

Can't we do better than Xen? We deserve better than simply 'free, as
in beer', but still lousy in performance and corrupted to boot.


____ Zend Zen ______________________________________________

6. Web 2.0 is based partly on dynamic languages (also on Java, and
Javascript/XML/XHTML for Ajax or Flash on the client side) supported
by web servers, and partly on the frameworks that run in those
languages.

The three most popular dynamic languages are PHP (largest community),
Ruby (backed by IBM and Microsoft) and Python (Google's favorite).
Perl was the first Web 2.0 dynamic language supporting .cgi webpage
generation under the Common Gateway Interface, but Perl's quirkiness
("You must think like Larry Wall" -Randal Schwartz) ultimately limited
its future. Groovy is like Ruby, but is based on Java internals, so it
produces bytecodes and can even compile and refactor most Java
programs. It is fairly new and changing quickly.

PHP looks the most like HTML. In fact, you can convert a .html file to
a .php file with a couple of small edits. PHP is included in the list
of object-oriented languages with Ruby and Python, but it's not an
easy relationship between PHP and OO.

Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python are all reflective, in that code can alter
its own behavior (for example, types can be extended during execution,
etc.) That makes an interpreted program have a certain amount of
liveliness, flexibility and hence, unpredictability to it.

Ruby and Python have strong typing, where operations are prevented
from operating on ARGUMENTS of the wrong type. That reduction of
unpredictability from strong typing offsets reflectiveness in a nice
way. Python further reduces this by being the only one of the four
languages to be considered 'type-safe', in that RESULTS are
structurally defined by their type to not receive erroneous results
which would lead to anomalies. In both Ruby and Python, if it's
supposed to be a duck, it must talk and walk like a duck, or it's an
error.

PHP is weakly typed, and operations are not prevented from making
clearly meaningless evaluations, which leads to quirkiness, not unlike
that of Perl (also weakly typed). PHP and Perl force the programmer to
deal with far fewer immediate problems (the code always runs), but
then again you don't catch your bugs so easily and bug hunts can go on
for days. Some things in PHP have compensated for this, for instance
the string concatenation operator is the period ".", so that an
unfortuitous conversion to a string will not change a numeric addition
"+" into a string concatenation. But why fix it if it wasn't broken?

All in all, not a good design heritage for PHP, in comparison to its
competitors.

All three popular languages have frameworks. If you were to look at 50
examples of large successful applications in a given programming
system, you would see that there is a lot of commonality in their
overall top-down structure, and also there is a lot of repetition in
the utility code that is shared commonly bottom-up throughout those
systems. Combine all the bottom-up utility code and strip out the top-
down skeleton that is common between all the 50 systems (in a rational
and effective way) and you would end up with a framework for
programming systems. You would use it by satisfying framework calls
with the procedures you would supply, because frameworks mostly
operate by the Hollywood Principle ("Don't call us, we'll call you.")
And, of course, you would use the shared framework utilities in your
code.

Each of the three most popular languages has over a dozen frameworks,
but let's just talk about the most popular ones ... Ruby has its Ruby
on Rails framework, Python has Django and TurboGears and PHP has three
of its own: CakePHP which is a takeoff on Ruby on Rails, Symfony and
the dreaded Zend.

Zend has been working its way throughout the PHP realm for some time,
now. It has maintained its position as a top framework, by innovating
and borrowing the finest functionality and code from Django, etc. Zend
is keeping up with or staying just ahead of Symfony. Also, Zend has
made itself the 'best friend' of the PHP programmer, by supplying PHP
plugins for the Eclipse IDE for any purpose. Now in version 5 of PHP,
when you do a PHPInfo call from the web server, you see a couple of
dozen references from Zend, which has thoroughly incorporated its
'essence' into the heart of PHP.

In the past tense, PHP has been Zend. Eclipse is next on the Zend
Agenda.

As of this writing, PHP 5 has been installed in about 36% of the PHP
accounts, double from last year. That means that it will likely top
50% sometime this year.

Zen is a catastrophic distortion of Buddhism. Referring to Zen in your
product name implies that the same evil is present in the minds of
developers. Now, you can't say that you weren't warned about this.


____ RubyGems Zen __________________________________________

7. Ruby is a very popular language invented by Yukihiro "Matz"
Matsumoto, a Japanese Mormon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto

and includes IBM and Microsoft among its ardent supporters. There is
a Java version of Ruby named JRuby, that is close to the latest Ruby
version and supports just-in-time compilation.

JRuby has the added advantage of having access to the entirety of the
Java Class Libraries (JCL). That includes Java Types, JavaBeans, Java
Events, Java Streams, AWT, JFC/Swing, JavaFX, JDBC, and Applets.

When you invoke Java classes from JRuby, it's a heck of a lot easier
than the equivalent invocation from Java code: JRuby generates a lot
of the declaration and wrapping code for you. So, for lazy programmers
(most of us are) JRuby on Java makes JCL programming a breeze, and
even enjoyable.

The Ruby on Rails framework has its limits: it is single threaded and
will stay that way.

Ruby is reflective and dynamic, so it modifies its own classes in real-
time, and Rails modifies its classes and its metadata in real time,
and there are simply too many levels of modifying to have to thread-
block, and make critical sections for (or something), to make a multi-
threaded Ruby on Rails. So it will never thread-scale, only scaling up
by running multiple instances of Ruby on Rails.

For the very same reason, IMHO, this is the common fate of all the
popular frameworks that run on dynamic languages: Rails, Django,
TurboGears, CakePHP, Symphony, and the dreaded Zend. If any of these
become multi-threaded, the result will be highly limited and
perpetually fragile, like the Microsoft frameworks (MFC, OLE,
and .NET). A maintenance nightmare !!!

Of course, human beings often accomplish what I see as impossible, so
those who try to multi-thread the frameworks could surprise me.

Once you can accept the single-threaded limitation, Ruby/JRuby on
Rails ain't so bad.

Ruby Gems is the management system for plugin components into the Ruby
language and runtime system. Ruby Gems itself appears copacetic, but
some of the Gems that it can load into your system are very bad for
your life condition and future happiness. There is a Zen Spider
spinning its web in Ruby Gems.

Zen Spider Software, which uses the initials ZSS in some directories,
is the product of a Zen mind. ZSS products include ...

| Apache::ContentHandler
| Coco/R(uby): LL Parser Generator for Ruby
| DropUNIX
| ParseTree
| RubyInline
| Struct::Compare
| ZenGUI
| ZenHeaders
| ZenTest: Automated test scaffolding for Ruby
| ZenWeb

Beware the toxic bite of the Zen Spider. You've been warned.

Other than the ZSS Gems and products, Ruby seems pretty clean , so if
you are selective and do not download all the Gems in an impure lump,
that result should be relatively Zen-less and mostly complicity-free
of slander and distortion of the Buddhist Law (as far as is known at
present).


____ Python Zen ____________________________________________

8. Python is another very popular language invented by Dutch
programmer Guido van Rossum, and includes Google among its ardent
supporters. Python is the only dynamic language provided by the Google
App Engine facility to support customer applications running on the
Google cloud, at present.

Sad to say, Guido's lifestyle includes a distortion of Buddhism. From
his personal home page

http://www.python.org/~guido/

...

| "OK, here's one non-computer link: Contact Improvisation -
| a relaxing mix of modern dance, yoga, martial arts, and
| just being silly. I can be found at the Washington, DC
| jam on some Sunday afternoons."

Before you say I am just being picky, listen to the logic of my
argument, in 3 parts.

[a.] The martial arts are a distortion of Buddhism.

All of the martial arts stem from either China, or a later evolution
in Japan.

The Chinese martial arts stem from Kung Fu which originates in the
Shaolin Monastery at Lo-Yang. Lo-Yang is where Bodhidharma (AKA Ta-Mo,
Da-Mo or Daruma in Japan) invented Zen by stealing the name of
Buddhism, by discarding the sutras or teachings of the Buddha
(including the highest teaching of the Buddha, the Lotus Sutra which
the Buddha described as his true intent), and by mixing Hindu
meditation (Dhyana in a seated Yoga posture) with Taoism to meditate
upon natural phenomena instead of the Buddha's teachings to free the
mind. The mind, once freed in such a way, will have a strong tendency
towards evil, BECAUSE of the distortion and slander of Buddhism
involved.

It was at the Shaolin Monastery that Kung Fu (which existed before
that time) was infused with Bodhidharma's new abomination to create an
even greater distortion: Buddhism as the art of spectacular and
stylish murder. Many varying schools and added distortions later, the
"Fist Law" (Chuan Fa, Guan Fa), or "fist principles" were invented.
The Chinese character Fa is in fact, the very same character Fa in
Miao-Fa-Lien-Hua-Ching, which is the Chinese pronunciation of the same
5 characters, which in Japanese are pronounced Myoho-Renge-Kyo, which
is the name of the Lotus Sutra.

So, Chuan Fa is a Chinese Zen (Ch'an) practice in direct opposition to
Miao-Fa, the Mystic Law or the Wonderful Law of the Lotus Sutra. And
in Japanese, Chuan Fa is pronounced Kempo (Ken + Ho is pronounced
Kempo in Japanese) a Japanese Zen practice in direct opposition to
Myoho, the Mystic Law or the Wonderful Law of the Lotus Sutra. The
grappling martial arts spring from Kung Fu and and Tai Chi, its
brother from the Shaolin Monastery. Karate and the striking martial
arts spring from Chuan Fa or Kempo. Other grappling martial arts such
as Jiu-Jitsu and Judo are designed as a counter to Kempo and Karate,
and thus are their children as well.

The Japanese martial arts, collectively under the umbrella of Bushido,
had their practices formalized under the Ashikaga Shogunate (early
Muromachi period) and especially the Tokugawa Shogunate. Under the
Ashikaga, Gozan (Five Mountains) Rinzai Zen became a branch of the
bakufu or military government, which made Gozan its official religion
in 1340. Bakufu officials made decisions in Gozan appointments, and
Gozan priests consulted in bakufu matters. About the same time, the
Tendai (Lotus Sutra) Buddhists at Mt Hiei, re-wrote history to
ingratiate themselves with the new Kyoto Shogunate of the Ashikaga,
the gradually diminished Imperial family and Yoshida Shinto.

The Tendai did this by going along with Yoshida Shinto's new theory,
of newly interpreting the writings of Dengyo (Saicho) the founder of
Tendai Buddhism in Japan, who brought the Lotus Sutra to Japan in the
early ninth century. In this profoundly evil act of distorting
Buddhism and destroying their founder's intent, they reversed Dengyo's
view that the Kami (gods or benevolent forces) were the emanations of
the Buddha's life, and instead established that Dengyo just the
reverse ... that the gods and especially Amaterasu were the deity
(Sanno Gongen) of the Tendai shrine at Mt. Hiei, which became
effectively a Shinto shrine in support of the main shrine at Ise
worshipping the Imperial family, who were believed by Shinto to be
descended from Amaterasu.

In the early 17th century, under the Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, this
distorting of Tendai faith in the Lotus Sutra was completed under the
Tendai monk Tenkai. Tenkai actually invented a conversation between
Dengyo and the Hiei deity (Sanno Gongen), where Dengyo revealed that
Sanno was the universal god of gods and superior to all the Buddhas (a
total reversal of the Lotus Sutra). This god of gods was identified as
Iemitsu's grandfather Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate,
which made Iemitsu also sacred by descent. And Ieyasu's ashes could
conveniently be worshipped by frequent pilgrimages of all the lords
and high priests of all of the temples under Sankin Kotai, to the NEW
Shinto head shrine at Nikko, north of Edo (Tokyo) where the Tokugawas
ruled. This replaced and sidelined the Emperor and his shrine at Ise,
until the Meiji Restoration 250 years later switched from the new
Shinto abomination back to the old one. Tenkai placed all of his new
Shinto under the rubric of tendo, or the heavenly way. Each successive
dictator, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, Ieyasu had their own tendo, which was a
distortion of Buddhism. However, it was Iemitsu's new tendo that
finally stuck for 250 years, more than long enough to produce a
complete alteration in the fabric of Japanese society.

This distortion of Buddhism was the ultimate intent of Gozan Rinzai
Zen in the Bakufu headed by Iemitsu, to control the power structure of
the entire country through distorting Buddhism, and by the perpetually
draining pilgrimage of the elite. The masses were controlled by a new
philosophy created by the Zen monk-soldier Suzuki Shosan, who made
them effectively slaves who had no thought but serving their lord, and
who now considered all of the Buddha's teachings as a waste of time
(theoretical) to be replaced by a new Buddhist practice, which was
serving and dying at the merest whim of one's lord, and having no
thought other than that single-minded desire, to gain entry into the
pure land of the Nembutsu West. Some quotes from Suzuki Shosan ...

| "Be earth, become earth."
|
| "If you entrust everything to Heaven, keep upright and
| do not dwell on your selfish desires, you will receive
| Heaven's blessing and both this life and the next will
| be fine"
|
| "to receive life as a peasant is to be an official
| entrusted by Heaven with the nourishment of the world.
| Without the least thought for your body, entrust it
| single mindedly to Heaven and thus work in the fields in
| true service to tendo"
|
| "Any occupation (jigyo) whatsoever is Buddhist practice.
| It is on the basis of men's actual work that Buddhahood
| is to be attained. There cannot be any activity that
| falls outside Buddhist practice because everything one
| does is for the good of the whole world"
|
| "Peasant work is Buddhist practice and not a shameful
| occupation (sengyo) ... when you put yourself into each
| sweep of the sickle and labour without other thought,
| the fields are the Pure Land"
|
| "Imagine the agony when your crop will not pay your
| taxes and debts, of having to sell your wife and your
| daughters, of having to part from them in this life and
| of having to move to a far-off province"
|
| "what shall we judge to be good and what bad? We truly
| must realize that all things are one"
|
| "A lord is a lord, an inferior is an inferior, a parent
| is a parent, a child is a child, and each will be taken
| to places either good or bad according to their karmic
| order."
|
| "Shingaku [the popular Mind Learning] addresses itself
| to works (gyo) so it can be practiced just like that,
| whereas my teachings are ascetic practice (shugyo) that
| addresses the mind ... [in the] batabata of gunfire he
| puts his meditation into action"
|
| "The samurai who stands on guard duty is practicing
| zazen (Zen meditation)."
|
| "To cultivate the mind is thus to destroy it."
|
| "Buddhism (like Taoism and Confucianism) is all about
| intellectual discrimination (funbetsu) and the
| interpretation of texts"
|
| "A monk said: 'Abbot Ikkyu asked if a liar goes to hell
| what one has to make of Sakyamuni, who made up things
| that never were. Why does the Buddha tell falsehoods
| too?' The Master replied: 'It is precisely because
| Sakyamuni and Amida told lies that they are Buddhas. If
| they told the truth they would be ordinary men."
|
| "[Beware] the disease of Buddhism"
|
| "I know nothing about Buddhism"

On the point of the third quote from the last, Shakyamuni Buddha and
Nichiren Daishonin made the point clearly that the Buddha is a common
mortal. They told nothing but the truth, because they WERE ordinary
men who embraced the Mystic Law.

The intent of Suzuki Shosan was to serve the Tokugawas by transforming
the Japanese people into a race of willing robots with no thought
other than the military (bakufu) leadership's Gozan Rinzai Zen
thought. And for the bushi (warrior class) that meant transforming
them into mindless killing robots. The Japanese people were actually
quite different before all of this ... before Suzuki Shosan, who was
the great Devadatta of Japan betraying the common people ultimately
into defeat and destruction in the Pacific War. It was not their
fault ... Suzuki Shosan, Tenkai and the Tokugawa were their
circumstances.

So, in a nutshell, that is Bushido, the "Way of the Warrior" which is
the supporting framework for the elite Tendo, the "Way of Heaven". All
of the Japanese martial arts are a formal expression of Suzuki
Shosan's slave-mind of mixed and distorted Buddhism, in support of a
remote and meaningless religious practice of the elite, to the
ultimately evil purpose of a military dictatorship. And that is
nothing to celebrate or dance about.

All of the martial arts come from either the Chinese source, or the
Japanese source, or a mixture of both profound evils.

[b.] As I stated above, seated Zen meditation and Hindu meditation
(Dhyana) in a seated Yoga posture are pretty indistinguishable at a
glance. In truth, the founder of Zen, Bodhidharma, hated the Buddha
and his teachings and was really a throwback to Hinduism, until he
mixed it all together with Taoism after encountering it in China. This
is why Zen occurred there, because only at that place and time were
all the ingredients present for this catastrophic mixture.

Yoga, itself, is listed by Nichiren Daishonin as a practice of
provisional Buddhism.

Nichiren Daishonin (in the Rooster Diagram) lists the five periods of
the Buddha's teachings as:

. 1. Preaching the Flower Garland Sutra, 21 days.
. 2. Preaching the Agama sutras (Hinayana), 12 years.
. 3. Preaching the Correct and Equal sutras and
. 4. Preaching the Wisdom sutras (provisional Mahayana),
. [ periods 2 & 3 together ] 30 years.
. 5. Preaching the Lotus Sutra (preceded by the Immeasurable
. Meanings Sutra), 8 years, and Preaching the Nirvana Sutra,
. one day and one night.

Under the Correct and Equal sutras, Nichiren includes the following
treatise:

From the "Rooster Diagram of the Five Periods of the Buddha's Lifetime
Teachings", WND II, p. 1036 ...

. The Treatise on the Stages of Yoga Practice
. 100 volumes
. spoken by Bodhisattva Maitreya and
. recorded by Bodhisattva Asanga

Hence, Nichiren Daishonin specifically includes Yoga as a provisional
Mahayana practice, which is extraneous to the practice of the Lotus
Sutra, which is the Buddha's true intent in all of this.

Furthermore, Nichiren Daishonin lists the Yoga Sutras of Bodhisattva
Maitreya specifically within the teachings of the 3rd provisional
Mahayana period of the Buddha's teachings, and the Yoga sutras would
be therefore be considered a "connecting teaching", or introductory
Mahayana (we are way past the time for anything good coming from this
kind of introduction).

In both the Lotus Sutra (the Buddha's highest teaching) and the
Nirvana Sutra (the Buddha's final will and testament), the Buddha
implores his followers to honestly discard provisional teachings, such
as the connecting teachings, which include "The Treatise on the Stages
of Yoga Practice." And practicing is not honestly discarding.

[c.] Then there is the eternally popular practice of distorting
Buddhism by mixing and then mixing it again with more crap. There is
no innocence in this, and no matter how many times it has been mixed,
each time makes the evil successively worse and is a greater evil
cause for the misery of humanity.

From "Letter to Akimoto", Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, pp.
1014-1015,

http://www.sgilibrary.org/view.php?page=1014

. ... we may be the kind of practitioners of the Lotus
. Sutra whose mouths are reciting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo one
. moment, but Namu Amida Butsu the next. This is like
. mixing filth with one's rice, or putting sand or pebbles
. in it. This is what the Lotus Sutra is warning against
. when it says, "Desiring only to accept and embrace the
. sutra of the great vehicle and not accepting a single
. verse of the other sutras." [Note 1: Lotus Sutra, chap.
. 3.]
.
. The learned authorities in the world today suppose that
. there is no harm in mixing extraneous practices with the
. practice of the Lotus Sutra, and I, Nichiren, was once
. of that opinion myself. But the passage from the sutra
. [that I have just quoted] does not permit such a view.

From The Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings (Ongi Kuden),
p. 50, Lotus Sutra Chapter Three, "Simile and Parable", Point Six ...

. Point Six, regarding the words "all [acting] at the same
. time" in the passage "Heavenly beings made music, a
. hundred, a thousand, ten thousand varieties, all
. [acting] at the same time in the midst of the air,
. raining down quantities of heavenly flowers and speaking
. these words:"
.
. The Record of the Orally Transmitted Teachings says: The
. word "time" refers to the time of the Latter Day of the
. Law. "All [acting]" refers to Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. "All"
. refers to the words "in the end to dwell in the single
. vehicle" in the passage "As the light of the sun and
. moon / can banish all obscurity and gloom, / so this
. person as he passes through the world / can wipe out the
. darkness of living beings, / causing immeasurable
. numbers of bodhisattvas / in the end to dwell in the
. single vehicle" (chapter twenty-one, Supernatural
. Powers). Now Nichiren and his followers center on the
. five characters of the daimoku AND ARE NOT CONCERNED
. WITH ANY OTHER PRACTICES.
.
. Again the Record says: The words and sayings of the Ten
. Worlds are all activities springing from a single
. chanting of the daimoku. How then could they fail to
. have an effect?

You mix Buddhism with anything, ever, WITH THE GUARANTEED RESULT OF
MISERY. It does not matter how many times the mixture including
Buddhism was mixed before, your new admixture is your own personal
lead weight to carry through eternity. Oh, and everyone who is with
you is complicit with your evil act.

So, everyone depending on the brilliance of Guido van Rossum's life
product is with him when he does his "Contact Improvisation" doing his
"just being silly" dance. He didn't know, but being in reality the
Buddha, his lack of knowledge just doesn't matter. Your lack of
knowledge of his lack of knowledge doesn't matter, either. Everyone
wins from the Buddha's teachings in the Lotus Sutra, and everyone
loses when the Buddha and his true intent are slandered. It's just
karmic, how these evils arrive on our path.

Avoid the Python's embrace. You've been warned.

Not much else about Python was found to be immediately, obviously
corrupted. There is a CMS using Python and Django called Zorb, that
has a website containing wisdom regarding Zorb named ZorbZen, which
means that group is corrupted by Zen.

Of course, once you find out that the founder has been corrupted by
innovating some new Buddhism, it's all finished for any CMS based on
it.


____ Dojo Zen ______________________________________________

9. Javascript brings us client side programmability without the Flash
legacy, although there are many things that can only be done in Flash.
Javascript can allow your code to execute with the performance of
desktop software, without any refreshes, if you know what you're
doing. And with AJAX asynchronous push streaming, you can keep the
client side fed from the server, also without refreshes. It's like
magic.

Javascript has little to do with Java, it was invented by Netscape
when the Sun's Java name was hot, and Netscape wanted some of that
heat for its new client side technology.

Here's a riddle: 97% of Web browsers support it, but only 0.001% of
Web sites use it. What is it?

The answer: Client Side Storage.

http://www.slideshare.net/idontsmoke/client-side-storage


There are 5 kinds:

. Gears plugin
. WHATWG DB
. WHATWG Global/Session Storage
. DHTML userData Behaviour
. Flash Cookies

Of these five the one you MOST WANT TO AVOID is Google Gears.

Why? Two reasons.

[a.] Google Gears installed base is tiny and diminishing because no
one installs the plugin.

[b.] Google Gears is becoming more wedded to Dojo Offline.

So, following on from the discussion on the martial arts above, a dojo
is a place where a Japanese martial arts "way" (do) is practiced and
learned. If you were paying attention above, this is the last place
you would ever want to be, because of the misfortune it generates in
your life which will ultimately undermine it completely. See these
postings on Bruce and Brandon Lee ...

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.zen/msg/79d1c98d9512bf9a?hl=en

and on Bruce Lee's students ...

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.zen/msg/3a23c9a761540a0a?hl=en

However Dojo of Javascript got its name, it is completely corrupted by
that choice. Don't let yourself become corrupted by that choice. Use
one of the other methods for Client Side Storage and stay online.


____ GNU Zen _______________________________________________

10. Prowling through the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) directory of
projects some years ago, I noticed a gnu, which is nothing unusual.
This GNU logo, however was floating in meditation wearing monk's robes
with a laptop. The product was Savannah or Savane (the relationship
was confusing), which is a central software forge system at FSF.

GNU is the name for the free software operating system, which includes
the GNU kernel (Linux, for now, Hurd, they say for later) and all the
endless variety of GNU tools which make an operating system useful.
The idea of independence from a particular kernel, allows the GNU
operating system to survive the demise or the seeming inadequacy of
the kernel of the moment. So, if you don't like Linux much, just wait.
The GNU tools can run on anything, like FreeBSD, Mach and even
Windows, in large part.

The GNU name itself is a recursive acronym: GNU's Not Unix.

More recently, the meditating monk GNU logo is now found on the splash
screen for the Free Software Foundation itself.

http://www.fsf.org

That constitutes a promotion for this religious icon.

Is it Hindu meditation? Or Zen meditation? TM? Yoga? Which Tendo
(Heavenly Way) is it?

It certainly is not a Western religion, it is clearly an Eastern one.
All of these religions, East and West, have tax IDs for donations,
priests, temples or centers or churches paid for by donations and
their own religious traditions, which are their right under the First
Amendment of the Constitution. Unpaid advertisements and promotions
are NOT their right, however.

Why has the Free Software Foundation taken upon itself to become an
advertisement and advocate for Tendo meditation? The FSF should purge
itself of ANY religious bias, otherwise it is no better than the Bush
White House, or the Falwell-Reagan conspiracy which led to 25 million
deaths by the AIDS epidemic, which was thought to be a benign 'final
solution' to the gay problem, if AIDS were left to run its course.

Purge yourselves !!!
_________________________________________
_________________________________________
_________________________________________

So, ask yourselves, why do these horrible men, these Philistines like
Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Mark Cuban always end up kicking Silicon
Valley's collective ass over and over again?

And it is, apparently, going to happen again with Google and all the
rest of the Zen.

Personally, I am completely frustrated by this. Google has been a
major tool that I have depended on time and again, and it has rescued
me countless times from ignorance on one area and topic after another.
I owe Google an enormous debt that I can seemingly never repay.

Fortunately, the Lotus Sutra supplies a way to repay my debt of
gratitude, by becoming the true parent of the misled.

From "The Opening of the Eyes", Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, p.
287 ...

http://www.sgilibrary.org/view.php?page=287

. I, Nichiren, am sovereign, teacher, and father and
. mother to all the people of Japan. But the men of the
. Tendai school [who do not refute misleading teachings]
. are all great enemies of the people. [As Chang-an has
. noted,] "ONE WHO RIDS THE OFFENDER OF EVIL IS ACTING AS
. HIS PARENT."

To repay my debt of gratitude to Google and others it is required of
me to speak up and refute their error, and thus to become their
parent. It is not required of me to gain compliance, or even
acknowledgement, to avoid the offense of my own complicity in their
errors.

From "On Recommending This Teaching to Your Lord and Avoiding the
Offense of Complicity in Slander", WND, p. 461 ...

http://www.sgilibrary.org/view.php?page=461

. From the ruler on down to the common people, all have
. become slanderers of the Law whose offense exceeds the
. five cardinal sins. Therefore, all of you are also on
. the side of the ruler. Although at heart you are of the
. same mind as Nichiren, since your person is in service
. to your lord, it would have been extremely difficult for
. you to have avoided the offense of complicity in
. slander. How admirable it is that, despite this, you
. communicated this teaching to your lord and urged him to
. take faith in it. EVEN THOUGH HE MAY FAIL TO ACCEPT IT
. NOW, YOU HAVE MANAGED TO AVOID THE OFFENSE OF
. COMPLICITY.

As always, I defer to your enlightened wisdom as to your collective
choice of path.

If I may be so bold, a better choice than slandering the Lotus Sutra
is to give it the immense appreciation that it immensely deserves.

From "The Blessings of the Lotus Sutra", WND, p. 673 ...

http://www.sgilibrary.org/view.php?page=673

. The more gold is heated in the flames, the brighter will
. be its color; the more a sword is whetted, the sharper
. it will become. And the more one praises the blessings
. of the Lotus Sutra, the more one’s own blessings will
. increase. Bear in mind that the twenty-eight chapters of
. the Lotus Sutra contain only a few passages elucidating
. the truth, but a great many words of praise.

That last line is the most beneficial view of life.

This quote from President Ikeda of the SGI describes the true intent
of the Lotus Sutra, and Buddhism itself, before that intent was
waylaid by greedy and scurrilous priests ...

From "A Scripture That Calls Out To All People", The Wisdom of the
Lotus Sutra, Vol. 1 of 6, Daisaku Ikeda et al, p. 45 ...

. In that assertion-that the sutra was taught for the sake
. of those living after Shakyamuni's passing, for the
. people of the Latter Day of the Law -- the compassion of
. the Lotus Sutra, which extends to all people, is
. apparent.
.
. The Lotus Sutra teaches that the "one great reason" why
. Buddhas appear in the world -- in other words, the
. supreme and ultimate purpose for the advent of Buddhas -
. - is to enable all living beings to attain Buddhahood
. (LS2, 31).
.
. This goal cannot be accomplished unless the teachings
. preached by Shakyamuni are also effective for all those
. living after him, particularly those in the defiled age
. of the Latter Day of the Law. It is inconceivable,
. therefore, that the Buddha would fail to leave behind
. teachings for those living in later ages. The Lotus
. Sutra is the compassionate scripture he taught for
. precisely that reason.
.
. Nichiren Daishonin read the Lotus Sutra with his life,
. revealing and propagating Nam-myoho-renge-kyo as the Law
. implicit in this sutra, which is designed to enable all
. people to become happy. The Daishonin was the first to
. demonstrate how to realize the ideal of the Lotus Sutra
. to bring happiness to all people in the Latter Day of
. the Law, when the Buddha's teachings were predicted to
. perish.

The vast majority of people who have heard about the Lotus Sutra and
Nichiren Buddhism, have heard about it through the efforts of this one
man, President Ikeda. It is because of him that I practice Buddhism,
however unworthy a disciple I may appear to be.

-Chas.

_________________________________________

[Keep in mind when reading chapter two of the Lotus Sutra, that it is
the core of the "theoretical" first half of the Lotus Sutra. As such,
it expresses theoretical ichinen sanzen, the theoretical wisdom of the
Lotus Sutra.

When you read this section it can raise in your mind the provisional
view of Buddhism, that enlightenment is attained through worshipping
statues or various practices over many lifetimes, which is incorrect
for this time. In fact, the one and only way to attain the
enlightenment related to the Lotus, is the practice of the Lotus
Sutra, which in the latter day of the Law is chanting Nam-Myoho-Renge-
Kyo.]

LS Chap. 2

If there are persons who for the sake of the Buddha
fashion and set up images,
carving them with many distinguishing characteristics,
then all have attained the Buddha way.
Or if they make things out of the seven kinds of gems,
of copper, red or white copper,
pewter, lead, tin
iron wood, or clay,
or use cloth soaked in lacquer or resin
to adorn and fashion Buddha images,
then persons such as these have all attained the Buddha way.
If they employ pigments to paint Buddha images,
endowing them with the characteristics of hundredfold merit,
if they make them themselves or have others make them,
then all have attained the Buddha way.
Even if little boys in play
should use a piece of grass or wood or a brush,
or perhaps a fingernail
to draw an image of the Buddha,
such persons as these
bit by bit will pile up merit
and will become fully endowed with a mind of
great compassion;
they all have attained the Buddha way.

This anthology:

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