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 during the dot com bust. 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-manGod 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.

And it looks like Apple is on the downhill slide, according to Job's former top salesman:
http://readwrite.com/2014/03/20/apple-mac-windows-pc-balance#awesm=~ozdqmU7m62850N

When they stop serving the devilish function, Tenji-ma drops them straight into the hell of regret ("Wha hoppen?"), every time. Love 'em and leave 'em.

The next Zen Man is an entire company based on one revenue stream: ads embedded in web search.

Google has embraced Buddhism, but not the highest teaching of the Lotus Sutra, oh no. That would be too obvious, they have gone whole hog for Hinayana: "the lesser way".

Google have embraced Mindfulness and the Agama Sutras:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness

The practice is, of course, Hindu meditation (dhyana) dressed up as Buddhism, as opposed to Zen which is Hindu meditation (dhyana) dressed up as anti-Buddhist, and anti-Sutras.

Similar, huh? And identical in their rejection of the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha's highest teachings. Google are now the Zen Gods of High Tech.

In Nichiren Daishonin's writing before his death in 1282 called the "Rooster Diagram of the Five Periods of the Buddha's Lifetime Teachings" WND II, p. 1036:
http://www.nichirenlibrary.org/en/wnd-2/Content/367#p1036

He places the Agama sutras correctly into the earliest extended 12 year period of the Buddha's teachings over 42 years before preaching the Lotus Sutra, and points out that the Buddha himself admonished his followers that the provisional teachings were to be "honestly discarded" after the Lotus Sutra was preached because they could not be used as a vehicle to enlightenment, no matter how many lifetimes they were practiced.

Only the Lotus Sutra is the direct path to enlightenment, and after the Lotus Sutra has been preached the provisional teachings become the enemy of the Buddha and the Lotus Sutra: they are a profound slander of the Law:

... The Immeasurable Meanings Sutra states: "I made use of
... the power of expedient means. But in these more than
... forty years, I have not yet revealed the truth."

... The Flower Garland Sutra, 21 days; the Agama sutras,
... 12 years; the Correct and Equal sutras and the Wisdom
... sutras, 30 years. The above come to 42 years. The
... Treatise on the Nature of the Phenomenal World says
... 42 years.

... The Immeasurable Meanings Sutra also says: "Though
... immeasurable, boundless, inconceivable asamkhya kalpas
... may pass, they will in the end fail to gain unsurpassed
... enlightenment. Why? Because they will not know about
... the great direct way to enlightenment, but will travel
... perilous byways beset by numerous hindrances and
... trials." And it also says: "Because, practicing it,
... one travels a great direct way free of hindrances and
... trials."

Now Google has embraced them as the truth and they are propagating them inside Google widely:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/technology/google-course-asks-employees-to-take-a-deep-breath.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Having corrupted themselves thoroughly, they must now spread that corruption to the world:
https://sites.google.com/site/mindfulnessonlinecourse/Home

What will they do next, these Zen Gods of Google in their paradise? They are searching high and low for another way to make money, before the inevitable droop in the ad revenue from search. Robots, AI, anything. Nothing will avail their increasingly more desperate efforts to find another vein of gold before this one taps out. They will undermine themselves with slander of the Law to comfort themselves in their decline, as Nichiren indicates quoting T'ien-T'ai regarding the followers of Bodhidharma:

............ 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."

I also regret that, and now, not later.

____ 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.

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____ 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.
_________________________________________

LS Chap. 16 .....

All harbor thoughts of yearning
and in their minds thirst to gaze at me.
When living beings have become truly faithful,
honest and upright, gentle in intent,
single-mindedly desiring to see the Buddha
not hesitating even if it costs them their lives,
then I and the assembly of monks
appear together on Holy Eagle Peak.
At that time I tell the living beings
that I am always here, never entering extinction,
but that because of the power of an expedient means
at times I appear to be extinct, at other times not,
and that if there are living beings in other lands
who are reverent and sincere in their wish to believe,
then among them too
I will preach the unsurpassed Law.