Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

[Al Christians <achrist@easystreet.com>]

"Michael P. Card" wrote:
> 
> Hey Al (& everyone else on CLA)-
> 
> 
> I think the situation is worse than that! Right now, you can't get 
> these particular products no matter how much $ you
> have because ...
>
> The easiest answer (IMO) would be for the US govt to "seed" 
> commercial ventures for these kinds of things by providing
> start-up funding to commercialize these products. 
>

You are saying (?) that:

1. Contractor can't figure out how to market this unless some one gives
them a contract to figure that out, and

2. Nobody can figure out how to give it away because lawyers turn colors
over the prospect,  but

3. There is some slim change that the government might be able to figure
out how to give entrepreneur funding so that entrepreneur can use the 
government money to buy the product (from the government or from the 
contractor? IDK)  and then be profitable business as a value-added 
reseller of this product to the refractory, yak-fat-extracting, widget
womping, rental repair, and on-line fortune-telling industries? Sounds
like a guaranteed ticket to the Fortune 65535.  Put my name on the list.

BTW, one time previous when I was looking for available Ada database
software, I came across a package on the Ada CD-ROM that was developed
by a branch of the US government (I won't use any names 
because of what I'm going to say)  that wears tin hats and carries 
rifles.  This was some kind of keyed file package that returned data
according to key using a linear search of the entire file for each 
request.  Whether this was first implemented to work with a tape drive,
IDK.  Nothing about this is paranormal, but that it was written this
way, and made available as a reusable component, and published on the
Ada CD is a little bit different from what one would expect from reading
too much CLA, where Ada renames Superb. But maybe the story for Ada is 
not that different from the story for everything else.


Al