I finally got around to creating a very short biography.

Dave: I responded "Mike, while I'm not a lawyer, I don't think it's legal to spin when you're under oath. I think it's required that you tell the truth."

And I say:

In this case, the whole truth is a complex, abstract thing. When you express it using a reasonably small amount of English, something is invariably lost. One is free to judge if what is lost is pertinent to the issue, and that is what is happening here. If I cared enough to follow the proceedings in detail, I'm sure that I would find that much of what I might consider to be pertinent was left out of the anti-Microsoft testimony.

Survey: Is Gates Lying?  [Scripting News]

Dave's survey doesn't include a choice for what, in my personal opinion, may be a more correct answer:

When simplifying for mass consumption any issue as complex as this one, one could "spin" it in any number of ways without abandoning the "truth." Gates is spinning this one in the way that is best for Microsoft's bottom line. It is his responsibility to Microsoft's share holders to do this.

This isn't a childish school yard dispute about who is lying and who is telling the truth. Expressing an informed opinion on it requires mature language, thought, and discussion.

Simon Fell: It seems to me though that the industry has got to get to the point where [understanding your platform] isn't the case, and I can't see that happening with the current mainstream software development paradigms.

When it comes to applications of XML (like web services) I think it is critical that people work in terms of schema. The problem is that schema adds a lot of complexity to address %10 cases and the specs are nearly unreadable. That makes people shy away from it instead of leveraging it to bring a kind of simplicity into their overall system designs. The truth is, there are simple approaches to schema and XML. All we need are more of these and some common, interoperable, patterns for evolving schema based type systems.