| William H. Magill on Sat, 17 May 2003 18:57:39 -0400 |
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On Thursday, May 15, 2003, at 07:57 PM, Barry Roomberg wrote: You got stomped.
With the brief as filed by the City's Lawyer, nothing short of a trial with Expert Testimony and Cross Examination, could possibly show it to be a wrong. (That's the only way you will be able to establish the relevance of explicit knowledge of the BRT's system.) However, the BRT affidavits are 100% correct. The basic problem is, they have facts, you have opinions. The Lawyer's summation is typical lawyerese which the Judge understands. The part which you can't refute (because it is accurate from the technical point of view) is: "... does not require the government agency to create a document which does not exist - no matter how simple the task may be." The "public document" which you are asking for is a CD which does not contain the two additional fields you want. And that system agregates the data as you now see it on the web.
What is being asked for, is different from what is seen. An existing document, aka CD, aka disc, contains all the requested data EXCEPT for two fields. To "add" those two fields will require the creation of a new document (which is not required under the RtKA). The procedure for creating the existing document (as well as the new one) is described as the first point in Mescelotto's affidavit. The information viewable on the Web is an entirely different "document," - one that you are not asking for. Put another way, you are requesting the wrong document... and the RtKA requires that you explicitly state the document you want a copy of. Ideally, what you want is an XML feed from the BRT web server, which can be easily demonstrated to have all of the data aggregated in one spot. However, even there, unless there is a way to feed the web application "*.*" (or whatever), getting "all the data sequentially" is not something which the web application is designed to do. While a spider could retrieve the data, it will be a painful and lengthy process. (It will take you a minimum of 500,000 queries, and assuming 10 seconds per query... 1400 minutes or about 23 1/4 hours) ... assuming that you would start out with the data from the CD and use that as the Key to retrieve the web pages. Thinking about it, the primary reason for such reluctance to use even say, EASYTREVE, to suck out the data is the fact that most of us COBOL literate folks have "retired" again (aka positions discontinued) since the end of the Y2K debacle. The mainframe structure is a Legacy system which they are in the process of replacing. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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