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Dear Larry,
Thanks for putting this so clearly. My recent postings were largely an attempt to stimulate this sort of discussion - if theory X is correct, then what would it predict about the manuscript which we could go and check? (And, more importantly, how could we tell if that theory was wrong, so we could learn from that, and move on to the next candidate?) I think that a lot of the answers are already out there, but need to be brought together. Philip's recent posting is a good example of the sort of solid research which has already narrowed down the set of possible answers quite considerably - if we could mount a systematic push along these lines, I think that it would make a significant difference to our understanding of the problem. Best wishes, Gordon
Larry Roux wrote: Thanks, Rene! I guess what I was trying to stress is that there does not seem to be a coherent attack at the VMS. A lot of ideas are floated, and die in the ether. Coming from the computing world I am used to people submitting ideas, and the rest of the group proposing alternative solutions, suggestions, or debunking the thought. Then a team of people work on making the best path to the outcome. Issue logs are kept. Best practices. What I would really like to see is a complete list of attacks being used and the chain of thoughts that propel the attack forward - or scuttle it. It seems we are a bunch of single units trying to attack the VMS one at a time, in seclusion. Many people are redoing old work (which is sometimes very valuable) and other people are working on attacks that might contain the one clue that the other person needs to resolve a problem. Personally, I find people sending suggestions/caveats very helpful ("Did you think of how your solution might fail in case b?" - "Your attack is interesting, but flawed in that ...."). There are a lot of great minds on this list. It seems such a shame that they are all being used as individual units rather than some powerful network. |