In No Integrity: A Systemic Problem I started with the following quote:

 

"We have 22 universities and colleges with over 200,000 students in Dalian," the city's mayor, Xia Deren, told me. More than half graduate with engineering or science degrees, and even those who don't are directed to spend a year studying Japanese or English and computer science” … The Chinese certainly want to believe it's inevitable that they will move from basic software outsourcing to design, but even a top Chinese science planner acknowledges that it won't be easy. Xu Kuangdi, president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said to me that for China to advance, "we have to build more products from our own intellectual property … But in software”, he added, that will require "improving the innovative capability of the younger generation," which will require some big changes in China's rigid, rote education system. Chinese officials, he said, are thinking about such changes right now. I wouldn't bet against them.  Have your kids finished their homework?

--Thomas Friedman, Doing Our Homework, New York Times

 

Just as I completed the article, I receive the following from a reader.

 

 

From: KP

To: Editor

Date: 28 Jun 2004

 

A coworker has suggested we use Hibernate, a Java object-relational mapping tool, as a persistence framework.  It should be noted that Hibernate is a widely used open source O/R mapping tool that is in fact the foundation of container managed persistence for JBOSS (the premier open source Java application server).  In researching this possibility I came across an interesting interview with one of the creators of Hibernate:

 

Q: Have your original ideas about O/R mapping changed much since you embarked on this project?

 

A: I went into this knowing very little about ORM, and even very little about databases. One of my first tasks was to go out and buy a book to learn SQL properly. All my understanding of the problem comes from what our users have taught us over the last two years.

 

I rest my case.

 

This is, of course, in a broader context. See Your Time Is Up, George, Simon Said.