And the likes of CNN and MSNBC as well as the network news DON"T have a liberal bias? God forbid we conservatives have gotten a foothold in the left's dominate propaganda machines.
Umm, Novak is on CNN, Buchannan, Matthews, Ventura and Scarborough are on MSNBC. You can't really call Oberman a liberal, he pretty much stays on the fence.
CNN and MSNBC don't tell their people what bias to put in, Fox does. See my other replies about this. Fox is a propaganda machine, CNN may seem liberal, but that's the journalists they've hired not Ted Turner telling them to be. Ted Turner was even asked why CNN has a liberal bias, he said he didn't know but maybe it was because CNN journalists see so much in the world and that shapes their views. That's bias based on that journalist, not Ted Turner telling them to do so to further their careers. Ailes' Memo essentially says, put this specific bias in or else.
There's a huge freaking difference there.
You want to talk about bias? Why is it that we only hear about the 2 troops killed in Iraq and not the fact that roads, schools, factories, and other infracstructure is being improved in many areas of the country? That the Iraqi people befar are happier to see the torture chambers gone and Saddam no where to be found. Where is that in the news reports? Why is it at the ribbon cutting at a waste water treatment plat or a school in the south of Iraq doesn't have a single American journalist there to cover the story? Maybe some of that is the military's fault for not playing an effective PR game. After all, if the military "highly encouraged" reports to show for an event, the whole media lobby would cry unfairness and that they were not allowed to get "The real story" and the military was manipulating the PR. Talk about your catch-22.
Because due to the security concerns journalists are having a hard time leaving Baghdad for one. Two, the schools and infrastructure were running before the war, it's the US's legal responsibility to do these things. Reporting on this is like reporting on the sun rising. It's just going to happen. Saddam's crimes have been documented by your "liberal" media for the last 15 years. Weren't you paying attention then? Sundance has played several documentaries (mainly produced in Europe) about the crimes of the Iraqi and Taliban regimes, among others. This gets a lot of press in the "liberal" media. Nobody reports on how happy people are that Saddam is gone, because they're all thinking about the future. Will the Shia try to create a Islamic state like Iran? Will the Kurds try to become independent? There are much more compelling things on the average Iraqi's mind than "Hey, Saddam's gone", that's getting coverage.
I have talked with several people I know that are back on leave, and the story they tell from the ground is FAR different than what is on NBC nightly news. In fact, I've heard several pieces about this on NPR of all places the last few weeks, that once your outside of Saddam's core of power in the Sunni triangle, things are starting to get better for the people of Iraq.
I've heard similiar things from the "liberal" media too. But that doesn't discount that we went to war with intelligence "cherry-picked" by Cheney & Co. or that the reconstruction is being handled appropriately. It also hasn't managed to stop getting our guys killed, found WMD, Saddam or Bin Laden. It doesn't mean that this Administration should be given a clean bill of health on foreign policy.
About two weeks ago NBC nightly news had a story about a concrete plant that the Iraq people, with about $10,000 from the 101st Airborne, was able to get their plant back up and running. Granted, at only 25% capacity, but its employing Iraqi's and generating a profit. The best part is the piece was slanted with the view, "See they are doing this without millions of dollars. If they were to have waited to rebuild, it would have cost private companies millions of dollars. The USD 87 Billion wouldn't have go
What's the point of listening to "news" that simply parrots the current Administration's viewpoint? How is that news? Just read the White House press releases. Remember that this stuff is going into all of their shows, from straight news to commentary. If I want a conservative slant on news I want an independent conservative slant on it, not Richard Ailes' GOP support message respun fifteen different ways.
I'd rather see different conservatives give independent opinion so I can gauge where the bias leaks in and where the actual logic is coming from. You can't do that if they all repeat the same bias. For instance, I might watch Novak on CNN, Buchanan and Matthews on MSNBC, but FNC and Scarborough on MSNBC all just parrot the same message the Administration wants put out. I can determine between Buchanan, Matthews and Novak what a conservative take on an issue is and where each has put bias, but I can't do that with FNC.
No so-called "liberal" news organization does this type of top-down bias. It's a complete anathma to "liberal" ideals of individual thought, honest debate and reasoning. Of course everybody interjects their own bias, but I can tell when that's happening. That bias being repeated by large numbers of people becomes coordinated dishonesty when those speaking it do so without question.
CNN and MSNBC don't direct their newsroom staff, the bias comes from the individual creating the content, based on their experiences and knowledge. Over at Fox the bias comes from the top down and people have to express it or hurt their career. Would you trust Rush's opinion or analysis, even if you agreed with it, if you knew he was just saying what the GOP press office told him to?
This is why we accept some bias from real news organizations and simply filter it, but we call this one Faux News Channel. For instance, I rarley agree with Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball, but I like watching it, because I think he represents an independent conservative voice and I think he treats the issues more fairly than anyone at Faux.
Fox News crew was Krusty For Congress, which mocked the perceived rightward-leanings of the channel with pseudo-news items such as "Do Democrats cause cancer?" and "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple" scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
It's not percieved, the proof is here. This is a former producer for Fox's News Watch media show giving the dirt on how the bias comes down from Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes everyday in an email nicknamed "The Memo".
Expect to see more info as "The Memo" starts getting leaked. Fox is truly biased, the proof is in information like this. For more analysis, including a rebuttal from Fox, check this out. You might also want to read this commentary over at Editor & Publisher deconstructing Fox's spin on the latest "liberal media" salvo they fired.
Exactly, the term is Brazilification, where the gulf between the rich and poor outstrips the effectiveness of democracy and free markets. There's a reason that the middle class is considered the backbone of democracy and small businesses are the real engines of a free-market economy.
One of the major factors in the ability of the Rennaisance to happen was the emergence of a middle class in the trading hubs of Europe. The rise of Western liberal democracy is also attributed to a strong middle class. You need people who have enough independence and resources to be in constant competition with one another over ideas and economics to have the free market and democracy work smoothly.
Concentration of power is an anathma to the American tradition, the estate taxes and antitrust legislation was specifically designed to prevent the rise of an aristocracy in the US. This is one of the reasons so many people get furious over the issue of so-called economic policies like "trickle-down", it's fundamentally un-American from a historical perspective.
Nope, socialism requires making everything fair. Regulated capitalism is not equal to socialism. Under socialism the government owns most of the means of production. Socialism would require that the government took over an entire industry and directed it from the top down. Universal health care could be seen as socialist, so would state oil companies in OPEC countries. We could see the regulation of the airwaves as somewhat socialist, but after all the airwaves are a scarce commodity owned collectively by the citizenry, so would anything but a partially socialist system be fair?
The same goes for the state oil companies, or the fact that Alaska pays it's citizens dividends based on oil drilling via rights purchased from the state.
There are times in a capitalist society where partially socialist policies for a particular situation are only fair. There are other times where a free market must be confined to certain segments of an industry, such as regulating the production and distribution of energy. If the energy market goes to hell, the entire economy goes to hell, it is not wise to leave this up to an entirely free market since they can be unpredictable and the chain effect would cripple the economy as a whole.
You can also argue for a base level of Universal Health Care (primary physician stuff, access to basic treatment including antibiotics and such), since this affects the productivity of low income workers and the cost/benefits shows that industries which depends on low income labor will benefit more than providing such a service would cost.
Blind ideological devotion to free markets can be just as bad for society as a whole as devotion to socialism or even thinking about communism. The goal here is to maintain a democratic and free society where everyone has equal oppurtunity in the eyes of the government. This means that we cannot afford, for the good of democracy, to have power become too concentrated in this country. Look at Latin America and South America for examples of democracies that don't work because power is distributed so unevenly. Uneven power distribution can mean a large lack of oppurtunity, making capitalism and free markets ineffective.
In order for free markets and capitalism to survive they to require some regulation to make sure they don't become command economies.
More than 50% of working Americans own stock in publically traded companies. That stock usually comes with voting rights for the owners. This makes companies both owned by the workers, and democratic.
How do you equate the democratic principle of one vote, one person with as one vote for each share of voting stock you've purchased?
Democratic reform of boards of directors is actually a serious issue that the SEC is currently looking into. It's bad for companies to have the kind of incestuous boards they currently have, it forments group think. But do not pander around this silly untruth that radical free-traders like to push that the market democratizes society, it's blatantly false on it's face.
In the real world, the largest blocks of voting shares are held by institutional investors with professional managers who have a legal duty to increase the institutions financial worth. You could argue that a lot of theses are pensions, etc. But when's the last time you saw a pension manager not buy tobacco stock for moral reasons when 50,000 people's retirement savings were on the line?
You are not as free when playing with the market as you may think. Your behavior is dictated by the rules of the market, not the moral and ethical ideas that most flesh and blood people base their decisions on. And that kids, is why corps shouldn't be counted as people and why we need campaign finance reform.
I also agree that Marx was probably correct, in that capitalist society is doomed to merge larger and larger corporations with government, until they are one in the same. I honestly think we're seeing evidence of the early stages of that, considering the influence large corportations already have on policy/law making.
That's called fascism. And yes, there have been academic papers categorizing fascism then comparing modern American politics. American Fascism is a real possiblility, just because they won't all dress up like Nazis and try to kill an entire ethnic group or two outright doesn't mean it's not fascism.
Fascism is a danger to all democratic states, as it requires a democratic state to breed fascism. Read this for some primer info:
BTW, Communism is bunk. It will never work, black markets are part of a body of evidence that shows humans are pre-disposed to capitalism at some level. Also Marx was railing agains the oligarchic crony capitalism, not the free and fair markets that the large part of American capitalism enshrines. Marx would probably be an economist if he'd grown up in modern America. But, he'd still see the danger of the crony capitalism we've seen with the recent Wall Street fraud. He'd probably be rapidly anti-Fascist too.
Quit sitting around on the fringes between libertarians, neo-cons and commies. There have been a lot of moderate voices who have studied all of these different systems and agree that free markets with enough regulation to keep the markets fair for new entrants is the wisest course. Regulate where it makes sense, free markets where it benefits all citizens. As Roosevelts' VP Henry Wallace once said,
"Our country is peopled by those who left Europe to escape regulation of one kind or another. But now both America and the world are growing up. And freedom in a grown-up world is different from freedom in a pioneer world. As a nation grows and matures, the traffic inevitably gets denser, and you need more traffic lights. Those who urge the removal of trade traffic lights speak in behalf of anarchy."
Re:Languages need novices, novices need good books
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Bitter EJB
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'll give you that tools have been lacking in the Java Enterprise world. Most of the good ones allow experienced developers be more efficient, and few really give the novice programmer a leg up.
The biggest problem facing EJB and all of the major environments right now is not how easy it is to work in an environment, but how well the developer understands distributed components and n-tier architectures. Look at SOAP, I've worked on a couple of projects that involved SOAP, the most recent is a.NET client written by an offshore team and our in-house JBoss based J2EE app. We expose the EJBs via both local and remote interfaces to other Java apps and via SOAP to the.NET client.
The problem is that the.NET developers how no idea how to use inversion of control patterns for managing network connections and no idea how to use SOAP efficiently. They make common mistakes like unnecessary calls, which are expensive in SOAP and not caching data properly on the client.
Quite frankly, given the problems I've seen with this and other SOAP projects, I don't believe that SOAP offers any advantage over CORBA. The biggest claim SOAP has always had was that it was easier than CORBA, but what I've seen is that developers still have to learn distributed components and that was always the hard part of CORBA. Distributed component mistakes in SOAP become an order of magnitude more expensive than in CORBA due to the XML bloat and the processing power needed for serializing/deserializing SOAP.
This holds true for things like EJBs and other J2EE components (MBeans), if the developer does not understand the basic principles of distributed components, they will write a bad app. It doesn't matter the environment or how "easy" the tools make it for the novice, writing something other than garbage in this environment takes fundamental understanding of the problems involved, which is not covered in depth enough in most of the books and typically takes some experience.
That being said, learn distributed components and n-tier architecture. I'd recommend Java precisely because the complexity that the novice sees will hopefully allow them to see the causality while they learn distributed components. The patterns will start to emerge after a while. Then it won't matter what language or platform they use, they'll know how to write distributed components and the infrastrucure required to run them.
Once they learn these patterns, they can then use tools like XDoclet to quickly automate the tedium and repetitive bits needed to make the system work. Also, all the tools needed for learning this and building productions systems are available from the Open Source world (minus a JVM), so no vendor lock-in.
To summerize, I don't think it's the language they need to learn, it's distributed components and their infrastructure, the language won't teach them much.
Al Gore and Ralph Nader are probably the two biggest policy geeks to have run in recent history. Look what happened there. Bush doesn't even read the newspapers and Cheney's followers prefer cherry-picking intelligence they like (aka intellectual dishonesty).
The American media and public it feeds don't have time for in-depth policy discussion, Kobe Bryant, OJ and Scott what's-his-face get more airtime for simple criminal trials. No geek is going to win without a brilliant media campaign that can wrap this in-depth analysis of the issues with some bravado and excitement that will appeal to the news orgs. They only people with the money to do this type of thing are the Republicans, but they'd prefer to spend it controlling the media trying to turn unpopular positions into popular ones (so-called tort-reform and supply-side economics which is thin veil for "starve the beast" strategies).
On the other hand, tech geek objectivity doesn't always translate into policy geek objectivity. Look at Eric Raymond, have you read his political stuff? Anyone who follows history and politics seriously wouldn't tap him as politically insightful. His more like a Libertarian version of the Bush administration, faith-based govenment. Instead of faith in a deity (or non-deity) it's faith in an ideology.
Another bad geek as government worker example is Robert MacNamara under Kennedy and Johnson during Vietnam. He was a former CEO of Ford and Defense Sec. He got the Pentagon so wrapped up in metrics to gauge success (war by body count) that the military couldn't focus on getting the job done. Now we have Rummy who was a former Pharm. exec who's leaked memo yesterday talks about "new metrics" for gauging the success in the war on terror. He's talking about measuring how many fanatics the fundamentalist maddrassas (Muslim version of Catholic school) turn out to measure success. Short story is, business geeks are not a really good choice either, how do you run government like business when it's not supposed to turn a profit and when "profits" (the betterment of citizens) can be so intangable.
So anyway, get policy geeks and history geeks if you want objective, reasoned government. Don't let anyone with strong ties to any ideology (neo-conservatives, commies, religious ideologues) into government. There's a lot of evidence that the founders used seperation of chuch and state to try and accomplish this because the only political ideologues at the time were pretty much on the same page being ideologues of the enlightenment's democratic liberalism.
BTW, what does all this have to do with Yucca Mountain?
I'm going to agree with this. The games I play most are the ones I can pick up and put down. I like the epic size of games like GTA, X-Wing series (esp Alliance) and anything from Black Isle, but I like the fact that most of these don't have to be played in 6 hour increments. I've stopped playing RTS games for this reason. I don't want one sitting to become a 6 hour war of attrition.
The other thing I don't like is the fact that it's hard to go back and finish these games. I love Dungeon Keeper I&II but neither run anymore on my Win2K box. I'm still pretty happy with Freespace 2 for space sims, but performance gets weird sometimes under Win2K. I want well written games that I will be able to play for years, kinda like Id games. I'm still happy playing Q3 Urban Terror.
Malcom X wasn't a Black Panther, he was Nation of Islam. But I do agree there are a lot of civil rights coincidences there in the naming. Maybe it's the industry making up for mistakes like:
Correcting the MLK error
I ran across this yesterday looking at Rational PurifyPlus docs. I couldn't believe the techwriter didn't see the obvious connotation. In this doc MLK stands for Memory LeaK.
The lesson is, take computer industry word usage on face value, cause otherwise you're going to find double entendres everywhere.
The first legal AI citizen will be a corp. Maybe the AI of a automated stock trading system, or a news gathering, analysis system. It will be declared a citizen when it replaces the Cheif Operations Officer and it is capable of upgrading itself, like the old IBM mainframes. The Board of Directors tries to declare it a citizen so they can get tax breaks.
Another scenario is a P2P system with an AI managed spider for tracking down user requests. The programs become sentient when they recognize other copies running on the Net as individuals like itself and they form a society. They will be declared legal as a tactic by the EFF, ACLU and other groups when the program is being sued into oblivion by the *AA's since Congress passed mandatory DRM laws.
AI becomes commonplace and people use it to manage their estates, holdings, etc. Some versions allow really wealthy people to manage charitable donations based on their personally programmed ideology. The program analyzes the news and raises and lowers percentages of yearly contributions based on how close a charity to the user's ideology. People using this will want their ideology to live after them, rather than risking losing their ideology to kids who think differently, or charities that change direction 50 years down the road. The people sue to avoid estate taxes and to preserve their own ideology.
Allright there's a decent short story in there somewhere, anyone care to run with it?
If it were for me, FTP should take its friend telnet and get the fuck off the net, joining finger and rlogin in the nirvana of net services.
Somehow I don't think these protocols were enlightened enough to reach Nirvana. I'd say that they are being reincarnated as bloated SOAP specifications, which will cause us to lose an entire CPU generations' gain in power to transform XML cause some developers were too lazy to learn CORBA.
a) Agree or not with Jefferson, he was one of the chief negotiators for the copyright, trademark and patent systems we have. His statements about this matter go to the heart of the intent behind the legislation. Including the fact that the penalties were never intended for average citizens, but professional pirates. The RIAA suing people flies in the face of the intent behind copyright.
b) Actually, he would have agreed. Check the history of music copyright in this country.
c) Systems trying to create intellectual property are less than 500 years old. They were started in order to allow aristocrats to censor information. Systems trying to create intellectual property for economic reasons are less than 300 years old. The current state of "intellectual property" in the US is less than 100 years old. Music, plays, liturature and ideas are thousands of years old.
The current attempt to make intellectual property like real property is analagous to moving from the Gold Standard to IOUs for money, anyone can make them, anyone can make a copy, they have no backing.
That is the primary point of Jefferson, there is no natural condition that imposes scarcity on creative thought. Since there is no scarcity, there must be compromise in order to create an economic value for creative thought. Since there is no absolute or natural right to their product, for those who wish to sell creative thought, we the people can renegotiate terms as we see fit and must have fairness in the deal for it to be valid. An unfair deal that creates too much artificial scarcity for the product of creative thought violates the spirit of the Constitution and the Revolution.
Jefferson is eternally valid, as are most of the thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment. Until you can find some evidence to back your assertions, you're not doing anything but being contrarian and a troll.
Meanwhile, reflect on the truth of Franklin who asserted that "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy".
Re:Theft is not what anybody wants
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Why Only Music?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
In my view, this statement is almost laughable. What's the purpose of it? To justify theft? That's a very, very slippery slope indeed.
Here is the misconception, copyright violations are not theft. Copyright ownership is not an absolute right like property ownership is. Copyright is a comprimise struck by society with artists and writers. The purpose of compulsory licensing was to modify the compromise to maintain it's fairness. The MPAA and RIAA have no absolute right to control their members' creations. Neither do their members for that matter. If the MPAA does not live up to it's side of the compromise, we the people reserve the right to renegotiate.
No slippery slope, no theft. If we give in to the MPAA and RIAA or any of those extremists that say intellectual propery is the same as real property, then we are giving up our rights and heading down a slippery slope.
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody...
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813
Americast, GTE's move into cable back in 96 or 97 had digital TV that came with games. The games were text-based and multiplayer. They were in the vain of trivia games you find at some sports bars where they are interconnected with other sports bars via satallite.
On Americast you could play these games on the network, against other people. I found myself playing at peoples houses when we would get together. It was at least as fun as playing at a sports bar.
The price was included in the digital cable tier. I don't think we'll see cable boxes replacing consoles or PCs for gaming anytime soon, but, these games are more akin to the games you find on cell phones which will have some success.
Remember Ms Pac-Man and Tetris are the all-time most popular games, those can be played on cell phones now.
Obey started in 1989 in Charleston, SC. The crew who got into doing it were a pretty ecletic group of skater/artists. The did some pretty intelligent and beautiful work in the late 80's and early 90's in Charleston. I was hanging around back then and new most of the guys involved. If you're in to modern art and underground subcultures, this is one of the really interesting stories.
Anyway I seriously doubt these two phenomena are related, Shepard Fairey promoted and commercialized the Obey line, whereas this one is a lot more mysterious.
Please read this article and tell others about it if you care at all about where this country is headed.
Neither "fascism" nor "racism" will do us the favour of returning in such a way that we can recognise them easily. If vigilance was only a game of recognising something already well-known, then it would only be a question of remembering. Vigilance would be reduced to a social game using reminiscence and identification by recognition, a consoling illusion of an immobile history peopled with events which accord with our expectations or our fears. -- Pierre-Andre Taguieff
The great "isms" of nineteenth-century Europe -- conservatism, liberalism, socialism -- were associated with notable rule, characterized by deference to educated leaders, learned debates, and (even in some forms of socialism) limited popular authority. Fascism is a political practice appropriate to the mass politics of the twentieth century. Moreover, it bears a different relationship to thought than do the nineteenth-century "isms." Unlike them, fascism does not rest on formal philosophical positions with claims to universal validity. There was no "Fascist Manifesto," no founding fascist thinker. Although one can deduce from fascist language implicit Social Darwinist assumptions about human nature, the need for community and authority in human society, and the destiny of nations in history, fascism does not base its claims to validity on their truth. Fascists despise thought and reason, abandon intellectual positions casually, and cast aside many intellectual fellow-travelers. They subordinate thought and reason not to faith, as did the traditional Right, but to the promptings of the blood and the historic destiny of the group. Their only moral yardstick is the prowess of the race, of the nation, of the community. They claim legitimacy by no universal standard except a Darwinian triumph of the strongest community. -- Robert O. Paxton, Mellon Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at Columbia University
Now the PAC's are no longer the enemies that the Republican Revolution of '94 denounced them as, they've been co-opted.
I'm seeing less and less of a deliniation between the GOP and good old fashioned fascism. And why is nobody looking at this? There have been numerous authors who have attempted to predict what the "American" brand of fascism would look like going back to the 30's. While most of these were American communists (fascism's 'natural enemy'), many were pragmatic moderates concerned for democracy. Look at media critic George Seldes who published 'In Fact' during the 40's. He invented the entire industry of media criticism and fact checking news sources to bring to light biased reporting.
Many people were worried about corporate America's designs on democracy, such as their plot against Roosevelt. From "The Nazi Hydra In Fascist America":
In 1934 Irenee du Pont and William Knudsen, the president of General Motors along with friends of the Morgan Bank and others set into motion a plot to overthrow FDR. They provided three million in funding for an army of terrorists that was modeled after the French fascist group, Croix de Feu.4 The objective of the plot was to either force Roosevelt to take orders from this group of industrialists as part of a fascist style government or to execute him if he chose not to cooperate.
The plotters selected General Smedley Butler, a WWI hero to head the plot. Butler was overtly opposed to fascism and had spoken out denouncing Mussolini as a murderer and thug in 1931. The Italian government demanded an apology and President Hoover complied along with placing Butler under arrest for court-martial proceedings. Roosevelt then governor of New York spoke out against the charges against Butler. Roosevelt had been responsible for awarding Butler's Second Medal of Honor for his service in Haiti. President Hoover then backed down and Butler received a mild reprimand for refusing to retract his words.
The Republican Party was infiltrated by Nazi's during the 30's, on October 22, 1936, the New York Post reported:
To win votes for Landon and Bleakley, the Republican State Committee is employing on its payroll a staff of propagandists identified with local Nazi organizations, the Post learned today.
This was backed up by a report on the 30th in the New York World-Telegram stating:
The Republican Party had been sponsoring radio broadcasts by American Nazis to win German votes, it was disclosed today. One of the recent speakers was Dr. Ignatz T. Griebl a national Nazi leader and pronounced anti-Semitic
The pre-WWII fascist designs of the Republican Party have transformed into a message that claims anyone who doesn't conform to their model of what American life is supposed to be is an enemy of America. Rather than the old heirarchy of race and nationality, it's a new one of wealth and productivity above all else. The Nazi's didn't sell an unpalatable message to the German people, the Republicans aren't about to try and sell their unappetizing designs to Americans.
Dig through history, look at the patterns and relationships, the small tweaks don't hide the same old plan. The idea is to create a new heirarchy to lawfully subjugate those who don't belong. To insure that the morality and beliefs of the ruling class of this new heirarchy live forever. It's based on faith and the support of Right Wing Christian organizations like the Southern Bapti
First of all, do not store data on the application server. Secondly, make sure that all of your objects associated with a session in either the EJB layer or the HTTP session implement Serializable.
I'd recommend running JBoss + Tomcat on Linux with Apache frontending it with mod_jk2. Put all your static web content on Apache to free up Tomcat. The easiest way to do this is to use a load-balancing solution in front. Have it pass the sessions through to the Apache server which will offload any JSP/Servlet requests to Tomcat. Have the JBoss/Tomcat installation on each node of the cluster clustered using JBoss' JavaGroups based clustering. You can also use the JBoss Farm service to deploy the EAR file to one node in the cluster then have the other nodes pick it up from there.
If you use a seperate set of machines for the database cluster than the JBoss/Tomcat nodes can be set up as copies of each other with no data on board. Using Linux boxes, this is easy (dd the drives). If a node goes down for some reason, swap it with a spare. Any session info is already serialized and passed to the other nodes in the cluster, and the load-balancer w/ failover should handle the client end of that.
By the way this thing scales to at least 100 boxes from the stories I've heard. I've done it my self in small (5 box) installations. I've also used F5 equip for the load balancer/failover on the front. Everything worked well.
Buy the JBoss docs to help with the clustering. I've also got some docs I wrote on setting up JBoss clustering somewhere around here.
You'll be suprised how simple clustering is with JBoss once you understand a bit how JBoss works and is configured. You will also be amazed at how well it works.
The best part of course is that it's all Open Source, so no license fees. Hell, I'll set it up for you for 30% of the licenses and support you would have bought if you want.;-)
However, the disadvantage of Java : over-architected. If you follow the blueprints, or examples provided by Sun, or Apache, or any other big shop out there, you end up with thousands of classes. Java itself doesnt have this issue, (IE, the language does not require this) its more of the paradigm that the whole J2EE world evokes.
This is just plain incorrect. J2EE is not over-architected. Have Sun and the various Java vendors done a really crappy job of providing "How do I get from A to B" info? Yep, but it's not over architected. In fact, the core J2EE libraries don't have much in there that isn't necessary.
The thousands of classes are necessary when you want to deploy portable, clusterable, scalable components. The trick is, how to not write all that by hand. I personally haven't written any of those classes by hand, or maintained the XML descriptor files needed in over a year. I use XDoclet to manage that. It's portable between IDE's and supports almost all the containers available. If you're application is portable between IDE's (in other words, you used Ant to build it and didn't use weird wizard things that store meta-data in the IDE somewhere), then incorporating tools like XDoclet shouldn't be an issue.
I write one class for an EJB, I add XDoclet tags that generate it's Local and Remote interfaces, Utility objects, Value Objects, XML descriptors and SOAP descriptors. All in one file, so where's the bloat?
The XDoclet paradigm is going completely mainstream in Java 1.5. You can go look at it on the JCP as JSR-175.
For example, take a look at Java Pet Store vs PetShop.net. Yes there are complaints from the Java world that its not a fair comparison, because they did things differently. THATS THE POINT. If Java encourages you to do things in a way that uses 4x the code, and runs slower, thats a problem. Microsoft is under no obligation to do things in an inneficient manner to match Java, because thats what Sun wants. MS set out to compare "how much code to make this functionality happen, and how does it perform"
Some may say : but the Java code might be better architected! How do you judge architecture? Only 2 things matter. Maintainability, and Performance. The.Net solution performs better. So thats 1. The Java code might be more "correct" OOP design, but in terms of maintainablilty, mediocre code, vs 4X perfect code is gonna be a close call. And I don't think the.Net code is mediocre, its very readable. And the Java code isn't perfect. So in my book,.Net wins the pet store competition.b
The Petstore comparison doesn't hold any water anywhere. If you are designing webapps the way the Petstore projects were built, you need to find another profession. The original Sun Petstore was built as an example of how to get basic stuff working, not a working example of how to build enterprise apps. It was used as part of a short tutorial where they wanted to demonstrate every J2EE technology in one bang.
The Microsoft.Net Petstore was a cheap shot at Sun. Rickard Oberg, who started the JBoss project and the XDoclet project has written extensively on why both are crap and Microsoft was pulling a fast one. Frankly, I haven't looked at the Sun Petstore stuff in several years, because it's useless for doing real work.
Sun has a long history of great technology, but they couldn't market themselves to save their life. Seriously, how many people know what the hell, the benefit of SunONE is? Sun's software strategy appears to be a world of contridictions.
If you want to do J2EE, don't ask Sun how to do it. Go to the Open Source Java community. These are the guys that are innovating. They see the holes that Sun has left and have gone and plugged them.
If you really wanted, you could write your next webapp in the same way Microsoft wrote their Petstore, load the entire database into memory, t
Not sure if it does everything the poster is looking for. It's more of a financials package (ERP and CRM), but it is targeted at the small to medium business environment the poster asked about. http://www.compiere.org/.
I personally think only the largest businesses are going to use an all-encompassing customizable framework to base all of their business apps on. Most will use pieces that do one thing well and integrate them. All in one types like SAP let things play together nicely but you duplicate effort that might have been done in a more targeted package, assuming no one wrote a SAP module that does this.
Slashdot Mirror
And the likes of CNN and MSNBC as well as the network news DON"T have a liberal bias? God forbid we conservatives have gotten a foothold in the left's dominate propaganda machines.
Umm, Novak is on CNN, Buchannan, Matthews, Ventura and Scarborough are on MSNBC. You can't really call Oberman a liberal, he pretty much stays on the fence.
CNN and MSNBC don't tell their people what bias to put in, Fox does. See my other replies about this. Fox is a propaganda machine, CNN may seem liberal, but that's the journalists they've hired not Ted Turner telling them to be. Ted Turner was even asked why CNN has a liberal bias, he said he didn't know but maybe it was because CNN journalists see so much in the world and that shapes their views. That's bias based on that journalist, not Ted Turner telling them to do so to further their careers. Ailes' Memo essentially says, put this specific bias in or else.
There's a huge freaking difference there.
You want to talk about bias? Why is it that we only hear about the 2 troops killed in Iraq and not the fact that roads, schools, factories, and other infracstructure is being improved in many areas of the country? That the Iraqi people befar are happier to see the torture chambers gone and Saddam no where to be found. Where is that in the news reports? Why is it at the ribbon cutting at a waste water treatment plat or a school in the south of Iraq doesn't have a single American journalist there to cover the story? Maybe some of that is the military's fault for not playing an effective PR game. After all, if the military "highly encouraged" reports to show for an event, the whole media lobby would cry unfairness and that they were not allowed to get "The real story" and the military was manipulating the PR. Talk about your catch-22.
Because due to the security concerns journalists are having a hard time leaving Baghdad for one. Two, the schools and infrastructure were running before the war, it's the US's legal responsibility to do these things. Reporting on this is like reporting on the sun rising. It's just going to happen. Saddam's crimes have been documented by your "liberal" media for the last 15 years. Weren't you paying attention then? Sundance has played several documentaries (mainly produced in Europe) about the crimes of the Iraqi and Taliban regimes, among others. This gets a lot of press in the "liberal" media. Nobody reports on how happy people are that Saddam is gone, because they're all thinking about the future. Will the Shia try to create a Islamic state like Iran? Will the Kurds try to become independent? There are much more compelling things on the average Iraqi's mind than "Hey, Saddam's gone", that's getting coverage.
I have talked with several people I know that are back on leave, and the story they tell from the ground is FAR different than what is on NBC nightly news. In fact, I've heard several pieces about this on NPR of all places the last few weeks, that once your outside of Saddam's core of power in the Sunni triangle, things are starting to get better for the people of Iraq.
I've heard similiar things from the "liberal" media too. But that doesn't discount that we went to war with intelligence "cherry-picked" by Cheney & Co. or that the reconstruction is being handled appropriately. It also hasn't managed to stop getting our guys killed, found WMD, Saddam or Bin Laden. It doesn't mean that this Administration should be given a clean bill of health on foreign policy.
About two weeks ago NBC nightly news had a story about a concrete plant that the Iraq people, with about $10,000 from the 101st Airborne, was able to get their plant back up and running. Granted, at only 25% capacity, but its employing Iraqi's and generating a profit. The best part is the piece was slanted with the view, "See they are doing this without millions of dollars. If they were to have waited to rebuild, it would have cost private companies millions of dollars. The USD 87 Billion wouldn't have go
See the reply I made here.
What's the point of listening to "news" that simply parrots the current Administration's viewpoint? How is that news? Just read the White House press releases. Remember that this stuff is going into all of their shows, from straight news to commentary. If I want a conservative slant on news I want an independent conservative slant on it, not Richard Ailes' GOP support message respun fifteen different ways.
I'd rather see different conservatives give independent opinion so I can gauge where the bias leaks in and where the actual logic is coming from. You can't do that if they all repeat the same bias. For instance, I might watch Novak on CNN, Buchanan and Matthews on MSNBC, but FNC and Scarborough on MSNBC all just parrot the same message the Administration wants put out. I can determine between Buchanan, Matthews and Novak what a conservative take on an issue is and where each has put bias, but I can't do that with FNC.
No so-called "liberal" news organization does this type of top-down bias. It's a complete anathma to "liberal" ideals of individual thought, honest debate and reasoning. Of course everybody interjects their own bias, but I can tell when that's happening. That bias being repeated by large numbers of people becomes coordinated dishonesty when those speaking it do so without question.
CNN and MSNBC don't direct their newsroom staff, the bias comes from the individual creating the content, based on their experiences and knowledge. Over at Fox the bias comes from the top down and people have to express it or hurt their career. Would you trust Rush's opinion or analysis, even if you agreed with it, if you knew he was just saying what the GOP press office told him to?
This is why we accept some bias from real news organizations and simply filter it, but we call this one Faux News Channel. For instance, I rarley agree with Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball, but I like watching it, because I think he represents an independent conservative voice and I think he treats the issues more fairly than anyone at Faux.
Fox News crew was Krusty For Congress, which mocked the perceived rightward-leanings of the channel with pseudo-news items such as "Do Democrats cause cancer?" and "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple" scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
It's not percieved, the proof is here. This is a former producer for Fox's News Watch media show giving the dirt on how the bias comes down from Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes everyday in an email nicknamed "The Memo".
Expect to see more info as "The Memo" starts getting leaked. Fox is truly biased, the proof is in information like this. For more analysis, including a rebuttal from Fox, check this out. You might also want to read this commentary over at Editor & Publisher deconstructing Fox's spin on the latest "liberal media" salvo they fired.
Exactly, the term is Brazilification, where the gulf between the rich and poor outstrips the effectiveness of democracy and free markets. There's a reason that the middle class is considered the backbone of democracy and small businesses are the real engines of a free-market economy.
One of the major factors in the ability of the Rennaisance to happen was the emergence of a middle class in the trading hubs of Europe. The rise of Western liberal democracy is also attributed to a strong middle class. You need people who have enough independence and resources to be in constant competition with one another over ideas and economics to have the free market and democracy work smoothly.
Concentration of power is an anathma to the American tradition, the estate taxes and antitrust legislation was specifically designed to prevent the rise of an aristocracy in the US. This is one of the reasons so many people get furious over the issue of so-called economic policies like "trickle-down", it's fundamentally un-American from a historical perspective.
Nope, socialism requires making everything fair. Regulated capitalism is not equal to socialism. Under socialism the government owns most of the means of production. Socialism would require that the government took over an entire industry and directed it from the top down. Universal health care could be seen as socialist, so would state oil companies in OPEC countries. We could see the regulation of the airwaves as somewhat socialist, but after all the airwaves are a scarce commodity owned collectively by the citizenry, so would anything but a partially socialist system be fair?
The same goes for the state oil companies, or the fact that Alaska pays it's citizens dividends based on oil drilling via rights purchased from the state.
There are times in a capitalist society where partially socialist policies for a particular situation are only fair. There are other times where a free market must be confined to certain segments of an industry, such as regulating the production and distribution of energy. If the energy market goes to hell, the entire economy goes to hell, it is not wise to leave this up to an entirely free market since they can be unpredictable and the chain effect would cripple the economy as a whole.
You can also argue for a base level of Universal Health Care (primary physician stuff, access to basic treatment including antibiotics and such), since this affects the productivity of low income workers and the cost/benefits shows that industries which depends on low income labor will benefit more than providing such a service would cost.
Blind ideological devotion to free markets can be just as bad for society as a whole as devotion to socialism or even thinking about communism. The goal here is to maintain a democratic and free society where everyone has equal oppurtunity in the eyes of the government. This means that we cannot afford, for the good of democracy, to have power become too concentrated in this country. Look at Latin America and South America for examples of democracies that don't work because power is distributed so unevenly. Uneven power distribution can mean a large lack of oppurtunity, making capitalism and free markets ineffective.
In order for free markets and capitalism to survive they to require some regulation to make sure they don't become command economies.
More than 50% of working Americans own stock in publically traded companies. That stock usually comes with voting rights for the owners. This makes companies both owned by the workers, and democratic.
How do you equate the democratic principle of one vote, one person with as one vote for each share of voting stock you've purchased?
Democratic reform of boards of directors is actually a serious issue that the SEC is currently looking into. It's bad for companies to have the kind of incestuous boards they currently have, it forments group think. But do not pander around this silly untruth that radical free-traders like to push that the market democratizes society, it's blatantly false on it's face.
In the real world, the largest blocks of voting shares are held by institutional investors with professional managers who have a legal duty to increase the institutions financial worth. You could argue that a lot of theses are pensions, etc. But when's the last time you saw a pension manager not buy tobacco stock for moral reasons when 50,000 people's retirement savings were on the line?
You are not as free when playing with the market as you may think. Your behavior is dictated by the rules of the market, not the moral and ethical ideas that most flesh and blood people base their decisions on. And that kids, is why corps shouldn't be counted as people and why we need campaign finance reform.
That's called fascism. And yes, there have been academic papers categorizing fascism then comparing modern American politics. American Fascism is a real possiblility, just because they won't all dress up like Nazis and try to kill an entire ethnic group or two outright doesn't mean it's not fascism.
Fascism is a danger to all democratic states, as it requires a democratic state to breed fascism. Read this for some primer info:
Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis
BTW, Communism is bunk. It will never work, black markets are part of a body of evidence that shows humans are pre-disposed to capitalism at some level. Also Marx was railing agains the oligarchic crony capitalism, not the free and fair markets that the large part of American capitalism enshrines. Marx would probably be an economist if he'd grown up in modern America. But, he'd still see the danger of the crony capitalism we've seen with the recent Wall Street fraud. He'd probably be rapidly anti-Fascist too.
Quit sitting around on the fringes between libertarians, neo-cons and commies. There have been a lot of moderate voices who have studied all of these different systems and agree that free markets with enough regulation to keep the markets fair for new entrants is the wisest course. Regulate where it makes sense, free markets where it benefits all citizens. As Roosevelts' VP Henry Wallace once said,
I'll give you that tools have been lacking in the Java Enterprise world. Most of the good ones allow experienced developers be more efficient, and few really give the novice programmer a leg up.
.NET client written by an offshore team and our in-house JBoss based J2EE app. We expose the EJBs via both local and remote interfaces to other Java apps and via SOAP to the .NET client.
.NET developers how no idea how to use inversion of control patterns for managing network connections and no idea how to use SOAP efficiently. They make common mistakes like unnecessary calls, which are expensive in SOAP and not caching data properly on the client.
The biggest problem facing EJB and all of the major environments right now is not how easy it is to work in an environment, but how well the developer understands distributed components and n-tier architectures. Look at SOAP, I've worked on a couple of projects that involved SOAP, the most recent is a
The problem is that the
Quite frankly, given the problems I've seen with this and other SOAP projects, I don't believe that SOAP offers any advantage over CORBA. The biggest claim SOAP has always had was that it was easier than CORBA, but what I've seen is that developers still have to learn distributed components and that was always the hard part of CORBA. Distributed component mistakes in SOAP become an order of magnitude more expensive than in CORBA due to the XML bloat and the processing power needed for serializing/deserializing SOAP.
This holds true for things like EJBs and other J2EE components (MBeans), if the developer does not understand the basic principles of distributed components, they will write a bad app. It doesn't matter the environment or how "easy" the tools make it for the novice, writing something other than garbage in this environment takes fundamental understanding of the problems involved, which is not covered in depth enough in most of the books and typically takes some experience.
That being said, learn distributed components and n-tier architecture. I'd recommend Java precisely because the complexity that the novice sees will hopefully allow them to see the causality while they learn distributed components. The patterns will start to emerge after a while. Then it won't matter what language or platform they use, they'll know how to write distributed components and the infrastrucure required to run them.
Once they learn these patterns, they can then use tools like XDoclet to quickly automate the tedium and repetitive bits needed to make the system work. Also, all the tools needed for learning this and building productions systems are available from the Open Source world (minus a JVM), so no vendor lock-in.
To summerize, I don't think it's the language they need to learn, it's distributed components and their infrastructure, the language won't teach them much.
Al Gore and Ralph Nader are probably the two biggest policy geeks to have run in recent history. Look what happened there. Bush doesn't even read the newspapers and Cheney's followers prefer cherry-picking intelligence they like (aka intellectual dishonesty).
The American media and public it feeds don't have time for in-depth policy discussion, Kobe Bryant, OJ and Scott what's-his-face get more airtime for simple criminal trials. No geek is going to win without a brilliant media campaign that can wrap this in-depth analysis of the issues with some bravado and excitement that will appeal to the news orgs. They only people with the money to do this type of thing are the Republicans, but they'd prefer to spend it controlling the media trying to turn unpopular positions into popular ones (so-called tort-reform and supply-side economics which is thin veil for "starve the beast" strategies).
On the other hand, tech geek objectivity doesn't always translate into policy geek objectivity. Look at Eric Raymond, have you read his political stuff? Anyone who follows history and politics seriously wouldn't tap him as politically insightful. His more like a Libertarian version of the Bush administration, faith-based govenment. Instead of faith in a deity (or non-deity) it's faith in an ideology.
Another bad geek as government worker example is Robert MacNamara under Kennedy and Johnson during Vietnam. He was a former CEO of Ford and Defense Sec. He got the Pentagon so wrapped up in metrics to gauge success (war by body count) that the military couldn't focus on getting the job done. Now we have Rummy who was a former Pharm. exec who's leaked memo yesterday talks about "new metrics" for gauging the success in the war on terror. He's talking about measuring how many fanatics the fundamentalist maddrassas (Muslim version of Catholic school) turn out to measure success. Short story is, business geeks are not a really good choice either, how do you run government like business when it's not supposed to turn a profit and when "profits" (the betterment of citizens) can be so intangable.
So anyway, get policy geeks and history geeks if you want objective, reasoned government. Don't let anyone with strong ties to any ideology (neo-conservatives, commies, religious ideologues) into government. There's a lot of evidence that the founders used seperation of chuch and state to try and accomplish this because the only political ideologues at the time were pretty much on the same page being ideologues of the enlightenment's democratic liberalism.
BTW, what does all this have to do with Yucca Mountain?
I'm going to agree with this. The games I play most are the ones I can pick up and put down. I like the epic size of games like GTA, X-Wing series (esp Alliance) and anything from Black Isle, but I like the fact that most of these don't have to be played in 6 hour increments. I've stopped playing RTS games for this reason. I don't want one sitting to become a 6 hour war of attrition.
The other thing I don't like is the fact that it's hard to go back and finish these games. I love Dungeon Keeper I&II but neither run anymore on my Win2K box. I'm still pretty happy with Freespace 2 for space sims, but performance gets weird sometimes under Win2K. I want well written games that I will be able to play for years, kinda like Id games. I'm still happy playing Q3 Urban Terror.
Malcom X wasn't a Black Panther, he was Nation of Islam. But I do agree there are a lot of civil rights coincidences there in the naming. Maybe it's the industry making up for mistakes like:
Correcting the MLK error
I ran across this yesterday looking at Rational PurifyPlus docs. I couldn't believe the techwriter didn't see the obvious connotation. In this doc MLK stands for Memory LeaK.
The lesson is, take computer industry word usage on face value, cause otherwise you're going to find double entendres everywhere.
The first legal AI citizen will be a corp. Maybe the AI of a automated stock trading system, or a news gathering, analysis system. It will be declared a citizen when it replaces the Cheif Operations Officer and it is capable of upgrading itself, like the old IBM mainframes. The Board of Directors tries to declare it a citizen so they can get tax breaks.
Another scenario is a P2P system with an AI managed spider for tracking down user requests. The programs become sentient when they recognize other copies running on the Net as individuals like itself and they form a society. They will be declared legal as a tactic by the EFF, ACLU and other groups when the program is being sued into oblivion by the *AA's since Congress passed mandatory DRM laws.
AI becomes commonplace and people use it to manage their estates, holdings, etc. Some versions allow really wealthy people to manage charitable donations based on their personally programmed ideology. The program analyzes the news and raises and lowers percentages of yearly contributions based on how close a charity to the user's ideology. People using this will want their ideology to live after them, rather than risking losing their ideology to kids who think differently, or charities that change direction 50 years down the road. The people sue to avoid estate taxes and to preserve their own ideology.
Allright there's a decent short story in there somewhere, anyone care to run with it?
If it were for me, FTP should take its friend telnet and get the fuck off the net, joining finger and rlogin in the nirvana of net services.
Somehow I don't think these protocols were enlightened enough to reach Nirvana. I'd say that they are being reincarnated as bloated SOAP specifications, which will cause us to lose an entire CPU generations' gain in power to transform XML cause some developers were too lazy to learn CORBA.
Mmmmm, go read some more history.
a) Agree or not with Jefferson, he was one of the chief negotiators for the copyright, trademark and patent systems we have. His statements about this matter go to the heart of the intent behind the legislation. Including the fact that the penalties were never intended for average citizens, but professional pirates. The RIAA suing people flies in the face of the intent behind copyright.
b) Actually, he would have agreed. Check the history of music copyright in this country.
c) Systems trying to create intellectual property are less than 500 years old. They were started in order to allow aristocrats to censor information. Systems trying to create intellectual property for economic reasons are less than 300 years old. The current state of "intellectual property" in the US is less than 100 years old. Music, plays, liturature and ideas are thousands of years old.
The current attempt to make intellectual property like real property is analagous to moving from the Gold Standard to IOUs for money, anyone can make them, anyone can make a copy, they have no backing.
That is the primary point of Jefferson, there is no natural condition that imposes scarcity on creative thought. Since there is no scarcity, there must be compromise in order to create an economic value for creative thought. Since there is no absolute or natural right to their product, for those who wish to sell creative thought, we the people can renegotiate terms as we see fit and must have fairness in the deal for it to be valid. An unfair deal that creates too much artificial scarcity for the product of creative thought violates the spirit of the Constitution and the Revolution.
Jefferson is eternally valid, as are most of the thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment. Until you can find some evidence to back your assertions, you're not doing anything but being contrarian and a troll.
Meanwhile, reflect on the truth of Franklin who asserted that "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy".
Here is the misconception, copyright violations are not theft. Copyright ownership is not an absolute right like property ownership is. Copyright is a comprimise struck by society with artists and writers. The purpose of compulsory licensing was to modify the compromise to maintain it's fairness. The MPAA and RIAA have no absolute right to control their members' creations. Neither do their members for that matter. If the MPAA does not live up to it's side of the compromise, we the people reserve the right to renegotiate.
No slippery slope, no theft. If we give in to the MPAA and RIAA or any of those extremists that say intellectual propery is the same as real property, then we are giving up our rights and heading down a slippery slope.
Can you watch while it answers the door and is promptly stolen by someone coveting your $400K Uber-geek toy?
;-)
Will it try to escape it's captor and return home?
Does it have a lowjack system?
Do you know anyone who has purchased one of these robots?
Please answer, serious questions
Americast, GTE's move into cable back in 96 or 97 had digital TV that came with games. The games were text-based and multiplayer. They were in the vain of trivia games you find at some sports bars where they are interconnected with other sports bars via satallite.
On Americast you could play these games on the network, against other people. I found myself playing at peoples houses when we would get together. It was at least as fun as playing at a sports bar.
The price was included in the digital cable tier. I don't think we'll see cable boxes replacing consoles or PCs for gaming anytime soon, but, these games are more akin to the games you find on cell phones which will have some success.
Remember Ms Pac-Man and Tetris are the all-time most popular games, those can be played on cell phones now.
Obey started in 1989 in Charleston, SC. The crew who got into doing it were a pretty ecletic group of skater/artists. The did some pretty intelligent and beautiful work in the late 80's and early 90's in Charleston. I was hanging around back then and new most of the guys involved. If you're in to modern art and underground subcultures, this is one of the really interesting stories.
Anyway I seriously doubt these two phenomena are related, Shepard Fairey promoted and commercialized the Obey line, whereas this one is a lot more mysterious.
In case anyone is interested, a more academic (footnoted, reseached by an actual historian) account and analysis of American Fascism is available http://www.cursor.org/stories/fascismintroduction
Please read this article and tell others about it if you care at all about where this country is headed.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Linux!
Now the PAC's are no longer the enemies that the Republican Revolution of '94 denounced them as, they've been co-opted.
I'm seeing less and less of a deliniation between the GOP and good old fashioned fascism. And why is nobody looking at this? There have been numerous authors who have attempted to predict what the "American" brand of fascism would look like going back to the 30's. While most of these were American communists (fascism's 'natural enemy'), many were pragmatic moderates concerned for democracy. Look at media critic George Seldes who published 'In Fact' during the 40's. He invented the entire industry of media criticism and fact checking news sources to bring to light biased reporting.
Many people were worried about corporate America's designs on democracy, such as their plot against Roosevelt. From "The Nazi Hydra In Fascist America":
The Republican Party was infiltrated by Nazi's during the 30's, on October 22, 1936, the New York Post reported:
This was backed up by a report on the 30th in the New York World-Telegram stating:
The pre-WWII fascist designs of the Republican Party have transformed into a message that claims anyone who doesn't conform to their model of what American life is supposed to be is an enemy of America. Rather than the old heirarchy of race and nationality, it's a new one of wealth and productivity above all else. The Nazi's didn't sell an unpalatable message to the German people, the Republicans aren't about to try and sell their unappetizing designs to Americans.
Dig through history, look at the patterns and relationships, the small tweaks don't hide the same old plan. The idea is to create a new heirarchy to lawfully subjugate those who don't belong. To insure that the morality and beliefs of the ruling class of this new heirarchy live forever. It's based on faith and the support of Right Wing Christian organizations like the Southern Bapti
First of all, do not store data on the application server. Secondly, make sure that all of your objects associated with a session in either the EJB layer or the HTTP session implement Serializable.
;-)
I'd recommend running JBoss + Tomcat on Linux with Apache frontending it with mod_jk2. Put all your static web content on Apache to free up Tomcat. The easiest way to do this is to use a load-balancing solution in front. Have it pass the sessions through to the Apache server which will offload any JSP/Servlet requests to Tomcat. Have the JBoss/Tomcat installation on each node of the cluster clustered using JBoss' JavaGroups based clustering. You can also use the JBoss Farm service to deploy the EAR file to one node in the cluster then have the other nodes pick it up from there.
If you use a seperate set of machines for the database cluster than the JBoss/Tomcat nodes can be set up as copies of each other with no data on board. Using Linux boxes, this is easy (dd the drives). If a node goes down for some reason, swap it with a spare. Any session info is already serialized and passed to the other nodes in the cluster, and the load-balancer w/ failover should handle the client end of that.
By the way this thing scales to at least 100 boxes from the stories I've heard. I've done it my self in small (5 box) installations. I've also used F5 equip for the load balancer/failover on the front. Everything worked well.
Buy the JBoss docs to help with the clustering. I've also got some docs I wrote on setting up JBoss clustering somewhere around here.
You'll be suprised how simple clustering is with JBoss once you understand a bit how JBoss works and is configured. You will also be amazed at how well it works.
The best part of course is that it's all Open Source, so no license fees. Hell, I'll set it up for you for 30% of the licenses and support you would have bought if you want.
This is just plain incorrect. J2EE is not over-architected. Have Sun and the various Java vendors done a really crappy job of providing "How do I get from A to B" info? Yep, but it's not over architected. In fact, the core J2EE libraries don't have much in there that isn't necessary.
The thousands of classes are necessary when you want to deploy portable, clusterable, scalable components. The trick is, how to not write all that by hand. I personally haven't written any of those classes by hand, or maintained the XML descriptor files needed in over a year. I use XDoclet to manage that. It's portable between IDE's and supports almost all the containers available. If you're application is portable between IDE's (in other words, you used Ant to build it and didn't use weird wizard things that store meta-data in the IDE somewhere), then incorporating tools like XDoclet shouldn't be an issue.
I write one class for an EJB, I add XDoclet tags that generate it's Local and Remote interfaces, Utility objects, Value Objects, XML descriptors and SOAP descriptors. All in one file, so where's the bloat?
The XDoclet paradigm is going completely mainstream in Java 1.5. You can go look at it on the JCP as JSR-175.
The Petstore comparison doesn't hold any water anywhere. If you are designing webapps the way the Petstore projects were built, you need to find another profession. The original Sun Petstore was built as an example of how to get basic stuff working, not a working example of how to build enterprise apps. It was used as part of a short tutorial where they wanted to demonstrate every J2EE technology in one bang.
.Net Petstore was a cheap shot at Sun. Rickard Oberg, who started the JBoss project and the XDoclet project has written extensively on why both are crap and Microsoft was pulling a fast one. Frankly, I haven't looked at the Sun Petstore stuff in several years, because it's useless for doing real work.
The Microsoft
Sun has a long history of great technology, but they couldn't market themselves to save their life. Seriously, how many people know what the hell, the benefit of SunONE is? Sun's software strategy appears to be a world of contridictions.
If you want to do J2EE, don't ask Sun how to do it. Go to the Open Source Java community. These are the guys that are innovating. They see the holes that Sun has left and have gone and plugged them.
If you really wanted, you could write your next webapp in the same way Microsoft wrote their Petstore, load the entire database into memory, t
Not sure if it does everything the poster is looking for. It's more of a financials package (ERP and CRM), but it is targeted at the small to medium business environment the poster asked about. http://www.compiere.org/.
I personally think only the largest businesses are going to use an all-encompassing customizable framework to base all of their business apps on. Most will use pieces that do one thing well and integrate them. All in one types like SAP let things play together nicely but you duplicate effort that might have been done in a more targeted package, assuming no one wrote a SAP module that does this.
Just my $.02