Month: October 2006

OpenLaszlo to Java Mobile

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OpenLaszlo is a platform for making Rich Internet Applications. The “production” version of OL (presently at release 3.3, I believe) allows you to compile to (Flash) swf7 or swf 8. OpenLaszlo version 4.0, project name “Legals”, will support, in addition, compilation to DHTML (aka “Ajax”). Legals is in “pre-beta”; an official Beta program will be announced soon. To see how far along the project is, you can go to the OpenLaszlo site and play with a variety of demos that run pretty much equally well in either Flash or Ajax. Sometime next year, probably in the spring, OL version 4.something will support Flash 9.

Now here comes an announcement of Project Orbit from Sun Mircosystems, to compile OpenLaszlo apps to Java Mobile Edition. Java ME runs on *billions* of devices, notably cell phones.

I work for Laszlo Systems, Inc, the creator and main supporter of OpenLaszlo. I’m responsible for all the OL documentation. It’s a good job. It’s cool to see the whole idea of “write once run everywhere” really starting to become real. Flash 9 which is based on the next version of ECMAscript/JavaScript, is different enough from earlier versions of Flash that it really constitutes a separate runtime. For those of you keeping score, that means that OL has active projects underway to support four distinct runtimes: Flash 7/8, Flash 9, DHTML (Ajax), and Java. Yes, there will be locally distinct differences in some applicaitons depending on the target runtime. But in general, OpenLaszlo applications truly are runtime-agnostic.

It’s also fun see the OL community growing and becoming real. There are now several developers who have “commit” priveliges to the code base who do not work for Laszlo Systems — including developers from Europe and Japan.

Note that OL is developed completely in the open. Anybody can sign up for the mailing lists on which we discuss architecture and implementation. The “nightly build,” which incorporates each successive day’s work, is avaible for free download. In other words, even though “Legals”, our Ajax port, is not yet in an official Beta program, you can still get your hands on the code if you’re the kind of person who likes to read code to see what’s going on.

DOJ — “Antitrust? What's That?”

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The U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division approved the AT&T/BellSouth mereger without imposing any conditions. By law, the DOJ Antitrust division has no obligation to explain its decision to take no action. Nevertheless, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Barnett did issue a statement explaining the decision to take no action. Apparently, the market has gotten so much more competitive since the DOJ imposed (albeit wussy) conditions last year on the Verizon/MCI merger and SBC/AT&T merger last year that DOJ can’t imagine why this merger might be anticompetitive.

We now bounce over to the FCC, where Kevin Martin has placed approval of the AT&T/BellSouth on the agenda for tomorrow’s FCC meeting. But will the meeting take place? Can Martin get the merger through without conditions? And why didn’t DOJ at least pretend to care and enter into some wussy conditions — rather than just roll over like a good little industry lap dog begging for treats?

Some guesses below . . . .

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I Co-Author Paper On Why “Free Market” BS Work So Well In Policy

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I found this item on Techdirt interesting. The article links to several techno-libertarians finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of evaluating the reality that (a) countries such as South Korea, Japan, Estonia, France (and more!) are now zooming ahead of us in just about every measure in broadband deployment and adoption; (b) these countries rocketed past us after they adopted intrusive regulatory regimes and market-warping government incentives; and, (c) our supposedly superior, libertarian, deregulatory approach has not produced the competitive and productive nirvana the theoretical literature promised.

So why do “free market” arguments keep working, so much so that just about every piece of state or federal telecom reform legislation introduced right now assumes that competition happens as a result of deregulation? Why, despite all evidence to the contrary, do Democrats and Republicans alike still rush to deregulate with the religious zeal usually associated with someone who just spotted a burning bush in their back yard? As the Techdirt piece shows, this can’t be explained by the usual cynical response that Congress and the FCC are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Bells or cable cos.

So my buddy Greg Rose and I have written a paper explaining why the same arguments keep working time and again for the 34th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (you can see a rough draft here). As an aside (in the final version, not yet posted), I explain why Lakoff and his buddies should perhaps spend a little less time on the linguistics of framing and a little more time worrying about the structure of media. To paraphrase McCluen, “whoever owns the media frames the message.” In a world where the mass media can trigger riots by showing a picture of the Pope and pulling a single line out of an academic speech delivered to an academic audience, it’s optomistic to the point of delusional to believe you can frame a message just by picking the right words.

Basic summary below . . .

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Stunning Announcement! Ward Churchill appointed to Hoover Institution!

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We all remember Ward Churchill, poster boy for the “blame America first” crowd, who basically wrote about the September 11, 2001, attacks that “we (Americans) had it coming to us.” In particular he slandered the actual dead who had worked in the World Trade Towers as “little Eichmans.”

His invitation to speak at Hamilton College caused a national stink (google can tell you all about it), even though he had been invited to speak on another topic and the person who invited him had no prior knowledge of his controversial opinions about September 11th. (I paid some attention to this stink because I’m a Hamilton alumnus, and also because the person who invited him to Hamilton is a good friend and former professor of my sister Muggs, who is also an alum.)

Well as anybody who has spent any time at wetmachine at all knows, I’m a left-leaning liberal pinko Christo-athiest from Massachusetts; you can hardly get any further away from Bill O’Reilly and the other torchbearers who kept Churchill from speaking at Hamilton (the death threats which the State Police deemed ‘credible’ kind of forced the college president’s hand, according to her letter to the community). Yet even I am no defender of Ward Churchill, and I find his remarks scandalous and cruel. ANYWHO, imagine, then, my surprise, upon learning that the conservative Hoover Institution, a right wing “think tank” closely associated with Stanford University, had appointed this hate-filled, blame-America nut job, Ward Churchill, to its prestigious faculty! Ward “Blame America First” Churchhill on the faculty of the Hoover Institution!

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Weimar Washington: Republican Christian Homosexual Predators in the Halls of Congress–So What Else is New?

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Child rapists roam the halls of congress, protected by the Powers that Be, powers such as the People’s Representative Dennis Hastert and his live-in “chief of staff” Scott Palmer (um, incidentally, Scott, can you define “staff” for us, please?). Surprise, surprise, the corporate media (the same guardians of our democracy who created the pan-channel “All Monica All the Time” monocourse) somehow did not think that sexual predation on adolescents by congressmen was even back page news. Katie Couric is no Einstein, but even she knows that blowjobs are newsworthy when performed by adult women on Democratic men, not when boys and Republicans are involved.

For as anyone who pays attention to this kind of thing would expect, the predators in this case are men who rape boys, and they’re Republicans.

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“Updating” Media Ownership Rules — Is That Like Boiling a Frog?

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It’s an old cliche that it’s easy to boil a frog. Don’t drop the frog in the boiling water — he’ll just climb out. Drop him in the pot and raise the temperature a little at a time. Before he knows it, he’ll be dead.

We have that with media consolidation and the non-stop relaxation of the rules. But instead of calling it “boiling,” proponents of consolidation call it “updating.” This attempt to describe relaxing the ownership rules to allow more consolidation as “updating,” when the evidence shows that the last round of consolidation kicked off by the 1996 deregulation has been a disaster for the industry and a disaster for democracy, came up again at yesterday’s media ownership hearings.

Powell tried to frame it as a debate about evidence v. “emotionalism.” He lost because the evidence did not justify his efforts to relax the rules. Now FCC Chairman Martin is trying to frame this as “updating” the rules, when a real “update” would mean forcing the biggest companies to sell off assets to scale back to a healthier size.

My analysis below . . .

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