the Pulp Complex

Butterfly Wings & Pandora's Box

2011-09-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

For over four decades, from his first novel the Andromeda Strain in 1971 to his untimely death in 2008, Michael Crichton dazzled science fiction fans with sci-tech thrillers about science and technology gone awry. Although often dismissed as an author of escapist pulp or Hollywood screenplay fodder, Michael Crichton remains a writer with a vision, an aesthetic, and a message. He speaks to our inner fears of losing control in a world steeped in science and technology, while at the same time bringing a tone of humility and circumspection to science and its methods and admonishing its practitioners to tread lightly.

Michael Crichton novels are basically mad scientist stories, postmodern loops of Frankenstein, in which big corporations, government institutions, or cultural forces mess with some sci/tech they don't fully understand or appreciate and then as a result must deal with some terrible consequence. Scientific hubris is the villain and human greed and ambition are its henchmen. Crichton is most famous for Jurassic Park, the runaway best seller and iconic blockbuster film. This is fitting insofar as it remains his greatest work and exemplifies the major themes found in much of his pervious and subsequent works. Most notable among these are the Andromeda Strain (1917), Prey (2002), and Next (2006).

Indeed, much of the action in Michael Crichton novels deals with putting the lid back on the proverbial Pandora's Box. In Andromeda Strain, a set of government projects named Scoop and Wildfire are employed to find and develop biological agents from outer space for potential biological weapons. The program is partially successful insofar as it finds an agent, but this agent—an extraterrestrial microbe—proves impossible to control and a threat to all life on the planet. Most of the novel deals with a group of scientists tying to contain and eradicate this threat.

In Prey, a top-secrete research lab Xymos attempts to develop nanotechnologies for the military, swarms of self-replicating microscopic machines meant to act as roving eyes in the sky, but the swarms spiral out of control, adopt the behavior of predators inherent in their programming, and threaten to replicate indefinitely in the Nevada desert. A programming consultant struggles to contain the swarm and the humanoid zombies the nanosized killers have spawned.

Finally, in Next, his most ambitious work, Crichton targets the multi-million dollar genomics industry, which has created a social milieu in which gene patents and genetic products dehumanize human life, where a person's very cells become the property of greedy corporations, and where transgenic experiments produce animal/human hybrids, such as a humanzee. The courts are forced to deal with much of this, but the out-of-control technology continues to wreak havoc on human lives.

Michael Crichton suggests that any scientific endeavor is a potential Pandora's Box. Nature is volatile, pregnant with a myriad of initial conditions and unknown variables, and science can never be sure of the consequences of its influence, of its probings and manipulations, of its attempts at domination and exploitation. Chaos theory is thus the dominant and most appropriate motif in the works of Crichton. It finds explicit presentation in Jurassic Park and personification in the character of Dr. Ian Malcolm.

Chaos theory is a field of mathematics that focuses on determined yet unpredictable systems, often termed non-linear systems, such as found in weather patterns or the stock market. It underscores the variability of science and our vulnerability to its vagaries. Our inputs or initial conditions do indeed determine output, but this output often remains unpredictable. Michael Crichton dramatizes this variability, where the mere flapping of a butterfly's wings can wreak havoc on the most carefully constructed assumptions of science, bringing stark and terrifying consequences, whether they be dinosaurs run amok, bacteria on the loose, microscopic machines swarming, or genomics out of control. Dr. Ian Malcolm explains it best as he prophesies the disastrous climax of Jurassic Park:

"…if I have a weather system that I start up with a certain temperature and a certain wind speed and a certain humidity—and if I then repeat it…the second system will not behave the same. It'll wander off and rapidly will become very different from the first….That's nonlinear dynamics. They are sensitive to initial conditions: tiny differences become amplified….The shorthand is the 'butterfly effect.' A butterfly flaps its wings in Peking, and weather in New York is different…There is problem with that island. It is an accident waiting to happen."

In a nutshell, this is the message found in most Michael Crichton novels. The butterfly effect is an inherent potentiality in all science and technology, lurking beneath the surface of even the most seemingly benign innovations and discoveries. The implication to proceed with circumspection is a strikingly pertinent message for the age. Crichton delivers this message in a lucid and economical writing style, a style that could be characterized as Cinematic, since his novels read like movies and television shows, a style more than befitting the writer of Jurassic Park

Where have all the toggles gone?

2011-08-05T08:53:00.000-07:00

Toggle switches…old sci-fi featured tons of toggle switches. They were ubiquitous and far more dramatic than keyboards, mice, or—most bland of all—touch pads. When the science officer aboard the needle-shaped rocket on its voyage to Saturn was faced with a critical situation, nothing dramatized this more than the click clicking of a bank of toggle switches. This simple binary on/off switch found its way onto the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek, the Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, and countless other rockets and saucers of the 50s and 60s era Sci-Fi. Much of this stemmed from their actual, real-world use in the NASA space program and just about every area of electronics and electrical engineering. They are still in use today, especially in automotive electronics. Sadly however the toggle switch has lost favor in science fiction. Ever since Star Trek: The Next Generation showed us the wonders of touch screens and the Matrix jacked us into cyberspace via computer terminals, the toggle switch—as far as science fiction is concerned—has been cast into the dustbin of obsolescence.

Netflix Price Hike

2011-07-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

Netflix is restructuring its pricing and subscription model. The DVD rental and streaming video services have been split up into two separate services. Gone is the $9.99 per month combo package. Each service will now be offered separately for $7.99 each. Therefore, the combo package will now cost $15.98, an increase of $5.99. Netflix subscribers have until September to restructure their plans.

The changes have caused mixed reactions. Some users are up-in-arms, complaining bitterly across the Internet and threatening to cancel their accounts and seek alternative services, while still others are more philosophical about the change, shrugging their shoulders at the $5.99 price hike, and accepting it as an inevitable cost for a still-emerging new media model. I am of the latter opinion (though I rarely use the DVD service anymore and will probably drop it). I cut the cord on my cable television service last year and now live on Netflix streaming. I will accept the new pricing scheme because I support the service, the a la carte style of media delivery, rather than the 100 channel packages (stuffed with commercials and other unwanted programming) offered by my local cable service. And until my local cable company offers some kind of streaming service (wink wink), I will continue to support and utilize Netflix.

Gears of War 2: Overrated Fun

2011-07-17T09:05:00.000-07:00

Gears of War 2 is a bit overrated. Upon its release in November 2008, the game received high marks from just about every game review site on the Internet. IGN rated it a 9.5, Gamespot 9.3, and even Metacritic awarded it a 93. Most of these numbers are based on reviews by critics, while user scores are slightly lower, which is ironic since the public usually rates stuff higher than the so-called professional critics. These numbers, both those of the critics and the public, are severely inflated. Gears of War 2 is more a 2 1/2 to 3 star game (out of four stars) or falling in the 75 to 85 range.

It is not a bad game, but at the same time it is not a great game. The story and dialogue are pure cheese. You are a marine type in a squad of other marine types all of which behave and speak like the typical jarhead marine type. The story is uneven and at times confusing. The big picture is never clear in the game, except perhaps with Dominic's wife Maria, and all the missions seem to blend together. The choice of weapons is meager. The default Lancer Assault Rifle, the trademark weapon of the COG military, specially equipped with a chainsaw bayonet for melee attacks, remains the best weapon in the game's arsenal. It is all downhill after the Lancer, though the Long Shot Sniper Rifle and the Frag Grenades are pretty cool.

The game play is a one trick pony, a punk song with a really great riff that burns itself into your psyche. This involves taking cover, shooting over or around said cover, usually a burned out car or the debris of bombed-out buildings, and slowly moving up until the opposing enemy is neutralized. Sometimes you get the chance to engage the enemy at close quarters and use the chainsaw bayonet to slice them in half from head through midsection in an explosion of blood, screams, and chainsaw torque. This in itself is worth the price of admission. But that is about it. There you have Gears of War in a nut-shell.

In an attempt to break up the monotony of this single-riff game play, Gears of War 2 has a lot of vehicle/on-rails sections, as well as puzzle/maze sections with such a minimal amount of player interaction they might as well be cut scenes. At one point, you are inside a giant worm, called a Riftworm, and are required to literally cut your way out by severing arteries with your chainsaw bayonet. This only requires going forward and pressing B at the appropriate times. The worst points in the game involve manning a turret and engaging in game play that was covered by Duck Hunt back in the 80s. Totally lame.

Despite its shortcomings, Gears of War 2 is a fun game overall and deserves a play-through by any respectable gamer. I look forward to Gears of War 3 and hope they can improve the single-riff game play and move the Gears of War brand ahead. As for the inflated reviews on the Internet, Gears of War 2 highlights the problem with game reviews across the board. They are always inflated, poorly represent the true quality of the games, and should be taken lightly.

Flashpoint

2011-07-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

With Flashpoint, DC Comics manages to deliver a compelling crossover event title. Writer Geoff Johns pens this thrilling, mind-bending story, while Andy Kubert renders the story in a dark and gritty style. Flashpoint features an alternate timeline, an Elseworld or What If story, where everything has a familiar color but is shaded slightly different, a Twilight Zone episode starring Barry Allen as the Flash.

Allen wakes up to discover a DCU altered almost beyond recognition by his arch-nemesis Zoom, the Reverse-Flash, a world in which Thomas Wayne is the Batman while his son Bruce Wayne is long dead; Cyborg is the dominant superhero; Superman is under government detention in an Area 51-like compound; and Aquaman and Wonder Women are despotic leaders of warring nations that have reduced most of Europe to rubble. Thus far, only the Flash is aware of these changes, although in a related tie-in Booster Gold is also aware of the alternate timeline.

Flashpoint will be a limited series of five issues running until September. This is a welcome change after the prolonged Blackest Night and Brightest Day events, each of which ran for a year or more, creating convoluted and dizzying story arcs that only the most diehard of fans could follow. The recent news of DC's plans to relaunch 52 of its titles in September lends Flashpoint an ominous and cataclysmic undertone. Is this event setting the foundation for a DCU reboot? Will the conflict between the Flash and Zoom effect a DCU slate cleaning? Only time will tell.

Andy Kubert's artwork is gritty, dark, and classic. The pencil work is very refined and the coloring subtle. This is the perfect blend for a DC title. It reminds me of classic DC, a la Batman: Year One. Some might find it boring, but after the histrionics of the last few DCU events, this more subtle approach—like the shorter story arc—is a welcome change. If there is any drama to be found in the artwork, it is in the violence. From the onslaught of Batman on the Flash to the recharging of Barry Allen's batteries, Flashpoint is filled with graphically violent action scenes.

Flashpoint avoids most of the potholes and landmines of event title clichés. This is mostly due to its alternate timeline. It doesn't matter what you do in such a story arc since there is an implied understanding that eventually everything will go back to normal. But doesn't that apply to all comic book story arcs? Eventually we always return to the iconic templates of Batman and Robin, Superman versus Lex Luther, or the JLA saving the world. In a moment of meta-dialogue, Geoff Johns expresses this sentiment through Batman: " ...after you fix whatever your enemy did, none of this will matter anyway, will it?" No it won't matter...anymore than Infinite Crisis or Final Crisis matters to today's DCU, but in the meantime we have a pretty good story arc with infinite possibilities ahead.

Fear the Formula

2011-07-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

Fear Itself, the latest Marvel crossover event, is four books in and has already degenerated into a formula. As with most of these events, a menacing threat or conflict is dropped like a monkey wrench into the machinery of the Marvel Universe, a world-changing struggle that will change everything, lines are drawn among the heroes, battles are fought across splash pages, a hero of minor importance dies (or a notable one under dubious and most likely reversible circumstances), before the conflict is ultimately resolved and a new status quo is established ...at least until the next big crossover event. Marvel is usually really good at setting up these events, such as with Civil War and Secrete Invasion, but they always end the same: splash page battles followed by a hero in front of a podium giving a speech.

However, Fear Itself hits the ground running with the tropes and clichés. It fails to establish a fresh and original story right from the start. It feels like a retread, an exercise in déjà vu. The dark hammers are disturbingly reminiscent of the dark rings in Darkest Night and the whole gathering of villains steals a page from the script of Oceans 12 or the Dirty Dozen. And of course a major character is killed off; this time the recently resurrected Bucky Barnes (among the living since 2005), but even this receives shoddy handling.

The death of Bucky was anti-climatic, contrived, and commercially motivated. With a Captain America movie slated for release on July 22^nd, Marvel is obviously anxious to put Steve Rogers back into the role and suite of Captain America, but to do so by resorting to the death-of-a-hero cliché—without even including him in the story except for the death scene, effectively bringing him in just to die—lowers Fear Itself to the standard of a billboard sign.

The one saving grace of Fear Itself is the artwork. Stuart Immonen does a fine job fleshing out this lifeless story. Everyone looks super cool and the action scenes are electric with flashy neon coloring. The art team skillfully achieves the sense of immense scope and gravity needed in a major event story. From the smack down brawl between Odin and Thor to the devastated battleground sprawl of NYC with the Nazi Blitzkrieg machines, Fear Itself abounds with brightly colored eye candy. But this is sadly not enough to save Fear Itself from its lackluster story.

Matt Fraction seems to be going through the motions, spitting out an event story for the sake of an event story. No one wants to get excited about a crossover event more than me. I am frankly tired of the whole "event-fatigue" bandwagon. But Fear Itself has nothing to offer except the usual tropes and clichés. The series is scheduled to trudge on until the fall. Then maybe we can get back to the status quo of good, self-contained three-to-four book story arcs of our favorite titles.

Red Mars

2011-07-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

Red Mars, the 1993 Nebula Award winning novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a sprawling hard science fiction epic about the first 100 colonists on Mars and their efforts to build a human colony. It is a novel of discovery that reveals the wonders of the red planet and a pseudo-historical drama that examines the political, environmental, and social implications of Martian colonization in a foreseeable future. Mars itself is the primary character, with its landscape and geology vividly described, while a richly drawn ensemble cast of characters offers a human point of view of the conflicts and struggles facing the colony.

Red Mars is organized around the points of view of six main characters. There is John Boone, the natural leader who tries to build a consensus from a myriad of conflicts; Frank Chalmers, a Machiavellian sociopath who lusts after power; Maya Toitovana, the emotional head of the Russian team who gets entangled in a love triangle with John and Frank; Nadia, a pragmatic and practical Russian engineer who brings a common-sense approach to the problems and challenges facing the colony; Michel Duval, an isolated psychologist who has trouble adjusting to Mars and dreams of going home; and finally Ann Clayborne, an American geologist who is firmly against terraforming or any other efforts to exploit Mars. Each of these characters gets their own chapter with two repetitions (Frank & Nadia). It is these points of view that narrate the story of Red Mars, many are unreliable, often superficial or irrelevant, but from these buzzing cerebral beehives the story is laid out in narrative layers.

With such a structure Red Mars is logically character driven. Many criticize the novel for lacking a well-defined plot or sufficient amounts of action, but much goes on between the ears of its many characters. Without becoming mere personifications, these differing points of view deepen the conflicts at the core of the story by offering multiple perspectives colored by the depths of human psychology. Fleshing out these characters with their unique internal monologues, Robinson shows how facts are filtered through personality, how ideologies can become so firmly entrenched, how justification works inside the human brain, how people can be petty and yet still significant at the same time, how the ego guides all thoughts along a self-centered continuum, and just how political even rational minded scientists can be. Indeed, Nadia, the pragmatic engineer, at one point says “science was many things...including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.”

The main conflicts at the core of the story involve the effects of colonization on Mars. These raise a host of questions that play like mantras throughout the novel: What will man make of Mars? What do you do with a blank slate? How exactly should the planet be treated and what kind of civilization should be cultivated and grown from the seeds of the Martian colony? Should the planet be terraformed or preserved? How much influence should Earth have over the budding Martian colony? How much of the planet’s natural resources should be exploited for Martian and/or transnational profits? And who will ultimately decide the fate of Mars; the Earth governments, the super-powerful transnational corporations, or the Martian colony itself? All of these issues are contemplated, analyzed, and reflected upon in the internal dialogues of the six main characters, scientists and engineers who live in their own heads, and only come out occasionally to clash with one another.

It seems like everyone has their own set of answers to these questions, but roughly fall into two camps: Reds who support Mars conservation and independence from Earth and Greens who support terraforming and cooperation with Earth. There is also a growing conflict about Martian culture: Should it be a wholly new thing or simply imported from Earth? This becomes extremely relevant as immigration ratchets up and a diversity of cultures starts settling on Mars. Finally, Robinson envisions a near future in which transnational corporations, an enhanced version of our own multinational corporations, wield more power than governments, introducing an economic slant to the political struggles in Red Mars, a collectivism versus capitalism angle, with the business-friendly capitalists clearly cast as the bad guys, opening Robinson up to charges of bias within his own narrative.

Many have criticized Robinson for favoring the liberal elements of Red Mars and demonizing the right-wing elements, but this is to read the novel through the lenses of contemporary politics. Within the context of the narrative, it makes sense that the forces of exploitation should wear the villain’s cloak. Human exploitation of lands and people has never been pretty, just go ask the Sioux Indians. The prospect of transnational corporations exploiting Mars for its natural resources works effectively as a menacing threat to the heroic quality of the colonists and the beauty of the Martian planet described in the narrative.

And description is a strong force in Red Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson writes a rich and vivid descriptive prose. There is very little dialogue in the novel, so much so that some may find the narrative a dense, rocky terrain to traverse. However, Robinson paints a convincing panorama of the red planet. He puts you on the Tharsis Bulge looking across a red-sand horizon, atop Olympus Mons during a Martian sunrise burning like a furnace blast, inside the endless canyons of the Valles Marineris, and at the tip of the polar cap beneath the whirling cosmos. There are epic sand storms and canyon floods. There is the low orbiting moon of Phobos hanging like a zeppelin in a red-tinged sky peppered with streaks of yellow clouds. And there is the endlessly developing human colony within bio-domed settlements or out exploring the Martian landscape on the surface in walkers and rovers or from the air in dirigibles. No crater is passed over without careful, meticulous description. Indeed, Red Mars will leave you feeling like you have actually been to the red planet.

In Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson plots a strict course of hard science fiction. At the time of its release in 1993, this marked a return to traditional form for science fiction, epitomized by Golden Age writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark, after almost two decades of New Wave and Cyberpunk domination, whose writers, such as Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson, were more interested in existential and metaphysical musings than plausible scientific speculative fiction. Nevertheless, Red Mars is filled with much sci-fi paraphernalia: terraforming, space elevators, genetic engineering, robotics, nanotech, and interplanetary space flight. However, these devices are presented as plausible extrapolations of our own science and technology. There are no ray guns or bug-eyed aliens, just well researched and wholly believable sci-tech of the foreseeable future. Robinson never deviates from this hard science fiction pathway.

The conflict between the Reds and the Greens in Red Mars finds an intellectual or conceptual resolution, but tragically this proves impractical to avoid the cataclysm that befalls the Martian colony and climaxes the Red Mars novel. In the John Boone chapter, “Falling into History,” a middle ground between the extremes of the Reds and Greens is expressed in a speech given by Boone on Olympus Mons and symbolized by the appearance of the mysterious Hiroko and her brood of clones. The chapter is nominally about an investigation into acts of anti-terraforming sabotage assumed to be carried out by a radical group of Reds. John Boone slips into the role of Sherlock Holms and travels across Mars investigating the crime, but this detective work becomes more a journey of discovery of the social and cultural makeup of Mars than any kind of actual criminal investigation. During this so-called investigation, John Boone builds a potential consensus or synthesis about what exactly man will make of Mars and what kind of civilization the Martian colony will become, a middle ground that offers Mars the best chance for a fruitful future:

“Now I know I used to say that we had to invent it [Martian civilization] all from scratch but in these last few years traveling around and meeting you all I’ve seen that I was wrong to say that...we have the genes you might say...its...an act of genetic engineering...we have the DNA pieces of culture all made and broken and mixed by history, and we can choose and cut and clip together from what’s best in that gene pool...”

John Boone offers a middle ground vision, a Hegelian synthesis from the thesis and antithesis extremes, one symbolized by Hiroko, who creates a model of Martian life separate from the rest of the colony and based on children cloned from the genes of the first 100 colonists. However, the forces of greed and extremism prove too ingrained, too biased, and too inevitable, like a snowball effect that must roll to its logical conclusion. John Boone is assassinated, the transnational space elevator is destroyed, Phobos is brought crashing down onto Mars, and the Martian colony is effectively destroyed. The vision offered by John Boone on Olympus Mons survives posthumously in Hiroko’s hidden colony which takes center stage in the sequel Green Mars. But that is another novel. Red Mars ends in a tragic cataclysm.

Red Mars is a remarkable achievement of science fiction literature and is quickly becoming a classic. It offers a hard science narrative without becoming dry and lifeless, while at the same time indulging in lush descriptive prose and intricate maze-like character development without losing its plausibility. Finally, Red Mars offers a vision of Martian colonization that will continue to inform our ideas about our future relationship with the red planet. Indeed, in his glowing review back in 1993, Arthur C. Clark said " it [Red Mars] should be required reading for the colonists of the next century."

DC Retools

2011-06-13T11:06:00.000-07:00

Big news from DC Comics as it announces plans to renumber its titles, reboot its universe, and reinvent itself with day-and-date digital sales. The 76 year old publisher of such iconic superheroes as Batman and Superman will restart the clock on 52 titles in its catalog by relaunching them with #1 issues. Justice League #1 will be released on August 31^st and feature the classic lineup of Superman, Batman, Wonder Women, the Flash, Aquaman, and the Green Lantern. To sweeten the deal, as if a Justice League #1 needed any more sweetening, the book will be written by Geoff Johns and illustrated by Jim Lee. The rest of the DC titles will follow suit with the renumbering in September. This leads to the obvious question of what effect this renumbering will have on the DC Universe. Will the number reset coincide with a universe reboot? Will the Superman and Batman titles include a retelling of their respective origins? Are we looking at another Crisis on Infinite Earths?

The move is being reported by most news sources and blogs as a reboot of the entire universe. However, the details remain sketchy. Bob Wayne, senior vice president for sales at DC, said “some characters will have new origins, while others will undergo minor changes.” By all accounts, it appears DC aims to simplify its universe and thereby entice new readers and—at the same time-- allow old readers to experience the iconic lineup in a new light. This “new light” talking point seems to be dominating the reboot meme, so it is safe to assume some changes are on the way. But it sounds more like a retooling than a full-scale reboot and this may be a good thing. The DC Universe has a tendency to become convoluted and get bogged down in continuity quagmires. Is there really a need for two Batmen? And who exactly is the Flash now? Wiping the slate clean and returning the universe to its iconic purity could make for a more satisfying DC Universe.

Finally, DC Comics will start offering day-and-date digital sales. This means the publisher will offer digital copies of its titles through apps and websites on the same day and at the same price as the print versions offered at comic book shops. The prices will remain the usual $2.99 for the first month and then drop to $1.99 a month later. Oversized issues and annuals may be priced slightly higher, but their digital and print versions will still remain the same. With the popularity of tablets and digital readers, this move was inevitable and has already been implemented by smaller publishers and Archie Comics. Marvel is sure to follow suite in the near future. As for what impact this will have on local comic shops, it is hard to say. Digital comics are more likely to boost print sales as they bring more people into the fold. Some people will buy print version, some will download digital version, and some may even go both ways. It doesn’t necessarily follow that one will cannibalize the other.

There is no telling how any of this will pan out, but one thing is for sure: expect DC sales to skyrocket in September.

In Defense of Unity

2011-05-28T06:45:00.000-07:00

Change can be painful, an often cruel process that weeds out the old to make room for the new. Such is the state of affairs with Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) with its new Unity desktop environment. Up until now, Ubuntu has used the more traditional Gnome 2 desktop, but with the newest release including Unity as the default, it is clear that Canonical intends to bring radical change to Ubuntu and turn the traditional GUI shell on its head. As a result, many Linux users are up in arms, inundating the Ubuntu forums with vehement rants, threatening to migrate to other distros such as openSUSE, Linux Mint, or Fedora, and denouncing the Unity desktop as open-source blasphemy. Has Canonical nailed a thesis to the cathedral door of the Linux community with its adoption of Unity? Is the adverse response from both end users and power users warranted? I think we need to take a step back, relax, and give Unity a little more time and patients.

I first started using Ubuntu with the 6.10 Edgy Eft release in 2006 after trudging around in the Red Hat/Fedora swamp for a bit, and after updating Ubuntu to the latest 11.04 version, I too was taken aback, shocked and dismayed at the strange environment Unity presented, and extremely confused and disoriented as I tried to navigate around the system. Where are all my applications? What is this launcher thing and why can’t I get rid of it? Where has my simple Gnome interface gone?

I realize now just how set in my ways I have become. I have been using the same type of desktop environment since the 1990s, mostly based on Windows 95. This style is pretty standard and has changed little over the last 16 years. Just about everyone is familiar with it, an interface consisting of icons along the left side of the screen and a start menu and/or other menus in a control bar either at the bottom or top of the screen. Whether it appears in M$ Windows or some GNU offshoot, it has been the face of computing since the 1990s.

And that is basically it. Sure you can dress it up with themes and wallpaper, make it look like a Star Trek LCARS interface or trick is out with a Matrix screen saver, but it is still basically the same thing…Windows 95. This simple, workable layout has burned itself into my psyche and--despite years of banging away at a command prompt--remains the locus of all my computing. And it is not much different with Apple computers, at least not since the release of OS X in 2001. Swap out the icons for a launcher bar and you have an interface that has remained pretty much the same over the last ten years.

Enter the Unity desktop environment, an entirely new interface with an entirely new look and feel.

In many ways, Unity is a hybrid of Mac OS and Windows…but that is kind of the whole point. Canonical has created a desktop environment that unifies the user experience from both of the traditional desktop camps, a move clearly aimed at creating a big tent for the widest demographic possible. The poles holding up this big tent include an intuitive layout, better use of screen space, and unified compatibility across multiple devices.

The look of Unity is slick, clean, and minimal. This economy frees up desktop real estate creating a more spacious user experience. Indeed, the Unity screen spreads out before you like an endless expanse from a John Ford film. The launcher bar provides easy access to applications and passes the technically challenged significant other test. I put my wife on Unity and she started up Firefox and went about her social network/email tasks without missing a beat. What other Linux distro can claim to be newb friendly? And Unity will integrate well with touch screen devices such as tablets, mobile devices, and the soon-to-be ubiquitous LCD monitor touch screens…wait folks...it’s coming.

I used Unity for a week on a test run with an open mind and now I am a disciple. Unity is a game changer. It breaks from the static desktop environments offered by Windows and Apple over the past 16 years and embraces innovation and radical change. It has created an exciting, interesting, innovative, and—most important of all—truly new graphic user interface that remains exclusive to the Linux community. Many will continue to balk at the change offered by Unity. Even Linux users can be stubborn and set in their ways. However, if you could just tap into the spirit that drove you over to Linux in the first place and give Unity an honest try, I think even the most hardened cmd users will find Unity an exceptional experience. And if you still don’t like it, you can always use the classic Ubuntu option.

Thor Proves Epic

2011-05-22T22:51:00.000-07:00

Lightening struck twice for Marvel Studios as Thor earned the No. 1 box office spot two weeks in a row dispelling many naysayer predictions of a second week dive. Word of mouth has been good for the God of Thunder, despite a mixed critical reception stemming mostly from NY film critics growing tired of the superhero film genre. To date, Thor has earned an estimated $119.5m at the box office in its first ten days. All told Thor has proven itself a blockbuster hit, an accomplishment that would have seemed unlikely not too long ago.

Of all the Marvel superheroes, Thor had the biggest mountain to climb in the terrain of live-action film. Unlike most Marvel characters, which are largely grounded in reality, Thor has always been an oddity in the Marvel Universe. While Spider-Man is a teenager living in NYC and Iron Man a mogul of the military-industrial complex, Thor is literally from another world, a God among men, an over-the-top character complete with flowing red cape, mystical hammer, and winged chrome helmet. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the creators of Thor, plundered the pantheon of Norse mythology when they created Thor in 1962 to bolster the faltering Journey into Mystery. Thor would go on to have even greater success with his own title The Mighty Thor and as a member of the superhero team the Avengers. But Thor has always stood out as the least convincing of all the Marvel superheroes. The prospect of a live action film based on Thor always seemed like a long shot. In fact, many Marvel fans were wary of a Thor movie fearing Hollywood would make a mockery of the beloved hero. Such sentiments are what make the success of the current Thor film such a triumph.

Thor is an epic film that achieves a perfect balance of action, drama, and wit. The story follows a redemption arc in which the arrogant Thor is cast out of the realm of Asgard and exiled to Earth where he must overcome his hubris and prove himself worthy to wield Mjölnir (the hammer of Thor). The film spends a lot of time in Asgard, an effective strategy, warming audiences up with a Lord of the Rings vibe, introducing Thor in his native element along with comic book regulars the Warriors Three, Sif, Heimdall, Odin, and sibling rival Loki. On Earth, Thor is played as a fish-out-of-water character with genuinely humorous results. The action scenes are amazing, purposeful, and avoid overkill. From the brawl with the frost giants, to the battle with the Destroyer, and on to the final showdown with Loki, every fight is necessary to the story and its redemptive theme, showing Thor reckless and arrogant at the beginning and then altruistic and noble near the end. Chris Hemsworth puts in an amazing performance as Thor and is on his way to becoming the next big action movie star. And Heimdall, played by Idris Elba, deserves special mention for his badassery.

But the action in Thor is only one element of this brilliant balancing act. The real strength of Thor is in the drama, where character development mushrooms up from the incendiary action scenes and special effects. Kenneth Branagh, famed actor and director of such films as Henry V and Hamlet, brings his Shakespearian roots and sensibilities to the task of directing. Rather than simply give the story a superficial shell decorated with the Thee’s and Thou’s of the Bard’s tongue, Branagh and his writing team delve deeper into the core of Shakespearian drama and focus more on the classical conflicts found at its kernel, setting son against father (Thor versus Odin), brother against brother (Thor versus Loki), and hero against his own moral failings (Thor versus Thor). In lesser hands, the film might have been a cartoonish fantasy film with pretentious language, complete with wrestler come actor screaming “I strike thee down”. For this reason, the biggest hero of Thor just might be Kenneth Branagh.

So we now live in a world where a live-action Thor movie is not only possible but is actually an epic success. What will Marvel Studios pull off next: a killer Ant-Man movie, an Oscar-caliber Spider-Women film, an entertaining Fantastic Four flick? After Thor anything is possible.

Superfast Ethernet

2009-08-16T02:15:00.000-07:00

On the road to developing a network that can handle 1Tb (terabit) per second bandwidth, research scientists are developing a 100Gbps Ethernet network at the US Department of Energy (DOE) supercomputer center.

The usual Ethernet network standards and speeds are Fast Ethernet (100Base-T) clocking in at 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet (1000Base-T) clocking in at 1 Gbps. The fastest Ethernet network has been clocked at 40Gbps. This effort to reach 100 Gbps is a a bold effort that could lead to increase bandwidth capability in both research and commercial networks.

The US government is funding the project allocating much of the money from the stimulus package enacted by the Obama Administration earlier this year. This continues the Federal Government's tradition of cultivating and promoting the domestic tech sector and is a nice change from the usual allocation of funds for defense related technologies.

This could lead to super fast networks delivering HD quality streaming video to home computers and televisions in less than a decade. The government has always led the way with network innovations. The Internet itself started life as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Program Agency), a program launched by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Superfast Ethernet project aims for 100Gbps - ZDNet.co.uk

Google vs. Microsoft: The Clash of Titans Continues

2009-08-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

The clash between Google and Microsoft intensified as Microsoft and Yahoo reached a partnership deal that will give Microsoft 28% of the search engine market. Bing, the fourth incarnation of a Microsoft search engine, will now reside on Yahoo. Since 2005, despite repeated efforts to the contrary, Microsoft has lost ground in search engine market shares, coming in a perennial third place behind Google and Yahoo, but this new partnership, combining Yahoo (number 2) with Microsoft (number 3), may just be the thing to finally bring the battle to the market leader Google who still retains 65% of the search engine market.

Google and Microsoft have been skirmishing all year. After Microsoft failed to buyout Yahoo last year, a brute force attempt to challenge Google's dominance in the search engine/home page market, Google released its own Chrome browser, adding to its free application offerings that include Google Docs, an online office suite that continues to grow in features and popularity. Although a feeble challenge to Microsoft's Internet Explorer or the Herculean MS Office Suite, these free applications are not unlike shells fired deep into Microsoft territory. Returning fire, Microsoft announced that the upcoming MS Office 2010 would be offered for free online and will include many online features similar to those found in Google Docs. This prompted Google to announce its most ambitious project yet: an operating system called Chrome OS. The details of this OS are murky at best, apparently it will consist of a Linux kernel wrapped up in a Chrome browser, but it represents the most hostile attack yet on Microsoft whose Windows operating system remains its chief product.

Chrome OS may be nothing more than vaporware, or perhaps Google's version of SDI, the Cold War's greatest piece of vaporware, but it is sure to keep the clash between Google and Microsoft interesting.

Google vs. Microsoft: Will This Time Be Different?

World War Z: Bringing New Perspectives To An Old Genre

2009-07-26T15:28:00.000-07:00

In World War Z, Max Brooks greatly expands on the typical elements found in the Zombie horror genre, incorporates them into a global worldview, and thereby creates something unique and compelling. The novel is presented as an oral history, a narration made up of testimonials told by various people across the globe after the events of the world wide zombie epidemic.

The usual elements of the zombie genre are found in World War Z. Its theme is the breakdown of civilized society in the face of the preternatural phenomenon of reanimated corpses feasting on human flesh. This is the theme in just about ever zombie movie ever made from the George Romero classics Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead to the more recent 28 Days Later and Resident Evil. They all deal with mass hysteria and present this as the greater threat to humanity. The zombies hordes could easily be taken care of if only cooler heads would prevail, but they never do until it is too late and humanity is overrun. In World War Z all of this is predictably present, but the author takes things a bit further and thus expands on the zombie myth.

In World War Z, the break down of society is accomplished on a global scale and depicts the utter defeat of humanity. The zombie infestation is a global phenomena. The oral narrative stretches across the globe from South Africa to Russia to middle America and even to thousands of leagues under the sea in submarines. At the Battle of Yonkers, the human armies are defeated by underestimating the zombie hordes and overestimating the effectiveness of human technology and weapons. Humanity—in its breakdown—fails to understand the kind of war they are fighting. It is truly Total War, the fist such war humanity has faced, a war against an enemy that does not fear, that will never retreat, that doesn’t think strategically, an enemy driven by pure animal instinct alone. For example, land minds prove totally inadequate against the zombies who simply crawl after having their legs blown off and leave behind trails on which other zombies move forward unmolested. This whole Total War theory is really something new to the zombie genre and even more unique and terrifying is the way in which humanity deals with this total war.

The Redeker Plan is brought to bear on the zombie apocalypse. This is a strategy of acceptable loses, a plan that calls for sacrificing large portions of the population in order to save a small genetically/militarily/vocationally fit population. It is eugenics brought to Total War. Developed in South Africa by Paul Redeker, a logical and dispassionate man, the Redeker Plan was actually a redraft of his earlier effort called Orange 84 aimed at securing the Apartheid government in case of a negro uprising. One of the more controversial elements of the plan, and the one that many say has earned Paul Redeker a special podium in hell, is the use of pockets of civilians to distract the zombies away from the more strategically important safe zones. These civilian decoys were actually kept supplied by the government to continue to act as bait for the zombies. This strategy actually works and enables humanity to turn the tide of war against the zombie hordes.

The success of the zombie hordes and the near extinction of humanity was a result of a splintering of the global community. Max Brooks uses the ingredients of Root Beer to illustrate the effects of this global splintering and provides an insight into how unprepared we ourselves are for a global catastrophe. The ingredients of root beer comes from many sources: molasses from the United States, anise from Spain, licorice from France, vanilla from Madagascar, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, cloves from Indonesia, wintergreen from China, pimento berry oil from Jamaica, and balsam oil from Peru. All of this just for a bottle of root beer, so imagine what it takes to build a tank, or a rifle, or a dump truck. The implications of this are menacing when you consider a global disaster like the zombie apocalypse (such as a pandemic) in which nations are cut off from one another. The root beer imagery thus offers a chilling message for our own globally dependent world.

Total War, the Redeker Plan, and the Root Beer symbol are just a few ways Max Brooks brings something new and fresh to an old genre.

The Great Kindle kerfuffle

2009-07-26T13:27:00.000-07:00

Amazon pulled perhaps one of the worst PR gaffs in history last week when it digitally deleted books directly off of customer's Kindles. The customer's accounts were reimbursed for what they paid for the books, but the customers themselves were given no advanced warning. This was tantamount to sneaking into someones house and stealing a book right off their nightstand and leaving a check for the cost of the book in its place. To add irony to insult the books being deleted were George Orwell books including 1984. This of course is the classic dystopian political thriller in which Big Brother Is Watching and the main character Winston must keep an illicit book hidden in a secret wall nook. Apparently the books offered by Amazon were published illegally by an independent publisher and therefore needed to be deleted to keep Amazon from getting sued. It may be too early to call, but this may just be the Coup de grace for the Kindle, a product that has struggled to gain a foothold in the consumer electronics market.

Making sense of the '1984' Kindle kerfuffle | Speeds and feeds - CNET News

Cryptonomicon: A Meandering Aesthetic

2009-07-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is a sprawling, epic novel that alternates between the present (or at least the late 90s) and the Second World War and hosts an ensemble cast that includes genius mathematicians and cryptographers, eccentric soldiers and generals, adventurous treasure seekers and U-boat captains, and paranoid politicians and entrepreneurs. At over 900 pages Cryptonomicon is not unlike the postmodern tome Gravity’s Rainbow and is just as ambitious in theme and tone. It is hard to say exactly what this book is about. There are a myriad of themes and subjects in Cryptonomicon: computer technology, cryptography, the Internet, the controversy over digital privacy, the legacy of World War II, death, globalism, and computer operating systems. In many ways the books is about Everything or--at least—about the methods to discover the true nature of Everything.

Indeed, in Cryptonomicon, as in other works by Stephenson, the world is presented as a cryptosystem, a coded operating system whose ultimate meaning is revealed only to the hacker skilled enough to decipher its symbols. To support and epitomize this theme, there is the character of Lawrence Waterhouse, a mathematical genius who is obsessed with the patterns found in nature, which is displayed in this telling passage:

The sand at the surf line has been washed flat. A small child's footprints wander across it, splaying like gardenia blossoms on thin shafts. The sand looks like a geometric plane until a sheet of ocean grazes it. Then small imperfections are betrayed by swirls in the water. Those swirls in turn carve the sand. The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks. Plodding through the surf, Waterhouse strikes deep craters in the wet sand that are read by the ocean. Eventually the ocean erases them, but in the process its state has been changed, the pattern of its swirls have been altered. Waterhouse images that the disturbance might somehow propagate across the Pacific and into some super-secret Nipponese surveillance device made of bamboo tubes and chrysanthemum leaves. Nip listeners would know that Waterhouse had walked that way. In turn, the water swirling around Waterhouse's feet carries information about Nip propeller design and the deployment of their fleets -- if only he had the wit to read it. The chaos of the waves, gravid with encrypted data, mocks him.

As a corollary of this theme, the world is dominated by two personality types personified by the Goddess Athena and the God Ares, Greek gods whose jurisdiction as gods of war overlap, at least according to the enigmatic and eccentric former Catholic priest turned cryptographer Enoch Root, one of the few characters to bridge the time lines. This is the classic distinction between men of mind and men of action. In Cryptonomicon the main characters fall into one of these two camps. There are the men of action such as Bobby Shaftoe, a morphine addicted WW2 marine; his granddaughter American Shaftoe, a treasure hunting scuba diver (the only real female character in the novel who also functions as the lead’s love interest); Gunter Bischoff, a brilliant German U-boat captain; and Goto Dengo, a Japanese soldier who survives to become a powerful businessman. And then there are the men of mind: Lawrence Waterhouse, a mathematical genius and friend of Alan Turing who works at Bletchley Park helping to crack the Nazi Enigma code; and his grandson Randy Waterhouse, a role-playing-game geek and co-founder of the telecom start-up company Epiphyte(2) which is trying to create a data haven that will act as a kind of online Federal Reserve using gold retrieved from a sunken Nazi U-boat.

These two personality types make up the world of Cryptonomicon and come to personify the mechanical subroutines, the abstract conceptions and the concrete executions, of the modern world. A good example is the war itself. The men of mind develop the actual tools to fight the war and crack the codes that give the fighting forces the edge to win the war. Indeed, as is often illustrated in the novel, it is the code crackers who win the war. However, the men of action are still called in to pry the lid off and clean up the mess. Similarly, in the modern time line, Randy Waterhouse and the Epiphyte start-up have the technical prowess to create the data haven, but they still must rely on Douglas and American Shaftoe to retrieve the Nazi gold at the bottom of the sea.

A common criticism of Neal Stephenson’s writing is his tendency to digress, to go off on tangents, to wander off the path and get lost in the minutia of flora and fauna. In Cryptonomicon, the narrative indeed tends to meander, but this is more a stylistic choice than a lack of focus and actually lends richness, depth, and above all wit to the novel as the author indulges in countless thoughts and interests. There are pages describing the best way to eat Captain Crunch, the removal of wisdom teeth, and the usefulness of beards. The novel also goes into painful detail about mathematics and cryptography, one of the novel’s main subjects that has endless sub-categories unto itself. There are a lot of inside jokes for computer geeks, engineers, programmers, hackers, mathematicians, crackers, Unix zealots, and RPG nerds. Historical figures are brought to vivid life in the novel such as Alan Turing, General Douglas MacArthur, Ronald Reagan (before he was president), and General Yamamoto. And detailed descriptions of geography are drawn with mathematical precision stretching across the globe from Manila to Finland to the fictitious Celtic Isle of Qwghlm and the Sultanate of Kinakuta. The title of the novel is derived from the urban mythical book of the same name, which is a patch work collection of essays and tutorials on cryptology, a great metaphor for the novel itself. Yes Cryptonomicon tends to ramble and meander, expressing an encyclopedic vision of the world, but that is the whole point.

Neal Stephenson’s prose are a joy to read. His humor is biting and real and nearly every page offers a funny metaphor such as when Randy Waterhouse pictures himself as a Tolkien Dwarf confronted by the Hobbit nonsense of his girlfriend’s academia-laden cocktail party. Many people criticize Stephenson’s liberal use of similes and metaphors, but again it adds richness to the narrative. And again the meandering quality of the narrative is what makes the novel so much fun to read waiting to see what digression Stephenson will take next and where he will go with it. I was thoroughly engrossed in this novel and found it difficult to put down.

My Favorite iPhone Apps...so far.

2009-07-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

I finally got my hands on an 8GB iPod touch. This amazing little device has taken hold of my psyche in a way I have not experienced since I got my first true multi-media computer circa 1996, and unlike that old Win95 machine, the iPod never freezes with a BSOD. Where has this thing been all my life? How did I live without it for so long? My only regret, and one I will soon correct, is passing on the iPhone proper. Anyway, just like all those early multi-media computers that came loaded with Windows 95, the device is only as good as the software it runs. Now don't get me wrong, Apple provides a pretty nifty set of apps to get you started, essential stuff like a browser, an email client, a media player, a clock, and a calendar are all included. However, scouring through all the apps on iTunes is where the real fun starts. I have compiled an early list of my favorites. Below is just a sample of the games and productivity apps I am using and highly recommend.

Being in no particular order other than increasing levels of interest, I will start this list off with a game.

Zombieville USA

Zombieville USA is a side-scrolling shooter. It is extremely simple to learn and a lot of fun to play. You move right and left killing zombies with various weapons, ducking inside houses for ammo or money, until you reach the far rightward end and level up. Before each level up, you are given the opportunity to buy new weapons. These include pistols, shotguns, machine guns, a Gatling gun, a rocket launcher, and a chainsaw..yes a chainsaw. The graphics are great. Everything is very cartoonish, but in a very cool way. The best part is watching the zombies die in gushes of blood and exploding body parts. Although the game can get tedious, it remains a lot of fun as a casual game. I often find myself firing up Zombieville whenever I am bored or have a half-an-hour to kill (sorry for the pun). Zombieville USA is available for only $1.99. There is a lite version for free if you want to try it out first, but this will only include one level and you won't get to use the chainsaw.

Documents 2

Documents 2 is a comprehensive mobile office suite that works seamlessly with Google Docs. It will enable you to sync and edit files such as spreadsheets, documents, and presentations between your iPod and desktop computer. It claims to be compatible with M$ Office, but in my experience M$ formatting is lost when synced with the iPod...but what's new. I migrated away from M$ Office and jumped on the Google cloud a long time ago. At $3.99 this is a cost effective solution to the more expensive M$ Office friendly Quickoffice, which goes for about $12.99. What's more, you can get a free version with limited features. I have been using the free version for my college papers and see no need to upgrade just yet. Documents 2 is truly the open source office suite for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Rise Of Lost Empires

Rise Of Lost Empires is basically a Warcraft 2 clone. It does a great job of emulating one of the greatest RTS games ever made, complete with orcs and humans building cities, cultivating and collecting resources, and raising armies to do battle. Like any good RTS game, this one will steal hours from your life as you keep telling yourself just a few more minutes...just a few more minutes. The only drawback I found is in the monotonous phrases the characters keep saying over and over, but this is easily remedied by muting the sound. Rise Of Lost Empires goes for only $4.99. It too offers a free version so you can try it out first.

Doom Resurrection

Earlier I waxed poetic about my first multi-media PC. Well a lot of this idealized nostalgia comes from spending hours on that computer playing a game called Doom. What an awesome surprise to find a version of Doom for the iPhone called Doom Resurrection. It is made by the same Id team and led by the same creator John Carmack who created the first legendary Doom game. With no free version I was forced to pay the $9.99 up front and hope for the best. How bad could it be? It is Doom after all.

My first reaction was pretty negative. This is a rail-shooter, meaning you have no control over your movement through the game, you are carried along as if on a railway cart on a ride at Disney World. What's more, the shooting system is quite different: you actually must tilt your iPod to aim. All this turned me off at first, but after spending almost ten bucks on the damn game, I wasn't going to just give up. I soldiered on.

I am really glade I stuck with it. By the second board I was enthralled. You get used to the shooting system real quick and being on rails doesn't bother you at all after awhile. In fact, the limitations the rails and targeting system impose actually makes the game far more immersive. The graphics are amazing and the action is a non-stop thrill ride. Before I overdose on movie blurb cliches, let me just say Id has done it again. If you love FPS games and have an iPhone or iPod touch then this is a must buy.

The game cost $9.99. This is a lot, but trust me it is worth it. There is also no free version available. I totally understand the reason for this. You need to play with it for a little while to truly discover the genius of the targeting system and the turn based rail-shooter plot-line. Doom Resurrection is probably my favorite iPhone game to date.

Ryan Reynolds is The Green Lantern

2009-07-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

This is good news. At first I was taken aback, thinking of Ryan Reynolds as strictly a comedic actor, and comedy is definitely not what comes to mind when you think of Hal Jordan, one of the more serious heroes in the DC universe. However, Reynolds has more than just comedy on his film resume. He has convincingly displayed a serious side in such films as Smoking Aces, Blade: Trinity, and The Amityville Horror. Letting this drive away any thoughts of a Van Wilder Green Lantern, I will give Ryan Reynolds a chance. He just may pull this off and become a huge star in the process. He can yuk it up as Wade Wilson in Deadpool, the planned spin-off from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and save his more iconic performance for Green Lantern.

The reaction to Reynolds choice has been overwhelmingly positive in geek forums across the net, but this may just be a collective sigh of relief after a short period in which Justine Timberlake was in the running. Yes we are talking about the "Cry Me A River" Timberlake who is as foreign to the geek community as higher cognitive functions are to fish. About 24 hours before the official announcement of the Reynolds pick, a story broke on the web pitting the role of Hal Jordan between three actors : Ryan Reynolds, Bradley Cooper, or Justine Timberlake. Saving thousands of fanboys from certain suicide, Reynolds ultimately got the role.

Not to get all Alex Jones here, but it seems like the Timberlake option was just a ruse designed to drum up more support for Reynolds. Did anyone at Warner Brothers really believe Justine Timberlake could take on the role of the Green Lantern? Any studio hack who thought this was a good idea needs to be fired at once. The last thing we need is Timberlake showing up in a future Justice League or Flash movie.

Ryan Reynolds is Green Lantern

The Palm iBerry

2009-07-12T10:46:00.000-07:00

The Palm Pre is no iPhone killer, but it may give the Blackberry a run for its money. The iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre are in a dead heat when comparing features and price. While the iPhone offers more multi-media features and a greater ecosystem of applications offered through iTunes, the Palm Pre is truly multi-tasking and offers greater messaging features. The iPhone offers more storage capacity with the 16 GB iPhone costing the same $199 as the 8 GB Palm Pre while the 8 GB iPhone only costs $99 and the 32 GB iPhone costs only $100 more than the Palm Pre. However, the Palm Pre offers a much cheaper data plan through Sprint at $90 a month compared with the $149.00 a month AT&T plan.

In the end, the choice between the two comes down to user preferences and priorities. The iPhone is a win if you are looking for a good multi-media playback device. The Palm Pre, as was also the case with the Blackberry, will appeal to those users more concerned with email and messaging services.

So the real question is how the Palm Pre stacks up against the Blackberry. The Blackberry Curve and Pearl offer a tried and true platform with a superior OS and cheaper plans offered by multiple carriers, so the Palm Pre has a lot of catching up to do. However, by incorporating a lot of iPhone-like features such as a touch screen, and focusing heavily on messaging, social website interactions, and cloud computing, the Palm Pre has set its sites on filling the void between the iPhone and the Blackberry. As it stands now, the Palm Pre remains a third player on the smart phone front, but if Blackberry falters (as it did with its Storm) and fails to keep up (BB needs to come up with a touch-screen, multi-media rich phone that works), the Palm Pre may just capture the number two spot.

Clock Running Out For WB Superman

2009-07-12T00:07:00.000-07:00

It looks like Warner Brothers is going to lose the rights to Superman in 2013 when those rights revert back to the heirs of the creators Siegel and Shuster. A lot of website articles are touting the fact that Warner Brothers is unprepared to film a sequel to Bryan Singer's 2006 Superman Returns and are furthermore speculating that the latest court rulings may spur Warner Brothers to quickly bang out one last Superman movie. Theoretically, the studio could have a sequel ready for release as early as summer 2012. Some people see this as good news, a way to put pressure on Warner Brothers to produce another Superman movie in the near future.

But do we really want to go there?

Does anyone really want to see a makeshift Superman movie slapped together just to milk every last possible cent out of the Man of Steel? The potential for suckness is pretty high here. I can see it now: Superman Returns Again in 3D staring Shia LaBeouf directed by McGee featuring music by the Jonas Brothers.

It gets even scarier when one considers the fate of Smallville. The highly successful television show that has treated Superman cannon and continuity like a cheap whore for over eight seasons will also face a curtain call in 2013. This is kind of cool in that we finally have an end date for the corniest DC inspired t.v. show ever (and yes...Smallville is cornier than the 1960s Batman and Robin). But this is scary in that they may decide to go out with a bang and make a Smallville movie. As a result, the last Warner Brothers Superman movie may wind up being the gayest Warner Brothers Superman movie as the WB cast jumps onto the silver screen and thirty-something Tom Welling finally puts on the red and blue suit bringing Superboy into puberty about six years late. Christopher Reeves will be rolling over in his grave.

I would much rather wait for some other studio to pick up Superman after the court order of 2013 goes into effect. Warner Brothers seems to have not only run out of ideas but have also lost the desire to make another Superman movie. Thus far there is no script and no production plans in the works. It is unlikely Bryan Singer will return to direct another movie after being panned by critic and fans for Superman Returns, which will probably be remembered as Singer's first bad movie. So it is time for the Man of Steel to leave Warner Brothers and find a more fertile studio in which to flourish.

We might get a better film out of such a move. Perhaps one that includes fight scenes and villains other than Lex Luthor and falling aircraft. It is hard to believe this property can't find its place on the silver screen. Give us Brainiac, give us Bizarro, give us Darkseid, give us Lexcorp, give us Doomsday, give us Kandor...give us something. The material is there just waiting to be dug up and refined. Perhaps Disney/Miramax or Paramount can get the job done.

Why the clock is running out for a Superman sequel | SCI FI Wire

Speed Up Firefox 3.0.10

2009-05-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

My browser was running a little slow. I would start it up and have to wait over a minute before typing a query into Google or else the browser would fail to keep up with my keystrokes responding instead with lagging ghost characters. So a cursory search on Google revealed a quick fix for anyone with broadband (Is there anybody left using dial-up?). The detailed steps are below.

1 Open FF and type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. (please note the : between "about : config" without the space)
Then Scroll down and look for the following 3 entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time.
When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter finding all 3 entries as follows: (double click to change the first 2)

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30.
This means it will make 30 requests at once. (default is 4)

3. Now, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0".
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

4. Don't forget to re-fresh the page "F5" for the changes to take effect.
(Unlike IE, FF needs to be manually re-freshed when changes are made, even forum settings)

Star Trek Is Back!!!!

2009-05-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

Star Trek is a huge hit, a retcon masterpiece, and a much-needed jolt for a franchise that has languished on life-support for the past decade. Mastermind behind the television series Lost and the films Mission Impossible III and Cloverfield, J.J. Abrams brought his A-games and knocked one out of the park. The film is being hailed as an instant science fiction classic by both long-time trekkies and those new to the Star Trek universe.

Star Trek dominated its opening weekend of May 10th grossing $72 million, came in a close second the following weekend of May 17th grossing $43 million, and then dropped to third in the weekend of May 24th yet still grossed a respectable $21 million. Public response to the film has been overwhelmingly positive. Rotten Tomatoes, which reflects the critical reaction, gives the movie an impressive 95% positive reviews, while IMBD, where users rate the films, gives the movie an 8.5 out of 10. So it looks like Star Trek is a hit and may be on its way to being the best movie of the summer, enjoying the same honor as last year’s The Dark Knight and Iron Man.

How did Star Trek, whose target audience would normally confine itself to a select cabal of sci-fi geeks, appeal to so many movie goers? Indeed, the success of this film is based largely on its inclusiveness, its ability to entertain everyone and pull in the widest segment of the summer movie demographic. How did it pull it off? One word: retcon. Carefully using the plot devise of time travel, and thereby creating a quantum-based multi-verse in which a new time line is created existing parallel with the old time line, J.J. Abrams effectively creates a clean slate for the Star Trek universe without destroying the old or making the new redundant. As a result, we have a new Kirk, Spock, and Bones and a new frontier for them to boldly go and explore. Unlike the Star Wars prequels that delivered stories whose ultimate end was already known, this new Star Trek universe grants the franchise infinite possibilities. Meanwhile, those old 1960s episodes and 1980s films, featuring the original cast of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, are still valid. They just exists in another, alternative time line. In this way, J.J. Abrams manages to make Star Trek new again, accessible to new fans, and at the same time satisfying to traditional fans.

All of this represents a much needed win by the Star Trek franchise. When Star Trek: Enterprise went off the air in 2005 after an unremarkable four year run, it looked as though the franchise was finished. For the first time in twenty years there was no Star Trek series on television. What’s more, the last two movies, Insurrection in 1998 and Nemesis in 2002, both featuring the TNG cast, were panned by critics and fans alike as nothing more than glorified episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation. These disasters came on the heels of Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001), a mediocre trek series that showed the franchise was running out of steam. Much debate has raged over who or what to blame for the Star Trek crash and burn, but now with the new movie ready to revitalize the franchise the only debate worthy of attention is how soon J.J. Abrams and Co. can put out another movie. Can we hope for a new television series? Will the DVDs feature Director’s commentary? Will they offer cell phones that look like the actual Star Trek communicators?

Star Trek Is Back.

X-Men Origins: WTF???!

2009-05-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

After much anticipation from comic book and movie fans alike, X-Men Origins: Wolverine was released to theaters earlier this month kicking off the summer movie season. The movie stars Huge Jackman, reprising his role as Wolverine, Liev Schreiber as Sabretooth, and a bevy of other actors making short, cameo-like appearances as various mutants. Although the movie avoids being an absolute disaster like Daredevil, Catwomen, and Ghost Rider, it fails to meet expectations and wallows in mediocrity. Wolverine suffers from too many action movie cliches, a flagrant disregard for the source material, and a weak story with ultimately no point. Like the adamantium bonded to his skeleton, Wolverine and his origin story were thought to be a rock solid formula for success. The film is thus a study in how to break the seemingly unbreakable.

There are far too many action movie cliches in this film. Three times Wolverine stretches his arms out, looks up to the heavens, and gives a plaintive scream not unlike Capt. Kirk in The Wrath of Kahn. Then there is the scene in which Wolverine blows up a helicopter and swaggers away in slow motion, waking straight toward the camera with a flinty stare, as the flames billow up behind him. In fact, many of the action scenes seem like a Vogue photo shoot featuring Huge Jackman flexing his neck muscles and striking an action-figure pose.

Wolverine was thought to be a no-brainer of a movie because of the source material. The character of Wolverine has a long history in Marvel Comics. From Uncanny X-Men to the Wolverine solo series to the Weapon X mini-series, Wolverine has accumulated a large body of work that has fleshed out his character and fueled his popularity. But for some reason the film makers chose to disregard this rich history and instead retell the origin story their way. Unfortunately, this retelling renders the story and film a continuity train wreck. Logan (Wolverine) and Victor (Sabretooth) are presented as brothers who grow up together, fight wars together, decide to be enemies, and then decide not to be enemies. It makes no sense and adds nothing to the story.

And then there are those adamantium bullets. Wolverine’s memory loss was always considered a side effect of either his healing ability or the Weapon X procedure of bonding adamantium to his skeleton. However, in the movie they shoot Wolverine in the head with adamantium bullets; his healing ability enables him to survive but leaves him with amnesia. This is just silly. It doesn’t take a continuity snob to yell foul with this movie. All they needed to do was stay true to the source material, like they did in Watchmen, and Wolverine would have been fine story-wise at least. Things get even worse for the other characters such as the Blob and Deadpool, more on that later.

The story felt rushed throughout, hurried along as if the actual plot points were just narrative devices used to segue into the next clichéd action scene. This includes cramming as many secondary mutant characters in as possible. Deadpool, the Blob, Emma Frost, Gambit, and Cyclops all make brief appearances, so brief they add nothing to the story. Their inclusion seems unnatural, surgical implants meant to attract and appease X-Men fans. Some of these characters, such as Gambit and Emma Frost, are mistreated by their lack of screen time, while others, such as Deadpool and the Blob, simply by their poor handling. The Blob is supposed to be an unmovable mass, but the movie presents him as a washed up black-ops soldier who is morbidly obese and so weak that Wolverine knocks him down without a problem. And then there is Deadpool. At the end of the movie, during the insipid climax, Deadpool appears as a human remote-controlled weapon with his mouth sewn shut. Taking away Deadpool’s mouth is like taking away Wolverine’s claws, half of Deadpool’s charm comes from his relentless sarcastic banter.

Finally, taken as a whole the story is pointless and unbelievable even by comic book standards. Stryker goes to pretty extreme lengths to get Wolverine to cooperate with the Weapon X program. He blackmails Silverfox into seducing Wolverine in order to engineer a revenge scenario by having Sabretooth appear to kill her. This compels Wolverine to volunteer for the Weapon X program, but then after Wolverine freaks out and runs off into the woods on his revenge mission, Stryker decides Wolverine must be destroyed. Meanwhile, Sabretooth has conspired against his brother with Stryker for vague reasons which are totally abandoned at the end when the brothers fight side-by-side against Weapon XI. So the revenge plot was an engineered farce, the love affair with Silverfox a sham, the Weapon X project a dry run for Weapon XI and the deadly rivalry between Sabretooth and Wolverine just a petty spat between brothers. Is it any wonder it all seems pointless at the end?

Final Crisis:...Wait For It!

2009-03-29T01:18:00.000-07:00

Now that Final Crisis is finally finished and soon to appear in trade paperback, it would seem a good time to counter all those criticisms that cried so loudly while the story was being rolled out. If ever a story would read better in trade paperback form, it would be Final Crisis. A lot of baffled readers are asking exactly what happened in Final Crisis. Quite a bit happened actually: Barry Allen returned from the dead, Martian Manhunter died, Darkseid and the 4th World New Gods were defeated ushering in a 5th World, and of course Batman kind of died...if only for a little while.

Final Crisis seemed a bit cryptic to most readers. Even DC diehards found it difficult to discern exactly what was happening. This is not unusual for Grant Morrison, who often employ an advent guard style, featuring his infamous channel-flipping technique switching rapidly from one part of the DC Universe to the next, randomly dropping plot points until they all dovetail at the end. Another reason why Final Crisis will read better as a trade paperback.

So in the end a lot did happen in Final Crisis. It radically changed the DC Universe and will continue to have a ripple effect for a long time. The initial confusion caused by the non-traditional narrative style was ironed out in the end and everything finally came together. So it was not as bad as it seemed, though it failed to meet the hype. And again it will read better in trade paperback.

Bravo BSG!!!!

2009-03-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

Battlestar Galactica ended last Friday with a two-hour series finale that tied up some of the many tattered loose-ends and offered a chance to say goodbye to a beloved cast.

Speculation was running wild in the run-up to the series finale. How would it end? This show had the potential to disappoint in an epic fail not seen since the Sopranos ended two years ago. A lot of people, including myself, were expecting a depressing ending. Battlestar has never been an optimistic show like Star Trek, in fact it has been the complete opposite of Trek, crushing all those glimmers of hope at every turn, from the Cylon occupation of New Cobol to the discovery of a nuked Earth. In this way, Battlestar Galactica ended on a shocking note by giving us the unthinkable...a happy ending.

The Fleet finds Earth...the real Earth...not that nuked planet they found at the end of last season. This comes after a fierce battle with the last hostile Cylons that fulfills all those many opera house visions seen throughout the series. What's more, it is Kara Thrace who inputs the coordinates using numbers gleaned from the music Hera gave her, the musical notes of "All Along The Watchtower." Finally, after her last terminal FTL jump, the Battlestar Galactica sails over the craters of the Moon and reveals that " shining planet known as Earth." And then it was all over except for the goodbyes.

I really didn't expect to get emotional, but out came the hanky. The ending was not unlike the last episode of a sitcom series like Seinfeld or M.A.S.H in which each character gets his or her final say. Of coarse Roslyn dies and Adama is left alone, this much was expected. The rest of the crew literally scatter to the four corners of the Earth, along with the rest of humanity bent on returning to nature, while Anders sails the empty fleet into the sun. In what will surely remain controversial, especially to those continuity purists, Kara Thrace simply disappears into thin air, implying she was a head character/angel like the head 6 and head Baltair. We probably won't ever hear the end of that disappearing act.

But does everything have to be solved? Tied up in neat little boxes with pretty bows? Can't some things be left a mystery? Already there are grumbling online and off about the series ending: The human population would never give up their technology and choose a return to nature/a clean slate; calling the head 6 and Baltair 6 angels and fobbing the whole Kara Thrace resurrection off on some spiritual theme is cheap and lazy; most of the characters acted totally out of character in the series finale such as Cavil killing himself and Baltair making a selfless and moral choice. Such criticisms will continue to be voiced and debated, but will ultimately fall victim to the critical imperative of "it's just a television show dude."

Yes it was just a television show, but is was a great one. I was really happy with the way this series ended. I remember when Battlestar Galactica first premiered. I thought it was going to be stupid and the sight of that blond bombshell in a red dress just reinforced my negative bias. Later I learned she was a Cylon named 6 after her model number and later she was simply Caprica. And there she was at the very end walking away in that same red dress while the Jimi Hendrix rendition of "All Along The Watchtower" played. I've always been a fan of science fiction television, having watched Star Trek in the 70s as a kid and then later the Next Generation, Dr. Who, Farscape, Babylon 5, and even some Stargate...but nothing beats Battlestar.

So Say We All

The new iPod shuffle

2009-03-12T06:31:00.000-07:00

The new iPod shuffle looks terrible. They removed all the controls and put them on the iPod headphone wire, locking the user into Apple earbuds without which the unit is unworkable. I hate the earbuds that come with iPods and have never used them. What's more, playback has been rendered counter intuitive with a single multi-use button: single-click to play/pause, double-click for the next track, and triple-click for the previous track. I guess Apple just wants us to cue up a playlist and just leave it.

I have a second-generation 1GB shuffle that I use everyday at work and absolutely love. Now I'm thinking I may run out and buy another one before they disappear off shelves to make way for the new monstrosities. Then again, something tells me the new design will fail and the old form factor will return with a new title: Shuffle Classic.

The new iPod shuffle: Button, button, who's got the button? | Player Hardware | Playlist | Macworld

Mickey Rourke Officially IRON MAN 2's Villain

2009-03-12T05:57:00.000-07:00

Mickey Rourke is back on to play the baddie in Iron Man II. Rourke sparred with Marvel Studios over salary for a few weeks, joining Samuel L Jackson in the latest casting news trend, before officially taking the role of a Russian villain--Crimson Dynamo? Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson is still set to play the Black Widow after Emily Blunt was forced to drop out. It looks as though Iron Man will stick to a one-villain formula in the up-and-coming sequel. It remains to be seen whether any of this will translate into silver-screen magic. I am personally skeptical of Rourke's ability to play a villain in a comic book movie. Not because I feel he is a bad actor, I just think Rourke performs better in edgy, independent type movies like The Wrestler and Sin City. I just can't see him in a big, colorful summer movie like Iron Man.

Mickey Rourke Officially IRON MAN 2's "Russian Villain"! Is Black Widow Cast, Too? -- Ain't It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news.

Old School Geek Movies

2009-03-02T22:43:00.001-08:00

Because of the snow storm I stayed home from work today and watched John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), the greatest movie ever made to watch while snowed-in at home . I always loved this movie and can actually remember watching it on Laserdisc back in the 80s. I still get a kick out of the way they used make-up and props to create special effects, a style that is lost in today's CGI movies.

I get real nostalgic about old school geek movies like The Thing, The Fly (1985), Scanners, Videodrome, Re-Animator, Total Recall, RoboCop, Hellraiser, Evil Dead I & II, and the Toxic Avenger (as well as everything else made by Troma Films). Back in the pre-Jurassic Park CGI era, horror and science fiction movies still managed to produce some of the most wicked makeup and special effects, all of it natural, created using real concrete props and make-up. I've got nothing against CGI. In fact I love the use of CGI. But there is something about the old green-screen, matte painting, Lon Chaney make-up movies that I miss. Sometimes I feel they go needlessly out of their way to use CGI. Did they really have to use CGI to create the infected zombies in I Am Legend? Such character's were screaming for the George A. Romero make-up treatment. With the exception of a few shocker moments in David Cronenberg movies such as A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, you never see that old style anymore. But at least will always have the videos.

Scanners. Stay With It.

A Bit Dated but still a classic.

Simply the best of its kind.

Frak Earth: the Beginning of the End

2009-01-18T12:42:00.001-08:00

Battlestar Galactica returned on Friday with the premier of its final season. In this episode titled “Sometimes a Great Notion,” the fallout of last season’s shock ending, in which a long sought after Earth is revealed to be a nuked-out wasteland, engulfs the entire crew in a collective depression. All the dreams and hopes of Galactica are crushed, most of the fleet staggers around dazed or drunk, and morale has sunk to unfathomable depths. This spiritual bankruptcy ultimately claims the life of long-time crew and cast member Anastasia "Dee" Dualla. She commits suicide in a shocking scene that pretty much summed up the whole vibe of the episode, one of utter despair and desolation.

The Fifth Cylon mystery is finally at an end. The 5th Cylon is Colonel Tigh’s wife Ellen, whom Tigh killed for collaborating with the Cylons back in Season 3 on New Caprica. This makes sense and fits into the overall story arc, but is hardly a big reveal. It is what executive producer Ronald D. Moore concedes is a “slotting into place” event. But it finally puts the Fifth Cylon question to rest. It will be interesting to see if the Ellen character will somehow make an appearance on the show during the finally nine episodes. And then there is Starbuck.

In a shocking reveal just as shocking as the previously mentioned two, Starbuck finds her old Raptor and the remains of a blonde-haired pilot on the burnt-out surface of Earth. It appears that Starbuck has found her own corpse. I thought for sure this settled the 5th Cylon debate, casting Starbuck as a toaster, until the end when Ellen was revealed as the 5th. In fact I wasn't entirely convinced of the Ellen reveal, thinking it a mistake on the part of Colonel Tigh, until I read an interview with executive producer Ronald D. Moore that supports Tigh's conclusion. So what exactly is Starbuck? If she isn't a Cylon than what is she? Some have suggested she was cloned by the Cylons when she was imprisoned on Caprica. I guess we will just have to wait and see.

Star Wars Clone Wars Episode 11 & 12 Seeming Continuity Gaff

2009-01-17T06:52:00.001-08:00

An unusual plot contradiction occurred in-between episodes 11 & 12 of The Clone Wars television show. A common event in the Star Trek universe, this almost never happens in the Star Wars universe. At the end of episode 11, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker are in a seedy bar on a pirate base where the pirates attempt to drug them. With the help of some force-juggling, the two Jedi are able to swap their Mickey-laden drinks and thereby avoid being drugged. However, at the beginning of episode 12, the two Jedi wake up prisoners in a pirate jail complaining about being drugged. WTF!!!

Were our Jedi heroes drugged or not? It turns out this contradiction can easily be resolved by reading the associated web comic. Each episode of the Clone Wars has a web comic attached to it. This can be found at the Star Wars web site. Reading the comic that falls between episodes 11 & 12, it is clear what happened. However, this is a shoddy way to link together two episodes, especially two that make up one two-part story. Most people just watch the show and if the creators want these people to keep tuning in, they may want to watch their Ps and Qs with continuity. If I want plot contradictions, I can always watch Star Trek thank you.

Update: Warner Bros. and Fox Settle Watchmen Dispute - Superhero Hype!

2009-01-16T07:30:00.000-08:00

The Warner Brothers and Fox dispute over the Watchmen movie has been settled. Warner Bros will pay Fox a cash payment and a percentage of the film's box office earnings. The scheduled March 6th release will remain unchanged.

It seems that Fox lost the PR battle in this case. Most people unfairly blame Fox for the dispute, when in actuality it was Warner Bros. who dropped the ball. Why did they make a movie they did not have the rights to? They were notified almost a year ago about Fox owning the rights to Watchmen and then they went ahead and made the movie anyway.

Fox brought the case three months before the scheduled theatrical release of March 6th and this caused bloggers and fanboys to lose their minds. There was a danger the litigation would delay the release. But perhaps the anger directed at Fox goes deeper than this? Perhaps it has something to do with all the poor movies it has released lately? X-Files, the Happening, the Day The Earth Stood Still: Do Fox's actions really come as such a shock?

Update: Warner Bros. and Fox Settle Watchmen Dispute - Superhero Hype!

Pseudo-Hackers

2009-01-08T06:31:00.001-08:00

I’m getting really sick of all these newbs who discover file sharing and then affect the air of belonging to some kind of esoteric elite. This stuff has been going on for over ten years now. It is nothing new. But I keep running into people who trip over themselves to tell you how many GBs of music and movies they have. And now we have moved into the TB realm making things even more pathetic. This usually happens whenever I talk about a DVD I bought or when —god forbid—I take my wife out to the movies.

“You got ripped off man. I’ve had that movie for weeks,” they boast, usually with a condescending tone. “I have over 2 Terabytes of movies on an external drive man and I haven’t paid for a movie in years.”

This kind of banter only proves two things. A) You have way too much time on your hands. and B) You are cheap.

And what is it with this pack-rat mentality? I downloaded the Matrix back in 2000 like everybody else. Guess what? Those matrix.avi files are still out there. What’s more, I can buy the Matrix DVD for about ten dollars, and DVD is better quality than any avi file. So why do I need to have this file sitting on some drive? A terabyte of .avi files represents a waste of time and space.

And sometimes I just want a hard copy of a movie, especially if I really like the film. Recently I bought the three-disc Special Edition of the Dark Knight. Why do I feel like I need to apologize for this? DVD is better than AVI and yes…yes…I can tell the difference. I downloaded the Dark Knight when it appeared on Pirate Bay, but I didn’t actually watch the whole thing because I wanted to wait to get the DVD. God forbid.

All these bit torrent cowboys need to get over their hard drive space and broadband accounts. We all have this stuff. Just some of us have better things to do with our lives than download every movie that is ripped to avi.

Humanitarian Crises For Only Three Hours A Day- NYTimes.com

2009-01-07T10:10:00.000-08:00

The Israel Army observed a three-hour cease fire yesterday to allow humanitarian aid to enter the embattled Gaza region. This comes a day after the Israelis denied there was a humanitarian crises. According to international agencies, three-quarters of the 1.5 million residents are currently without power and thousands are without water.

Meanwhile, the French and Egyptians are aggressively pursuing a cease-fire as the United States basically sanctions Israel aggression by blocking a UN cease-fire effort. The French-Egyptian initiative is making the United States look pretty bad as France led by President Nicolas Sarkozy takes the lead role in peace negotiations.

The death toll in Gaza reached around 660 on Wednesday, according to Palestinian health officials. The United Nations has estimated that about one-fourth of those dying in Gaza are civilians.

Israel Resumes Gaza Attack After Halt to Allow Aid - NYTimes.com

Fahrenheit 451

2009-01-04T23:18:00.001-08:00

I finally read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I really wish I had read this sooner. For some reason I have put this off most of my life. I have a proclivity for dystopian fiction, and after reading 1984, A Brave New World, Neuromancer, and even This Perfect Day by Ira Levin, I suppose guilt has kept me away from reading anymore such works, as if gorging myself on too much dystopian fiction would warp my literary sensitivities. Anyhow, I finally read the book and I found it absolutely brilliant.

I was surprised to find it much more an indictment on social ignorance than on censorship. I was under the misguided perception this was a novel on a totalitarian state that banned books and enforced its policy by book burning, big brother with a blow torch if you will. Actually, the book burning and censorship are operations of convenience, needed services in a society that has no value for books and the critical thoughts they engender. The dumbed-down society is a fate accompli in Fahrenheit 451, accomplished long ago by television and interactive role-playing games not unlike our own reality TV and video games.

Fahrenheit 451 offers a much more terrifying vision than any of the previous dystopian novels I have read, including 1984 and Brave New World, because much of it sounds almost contemporary. In our own time we don’t need to censor books and burn them into oblivion, indifference is doing the work of the blowtorch just as it does in the novel.

Editorial - Recession, Taxes and Mr. Obama - NYTimes.com

2009-01-04T21:56:00.000-08:00

Let's try to make sense of all this: $300 billion in tax cuts to win over the GOP and fiscal conservatives, increased spending on infrastructure and aid to state governments, and now the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will remain intact because cutting them will go against conventional wisdom. Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan is starting to sound like something out of the Wizard of Oz. Just tap your shoes and repeat these words: the economy will recover...the economy will recover.

How is any of this going to be paid for? So far Obama's stimulus package looks like a whole lot more deficit spending. I'm sick of all these programs that are supposed to pay for themselves later. Just once I would like to see Washington step up and call on the American people to endure sacrifice to strengthen the Nation fiscally. But I guess with a system like ours, a capitalistic Republic fueled by greed, that will never happen.

Editorial - Recession, Taxes and Mr. Obama - NYTimes.com

Biggest Tech Stories of 2008

2009-01-03T17:03:00.001-08:00

The year 2008 was a busy year for technology. Below are just a few of the stories that emerged during this heady yet transformative year.

Microsoft attempts to buy Yahoo. In a bid to compete with online giant Google, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo in February of 2008. Yahoo rejected Microsoft's offer claiming it was too low and Yahoo was worth more. In the end, Yahoo saw its stock prices plummet as its chief competitor Google continued to grow.

Death of HD DVD. The year 2008 saw the end of the HD format war between HD DVD and Blu-Ray. Because of stagnant holiday sales and a domino effect of studios dropping HD DVD support, Toshiba was forced to discontinue its HD DVD business. Blu-Ray won, but still struggles to gain sales in the face of digital download services and traditional DVD sales.

Nintendo rules the roost. The Nintendo Wii and the DS were the biggest selling gaming consoles of 2008 despite the more technologically advanced platforms offered by competitors Microsoft and Sony. In the all-important month of November, the Nintendo Wii sold twice as many units as its closest competitor, Microsoft’s Xbox 360. And in the hand held market, the Nintendo DS tripled the output of Sony’s PSP. Throughout the year of 2008, sales of next-gen consoles put Nintendo far ahead of both Microsoft and Sony.

Analog cell phone networks were phased out in early 2008 to make room for more digital services. Most users probably didn’t even notice the phase-out since the mobile-phone companies have been pushing people to upgrade to digital phones for the past seven years. However, many owners of automobiles equipped with older versions of On Star were out of luck. A similar phase-out is in the works for 2009 when television stations will cease broadcasting analog signals.

Sirius and XM Satellite Radio merged into one company with more than 18.5 million subscribers in July of 2008. Because these were the only two satellite radio stations and their merger would constitute a monopoly, the FCC initially barred the merger. However, after executives argued that satellite radio faces more competition from Internet music services and music playing cell phones (such as the iPhone), the FCC ultimately approved the deal . The merged company is now known as Sirius XM Radio.

Twitter, the free social networking and micro-blogging site, had a big year. According to stats released from Nielsen Online, Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August, an increase of 422% from the same period last year.This comes despite being bogged down most of the time with technical problems. The bloom may be wearing off Twitter as users complain about social networking overkill, being too connected, and having to tell friends to stop making frivolous posts such as what they had for dinner or when they go to the bathroom.

Bill Gates retired in 2008...well sort of. He is still Microsoft's chairman and largest shareholder, but June 27th was his last day as a full-time worker at the software giant, marking the unofficial end of his career as a business leader. And what a career it has been. Bill Gates has been an animating force behind the personal computer revolution, helping to build a huge global industry and engineer blockbuster products like Windows and Office, used every day in offices and homes around the world.

First Internet President. Obama raised millions of dollars in his presidential bid by using the Internet. What's more, Obama is the first tech savvy President, comfortable with both a Blackberry and a laptop.

Israeli ground forces launch Gaza invasion - Israel-Palestinians- msnbc.com

2009-01-03T14:17:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, Israel has played into the hands of Hamas. This is precisely what Hamas wanted: To make Israel look like an aggressor, like a killer of women and children. This is why Hamas hides its military hardware in civilian-dense regions, using its own citizens as shields. Hamas wanted Israeli to attack Gaza and produce a large number of civilian casualties. Support for Israeli in the United States was already waning after the 2006 war with Lebanon, now it will erode even more as a result of the past week's campaign of brutal violence. And now a ground invasion and an occupation? How much worse can things get? Where is the diplomacy? Where is the statesmanship?

Israeli ground forces launch Gaza invasion - Israel-Palestinians- msnbc.com

Nail on the Head

2008-12-29T11:14:00.000-08:00

Although this article is about Barack Obama's efforts to quite smoking, it gives a good description on the challenges smokers face and the strategies they use to quiet the habit once and for all.

I quiet smoking on September 1 of this year. I used the patch and gum for three months and have been completely nicotine free for just about three weeks. I was thrilled to see the article give credence to using both the patch and the gum at the same time. This is something I did in the early stages of my quite, and although people said I shouldn't do this, it worked out just fine. There are some dangers, but these are alleviated by using common sense. The first month of my quite I was actually getting more nicotine than I normally did with cigarettes. That might sound crazy, but it gave me time to wrap my head around the idea of not lighting a cigarette every hour.

It is true that a lot of the things I liked to do have lost their flavor without cigarettes, but I am slowly learning to enjoy these things again. When you quite smoking, you are forced to re-learn everything from eating to sleeping without nicotine.

Barack Obama should quite smoking, it would be the right thing for him to do, but as far as becoming a spokesmen or offering himself up as a power of example, I think he has enough on his plate right now. Quitting smoking is hard enough in and of itself, but quitting as the President of the United States has got to be that much harder.

Lessons for Other Smokers in Obama’s Efforts to Quit - NYTimes.com

Israeli Attacks in Gaza Strip Continue for 2nd Day - NYTimes.com

2008-12-28T06:50:00.000-08:00

Violence in the Middle East: Nothing new here. From what I understand, Israeli has suffered one casualty as a result of Hamas Rockets fired in the south, while over 200 Palestinians have died in the Gaza Strip as a result of the Israeli bombings. It seems like a case of shotguns vs slingshots. The UN, Europe, and almost all Arab countries have denounced the Israeli attacks, but the US has come out in support of Israel and urged Hamas to end the rocket attacks. Of course the US would look like hypocrites if they took any other position.

Israeli Attacks in Gaza Strip Continue for 2nd Day - NYTimes.com

Pakistan Moves Troops Amid Tension With India - NYTimes.com

2008-12-28T01:09:00.000-08:00

This is not surprising at all. President-Elect Obama has favored an increased US military presence in Afghanistan all along, calling for a redeployment of US forces from Iraq to the region and broader operations that would include crossing the border into Pakistan. Indeed, the United States has givens millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan's army to fight the militants in the region, which is believed to be a hiding place for Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaida leaders. Now, with the Pakistanis all but standing down in the region, Obama should expect little resistance to his plans for redeployment and escalation.

Pakistan Moves Troops Amid Tension With India - NYTimes.com

Top Ten Comic Book Movies

2008-12-25T22:45:00.001-08:00

Here are my Top Ten Comic Book Movies of all time.

1. The Dark Knight
2. Superman:The Movie
3. The Incredibles
4. American Splendor
5. Spider-Man 2
6. X-Men 2
7. The Incredible Hulk
8. Batman(1989)
9. Ghost World
10.Thor

New JUDGE DREDD Film Is Greenlit

2008-12-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

This is excellent news. I have been a fan of Judge Dredd since the mid-eighties. I was appalled by the movie they made with Stallone in the 90s and was hoping the character would get another chance. Most people feel that Stallone's insistence on taking off Dredd's helmet was the downfall of the movie. Actually I'm more inclined to blame the poor script. Hopefully, they do a better job this time, both with writing and wardrobe choices.

New JUDGE DREDD Film Is Greenlit For Production By DNA FILMS!!!!! -- Ain't It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news.

New Heroes Updates! - Superhero Hype!

2008-12-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

It's good to hear Heroes will become more character driven and less dense with its mythology. It definitely was pulling it together near the end of volume three by simplifying the story lines and avoiding the hyperactive pacing and radical, ubiquitous plot shifting that came to plague the earlier episodes. They also really need to stop using time travel. This is a bad crutch for a show to use. The last volume of Heroes basically rebooted itself. It used time travel to return everything to a kind of strained status quo. This return to normalcy rendered the previous 13 episodes kind of meaningless. Hopefully, in the up and coming fourth volume titled Fugitives, Heroes will learn from its past mistakes and achieve enough success to earn a fourth season.

New Heroes Updates! - Superhero Hype!

Batman RIP Cluster*@!ck

2008-12-15T00:59:00.001-08:00

The recent Batman R.I.P story arc, authored by legendary comic writer Grant Morrison, has left many fanboys scratching their heads. The DC hype machine and Internet chatter suggested that the R.I.P arc would conclude with a major event in the DC Universe: specifically the death of Bruce Wayne and the assumption of the Batman identity by Dick Grayson, a.k.a Nightwing. However, in Batman #681, these conclusion are far from clear. Wayne is only presumed dead after a helicopter accident while Nightwing is pictured full-page holding Batman's cape and cowl, suggestive imagery yet far from conclusive. This is a somewhat anti-climatic end for a character that has been around for over sixty years. The buzz now is that the fate of Batman, or Bruce Wayne, will finally be revealed in Final Crisis. There are signs that DC may be backing away from a “Death of Batman” event. Dan DiDio, editorial VP at DC Comics, has already stated that “RIP could stand for a lot of things.”

Meanwhile, Grant Morrison’s writing has come under attack. Many fans claim the R.I.P story arc has been mired from the beginning with an elusive, convoluted, and unfocused tone and style. But perhaps this is all part of Morrison’s master plan to turn the usual “Comic Book Event” on its head.

Morrison is of course best-known for his nonlinear narratives, counter-cultural leanings, and eccentric style that often deconstructs superheroes, freeing them from age-old conventions and remaking them for a new day. Such an approach has yielded success in the past with JLA and the New X-Men. Indeed, Dan DiDio has referred to Morrison as the unofficial "revamp guy" at DC. So perhaps R.I.P is just Morrison’s way of revamping the big-comic-book-event. Instead of the usual "death event" with funerals featuring characters from the DC universe and a passing of the torch (or in this case cape and cowl) on the last panels of the issue, we get an ending that provokes more questions than it provides answers.

Or maybe DC is just getting cold feet?

The Joker might win an Academy Award.

How’s it going to look if Bruce Wayne is dead and some post-modern weirdo is writing for Batman?

The R.I.P story arc should really have had a more satisfying conclusion. However, taken in and of itself, the R.I.P story offers some fascinating elements that only a writer like Morrison could produce. I disagree with a lot of the criticism of Morrison’s writing. I feel there is a richness to the writing that lends the story much more depth. I’ve re-read the story arc already and probably will again. How often does that happen with a comic book? This one will probably read better as a TPB.

Back On Board With Windows Live Writer

2008-12-13T15:13:00.001-08:00

It took almost all day to get this program up and running. It appears there was a problem installing it via the download option. I had to find an offline installer to make it work. This was the end solution of a very long and frustrating process that included updating XP to Service Pack 3 and a whole host of other updates. I guess I needed all those updates anyway. I swear one of these days I am going to buy an Apple and be done with all this Microsoft stuff.

Decade of the Gadget

2008-12-13T06:20:00.000-08:00

If the 90s where all about the Internet, then the New Millennium, that poorly named decade that falls between the years 2000 and 2010, is all about the gadget. Cell phones, mp3 players, digital cameras, and GPS units have dominated and come to define the era.Gadget websites such as Gizmodo and Engadget that review the plethora of devices that flood the market each week have become ubiquitous. Even the national lexicon has been affected with the abbreviated text speak of small devices becoming mainstream: we all know what lol and wtf mean even if we don't text. There has been much competition in this field, but the company that has come to dominate the industry is Apple. It started with the iPod in 2001 and has culminated with the iPhone, a gadget that is the crowning achievement of this age of gadgets, combining phone, internet, and mp3 player in one sleek and stylish device. It has become the must-have device as the Apple store, offering over 10 million applications for download, has surpassed one billion downloads as of 2008. If a copy of Windows 98 belongs in the time capsule for the 90s, this era demands an iPhone in the capsule.

At first I was skeptical about this phone and thought it was a feature-overkill geek symbol. However, the Apple iPhone is becoming a device that is greater than the sum of its parts. It truly is more than just a phone or an Internet device or an mp3 player. In many ways it has become a way of life.

iPod Touch As A Phone?

2008-12-07T11:09:00.000-08:00

The Apple app store is actually offering a free app that turns the iPod Touch into a phone. Truphone allows users with a Wi-Fi connection to make and receive phone calls via voice over IP. However, the service is limited to other iPod Touch owners, users of Google Talk's messaging service, and customers of Truphone's Internet telephone service. Although Apple doesn't appear threatened by Truphone, will this leniency continue as Truphone seeks to include landline calls?

Turning the iPod Touch into a phone | Apple - CNET News

Georgia Started It!

2008-11-07T10:34:00.000-08:00

The NYT is reporting that Georgia may have been the aggressor in its recent clash with Russia. This reverses the neocon spin on the conflict, casting Russia as the aggressor and insinuating a return to icy, Cold-War relations with the former Soviet Union. Such a state of affairs would have favored the McCain campaign and given the Bush Administration a face-saving exit strategy, appearing resolute and strong after its failed policies in Iraq.

McCain criticized Obama for his reaction to the conflict and tried to politicize the issue by demonizing the Russians. These new developments certainly vindicate Obama's reaction to the conflict, characterized by many as cautious and patient.

NYT Article

Obama 08 Renders GOP irrelevant?

2008-11-05T09:53:00.000-08:00

Riding on Obama's coattails the Democratic party now has a commanding majority in both the House and Senate. This electoral bloodbath claimed the political lives of many moderate Republicans leaving only the extreme elements of the GOP alive. With only far right-wing extremists left, such as Sen. Saxby Chambliss (G), the GOP is in danger of disintegrating into a fringe party. The folks who spewed hate at Palin rallies and cast Obama as a Marxist or an Arab and concocketed conspiracies of Obama as a Manchurian Candidate may now dominate the party. Consequently, the GOP may wind up becoming as relevant to national politics as the rodeo is to professional sports.

Op-Ed Columnist - The Republican Rump - NYTimes.com

BSG Mid-Season Finale: A Prophesy Comes True

2008-06-14T09:53:00.001-07:00

Last night the Mid-Season Finale of Battlestar Galactica aired and the ending has shocked quite a few BSG fans. I was not surprised. In fact one of my pet theories was vindicated. And now I can gloat.

********Spoiler Warning********

So it turns out Earth is nothing more than a nuclear wasteland, a burned-out shell of blacken countryside and crumbled city steel. The final moments of this episode were played out very well. The joyous celebrations of finally reaching Earth are crushed with the revelation that Earth is as damned as the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Such is the bitterness of the BSG universe.

But this was no cheap twist ending, no M. Night Shyamalan-like reversal, where things are turned on there head in the face of logic and continuity just to dazzle a mislead audience. This ending was foretold in prophetic allusions dropped throughout the season.

“Kara Thrace will lead the human race to its end. She is the heralder of the apocalypse, the harbinger of death. They must not follow her.”

These were the words uttered by the First Hybrid in the Razor Mini-Series and repeated again during the fourth season by the Cylon base-ship hybrid. Here we have a direct allusion to the Planet of the Apes.

Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.

These lines are spoken at the end of Planet of the Apes just before Taylor (Charlton Heston) rides horseback down the beach and finds the burned out Statue of Liberty, revealing he has been on a destroyed and mutated planet Earth all along (Damn you all to Hellllllll!).

The Planet of the Apes reference goes deeper. Battlestar Galactica has always been critical of humanity. It has indeed portrayed humans as beast men, the Devil's pawns, killing for sport or lust or greed and turning his home into a desert. Often we are given a glimpse of hope, a ray of optimism that humanity can change and become a better species, but these are far and few between. If this depresses anybody, then they are watching the wrong series. If you want an optimistic view of future humanity watch Star Trek. Battlestar Galactica has always focused on the darker side of humanity. For that reason, this Mid-Season Finale was superb. BSG should end on a negative note, anything less would be disingenuous.

So everything seems to be wrapping up nicely. The Cylons are no longer a threat after the Cylon Civil War destroyed most of the Cylon Fleet and brought an alliance with the human survivors of the 12 colonies. Earth has been found and although it's not what everyone expected, the surviving Cylons and Humans will have to make the best of it.

But what about the Fifth Cylon? And they still didn't explain Kara Thrace's pristine Raptor with that Earth-finding GPS unit. Where the hell did it come from? And where the hell was that beacon that led them to Earth in the first place coming from? And what about the 6 that is pregnant with Colonel Tye's child? Is the President the dying leader? If so does this mean she should die now? Will Baltar become a Christ-figure on the new Earth or continue to sleep with every female he meets? Are they really going to make us wait until 2009? Damn you all to Hellllllll!!!!

See You All In 2009

Death Throes Of A Career?

2008-06-13T08:08:00.001-07:00

M. Night Shyamalan is getting pretty roughed up by the critics for his latest movie The Happening. The Web is merciless when it comes to reviews of artistic works, whether it be books, music, or video games, but with movies the web can whip up a tidal wave of hype that can make or break a movie. The making of Transformers (2007) was actually heavily influenced by the Internet as fanboys posted their concerns daily as the movie went through production. The blogosphere now has its cross-hairs aimed directly at Shyamalan and The Happening.

After the success of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, and shortly before the release of Signs, Shyamalan's star was soaring high. He was often compared to such great directors as Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock. All this started to change with the release of Signs. This film was met with mixed reviews, but most Shyamalan's fans were disappointed. This was followed up with two more largely disappointing film efforts: The Village and The Lady In The Water. The Village was extremely controversial and seem to split both fans and critics, but The Lady In The Water was uniformly blasted as an epic fail and was nominated for a Razzy award for worst picture of 2006 (losing out to Basic Instinct 2). However, with the way things are going, it looks as though The Happening might get Shyamalan his Razzy for 2008.

I have enjoyed Shyamalan's films overall. I liked them all except The Lady In The Water. However, I never bought into the hype that made him out to be a current-day Hitchcock. And then there is the EGO. Few directors have blown themselves up to such a degree, a pretense of unforgivable dimensions, and seeing this ego deflated a bit might just give The happening its one saving grace.

Spielberg to Make a 3-D Ghost in the Shell

2008-06-13T07:04:00.000-07:00

This is very encouraging news. With Spielberg, Dreamworks, and Avi Arad on board, Ghost is sure to get the proper funding and artistic attention it deserves. I only pray a good script it created and Spielberg doesn't drop the ball on this one like he did with AI.

Spielberg to Make a 3-D Ghost in the Shell | The Underwire from Wired.com

Makin' Music with John Mayer

2008-05-09T09:45:00.001-07:00

This is some pretty funny stuff. I just had to blog it. Of course I was looking for any excuse to try the Windows Live 'Blog This' plug-in, but as an added bonus I found this John Mayer video that is funny as hell.

Makin' Music with John Mayer from John Mayer, Judd Apatow, Kristen Bell, GerryBednob, Ian Roberts, and Cohen/O'Brien

Windows Live Writer Trial Run

2008-05-09T09:25:00.001-07:00

I heard a lot of good things about MS Windows Live Writer, and hearing good things about a Microsoft product being such a rarity, I just had to try it out for myself. So far the installation was painless and the interface seems pretty nice.

The view function is really great. You can get a look at your blog with Web Preview by pressing F12 and then return to Web Layout by pressing F11 to continue writing. You can't write to your blog in real time, but that is a good thing. Most surprising of all, your HTML code is left in a pristine state, unlike other MS programs that insert their own proprietary spaghetti code. The code can be viewed by pressing Shift+F11.

The most exciting element of Windows Live Writer is how it works with images. I've never used a blog tool that works so well. Click on Insert Picture, navigate to the image either on the web or your hard drive, and it will immediately appear on your post. What's more, and this is where this program really shines, the image can be resized and positioned anywhere within the text with seamless integration and the best formatting I've ever seen. This will remove a lot of the trial and error of inserting pictures into my blog, where I always had to play with the html code and could never get it 100% right.

So this program is off to an excellent start. Who would have thought a Microsoft Program would work so well. Just when I thought I was ready to migrate to Linux forever, I find a program like Live Writer. The damn thing even works with Firefox! So not only does Windows beat Linux with audio apps, now it has a blog tool that outdoes the penguin. Poor Linux.

The Top Ten...of all time

2008-05-08T08:38:00.000-07:00

One of the more popular elements of every personal blog are the top ten or twenty lists. You see them all over the internet and daily on social sites such as Digg. So I figured it was about time the Pulp Complex indulge in this exercise of shameless vanity and personal opinion.

Top Ten Science Fiction Movies

Blade Runner
2001: A Space Odyssey
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Alien
The Matrix
Planet of the Apes
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Terminator 2
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
Jurassic Park

Top Ten Rock Albums

Abbey Road: The Beatles
Led Zeppelin IV: Led Zeppelin
The Dark Side of the Moon: Pink Floyd
Are You Experienced: Jimi Hendrix
Paranoid: Black Sabbath
Second Helping: Leonard Skinner
Nevermind: Nirvana
Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan
Never Mind The Bullocks: the Sex Pistols
Master of Puppets: Metallica

Top Ten Comic Book Movies

The Dark Knight
Superman:The Movie
American Splendor
Spider-Man 2
X-Men 2
Iron Man
The Incredible Hulk
Watchmen
Ghost World
Thor

SanDisk Sansa Express 1 GB

2008-04-12T16:04:00.000-07:00

These nifty little mp3 players are now going for only $39.99 at Best Buy. I bought one last weekend and have been using it at work. Convenience is the selling point here. The loading and charging of the device is all accomplished very quickly via USB. Plugged in, it will appear as another hard drive device wherein you can simply drag and drop your songs and/or audio books into its flash memory. It is compatible with both Windows and Ubuntu Linux (Yes...its compatible with Ubuntu Linux). In addition, its small and sleek form factor simplifies carrying it around; I usually keep it in my pocket. Finally, the OLED display looks and performs surprisingly well for its size.

As for cons, it doesn't handle ID3 tags all that well, so be prepared to tweak your tags a little to accommodate its menus. Also the ear-buds it comes with are somewhat lacking in quality...oh hell...they suck. Most people nowadays already have a pair of ear-buds somewhere, so dig em up. As for durability, customer reviews are hit and miss with these things. A lot of people complain about the player just up and dying on them. Just in case I got a $10 warranty along with the unit. If something goes wrong in the next year, I can just get a brand new one.

All in all, I think the Sansa Express is a good, cheap, no-nonsense mp3 player for people on the go. It does its job well. If you want a gazillion features and an interface that rivals a desktop computer, then save your money and get an iPOD.

Same Old Spidey, Brand New Day

2008-04-12T13:11:00.001-07:00

Over three months have passed since the infamous Amazing Spider-Man "One More Day" was unleashed on the comic book world, and with the dust from the critical maelstrom and irate fanboy vortex beginning to settle, I thought it was time to take a look at the aftermath that is "Brand New Day."

For those not in the know, casual comic readers or anybody with a life, "Brand New Day" is the current Amazing Spider-Man story arc coming on the heels of the controversial "One More Day." This 2007 retcon of Spider-Man was a four part crossover story encompassing all the Spider-Man series books, Amazing Spider-Man, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, and Sensational Spider-Man. It concluded with a major restructuring of the the Spider-Man franchise, eliminating all Spider-Man books except Amazing Spider-Man, which is now published three times monthly, and-more importantly-retconned the Spider-Man universe so that Peter and Mary Jane were never married, Aunt May is alive, and Spider-Man's identity is once again a secret. "One More Day" also marked the end of J. Michael Straczynski's run as storyline writer of Amazing Spider-Man, a run that lasted almost seven years.

This retcon was blasted by critics and fans alike. Any cursory Google search on OMD will reveal blog after blog of the most scathing and invective critiques ever written on a Marvel title. Wizard magazine called the retcon "the biggest cheat since ‘Dallas’." And IGN reviewer Jesse Schedeen described it as "undoubtedly the worst comic Marvel published in 2007" and a "deus ex machina of the highest order". This brings us to "Brand New Day".

Ten issues into "Brand New Day,"as of this writing, and I have to say I am enjoying it greatly. What we have here is a return to classic Spider-Man without going all the way back to the beginning as with Ultimate Spider-Man. This is the archetype Spider-Man, the Spider-Man everyone knows and loves, the red-and-blue costume with web-shooters, JJJ and the Daily Bugle, a single, young, photo-snapping Peter who lives with his Aunt May and can't seem to get a break in a believable New York City. The humor and light-heartiness of the web crawler is back as well. This is a real breath of fresh air after the high-drama of "The Other," "Civil War," and "Back In Black" story arcs. I find myself enjoying Spider-Man the way I did 30 years ago...with a smile.

But while "Brand New Day" brings the tone of ASM back to its roots, the writing has kept it fresh and exciting. Steve Wacker, the new editor of ASM, has put together a team of rotating class A writers to tell continuing and compelling stories, serialized stories with sub-plots that simmer on the back-burner. Ten issue in and very little has been resolved with any of the stories and yet each issue feels complete and satisfying. What's more, a whole new cast of villains has appeared: Mr. Negative, Menace, The Freak, shady gangsters, corrupt businessmen, and clueless politicians. With its thrice-run monthly pace, ASM feels like a weekly television show.

I really look forward to these issues of ASM. And there is so much to look forward to: When will the Freak come out of its stasis and how will Spidey and Dr. Connor deal with it? Who exactly is Jackpot? What will Mr. Negative's next move be and will it endanger Aunt May? Will JJJ stop having heart-attacks and regain control of the Daily Bugle? Will the NYPD realize Spider-Man is not a serial killer? Whatever happen to the Menace? Will Peter Parker every make enough money to get his own place to live?

A lot of people dropped ASM from their pull-list after "One More Day." I feel this was a rash and unfortunate decision for any true believer. Spider-Man still rules and will remain on my pull-list.

Firefox Shortcuts I Can't Live Without

2008-04-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

Firefox is the greatest web browser in the world. One of the things that makes it so great is its endless flexibility. Of the many features that make Firefox so flexible are its keyboard shortcuts. Below are a few such shortcuts that have made the browser indispensable to me.

F6: This will take you to the address bar

Middle Click: On a link or bookmark will open the site in a new tab. If you middle click on an existing tab, it will close the tab out. If you middle click on the Home icon, it will open your home page in a new tab.

Delete Key: Removes Search History. More specifically, if you highlight the first entry and just hold down the Delete Key you can remove most if not all of your search history.

ctrl+shift+t: This will open the last site you visited in a new tab. This is very useful when you accidentally close out a tab. Actually you can go back to the last two sites if you use ctrl+shift+t 2x.

Although not actually a shortcut, if you open the properties of any bookmark, you will find a data field called Keyword. There you can enter a keyword, a short descriptor, such as WIK for Wikipedia, which will enable you to quickly access the site by simply entering the keyword into the address bar.

Gates: Windows 7 may come 'in the next year'

2008-04-05T19:44:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is already set to release a new version of Windows? I guess this is as close to an admission of failure we will get from Redmond? Vista is a disaster that won't go away. Businesses have been slower than usual to adopt Vista, retaining XP even as its support is phased out. Perhaps Microsoft is wary of losing ground in a market it has traditionally dominated. But exactly what are they planning on releasing here? Speculation on the web is it will be a repacking of XP, or a morphing of XP and Vista, taking the best from each and creating something seemingly new that will run good enough for wide-spread adoption on newer computers.

Gates: Windows 7 may come 'in the next year' | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News.com

Battlestar Is Back!

2008-04-05T15:52:00.000-07:00

[Spoiler Warning]

Last night on the SCI-FI Channel, Battlestar Galactica launched its fourth and final season with a strong premier. Starting right from where it left off a year ago, the fleet finds itself in a desperate battle against a cylon attack. The Pixis, a ships of the fleet, is destroyed taking with it 600+ people. This occurred less then twenty minutes into the show, a possible harbinger for a season that promises to bring a high body count.

Meanwhile, Gaius Baltar, fresh off his acquittal, finds himself the object of adoration by a Manson Family-like cult. Torn between the spirit and the flesh, Baltar jumps at the chance to sleep with a cult member, but then in a deep and sincere prayer offers God his own life in exchange for the life of a dying young boy. After Baltar comes close to dying in an assassination attempt, the young boy is miraculously cured of his life-threatening illness. Does this make Baltar some kind of spiritual healer or messianic prophet? Only time will tell.

And then there is Starbuck. Many were wondering how they would bring Starbuck back. Believed to be dead when her Viper blew up midway through season 3, she mysteriously reappeared at the tail-end of the season finale. But even Starbuck doesn't know. She claims she doesn't remember most of her flight in which she found and photographed Earth, a flight she believes lasted only six hours. What's more, the Viper she flew back on is an unscathed, brand-new model, unlike any other in a fleet of banged-up, damaged ships. Consequently, just about everybody assumes she is a cylon.

So instead of answers we have more questions. Starbuck is back but is she a cylon? If she's not then where did she get the new Viper? How did she find Earth? Where is this 'feeling' that she can locate Earth coming from? Who is the 5th cylon to complete the final 5? Is Baltar a spiritual messiah or the same old philandering fool? And will the fleet survive long enough to finally find Earth? This will certainly be an interesting season.

Using a Shell Script to Archive Files In Ubuntu

2008-04-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

I was thinking it would be great to have a quick and easy method to just back up everything in my Linux home directory to my backup partition. In the process I came up with an interesting solution. I wrote a shell script file to archive all my pictures and documents in my home directory into my backup partition.

A shell script is a plain text file that contains shell commands. It allows several commands to be executed rapidly and automatically facilitating a task that would otherwise require numerous command-line entries made by hand. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipulation, program execution, and printing text.

To write a shell script in Ubuntu, you create a text file with a special first line that names an appropriate command processor. In Ubuntu this is usually:

#! /bin/sh

You can then add whatever commands you would like your script to perform. Since I wanted to archive certain files to another folder, I used some simple copy commands like so:

#!/bin/sh
cp -r /home/Pictures/* /media/hda2/pictures
cp -r /home/Documents/* /media/hda2/documents

You then save your script file, giving it an appropriate file name with the traditional suffix .sh, such as backUP.sh.

Finally, to make the script file executable, you must change its permission bits like so:

$ chmod +x (shell script file name)

You can then execute the script file in the command line by entering the following:

$ ./scriptname.sh

Or just click on the script file icon from where ever you saved it.

This is a very basic example of shell script files. The possible applications of which are endless. You can even add logical operators (if...then) to script files.

Getting Lost Along The Way

2008-04-03T08:44:00.000-07:00

When will it end?

I've never been so eager to see a series I truly love end. I feel like a crack-addict waiting to get into rehab. And with the fourth season of Lost suffering a huge decline in ratings, I am not alone in feeling the show is dragging its feet to its long awaited conclusion. A lot of people would rather watch Lost on DVD or through BitTorrent, where you can watch the whole season in a marathon session or a few episodes at a time. This is how I watched the first and second seasons. To make matters worse, the writer's strike completely disrupted the fourth season, breaking it up into two segments: the first eight episodes airing between January 31-March 20 and the last five-condensed-episodes set to air between April 24 and May 22. In between we are stuck with more re-runs. Hopefully the fifth and sixth seasons will run a lot more smoothly without any interruptions. Still, 2010 is a long way off and the chances are a lot more folks will get lost along the way.

The easy way to resize windows in Ubuntu

2008-04-03T07:11:00.000-07:00

After almost having a breakdown trying to re-size windows with the mouse cursor in Ubuntu, I Googled the problem and discovered this simple solution.

Alt+Middle click = Re-size
Alt+Right&Left click = Re-size
Alt+Left click = Move windows around

Easy as cake and cheaper than a psychiatrist.

Arthur C. Clark R.I.P

2008-03-22T16:12:00.000-07:00

Arthur C. Clark passed away this week at the age of 90. One of the big three of science fiction literature, along side Isaac Asimov and Robert H. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clark's prolific writing career spanned nearly six decades and included over 35 novels and twice as many short stories. His 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, an accomplishment he would later repeat with his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise. In addition to writing, Clark is credited with conceptualizing--if not inventing--many technological advances, most notably satellite communications, which he described in a 1945 article entitled 'Extraterrestrial Relays.' Finally, Clark is probably best known for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which he co-wrote the screenplay with Stanley Kubrick. The film is considered a cinematic masterpiece and a classic of the science fiction genre.

Like most folks, I was first exposed to Arthur C. Clark with the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I really enjoyed the movie, especially the way it dramatized the conflict between man and technology, with the whole HAL 9000 story arc, but was left perplexed by the film's ending. It would take years before it made any sense to me. The fault was with my own naiveté. See Clark was more than just a B-movie script writer and his ideas delve deeper than The Terminator theme foreshadowed by the HAL 9000.

In college, I took a class in science fiction literature and one of the first stories we read was "The Sentinel." This 1948 short story was the seed that grew into the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I found the story fascinating. One of the more interesting elements was the mysterious monoliths, revealed as alien communication devices, much like turkey pop-up timers, alerting a greater intelligence that earth had evolved to a certain level of advancement. I would later read Rendezvous with Rama and for me this really illuminated Clark's central themes of spiritual rebirth and the search for man's place in the universe.

But I feel as though I've only scratched the surface. I wish I could say more about this giant of science fiction, but unfortunately I've only read a few of his works. I doubt I suffer this guilt alone. Of the big three, Arthur C. Clark was probably the one most taken for granted. Asimov was the undisputed prolific genius; Heinlein the enigmatic, unorthodox maverick; while Clark was the guy who co-wrote 2001. Hopefully, I will find the time to give Clark his due.

Obituary For the Sony Trinitron

2008-03-04T06:42:00.000-08:00

SONY will cease production of its Trinitron TVs and CRTs this month, marking the end of one of the most successful product runs in consumer electronics history. I see this as excellent news. Soon I will be able to upgrade my 17" Trinitron to a 19" or 21" as the old tubes start showing up in thrift stores. The one I have now has worked for over ten years, outliving two LCD monitors.

Slashdot | Obituary For the Sony Trinitron

Obama '08

2008-02-27T08:20:00.000-08:00

The Obama campaign is an historical event fueled by destiny, not unlike the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. Unstoppable and larger than the sum of its parts, this historic race for the White House will go down as another agonizing step the country takes toward living up to its own ideals.

There is nothing more American than African American: Fredrick Douglas, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Robert Johnson, Charlie "Bird" Parker, Thoroughgood Marshall, Brown vs Board of Education, Motown, Willie Mays (hey hey), Joe Lewis, James Baldwin, the Harlem Renaissance, the Apollo Theater, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr--all bear witness. It is only fitting that such an American should rise to the highest office in a land that claims to support the highest ideals of human rights. Obama will win because he cannot be stopped any more than time itself can be stopped.

I feel bad for the Clintons. I have always been a big supporter. They spent four years plotting out their campaign strategy only to have it all upset by a dark horse (no pun intended). But the Clintons have to realize they are being swept aside by history. Who could have foreseen these events? Who would believe such a thing would be happening today? The Clintons must step aside and allow history to stretch its arms.

So there is my endorsement for Obama '08.

Thumbnailer

2008-02-27T06:48:00.000-08:00

I finally updated Ubuntu Linux from Feisty Fawn7.04 to Gutsy Gibbon7.10. Overall it was a flawless upgrade without incident. However, I had to reinstall most of the restricted multimedia codecs. Not really a problem, but in the mix I lost one feature I always loved: Video thumbnailer.

Video thumbnailer is a feature that presents your video files in small filmstrip-like thumbnails in the file system. Below is an example:

When I reinstalled my multimedia applications, I didn't immediately install totem. I went with VLC just to get things moving. This caused the thumbnails to fail. In the home directory, there is a hidden folder named .thumbnails and if thumbnails fail to load, a sub-directory called .fail is created. The cure here is to delete the whole .thumbnail directory and allow the system to recreate it after a reboot. But first I needed to install totem.

Totem Movie Player is a decent application for playing video files and has as a feature Video thumbnailer. This got past me for some reason. I always thought it was a global feature of Ubuntu. Anyhow, in addition to totem, I needed to install the proper plugins. Both totem and Ubuntu use the gstreamer plugin to decode avi and mpg files. Therefore, I installed totem and totem-gstreamer using the Synaptic Package Manager. I then went ahead and deleted the .thumbnail sub-directory in my home directory. After rebooting my system, my video file collection was returned to its former glory.

Most cases of depression don't need Antidepressants

2008-02-26T12:47:00.000-08:00

An article on Slashdot confirms a suspicion I have had for years. Anti-depressants only work on extreme cases of clinical depression and have little or no effect on other less extreme cases. Everybody feels down at times, gets the blues over work stress or grieves over a loss. General practitioners are too quick to diagnosis patients as having clinical depression. Mild cases of depression are usually the symptom of much larger problems that would be better treated with psychotherapy and/or support group therapy.

The findings of the study cited in the article are misleading in that it faults the use of Anti-depressants across the board, implying that they are no better than a placebo, when actually it just shows how over prescribed the drugs are. The medical and psychiatric community needs to re-evaluate its use of these drugs and support the more traditional approaches of psychotherapy when dealing with depression.

Slashdot | Antidepressants Work No Better Than a Placebo

A perfect PS3 storm: Blu-ray hotness and Xbox supply issues

2008-02-15T18:54:00.000-08:00

It appears the PS3 had a good month thanks to Blu-Ray's sudden dominance, what with WB, Netflix, and Blockbuster delivering the coup de grace on HD-DVD, and Microsoft's inabliity to keep their Elite and Pro systems on retailers' shelves. However, these figures are for January. I am no marketing expert, but common sense tells me the mounth of January isn't exactly stellar for gaming consoles.

A perfect PS3 storm: Blu-ray hotness and Xbox supply issues - Topic Powered by eve community

Enhanced Star Trek Episodes

2008-02-14T07:09:00.000-08:00

In 2006, Paramount started releasing digitally remastered episodes of Star Trek TOS. The episodes have been playing in syndication on the weekends across the country. Here on Long Island, they have been appearing on the CW11 on Sundays at 6:00 pm. I've been recording them with my DVR for the past couple of weeks and I have to admit I am enjoying them a lot.

Much like what George Lucas did with the old Star Wars films, the remastered episodes of Star Trek have upgraded the aging special effects of the classic series with CGI. Most of these upgrades occur during exterior shots of the Enterprise and other space craft. This has greatly improved scenes involving space battles, such as found in the episodes "Battle Seed" and "The Ultimate Computer." In addition, the old matte paintings used in the background on the alien planets the crew often explored have also been touched-up with CGI, improving the lighting and atmosphere. And of course the show opening has gotten a make-over, giving the main title sequence the depth and dimension the old version lacked.

It seems most Trekies are happy with the enhanced episodes of Star Trek, unlike the fan backlash the Star Wars films received when their remastered versions were released. A big reason for the positive reaction is the way the CGI elements are seamlessly and non-intrusively woven into the shows. Overkill is avoided and the original stories are left unaffected. As a result, the CGI scenes further support the stories, making them fresh and exciting again.

In my opinion, the classic Trek episodes needed this make over. It has taken the cheese out of the series and will enable new generations to re-discover Gene Roddenberry's vision. With the Star Trek franchise sagging in popularity, and the The Original Series languishing in the ghetto of nostalgia, appearing on TV Land at 6 am, breathing new life into the classic episodes is a welcome development. Now if they could just do something about those fight scenes.

Below is a trailer for the Enhanced Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine."

Dual Channel Memory: 2x Bandwidth

2008-02-11T10:38:00.000-08:00

The quickest path to improved performance is always in the memory. A couple of weeks ago I decided to take just such a route. However, as I set out to find the perfect memory modules, the upgrade path seemed to be muddled with potholes and dead-ends.

An often overlooked aspect of Dual Channel Memory is that it doubles the speed of its stated bandwidth. Therefore, if you have 400 MHz of dual channel memory, it will actually run at 800 MHz and thus attain a 1:1 ratio with a 800 MHz front-side bus.

The front-side bus on my Pentium IV is 800 MHz, while the DDR2 memory is rated at 400Mhz. Being from the Old-School where we simply matched the memory speed with the CPU’s external speed, achieving a Bus/Bandwidth ratio of 1:1, I wrongly surmised my memory was well below par and probably creating a bottleneck and that I needed to upgrade to 800 MHz memory, which would mean a stick or two of PC2 6400 (DDR2 800 MHz). But according to ASUS, my MOBO was only compatible with a max of PC2 4200 (DDR2 533 MHz). What’s more, CPUID reported that my Bus/Bandwidth was indeed running at a ratio of 1:1.

It was here that the old cliché about not being in Kansas anymore hit me. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. In fact, I wasn’t even in the States. A few years worth of PC technology did a flyby and left me choking on the after-burner smoke. I scoured the Internet and discovered something I had totally missed: Dual Channel Memory doubles the bandwidth.

Dual Channel Memory is yet another method of breaking the age-old bottleneck problem in PCs. At the time that my particular MOBO was made, Intel CPUs ran externally at 400 MHz, 533 MHz, 800 MHz, but the memory then available still lagged behind, with DDR2 maxing out at 400 MHz. To bring memory up to speed with the then current Intel CPUs, Dual Channel architecture was implemented. With this configuration, memory is accessed 128 bits at a time, instead of 64 bits. Therefore, the transfer rate is doubled. In effect, DDR2 400 MHz memory will match an 800 MHz front side bus if it is run in Dual Channel Mode. Even if my MOBO could support it, DDR2 800 MHz memory would give no performance gain and would just cost more money, since it would match the front side bus in single channel mode and uselessly exceed it in dual channel mode.

Eureka!!! Discovering the obvious has never been so satisfying.

Dark Knight Trailer

2008-02-08T09:06:00.000-08:00

I'm so stoked for this release. RIP Heath Ledger

PS3 80GB might get the AXE

2008-01-25T18:30:00.000-08:00

A Best Buy memo leaked to the internet has rumors milling about the discontinuation of the 80GB PS3. With the 60GB PS3 extinct, this will leave retail shelves with only the 40GB PS3 which is not compatible with PS2 games. However, Sony has yet to announce a discontinuation. It is possible Sony will unveil a new PS3 SKU, perhaps the White PS3 released in Japan earlier in the week. One can only hope the new SKU will be PS2 compatible, sport a 60GB HD, and usher in another round of price drops.

Sony won't confirm rumors that 80GB PS3 will be killed

The Elfstones of Shannara

2008-01-25T17:12:00.000-08:00

Terry Brooks
Mass Market Paperback: 576 pages
Publisher: Del Rey (December 12, 1983)
Amazon Link

The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks is high fantasy at its best: elves, dwarves, druids, magic, demons, witches, sprawling epic battles, and the desperate struggle between good and evil. Elfstones is the second book in the Sword of Shannara trilogy and considered by many to be the best. While the first book in the series was criticized for being unduly derivative of Lord of the Rings, in this second installment Brooks manages to move out of Tolkien’s shadow and create a fresh, original story with a unique voice. He gives a larger role to character development, delving deep into the minds of the heroes and presenting conflicts that mirror their earthly struggles. In Brook’s world, the hero must first overcome his inner fears and short coming before he can overcome the challenges around him. Intelligence, determination, and morality are valued more than skill with a sword and can enable even the weakest to overcome the greatest of obstacles.

Bad media coverage killing HD-DVD

2008-01-25T11:35:00.000-08:00

Ever since Warner Bro defected from HD-DVD and awarded Blue-ray with its exclusive content, the media has been giving up-to-the-minute reports on the death of HD-DVD. Of course no one is saying the format war is over, they are just saying things are bad for HD-DVD. Every day there are reports, like the one linked to below, detailing the sagging sales of HD-DVD hardware and titles. It's funny. I remember a couple of months ago there were pro-HD-DVD stories everywhere, especially after Paramount dropped Blue-ray and the price of Toshiba players came down to the $300-$400 dollar range. So much so, I almost bought one of the low-end players. Thank God I didn't...but then again who knows where things will stand six months from now. In the meantime, I'm completely happy with my standard definition DVD player.

Recent HD DVD sales grind to a virtual halt

Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society

2008-01-25T09:42:00.000-08:00

Distributor: Manga + Bandai Entertainment

Release Date: August 2007 (Japan 2006)

Director: Kanji Kamiyama

IMBD Link

Ghost in the Shell is a Japanese Anime franchise derived from the cyberpunk manga created by Masamune Shirow. Although billed as the 3rd movie in the Ghost in the Shell franchise, Solid State Society is actually the first theatrical production stemming from the TV series entitled Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. This is significant in that the original movies, Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, directed by Mamoru Oshii, followed a different story line from the television series. Ironically, the television series, thought to be inferior to its theatrical big brothers, retains more elements from the original Masamune Shirow manga. So much for cannon...

Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society is essentially a police detective thriller dealing with the return of Major Motoko Kusanagi to Section 9. The major had resigned from her post at Section 9 two years before and took to investigating crimes independently based on her gut reactions, using remotes (puppets) to interact with the physical world while her disembodied consciousness crawls around the net. Meanwhile, investigating a rash of suicides, Section 9 comes across a hacker named the Puppeteer. As the investigation reveals a deeper government conspiracy, Section 9 and the Major cross paths and it seems as though the Major might herself be the Puppeteer. Much of the story deals with unraveling the government conspiracy and speculating on who the Puppeteer really is.

Unfortunately, Solid State Society suffers from bad writing that makes the plot difficult to follow. The identity of the Puppeteer and the true nature of the Solid State Society are left vague and inconclusive from dialogue muddied and weighed down with technobabble and endless speculation. Getting at the truth in this movie demands a lot from the viewer. I had to watch it twice before I could venture a theory on the identity of the Puppeteer, the resolution to which remains uncertain at the end of the film. Unlike the original movies that were confusing because they dealt with complex ideas and themes, this movie is confusing because of the way the story is told. Too much is left open-ended to discern any kind of theme or resolution.

My opinion of the identity of the Puppeteer is that it is Kusanagi's subconscious. This is underscored by the fact that the Puppeteer always seems to be one step ahead of the Major, arriving at crime scenes and performing missions just before the Major arrives. Kusanagi's disillusionment with the red-tape of police work and the bureaucratic impediments to justice, those very things that caused her to leave Section 9 and take on freelance detective work, manifests itself as vigilantism in the guise of the Puppeteer. Kusanagi, ruled by the strong dictates of reason and morality, would never indulge in such methods. But in the disembodied universe of the net, her unconscious desires run rampant and spin out of control. In many ways, this makes the story something of a Frankenstein tale: the Puppeteer is a cybernetic monster of Kusanagi's own making.

If this was indeed their intentions, it is a shame the writers didn't make it clearer. As the film stands a hundred different theories could fit to explain the Puppeteer's identity.If little else, all the elements of the Ghost in the Shell universe are here and the action scenes are quite good. Like with most sequels, the law of diminishing returns is in full force, but to any fan Solid State Society offers another trip to the Ghost in the Shell universe.

Cyberpunk Vision on the Horizon

2008-01-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

Electronic implants used to enhance human biology have always been a staple of science fiction, most notably in the sub genera of cyberpunk, where hackers like Neo, Molly, Case, and Johnny Mnemonic fuse technology and biology to achieve a cybernetic edge. One piece of technology often seen is the virtual retinal display (VRD), which generates a graphic display floating in space in front of the user. Throughout the years, researchers have attempted to make this fictional gear a reality. Usually this meant the use of wearable computers of some kind, eyeglasses or bulky head gear, such as seen with the EyeTap , which is really nothing more than a glorified head-up display (HUD) .

However, a more elegant solution may soon be available.

Engineers at the University of Washington have managed to integrate VRD technology into a contact lens. Using circuits only a few nanometers thick and light-emitting diodes one third of a millimeter across, the lens is able to generate a display superimposed on the world outside. The technology is made possible by capitalizing on the large area outside of the transparent part of the eye that affords room enough for the tiny electronics. Soon the researchers hope to integrate wireless communication to and from the lens and power it using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens itself.

Such a technology would have plenty of practical applications. Drivers and pilots could keep important instrument read-outs before them at all times and technicians who find that two arms are not enough could have schematics floating before them. Video games could finally reach virtual reality immersion. And communications would benefit with web and data base searches conducted without a screen of any size to lug around. And of course they would be invaluable to the mercenary hacker who needs to gain access to the local Yakuza database to steal the source code for that government procured AI that has gone maverick and is running a muck in the sprawl.

Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision

Star Trek Returns

2008-01-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

JJ Abram’s Star Trek took another step toward reality with a teaser trailer appearing before Abram’s latest project Coverfield. Photos from the Trek teaser have already appeared on the Web and it won’t be long—a few days or so—before the trailer is leaked. Until then there is this photo of the Enterprise in space dock under construction. The new film, simply called Star Trek, is expected to be released in December of this year. To see the image in full size just click on the picture below.

Chinese Toys Kill

2007-08-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

Mattel, one of the largest toy manufacturers in the US, has issued a recall of over 9 million toys because of toxic levels of lead paint and small magnetic parts dangerous to small children. Already one child has died and several have been hospitalized because of the magnetic parts being swallowed.

The real story here is Mattel's indifference to overseas labor and manufacturing practices. This horrible tragedy should have been avoided. This is just another example of Corporate America's inability to impose safety standards on foreign manufacturing plants. It is unlikely this would happen in an American plant, where quality control and safety standards are maintained with anal precision. But such controls cost money and add to the price of manufacturing in the USA, not to mention the higher wages and benefits. Ironically, Mattel will now pay dearly for the Chinese manufacturing plants that have heretofore fatten its bottom line.

One of the more shocking elements of this story, being glossed over in the press, is the reaction by some of the Chinese. A co-owner of one of the guilty manufacturing companies actually committed suicide by hanging himself.

Mattel issues new massive China toy recall - Consumer News - MSNBC.com

CNN has a new reality show...the presidential debates.

2007-07-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

The CNN/YouTube Democratic debate promised a fresh format for the average American to question the presidential hopefuls, but the debate only delivered more of the same dull sound-bites. As usual, the candidates simply ignored the questions and brought the talking points back to where they wanted them. There was no opportunity for YouTubers to follow up with replies such as "Senator you didn't answer my question." Moreover, the whole presentation of this debate was cheapened by CNN's sensationalistic approach. Was there really a need for a snowman to ask about global warming? Why were the juvenile, rejected YouTube videos shown in the beginning, featuring idiots playing guitar and dressing up as the Terminator? Is this how the average American should be portrayed? I feel the whole thing was presented as a circus act and therefore lost any potential gravity. A presidential debate should be a little more serious than bad reality tv.

iPhone Guilt

2007-07-21T14:05:00.000-07:00

I didn't buy an iPhone and it doesn't look like I will be getting one anytime soon. There are two main reasons for my abstention: price and need. With a price tag of $499 and a mandatory 2 year contract with AT&T, the iPhone is way out of my budget. Of course if this were a must have, a beg, borrow, or steal want, a live-on-ramen-noogles-for-a-month need, I would find a way to get it, but this is just not the case. My lifestyle doesn't warrant a cell phone. My social life isn't exactly the center of my universe. After ten years of marriage my social life is more of a burden than anything else. The same applies for my job--no need for a cell phone unless I want to work even more hours. Despite my love of gadgets, I just can't justify buying an iPhone. And yet I'm feeling guilty.

I feel left out of something big in the tech world. Is the lack of an iPhone affect my geek credibility? All those smug Apple fanboys standing on line over night to get this so-called Holy Grail of gadgets depresses me. Buy why? This got me to thinking about the tech world of today: When did buying expensive gadgets lend one tech or geek credibility? I built my first PC in 1991, trudged through Calculus and C++ at college, and stood in line for nine hours to see the Phantom Menace (oh, the humanity). For some reason a lot of younger so-called geeks think buying consumer electronics makes them tech savvy. Sitting in my favorite coffee shop with my 8 year-old Dell laptop hacking away at Linux, I am often assaulted with dismissive, condescending looks from some web 2.0er flaunting his/her newest Apple MacBook.

Who gives a damn what high-tech gadgets you own? It's what you do with the technology that matters most. Updating your My Space page and watching videos of skateboarding dogs on YouTube doesn't make you a geek or tech-savvy no matter what system you do it on.

There...hopefully I've purged whatever guilt I was feeling.

William Gibson's Neuromancer to be made into a movie

2007-05-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

William Gibson's Neuromancer, the 1984 bestseller and cyberpunk prototype, is finally being made into a movie. However, the long-awaited screen adaptation may prove feeble with a case of too-little-too-late. The film will be produced by Peter Hoffman with a B movie budget of $70 million, the same amount used to make Doom and Alien Vs Predator. Even more discouraging, the inexperienced Joseph Kahn is set to direct. Kahn's only other direction credits include the motorcycle film Torque, the Britney Spear's music video "Toxic", and various episodes of The Ashlee Simpson Show. But the biggest obstacle facing a Neuromancer movie is its own legacy.

Neuromancer has been the chief influence behind a dozen or so SF movies since its publication in 1984, most notably The Matrix. The novel examines the concepts of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering, multinational corporations overpowering the traditional nation-state, and cyberspace, the metaphorical space of computer systems and networks, in which electronic data are stored and online communication takes place. Because of its huge influence on Science Fiction films, the Neuromancer novel will be hard pressed to translate into an original and fresh movie. Indeed, after over twenty-years of cyberpunk inspired films, the originator may wind up looking like an imitator.

Finally, there is the Hollywood factor. In the spring of 1995, Johnny Mnemonic hit the silver screen and science fiction fans and critics alike screamed foul. This film was expected to be a cyberpunk magnum opus, with the screenplay written by Gibson himself, adapted from one of his earlier short stories, but the film disintegrates into cliches and B movie action sequences. Is there any reason to believe a Neuromancer film will be taken more seriously? If the direction choice and low budget are any indication, we will be seeing Britney Spear's jacking into the matrix to fight the forces of evil with bullet-time judo while Hollywood sponges up cash with the pulp of a SF literary classic.

William Gibson's Neuromancer Finally Coming to the Big Screen! � FirstShowing.net

StarCraft II in the works at Blizzard

2007-05-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

Almost ten years after its debut release, StarCraft is getting a sequel: StarCraft II. The hugely popular Sci-Fi RTS has taken on a cult following of epic proportions over the last decade, selling over 7 million copies, finishing in the top ten in most online best-game-of-all-time polls, and literally becoming a professional sport in Korea.

News of the upcoming game was released on Blizzard's website, where some screenshots and CG movies offer a glimpse of what to expect. However, the game's official release isn't expected until late 2009.

StarCraft II

Marvel Fanboys Must Die!!

2007-05-19T10:31:00.000-07:00

Here we have the usual Marvel bashing of DC Comics.

This sort of thing always bothers me. It is so easy to be a Marvel fan and hate DC. Marvel has gotten more exposure over the past twenty years and as a result has overshadowed its big brother Detective Comics. But so what? In my opinion, Marvel is about quantity while DC is about quality. DC heroes are universal icons, while Marvel heroes are trendy commercial entities designed to appeal to the widest possible demographic. Comparing DC to Marvel is like comparing Marlon Brando to Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Cadillac to a Hyundai, the Beatles to Limp Biscuit, Marilyn Monroe to Anne Nicole Smith, Yogi Berra to Barry Bonds.

As far as the current crop of superhero movies is concerned, I don't care much for all these Marvel inspired movies and I foresee a backlash against Marvel in the near future. How many damn comic-book adaptations do we need anyway? I enjoyed the Spiderman and X-Men movies, but they still don't hold a candle to Richard Donner's Superman.

Imperial Walkers in Blade Runner?

2007-05-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

Preparing for a new cinematic release and super-deluxe DVD box-set, Ridley Scott has re-shot material for Blade Runner. The scene getting the make-over involves Replicant Zhora, played by actress Joanna Cassidy, being questioned and then retired by Deckard outside a nightclub. Twenty-five years after its original release, Cassidy re-shot the scene wearing the same exact outfit from the first production.

This raises a lot of questions about the upcoming release. How much new material will be shot for the new cut of the film? Does this mean the new cut will be reworked much as the original Star Wars Trilogy was reworked into the infamous Special Editions? George Lucas' attempt to remold the original Trilogy to better accord with the horrendous prequels using CGI was a disastrous blasphemy in the minds of many Star Wars fans. Hopefully, Ridley Scott avoids the same mistake of excess made by Lucas.

The multi-disc DVD and limited theatrical release of the new Blade Runner is expected in the latter part of 2007.

Cassidy Reshoots "Blade Runner"

Gwyneth Jones vindicates Cyberpunk?

2007-04-30T18:53:00.000-07:00

Much of the paraphernalia of cyberpunk is now a reality and as ubiquitous as manure to the horse-drawn 18th century. Cell phones, wireless networks, personal computers, PDA's, lazer eye surgery, electronic banking, multi-national corporations, massive database networks, GPS gadgets, etc.

What Jones fails to mention is cyberpunk's foreshadowing of much of today's technological encroachment. Indeed, it seems technology is making a mess of the world, especially with regards to privacy, civil liberties, and cultural choices. Massive database technology has turned personal information into public record where criminal background and credit checks are performed daily. Identity is increasingly being reduced to field entries vulnerable to manipulation and theft. Email messages are often used in courts and elections are now making the dubious move to the computer base. Meanwhile, the National ID Card is moving forward.

Culturally, digital technology has had anything but a positive influence. Porn remains the biggest biz on the Internet. Sexual predators troll chat rooms for victims while hate groups organize and grow. What's more, the information age has succeeded in dumbing down information. Most people today are unaware of events outside their own universe of RSS feeds and Tivo schedules, important events Cronkite would have had us glued to the screen with, such as the Iraq War, are largely ignored.

But does this vindicate cyberpunk?

Just because a Science Fiction genre produces works that foretell the future accurately, does this make such works valuable pieces of SF literature. After all even Star Trek was able to invent fictionalized technologies that would later become non-fictional artifacts. Does Capt. Kirk deserve a Noble Prize?

SF Signal: Gwyneth Jones says Cyberpunk Got it Right

Interview: aXXo, The Most Popular DVD Ripper on BitTorrent | TorrentFreak

2007-04-29T06:26:00.000-07:00

From what I've gathered in this interview, aXXo is a teenager and operates outside of any scene. This may explain his success in eluding arrest by the FBI and litigation by the MPAA: they are waiting for him to turn 18. On the other hand, this interview may just be a carefully crafted piece of disinformation. How else does a DVD pirate reach almost celebrity status and avoid getting busted? Every torrent site on the Internet is filled with aXXo rips, all of superior quality and convenient size. I see a big story in the future where aXXo is busted.

Interview: aXXo, The Most Popular DVD Ripper on BitTorrent | TorrentFreak

Nintendo rules the roost

2007-04-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

It looks like Nintendo is regaining command of the video game console market, winning the first battle in the next-gen war. The many predictions of Nintendo coming in third, as it did a few years back with the Gamecube, have proven false as the PS3 has sunk like a rock and Xbox 360 sales remain sluggish. Still, the preconception that Playstation is The Console to own remains steadfast in gamers minds. Most people I talk with think the PS3 is on top, despite its sales record. This may mean PS3 sales will pick up as more people find the means to obtain one.

First quarter console sales: Nintendo rules the roost

Bogus Book Reviews on Amazon?

2007-04-22T05:34:00.000-07:00

Harriet Klausner, #1 reviewer on Amazon, is thought by many to be a fake. According to Time Magazine, this 54 year old former librarian from Georgia has posted over 12,000 reviews on Amazon. Mostly she reviews genre literature such as romance, fantasy, horror, and science fiction. However, her reviews of the latter category, science fiction, may have gotten her into some trouble lately. The SF community -at least the portion that reads- finds Harriet Klausner's review record dubious and suspects she is a fake, an in-house pseudonymous reviewer created to increase book sales. SF signal has had a running thread on this topic since September of 2003.

Harriet Klausner's detractors claim she could not possibly read all the books she reviews, doing the math reveals she would need to read 14 books a day. What's more, she reviews books the day they are released, sometimes three or four new releases a day. Such numbers have lead many to suspect she is either reviewing books she hasn't read or there is more than one Harreit Klausner. Another complaint is she gives every book either 4 or 5 stars, in HK's universe there are no bad books. Finally, most agree that HK's reviews are poorly written and are often merely a paraphrase of the book's jacket blurb.

As a result of the SF fanbase backlash, Harriet Klausner's reviews have slowed from 40 books a day to just 2 books a week, and none of her recent reviews have dealt with Science Fiction literature. The HK backlash is causing people to look at other top Amazon reviewers and at Amazon itself, whose involvement in all of this remains to be seen.

Beryl Screenshots

2007-04-21T05:49:00.000-07:00

I thought I would post some screenshots of my desktop featuring Beryl. I am looking into creating a screencast and hopefully will post that soon...so stay tuned.

Jack Thompson...pwned

2007-04-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

Attorney Jack Thompson is finally exposed as a crackpot opportunist. MSNBC.COM ran a front page article criticizing the rush to blame video games for the Virginia Tech massacre by so-called pundits such as Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil. In addition, Chris Matthews took Thompson to task on Hardball where Thompson characterized all gamers as violent cyborgs like the Terminator. It is about time the mainstream media recognizes these crackpots for what they are: publicity-chasing instigators trying to further their political/legal agenda and enrich themselves in the process.

Were video games to blame for massacre? - Games - MSNBC.com

Blame it all on Doom...again.

2007-04-19T18:24:00.000-07:00

Before the bodies in the VT tragedy were even cold, the media and a few of its so-called pundits tried to blame the massacre on video games. Dr. Phil and Jack Thomson wasted no time taking to their soapboxes and railing against violent video games. But guess what, the shooter wasn't a gamer at all. Too bad guys...maybe next time.

Media looks for nonexisting link to gaming in VT massacre

Galactus Is A Cloud?

2007-04-19T18:01:00.001-07:00

So the comic book purists are angry over news that Galactus will appear as a giant planet-killing storm cloud rather than a giant humanoid in a purple helmet. I'm not entirely dismayed by this rumor. The classic Jack Kirby image of Galactus would look silly and unrealistic on the silver screen. Besides, this is just a rumor. It remains to be seen how much screen time Galactus will actually receive. He may only appear briefly or at the very end, Dues ex machina, which would work good in a movie. Turning Galactus into Godzilla would do the character a greater injustice than making him into a storm cloud. Comic book fans need to lighten up.

read more | digg story

Upgrading to Feisty Fawn and installing Beryl

2007-04-16T19:43:00.000-07:00

I just updated Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft to 7.04 Feisty Fawn. The upgrade was simple and uneventful. I just ran this simple command in the console:

gksu "update-manager -c -d"

This launched the update manager and offered the new version of Ubuntu via a button at the top of the window. I clicked start and away it went. It informed me it would disable third party repositories, asked me once--and only once--if I was really sure I wanted to upgrade, and then showed a list of software that was no longer supported--nothing very essential on this list. About an hour and a half later, I was prompted to reboot and the upgrade was complete. And to think I was putting off the upgrade to avoid headaches. This upgrade process really gives Vista a run for its money.

Beryl is native to Feisty Fawn and was just as easy to install as the upgrade. It can be found in the Synaptic Package Manager. I marked the following packages for installation: beryl, beryl-core, beryl-plugins, emerald, emerald themes, and beryl-manager. The packages installed and beryl was up and running without even a reboot. I am happy to find that beryl runs better under Feisty Fawn. I only have 384MB of SDRAM on a 1 GHZ AMD T-Bird and beryl's performance is quite robust. I doubt I could even get Vista to install on my system much less run any good.

I am getting real close to abandoning Windows once and for all. I don't see myself switching to Vista anytime soon, and if XP support is dropped by the end of the year as Microsoft plans, then I won't have any need for Microsoft.

SF Signal: POLL RESULTS: The Best Movie Ever!

2007-04-16T17:21:00.000-07:00

SF Signal had a poll for best SF movie ever. These things have been popular lately, ever since Serenity beat out Star Wars in the now infamous SFX poll.

It is good to see Blade Runner coming in second, bested only by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Serenity did well coming in third and still beat Star Wars which came in fourth.

I believe Star Wars is suffering from over-exposure. Ten years ago it would have taken first place without a fight, but after the prequels, cartoons, comic-books, video games, and mass-media hype, I think we are all a little sick of Star Wars.

SF Signal: POLL RESULTS: The Best Movie Ever!

Reduce Firefox Memory Bloat

2007-04-15T13:54:00.000-07:00

Firefox is a great web browser, miles ahead of Microsoft's IE in both features and performance. But the Fox is a memory hog. After a bit of time with the browser open, you might notice it grow a bit sluggish from memory leaks, as well as slow down other applications from which it is hogging memory. Below are two quick tweaks that can be used to free up system memory and keep the browser's performance robust.

Firefox doesn't use a memory cache and uses system memory by default. To keep Firefox from hogging system memory, it is a good idea to assign a fixed memory cache to reduce the usage of such memory. Here's how you do it:

1.Open Firefox
2.Key in about:config in the address bar
3.Key in browser.cache.memory.enable in the Filter field
4. Ensure the value of the above item is set to true, if not, double-click on it to set it to true.
5.Right-click in the browser and select New->Integer from the pop-up.
6.Key in, browser.cache.memory.capacity, click ok
7.You need to enter a value here and the value depends upon the RAM your computer has.
8. If you have:

1. 256MB RAM -Enter "4096"
2. 512MB RAM -Enter "8192"

9. If you have 128MB or less RAM then you should consider buying more RAM.

When Firefox grows sluggish, usually a restart is in order. But there is an alternative that will allow you to minimize the browser and achieve the same results as a restart. Here's how you do it:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

What happens with this fix is each time you minimize the browser, it restarts the memory usage. It will steadily go back up once restored, but can really make a difference if you don't want to completely restart the browser.

Imus Overkill

2007-04-15T12:22:00.000-07:00

I am usually apolitical on most issues, but this Imus story bothers me, and not for the reason it bothers most people. I don't really care if Imus is a racist or a sexist or just a plain jerk. What bothers me is the attention this irrelevant story has garnered in the press, much like last week's Anne Nicole Smith story. Below is a video of the Imus show featuring the offending comments that have dominated the headlines over the past week.

Ok, so the guy's an idiot. Is he a sexists or a racist? Did he deserve to be fired over these remarks? Should all media be subjected to such PC control? Who cares! There are far more serious things going on in the world, such as the war in Iraq.

Let's review the events that have occurred in Iraq over the past week while the whole country was consumed by the Imus controversy.

- A truck bomb near the Mahmoudiyah General Hospital killed at least 18 people and wounded 23 on April 8. At least 47 people were killed or found dead in violence, including 17 execution victims dumped in the capital.

- Twenty-five people were killed or found dead in the country Monday, according to police and morgue reports.

- Four Iraqi soldiers were killed, 16 U.S. soldiers were wounded and a U.S. helicopter was hit by ground fire in central Baghdad on Tuesday. In Muqdadiyah, a woman with a suicide vest strapped beneath her Muslim robe blew herself up amid 200 Iraqi police recruits, killing at least 16 men.

- The U.S. military announced two more soldier deaths Wednesday: One soldier was killed and two were wounded by a roadside bomb Wednesday in the capital, and another soldier died a day earlier in an attack in Baghdad. At least 28 people were killed or found dead across Iraq on Wednesday.

- A suicide bomber blew himself up in the midst of lawmakers in the Parliament dining hall Thursday. U.S. officials initially said eight people, including Parliament members, were killed in the attack in the American-guarded Green Zone. They later revised the number to one person, a lawmaker, killed. In another attack, a bombing sent the al-Sarafiya bridge linking east and west Baghdad plunging into the Tigris River. At least 10 people died.

-As of Saturday, 3,297 U.S. troops have died in Iraq.

It's as if the whole country were in some Vicodin induced haze, sitting like plant life before LCD screens, captivated by the lowest common denominator of media coverage.

'Trainspotting' Sequel - All cast members have signed on!

2007-04-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

More than ten years on from its release, Danny Boyle, the film's director, has confirmed that Renton, Begbie, Spud and co will return to the silver screen in a follow-up to Trainspotting. Ewan McGregor, will be reunited with Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner and co. Boyle claims that "all the actors" have agreed to reprise their unforgettable roles.

I really enjoyed this movie when it first came out. Has it really been ten years? I have also enjoyed Boyle's other movies such as 28 Days Later and look forward to its sequel this summer. However, having such positive memories of this film, I can't help feeling a bit apprehensive about a sequel. How will this play out? Is Renton still on drugs or is he in recovery, going to NA meetings and satisfying the terms of his probation. I mean give me a break...this was a film about drug addicts.

One of the things I loved about this film is it portrayed the struggle with drug addiction in a much more realistic light. Renton goes on and off the wagon throughout the film and in the end it remains uncertain whether he will ever completely free himself of his "terrible affliction." As a recovering addict, I always appreciated this approach. Not everyone recovers from addiction in the neat, linear fashion so often depicted in Hollywood movies, as seen in such cheese-ball manifestations as Clean and Sober, 28 Days, and When A Man Loves A Women. More often than not, the addict will have an on-and-off relationship with his/her disease for quite some time before finally choosing life.

digg story

GNU Screen: an introduction and beginner's tutorial || kuro5hin.org

2007-04-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

This is a nice little console program that facilitates multitasking in a command-line environment. I never hear of it until reading this on Digg. Of course, everyone on Digg has heard about it and uses it extensively, being a hotbed of 1337 haxorz.

GNU Screen: an introduction and beginner's tutorial || kuro5hin.org

When Blogs Collide

2007-04-04T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Sci-Fi Forums were invaded by Digg users yesterday as thousands responded to a Digg post linking to a Battlestar Galactica Mod Demo, Beyond the Red Line, for the aging yet still venerated Freespace2. Digg user foolFromHell originally posted the news of the free mod on the Sci-Fi forums, including a link to game-warden.com and hard-light.com, where the files for the demo could be found. As a result, the digg-effect marched like barbarian hoards through the Sci-Fi forums on its way to game-warden and hard-light. The forums saw their usual browser/guest population of 400 skyrocket to over 2000 in just a few hours. And the hard-light and game-warden forums where overrun with users downloading the demo, effectively shutting those sites down. I myself found it impossible to download the demo from either of the offering sites and had to find an alternative mirror.

Digg Thread

Designers Work to Rescue a Dying Art Form -- the Album Cover -

2007-04-03T13:59:00.000-07:00

A bunch of music label designers think they can save album artwork, you know those pictures they put on the front of CDs, using digital packaging involving everything from Flash animation to interactive menus. However, without even a standard in place, it seems like a case of too-little-too-late.

I hate to play the cynic here, but the album cover has been dying for years and with the move to digital music via computers and mp3 players, album artwork has been reduced to optional thumbnails. Indeed, I know a lot of people who don't bother with the album artwork at all and those who do usually opt for whatever images strike their fancy. You rarely see an iTunes collection with the proper album covers. Personally, I'm a purist on this issue. My iTunes collection is largely tagged with the correct album covers, but from what I've seen I'm in a minority.