Slashdot Mirror

Well its a slow day, and since I saw GalaxyQuest last night, I figured I'd pop up and write a quick review of the film. The quick summary is that it stars Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman, and it is a sort of parody/lampoon of Star Trek, Trekkies, and the whole Trek phenomenon. The quick rating is that if you've got a sense of humor, you'll enjoy it. Read on for more stuff, and hopefully with minimal spoilers.

Allright truth be told, I'm a not a super trekkie. I'm right on the border. I mean sure, when I first got the sci-fi channel last may, for like 2 months I tuned in every night at 7pm and watched an episode of the original series, and I enjoyed it. But over the years the series has come and gone, and repeated itself. Voyager is mediocre, but sometimes great. DS9 had potential and then turned into a soap opera. TNG was fun, but oh so preachy. And about half of the movies are absolute crap (My favorites are in order, Kahn, Spock, First Contact and Undiscovered Country. The worst are Generations and last fall's total crapfest, Insurrection).

So the truth is out. When Trek is good, its great, and when its bad, its horrible. I think even the most die hard trekkie can accept that. And I also think that even the most die hard trekkie can accept the healthy lampooning that they take in GalaxyQuest.

Tim Allen play the Captain, Alan Rickman plays a surly Spockish role, and Sigourney Weaver plays the largest breasted crewman who's primary job is to repeat whatever the computer she says... and even she knows that its a stupid job.

Essentially, these 3, along with the Scottyish charachter (who has the best lines and scenes in the movie) and the "Extra" who died and was forgotten in some episode way back when are washed up actors from the early 80s television program "GalaxyQuest". These days they get by making personal appearances and GalaxyQuest Conventions where Questarians pay fifteen bucks a pop for autographs.

At one of these cons, a group of wacky looking costumed kids asks captain Tibbit for a 'Personal Appearance' (and yes, they get the requested limo). Of course you've seen the trailers, they turn out to be aliens who intercepted the signals of the bad 80s space adventures, and interpretted them to be "Historical Documents" of a real band of space heros. They then modeled their society after them: complete with building an exact replica of the Protector. Now that they are in conflict, they need help, and they retrieve our heros to save the day.

So thats the plot. Comedy follows. The range the spectrum of "Good trying to look Bad" all the way to just bad, to pretty dang cool. The acting is all great... the aliens are quirky and naive tenticled beings that squeeze laugh after laugh just with crazy facial expressions. The cast themselves are right on the money, parodying the conventions that the original Star Trek series created (the running gags about the "Extra" dying are just great... he's the red shirted guy with no last name: he's destined to die, it happens every episode right?).

And of course there are the Trekki-I mean, the Questarians. Geeks who ask technical questions about contradictions between episodes, or scientific questions derived from badly written episodes of a low budget television program. You know these guys. I know these guys.

The truth is that this movie was lovingly crafted by people who obviously knew their stuff about the star trek world, and the bizarre cult that has sprung up around it here in the real world. They've seen that its crazy, and they've had a lot of fun with it. This isn't the greatest parody in the world (Mel Brooks pretty well has a lock on that between Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs) but its more than a parody of a movie or a genre, its a parody of something that has surpassed the small screen and the big screen, and become part of lives in a way that few programs have. Its about the show that causes people to dress up with pointy ears, or write a book so that others can learn the tongue of a fictitious warrior race.

See this movie. Hell, its better than half of the Star Trek movies.

So I'm wandering off to my rapid-fire trio of family festivities today, but I figured before I hit the road I'd wish my slightly more extended family a Merry Christmas (or kurt@thepope.org or Annual Gift Giving Day or whatever the hell else you choose to celebrate or not celebrate around this time of year). Hope you get a day (or at least a few hours) off, and that you don't get snowed in (especially if you live in California). Hope Santa leaves you a wearable PC that is capable of running Linux, or an Aibo, or maybe a shiny new DIMM under your tree... or for the more paranoid, 600 gallons of pure drinking water and lots of ammo! Best wishes to all of you (except the flamers: may you get a lump of coal).

karma vs Dogma writes "ABC ran a couple of stories tonight on the "Evils of Crackers/Hackers". Read the summaries of the World News Tonight story and the 20/20 story. I am just wondering where they keep getting these huge figures on the costs of replacing one html document with another."

doomy writes "A pretty stunning story hit Associated Press's wire today. Apparently Jeff "king of cybercommerce" Bezos of Amazon.com fame would be named the Time Magazines's person of the year. The same wire states that Amazon was loosing millions of dollars while this award was given." I've stopped shopping at Amazon personally. Until they drop their lame patent stuff, I figure they don't want my business.

ErGoNoMiC wrote to us with one of those really, really strange polls that people like to conduct. Anyway, the poll was performed involving various European nations and their...computer habits. I'm missing the Americans in there - I figure we're most likely to franchise our computer and sell it to someone.

An anonymous reader noted an article that is running over on CNN that is discussing the news that DVD Audio will be delayed while manufacturers attempt to implement strong encryption to prevent the same thing from happening to DVD Audio that happened to DVD Video. They are still operating under a fundamentally flawed assumption: if we can decrypt it to watch it, someone will figure out a way to decrypt it to rip it. The delays hurt their profits as well as irritate their customers that want new products. Its quite frusterating.

Pete Brubaker writes "PCExtremist.com is running a story about some clever individuals that figured out how to layer data on a CDROM to achieve storage capacities 200 times over conventional CDROM's. Thats more than 30 times the capacity of a double sided, double layer DVD. "

SuperguyA1 writes "Salon is running this almost unbelievable story on "Thought Activated Computing". This was the one thing I always wanted to see that I figured wouldn't be possible in my lifetime. " Really, really amazing work being done - makes me happy to be alive right now and able to see stuff like this. Currently the technology is being used to help paralyzed people now and the possibilites in the future are endless.

Matt Braithwaite writes "Answering RMS's call for free documentation, Karl Fogel has written a book on CVS that is free (GPLed) and available online. (The paper version has additional non-free material.) " Also, edinator wrote to say that ORA has put the Using Samba text online. Some old news there, but, hey, some light figure for after eating turkey.

udhay asks: "Hi -- I'm with a startup that has what we think is a hot new product (it's a downloadable desktop app). We got some venture funding in, and are looking to outsource some of the stuff that we need to do, such as online promotion. "Online Promotion Agencies" are a dime a dozen however, and we were wondering how one would go about rating them, and how one would quantify the results they produce. I figured /. is a good place to ask - any ideas?"

Ok guys, this is purely a rumor, but its one that I've heard from several points on the globe so I'm gonna share it: Vulture Capitalist writes "I just got out of a meeting with Matthew Szulick and it appears as though Red Hat has inked a deal to buy Cygnus. In related news- we also understand that some people at Red Hat were so upset with the acquisition and it's corporate implications that they have decided to resign from their Sr. management (founding) positions. After the failed acquisition attempts with both Linuxcare and TurboLinux- this should prove to be a very interesting deal. I'm personally looking forward to the annual report! " Again, none of this is any more than rumor, but I've caught wind of it from several spots so I figure its worth sharing. What's interesting is that Cygnus has more employees then Red Hat, and actually generates more revenue.

Can you say "controversial figure," boys and girls? Within the hacker/cracker crowd, nobody stirs up as much noise as John "JP" Vranesevich, founder and owner of the computer security site AntiOnline.com. This is your chance to go straight to the source and ask John himself what's up with all the sound and fury that always seems to surrounds him. (Punch the "Read More" link to continue.)

Before you start posting questions for John, you may want to learn a little more about him. First check his Web site, AntiOnline. Then take a look at this story about him in The New York Times (free registration required). And, for a sample of the kind of animosity John has stirred up among some members of the "inner circle "hacker/cracker and computer security crowd, you might want to check this site, too.

We expect this interview to be full of fire. Fine. We have our flameshields set to "high." But realize that the questions we forward to to JP Tuesday afternoon are subject to our usual screening process; we're only going to send him the 10 - 15 questions deemed most interesting and/or relevant by Slashdot moderators and editors, so please try to be as level-headed as possible.

John's answers will appear Friday.

jonathan_ingram writes "Through some strange twist in the space-time continuum, Linux Today has received Joe Pranevich's Wonderful World of Linux 3.0 one year early... Nice to know RMS will still be around after the end of civilisation." Um ... yeah. You may want to read up on Abacus World Expo before you try to figure out what Joe P. is talking about in this story.

Thor Sigvaldason asks: "I work for one of the largest companies in the world (PwC). Some of the powers that be have recently decided that we need to do the E-Business thing in a big way. My mandate is to determine who can provide this. Yeah, yeah, I know; php4 compiled as an Apache module will do everything you ever need. I've been running Linux since the pre-1.0 days, and still can't figure out why people would boot to anything else. That's not my point. Most big clients need a 1-800 number to settle their frazzled nerves. There are millions of dollars being spewed into e-commerce as we speak. But where is the OpenSource equivalent of Broadvision, NetPerceptions or someone like them? The market is really, really ready. Do you need help with an IPO? Have I missed the relevant URL's?" Sounds like a void some brave entrepreneurs might want to fill.

rips asks: "I've been a moderately skilled Linux user for several years now but my problem solving skills on this one have got me stumped. I have compiled many kernels before but when compiling a recent kernel (2.2.11 or 2.2.12) the compilation will run without a hitch, lilo (v20) will accept the changes but after a reboot the system will crash at: 'Uncompressing Linux... Ok'. I have tried compiling the 2.2.12 kernel on 3 different machines with 2 different distributions (RedHat 6.0 and Slackware 3.2.0) and for different target processors and kernel options but nothing seems to work. I've even tried running off a boot disk incase it was LILO but to no avail. This has really got me stumped. Has anyone else figured out the cause/solution to this?"

I usually don't post nameless submissions, but this one was interesting enough that I figured it did deserve some attention. We've all heard about Sega's Dreamcast and how it has the capability to connect to the internet via it's 56k modem. So how does one go about connecting systems that are within a few feet of each other? Is it just me or do some of you think that Sega dropped the ball a bit when they didn't provide the Dreamcast with a way to connect to the local LAN?

gregbaker writes "Shift Magazine has an interesting article on bugs. They look at why commercial software has so many bugs and attempt to figure out why the software industry doesn't seem to have the same quality standards as other industries." Every Slashdot reader who manages commercial software projects should print this 8-page article out and glue it to his or her bathroom mirror and reread it every morning. But that's just my opinion - which is probably shared by another 100 million+ disgusted computer users worldwide who the commercial software industry seems to think should happily eat whatever garbage they want to throw at us.

Rudolf writes "Newsweek has an article this week, available here, about NASA calculating that space probes, such as Pioneer 10, 11, and Ulysses, are slowing down more than they should. A team of astronomers and physicists couldn't figure it out, so they published their findings in Physical Review Letters to generate discussion. Several possible causes of the slowing have been discussed, but nothing that completely solves the puzzle. Anyone care to rethink gravity and time?" Update: 09/29 09:00 by H :Thanks to Mark for his link to the original citation.

codec7 asks: "Ever since I read the article a about Australia legalizing reverse engineering, I've been curious -- How DO you reverse engineer software? I'm an average programmer really interrested in computer graphics, and would love to get into some software packages to see how they work. Nothing underhanded, strictly educational. I get off on algorithms. Anyway, am I in over my head even contemplating it? I have a feeling that by the time I could really reverse engineer anything (even with help) the information would be grossly obsolete and I could pick up better tips and tricks from some gaming mags. I would appreciate any direction I could get from readers who know a little about this kind of stuff." I figure it's probably best to discuss this now while it is still legal someplace in the world.

EverCode asks: "I have seen the nano-servers in a few stories here on Slashdot, and in a way, the idea of those little things are part of my question. I need a server that does not suck electricity like a full blown computer does. It would run 24/7, not need to be very fast, quiet, and be CHEAP. 10baseT is all I need for NIC speed. Operating system is not an issue here. I figure one option may be to use my Windows 98 PC with some power management options turned on, but I imagine that would create slow response time and a lot of other problems, obviously. Ideally, the power savings would come from the hardware, not from the software. I am not against building something from scratch myself if necessary. Would it be possible for me to build a little/power saving server? Thanks. "