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'Matrix' Parody: 'Computer Boy'
Stoke sent us linkage to iFilm's parody of The Matrix called Computer Boy . I laughed quite hard, although it's about 45 minutes long. Available in Real (note to story submittors: if video clips aren't viewable under Linux, I can't view them to consider them for posting, so don't bother submitting those quicktime clips ;). Anyway, this one is pretty well done. A good edit would do it well: take some of the slower bits out, maybe trim 10 to 15 minutes (especially the beginning: it starts off kinda slow), but there are several really funny sequences,
especially towards the end.
Oh yeah, and I hate Realmedia too - I only have it installed on the PC I don't care about. (MPG 4ever! ;)
thanks
You tell me. I use Opera 4 on Windows, which is quite capable of using Shockwave and Flash, but Macromedia's site is unavailable because it's not a "supported browser". As if there was some hard limit to the number of possible browsers which supported Netscape's plugin architecture or Microsoft's ActiveX.
Could someone please place roadblocks around Macromedia HQs with signs saying their cars aren't supported by this road?
Cut the guy a little slack. He probably just doesn't want to reboot his system to Windows and back just to watch some stupid Quicktime flick. If I got a million submissions a day, I wouldn't want to constantly be rebooting either.
You know, I usually consider it a Bad Sign when I'm looking forward to the end of a movie before it's half over. Don't get me wrong, I'm a HUGE fan of the Matrix but this thing just bites. Bad acting, an awful script, and pathetically misguided attempts at humor added up to a 49 minute yawnfest.
:)
If you're bored witless and are looking for a way to blow the better part of an hour, go ahead and watch the film. But if you're a Matrix fan looking for a quality spoof, or a comedy fan looking for a good laugh, I'd suggest skipping this one. I definitely give it two thumbs down.
Then again, this is just my opinion
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
And what if Reality is that he doesn't have any way to view a Quicktime movie? That's the case with me too, unless I go use my brother's Mac.
Since when is it zealotry to request that people use a universally readable format, as opposed to an obscure proprietary one that is only playable on two platforms (both of which are pretty antiquated an uninteresting to geeks) out of the dozen (dozens?) available?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You said it! Real has had a number of problems. My personal pet peeve is their proud claims of having a mailing list with 53,000,000 people on it. Including such famous RealAudio customers as "ietef@ietf.org", "rbl@mail-abuse.org", and "comments@cauce.org".
Real is a scumbag's scumbag, and I don't see why we should be endorsing and supporting their product. Because it's free as long as you give them at least one email address (possibly even yours)? I thought this was about free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer. If all it takes for us to be happy with a piece of software is that you can have it without paying for it, let's all switch to Internet Explorer.
It's not all about Linux, per se. (If it were, as people have pointed out, Slashdot wouldn't have mentioned Diablo II.) It's also about open standards, open policies, and respect for individuals. Real has none of that.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
In other words, we lie to them, and give them bogus addresses - and every so often, one of the bogus addresses belongs to someone.
:)
Better to just avoid these companies.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
It's a pain to compile, but works well enough for me to use linux to watch the "Come on my selector" video from the squarepusher "big loada" EP, which is what mattered to me
Beware, you need a fairly porky machine- I was using an 800mhz athlon with 256 megs of ram, a g400 etc, and was only playing about 1/4 screen. It's less than perfect, but it works.
BTW, if you do use xanim, the switch to allow resizing of the window is +Sr, drove me nuts looking for that, HTH.
http://www.mp3.com/tib - See how fast the b*stard burns.
Granted WINE is already more stable than Win98, but QuickTime 4 under Win98 is totaly unstable in my expirance.
Not to get off on a rant or any thing...
It freeses on launch, when you hit play, when you close it, basicly any time it does any thing at all other than sit there. And it freeses then too.
Of the 4 Windows boxes in my office none can play a QT movie on the first try, worst case is QT will lock up windows hard and you'll have to reboot a few times to play the movie.
But that's just my expirance I may be wrong.
Because of that goddamn syringe guy (who wouldn't be so bad, and possibly even entertaining, if he didn't post 1000 times per story (2 or 3 would be fine) and changed the post more often (how many times do I have to read about MDMA? Once is enough. Now tell us about the dangers of coke or something :-)) I'm now browsing at 1. Anonymous Cowards often have good things to say, but I just can't deal with that motherfucker anymore, so I hope that good insightful or funny AC's get moderated up so that I don't miss them. Repeated posts are not funny, nor are they true trolls. ORIGINALITY is what makes a good troll, not posting a million times to the same story.
:-)
P.S. Moderators - don't kill my karma, I marked this off-topic myself, so you don't need to do it again. I'll even turn off my +1 bonus for you
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I'm used to fiddling with things in Linux to get them to work, but RealPlayer seriously sucks.
Essentially no documentation, it doesn't even tell you the command to run. The service area of their website doesn't even want to admit that a Linux version exists.
On my system (x86, Redhat 6.0, fairly vanilla but with an uncommon window manager, as if that should matter), it just doesn't work. No core dump, no error message, no zombie processes, it just does nothing. WTF?
Anyone else have this problem? Anyone know how to fix it?
I've been searching all over the place, and I can't seem to find any info. Plenty of stuff on little glitches, but no flat-out failures like I'm facing.
...why didn't you ask? Just a thought. Oh, and ask any of the regulars, I very rarely troll in the tradtional sense. That one thar'd be a real comment.
so wait, if someone thinks a comment is a troll, did you troll them by their mistake? Or are they trolling you when you have to explain? God, I'm so lost. I should just stick to talking about something I know. Like cartoon monkeys and genocide.
When you do, I'll have you
but the question remains, do you REALLY want us?
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
OK, I'm probably gonna get flamed for this. Well, so be it, after all, you only live twice...
I don't see what everybody is so up in arms about. I personally downloaded the Real* programs expecting some sort of "catch." I mean, it costs A LOT to write a program - those outrageous M$ developers fees, plus the expense of a development environment, plus paying the programmers to do it, etc. There's no way that I would expect a company to give away a product like that for free. I went into the deal fully expecting there to be a "catch." And there was -- RealJukebox was sending tons of marketing data back to homebase. Fine with me -- I went in to the deal expecting there to be a catch, and so there was.
The same goes for web banner advertising. What do you think pays for the websites to stay up? I mean, bandwidth, hosting, content, and Web designers all cost money -- LOTS of money. If a site wants to slap up a DoubleClick ad thingy to help pay for it, I have no beef with that. I actually don't mind the ads - a little splash of color in a web page is a good thing. Hell, I even click 'em every once in awhile. As a Webmaster myself, I am exploring the ad banner options. Much as how I'd like to give out information for free, I have to acknowledge financial reality. I'm a starving student/odd job consultant type person, so the money inflow is few and far between. Yet the bills come in a steady stream. The DSL bill costs me $65/month, plus the electricity to run the server, the money to feed it (memory, hard drives, etc.), and so on. And I've got a landlord that would love nothing better than to throw me out on the street if i'm late with a rent payment. Any help that I can get with this, I consider to be a godsend.
Even our favorite operating system, Linux, isn't totally "free" either. There's that little matter of the GPL... (Yes, I'm one of those BSD zealots. So sue me.)
Like the man said, "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
Now, what I _DO_ take issue with is when a company out-and-out lies about it. (and I consider not telling the user to be a lie too -- it's a lie of omission.) So that ticked me off about the RealNetworks deal. But now they have disclosed it, and have provided and opt-out, and I have no problem with that now.
So feel free to flame away!!!
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Yomigaeru Aiyan Geek!!!
I personally downloaded the Real* programs expecting some sort of "catch."
There's a bigger catch than a marketing spy with an "opt out" feature.
Realvideo and Realaudio are proprietary formats, and there are no converters from Real, but plenty of free converters to Real. So if the current version of RealPlayer expires and they decide to charge for the next one, all the websites that put up Real media because they think everyone can view it for free will be screwed.
It did some things well, but overall I think it was about twice as long as it needed to be. Still, for a couple of guys with a camera and a lot of free time, I certainly can't claim to have done any better. . .Cut the whole pond/duck/narration sequence.
Neo singing '99 bottles of beer on the wall' was hilarious!
-S
http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu
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Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
Okay, I am probobly going to get a score of -1 for this, or get edited down, but that is okay. First, is there an MPEG, AVI or Quicktime version of this movie available? I have a 33.6 modem, and frankly, Real Player is not the greatest streaming format on the planet. I would love to be able to grab that 300k ASF file, but it seems to only want to stream. An overnight download would be fine for me. Now, to flame the poster. Man, grow up. So Apple hasn't released Quicktime for Linux. Like the video players that are out there are anygood. The dxr2 player for linux is fine, but xanim is a joke, Real Player for Linux is buggy and choppy, plus the G2 codec SUCKS, and there is almost no video accelleration that I know of for any video card in Linux. Yes, Linux is a great OS, but I don't think I would hug it to the point that I will go all off on having to reboot into another OS to run software. And if you are playing Diablo 2, as these people claim you are, then get a life, get IE or Mozilla, get your modem working in Windows, and stop being a troll by not posting about great movies simply because the file is in a format not supported by Linux.
to earn some extra brownie points they outght to save that thing, zip it and upload for those of us who loath streaming movie sites, you'd think that having people want a copy of a film/trailer was enough but no, we have to go back to the site and watch as we get half a frame every 5 seconds drip through our 56k modems, first up against the wall I tells ya.
Anyway, do it.
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My ass.
Quicktime player not only feels free to crash itself on a wide variety of windows operating systems (IE, ALL of them) but the player is HORRIBLE at streaming, even when you're on a T1, with a DMA'ing PCI ethernet controller, a P3-500 and 128mb of ram. While it's downloading, playback will stutter, even though you're not at the end of the downloaded data; When it finishes downloading, everything picks up just fine.
When you're outperformed by media player (though really, I wish microsoft could get their shit together and get a real codec) it's pretty goddamn pitiful. Then again, RealVideo has been in that position for a long, long time...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Rob talked about this in GIS, it's very simple: He just doesn't want to reboot ten times a day to watch something which in 90% certainty is just another lame vid. I can't say I blame him. Plus everytime a QT clip does get posted, every Linux zealot and their mother complains about it.
(note to story submittors: if video clips aren't viewable under Linux, I can't view them to consider them for posting, so don't bother submitting those quicktime clips ;).
Having principles is good, and I agree that Real Networks hasn't been a good neighbor lately, but come on... do you have to have your hand held for you? If you want the Quicktime clips, can't you find them yourself?
"... message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an excercise in computer science masturbation."
Does anyone know how/where i can download it? My modem connection is way too slow for online viewing.
If CmdrTaco can consider movies that are only viewable in Linux, how the hell is he playing Diablo II??
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Okay, so I watched the whole thing and was mildly amused. I couldn't help but notice for a few things in the credits they said Miguel Sanchez did them (Director of Photography). Now my question is, did they actually find someone in Australia (I presume that's where this was made from cars and license plates) that was named Miguel Sanchez or was it a take from the Simpsons where Lionel Hutz is babysitting Bart and Lisa. "Lionel Hutz is no more. Say hello to Miguel Sanchez!"
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
The sad fact of it all is that if I were sitting around trying to make myself sound like an ignorant person, I might say something like this:I'm pretty sure that the general Slashdot population would feel okay about flaming the living daylights out of anyone who would say such a foolish thing. Quite possibly we'd merely dismiss them as a newbie.. as I think many of us were at the "Windows is kinda cool" stage, if only for a moment in our lifetime. Sure, some people would highlight the merits of Windows for a new computer user just as some would point out Linux's novel qualities. Do I think CmdrTaco is ignorant? Absolutely not. However, given this statement in an unknown context, the conclusion I'd come to is quite baffling.
Well, would anyone really expect a seasoned computer user with such a wide exposure to the many facets of a multitude of operating systems to say something such as,Maybe so.. but probably not. Oh, that our fearless leader CmdrTaco had not been kidnapped in his sleep. Why couldn't he have turned cookies off on his browser so that his mother wouldn't post stories under his handle?
I am officially distraught.
okay, fine, no quicktime clips because you can't see them in linux. So you could say that you are protesting apple's decision to not support your operating system of choice. That's fine, and I respect that.
:-)
However, there are those of us who dual boot (or more. Been playing with BSD lately myself), and that's fine that you don't want to share the info you hear. It's your site. But I can't watch this. Oh, I could download the Real player and watch it. I refuse to support Real Networks. You remember that thing a few months ago where RealJukebox was scanning hard drives then reporting back the motherbase? I certainly do. And that, among other reasons is why I don't have anything by Real Networks on my computer.
Yeah, they made an opt out. And they appologized. But quite frankly, it's not about our personal privacy. It's about the privacy of those who DON'T live their lives paying attention to every little byte that flows across their computer's circuits. We're GOING to find out about this and opt out. However, Joe Windows down the street isn't. So they appease the geek community, while still taking the average user for a ride. Do you appreciate that? What if it was your mother?
To me, it's not about Free Software (open source, whatver) versus proprietary. It's about infringing software versus non-infringing software. And this doesn't need to be your fight (though you preach it more often than I do), but you bitch about quicktime, I'm going to bitch about Real. We've both said our peace, and everything is okay, right? Thought so
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
http://www.platrix.com/
:)
This one kick @ss and is hilarious if you are a fan of both shows.
I didn't like Computer Boy either. The only part that made me laughed was the silly music during the chase.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
note to story submittors: if video clips aren't viewable under Linux, I can't view them to consider them for posting, so don't bother submitting those quicktime clips
Right, and you've been playing Diablo 2 through WINE. Sad or funny, can't decide.
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Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown