Oh, I'm not saying the films released worldwide on the same day always suck. Usually you can spot that by a desperate ad campaign and seeing two commercials for the same film within 5 minutes of each other on TV. I'm just saying it's a great way to mitigate the damage of releasing a crappy film and piracy all at once. I've enjoyed the hell out of both LOTR and The Matrix series and I'll be there for both at the midnight show. I know I'll enjoy them, and an opening night crowd for these films isn't something to miss. Matrix draws the biggest crowd of alpha geeks I have ever seen, though it is a bit scary to watch a theater of 600 people do nothing except talk randomly about the first film while comparing cell phones for an hour.
Those two movies, and probably Kill Bill, will however be the only ones I drag myself into the theater to see for the rest of the year. Everything else will be rip or netflix rental with a DVD purchase on release if it's any good. By the time you spend $10 on a ticket and $5 on a rental you could have almost bought the DVD.
I recommend Media Play for buying DVDs, by the way. Get one of their replay point cards and only buy your movies on triple points days (they have em twice a month). Myself and two of my friends walked out of there with $1200 in DVD purchases that night, and got about $250 back in replay certificates to use on more DVDs. It evens out to be cheaper than buying them online, and you get them immediately.
We were back there a couple days later. The employee who rang us out that night saw us and came over to tell us a trio of young women had come through about an hour after we left and bought $1600 in DVDs (none of them box sets or series). The son of a bitch wouldn't give up their phone numbers, though. Dammit.:P
1) Guarantees the largest box office take. 2) Minimizes the effect piracy has on opening weekend numbers. 3) Avoid the worst effects of bad word-of-mouth by showing it to folks before they are warned away from it.
Studios never used to bother with this, as coordinating such a large release was an impressive logistical problem to tackle. Due to those three factors, however, they really have no choice anymore. The studios like to play it like they are doing this to please the fans, but it's really just to buff their bottom line.
They long for the days when there was no "buzz" on a movie except for the one they created with their marketing campaigns. Websites like AICN and Rotten Tomatoes have destroyed their business model of using an ad campaign to boost the box office for a bad film. News travels at the speed of suck from those websites and viewers are now warned away from crappy films months before the film is even released. Conversely, good movies get tons of free exposure and do much better in the box office, making it harder for studios to bury a picture. Be glad for those kinds of websites and pay them a visit, even if you don't read the reviews. They make it harder for hollywood to push crap product and get away with it.
Word of mouth is much faster these days as well. Thank your pagers, mailing lists, and cell phones for that. When you see a good movie, you tell your friends. Same goes for warning them about a bad one.
Piracy makes it dangerous to stagger a film release. Release it in the USA and tomorrow it's on the streets in Yugoslavia and Hong Kong, and floating around Kazaa or Usenet for anyone with a phat | to download. It's best to get the biggest bang out of opening weekend because piracy will damage the ticket sales more and more over time. Movies don't really have legs these days... Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding are the only ones I remember recently that had any real long term box office take. These days it's just a flash in the pan on opening weekend.
The studios like to moan about how all this technology is wrecking their business. Frankly, it's all bullshit. All the technology and piracy does is let us avoid wasting our money on crappy pictures. If it's a good movie, you'll see it in the theater or buy the DVD (still reasonably priced, as opposed to music) and they'll get their money. They are just pissed off because they can't sell us a crappy product anymore.
Hey, hollywood. Improve your product. Stop wasting time and money fighting a war that you'll never win. Take some of those annoying commercials out of the theater and perhaps I'll go to the movies more often. I don't like paying to watch a bunch of ads for products I don't give a damn about in the first place. The ads aren't even superbowl quality! That's pretty insulting.
Remember, every time you pirate a movie, they fire a producer (and baby Jesus kills a kitten). Pirate at least one a week so they fire all the crappy ones and they either go out of business or make some good films for a change. Keep the pressure on, and remind them who they really work for. You.
That one change flies directly in the face of everything in the books. The elves had committed the sin of depair by assuming that Sauron was unbeatable. They had given up. Part of the drama of Helm's Deep was that you had some 300ish old men and boys and they were still able to hold that fortress for as long as they did, despite the apparent certainty of defeat and total hopelessness they all felt. How much more moving would it have been without the elves there? I really think PJ made a bad call on that one. Glaringly, painfully, *stupidly* bad. You do know that originally, Arwen was filmed at Helm's Deep as well, but due to massive fan outcry (they dubbed her Xenarwen) PJ pulled it, cut most of her scenes and digitally edited her out of the background of the other shots.
Frankly I love having Arwen replace Glorfindel, as it's a very effective way to up the romance in the film. That's a wonderful addition, and the substory with her and Elrond is playing out very well.
The best part about doing this as a movie is that you can show some things the books left out. I think we're better off with an interpretation than a shot for shot remake with no soul. With the exception of the elves at Helm's Deep, it is thematically true to the books.
One now wonders if Peter is going to include the Scouring of the Shire. That's a fan favorite chapter, but it's stuck in between the climax and the resolution. Peter said he didn't intend to include it, but there's been a lot of people complaining about it (including me). I hope it makes it into the special edition DVD of ROTK.
There was more (and better) eye candy in that than in SW:EP2, and that... just for a moment... it recalled the greatness of the first movie. It can't help but be better than the second one. Heck, that *trailer* is almost better than the second one!
He's definitely right about this one. That sort of copy-paste and drag-drop power is taken for granted in Windows, and it's one of the things a Windows user is going to notice is missing instantly when using linux.
Linux desktop simply isn't ready to tackle Microsoft yet. It's too kludgy and doesn't have enough program interoperability. When it does, I'll switch with a big ole smile on my face. I just hope linux gets a good desktop before I am forced to switch to a Mac to get away from Microsoft.
Do not buy these cheap mirroring controllers. Use software raid from your operating system instead. It's more stable, easier to recover, and runs at the same speed. As others have pointed out, these controllers are doing everything in software anyway, so you may as well hand the responsibility for the data over to the more robust and mature OS drivers and save yourself the cash.
If you want real RAID, spend the money. As many have pointed out, 3Ware owns this market. A 2-port 3Ware card is $120, and they offer 4, 8, and 12 port models. They do standard ATA or serial ATA. As of now they have a limitation of 2TB max per array, so if you have more than 2TB of space you'll need to divide it into two arrays to use it all. This limitation is going to be removed in the future.
Another thing you really must not overlook is proper cooling for these systems. Even two IDE disks in close proximity get pretty hot. Not as hot as their SCSI anscestors, of course, but the heat adds up, especially on busy arrays. I highly reccomend that if you are serious about protecting your drive's health you invest in some kind of hotswap cage. These have dropped drastically in price. Look for Cremax ICYDock bays. They are cheap, you can get a temperature monitored, fan cooled, hot swap capable mounting bay with alarms and a lock that will mount 5 drives into 3 5.25' bays for $150. That's a steal. They offer a 3 drives in 2 5.25' bays option for $110. Check out www.scsi4me.com, it's a good site with a good selection.
I've done break tests on numerous 3Ware arrays, and had them rebuild perfectly every time. They have a much better track record than SCSI controllers. I've also benchmarked them against top of the line SCSI controllers. 3Ware decimates SCSI in writes, and ties or lags just a tick behind in reads. SCSI is still the king of access time, however... but for the 3x increase in price over ATA I can live with waiting that extra 6ms.
There ARE some things ATA raids lack, however...
So far, I've never seen any IDE/ATA raid controller that allows you to *grow* an existing RAID5 array by adding another disk to it on the fly. You always have to delete the array, then recreate it using the extra disk. I know a lot of the more expensive SCSI cards could dynamically grow their arrays. I asked 3Ware about this when I stopped by their booth at Linuxworld and they did say it is something they plan to offer in future products.
Some of the very expensive SCSI array cards would also stripe the free space of your online spare. This was handy because it used all the disks on your controller at once, giving you the best speed. It also let you know in a hurry if your online spare was a lemon, since all disks were in use. If you had a disk failure, it would then regenerate the missing data into the free space striped across all disks, and you would end up with a perfectly healthy RAID5 array and one dead disk. You could then lose your standard single disk from the RAID5 and still have your data even though the array was degraded. I mentioned this to the 3Ware guys as well and I was surprised to have them tell me they had never heard of it before. Again, this was a common feature on the high end Compaq array controllers. I'd love to see this one make its way into 3Ware's products.
- Extended opening, in which the hobbits scale a cliff face using the rope Galadriel gave Sam, including a better build-up to the arrival of Gollum.
- More friction between the Uruk-Hai and the Orcs as they transport Merry and Pippin back to Isengard, which better sets up the fight over food that takes place later.
- More scenes of Saruman breeding his army, creating better pacing as the invasion of Rohan begins
- Terrific scene in which Eomer finds the body of Theodred, Theodens son.
- Additional scenes with Merry and Pippin, including extensions to existing Treebeard scenes and the Ent Draught sequence, in which the hobbits grow. In another scene, Treebeards soporific poetry works its magic.
- Theodreds funeral scene, with Eowyn singing a lament.
- A wonderful introduction to Aragorns horse Brego, who we learn was Theodreds horse. Aragorn requests Brego be set free, which places his later rescue in better context.
- Additional scenes between Eowyn and Aragorn, including one in which he attempts to eat a bowl of evil-looking stew.
- More scenes between Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, which expand upon the films politics (including the union between the two towers Gandalf scene from the trailer, though that line is missing from what I can remember).
- More of Sarumans musings, setting up themes that will be explored in The Return of the King.
- Flashback to the circumstances surrounding Boromir being sent to Rivendell for the Council of Elrond, taking place during the re-taking of Osgiliath by the Gondorian army. This sequence briefly introduces John Noble as Denethor, a major character in The Return of the King. I was worried this sequence would seem like an indulgence, but its difficult to imagine the film without it; not only is the character of Faramir, much maligned by fans of the book, given added depth, so too is Boromir enriched by this addition.
- Just before the Ents storming of Isengard, the Huorns mobilise and leave to attend to business elsewhere; they reappear at Helms Deep to kill the Uruk-Hai as they flee.
- New ending, with Merry and Pippin finding a larder at Isengard, including two barrels of pipe-weed; a hilarious scene in which Gimli and Legolas compare their scores after the battle of Helms Deep; Frodo, Sam and Gollum are shown the way out of Osgiliath by Faramir, who threatens Gollum; theres even a brief moment in which Sam and Gollum appear to make peace.
- Along with all these major additions, many more scenes are subtly extended to give more information or reinforce themes already present.
I was talking about the worm, not the exploit. Think mostly harmless compared to seeing a NO ROM BASIC prompt on every machine in your company datacenter. This worm basically causes a big fuss and takes a jab at MS, but doesn't do anything destructive to your system. The DDoS isn't that big of a deal, it's more like a red herring thrown in there to make it look serious... I mean it's not like you can use the computer while it's infected since it shuts down after you log in. Serious DDoS attackers don't arbitrarily shut down their attacking boxes after 60 seconds.
The exploit is certainly anything but harmless. Of course, now that this mostly harmless virus has brought attention to the issue, the vulnerability will be much more closed than it would otherwise have been. In an odd sort of way, you could say this virus writer was doing us all a favor.
I'm sure one of these days someone will take the time to write a real worm... the kind that leaves entire datacenters smoking in its wake. So far I've never seen that happen, but it certainly could. A couple billion in damages due to a MS security hole... that'll get you some press coverage, none of it good. I really hope MS is taking these security problems seriously and not just pretending to because they've been forced into a corner.
Must be pacific time, since it just changed to this:
Discovered on: August 11, 2003 Last Updated on: August 12, 2003 08:37:01 AM
It's 12:36 here. Perhaps my browser cache is just damn slow in refreshing. Or perhaps I'm posting to one of those alternate reality slashdots I keep reading about here.
I wonder if they corrected the link based on this slashdot post? Rather amusing to see a linking error redirected through such a strange pipeline to find its way back to you.
You're right. The link in the original article I sumbitted was from Symantec's website. Don't think I surf windows security bulletins for fun.:P
Discovered on: August 11, 2003 Last Updated on: August 12, 2003 07:03:31 AM
Looks like Symantec fixed the bad link this morning (probably as I was reading it judging by the time) since they are pointing to MS03-026. Nice to know they are checking up on the validity of their security posts. I wonder what time zone that datestamp on their article is from. I'm EST and I swear I didn't get to work until 7:15AM.
Actually, you were right. We're talking about different patches for some reason. Now isn't this interesting...
The link to the MS patch in the original article is to the wrong patch. I was rather surprised by that as I'd simply followed the patch link from Symantec's page to get there. So I decided to check out Symantec's page again and now theirs is also pointing to the right article./boggle
Discovered on: August 11, 2003 Last Updated on: August 12, 2003 07:03:31 AM
Looks like someone caught it and edited it at about the same time I read it this morning. This is what I get for skipping coffee this morning when I get into work. An extra five minutes making a pot would probably have done it./sigh
If you want to stop the timer from fscking with you, simply set your clock back a few hours right after the timer appears. Any time you subtract from the clock is added to the timer. This will give you time to install the patches. We got lucky, this one is mostly harmless. This vulnerability was patched on March 26th, btw.
It's a bit difficult for a corporate user to get away with flat out installing Linux on his box, as that sort of thing shows up rather quickly in security audits.
Where I work, we have 3 or 4 developers who use Linux. They requested it when hired, and other than making sure they don't have rogue DHCP servers screwing up our networks, we have a hands-off policy where we don't officially support the box because it's not Windows. Unofficially I help them all the time, of course.;)
What gets me is Cygwin. The last time I ran a software audit, I checked for Cygwin just for a goof. HALF THE COMPANY (that's 50 people) has Cygwin installed. Well, why not? It lets you comply with management's wishes for a Windows world, but still gives you the lion's share of Linux's power. If you count Cygwin I'll wager you'll find the 1% figure to be much lower than reality.
Of course, if you're comfortable with Cygwin, switching to Linux is that much easier.
It's the only way I know of to sit on your ass all day long and lose weight without exercise... other than going the Ghandi route, anyway. Of course, you'll have to switch to Michelob Ultra if you want to continue drinking beer.:)
Seriously tho, give the Atkins diet books a read sometime. It takes a bit of work to switch your eating habits from carb rich to carb lite, but honestly after the first week it's a piece of cake. Wait, can't have cake... dammit. You can have Leek and Mushroom pie tho.
Yes, the guy who invented the diet died. No, the diet didn't kill him. Well, maybe the sugar deprivation made him lightheaded which is why he fell, but I guess we'll never know...
Re:Really really bad sound quality...
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Pods Unite
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· Score: 1
I've got a 2002 model with the Monsoon and it's pretty good. The default settings from the factory were, of course, rather terrible. After some tuning on both the stereo and my Archos MP3 Player it makes very good sound. You get much better sound from the rear speakers. I was thinking I'd need to add a kicker to boost the bass but the monsoon surprised me, I think since it can already shake the mirrors (and my glasses) it's good enough as is.
The only real complaint I've got with the sound is that it is incredibly easy to hit the resonance frequency of the door panels with loud music, and when that happens you get the nastiest burst of noise. It's really bad in cold weather. I'm planning to pop open the panels at some point and insulate the speakers to give them more kick and put an end to the noise. Once that's done I doubt I'll bother upgrading the sound system until the speakers die.
I just have to say... for the price, you can't touch this car for comfort, performance, and safety. I'm beginning to think I should have bought the Turbo-S model. I have the 1.8 Turbo and up around 120MPH it would really, really benefit from that 6th gear. Gas mileage in these cars is sick... if you actually know how to drive a stick properly you can get 45mpg even in city traffic. It's like the poor man's Audi TT;)
Look, I'm all for a good star wars mmorpg... but this isn't it. I've played in the beta.
It looks and feels like Anarchy Online. It's actually a pretty boring game. So far, it's been plagued by the same kinds of problems Everquest had, including the same lack of customer support and generally shoddy game design. They've had several patches that were nothing but nerf-fests and introduced more bugs than they fixed. You've got about a one in one thousand chance of ending up with a force-sensitive character, so forget about ever playing a Jedi.
Sure, they'll iron this thing out eventually. Once a lot of people start playing it and player communities take hold, it'll probably be fun. Once they get the 100 or so feautres they left out of the initial release added, it'll be a better game. Once the playerbase beats them into submission and forces them to make a few obvious, common sense design changes that should have been in from the beginning, it'll be a better game. It'll also probably be 2007.
If this game ends up being fun, it will be in spite of Sony, not because of Sony. Just like Everquest. Remember that this is not truly a LucasArts game.
Honestly I'd hold out for Worlds of Warcraft. Blizzard will treat its customers far better than Sony does.
While it's certainly true that under the contract, Novell may be obligated to enforce IP claims on behalf of SCO, but doesn't Novell set those terms? It is not in Novell's best interest to attack Linux, as Linux is now and will continue to be a fundamental part of their business.
Can SCO force Novell to do something that is not in thier own best interests?
What's to stop Novell from just GPLing the parts of the copied code?
What's to stop Novell from charging Bruce Perens a one time only $0.75 licensing fee on behalf of all Linux users?
Re:This review is bogus!!
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IDE RAID Examined
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· Score: 4, Informative
I'll second this. I've got a 3Ware card running a 4-disk RAID5 (100GB WDCs) under Suse Linux 7.3 on a dual Athlon 1800XP tyan board with 64bit/66MHz bus, and it owns every raid system I've benchmarked here in the office.
I even ran it up against a real SCSI RAID5 array running on 10,000RPM Seagate Cheetah drives (again 4 disks) and it decimated SCSI for write speed, the 3Ware card was easily 5x faster. It tied it for read speed, but the SCSI still beat it in access time (5ms vs 16ms). The SCSI raid card was one of Adaptec's best, $800 but I forget the name now. Still, that's damn good performance for something 1/4 the cost. I've even got the benchmarks around here somewhere...
If you are going to build a raid for a server, and you decide not to use 66MHz/64bit cards for your array controllers (scsi OR ide), kindly take this ball peen hammer and go stand in the corner whacking yourself in the head with it for several hours.
Re:On SCSI drives and RAID controllers
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IDE RAID Examined
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· Score: 2
The 3Ware cards will do a hot spare. I'm not sure about the competition. I spent some time at 3Ware's boot at Linuxworld in NYC back in 2000 and they blew me away, so the next time we had to build a server here at work I built a 4-drive (WDC 100GB) RAID-5 on a 3Ware 7850. Got it up and running under Suse 7.3, hosts a big ole postgres database. I've got 3 drives for data and the fourth as a hot spare.
Now, here's an interesting bit... Compaq had a technology in their servers I remember seeing that would stripe the *free space* across the disks as well as the data. Your "hot spare" would actually be a member in the array with data on it... each disk would have enough free space on it so that if a drive died, the array would rebuild the missing data and write it in filling up all this free space across the entire array. You'd still have your parity information at this point, so you could handle a second drive failure and not lose the array.
Stripe the free space as well as the parity information. Good idea. Why the hell don't I see this more often? You can survive a 2-drive failure on a RAID-5 with it. Hell, there's really no reason you couldn't add in multiple "hot spare" drives and stripe your array across them so you could survive losing 3 or more disks at a time. I'm not sure why you'd want to do that, but I'm sure it'd be useful in some applications, and at any rate striping the usual single hot spare gives you better performance than letting it sit there doing nothing.
Never understood why that technology hasn't started popping into IDE RAIDs... considering the qeustionable reliability of IDE drives these days, I think it would be a huge selling point for any vendor that offered it. If anyone knows more about this, please do comment on it.
Had a Fujitsu 40GB report it was failing (via SMART), so I popped a brand new Fujitsu 40GB drive in off our parts shelf to clone the old one to, and it reported the same error. After spending an hour making sure it really was the drives failing and not the machine I cloned it over onto an old maxtor and sent both in for warranty service. Got new ones back promptly in 11 days. I'll have to keep an eye on them now as well, guess I'll be putting them on the shelf with the spare 75GB IBM Deskstar...
Stop using commercial software. Completely. I'm quite serious.
Back in the day when the 80s warez scene was going strong, we really didn't have that option. Enter Linux/GPL/OSS software. These days, I can do anything on OSS that I can do on commercial software. Why the hell would I pony up $500 for Photoshop when Gimp can do almost everything Photoshop can do? Why spend $300 on Windows when Linux is storming up behind it and will soon pass it in features, reliability, and usefulness? Use free databases, tell Oracle to stuff their $20,000 per processor license up their ass. I'm not paying any company enough money to buy a decent car for a bunch of ones and zeros. To me, that's blatant extortion.
So I'm taking myself out of the loop by learning to use all of the free stuff. Not just me, either... we've been offering open source solutions along with closed source solutions regularly to our customers, and since about 8 months ago they have been going 100% with the open source solutions because the price tag difference is stunning.
Sure, there might be a few applications that you simply cannot find oss solutions for. Those are few and far between now, and they are going to get a lot fewer and farther in the future. Itches to scratch, and all that.
Microsoft was right... OSS was very much like a cancer. It's a cancer of the software industry, and hopefully one day it will kill its host and provide all of us with a great deal more freedom than we have right now. If you think that sounds laughable, just remember that until about 5 years ago very, very few people had heard of Linux. These days it is a household word among anyone who uses a computer.
You're getting there... there's just a few problems.
Through and all variants of it were long ago replaced with "thru", just like Though was replaced with "tho". They wouldn't reference the FBI, it's always "the man" nowadays. Please has been universally replaced with "plz". There are new terms for "own" these days as well. "0wn" refers to posessing something, whereas "pwn" refers to kicking someone's ass be it physically, verbally in debate, or by proving them wrong.
Use of letters M W N H etc are replaced sometimes with a combination of slash characters, changing them to |\/| |/\| |\| |-| respectively. I'll leave those out, in this font at least they are a terrific blow to reading comprehension.
I also wonder if "our father" shouldn't be replaced with something else... Linus perhaps, or a reference to root... don't know really, nothing I think of seems to fit but I have this nagging suspicion that "our father" ought to go.
Also a bit too much with the "t0 t00 tw0", all of those have collapsed into just plain "2" now.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I'm not saying the films released worldwide on the same day always suck. Usually you can spot that by a desperate ad campaign and seeing two commercials for the same film within 5 minutes of each other on TV. I'm just saying it's a great way to mitigate the damage of releasing a crappy film and piracy all at once. I've enjoyed the hell out of both LOTR and The Matrix series and I'll be there for both at the midnight show. I know I'll enjoy them, and an opening night crowd for these films isn't something to miss. Matrix draws the biggest crowd of alpha geeks I have ever seen, though it is a bit scary to watch a theater of 600 people do nothing except talk randomly about the first film while comparing cell phones for an hour.
:P
Those two movies, and probably Kill Bill, will however be the only ones I drag myself into the theater to see for the rest of the year. Everything else will be rip or netflix rental with a DVD purchase on release if it's any good. By the time you spend $10 on a ticket and $5 on a rental you could have almost bought the DVD.
I recommend Media Play for buying DVDs, by the way. Get one of their replay point cards and only buy your movies on triple points days (they have em twice a month). Myself and two of my friends walked out of there with $1200 in DVD purchases that night, and got about $250 back in replay certificates to use on more DVDs. It evens out to be cheaper than buying them online, and you get them immediately.
We were back there a couple days later. The employee who rang us out that night saw us and came over to tell us a trio of young women had come through about an hour after we left and bought $1600 in DVDs (none of them box sets or series). The son of a bitch wouldn't give up their phone numbers, though. Dammit.
They'd be fools not to.
1) Guarantees the largest box office take.
2) Minimizes the effect piracy has on opening weekend numbers.
3) Avoid the worst effects of bad word-of-mouth by showing it to folks before they are warned away from it.
Studios never used to bother with this, as coordinating such a large release was an impressive logistical problem to tackle. Due to those three factors, however, they really have no choice anymore. The studios like to play it like they are doing this to please the fans, but it's really just to buff their bottom line.
They long for the days when there was no "buzz" on a movie except for the one they created with their marketing campaigns. Websites like AICN and Rotten Tomatoes have destroyed their business model of using an ad campaign to boost the box office for a bad film. News travels at the speed of suck from those websites and viewers are now warned away from crappy films months before the film is even released. Conversely, good movies get tons of free exposure and do much better in the box office, making it harder for studios to bury a picture. Be glad for those kinds of websites and pay them a visit, even if you don't read the reviews. They make it harder for hollywood to push crap product and get away with it.
Word of mouth is much faster these days as well. Thank your pagers, mailing lists, and cell phones for that. When you see a good movie, you tell your friends. Same goes for warning them about a bad one.
Piracy makes it dangerous to stagger a film release. Release it in the USA and tomorrow it's on the streets in Yugoslavia and Hong Kong, and floating around Kazaa or Usenet for anyone with a phat | to download. It's best to get the biggest bang out of opening weekend because piracy will damage the ticket sales more and more over time. Movies don't really have legs these days... Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding are the only ones I remember recently that had any real long term box office take. These days it's just a flash in the pan on opening weekend.
The studios like to moan about how all this technology is wrecking their business. Frankly, it's all bullshit. All the technology and piracy does is let us avoid wasting our money on crappy pictures. If it's a good movie, you'll see it in the theater or buy the DVD (still reasonably priced, as opposed to music) and they'll get their money. They are just pissed off because they can't sell us a crappy product anymore.
Hey, hollywood. Improve your product. Stop wasting time and money fighting a war that you'll never win. Take some of those annoying commercials out of the theater and perhaps I'll go to the movies more often. I don't like paying to watch a bunch of ads for products I don't give a damn about in the first place. The ads aren't even superbowl quality! That's pretty insulting.
Remember, every time you pirate a movie, they fire a producer (and baby Jesus kills a kitten). Pirate at least one a week so they fire all the crappy ones and they either go out of business or make some good films for a change. Keep the pressure on, and remind them who they really work for. You.
I do have to agree.
That one change flies directly in the face of everything in the books. The elves had committed the sin of depair by assuming that Sauron was unbeatable. They had given up. Part of the drama of Helm's Deep was that you had some 300ish old men and boys and they were still able to hold that fortress for as long as they did, despite the apparent certainty of defeat and total hopelessness they all felt. How much more moving would it have been without the elves there? I really think PJ made a bad call on that one. Glaringly, painfully, *stupidly* bad. You do know that originally, Arwen was filmed at Helm's Deep as well, but due to massive fan outcry (they dubbed her Xenarwen) PJ pulled it, cut most of her scenes and digitally edited her out of the background of the other shots.
Frankly I love having Arwen replace Glorfindel, as it's a very effective way to up the romance in the film. That's a wonderful addition, and the substory with her and Elrond is playing out very well.
The best part about doing this as a movie is that you can show some things the books left out. I think we're better off with an interpretation than a shot for shot remake with no soul. With the exception of the elves at Helm's Deep, it is thematically true to the books.
One now wonders if Peter is going to include the Scouring of the Shire. That's a fan favorite chapter, but it's stuck in between the climax and the resolution. Peter said he didn't intend to include it, but there's been a lot of people complaining about it (including me). I hope it makes it into the special edition DVD of ROTK.
In that case, just know this.
There was more (and better) eye candy in that than in SW:EP2, and that... just for a moment... it recalled the greatness of the first movie. It can't help but be better than the second one. Heck, that *trailer* is almost better than the second one!
He's definitely right about this one. That sort of copy-paste and drag-drop power is taken for granted in Windows, and it's one of the things a Windows user is going to notice is missing instantly when using linux.
Linux desktop simply isn't ready to tackle Microsoft yet. It's too kludgy and doesn't have enough program interoperability. When it does, I'll switch with a big ole smile on my face. I just hope linux gets a good desktop before I am forced to switch to a Mac to get away from Microsoft.
You know... it's being modded as funny but this fella does have a point. Check out the features of OSX Server sometime. You'll be surprised.
Do not buy these cheap mirroring controllers. Use software raid from your operating system instead. It's more stable, easier to recover, and runs at the same speed. As others have pointed out, these controllers are doing everything in software anyway, so you may as well hand the responsibility for the data over to the more robust and mature OS drivers and save yourself the cash.
If you want real RAID, spend the money. As many have pointed out, 3Ware owns this market. A 2-port 3Ware card is $120, and they offer 4, 8, and 12 port models. They do standard ATA or serial ATA. As of now they have a limitation of 2TB max per array, so if you have more than 2TB of space you'll need to divide it into two arrays to use it all. This limitation is going to be removed in the future.
Another thing you really must not overlook is proper cooling for these systems. Even two IDE disks in close proximity get pretty hot. Not as hot as their SCSI anscestors, of course, but the heat adds up, especially on busy arrays. I highly reccomend that if you are serious about protecting your drive's health you invest in some kind of hotswap cage. These have dropped drastically in price. Look for Cremax ICYDock bays. They are cheap, you can get a temperature monitored, fan cooled, hot swap capable mounting bay with alarms and a lock that will mount 5 drives into 3 5.25' bays for $150. That's a steal. They offer a 3 drives in 2 5.25' bays option for $110. Check out www.scsi4me.com, it's a good site with a good selection.
I've done break tests on numerous 3Ware arrays, and had them rebuild perfectly every time. They have a much better track record than SCSI controllers. I've also benchmarked them against top of the line SCSI controllers. 3Ware decimates SCSI in writes, and ties or lags just a tick behind in reads. SCSI is still the king of access time, however... but for the 3x increase in price over ATA I can live with waiting that extra 6ms.
There ARE some things ATA raids lack, however...
So far, I've never seen any IDE/ATA raid controller that allows you to *grow* an existing RAID5 array by adding another disk to it on the fly. You always have to delete the array, then recreate it using the extra disk. I know a lot of the more expensive SCSI cards could dynamically grow their arrays. I asked 3Ware about this when I stopped by their booth at Linuxworld and they did say it is something they plan to offer in future products.
Some of the very expensive SCSI array cards would also stripe the free space of your online spare. This was handy because it used all the disks on your controller at once, giving you the best speed. It also let you know in a hurry if your online spare was a lemon, since all disks were in use. If you had a disk failure, it would then regenerate the missing data into the free space striped across all disks, and you would end up with a perfectly healthy RAID5 array and one dead disk. You could then lose your standard single disk from the RAID5 and still have your data even though the array was degraded. I mentioned this to the 3Ware guys as well and I was surprised to have them tell me they had never heard of it before. Again, this was a common feature on the high end Compaq array controllers. I'd love to see this one make its way into 3Ware's products.
For those too lazy to click a few links. ;)
- Extended opening, in which the hobbits scale a cliff face using the rope Galadriel gave Sam, including a better build-up to the arrival of Gollum.
- More friction between the Uruk-Hai and the Orcs as they transport Merry and Pippin back to Isengard, which better sets up the fight over food that takes place later.
- More scenes of Saruman breeding his army, creating better pacing as the invasion of Rohan begins
- Terrific scene in which Eomer finds the body of Theodred, Theodens son.
- Additional scenes with Merry and Pippin, including extensions to existing Treebeard scenes and the Ent Draught sequence, in which the hobbits grow. In another scene, Treebeards soporific poetry works its magic.
- Theodreds funeral scene, with Eowyn singing a lament.
- A wonderful introduction to Aragorns horse Brego, who we learn was Theodreds horse. Aragorn requests Brego be set free, which places his later rescue in better context.
- Additional scenes between Eowyn and Aragorn, including one in which he attempts to eat a bowl of evil-looking stew.
- More scenes between Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, which expand upon the films politics (including the union between the two towers Gandalf scene from the trailer, though that line is missing from what I can remember).
- More of Sarumans musings, setting up themes that will be explored in The Return of the King.
- Flashback to the circumstances surrounding Boromir being sent to Rivendell for the Council of Elrond, taking place during the re-taking of Osgiliath by the Gondorian army. This sequence briefly introduces John Noble as Denethor, a major character in The Return of the King. I was worried this sequence would seem like an indulgence, but its difficult to imagine the film without it; not only is the character of Faramir, much maligned by fans of the book, given added depth, so too is Boromir enriched by this addition.
- Just before the Ents storming of Isengard, the Huorns mobilise and leave to attend to business elsewhere; they reappear at Helms Deep to kill the Uruk-Hai as they flee.
- New ending, with Merry and Pippin finding a larder at Isengard, including two barrels of pipe-weed; a hilarious scene in which Gimli and Legolas compare their scores after the battle of Helms Deep; Frodo, Sam and Gollum are shown the way out of Osgiliath by Faramir, who threatens Gollum; theres even a brief moment in which Sam and Gollum appear to make peace.
- Along with all these major additions, many more scenes are subtly extended to give more information or reinforce themes already present.
I was talking about the worm, not the exploit. Think mostly harmless compared to seeing a NO ROM BASIC prompt on every machine in your company datacenter. This worm basically causes a big fuss and takes a jab at MS, but doesn't do anything destructive to your system. The DDoS isn't that big of a deal, it's more like a red herring thrown in there to make it look serious... I mean it's not like you can use the computer while it's infected since it shuts down after you log in. Serious DDoS attackers don't arbitrarily shut down their attacking boxes after 60 seconds.
The exploit is certainly anything but harmless. Of course, now that this mostly harmless virus has brought attention to the issue, the vulnerability will be much more closed than it would otherwise have been. In an odd sort of way, you could say this virus writer was doing us all a favor.
I'm sure one of these days someone will take the time to write a real worm... the kind that leaves entire datacenters smoking in its wake. So far I've never seen that happen, but it certainly could. A couple billion in damages due to a MS security hole... that'll get you some press coverage, none of it good. I really hope MS is taking these security problems seriously and not just pretending to because they've been forced into a corner.
Must be pacific time, since it just changed to this:
Discovered on: August 11, 2003
Last Updated on: August 12, 2003 08:37:01 AM
It's 12:36 here. Perhaps my browser cache is just damn slow in refreshing. Or perhaps I'm posting to one of those alternate reality slashdots I keep reading about here.
I wonder if they corrected the link based on this slashdot post? Rather amusing to see a linking error redirected through such a strange pipeline to find its way back to you.
You're right. The link in the original article I sumbitted was from Symantec's website. Don't think I surf windows security bulletins for fun. :P
Discovered on: August 11, 2003
Last Updated on: August 12, 2003 07:03:31 AM
Looks like Symantec fixed the bad link this morning (probably as I was reading it judging by the time) since they are pointing to MS03-026. Nice to know they are checking up on the validity of their security posts. I wonder what time zone that datestamp on their article is from. I'm EST and I swear I didn't get to work until 7:15AM.
Actually, you were right. We're talking about different patches for some reason. Now isn't this interesting...
/boggle
/sigh
The link to the MS patch in the original article is to the wrong patch. I was rather surprised by that as I'd simply followed the patch link from Symantec's page to get there. So I decided to check out Symantec's page again and now theirs is also pointing to the right article.
Discovered on: August 11, 2003
Last Updated on: August 12, 2003 07:03:31 AM
Looks like someone caught it and edited it at about the same time I read it this morning. This is what I get for skipping coffee this morning when I get into work. An extra five minutes making a pot would probably have done it.
No, March 26th. Read the MS bulletin.
:P
"V1.0 (March 26, 2003): Bulletin Created."
Or the patch date.
"Release Date: March 25, 2003"
So I was off by a day. pffft.
Actually I like the "shutdown /a" option someone posted earlier. Short and sweet. But that's handy too for preventing this sort of thing in the future.
If you want to stop the timer from fscking with you, simply set your clock back a few hours right after the timer appears. Any time you subtract from the clock is added to the timer. This will give you time to install the patches. We got lucky, this one is mostly harmless. This vulnerability was patched on March 26th, btw.
It's a bit difficult for a corporate user to get away with flat out installing Linux on his box, as that sort of thing shows up rather quickly in security audits.
;)
Where I work, we have 3 or 4 developers who use Linux. They requested it when hired, and other than making sure they don't have rogue DHCP servers screwing up our networks, we have a hands-off policy where we don't officially support the box because it's not Windows. Unofficially I help them all the time, of course.
What gets me is Cygwin. The last time I ran a software audit, I checked for Cygwin just for a goof. HALF THE COMPANY (that's 50 people) has Cygwin installed. Well, why not? It lets you comply with management's wishes for a Windows world, but still gives you the lion's share of Linux's power. If you count Cygwin I'll wager you'll find the 1% figure to be much lower than reality.
Of course, if you're comfortable with Cygwin, switching to Linux is that much easier.
It's the only way I know of to sit on your ass all day long and lose weight without exercise... other than going the Ghandi route, anyway. Of course, you'll have to switch to Michelob Ultra if you want to continue drinking beer. :)
Seriously tho, give the Atkins diet books a read sometime. It takes a bit of work to switch your eating habits from carb rich to carb lite, but honestly after the first week it's a piece of cake. Wait, can't have cake... dammit. You can have Leek and Mushroom pie tho.
Yes, the guy who invented the diet died. No, the diet didn't kill him. Well, maybe the sugar deprivation made him lightheaded which is why he fell, but I guess we'll never know...
I've got a 2002 model with the Monsoon and it's pretty good. The default settings from the factory were, of course, rather terrible. After some tuning on both the stereo and my Archos MP3 Player it makes very good sound. You get much better sound from the rear speakers. I was thinking I'd need to add a kicker to boost the bass but the monsoon surprised me, I think since it can already shake the mirrors (and my glasses) it's good enough as is.
;)
The only real complaint I've got with the sound is that it is incredibly easy to hit the resonance frequency of the door panels with loud music, and when that happens you get the nastiest burst of noise. It's really bad in cold weather. I'm planning to pop open the panels at some point and insulate the speakers to give them more kick and put an end to the noise. Once that's done I doubt I'll bother upgrading the sound system until the speakers die.
I just have to say... for the price, you can't touch this car for comfort, performance, and safety. I'm beginning to think I should have bought the Turbo-S model. I have the 1.8 Turbo and up around 120MPH it would really, really benefit from that 6th gear. Gas mileage in these cars is sick... if you actually know how to drive a stick properly you can get 45mpg even in city traffic. It's like the poor man's Audi TT
Look, I'm all for a good star wars mmorpg... but this isn't it. I've played in the beta.
It looks and feels like Anarchy Online. It's actually a pretty boring game. So far, it's been plagued by the same kinds of problems Everquest had, including the same lack of customer support and generally shoddy game design. They've had several patches that were nothing but nerf-fests and introduced more bugs than they fixed. You've got about a one in one thousand chance of ending up with a force-sensitive character, so forget about ever playing a Jedi.
Sure, they'll iron this thing out eventually. Once a lot of people start playing it and player communities take hold, it'll probably be fun. Once they get the 100 or so feautres they left out of the initial release added, it'll be a better game. Once the playerbase beats them into submission and forces them to make a few obvious, common sense design changes that should have been in from the beginning, it'll be a better game. It'll also probably be 2007.
If this game ends up being fun, it will be in spite of Sony, not because of Sony. Just like Everquest. Remember that this is not truly a LucasArts game.
Honestly I'd hold out for Worlds of Warcraft. Blizzard will treat its customers far better than Sony does.
While it's certainly true that under the contract, Novell may be obligated to enforce IP claims on behalf of SCO, but doesn't Novell set those terms? It is not in Novell's best interest to attack Linux, as Linux is now and will continue to be a fundamental part of their business.
Can SCO force Novell to do something that is not in thier own best interests?
What's to stop Novell from just GPLing the parts of the copied code?
What's to stop Novell from charging Bruce Perens a one time only $0.75 licensing fee on behalf of all Linux users?
I'll second this. I've got a 3Ware card running a 4-disk RAID5 (100GB WDCs) under Suse Linux 7.3 on a dual Athlon 1800XP tyan board with 64bit/66MHz bus, and it owns every raid system I've benchmarked here in the office.
I even ran it up against a real SCSI RAID5 array running on 10,000RPM Seagate Cheetah drives (again 4 disks) and it decimated SCSI for write speed, the 3Ware card was easily 5x faster. It tied it for read speed, but the SCSI still beat it in access time (5ms vs 16ms). The SCSI raid card was one of Adaptec's best, $800 but I forget the name now. Still, that's damn good performance for something 1/4 the cost. I've even got the benchmarks around here somewhere...
If you are going to build a raid for a server, and you decide not to use 66MHz/64bit cards for your array controllers (scsi OR ide), kindly take this ball peen hammer and go stand in the corner whacking yourself in the head with it for several hours.
The 3Ware cards will do a hot spare. I'm not sure about the competition. I spent some time at 3Ware's boot at Linuxworld in NYC back in 2000 and they blew me away, so the next time we had to build a server here at work I built a 4-drive (WDC 100GB) RAID-5 on a 3Ware 7850. Got it up and running under Suse 7.3, hosts a big ole postgres database. I've got 3 drives for data and the fourth as a hot spare.
Now, here's an interesting bit... Compaq had a technology in their servers I remember seeing that would stripe the *free space* across the disks as well as the data. Your "hot spare" would actually be a member in the array with data on it... each disk would have enough free space on it so that if a drive died, the array would rebuild the missing data and write it in filling up all this free space across the entire array. You'd still have your parity information at this point, so you could handle a second drive failure and not lose the array.
Stripe the free space as well as the parity information. Good idea. Why the hell don't I see this more often? You can survive a 2-drive failure on a RAID-5 with it. Hell, there's really no reason you couldn't add in multiple "hot spare" drives and stripe your array across them so you could survive losing 3 or more disks at a time. I'm not sure why you'd want to do that, but I'm sure it'd be useful in some applications, and at any rate striping the usual single hot spare gives you better performance than letting it sit there doing nothing.
Never understood why that technology hasn't started popping into IDE RAIDs... considering the qeustionable reliability of IDE drives these days, I think it would be a huge selling point for any vendor that offered it. If anyone knows more about this, please do comment on it.
Had a Fujitsu 40GB report it was failing (via SMART), so I popped a brand new Fujitsu 40GB drive in off our parts shelf to clone the old one to, and it reported the same error. After spending an hour making sure it really was the drives failing and not the machine I cloned it over onto an old maxtor and sent both in for warranty service. Got new ones back promptly in 11 days. I'll have to keep an eye on them now as well, guess I'll be putting them on the shelf with the spare 75GB IBM Deskstar...
Stop using commercial software. Completely. I'm quite serious.
Back in the day when the 80s warez scene was going strong, we really didn't have that option. Enter Linux/GPL/OSS software. These days, I can do anything on OSS that I can do on commercial software. Why the hell would I pony up $500 for Photoshop when Gimp can do almost everything Photoshop can do? Why spend $300 on Windows when Linux is storming up behind it and will soon pass it in features, reliability, and usefulness? Use free databases, tell Oracle to stuff their $20,000 per processor license up their ass. I'm not paying any company enough money to buy a decent car for a bunch of ones and zeros. To me, that's blatant extortion.
So I'm taking myself out of the loop by learning to use all of the free stuff. Not just me, either... we've been offering open source solutions along with closed source solutions regularly to our customers, and since about 8 months ago they have been going 100% with the open source solutions because the price tag difference is stunning.
Sure, there might be a few applications that you simply cannot find oss solutions for. Those are few and far between now, and they are going to get a lot fewer and farther in the future. Itches to scratch, and all that.
Microsoft was right... OSS was very much like a cancer. It's a cancer of the software industry, and hopefully one day it will kill its host and provide all of us with a great deal more freedom than we have right now. If you think that sounds laughable, just remember that until about 5 years ago very, very few people had heard of Linux. These days it is a household word among anyone who uses a computer.
You're getting there... there's just a few problems.
Through and all variants of it were long ago replaced with "thru", just like Though was replaced with "tho". They wouldn't reference the FBI, it's always "the man" nowadays. Please has been universally replaced with "plz". There are new terms for "own" these days as well. "0wn" refers to posessing something, whereas "pwn" refers to kicking someone's ass be it physically, verbally in debate, or by proving them wrong.
Use of letters M W N H etc are replaced sometimes with a combination of slash characters, changing them to |\/| |/\| |\| |-| respectively. I'll leave those out, in this font at least they are a terrific blow to reading comprehension.
I also wonder if "our father" shouldn't be replaced with something else... Linus perhaps, or a reference to root... don't know really, nothing I think of seems to fit but I have this nagging suspicion that "our father" ought to go.
Also a bit too much with the "t0 t00 tw0", all of those have collapsed into just plain "2" now.
So we end up with this...
0wr F4th3R, wh0 0wnz h34\/3n, j00 r0x0rs! M4y 4|| 0wr b4s3 s0m3d4y Bl0ng t0 j00! M4y j00 0wn 34rth juss |1|3 j00 0wn h34\/3n. G1v3 us th1s d4y 0wr w4r3z, mp3z, 'n pr0n thru a ph4t |. 4nd cut us s0m3 sl4ck wh3n w3 4ct lik3 n00b l4m3rz, juss 4s w3 g1v3 n00bz 4 l34rn1n wh3n th3y r l4m3 2 us. Plz d0n't l3t us 0wn s0m3 p00r d00d'z b0x3n wh3n w3'r3 2 p1ss3d 2 th1nk 4b0ut wh4t's r1ght 4nd wr0ng, 4nd 1f j00 c0uld k33p th3 m4n 0ff 0wr b4ckz, w3'd 'pr3c14t3 1t. F0r j00 0wn 4ll 0wr b0x3n 43v3r 4n 3v3r^#*)@&$NO CARRIER