"anti-hype"? "non commercial?" "beating out wannabe blockbusters?"
As I was walking out the door this morning there was about the billionth blaring commercial for the Blair Witch Project showing one of about two good scenes. There was so much hype around the movie it made me sick.
I heard no mention at all in the entire essay of "The Sixth Sense" an excellent, intelligent movie that had little or no hype that has been beating out the Blair Witch Project for weeks now. Media analysts are now saying it may beat out records set by Star Wars: TPM.
Katz says to grasp the success of the movie is to go see it in a theater with 200 teens glued to their chair. I saw it a crowded afternoon at the Fremont, one of the artsiest and teenager-ists movie theaters in the area, and I don't think anyone was glued to their chair, nobody looked scared at all, and rather than screams, there was laughter and dissapointment as we walked out of the movie.
As for the internet fueling the hype, in some areas, yes. But also on the internet are some of the biggest critics of the Blair Witch Project. I didn't see a single criticsm of the movie on the airwaves, but nearly a dozen in popular places on the Internet.
Write shareware. Of course in the linux world, people aren't as willing to pay for software, but it'll bring him in some cash, get him experience, and nobody will bother him about business liscences and being underage and all that stuff.
Their ways of making money using your open-source software knowledge is almost exactly the same way you make money in the computer industry, period. There's nothing new in here. Work for a help desk, make your own help desk, write your own software, sell software - all these things people have been doing for years, long before all the hype around linux and open source came about.
I can see where they're complaining. Penguins may be pretty good around people but they are still wild animals. It's just plain tacky to put them in a little cage like that with newspapers on the ground and put them up for display. If they wanted to have a real show and not piss of the greenpeace types they really should have set up a miniature version of the penguin habitat at Sea World (like a big terrarium/aquarium with a pool and rocks and ice and stuff) Now *that* would be classy.
It might really be a step in the right direction. If they adopt algorithms developed in foreign nations, they might realize how silly it is to try to stop exportation of strong crypto. It is also a good decision in that they realize that the encryptions they've been using are going to rapidly start becoming less trustworthy as faster and larger computers as well as distributed computing become more and more common.
Speaking of distributed computing, does anyone know if distributed.net has plans to add a new contest for these encryption schemes?
I think Andover.net is secretly headed by none other than Microsoft. They innocently buy up every popular pro-linux site, and then one day.. wham! all sites are automatically redirected to microsoft.com
Or I know, Slashdot is the one who really owns andover instead, and that Rob is slowly forcing them all to use the buggy slash code, so then he can have backdoor access to hundreds of websites, to try and take over the world!
You guys got any other conspiracy theories?
It's not just the current business climate
on
R.I.P. Linuxbox
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· Score: 1
It's everywhere.. it reminds me a lot of BBS's in the old days.. tons of people would come and freeload as the sysop slaved away, and only a very small few would contribute. It's nice to think that you can get by on grateful people giving you money for your hard work, but it just never works out.
I think I would have liked them better if they were all 'escaped convicted rapists'. I ended up hating them because they were three immature kids without an ounce of sense and with a vocabulary of about four words.
They may have done a great job about bonding with each other, but a lousy one at bonding with me. I may have been able to get along with them when I was in jr. high, but you think that even though they were immature that, as filmmakers, the age where they thought filming people going pee was hilarious would have passed long ago.
Sheesh, there's some sort of "Giant Linux Expo Of the Century and you really have to be there!" every week.
God help me if all movies are going to be like tha
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
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· Score: 1
Katz wants more films shot on Radio Shack camcorders? more films starring people like Heather Donahue? More movies that EXPECT you to visit the website beforehand for the vital information to fill in the holes in the plot?
I've already posted my comments on the movie itself, but I feel the need to post on Katz's article.
The camcoders were horrible. I think, yes, movies can use footage shot by the actors themselves for great effect, but not the entire movie! For a higher budget hidden cameras could be installed in the forest to film them from above as they passed by.. possibly from the viewpoint of whoever was after them for great effect. Even if they couldn't do that, for god's sake they could have gotten a steadycam.
Heather Donahue was another annoyance. Not only did she have a grating scream and nagging voice the whole movie, she had a permanent sour look even when she was smiling at the beginning of the movie! I know nobody looks good after days in the woods, but they could have gotten someone who looked better than that. Everyone talks about her acting skills as well, but all she did was overreact to everything. They weren't really scared when they were lost, or when they came around to that same place again, because they were going to where they were supposed to. Those reactions were about as 'genuine' as any other movie.
I'm not the kind of person who will see a film because it is an "indie" film or because it had either a very large or a very small budget. I judge all films equally, and the BWP wasn't the great film everyone thinks it was. Too high a budget can be bad, but too low of a budget can be equally devastating.
Obviously you never looked at the subject line. I did not write those comments. I picked them out of the "talkback" section of the ZDnet article because I thought they were funny. As for frontpage, i handcoded it, and I put it all in blockquotes and italics to distinguish it as a quote rather than comments from myself. HR's ended up separating them better than the regular
tag. And BTW, I have neither a wife or a g/f, because that "H" stands for Heather.
System is Up! How about ZDNet post a small sidebar with this info. They make is sound like the system is down and staying down. Sounds great on a bash-Microsoft story, but very misleading for a neutral news story (if that exists anymore)!
Hackers are bastards anyway. If you are, don't you have something better to do than mess with other peoples computers. Get a job, get a life, go find a real woman instead of that deflated one under your bed....
To Mike West... no, there is no such thing as an objctive story from ZDNet when it comes to Microsoft. This became obvious to me when they wrote that 'story' a while back about how big, terrible Microsoft dared to make the Java VM an optional component of IE5's minimal installation. It was obvious to anyone who had 2 brain cells to rub together that it was a (poorly and easily countered by truth) manufactured piece of MS-bashing. And now I see ZDNet has stooped to quoting hacker groups as if they were legitimate sources of information. How sad.
What a fabulous (and extremely brave) move by Microsoft. Bravo. This kind of open challenge takes enormous guts and nerve that few in the technical realm are capable of endorsing. Now hopefully others (the UNIX mafia -- SUN, IBM, HP are you watching, listening - do you have the chutzpah?) will follow suite. Lets only hope that rampant mediocrity does not blindside technical brilliance and innovation...DM..
Cheap shots at MS are easy enough. I'm sick and tired of all these whiny, self-proclaimed gurus talking about "big brother" being so clumbsy and inept. Microsoft has been the most significant factor in the information technology revolution. I make the really big bucks because of MS, and I love to develop using MS. A lot of what I am hearing amounts to sour grapes and really insignificant mud slinging. Especially, those of you who think that only Unix, or some look alike thereof are real, Get a life!
The site is up and it looks like the videos are available for download. It's been slashdotted something fierce, however, so good luck downloading anything.
The "Jet Set" had style, beauty and class. Everyone turns on the TV and appreciates the beautiful people on there and wants to be like them. Who wouldn't want to be Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts? Bill Gates is rich and talented (hey, to make that much money you have to be), but he's a fsking dork. Everyone pokes fun at his glasses and his haircut and his goofy expressions. They call him a dork: Who would call Brad Pitt a dork? Who would call Brad Pitt anything but good looking and a good actor? (Don't argue, I'm just using him as an example). The only people who can appreciate the knowledgable "net set" are people in it already. To the rest of the world Linus Torvalds is a funny looking geek with an accent. They can't understand a word we utter once we start speaking geek, and the only thing we do to ourselves when we do that is ostracize ourselves further.
The only geeks that are going to be in any sort of elite are the ones like the people in 'Hackers' or 'The Net', the ones who say "I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV."
It is far too much. Some have suggested one just turn off their TV, but some of us need or want to keep on top of important events in politics and the world, and the only way for the average is through the media.
About the nicest thing I've heard about JFK Jr was that he was good looking, which I don't even agree with. So let's get bombarded with pictures of him looking cute saluting his dad, looking cute at a family reunion. Oh the poor Kennedy clan. Screw all the ordinary people who made stupid mistakes while flying their plane and were too incompetent to get out of it. They're not special. The pain and suffering their families had to go through is nothing compared to the poor, rich, kennedys, who only have to put their name on a ballot and get elected because one of their relatives was shot a long time ago
Who the hell takes some spoiled rich kid as the defining person in their generation? It's ridiculous! Camelot is sentimental BS, and the original Kennedy wasn't that great and had more affairs in his office than Bill Clinton. If people don't remember we had the revolutionary war so we wouldn't have to deal with royal families. I swear if Bill Clinton was shot during his first term we would be hearing about the 'beautiful' chelsea clinton for the rest of our lives, until she finally keeled over, then it would be a national tragedy.
I'm tired of it. I'm tired of people pretending to care. I'm tired of the constant coverage and the commentary by the reporters and all the old Kennedy family videos. Why doesn't a bomb just hit them during a reunion and so we could deal with all the false public mourning all at once rather than this extended farce.
Yes, but in the animal kingdom the "better billygoats" don't go sneak around the dominant billygoats and rape their she-goats (users) just for the hell of it. Real billygoats challenge the head male, and if they lose they go away, and if they win they get the she-goats (users).
cDc and Back Orifice is more like a tick, that is set out to harm the head billygoats, but does it by infesting all the she-goats. Sure, the head billygoat is hurt, but the she-goats are hurt even more, and if they come to the conclusion that the head billygoat is bad, they are left with no replacement billygoat. More likely, they will think the ticks are bad and will try to get rid of them.
The only real way to challenge microsoft and win it's "she-goats" is as a competitor (Linux, BeOS, whatever), not as a parasite.
I found the imacs looked nice on TV and everything, but once I saw one in real life I was less than impressed. I'll assume the ibooks look pretty much the same IRL. The only reason you guys like it so much is because you spend all your time in grey cubicles. Go visit the Big Room sometime. I wish they would make something for the non-rainbow color crowd.. like a shiny metallic case.. now THAT would be cool.
A few hundred years ago in many cases minorities (natives) were forced to speak English and were beaten if they used their native language. They wanted to assimilate the natives into their culture "for their own good".
My question is: is there any difference between advertising blitzes trying to coerce minorities into getting computers for their own good and forcing them to speak another language for their own good? Isn't it racist to say that what these "minorities" are doing on their free time isn't worthy, and that they should be spending time online instead?
I love computers. It's a hobby, it's my major, and it's my job. I definitley have benefits to having a computer at home. However, should some kid who really loves to say, build model airplanes give up his free time to a computer when all he really wants to do is build airplanes in real life? It would have little or no benefit for him compared to his current hobby.
I got sucked into the computer world, and if not for computers I would still probably want to be a marine biologist. I would have never wasted so many hours online that I have, instead reading books or actually getting outside.
Sure, computers are nice for research reports and typing up essays, so by all means have all schools allow access to computers for their students, but it is not necessary to have them in every household.
Sounds like some members of Congress are trying to rile up some good old FUD about Clinton declaring martial law. Think about it, when they get enough people convinced that the president is going to go crazy with his power, they get enough support to pass an amendment further limiting the president's power, and not coincidentally increasing their own.
However, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, if the president *does indeed* have too much power, that's why we have the Legislative and Judicial branches to knock him down a notch. If Congress does that and in turn gains too much power of their own, well then there's the other two to take it away.
Next we'll find that some unknown company has patented "A disc shaped object that rotates on any pole, or axle, that is used to facilitate transportation" and that they're demanding a "compensation agreement" from all manufacturers who use what they refer to as a "wheel".
Gentlemen, phase three. We place a giant "laser" on the moon. Let me demonstrate.
The "laser" is powerful enough to destroy every city on the planet at will. We'll turn the moon into what I like to call a "Death Star".
Since my "death star" laser was invented by the noted Cambridge physicist, Dr. Parsons. I thought we'd name it in his honor-- the "Alan Parsons Project."
"I agree!" seriously though, I'm still in college, so many of you may say I don't know what the real world is like. However, in all these talks about being in a sweatshop, etc, etc, etc, nobody ever seems to give much in the way of reasons for doing it. You guys seem to make enough money, it's not like you need to work all that extra time to support children, and what I gather is that many don't get paid for the extra hours. Again, what's the motivation?
I, unlike most computer geeks, cannot pull off all nighters. I often sleep 8 hours a night or more, and I *need* sleep to do anything more productive than idle on IRC. If any future bosses try to make me do anything like that, I'll give them a big fat 'screw you'. Heck, I know many business owners who work less than some of you guys claim to, and they get a lot more from working more hours.
Slashdot Mirror
"anti-hype"? "non commercial?" "beating out wannabe blockbusters?"
As I was walking out the door this morning there was about the billionth blaring commercial for the Blair Witch Project showing one of about two good scenes. There was so much hype around the movie it made me sick.
I heard no mention at all in the entire essay of "The Sixth Sense" an excellent, intelligent movie that had little or no hype that has been beating out the Blair Witch Project for weeks now. Media analysts are now saying it may beat out records set by Star Wars: TPM.
Katz says to grasp the success of the movie is to go see it in a theater with 200 teens glued to their chair. I saw it a crowded afternoon at the Fremont, one of the artsiest and teenager-ists movie theaters in the area, and I don't think anyone was glued to their chair, nobody looked scared at all, and rather than screams, there was laughter and dissapointment as we walked out of the movie.
As for the internet fueling the hype, in some areas, yes. But also on the internet are some of the biggest critics of the Blair Witch Project. I didn't see a single criticsm of the movie on the airwaves, but nearly a dozen in popular places on the Internet.
Write shareware. Of course in the linux world, people aren't as willing to pay for software, but it'll bring him in some cash, get him experience, and nobody will bother him about business liscences and being underage and all that stuff.
Their ways of making money using your open-source software knowledge is almost exactly the same way you make money in the computer industry, period. There's nothing new in here. Work for a help desk, make your own help desk, write your own software, sell software - all these things people have been doing for years, long before all the hype around linux and open source came about.
I'm glad to see the courts are throwing out silly copyrights.. Now if they'll only start throwing out the silly patents everywhere..
I can see where they're complaining. Penguins may be pretty good around people but they are still wild animals. It's just plain tacky to put them in a little cage like that with newspapers on the ground and put them up for display. If they wanted to have a real show and not piss of the greenpeace types they really should have set up a miniature version of the penguin habitat at Sea World (like a big terrarium/aquarium with a pool and rocks and ice and stuff) Now *that* would be classy.
It might really be a step in the right direction. If they adopt algorithms developed in foreign nations, they might realize how silly it is to try to stop exportation of strong crypto. It is also a good decision in that they realize that the encryptions they've been using are going to rapidly start becoming less trustworthy as faster and larger computers as well as distributed computing become more and more common.
Speaking of distributed computing, does anyone know if distributed.net has plans to add a new contest for these encryption schemes?
I think Andover.net is secretly headed by none other than Microsoft. They innocently buy up every popular pro-linux site, and then one day.. wham! all sites are automatically redirected to microsoft.com
Or I know, Slashdot is the one who really owns andover instead, and that Rob is slowly forcing them all to use the buggy slash code, so then he can have backdoor access to hundreds of websites, to try and take over the world!
You guys got any other conspiracy theories?
It's everywhere.. it reminds me a lot of BBS's in the old days.. tons of people would come and freeload as the sysop slaved away, and only a very small few would contribute. It's nice to think that you can get by on grateful people giving you money for your hard work, but it just never works out.
I think I would have liked them better if they were all 'escaped convicted rapists'. I ended up hating them because they were three immature kids without an ounce of sense and with a vocabulary of about four words.
They may have done a great job about bonding with each other, but a lousy one at bonding with me. I may have been able to get along with them when I was in jr. high, but you think that even though they were immature that, as filmmakers, the age where they thought filming people going pee was hilarious would have passed long ago.
Sheesh, there's some sort of "Giant Linux Expo Of the Century and you really have to be there!" every week.
Katz wants more films shot on Radio Shack camcorders? more films starring people like Heather Donahue? More movies that EXPECT you to visit the website beforehand for the vital information to fill in the holes in the plot?
I've already posted my comments on the movie itself, but I feel the need to post on Katz's article.
The camcoders were horrible. I think, yes, movies can use footage shot by the actors themselves for great effect, but not the entire movie! For a higher budget hidden cameras could be installed in the forest to film them from above as they passed by.. possibly from the viewpoint of whoever was after them for great effect. Even if they couldn't do that, for god's sake they could have gotten a steadycam.
Heather Donahue was another annoyance. Not only did she have a grating scream and nagging voice the whole movie, she had a permanent sour look even when she was smiling at the beginning of the movie! I know nobody looks good after days in the woods, but they could have gotten someone who looked better than that. Everyone talks about her acting skills as well, but all she did was overreact to everything. They weren't really scared when they were lost, or when they came around to that same place again, because they were going to where they were supposed to. Those reactions were about as 'genuine' as any other movie.
I'm not the kind of person who will see a film because it is an "indie" film or because it had either a very large or a very small budget. I judge all films equally, and the BWP wasn't the great film everyone thinks it was. Too high a budget can be bad, but too low of a budget can be equally devastating.
tag. And BTW, I have neither a wife or a g/f, because that "H" stands for Heather.
The site is up and it looks like the videos are available for download. It's been slashdotted something fierce, however, so good luck downloading anything.
The "Jet Set" had style, beauty and class. Everyone turns on the TV and appreciates the beautiful people on there and wants to be like them. Who wouldn't want to be Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts? Bill Gates is rich and talented (hey, to make that much money you have to be), but he's a fsking dork. Everyone pokes fun at his glasses and his haircut and his goofy expressions. They call him a dork: Who would call Brad Pitt a dork? Who would call Brad Pitt anything but good looking and a good actor? (Don't argue, I'm just using him as an example). The only people who can appreciate the knowledgable "net set" are people in it already. To the rest of the world Linus Torvalds is a funny looking geek with an accent. They can't understand a word we utter once we start speaking geek, and the only thing we do to ourselves when we do that is ostracize ourselves further.
The only geeks that are going to be in any sort of elite are the ones like the people in 'Hackers' or 'The Net', the ones who say "I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV."
It is far too much. Some have suggested one just turn off their TV, but some of us need or want to keep on top of important events in politics and the world, and the only way for the average is through the media.
About the nicest thing I've heard about JFK Jr was that he was good looking, which I don't even agree with. So let's get bombarded with pictures of him looking cute saluting his dad, looking cute at a family reunion. Oh the poor Kennedy clan. Screw all the ordinary people who made stupid mistakes while flying their plane and were too incompetent to get out of it. They're not special. The pain and suffering their families had to go through is nothing compared to the poor, rich, kennedys, who only have to put their name on a ballot and get elected because one of their relatives was shot a long time ago
Who the hell takes some spoiled rich kid as the defining person in their generation? It's ridiculous! Camelot is sentimental BS, and the original Kennedy wasn't that great and had more affairs in his office than Bill Clinton. If people don't remember we had the revolutionary war so we wouldn't have to deal with royal families. I swear if Bill Clinton was shot during his first term we would be hearing about the 'beautiful' chelsea clinton for the rest of our lives, until she finally keeled over, then it would be a national tragedy.
I'm tired of it. I'm tired of people pretending to care. I'm tired of the constant coverage and the commentary by the reporters and all the old Kennedy family videos. Why doesn't a bomb just hit them during a reunion and so we could deal with all the false public mourning all at once rather than this extended farce.
(P.S. Be sure to check out the Misanthropic Bitch's commentary at http://bitch.shutdown.com/kennedy.html (no, that's not me)
Yes, but in the animal kingdom the "better billygoats" don't go sneak around the dominant billygoats and rape their she-goats (users) just for the hell of it. Real billygoats challenge the head male, and if they lose they go away, and if they win they get the she-goats (users).
cDc and Back Orifice is more like a tick, that is set out to harm the head billygoats, but does it by infesting all the she-goats. Sure, the head billygoat is hurt, but the she-goats are hurt even more, and if they come to the conclusion that the head billygoat is bad, they are left with no replacement billygoat. More likely, they will think the ticks are bad and will try to get rid of them.
The only real way to challenge microsoft and win it's "she-goats" is as a competitor (Linux, BeOS, whatever), not as a parasite.
I found the imacs looked nice on TV and everything, but once I saw one in real life I was less than impressed. I'll assume the ibooks look pretty much the same IRL. The only reason you guys like it so much is because you spend all your time in grey cubicles. Go visit the Big Room sometime. I wish they would make something for the non-rainbow color crowd.. like a shiny metallic case.. now THAT would be cool.
A few hundred years ago in many cases minorities (natives) were forced to speak English and were beaten if they used their native language. They wanted to assimilate the natives into their culture "for their own good".
My question is: is there any difference between advertising blitzes trying to coerce minorities into getting computers for their own good and forcing them to speak another language for their own good? Isn't it racist to say that what these "minorities" are doing on their free time isn't worthy, and that they should be spending time online instead?
I love computers. It's a hobby, it's my major, and it's my job. I definitley have benefits to having a computer at home. However, should some kid who really loves to say, build model airplanes give up his free time to a computer when all he really wants to do is build airplanes in real life? It would have little or no benefit for him compared to his current hobby.
I got sucked into the computer world, and if not for computers I would still probably want to be a marine biologist. I would have never wasted so many hours online that I have, instead reading books or actually getting outside.
Sure, computers are nice for research reports and typing up essays, so by all means have all schools allow access to computers for their students, but it is not necessary to have them in every household.
Sounds like some members of Congress are trying to rile up some good old FUD about Clinton declaring martial law. Think about it, when they get enough people convinced that the president is going to go crazy with his power, they get enough support to pass an amendment further limiting the president's power, and not coincidentally increasing their own.
However, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, if the president *does indeed* have too much power, that's why we have the Legislative and Judicial branches to knock him down a notch. If Congress does that and in turn gains too much power of their own, well then there's the other two to take it away.
Next we'll find that some unknown company has patented "A disc shaped object that rotates on any pole, or axle, that is used to facilitate transportation" and that they're demanding a "compensation agreement" from all manufacturers who use what they refer to as a "wheel".
Gentlemen, phase three. We place a giant "laser" on the moon. Let me demonstrate.
The "laser" is powerful enough to destroy every city on the planet at will. We'll turn the moon into what I like to call a "Death Star".
Since my "death star" laser was invented by the noted Cambridge physicist, Dr. Parsons. I thought we'd name it in his honor-- the "Alan Parsons Project."
I thought someone (ICANN?) was cracking down on this? Or is this considered to be something different than grabbing coke.com and selling it?
---------------
Vote Libertarian.
"I agree!"
seriously though, I'm still in college, so many of you may say I don't know what the real world is like. However, in all these talks about being in a sweatshop, etc, etc, etc, nobody ever seems to give much in the way of reasons for doing it. You guys seem to make enough money, it's not like you need to work all that extra time to support children, and what I gather is that many don't get paid for the extra hours. Again, what's the motivation?
I, unlike most computer geeks, cannot pull off all nighters. I often sleep 8 hours a night or more, and I *need* sleep to do anything more productive than idle on IRC. If any future bosses try to make me do anything like that, I'll give them a big fat 'screw you'. Heck, I know many business owners who work less than some of you guys claim to, and they get a lot more from working more hours.
P.S. What *is* a wild turkey?