I have real issues with some of the reviews these guys post. In particular they don't seem to pay attention to any of the background justification in the movie.
For example - in the Matrix they spend a lot of effort pointing out that the jumps and kung-fu moves the protagonists pull off are impossible according to the laws of physics. COmpletely ignoring half the story which explains that people can do these impossible things because it's just a computer simulation they're hacking. They even seem to have major problems handling the concept of bullet time - "Trinity (one of the hackers) jumps five feet off the ground and pauses in mid air before kicking a policeman"..... tsk tsk
Sure the whole 'batteries' argument is bad movie physics, but most of the rest of their review is them applying textbook physics in places where it doesn't belong.
Or how abotu star wars where they point out that the force fields are transparent to light but they seem to stop the 'laser beams' - ignoring the fact that the weapons used in star wars clearly are something different from laser beams because they don't travel at the speed of light.
Basically these guys don't cover the genuinely insulting movie physics where writers setup some futuristic technology e.g. time travel - then
Of course, given that I worked as an astronomer writing papers on asteroids and comet impacts I've made more than a few analysis of Deep Impact and Armageddon. (both were bad in different ways, but I liked Armageddon for it's stupidity). Their reviews are rather shallow and I've pointed out a few errors to them, never had a response though.
Used to deal with all this stuff, It was especially important to us because we lived in Ireland and so we felt we had to promote Edgeworth's case over that upstart Kuiper. Anyway - now I'm in the US, I work as a software developer and.... I DJ at raves all the time these days.
One of th more original titles - like a cut down version of Acid on the GBA - sadly not available in north america. Instead we get more crappy platformers.
This is a bad idea from what I hear, the worm throws worms out to the internet with spoofed source addresses. Which means the host will start sending responses back to all those spoofed addresses so you could find yourself with a network storm anyway.
Just picked up a Jukebox Multimedia for $300 - 20 gigs + support for recording and low end DivX movies. Spent a lot of time interviewing people with it at Defcon, not great quality but a versatile little box.
Has Anyone in the area noticed the relatively recent addition of the pedestrian crossing signs outide the Oracle building showing a family of penguins crossing the road. Especially cute since the area also has signs showing ducks crossing the road.
I used to use it a lot back when I was doing astronomy, I used to make movies and I wrote a load of scripts for IM which basically worked on directories full of jpegs to do crossfades, motion blur, and all sorts of other effects. Some of these movies of asteroids and comets still make it onto the occasional TV slot. The originals were rendered in POV ray, but IM was more important since it was essential for editing and compositing.
It still runs today producing the map of asteroids (http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/), even though I've moved on a long time ago. For a while I even used ImageMagick as the core for a webcam motion detection program - rescale, blur, edge-detect, subtract differences and then count the total intensity of the output image - it worked pretty well, although it was a little slow.
I think I've created more art with ImageMagick than I've done with the Gimp.
Funnily enough when I think of specialist music retailers I think of the stores that concentrate on one type of music, like all those DJ stores which still carry most of their releases on Vinyl only. These small stores have their financial problems, but they tend to keep a loyal customer base regardless of internet downloads. I go to my favourite places, bring some beer, listen to records, listen to more records, maybe buy a few. HMV, tower and all the others just don't encourage loyalty, if you tried to just hang around and talk abotu music then the security staff would probably ask you to leave.
They seem to miss the point that plok is a perfect example of how you can make a generic character truly memorable. When the title screen pops up an uptempo bluesy harmonica driven soundtrack kicks in and plok drops in playing the lead, toes a tappin. The music in the game is fantastic - Tim Follin is a great composer of video game music.
Then we have the whole presentation of plok, he runs around, jumps, spins and throws punches and kicks at the enemies. Literally, his arms and legs fly away, and sometimes you find his dismembers body bouncing along trying to recover a lost leg so he can jump again.
And to add to the Plok family there's Grandpa Plok, which we see in a set of levels that are all sepia toned. And there's many powered up variations, helicopter, cycler, unicycler, tank, rockets, sherlok plok, super plok.
AT LAST, A REAL HERO! Plok is an irresistible, irrepressible, unstoppable, highly improbable and downright dangerous bundle of pure energy. Plok does not like fleas. Plok has the amazing ability to fire all his body parts at will. Plok can really 'throw' a punch. Plok has a very short fuse; at the slightest irritation those limbs begin to fly. Plok hates fleas. Plok is a true hero, with a heart of gold and joints of the highest-quality velcro. Plok is a man with a mission. He is dedicated to ridding the world of the dreaded Fleas. Plok is a dreamer, a wanderer, a free spirit. He's suave and elegant. He's grade-A, first-class prime cut. Plok really does not like Fleas. Plok is the king of the beautiful island called Akrillic, part of the archipelago Poly-Esta
I play around San Francisco and other places as a club DJ, mixing the latest tunes on old school vinyl and turntables. Forget about mp3's I'm a vinyl fanatic, even when I worked at napster I was still spending thousands of dollars on 12 inch records. I play most club styles, House, breaks, techno, trance, Drum n Bass - whatever they'll let me get away with. This also lead to a radio show - theDMZ - it's supplied to stations as a 2 hour slot (and it's free to non-profit broadcasters)
I'm playing at the DNA lounge in a few weeks - July 10th - slashdotters should drop by on thursday night. Look out for DJ S&M (Is it possible to slashdot a nightclub?)
If you bought their last album (I got the vinyl version) - you got a card which let you go to their web page and download exclusive tracks. Personally I think it's a great idea, I mean most live concert recordings will only be bought by dedicated fans and those people won't be abandoning hte album in favour of these extras (remember the Perl Jam concert series).
One was playing a not entirely legal Power Puff Girls DVD - it seemed to only play the keyframes - while my Samsung POS dvd player handled it fine.
The other problem has been several PS1 discs - Finaly Fantasy 8, Resident Evil 2 - they don't recognise the disc. Not that it matters I still have my old school playstation and it's more than capable of handling these.
I started producing a specialised dance music radio show for kHz networks, now I'm on a few radio stations.
It's somewhat Ironic, when I wrote mp3serv back in '97 it was so I could do internet radio, that little piece of innovation (before anyone ever thought of shoutcast) landed me jobs with media companies in California. But it took getting laid off 3 times last year to give me the time to get my radio show off the ground. Now I'm working again and able to keep up the dj aspirations too.
If you're in San Franciso be sure to check out DJ S&M
This guy has written many high quality scientific papers, he does a lot of work on Cosmology, and yet he was a devout 7th Day Adventist - and therefore believed in creation.
My Girlfriend Signed Up for the DSL service and asked me to install it on her windows machine. So, I popped the disk in and started - it got as far as the minimum requirements then decided that a 233MHz processor was too slow to appreciate broadband connections and refused to go any further.
I just installed the Efficinet networks DSL client, then logged in to the account creation address (which wasn't detailed in the PC info - only the Mac users needed to know this). Created an account and bang... there I was with DSL and none of the baggage the Yahoo attaches.
Once this is stable I'll just use my nice SMC NAT box and let it handle the connection (we're moving in together RSN).
Slashdot Mirror
I have real issues with some of the reviews these guys post. In particular they don't seem to pay attention to any of the background justification in the movie.
For example - in the Matrix they spend a lot of effort pointing out that the jumps and kung-fu moves the protagonists pull off are impossible according to the laws of physics. COmpletely ignoring half the story which explains that people can do these impossible things because it's just a computer simulation they're hacking. They even seem to have major problems handling the concept of bullet time - "Trinity (one of the hackers) jumps five feet off the ground and pauses in mid air before kicking a policeman"..... tsk tsk
Sure the whole 'batteries' argument is bad movie physics, but most of the rest of their review is them applying textbook physics in places where it doesn't belong.
Or how abotu star wars where they point out that the force fields are transparent to light but they seem to stop the 'laser beams' - ignoring the fact that the weapons used in star wars clearly are something different from laser beams because they don't travel at the speed of light.
Basically these guys don't cover the genuinely insulting movie physics where writers setup some futuristic technology e.g. time travel - then
Of course, given that I worked as an astronomer writing papers on asteroids and comet impacts I've made more than a few analysis of Deep Impact and Armageddon. (both were bad in different ways, but I liked Armageddon for it's stupidity). Their reviews are rather shallow and I've pointed out a few errors to them, never had a response though.
Check out this story at vulns.com on how P2P apps bring more than just legal threats. OK... I wrote it in my spare time....
Anyway, it's entirely possible to legally distribute content via p2p, I'm amazed that nobody has really turned it into a fully fledged service.
Used to deal with all this stuff, It was especially important to us because we lived in Ireland and so we felt we had to promote Edgeworth's case over that upstart Kuiper. Anyway - now I'm in the US, I work as a software developer and.... I DJ at raves all the time these days.
truth is stranger than fiction sometimes
One of th more original titles - like a cut down version of Acid on the GBA - sadly not available in north america. Instead we get more crappy platformers.
This is a bad idea from what I hear, the worm throws worms out to the internet with spoofed source addresses. Which means the host will start sending responses back to all those spoofed addresses so you could find yourself with a network storm anyway.
You know the worm has a habit of killing port 135 - so infected machines will show up with refused connections.
CLearly they don't know how to patch windows quickly.....
Wow! At last a worm / power cut link that actually makes sense, what's the bets on Con-Ed moving over to linux in the near future?
Great Got a URL?
Is this it?
http://quidscor.sourceforge.net/
Just picked up a Jukebox Multimedia for $300 - 20 gigs + support for recording and low end DivX movies. Spent a lot of time interviewing people with it at Defcon, not great quality but a versatile little box.
Has Anyone in the area noticed the relatively recent addition of the pedestrian crossing signs outide the Oracle building showing a family of penguins crossing the road. Especially cute since the area also has signs showing ducks crossing the road.
Check out my NEO map from my astronomer days (before this whole interweb thing stole me away)
http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/
It works off the same data and basically plots all the positions every day.
I used to use it a lot back when I was doing astronomy, I used to make movies and I wrote a load of scripts for IM which basically worked on directories full of jpegs to do crossfades, motion blur, and all sorts of other effects. Some of these movies of asteroids and comets still make it onto the occasional TV slot. The originals were rendered in POV ray, but IM was more important since it was essential for editing and compositing.
It still runs today producing the map of asteroids (http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/), even though I've moved on a long time ago.
For a while I even used ImageMagick as the core for a webcam motion detection program - rescale, blur, edge-detect, subtract differences and then count the total intensity of the output image - it worked pretty well, although it was a little slow.
I think I've created more art with ImageMagick than I've done with the Gimp.
Beat me any my friends at a game of caps last night... there is no end to his talents ;-)
Funnily enough when I think of specialist music retailers I think of the stores that concentrate on one type of music, like all those DJ stores which still carry most of their releases on Vinyl only.
These small stores have their financial problems, but they tend to keep a loyal customer base regardless of internet downloads. I go to my favourite places, bring some beer, listen to records, listen to more records, maybe buy a few. HMV, tower and all the others just don't encourage loyalty, if you tried to just hang around and talk abotu music then the security staff would probably ask you to leave.
Anyway.... just an aside
They seem to miss the point that plok is a perfect example of how you can make a generic character truly memorable. When the title screen pops up an uptempo bluesy harmonica driven soundtrack kicks in and plok drops in playing the lead, toes a tappin. The music in the game is fantastic - Tim Follin is a great composer of video game music.
Then we have the whole presentation of plok, he runs around, jumps, spins and throws punches and kicks at the enemies. Literally, his arms and legs fly away, and sometimes you find his dismembers body bouncing along trying to recover a lost leg so he can jump again.
And to add to the Plok family there's Grandpa Plok, which we see in a set of levels that are all sepia toned. And there's many powered up variations, helicopter, cycler, unicycler, tank, rockets, sherlok plok, super plok.
AT LAST, A REAL HERO!
Plok is an irresistible, irrepressible, unstoppable, highly improbable and downright dangerous bundle of pure energy.
Plok does not like fleas.
Plok has the amazing ability to fire all his body parts at will.
Plok can really 'throw' a punch.
Plok has a very short fuse; at the slightest irritation those limbs begin to fly.
Plok hates fleas.
Plok is a true hero, with a heart of gold and joints of the highest-quality velcro.
Plok is a man with a mission. He is dedicated to ridding the world of the dreaded Fleas.
Plok is a dreamer, a wanderer, a free spirit. He's suave and elegant. He's grade-A, first-class prime cut.
Plok really does not like Fleas.
Plok is the king of the beautiful island called Akrillic, part of the archipelago Poly-Esta
I play around San Francisco and other places as a club DJ, mixing the latest tunes on old school vinyl and turntables. Forget about mp3's I'm a vinyl fanatic, even when I worked at napster I was still spending thousands of dollars on 12 inch records. I play most club styles, House, breaks, techno, trance, Drum n Bass - whatever they'll let me get away with. This also lead to a radio show - theDMZ - it's supplied to stations as a 2 hour slot (and it's free to non-profit broadcasters)
I'm playing at the DNA lounge in a few weeks - July 10th - slashdotters should drop by on thursday night. Look out for DJ S&M
(Is it possible to slashdot a nightclub?)
If you bought their last album (I got the vinyl version) - you got a card which let you go to their web page and download exclusive tracks. Personally I think it's a great idea, I mean most live concert recordings will only be bought by dedicated fans and those people won't be abandoning hte album in favour of these extras (remember the Perl Jam concert series).
WE stil need to get apps signed to run on my hone right? So even if I wanted to write all those apps I'd not be able to distribute them easily right?
One was playing a not entirely legal Power Puff Girls DVD - it seemed to only play the keyframes - while my Samsung POS dvd player handled it fine.
The other problem has been several PS1 discs - Finaly Fantasy 8, Resident Evil 2 - they don't recognise the disc. Not that it matters I still have my old school playstation and it's more than capable of handling these.
An unfortunate way of demonstrating another advantage of car free cities. Eerily Ironic.
. st m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3035803
I started producing a specialised dance music radio show for kHz networks, now I'm on a few radio stations.
It's somewhat Ironic, when I wrote mp3serv back in '97 it was so I could do internet radio, that little piece of innovation (before anyone ever thought of shoutcast) landed me jobs with media companies in California. But it took getting laid off 3 times last year to give me the time to get my radio show off the ground. Now I'm working again and able to keep up the dj aspirations too.
If you're in San Franciso be sure to check out DJ S&M
Need an update to run this, meanwhile you can watch the slashdot effect on the shacknews server here ;-)
http://www.shacknews.com/docs/amd.x
This guy has written many high quality scientific papers, he does a lot of work on Cosmology, and yet he was a devout 7th Day Adventist - and therefore believed in creation.
Didn't seem to interfere with his work.
My Girlfriend Signed Up for the DSL service and asked me to install it on her windows machine. So, I popped the disk in and started - it got as far as the minimum requirements then decided that a 233MHz processor was too slow to appreciate broadband connections and refused to go any further.
I just installed the Efficinet networks DSL client, then logged in to the account creation address (which wasn't detailed in the PC info - only the Mac users needed to know this). Created an account and bang... there I was with DSL and none of the baggage the Yahoo attaches.
Once this is stable I'll just use my nice SMC NAT box and let it handle the connection (we're moving in together RSN).