Archive for December, 2005
the BEST media player
VLC is just thee best damn media player on the planet. it’ll play most anything you point it at, on ANY platform and without having to install any codecs or futzing around with it.
It also has a solid server built right into it, so it’s great for neophytes and geeks alike!
Try it!
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Moving
that’s right, gang, A and i are moving on Friday, which means this server (i.e. this website) will be moving with us.
so, it’ll be down for a couple of days at most. don’t fret, though: when it’s back up i’ll continue posting the latest, greatest, most exciting things on the planet that keep you riveted to your seats like dentures on fixadent.
:uh huh:
; )
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Wikipedia survives research test
The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
The British journal Nature examined a range of scientific entries on both works of reference and found few differences in accuracy.
Wikipedia is produced by volunteers, who add entries and edit any page.
But it has been criticised for the correctness of entries, most recently over the biography of prominent US journalist John Seigenthaler.
Wikipedia was founded in 2001 and has since grown to more than 1.8 million articles in 200 languages. Some 800,000 entries are in English.
It is based on wikis, open-source software which lets anyone fiddle with a webpage, anyone reading a subject entry can disagree, edit, add, delete, or replace the entry.
Paramount buys rival Dreamworks
Hollywood giant Paramount Pictures has bought one of its best-known rival studios, Dreamworks SKG.
Viacom, which owns Paramount, has agreed to pay $1.6bn (£914m; 1.36bn euros) – more than $1bn in cash, plus taking over Dreamworks’ debts.
It gives the company the talents of one of the most famous filmmakers in the world, ET director Steven Spielberg.
And it appears to show that even a top name like Spielberg cannot create a new independent film studio these days.
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Dreamworks was established 11 years ago to combine three talents in the world of film, animation and music – Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Spielberg is known around the world for directing huge Hollywood hits like Jaws and Schindler’s List.
Geffen had been a top record producer and Katzenberg a leading light at Disney.
NBC bid, too, but evidently not enough!
By buying Dreamworks, Paramount has now acquired an impressive library of films, which includes Gladiator, American Beauty, and Saving Private Ryan.
It reportedly plans to sell off the library, expecting it to fetch $850m to $1bn.
The deal does not include Dreamworks’ animation studios – the creators of hits such as Shrek – but it does include the right to distribute already-made animated Dreamworks films.
Paramount will also take over a television division with long-running popular shows like Spin City.
NBC Universal, a unit of GE, had offered $900m but was outbid. Last Friday, it was given an extra hour to improve on its offer but walked away.
BBC North America business correspondent Guto Harri says Viacom hopes the deal will enable it to establish Paramount as an industry leader.
He adds that for Dreamworks, the deal is the final proof that despite the talents involved, the company has failed to become the ambitious media conglomerate that it had once hoped to be.
Recent Dreamworks films include Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and War of the Worlds – coincidentally a joint production with Paramount.
Spielberg and Geffen will reportedly stay with the company.
Pat Malecha : studmuffin
This is our pal, Pat. Isn’t he hot?
Not only that, he’s smart as a whip on a horse’s back. He and Jen have been living in Little Port Walter (known by those in the know as Club Fed) for nearly two years now and we don’t get to see them as often as we’d like. Guess that’s why i’ve dedicated today’s post to you two. We miss you!
Some cool facts about Pat:
Subsequent to being a Rasmuson Fellow, Pat initially worked as a research analyst at the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission where he reported on aspects of diverse Alaska fisheries including Pacific cod, weathervane scallops, Pacific herring, and horsehair crab. Since 2001, Pat has worked as a research fishery biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service at the Auke Bay Laboratory in Juneau. In his primary role, he studies the effects of commercial fishing on benthic habitats. These studies, utilizing both submersibles and scuba, have varied objectives from simple habitat typing to manipulative studies identifying effects of trawling at varied intensities.
Pat is also involved with other work that is attempting to determine growth rates of two species of sponge and two species of coral. These studies will help managers understand habitat and fishery interactions and allow for sustainable fisheries.
Those interested in checking out some of Pat’s work can find a good start here.
Some cool facts about Jen:
Once had a most unhealthy obsession with notorious Minneapolis band Mango Jam
Has had the experience of fending off brown bears with high powered weaponry (and is licensed by the Feds to do so)
Makes, arguably, the best bread in the world
Perhaps, the only woman we know who can live so self-contained in a place as remote as LPW
Ain’t afraid to GET DOWN ON THE DANCE FLOOR
Able to catch and pull up a 100-pound halibut
The most elegantly diplomatic person we’ve ever met (without being a wanker or sycophant)
Like her husband, Pat, is a TOTAL BABE, which may have something to do with the fact that Jen is a LEAN, MEAN, HIKING MACHINE.
Meanwhile, she awaits the opportunity to administer her homespun insulin treatment to a helpless diabetic stranded in the woods via turkey baster (inquire with questions)
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Trampled by Turtles!
Trampled by Turtles is an original, non-traditional bluegrass band from Duluth, Minnesota. Their energetic live performances and two well-received albums (Songs From a Ghost Town, 2004 and Blue Sky and the Devil, 2005) have gained them a large and loyal fan base throughout the Midwest and beyond.
“Duluth’s finest Jameson swigging lads, Trampled by Turtles, take to the stage to quench the Lake Superior hippie/yippie/cow-punk contingent’s insatiable thirst for mosh-pit inducing hardcore bluegrass.”
- Transistor Transmission, Dec ’04
Coming from varied musical backgrounds, the members of Trampled by Turtles blend hints of grunge, punk, alt-country, and pop with the traditional sounds of the acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass. The last two years have been spent playing venues ranging from punk-rock basement parties to the Great American Music Hall, sharing the stage with a diverse group of musicians including Low, The Radiators, Pedro the Lion, Nickel Creek, and Charlie Parr.
“The Duluth foursome stretches the bluegrass template with its youth, sardonic humor and indie rock backgrounds.â€Â
- Duluth News Tribune, Mar ‘05
The group consists of guitar player and lead vocalist Dave Simonett, mandolin player Erik Berry, banjo player Dave Carroll, and bass player Tim Saxhaug.
These guys were music to our ears last night at First Ave.
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The Best Movie Ever Made?
“I am an incredibly powerful salesperson who continually climbs higher and higher up the ladder of success.
SUCCESS!!!”
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Linux for the rest of us
For those of us who are born geeks, Linux is a blessing. For others, a curse given the lackluster GUIs which require users to delve deep within its various levels of complexity via the command line. Surely, some like to know how the car works, others just like to ride. Not only that, but some fellow geeks i know and admire just prefer graphical interfaces. The battles of taste shall never be won.
Thus, it is with great excitement that the Linux world welcomes Ubuntu, a strain of the Debian distro that has come leaps and bounds towards being friendly to graphicos and commandos alike.
If you haven’t tried Linux but have always thought it sounds cool, here is a perfect opportunity for you to broaden horizons. Ubuntu loads up real nicely on most anything but especially well on laptops, as it finds devices like no other distro that has gone before.
In fact, i recently installed it on an old PII lappie with only 128MB of RAM and had to do little to make it fully operational (wifi included). It hums along quite well, given it’s gotta lotta miles on it. That makes four machines i’ve dedicated to running it, each proving rock-solid stability and ease of use. Really.
So, if you’ve been faint of heart about venturing forward into the much-talked-about Open Source community but curious, have no more fear. Ubuntu Linux is here.
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Salinger, Lennon, Browning
by Steve King
On this day in 1980 Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon outside his New York City apartment building. There are two books by him (In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works), and many about him, but the book which will forever be associated with Lennon is The Catcher in the Rye. After shooting Lennon four times, Chapman sat down on the sidewalk to read the book while he waited for police — or perhaps just to have it ready for presentation, given that he had inscribed the inside cover with “This is my statement. Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye.” Even Chapman’s previous days were made to parallel Holden’s: a lonely, pre-Christmas wandering through the streets of New York; a prostitute, who arrived as Holden’s did in a green dress (and also left without doing much more than take it off); talks with strangers about where the central park ducks go in winter (though this to a cop rather than a cabby, and getting not even a stare rather than a reassurance about how Mother Nature provides). To all this Chapman, or his voices, added his own twists: the refrain, The phony must die says The Catcher in the Rye, the gun and hollow-point bullets, the lifelong confusion over identity and purpose.
This last question, recast now as a search for motive, dominated the next days and months — and still dominates, if not Chapman but his parole board is right. Two hours after the murder, Chapman told police that he killed because he wasn’t Holden enough:
Then this morning I went to the bookstore and bought The Catcher in the Rye. I’m sure the large part of me is Holden Caulfield, who is the main person in the book. The small part of me must be the Devil.
I went to the building. It’s called the Dakota. I stayed there until he came out and asked him to sign my album. At that point my big part won and I wanted to go back to my hotel, but I couldn’t.
At the trial, he killed because he was too Holden, his pre-sentence statement being a reading aloud of the passage from the text which begins, “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all….” And months afterwards Chapman was happily handing out autographed copies of the book from the supply he kept in his cell. After many years in isolation, Chapman now mixes with a controlled group of prisoners, and says he is over wanting to be Holden, or famous. His keepers have now turned down his parole bid three times, citing the “bizarre and morally corrupt” nature of the crime, and “your continued interest in maintaining your notoriety.”
For Lennon and Yoko Ono, the most persistent and last literary connection was not Salinger but the Brownings. Lennon’s last journal entry quotes the very un-Holden beginning of Robert Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” turned into song in Lennon’s last year-”Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be….” The recent DVD, Lennon Legend, tries to keep the man and the music in view, but the flip-side continues to intrude: last week four bidders met the half-million dollar asking price for the “Double Fantasy” album which Lennon autographed for Chapman just hours before being shot. This was found on the ground at the murder scene, and as it was used in evidence at Chapman’s trial, it boasts his “forensically enhanced” fingerprints.
APE WITH A HEART MAKES GROWN MEN CRY
$1,845,034,000 worldwide and $600,788,188 are the all-time boxoffice records for a single movie, TITANIC, first released on December 19, 1997.
Now roars along another December blockbuster, KING KONG, a film many top Hollywood executives predict will break the record!
The movie opens wide as Victoria Lake next Wednesday, but recent screenings by UNIVERSAL have left the audience cheering and sobbing.
“Grown men around me were crying,” says one Hollywood insider. “Yes, I think this will do TITANIC numbers. It is going to be a huge movie.”
Complaints the Peter Jackson movie starts slow and is too long [more than 3 hours] will fill critics’ columns. “The human relationships are s**t … the dialogue is piss poor and there is a scene of Jamie Bell shooting gigantic bugs off of Adrian Brody with a tommy gun … those are the bad parts,” says a Hollywood reporter. “But…. the scenes between Kong and Naomi Watts tug at the heart strings big time. And the final scene was just great! There were one too many longing looks between the ape and Watts … but the audience around me ate it up.”
Nikon’s SmallWorld Gallery
We no longer live in the days when people thought “if it’s smaller than us, then it can’t be smarter than us.”
Perhaps, that’s why i find myself returning to peruse images in this gallery. The colors, the shapes and most definitely the life behind things in the SmallWorld.
You can check it out for yourself here.
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The enduring appeal of King Kong
As Peter Jackson’s new version of King Kong receives its world premiere on Monday, the BBC News website looks at the lasting legacy of the original film.
King Kong has become one of the most enduring monster films of all time – not bad for a picture made 72 years ago, starring an 18-inch model ape.
Co-directed by the maverick film-makers Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack, it was made decades before the computer-generated special effects seen in contemporary fantasy films.
The tale of a gigantic ape who falls for a beautiful woman was partly shot using the stop motion technique – where Kong and dinosaur miniatures were moved an infinitesimal amount, shot, moved again, re-shot, moved again…
Read the letter that won the internet governance battle
Condoleezza Rice’s missive to the EU
By Kieren McCarthy
Published Friday 2nd December 2005 09:07 GMT
The World Summit in Tunis last month was overshadowed by the global argument over internet governance.
Its biggest controversy came with the proposition put forward by the EU a month earlier that there be a new inter-governmental body that oversee ICANN. The US government – which currently enjoys unilateral control over the internet infrastructure – was furious and launched an enormous lobbying campaign, both public and private, across the board to retain its position.
Click Here
Most significant among all those lobbying efforts was a letter sent from the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to the UK foreign minister Jack Straw acting in the role of presidency of the EU.
In the letter, Rice used strong language for a diplomatic missive, to stress how seriously the US administration was taking the issue and how determined it was to retain ICANN in overall charge of the internet. European diplomats privately confessed that the letter had a significant impact on their position.
The result was that the EU never raised its inter-governmental forum again in World Summit meetings, and the end agreement stuck with the US position.
This is the first time time the full text of that letter has been published:
7 November 2005
To:
The Right Honourable Jack Straw MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, London
Dear Foreign Secretary,
The governance structure and continued stability and sustainability of the Internet are of paramount importance to the United States. The Internet has become an essential infrastructure for global communications, including for global trade and commerce, and therefore we firmly believe that support for the present structures for Internet governance is vital. These structures have proven to be a reliable foundation for the robust growth of the Internet we have seen over the course of the last decade.
As we approach the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), we should underscore the vast potential of the Internet for global economic expansion, poverty alleviation, and for improving health, education and other public services, particularly in the developing world where Internet access remain unacceptably low.
The Internet will reach its full potential as a medium and facilitator for global economic expansion and development in an environment free from burdensome intergovernmental oversight and control. The success of the Internet lies in its inherently decentralized nature, with the most significant growth taking place at the outer edges of the network through innovative new applications and services. Burdensome, bureaucratic oversight is out of place in an Internet structure that has worked so well for many around the globe. We regret the recent positions on Internet governance(i.e., the “new cooperation modelâ€Â) offered by the European Union, the Presidency of which is currently held by the United Kingdom, seems to propose just that – a new structure of intergovernmental control over the Internet.
The four principles the United States issues on June 30, 2005, reinforce the continuing U.S. commitment to the Internet’s security and stability, including through the historical U.S. role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file. At that time, we also expressed our support for ICANN as the appropriate private sector technical coordinator of the Internet’s domain name and addressing system. We believe that ICANN is dedicated to achieving broad representation of global Internet communities and to developing policy through consensus-based processes. We have also expressed our interest in working with the international community to address legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns with respect to country code top-level domains (ccTLD). We wish to underscore that, in our statement of June 30, we supported ongoing dialogue on issues related to Internet governance across international forums.
The United States and the European Union have long worked together toward the goal of global access to the Internet. The WSIS offers us the opportunity to reaffirm our partnership to spread the benefits of the Internet globally. At the same time, the security and stability of the Internet are essential to the United States, the European Union, and to the world. We firmly believe that the existing Internet system balances the stability and security we need with the innovation and dynamism that private sector leadership provides.
The history of the Internet’s extraordinary growth and adaptation , based on private-sector innovation and investment, offers compelling arguments against burdening the network with a new intergovernmental structure for oversight. It also suggests that a new intergovernmental structure would most likely become an obstacle to global Internet access for all our citizens. It is in this spirit that we ask the European Union to reconsider its new position on Internet governance and work together with us to bring the benefits of the Information Society to all.
Sincerely,
Carlos M. Guiterrez Secretary of Commerce
Condoleezza Rice Secretary of State
