What Dell Can Do...

Preface the First

I'll begin by saying that I wish people would get off MySpace and put their blogs somewhere else. I'm sick of advertisements flashing around my reading material and I'm sick of my customers coming to me saying they clicked an ad and their computers filled up with spyware shortly thereafter. MySpace is a whorish website which exposes the true nature of Microsoft theology: do nothing you're told to do and you won't have problems, which is backward and stupid.

Folks, learn about RSS and get with the program.

Preface the Second

Now I'll say that I'm one of Dell's biggest detractors. Even in a market vastly populated by low-grade, cheap hardware being sold off at high prices and being called "quality" materials, Dell makes some of the worst computers a person can buy. Proprietary motherboards, power supplies, and cases don't make anybody's lives easier. We should strive for standardization, especially in a world dependant on the solutions sold to them and even more especially in a world where the buyers of technology have little to no tech knowledge, so the purchase decision can be based on bottom-line price, not what a biased, sales-oriented website tells a person.

But lately, Dell has shown some promise.

The Bulk of It

What you can gather from above regarding my opinion on the end-user desktop computing market is:

• Knowledge of the subject is generally minimal
• You can't expect the entire world to be a tech nut
• People should at least attempt to keep up with tech trends (like RSS)
• PC sales are based on advertisements, not truth
• Windows, while a functional OS, creates far more problems than it solves

Further, you can gather that I'm a Linux enthusiast. By no means am I an expert. But I am a geek for it. And I do believe that the ideas behind it embody the solution to many problems. Linux, especially amongst the Debian family of distributions, is all about community. Community support, community development, community involvement. It's all free for distribution and mostly free of charge.

Imagine this utopia: You live in a town. You have a tomato farm. Your neighbor ranches chickens. The guy across the street can grow wheat and turn it into flour. Down the road there's a dude with a huge building. Everybody takes what they make and puts it on a shelf in the building. When you need something, you walk in and take it. Most everybody contributes. The contribution is the price of the product that you take. It's the same concept behind Ubuntu and other Linuxes.

No viruses, no spyware, no bugs. Linux is robust. Linux doesn't crash. Linux doesn't cause unfixable problems.

And now Dell is putting Ubuntu Linux on a small portion of PCs that they sell. This may be the one thing Dell has ever done right. Will people buy it? Maybe. Maybe a geek like me. Should everyone buy it? No. But most people. Should Linux be bigger than it is? Yeah. Definitely.

What experience do I have that allows me to make this claim? I do desktop support for PCs that people buy. A good 80-90% of peoples' PC problems are the result of Windows. These customers are frustrated with Windows. They're as sick of Windows as I am sick of flashy ads urging me to put a pie in Britney Spears's face when I'm reading my friends' weblogs. Linux is a solution for this. I offer it every time. Sure, you could call that moonlighting, but is it really so wrong to do that? I don't think so. I use Windows for two things: commercial video gaming (read: gaming that costs money) and programming in Windows-only programming languages. Aside from these two things, Linux does everything else I could ever want to do.

What keeps people from using Linux? It has a bad rap, and I know why. Windows is sold to a buyer. Linux is not sold at all. It is given. With all the benefits of Linux, the fact that it comes at no cost seems too good to be true. So I understand the skepticism. I am, after all, a master of cynicism. Also, Linux has this "geek chic" culture surrounding it. So a buyer thinks, I am not a geek. I cannot use Linux. I will be lost. And they knock it before they've tried it.

Dell can help solve this problem. The problem is, after all, an issue of image. PC sales are based on advertisements, not truth. Advertisement, I believe, can allay the lack of knowledge about the product. If I stand on a soapbox here at my blog, or if I show up at Starbucks with a stack of Linux Live CDs and purport to know that I hold in my hand the end-all, be-all of computer problem solutions, who will listen? No one. Because I'm just a guy. I'm a geek. I get Linux. My response, of course, is, "Do you get Windows?" No average PC user can honestly say, "Yes." So what's the friggin difference?

But if Dell advertises to the masses saying that Linux is a solution for a good 70% of the PC-using population, they can convince people. Whether they'll do this or not will be left up to Microsoft, I fear. If Dell makes claims that Linux is better than Windows (in other words, if they speak the truth), and their efforts succeed, they'll be shooting themselves in the foot, considering all their profit comes from the fact that they pre-install Windows Vista on damn near every PC they sell.

Dell can help. I'm willing to take a step back from my anti-Dell ranting to allow them time to perfect their "open" product line and fix their company.

In conclusion, I propose that people comment here on things Linux does not do or things that Linux does not make user-friendly, or encase in a GUI. That way I can prove you all wrong.

Update!

On October 27, 2007, I wrote a post entitled, "Is Michael Bay Able to Save Himself?" The post's title was in reference to his latest movie, Transformers. I simply couldn't believe that so many people could absolutely rave about a flick and it could still be as bad as Bay's previous "efforts." You see, I still don't understand how an advertising point like "From the director of Armageddon and Pearl Harbor" actually sells tickets.

So I reluctantly watched the movie, and my answer to the question "Is Michael Bay able to save himself?" is a very ashamed and self-disgusted "NO!" How could I have let a movie like Transformers pique my interest? How could I have let the opinions of millions of bovine-minded masses influence my life? This is like that time when everybody thought 300 was the greatest movie on earth and I was like, "Meh."

Transformers is mediocrity at its most shameless. It's astounding to think that Michael Bay, given nearly 250 million dollars, can only make a movie this boring. For Christ's sake, man, the explosions aren't even real anymore! Where's the fun? What happened to the Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry days of exciting filmmaking? Vanishing Point, anybody? Death Proof?

That's an interesting concept there - I didn't initially think that Death Proof was as amazing as Tarantino's other work, but now that I realize that it's specifically Michael Bay he's out to punish with that movie, I think it's the coolest movie of all time. Next time I watch it, I'll be imagining Michael Bay in Stuntman Mike's driver seat while Rosario Dawson, Zoe Bell, and Tracie Thoms kick his ass. I'll be cheering for them.

"You know I can't let you go......without tapping that ass!"

CRUNCH!

Ambushing the mainstream...

Read a report last night (sorry, no link, but it came from Engadget) about the first Trojan to be written for the iPhone. Apparently, it only affects Jailbroken iPhones, but that's beside the point, which is something like this:

If it's only taken this long to get malicious software written for the iPhone, then it's a sign that Apple's marketing is flawed (and I knew all this before I read the article; the article just made it strikingly clear). If you switch to Apple, then no worries about catching a nasty virus or worm or Trojan or adware. But the truth is, the reason there isn't a huge Internet overload of Mac-based malware is because its market share never really gets above 10-15%. Windows holds the vast majority of the operating system market, so, to affect the most people, you write evil-ware for Windows.

But if Apple succeeds in switching a significant portion of people away from Windows (which is becoming easier to do now that Vista's been received so generally negatively), enough to recover their market share, then that will open Mac up to all sorts of disgusting little bits of code. Mac will no longer be able to use that same old schtick of theirs to gravitate customers away from Windows.

What really scares me about all this is that Mac OS X (and probably previous versions as well) is a Unix-based operating system, just like Linux. The directory structure of Mac OS is virtually identical to the directory structure on my computer running Ubuntu 7.10. Should Mac by some chance become popular enough to begin attracting more attention to the hackers and advertisers and Internet black marketers, wouldn't this put my precious open-source OS in danger? I mean, if I were writing this kind of software, I'd make sure it infected some kind of Unix system folder like /bin or /usr/lib or /etc. Since these folders exist both here in Linux and out there on Mac, wouldn't my computer become like an unintended target for that software?

It'd be almost like friendly fire!

On horror and The Thing...

Got around to watching John Carpenter's The Thing last night. This is one of those movies that, being so well-known by friends and family to be a hopeless lover of horror flicks both amazing and atrocious, I am embarrassed to have never seen. I can be embarrassed no more, for I have now witnessed the flick and I have to say that it's an excellent example of how a horror movie should be made.

Jenny turned to me and said that she liked it, but it seemed a little like every other horror film she's ever seen. There is a point to be made by this comment, though the point is quite the opposite of the comment. It's not that The Thing is like other horror movies. Other horror movies are like The Thing. Carpenter is a master of the horror genre which gets just enough nose-turning to make it seem like it's not something one can be master of. But those who turn their noses at these nose-turners would cite The Thing as a major point in their argument.

Of course, The Thing takes an awful lot from Ridley Scott's Alien, released three years prior, but that's not such a bad thing, is it? The pace is sluggish, but it builds the tension. It builds the fear. The Thing has all the elements of "classic" horror.

Watching the film made me think about the qualities of horror that segregate the bad ones from the good ones.

I hate it when a horror movie attempts to frighten its audience by using cheap scares involving something ugly rapidly entering the frame accompanied by an orchestral lurch in the score. It's simply a given that the audience will jump. It's a defense mechanism our bodies have. The adrenaline blasts through our veins and our muscles tense. It's not hard to do that. But it leaves the audience with a feeling not unlike going on a rollercoaster. We zoom off on a guided track, helpless against the force of gravity which tugs us upside-down on loops, ties our guts in knots as we spiral through corkscrews, peels the skin to the front of our faces as we are suddenly braked to a stop. And you know what? The next time you ride the coaster it's gonna be the same. And the next time you watch the movie it's gonna be the same. But it's a movie theater we're in, not an amusement park, and we're all going to leave thinking the same thing: "I've been cheated."

The kind of horror that really gets to people is the kind that attacks you in a way more than physical. It gets at your own fears. It wrenches your own psyche. When a movie can wrangle the truly terrifying into a context that we don't have to make very forgiving leaps and bounds to believe, it transcends the cheapness onto a level that grabs us and doesn't let go when the lights come back on.

Stephen King usually works this type of magic by writing his characters and stories into small towns or isolated areas, and then makes the characters seem just like us. The Shining takes place at a snowed-in hotel. There is no escape. There is no hope of rescue. Jack Torrance is a regular alcoholic falling back off the wagon. When he's finally done in by the isolation, his victims have nowhere to go. They can hide, but Jack can find them easily.

Carpenter is working with an adaptation here. There's the B-movie from '51 (The Thing from Another World, Howard Hawks), but initially, even that movie was the spawn of a short story by John W. Campbell called "Who Goes There?" The story seems somehow modern by the insertion of some brief mentions about the titular monster's cellular manipulation. Admittedly, I know not if these factoids were in the original story or older movie, having partaken in neither of them. Adaptation or not, the idea of isolation comes into heavy play and goes a long way toward making the story believable. An alien existence that a team of scientists has no reason to know about crash landed in the frozen antarctic terrain many thousands of years ago and has been thawed out by a similar team of Norwegian scientists. As the alien presence grows more menacing, a storm blows in, efficiently trapping the band in their forty-below-zero, limited-sight, guide-rope-necessary surroundings.

There are two sequences in particular that show off the true confines of the encampment. The first is the opening sequence. A singular helicopter rages closely over the landscape, its two passengers firing at a sled dog from the air. You know something bad is happening, but you can't be quite sure what it is. And the fact that a singular dog is the only non-human life in the area instills a feeling of desolation in the audience. Later, a crew member frantically crosses between buildings by grabbing and following a guide rope. The line is his only direction to his destination, which has no shape, only beams of glaring white-blue light that could be close or could be a quarter-mile away.

There is one cheap thrill in The Thing, but it's surrounded by such tension from the crew (who, by this point in the film, cannot trust any of the others for fear that they're really the harbinger of extraterrestrial doom) that it does more than just cause an unavoidable, natural jump. It briefly opens us up to the cold, to the fear, to the true meaning of failure.

The Thing failed at the box office, something which is largely attributed to the release of the infamous E.T. The Extra Terrestrial a couple of weeks previous, but it has certainly found a welcome home on the shelves of cult movie enthusiasts across the country. Perhaps this is where it belongs. Let those who cherish this should-be acclaimed film have it, and give the others One Missed Call.

Review: The Golden Compass

Phillip Pullman's novel His Dark Materials is currently being developed into three movies corresponding with the three portions of the book. The first is The Golden Compass. Chris Weitz (About a Boy) directs the likes of Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman, and others in this sci-fi/fantasy adventure about a parallel universe where people's souls live alongside human bodies in the form of spiritual animals called Daemons.

To be perfectly honest, The Golden Compass seems to be another way to capitalize on youthful audiences, and I'm sure that more youthful audiences appreciate the movie more than I did. The IMDb user rating details show that females under the age of eighteen gave the highest average rating for the movie, tied with females over forty-five. It's hard to say whether this means anything. Typically (personal observation), the ratings given on IMDb by young women tend to skyrocket higher than any other age/gender group.

I will say that the CGI in the film is rather exceptional. I was concerned about having realistic-ish animals talking. I generally hate movies where this is a major feature. No worries here. The problems with the movie come from other areas.

Though I've never read Pullman's novel, I get the feeling from the movie that it is far more immersive than the film. The film sets up an entire world's back story in a matter of ninety seconds. By assuming that the audience will buy into the fantasy aspects of the story simply by labeling the movie "fantasy," the filmmakers make a horrible mistake. I would have preferred an additional twenty to thirty minutes if it made the rest of the movie more enjoyable. I think it is this detriment that contributes the most to my lack of interest that followed.

As far as the cast is concerned, I think Nicole Kidman was probably the best-cast of the movie, though she seems somehow uninspired. Dakota Blue Richards, who plays the primary character Lyra, is decent for a child actor, though it's obvious she can't cry on command, which contributes poorly to a scene near the climax. I don't want to be too hard on her though. She's very young, and the script didn't allow for much character development. In fact, all the characters are rather wooden and flat.

The camerawork didn't impress me. When I watch an epic movie, I expect to see sweeping images that dazzle my eyes, or at the very least something creative. The Golden Compass is a photocopy of a cinematography textbook. And when most of a movie is made by a computer, you have free reign over the way it looks. This goes back to the idea that it's just there to follow a string of successful like-styled movies.

All-in-all, the movie's alright. It's watchable. I'm glad I saw it at the movies with my wife because if this were on DVD, I would have turned it off or walked away after half an hour. If that had happened, I would have misssed the only interesting point in the entire movie. There's a spot of brutality about an hour and a half through that absolutely floored me. It caught me by surprise. I won't mention here what it is because if you're gonna see this scene, you're gonna have to sit through the same forced "speeches for the sake of having speeches" that I did. Overall, this gets a boring 5/10.

Review: The Mist

In 1985, Stephen King published a collection of short stories and novellas called Skeleton Crew, the first and longest story of which is called "The Mist." It should be mentioned that "The Mist" was published five years prior in an anthology called Dark Forces, but that's beside the point because now, twenty-two years later, we have a movie version screening in mass release across the country.

Now, I'm a guy who likes me some Stephen King. I've read a great deal of his novels (though certainly not all of them), and seen most of the movies based on his books. It's a trend for me to not like the movies too much when they're based on King's more frightful novels. In cases where King's source material is more akin drama, I typically enjoy the movie. For instance, I didn't like Carrie or Misery, or even Kubrick's The Shining, but The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me (based respectively off of the novellas "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" and "The Body") are both somewhere on my top 50.

Directing The Mist is a man who's had some experience working with the kind of Stephen King movies I like. Frank Darabont directed The Shawshank Redemption back in 1994 and then The Green Mile in 1999, and both were movies I enjoyed. The Mist, however, is the first actual horror film based on King's work that he's directed, unless you count The Woman in the Room (1983), a television program that was part of a larger collection of King's horror stories. I had my doubts. Especially since The Mist has a lot of monsters in it and material that seems corny when taken outside the perspective of King's The Dark Tower series.

I was pleasantly surprised. The movie focuses enough on the human aspect of fear to allow for some monsters without feeling too cheesy. The story is actually about our perceptions of death and fear, and how they affect us, as well as how people can influence one another by emotion alone. Much potential corniness is done away with by underplaying everything.

The acting here is superb all around, but a special shout-out goes to Marcia Gay Harden as the demented Mrs. Carmody. An imbalanced Bible-thumper, she believes that the mist which has overcome the ordinarily cozy outpost of Castle Rock, Maine, is actually God's hand in the end-time. She begins preaching to the marooned crowd of shoppers, and, after they've seen enough to believe, they begin to follow her. She believes she is God's vessel for their salvation, and the group eats it right up.

The cinematography is fresh and interesting, with a great deal of subtle, but noticeable, quick zooms and pull backs. The camera is constantly moving, and handheld most of the time. It gives the audience the feeling like they're there in the mist as well.

The mist itself serves as a symbol of the unknown, and death, and this tale has more to it than just tentacled monsters and a few good frights. It's a good thing Frank Darabont got ahold of this story, and not someone else.

I didn't like the ending at all, but I don't have much room for complaint, since I didn't write the damn thing, but it still is the only thing that counts against what would ordinarily be a perfect score. I give The Mist an 8/10.

Edit: I am upping my score on The Mist to a 9. Retrospect shows that I actually really liked the ending, just not the way it made me feel. That's the tough thing about true tragedy, isn't it? It's the best way the movie could have ended, but it doesn't make you feel too warm and fuzzy.

Is Michael Bay able to save himself?

Alright, alright. It's no secret. Everyone knows that I hate Michael Bay and that for months, I have outright refused to see Transformers. But sometimes you have to be lenient and I can barely look at myself in the mirror now that I've thought this, but I might just have to see this one.

I was working today. One of my fellow Geek Squad agents got there before me. He put on Transformers before I got there. I usually hog the CD player so I can listen to Modest Mouse or the Shins or whatever obscure music that everybody except me hates that I want to. But today, Transformers was on before I could get my greasy hands on the A/V deck. So I respected his desire to have the movie playing during working hours.

Like I said before, the one credit I'll pay to Mr. Bay is to say that while he doesn't have storylines in his movies, or plots, or interesting characters, or engaging dialogue, or pertinent themes, or pretty much anything else that makes a movie a film instead of a flick, Michael Bay does have the uncanny ability to capture in every single frame of celluloid an eye-pleasing image.

These aren't particularly expressive images, nothing like you would get in a Coen Brothers movie or a classic film noir, but even after just glancing at the TV every few minutes as I walked from one customer's computer to another's, I was engaged. It pains me to say that, but I was. I will probably rent this movie. If I hate it, expect to see Michael Bay slandered on this blog like never before. If I'd had this blog back when I paid fourteen bucks for my wife and I to go see Spider-Man 3, you'd know the kind of retribution I'm talking about. You don't want me to go there. I don't even want to go there.

So know this, Michael Bay -- Spider-Man 3 was probably the worst movie I saw this summer, but I didn't see Transformers. If Transformers somehow manages to be worse than that heaping pile of eel sushi vomit (and in case you're wondering, yes, I do know what eel sushi vomit looks, smells, and tastes like) then you have created a masterpiece of crap which could rival many an Ed Wood movie. And you will be called deceptive. You will be called a con. Dragging me into a movie with appealing images only to discover the movie blows is evil. I will even invent a new word to call you, which will become synonymous with your name. Maybe... "decepticon." Yes, you will be labeled a Decepticon!

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourself. The definitive verbal beating of all time may well be on the horizon.