Movie Retrospective – Why Star Wars was not as awesome as you thought it was.

Movie Retrospective – Why Star Wars was not as awesome as you thought it was.

The epic space opera franchise, known as Star Wars, was conceived by George Lucas during the 1970’s and spanning a total of 31 years, 7 movies were released forming the original Star Wars trilogy, the prequel trilogy and The Clone Wars. The total films ranged from 97% (The Empire Strikes Back) to 18% (The Clone Wars) on Rotten Tomatoes. One would think George Lucas would prevent anyone from defiling his ideas further by making The Clone Wars, but seeing as he did write and direct The Phantom Menace, Lucas probably realised it was past the point of no return.
Okay, put a group of Star Wars fans in a room for long enough and I guarantee the conversation will eventually turn to prequel bashing, so I doubt we need to explain further. If you still don’t believe me – Jar Jar Binks and midi-chlorians.
Hypothetically, a movie is only as bad as the number of plot holes it produces, and the original trilogy did produce a bit although overshadowed by the prequel trilogy.
“I wince every time a person dies” – Of course, we all remember when Yoda and Ben winced when thousands perished, however considering this is a universe we’re talking about, the average deaths per minute should incapacitate them.
“Don’t kiss me bro!”- If Luke and Leia are both attuned to the force (how else can we explain Leia’s recollection of her real mother as a “kind and gentle woman”) how come they didn’t realise they were brother and sister? How come Luke never sensed that his father was really Vader?
“It’s a TRAP!” - Admiral Ackbar’s memorable quote definitely stayed in the hearts of many and his words of wisdom definitely helped out. How else did Luke realise that he had to fly vertically towards the north pole of the Death Star to fire the magic missiles rather than to fly horizontally as per the briefing?
So in the end, maybe Star Wars is still an epic and fun series of movies to watch, but remember, even George Lucas bailed after filming the first one and decided to swap profit points with Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. At least it’s still better than Catwoman.

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Movie Rental Review - The One - Jet Li

Movie Rental Review:

This week, we review The One - directed by James Wong.

There are many things that make up a good movie; action scenes, plot, plausibility, believability and maybe lack of plot holes. The only thing that made The One half decent was the fighting scenes which involved Jet Li beating up crap. Then there comes a point when you just run out of things to beat up so the directors probably thought "Hmmm...instead of Jet Li beating up walls and objects, Jet Li beating up good guys, Jet Li beating up bad guys, we'll have Jet Li beating up Jet Li (insert smiley face). And since we all know action movies involving no plot gets old easily: we’ll add lots of bullet time and slow motion, so that the 30 minute tv special will become a full length feature movie!" So instead of the normal sane reaction of "Wait...what?" producers actually gave the green light and today we have the movie known as 'The One'.
If leaps and bounds in plot hole techniques were to be congratulated upon, then 'The One' would definitely win and if there was one thing that could of saved this movie, it would have been making Jet Li unable to talk. Unfortunately, neither is true, and 'The One' is definitely not made out of 'win'. Okay, so the movie goes on somewhat like this: Jet Li being himself accidentally talked to another Jet Li from another universe, killing it and somehow absorbed that universe's Jet Li's energy (plot hole 9000), sending him down a spiral filled with the thirst for more power, unfortunately none of the universes had POWER THIRST (plot hole 9001) causing him to travel to other universes to kill more Jet Li's, until there is only one left, and since (still with us?). Oh crap. I’m sorry I spoilt the movie for you; I guess you can’t go and waste your money on it now.
One and a Half Betas (add one beta if you enjoy a movie with action and no plot). In case you’re not convinced, screaming into the paper as you read “This is BS, Jet Li does martial arts, it can’t be bad!” then I have prepared a rebuttal: “Jet Li spoke English...ENGLISH”

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Giant Robots and the such – exploring the possibility of a real life Gundam

Following the release of the information regarding Japan’s plan to build a giant robot…Oh wait…they never actually planned to build anything. So take back those conversation topics about “Did you hear? Japan’s going to build a gundam!” and confused questions of “but how will they get the gundanium?”, because when taking into account the plausibility of building and running an actual Gundam-like robot, the possibilities involving current technology is quite...impossible.

The armor:

Putting aside the need of gundanium alloy, one would need to speculate on a possible substitute and while the Japanese Science and Technology Agency suggested that aluminum alloy would be feasible as a light-weight alternative, one would also wonder why carbon fiber wasn’t chosen. Considering carbon fiber can exhibit more than 10 times the maximum tensile strength of aluminum alloy, it is more heat resistant, lighter and will not fail under very small cyclic loadings, this makes it perfect for defense against children throwing rocks. Is there anything that makes it a worse choice than aluminum alloy? Maybe it was the cost.

The computer system:

One would think a gundam would only require a simple computer to run it, since it was only built to walk. However a US$1.5 million computer used to run 30 400KW motors (maybe even simultaneously) most definitely sounds like a steal!

The propulsion system:

So this thing has 30 x 400KW motors. So it can walk. So what? What about flying? Even in the anime the robots moved more like cars instead of utilising the human walking motion. If our walking motion was used, theoretically a pilot inside would feel extremely sick after the high gforces of the constant upwards and downwards motion. So unless a carlike motion was adopted, this rules out any chances of pilots. (Not to mention where are we going to find those coordinators.)

So unless we dig up some ancient super-technology, this writer doubts that a Gundam could be built in the foreseeable future. But in the mean time >insert propaganda for recruiting people into robotics design at unsw<

Next week -> Gundam is totally possible!

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The easy-way to "Dual-Boot" Kubuntu Linux with Windows XP - just "Shrink" your Windows Partition

Well I recently got a version of Kubuntu (free that I might add) and was wondering how to 'Dual-Boot' install it without harming my original xp installation.

That's when i found this guide by Shannon VanWagner. Props to him you can find the original article here.

The easy-way to "Shrink" your Windows XP partition with the GParted LiveCD and prepare your hard drive for installation of Kubuntu Linux.

With the use of the open source GParted utility (think partition magic but easier) you can very easily "shrink" your Windows XP partition quickly and safely without purchasing any additional software.

To install Kubuntu Linux (or any other Linux distro for that matter) you should "Shrink" your Windows Partition to make room for your Kubuntu Linux installation. You can then install Kubuntu in the extra space that you free up after "Shrinking" your Windows partition and the Linux Grub loader will automatically provide the option for you to select Windows or Kubuntu Linux on startup.

About GParted: The GParted utility is an easy-to-use yet very powerful graphical Open-Source partition editor that is available in "LiveCD" format(meaning that it boots from CDROM).

To use a "LiveCD, download the *.iso file and then use your favorite cd-burning software to burn the .iso image to a cdrom disk (My favorite cd-burning app for Windows is DeepBurner Free 1.8 for Linux use K3B).

Here are the steps that I used to "Shrink" my Windows partition with a nifty utility called "GParted ". I was then able to install Kubuntu 7.04 in the free space that was left over.

1.) Download and burn to cdrom the free Gparted Partition Editor Utility in LiveCD format from here or direct link to the gparted-livecd-0.3.4-7.iso file: http://tinyurl.com/24ph7r.

2.) Boot into Windows, perform a full disk cleanup (checkout www.ccleaner.com for a good cleanup utility), then run a full defragmentation of your Windows drive(s) (with Windows Defragmenter) to move all the physical data on your hard drive and provide room to "Shrink" the Windows partition.

3.) Boot up your computer to the GParted LiveCD (from Step #1 above). Upon booting into Gparted, try pushing Enter all the way through to accept the defaults at each of the configuration screens - this will get you into the GParted graphical utility, which is very simple to use.

4.) To "Shrink" your Windows partition, simply right-click it from within the GParted graphical utility, then select "resize". From the resize dialog simply use the slidebar to adjust the size of your Windows partition to a smaller size (slide to the left or enter a number). Be sure to leave some free space for Windows (4GB or more would be great)to avoid Windows performance problems. For Kubuntu you can set aside as little as 4GB of free space for the install. However, I suggest that you free up 20GB or more to have plenty of space for using Kubuntu. Chances are that once you start using Kubuntu Linux you will make it your primary OS of choice.

5.) Click "Apply Changes" and watch the magic of the GParted as it performs a "Shrink" of your Windows partition. Note: GParted may not work properly if you have any type of RAID array, so you're on your own for testing that.

6.) After all changes are applied, reboot the machine (Be sure to remove the GParted cdrom first). Windows XP will then perform a "chkdsk" to scan the hard drive for errors- this is normal, let it complete. Note: Be sure to let the chkdsk fully complete and then login to Windows to test to see that everything changed properly. If you look in "My Computer" it should show that your Windows partition is now smaller. If you were to run Start>Run>diskmgmt.msc , you would see that your drive now has the free space you created in steps 4 & 5 from above.

7.) Reboot with the Kubuntu LiveCD in your drive, once you get to the point where you can install Kubuntu you can install the linux partitions (swap, and / (e.g. ext3 root)) in the free space you created. Kubuntu will automatically detect your Windows partition and will add it as a selection for the GRUB Boot loader during the final steps of installion.
Explore a great new world and have a lot of fun using Kubuntu!! Try it, I'm sure you'll like it!!


Shannon VanWagner

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The Piano

A Happy New Year to everyone who has stayed with ITT for so long *cough*

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