The plot follows Blake, an alienated and disenchanted rock star who is escaping his turbulent life by isolating himself at his mansion. He eludes a private detective looking for him and ignores his ex-wife's demands that he should come home. Blake spends much of the film walking around, muttering to himself. He sometimes wears a dress and plays music. At one point, he goes out to a seedy rock club, then returns home, where he dies, presumably by suicide. His friends and associates flee to avoid suspicion. Much like the real-life Kurt Cobain case, the ending is left ambiguous. A mysterious figure in red can be seen wandering around the greenhouse Blake dies in before and after he dies.
It is January 1954. The Korean War is over. Captured UN soldiers held in POW camps are free to return home. Those who refuse repatriation to their homeland are transferred to a neutral zone and given 90 days to reconsider their decision. Among them are 21 American soldiers who decide defiantly to stay in China. Back in the United States, McCarthyism is at its height. Many Americans believe these young men have been brainwashed by Chinese communists through a new form of thought control. But what really happened? Featuring never-before-seen footage from the Chinese camps as well as interviews with former POWs and their families, They Chose China tells the fascinating stories of these forgotten American dissidents. With the Cold War fading into memory, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Shuibo Wang (Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square) aims his camera on this astonishing story. In They Chose China, we meet and begin to understand a group of courageous men who fought for and then cut ties with the USA.
Alex Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest wars ? creating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire. * Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. * Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever. * Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation. * View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union. Support the makers of this documentary and get the DVD with all the extras at http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/endgamedvd.html or signup at www.prisonplanet.tv and watch more documentaries and special reports Spread the word!
July 2009 The Hells Angels illicit drug trade has reached every corner of the city of Vancouver. This organised crime has successfully become a multi billion-dollar business based on their fierce reputation. Local communities are lacking faith in their government, blaming them for allowing these thugs to become so powerful. Why is it that the most open, known, brazen criminal gangs can't be put away? With no dedicated policing, the families of victims feel that the criminals are prioritised over them, a feeling fuelled by claims that these thugs- turned-police informants have made deals with the law. We have promises for secret deals says former drug dealer Jim Boivine. Journalist and activist Julian Sher has followed the rise of the Angels for over 10 years and believes a tougher more direct approach should be used: You can't strut around wearing your biker vests and your bikie patches and think you control our cities. Over 100 members of the Hells Angels gang are now behind bars. Produced by SBS, distributed by Journeyman Pictures
Official NASA footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work of the United States Federal Government under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code. Generally speaking, works created by U.S. Government employees are not eligible for copyright protection in the United States. See Circular 1 "COPYRIGHT BASICS" from the U.S. Copyright Office. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/
July 2009 The Taliban are on the move in Pakistan, and control of the country is now clearly in their sights. Despite a recent military offensive in Swat, bombing missions are being run in all major cities. The Koran tells me to turn myself into pieces states the driven voice of one of the new wave of suicide bombers, targeting Pakistans major cities. This is the Talibans response to the governments offensive into Swat and every aspect of Pakistani culture is affected. They're against show business. They want it removed from Pakistan says Sayed. His actress friend was beheaded at a major intersection. Sayeds experience in Swat made him ready for civil war. Yet others only saw it as confirmation of the governments slow and failing system. We didn't know if we were being shot at by the Taliban or by government forces says one government official. Theres an enormous increase in conservatism comments Professor Pervez. Eighty per cent of Pakistanis are prepared to accept Sharia Law. The Pakistani Taliban now leads an alliance of over 40 extremist groups. The Talibanisation of the whole of Pakistan is not only very dangerous but also closer to reality than the situation in Afghanistan says author Ahmer Rashid. How long can a moderate, secular Pakistan, withstand rising extremism? Made by SBS Dateline
Its cheap, highly addictive and ultra-powerful. "Ice", or crystal methamphetamine, is now more popular than heroin. It plays havoc with the minds and the bodies of addicts, filling emergency wards with dangerous, psychotic patients. But little is known about the long term effects of the drug or even how to treat the addiction. And health services are not prepared for the chaos ice has just started to unleash. This weeks documentary reports on the hidden epidemic. These are the most out of control, most violent human beings Ive seen in my whole life and Ive been around a long time, despairs Dr Gordian Fulde, Head of the Emergency Unit at St Vincents hospital. It makes heroin seem like the good old days. His hospital has seen a five-fold increase in patients admitted with ice psychosis since 2000. Theyve had to build a special security cell to contain them. Almost one in four ice users will experience at least one debilitating psychotic episode. It alters the functions of the brain, explains Professor Iain McGregor. Heavy users have a reduced brain volume basically they have brain damage. The ice epidemic has pushed hospitals and mental health units to their limits. Many of their resources have had to be diverted. But doctors are hampered by lack of knowledge about the drug, which appeared on the scene less than ten years ago. John suffers from Ekboms Syndrome, brought on by chronic addiction. He is covered in scabs and picks obsessively at his skin, desperately trying to pull out the "ice bugs" he believes live inside him. They live about three layers down and feed on the fat layer, he explains. His delusion is common among ice addicts. His friend, "Lenore", has 23 personalities, each with their own name. She obsessively sorts through rubbish for days on end when shes on ice. Its her way of making order out of her chaos. John and Leonore are part of a tribe of junkies who roam the inner cities, scoring and shooting up. They stay manically high for up to a week, without food or sleep. Finally, they crash and eat, before the welfare cheque arrives and the cycle starts all over again. "Were the fringe-dwellers," boasts "Mick", whose veins are so wrecked he can barely find a place to inject. But ice isnt only a cheap drug for hardcore addicts. Its also big on the party circuit, where its regarded as sociable and affordable. And because it lacks the stigma of heroin, its used at all levels of society, in the gay community, among students and nightclubbers, shiftworkers and the career minded. Jason" used to be a computer engineer earning good money. He started out as a recreational user but now hes an addict determined to kick the habit. Its going to be hard, he readily acknowledges. As yet, there is no dedicated treatment programme or legal substitute for ice in Australia. Funding for research into withdrawal problems is scarce, meaning the problem looks set to worsen. This confronting documentary will challenge and unsettle the most hardened of viewers.
Many of today's large enterprise networks are burning cash and are overly dependent upon layers of manual processes (like DNS, DHCP and IPAM for starters) to stay available and secure. Networks were created this way from the start; we architected networks to work just like the environments networks were about to transform. From those early days until today they have replaced populations of "middle men" and paperwork with streaming electrons racing between larger populations of endpoints. They drove incredible IT innovation and productivity gains.
Embarcadero Technologies announced the last of three sneak previews into Delphi 2010 and C++Builder 2010, part of the Embarcadero® RAD Studio 2010 family. The latest sneak preview showcases expanded database connectivity for more than a dozen platforms including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, MySQL, InterBase, IBM DB2, and more, plus new support for the popular Firebird SQL database. Firebird is a community-supported open source database based on Embarcadero’s InterBase platform. RAD Studio’s DataSnap multi-tier data access framework has also been enhanced to support an array of industry-standard data communication protocols such as JSON, SOAP, XML and REST enabling interoperability with virtually any data source.
Terracotta and Ehcache, two promising open source companies, expect to register a slight tremor on the Richter scale today when the industry, particularly the Java contingent, finds out that Terracotta bought Ehcache last week. The move, after Ehcache reportedly rejected three other offers, should have Oracle’s Coherence people gritting their teeth and Red Hat’s JBoss unit looking for a box of tissues while VMware purrs like a kitten since it’s buying SpringSource, which has an existing relationship with both Ehcache and Terracotta.
I would say that I am not really hooked on my Smartphone... unless you ask Mrs Thain, who I'm sure would give you a whole different answer. Yes...I'm Ian and I'm hooked on my Smartphone, LOL :-)
With an eye over its shoulder to see what rivals HP and IBM are doing, CA is making a cloud play in concert with Amazon EC2. Both are hunting large enterprise accounts because – in the words of Willie Sutton – “that’s where the money is.” They are telling them to manage the cloud as a critical component of their IT architectures – “a simple extension of their enterprise IT infrastructure,” as Amazon puts it – which then spells the need for comprehensive management capabilities between existing internal infrastructure and the cloud.
The Wall Street Journal doesn’t think Oracle can make its end-of-August schedule for closing its Sun acquisition because of the regulators on both sides of the pond. The paper’s also talked to legal experts that say Oracle may be required to divest something or accept licensing conditions to get the deal through. The European Commission has been soliciting opinions about whether the level of competition or pricing in databases, middleware or Java is threatened by the combine.
It is now one week since I upgraded my primary desktop system to Windows 7. I had been an early adopter of Vista and had a number of problems, even an occasional BSOD in the early days. I delayed putting Vista on my school computer because it did not support Novell which is used at Dawson College where I teach. Today I upgraded my school computer and I am fully integrated into the Novell structure. Here is the what and why of what I did, part one.
NetBeans IDE 6.7.1 with JavaFX and JetBrains Web IDE Early Access are ready for download. In their own words here are some of the benefits these releases deliver. An update to the 6.7 release release that is integrated with Project Kenai, a collaborative environment for developers to host open-source projects. With Kenai and the NetBeans IDE, a team of developers is able to create projects, check out, edit, debug, build, discuss, and commit code, all through one easy-to-use interface.
Posting from my iPhone at LAX. I’m flying Virgin America today for the first time, and I’m waiting at the gate to board a flight to JFK/New York City. I’m already impressed. When I walked up to the ticket counter, hip music was playing. The counter is lower than other airlines, so you don’t perceive a barrier between you and the ticket agent. After my bags were checked, the agent stepped from behind the counter to hand me a boarding pass and point me to security. The way she handled ...
Over the next six years JVC Kenwood Holdings is going to spend $27.4 million more or less (2.6 billion yen) so IBM can lift it into an outsourced cloud. The system will utilize IBM’s Shared Hosting Services for its System z mainframes or “zSHS” and be hosted out of IBM’s data center in Makuhari, Chiba, Japan, where JVC’s existing data centers in Saitama and Tokyo will be relocated.
Whether you are a project manager planning for a smooth implementation of a plan or a project sponsor on whose decisions a project depends, you cannot escape from the fact that project estimation is essential to its success. In the first place, there are three basic requirements that a project must satisfy: schedule, budget, and quality. The need to work within these essential project boundaries poses a huge challenge to everyone in the central management team.
Even in a recession training is a key aspect of a successful company. In fact I have been reading around on the internet and the real buzz out there is that companies need to train themselves out of a recession, rather than cut back.
Some interesting numbers about worldwide market shares of Smartphones (not dumbphones since those are so uninteresting to me). Both handset market share and web "traffic" shares are discussed.
For fifty years we've been moving data to where the computing power is. With intercloud computing, the world is going to look quite different, with the computing power moving to where the data is. The intercloud turns computing inside out. With traditional IT, we move the data to where the computing infrastructure is located. With the data volumes in most application areas now growing exponentially, this IT model is now broken. Moving massive volumes of data around means more bandwidth, more storage, and more latency.
SYS-CON Events announced today that CloudSwitch, which provides an enterprise gateway to the cloud, was named "Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on November 2 - 4, 2009, Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California. The event is expected to attract over 1,500 developers, engineers, architects, IT managers, and hardware and software professionals of every stripe.
Netbiscuits provides one platform for all devices. The software service allows you to fully exploit the capabilities of high-end mobile devices like the iPhone, Nokia Series 60, BlackBerrys, Android phones and many others.
Cloud Computing is one of the many things enterprise CIOs, CTOs and other engineers will master in delivering capability. I believe in the power of new Cloud Computing technologies and concepts and think we should all continue our focus there. I have said, and still say, the same thing about design approaches like Service Oriented Architecture [...] Related posts:
Unisys Corporation (NYSE:UIS) announced that the Unisys Secure Cloud Solution became available to clients on July 31. This innovative solution enables enterprise clients to securely move conventional business applications – including those with secure or sensitive data, such as human resources, financial, customer and healthcare information – into a managed, shared cloud service without costly, time-consuming rewrites or other alterations. The Unisys Secure Cloud Solution is a core component of Unisys cloud computing strategy, which enables clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed private clouds to Unisys-managed cloud services as well as hybrid solutions.