Photo by Art Streiber

THE VISION THING

BY RICK TETZELI

How Marty Scorsese risked it all and lived to risk again in Hollywood.

AT 69, AN AGE WHEN MOST HOLLYWOOD DIRECTORS have been packed off after a hollow cavalcade of plaudits, roasts, and nostalgic fetes, Martin Scorsese is once again panicked about hitting a deadline. His new movie is Hugo, a 3-D children’s movie being released by Paramount Pictures this Thanksgiving weekend, and Scorsese has never before directed in 3-D, nor, God knows, made anything resembling a kid flick. But this is what life is like for Marty, as everyone calls him. The director has achieved the trifecta of a fulfilling, creative life: enough money to do only what truly interests him, enough freedom to attack those projects in a way that is satisfying, and enough appreciation from his peers to tame–just slightly, just ever so slightly–the neurotic beast of self-doubt.

via Martin Scorsese On Vision In Hollywood | Fast Company.

James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him@jaltucher.Iʼm writing this white sitting in a hotel room. To my left is the Pacific Ocean and all the magical San Francisco fog stuff people kept whispering to me about. About 12 floors downstairs Claudia is doing yoga in the gym.About four feet directly behind me is a woman that is a complete stranger to me who is having an unbelievably long orgasm. Thereʼs a wall between us. Hold on a second while I take a glass and listen against the wall.If there was no wall there then this whole thing would probably have been pretty awkward. I probably would not have been able to keep staring at the computer screen, for instance.

via How To Be The Best Entrepreneur In The World | TechCrunch.

Here is a great review of Attack the Block from the good folks over at Zombie Emergency Response Operations. Right on target. We love this movie!

Attack the Block

A teen gang in South London defend their block from an alien invasion.

Shaun of the Dead (2004) meets Super 8 (2011)! An absolutely FUN sci-fi action comedy.

Props to writer/director Joe Cornish, for blurring the lines of fantasy and reality. This had great visuals and the characters felt real. Dark and vibrant at the same time. This urban sci-fi has something about it that just captures audiences…

Potty mouth kids battle “blackest black” creatures from another planet. The effects and creatures were simple and yet decent. What drove this film was the awesome bunch of troublemakers and their leader Moses. Played by 1st timerJohn Boyega - who did a good job as the rough and tough teen. The banter and wit was amusing to say the least.

via Tumblr.

Here is the restricted trailer: Attack the Block

“This is Apple’s worst release in history,” seethed one in an e-mail message. “Apple has absolutely no clue what professionals need. There are so many missing high-end features that we need, it should be called iMovie Pro.”

via Professional Video Editors Weigh In on Final Cut Pro X – NYTimes.com.

Lydon, known to generations of miscreants as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, lives a few hundred yards from the beach, just south of Venice, and has for close to two decades. “Well, somebody has to replace the hippies,” he said by way of explanation, spitting the last word with the same amount of contempt that he did in his youth. “All the beach there used to be very, very hippie. Very crime ridden too, in the past. Very druggy. But Johnny came along and kicked all that out.” His voiced turned faux-sinister. “Yes, I showed them a thing or two about manners.”

via John Lydon’s latest noise – latimes.com.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

via The Creativity Crisis – Newsweek.

Iron Man 2 Trailer: Mickey Rourke Whips Robert Downey Jr. Into Shape

12/17/09 at 09:30 AM

Iron Man 2 Trailer: Mickey Rourke Whips Robert Downey Jr. Into Shape

Prior to Iron Man’s May 2 release in 2008, Marvel and Paramount had fairly high hopes that they could successfully will another superhero franchise into existence. However, their most optimistic box-office projections were shattered — in a good way! — when the film roared to a $98 million opening weekend on its way to cracking the $300 million barrier at the domestic box office. After that mammoth success, there was some fallout: Terrence Howard was surprisingly replaced by Don Cheadle during a salary dispute, the studio tried to lowball Vulture hero Mickey Roarke Rourke, and Emily Blunt was hired to play the Black Widow, and then, just as quickly, was promptly un-cast. So, after all that turmoil, how did the film turn out? Well, the first trailer for the film just hit the interwebs, and thankfully, all of Robert Downey Jr.’s cocksure attitude that made the first movie such a huge hit looks as if it has been successfully replicated. The trailer also gives us a really good look at Mickey Rourke as Whiplash, but sadly, there’s no sign of his signature drunk cockatoo.

Read more: Iron Man 2 Trailer: Mickey Rourke Whips Robert Downey Jr. Into Shape — Vulture

Posted on Alltop by Annie Colbert.

What the heck is Google Wave? You and about 64.7 percent of the Twittersphere are all wondering (scientific calculation based on random checks of trending topics.) EpipheoStudios.com created a handy animated video to help explain the Wave hype with an underlying motive of scoring an elusive invite to the fancy new Google product. Does anyone else feel like this whole invite situation is reminiscent of elementary school birthday party invites? Still not a cool kid, I suppose.

MSE is basically the next generation of Microsoft’s Windows Live Onecare anti-virus and anti-spyware service, but without all of the extras, such as a firewall, data backup solution and restore or PC performance tuning (Microsoft announced in Nov. 2008 that it would stop selling Onecare through its retail channels at the end of June 2009).

The toughest part was getting the program installed. MSE can run on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions), but the program failed to install on an XP Pro system I tried to use as my initial test machine — leaving me with nothing more than a failure message and cryptic error code that didn’t turn up anything in an online search.

Fortunately, it installed without issue on my Windows 7 Beta system. Interested users should note that installing MSE requires that the would-be user’s system passes Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy tool, which checks to make sure it is being installed on a licensed version of Windows. Would-be users also will need to register for or already have a free Windows Live (or Hotmail) account in order to download the program.

After installation, MSE spends a couple of minutes downloading additional files, and then prompts the user to perform a “Quick Scan.” True to its name, that scan took less than 10 minutes on my test system. A full scan, however, took about 45 minutes on a relatively new install of Windows 7.

Anti-virus products are notorious for sucking up system resources, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting this program is even running. It barely used more than 4 MB of system memory for the entire time I tested it, including during scans.

By default, MSE scans archived files (.zip, e.g.), and creates a system restore point before deleting any files that set off alarms. The one scanning option not checked by default is to scan removable drives — such as USB drives — for viruses. But users can enable this option.

The program is not just an on-demand scanner: It includes real-time protection, which Microsoft says “alerts you when viruses, spyware and other potentially unwanted software attempts to install itself or run on your computer.”

In addition, MSE monitors file and program activity on your computer, and automatically scans all downloaded files and attachments. If it finds something, it will ask you what to do with the suspect file, and if the user takes no action after 10 minutes, Microsoft will decide what to do with the file(s) according to its default actions. Out of the box, it schedules a scan every Sunday at 2:00 a.m., but only if the PC is idle at that time.

A great deal has been written so far about the potential for MSE to unseat established giants in the anti-virus industry. It’s too soon to say whether that will happen, or how Microsoft’s new offering will measure up in tests against real-life malicious software, tests that are beyond the scope of this review.

Personally, I doubt whether MSE will have much of an impact on the anti-virus market as a whole. If anti-virus industry players fall by the wayside in the coming years, it will be because they either get gobbled up by their (non-Microsoft) competitors, or they fail to adapt to the latest threats.

Each time the issue of Microsoft throwing its weight around in the security space arises, it invariably raises the same issues of trust, privacy and efficacy. Allow me to address a few of the common themes, in the context of MSE:

Microsoft made the operating system, so it’s probably best equipped to produce software capable of defending its weaknesses: The truth is, Microsoft is continually defending the weaknesses in Windows. Every month, it ships new patches to fix security and stability problems in its software that it didn’t know about until bad guys or researchers unearthed them and proved they were exploitable. What’s more, Microsoft is in no more advantageous a position vis-a-vis other anti-virus makers to tell which tricks the bad guys will pull out of their hats next.

Microsoft is responsible for the same buggy software that lets the bad guys break in, so why would you trust them to also do a good job defending your PC against malware?: This is a fair question, but the folks asking this very question probably will never install this software anyway.

And, while I don’t believe Microsoft has the time or the inclination to go rooting through users’ systems for personal information, the disclaimer for the default “Basic membership” in Microsoft SpyNet that ships with MSE also isn’t likely to reassure those who doubt the company’s intentions. It reads:

“Send basic information to Microsoft about software that Microsoft Security Essentials detects, including where the software came from, the actions that you apply or that Microsoft Security Essentials applies automatically, and whether the actions were successful. In some instances, personal information might unintentionally be sent to Microsoft. However, Microsoft will not use this information to identify you or to contact you.”

Microsoft is only offering this product so that it can gain a foothold in the security software market, after which time it will start charging people to protect their computers whilst strong-arming its competition: Microsoft has said it plans to continue offering MSE for free. And for all of the reasons stated above, I don’t believe Microsoft’s offering of a free anti-virus product is going to steal too many paying customers away from other products. After all, there are plenty of other free anti-virus products available, including AVAST! Home Edition, Avira’s AntiVir, AVG Free, ClamWin, PCTools, and Panda’s new Cloud Antivirus offering, to name but a few.

I suspect Microsoft is offering this software for reasons part public relations and part self-preservation: Redmond knows that anything it can do to ensure that there are fewer malware-infested PCs out there is a good thing. And let’s face it, for whatever reason — even with the impressive number of free anti-virus offerings out there already — a dangerous number of Windows users continue to use the operating system without any kind of anti-virus software installed. At least with its brand recognition, Microsoft has a good chance of changing that reality to some degree.

One final note, if you’re interested in trying out this software, you probably want to move pretty quickly. According to ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft intends to make this beta available only to the first 75,000 downloaders in the United States, Brazil or Israel.

By Brian Krebs | June 24, 2009; 7:00 AM ET