This reboot of The Planet of the Apes proved to be an interesting and intelligent movie about the ethics of animal research as well as an exciting SF thriller.
I think the work done to bring the apes to the screen both the CGI and the underlying performances of the actors was fantastic, very believable as apes and excellent in the way that the increased intelligence was implied.
The rights to the Otherland tetralogy by Tad Williams have been acquired by Warner Brothers. The fact that they have purchased the rights however doesn't mean that we will see them actually adapt the books into movies and in any case I think that a television series would be a better format.
It is a science fiction story told on an epic scale as each of the four books is several hundred pages long and they follow on directly from one another. Set towards the end of this century the eponymous Otherland is a virtual world made of many different realms many of which are based upon works such as Through the Looking-Glass, The Odyssey and The Iliad, The War of the Worlds, and The Wizard of Oz.
Not quite three weeks into the new year and I think that The Artist will be one of the contenders for my favourite film of the year. Fantastic charming movie that cannot fail to win over the affections of any viewer.
It is a brilliant idea to make a black and white silent movie about a star of silent movies whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of 'talkies'. The concept works so very well, I really didn't miss having dialogue and there are some very clever little touches that utilize the nature of the film.
To commemorate the 60th anniversary of Polish SF author Stanislaw Lem's first book Google have produced an amazing interactive animated doodle with art inspired by the drawings of Daniel Mroz used in Lem's short story collection The Cyberiad.
Representatives of 60 nations gathered to discuss how to tackle the rising levels of cyber-crime.
I hope when they discuss cyber-crime that they aren't focusing on intellectual property because the actual financial cost of copyright infringement as opposed to the trumped up figures given by the media pales in comparison with the real costs of cyber-crime such as fraud and identity theft.
So in searching for a little more information on the new Kindle that Amazon have launched in the UK I stumbled across the fact that in the US they have launched two new additional model, a touchscreen version and the Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire is a colour touchscreen dual-core tablet with a 7" screen and 8GB of storage, all for $199.One of the key features of the Kindle Fire is the Amazon Silk web browser that will dramatically improve the web browsing experience for the user by utilizing the Amazon Web Services cloud to act as a form of proxy server and carry out much of the computational load of displaying a webpage which might contain elements from many different servers thus requiring many requests to many different IPs.In addition through analysis of web requests flowing through the Amazon Web Services cloud they can predict the most likely next page a user might browse to and preload that page in the background as the user views the original page again decreasing the time waiting for a page to load.
Matt Wharton is an entrepreneur, photographer, publisher, writer and occasional network engineer. He was also in a former life a cinema manager. Educated at the University of Bath he holds a degree in Electronic and Communication Engineering and is a MCITP: Server Administrator and CCNA.
