James Bond Film Skyfall Inspired By Stuxnet Virus 187
Velcroman1 writes "No smartphones. No exploding pens. No ejector seats. No rocket-powered submarines. 'It's a brave new world,' gadget-maker Q tells James Bond in the new film Skyfall. The new film, released on the 50th anniversary of the storied franchise, presents a gadget-free Bond fighting with both brains and brawn against a high-tech villain with computer prowess Bill Gates would be envious of. What inspired such a villain? 'Stuxnet,' producer Michael G. Wilson said. 'There is a cyberwar that has been going on for some time, and we thought we'd bring that into the fore and let people see how it could be going on.'"
Poison? (Score:2, Interesting)
Is it really necessary to prove it's possible to ruin a James Bond movie by taking all of the fun out of it?
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Is it really necessary to prove it's possible to ruin a James Bond movie by taking all of the fun out of it?
On the other hand, this is the first Bond movie I have actually enjoyed all the way through. None of the shallow crap from the previous movies about gambling and drinking heavily being 'suave' whatever the hell that means, or a completely unbelieveable storyline. And the actors seem to be genuinely able to act as well.
Exploding pens have been replaced with ads (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying this -- there's ~30 minutes of ads before the movie even starts. Not coming attractions, not "go buy some popcorn," but television-style ads for products.
Seems MI6 has been hit hard by austerity!
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Well, you can always come 20 minutes after the announced showtime. When you rent it on disc, you'll get the same half hour of ads, and they'll disable fast-forward to make you watch it.
A clever person can get around this crap, but the sheer arrogance of an industry that wants to treat you like Alex being brainwashed [youtube.com] makes me crazy.
Re:Exploding pens have been replaced with ads (Score:4, Interesting)
Downloading from The Pirate Bay doesn't take a lot of smarts. Pay to watch ads, or see the movie for free without them? The industry is brain-dead, this is the kind of crap that drives people to the very piracy the industry hates and was the sort of thing DeCSS was written for.
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Or if you want to support the artists (or, to be more correct, the god damn middlemen) you can buy this disk AND download it.
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I never buy disks for recent movies, so I don't actually know, but I can't believe they'd pull this no-FF crap on disks that were for sale. I've only ever noticed the issue on those gray rental-only discs you get from Redbox and Netflix.
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Last time I used Pirate Bay, I got a nasty email from my ISP. Not gonna do it again without a VPN account, and for the number of movies I watch, it's not worth the trouble.
If you read my post all the way through, you'd have noticed the part where I said I could bypass the crap.
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It's funny, you're still sticking with this argument. We're in the post-piracy era. People have realized that being a self-centered shithead means everyone loses.
I don't expect you'll pick up on that, though. You've made it perfectly clear just how much of a self-centered shithead you are over the last several years.
Post-piracy era? Maybe for music but definitely not for movies. As for being a "self-centered shithead", I believe that piracy is a form of civil disobedience. The mafiaas have paid for laws that have robbed from us and try to artificially enforce their broken business model. The people fight back by not playing by their rules.
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I believe that piracy is a form of civil disobedience.
For it to be civil disobedience in the classic sense, you would need to pirate the movie, inform your ISP/the movie company that you had done so, get sued and by refusing to pay the fine end up in jail.
Otherwise, you're just getting stuff for free and no one changes anything, unless enough people do it and somehow put the movie companies out of business.
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Those ads are the cinema's, not the film studios. They show them from a separate reel.
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Again, I don't want to post any spoilers here, but the ads are most certainly attached to the film.
You'll see. Or if not, you could google it.
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That's not exactly new ... car commercials, coca cola, banks, cell phone companies ... all sorts of extra ads and crap has been shown before movies for quite some time.
BIND movies (Score:3, Funny)
The name is BIND, James BIND
Re:BIND movies (Score:5, Funny)
Re:BIND movies (Score:5, Funny)
Agent BIND, it is imperative that you contact MX immediately. It would seem that the DNSSEC has been found dead.
Did someone use to many AAAA records on him? Or will we have to wait for the CNAME resolution to find out?
Hopefully we'll get our answer before the MPAA assaults the NAME CACHE to once again lock down the world with their RIAA allies...those fiends.
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Need I remind you, ::1, that you have a license to Resolve, not to break the traffic laws.
huh? (Score:3)
The "brave new world" is "smartphones" (and tablets, wifi, etc.)
It has a PCI bus. (Score:5, Funny)
Can't wait for another stunning Hollywood interpretation of computer science. Maybe this time when he flies up to the spaceship and hacks it with his MacBook, it will show a virus check on screen and tell us that it's the Matrix.
They do the same with physics (Score:4, Insightful)
How often do we see someone being shot where they get thrown back and yet the shooter goes nowhere?
Or where the bad-ass good guy walks away from an explosion that should have turned him into jelly?
Or fighting on a floating piece of rock in a lava stream? AND they don't burst into flames themselves?
Or spacecraft maneuvering like airplanes?
And lastly, sound in space.
Re:They do the same with physics (Score:5, Interesting)
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In one of the Pierce Brosnan movies, I think GoldenEye, the bad guy chains Bond and the girl to a (grounded) helicopter pilot's seat. There is a timer set to trigger bombs that will explode the helicopter, unless Bond manages to escape. Which he does by loosening his hands in-time just enough to trigger, the ejection seat, of the helicopter.
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ejection seat, of the helicopter.
The Kamov Ka-50 [wikipedia.org] has an ejector seat.
Re:It has a PCI bus. (Score:4, Insightful)
For what it's worth, ID4 does establish (in the second act, I believe?) that our technology is replicated from the alien designs. From a storytelling perspective, it's not much of a stretch, then, to make a "virus". Something that simply moves along byte by byte making copies of itself wouldn't be that difficult a thing to figure out, if you had access to one of their computers on the ground (Which they do, in Area 51) and it's further not much of a stretch to imagine that their admins might have left access a little *too* open.
Sure, he's shown using his PowerBook running MacOS, but it's probably just a terminal window of sorts into the guts of the alien computer, because the PowerBook is designed for a human, and the alien systems are not.
Most movie portrayals of computing are pretty far fetched, but this is one I'm actually willing to forgive. It doesn't seem implausible in the least to me that someone faced with impending annihilation would figure out how to do this. Hell, I bet the guys at Area 51 might have even had a compiler for the damn thing, they have had it for a few decades.
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For what it's worth, ID4 does establish (in the second act, I believe?) that our technology is replicated from the alien designs. From a storytelling perspective, it's not much of a stretch, then, to make a "virus". Something that simply moves along byte by byte making copies of itself wouldn't be that difficult a thing to figure out, if you had access to one of their computers on the ground (Which they do, in Area 51) and it's further not much of a stretch to imagine that their admins might have left access a little *too* open.
Sure, he's shown using his PowerBook running MacOS, but it's probably just a terminal window of sorts into the guts of the alien computer, because the PowerBook is designed for a human, and the alien systems are not.
Most movie portrayals of computing are pretty far fetched, but this is one I'm actually willing to forgive. It doesn't seem implausible in the least to me that someone faced with impending annihilation would figure out how to do this. Hell, I bet the guys at Area 51 might have even had a compiler for the damn thing, they have had it for a few decades.
But you think they'd have closed that security hole in 50 years time. It's not like they were Microsoft....
Re:It has a PCI bus. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Depends. If you're civilization that's millions of years old that has encountered little, if any, resistance out of the countless conquered planets, you might actually become a bit overconfident and neglect to patch things on a timely basis.
More like they'd be mired in the red tape than overconfident...
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But you think they'd have closed that security hole in 50 years time. It's not like they were Microsoft....
They were a telepathic species. It's quite possible that, in their society, there were no private thoughts. Given that, it's quite possible that they didn't even have any computer security to speak of.
That's the justification I use anyway.
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RISC architecture is going to change everything.
RISC is good.
?????
Hackers
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To be fair...it kinda did. Not to many CISC (to the metal) machines around anymore...
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Re:It has a PCI bus. (Score:5, Interesting)
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To be fair, the fact that the way the characters are hitting the keyboard does not match with what's going on on the screen, is the least of all problems that annoy me about the representation of IT in the movies.
If music was to be butchered by a blockbuster the way hacking is, it would probably include:
- grotesquely disfigured instruments (exploding when played wrong)
- musico-babble: "I've got an idea - let's transpose the C Minor Major scale into the Midichlorian mode and play it allegro al dente!"
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That's going to be true of almost any plot device which which involves domain-specific knowledge.
I used to do some work in the airline industry, and the maintenance guys told me numerous tales about stuff that was shown in movies that was wrong for the kind of aircraft being depicted (the cabin isn't hat big, that p
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RISC architecture is gonna change everything! (Score:2)
Stupid Gadgets (Score:2, Insightful)
Even though I was 12 years old when I saw it, the ejector seat in Goldfinger impressed me as the dumbest gadget ever. "OK, Bond, we've killed two of your Bond Girls in absurd ways, now get in the back of this truck." "Oh gee, is it OK if I drive myself?" "OK, we'll have a henchman accompany you, just promise us you don't have an ejector seat."
Even dumber (though more low tech) is the part where the limousine gets reduced to a metal cube for no obvious reason.
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And since we're on James Bond, I'll even speak up for today's blockbusters; the huge sums spent on making films today *does* create a bigger stage. I re-watched Avatar the other night. I know the plot bothers people but, man, I ju
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I'd strongly disagree on Avatar.
They used a lot of resources creating a world, and forgot to make it interesting or have a story. For all the CG effort on that movie, they still didn't come up with anything that isn't roundly trounced by many real world locations in terms of spectacle. Technically impressive yes - but ultimately pretty dull.
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Could have been great, but they botched the presentation. Standing on top of a very high thing looks quite similar up close. But it's a mash of problems really - you can make pretty mundane stuff look amazing if your script and presentation is solid - science fiction has been doing this for years. The problem with Avatar is they had all this technology and money, but then basically decided to slack off on everything else.
Which is sad - because the original script treatment, while still having it's problems,
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I don't share your love of Avatar (well made, but too long, and there's something lame about the save-the-earth preachiness in a movie that's at the center of a billion-dollar marketing effort), but I agree that this is a great time to be a movie buff. As you say, the access is mind-boggling.
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Wasn't talking about the movie itself.
http://www.technologytell.com/gaming/52322/mcdonalds-giving-avatar-big-mac-thrill-cards-with-big-mac-purchases/ [technologytell.com]
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Bond films were generally filled with stupid gadgets. The Roger Moore era was particularly straining of whatever willing suspension of disbelief I was able to muster, from the gadgets to the villains, to the very worst of the worst, Jaws the Henchman.
Where the Bond films always shined brightest was in their exotic locales, the beautiful women, and the chase scenes. The location shots were always gorgeous, and watching one was like taking an exciting vacation. But the soundstage shots were generally paint
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"Computer prowess that Bill Gates would envy" (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, so the villain in this movie goes *further* than creating a monopoly, using its power to force suppliers to put competitors out of business, using a file-system hack to implement long filenames, having Notepad write a BOM to UTF-8 files, and, finally, choosing Ballmer to run the business into the ground?
How will Bond ever defeat a villain with such technical skill?
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Oh, so the villain in this movie goes *further* than creating a monopoly, using its power to force suppliers to put competitors out of business, using a file-system hack to implement long filenames, having Notepad write a BOM to UTF-8 files, and, finally, choosing Ballmer to run the business into the ground?
How will Bond ever defeat a villain with such technical skill?
By throwing a chair, duh.
New Bond? (Score:5, Funny)
Is Vladimir Putin still playing James Bond?
We need a Bond that looks more like Bond and less like a Bond Villian.
Re:New Bond? (Score:5, Insightful)
I had the pleasure of reading through all the Ian Flemming books last summer. They were really fun reads that hold up nicely (well, some of them do). I think it was The Spy Who Loved Me that really drives home the point about Bond And it's this -
Bond is a villain. The only difference with him is that he's our villain.
In such light, I think Daniel Craig looks perfect for the part. Just my two cents.
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Larry Ellison? Oh wait.
Didn't they do this already? (Score:4, Informative)
I also seem to remember Jeff Goldblum disabling an entire civilization's computer system with a computer virus so that it could be destroyed by nuclear weapons, about sixteen years ago.
A computer virus is a brave new world for filmmaking now?
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I seem to remember Bruce Willis doing this five years ago, against a Timothy Olyphant "who hacked the Pentagon with just a laptop!"
I also seem to remember Jeff Goldblum disabling an entire civilization's computer system with a computer virus so that it could be destroyed by nuclear weapons, about sixteen years ago.
A computer virus is a brave new world for filmmaking now?
You mean in Die Hard 4, Die Harder? or Independence Day? Or The Net? or Hackers? etc....
I remember in Die Hard 4, a computer virus made a house blow up! Does Skyfall one-up this?
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When does that show up?
You're the second person to mention this, and I've never seen anything like it in the movie. In the movie it's the satellite signal which serves as the reverse engineering basis.
The whole "source of the modern age" thing was from Transformers.
Bethesda (Score:2)
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Beats Marrowlivion, I guess.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Now... let's see... How did the political landscape change during that time. Hmmm...
I feel there was some sort of shift in power. Some sort of fundamental change in focus. A target demographic finally getting a gripe and coming to the realization that the guy they were standing behind is royally fucking shit up. Or, at the very least, a writer or two in the depths of Hollywood seemed to think so.
Wow, 192 episodes and eight seas
An exercise in suspending disbelief.. (Score:3)
The concept behind the plot, while at the most extreme of technical possibility, was a valid idea to explore in a piece of fiction. The Iranians would likely have never detected stuxnet if its 'herders' had kept a better control on its spreading. Imagine something like that in a western government (as the victim). No, what annoyed me most is that they didn't even bother. Simply swapping some of the IT buzzwords in the script for ones that actually meant something in the given context, would have greatly improved its palatability. However that would mean employing someone with real IT knowledge on the writing team. Such a person might have gone insane or have made the script 'boring' with too much attention to accuracy, who knows.
One theory I had when leaving the film, was that maybe the makers didn't want to give the general public any ideas or tips in how someone would go about achieving any of the anarchy portrayed in the film. The more misinformed about computer 'hacking' the safer we'll all be...
Re:An exercise in suspending disbelief.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Accurate technical detail is usually too boring or irrelevant to most of the audience - look at Top Gear's version of The Sweeney car-chase with Clarkson's insistence on getting the technical detail correct that the Jag's traction control needed to be disabled and that in turn required holding down a button for 10 seconds. By showing what a movie would be like if they stuck to such facts, the showed (in an amusing way) why it is a very, very bad idea.
In the James Bond world, G is a valid hex number. (Score:2)
Skyfall is embarrasing (Score:2)
Is this the real slashdot (Score:2)
"The new film, released on the 50th anniversary of the storied franchise, presents a gadget-free Bond fighting with both br
Gadget-free Bond can suck my b*lls! (Score:2)
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Yeah. It actually /is/ good. Except if you happen to know something about computers, unfortunately.
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It was very boring for a Bond movie. I fell asleep twice trying to watch it. No one liked bond because he simply completed his mission. They like bond because he did it using innovative technology and gadgets. The same reason Batman movies work, take away his gadgets and he is just a rich 1%'er with mental issues and some anger.
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he is just a rich 1%'er with mental issues and some anger.
Then, pretty much what everyone on /. aspires to become?
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It was very boring for a Bond movie. I fell asleep twice trying to watch it. No one liked bond because he simply completed his mission. They like bond because he did it using innovative technology and gadgets. The same reason Batman movies work, take away his gadgets and he is just a rich 1%'er with mental issues and some anger.
Wow, how old are you? The tech and gadgets are just shiny stuff for ten year olds. What makes them work is good writing, acting and directing.
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Easy solution: Don't go and see it!
Re:No wonder it sucks! (Score:5, Insightful)
Millions of people also think the Bach Brandenburg concertos, Firefly, Aliens, Terminator2, the Curiosity rover, seasons 3-10 of the Simpsons and Raiders of the lost Ark were pretty awesome. Your point?
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... Bach Brandenburg concertos ...
I haven't seen this one, is it any good?
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Slashdot high-five, bra!
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I've watched it and it was good entertainment despite. In contrast to the last one horrible Daniel Graig even does not appear entirely like a psychopathic murderer, so it's a bit easier to empathize with him this time (though still not easy). There are worse James Bond movies but also better ones, and it's fun unless you expect more than a James Bond movie.
Re:No wonder it sucks! (Score:5, Interesting)
...and it's fun unless you expect a James Bond movie.
FTFY.
To give an explanation, I think Craig is so far from the Fleming character and when introducting him they shouldn't have thrown out the good bits of the existing film canon.
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...and it's fun unless you expect a James Bond movie.
FTFY.
To give an explanation, I think Craig is so far from the Fleming character and when introducting him they shouldn't have thrown out the good bits of the existing film canon.
The Fleming Bond is a brutal psychotic nut. In that way, Craig is much closer than the dandies that previously played him.
Re:No wonder it sucks! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it is so boring and not even funny. Whatever, it should not be funny.
The IT stuff are so laughable.
- Q (with all the Geek-chic aparel) : "Oh my god, we have been hacked !" (And splash !, a animated 3D representation of the "thing" in your face.
Ok, go back to school, assholes)
- James Bond (Looking at the hex representation) : "Ok, Let's try that password" (Yes, every "Virus" have a password to decypher it)
- Q : How, what is it ?
- JB : It's map !
There not a single gram of Ian Fleming novel' spirit in that movie, such a shame. This is just a giant advertising for Omega® and Sony® for zombie audience eating pop-corn.
You can leave it.
Re:No wonder it sucks! (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget:
Q: "We're under attack! Strip the headers and find the source!"
Bad Guy: "Good luck, I'm behind seven proxies!".
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Oh.
Ow.
My brain.
Oh god.
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Why does that remind of this?
In A.D. 2101
War was beginning...
Re:No wonder it sucks! (Score:5, Informative)
There not a single gram of Ian Fleming novel' spirit in that movie, such a shame. This is just a giant advertising for Omega® and Sony® for zombie audience eating pop-corn.
You can leave it.
I'd be curious to know if you think any of the Bond movies have featured a portrayal of 007 that is true to the novels. Outside of Sean Connery, Daniel Craig's Bond is fairly close to the source material. Where Craig excels is in his physical portrayal of Bond: not only does he have the physique, but he moves like Bond: an operator, an athletic pugilist, with just a hint of the street; he looks and acts like a hard case.
The fact is, the Bond portrayed in the books is a thug, and at least initially, he lacks sophistication. He is provincial, and somewhat racist (though not consistently so, and actually irrelevant). So if you think that earlier portrayals of Bond (Connery excluded, of course) are somehow more accurate... I don't know what to tell you. Methinks you protest too much (and that you don't know of what you speak).
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Is Bond as sexist in the novel as in this film?
Bond wasn't even looking at the first girl that saved him while having his Heineken® on the bed, and he left without even telling her anything. He appeared like a creep behind the second girl while she was showering and just fucked her.
Women were just sex objects. Despite the film being very long they didn't get any character development at all.
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Well, he is just a kid. Probably had some imaging tools on the local server and couldn't be bothered to get the disk out. A beginner's mistake!
But you didn't look closely enough. Those were open racks with motherboards on them. The red lights provide a nice movie style heartbeat status display.
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It has been released in most of Europe, and from what I hear, it sucks big time.
I think I know what you are trying to do [xkcd.com]
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Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Interesting)
He could code (and in multiple languages), in contrast to, say, Steve Jobs.
From what I've read of the experiences of other coders/designers/architects, he had the in-depth technical acumen to make a one-on-one development review a very detailed and rather harrowing experience, as well.
Re:Bill Gates? (Score:5, Informative)
Last time I checked, Bill Gates wasn't a computer genius at all, unlike Steve Wozniak.
Check again.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates [wikipedia.org]
In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent. His solution was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.
and
During Microsoft's early years, all employees had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, Gates personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit
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Well... [xkcd.com]
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To its credit, Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter had one of the most innovative fight scenes I have ever seen. The one in the herd of stampeding horses. Not realistic, but it was certainly made of awesome.
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I can't wait to see Bond and his 'modern' love interest, a mysterious blond PHD computer scientist named Kitty Scripter, code up some GUIs in visual basic to save the day
I would pay full price at an IMAX theater to see that movie!
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