Die Hard 4.0: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

Caught John McClane [JMC] (Bruce Wills) in all the Die Hard 4.0 action this Friday, opening night show. If you are wondering whether you should watch this flick - my suggestion is certainly/+vely YES! Specially, for all Die Hard fans and action movie buffs.
The entire movie in totality gels and amalgamates into a great overall experience; although may seem to be a bit clumsy and not all that fine in disintegration.
It has abundant amount of kick-ass stunts (some of them have actually been performed on streets rather against some green backdrop), thrills, comedy with a storyline built on a plot to wreak the entire US utility, telecommunications, transportation…infrastructure and control the entire financial data (Its always about the money) by a group of cyber-terrorists led by Timothy Olyphant and Maggie Q. The rest is how JMC, an analog entity in the digital world with the help of Justin Long his hacker sidekick save the day.
You definitely can't miss out the trademark McClane quick & witty humor and bone crunching action (Stunt double of Wills did get injured while performing a difficult stunt for the movie).
There is good chemistry between Wills and Justin Long (The "I'm a Mac Guy" you can catch on Apple commercials & earlier seen in Herbie Fully Loaded, Jeepers Creepers) and their on-the-run byplay gives each scene the added X-factor.
There were occasional applause from the audience especially when JMC brings down a helicopter with a car, Fight with Maggie Q & when his kidnapped daughter is told by the villain (Tim Olyphant) --- to make him understand that he is fighting a loosing battle, she quips - "There are only 4 left now, Dad!"; however the F-35 taking on McClean in a Semi & him riding it to the ground was something I thought a bit over (reminiscing of Arnold in True Lies with a Sea Harrier).

So go ahead and have fun. Thumbs Up from me! Yippee-ki-yay!!!

THE ZOMBIE'S FATE

Your Old;
n' your skin turns cold
In the prehistoric fold
sitting comfortably numb on the decaying mould,

You who had his soul sold
in lieu of bags of gold
said so the druid, who told;
gonna be struck with Zeus’s bolt
even the Satan’s gonna give you a jolt,
He who abhors all
can't take the old man's scold.

New Strategic Marketing Paradigm

TOWARDS A NEW STRATEGIC MARKETING PARADIGM

"The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility". The focus today is innovation and its realization.
Business professionals of all market segments recognize that some products and services will fail every year after year though the products or services themselves are perfect or perceived to be so.

Whether it be the hi-technology driven niche' markets or the general cluttered ones, failures of products/services and their marketing strategies do occur. This happens because the competition is catching up, because the customer has matured, or because today's environment is dynamic.
The contention here is to move towards a new strategic marketing paradigm and to offer not a single product or a product line, but to "provide committed differentiated solutions" to the industry. Solutions that dramatically impact and improve every aspect of the product development and manufacturing process-from "concept to market".

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them, into the impossible".

-KICK AT THE DARKNESS UNTIL IT BLEEDS DAYLIGHT

SMPs or Clusters?

Today, Microprocessor performance far exceeds that of traditional supercomputers costing many times more. This cost advantage allows a system of scalable computing resources to be built in many different ways: clusters, MPPs, and SMPs to name a few. Because high-speed, low-latency standard communications technologies now rival those available from proprietary sources, the open systems cluster paradigm can flourish. Software for several layers of standard tools for distributed computing now exists. It ranges from communications protocols like UDP/IP and TCP/IP to high-level programming environments such as OSF's DCE and ONC+.

In my experience over the past 10 years, he best reasons to favor clusters over vendor proprietary MPP solutions have little to do with technology but rather with complexity and market share. System administration costs for clusters are vastly lower than for dispersed workstation resources. The third party software available for the workstation components makes clusters far more attractive than their MPP brethren. Simply put, clusters leverage the benefits of the component platforms.
A typical supercomputers day-to-day workload resembles a cascade of boulders and sand. The boulders represent applications with very large memory, CPU, and disk requirements; the sand is at the other end of the spectrum. Typically, many of these applications are very complex legacy codes for whom it is not cost effective to attempt to parallelize. Accommodating this workload requires a cluster of elements with very large memories. Because memory quickly dominates the cost of the cluster, it is worthwhile to add more processors to each memory element. The boulders and sand workload and the SMP's cost effectiveness in matching this workload is the fundamental motivation for SMP cluster computing.

While deciding whether SMP is right for your organization, it is important to understand its place in the quest for computing power. Individual machines (nodes) in a cluster, which themselves can be SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) machines, communicate via high-speed connections--such as Infiniband, Gigabit switched or Myrinet and proprietary interconnects as numaflex, to give a single application access to the CPUs, disks, and memory of all connected nodes. On the downside, the overhead required to coordinate disk and CPU access from one machine to another prevents clusters from scaling as efficiently as SMP implementations, which have closer ties between processors, memory, and disks.
Given these options, how does one determine which architectures to deploy ? My view is that this will mainly depended on the applications required to run on the systems. The user with a broad application mix, which is the case most of the time, may choose to deploy both clusters and large shared-memory systems, each running the applications best suited for them in different compute workflows. As computing problems grow increasingly complex and data intensive, the real challenge is not how to buy the most processors for the budget, but how to best map the numerous architectural options to the users’ specific problems.

As leading processor vendors as Intel and AMD turn to muti-core architectures, the compute horsepower available to clusters is on the rise, along with more and more scientific and technical applications are being written in MPI, this provides clusters with good application availability.

I see the market share of cluster systems increase in the TOP 500 supercomputers in the years to come, with large SMP systems being confined to specific application usage.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)

Although AWE may seem to have a convoluted, intermittently inexplicable narrative, it's worth seeing for the jaw-dropping action, the doses of humor and special effects, swashbuckling adventure and of course the star power of Johnny Depp, Knightley, Rush, Orlando Bloom, Bill Nighy, Chow Yun-Fat and a host of other talented actors who utter their lines with great enthusiasm & gusto, even if they're dripping wet and pretending to do battle with computer-generated creatures.
Keira Knightley comes out with probably the strongest performance as her character, Elizabeth Swann reprises in its true element. Rest of the cast manages to hold their presence though tending to loose themselves in the clutter of too many characters (It is evident that the director-Gore Verbinski is not sure what to do with most of them). Chow Yun-Fat as the sneering Singapore pirate lord Sao Feng, Jack Davenport as Admiral Norrington are prominent ones. The plot weaved between Davy Jones (Bill Nighy, under a wriggling mass of Computer Generated tentacles) and Calypso (Naomie Harris) shreds off, Bloom as Will Turner is mostly in the background. Depp as Jack Sparrow is great as always and the scene involving multi-Jack Sparrow's are one of the best moments in the film. Depp and Geoffrey Rush as the rip-roaring Captain Barbossa are treat to watch.
The story may seem to frustrate, but the acting and the visual effects and the overall scene never tends to disappoint.
Great to watch movie, we enjoyed it. Word of advice, just enjoy the impressive blend of live action work and CGI wizardry, don't spend too much of effort in understanding the story.

Ocean's Thirteen (2007)

Lot of insistence from my wife finally made us catch Ocean’s 13 and we didn’t regret it. The movie is all heist, high style presentation wonderfully shot and witty, quite enjoyable. The plot starts with Al Pacino (Willy Bank) a Vegas big shot hurting one of the original Ocean’s gang members, leading Ocean to put his team back together for one more heist and target the casino owner Willy Bank, and bring him down.
Pitt & Clooney perform as expected with effortless charm while Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Don Cheadle, Ellen Barkin, and Al Pacino, as the scrappy villain; hold on their own making the experience worth watching. The sparring between Pitt [Rusty] and Clooney [Ocean] is great, especially when Rusty teases Ocean, referring to the pounds Clooney gained for Syriana. "Keep the weight off," Ocean replies back "Settle down, have a couple of kids," with a real life reference to Pitt & Joile, which can’t be missed.
So just make yourself comfortable in the theater chair and enjoy the movie.