Finally Titanic taken down a notch. I had hope for Return of the King, but it looks like Avatar has done it.
The original Titanic sank in 1912. Now the blockbuster movie it inspired has also gone down.
This time, though, it was not an iceberg that toppled it, but a 3D film about a blue-skinned alien race defending their planet against human invaders.
Towards the end of the last decade, James Cameron’s epic Titanic became the most successful movie ever with global takings of $1.843bn (£1.14bn).
But that record no longer stands thanks to Avatar – also directed by Cameron – which this week stole its crown as the all-time global box office champ, with receipts of $1.859bn (£1.15bn).
It is an astonishing achievement for the 55-year-old Canadian, and one that is unlikely to be repeated in his or our lifetimes.
[Via BBC News]
After seeing Avatar and its excellent digital characters it really makes me wonder do we really need actors that are payed millions pre movie. It looks like they have the visual part of the technology very refined. Now they just need to add the back end. I mean really it’s a script that could be read by a computer, develop some emotion/inflection component and let the animators run wild.
Ran into an interesting problem the other day. I was working on a clients machine that every time you connected a USB device the machine would blue screen and throw up a 0x000000FC stop message. The station was a Dell with XP Home SP3 installed and after some digging I found the solution.
If you have a XP disc handy just pop it in and after the pre-installation fun is over enter the Recovery console and replace the following files:
c:\windows\system32\drivers\usbport.sys with c:\windows\$NtServicePackUninstall$\usbport.sys
c:\windows\system32\drivers\usbohci.sys with c:\windows\$NtServicePackUninstall$\usbohci.sys
c:\windows\system32\drivers\usbuhci.sys with
c:\windows\$NtServicePackUninstall$\usbuhci.sys
Simply use the copy command to copy the files over the originals. Be sure to backup the originals just in case. After a reboot everything was copacetic. You gotta love Windows. 
[Via Microsoft TechNet]
Well it looks like the extended version of LOTRs is finally coming to Blu-ray in 2011 or 2012. It’s to bad that they are going to push the theatrical versions out first but I think I will be waiting.
[Via Amazon]
