christmas with the psychopaths “santa’s slay”

Let’s wrap up our little Batshit-Crazy-Santas review series with a look at the 2005 straight-to-DVD “starring” vehicle for ex-wrestler Bill Goldberg, Santa’s Slay, shall we? Glad you agree.

So, yeah, here’s the straight dirt on Jolly Old St. Nick — he’s really a demon, got it? in fact, truth be told he’s not just any garden-variety demon, he’s the son of the Great Horned One, good ol’ Lucifer himself! Okay, so you could already have guessed as much.? Nobody’s that fucking cheerful out of the goodness of their heart, it just ain’t natural. He’s an unlucky demon, though, in that he lost a bet to an angel and had to go around being nice for the next 1,000 years. Time’s just about up, though, and this Christmas is the Christmas that Santa gets to revert back to his old ways and pay back the human race — with interest!

Teenage schmuck Nicholas (Douglas Smith, who’s absolute cardboard and represents the weakest link in this movie’s casting) lives amidst a family of typically nauseating Christmas-lovers (even his girlfriend, future Lost beauty Emilie de Ravin seems to enjoy the “festive” season), with one notable exception : his curmudgeonly old grandpa (the late, great Robert Culp, who I guess it’s fair to refer to here as a Christmas-horror veteran since he also featured in Silent Night, Deadly Night 3), who for some mysterious reason knows the truth about the jolly fat man and shares it with his grandson. It might be too little, too late though, since (again, for reasons initially unexplained) Santa’s set his newly-evil sights squarely on Nicholas and intends to make him and his family the first victims of his new campaign of sadistic evil!

I’m not much for the whole wrestlers-turned-actors thing, but Goldberg’s casting as the wicked Santa here was definitely a stroke of genius — he tackles the role with absolute relish and looks to be having the time of his life. Culp is fantastic as always as grandpa (sporting an uncharacteristic five o’clock shadow here), and Fran (The Nanny) Drescher ,? Dave Thomas of Mackenzie Brothers fame, and the always-solid Saul Rubinek turn in fun ? performance in smaller roles, as well.? the direction from David Steiman (who also wrote the screenplay) is unremarkable in any sort of stylistic sense, but certainly workmanlike and highly competent. My only gripe with this flick is that some of the CGI looks pretty dated (and was probably even substandard for its time), but apart from that this is a fun, original, slapstick-ish Christmas horror-comedy.

Santa’s Slay is available on DVD from Lionsgate and features a nice selection of extras including a full-length commentary track and some behind-the-scenes-type stuff. The anamorphic widescreen transfer looks great and the 5.1 surround-sound mix is very nicely done, as well.

If foul-mouthed children, even-fouler-mouthed old ladies, a flying bison, a gaggle of strippers, a demonic St. Nick out for revenge, jokes about caulk, and a cinematic salute to the sport of curling sound like your cup of tea, look no further — you’ll not only enjoy the hell out of Santa’s Slay, it will become a new holiday tradition in your home.

AMD HD 5800 quot;mass widespread availability quot; by year's end

In a conversation with AMD Product Manager Dave Baumann, HardOCP hasclarified most of questions surrounding the much-debated availabilityof the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series. Excess demand and limited supply hasmeant it is difficult to get a HD 5800 series card, even at higherprices, and even though the product has enjoyed 6 weeks of launch.

However,availability has been improving, albeit slightly and at the cost of ahigher price. Mr. Baumann expects mass widespread availability by theend of 2009, assuming AIBs continue air freighting the products, whichis very likely.

Fortunately, there are no issues expected with HD 5700 stock - and indeed, they are widely available on e-tail.

Here's a summary of the conversation (Courtesy HardOCP):
TSMC is steadily rolling out production of 5800 series GPUs albeitat a slower rate than AMD wishes. There are daily production runs of5800 series GPUs.

AMD’s Add-in-Board (AIBs) partners are currently shipping thousands of 5800 series video cards per week on a worldwide basis.

The number of 5800 series video cards that have been shipped into the channel already is in the very "high tens of thousands."

While currently there are thousands of video cards shipped on aweekly basis, we will likely see this weekly number reach into the"tens of thousands" come late November or early December. This hingeson whether or not AIBs keep air freighting video cards. The likelihoodof air shipments to continue is very high, but AMD does not directlycontrol this.

Should air freighting continue we are still not going to see"mass widespread availability" by years end, but certainly supply willcontinue.

Most of these 5800 video cards are moving into e-tail and retail sales while the great minority are going into OEM sales.

Expect "well into the hundreds of thousands" of 5800 video cards to be shipped into the channel by year’s end.

Expect no issues with 5700 stocks.

TSMC is still having some 40nm production issues, but as youcan see from the points listed above, production is not close to astandstill and has ramped up greatly in the last 30 days. TSMC also hasnew 40nm machines as of September and that capacity is starting to nowcome online.

The current mix of 5870 and 5850 cards is running approximately 50/50.With Nvidia's Fermi nowhere to be seen, we can't expect price drops; at least not in a few months. Though, we can expect the prices to fall back to normal once supply meets demand.

Of course, both TSMC and AMD are working hard to ensure maximum availability of HD 5800 as soon as possible. Considering availability patterns and statements from both TSMC, it seems likely that a majority of availability issues will vanish by December. Another anecdotal evidence is that Hemlock is finally expected to hit retail in late November. Of course, AMD would only put out Hemlock when they have enough Cypress dies.

To conclude, while there are HD 5800 cards available, and you can get them if you are lucky, a widespread availability can be expected in December. There will be no big price drops however, though we can expect prices to return back to normal. Following which, let's hope a competition (Fermi) emerges soon.

Reference: HardOCP

ATi AIW Radeon 9600 Pro

ATI enhances the multimedia PC experience with the new ALL-IN-WONDER® 9600 PRO. ATI’s newest multimedia video card joins the award-winning ALL-IN-WONDER® family to provide customers with all the best of current PC Multimedia technologies combined with fantastic new features such as FM Radio, Dual VGA, Faster-than-Real time DVD / CD Authoring and the next generation REMOTE WONDER™ II radio frequency (RF) Remote Control.

ATI’s award winning MULTIMEDIA CENTER Software has been updated to version 8.6, which now includes DVD and CD Authoring. A customer can easily archive recorded television, video and audio programs to the media of their choice with a couple of clicks of the mouse. ATI’s media authoring solution supports DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW, and CD-R/-RW. Depending on the media drive speed, ATI’s solution allows Faster-than-Real time authoring which makes real time authoring obsolete because it does not tie up a computer for an extended period of time.

Designed as ATI’s mainstream multimedia solution, ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO also includes the new REMOTE WONDER II and dual VGA support. The ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO will be available from selected partners in Europe and Asia-Pacific within 4 to 6 weeks.

Emeza Zalando erffnet Online-Shop fr Luxus-Mode

Auf emeza.de will Zalando Luxus-Artikel verkaufen.

Die Plattform soll eigenstndig gefhrt werden, hie es. Die Konditionen sind etwas anders als bei Zalando: Retouren sind zwar auch kostenlos, aber nur binnen 30 statt 100 Tagen, wie Geschftsfhrer Felix Zirkler dem Handelsblatt sagte. Emeza solle mittelfristig profitabel wirtschaften, kndigte er an, ohne einen nheren Zeitraum zu nennen.

Zalando wchst auch dank einer massiven Werbekampagne (Schrei vor Glck!) rasant schreibt aber noch Verluste. Im vergangenen Jahr verdoppelte der Online-Shop den Umsatz auf ber eine Milliarde Euro. Zalando beliefert inzwischen rund zehn Millionen Kunden in 14 Lndern. Zu den Investoren gehrt der bekannte Berliner Start-up-Inkubator der Samwer-Brder, denen oft das Kopieren von Geschftsmodellen aus dem Ausland vorgeworfen wird.

Die Angebote der Woche im berblickGnstige Angebote ansehen5 Produkte

Apple snatches chip veteran from Samsung

Apple has just hired a veteran in the chip making industry, Jim Mergard, whose 16 year career with AMD led him to the positions of vice president, as well as chief engineer. Mergard is responsible for the development of AMDs mobile APU "Brazos". 16 months ago, Mergard finally left AMD to work for Samsung as chief system architect, but now, hes left that company as well, in favor of a position at Apple.

Naturally, this will impact Samsung, and perhaps more than one would think: Apple is currently dependent on Samsung for manufacturing their touch devices. Though the design is carried out by apple, the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch all make use of the A5 and A6 processors which are manufactured by Samsung. Thus, as Apples expertise grows, their reliance on Samsung diminishes. And that means a potentially massive future loss for Samsung.

Jim Mergard

Similarly, Intel manufactures the CPUs for Apples Macintosh computers. Mergards expertise may help develop chips for the Macs as well, thus reducing Apples reliance on Intel as well. Patrick Moorhead, former executive for AMD, stated that Mergard could absolutely help make Apple more independent: "[He] would be very capable of pulling together internal and external resources to do a PC processor for Apple."

The implications of switching to hardware unique to apple would mean returning to how Macs were built prior to 2006; that is, without the ability to natively run operating systems such as Windows alongside Mac OS X (though this would still be possible through emulators). Is this Apples plan, and if so, will it work?

indie sidebar richard linklater’s “bernie”

Okay, I admit it : I still like Richard Linklater. Always have and, at this point, probably always will. I dig the hell out of 90s classics like Slacker and Dazed And Confused. I thought A Scanner Darkly was one of the best sci-fi and best animated films in years. And yes, I even enjoy Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (especially the first one). Heck, even School Of Rock is pretty fun stuff all these years later. Sure, my guy Richard was overthrown in a silent coup as the coolest filmmaker working in the Capitol city of Texas some years ago by Robert Rodriguez (or so I’m told), but he’ll always be “Mr. Austin” in my book. And you know what? It pleases me to report that his latest directorial effort (for which he also co-wrote the screenplay), Bernie, shows him to be in fine form.

This little slice of low-key near-perfection centers on the true story of one Bernie Tiede (Jack Black in a phenomenal performance that sees him absolutely inhabiting the character, and also gives him numerous chances to showcase his singing voice on-screen for the first time in years), the more-than-likely-homosexual assistant funeral director of the only mortuary in the small East Texas town of Carthage who seems to take a rather unwholesome interest in comforting the sorrows of the elderly widows he naturally makes the acquaintance of in his line of work, particularly the wealthy ones. He hits the jackpot, so to speak, with Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine, who we just flat-out don’t get to see enough of anymore, and who ably proves she hasn’t lost a step at all here), the less-than-grieving inheritor of the local bank, who everyone in town seems to regard as a grade-A bitch. Hell, her own siblings, children, and grandchildren don’t even have anything to do with her.

She takes a liking to Bernie, though, who proves more than willing to step in and essentially handle all her affairs, both business and personal — but eventually, of course, she proves too much for even a guy of his apparently infinite patience and courtesy to deal with. The Bernie-Marjorie relationship is a complex one, certainly not romantic in nature (that would be too simple), but miles away from the expected gigolo-and-his-mark pairing that you would expect in a film about a guy who kills the old woman he’s living with shortly after she bequeaths him all her assets in her will (I guess I should say “whoops” at this point, but I honestly don’t think I’m giving anything away here). Instead, what we’ve got here in an evolving personal partnership that goes from “get the hell out of my face” to genuine acceptance to warm companionship to the kind of mental and spiritual cruelty and barely-disguised contempt that only over-familiarity can engender. Marjorie goes from wanting nothing to do with her too-damn-friendly would-be best friend to liking him enough to have him accompany her on all her travels to trusting him enough to take care of all her financial dealings to jealously monopolizing all his time and cutting him off from everyone and everything he loves (he’s big into community theater and being everybody in town’s best friend) so she can set him to work on the most trivial and dehumanizing of tasks.

So, yeah — eventually Bernie snaps and shoots her four times in the back before putting her body in a meat freezer and going around pretending she’s still alive (and spending her money) for as long as he can. Eventually the gig is up, though, as hard-charging, publicity-hungry, ultra-homophobic DA Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey, for once not trading on his looks at all and clearly relishing the chance to tackle a role 180 degrees away from his typicalfare) digs in his heels when he smells a rat with Bernie’s “she’s had a stroke and is in a rest home” stories and decides to throw the book at the guy when a search warrant of her home finally reveals Marjorie’s gruesome final resting place.

There’s a catch, though — even though he confessed almost immediately to the murder, the townsfolk wither actively don’t want to believe that Bernie could do such a thing, or they just flat-out don’t care. He’s been recklessly foolish with the old widow’s money, after all, financing the construction of a new addition at the local Methodist church, buying up struggling businesses, treating people to new cars, spoiling their kids with expensive gifts, etc. — so naturally, they all love the guy more than ever. And they never had much time for old Mrs. Nugent in the first place.

It’s in capturing this dichotomy of “normal” life in a hick town “behind the Pine Curtain” followed by how desperate these simple folks are to maintain that sense of normalcy once the balance of their entire collective reality has been upset that Linklater really shines, even utilizing many actual Carthage locals to do documentary-style? interview bits talking about how much they still think the world of Bernie no matter what he might have done. Hell, many still desperately cling to the notion that he’s absolutely innocent despite his own hardly-coerced confession.? It’s a pretty quietly amazing thing to behold, and is handled with an unforced naturalism that retains sensitivity for the town’s situation without ever crossing the line into syrupy sentimentality. In short, Linklater treats this material, and the people involved with it, with the respect they deserve without ever once going to any extra lengths to make them look either quaint, folksy, or stupid. They just are who they are, and this flick is what it is. Sure, it’s a heavily-dramatized script that probably takes a few liberties with the facts, but it feels utterly authentic and he lets? both the story and its players speak for themselves. That may not make for the flashiest of films, but it’s a refreshingly honest one, and in the midst of all the half-billion-dollar CGI-effects-laden soulless blockbusters currently polluting our screens, a quietly engaging piece of cinema that values its own integrity above all else makes for a very refreshing change of pace indeed.

ARM announces the Mali-T658 GPU core

Its somewhat amusing when you consider how far ahead of actual product availability that ARM announces upcoming solutions, although as an IP only company ARM might not have a lot of direct competitors when it comes to its CPU cores, but todays upcoming GPU announcement is an entirely different kettle of fish. As ARM allows its partners to use whatever components and building blocks they want, ARM is competing with several companies when it comes the GPU cores in ARM based SoCs and as such the company needs to try and stay ahead of the competition.

Its latest GPU related announcement is of a product that were not likely to see in products until 2013, as ARM has another GPU core that will arrive ahead of the Mali-T658 called the Mali-T604 which is the replacement of the current Mali-400. The Mali-T604 is likely to end up in the first quad core Cortex-A9 SoCs built on 32 and 28nm and is based on a new architecture that ARM calls Midgard (based on Nordic mythology) whereas the Mali-400 was part of the Utgard architecture.

ARM claims that the Mali-T658 will offer up to 10 times the graphics performance compared to "mainstream Mali-400 MP implementations" although the company doesnt go into any greater explanation as to which kind of implementation its referring to. The problem here is that the Mali-400 comes in single, dual and quad "core" configurations and if the Mali-T658 is 10 times as fast as what were seeing in something like Samsungs implementation of the Mali-400 MP in its Exynos then were looking at an incredibly powerful GPU, but if its compared to a simpler implementation, then it wont be quite as impressive.

Furthermore, ARM is claiming four times the GPU compute performance compared to the Mali-T604 which is said to offer 68GFLOPS of compute performance in whats presumed to be a four core design at high clock speeds. That said, the Mali-T658 will be scalable to up to eight cores which looks pretty impressive right now, but we shouldnt forget the competition. Imagination Technologies PowerVR Series5XT GPU which is already available can scale to 16 cores, its just a matter of someone implementing into an ARM based SoC.

As far as software support is concerned, ARM is claiming that the Mali-T658 will support DirectX 11, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, OpenCL, DirectCompute and Renderscript. Thats most of the major APIs and as far as software developers are concerned the good news here is that the Mali-T604 and Mali-T658 will use common drivers of which the end result should be better software compatibility and a quicker and easier transition to the new GPU core. ARM has listed Fujitsu, LG, Nufront and Samsung as its launch partners, although others are likely to follow once we get closer to actual products.

In related news, Samsung has announced that it has licensed Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX MP core technology. As to what this means in the long term will be interesting to see, but it suggests that Samsung is trying to make sure it can offer the best GPU core possible with whatever next generation ARM based SoC the company is working on. Theres no doubt that the ARM space is where its happening at the moment and with Windows 8 expected to end up on quite a few ARM powered devices, it looks like were got quite an interesting future ahead of us when it comes to low power mobile computing.

Source: ARM, Anandtech