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The Matrix Media Movies

Latest Animatrix Short Released 308

Posted by michael from the breathe-in-the-sweet-sweet-scent-of-marketing dept.
martyn s writes "The latest animatrix short, The Second Renaissance, Part 2 is finally out. This short is the continuation of The Second Renaissance Part 1. Taken together, these shorts document how, in the matrix universe, 'Man was the architect of his own demise.'" And here's the BitTorrent link.
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Latest Animatrix Short Released More

Latest Animatrix Short Released

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  • They were the contractors he hired after he'd finished his blueprints!

  • Slashdot Reloaded (Score:5, Funny)

    by mao che minh ( 611166 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:04PM (#5895079) Journal

    I liken the recent rebirth, revelations, and renaissance of trolling on Slashdot to the soon-to-be-classic epic battle between Neo (played by actor Keanu Reeves) and the rogue virus Agent Smith (portrayed by the esteemed actor Hugo Weaving).

    In this climactic and feverishly pitched battle, a rejuvenated Agent Smith confronts Neo. Neo (cmdr taco) has increased his power (anti troll filters) exponentially. Agent Smith (troll) has since developed the ability to infect the "shells" of others, a process which he uses to effectively multiply. At the outset of the battle, Agent Smith attempts to first infect Neo and spread into his "system". The troll filters prove amiable, and Neo easily repels this clever initial attack. Undaunted, the troll (Agent Smith) seeks to gain assistance from those in his surrounding environment. With the most excellent and well placed of trollings, Agent Smith captures the hearts and minds of many others, effectively creating an army in his own image (Trollkore, CLIT, You Fail It, IN SOVIET RUSSIA, etc).

    This new army of Agent Smiths pour down upon Neo in a glorious wave of absurdity, brutal character attacks, vulgar ASCII imagery, and unprecedented and unusual tales of sexual escapades. The ensuing melee is a remarkable epic of good vs. evil, as the many trolls continue to pour down upon cmdr taco, seeking to defeat him with an avalanche of numbers. The outcome to this bitter rivalry has yet to be seen.

    Which is where we find ourselves tonight gentlemen.

    This is a war, and we are soldiers.

  • It's AOL! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:05PM (#5895085) Journal
    Why are we using BitTorrent to spare AOL's bandwidth?!?!?!? We never use BitTorrent to spare the poor guy who builds a lego robot or whatever and hosts his site on his DSL and then gets slashdotted. Sometimes Slashdot editors can just be so dumb...

  • Site is fixed (Score:3, Informative)

    by Odaeus ( 563586 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:05PM (#5895086)
    If you went along earlier today there would have been the pages accessible to download Part 2, except all of the links pointed to the first episode! I think a professional site could do a bit better than that. As some of you may have discovered after downloading a hundred megabyte file. :)
    • I think a professional site could do a bit better than that. As some of you may have discovered after downloading a hundred megabyte file.

      I think an informed /.'er would've noticed the filenames were the same...

      To those who wasted their bandwidth, its like my friend says "It's your own fault, buddy."
      • I think a professional site could do a bit better than that. As some of you may have discovered after downloading a hundred megabyte file. I think an informed /.'er would've noticed the filenames were the same...

        true, unless an informed /.'er changed the original filename to something readable!

    • Re:Site is fixed (Score:2, Informative)

      by martyn s ( 444964 )
      Yeah, it's true, I posted this story before I actually finished downloading the movie, and I included direct download links to the wrong files, to part 1. I was afraid the whole slashdot community would rise up against me, but luckily the editors took those links out and included the bittorrent link instead.

  • Totally sweet...wget -c rocks... (Score:4, Informative)

    by `Sean ( 15328 ) <sean@ubuntu.com> on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:05PM (#5895087) Homepage Journal

    wget -c http://progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/animatrixlgfinal_dl.m ov

    For those of you who keep getting dropped or get half finished downloads...

  • Feeling a little empty after watching (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kammat ( 114899 ) * on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:07PM (#5895105)
    Just finished watching it, and I'm a smidge disappointed. I thought the first half set up an excellent backstory, but here, it's just "We attacked them, we lost, we're a power source," without any kind of expansion. It feels like this half just ended the story without trying to make any details beyond what we've gleaned from the first movie. Wasn't there a first Matrix that crashed and burned due to the people not able to accept it as reality? Was there any debate at all over how long the Dark Storm would last, unless they had some way to clear it afterwards? When did the AI develop the spidery robots?

    While I think the Animatrix project has been pretty damn good, I think this one has fallen way short of expectations.
    • Yeah, that's the hook to get you to buy the 9 episode DVD. I'm all over that.

    • Re:Feeling a little empty after watching (Score:4, Insightful)

      by br0ck ( 237309 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:41PM (#5895399)
      we're a power source

      And it made it worse when the narrator stated that (SPOILER?) "the machines turned to an alternate and readily available power supply, the bioelectric, thermal and kinetic energies of the human body. A newly refashioned symbiotic relationship between the two adversaries was born. The machine, drawing power from the human body, an endlessly multiplying infinitely renewable energy source. This is the very essence of the second renaissance. Bless all forms of intelligence."

      Arghh.. bless all forms of intelligence to have a 7th grade understanding of thermodynamics. It's too bad they didn't take the chance to use these shorts to clarify or correct the human battery crossed with a form of fusion explanation from the first movie.
      • I've read that the original intention was that the rationale behind farming humans was to use them as nodes in a huge parallel processing computer. However, this idea was dropped because it was thought that your average viewer wouldn't understand it. Unfortunately, can't find a link that would back this up. It would be encouraging if this was true, though.
        • A Beowulf cluster of... people?
        • That would go along very well with the Gnostic symbolism present in the first installment (no, really!). From what I remember of Gnostic Christian teachings (not all that much), they believed that the world was sort of a mass hallucination, controlled by evil spirits who want to keep humanity in the dark (think Plato's Cave, kind of). The important thing here is that humanity is actively participating in its own deception; I wish the original Matrix had kept this plot point and developed it further.

          Still,

      • I think people are skipping over two very important parts of the narrator's statement: 1) It's a symbiotic relationship, implying that there is something in it for humans, too. If the machines were simply using humans for power, it would be a parasitic relationship. For some reason, the machines are not killing humanity, and instead are giving them the Matrix. 2) "Bless all forms of intelligence." This could be the motive for preserving humanity, respect for all forms of intelligence. They fought the humans
    • I too am a little disappointed overall. I guess lot of us are expecting explanations in these shorts.

      Taking them for what they are -- a showcase of different anime styles spunoff of the movie's universe -- then they're mildly entertaining. Not quite spectacular, but enjoyable.

      However, I think "The Second Renaissance" failed to deliever in either respect. Artistically it's typical, the art direction lacks imagination. The "history" it tells is boring and cut-and-dry. The first half has a nice political spi
      • I got an advance DVD of all nine movies - "Osiris" is phenomenal, but I have to say that "Beyond" is my favorite. I felt the exact same way about the second installment of "Renaissance" - felt like they could have done alot more with it...
    • I understand the disappointment. I was disappointed when the narrator said, "This is the essence of the Second Renaissance." Well, uh, duh.

      And while I was initially disappointed like you, I think that you were hoping for an ending that described everything a la Star Trek, where this short wasn't attempting that. It was building the character of the machines. We know who humans are, we can identify with them. We don't know the machines, nor their motives. This showed that the machines are ruthless ki

  • BAD LINKS (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChrisCampbell47 ( 181542 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:08PM (#5895113)
    Those direct links are for the FIRST episode (hence the "Episode1" in the URL). And post the sizes next to the links, these are HUGE (e.g. 140 MB). Better yet, just link to the page, it's really well done and quick.

  • Natural order of progression (Score:5, Funny)

    by mahdi13 ( 660205 ) <icarus.lnx@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:08PM (#5895117) Journal
    The latest animatrix short, The Second Renaissance, Part 2 is finally out. This short is the continuation of The Second Renaissance Part 1.

    Thanks for clearing that up for me...I was wonder what part was before part 2

  • Nice to see slashdot promoting legitimate p2p (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:08PM (#5895121)
    But, with all the illegal [torrentse.cx] stuff also going around, im sure that the **AA's will be going after bittorrent as well!

    Because it needs a centralised server (the tracker), it will be easier to knock out!
    • What you fail to mention is that it needs one centralized spot per file. So yeah, it's easy to knock out a specific file. But since trackers don't connect anywhere else, and just about anybody can run a tracker, your point is moot.
      Basically it's like saying "Because FTP needs a centralized server (the ftp server), it will be easier to knock out!" -- well yeah, it will be easy to knock out the offending site by sending nastygrams to its provider.

      Note that BT never promised you resilience and anonymity when

  • Preaching? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:08PM (#5895122) Homepage Journal
    "Taken together, these shorts document how, in the matrix universe, "Man was the architect of his own demise."

    I dunno, man, I feel like I'm being preached to, again. Like:

    Clean out the fridge before you eat something moldy which will make you sick.

    Driving an SUV supports terrorism

    Ordering french fries supports evil regimes which have WMD

    If you don't pick up your room it'll lead to communist world domination.

    Technology advances faster than our ability to manage it, eventually it will manage you if you don't watch out.

    Some year, first the Matrix 2, then T3... What's the message here? Fear technology? Screw that.

    • Re:Preaching? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dalassa ( 204012 )
      I got the feeling after the first one that the creators opinion of the average intelligence of its audience was around the level of fungus. So humans are bad evil and nasty with no redeeming qualities, machines are warm and fuzzy and just like us except nicer.

      Something with actual conflict or shades of gray would be nice. Especially with the complete reversal of roles in the Animatrix.

      • Re:Preaching? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ttrafford ( 62500 )
        It is, however, a counterpoint to the "the machines are evil" theme that runs through the first movie.

        Taken together they present a different picture than they do on their own.

    • Re:Preaching? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mraymer ( 516227 ) <mraymer@nOsPaM.centurytel.net> on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @11:56PM (#5898409) Homepage Journal
      It's interesting that you should mention terminator...

      Terminator shows that technology itself is neither good nor bad. It is merely the use of it that makes it so. In the first movie, the Terminator attempts to destroy the future of the human race by killing the mother of its enemy. In the second, the same model terminator is reprogrammed to save the human race.

      And another thing... In both the matrix, and Terminator... what's so bad about humans being wiped out or machines taking over control of them? Would this not be, in a sense, a form of natural selection? If machines were more fit than us to survive, and intelligent enough to exterminate us or control us, then don't they sort of deserve to take our place as the dominant form of life on this planet?

      I think that a planet of machines would probably be a lot less self-destructive, and more productive, than the current one containing humans.

      The machines in both the Matrix and the terminator movies want us controlled or exterminated for good reasons: we're a danger to ourselves, and everything on the planet.

      "If a machine, a terminator, can learn the value of human life... maybe we can, too."

      Probably not, which is why the machines are likely morally superior to us, and more worthy of the right to exist, even if they are "soulless" creations. Better that we humans die and our work live on, than we simply fade out of existence without a trace.

  • wrong links (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:09PM (#5895124)
    The "direct links" are wrong, they point to the episode 1. Here are the correct ones:
    http://progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wb online/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/2R2_640_dl.zip
    http: //progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/2R2_480_dl.zip
    http: //progressive1.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonline/ progressive/thematrix/us/med/2R2_320_dl.zip

  • Links might be wrong (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zakabog ( 603757 ) <john&jmaug,com> on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:16PM (#5895189)
    I think those links are wrong, I only tried the large one. Here's some new links -

    Large [aol.com] 640x272 - 138 MB
    Medium [aol.com] 480x204 - 87 MB
    Small [aol.com] 320x136 - 31 MB

    Or you can go here [intothematrix.com].

  • Animatrix on DVD out soon (Score:5, Informative)

    by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:16PM (#5895193) Journal
    The entire series of 9 short CG-Animatrion/Japanese Anime films will soon be available on DVD. Depending on your MPAA stance (and what day of the week it is) follow the white rabbit via one of the links below to pre-order your copy.

    Official web site [intothematrix.com]
    Amazon US [amazon.com]: available 3 June
    Amazon UK [amazon.co.uk]: available 2 June
    • search eDonkey and you will probably find the whole Animatrix movie (DVD -> DivX rip)... i have it, saw it last nite, the other shorts were really really good. My two favorites were Matriculate (by the guy who did Aeon Flux) and the one called Beyond, which was a fun story, I guess you can say.

  • Never seen this coming... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ePhil_One ( 634771 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:17PM (#5895204) Journal
    This short is the continuation of The Second Renaissance Part 1.

    Never saw this one coming... :^)

  • The Second Renaissance and Lameness (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ink ( 4325 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:20PM (#5895231) Homepage
    I think these were the worst shorts of those that I've seen online and in the theaters. The plotline, while interesting, is overly simplistic with the nice, sweet, never-harming robots simply wanting their own state while the cruel, evil humans only want to enslave them. It glosses over issues such as the previous human occupiers of the new robot state, or human sympathizers (geeks?) and the real problems with granting sentient-status to the machines. I realize it's just a short, and that it's told from the perspective on another computer (the Zion archive...?), but I still felt that it was a (very) poor-man's Metropolis. If you did enjoy it, please pick up Metropolis and check it out, you'll probably love it.
    • I agree that the short is bad, but some of the points are not really necessary to explain:

      ...the previous human occupiers of the new robot state

      This state were made far out in the desert, in the Middle East. I think that the number of people that previously occupied that territory were less than a thousand.

      human sympathizers

      When an all-out war starts, sympathizers tend to get viewed as traitors or worse. No need to explain their fate.

      and the real problems with granting sentient-status to the machi
      • It's interesting on the take of this from the Zion computer. If this was from the computer archives of Zion, the last bastion of humanity, would it really portray robots in such a forgiving light?

        Or would it be filled with robot hate propaganda written by the bitter people on the losing end of a guerilla war?

  • .zip?? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Flamesplash ( 469287 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:23PM (#5895249) Homepage Journal
    What exactly is the reason behind trying to compress already compressed audio and video files again? The size reduction, if you happen to get one, is negligable and it tends to make the file slightly bigger from what I've seen. I've never really understood this.
    • You might not get much compression, but at least you'll know that that 140 meg file you just hauled down isn't corrupt three-quarters of the way through.
    • 6MB

    • Re:.zip?? (Score:3, Informative)

      by jedinite ( 33877 )
      Simple - to force people to save the files and not just "stream" them. So a user who wants a file downloads it once, and generally won't need to download it a second time if they want to watch it again (thus saving potential bandwidth).

      I run a website where I offer a number of videos for download and I routinely used to get a number of downloads of the same video from the same IP address, more than could be explained by proxy servers. Once I started zipping the files, a lot of that disappeared... enough

  • instead of hammering the system, help (Score:3, Interesting)

    by itzdandy ( 183397 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:24PM (#5895266) Homepage
    a bittorent site specifically for slashdot victims.

    go to

    BitTorrent Files for Slashdot Effect Victims [scarywater.net]

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) * on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:31PM (#5895328)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Actually I would advise downloading this from AOL directly. This isn't some file hosted on a colleges T3, this is a file hosted on a site run by a HUGE corporation. They have insane amounts of bandwidth and we should use it up before relying on people like us who really need their bandwidth. I'm getting around 250K/sec from AOL so it seems like they don't have much of a bandwidth problem.

    • Re:Freenet Link (Score:4, Informative)

      by mxs ( 42717 ) * on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @06:26PM (#5895772)
      "as Freenet has a more robust, permanent network"

      Care to say what you mean by permanent ? It's no more permanent than BitTorrent; if nobody wants the file, it dies off quickly.

      "but will automatically begin to share it, if it becomes popular." ... It will also use the bandwidth avaiable in a rather suboptimal way, to insure privacy and security. BitTorrent does not waste bandwidth, at the price of anonymity.

      "That means faster download speeds. The RedHat 9 ISO files were downloading at over 120KB/sec on Freenet."

      Hmm. I got a download rate of over 1mbyte/s on the torrent for that; and there were a LOT of people getting fast speeds (I have the logs to prove it ;-)

      "There is also the advantage that the link does not go down, when the people close their download windows ;)"

      Yeah, the link only goes down when the generous storage & bandwidth providers on the freenet network don't feel like providing this free service anymore ...

      Don't get me wrong, FreeNet is a nice system ... Its goals are different from BitTorrent though (anonymity vs. efficient use of bandwidth, privacy vs. speed, everything vs. single-uri, etc.), and in this case, BT is probably the better choice.

      If you were to share something that could get you into trouble (say, a complete crack of Microsoft's DRM schemes), you'd probably want to use Freenet instead ;)
    • Negative, this is the type of thing BitTorrent was DESIGNED for.
    • Gnutella would be an even better solution. Nothing like the overhead of FreeNet, and a FAR larger network.

      All the editors would need to do is provide the SHA1 hash of the file, and Gnutella/EDonkey users could download from their p2p clients.

  • Obvious (Score:2, Funny)

    by EpsCylonB ( 307640 )
    "The latest animatrix short, The Second Renaissance, Part 2 is finally out. This short is the continuation of The Second Renaissance Part 1.

    No shit sherlock.

  • Minor spolier (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ymgve ( 457563 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @05:52PM (#5895488) Homepage
    They still don't explain how a human in itself can generate more energy than it costs to maintain that very same human alive and well in the Matrix.

    That is a major plot hole for me, and I hoped they would use the possibility here to explain it in greater detail. But noo. Just a tiny bit of plot that amounts to 'the war started, we darkened the sky, then we lost and got put in the Matrix'.

    (Since this is anime, they could have gone wacky with this. For example, say that humans posess a unique ability to harvest immense amounts metaphysical energy, and that the Matrix somehow taps this energy. Much better than the 'new form of fusion' crap explanation.)

    • Re:Minor spolier (Score:5, Informative)

      by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @06:14PM (#5895665) Homepage Journal
      This is becoming almost a FAQ, but here goes anyway. AFAIK the initial script used humans in a computing cluster, which would make more sense, but it was considered too difficult for the mundane masses, and it was changed for the final movie.

      I'm not sure if that's true though, might be just a rumour. In fact, using human brains in a Beowulf cluster does present some problems, because people would probably find more hints of the reality through the calculations going on in their subconscious minds.

      On the other hand, it's marginally possible that humans can be used to extract energy from food such as carbohydrates, even if some entropy is increased in the process. Maybe the alternatives for using that particular fuel were not that efficient or practical. Then again, the food had to be produced somehow, and in the absence of sunlight it would have meant even more wasted energy.

      • The computing cluster idea is also a bad one, because there is nothing the human mind could give the machines that they didn't have already. The machines have sentience, creative tought and the power and ability to enslave the WHOLE human race (6 billions of us). It would be many times more effective to create machine arrays instead.

        Another viable possibility is that the machines just felt so sorry for us, that they decided to put us in a near-perfect world where we could live as we used to, without bother

        • Re:Minor spolier (Score:3, Interesting)

          by RobinH ( 124750 )
          there is nothing the human mind could give the machines that they didn't have already

          Hmmm, perhaps that's part of the story. I personally believe that a complicated enough machine could be built to essentially surpass us on every intellectual level, but there are many people who don't think a machine could ever have what we have: a soul. Given the religious undertones of the movie, this seems like a plausible suggestion... they are enslaving our souls.

          Perhaps by using human brains, the machines can add
      • Remember the 85% efficient biomatter transformation thing from what, last week? Bet that's more efficient than humans. Direct to oil...

    • Re:Minor spolier (Score:5, Insightful)

      by egomaniac ( 105476 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @06:58PM (#5896096) Homepage
      They still haven't explained how it's energy-efficient for humans to use fossil fuels. After all, it takes more energy to generate fossil fuels than is released in burning them.

      So what?

      The laws of thermodynamics guarantee that you're always going to put more energy into a machine than you're going to get back out. This can't be a surprise to anyone who has taken high school physics. Converting energy from, say, the chemical bond energy of the wood in a tree to another form, such as heat, is still a useful process, even though you're putting in far more energy than you're getting out.

      What if, for instance, the machines are feeding us their waste products? And our metabolisms conveniently convert this waste into useful heat energy? As long as the process is efficient enough to be useful, it makes sense.

      • Re:Minor spolier (Score:3, Informative)

        by Wraithlyn ( 133796 )
        All energy on Earth (except geothermal) comes from the Sun originally. Wind, the water cycle, solar power.. everything is driven by the Sun. Sure, there are non-renewable resources such as oil you could harvest, but adding human bodies into the mix as a conversion "solution" is simply ridiculous and makes no sense.

        The human body CONSUMES about 1800 calories a day just sitting still.. breathing, pumping blood, etc. Building a power plant out of them would just drain massive amounts of energy, not produce

        • Re:Minor spolier (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Wraithlyn ( 133796 )
          Just wanted to add, of course the energy consumed doesn't vanish.. you can harvest it as heat byproduct.. but there will always be net loss.

          Botton line, they need an external power source, you can't recycle a closed system indefinitely unless you have 100% efficiency, which doesn't exist.
      • The laws of thermodynamics guarantee that you're always going to put more energy into a machine than you're going to get back out.

        Unless it's a heat pump where Qh = w + Qc. In a heat pump, you put in the w and nature provides the Qc.
    • Obviously the machines are smarter than you :-P
    • They still don't explain how a human in itself can generate more energy than it costs to maintain that very same human alive and well in the Matrix.

      You know, the idea of sentient robots isn't fully explained either, and I consider this to be a major plot hole. Since this movie is not scientifically exact and doesn't have a Tolkien-esque history, I feel compelled to join you in your nitpicking.

      For example, say that humans posess a unique ability to harvest immense amounts metaphysical energy, and that
    • >That is a major plot hole for me,

      No, the energy stuff is called a McGuffin. A Mcguffin is anything in a movie that keeps the plot going. For instance a super-secret agent chasing down a beautiful super-model who is also a super secret agent because she's carrying the microfilm. What's on the microfilm? It doesn't matter.

      So the writers needed a reason to keep the Matrix going, or the machines would just kill the humans and be done with it. Other acceptable alternatives would be to examine their stra

  • Interseting (Score:4, Insightful)

    by YllabianBitPipe ( 647462 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @06:07PM (#5895611)
    Beyond the sci-fi and action elements of the Matrix it's neat how they are working more of the religios and philisophical elements into the canon ... quite a bit of it going on in this short ... the Boddhavista sitting on the lotus, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That being said, I was expecting this episode to be a bit more cynical (if that can be imagined, it's pretty dark already) ... I always thought it would be a mind bender to learn that the humans voluntarily hooked themselves up to the Matrix because living that way would be preferrable to the burned out wasteland they created through war.

  • Use the main link (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Vilim ( 615798 )
    I started getting it off bittorent then cancelled cause I was only getting like 30k, now I am getting 120k off the main link. The main link stood through the last slashdotting when the last animatrix movie came out, I don't think they will go down this time

  • Matrix Article in Time (Score:4, Informative)

    by tbmaddux ( 145207 ) * on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @06:31PM (#5895832) Homepage Journal
    Also, out today (or maybe yesterday?) is a multi-page article in the print magazine, and a flash-laden online version at Time.com [time.com] about The Matrix: Reloaded.

    Watch out for spoilers -- there's a multi-page section discussing the plot which is well-marked with warnings.

  • Corrupted file? (Score:3, Informative)

    by webslacker ( 15723 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @06:34PM (#5895860)
    It appears as though the 480 wide movie and the zip file from the official website are both corrupted.
  • I've always wondered this, so I'll ask here.

    Neo's powers only work within the Matrix right? And they have had the Matrix crash before right? (They mention it in the first when Smith was interrogating Morpheus- and at the end when the green code stops) So why not just debug whatever it is that gives Neo his power in the Matrix and recompile?
    Or just do away with the whole program. They didn't always have a programming running, they could just force people at this point...kind of like a UPS system, not as goo

  • The stupid power-source thing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @07:04PM (#5896182)
    They're _still_ sticking with the claim that the machines are using people as a source of energy!

    That makes abolutly _no_ sense. Entropy makes it very unlikely that getting energy from people would be more efficient than converting the stuff they're using to feed the people directly into energy, especially given the "along with a kind of fusion" remark in the first movie. Even if that weren't true, _cows_ would be a much better source of energy, they're 100% herbivores and thus more efficient, and the machines wouldn't need to bother with the matrix at all for cows.

    The only reasonable explanation is that Morpheus doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. He assumes the people are being used as a power source because he's not up on his basic physics, in actuality the people are being used as processors for tasks that the human brain is well suited for but the machine style AI can't handle efficiently.

    Unfortunatly with the Second Renaisance Part 2, we need to expand the circle of people who have no clue what they're talking about and include the archivist, or whatever the narator is, in the group.

    • Speaking of not knowing what you're talking about, you just said a mouthful. You forget, that in the Matrix,they explained that the Humans "scortched the sky" to stop the machines from using Solar power. In an effort to continue to enslave human kind, the machines came up with the idea of using humans as a battery. They can't use anything else, because they want to keep humans at bay and also, there are no cows in this world, they DIED OFF!

      Now that said, your point about using human brain power to compensa

      • Re:The stupid power-source thing (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Wednesday May 07, 2003 @01:14AM (#5898703)
        Speaking of not knowing what you're talking about, you just said a mouthful.

        You said it not i. Oh wait, you _thought_ you were talking about me.

        There's this thing called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can't get more out of a system than you put in. You can't even get as much out again, some is always wasted as heat. People have been trying to figure out a way around that law for centuries, and if you think you've found a way, it's 99.999999% certain that you're just not accounting for all the steps.

        Yeah, the humans scorched the sky, so what? It doesn't matter that there's no sun in this equation. HUMANS DO NOT PRODUCE ENERGY! We do not even _store_ energy very well!

        Sure they grind up the humans to feed other humans, but that is not a self-sustaining cycle! You need some kind of energy input. In the natural world all energy comes from one of two sources, fusion power via the sun, or gravitational compression power via the earth's core. The sun is mostly gone, at least in terms of direct sunlight, although the earth is getting at least some heat through the cloud layer or it would freeze over (it's probably got a much higher greenhouse effect, but the green house effect can't be 100% efficient, so there has to be some input)

        So the machine's only natural sources are geothermal power, and fossil fuels and anything else that has sun power stored up. They also have the options of fission and fusion, the later being mentioned in the movie.

        They could use those sources of energy to produce more nutrients to keep the humans' "ecosystem" going. However as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, growing food to feed to animals is horribly energy inefficient. The machines could use this energy source directly and get far more out of it than they would eventually be able to extract from the humans that absorbed the nutrients that the machines could grow with the energy.

        As for the cows, like i said, even if they went with this INSANE idea of using high level living beings to produce energy, any mammal would do. Sure, the cows are most likely all dead now (except perhaps in Zion, and you're assuming the machiens don't have advanced cloning capabilities) however at the time the machines made this decision there were cows alive!

        When fighting the war, why didn't any of the machines say, instead of capturing all these humans, why not just KILL all the humans and round up some of the starving cattle and use them instead? Even if all the cows were dead, they could use dogs, or jackals, or rats, or anything else that could survive off of all the dead animals and humans lying around, which there would have been quite a lot of during the war. Humans were not the only option, and were a really stupid choice unless power is not what the machines are really getting out of them.

    • I wonder if this is a voluntary absurdity; the first thing I though when I noticed it is the 'calories to agricultural resource' ratio of beef... for the same amount of estate and water vegetable carbohydrates and proteins are much cheaper to produce. In the real world we're kind of doing the same thing as Matrix's machines.
    • That makes abolutly _no_ sense. Entropy makes it very unlikely that getting energy from people would be more efficient than converting the stuff they're using to feed the people directly into energy...

      The "stuff" they're using to feed the people is, well, the people. This causes me to wonder: do people in the Matrix get a strange feeling when they're watching Soylent Green and the hero shouts "Soylent green is people!"?

    • After reading a particular article [warnerbros.com] in the Matrix philosophy section [warnerbros.com], I've gotten a little less annoyed with the bio-electric power, because they put more emphasis on telling a story and seeding discussion. --although I still occasionally get knee-jerk desires to yell out, "OMG that's so BS," at the "bioelectric" energy plot-hole/saver(?). One possiblity: The machines, following the "essence of the second renaissance", chose to "bless all forms of intelligence" and preserve humanity for ethical[?] reasons a

  • mplayer whining (Score:4, Informative)

    by ArmorFiend ( 151674 ) on Tuesday May 06, 2003 @08:25PM (#5897097) Homepage Journal
    As usual, no way to watch this in Linux.
    Take for expample MPlayer's complaint:

    Opening video decoder: [qtvideo] Quicktime Video decoder
    Win32 LoadLibrary failed to load: qtmlClient.dll, /usr/lib/win32/qtmlClient.dll, /usr/local/lib/win32/qtmlClient.dll
    invalid qt DLL!
    VDecoder init failed :(
    *** Try to upgrade /roam/dm/.mplayer/codecs.conf from etc/codecs.conf
    *** If it still does not work, read DOCS/codecs.html!

    DOCS/codecs.html said, a bunch of confusing stuff, mainly "go to our website and get more confused". Why can't video people ever write stuff in english?
  • "Hi, my name is Foobar, and I can't seem to get Bit Torrent working under linux!"

    I had the same problem, so what I do is just run the python scripts directly to make them download the .torrent.

    Run this in your Bit Torrent dir:

    btdownloadheadless.py --display_interval 5 --url http://www.url.org/file.torrent

    Not the best solution out there, but one that works for me.
  • Many have complained about the perpetuation of the battery story. For me, it's a real serious blow to see it confirmed.

    I always wondered to myself, "how could people who could write such a cool movie put in something as stupid as the battery story? If so, how did it get past everybody who saw the script or rushes?"

    It made no sense. Small as it may seem, it takes the movie down several notches in my book, and the book of anybody with an education.

    So I started thinking to myself -- maybe they aren't so
  • Do they not have spellcheckers in the Matrix universe?

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