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(article index)
BYTE Magazine Archive
(article index)
Unofficial BYTE FAQ
( R.I.P. 1975-1998 )
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(magazine articles)
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(free Java applet)
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Tom's Oscar Contest
Tom's Oscar Contest
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Recent Movies
Leatherheads is a passable comedy about the early days of pro football. Overshadowed by college football and major-league baseball, pro football in 1925 was a backwater sport. Small-town teams located mainly in the Midwest frequently moved or folded, unable to find an audience. Leatherheads (named for the leather helmets then in vogue) is loosely based on Red Grange, a thrilling college star lured to the pros by a huge salary, bringing new attention to the struggling league. George Clooney stars as the aging player/manager who hires the young man. (Clooney also directs.) Renée Zellweger plays an aggressive reporter for a big-city paper who doubts the college star's reputation as a World War I hero. Although this movie isn't bad, it never quite rises to the zany heights to which it aspires.
Stop-Loss is an Iraq war drama about three U.S. Army Rangers from Texas. One of them, after a harrowing second tour of duty, decides not to re-enlist. But his celebrated homecoming is interrupted by a "stop-loss" order -- a peremptory order that forces him to stay in the Army and return to Iraq for another tour. He doesn't want to go, and his trouble deepens. This movie is powerfully written and acted, one of the best this year. It shows the many problems faced by Iraq war veterans and their inner conflicts. Vets are saying it's the most realistic drama they've seen. Unfortunately, another realism is the naiveté of the young soldiers. Perhaps they could have avoided their betrayal by reading a newspaper before enlisting.
Shutter is a lightweight thriller about a newlywed couple stalked by a ghost, who keeps showing up in their photographs. The ghost is a thoroughly modern manifestation, equally comfortable with film or digital. It haunts the husband's professional-caliber Hasselblad as well as his wife's little digicam, and it even bedevils a darkroom. Although the running time of this film is relatively short (85 minutes), this is one of those movies that seems to end once or twice, then springs another surprise. Overall, it's fun, with lots of real and fake thrills. The screaming teenage girls behind me in the theater seemed to enjoy it.
Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day is a wonderful romantic comedy that seems like a picture made in the 1940s -- and not just because it's placed in 1939. It's a spiritual link to the light comedies of Frank Capra and George Cukor. Frances McDormand stars as Miss Pettigrew, an unsuccessful English governess who desperately needs a job. She stumbles into a position with an American party girl (played very brightly by Amy Adams) who's posing as a blue blood in high-hat London society. Soon the formerly prim governess is caught in a social whirl of romance and intrigue. To say more would spoil the fun of this short and sweet film.
Persepolis is an animated French drama about a young girl living in Iran during the Islamic revolution of 1979. After the hated Shah is overthrown, hope for the future quickly turns bitter as Iran becomes an Islamic theocracy. Everyday life for women becomes particularly oppressive. Told as a series of flashbacks, Persepolis is a good example of a film that personalizes historic events through a child's innocent eyes. The animation may appear crude by modern standards, but it's actually creative and expressive, and most scenes are appropriately drawn in black-and-white. Overall, though, it's a depressing story -- especially because little has changed in Iran since 1979.
>> Many more mini-reviews, including Juno; There Will Be Blood; National Treasure: Book of Secrets; Charlie Wilson's War; Atonement; Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story; Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; I Am Legend; and No Country For Old Men.
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Tom's Oscar Contest
First Place: Lance Elko
Second Place: Ezra Olson
Booby Prize: Amy Helen Johnson
Lance Elko has won Tom's 25th Annual Oscar Contest for the first time since he began entering in the 1980s. Ezra Olson, a first-time contestant, finished second. Amy Helen Johnson won the last-place Booby Prize. Read the thrilling story of this year's contest, check the final scoreboard, see how Tom's OscarCalc program fared with its Oscar predictions, and view the Oscar contest Hall of Fame.
Inflation Calculator
Tom's Inflation Calculator now includes the latest U.S. government inflation data for 2007. This free Java applet can adjust U.S. dollar amounts forward or backward in time for any years between 1666 and 2071 for retail price inflation, between 1914 and 2008 for wage inflation, and between 1936 and 2008 for medical-cost inflation. You can view inflation rates for any intermediate range of years, too. The new improved version 7.0.6 is available now. It's the best inflation calculator on the Internet!
Computer Dictionary
Common Terms Defined
Are you baffled by a technical term or acronym you've never seen before? Or just curious about the latest techie slang? Tom's Computer Dictionary may have the answer. From "AAC" to "zoo virus," it defines more than 750 terms in plain language.
Guitar Cheat Sheet
Do you want to learn the most common major and minor guitar chords? Instantly transpose songs from one major key to another? Find out which major and minor chords go together? Play scales in any major key? Learn the notes on the fretboard? It's easy! And it's free! Just download and print Tom's Guitar Cheat Sheet.
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Microprocessor Report
Index to Tom's Articles
Here's an index to more than 250 of Tom's articles in Microprocessor Report, the insider's guide to microprocessor hardware. Learn about embedded processors, microcontrollers, digital-signal processors, and other chip-related topics. (Subscription required for most articles.)
Microprocessor Report Editorials
Read Tom's editorials in MPR. No subscription required!
Test Your Java Security
How safe is your system from hostile Java applets? Find out with JSecure, one of Tom's free applets. JSecure harmlessly tests the security manager of your Web browser or applet viewer by trying to access information from your computer's operating system and hard disk. Try it today!
Scramble Text With ROTator
ROTator is a Java applet that lets you encode and decode text in the popular Internet format known as "ROT 13." Lots of other programs do that, too, but Tom's ROTator applet goes further by allowing you to encode and decode text in any rotational letter-substitution format. With ROTator, you can shift the letters left or right, and you can shift them by any number of letters from ROT 1 to ROT 26.
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BYTE Articles
Here is an index to more than 180 of Tom's computer articles from BYTE Magazine published from 1992 to 1998. (BYTE ceased publication in June 1998.) Most articles are still available online and include the original photographs, figures, and screen shots.
And more stuff...
- Tom's Mini Movie Reviews. Snappy reviews of recent movies, like those in the blue column on the left. Reviews that scroll off the column end up on the Mini Movie Reviews page.
- Shutterbug Articles. More than a dozen of Tom's photography articles from Shutterbug magazine are now online. Learn how to personalize your film speed, banish dust from your darkroom, make professional-looking postcards, find the best deals on used cameras, create special effects with open flash, and more.
- Tom's Oscar Contest. An annual tradition for 25 years, Tom's Oscar Contest is both entertaining and challenging. Hundreds of people have tried to guess who will win an Oscar in each Academy Award category. Competing against them is the computer brain of Tom's famed OscarCalc program, which sometimes wins the contest and always places near the top.
- The Death of BYTE Magazine. In 1998, after 23 years of operation, BYTE Magazine was shut down by its new owner, CMP Media. A year later, CMP launched BYTE.com as a very different web-only publication. To learn the inside story about what happened to the world's second personal computer magazine, see Tom's Unofficial BYTE FAQ: The Death of BYTE Magazine.
- Tom's Favorite Web Links. Find information about personal computers, microprocessors, Java, and other technologies. There are quite a few photography-related sites, plus some offbeat places you've never been. Lots of new links!
- Tools for Web Builders. The hardware, software, programming tools, and books used to build this web site might be useful to you, too. Most of these tools are linked to their vendors' web sites so you can find more information.
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