Anybody but You

The movie "The Avengers" rolled unstoppably through the second weekend at first place and a US tally of $103 million. That's way more than most movies make in their first opening weekend. In case you missed it, "The Avengers" raked in over $200 million last weekend, its opening weekend.

But that's not the complete story. Adding in oversea's receipts, "The Avengers" crossed the $1 billion mark in just 10 days. I believe (I fervently hope) that it blows past Cameron's "Titanic" ($2.2 billion) and "Avatar" ($2.8 billion). At the rate "The Avengers" is rolling along I personally believe it will pass "Titanic", and I believe it has a pretty good shot at passing "Avatar" as well.

My reasons for my attitude towards Cameron are my own. After all, he's got his fortune and watching his movies loosing out their top two positions won't really effect him financially at this point in time. But it's nice to have an alternative to Cameron. I don't believe Cameron's movies were ever worth that much in ticket sales.

The second reason I'm anti-Cameron is his entrenched position within the Hollywood elites. Hollywood "executives" are always screaming about how pirates supposedly siphon away billions (billions they say!) from their movies. When I look at Cameron's two movies and the 10-day take from "The Avenger" (just to name but three), I have to ask "where's piracy's harm?" All I hear is the bleating of fat-cat MPAA sycophants who can never be satisfied with any amount of money.

Soon enough I'll get tired of Joss Whedon and I'll start looking for a newer champion, but for the time being there is some satisfaction watching the latest anointed wonder director grind down the prior.

Anybody but Gnu

Meanwhile, back at the virtual ranch comes word that the FreeBSD devs are working to make Clang/LLVM the default compiler tool chain for FreeBSD 10-CURRENT in preparation for deprecating GCC (Gnu Compiler Collection).

There are all sorts of reasons given for the change, from ideological to technical, but there's no getting around the ideological roadblocks that went up when GCC migrated from GPL 2 to GPL 3. There were already issues of modularity (gcc is highly monolithic) and maintainability. The change from GPL 2 to GPL 3 was the last straw that pushed Apple specifically to sponsor the development of Clang as the replacement front end for LLVM, which Apple'd already started to use as early as 2005.

I'm personally looking forward to this final transition. It will probably push me back towards FreeBSD, even if it is on a virtual machine. VMware supports FreeBSD 8.2 as a guest, but not as a host. I'm looking now to find a basic hardware system that can support FreeBSD 9 and beyond.

One draw to Clang is its nearly complete support for C++11.  I know I won't have Oracle Java support on FreeBSD, but I'm more than ready to move on to other tools such as C#/Mono on FreeBSD (BSD# Project). The major scripting languages I care for, Ruby (dual licensed under Ruby or BSD licenses) and Python (BSD-style license), are ports. Other interesting launguages such as Haskell are also BSD ports with BSD-like permissive licenses. Tool-wise I've got all I could ever want running on FreeBSD.