Ronald.phillips

Unlike Meta, Microsoft doesn't need to change its name to prove it's committed to an entirely new tech platform: It's doing so through action. After debuting its AI-infused Bing search engine earlier this year, the company unveiled the Microsoft 365 Copilot for Office apps. And even before those consumer reveals, Microsoft delivered an AI tool for developers in 2021 with GitHub Copilot. Today at its Build developer conference, Microsoft is making the inevitable next step: It's making AI an integral part of Windows 11.

The new Windows Copilot tool lives in the Windows sidebar and, just like Bing's AI chat, you can use it as a super-powered search engine by typing in general questions. But true to its name, it's also deeply integrated with Windows. You can ask it to accomplish tasks within the OS — like turning on the night light mode, or changing your desktop background — without fishing around for specific settings. Windows Copilot can also function as a genuine virtual assistant by summarizing documents, or launching a photo app to accomplish a few edits before sending it off to a group of your coworkers. Cortana would never.

Lucas Jackson / reuters

"I think about Windows and the role of AI as such an opportunity," said Panos Panay, Microsoft Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, in an interview with Engadget ahead of Tuesday’s launch. "We have hundreds of millions of people [using Windows], bringing the power of AI to Windows 11 gives you the opportunity to not only get more creative and get more productive, but ultimately just let every Windows user become a power user."

Windows Copilot, which will be available to preview in June, also has the potential to reach far more users than the revamped Bing. The company's search engine clearly received plenty of buzz thanks to AI — Microsoft said it hit 100 million daily active users a month after the AI chat feature launched — but according to StatCounter, Bing has also lost market share over the past few months. It hit 7.2 percent in April, down from a recent high of 9.92 percent last October.

That's not entirely surprising, though. Microsoft's battle against Google has always seemed like a hopeless endeavor. The company launched its first attempt, MSN Search, in 1998 soon after Google arrived, and amid Yahoo's dominance as the go-to web portal. MSN Search turned into Live Search, which ultimately evolved into Bing in 2009.

Microsoft has always been a company that's dabbled in search, but it's not a search company. But Windows is another matter entirely. It's a product with a devoted user base, many of whom have decades of experience with the OS. According to Microsoft, there are over 1.4 billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 or 11. (And of course, that doesn't include the PCs running older Windows versions.) Microsoft previously tried to bring Bing's AI capabilities into the Windows taskbar in February, but that ultimately just amounted to a shortcut that launched Bing's AI chat in the Edge browser. Windows Copilot actually weaves AI into the core Windows 11 experience.

"There's so much depth in this product from the '90s on," said Panay. "Our job is to responsibly, of course, push it forward to users that need both the past and need to get to the future [...] We have so many kinds of users that use Windows in its simplest form, like browsing, Mail, and Office [...] And then we've got the hardcore devs who get right down to the depth of the product. And I think both are so vital to the platform. But now I think every developer can move forward as an AI developer and every user can be a power user on Windows. I think it just makes Windows that much better."

Windows Copilot is currently a text-only tool, but Panay envisions it evolving into something you can interact with on your own terms. It has the potential to be the powerful voice assistant that Cortana, the Siri competitor Microsoft pushed for years, never amounted to. (And to be fair, pretty much every virtual assistant ended up being a disappointment. Siri remains confounding and inaccurate, while Google's Assistant is mainly useful for preemptively delivering information, rather than dealing with voice commands.)

Microsoft

The simple, text-based approach to AI also makes sense for Microsoft. For many users, Windows Copilot will be the first time they've interacted with any sort of generative AI product. Better to let general users warm up with a few text strings before overwhelming people with voice commands. And hopefully by the time Microsoft adds voice support, it'll be closer to the Star Trek computer than the frustrating assistants of yore. (I'm dreaming of the day when I can shout at my computer to look up information as I'm writing feverishly on deadline, or ask it to transcribe and summarize a meeting.)

Windows Copilot, just like Bing Chat, will also support the same third-party plugins that OpenAI's ChaptGPT uses. That means any developer will be able to easily connect their apps to AI, an essential move to make these products more useful. Every software platform needs a thriving third-party ecosystem to survive — just think of what iOS or Android would be like if you were stuck using only Apple or Google's apps.

"AI is going to be the single largest driver of innovation for Windows in the years to come," said Panay. "It's going to change the way you work, change your interaction models to make it easier. It's going to understand so much about what you need."

Microsoft

Panay stressed that Microsoft is also focused on making your AI interactions secure and private. Windows Copilot could end up juggling some sensitive information if you start asking questions about specific health questions, for example. A potentially bigger concern is misinformation: Windows Copilot and Bing Chat can answer your questions confidently, but it may not always be accurate. And it's a bigger problem than standard web searches since it's unclear where AI chatbots are pulling information from.

"We have to approach AI with innovation but also optimism," Panay said when I asked about how Microsoft is planning to deal with AI misinformation. "To your point, we have to prioritize both people’s safety and privacy. Also, at the end of the day, if you do it in a frame of humility, where we're always learning, this is going to be vital to your point."

It's clear that Microsoft still has plenty to learn from Windows Copilot. The preview period, which kicks off next month, is a chance for the company to see how it's used in the wild, and to make adjustments before it's officially released. Panay says that the Bing team is already working to make sure its results come from grounded references, and that they're also holding to Microsoft's responsible AI standards.

Microsoft

According to Shilpa Ranganathan, a Microsoft Corporate Vice President leading the Windows team, the company has been talking a lot about how Copilot results are displayed, as well as communicating the uncertainty of some answers to customers. “We're going to build it into the experience as a learning experience for us as well […] I don't want to take a path that allows us to lose trust with customers,” she said. “We believe that's most important. I'd rather say, hey, we're not 100 percent sure. Help us make this better or if this didn't help you, I would like feedback now so that we never show this to another customer again.”

Panay hopes to get to a point where "as a product maker, I have the confidence that what we're handing to our customers is exactly what they need when we launch into the full availability [of Windows Copilot]." He added, "It's about humility. If you give it time and the right innovation, then we can get to that point of creating the guardrails needed to keep it safe and remove the misinformation."

Given the state of the web today, where less reputable websites employ a variety of SEO tricks to rank higher in search results, it’s unclear if we’ll ever be truly rid of AI misinformation. The next content war will be entirely focused on websites vying for placement within AI search results. The problem for users is that it’ll be harder to tell if bad information is coming from a seemingly reputable source, rather than an obviously scammy website filled with junk content.

Windows Copilot has the potential to fundamentally reshape the way we use Windows. But hopefully, it won’t erode user trust in the process.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-windows-copilot-ai-panos-panay-interview-150044298.html?src=rss

I’ve been lately trying to understand and improve the idling behavior of DOS programs and one of my guinea pigs has been the Open Watcom vi editor.

While the 16-bit real-mode DOS variant of the editor idles nicely, the 32-bit DOS extended version that’s actually shipped with the Open Watcom tools just refuses to idle. What’s notable is that it won’t idle with DOS POWER.EXE, with DOSIDLE, and it also won’t idle when run under Windows 9x or XP. And it doesn’t idle with my DR-DOS $IDLE$ driver either.

So I decided to track down what’s going on in the DR-DOS case. What I could see was that the DRIDLE.SYS driver never went into idle mode because every time it decremented the INT 16h idle counter, it was already reset to the initial (maximum) value by a timer tick.

In other words, as far as the DRIDLE.SYS was concerned, the editor wasn’t idle because it was only calling INT 16h very rarely. But I know that the editor polls INT 16h in a tight loop!

While trying to characterize the problem, I also found another oddity: The refusal to idle happens with the (default) DOS/4GW extender. But when the same vi.exe program is run using the CauseWay or DOS/32A DOS extenders (both also shipped with Open Watcom), the editor idles just fine!

Initially I thought there could be some problem specific to the protected-mode version of the editor, since the code is necessarily slightly different from the real-mode variant. But if it were the editor itself, it would behave the same with all DOS extenders, wouldn’t it?

The only option was to step through the code and see what actually happens. With a profiler I could see that yes, INT 16h does get invoked many, many times per second. So I put a breakpoint on the protected-mode INT 16h entry point, which is what gets executed when a protected-mode program executes the INT 16h instruction.

What I found was… unexpected. DOS/4GW, like all DOS extenders, installs its own INT 16h handler which calls down to the real-mode handler, and provides whatever input and output parameter conversion is necessary.

Only the INT 16h handler in DOS/4GW does a little bit more than that. It has special handling for INT 16h functions 00h and 10h (read keystroke), plus functions 01h and 11h (check if keystroke available). It is the latter pair that’s used by applications polling the keyboard.

The logic is roughly as follows. When INT 16h function 01h or 11h (polling) is called, DOS/4GW checks if the timer has ticked (by examining whether the byte at 40:6C is different from its last saved value) or if an internal flag is set. When neither is true, the INT 16h handler returns to the caller without passing down to the real-mode INT 16h handler and without checking the BDA to see if a keystroke is available.

When INT 16h function 00h or 10h is called, DOS/4G decrements the internal copy of the timer tick low byte at 40:6c, and passes down to the real-mode handler.

As far as I can see, this is some sort of optimization which avoids frequent transitions between 32-bit and 16-bit code, and depending on host configuration, also avoids frequent switching between protected and real mode. Especially in cases where switching between real and protected mode is required, this optimization likely greatly reduces interrupt latency (by significantly reducing the periods of time where the CPU is unable to take interrupts).

The optimization has a minor side effect in that a newly arriving keystroke won’t be seen until the next timer tick. However, if keystrokes arrive quickly, they will also be processed quickly (because every time a keystroke is read, the next poll will call into the BIOS). I can’t say I ever noticed this delay which can be up to about 1/18th of a second.

Unfortunately, the DOS/4G logic also has another side effect in that it completely defeats idle detection based on frequent INT 16h polling. Because the real-mode INT 16h handler is almost never executed when polling, idle detection fails because the program does not appear very idle at all.

This of course also explains why other DOS extenders behave differently: Their protected-mode INT 16h handler does not avoid calling into real mode, and therefore idle detection does not get bypassed.

Is There a Workaround?

Remember how I mentioned that there’s some kind of internal flag that controls whether INT 16h functions 00h/10h should be skipped or not? Presumably there must be some way to set it…

And sure enough, there is. It is in fact documented in a file called DOS4GW.DOC, which is conveniently shipped with the Open Watcom tools. Except the explanation, frankly, does not make a lot of sense.

To disable the optimized INT 16h polling behavior in DOS/4G(W), one has to set the DOS16M environment variable as follows:

SET DOS16M=^0x04

Yes, that’s a caret, which may have a special meaning in some command processors like 4DOS. With this setting, the Open Watcom protected-mode vi.exe magically idles just fine!

But the explanation for this setting is rater strange. According to DOS4GW.DOC, the flag does this:

0x04  directly pass down keyboard status calls -- When this option is
      set, status requests are passed down immediately and
      unconditionally.  When disabled, pass-downs are limited so the
      8042 auxiliary processor does not become overloaded by keyboard
      polling loops.

What’s strange about that? In a standard PC/XT/AT BIOS, INT 16h function 01h/11h normally does not touch any keyboard hardware at all. It only checks whether the keyboard buffer head and tail pointers in the BDA are the same or not. And besides, if the 8042 keyboard controller really were overloaded by frequent polling, why would it not happen in real mode as well?

The explanation in DOS4GW.DOC has all the hallmarks of a desperate fix for a problem that is not fully understood. There’s no doubt that skipping the INT 16h polling call-downs to real-mode BIOS did something, on some machine, at some point in time. But I rather doubt that it worked for the reasons the authors imagined it did.

The fix was almost certainly implemented at a time before POWER.EXE was common, and the power save disabling side effect was not noticed. Even on an old laptop with power management, the problem could well have gone undetected, given the absence of a loud fan that aggressively kicks up. However, the fact that the behavior could be overridden using an environment variable suggests that the implementors strongly suspected that skipping calls to the BIOS might cause trouble.

I’m not entirely sure when this fix was implemented. A quick survey reveals that it was already there in DOS/4GW version 1.8, shipped with Watcom C 8.5 (1992). The behavior remains unchanged at least up to and including DOS/4G version 2.60 (1997). In all cases, the workaround using the DOS16M environment variable also applies.

All in all, another curious mystery solved.

Update: In Windows XP, the caret is a special character. To set the environment variable correctly, one must type:

SET DOS16M=^^0x04

If only a single caret is used, it will be left out entirely and the environment variable will have no effect.

In today’s economic climate, cost cutting is on everyone’s mind, and businesses are doing everything they can to save money. But, it’s equally important that they can’t afford to compromise the integrity of their infrastructure or the quality of the customer experience. As a startup, taking advantage of free cloud credits from cloud providers like Amazon AWS, especially at a time like this, seems enticing. 

Using those credits can make sense, but it takes more planning than you might think to use them in a way that allows you to continue managing cloud costs once the credits run out. 

In this blog post, I’ll walk through common use cases for credit programs, the risks of using credits, and alternatives that help you balance growth and cloud costs.

The Shift to Cloud 3.0

As we see it, there have been three stages of “The Cloud” in its history:

Phase 1: What is the Cloud?

Starting around when Backblaze was founded in 2007, the public cloud was in its infancy. Most people weren’t clear on what cloud computing was or if it was going to take root. Businesses were asking themselves, “What is the cloud and how will it work with my business?”

Phase 2: Cloud = Amazon Web Services

Fast forward to 10 years later, and AWS and “The Cloud” started to become synonymous. Amazon had nearly 50% of market share of public cloud services, more than Microsoft, Google, and IBM combined. “The Cloud” was well-established, and for most folks, the cloud was AWS.

Phase 3: Multi-Cloud

Today, we’re in Phase 3 of the cloud. “The Cloud” of today is defined by the open, multi-cloud internet. Traditional cloud vendors are expensive, complicated, and seek to lock customers into their walled gardens. Customers have come to realize that (see below) and to value the benefits they can get from moving away from a model that demands exclusivity in cloud infrastructure.

In Cloud Phase 3.0, companies are looking to reign in spending, and are increasingly seeking specialized cloud providers offering affordable, best-of-breed services without sacrificing speed and performance. How do you balance that with the draw of free credits? I’ll get into that next, and the two are far from mutually exclusive.

Getting Hooked on Credits: Common Use Cases

So, you have $100k in free cloud credits from AWS. What do you do with them? Well, in our experience, there are a wide range of use cases for credits, including:

• App development and testing: Teams may leverage credits to run an app development proof of concept (PoC) utilizing Amazon EC2, RDS, and S3 for compute, database, and storage needs, for example, but without understanding how these will scale in the longer term, there may be risks involved. Spinning up EC2 instances can quickly lead to burning through your credits and getting hit with an unexpected bill.
• Machine learning (ML): Machine learning models require huge amounts of computing power and storage. Free cloud credits might be a good way to start, but you can expect them to quickly run out if you’re using them for this use case. 
• Data analytics: While free cloud credits may cover storage and computing resources, data transfer costs might still apply. Analyzing large volumes of data or frequently transferring data in and out of the cloud can lead to unexpected expenses.
• Website hosting: Hosting your website with free cloud credits can eliminate the up front infrastructure spend and provide an entry point into the cloud, but remember that when the credits expire, traffic spikes you should be celebrating can crater your bottom line.
• Backup and disaster recovery: Free cloud credits may have restrictions on data retention, limiting the duration for which backups can be stored. This can pose challenges for organizations requiring long-term data retention for compliance or disaster recovery purposes.

All of this is to say: Proper configuration, long-term management and upkeep, and cost optimization all play a role on how you scale on monolith platforms. It is important to note that the risks and benefits mentioned above are general considerations, and specific terms and conditions may vary depending on the cloud service provider and the details of their free credit offerings. It’s crucial to thoroughly review the terms and plan accordingly to maximize the benefits and mitigate the risks associated with free cloud credits for each specific use case. (And, given the complicated pricing structures we mentioned before, that might take some effort.)

The Risks of AWS Credits: Lessons from Founders

If you’re handed $100,000 in credits, it’s crucial to be aware of the risks and implications that come along with it. While it may seem like an exciting opportunity to explore the capabilities of the cloud without immediate financial constraints, there are several factors to consider:

1. The temptation to overspend: With a credit balance at your disposal just waiting to be spent, there is a possibility of underestimating the actual costs of your cloud usage. This can lead to a scenario where you inadvertently exhaust the credits sooner than anticipated, leaving you with unexpected expenses that may strain your budget.
2. The shock of high bills once credits expire: Without proper planning and monitoring of your cloud usage, the transition from “free” to paying for services can result in high bills that catch you off guard. It is essential to closely track your cloud usage throughout the credit period and have a clear understanding of the costs associated with the services you’re utilizing. Or better yet, use those credits for a discrete project to test your PoC or develop your minimum viable product, and plan to build your long-term infrastructure elsewhere.
3. The risk of vendor lock-in: As you build and deploy your infrastructure within a specific cloud provider’s ecosystem, the process of migrating to an alternative provider can seem complex and can definitely be costly (shameless plug: at Backblaze, we’ll cover your migration over 50TB). Vendor lock-in can limit your flexibility, making it challenging to adapt to changing business needs or take advantage of cost-saving opportunities in the future.

The problems are nothing new for founders, as the online conversation bears out.

First, there’s the old surprise bill:

Even with some optimization, AWS cloud spend can still be pretty “obscene” as this user vividly shows:

There’s the founder raising rounds just to pay AWS bills:

Some use the surprise bill as motivation to get paying customers.

Lastly, there’s the comic relief:

Strategies for Balancing Growth and Cloud Costs

Where does that leave you today? Here are some best practices startups and early founders can implement to balance growth and cloud costs:

1. Establishing a cloud cost management plan early on.
2. Monitoring and optimizing cloud usage to avoid wasted resources.
3. Leveraging multiple cloud providers.
4. Moving to a new cloud provider altogether.
5. Setting aside some of your credits for the migration.

1. Establishing a Cloud Cost Management Plan

Put some time into creating a well-thought-out cloud cost management strategy from the beginning. This includes closely monitoring your usage, optimizing resource allocation, and planning for the expiration of credits to ensure a smooth transition. By understanding the risks involved and proactively managing your cloud usage, you can maximize the benefits of the credits while minimizing potential financial setbacks and vendor lock-in concerns.

2. Monitoring and Optimizing Cloud Usage

Monitoring and optimizing cloud usage plays a vital role in avoiding wasted resources and controlling costs. By regularly analyzing usage patterns, organizations can identify opportunities to right-size resources, adopt automation to reduce idle time, and leverage cost-effective pricing options. Effective monitoring and optimization ensure that businesses are only paying for the resources they truly need, maximizing cost efficiency while maintaining the necessary levels of performance and scalability.

3. Leveraging Multiple Cloud Providers

By adopting a multi-cloud strategy, businesses can diversify their cloud infrastructure and services across different providers. This allows them to benefit from each provider’s unique offerings, such as specialized services, geographical coverage, or pricing models. Additionally, it provides a layer of protection against potential service disruptions or price increases from a single provider. Adopting a multi-cloud approach requires careful planning and management to ensure compatibility, data integration, and consistent security measures across multiple platforms. However, it offers the flexibility to choose the best-fit cloud services from different providers, reducing dependency on a single vendor and enabling businesses to optimize costs while harnessing the capabilities of various cloud platforms.

4. Moving to a New Cloud Provider Altogether

If you’re already deeply invested in a major cloud platform, shifting away can seem cumbersome, but there may be long-term benefits that outweigh the short term “pains” (this leads into the shift to Cloud 3.0). The process could involve re-architecting applications, migrating data, and retraining personnel on the new platform. However, factors such as pricing models, performance, scalability, or access to specialized services may win out in the end. It’s worth noting that many specialized providers have taken measures to “ease the pain” and make the transition away from AWS more seamless without overhauling code. For example, at Backblaze, we developed an S3 compatible API so switching providers is as simple as dropping in a new storage target.

5. Setting Aside Credits for the Migration

By setting aside credits for future migration, businesses can ensure they have the necessary resources to transition to a different provider without incurring significant up front expenses like egress fees to transfer large data sets. This strategic allocation of credits allows organizations to explore alternative cloud platforms, evaluate their pricing models, and assess the cost-effectiveness of migrating their infrastructure and services without worrying about being able to afford the migration.

Welcome to Cloud 3.0: Alternatives to AWS

In 2022, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Basecamp and Hey, announced that he was moving Hey’s infrastructure from AWS to on-premises. Hansson cited the high cost of AWS as one of the reasons for the move. His estimate? “We stand to save $7m over five years from our cloud exit,” he said.  

Going back to on-premises solutions is certainly one answer to the problem of AWS bills. In fact, when we started designing Backblaze’s Personal Backup solution, we were faced with the same problem. Hosting data storage for our computer backup product on AWS was a non-starter—it was going to be too expensive, and our business wouldn’t be able to deliver a reasonable consumer price point and be solvent. So, we didn’t just invest in on-premises resources: We built our own Storage Pods, the first evolution of the Backblaze Storage Cloud. 

But, moving back to on-premises solutions isn’t the only answer—it’s just the only answer if it’s 2007 and your two options are AWS and on-premises solutions. The cloud environment as it exists today has better choices. We’ve now grown that collection of Storage Pods into the Backblaze B2 Storage Cloud, which delivers performant, interoperable storage at one-fifth the cost of AWS. And, we offer free egress to our content delivery network (CDN) and compute partners. Backblaze may provide an even more cost-effective solution for mid-sized SaaS startups looking to save on cloud costs while maintaining speed and performance.

As we transition to Cloud 3.0 in 2023 and beyond, companies are expected to undergo a shift, reevaluating their cloud spending to ensure long-term sustainability and directing saved funds into other critical areas of their businesses. The age of limited choices is over. The age of customizable cloud integration is here. 

So, shout out to David Heinemeier Hansson: We’d love to chat about your storage bills some time.

FAQs About Cloud Spend

If you’re thinking about moving to Backblaze B2 after taking AWS credits, but you’re not sure if it’s right for you, we’ve put together some frequently asked questions that folks have shared with us before their migrations:

My cloud credits are running out. What should I do?

Backblaze’s Universal Data Migration service can help you off-load some of your data to Backblaze B2 for free. Speak with a migration expert today.

AWS has all of the services I need, and Backblaze only offers storage. What about the other services I need?

Shifting away from AWS doesn’t mean ditching the workflows you have already set up. You can migrate some of your data storage while keeping some on AWS or continuing to use other AWS services. Moreover, AWS may be overkill for small to midsize SaaS businesses with limited resources.

How should I approach a migration?

Identify the specific services and functionalities that your applications and systems require, such as CDN for content delivery or compute resources for processing tasks. Check out our partner ecosystem to identify other independent cloud providers that offer the services you need at a lower cost than AWS.

What CDN partners does Backblaze have?

With the ease of use, predictable pricing, zero egress, our joint solutions are perfect for businesses looking to reduce their IT costs, improve their operational efficiency, and increase their competitive advantage in the market. Our CDN partners include Fastly, bunny.net, and Cloudflare. And, we extend free egress to joint customers.

What compute partners does Backblaze have?

Our compute partners include Vultr and Equinix Metal. You can connect Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage with Vultr’s global compute network to access, store, and scale application data on-demand, at a fraction of the cost of the hyperscalers.

The post The Free Credit Trap: Building SaaS Infrastructure for Long-Term Sustainability appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

At this point, it might not surprise you to know that I love a good casserole. A lineup of my favorite ingredients amassed into a sliceable savory cake of sorts–what’s not to like? Monotony, that’s what. It’s important to keep it interesting, and my latest finding does exactly that. Give your casserole a makeover with…

Read more...

by Cláudio Alves

Back in April, Nathaniel wrote about Sigourney Weaver, arguing that her legendary career more than deserves Oscar gold. Maybe it's time for the Academy to give her an Honorary award since they don't seem especially keen on recognizing her recent output. Regardless, you can't argue that Weaver has significantly faltered in her craft, for the thespian's excellence is as apparent today as it was in her 1980s heyday. Indeed, both that article and its comment section were full of recommendations for those eager to explore the star's filmography. Inspired by them and the release of Paul Schrader's Master Gardener in theaters, I decided to do just that, enjoying a SigWeavie marathon that doubled as research for this actress-y top ten.

Continuing the tradition established with the Nicolas Cage top ten, I shall exclude Weaver's Oscar-anointed work because there's plenty written about them already. In each case, she delivered superior work to the Academy's chosen victor, showcasing the sheer range of her talents as she did so...

Making a list of the 100 greatest movies of all time is the definition of "damned if you do, damned if you don't." You're always going to leave something off. It's never going to feel complete. A particular genre, era, or filmmaker will be neglected. People are going to be mad at you no matter what, so why do such a thing?

Well, why climb Mount Everest? Because it is there. Because we must. 

This isn't your list of the 100 best movies ever made. This is /Film's list of the 100 best movies ever made, as voted by a selection of writers and editors, with the final list determined via several hours of impassioned arguments and debates (which we recorded and you can listen to here and here). Those who participated were given simple instructions: Nominated films needed to be movies they truly love. Established canon should be thrown to the wayside, and obliterated if necessary. The movies you expect to be on a list like this shouldn't just waltz right in. Select, you know, your actual favorite movies. 

The result is a list that we think is as exciting as it is maddening, a list composed of old and new masterpieces alike. We're proud that it covers areas lists like this often neglect (animation and horror, baby!) and annoyed by what it sidesteps (yes, it does skew a bit too Hollywood, we know). But one thing remains true above all else: This list was made honestly, and every movie on it is one the /Film team considers vital.

And now, in alphabetical order, here are the 100 best movies ever made. According to us. Your favorite movie is number 101. We promise. 

12 Angry Men (1957)

Taking place essentially in real time, almost entirely in one room, and with a cast of characters who are almost all unnamed except for their juror numbers, Sidney Lumet's "12 Angry Men" is a masterclass in the push and pull of dialogue. As the jury gathers to convict an accused teenage murderer in what seems like an open-and-shut case, Henry Fonda's lone holdout -- Juror #8 -- suggests that they simply take an hour to talk things out. Tensions rise, prejudices are revealed, and human nature itself is put on trial. "12 Angry Men" is as gripping as any action film, set in an arena where words are the weapons that make the difference between life and death.

It's also a film that has only grown more relevant with time -- particularly now, when opinion seems so deeply divided and factional that good faith debate seems impossible, and people changing their minds even more so. "12 Angry Men" delves deep into how opinions are formed, whether it's simply by following the crowd, or innermost resentments rising to the surface. And though the crime in question can't be solved in a jury room, there's a tinge of murder mystery to it that draws the viewer in, inviting them to become a thirteenth angry man.

The Alternate Take: In 2022, Sarah Polley delivered an answer to "12 Angry Men" with "Women Talking," the story of a group of Mennonite women who have only a day to resolve through the debate about what they should do in response to their colony's serial sexual assaults: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. (Hannah Shaw-Williams)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

In his wry 1978 sci-fi comedy novel, author Douglas Adams tried to communicate the infinity of the cosmos: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." 

What Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction film "2001: A Space Odyssey" communicates best is the vastness of space and time. This is a film that begins millions of years ago when humans were still primates and ends in a heady space "Beyond the Infinite" where human consciousness and the fabric of spacetime begin to merge into one. "2001" is about the enormity of all things, and how the human race is only, just now, beginning to wrap our heads around it. 

It's worth remembering that when Kubrick and his collaborator Arthur C. Clarke were constructing "A Space Odyssey," Earth was preoccupied with looking up. The United States and Russia were embroiled in a space race, and it seemed like the next step of human evolution -- our movement into the stars -- was immediately nigh. Traveling into space wasn't merely a feat of engineering, but a positive sign of humanity's ultimate fate as denizens of the cosmos. Our tools can kill, of course -- whether it be a bone or a hyperintelligent computer named HAL -- but they will lead us into the stars to meet beings we cannot understand. Only then will we be ready to be born.

The Alternate Take: If thinking of time as an enormous, interconnected fabric of human consciousness is your jam, then definitely try out Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" (2011). (Witney Seibold)

Alien (1979)

Depending on how you choose to look at it, "Alien" is either a ruthless statement on the gears of corporate capitalism chewing up and spitting out blue collar workers without remorse, an incisive commentary on sexual violence inflicted on a primarily male-dominated crew, or a straightforward sci-fi/horror flick that can be thoroughly enjoyed when taken exactly at face value. The true magic of this unparalleled movie isn't the wealth of fascinating concepts and provocative ideas present in Dan O'Bannon's screenplay, or the immediate influx of world-building provided by H.R. Giger's profoundly disturbing designs, or even how far director Ridley Scott elevated the production despite a minor budget. Instead, it's that all-too-rare feeling of a picture somehow exceeding the already-formidable sum of its parts.

As perhaps the peak example of "Less is more," this classic hails from a long-gone era when we were forced to reckon with the unknown hanging just on the edges of the frame. A derelict ship and a dead pilot carrying a mysterious alien cargo with no other explanation; a refreshingly practical crew of protagonists given no backstory or tragic origins to make them any more relatable than they already are; and a singularly terrifying villain that would provide nightmare fuel for entire generations of moviegoers for decades to come. "Alien" stands the test of time as the kind of horror that redefines a genre -- a perfect organism.

The Alternate Take: After the stripped-down, functional brutality of "Alien," yet another Ridley Scott movie inspired a sequel exploring the extreme other end of the sci-fi spectrum. Where "Alien" embraced minimalism, "Blade Runner" and especially its follow-up set decades later, "Blade Runner 2049," leaned into their gaudy, noir, neon-lit trappings for all they were worth to delve into even more heady, existentialist themes -- the fact that both franchises may or may not share continuity is only the cherry on top. (Jeremy Mathai)

All The President's Men (1976)

"The truth is these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand." This blunt assessment of the men behind the Watergate break-in, spoken by Hal Holbrook's Deep Throat, will be the epitaph of the United States. We didn't know this when Alan J. Pakula's spellbinding dramatization of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's pivotal role in hastening President Richard M. Nixon's resignation hit theaters in 1976. Pakula transforms recent history into a gripping paranoid thriller, while crafting a paean to the power of dogged journalism. It holds that when would-be despots take the White House, the country's fourth estate will instinctively hold these cretin's accountable.

Pakula wrings maximum suspense from Woodward and Bernstein's relentless digging. These men are so hellbent on piecing together the architecture of an inexplicable own-goal that they don't realize their lives are in jeopardy. Pakula wisely refuses to explicate the multitudinous conspiracy theories swirling around this incident and American politics in general. The story is getting the story, and getting it right. Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Robards, and Jack Warden inhabit their roles like they've been working the D.C. beat their entire lives. The victory is hard won, and the film ends as it began -- with the gunshot blast of a typewriter hammer hitting paper. Democracy survives. At least, it did 49 years ago. Alas, the not-very-bright-guys run every institution of consequence today, including our free press. Pakula's film now resonates with the ache of a high-school yearbook. What a time that was.

The Alternate Take: The darkly manipulative power of the press is on full, cynical display in Billy Wilder's arsenic-laced "Ace in the Hole." Kirk Douglas' slimy journo is the anti-Woodward & Bernstein; rather than report the truth, he contorts it for his own professional/financial benefit. (Jeremy Smith)

Anchorman: The Legend Of Run Burgundy (2004)

Mainstream comedy was searching for an identity in the early 2000s in a post-"Scary Movie" world. One could argue that identity was found with 2004's "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," which served as the first mighty feature collaboration between "SNL" star Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay. Their first trip up to bat was a home run, even if critics of the day didn't see it that way. The absolute absurdist humor centered on Ferrel's Ron Burgundy as a newsman in the '70s struggling to get with the times, filled with non-sequitur gags and endlessly quotable lines such as "I'm in a glass case of emotion" or "60% of the time, it works every time."

This film would tee up the ball, not only for other Ferrell/McKay hits such as "Step-Brothers," but also comedies such as "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" that would further help give this era of studio comedy an identity it sorely needed. Well beyond its importance though, "Anchorman" plays like gangbusters as a laugh-a-minute, tight, singular motion picture experience. From all-time great names like Wes Mantooth (Vince Vaughn) to an all-timer of a silly performance from Steve Carell as Brick Tamland, this movie has aged like a big, tall glass of scotchy, scotch, scotch, cementing itself as not only one of the best comedies of all time, but one of the most important as well.

The Alternate Take: "Anchorman" owes a lot to "Caddyshack," a 1980 comedy about a different, very specific form of employment (caddying at a golf course) with a diverse cast of wacky characters featuring the who's who of comedy at the time. It's not a stretch to say that the Adam McKays or Judd Apatows of the world wouldn't exist without director Harold Ramis' seminal classic. (Ryan Scott)

Back To The Future (1985)

"Back to the Future" is perfect. Full stop. Director Robert Zemeckis gave audiences a crowd-pleasing motion picture that has a little bit of everything: a high concept sci-fi premise, some zany comedy, a dose of action and adventure, and even a bit of romance. With a brilliant, high strung, career-defining lead performance from Michael J. Fox as teen Marty McFly, a hilariously eccentric supporting turn from Christopher Lloyd as inventor Doc Brown, the adorable charm of Lea Thompson in an admittedly awkward family situation as Marty's mother, the social ineptitude of Crispin Glover as the clueless George McFly, and the unrivaled meathead douchebaggery of Tom F. Wilson as Biff, "Back to the Future" is filled with unforgettable characters, memorable quotes, and pure entertainment. We haven't even mentioned the fact that the DeLorean time machine is one of the most iconic props in cinema history. 

How has "Back to the Future" endured after nearly 40 years? It's a flawless screenplay by Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale, one that stands as a sterling example of how to craft a rousing blockbuster. The structure of the story doesn't have a single set-up that doesn't pay off in a significant way. It's the cornerstone against which every other time travel movie is judged. Movies like this aren't often nominated for Academy Awards these days, but "Back to the Future" landed a nod for Best Original Screenplay, and honestly, it should have been nominated for Best Picture. 

The Alternate Take: If you're looking for another example of a finely tuned screenplay turning into a masterful movie, look no further than "Tootsie," a comedy starring Dustin Hoffman as a struggling actor who finally finds gainful employment on a soap opera by pretending to be a woman. Funny and irresistibly charming, "Tootsie" is just a delight. (Ethan Anderton)

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

"In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found." So begins "The Blair Witch Project," the 1999 found footage horror film that became a cultural phenomenon. Thanks to some clever marketing that sold this tale of terror as 100% real — complete with "MISSING" posters for its three lead actors — "The Blair Witch Project" was a massive box office success, scaring up $248.6 million against a shoestring budget. Filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez came up with a simple but effective concept: a faux documentary about three film students — Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard, all using their real names — who venture into the Maryland woods to make a doc about the legend of a local witch. Sure enough, these three hapless kids get lost in the woods and quickly learn that the so-called Blair Witch is more than a legend.

There was so much hype surrounding the film that a backlash was inevitable, and sure enough, many viewers took issue with the film's shaky camera work and the fact that you never really see anything in the film, although that's not quite true — you see plenty, it's just done in a subtle way that doesn't quite announce itself, which makes things all the more frightening. But it's a testament to how effective this film is that even after its release, many still thought it was completely real and that the three leads were really missing and presumed dead.

Dread hangs over the film from the start, and the grainy footage only adds to the unsettling vibe. This feels real, and when the supernatural stuff starts happening, that feels real, too. By the time the film reaches its terrifying climax, all hope is lost, and only the legend remains.

The Alternate Take: "The Blair Witch Project" ushered in a new era of found-footage horror films, many of which just don't cut it. But one of the best of the best is Joel Anderson's "Lake Mungo," a faux documentary about a family that swears their dead daughter is haunting their house. Thick with ominous dread, "Lake Mungo" ends up being a treatise on death itself, and how it's coming for all of us sooner or later. (Chris Evangelista)

Blow Out (1981)

The paranoid style transmogrified into personal tragedy. Brian De Palma blends the buckshot satire of his early comedies with his precision-crafted suspense films and comes away with a work that's as brutally cynical as it is heartbreaking. John Travolta stars as a bored sound man whose work leads him to witness and record a fatal car crash involving a top presidential candidate. When he pieces his sound together with a Zapruder-like presentation of the accident, he becomes convinced that the blown tire was shot out by a hidden gunman.

De Palma tones down the eroticism of "Dressed to Kill" to vent his frustration with the house-wins rules of political cover-ups, particularly the JFK assassination. Travolta's character, desperate to atone for a lethal mistake from his past, believes he can expose the plot, and he's capable enough to get us believing in him. De Palma hooks us with dense technical details, and gets first-rate performances out of his leads. Karen Allen works an adorable riff on Shirley MacLaine's perky "Some Came Running" wastrel, while John Lithgow horrifies as a hitman turned serial killer. De Palma expertly tightens the screws before walloping us with a corker of an ending. It's his finest hour as a filmmaker.

The Alternate take: Rebecca Romijn sizzles as a diamond thief who double-crosses her accomplices in De Palma's wildly underrated "Femme Fatale." It's an erotic fever dream, and, like "Blow Out," the purest of pure cinema. (Jeremy Smith)

Brazil (1985)

Director Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," a portrait of a sci-fi dystopia dominated by cruel and casual fascism, infuriating bureaucracy, and a population too comfortable to do a damn thing about it, has aged like a wine you wish didn't taste so familiar. The film's grim comedy is matched only by its sweeping eye for romance and beauty in the face of oppression -- what can save us from a nightmare if not a beautiful dream?

With a cast of game actors leading the charge (including Michael Palin playing against type as a disturbing family man with a successful career as a government torturer), Gilliam's film borrows the rib-jabbing satire of his Monty Python days but instills it with an anger that resonates, all brought to life with a camera whose mobility reflects the chaos and confusion of the world it depicts. And that world, cluttered and ugly and gray and utilitarian to the point of suffocation, remains one of the great cinematic landscapes, one that fascinates and sickens in equal measure.

Gilliam famously fought the studio to preserve his vision, pessimistic ending and all. But the real miracle of "Brazil" is that the movie itself is better than the story of its making. And that's one of the most interesting stories in Hollywood history, so that's saying something.

The Alternate Take: For a less intentionally idiotic and more beautiful and haunting vision of a science fiction dystopia that hits far too close to home, you can't go wrong with Ridley Scott's immortal "Blade Runner." (Jacob Hall)

The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935)

James Whale's brilliant, groundbreaking, haunting "Frankenstein" feels almost quaint compared to his energized and subversive follow-up. "The Bride of Frankenstein" finds the Monster, played from living corpse to childlike naiveté to tortured adulthood by the iconic Boris Karloff, growing beyond his creator's horrified dreams, and longing for a creature just like him to ease his lonely, man-made soul. Meanwhile, the guilt-ridden Doctor Frankenstein (Colin Clive) finds himself goaded into recreating his ill-fated experiment by an old college... friend... named Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), who laughs in the face of conventional and toasts "a new world of gods and monsters."

"The Bride of Frankenstein" abounds with innovative visual effects, eerie makeup, stunning cinematography. It takes Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's literary masterpiece and adapts it into ecstatic cinema, keeping all the horror, but adding new layers of camp, and all the while needling at social convention. Religion, sexuality, and morbidity of the weirdest kind. To watch "The Bride of Frankenstein" today is to wonder at how Whale ever got away with it amidst the constrictive morals of the Hayes Codes, and to marvel at just how fresh and bizarre it all still is. The early horror films from Whale — two "Frankensteins," the ingenious "The Invisible Man," and the wonderfully bizarre "The Old Dark House" — make up one of the genre's great oeuvres, and "Bride" is the masterpiece.

The Alternate Take: Did somebody say "religion, sexuality, and morbidity of the weirdest kind?" Ken Russell's endlessly controversial and deliriously fascinating "The Devils" (1971) couldn't be described better. The film's perverse yet pointed exploration of nuns claiming to be possessed by sexually-depraved demons in the 17th century has the power to get under anyone's skin, and it loves to squirm around in there. (William Bibbiani)

Casablanca (1942)

The astonishing thing about Michael Curtiz's "Casablanca" is that, despite being removed from modern sensibilities by 81 years, it still plays like the Devil. Curtiz, a Hungarian-born director who had made hundreds of films all over the world prior to "Casablanca," was known in America for making action pictures like "Captain Blood" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood." His propensity for action and pacing allowed "Casablanca" to emerge as a feisty, energetic romance, full of intrigue and melodrama, without ever feeling artificial or contrived. Humphrey Bogart's embittered WWII bar owner Rick has become something of a Jungian archetype, while Claude Rains' Renault, comfortable with his corruption, remains one of cinema's great scoundrels. 

"Casablanca," despite its status as a classic, was constructed as "just another studio film" by Warner Bros. It had some contract stars, and was tapping into popular trends at the time: romance, exotic locations, spy-type intrigue, and concerns about World War II. It seems that sometimes, through strange ineffable alchemy, the studio system can produce an indelible and timeless classic kind of by accident. Just this once, everything fell into place. The drama is beautiful, the romance is moving, the politics are assertive, the characters sublime. Even "As Time Goes By," written for the movie to sound like an old standard has, in itself, become an old standard.

The Alternate Take: If Curtiz's career as a genre filmmaker interests you, one would do well to check his 1932 horror mystery "Doctor X," a film shot in then-new color techniques and featuring a murder mystery wherein all the suspects are mad scientists. It's dynamic, fast-paced, and exciting. It's like a sci-fi noir version of the play-within-a-play segment of "Hamlet." (Witney Seibold)

Children Of Men (2006)

"Children of Men" is a harrowing experience that lets its audience know that nothing is safe from its first scene, when former activist Theo (Clive Owen) narrowly escapes a terrorist bombing in a coffee shop. Alfonso Cuarón's brutal-but-hopeful dystopian masterpiece has it all: Christian virgin birth allegory, harsh commentary on nationalism and racism, and some of the most heart-pounding action sequences ever put to film. The film is a carefully orchestrated symphony that uses silence like a weapon, where even moments that might feel like a reprieve in other films are still menacing and tense. 

The movie takes place in a world where no babies have been born for 18 years, but a young refugee woman named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) is trying to find asylum in London, and she's miraculously pregnant. The problem is that refugees are treated as less than human, and there's a good chance her baby would be taken away from her (and possibly even killed). Theo, along with his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore), and their allies from their activism days, are tasked with getting Kee to the coast and on a boat, where she will be taken to safety. Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki utilize an always-moving camera, even inventing a masterful rig specifically for an intense one-take sequence during a violent car chase that feels more intimate than even documentary filmmaking. "Children of Men" is incredibly made, and sadly only grows more relevant as time goes on. 

The Alternate Take: For another thought-provoking dystopian story with bold cinematography, look no further than Terry Gilliam's 1996 film "12 Monkeys," starring Bruce Willis as a prisoner tasked with time-traveling to prevent an apocalyptic plague unleashed by terrorists. (Danielle Ryan)

Citizen Kane (1941)

The greatest of Orson Welles's directorial debut has been so widely accepted, and for so long, that putting it on a list of the greatest movies ever made might seem like a cliché. But "Citizen Kane" is no stuffy art house venture. Indeed, Welles's youthful enthusiasm, his eagerness to push boundaries, and his desperate desire to entertain keeps this classic timeless. The 25-year-old wunderkind throws everything at his audience to keep our attention rapt, injecting a serious indictment of American capitalism — in which a young impoverished boy gets raised by a corporate tycoon, and tries to fill the void in his soul with a lifetime of empty acquisitions and superficial victories — with humor, music and Shakespearean melodrama.

"Citizen Kane" is such a lively and impassioned affair that its many subtleties aren't visible without multiple viewings, they're too buried under exciting camerawork and crackling dialogue. Even the film's famous ending — there's no sense in spoiling it here — takes on new dimensions, when you realize only in retrospect how close "Rosebud" was to Charles Foster Kane all along, what distracted him from his pursuit of it, and what it ultimately meant to him beyond the obvious, yet no less tragic interpretation offered by the film's stunning final moments.

The Alternate Take: Orson Welles rewrote the cinematic language when he was 25, with a film that's been called the best ever made. How fitting, then, that the most recent film to grab that title — Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975) — was also the work of a 25-year-old genius, challenging cinematic norms as she took the seemingly mundane life of a stay-at-home mom and sex worker and transformed it into the audience's whole universe, to the extent that even subtlest changes in routine become gigantic and powerful. (William Bibbiani)

Clueless (1995)

The pantheon of teen cinema exists in two timelines: Before "Clueless," and after. Amy Heckerling's updated adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma" impacted fashion, language, pop culture, and cinema forever. This "way existential" piece is a slice-of-life comedy centered on ultra-rich Beverly Hills teenagers, but beneath the seemingly vapid and shallow exterior is a deeply layered story not just about growing up, but embracing a life of self-aware maturity. Alicia Silverstone's Cher Horowitz is an all-time feminist protagonist, banishing the misogynistic idea that being a smart and respectable woman requires disavowing stereotypical feminine behaviors or expressions.

At the same time, "Clueless" is a brilliant satire on white, wealthy elites. Heckerling embraces the smart rom-com beats of Austen's literary work, and uses Cher and her friends as a vehicle to point out the ways folks who already "have it made" still have a lot of growing up to do.

Cher may be the central focus, but "Clueless" is ultimately a story about the power and necessity of female friendships, and how women are at their best and brightest when working together and learning from one another, rather than trying to teach each other down the way society wishes we would. It's only when Cher, Dionne (Stacey Dash), and Tai (Brittany Murphy) stop trying to fall in line with the arbitrary societal requirements of high school and instead do what truly makes them happy that they're able to feel less clueless about what comes next.

The Alternate Take: "Heathers" (1988) completely changed the landscape of teen cinema, a pitch-black comedic satire unafraid to acknowledge the mortifying realities of teenage existence with just as many quotable lines. How very, indeed. (BJ Colangelo)

Coraline (2009)

Leave it to the twisted mind of Henry Selick to do justice to Neil Gaiman's writing on the big screen. Selick's "Coraline" is the rare movie to fully capture the delicate mixture of terror, whimsy, and poignancy that characterizes Gaiman's literature. It also suggests that animation might be the ideal medium for adapting the multihyphenate's work. Gaiman's stories tend to morph from one genre to another in the blink of an eye and "Coraline" is no exception. But Selick's film never struggles to maintain the pace, its ever-moldable and gorgeous stop-motion animation shifting through a spellbinding array of colors and shapes to match every twist and turn in its narrative.

Speaking of, there are few modern animated movies quite as tightly-structured as "Coraline." Nary a scene nor interaction fails to move the story forward or develop its characters in some meaningful way, even when it's simply Coraline herself (Dakota Fanning channeling her inner moody tween to perfection) moping about her family's new apartment. At its core, though, Selick's film is more than just an extra-scary coming-of-age fantasy in the style of "The Wizard of Oz." It's a movie that teaches kids that adulthood is not actually something to be afraid of, while at the same time reminding grown-ups what the world looks like through the eyes of a child. And what better way to impart those lessons than a movie that will mildly traumatize the kiddos of the world?

The Alternate Take: 30 years (and counting) after its release, Selick's "The Nightmare Before Christmas" remains a fiendish holiday delight. But beneath Danny Elfman's cheerfully macabre tunes and the movie's gorgeously warped stop-motion visuals is a timeless reminder: Even the Pumpkin King struggles with ennui and creative burnout every now and then. (Sandy Schaefer)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is more than just the best Ang Lee film, it's also the most Ang Lee film. Thematically, Lee's Wuxia epic cuts to the heart of the director's electric filmography, exploring the ways repressed desires and emotional subjugation -- most of which is imposed by social practices -- wreak havoc on people's lives. It's what makes "Crouching Tiger" so deeply romantic yet at the same time melancholic. So much of the movie's conflict and eventual tragedy might have been avoided, had its characters not been forced into the boxes deemed appropriate for them by society (be it because of their gender, class, or lifestyle).

The other defining quality of Lee's artistry is his knack for pushing the envelope technically -- and in that regard, "Crouching Tiger" soars higher than two martial artists clashing swords over the treetops of a bamboo forest. Working in tandem with cinematographer Peter Pau, legendary Hong Kong fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, and the rest of his cast and crew, Lee crafts some of the most breathtaking martial arts brawls in cinema history. Decades later, the film's gorgeous real-world locations and awe-inspiring practical effects retain their power, and yet it's the combination of spectacle and its unique perspective on the Wuxia genre's motifs that give the movie its true staying power.

The Alternate Take: Substitute the martial arts sequences in "Crouching Tiger" with delectable foodie porn and the action-adventure story with a plot involving a widower and his daughters, and what do you get? Ang Lee's thoroughly captivating 1994 romantic dramedy "Eat Drink Man Woman," a must-see for anyone who enjoys the filmmaker's work. (Sandy Schaefer)

The Dark Knight (2008)

If any popular filmmaker of the 2000s has a shot at making their way onto the eventual Mount Rushmore of cinema, it is almost certainly Christopher Nolan. Much of that has to do with his originals such as "The Prestige" and "Inception," yes, but it's the man's work with one of the biggest pop culture icons of all-time that cements his status as a legend behind the camera. "The Dark Knight" picked up where "Batman Begins" left off, but that first film only teed up the ball for something far greater -- one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. Period.

With a great deal in common with expert crime dramas such as "Heat," Christian Bale's second solo "Batman" film feels so grounded and real (especially compared to the camp of "Batman & Robin," released just over a decade earlier) that it hardly feels like a superhero movie in the traditional sense at all. From the opening frames of the bank robbery to the film's superheroic closing moments where Batman becomes the hero we all understand him to be, this is what all summer blockbusters wish they could be. The entire thing is elevated by the late Heath Ledger as The Joker, which easily ranks as one of the most memorable performances ever committed to film. If there's ever been a case that comic book movies can and should be taken seriously, this is it.

The Alternate Take: 2008, as it turns out, is the most significant year in the history of making superhero movies an ongoing, cinematic concern. Case in point, "Iron Man" was also released that year, which launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe by turning a B-list hero into an A-class comic book movie. Remarkable that these movies were released within mere weeks of one another. (Ryan Scott)

Die Hard (1988)

There is a convincing argument that great cinema does not require perfection. So many of the best movies ever made (many of them on this list) have their flaws. But every so often, a movie does come our way that is downright perfect no matter how one slices it. One of those movies is "Die Hard," the action classic to top all action classics, not to mention one hell of a Christmas movie. This is Bruce Willis at his finest, working under the direction of the brilliant John McTiernan. It's deceptively simple yet brilliantly executed, centered on a bunch of vaguely European criminals who just want a bunch of money with one rogue cop standing in their way. That's cinema, baby.

When the greatest movie villains of all time list is put together -- be it on this site or elsewhere -- "Die Hard" belongs in the conversation. But part of what makes this movie stand out is the sheer perfection of Alan Rickman as Gruber. From the moment he enters Nakatomi Plaza to the moment he falls from the top of that glorious building, it's everything we popcorn-loving moviegoers yearn for. Endlessly quotable lines, relentless re-watchability, and unabashed entertainment of the highest order, "Die Hard" is what all action movies aspire to be.

The Alternate Take: For those who love this brand of action, McTiernan had arguably the greatest three-movie run in history, following up "Die Hard" with "The Hunt for Red October." But that run started with another all-timer in the form of 1987's "Predator," which helped cement Arnold Schwarzenegger as an action star who had more than one trick up his sleeve. Another beautiful marriage of the right star with a brilliant premise that is just as deserving of immortal status. (Ryan Scott)

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Watching Sidney Lumet's beautiful and blistering 1975 film about a bank robbery gone wrong feels a bit like stepping on a live wire for 125 minutes straight. This is a film that jolts audiences from our stupor as well now as it did upon release, thanks to a stunning performance by a young Al Pacino, a funny, dark, and melancholy script from "Cool Hand Luke" scribe Frank Pierson, and a ripped-from-the-headlines true story.

"Dog Day Afternoon" pulls from the real life of John Wojtowicz, a man who, according to the Life magazine piece on which the script was based, held up a bank in 1972 in order to help pay for his transgender girlfriend's gender-affirming surgery. The film's subjects would eventually sue the project for its inaccuracies, but there's certainly an emotional truth to "Dog Day Afternoon" that transcends its true story moniker. Pacino's volatile yet charming performance as Sonny Wortzik is countered perfectly by a rare appearance from John Cazale, whose robbery accomplice Salvatore Naturile may be the most tragic character in a film that's full of them. With sympathetic criminals and overtly queer characters at its core, "Dog Day Afternoon" is a transgressive and unforgettable anti-authority shout of a film.

The Alternate Take: 1976's "Network" is the other half of Lumet's mid-'70s cinematic one-two punch, and it's just as classic as "Dog Day Afternoon." "Network" features another American man on the brink, only this time around, it's Peter Finch's fed-up TV news anchor Howard Beale. (Valerie Ettenhofer)

Do The Right Thing (1989)

It's well established that Spike Lee's sizzling-day-in-the-life of a block in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood is the definitive cinematic depiction of race relations in this busted country, but people often overlook how entertaining and downright joyous it is for most of its runtime. For some urban dwellers, this was a rare opportunity to see themselves on screen in all their festive, loving, good-naturedly quarreling glory. Every community has a Da Mayor (Ossie Davis) or a Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), and there's always some middle-aged men hanging out, sucking down suds and talking trash on a hot summer day. Lee's Bed-Stuy isn't a paradise, but it's a place where people who've grown up knowing each other tend to take care of each other when s*** goes down.

At the center of the drama is Sal's Famous Pizzeria, and the conflict that explodes out of this establishment is depicted without a clear slant. Lee wisely leaves his audience to draw their own conclusions about the dispute between Sal (Danny Aiello), Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito) and Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), but he makes it plain that the most intrusive, destabilizing force in the neighborhood is the police. The conclusion is tragic and infuriatingly unnecessary, and a reminder that cops who patrol an area where they do not live take an antagonistic approach to the people they are supposed to protect. This element of Lee's film feels more searingly palpable in 2023, and makes his masterpiece more essential than ever.

The Alternative Take: Lee's "Malcolm X" is, like "Do the Right Thing," as entertaining as it is provocative. He gets an all-time great performance out of Denzel Washington as the slain religious leader, and humanizes a man who, for too long, was viewed as a fire-breathing demagogue. (Jeremy Smith)

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

"Star Wars" changed American movies forever, but "The Empire Strikes Back" is the reason the franchise is still thriving today. Lawrence Kasdan's crackerjack screenplay supplies Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) with lively banter that would be right at home in a screwball comedy. It also, miraculously, downshifts to imbue the Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Yoda relationship with a Buddhist spirituality. The stakes are gently raised as we invest in Han and Leia's blossoming romance and the deeper meaning of The Force. Who knew that a giggly, green, 2'2" puppet would get a generation of young moviegoers considering their life's purpose?

Of course, when it comes to action, "The Empire Strikes Back" has it where it counts. The Hoth battle, with T-47 airspeeders buzzing AT-AT walkers is thrilling stuff, as is the Millennium Falcon's frantic flight through a dense asteroid belt. It all builds to a masterfully orchestrated feat of parallel action on Cloud City, where Leia and company scramble to escape the clutches of the Empire, while Luke takes his first crack at Darth Vader (and learns something awfully disquieting about his heritage in the process). Audiences freaked out over the cliffhanger finale, but that didn't stop them from lining up time and again to compile intel on where the concluding installment might be headed. This is the apex of the franchise, and it still hasn't been topped (though Rian Johnson got awfully close).

The Alternate take: George Lucas handed Irvin Kershner the reins on "The Empire Strikes Back" based on the director's spooky thriller "Eyes of Laura Mars." Written by John Carpenter, it's a nifty, high-style American giallo wherein fashion photographer Faye Dunaway envisions a killer's acts as they happen. (Jeremy Smith)

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Over a long career spent assembling deeply personal stories in crowd-pleasing packages, "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" is still Steven Spielberg's most emotionally naked work. It's a film that taps deeply (even painfully) into the universal experience of being a lonely child who's hurt and confused to learn that life doesn't always go the way we would like. It might be an other-worldly visitor with a magic touch who teaches Elliott the power of empathy and compassion for others, yet it's the film's fantastical elements that free up Spielberg and writer Melissa Mathison to deal with harder emotional truths as authentically as they do.

Framing is also key to the power of the movie's story. Spielberg meticulously films "E.T." from the perspective of a child, presenting most of the adult characters as blurry figures or, during a particularly harrowing moment, as faceless beings invading Elliott's home. This emboldens "E.T." to run the gamut in terms of its tone, shifting effortlessly from scenes of terror and heartbreak to whimsical comedy and the ebullient wonder of the iconic flying bicycle rides (fueled by John Williams' stirring and wondrous score). It's the type of pure, unrestrained cinematic magic that the very term "Spielbergian" has come to encompass.

The Alternate Take: Who could've predicted Spielberg would see so much of his own life in the true(-ish) tale of a runaway teen con artist? "Catch Me If You Can" is brisk and amusingly risqué for a Spielberg film, but it's the affecting story of a kid yearning to repair their broken family that makes this one of the director's essential offerings. (Sandy Schaefer)

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)

Director Michel Gondry brings his makeshift moviemaking mind to this lo-fi sci-fi romance starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as two star-crossed lovers. Well, maybe. It depends on how you look at it this magnificent motion picture. Either the melancholy Joel (Carrey) and the impulsive Clementine (Winslet) are doomed to repeat a failed romance for the rest of their lives, even after they have any memory of each other erased from their minds, or they're destined to be together, no matter how many times they screw it up. That's part of the undeniable beauty of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." Either it's a tragic reminder of the relationships that fall apart or an encouraging reminder that true love will endure. 

What makes "Eternal Sunshine" even more special is the practical camera tricks and visual effects used to bring the story to life. Our story cuts back and forth between present day and memories of the past in reverse chronological order as two technicians erase the memory of Clementine from Joel's memory. As each memory is erased, Joel realizes he doesn't want to forget about Clem, and we watch him desperately try to hold onto as much as he can, even as the memories crumble around him. The way Gondry brings such a grand concept to life in a deceptively simple way is just good old fashioned creative filmmaking, and everything comes together to make this movie a masterpiece. 

The Alternate Take: Much of the same grounded, surreal filmmaking style and quirky storytelling that makes "Eternal Sunshine" so great can also be seen in "Being John Malkovich," which makes sense since both were written by acclaimed writer Charlie Kaufman. It's more of a dark comedy than "Eternal Sunshine," but it's a stellar, original piece of cinema. (Ethan Anderton)

The Exorcist (1973)

Just five years after the Hays Code and its strict rules of self-censorship lost its grip on film industry, Regan MacNeil was bloodily masturbating with a crucifix as the demon possessing her screamed "Let Jesus f*** you!" and her mother watched in horror. You could say it was quite a transformative time for Hollywood.

That sheer, unrestrained depravity and malevolence are a big part of what makes "The Exorcist" such a terrifying film: once it smashes through those boundaries, the audience has no idea where the guardrails are -- or if they even exist at all. Fear is often dismissed as a cheap emotion that's easy to wring from audiences, but it takes a lot of skill to make a film as relentlessly terrifying as this one. The initial slow build of dread lulls you into expecting a slow burn suspense, until "The Exorcist" starts to hit you with stings of chaos, monstrosity, and blasphemy extreme enough to shock even the staunchest atheist.

There is a lot of depth to "The Exorcist," underpinning the green projectile vomit and those sneak-attack glimpses of Captain Howdy. Ultimately, though, its place in the top 100 is earned simply because few films have ever scared so many pants off so many people.

The Alternate Take: If another movie were to make it into this list by sheer virtue of leaving audiences too frightened to move, it would have to be "Ju-On: The Grudge." There really isn't much of a plot -- it's a movie where a series of people go to the same house and see a horrible thing -- and yet with the simplest of set-ups director Takashi Shimizu delivers a masterclass in crafting horror. (Hannah Shaw-Williams)

Get Out (2017)

With some movies, it can take years of reevaluation and evolving mindsets to finally recognize what a certain filmmaker -- typically considered to be "ahead of their time" -- was trying to accomplish. With others, you just know an instant classic the minute you see it. Jordan Peele's feature debut "Get Out" belongs to a highly specific class of movie that stands out because of how precisely and unapologetically it remains of its time. Releasing in theaters barely a month after Donald Trump's inauguration, the circumstances of the movie's timing clearly enhanced the power of its themes -- although even that would mean little if it weren't for the technical precision Peele demonstrates behind the camera, too.

Every choice in "Get Out" is made in service of putting audiences in the perspective of a Black man living in America, under systemic racism both insidiously subtle and obviously violent. For much of the story, the film's main antagonist is embodied by Bradley Whitford's Dean Armitage, a well-meaning white liberal father lacking in self-awareness. After the big reveal, Daniel Kaluuya's Chris Washington must reckon with the lingering effects of the oldest and most deep-rooted example of racial bigotry in American history. "Get Out" starts with a Black man lost and kidnapped in a wealthy white neighborhood. It ends by successfully convincing even its white viewers to share the same dread that its Black main character feels when flashing police lights arrive at the most inopportune moment. That's movie magic, baby.

The Alternate Take: From one modern horror movie acting as a feature-length metaphor for complex social realities to another, Leigh Whannell's "The Invisible Man" bears the distinction of somehow managing to remix a familiar property into something shockingly relevant, turning a classic Universal monster story into a parable about abusive relationships and gaslighting. Like "Get Out," its potent themes are matched by the razor-sharp script and filmmaking acumen that combine to make each scare land, squeeze every ounce of tension out of the story, and leave viewers thrilled and horrified by the carnage left in its wake. (Jeremy Mathai)

Ghostbusters (1984)

Who ya gonna call? Immediately knowing the answer to that question may be enough to solidify "Ghostbusters" as one of the greatest movies of all time. Powered by one of the most famous movie theme songs of all time, "Ghosbusters" is more than your average comedy. Director Ivan Reitman delivered a gamechanger by combining the sarcastic wit of comedy legends Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis with a blockbuster premise, making for a new kind of cinematic experience back in 1984. 

Rarely had this level of laugh out loud humor been paired with earnest genre filmmaking on this large of a scale. While the buddy cop subgenre had achieved a similar feat in the blending of gunfire and car chases with big laughs, the VFX-driven paranormal spooks, specters, and ghosts at the center of "Ghostbusters" turn it into something else entirely, giving us a wry, blue collar approach to an apocalyptic threat in the heart of New York City. The film goes from sliming Bill Murray and calling an EPA agent d***less to fending off a destructive god and a massive marshmallow man. It doesn't get much better than this. In fact, many movies have tried to capture the undeniable magic of "Ghostbusters," but even the franchise itself couldn't capture lightning in a ghost trap again with "Ghostbusters II."

The Alternate Take: If there's one movie that manages to capture the same comedic spirit of "Ghostbusters" while also maintaining the blockbuster scale, it's "Men in Black," featuring the unlikely fantastic teaming of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones and the unparalleled movie magic of special effects master Rick Baker. (Ethan Anderton)

The Godfather (1972)

"That's my family, Kay. It's not me." Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) means this at the outset of Francis Ford Coppola's mafia epic, but their blood is the thickest of thick. Marlon Brando's disappearing act as Don Vito Corleone was the hook that had moviegoers circling blocks on opening weekend, but the central tragedy of "The Godfather" is Michael's transformation from war hero to cold-hearted kingpin. He surrenders his future to avenge an attempt on his father's life, and, after a grave personal tragedy, returns from Sicily a man of unrepentantly corrupt industry. He is the apotheosis of a corporate operator in that the family business condones murder as a means to a perpetuating end. This is how Vito gained a foothold in America, and Michael, having killed for his country, is shockingly comfortable with the bloodletting aspect of his chosen profession.

This was a make-or-break movie for Coppola, and he did himself no favors by hiring Gordon Willis to shoot the film in shadowy earth tones. But this dimly lit gambit, abetted by Nino Rota's mournful main theme, imbued Mario Puzo's pulpy narrative with a dark soul. The casting is top-to-bottom perfection, and Coppola's mise-en-scène is a literal master class (his staging is taught in film schools all over the world). "The Godfather" is every bit as captivating as it was 51 years ago. It is as timeless as "The Wizard of Oz" and "Casablanca." You're throwing it on right now, aren't you?

The Alternate Take: "The Godfather" and "The Godfather Part II" are masterpieces in their own right, but the ideal version of Coppola's first two installments might be found in "The Godfather Saga." The chronological telling of the Corleones' story threads both movies together, and sticks that Lake Tahoe ending like a knife through the heart. (Jeremy Smith)

Goodfellas (1990)

Martin Scorsese's masterpiece, "Goodfellas" is an endlessly rewatchable look at three decades of life in the mafia as viewed through the eyes of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). Based on a true story, we follow Hill as he grows up around and eventually becomes a gangster, guided by local hoodlum Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro, who has never been cooler than he is in this movie) and pal Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci in an Oscar-winning role).

Scorsese weaves a rich tapestry here, focusing on tiny details that burn themselves into our minds — the pinky rings, the silk suits, the bad jokes, the dimly lit nightclubs, the bursts of violence, and of course, the food. So much food. (Don't forget to stir the sauce!)

Slick, stylish, and hilarious, Scorsese's film looks like it's glorifying a life of crime — until it all comes crashing down in a coke-fueled, murder-filled haze. Henry is not a big name in the mafia, he's a low-level crook who just happens to be our Dante, guiding us through several circles of hell. Using a showstopping one-take, brutal violence, a darkly comedic script, a soundtrack full of wall-to-wall pop music, and an energy that absolutely no one has ever been able to recreate (except for Scorsese), "Goodfellas" is brilliant, nasty, and one of a kind. The fact that it lost Best Picture at the Oscars to Kevin Costner's hum-drum "Dances With Wolves" should be considered a crime against cinema.

The Alternate Take: "Goodfellas" is a young man's look at a life of crime. Decades later, Scorsese created a much different gangster movie with "The Irishman," bringing back "Goodfellas" stars De Niro and Pesci and adding Al Pacino to tell a winter's tale — a story of violent men who slowly watch the world pass them by until they're irrelevant bones in a box. A massive, staggering work, this is one of Scorsese's best pictures, and the fact that he made it so late in his career is a testament to his power. (Chris Evangelista)

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (1966)

It's almost funny that Sergio Leone considered "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" a satire of Hollywood westerns because, in hindsight, the film is more of a reconstruction than a deconstruction. Just a year before the similarly transgressive "Bonnie and Clyde" kicked off the New Hollywood era in earnest, the sheer power of Leone's filmmaking reconfigured the cinematic west into a landscape that's, to use Leone's own words, just as "violent and uncomplicated" as the people who live there. When people heard the word "gunslinger," they used to picture John Wayne. Now, they think of Clint Eastwood.

"The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" didn't do this alone, of course. Not by a long shot. Sam Peckinpah had something to do with it, as did a number of other great spaghetti westerns, including many from Leone's filmography. But "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" is the best of the bunch, and its influence transcends genre boundaries. You'll see its imprint in "Star Wars," "Logan," Stephen King's "The Dark Tower," and every film Quentin Tarantino has ever made.

That's the level of craft we're talking about. Eastwood, Wallach, and Van Cleef's trio of treasure-hunting outlaws are the perfect guides to the horrors of the Civil War, and while the film's long and languidly paced, it never drags. And then there's Ennio Morricone's score, which might as well be the film's fourth main character. Close your eyes and listen; even without the visuals, the music tells you everything you need to know.

The Alternate Take: "Unforgiven" is a sequel to "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" in all but name, and while William Munny isn't technically an older version of the Man with No Name, the whole enterprise gives Eastwood an opportunity to dissect the films of his early career in the same way that Leone tackled the westerns of Hollywood's golden age. (Christopher Gates)

The Graduate (1967)

Mike Nichols' bright, incisive, endlessly stylish film about post-college malaise is the coming-of-age genre at its best and most emotionally complex. When Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) meets seductive family friend Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the recent California grad who's prone to spending his days floating in the pool finds his life exploding in vivid color. The pair's memorable tryst is the focal point for many a retrospective on the film (how many times have you heard "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me, aren't you?"), but "The Graduate" has a whole lot more on its mind than the illicit affair at its center.

When Benjamin ends up separately involved in a relationship with Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross), the film evolves into a surprising and potent exploration of the trappings of the status quo -- the moment in a man's life when "sow your wild oats" turns into "when are you going to get serious?" The film's most famous shot is its last, a stunning oner on the back of a bus that conveys more in silence than the film ever did in words. Still, though, every moment of "The Graduate" feels gorgeously expressive, from those pool shots to a sequence that frames Bancroft as a small, wounded creature in a hallway -- not to mention each moment that brims with the energy of the film's Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack.

The Alternate Take: Hal Ashby's 1971 black comedy "Harold and Maude" takes a softer -- yet ultimately more melancholy -- approach to the May-December romance. In this beautiful and bittersweet classic, death-obsessed teen Harold (Bud Cort) strikes up an unorthodox friendship (and more) with life-loving septuagenarian Maude (Ruth Gordon), and the result is offbeat and indelible. (Valerie Ettenhofer)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Wes Anderson has only further refined and fine-tuned his so-called dollhouse aesthetic with each new movie, yet it's 2014's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" that continues to reign triumphant in his filmography. The storyteller's magnum opus of pleasing colors and symmetrical compositions is, of course, a feast for the eyes full of candy-colored scenery and the type of droll visual comedy that's rarely found in modern cinema.

There's also a whole lot going on below the decadent surface here. Anderson and his co-writer Hugo Guinness are telling a story that's been passed down by a nostalgic old man and then repackaged by an author within the movie, freeing it up to deal with some heavy subject matter (the spread of fascism in early 20th-century Europe) while retaining a touch as delicate and light as one of Herr Mendl's baked treats. In other words, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is knowingly romanticizing the past by focusing primarily on its fanciful plot and doing its best to keep the sadder moments in the margins -- an act that only serves to make them all the more moving and haunting.

As a whole, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is much like Monsieur Gustave H. (a never-better Ralph Fiennes): enchantingly ridiculous, comically posh, and more than a little bit naughty, but above all else a truly remarkable one-of-a-kind specimen.

The Alternate Take: Anderson's ode to childhood and young love (in all its ungainly glory), "Moonrise Kingdom" is idiosyncratic, pensive, mischievous, and bittersweet, often at the same time. That is to say, it's a Wes Anderson joint through and through, effortlessly marrying classic film homages with Anderson's quirky original ideas to the point where you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. (Sandy Schaefer)

Groundhog Day (1993)

Every single time loop movie that has been made since "Groundhog Day" has been trying to replicate the greatness of this 1993 wonder. The mere existence of this movie is a bit of a miracle when you consider how it tore apart the friendship of director/writer Harold Ramis and his "Ghostbusters" cohort Bill Murray, but the fact that it's actually a perfect and genuinely funny romantic comedy that manages to fit in tinges of darkness and existential crisis makes it even more special. 

Bill Murray has never been better as he slowly loses his mind while living the same Groundhog Day over an over again. Though he may have earned an Oscar nomination for his turn in "Lost in Translation," this is truly the best performance of his career, tapping into everything that makes him a joy to watch. Time loop movies can be especially difficult to crack because they require repeating the same beats over and over again, which means a decent chunk of your movie has to be downright amazing in order for audiences to even tolerate watching scenes over and over again. Witnessing Murray slowly descend into madness, hit rock bottom by killing himself in a variety of creative ways, and then rising up out of the ashes to find meaning in his life never gets tired. "Groundhog Day" finds comedy in the mundane with a little bit of mayhem sprinkled throughout, and it's not just one of the best comedies of all time, it's one of the best films ever made. 

The Alternate Take: "Edge of Tomorrow" (or "Live. Die. Repeat.") is perhaps the only time loop movie that has come close to being as good as "Groundhog Day," and it's all thanks to the meshing of some surprising comedy chops from Tom Cruise and the absolute badass Emily Blunt alongside him in some stunning sci-fi action sequences. (Ethan Anderton)

Halloween (1978)

John Carpenter invented the slasher film as we know it with "Halloween," a so-simple-it's-brilliant story of unspeakable, unstoppable evil. It's Halloween and murderer Michael Myers has escaped from an insane asylum to head back home to Haddonfield, Illinois. There, pursued by his psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence, creating an iconic character by wearing a trench coat and uttering uber-dramatic lines about evil), he begins targeting a group of babysitters who have the misfortune of crossing his path. One of the babysitters, virginal Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), is soon the last girl standing.

Over the years, "Halloween" sequels would expand on the mythology, adding weird new footnotes and caveats. And while those films are entertaining, none of them can match the raw, primal power of the original. What could've easily been a forgotten B-movie became a phenomenon; a film audiences couldn't get enough of, even as they screamed in terror. As the great Roger Ebert wrote in his four-star review of the film, "We see movies for a lot of reasons. Sometimes we want to be amused. Sometimes we want to escape. Sometimes we want to laugh, or cry, or see sunsets. And sometimes we want to be scared."

The Alternate Take: While "Halloween" is perhaps one of the most famous holiday-themed horror titles, it wasn't the first. A few years before Carpenter took us to Haddonfield, Bob Clark gave folks the chills with his creepy slow-burn "Black Christmas," focusing on a group of sorority sisters targeted by a killer. Stylish and scary, it's actually one of two big Christmas movies Clark made. The other? "A Christmas Story." (Chris Evangelista)

Heat (1995)

"Heat" was advertised as the first time legendary actors Al Pacino and Robert De Niro would share the screen (they previously both appeared in "The Godfather Part II," but never occupied the same scene), but the big Pacino/De Niro meet-up is just one scene in a vast, sprawling crime epic. Career criminal De Niro and his crew are planning one big score when they catch the eye of cop Pacino, and director Michael Mann weaves in and out of the lives of these characters and those around them to weave a brilliant tapestry. It's one of the best crime movies ever made because it's about so much more than crime. It's about the lives these characters live and the traps they build for themselves along the way. At any moment, one of these men can walk away and save themselves and the lives of others around them. But they can't. They're both obsessed with their work because their work is all they know, and if that creates collateral damage along the way, so be it.

All of this culminates in one of the greatest shoot-outs ever captured on screen — a loud, brutal blast of bullets on the streets of Los Angeles as De Niro and his crew do battle with Pacino and his guys. Pacino and De Niro's characters respect each other, but they also won't hesitate to put each other down if need be. Such are the lives of violent, driven men. Mann is obsessed with the locations these characters inhabit, from the parking lots, to the restaurants, to the airports, to the balconies overlooking landscapes of twinkling city lights. "The view right here of the underpass is one of the most beautiful underpasses in the world of beautiful freeway underpasses," Mann says at one point during the director's commentary on the Blu-ray. That's poetry, baby.

The Alternate Take: What's better than this, guys being dudes? Michael Mann's "Miami Vice" was not a box office smash or a critical darling, and yet it's one of his best films, a no-nonsense story of two cops (Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell) willing to push things to the limit and beyond in order to get their work done. Nestled in the middle of this, like so many other Mann movies, is a doomed love story that will make a mark even if it doesn't survive. (Chris Evangelista)

Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan built an entire career on stories about men avoiding their emotions, and it's fitting that his greatest work takes that concept and literalizes it within an inch of its life. "Inception" tells the story of Cobb, a thief played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who steals not from your wallet but from your very subconscious, using technology that allows him and his expert associates to venture inside your dreams. Cobb has been tasked with a nearly impossible mission — to give someone an idea instead of taking it — but his personal baggage is so overwhelming that it follows him into other people's heads, and threatens to destroy him, everyone around him, and everything he's built.

"Inception" takes what could have been merely an exciting sci-fi thrill ride and packs it full of overwhelming portent, a tidal wave of uncontrollable psychic damage that threatens to wash away an already exhilarating heist picture. Nolan borrows heavily from Satoshi Kon's anime masterpiece "Paprika," there's no question, but "Inception" feels like a personal expression anyway. It's a disarmingly populist rendition of the filmmaker's own notorious perfectionism, undone or perhaps only made artistically valid by the subconscious chaos he can't prevent from creeping into the periphery. Blockbuster filmmaking rarely gets more inventive, more thrilling, or more personal.

The Alternate Take: Nolan's cold and calculating attempts to control the subconscious make "Inception" a perfect double feature with David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr.," another film about a traumatic relationship and human frailty endangering a perfectly good fantasy. Lynch's film about a naive ingenue who falls in love with a mysterious amnesiac in a phantasmagorical Los Angeles never pretends to be fully logical, and perhaps that's why it feels so perfect; our dreams are a mess, because so are we. (William Bibbiani)

In The Mood For Love (2000)

Never has a love story set in Hong Kong been so beautiful and devastating as Wong Kar-Wai's "In The Mood For Love," which paints a bittersweet picture of loneliness in the midst of a bustling city. While unrequited love evokes pain, reciprocated, yet unfulfilled love alters the very soul of the ones involved, as they exchange longing glances near rain-drenched street corners or share a hotel room and pine for the other in restrained silence.

Adultery sets the plot of "In The Mood For Love" forward, but the focus is on the victims of such an act — Chow (Tony Leung) and Su (Maggie Cheug) share a love that can never be freely uttered or consummated, but only whispered in subtle gestures of affection, the air between them charged with intense sensuality. Wong uses bold, vibrant shades of red to convey these unspoken emotions while weaving character portraits that are deeply flawed, humane, and unforgettable.

The precious moments spent with the one you desire, but cannot have, feels transient and timeless at the same time, and "In The Mood For Love" captures this unique sentiment in heartbreaking ways, etching a tale about a love that endures, a dramatically distinct stance from "Chungking Express" or "Fallen Angels." Moreover, Wong's highly stylized, charged visuals are always a treat to witness, and there is something special about how he frames the simple act of eating streetside noodles alone after work, capturing a range of un-uttered emotions in a single frame.

The Alternate Take: Wong's "2046" anchors love across space and time, where lovers haplessly look for companionship in the wrong places. The sleek, futuristic aesthetic of "2046" is truly one of a kind, as Wong leans into a masterful, experimental examination of the very fabric of human longing and suffering. (Debopriyaa Dutta)

The Iron Giant (1999)

"The Iron Giant" is the best Superman movie ever made, period. A being with unlimited power crash lands on Earth, learns empathy and kindness from its residents, and decides to use his abilities to save humanity, not destroy it? That's the Superman myth in a nutshell. The Iron Giant's choice of Kal-El as his role model shows why Siegel and Shuster's creation has endured for over eight decades, and if that were all "The Iron Giant" had to offer, it would be enough.

But, of course, there's more. So much more. "The Iron Giant" remains one of the best fusions of hand-drawn art and CGI; while the human characters and the backdrops were animated traditionally, the Giant is a digital creation, and his precise, mechanical movements go a long way towards selling his otherness. The story of a living gun who rejects violence felt remarkably potent in summer 1999, when America was still reeling from the Columbine massacre, and hits even harder in today's firearms-plagued world.

And then there's Hogarth Hughes, one of the rare children in an animated feature who acts like a real kid. While the Giant gets all the attention, Hogarth is the one who provides all the heart. He's an over-active, imaginative, and unwaveringly optimistic little guy searching for the Hobbes to his Calvin, and the bond that results once he finds it is unforgettable. "The Iron Giant" is still the only film that makes me cry every single time I watch it.

The Alternate Take: "Superman: The Movie" doesn't have the pathos or tragic sacrifice of "The Iron Giant," but, in addition to providing the framework for the past 15 years of Hollywood blockbusters, it shares the perspective that everyone — human or otherwise — has the innate capacity for good. These days, that couldn't be more refreshing. (Christopher Gates)

It's A Wonderful Life (1946)

Few American traditions are as pure in spirit as the annual "It's A Wonderful Life" rewatch. Nearly 80 years after its release, it still feels like a miracle that Frank Capra's life-affirming portrait of a man on the brink of suicide has become a holiday season staple. That a two-plus-hour black-and-white emotional epic can become among the most popularly revisited classics is music to movie-lovers ears; that "It's A Wonderful Life" is actually a film deserving of this endless love is even more incredible.

James Stewart gives an earnest, effective performance as George Bailey, the man whose life takes a Charles Dickens-inspired turn when he's pushed to the brink by his circumstances. Here, though, the guardian angel who guides him through the past and present is less moralizing and more realistic, as "It's A Wonderful Life" reckons with surprisingly modern-feeling problems involving money, family, and reputation. Even among the best movies ever made, very few feel like they possess the power to change a life, but "It's A Wonderful Life" has a sort of transformative spirit that can bring a tear to the eye of even the most cynical among us. With each rewatch, George's fresh start feels like it can be ours, too, and we're left, above all else, with a weightless feeling of possibility. "It's A Wonderful Life" is movie magic at its finest.

The Alternate Take: Another Capra classic, "It Happened One Night," is a pre-code gem about love and money that features scintillating turns by Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. A formative rom-com before the term existed, it's clever, bold, and surprisingly sexy. (Valerie Ettenhofer)

Jaws (1975)

The movie that gave birth to the summer blockbuster! What, exactly, can one even say about "Jaws" at this point that hasn't been said a thousand times over? It's the tale of a page-turner morphing into a movie shot by a still relatively green filmmaker (you know who he is), running over budget and overschedule, complete with a robot shark that kept malfunctioning. And yet from that mess rose one of the biggest movies of all time — and one of the best.

Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" is a lean-mean machine of a movie; a man-vs-nature tale where nature just happens to have huge f***ing teeth. Roy Scheider is Martin Brody, the police chief of Amity Island, and he's one of the first people to sound the alarm when a great white shark starts munching on swimmers. But capitalism reigns supreme, and the mayor and other greedy townsfolk want to keep the beaches open for the summer. Big mistake, guys.

When things get too deadly, Brody, marine biologist Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and local salt Quint (Robert Shaw, who chomps more scenery than the shark) head to sea to stop the beast once and for all. Spielberg stages big, show-stopping set pieces, but he also focuses on little moments — like one of Brody's kids mimicking his father's actions at the dinner table, or the three men bonding over their various scars while they wait to kill the damn shark. It all works, and works perfectly, aided by John Williams' brilliant score full of primal notes that immediately trigger dread every time we start to hear them.

The Alternate Take: If "Jaws" was Spielberg's ascension into blockbuster filmmaker stardom, "Schindler's List" is the film where he finally proved once and for all that he wasn't just a popcorn entertainment guy — he was an artist. Spielberg had been trying his hand at "serious" movies before "Schindler's List," but none of them quite clicked. Then he got his hands on the true story of Oskar Schindler, who used his munitions factory during the war as a cover to save the lives of 1000 Jews. Spielberg uses every populist filmmaker trick he had learned up until that point to tell a harrowing, crushing, ultimately hopeful story that never flinches away from the horrors of the Holocaust. And the end result finally won the filmmaker the Best Director Oscar he so craved. (Chris Evangelista)

Jurassic Park (1993)

Steven Spielberg may well go down as the best to ever do it when all is said and done. That's why you see his name on this list more than once. And when Spielberg is firing on all cylinders, true movie magic happens. Such was the case in 1993 when he made "Jurassic Park," one of the most beloved and enduring blockbusters in the history of blockbusters. We may take it for granted now, but the film makes dinosaurs feel real for the first time ever. To this day, the T-rex breakout sequence is a shockingly convincing bit of filmmaking that allows even the most skeptical of viewer to suspend disbelief for the sake of sheer wonderment.

Perhaps more than the arguably perfect movie experience that the film itself represents, Spielberg also carved a path forward for the next three decades of filmmaking, introducing groundbreaking CGI that allowed for these creations to come alive, while also using equally groundbreaking animatronics to complete the picture. The marriage of the two in this adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel of the same name remains a touchstone for anyone trying to do the same. When we talk about groundbreaking films, this is right near the top of the list. More importantly, when we talk about great blockbuster entertainment that also functions as a pure expression of the art form, "Jurassic Park" is also right near the top of that list. Put simply? It's the definition of greatness.

The Alternate Take: Before Spielberg was making gigantic box office hits, he made what has been called the greatest made for TV movie in history in 1971 with "Duel." With limited resources and a tiny budget, what the director was able to accomplish is nothing shy of a minor miracle and demonstrates that, even then, he was a master of his craft, particularly in making a true edge-of-your-seat thrill ride. (Ryan Scott)

Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

For its first half, Hayao Miyazaki's "Kiki's Delivery Service" is exactly what you'd expect from the legendary Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli. Its stunning blend of fantasy and naturalism -- brought to life with hand-drawn animation so perfect and composed that you could happily frame every moment -- immediately draws you into the world of Kiki, a young witch who sets off on her own and starts a delivery service, racing around her new community on broomstick. It's charming. It's funny. It's a world you want to live in and luxuriate in, populated by a sprawling cast of characters who win your heart within moments.

But it's the back half of the film that takes a sledgehammer to your heart, as Kiki learns that turning what you love into a career can have dire emotional consequences. Her magic falters and her ability to fly vanishes -- everything she once loved now feels hopeless, joyless. It's a turn that's brutal but earned, the best-ever depiction of burnout, embedded into a tale of young witches and talking cats. Miyazaki's ultimately a big softie (he gives us the happy ending we want), but this is the greatest example of what the master animator and his team of geniuses at Studio Ghibli could pull off: A brilliantly realized fantasy universe given all the relatable emotional stakes of our own world.

The Alternate Take: You can't go wrong with literally any other Miyazaki movie, but "Spirited Away" is considered by many to be his masterpiece, and for good reason. But really, you can pick any of them. (Jacob Hall)

King Kong (1933)

Only a few years after sound became a mainstay in motion pictures, directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack assembled one of the greatest and most influential adventure movies ever made. An incalculable number of creature features came out in its wake, but the original "King Kong" still holds up where many of its imitators do not. A primary reason for its staying power is because Kong's emotions don't ever get lost in the wildly impressive technical wizardry of Willis O'Brien's stop-motion effects. He's more than just a lumbering brute or a gimmicky visual trick — he's an actual character with thoughts and feelings that you can track through facial expressions and body language, adding a layer of sophistication that separates this from its contemporaries. There's no getting around the rampant racism and misogyny on display here, which are indicative of the era in which it was released, but Fay Wray's movie star performance transcends the scream queen sobriquet and gives her the opportunity to convey real, human, relatable reactions to the chaos unfolding around her. More than 40 years before Steven Spielberg would essentially create the blockbuster with "Jaws," "King Kong" was the summer blockbuster to end all summer blockbusters.

The Alternate Take: For the most famous international riff on a giant monster movie, seek out the original 1954 version of "Godzilla," the best film ever made about the existential horror of nuclear war. (Ben Pearson)

Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)

There are "big" movies, and then there's "Lawrence of Arabia," arguably the very personification of epic filmmaking. This is not only the longest movie to win Best Picture at the Oscars, but it remains one of the purest examples of what you can only do with the format of cinema, of telling a story that only works when using the biggest possible screen.

David Lean takes the legendary tale of T.E. Lawrence and his role in the Arab Revolt and interrogates the myth that had been built around the man and the idea of white saviors and messiahs, of the British Empire and its history of colonialism. Even 60 years later, most of the many, many movies influenced by "Lawrence of Arabia" miss this part. And Peter O'Toole is integral to this. Impossibly handsome and enigmatic, O'Toole gives nuance to the character that grounds the grandiose elements of the story. He does not play to the legend, but keeps enough cards close to the chest that the audience doesn't never fully gets to know him. It's a legendary figure imbued with mystery and humanity. 

Of course, "Lawrence of Arabia" is best remembered for having the absolute greatest portrayal of the desert, which no movie has come close to replicating. Lean manages to present a world that is alien yet familiar, blistering hot, vast, and empty, and somehow, beautiful in its own way. There are no movies quite like this one.

The Alternate Take: What "Lawrence of Arabia" does in the desert, Peter Weir's "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" does at sea, presenting a thrilling but also intimate historical epic with one of the best opening texts in cinema. (Rafael Motamayor)

Let The Right One In (2008)

Most vampire films lean into gothic excess and bloody sexuality, but the Swedish horror film "Let the Right One In," based on the novel of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist, tackles a different kind of vampiric relationship. Directed by Tomas Alfredson, the film stars Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar, a very lonely 12-year-old boy living in the dreary Stockholm suburb of Blackeburg who strikes up a friendship with another, unusual child tenant, Eli (Lina Leandersson). It turns out that Eli isn't a 12-year-old girl but is actually a centuries-old vampire boy. The two's friendship becomes a bit more intense and romantic, leading to Eli hunting the boys who bully Oskar in an attempt to bring him happiness. 

"Let the Right One In" is a vampire movie like no other, with nuanced child performances and beautiful and haunting imagery that stands out despite the muted color palette. Simply watching it can make the viewer feel the cold isolation that Oskar and Eli both experience without each other, and it becomes a beautiful (if disturbing) love story for the ages. It also features one of the scariest underwater scenes in all of cinema, with a single still camera shot and muted audio that forces the audience to experience Oskar's terror with him. "Let the Right One In" is beautiful, bold, and absolutely brutal.

The Alternate Take: "Byzantium" is Neil Jordan's 2012 vampire romance starring Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as mother and daughter vampires who have existed on the fringes in a male-dominated vampire society and a human world that doesn't know they exist. It's beautiful and bloody, like "Let the Right One In," and offers another unusual human-vampire romance between Ronan's character and a sickly young man (Caleb Landry Jones). (Danielle Ryan)

The Lion King (1994)

The average runtime of movies has increased significantly since the early 1990s, and now it seems that 2.5 hours is the bare minimum for any movie with even a trace of the epic in its DNA. With that in mind (and particularly after the two-hour "live-action" remake released in 2019), it's even more impressive to look back at what Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff's "The Lion King" achieved in the space of 88 minutes.

The film takes the story of "Hamlet" -- not one of Shakespeare's lighter works -- and retells it in a way that's accessible for young children while also being engaging for their parents. The tone steers deftly from the Busby Berkeley bounciness of "I Just Can't Wait To Be King" to the emotional devastation of Simba witnessing Mustafa's death beneath the hooves of a stampeding herd, and then skips right back across the emotional spectrum to the bug-eating and fart jokes of "Hakuna Matata." That the various ingredients -- catchy songs for kids, a comic relief duo, and a grand operatic story about the harmony of life and death in nature -- hold together without ever feeling incongruent is something of a cinematic miracle. "The Lion King" is the shining jewel in the crown of the Disney Renaissance.

The Alternate Take: But before the Disney Renaissance, there was the Disney slump of the 1970s and '80s. It was during this time that Don Bluth made his feature directorial debut with the gripping, timeless animated adventure "The Secret of NIMH." In many places it's more like a horror-tinged mystery thriller than a typical animated children's film, but like "The Lion King," its boldness is its greatest strength. (Hannah Shaw-Williams)

Little Women (2019)

Louisa May Alcott's classic semi-autobiographical novel,about four sisters growing up in the mid-19th century, with very different personalities and very different dreams, has been made into several classic motion pictures, starring screen icons like Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Winona Ryder. All those versions of "Little Women" are beautiful in their own ways but Greta Gerwig's "Little Women" is more than just an adaptation. It's a profound exploration of everything we can take away from Alcott's classic story, on the page and beyond it.

Gerwig's version faithfully adapts the core of Alcott's story while also liberally fixing it, adding scenes that deepen and justify relationships that most of the other adaptations take for granted, acknowledging historical realities it would be irresponsible to ignore today, and eventually splitting the storyline in two. This "Little Women" lovingly dramatizes the novel's shameless romanticism while acknowledging that, in reality, what happened to Alcott has more power than the simple, albeit cathartic, melodrama of her fictional counterpart. And as performed by one of the most incredible ensemble casts in recent memory — Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Timotheé Chalamet, the list goes on, all working at the height of their powers — these beloved characters take on rich new life that should carry them far into the future, where it seems they will always be relevant.

The Alternate Take: Alcott's early feminism will always be fascinating, but Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames" (1983) looks to the future, and a unique dystopian landscape where feminist groups, often at odds with each other, vie to change the world through pirate radio, political activism, and roving the streets as badass bicycle gangs. Renegade filmmaking at its finest, challenging ideas that still feel bold today, and concluding with an image that's uncomfortably familiar. (William Bibbiani)

The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (2001)

In December of 2001, the world was still reeling from the most pivotal historical event of the 21st Century only weeks before. People needed assurances that things could somehow get back to normal. Moviegoers needed a distraction and a slice of escapism to help transport us away to another, more morally simple world. Eerily similar to when author J.R.R. Tolkien first published his novel in the years following World War II, Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" came about right when we needed it most. And, to its credit, time has only been kinder and kinder to the adaptation of one of the most "unfilmable" works of fiction ever put to paper.

Between the tricky rights situation, the financing complications, the technical challenges needed to bring the scale of the story to life, and the sheer enormity of committing wholesale to a trilogy of movies that could've easily flopped upon arrival, it's an actual miracle that this trilogy exists at all -- let alone at the level of quality that they do. While the sequels and "The Hobbit" prequels all strayed further and further towards indulgence and excess, "The Fellowship of the Ring" stands tall as a lean, mean, and practically perfect adaptation and film in its own right. Tasked with catering to longtime fans while introducing casuals to Middle-earth, Jackson did the impossible. Like a certain 1954 Tolkien novel, "Fellowship" changed everything.

The Alternate Take: For those who like their fantasy a little more impressionistic, cautionary, and full of deliciously ambiguous storytelling, writer/director David Lowery took a downright novel approach to adapting the 14th-century Arthurian poem telling the tale of Sir Gawain (which, for the record, Tolkien himself once famously translated, as well) with "The Green Knight." From the shrewd casting of Dev Patel in the lead role to the haunting use of color to the impeccable photography working in perfect tandem with Lowery's script, the brilliant retelling of Gawain's tests of heroism and chivalry is destined to become a new classic. (Jeremy Mathai)

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

How do you even begin to quantify what has to be considered the greatest action blockbuster of modern times? In terms of innovation, "Mad Max: Fury Road" initially came into being as a series of storyboards based on a broadly-sketched concept in George Miller's head -- not unlike George Lucas and "Star Wars" before it. Few others outside of the visionary director's inner circle could possibly wrap their minds around exactly what Miller had in mind, but the final result proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that our greatest storytellers (paired with their most trusted editors, of course) could spin absolute magic out of anything. When it comes to staging such elaborate action sequences, the collective work by the stunt people on location, various VFX artists, and actors alike is nothing short of awe-inspiring. And for a movie that entered production without a traditional script, the fact that every major character goes through their own respective arcs only makes this accomplishment even more impressive.

Despite a middling box office performance at the time, 10 Oscar nominations (with six wins), a rabid fanbase constantly preaching the gospel to anyone who'll listen, and a pop culture legacy that will reverberate for decades to come all help ensure one simple truth. In short, "Fury Road" is destined to be celebrated in the annals of film history for as long as moving pictures remain an artform. In other words, may this instant classic die historic on the Fury Road.

The Alternate Take: To stick with the dystopian theme, Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" also stands tall as another potent work of post-apocalyptic fiction that succeeded wildly on the strength of its socio-political metaphors. Al...

Nagios is an open-source monitoring tool designed to monitor various components of an IT infrastructure, providing real-time alerts and notifications in case of any issues or anomalies. It is aimed to help IT professionals with continuous monitoring of systems, services, logs and applications. Businesses can use Nagios as a powerful monitoring tool to proactively track and manage their IT infrastructure, ensuring system uptime and minimizing downtime for improved operational efficiency. Additionally, Nagios also provides customizable reports and centralized monitoring, allowing businesses to gain insights, streamline operations, and make informed decisions. In this article, we will address the question, “What is

What is Nagios Used For? Is it Any Good? is a post from: WhatSoftware.com

I’m always trying to get people to listen to more podcasts. If you listen to five, I want you listening to eight. If you listen eight, I want that number to be 13. This is my literal job, people.

If someone is already a podcast lover, it is fairly easy to convince them to add a new one to their library. But what about…

Read more...

The latest versions of the Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator introduce a variety of changes and improvements that vastly enhance The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom emulation and improve performance on graphics cards that have low amounts of VRAM.

Yuzu's early access 3601 introduces a new setting to recompress ASTC textures, supporting BC1 and BC3 formats. The first one provides lower quality textures, allowing saving more than eight times VRAM, essentially making Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom playable on cards with 2GB VRAM and AMD integrated GPUs. BC3 provides medium-quality textures, making it the recommended option for users with 4GB, and 6GB VRAM. These settings apply to all games that use ASTC textures, so titles like Bayonetta 3, Metroid Prime Remastered, and Fire Emblem Engage will run better on low-end hardware.

Shortly after the release of Early Access 3601, the developer released another version, version 3602, which further improves Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's emulation by fixing the pixelated shadows under objects when using the Ultrahand ability. The new features introduced in the latest Early Access versions have yet to be released to the public, but they should get implemented in the public build of the emulator in the coming days. You can get access to the emulator's latest Early Access builds by subscribing to the developer's Patreon page.

The Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator can now be downloaded from its official website, where more information on it is also available.

A financially motivated threat actor of Indonesian origin has been observed leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to carry out illicit crypto mining operations. Cloud security company's Permiso P0 Labs, which first detected the group in November 2021, has assigned it the moniker GUI-vil (pronounced Goo-ee-vil). "The group displays a preference for Graphical

Today we released the fourth edition of Cyber Signals highlighting a surge in cybercriminal activity around business email compromise (BEC). Microsoft has observed a 38 percent increase in cybercrime as a service (CaaS) targeting business email between 2019 and 2022.¹

Successful BEC attacks cost organizations hundreds of millions of dollars annually. In 2022, the FBI’s Recovery Asset Team (RAT) initiated the Financial Fraud Kill Chain (FFKC) on 2,838 BEC complaints involving domestic transactions with potential losses of more than USD590 million.²  

BEC attacks stand apart in the cybercrime industry for their emphasis on social engineering and the art of deception. Between April 2022 and April 2023, Microsoft Threat Intelligence detected and investigated 35 million BEC attempts with an adjusted average of 156,000 attempts daily. 

Common BEC tactics

Threat actors’ BEC attempts can take many forms—including via phone calls, text messages, emails, or social media. Spoofing authentication request messages and impersonating individuals and companies are also common tactics. 

Instead of exploiting vulnerabilities in unpatched devices, BEC operators seek to exploit the daily sea of email traffic and other messages to lure victims into providing financial information, or taking direct action like unknowingly sending funds to money mule accounts that help criminals perform fraudulent money transfers.  

Unlike a “noisy” ransomware attack featuring disruptive extortion messages, BEC operators play a quiet confidence game using contrived deadlines and urgency to spur recipients who may be distracted or accustomed to these types of urgent requests. Instead of novel malware, BEC adversaries align their tactics to focus on tools improving the scale, plausibility, and in-box success rate of malicious messages. 

Microsoft observes a significant trend in attackers’ use of platforms like BulletProftLink, a popular service for creating industrial-scale malicious mail campaigns, which sells an end-to-end service including templates, hosting, and automated services for BEC. Adversaries using this CaaS are also provided with IP addresses to help guide BEC targeting.   

BulletProftLink’s decentralized gateway design, which includes Internet Computer blockchain nodes to host phishing and BEC sites, creates an even more sophisticated decentralized web offering that’s much harder to disrupt. Distributing these sites’ infrastructure across the complexity and evolving growth of public blockchains makes identifying them, and aligning takedown actions, more complex.  

While there have been several high-profile attacks that take advantage of residential IP addresses, Microsoft shares law enforcement and other organizations’ concern that this trend can be rapidly scaled, making it difficult to detect activity with traditional alarms or notifications.  

Although, threat actors have created specialized tools to facilitate BEC, including phishing kits and lists of verified email addresses targeting C-suite leaders, accounts payable leads, and other specific roles, there are methods that enterprises can employ to preempt attacks and mitigate risk.  

BEC attacks offer a great example of why cyber risk needs to be addressed in a cross-functional way with IT, compliance, and cyber risk officers at the table alongside executives and leaders, finance employees, human resource managers, and others with access to employee records like social security numbers, tax statements, contact information, and schedules.   

Recommendations to combat BEC

• Use a secure email solution: Today’s cloud platforms for email use AI capabilities like machine learning to enhance defenses, adding advanced phishing protection and suspicious forwarding detection. Cloud apps for email and productivity also offer the advantages of continuous, automatic software updates and centralized management of security policies.  

• Secure Identities to prohibit lateral movement: Protecting identities is a key pillar to combating BEC. Control access to apps and data with Zero Trust and automated identity governance.  

• Adopt a secure payment platform: Consider switching from emailed invoices to a system specifically designed to authenticate payments.  

• Train employees to spot warning signs: Continuously educate employees to spot fraudulent and other malicious emails, such as a mismatch in domain and email addresses, and the risk and cost associated with successful BEC attacks.  

Learn more

Read the fourth edition of Cyber Signals today.

For more threat intelligence insights and guidance including past issues of Cyber Signals, visit Security Insider. 

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

---

End notes

¹Cyber Signals, Microsoft.

²Internet Crime Complaint Center Releases 2022 Statistics, FBI.

The post Cyber Signals: Shifting tactics fuel surge in business email compromise appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Not many actors can claim to have played multiple Marvel characters and Star Wars characters in addition to famous historical figures and the villain in one of the biggest Tollywood hits of all time, but Ray Stevenson is one of them. As first reported by Italian news outlets and latest confirmed by The Wrap and Variety, the actor died today at the age of 58. Born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, Stevenson started acting in film and TV in the 1990s. He would go on to become a bigger name thanks to his roles as Titus Pullo in the HBO series "Rome" and as Dagonet, one of Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, in Antoine Fuqua's 2004 period action-adventure epic "King Arthur."

As someone with a knack for playing hard-edged fighters and antiheroes, Stevenson was a natural fit to portray the Marvel comic book vigilante Frank Castle in Lexi Alexander's absurdly violent 2008 cult film "Punisher: War Zone." He would continue to carve out a niche for himself by playing hardened criminals and goons in "The Book of Eli" and "Kill the Irishman," along with his stint as Isaak Sirko on "Dexter." But Stevenson could also play against type, as he did in his role as one third of Thor's lovable Warriors Three, Volstagg, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's "Thor" films and as Porthos in Paul W.S. Anderson's utterly ludicrous (and ridiculously fun) "The Three Musketeers."

A Villain We Loved To Hate

Baddies were Ray Stevenson's true specialty, and he was responsible for creating some truly wonderful villains (in a love-to-hate-them sort of way). Their ranks include Cobra agent Firefly in "G.I. Joe: Retaliation;" Blackbeard himself, Edward Teach, in "Black Sails;" and Gar Saxon, a Mandalorian commander who served Maul in the animated series "Star Wars: The Clone Wars." But of all the despicable antagonists he brought to life, none might be more memorable than the blood-thirsty English governor Scott Buxton in S. S. Rajamouli's anti-colonialist Telugu-language epic "RRR."

In keeping with this trend, Stevenson will appear posthumously in the live-action "Star Wars" series "Ahsoka," playing the dark side user and Thrawn ally Baylan Skoll. The actor's filmography also includes roles in the historical drama series "The Spanish Princess" and "Vikings," as well as the "Divergent" movies (where he played Four's father, Marcus Eaton).

We here at /Film would like to extend our sincere condolences to Stevenson's family, friends, and loved ones in their time of grieving.

Read this next: Every Pre-MCU Marvel Movie Ranked

The post Ray Stevenson, Marvel, Star Wars, and RRR Actor, Has Died at 58 appeared first on /Film.

The Creative Labs Sound Blaster line of cards became the de facto DOS sound card standard in the early 1990s and carried through that dominance until the last DOS games.  The Sound Blaster offered many useful features in a single card, an FM synthesizer, a gameport, MIDI functionality but most uniquely a digital sound processor designed to process digital audio input and output with minimal CPU intervention.  Gamers saw the value in this "all-in-one" card and bought lots of Sound Blaster cards,  which required game developers to support the card and giving Creative a huge lead in the market.  Creative was naturally very protective of its technology, which was full of quirks and obscure hardware behaviors.  Eventually sound chips from other manufacturers like MediaVision, Crystal Semiconductor, Electronic Speech Systems and Yamaha were available which promised some level of direct Sound Blaster compatibility.  

Not everyone could use a Sound Blaster.  For some PC gamers, the cost of the cards was out of reach to them.  Systems with weird busses like Microchannel have few sound card options and those that are available are rare.  Laptops usually did not come with ISA expansion and PCMCIA sound cards are also rare.  Some systems just do not have enough slots for a sound card once more essential needs, like a hard drive, are added to the system.  In this case a parallel port sound solution may be your only option.  Finally there were people disgusted with Creative's monopolistic practices and refused to support the Sound Blaster ecosystem.  In this article we will give an overview of digital sound solutions which offered no hardware Sound Blaster compatibility.

Read more »

CNN's chief medical correspondent spoke to psychology professor Jean Twenge from San Diego State University who in 2018 published a book which, even before lockdowns, warned that teenagers were missing crucial life experiences. Its title? "iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us." From CNN's report: In her book, Twenge makes the case that Gen Z (or iGen, as she calls them) is growing up in a way that is fundamentally different from previous generations. She told me that some of the biggest behavioral changes ever recorded in human history coincided with the release of the smartphone. Twelfth-graders now are more like eighth-graders from previous generations, waiting longer to take part in activities associated with independence and adulthood, according to Twenge. They are less likely to go out with friends, drive, go to prom or drink alcohol than Gen X 12th-graders were. They are more likely to lie on their beds and scroll through endless social media feeds. They may be physically safer, but the long-term effect on their mental and brain health is a big question mark. Twenge told me that she "saw just a very, very sudden change, especially in mental health but also in optimism and expectations ... between millennials and iGen or Gen Z." CNN's chief medical correspondent ultimately recommends parents talk to teenagers about how they're using social media. But the article also recommends: "don't catastrophize." In all likelihood, you'll find out your kids are on some type of screen or device more often than you would like, but — this is key — not everyone develops a problem. In other words, don't assume the worst about the impact that use of technology will have on your child's brain and development. Most people may not develop catastrophic problems, but it can be challenging to predict who is most vulnerable... And lastly, in the words of author and science journalist Catherine Price, remember that life is what we pay attention to. Think about that for a moment; it is such a simple idea, but it is so true. I find it both deeply inspirational and empowering because it implies that we have it within our control to determine what our lives are like. The next time you go to pick up your phone, Price wants us to remember the three Ws: What for? Why now? What else? Price also wrote a book — titled "How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life.". Here's how CNN ends their article: As Dr. Keneisha Sinclair-McBride, a clinical psychologist at Boston Children's Hospital and an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, pointed out, we possess something very valuable that Big Tech companies want: our time and attention. We need to be judicious about how we allocate these precious resources — not just because they are important to TikTok, Snap or Instagram but because they are priceless for us, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three of George Miller's four "Mad Max" films have been decidedly post-apocalyptic. 1981's "The Road Warrior" took place in a desert that was peppered by bondage-gear-wearing thugs who sought to infiltrate and loot the fortified bases of those who thought to salvage water and gasoline. 1985's "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome," after an amusing dalliance in the titular fighting arena, found a tribe of children who vaguely remembered the world prior to an unnamed apocalyptic cataclysm. 

It seems that the Earth descended into "we have a Thunderdome" territory in the span of less than a decade. Meanwhile, 2015's "Mad Max: Fury Road" went full-tilt into fable territory, depicting a world as it might look a few generations after the apocalypse. Continuity isn't so much an issue with the "Mad Max" series, however, as Miller finds the world more interesting than any definable story arc. 

There was, however, a definite starting point. The 1979 original, "Mad Max," took place in a mid-apocalyptic world. There were still operational cars, still a working police force, and still remnants of civilization. Whatever cataclysm happened to create the world of "The Road Warrior" was still happening in "Mad Max." The world was merely in decay.

It seems that the decaying world was drawn from Miller's own personal memories of his childhood hometown. He was raised in a suburb of Darling Downs called Chinchilla, located in southern Queensland, and would eventually grow up to work as a medical doctor in the local hospital. It seems that Miller frequently treated victims of local car crashes, an all-too-common occurrence. According to a 2006 video interview with the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, real-world violence inspired Miller to invent a dark world that was falling apart.

Just Kids And Their Cars

The very geography of Chinchilla, Miller said, seemed to encourage speeding. There were a lot of long, flat roads that were ideal for pushing a car's limits. Miller first noticed his town's geography when he was a teenager in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he and his friend had first started driving. He recalled that several people he knew were victims of car-related violence. In his words: 

"There's no question that 'Mad Max' was influenced by my childhood in rural Queensland, which Chinchilla itself is west of the Darling Downs. Completely flat roads, loamy soil, heat haze, burnt land. And with a very intense car culture. I mean, the main street of town and Saturday night with just the kids in their cars. By the time we were out of our teens, several of our peers had already been killed or badly injured in car accidents. And there was just those long, flat roads where there was no speed limit and people would just go." 

George Miller does mention how much the deaths of his peers bothered him, but he did go on to recall his time as a medical doctor, and how seeing the blood firsthand started to deeply affect him. Miller looked at the constant car and motorcycle crashes, and his imagination began to wander into some dark territory. He said: 

"And it obviously had a big ... impact on me. And it wasn't until I ... ended up being a doctor in emergency and seeing the kind of carnage as a result of car accidents or bike accidents that it kind of got into me, kind of disturbed me quite a bit. And I think all of those things were kind of part of the mix of the 'Mad Max' films, particularly the first one."

The Practical Reasons

Miller has said repeatedly that he loves the old-world melodrama of silent films, feeling the format to be a purer form of cinema than talkies. He has said repeatedly that he has been influenced by the works of Buster Keaton. As such, when he conceived of "Mad Max," he wanted it to be just as heightened as over-the-top as the silent films of yore. But Miller felt that maybe it was too over-the-top for the present and conceived of a time jump. He said:

"We set the film in the future mainly because once I basically contrived the story — which was very, very intense in this instance — it felt like there was just too hyperbolic, it was totally exaggerated. So we thought if we settled in the future, it might take on a sort of a fable-like quality. But we didn't have enough money to really set into a far future and degrade it down. So it's set in the near future. By the time we made the second film, 'Mad Max 2,' we're able to do a little bit more."

Of course, Miller admitted that he never intended to make a "Mad Max 2," but, well, inspiration struck. A story idea came to him and he merely followed his heart. In the same interview from 2006, he even admitted that he was already kicking around ideas for a fourth "Mad Max" movie, the film that would eventually become "Mad Max: Fury Road" some nine years hence. 

Given that Miller, now 78, is currently finishing work on a fifth "Mad Max" film — a spinoff called "Furiosa" starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the character played by Charlize Theron in "Fury Road" — speaks to how much he thinks about those grime car accidents from his youth. Some things, it seems, mark you forever.

Read this next: The 25 Best '80s Action Movies Ranked

The post The Grim Real-World Inspiration Behind The Mad Max Franchise appeared first on /Film.

Wikipedia describes Freenet as "a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication," released in the year 2000. "Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke," Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot's readers...) And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity — Slashdot reader #1,431) returns to share this announcement: Freenet, a familiar name to Slashdot readers for over 23 years, has undergone a radical transformation: Freenet 2023, or "Locutus". While the original Freenet was like a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a full decentralized computer, allowing the creation of entirely decentralized services like messaging, group chat, search, social networking, among others. The new Freenet is implemented in Rust and designed for efficiency, flexibility, and transparency to the end user. "Designed for simplicity and flexibility, Freenet 2023 can be used seamlessly through your web browser, providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web," explains the announcement... And in the comments below, Ian points out that "When the new Freenet is up and running, I think it will be the first system of any kind that could host something like Wikipedia, not just the data but the wiki CMS system it's built on. An editable wikipedia, entirely decentralized and very scalable... "We've already had interest from everyone from video game developers who want to build a decentralized MMORPG, to political advocacy groups across the political spectrum. Plenty of people value freedom."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This post contains spoilers for "Fear the Walking Dead: Flight 462."

Early in its eight-season run, AMC's "Fear the Walking Dead" crossed over into a 16-part web series, "Fear the Walking Dead: Flight 462," which followed the breakout of the zombie apocalypse aboard a commercial flight bound for Phoenix, Arizona. In the series, Michelle Ang's character, Alex, is always one step ahead of the other passengers when it comes to dealing with "walkers." She can recognize the signs that a person is infected, knows when to tie them up or lock them in the restroom, and knows where to aim a gun or knitting needle in order to put one down.

In real life, however, Ang was much more in the dark than her character when it came to her place in the "Walking Dead" universe. "Flight 462" premiered in October 2015, the same day that "Fear the Walking Dead" wrapped up its first season. It was the spin-off of a spin-off and would conclude in March 2016 after observing its own mid-season break, by which time "Fear the Walking Dead" would be preparing to return for its second season.

Alex and other "Flight 462" survivors, including Jake Powell (Brendan Meyer), returned on a life raft in "Fear the Walking Dead" season 2, episode 3, "Ouroboros," after their plane went down off the coast. This gave Ang the chance to appear on the aftershow, "Talking Dead," where she revealed how she auditioned for "Flight 462" without any knowledge of its connection to "The Walking Dead."

Fear The Walking Rhino

On "Talking Dead," Michelle Ang told host Chris Hardwick that she only knew "Fear the Walking Dead: Flight 462" by its code name at first. Ang said her audition was "super secret," and it inserted her in a zombie-free scenario:

"It was totally shrouded in mystery because 'Flight 462' was its own standalone piece, and when my team got the audition, the project name was hidden. It was, like, 'Rhino.' It was super secret. And I was, like, 'Rhino?' Yeah. 'Rhino' web series? Sounds cool. Actually, the audition sides weren't even, sit on a plane, and didn't have anything to do with any infected people."My character was sitting in a train station, being bothered by an annoying young boy, who, she's just like, 'Please shut up. No, please. Can you shut up?' She was just basically a really staunch, grumpy, badass woman waiting for a train."

This sounds more like the beginning of "Train to Busan" than "Zombies on a Plane." It would be easy enough on the page, perhaps, to transpose Jake and Alex's "Flight 462" dialogue with that of the "annoying young boy" and "badass woman waiting for a train."

In the end, Alex gets the last available Flight 462 seat, while Jake is left to phone his mother and panic as he hears screams in the background and the lights eventually go out on the ground below. Later, Alex takes to stabbing zombies in the head and caring for the burned Jake after their plane crashes in the ocean.

Read this next: The 12 Most Upsetting Deaths In The Walking Dead

The post Michelle Ang Didn't Know She Was Joining the Walking Dead Universe in Flight 462 appeared first on /Film.

Most of the time, the best TVs for gaming are the best TVs you can buy, period. That said, there are a few key features to prioritize when picking out a big screen for your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X. While nobody needs a fancy TV to just enjoy a video game, the right set can help you maximize your experience. If you’re not sure where to begin, we’ve laid out some helpful advice for finding something good and researched a few well-reviewed gaming TVs that should suit your needs today.

What to look for in a gaming TV

Whether you use it for gaming or not, all good TVs are built on the same foundations. You want a 4K resolution, high-enough brightness to overcome glare and make HDR content pop, a relatively high contrast ratio with deep and uniform black tones, colors that find the right balance between accuracy and saturation and wide viewing angles. For video games specifically, you want a TV with minimal input lag and fast motion response, with no blur or other unwanted artifacts behind quick-moving objects. Of course, finding a set that does all of this well and fits into your budget can be tricky.

OLED and LCD

For now, top OLED TVs generally offer the best picture quality for gaming or otherwise. But good OLED sets usually cost more than their LCD counterparts, and some models may not get bright enough for those who have their TV set in a particularly bright room.

More specifically, modern OLED TVs may utilize different types of OLED display tech: WOLED (i.e., “White OLED”) or the newer QD-OLED. We won’t dig too deep into how the two diverge in panel composition and subpixel structure, but the simplified version is that QD-OLED displays use a layer of quantum dots (hence the “QD”) to deliver a wider gamut of more vibrant colors and higher overall brightness than traditional WOLED sets.

This doesn’t mean all QD-OLED TVs are inherently better: How well an individual set performs is more important than the panel it uses, and some premium WOLED TVs like the LG G4 utilize a form of display tech called Micro Lens Array (MLA) to greatly improve brightness. (Though LG and others now appear to be ditching that for a new “four-stack” OLED structure in their next top-end models.) And virtually all OLED TVs share the same core strengths. Broadly speaking, though, a reasonably priced QD-OLED set looks like the best balance of value and picture quality today.

If you opt for an LCD TV— whether to save cash or stick in room with poor light control — an advanced backlight with smaller and more precise mini LEDs and effective full-array local dimming will usually improve contrast and lighting detail. Many of these TVs, including some budget-level models, also use quantum dots to enhance colors (and are labeled as "QLED" TVs). They usually aren’t as vivid or fast in motion as the top OLED sets, but they’re often brighter and more affordable, and the best can still produce an excellent image in their own right.

HDMI 2.1

To get the most out of a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S, your TV should have full HDMI 2.1 support. This update to the HDMI spec enables a higher maximum bandwidth — 48 gigabits per second, up from HDMI 2.0’s 18 Gbps — and a handful of features that are beneficial for gaming performance specifically. Those include variable refresh rate (VRR) and automatic low latency mode (ALLM), which we detail further below.

Beyond that, perhaps the chief perk of HDMI 2.1 is its ability to transmit sharp 4K video up to a 120Hz refresh rate with modern consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X, or up to 144Hz with a powerful gaming PC. Not every PS5 or Xbox Series X/S game supports frame rates that high — and some only do at lower resolutions — but those that do will look and feel especially fluid in motion. HDMI 2.1 also includes support for Enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC), which allows you to pass higher-quality lossless audio from a source device connected to the TV to a compatible soundbar or receiver.

The more full HDMI 2.1 ports your TV has, the better. “Full” is the key word there. As reported by TFT Central, because HDMI 2.1 is backwards compatible with HDMI 2.0, TV and monitor manufacturers have been allowed to brand HDMI ports as “HDMI 2.1” even if they lack full (or any) support for the spec’s upgraded features. We recommend a few TVs below that have true HDMI 2.1 ports, but if you’re buying a new TV for gaming, make sure your chosen set isn’t trying to hide any capabilities you may consider essential.

While HDMI 2.1 is the latest and greatest today, it’s worth noting that the HDMI Forum officially revealed a new HDMI 2.2 spec at CES 2025. This update promises a greater maximum bandwidth of 96 Gbps, which should technically enable even higher refresh rates and resolutions. It could also help reduce hiccups in audio and video syncing (i.e., annoying lip-sync errors). If history is any indication, though, we’re likely several years away from HDMI 2.2 ports appearing on TVs you can actually buy. Even then, the only people who could take advantage of the theoretical resolutions and refresh rates allowed by the spec are those who connect a super-powerful gaming PC to their TV. But this could always change with whatever the next PlayStation and Xbox consoles bring.

HDR — High Dynamic Range

HDR refers to a TV's ability to display a wider range between the darkest and brightest parts of a picture. This broader range can bring out details that would otherwise be missing on a standard dynamic range (SDR) TV, in both the very dark and (especially) very bright areas of an image. HDR typically comes with an improvement to color reproduction as well, displaying a larger palette of more vibrant colors that brings content closer to its creator’s original vision.

To get an HDR picture, you need both content that is mastered to take advantage of the tech and a TV capable of displaying that content. HDR also comes in a variety of formats, which are generally split between those that utilize static metadata (e.g., HDR10) and those that utilize dynamic metadata (e.g., HDR10+, Dolby Vision). In short, the latter allows a TV to optimize its brightness and colors on a per-scene or even per-frame basis, while the former uses one set of optimized settings for the entirety of the given content. Support for these formats can differ depending on the TV, content and game console you use. The Xbox Series X and S, for example, support Dolby Vision for gaming, while the PS5 does not.

The good news is that most TVs you’d buy today are HDR-ready in some fashion, even on the budget end of the market. The catch is that some TVs are much better at getting the most out of HDR than others. The same goes for actual content mastered in HDR. With video games in particular, there aren’t quite as many titles designed to take advantage of HDR as there are movies (though the number is growing all the time), and the variance in HDR quality tends to be wider.

HGiG — HDR Gaming Interest Group

HGiG stands for the HDR Gaming Interest Group. Sony and Microsoft are both members, as are many TV makers and game developers. What this means is that, ideally, all the groups communicate information so that you can start up a new game on a console or PC and have it automatically recognize your display. Once that happens, the game can adjust the internal settings to adjust for that display's capabilities and give you the best picture quality possible, without losing details in the brightest or darkest areas of the screen. For example, daylight at the end of a dark tunnel may portray a brightly lit environment instead of looking like an overexposed white blob.

This is a good thing, but the reality is a bit more complicated. Not all TVs highlight HGiG compatibility in their settings menu, while only some PlayStation and Xbox games recognize and follow the guidelines. If an HGiG option is listed in your TV's tone mapping settings, you should turn it on prior to running the console's HDR settings. Then, if you're playing a game that supports HDR and HGiG, you should be in good shape without having to adjust the various luminance levels again. Still, how all of this looks to you might differ depending on your TV and the game you’re playing. Owners of certain LG OLED TVs, for instance, may prefer their TV’s Dynamic Tone Mapping setting. Use whatever settings you think look best.

ALLM — Auto Low Latency Mode

ALLM lets a compatible source (like your PS5 or Xbox) tell your display to switch into a picture mode that reduces lag between receiving each frame of an image and displaying it on the TV. This cuts out additional processing that could be the milliseconds of difference between landing a precise input or not. Put another way, it lets your TV automatically enable its "Game" mode when it detects that you've launched a game. A good modern TV can do this without forcing you to enter any menus, then switch back when you'd rather watch a movie or TV show.

VRR — Variable Refresh Rate

VRR should sound familiar to most gamers at this point. Many players have experienced slowdown, screen tearing or stuttering as a system struggles to render each frame at the target speed, which is most commonly 60 or 30 fps on a TV. With VRR, everything stays in sync: Your display won't show the next frame until it's ready, which can make things feel smoother and more responsive, even if the system fails to deliver on its target frame rate.

There are a few different implementations of VRR available, including Nvidia’s G-Sync, AMD’s FreeSync and the HDMI Forum’s VRR spec, which is part of the full HDMI 2.1 standard. Both a TV and an input device need to support the same VRR tech for it to work, and different devices may only support VRR within a specific refresh rate window. On a 120Hz display, for instance, the PS5’s VRR only works between 48Hz and 120Hz.

As a reminder, the PS5 supports HDMI Forum VRR, the Xbox Series X/S support HDMI Forum VRR and FreeSync, while gaming PCs may support G-Sync or FreeSync depending on whether they use a Nvidia or AMD graphics card. A great gaming TV supports all the big VRR formats, but missing, say, G-Sync, isn’t a killer if you only game on a PS5 or Xbox.

8K (You don't need it)

One thing you don’t need to worry about is 8K support. Although the PS5 and Xbox Series X are theoretically capable of outputting 8K video, almost no games are made for that resolution, and 8K’s practical benefits are extremely minimal unless you plan on sitting unreasonably close to a massive TV. The few 8K TVs on the market are usually very expensive as well.

Good gaming TVs you can get right now

There’s never an ideal time to buy a new TV. Prices for today’s models are always dropping, and next year’s upgrades are always just around the corner. Case in point: Our latest update comes just after CES, where Samsung and LG announced initial details for much of their 2025 lineups while Hisense, TCL and Panasonic unveiled a smaller selection of sets. A few of these could be worth waiting for, particularly on the upper-end. In the price ranges where most people shop, though, most of the new sets seem to be more iterative than transformative.

It'll still be several months until 2024’s best TVs are replaced for good, though. And when their successors do arrive, they’ll cost much more to start. So, per usual, you’ll get the most value by picking up a still-good TV from last year while it’s available for less. While we at Engadget do not formally review TVs, we’ve researched the market and rounded up a few sets that have been widely well-received by other professional review sites we trust, including Rtings, Wirecutter, Reviewed, PCMag and others.

Richard Lawler contributed to a previous version of this report.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/best-gaming-tv-131509986.html?src=rss

Homeowner’s insurance is a recommended (and if you have a mortgage, required) investment in the security of your home. While these policies help mitigate significant financial loss in the event of damage or destruction, they don’t cover every single issue in need of replacement or repair. There are situations when it…

Read more...

The first finished devices to ship with the 3Dfx Voodoo chipset inside them were not add-on boards for personal computers, but rather standup arcade machines. That venerable segment of the videogames industry was enjoying its last lease on life in the mid-1990s; this was the last era when the graphics of the arcade machines were sufficiently better than those which home computers and consoles could generate as to make it worth getting up off the couch, driving into town, and dropping a quarter or two into a slot to see them. The Voodoo chips now became part and parcel of that, ironically just before they would do much to destroy the arcade market by bringing equally high-quality 3D graphics into homes. For now, though, they wowed players of arcade games like San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey, and NFL Blitz.

Still, Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers, and Ross Smith were most excited by the potential of the add-on-board market. All too well aware of how the chicken-or-the-egg deadlock between game makers and players had doomed their earlier efforts with Pellucid and Media Vision, they launched an all-out charm offensive among game developers long before they had any actual hardware to show them. Smith goes so far as to call “connecting with the developers early on and evangelizing them” the “single most important thing we ever did” — more important, that is to say, than designing the Voodoo chips themselves, impressive as they were. Throughout 1995, somebody from 3Dfx was guaranteed to be present wherever developers got together to talk among themselves. While these evangelizers had no hardware as yet, they did have software simulations running on SGI workstations — simulations which, they promised, duplicated exactly the capabilities the real chips would have when they started arriving in quantity from Taiwan.

Our core trio realized early on that their task must involve software as much as hardware in another, more enduring sense: they had to make it as easy as possible to support the Voodoo chipset. In my previous article, I mentioned how their old employer SGI had created an open-source software library for 3D graphics, known as OpenGL. A team of programmers from 3Dfx now took this as the starting point of a slimmed-down, ultra-optimized MS-DOS library they called GLide; whereas OpenGL sported well over 300 individual function calls, GLide had less than 100. It was fast, it was lightweight, and it was easy to program. They had good reason to be proud of it. Its only drawback was that it would only work with the Voodoo chips — which was not necessarily a drawback at all in the eyes of its creators, given that they hoped and planned to dominate a thriving future market for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on personal computers.

Yet that domination was by no means assured, for they were far from the only ones developing consumer-oriented 3D chipsets. One other company in particular gave every indication of being on the inside track to widespread acceptance. That company was Rendition, another small, venture-capital-funded startup that was doing all of the same things 3Dfx was doing — only Rendition had gotten started even earlier. It had actually been Rendition who announced a 3D chipset first, and they had been evangelizing it ever since every bit as tirelessly as 3Dfx.

The Voodoo chipset was technologically baroque in comparison to Rendition’s chips, which went under the name of Vérité. This meant that Voodoo should easily outperform them — eventually, once all of the logistics of East Asian chip fabricating had been dealt with and deals had been signed with board makers. In June of 1996, when the first Vérité-powered boards shipped, the Voodoo chipset quite literally didn’t exist as far as consumers were concerned. Those first Vérité boards were made by none other than Creative Labs, the 800-pound gorilla of the home-computer add-on market, maker of the ubiquitous Sound Blaster sound cards and many a “multimedia upgrade kit.” Such a partner must be counted as yet another early coup for Rendition.

The Vérité cards were followed by a flood of others whose slickly aggressive names belied their somewhat workmanlike designs: 3D Labs Permedia, S3 Virge, ATI 3D Rage, Matrox Mystique. And still Voodoo was nowhere.

What was everywhere was confusion; it was all but impossible for the poor, benighted gamer to make heads or tails of the situation. None of these chipsets were compatible with one another at the hardware level in the way that 2D graphics cards were; there were no hardware standards for 3D graphics akin to VGA, that last legacy of IBM’s era of dominance, much less the various SVGA standards defined by the Video Electronic Standards Association (VESA). Given that most action-oriented computer games still ran on MS-DOS, this was a serious problem.

For, being more of a collection of basic function calls than a proper operating system, MS-DOS was not known for its hardware agnosticism. Most of the folks making 3D chips did provide an MS-DOS software package for steering them, similar in concept to 3Dfx’s GLide, if seldom as optimized and elegant. But, just like GLide, such libraries worked only with the chipset for which they had been created. What was sorely needed was an intermediate layer of software to sit between games and the chipset-manufacturer-provided libraries, to automatically translate generic function calls into forms suitable for whatever particular chipset happened to exist on that particular computer. This alone could make it possible for one build of one game to run on multiple 3D chipsets. Yet such a level of hardware abstraction was far beyond the capabilities of bare-bones MS-DOS.

Absent a more reasonable solution, the only choice was to make separate versions of games for each of the various 3D chipsets. And so began the brief-lived, unlamented era of the 3D pack-in game. All of the 3D-hardware manufacturers courted the developers and publishers of popular software-rendered 3D games, dangling before them all sorts of enticements to create special versions that took advantage of their cards, more often than not to be included right in the box with them. Activision’s hugely successful giant-robot-fighting game MechWarrior 2 became the king of the pack-ins, with at least half a dozen different chipset-specific versions floating around, all paid for upfront by the board makers in cold, hard cash. (Whatever else can be said about him, Bobby Kotick has always been able to spot the seams in the gaming market where gold is waiting to be mined.)

It was an absurd, untenable situation; the game or games that came in the box were the only ones that the purchasers of some of the also-ran 3D contenders ever got a chance to play with their new toys. Gamers and chipset makers alike could only hope that, once Windows replaced MS-DOS as the gaming standard, their pain would go away.

In the meanwhile, the games studio that everyone with an interest in the 3D-acceleration sweepstakes was courting most of all was id Software — more specifically, id’s founder and tech guru, gaming’s anointed Master of 3D Algorithms, John Carmack. They all begged him for a version of Quake for their chipset.

And once again, it was Rendition that scored the early coup here. Carmack actually shared some of the Quake source code with them well before either the finished game or the finished Vérité chipset was available for purchase. Programmed by a pair of Rendition’s own staffers working with the advice and support of Carmack and Michael Abrash, the Vérité-rendered version of the game, commonly known as vQuake, came out very shortly after the software-rendered version. Carmack called it “the premier platform for Quake” — truly marketing copy to die for. Gamers too agreed that 3D acceleration made the original’s amazing graphics that much more amazing, while the makers of other 3D chipsets gnashed their teeth and seethed.

Among these, of course, was the tardy 3Dfx. The first Voodoo cards appeared late, seemingly hopelessly so: well into the fall of 1996. Nor did they have the prestige and distribution muscle of a partner like Creative Labs behind them: the first two Voodoo boards rather came from smaller firms by the names of Diamond and Orchid. They sold for $300, putting them well up at the pricey end of the market —  and, unlike all of the competition’s cards, these required you to have another, 2D-graphics card in your computer as well. For all of these reasons, they seemed easy enough to dismiss as overpriced white elephants at first blush. But that impression lasted only until you got a look at them in action. The Voodoo cards came complete with a list of features that none of the competition could come close to matching in the aggregate: bilinear filtering, trilinear MIP-mapping, alpha blending, fog effects, accelerated light sources. If you don’t know what those terms mean, rest assured that they made games look better and play faster than anything else on the market. This was amply demonstrated by those first Voodoo boards’ pack-in title, an otherwise rather undistinguished, typical-of-its-time shooter called Hellbender. In its new incarnation, it suddenly looked stunning.

The battle lines were drawn between Rendition and 3Dfx. But sadly for the former, it quickly emerged that their chipset had one especially devastating weakness in comparison to its rival: its Z-buffering support left much to be desired. And what, you ask, is Z-buffering? Read on!

One of the non-obvious problems that 3D-graphics systems must solve is the need for objects in the foreground of a scene to realistically obscure those behind them. If, at the rendering stage, we were to simply draw the objects in whatever random order they came to us, we would wind up with a dog’s breakfast of overlapping shapes. We need to have a way of depth-sorting the objects if we want to end up with a coherent, correctly rendered scene.

The most straightforward way of depth-sorting is called the Painter’s Algorithm, because it duplicates the process a human artist usually goes through to paint a picture. Let’s say our artist wants to paint a still life of an apple sitting in front of a basket of other fruits. First she will paint the basket to her satisfaction, then paint the apple right over the top of it. Similarly, when we use a Painter’s Algorithm on the computer, we first sort the whole collection of objects into a hierarchy that begins with those that are farthest from our virtual camera and ends with those closest to it. Only after this has been done do we set about the task of actually drawing them to the screen, in our sorted order from the farthest away to the closest. And so we end up with a correctly rendered image.

But, as so often happens in matters like this, the most logically straightforward way is far from the most efficient way of depth-sorting a 3D scene. When the number of objects involved is few, the Painter’s Algorithm works reasonably well. When the numbers get into the hundreds or thousands, however, it results in much wasted effort, as the computer ends up drawing objects that are completely obscured by other objects in front of them — i.e., objects that don’t really need to be drawn at all. Even more importantly, the process of sorting all of the objects by depth beforehand is painfully time-consuming, a speed bump that stops the rendering process dead until it is completed. Even in the 1990s, when their technology was in a laughably primitive stage compared to today, GPUs tended to emphasize parallel processing — i.e., staying constantly busy with multiple tasks at the same time. The necessity of sorting every object in a scene by depth before even getting properly started on rendering it rather threw all that out the window.

Enter the Z-buffer. Under this approach, every object is rendered right away as soon as it comes down the pipeline, used to build the appropriate part of the raster of colored pixels that, once completed, will be sent to the monitor screen as a single frame. But there comes an additional wrinkle in the form of the Z-buffer itself: a separate, parallel raster containing not the color of each pixel but its distance from the camera. Before the GPU adds an entry to the raster of pixel colors, it compares the distance of that pixel from the camera with the number in that location in the Z-buffer. If the current distance is less than the one already found there, it knows that the pixel in question should be overwritten in the main raster and that the Z-buffer raster should be updated with that pixel’s new distance from the camera. Ditto if the Z-buffer contains a null value, indicating no object has yet been drawn at that pixel. But if the current distance is larger than the (non-null) number already found there, the GPU simply moves on without doing anything more, confident in the knowledge that what it had wanted to draw should actually be hidden by what it has already drawn.

There are plenty of occasions when the same pixel is drawn over twice — or many times — before reaching the screen even under this scheme, but it is nevertheless still vastly more efficient than the Painter’s Algorithm, because it keeps objects flowing through the pipeline steadily, with no hiccups caused by lengthy sorting operations. Z-buffering support was reportedly a last-minute addition to the Vérité chipset, and it showed. Turning depth-sorting on for 100-percent realistic rendering on these chips cut their throughput almost in half; the Voodoo chipset, by contrast, just said, “No worries!,” and kept right on trucking. This was an advantage of titanic proportions. It eventually emerged that the programmers at Rendition had been able to get Quake running acceptably on the Vérité chips only by kludging together their own depth-sorting algorithms in software. With Voodoo, programmers wouldn’t have to waste time with stuff like that.

But surprisingly, the game that blew open the doors for the Voodoo chipset wasn’t Quake or anything else from id. It was rather a little something called Tomb Raider, from the British studio Core Design, a game which used a behind-the-back third-person perspective rather than the more typical first-person view — the better to appreciate its protagonist, the buxom and acrobatic female archaeologist Lara Croft. In addition to Lara’s considerable assets, Tomb Raider attracted gamers with its unprecedentedly huge and wide-open 3D environments. (It will be the subject of my next article, for those interested in reading more about its massive commercial profile and somewhat controversial legacy.)

In November of 1996, when Tomb Raider been out for less than a month, Core put a  Voodoo patch for it up on their website. Gamers were blown away. “It’s a totally new game!” gushed one on Usenet. “It was playable but a little jerky without the patch, but silky smooth to play and beautiful to look at with the patch.” “The level of detail you get with the Voodoo chip is amazing!” enthused another. Or how about this for a ringing testimonial?

I had been playing the regular Tomb Raider on my PC for about two weeks
before I got the patch, with about ten people seeing the game, and not
really saying anything regarding how amazing it was. When I got the
accelerated patch, after about four days, every single person who has
seen the game has been in awe watching the graphics and how
smooth [and] lifelike the movement is. The feel is different, you can see
things much more clearly, it’s just a more enjoyable game now.

Tomb Raider became the biggest hit of the 1996 holiday season, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Voodoo-based 3D cards joined it under Christmas trees.

In January of 1997, id released GLQuake, a new version of that game that supported the Voodoo chipset. In telling contrast to the Vérité-powered vQuake, which had been coded by Rendition’s programmers, GLQuake had been taken on by John Carmack as a personal project. The proof was in the pudding; this Quake ran faster and looked better than either of the previous ones. Running on a machine with a 200 MHz Intel Pentium processor and a Voodoo card, GLQuake could manage 70 frames per second, compared to 41 frames for the software-rendered version, whilst appearing much more realistic and less pixelated.

One last stroke of luck put the finishing touch on 3Dfx’s destiny of world domination: the price of memory dropped precipitously, thanks to a number of new RAM-chip factories that came online all at once in East Asia. (The factories had been built largely to feed the memory demands of Windows 95, the straw that was stirring the drink of the entire computer industry.) The Voodoo chipset required 4 MB of memory to operate effectively — an appreciable quantity in those days, and a big reason why the cards that used it tended to cost almost as twice as much as those based on the Vérité chips, despite lacking the added complications and expense of 2D support. But with the drop in memory prices, it suddenly became practical to sell a Voodoo card for under $200. Rendition could also lower their prices somewhat thanks to the memory windfall, of course, but at these lower price points the dollar difference wasn’t as damaging to 3Dfx. After all, the Voodoo cards were universally acknowledged to be the class of the industry. They were surely worth paying a little bit of a premium for. By the middle of 1997, the Voodoo chipset was everywhere, the Vérité one left dead at the side of the road. “If you want full support for a gamut of games, you need to get a 3Dfx card,” wrote Computer Gaming World.

These were heady times at 3Dfx, which had become almost overnight the most hallowed name in hardcore action gaming outside of id Software, all whilst making an order of magnitude more money than id, whose business model under John Carmack was hardly fine-tuned to maximize revenues. In a comment he left recently on this site, reader Captain Kal said that, when it comes to 3D gaming in the late 1990s, “one company springs to my mind without even thinking: 3Dfx. Yes, we also had 3D solutions from ATI, NVIDIA, or even S3, but Voodoo cards created the kind of dedication that I hadn’t seen since the Amiga days.” The comparison strikes me as thoroughly apropos.

3Dfx brought in a high-profile CEO named Greg Ballard, formerly of Warner Music and the videogame giant Capcom, to oversee a smashingly successful initial public offering in June of 1997. He and the three thirty-something founders were the oldest people at the company. “Most of the software engineers were [in their] early twenties, gamers through and through, loved games,” says Scott Sellers. “Would code during the day and play games at night. It was a culture of fun.” Their offices stood at the eighth hole of a golf course in Sunnyvale, California. “We’d sit out there and drink beer,” says Ross Smith. “And you’d have to dodge incoming golf balls a bit. But the culture was great.” Every time he came down for a visit, says their investing angel Gordon Campbell,

they’d show you something new, a new demo, a new mapping technique. There was always something. It was a very creative environment. The work hard and play hard thing, that to me kind of was Silicon Valley. You went out and socialized with your crew and had beer fests and did all that kind of stuff. And a friendly environment where everybody knew everybody and everybody was not in a hierarchy so much as part of the group or the team.

I think the thing that was added here was, it’s the gaming industry. And that was a whole new twist on it. I mean, if you go to the trade shows, you’d have guys that would show up at our booth with Dracula capes and pointed teeth. I mean, it was just crazy.

While the folks at 3Dfx were working hard and playing hard, an enormously consequential advancement in the field of software was on the verge of transforming the computer-games industry. As I noted previously, in 1996 most hardcore action games were still being released for MS-DOS. In 1997, however, that changed in a big way. With the exception of only a few straggling Luddites, game developers switched over to Windows 95 en masse. Quake had been an MS-DOS game; Quake II, which would ship at the end of 1997, ran under Windows. The same held true for the original Tomb Raider and its 1997 sequel, as it did for countless others.

Gaming was made possible on Windows 95 by Microsoft’s DirectX libraries, which finally let programmers do everything in Windows that they had once done in MS-DOS, with only a slight speed penalty if any, all while giving them the welcome luxury of hardware independence. That is to say, all of the fiddly details of disparate video and sound cards and all the rest were abstracted away into Windows device drivers that communicated automatically with DirectX to do the needful. It was an enormous burden lifted off of developers’ shoulders. Ditto gamers, who no longer had to futz about for hours with cryptic “autoexec.bat” and “config.sys” files, searching out the exact combination of arcane incantations that would allow each game they bought to run optimally on their precise machine. One no longer needed to be a tech-head simply to install a game.

In its original release of September 1995, the full DirectX suite consisted of DirectDraw for 2D pixel graphics, DirectSound for sound and music, DirectInput for managing joysticks and other game-centric input devices, and DirectPlay for networked multiplayer gaming. It provided no support for doing 3D graphics. But never fear, Microsoft said: 3D support was coming. Already in February of 1995, they had purchased a British company called RenderMorphics, the creator of Reality Lab, a hardware-agnostic 3D library. As promised, Microsoft added Direct3D to the DirectX collection with the latter’s 2.0 release, in June of 1996.

But, as the noted computer scientist Andrew Tanenbaum once said, “the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.” For the next several years, Direct3D would compete with another library serving the same purpose: a complete, hardware-agnostic Windows port of SGI’s OpenGL, whose most prominent booster was no less leading a light than John Carmack. Direct3D would largely win out in the end among game developers despite Carmack’s endorsement of its rival, but we need not concern ourselves overmuch with the details of that tempest in a teacup here. Suffice to say that even the most bitter partisans on one side of the divide or the other could usually agree that both Direct3D and OpenGL were vastly preferable to the bad old days of chipset-specific 3D games.

Unfortunately for them, 3Dfx, rather feeling their oats after all of their success, made in response to these developments the first of a series of bad decisions that would cause their time at the top of the 3D-graphics heap to be a relatively short one.

Like all of the others, the Voodoo chipset could be used under Windows with either Direct3D or OpenGL. But there were some features on the Voodoo chips that the current implementations of those libraries didn’t support. 3Dfx was worried, reasonably enough on the face of it, about a “least-common-denominator effect” which would cancel out the very real advantages of their 3D chipset and make one example of the breed more or less as good as any other. However, instead of working with the folks behind Direct3D and OpenGL to get support for the Voodoo chips’ special features into those libraries, they opted to release a Windows version of GLide, and to strongly encourage game developers to keep working with it instead of either of the more hardware-agnostic alternatives. “You don’t want to just have a title 80 percent as good as it could be because your competitors are all going to be at 100 percent,” they said pointedly. They went so far as to start speaking of Voodoo-equipped machines as a whole new platform unto themselves, separate from more plebeian personal computers.

It was the talk and actions of a company that had begun to take its own press releases a bit too much to heart. But for a time 3Dfx got away with it. Developers coded for GLide in addition to or instead of Direct3D or OpenGL, because you really could do a lot more with it and because the cachet of the “certified” 3Dfx logo that using GLide allowed them to put on their boxes really was huge.

In March of 1998, the first cards with a new 3Dfx chipset, known as Voodoo2, began to appear. Voodoo2 boasted twice the overall throughput of its predecessor, and could handle a screen resolution of 800 X 600 instead of just 640 X 480; you could even join two of the new cards together to get even better performance and higher resolutions. This latest chipset only seemed to cement 3Dfx’s position as the class of their field.

The bottom line reflected this. 3Dfx was, in the words of their new CEO Greg Ballard, “a rocket ship.” In 1995, they earned $4 million in revenue; in 1996, $44 million; in 1997, $210 million; and in 1998, their peak year, $450 million. And yet their laser focus on selling the Ferraris of 3D acceleration was blinding Ballard and his colleagues to the potential of 3D Toyotas, where the biggest money of all was waiting to be made.

Over the course of the second half of the 1990s, 3D GPUs went from being exotic pieces of kit known only to hardcore gamers to being just another piece of commodity hardware found in almost all computers. 3Dfx had nothing to do with this significant shift. Instead they all but ignored this so-called “OEM” (“Original Equipment Manufacturer”) side of the GPU equation: chipsets that weren’t the hottest or the sexiest on the market, but that were cheap and easy to solder right onto the motherboards of low-end and mid-range machines bearing such unsexy name plates as Compaq and Packard Bell. Ironically, Gordon Campbell had made a fortune with Chips & Technologies selling just such commodity-grade 2D graphics chipsets. But 3Dfx was obstinately determined to fly above the OEM segment, determined to offer “premium” products only. “It doesn’t matter if 20 million people have one of our competitors’ chips,” said Scott Sellers in 1997. “How many of those people are hardcore gamers? How many of those people are buying games?” “I can guarantee that 100 percent of 3Dfx owners are buying games,” chimed in a self-satisfied-sounding Gary Tarolli.

The obvious question to ask in response was why it should matter to 3Dfx how many games — or what types of games — the users of their chips were buying, as long as they were buying gadgets that contained their chips. While 3Dfx basked in their status as the hardcore gamer’s favorite, other companies were selling many more 3D chips, admittedly at much less of a profit on a chip-per-chip basis, at the OEM end of the market. Among these was a firm known as NVIDIA, which had been founded on the back of a napkin in a Denny’s diner in 1993. NVIDIA’s first attempt to compete head to head with 3Dfx at the high end was underwhelming at best: released well after the Voodoo2 chipset, the RIVA TNT ran so hot that it required a noisy onboard cooling fan, and yet still couldn’t match the Voodoo2’s performance. By that time, however, NVIDIA was already building a lucrative business out of cheaper, simpler chips on the OEM side, even as they were gaining the wisdom they would need to mount a more credible assault on the hardcore-gamer market. In late 1998, 3Dfx finally seemed to be waking up to the fact that they would need to reach beyond the hardcore to continue their rise, when they released a new chipset called Voodoo Banshee which wasn’t quite as powerful as the Voodoo2 chips but could do conventional 2D as well as 3D graphics, meaning its owners would not be forced to buy a second video card just in order to use their computers.

But sadly, they followed this step forward with an absolutely disastrous mistake. You’ll remember that prior to this point 3Dfx had sold their chips only to other companies, who then incorporated them into add-on boards of their own design, in the same way that Intel sold microprocessors to computer makers rather than directly to consumers (aside from the build-your-own-rig hobbyists, that is). This business model had made sense for 3Dfx when they were cash-strapped and hadn’t a hope of building retail-distribution channels equal to those of the established board makers. Now, though, they were flush with cash, and enjoyed far better name recognition than the companies that made the boards which used their chips; even the likes of Creative Labs, who had long since dropped Rendition and were now selling plenty of 3Dfx boards, couldn’t touch them in terms of prestige. Why not cut out all these middlemen by manufacturing their own boards using their own chips and selling them directly to consumers with only the 3Dfx name on the box? They decided to do exactly that with their third state-of-the-art 3D chipset, the predictably named Voodoo3, which was ready in the spring of 1999.

Those famous last words apply: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” With the benefit of hindsight, we can see all too clearly what a terrible decision it actually was. The move into the board market became, says Scott Sellers, the “anchor” that would drag down the whole company in a rather breathtakingly short span of time: “We started competing with what used to be our own customers” — i.e., the makers of all those earlier Voodoo boards. Then, too, 3Dfx found that the logistics of selling a polished consumer product at retail, from manufacturing to distribution to advertising, were much more complex than they had reckoned with.

Still, they might — just might — have been able to figure it all out and make it work, if only the Voodoo3 chipset had been a bit better. As it was, it was an upgrade to be sure, but not quite as much of one as everyone had been expecting. In fact, some began to point out now that even the Voodoo2 chips hadn’t been that great a leap: they too were better than their predecessors, yes, but that was more down to ever-falling memory prices and ever-improving chip-fabrication technologies than any groundbreaking innovations in their fundamental designs. It seemed that 3Dfx had started to grow complacent some time ago.

NVIDIA saw their opening and made the most of it. They introduced a new line of their own, called the TNT2, which outdid its 3Dfx competitor in at least one key metric: it could do 24-bit color, giving it almost 17 million shades of onscreen nuance, compared to just over 65,000 in the case of Voodoo3. For the first time, 3Dfx’s chips were not the unqualified, undisputed technological leaders. To make matters worse, NVIDIA had been working closely with Microsoft in exactly the way that 3Dfx had never found it in their hearts to do, ensuring that every last feature of their chips was well-supported by the increasingly dominant Direct3D libraries.

And then, as the final nail in the coffin, there were all those third-party board makers 3Dfx had so rudely jilted when they decided to take over that side of the business themselves. These had nowhere left to go but into NVIDIA’s welcoming arms. And needless to say, these business partners spurned were highly motivated to make 3Dfx pay for their betrayal.

NVIDIA was on a roll now. They soon came out with yet another new chipset, the GeForce 256, which had a “Transform & Lighting” (T&L) engine built in, a major conceptual advance. And again, the new technology was accessible right from the start through Direct3D, thanks to NVIDIA’s tight relationship with Microsoft. Meanwhile the 3Dfx chips still needed GLide to perform at their best. With those chips’ sales now plummeting, more and more game developers decided the oddball library just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. By the end of 1999, a 3Dfx death spiral that absolutely no one had seen coming at the start of the year was already well along. NVIDIA was rapidly sewing up both the high end and the low end, leaving 3Dfx with nothing.

In 2000, NVIDIA continued to go from strength to strength. Their biggest challenger at the hardcore-gamer level that year was not 3Dfx, but rather ATI, who arrived on the scene with a new architecture known as Radeon. 3Dfx attempted to right the ship with a two-pronged approach: a Voodoo4 chipset aimed at the long-neglected budget market, and a Voodoo5 aimed at the high end. Both had potential, but the company was badly strapped for cash by now, and couldn’t afford to give them the launch they deserved. In December of 2000, 3Dfx announced that they had agreed to sell out to NVIDIA, who thought they had spotted some bits and bobs in their more recent chips that they might be able to make use of. And that, as they say, was that.

3Dfx was a brief-burning comet by any standard, a company which did everything right up to the instant when someone somewhere flipped a switch and it suddenly started doing everything wrong instead. But whatever regrets Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers, and Ross Smith may have about the way it all turned out, they can rest secure in the knowledge that they changed not just gaming but computing in general forever. Their vanquisher NVIDIA had revenues of almost $27 billion last year, on the strength of GPUs which are as far beyond the original Voodoo chips as an F-35 is beyond the Wright Brothers’ flier, which are at the forefront not just of 3D graphics but a whole new trend toward “massively parallel” computing.

And yet even today, the 3Dfx name and logo can still send a little tingle of excitement running down the spines of gamers of a certain age, just as that of the Amiga can among some just slightly older. For a brief few years there, over the course of one of most febrile, chaotic, and yet exciting periods in all of gaming history, having a Voodoo card in your computer meant that you had the best graphics money could buy. Most of us wouldn’t want to go back to the days of needing to constantly tinker with the innards of our computers, of dropping hundreds of dollars on the latest and the greatest and hoping that publishers would still be supporting it in six months, of poring over magazines trying to make sense of long lists of arcane bullet points that seemed like fragments of a particularly esoteric PhD thesis (largely because they originally were). No, we wouldn’t want to go back; those days were kind of ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look back and smile at the extraordinary technological progression we were privileged to witness over such a disarmingly short period of time.

---

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

---

(Sources: the books Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft by Michael Drummond, Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, and Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke. Computer Gaming World of November 1995, January 1996, July 1996, November 1996, December 1996, September 1997, October 1997, November 1997, and April 1998; Next Generation of October 1997 and January 1998; Atomic of June 2003; Game Developer of December 1996/January 1997 and February/March 1997. Online sources include “3Dfx and Voodoo Graphics — The Technologies Within” at The Overclocker, former 3Dfx CEO Greg Ballard’s lecture for Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series, the Computer History Museum’s “oral history” with the founders of 3Dfx, Fabian Sanglard’s reconstruction of the workings of the Vérité chipset and the Voodoo 1 chipset, “Famous Graphics Chips: 3Dfx’s Voodoo” by Dr. Jon Peddie at the IEEE Computer Society’s site, and “A Fallen Titan’s Final Glory” by Joel Hruska at the long-defunct Sudhian Media. Also, the Usenet discussions that followed the release of the 3Dfx patch for Tomb Raider and Nicol Bolas’s crazily detailed reply to the Stack Exchange question “Why Do Game Developer Prefer Windows?”.)

The Supreme Court has ruled that Andy Warhol has infringed on the copyright of Lynn Goldsmith, the photographer who took the image that he used for his famous silkscreen of the musician Prince. Goldsmith won the justices over 7-2, disagreeing with Warhol's camp that his work was transformative enough to prevent any copyright claims. In the majority opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, she noted that "Goldsmith's original works, like those of other photographers, are entitled to copyright protection, even against famous artists." 

Goldsmith's story goes as far back as 1984, when Vanity Fair licensed her Prince photo for use as an artist reference. The photographer received $400 for a one-time use of her photograph, which Warhol then used as the basis for a silkscreen that the magazine published. Warhol then created 15 additional works based on her photo, one of which was sold to Condé Nast for another magazine story about Prince. The Andy Warhol Foundation (AWF) — the artist had passed away by then — got $10,000 it, while Goldsmith didn't get anything. 

Typically, the use of copyrighted material for a limited and "transformative" purpose without the copyright holder's permission falls under "fair use." But what passes as "transformative" use can be vague, and that vagueness has led to numerous lawsuits. In this particular case, the court has decided that adding "some new expression, meaning or message" to the photograph does not constitute "transformative use." Sotomayor said Goldsmith's photo and Warhol's silkscreen serve "substantially the same purpose." 

Indeed, the decision could have far ranging implications for fair use and could influence future cases on what constitutes as transformative work. Especially now that we're living in the era of content creators who could be taking inspiration from existing music and art. As CNN reports, Justice Elena Kagan strongly disagreed with her fellow justices, arguing that the decision would stifle creativity. She said the justices mostly just cared about the commercial purpose of the work and did not consider that the photograph and the silkscreen have different "aesthetic characteristics" and did not "convey the same meaning."

"Both Congress and the courts have long recognized that an overly stringent copyright regime actually stifles creativity by preventing artists from building on the works of others. [The decision will] impede new art and music and literature, [and it will] thwart the expression of new ideas and the attainment of new knowledge. It will make our world poorer," she wrote. 

The justices who wrote the majority opinion, however, believe that it "will not impoverish our world to require AWF to pay Goldsmith a fraction of the proceeds from its reuse of her copyrighted work. Recall, payments like these are incentives for artists to create original works in the first place."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-supreme-courts-warhol-decision-could-have-huge-copyright-implications-for-fair-use-103547155.html?src=rss

As a teen and young adult, I drank a lot of full-sugar sodas—Mountain Dew, mostly. One day I decided that I would swap them all out for their diet equivalents, and the resulting loss of calories would mean I’d drop an easy five, maybe ten pounds by the end of the year. I stuck to my promise, and you know how many…

Read more...

A cybercrime enterprise known as Lemon Group is leveraging millions of pre-infected Android smartphones worldwide to carry out their malicious operations, posing significant supply chain risks. "The infection turns these devices into mobile proxies, tools for stealing and selling SMS messages, social media and online messaging accounts and monetization via advertisements and click fraud,"

The sdl12-compat project that implements the SDL 1.2 API/ABI atop SDL 2.x interfaces for better game compatibility on modern Linux systems is out today with a new pre-release...

The "Fast & Furious" franchise has taken quite the ride, growing from a modest "Point Break" riff to globe-trotting espionage, borderline superhero movies (with cars). Along the way, it left the laws of physics in the dust. There are currently 11 "Fast & Furious," the 10 mainline films plus the spin-off "Hobbs & Shaw" — or are there?

Director Justin Lin (who directed five of these eleven films) made himself a household name with 2002's "Better Luck Tomorrow." The film centers on four Asian-American high school students in Orange County, California: overachieving Ben (Parry Shen), his nerdy best friend Virgil (Jason Tobin), Virgil's cool cousin Han (Sung Kang), and valedictorian Daric (Roger Fan). Afflicted with ennui, the four begin committing petty crimes, which escalate to robbery and then murder — the victim is Steve (John Cho), boyfriend of Ben's crush Stephanie (Karin Anna Cheung).

The film was inspired by Lin's work as a youth basketball coach and a real-life 1992 crime, called the "Honor Roll Murder" by local paper The Orange County Register. Despite a tumultuous production (Lin claims he maxed out 10 credit cards to fund the shoot), "Better Luck Tomorrow" was a success — it made back its small budget many times over and earned positive reviews (Roger Ebert was a fan).

So, what's the connection with "Fast & Furious" besides Lin? It's Han. In a 2013 interview for Mandatory, conducted by /Film's William Bibbiani, Sung Kang confirmed that Han Lue in "Better Luck Tomorrow" is the same Han who later appears in "Fast & Furious" — "Justin and I always ... He wanted to keep the anthology going. He was always wondering where the characters go after high school."

In "Better Luck Tomorrow," Han is even introduced leaning on his car — a vintage red Ford Mustang — in a prescient glimpse of his future.

The Anthology Of Han Lue

Lin and Kang's first "Fast & Furious" movie was "Tokyo Drift," the third installment released in 2006. Han serves as the street racing mentor to Sean Boswell (Lucas Black). Kang added that once Lin came on as director, he rewrote the existing script to feature Han.

"Originally the role was named 'Phoenix,' and it was an African-American character, but they cast Bow Wow as Twinkie and so they figured, 'Hey, we have this Phoenix character, and it's kind of a brooding guy who's an older brother for everybody,' and Justin presented it to the studio and said, 'What if he's an Asian-American?' They're like, 'Well, how can an Asian-American be cool like this?' So then he showed them 'Better Luck Tomorrow.'"

From the beginning, Han became a central character in "Fast & Furious" by accident. He dies two-thirds of the way through "Tokyo Drift" in a car crash. However, the film ends with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) showing up in Tokyo, revealing he knew Han and challenging Sean to a race. This left a back door open for Han to show up in future "Fast" films — which, by extension, became "Tokyo Drift" prequels.

The timeline finally caught up in the post-credits scene for "Fast & Furious 6," which revealed Han was deliberately killed by Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham). His murder then became the driving force of "Furious 7." Then, in one of the most soap opera twists in "Fast" yet, Han showed up alive in "F9" (which also marked Lin's return after a hiatus on 7 and 8) and turned out to have faked his death.

Furthering The Connection

Since Han is back for "Fast X" and beyond, will future films touch on his "Better Luck Tomorrow" backstory? I'd guess no. For one, Lin is out as director of "Fast X." Without his personal connection to "Better Luck Tomorrow," there's little incentive to draw from it. Since "Better Luck Tomorrow" was distributed by Paramount and "Fast & Furious" is a Universal property, there could be legal complications as well. Compared to "Fast," "Better Luck Tomorrow" is obscure, meaning references could throw off the audience.

If there was ever a time to reference "Better Luck Tomorrow," it probably would've been "Furious 7" — give Ben, Daric, and co. cameos at Han's funeral — but that didn't happen. There is one other link though. In "Tokyo Drift," Han's mechanic Earl is played by Jason Tobin. According to Kang's Mandatory interview, this was a nod to Virgil being Han's cousin in "Better Luck Tomorrow" and, apparently, one could even take Virgil/Earl as the same character.

Considering what "Fast" has become, looking back on "Better Luck Tomorrow" can be surreal. This grounded crime drama is apparently set in the same universe where Vin Diesel can all but fly and cyborg Idris Elba shouts, "I'm Black Superman!" Maybe it's for the best that the films stay only implicitly linked.

"Fast X" is in theaters on May 19, 2023. "Better Luck Tomorrow" is streaming on Starz.

Read this next: The 14 Greatest Action Movies Of The 21st Century

The post An Acclaimed 2002 Indie Crime Drama is Actually Part of the Fast and Furious Universe appeared first on /Film.

If you cook with charcoal, you need a charcoal chimney. It’s not that you can’t get your coals hot without one, but using one really speeds up the process, and ensures your coals are consistently scorching every time. Even with a chimney, it takes about half an hour to get them white hot and ready to grill. Instead of…

Read more...

A financially motivated cyber actor has been observed abusing Microsoft Azure Serial Console on virtual machines (VMs) to install third-party remote management tools within compromised environments. Google-owned Mandiant attributed the activity to a threat group it tracks under the name UNC3944, which is also known as Roasted 0ktapus and Scattered Spider. "This method of attack was unique in

Vin Diesel starred in James Gunn's 2014 film, "Guardians of the Galaxy," as the voice of Groot, a humanoid tree made of moss and bark. Groot is only capable of saying one phrase, "I am Groot," which his closest friends seem to understand — Rocket Racoon (Bradley Cooper) seems to interpret this phrase liberally. Diesel managed to do a lot with only three words of dialogue, adding sentimentality to the character that, in conjunction with the motion capture performance provided by Krystian Godlewski, won the hearts of many fans. As of 2023, Diesel has played Groot or Groot's offspring, Baby Groot, in four different "Guardians" projects, in two "Avengers" films, in "Thor: Love and Thunder," and in the animated series "I Am Groot." 

Famously, Diesel played Groot in every non-English language dub of the above projects as well. He was deeply committed to the role. 

In a 2014 interview with the Independent, Diesel revealed why. It seems that he was using the role of Groot to cope with a personal tragedy: the death of actor Paul Walker. Walker and Diesel had appeared together in seven of the massively successful "Fast & Furious" movies together since 2001, and had grown very close. Walker tragically died in a car crash in 2013, in the middle of filming "Furious 7," and most of the world immediately mourned a reportedly kind human being and dazzling movie star. 

Diesel said that playing Groot was a "therapeutic" experience for him that allowed him to grieve a friend properly.

'The Most Innocent Character'

Vin Diesel seemingly took a great deal of inspiration from Groot's gentleness. While the alien tree person did occasionally help out on a battlefield, he seemed blissfully relaxed most of the time, taking in the world the way a child might. In the "Guardians of the Galaxy" sequel, Baby Groot was literally a child. For an actor like Diesel, whose stock in trade had become playing tough and grizzled characters, Baby Groot was a change of pace. Additionally, the role allowed him to be gentler and more emotional than he had ever been before. The gentleness let the actor appreciate life -- and the life of a friend -- more openly. He said: 

"When we deal with death, our appreciation for life is represented in so many ways. [...] We appreciate everything that's alive ... And this character celebrates life, in so many ways. It's the most innocent character I've ever played, clearly, which is why I've kind of been so silly. I'm not talking about heavy issues that I'm usually talking about with the movies I make ... I get to have fun!"

As one can imagine, playing just the voice of Groot -- a character who can only say three words -- was a challenge Diesel had never encountered before. He was facing the same challenges as Ikue Otani, the actor who plays Pikachu (who can only say one word). With such a limited instrument, Diesel had to find new ways to express emotion. He said: 

"I was being challenged as an actor, as a thespian ... the idea of playing a character without any facial mannerisms or allowing your body physicality to play into the character, and being limited to such a small vocabulary."

Pretending Paul Was There

Prior to playing Groot, Vin Diesel had faced an even more difficult acting challenge on the set of "Furious 7." Because Walker died during production, the film had to be changed to accommodate the departure of his character. The movie ended with Diesel saying a very emotional goodbye to Walker's Brian, whose presence was facilitated by stock footage from earlier "Furious" movies. In the film, the farewell scene was clearly for Walker and not for his character, who was merely retiring from the super-spy game. 

Diesel found the scene to be difficult, as he had to essentially act as if Walker was still there. Given the sadness he felt, the scene was immensely emotional. Diesel said: 

"[It] was the hardest film to do — and blessed, because there was such a sense of family and coming back. But surreal. [...] You would never imagine that you would ever have to mourn someone so close to you, and simultaneously pretend that they're sitting next to you. It's kind of a strange thing to have to do as an artist, and as a human."

Diesel has gone on to appear in three additional "Furious" movies since Walker's passing. Each film is careful to state that Brian is alive and well. Thankfully, none of the increasingly contrived and elaborately plotted movies have tried to bring back Brian in a crass, action-movie manner. In a way, the "Furious" movies allow audiences to remind themselves that Walker's legacy lives on and that Brian is living a happy life. 

Read this next: The Most Brutal Moments In The MCU Ranked

The post Playing Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy Helped Vin Diesel Grieve Paul Walker appeared first on /Film.

Tim Cain explain the name-finding process for Fallout: How Fallout Got Its Name

It's easy to think high-tech companies have a security advantage over other older, more mature industries. Most are unburdened by 40 years of legacy systems and software. They draw some of the world’s youngest, brightest digital natives to their ranks, all of whom consider cybersecurity issues their entire lives. Perhaps it is due to their familiarity with technology that causes them to overlook