Polish Student Alliance
in Pittsburgh, PA
invites you to the
4rd POLISH MOVIE NIGHT
(free)
Movie of the week: Potop (The Deluge) - Part One
When? March 30 (Thursday)
Where? 4130 Posvar Hall (University of Pittsburgh)
Movie genre: Historical, action, romance
Year: 1974 Duration: 315 minutes Other: Color, Polish with Engl
ish subtitles
Directed by Jerzy Hoffman. Starring Daniel Olbrychski as Andrzej Kmicic, Tadeusz Łomnicki as Michał Wołodyjowski
The Deluge, a sequel to With Fire and Sword, is also based on the 19th century novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz (a 1905 Nobel Prize Winner in literature), nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1974. The setting is the 17th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, then the largest European state. The story take place in the 17th century during the Swedish invasion and occupation, known as The Deluge, which left Poland in ruins. A historical war epic on a grand scale, with many battles and duels, excellent costumes, props and scenery recreating this forgotten setting, the end result is a picture that looks like it was beamed straight from the 17th century, and the level of realism really adds to the immersive nature of the story.
IMDb rating: 8.4/10.
To be followed:
March 16 (Ogniem i Mieczem, Part 2 of 2) (1999)
Room opens at 7:00 p.m, so if you want to practice your Polish, feel free to arrive early and talk with us!
Polish Student Alliance
in Pittsburgh, PA
invites you to the
3rd POLISH MOVIE NIGHT
(free)
Movie of the week: With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i Mieczem) (part 1)
When? February 23 (Thursday) 8:00PM-10:00PM
Where? 4130 Posvar Hall (University of Pittsburgh)
Movie genre: Historical, action, romance
Year: 1999 Duration: 175 minutes Other: Color, Polish with English subtitles
Directed by Jerzy Hoffman. Starring Izabella Scorupco and Michal Zebrowski
With Fire and Sword is based on the 19th century novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz (a 1905 Nobel Prize Winner in literature). The setting is the 17th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, then the largest European state, torn apart by the civil war (Chmielnicki uprising). A historical war epic on a grand scale, with many battles and duels, excellent costumes, props and scenery recreating this forgotten setting, the end result is a picture that looks like it was beamed straight from the 17th century, and the level of realism really adds to the immersive nature of the story.
To be followed:
March 16 (Ogniem i Mieczem, Part 2 of 2) (1999)
Room opens at 7:00 p.m, so if you want to practice your Polish, feel free to arrive early and talk with us!
Within weeks of the original Mindstorms debut, a Stanford graduate student named Kekoa Proudfoot reverse engineered the RCX brick and posted all of his findings, including detailed information on the brick's underlying firmware, online. Several other engineers quickly used Proudfoot's revelations to design their own Mindstorms tools, including an open source operating system (LegOS) and a C-like programming alternative to RCX-code (Not Quite C, or NQC). Lego's Danish brain trust soon realized that their proprietary code was loose on the Internet and debated how best to handle the hackers. "We have a pretty eager legal team, and protecting our IP is very high on its agenda," Nipper says. Some Lego executives worried that the hackers might cannibalize the market for future Mindstorms accessories or confuse potential customers looking for authorized Lego products.
After a few months of wait-and-see, Lego concluded that limiting creativity was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity. Besides, the hackers were providing a valuable service. "We came to understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting," Nipper says. "It's a totally different business paradigm - although they don't get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have with the basic Mindstorms set." Rather than send out cease and desist letters, Lego decided to let the modders flourish; it even wrote a "right to hack" into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild.
Soon, dozens of Web sites were hosting third-party programs that helped Mindstorms users build robots that Lego had never dreamed of: soda machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet scrubbers. Hardware mavens designed sensors that were far more sophisticated than the touch and light sensors included in the factory kit. More than 40 Mindstorms guidebooks provided step-by-step strategies for tweaking performance out of the kit's 727 parts.
I think there is bright future for LEGO. And a lesson for some dinosours out there. Read the original story here.
Polish Student Alliance
in Pittsburgh, PA
invites you to the
2nd POLISH MOVIE NIGHT
(free)
Movie of the week: Rejs
When? February 9th (Thursday) 7:30PM-9:00PM
Where? 4130 Posvar Hall (University of Pittsburgh)
Movie genre: Comedy
Year: 1970 Duration: 1 hour, 0 minutes Other: Black&white, Polish with English subtitles
Directed by Marek Piwowski. Starring Stanislaw Tym.
Rejs (The Cruise) is the mother of all cult films in Polish cinematography. Shot in a quasi-documentary style, with a cast featuring few professional actors, it is a perfect parody of the People's Republic of Poland, reducing a weekend river cruise to a hilarious parody of the entire communist system.
A stowaway (Stanisław Tym) sneaks aboard a ship departing on a cruise down the Vistula River. The captain takes him for a Communist Party cultural coordinator (KO) and the intruder gladly adapts to his new role, immediately setting to work at manipulating the passengers and crew into silly and vaguely humiliating games. Before long, Tym has got everyone under his thumb and created his own comedic dictatorship.
To be followed:
February 23 (Ogniem i Mieczem, Part 1 of 2) (1999)
March 16 (Ogniem i Mieczem, Part 2 of 2) (1999)
Room opens at 7:00 p.m, so if you want to practice your Polish, feel free to arrive early and talk with us!
The editors are currently blocked, but only for a week, so I feel this RFC is needed for the community to comment. I feel that a 1 week block is not enough.
It will be interesting to see if mainstream media picks that up.
