BeOS 5, Personal Edition will be available free to download today (Tuesday, March 28), in a handy no-partitioning installation package.

Salon interviews Peter Becker from the Criterion Collection. (Many thanks Bird on a Wire.) Of many cool things in this long article, Peter intelligently defends in the inclusion of Armageddon in the collection:

...You'd be silly to overlook blockbusters as a genre and leave them out of a film library. They drive so much. They drive tastes and shooting styles and visual references that appear all over the world in commercials and on TV as well as on movie screens. They're part of a huge cultural cross-pollination. And special effects are one of the most important aspects of a certain kind of contemporary filmmaking.

The opportunity we had to explore the effects in "Armageddon" was extraordinary. These guys dug a 400-foot hole in the middle of a Hollywood sound stage. It was a mammoth project and a great thing to be able to chronicle. One may choose to say, "What an enormous amount of money to spend on so frivolous an enterprise." But it occupies an important position on the spectrum of contemporary films.

The article also contains the first mention I've heard of Criterion taking on Seven. I can't wait!

The author of that article is Michael Sragow, who's done a weekly column on filmmakers for Salon since May 1999. Check their archives: 1999, 2000. For example, a February interview with Eric Mendelsohn on "Judy Berlin", a January interview with David O. Russell on "Three Kings", or a November interview with Pixar's Joe Ranft on "Toy Story 2" (before its December release). And because I'm in a quotin' mood:

"The great thing about Pixar," [Ranft] told me four years ago, "is that everybody is in on the story. Dozens of people here have read screenwriting books and gone to screenwriting conferences, and we collaborate in a form of oral storytelling, with people trying to top each other, acting out parts. I imagine it's what it must have been like in the Mack Sennett silent clown days, with a bunch of guys selling ideas, then going off and making the movie."

The UW Home Page has layered submenus now! I never thought they'd go that far out, web tech-wise. (Sorry, of interest to UW students only, I know, and I'm not even one of those any more...)

Hmm... KCTS seems to have cancelled showing Red Dwarf re-runs. I can understand cancelling it in favor of something new, as Red Dwarf hasn't had a new episode in a long time and won't until they're done making the movie. But Good Neighbors?

British Comedy on American TV has tons of good organized info on the subject.