Sir Alex Ferguson would be astonished if Carlo Ancelotti was sacked

The Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, would be amazed if Carlo Ancelotti was fired by Chelsea. Photograph: Paul Gilham/Getty Images

Sir Alex Ferguson believes it would constitute "an astonishing decision" if Chelsea chose to relieve Carlo Ancelotti of his duties at the end of the season, with the Italian set to discuss his future at Stamford Bridge in the week after the final round of Premier League fixtures.
Ancelotti takes his side to Old Trafford on Sunday aiming to extend Chelsea's title defence by becoming the first opposing team to win at Manchester United this season. Victory would see the visitors leapfrog Ferguson's side to go top with just two fixtures to play, yet even the retention of the championship is not guaranteed to keep the Italian in his job in south-west London.
Roman Abramovich – dismayed by a mid-season slump that saw 10 points gleaned in 11 matches and United eliminate Chelsea from the Champions League at the quarter-final stage – and his chief executive, Ron Gourlay, are to review Ancelotti's position with the manager expecting talks to take place immediately after the final-day fixture at Everton. "We will see after the end of the season, maybe the week after," he said. "That's what they've said to me. That's when we will speak about the future."
Asked whether it was really possible for a manager, who had claimed a league and FA Cup Double in his first season in the English game, to be sacked within hours of claiming the title, Ancelotti added: "In Italy, it's happened. I would like to stay. But I am very quiet and calm about it. At the end of the season, the club will take a decision. If they consider my job to have been good, I will stay. If not, they can change. But, for now, the problem is not whether I stay or if I go. It's whether we win at Manchester [United]."
His anticipated departure would amaze Ferguson, who claimed his first Double in 1994 but won no silverware the following year, prompting the sale of high-profile players such as Paul Ince, Mark Hughes and Andrei Kanchelskis.
"He has done well," the United manager said of Ancelotti. "I don't know where that atmosphere [of uncertainty] around him comes from, but it always seems to be there. The rumour mill at Chelsea seems to be working overtime, but the guy has won two European titles, he has won the Scudetto, and the Double with Chelsea, so you cannot question that record.
"Being knocked out of Europe affected them, but I cannot understand these stories [that Ancelotti will be fired even if he wins the league]. It would seem quite an astonishing decision. It is the rumour mill that happens in football. It sometimes comes from agents, sometimes it comes from people inside a club. But he has held his dignity well, he really has, and I do not see why he should have to answer the question [about his future]."
Abramovich has long coveted the European Cup, a trophy he had come so close to claiming with José Mourinho, Avram Grant and Guus Hiddink in charge. The appointment of Ancelotti, who had won the competition twice with Milan, partly reflected that desire with the reality that Chelsea have lost all four knock-out ties – against Mourinho's Internazionale last season and Ferguson's United last month – under the Italian a source of intense frustration at Stamford Bridge.
Chelsea are expected to drop their £50m signing Fernando Torres to the bench on Sunday with the visitors all too aware that defeat would effectively hand the title to United. "They have an opportunity to win it against us, but we don't want to see the celebrations of United," Ancelotti said. "Maybe, if they really have to win the title, they will have to postpone the celebrations until the next game."
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Article Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk  

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Meet the new kids on the block

Attack the Block's teenage stars photographed in Soho, London (l-r): Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh, John Boyega, Simon Howard, Leeon Jones. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

I'm surrounded by chanting teenagers. Five of them, eyeballing me and repeating: "Blood, blood, blood." "Cuz, cuz, cuz." "Trust, trust, trust." It's quite unnerving, a bit Lord of the Flies. "Bruv, bruv, bruv." "Oi, oi, oi." "Y'get me? Y'get me? Y'get me?"
They stop, point made. "See?" says one of them. "You see how it can be overplayed?" They are the young stars of Attack the Block, a new sci-fi film directed by Joe Cornish that pits a gang of south London estate kids against gorilla-like aliens that invade their tower block. Cornish's film, out on 11 May, is part monster flick, part study of youth culture and it's very good. Today, sitting around a hotel lounge in central London, the young actors are doing impressions of other recent "hood culture" films, films that have made a pantomime of street patois through overuse, with a "blood" or a "bruv" or a "cuz" inserted into every sentence in a bid for currency. "The colloquial language," says Franz Drameh, mocking the term, "but pushed way too much. You watch these films and think, OK, it's cool, we get it… blood." The other four snicker. Close friends after months together filming last year, they do a lot of snickering.
Attack the Block won the audience award at the SXSW festival in Texas in March, and elsewhere early reviews have been equally positive, largely due to the collective charisma of these five unusual leads, their believability as 15- and 16-year-old London miscreants. If, like me, you've come to dread the depiction of "yooves" on screen (dubious about Noel Clarke's overwrought Kidulthood kids, all those suspiciously Rada-ish hoodlums from episodes of Casualty and The Bill) then Cornish's film should come as a great relief. Its stars give hugely credible performances, drawing on their own lives in inner-city London. Slang is ever-present in the dialogue but never cringeing. And the five don't dress like post-apocalyptic bikers or whatever it is a far-removed costume designer has decided estate kids wear. They dress like estate kids.
The film is set entirely on a walkways-and-corridors estate in Lambeth, south London, and begins with a slow pan over Oval tube station (surely a first: no Woody Allen-ish establishing shots of the Gherkin or the Eye here). The actors were encouraged to veto clothes or phrases they deemed too inauthentic for the setting. They tell a story, overlapping each other: "What was that word they wanted us to use? Leek? Eek? I think it was eek. It was meant to mean a snitch. Someone didn't write it down properly when they researched it." So "eek" was scrubbed from the script, and "leek" too, for good measure.
Franz Drameh, the chattiest and the most polite, is 18 and has acted before (he was in Hereafter with Matt Damon last year). Three others are newcomers, plucked from school workshops and drama groups around London. Leeon Jones is 17, the shyest. Simon Howard, 18, displays a verve to match his great fan of hair, and the most disarming way with his diction ("liked" is "lacked", "mountains" are "mountings"). Alex Esmail, long haired and 17, sits apart a bit and doesn't smile much. Then there's John Boyega, the eldest at 19, the leader of the gang on screen and, from what I can tell, in real life as well. He waits for the others to finish speaking before he does and at one point silences the room completely by referring to Malcolm Gladwell in the middle of a discussion about action figures.
It takes five minutes for the group to settle, at first, after a spell trying to open Coke bottles with their belt buckles. ("Man," says Drameh, "that's stressful.") A scene of near hysteria descends, after they've been talking about a shared love of manga cartoons and computer games, when I float a question: which would they prefer – an Attack the Block computer game being made or Attack the Block manga?
"Woah! Computer game." "Computer game, straight up." "I'm gonna get my computer game." In the excitement, one of them starts to sing in a high falsetto voice.
Attack the Block's director, Joe Cornish, is one half of Adam and Joe, the irreverent comics and spoof experts, hosts of a popular radio show on BBC 6 Music. Cornish's stock in trade is satirical observation, and though Attack the Block is not an outright comedy he uses his good eye and ear to record and film some deliciously plausible reactions by a bunch of careless teens to alien invasion. Running out of credit on a mobile is almost as major a concern as being eaten by a gorilla-like monster. When things get really tough, the boys' instinct is to lock themselves up for a calming session on the Xbox.
"When you watch so-called hood-related stuff," says Howard, "you always know what it's going to be. Gangs beefing gangs. Someone gets robbed, someone gets beaten up. Happy days. Attack the Block is different."
It is different – all those aliens, for a start, and a great sense of genre affection that gives it a fond, reference-sprinkled Shaun of the Dead feel. (Shaun's Nick Frost has a supporting role and Edgar Wright produces, too.) The concept of "inner city versus outer space" came to Cornish when he was mugged, seven years ago. He wondered: what would happen if aliens landed now? His film starts with a mugging, the gang threatening a female neighbour with a knife and taking her jewellery. It happens matter of factly, part of an evening's activity for the boys, and it gives the following story a very unusual flavour. Once aliens invade, the boys become our heroes, but they're quite unrepentant about the earlier crime, and often quite unlikable.
Compare with another alien encounter film. Shortly after the release of ET, Steven Spielberg suggested, sweetly, that the kids he'd portrayed were pretty clued up. His young characters were ready to cope with extraterrestrial confrontation because they'd spent hours watching TV serials and playing Space Invaders. "The years of childhood have been subject to a kind of inflation," said Spielberg, in open wonder that the youth of today – this was 1982 – were so wise and cynical.
Oh, to watch Attack the Block with him. The Block kids do not meet extraterrestrial encounter with a charm offensive, a la ET, offering treats from the chocolate cupboard and a Sesame Street marathon. Instead, they kill the first arrival with a baseball bat because it has shown them disrespect. They do not speak in terms of cooing wonder. Instead: "What is that, cuz?" "That's a alien!" "We crazy kicked that." They drag the corpse away to stash it, in case there's money to be made by selling it.
Cornish makes a particularly close study of the clash between the gang (bored, riled, with confused ideas about territory) and a middle-class nurse, Sam, played by Jodie Whittaker. She is the neighbour they mug in the opening scene and afterwards she reports them to the police. Even when the sci-fi action kicks in, and the group are thrown together as comrades, neither Sam nor the gang is able to forgive the other over the mugging. To the boys, Sam snitching to the police was as bad as pulling out a knife. It's a subplot that gives the film great strength and grounds it in reality even as the surface action (fireworks used as missiles, Super Soakers turned into flamethrowers) gets sillier.
I ask if the boys have ever been involved in a mugging. Friends have, says Howard. "There's a difference between living somewhere," says Boyega, "and being part of somewhere. There's loads going on in Peckham [where he lives] that I'm not involved in because I'm doing my other thing. But I still know the world, what goes down."
Why, in the film, do the boys react so badly when Sam goes to the police? "In a gang lifestyle, snitching is kind of unforgivable," says Drameh. "I don't think it's just the gang lifestyle," says Boyega, "it's a community thing. The 'block' in Attack the Block is not just a physical thing, it's people, it's families. Everyone's living their own kind of life. When the police come round it makes it complicated. Even mothers are like, nah, I won't talk to the police. Not just gangsters. Would your mum," he says to the group, "ever go to the police?"
The others aren't sure. Eventually, Esmail says: "I'm not gonna lie, I've been robbed three times." They burst out laughing. "I'm glad you all find it funny, you bunch of wankers." "You're still alive, man," says Jones in a rare interjection, "it's all good." Howard says: "It happens every day. It's not, like, mean."
Not mean? Do they, then, accept it as a part of life? "I don't accept it at all," says Esmail. "It feels horrible. But the main reason I wouldn't pick up the phone to the police is that, no offence, they don't do much. They'll get you in the car, go look for the robber. But if he's smart no robber is still gonna be there." The gang are still laughing. "Nah, think about it…"
"Top tip," says Jones, and in an American accent Drameh says: "If you're gonna rob someone go home afterwards. That statement was sponsored by Attack the Block." Boyega steers them back. "Being robbed hurts – not physically but from what it does to your pride." "At the same time," says Drameh, "you can't stop bad things from happening. It may not be a good part of life but that's the world." By the end of the film, the boys' characters still haven't really come to terms with Sam's snitching. "It's not like, oh, we're all friends," says Drameh. "Let's slip off into the rainbow." They find this about right.
Chat moves on to lighter subjects. Trainers. BlackBerrys. How the film's slang might go down in America. "They've been feeding us with new language for years," says Boyega, a little irritated. "Slang in The Wire, Pandora language in Avatar, flipping Klingon. What the hell, man? Just take it as it is and enjoy the film." "I watch their films," says Howard, "and I can understand."
It's time to leave them be. As I make my way out they cheerily go back to opening Coke bottles with their belt buckles and doing impressions of fireworks; engaging in the overlapping discussion of excitable teens. "Man, it's hard putting out a film," someone says. "I thought it just went on in cinemas and that was it."
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Article Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk

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Posted in: Etc,movies

Acer Predator AG7750: Gear Up for World Domination

A force to be reckoned with, the wickedly powerful Acer Predator AG7750-U2222 gaming desktop PC complements its gamer-savvy graphics, razor-edge processing and ultra-fast memory technology with enhanced features like customizable overclocking, dual LAN connectivity and liquid cooling.

Driven by an elite Intel Core i7 processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX470 graphics for serious gaming and entertainment enthusiasts, the Predator AG7750 houses this muscular computing power within a mechanized black and orange case. Lifting the armored face shield reveals the all-access interface for fine-tuning your gaming, complete with glowing red LEDs and claw-like optical-drive doors.

The Predator AG7750 is ready from a thermal and power standpoint to take on 3-way SLI graphics--the next generation in graphics technology--delivering amazing, cinematic visuals with the combined power of DirectX 11, CUDA and NVIDIA PhysX technologies. And you can scale graphics performance by combining multiple NVIDIA graphics solutions in a 3-way SLI-certified motherboard (the AG7750's motherboard has an installed GTX470 card and can accommodate up to two more).

And the AG7750 is primed for dynamic, heart-pounding 3D gaming and video playback thanks to the NVIDIA SLI graphics. Just add an Acer GD245HQ/GD235HZ 3D monitor for a fully immersive experience with NVIDIA 3D Vision--a combination of high-tech wireless glasses and advanced software--to transform hundreds of PC games into full stereoscopic 3D.

The two-part liquid cooling system maintains a low CPU and GPU core temperature for increased efficiency and longevity. Enjoy faster system bootup, quick application loading and lots of space for content creation and multimedia files from the installed 1.5 TB hard drive and 12 GB of three-channel DDR3 memory. And the hard drive cage allows you to have up to four hard drives at 2 TB each for an amazing 8 TB of storage. Other features include a wealth of ports (including 11 USB, eSATA, and FireWire), an HDMI video output for connecting to your HDTV, high-definition 7.1-channel surround sound output, and dual Ethernet ports. It also comes with a USB keyboard and optical mouse.

This Gateway desktop comes pre-installed with the Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium operating system (64-bit version).

Key Features

Open the case to reveal the inner power with claw like optical doors,

• front access easy-swap hard drive bays, and red lighting effects.
• Chassis covered by a rugged protective material and has a secure handle for transport.
• 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7-930 processor (with Turbo Boost Technology up to 3.06 GHz) delivers maximum processing power in response to peak demands. Intel's Turbo Boost technology heightens performance by increasing processor frequency by 133 MHz on short and regular intervals if it's operating below power, until the upper limit is met or the maximum possible upside for the number of active cores is reached. It also increases energy efficiency by allowing near-zero power consumption for inactive cores.
• 1.5 TB installed hard drive (7200 RPM) with three additional easy-swap hard disk drive (HDD) cages, allowing up to a total of four Serial ATA 3 G/bs high-capacity hard disks to be added with up to a 2 TB capacity per single drive for a total storage capacity of up to 8 GB. You can save games, movies, music and more on the local disks, which can be easily swapped or removed for transport. An illuminated door on the lower front of the chassis provides quick entry to the hard disks, simplifying upgrades.
• 12 GB of DDR3 RAM (1333 MHz; 2 GB in each of six slots)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX470 graphics contains double the CUDA cores of previous generation GPUs, a high speed GDDR5 memory interface with 1280 MB onboard and full DirectX 11 support providing for unrivalled performance and breathtaking image quality. Expand your games across three displays in full stereoscopic 3D for the ultimate "inside the game" experience with the power of NVIDIA 3D Vision and SLI technologies. NVIDIA Surround also supports triple screen gaming with non-stereo displays.
• 16x SuperMulti DVD±R/RW drive can also write to CD, DVD-RAM, and dual-layer (DL) DVD±R discs--which can hold up to 8.5 GB of data.
• Easy access front and rear USB ports ensure fast data transfers and convenient connection for joysticks, steering wheels, headphone, foot pedals, printers and more.
• DualLAN technology two Gigabit Ethernet ports allows the demanding gamer to play games as well as use the AG7750 as a server when hosting LAN parties with friends.
• High-definition 7.1-channel surround sound output truly engages your gaming experience so you can enjoy realistic sound effects that pull you into the game
• Windows 7 Home Premium makes it easy to create a home network and share all of your favorite photos, videos, and music. And you can watch shows for free when and where you want with Internet TV on Windows Media Center. Get the best entertainment experience with Windows 7 Home Premium.
• Get more features with Windows Anytime Upgrade. It's the best way to add features to Windows 7, takes as few as ten minutes, requires no software or downloads, and you'll keep your existing programs, files, and settings. Windows will walk you through the simple upgrade process. (Learn more)
• Dimensions: 16.9 x 19.3 x 7.5 inches (WxDxH)
• Warranty: 1-year limited warranty

Networking, Connectivity & Expansion

In addition to a variety of open PCI Express slots, including two PCI Express x16, two PCI Express x1, one PCI Express x8 and a standard PCI, the AG7750 includes the following ports:

• 11 USB 2.0 ports for connecting a wide range of peripherals--from digital cameras to MP3 players (five in front, six in back)
• 1 FireWire port (also known as IEEE 1394 or i.Link) for connecting digital video camcorders and other peripherals.
• 2 next-generation eSATA ports offer a transfer speed of 3GB/s, delivering enhanced scalability and doubling the bus bandwidth for high-speed data retrieval and saves. They allow easy sharing and transfer of entertainment content and digital media on external devices.
• 1 HDMI output for connecting to a compatible HDTV or home theater receiver for uncompressed digital audio and video via a single cable
• Multi-format memory card reader compatible with CF+ Microdrive, CompactFlash I/II, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick PRO Duo, MMCmobile, miniSD, MultiMediaCard, Reduced-Size MultiMediaCard (RS-MMC), Secure Digital, xD-Picture Card media
• Audio I/O: 1 headphone jack, 1 microphone jack, 1 SPDIF digital audio output
• Networking: dual 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet networking ports
• Drive bays: four 3.5" hard drive, two 5.25" optical drive
• Expansion slots: one PCI 2.3, one PCI Express 2.0 x8, two PCI Express 2.0 x1, three PCI Express 2.0 x16 (one full x16 slot, two x8 refitted to x16 size)

What's in the box

This package contains the Acer Predator AG7750-U2222, power cord, USB keyboard and optical mouse, user manual

The system also comes loaded with Arcade Deluxe 2010, an all-in-one media portal for managing today's digital media.

• Acer Arcade archives millions of songs, photos, movies and videos
• Arcade Photo optimizes graphics acceleration for ultra fast photo sorting and creation of memorable slide shows
• Arcade Video converts videos quickly for playback on a favorite media player and uploads videos to YouTube and Facebook
• Arcade Music browses and organizes music collections 

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Article Source: Amazon.com

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Posted in: Computers,Technology