Hacker Cinema
Plan 9 from Outer Space
1957 · Film · 78 min
Directed by Edward D. Wood Jr.
In California, an old man grieves the loss of his wife, and dies the day after she is buried. However, the space soldier Eros and his mate Tanna use an electric device to resurrect them both, alongside the strong Inspector Clay, who was murdered by the alien-controlled dead couple. When the populations of Hollywood and Washington D.C. see flying saucers on the sky, a colonel, a police lieutenant, a commercial pilot, his wife, and a policeman try to stop the aliens.
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26 comments on Hacker News
All true, but I can't help pointing out that the code name for this new OS came from Plan Nine from Outer Space, a film (which I gather the gang went to watch and found hilarious, although it appears that the film was mainly shown on TV by the 1980s) by Ed Wood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
A theme in the film is the waking of the undead, and I'm wondering if this is a message from the original gang.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/PlanNine_08.jpg
Thanks for the clarification and another example of my ignorance about it. The only time I've ever seen it is when I was trying to build a "slender" kernel and I was removing all the stuff I've never used(eg: 9P ).
The only thing I did know about it was that it was named after the movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space". Kinda cool reference.
Its name ("Plan 9 from Bell Labs") is a reference to the movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space" :-)
> My comment was specifically about the use of tens of thousands of copyrighted books which had been pirated and distributed illegally, for which the authors - most of whom receive quite a small amount of money for their work as it is - received nothing and weren’t asked for permission.
I'm sorry, while true you've made to much of a heart warming story from it. It is an ongoing conflict between sharing and not sharing books, published papers, video, audio and perhaps patents should also be part of the scope. On both sides we have both small and large efforts that range from deserving to not deserving our sympathy.
The main beneficiary of not sharing the content of books are the publishers. For the most part they have proven not to care about authors. Much like the recording industry. They will not stop pushing for more and more control if it benefits them.
They really want (and have) my government adopting/creating/preserving/copying(lol?) laws that cant realistically be implemented. They wont be satisfied even if they can get a scheme like the TV license circus with random assholes searching peoples homes looking for a radio or TV (while even the police has no such rights) You already cant play music in public places without paying various kinds of protection money.
They are already scanning your uploads in various places looking for anything that vaguely resembles something else. When they think they've found it you will be punished. They don't care what life will be like after losing your proverbial google account over a false positive. Oh and Google has to pay for it which means you ultimately have to pay for your own investigation and persecution.
People got enormous fines for tiny offenses. There are efforts to filter out websites at the ISP level. Bittorrent is portrayed as a tool for pirates while it is simply a much superior sharing technology.
Many enormous data centers had to be build just so that we can use inferior means of distribution. You ultimately have to pay for that. You got asymmetric internet connections because hey, you don't need to be uploading anything now do you? We are retooling the entire civilization to protect Harry Potter, Shakin that Ass and Plan 9 from outer space and you get to pay for it.
The industries want to sell new works. That agenda also opposes the distribution of existing works. We have a rich history of book burning so that the old may make room for the new.
Personally, the most worrying part is the desire/agenda to breed a population of illiterate consumers who can barely tie their own shoes but should some how run a democracy.
It should be that if anyone shows an ever so slight interest in a topic we ram all the relevant books, published papers, patents, documentaries and tools in their hands and shout: HERE, READ THIS, WATCH THIS AND HERE IS YOUR FISHING ROD.
This is worth twice the military budget. We can find a way to pay authors. It doesn't seem a very hard problem. I'm not sure there really is a need but plenty of people want this so lets make it.
> There is a very big difference between knowingly downloading and using illegally distributed copyrighted works vs scraping the internet in general.
Not really, you cant look inside peoples head. If I buy something knowing it was stolen or pretending not to know it is still a crime.
Plan 9? Is this a reference to the cult movie Plan 9 From Outer Space?
Edit: Oh, it looks like it is indeed!^[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
yes, but since you haven't nailed the humor yet, the original pointer-outer should have pointed out, "Plan 9 from Userspace is a follow-on to the Plan 9 operating system from Bell Labs, which was whimsically named after the film Plan 9 From Outer Space. Since the unix operating system is built on a simple security model of kernel-space and userspace, this clever word play is also informative about the architecture"
That's not funny though, and it's an obvious reference to the movie.
> The name Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a reference to the Ed Wood 1957 cult science fiction Z-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space.[17] The system continues to be used and developed by operating system researchers and hobbyists.[18][19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
True, but that in turn was named after Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space. And its mascot "Glenda" is a reference to another of Wood's movies, Glen or Glenda.
For those who are unfamiliar, Plan 9 from User Space a pun on Plan 9 from Outer Space, an infamously "so bad it's good" movie from the 1950s. It has this ridiculous bimodal distribution of review scores as a result:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/plan-9-from-outer-space
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/ratings/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/78785/10-out-world-facts-about-plan-9-outer-space
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220107-is-this-the-worst-film-ever-made
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
Good catch
> “People often ask where the names Plan 9, Inferno, and Vita Nuova originated. Allegedly, Rob Pike was reading Dante’s Divine Comedy when the Computing Science Research Group at Bell Labs was working on Inferno. Inferno is named after the first book of the Divine Comedy, as are many of its components, including Dis, Styx and Limbo. The company name Vita Nuova continues the association with Dante: his first work, a book of poetry about his childhood sweetheart Beatrice, was called La Vita Nuova. The literal translation of Vita Nuova is ‘New Life,’ which in the circumstances is surprisingly prophetic. Plan 9 is named after the famous Ed Wood movie Plan 9 from Outer Space. There are no other connections except that the striking artwork for the products is a retro, 60s SciFi image modeled on the Plan 9 movie poster.’
https://dantetoday.krieger.jhu.edu/2009/03/08/vita-nuova-and-inferno-a-compact-system-for-building-cross-platform-distributed-systems/
I think we're talking at cross-purposes, here, because I agree with everything you said.
Let's take Plan 9 From Outer Space as an example: Ed Wood had a very unsubtle anti-war (particularly anti-nuclear-war) message and he pounded it into our stupid minds (Stupid! Stupid!) but that isn't what I was saying. I'm saying that his gravestones were cardboard and obviously moved like cardboard. Was that intentional? No, it was incompetence and not recognizing the need to do another take when a special effect failure is obvious onscreen. You can't read anything textual into the flimsy gravestones because Wood didn't intend for them to do that; it's all paratext, of the "This is a badly-made movie" variety.
Sometimes, it's a bit ambiguous: The characters in the film use their handguns in ways that would cause any range safety officer to disembowel them for the good of the species. Is that intentional on Wood's part, to show how stupid (Stupid! Stupid!) they are, or is it just bad actors treating props like props? I'm inclined to think it's the latter; in a better film, I'd be more apt to give it the benefit of the doubt, but in a better film, it would be reinforced through other means.
In a good film, everything is intentional and serves some purpose in the story. In a great film, there's multiple stories and themes going on, so there's layered meaning and the film rewards re-watching and debate. In a poor film, the only symbols are the obvious ones, pointless and accidental stuff happens, and the film contradicts its themes without intending to.
Here's a handy guide to uncovering such information for yourself, and being able to write a TIL rather than an IHNFC:
TUHS is The Unix Heritage Society mailing list, which might offer you some cues as to context. There's a link at the top-right of the submitted link:
https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/
Rob Pike is Kind of A Big Deal in Unix, C (he's the Pike in Kernighan and Pike, a/k/a The UNIX Programming Environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environment)) The Go programming language, and a thing called Plan 9.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike
Plan 9 From Outer Space was a so utterly bad it's ... well, just bad ... 1957 science fiction film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
Plan 9 from Bell Labs appropriated the name from the film for an operating system building on Pike's (and others') earlier experience developing Unix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
You can download and install Plan 9 OS if you like: https://plan9.io/plan9/
Ten Thousand: https://xkcd.com/1053/
I was happy to read[0] that the OS was indeed named after the so-bad-it’s-good cult film ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’.
[0] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html
Comparing https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/reviews (“Plan 9 from outer space? reviews) with https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/reviews (“Manos: the hands of death” reviews), I don’t think it qualifies as “worst movie ever”.
One of the reviewers of ‘Manos’ says: “What can I say about a movie so bad that it makes Plan 9 From Outer Space look like Casablanca?”, another “I have endured a thing or two in my life: Plan 9 from outer space. Hercules against the moon men. Godzilla versus Megalon. German musical comedies from the early sixties. However, THIS was too much for me. About one hour or so into the movie, I quit.”
> inspired by the cult B-movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space."
It's of course not relevant in the current context but still fun so I dare add that it is famous because it's so bad. It's known as "worst movie ever". It is worth watching the start and a few scenes - even if one does not have the patience for the whole thing - just for some laughs. It already starts (4 minutes in) with a scene in a hilarious airplane cockpit, which does not look like one at all (those controls..!). The zombies are really funny too.
Full movie: https://youtu.be/Ln7WF78PolA
I can't direct a movie but I can tell that Plan 9 from Outer Space is crap (or so crap it's gold, whatever). The kid who pointed out the emperor had no clothes didn't need to be a master tailor. And Gary Marcus doesn't need to propose alternatives to current deep learning practice in order for his criticism of deep learning to be valid.
... and yet he has: neuro-symbolic integration. That's his suggestion.
And in fact that's a whole field that's been publishing work for a while now. So he's not just making it up.
> There's this Illusion in public that what the public sees is the directors initial vision. But largely it's the work of hundreds of people, morphing over time to try and find what will be right.
Critics can have this illusion, too: Auteur theory posits that films have an author, that author being the director, and you can see that director's style manifest in the films they make. Sometimes, sure, this is obvious: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino... they all made or make films with a distinctive stamp on them.
Where this theory runs aground is where your comment comes in, filmmaking as a collaborative process. Citizen Kane was, for example, definitely a collaboration among at least three people: Welles, Mankiewicz, and Toland, the director, screenwriter, and cinematographer, respectively. They each contributed to the film as a finished product, a thing of words and images.
And then there's the failure of the auteur: Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau, people who had creative control through working outside the Hollywood system and, frankly, blew it. Plan 9 From Outer Space might be the Citizen Kane of laughably bad science fiction films, but it's not the Citizen Kane of films. To make a baseball analogy, Wood tried hard, had plenty of heart, got up there, swung for the fences... and spun around like a top a few times before landing flat on his face, never even whiffing the ball. There's a reason Burton made a sensitive film about him and his efforts.
> Plan 9 is obviously a joke name too.
Bell Labs replacing the Outer Space in Plan 9 From Outer Space, a schlocky 1959 sci-fi horror film. The subtitle is UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS FROM OUTER SPACE PARALYZE THE LIVING AND RESURRECT THE DEAD.
I hope its as good as the movie (considered by some to be the worst movie ever made). Read the trivia/goofs on its IMDB page, its hilarious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/
>Who exactly is "we"? Second Life is not so popular today, but it was pretty huge with some people for a very long time.
Second Life was a real life and good implementation of the sci-fi metaverse concept. You could trivially build things, script things, monetize things, etc. It was shoved down everyone's throat by marketers and corporate fad chasers looking for the next big thing to reach customers with. It was universally panned for being...well stupid. Meatspace equivalents make zero sense, 3D goggles or not. Plan 9 from Outer Space is a bad movie in both 3D and 2D.
>And I'm not going to use anything Sony makes as invalidation of any concept.
Ironically, Home was a much more stable and mature Metaverse and it targeted gamers exclusively, who would be much more open to the concept as they spend so much time in virtual worlds anyway. Even that failed. No one wants this crap. 3D Rift will be great for AAA shooters. It'll be yet another expensive gaming toy, not a revolution. The same way the Ouya didn't kill consoles and how Linux didn't kill Windows desktop. The nerd friendly PR that Oculus and Facebook have paid for is very much working.
An interesting bit of trivia about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space: The film's title was the inspiration for the name of Bell Labs' successor to the Unix operating system.
The archetypal 'bad' movie is "Plan 9 from Outer Space" [0], by Ed Wood. It holds that title mainly because of its production values.
This one has caused a stir on IMDB for reasons of moral integrity, or bending the truth. Rather odd, since this has been going on in films and similar media for a very long time.
"International Gorillay", a film from Pakistan depicting Salman Rushdie [1]. Coincidentally it was released a year or so after Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" [2]. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini [3] wanted Rushdie dead because of this novel. BTW Iranian films can be very good, like "Where is the Friend's Home?" [3].
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/ [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251144/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhollah_Khomeini [3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093342/
That is nothing compared to "Manos: The Hands of Fate" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt)
Unexpectedly, however, "Plan 9 from Outer Space" is rated much more evenly for a film that's been considered to be the worst of all time.
Am I the only one who thought this referred to the movie plan 9 from outer space?
I used to think Project Gutenberg was one of the most important projects on the internet, then Wikipedia. But the amount of value I'm getting out of Archive.org increases every day. Some examples:
1) I'm a fan of old-time radio because it can be more entertaining than books on tape or the radio for long car or bus rides. Archive.org has an unbelievable collection, literally months of well produced radio plays, including some great classic sci-fi like "X minus 1". https://archive.org/details/XMinus1_A
https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio
2) On top of hosting a copy of all of Project Gutenberg (almost 40k books), they have numerous other libraries including an awesome collection of scanned Magazines. I'm into old computers and sci-fi, so their OMNI archive (https://archive.org/details/omni-magazine) and an unbelievable collection of old computer magazines (https://archive.org/details/computermagazines) fit the bill. (There's also a pretty big library of classic computer books).
3) It's backed up with an extensive collection of old computer software. https://archive.org/details/software
4) An awesome video archive with everything from archived old computer shows like the computer chronicles https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles to a few thousand old movies, many of which are still worth watching https://archive.org/details/feature_films including "Plan 9 from outer space" https://archive.org/details/Plan9FromOuterSpace_811 and even the impressive (if incomplete) Chrontendo https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22chrontendo%22
Though I wish it was a bit better organized, browsing around archive.org, and hitting upon pockets full of awesome like the 5 above remind me of being a kid and going to the central library for the day and browsing the periodical and reference sections and coming across all sorts of great stuff. I haven't been this excited to use the internet in a long time and in many ways it seems like Archive.org fulfills much of the promise of the internet as a repository of all human knowledge.
Sorry if this sounds like a commercial, but it really is that great of a resource.
Heh, one of my personal "best" movies is Plan 9 from Outer Space... With that, here's my trick to find books/movies/music in more specific (or somewhat peculiar) genres: look for reviews or go shopping for the ones you already like/have.
IMDB has related movies/suggestions as well as Amazon (read the comments also, there might be more mentioned.)... sometimes you find other gems along the same line you were thinking.
Look at the production company, director, author and see whatever else they are attributed to.
One place I can recommend to finding a good movie blind is looking through the "Criterion Collection" videos and DVDs (Hulu has many of em, but not all), which is like the ultra-fan special edition of classic films, most of those are notable for some reason or other.
Lastly there have been several threads here on great books movies, do some searching and you will find em.
For music (besides amazon) - if you like particular genres check out some streaming radio stations - i.e. for the jazz fan Play Misty For Me radio or Luxuria... There's a streaming station for just about any interest. Shoutcast is a good place to start hunting for streaming stations.