Key BPM Grind
By 1966, AIP had captured the youth market again with bike movies. The poster for The Wild Angels noted that "Their credo is violence, their god is hate, the most terrifying film of our time!" It was directed by Corman and starred Peter Fonda - "He had a bath once but didn't like it" - and Bruce Dern, "a fuzz hater. Show him a badge and he sees red." Wild Angels was made for $360,000, including $35 a day each to a group of real Hell's Angels who took part in the orgy in a church, and grossed more than $10m. Arkoff followed it with Devil's Angels (1968) and Hell's Belles (1969), among many others.samuelz Arkoff also took AIP upmarket with Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, amusing shockers which took their tone from Vincent Price's sibilant ghoulish hamming. Arkoff continued into the 1970s as sole head of AIP, after his partner Nicholson left the company in 1969. The decade began with Corman's cold-eyed Bloody Mama, in which Shelly Winters let rip as Kate Barker, the plump and murderous matriarch of a gang of outlaws, and ended with The Amityville Horror, which became AIP's biggest hit, earning $65 million, holding the record for the next 10 years for the largest-grossing independent film. Many areas of technology have enjoyed spectacular advances in recent years: the number of transistors on a chip, the density of memory and storage, the bandwidth and speed of networks. Software quality, however, is not one of them. In spite of considerable effort, the quality of software remains a significant and persistent problem. Part of the reason is that software development practices change very slowly. Many projects still rely on languages, tools, and techniques designed decades ago. Therefore, any solution to this problem that requires substantial changes to existing programs and to existing programmers is unlikely to produce the kind of improvements we desperately need right now. In this talk he describes current research that his group is undertaking to address this problem. Their goal is to improve the reliability and performance of software in ways that are (a) easy to deploy in existing systems, (b) low cost and low investment, and (c) appealing to programmers, both novice and professional. He presents ideas and results from recent work focused on checking heap properties at runtime. Their techniques leverage a familiar programmer interface, assertions, and can check many complex properties with very low overhead — often in a range suitable for field-testing or deployment. In addition, he describs a closely related project in which we are building a tool for interactive visualization and querying of the heap in a running program.