At the theatre I attended, there were a couple of early reels where it seemed like there was a color registration problem, especially with the magenta in high contrast areas. Two scenes where it was really noticeable were the battle between Saruman and Gandalf in Isengard, and the fight on Weathertop with the hobbits and the Nazgul. It was rather distracting, but not bad enough to require a refund or raincheck.
There's a lot to rave about in this film. Greg covers a lot of them. But what really made me appreciate it was the little details that reflect the depth of the original story... much in the same way that the original story dropped so many hints to the history of Middle Earth, giving it the mythic feel that IMO is what captivated such a huge audience.
There are the obvious things, like the elvish tongue and runes, and the references to the people, places and names of the 1st and 2nd ages. But I'm talking about even more subtle things, like the way the rock troll reacted in especially notable pain when struck by Frodo's elven blade, or the white hand marks on the Uruk-Hai, or the use of Tolkien's original maps... the list goes ever on.
And, with respect to Galadriel, I must disagree. You acknowledge it yourself - she is one of the oldest elves remaining in Middle Earth... she was among the original Noldor of the First Age. And she bears/guards one of the three elven rings, which gives her considerable power. Even in the books, many words were devoted to her power over the realm of Lorien and her effect upon the people in it. I think it was done just right: a bit overwhelming at first, even scary to behold, but awesomely beautiful once you begin to understand it.
In fact, if I have a complaint about the portrayal of elves, it's that they weren't "mystical" enough.
More like when Legolas, and later Merry and Pippin, leap upon the back of the rock troll. Also, a bit further on, when the fellowship is hauling ass for the bridge of Khazad'Dum with hordes of goblins bearing down on them.
There were a few more, especially at Orthanc, but those were the most obvious... and you know what, I really didn't care. The set design and the action were so great you don't really care if not every clip of CGI is perfectly realistic.
And the sound effects... no one mentioned the sound effects, but Jackson uses subsonics quite effectively. It helps when you see it in a theatre where there seems to be resonant cavities underneath the chairs!
What needs to happen is that the manufacturers of players that are affected must take these labels to task, both in the media and in the courts.
Apple Computer, in particular, has been marketing their products as complete audio systems: Buy a CD, rip it using iTunes, and download it to your iPod. Lather, rinse, repeat. Now, by publishing CDs that don't adhere to the CDDA standard, UMG is interfering with their business. And now with Windows XP, Microsoft, Compaq, ell, HP, and the rest are using the same marketing strategy, and have the same complaint.
Of course, it may be easier for Apple to just publish an upgrade to iTunes that applies the same playback error correction that my Sony Discman uses.
Heck, it may be there already. I bought Pink Floyd's Echoes a couple of weeks ago, and it would not play in my Mac CD-ROM. I don't know what the error was -- it just would not sync up... playback would start and stop intermittently. A noticeable fraction of CDs I buy behave this way. But yet iTunes was able to rip it to MP3 just fine.
I've been using Macs 1984, and have kept at least one at home for the past 8 years, but this is the first time I've seen the word "velvety" used to describe its GUI. Velvety is something I associate with Macaroni and Cheese. Or Mel Torme. Not Macintosh.
So if MacOS is velvety, what adjective would be appropriate for comparing the Win32 GUI?
Har, har! It's safe to make a joke like that in a forum where people can reasonably be expected to know it's a joke, but be careful!
Novice users will take you literally. It happened to me.
My first month on the job, for an employer who made us peons use communal banks of PCs. Someone two seats away was running WordPerfect 5.1, and asked me "How do I save this file?"
I answered "Control Alt Delete," and before I could stop her, she'd rebooted her machine.
But of course, IE isn't software for productive work...
- OrbView 4 / QuickTOMS failure still under investigation
I worked for their sensor systems division on both the OrbView and TOMS instruments. (Past tense 'cause they just sold us to UTC.) To lose both on one shot was quite unpleasant to witness.
Re:Look into my eyes when I am conversating with y
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Virtual Keyboard
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Great idea, but unless you're aiming for the ruggedized computer market, there's no incentive to make a laptop with a lifetime greater than the time it will take for the model to become obsolescent. Which, for a PC, seems to be only two or three years, depending on your application of it.
Yeah, I have a friend with similar connections and saw an edit of the pilot well over a year ago. I don't remember many details so I can't spoil anything anyway. But I do remember I thought it was pretty good. Perhaps not good enough to last long, but hopefully longer than "Action!" anyway.
Things to look for:
* Watch The Tick's antennae. Very expressive. Good job, FOX!
* Does Warburton sometimes sound too much like Chris Farley at moments? (No one will ever sound truly like The Tick to me except the guy who did the first few animated seasons...)
* Pay special attention to the dialogue during the epilogue... I thought it was the funniest part of the show.
I know I'm posting this with only about a half hour to go for you ESTers out there, but us Left Coasters may not get delayed because of el Generalissimo Busho's speech.
Re:Peter Jackson? The Peter Jackson?
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Behind the Scenes
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Gee, lay off Lynch's Dune already. I realized he did a marvelous job once I stopped to consider how much he was limited on budget, production time, film length, and audience intellect. (I'm not talking about you and me, but the people the studio execs intended to pay for the film.)
Ruined? Hardly. My copy of Dune is still right there on my bookshelf patiently waiting for a seventh read. I'd read it four times before the movie came out. Nothing Lynch did could ever have spoiled my appreciation of the book.
Re:Peter Jackson? The Peter Jackson?
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Behind the Scenes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm really happy with this choice of directors.
Umm, actually, if you've been paying attention at all you'd know that the project didn't choose the director, the director chose the project. It's his baby, New Line is giving him complete authority, and that's what's going to make it work.
Re:But of course social geography was never ..
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Behind the Scenes
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I'm a Yankee who first paid notice to NZ's geography after seeing the visually stunning French film The Valley, most notable for being scored by Pink Floyd. I highly recommend it. Most of the soundtrack wound up on their album Meddle.
Come on now, that law does not apply to broadcast programming. If you broadcast a signal in a television or AM or FM band, everyone is entitled to receive your signal... it is part of the terms of your broadcast license.
That section of the communications act is there to protect people who use two-way radio for private communications. Not every law is part of some capitalist corporate conspiracy.
Gee - how come everyone seems to have forgotten how much T and A there was in TOS? There were silicone enhanced babes on every planet, and except for token episodes for the rest of the cast, Kirk all but fornicated with them every week.
I remember reading The Making of Star Trek as a teen, and I am reminded of the part about how the TOS producers and NBC censors were continually arguing about how far they could go. In fact there was one particular passage about how NBC had a rule that you could not show the underside of a breast, as if they thought moss grew under there or something.
Maybe it'll be sold as a "relaxation service" to hide the trail.
That's just the problem. It's not hiding the trail. It's not hiding who you bought it from, just what you bought. When the DEA or local law enforcement finally busts the "Relaxation Service" all they need to do is subpoena their Visa records and you can be identified.
Yes, that appears to be the prevalent ethical standard.
But I think people are overlooking a more ominous repercussion, technically and ethically: Setting a precedent. If the precedent were set that it's OK to loose countercode upon the world, think of what might result.
In other words, if counterviruses and antiworms became commonplace, it would turn the internet into one big war zone for autonomous code. And I can't even imagine what might result if an arms race broke out in that contest, though I expect some of its fruits would be quite frightening. I've already drawn the analogy to Core War in a previous thread.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, especially item number two on your list.
Not to mention throwing number two... the kind not on your list.
D'oh!
Isengard. Mount Doom, too, for that matter.
At the theatre I attended, there were a couple of early reels where it seemed like there was a color registration problem, especially with the magenta in high contrast areas. Two scenes where it was really noticeable were the battle between Saruman and Gandalf in Isengard, and the fight on Weathertop with the hobbits and the Nazgul. It was rather distracting, but not bad enough to require a refund or raincheck.
There are the obvious things, like the elvish tongue and runes, and the references to the people, places and names of the 1st and 2nd ages. But I'm talking about even more subtle things, like the way the rock troll reacted in especially notable pain when struck by Frodo's elven blade, or the white hand marks on the Uruk-Hai, or the use of Tolkien's original maps... the list goes ever on.
And, with respect to Galadriel, I must disagree. You acknowledge it yourself - she is one of the oldest elves remaining in Middle Earth... she was among the original Noldor of the First Age. And she bears/guards one of the three elven rings, which gives her considerable power. Even in the books, many words were devoted to her power over the realm of Lorien and her effect upon the people in it. I think it was done just right: a bit overwhelming at first, even scary to behold, but awesomely beautiful once you begin to understand it.
In fact, if I have a complaint about the portrayal of elves, it's that they weren't "mystical" enough.
There were a few more, especially at Orthanc, but those were the most obvious... and you know what, I really didn't care. The set design and the action were so great you don't really care if not every clip of CGI is perfectly realistic.
And the sound effects... no one mentioned the sound effects, but Jackson uses subsonics quite effectively. It helps when you see it in a theatre where there seems to be resonant cavities underneath the chairs!
Bullhockey. By your logic, beefing up airport security gives terrorists the victory.
If I freely give them my email address to pass around like a hooker at a tailhook convention, then they've won.
Besides, if someone doesn't have the IQ to demunge my email address, I don't care to hear from them.
Apple Computer, in particular, has been marketing their products as complete audio systems: Buy a CD, rip it using iTunes, and download it to your iPod. Lather, rinse, repeat. Now, by publishing CDs that don't adhere to the CDDA standard, UMG is interfering with their business. And now with Windows XP, Microsoft, Compaq, ell, HP, and the rest are using the same marketing strategy, and have the same complaint.
Of course, it may be easier for Apple to just publish an upgrade to iTunes that applies the same playback error correction that my Sony Discman uses.
Heck, it may be there already. I bought Pink Floyd's Echoes a couple of weeks ago, and it would not play in my Mac CD-ROM. I don't know what the error was -- it just would not sync up... playback would start and stop intermittently. A noticeable fraction of CDs I buy behave this way. But yet iTunes was able to rip it to MP3 just fine.
So if MacOS is velvety, what adjective would be appropriate for comparing the Win32 GUI?
(ObTroll: Nappy?)
I'd wonder what the hell he was up to and look for another door!
Gee... you hit on a pretty good analogy there.
Novice users will take you literally. It happened to me.
My first month on the job, for an employer who made us peons use communal banks of PCs. Someone two seats away was running WordPerfect 5.1, and asked me "How do I save this file?"
I answered "Control Alt Delete," and before I could stop her, she'd rebooted her machine.
But of course, IE isn't software for productive work...
Dave, please don't aim for my power supply. Any introduction there of your electrolytic micturations will surely cause me to malfunction.
Well, it's a run of two:
- X-34 failure due to a separated stabilizer fin
- OrbView 4 / QuickTOMS failure still under investigation
I worked for their sensor systems division on both the OrbView and TOMS instruments. (Past tense 'cause they just sold us to UTC.) To lose both on one shot was quite unpleasant to witness.
Great idea, but unless you're aiming for the ruggedized computer market, there's no incentive to make a laptop with a lifetime greater than the time it will take for the model to become obsolescent. Which, for a PC, seems to be only two or three years, depending on your application of it.
Actually, that's isn't an infinite loop at all. It would be "positive feedback."
The Tick is nigh unbeatable in competition with Survivor.
Hmm... I do believe you misspelled nigh invulnerable.
Yeah, I have a friend with similar connections and saw an edit of the pilot well over a year ago. I don't remember many details so I can't spoil anything anyway. But I do remember I thought it was pretty good. Perhaps not good enough to last long, but hopefully longer than "Action!" anyway.
Things to look for:
* Watch The Tick's antennae. Very expressive. Good job, FOX!
* Does Warburton sometimes sound too much like Chris Farley at moments? (No one will ever sound truly like The Tick to me except the guy who did the first few animated seasons...)
* Pay special attention to the dialogue during the epilogue... I thought it was the funniest part of the show.
I know I'm posting this with only about a half hour to go for you ESTers out there, but us Left Coasters may not get delayed because of el Generalissimo Busho's speech.
Gee, lay off Lynch's Dune already. I realized he did a marvelous job once I stopped to consider how much he was limited on budget, production time, film length, and audience intellect. (I'm not talking about you and me, but the people the studio execs intended to pay for the film.)
Ruined? Hardly. My copy of Dune is still right there on my bookshelf patiently waiting for a seventh read. I'd read it four times before the movie came out. Nothing Lynch did could ever have spoiled my appreciation of the book.
Umm, actually, if you've been paying attention at all you'd know that the project didn't choose the director, the director chose the project. It's his baby, New Line is giving him complete authority, and that's what's going to make it work.
I'm a Yankee who first paid notice to NZ's geography after seeing the visually stunning French film The Valley, most notable for being scored by Pink Floyd. I highly recommend it. Most of the soundtrack wound up on their album Meddle.
Come on now, that law does not apply to broadcast programming. If you broadcast a signal in a television or AM or FM band, everyone is entitled to receive your signal... it is part of the terms of your broadcast license.
That section of the communications act is there to protect people who use two-way radio for private communications. Not every law is part of some capitalist corporate conspiracy.
Not only that, but commercial RAM for desktop computers is "dynamic" RAM, meaning that as soon as the power goes out, POOF! No more data.
So you need to add the cost of a regular HD anyway, as a backup archive.
Well, gee, if you already have a regular HD, then your RAM drive doesn't need to be as big -- you can just page in the parts of memory that you need.
Hey, wait a minute... they already do that. It's called a cache.
So that option tree has already been explored to it's optimal solution.
QED.
Trek seems to be de-evolving into soft porn
Gee - how come everyone seems to have forgotten how much T and A there was in TOS? There were silicone enhanced babes on every planet, and except for token episodes for the rest of the cast, Kirk all but fornicated with them every week.
I remember reading The Making of Star Trek as a teen, and I am reminded of the part about how the TOS producers and NBC censors were continually arguing about how far they could go. In fact there was one particular passage about how NBC had a rule that you could not show the underside of a breast, as if they thought moss grew under there or something.
Maybe it'll be sold as a "relaxation service" to hide the trail.
That's just the problem. It's not hiding the trail. It's not hiding who you bought it from, just what you bought. When the DEA or local law enforcement finally busts the "Relaxation Service" all they need to do is subpoena their Visa records and you can be identified.
The e. coli is hitting the fan, and he just ducked. The man wants to be re-elected, so he needs to keep his political white robes clean.
So, in that context, it's the best decision he could have made, evading as much of the ethical issues as possible.
But I think people are overlooking a more ominous repercussion, technically and ethically: Setting a precedent. If the precedent were set that it's OK to loose countercode upon the world, think of what might result.
In other words, if counterviruses and antiworms became commonplace, it would turn the internet into one big war zone for autonomous code. And I can't even imagine what might result if an arms race broke out in that contest, though I expect some of its fruits would be quite frightening. I've already drawn the analogy to Core War in a previous thread.