There a small handful of files (main issue is old unix compression for fonts) in XFree86 before the licensing change which are GPL incompatible. After the change the entire XFree86 system is GPL incompatible. Rather than simply saying "stuff you XFree86, you're not that important", you want us to bow down to them and try and figure out that legal quagmire? Here's a wild conspiracy theory for you, MS (and SCO) are paying XFree86 to relicense in this way so they can attack every distribution out there, with 4.4, for not following licenses, Open Source = Pirates.
If somehow it was as simple as you would like to make it out (write XFree86 on packaging) then people might grin and bear it (I doubt it), but when they are making a vast array of programs (GPL) unusable do you really expect just follow along?
As someone else pointed out RMS essentially predicted it. But the most important point is that it is and was forkable into a seperate project (i.e. freedesktop.org) or just into a GPL compatible version, then the question is how much code gets shared and how much they diverge, and who chooses to use what for what and.... it's what Free software is about, each time someone closes off a freedom, someone will work to preserve it. People who put work in under the old licensing can continue on, they just mightn't be able to take the new stuff. Sometimes it will remain at the fringes but frequently the freer version will take most of the users and developers. I'm still happy that I saw Keith Packard saying freedesktop.orgs release will be DFSG-free, that's enough for me:-)
This (AC parent post) is exactly what I have been hoping to hear! I'd been looking to see what Branden would say about all this, as he not only does an excellent job overseeing X on Debian but he is also, imho, the main commentator for Debian on licenses.
I like the DFSG guidelines. I think they are the best interpretation out there of what you can really take as Free and what you can't. If XFree86 4.4 was not going to be DFSG-free, I would have felt sure we would have seen a Debian fork if no-one else stepped up. But what I really hoped to see was a collaboration between freedesktop, xouvert and debian to oversee a fork of X, but I had no idea if the desire would be there from the core of freedesktop and xouvert to be DFSG-free.
It's not a simple task, and it will mean compromises (s3-texture compression perhaps) but I think that the key for a free X is for it to have an out in an open development environment and to allow more seperation of the server from the system (so hardware development is easier and quicker, even use of non-free servers (nvidia and ati for example) would probably become easier if the full range of interests in X got involved). I feel this is make or break for XFree86, in the next month they will either back down and open up somehow, or else they will see themselves forked out of existence. I actually favour the latter and I already think it has started, if XFree86 don't change their tune very soon, how long will it be before Debian, Mandrake and Fedora all have freedesktop packages as the next (post 4.3) version of X? Even if they are a bit of a hairy option, like a 2.6 kernel could be now.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
So does NASA have a legal exemption for not following the terms of the GPL? They are distributing it (even if only internally) even though conditions have been imposed upon them that contradict the conditions of the GPL. They have no permission to distribute the Program at all. If they are allowed to ignore the terms of the GPL, the who else is also allowed to ignore them, or under what conditions can it be ignored? Could a NASA employee sue them for telling them to break the law?
Can NASA legally prevent someone internal who is given a copy of the software from taking the source and posting it online under the GPL (well anything that is GPL covered anyway)?
Wouldn't it be ironic if it was stolen off the Linux computer because someone exploited a hole which existed back in this leaked code (whether patches are available or not) which gave them access to it from a windows box? Of course if someone just clicked on the link to read that 7bit binary attachment (maybe on their laptop which they copied the source onto) then they deserve to be hanged from the towers of redmond by their left clicking finger for the next 20 years.
Under the new schemes where governments could have people look at the windows source, could someone not do this form of comparison against the full Windows tree? I can't remember all the restriction but would/do they prevent this or prevent them from disclosing what they find?
As of now, in efnet anyway:
Topic of #windows: http://www.windorks.com | I need to take a leak.
Topic of #phrack: shut the fuck up about leaked source codes
Presuming this code is genuine, I think it will be very interesting to see what comes from this. I have no doubt that there will be people looking at this source and releasing interesting tit-bits, for example the code that lets the FBI in! I'm sure that there will be more interesting things found though on a similar line, perhaps with regards to passport, DRM and/or the feedback tools and the information they gather and transmit. Other things which may appear are the connections between business decisions and coding decisions, though I would be slightly surprised if these survived into full trees like this (but seeing we don't know what this is...).
The biggest question for me though remains, what is this? Is it the initial release source, the latest release, the development tree? Ultimately though I don't care and won't be looking, though I won't be stopping myself from reading the/. stories as they appear over the next few months.
Finally I have one legal question, is there anywhere in the world where it would be legal to download this and study it for your own personal use if you already owned a copy of the binary? My sense of logic suggests that should be legal! If you then go on to tell anyone about what you found though the ground starts to shake, and if you make money in any connected way from it then you deserve to be swallowed up whole by a pack of rapid lawyers. What does the law say anywhere (if anyone knows)?
Of those 169 million units, how many were for business use and how many home? What percentage of them all were budget machines, i.e. onboard vga or equivalent video. I'm curious, and not really sure what I'd guess, but my impressions are that most non-gaming parents will downplay gaming and end up with a barely useful card/onboard, while most gaming non-parents will go for consoles. Of course there are the die hard gamers who pay $300 for a graphics card and they certainly seem to have finally brought an end to non 3d graphics cards (though onboard stuff is generally still rubbish for new pretty games). How long can they keep it up though in the face of a complete lack of interest in 3d for anything other than games, probably longer now that at least MS are using desktop chips in their console, what percentage of NVidia's chip sales last year were for Xbox?
Ok, I got it slightly wrong, I'd only heard of MiB for ppc. The MiB have a PPC alpha/beta/whatever aswell as a x86 Knoppix. There's some discussion in the knoppix forums and the images themselves (as pointed out by an AC) can be found on the ftp mirrors from the original link I gave.
The DVD was never really publically distributed. It was created for a german conference last year sometime where it was distributed to attendees. Nobody ever seemed to have the desire and the bandwidth to put it online.
Everything has been called Pentium X since the pentium as nothing has yet come along worthy of the next name... Sexium! Perhaps when they finally release a mainstream desktop 64 bit processor Intel will see if they can get Sex to sell it!
I don't have an issue with people charging for software, I don't EXPECT people to make something they've spent years developing free. However I hope that as time progresses more and more fundamental software will become free and hence the norm will be to make free software, unless you decide to try to reap the benefit of not using Free software to be in a "better" position to recoup the larger investment required to create the software. Free Software embodies the principle that you cannot work in isolation, and that the works of others are useful in creating your own works, it does force you to join in completely if you want to join in (well the LGPL is a half way house), but if you wish to use the pre-existing work to make your job easier you take that choice to sacrifice the ability to protect the work as your own (as it isn't, though some of it may be).
Doesn't that describe virtually every program every distributed? Everyone
derives their knowledge from what has been discovered or created by people before. Any programmer who could write a program WITHOUT referencing
other peoples ideas or work would probably deserve a clutch of nobel prizes.
To me the core argument for Free Software and against Software Patents!
On 2nd February just before 8am RTE Radio 1 in Ireland (the semi-state national broadcasters primary radio station) had an interview with a director of a computer training company here in Ireland. The piece was brought to the attention of the Irish Linux Users Group which subsequently picked apart the "computer experts" opinions. You can see a full transcript of the interview here, listen to the piece from rte themselves here or you can look through the threads on the mailing list to find an ogg transcoding of the interview.
The most controversial quote from the interview was:
the people who are behind this virus I would suspect are people who, who, em, are promoting what is called Open Sof... Open, eh, eh,.... Open System
Software
but numerous inadequacies in the piece (from calling OpenOffice.org, StarOffice and Linux companies to blurring the two variants into one and not mentioning anti-virus software or care in opening attachments as part of the protection) were pointed out. Subsequently, the ilug put out a press release which addressed the main issues and the "computer expert" replied quite unfavourably! The fallout led to the ilug chairman calling for some silence (controversial itself but explained here and here). The response (it seems) of the ilug to the "expert" was sent and RTE acknowledged the ILUG position on their site. The "expert" has returned once more and it seems the ilug will issue a final response saying that:
we are done discussing this with
Mr. Campbell, that we appreciate RTE's clarification and that we consider
the matter closed.
You can pick up all the ins and outs of the threads on the threaded archive, including the rumours that someone was going to start ringing employers to see if they concurred with their employees postings!
Tell that to a family with 2-3 kids who can afford to buy them a game each a year. Do you think they don't want to keep playing their old games? A few games on every platform are classics, that we all wish we could keep forever (perhaps mame will ultimately provide a long term solution). I would love to be able to keep an atari ST, Amiga, nes, snes and ps2 around but in practice people have one platform they play games on. If your platform of choice links the games to the hardware then you wouldn't want to get attached to any games unless you want to be one of the minority who does keep multiple platforms around.
If you listen to the commentaries on the extended editions of the first two films it quickly becomes apparent that a lot of work was put into the script. I don't agree with a lot of their choices either, but I certainly think they spent as much time on the story as the visuals (well not as many man hours, but at least as much quality time and effort).
I don't like the skipping of Bombadil and the transferal of the Old Man Willow scene, and lines, to Fangorn. Tom and Fagorn both have great similarities in the book, but Fagorn can at least be persuaded to venture out into the world and join in, but Tom... That being said, I can understand that decision but I feel the it really takes away from the journey, the world, the mystery and the balance of things. Tom's place in the book is bizarre and strange, but always left me feeling that the world was just that more complete for him. Also Tom serves to emphasise one very simple point, that it may be possible to defend the ring from Sauron to prevent him from getting it, but that would not be enough. They had to destroy the ring (and hence the world of the elves) or else Sauron would never be vanquished, and would most probably (certainly) have conquered regardless until the defender of the ring defended it alone for no purpose. Of course the fact that Jackson has really omitted anything which really gives you much of a clue into the history of middle-earth (Mithrandir is said once and he even fudges around with who holds the 3 rings, no mention of Bombadil, Radagast, little of Morgoth, the departure of the elves) means that perhaps you just have to accept the fact that he really did cut everything out which make LOTR magical and simply filmed the story behind it (ooh that's harsh, I like the films... really)!
The compression of the Elves into Arwen only annoys me because it was obviously done to make the "love story" more complete (and to avoid introducing extra charecters). However the love story, which is a heart renderingly painful threeway in the books, is just aimless (at least in the theatrical release of ROTK. LOTR is very much a story of hope in so many ways, and the hopes and despair of Arwen, Aragorn and Eowyn should more tragically reflect this, or simply be dropped!
The burning of the shire is the biggest tragedy to me however. Not exactly because it is missing in and of itself, but because the entire story line of Sarumans long standing trechary is reflected once, in the barrels of pipeweed. Saruman was the leader of the Council and had for a very long time been leading a duplicitous life which had slowly sucked him under the power of Sauron. The ultimate indignity being when the hobbits finally end his reign without men, elves, dwarves etc. and it is also the moment when you realise that while Frodo took the burden and hence should be the hero, the other 3 hobbits all carried the fight well beyond their means and you could argue Merry and Pippin alone destroyed Saruman (first with their influence over Fagorn and then in the shire). Of course this whole plot begins back in Bree in FOTR and that brings in Sams faithful pony, abandoned at the Gates of Moria only for it to find it's way to Tom. I know how easy a decision it must have been to decide to cut all this, but for me it is a major let-down! Let me put it this way, I hope PJ is able to site back down and look at the trilogy when he cuts the extended ROTK and can get the funding to do some more pick ups so perhaps in a few years time (no rush, clean everything up while their at it and put it all to bed once and for all) he can release the 15+ hour version that really does at least bring what he has done as far as he can? I guess I'm mad!
Now on a final point, I haven't RTF entire A yet, but an awful lot of the things mentioned are explained on the extended edition director/writers commentaries. I'm still stunned I've managed to sit through those, but in fact it was easy, delightful in fact and a beautiful insight into the writing/storyboarding process of the film (and the obvious planning for the extended dvds as a whole means the extra dvds of footage actually provide an incredibly detailed insight into the entire troligoies production).
Final answer, I love the films but they are flawed because they would never have gotten funding to do the film I would love to see. Would the film I would like to have seen been a box office success? Let's just say that Jackson wrote it a lot closer to a marketing mans script than Tolkien ever did!
I am extremely curious why the parent is deemed a troll! The article itself asks the very question, and the parent answers by saying that while they love all the previous h2g2 stuff, they are so appalled by the concept of Disney producing this that the won't watch it! I think my own opinions are pretty similar! I suspect this will be another one of those films I wont see until 3am in a friends house (the one who seems to have every film ever made) in 10 years time when they decide to put it on and I don't fall asleep (or leave).
More serious and directly related to the article as a whole (and the presumably contentious issue of the parent), most people would not regard Disney as the best people to adapt a book to film, unless they are under 8 years old. Who here who has actually read the full trilogy (in five parts) actually thinks that anything which bears any resemblence to it will end up on screen? Disney's H2G2 could never have the dynamic of the books, it just wouldn't stack up to a bunch of marketeers! H2G2 has nothing which would appeal to a Disney audience without a complete rewrite. I expect it to be nothing more than a space adventure where an earth guy saves the world with a little help from their friends, all extraneous plot removed (the books are all random wandering, anything which seems like a plot is retrofitted in by the readers mind to make them think they have a clue whats going on) and lots of cute creatures (ah look at the mice, don't they have pretty singing voices).
Let's face it, the odds on a Disney H2G2 actually being "the film" of H2G2 (as Peter Jacksons is now "the film" of LOTR) are at least 42:1! I'm sure we'll see another attempt further down the road, I just hope we don't have to wait until Disneys IP rights expire for this to happen because current trends would suggest that we would then never ever see anyone else get their hands on this material. I don't know what sort of a deal Disney has on this though so perhaps their is hope for a decent H2G2 maybe another decade or two down the road.
Now if Terry Gilliam or someone was Directing then... but imdb suggests the writer/director is Garth Jennings whose only credit is Title Designer on the Ali G TV show!
HBO made a substantial mistake, they should have funded a much longer series, as once you start showing the stuff your potential number of targets drops rapidly. This is by no means unique, Dennis Pennis suffered the same fate having to cross the altantic once he had been overly spotted in the UK, though he at least (somehow) managed to then do seperate LA and NY runs in the states before having to "retire". Personally I always found Pennis far better then Ali G, probably because he took the ripest targets and shattered them with the simplest constructs. Steve Martin allegedly cancelled a trip to the UK after one question thrown out by Pennis when he caught his eye outside an event (around Bilko time), the question?
Do you really want Linux to have more non free, closed source, proprietary software??
Yes, if it is using Free components! Let me take a simple example which demonstrates why I would still like to see the LGPL being used for libraries and similar building blocks. Imagine Adobe is considering bringing Photoshop to Linux, would you rather they wrote their own (jpeg/toolkit/compression) libaries, picked up a BSD/Public domain one, patched an LGPL one and distributed their improvements or just said to hell with Linux, we won't release?
I see the long term victory of Free Software being derived from a continuous chain where users who need software to perform specific tasks, find that each year less and less of the software they require is commercial and more is Free. As pieces are created totally Freely, they lessen the itching of developers to work on that area, and set them looking for new challenges. Any piece of software (such as QT) which requires commercial licensing is always a potential target. Any piece of software which is essentially a basic software building block should be used consistently, and just because someone is trying to write a commercial program shouldn't mean they have to re-invent lots of wheels and provide their users with a less satisfactory solution. Free software is about the users freedom, and if everyone (commercial and Free developers) works on the same code for the basic building blocks, then the user is in a better position (the core of their system is more solid/developed). If only Free software authors can use Free software libraries etc, then Free software has to create everything before it is a valid platform. The easier it is for commercial developers to bring their work across, the easier it is for the user to have a complete solution, the larger the "market" for people to write Free alternatives to remaining commercial programs and the more people are working on Free software as a whole as they can assemble the system they need to get their work done.
Pretty much exactly what i was going to say! Having just got a free gamecube I was quite surprised at how loud it is! Looks like I might have a use for it now, other than trying to figure out how to play the 2 games I was given with it, both in German!
Radon seems to be the most massive noble gas, but I guess it is useless here "because of its short half life (the longest life isotope has a half life of less than 4 days)".
Slashdot Mirror
There a small handful of files (main issue is old unix compression for fonts) in XFree86 before the licensing change which are GPL incompatible. After the change the entire XFree86 system is GPL incompatible. Rather than simply saying "stuff you XFree86, you're not that important", you want us to bow down to them and try and figure out that legal quagmire? Here's a wild conspiracy theory for you, MS (and SCO) are paying XFree86 to relicense in this way so they can attack every distribution out there, with 4.4, for not following licenses, Open Source = Pirates.
If somehow it was as simple as you would like to make it out (write XFree86 on packaging) then people might grin and bear it (I doubt it), but when they are making a vast array of programs (GPL) unusable do you really expect just follow along?
As someone else pointed out RMS essentially predicted it. But the most important point is that it is and was forkable into a seperate project (i.e. freedesktop.org) or just into a GPL compatible version, then the question is how much code gets shared and how much they diverge, and who chooses to use what for what and .... it's what Free software is about, each time someone closes off a freedom, someone will work to preserve it. People who put work in under the old licensing can continue on, they just mightn't be able to take the new stuff. Sometimes it will remain at the fringes but frequently the freer version will take most of the users and developers. I'm still happy that I saw Keith Packard saying freedesktop.orgs release will be DFSG-free, that's enough for me :-)
This (AC parent post) is exactly what I have been hoping to hear! I'd been looking to see what Branden would say about all this, as he not only does an excellent job overseeing X on Debian but he is also, imho, the main commentator for Debian on licenses.
I like the DFSG guidelines. I think they are the best interpretation out there of what you can really take as Free and what you can't. If XFree86 4.4 was not going to be DFSG-free, I would have felt sure we would have seen a Debian fork if no-one else stepped up. But what I really hoped to see was a collaboration between freedesktop, xouvert and debian to oversee a fork of X, but I had no idea if the desire would be there from the core of freedesktop and xouvert to be DFSG-free.
It's not a simple task, and it will mean compromises (s3-texture compression perhaps) but I think that the key for a free X is for it to have an out in an open development environment and to allow more seperation of the server from the system (so hardware development is easier and quicker, even use of non-free servers (nvidia and ati for example) would probably become easier if the full range of interests in X got involved). I feel this is make or break for XFree86, in the next month they will either back down and open up somehow, or else they will see themselves forked out of existence. I actually favour the latter and I already think it has started, if XFree86 don't change their tune very soon, how long will it be before Debian, Mandrake and Fedora all have freedesktop packages as the next (post 4.3) version of X? Even if they are a bit of a hairy option, like a 2.6 kernel could be now.
Can NASA legally prevent someone internal who is given a copy of the software from taking the source and posting it online under the GPL (well anything that is GPL covered anyway)?
Wouldn't it be ironic if it was stolen off the Linux computer because someone exploited a hole which existed back in this leaked code (whether patches are available or not) which gave them access to it from a windows box? Of course if someone just clicked on the link to read that 7bit binary attachment (maybe on their laptop which they copied the source onto) then they deserve to be hanged from the towers of redmond by their left clicking finger for the next 20 years.
Under the new schemes where governments could have people look at the windows source, could someone not do this form of comparison against the full Windows tree? I can't remember all the restriction but would/do they prevent this or prevent them from disclosing what they find?
As of now, in efnet anyway:
Topic of #windows: http://www.windorks.com | I need to take a leak.
Topic of #phrack: shut the fuck up about leaked source codes
Presuming this code is genuine, I think it will be very interesting to see what comes from this. I have no doubt that there will be people looking at this source and releasing interesting tit-bits, for example the code that lets the FBI in! I'm sure that there will be more interesting things found though on a similar line, perhaps with regards to passport, DRM and/or the feedback tools and the information they gather and transmit. Other things which may appear are the connections between business decisions and coding decisions, though I would be slightly surprised if these survived into full trees like this (but seeing we don't know what this is ...).
The biggest question for me though remains, what is this? Is it the initial release source, the latest release, the development tree? Ultimately though I don't care and won't be looking, though I won't be stopping myself from reading the /. stories as they appear over the next few months.
Finally I have one legal question, is there anywhere in the world where it would be legal to download this and study it for your own personal use if you already owned a copy of the binary? My sense of logic suggests that should be legal! If you then go on to tell anyone about what you found though the ground starts to shake, and if you make money in any connected way from it then you deserve to be swallowed up whole by a pack of rapid lawyers. What does the law say anywhere (if anyone knows)?
Of those 169 million units, how many were for business use and how many home? What percentage of them all were budget machines, i.e. onboard vga or equivalent video. I'm curious, and not really sure what I'd guess, but my impressions are that most non-gaming parents will downplay gaming and end up with a barely useful card/onboard, while most gaming non-parents will go for consoles. Of course there are the die hard gamers who pay $300 for a graphics card and they certainly seem to have finally brought an end to non 3d graphics cards (though onboard stuff is generally still rubbish for new pretty games). How long can they keep it up though in the face of a complete lack of interest in 3d for anything other than games, probably longer now that at least MS are using desktop chips in their console, what percentage of NVidia's chip sales last year were for Xbox?
Ok, I got it slightly wrong, I'd only heard of MiB for ppc. The MiB have a PPC alpha/beta/whatever aswell as a x86 Knoppix. There's some discussion in the knoppix forums and the images themselves (as pointed out by an AC) can be found on the ftp mirrors from the original link I gave.
The c't edition (the 3.4 version) has apparently removed a lot of software (like Lyx/Latex) so that Gnome (2.4) has returned!
Yep, the knoppix men in black privacy edition is a ppc knoppix derivative! You can find a list of mirrors for it here.
The DVD was never really publically distributed. It was created for a german conference last year sometime where it was distributed to attendees. Nobody ever seemed to have the desire and the bandwidth to put it online.
Everything has been called Pentium X since the pentium as nothing has yet come along worthy of the next name ... Sexium! Perhaps when they finally release a mainstream desktop 64 bit processor Intel will see if they can get Sex to sell it!
I don't have an issue with people charging for software, I don't EXPECT people to make something they've spent years developing free. However I hope that as time progresses more and more fundamental software will become free and hence the norm will be to make free software, unless you decide to try to reap the benefit of not using Free software to be in a "better" position to recoup the larger investment required to create the software. Free Software embodies the principle that you cannot work in isolation, and that the works of others are useful in creating your own works, it does force you to join in completely if you want to join in (well the LGPL is a half way house), but if you wish to use the pre-existing work to make your job easier you take that choice to sacrifice the ability to protect the work as your own (as it isn't, though some of it may be).
Doesn't that describe virtually every program every distributed? Everyone derives their knowledge from what has been discovered or created by people before. Any programmer who could write a program WITHOUT referencing other peoples ideas or work would probably deserve a clutch of nobel prizes.
To me the core argument for Free Software and against Software Patents!
On 2nd February just before 8am RTE Radio 1 in Ireland (the semi-state national broadcasters primary radio station) had an interview with a director of a computer training company here in Ireland. The piece was brought to the attention of the Irish Linux Users Group which subsequently picked apart the "computer experts" opinions. You can see a full transcript of the interview here, listen to the piece from rte themselves here or you can look through the threads on the mailing list to find an ogg transcoding of the interview.
The most controversial quote from the interview was:
but numerous inadequacies in the piece (from calling OpenOffice.org, StarOffice and Linux companies to blurring the two variants into one and not mentioning anti-virus software or care in opening attachments as part of the protection) were pointed out. Subsequently, the ilug put out a press release which addressed the main issues and the "computer expert" replied quite unfavourably! The fallout led to the ilug chairman calling for some silence (controversial itself but explained here and here). The response (it seems) of the ilug to the "expert" was sent and RTE acknowledged the ILUG position on their site. The "expert" has returned once more and it seems the ilug will issue a final response saying that: You can pick up all the ins and outs of the threads on the threaded archive, including the rumours that someone was going to start ringing employers to see if they concurred with their employees postings!Tell that to a family with 2-3 kids who can afford to buy them a game each a year. Do you think they don't want to keep playing their old games? A few games on every platform are classics, that we all wish we could keep forever (perhaps mame will ultimately provide a long term solution). I would love to be able to keep an atari ST, Amiga, nes, snes and ps2 around but in practice people have one platform they play games on. If your platform of choice links the games to the hardware then you wouldn't want to get attached to any games unless you want to be one of the minority who does keep multiple platforms around.
If you listen to the commentaries on the extended editions of the first two films it quickly becomes apparent that a lot of work was put into the script. I don't agree with a lot of their choices either, but I certainly think they spent as much time on the story as the visuals (well not as many man hours, but at least as much quality time and effort).
I don't like the skipping of Bombadil and the transferal of the Old Man Willow scene, and lines, to Fangorn. Tom and Fagorn both have great similarities in the book, but Fagorn can at least be persuaded to venture out into the world and join in, but Tom ... That being said, I can understand that decision but I feel the it really takes away from the journey, the world, the mystery and the balance of things. Tom's place in the book is bizarre and strange, but always left me feeling that the world was just that more complete for him. Also Tom serves to emphasise one very simple point, that it may be possible to defend the ring from Sauron to prevent him from getting it, but that would not be enough. They had to destroy the ring (and hence the world of the elves) or else Sauron would never be vanquished, and would most probably (certainly) have conquered regardless until the defender of the ring defended it alone for no purpose. Of course the fact that Jackson has really omitted anything which really gives you much of a clue into the history of middle-earth (Mithrandir is said once and he even fudges around with who holds the 3 rings, no mention of Bombadil, Radagast, little of Morgoth, the departure of the elves) means that perhaps you just have to accept the fact that he really did cut everything out which make LOTR magical and simply filmed the story behind it (ooh that's harsh, I like the films ... really)!
The compression of the Elves into Arwen only annoys me because it was obviously done to make the "love story" more complete (and to avoid introducing extra charecters). However the love story, which is a heart renderingly painful threeway in the books, is just aimless (at least in the theatrical release of ROTK. LOTR is very much a story of hope in so many ways, and the hopes and despair of Arwen, Aragorn and Eowyn should more tragically reflect this, or simply be dropped!
The burning of the shire is the biggest tragedy to me however. Not exactly because it is missing in and of itself, but because the entire story line of Sarumans long standing trechary is reflected once, in the barrels of pipeweed. Saruman was the leader of the Council and had for a very long time been leading a duplicitous life which had slowly sucked him under the power of Sauron. The ultimate indignity being when the hobbits finally end his reign without men, elves, dwarves etc. and it is also the moment when you realise that while Frodo took the burden and hence should be the hero, the other 3 hobbits all carried the fight well beyond their means and you could argue Merry and Pippin alone destroyed Saruman (first with their influence over Fagorn and then in the shire). Of course this whole plot begins back in Bree in FOTR and that brings in Sams faithful pony, abandoned at the Gates of Moria only for it to find it's way to Tom. I know how easy a decision it must have been to decide to cut all this, but for me it is a major let-down! Let me put it this way, I hope PJ is able to site back down and look at the trilogy when he cuts the extended ROTK and can get the funding to do some more pick ups so perhaps in a few years time (no rush, clean everything up while their at it and put it all to bed once and for all) he can release the 15+ hour version that really does at least bring what he has done as far as he can? I guess I'm mad!
Now on a final point, I haven't RTF entire A yet, but an awful lot of the things mentioned are explained on the extended edition director/writers commentaries. I'm still stunned I've managed to sit through those, but in fact it was easy, delightful in fact and a beautiful insight into the writing/storyboarding process of the film (and the obvious planning for the extended dvds as a whole means the extra dvds of footage actually provide an incredibly detailed insight into the entire troligoies production).
Final answer, I love the films but they are flawed because they would never have gotten funding to do the film I would love to see. Would the film I would like to have seen been a box office success? Let's just say that Jackson wrote it a lot closer to a marketing mans script than Tolkien ever did!
I am extremely curious why the parent is deemed a troll! The article itself asks the very question, and the parent answers by saying that while they love all the previous h2g2 stuff, they are so appalled by the concept of Disney producing this that the won't watch it! I think my own opinions are pretty similar! I suspect this will be another one of those films I wont see until 3am in a friends house (the one who seems to have every film ever made) in 10 years time when they decide to put it on and I don't fall asleep (or leave).
More serious and directly related to the article as a whole (and the presumably contentious issue of the parent), most people would not regard Disney as the best people to adapt a book to film, unless they are under 8 years old. Who here who has actually read the full trilogy (in five parts) actually thinks that anything which bears any resemblence to it will end up on screen? Disney's H2G2 could never have the dynamic of the books, it just wouldn't stack up to a bunch of marketeers! H2G2 has nothing which would appeal to a Disney audience without a complete rewrite. I expect it to be nothing more than a space adventure where an earth guy saves the world with a little help from their friends, all extraneous plot removed (the books are all random wandering, anything which seems like a plot is retrofitted in by the readers mind to make them think they have a clue whats going on) and lots of cute creatures (ah look at the mice, don't they have pretty singing voices).
Let's face it, the odds on a Disney H2G2 actually being "the film" of H2G2 (as Peter Jacksons is now "the film" of LOTR) are at least 42:1! I'm sure we'll see another attempt further down the road, I just hope we don't have to wait until Disneys IP rights expire for this to happen because current trends would suggest that we would then never ever see anyone else get their hands on this material. I don't know what sort of a deal Disney has on this though so perhaps their is hope for a decent H2G2 maybe another decade or two down the road.
Now if Terry Gilliam or someone was Directing then ... but imdb suggests the writer/director is Garth Jennings whose only credit is Title Designer on the Ali G TV show!
Yes, if it is using Free components! Let me take a simple example which demonstrates why I would still like to see the LGPL being used for libraries and similar building blocks. Imagine Adobe is considering bringing Photoshop to Linux, would you rather they wrote their own (jpeg/toolkit/compression) libaries, picked up a BSD/Public domain one, patched an LGPL one and distributed their improvements or just said to hell with Linux, we won't release?
I see the long term victory of Free Software being derived from a continuous chain where users who need software to perform specific tasks, find that each year less and less of the software they require is commercial and more is Free. As pieces are created totally Freely, they lessen the itching of developers to work on that area, and set them looking for new challenges. Any piece of software (such as QT) which requires commercial licensing is always a potential target. Any piece of software which is essentially a basic software building block should be used consistently, and just because someone is trying to write a commercial program shouldn't mean they have to re-invent lots of wheels and provide their users with a less satisfactory solution. Free software is about the users freedom, and if everyone (commercial and Free developers) works on the same code for the basic building blocks, then the user is in a better position (the core of their system is more solid/developed). If only Free software authors can use Free software libraries etc, then Free software has to create everything before it is a valid platform. The easier it is for commercial developers to bring their work across, the easier it is for the user to have a complete solution, the larger the "market" for people to write Free alternatives to remaining commercial programs and the more people are working on Free software as a whole as they can assemble the system they need to get their work done.
Pretty much exactly what i was going to say! Having just got a free gamecube I was quite surprised at how loud it is! Looks like I might have a use for it now, other than trying to figure out how to play the 2 games I was given with it, both in German!
Radon seems to be the most massive noble gas, but I guess it is useless here "because of its short half life (the longest life isotope has a half life of less than 4 days)".