I would add to #1: that in some cases you don't get the whole detail, and are left wondering a little bit. For example, who really are the Wild Men, and what is their connection with the giant statues (not the two kinds on the river, the other statues on the switchbacks of that one mountain whose name I can't remember). Things like that, where you have to go back and read The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales to really get the truth.
In fact, some of those things have never been entirely explained IIRC. Tolkien writes a world that's like real life - you can never wrap up all the threads. And since there's always this level of uncertainty, it leads you to always consider the deeper motivations behind things that otherwise you would take for granted, like elves hating dwarfs, etc. You think "I wonder what part of the story Tolkien isn't telling me in that case?"
I sincerely hope that you do not find yourself disappointed. It usually seems that folks with the most emotional investment in a movie beforehand turn out to be the most devastated when it doesn't live up to their hopes. I'm looking forward to it too, but I'm trying to not look forward to it too much, if you know what I mean.
It was a children's novel - note the parenthetical asides that he writes in The Hobbit that he doesn't use in the other books. IIRC I read somewhere that he used the asides because he felt it would make the story work better for kids, but then got away from that for the other books because he felt it was too distracting from the story.
My personal favorite would have to be Beatrix' theme from FFIX ("protecting my devotion?") - it starts off as kind of an ominous theme when she's a bad guy, grows more pensive as she questions her allegiance to the mad Queen, and eventually becomes triumphant as she helps Steiner defend Alexandria.
Runners-up from FFIX: the theme from the game where the frog-king Cid has to sneak up and steal the key from the red monster, and the swamp frog-catching music. Both are laugh-out-loud funny to listen to, IMHO.
I'll have to go back and play FFVII; right now I'm having problems remembering the tunes from it as well:)
Oh, come on, surely you can put together a better Microsoft troll than that - I've seen you do it in the past:).
Corrupt and powerful governments will act evilly no matter what tools they have, and I don't see how the use of Linux has made their actions much easier. They could just as easily spy on dissidents, etc. with Microsoft products.
And in fact, if you are a dissident in China, it is probably safer for you to download independent Linux sources and compile your own apps, than it is for you to use Microsoft China's products and hope that they haven't added any government-required back doors. The government's standardization on a platform that is available from many independent, non-government-controlled sources besides the official government version is a Good Thing for the people of China.
But hey, to the average Slashbot, torturing political prisoners in concentration camps is preferable to Microsoft,
whose only crime is that given the choice, some people like to buy their stuff.
I don't think anyone here is in favor of torturing political prisoners. And I, for one, would love to be given the choice of whether or not to buy Microsoft. Unfortunately, in many cases Microsoft's actions have been concentrated on removing that choice. So I have little sympathy for when they find themselves in a situation where a government has removed them from being a choice - turnabout is fair play, says I.
My company used Netscape email. We're gradually being Microsoftened. Our email system availability and average message throughput have both decreased as a result, and I'm not even counting productivity losses due to viruses that we couldn't even get before. At one point last year the whole company's email was down for a week due to an Exchange bug (well, except for those of us still on Unix mail at the time).
Be thankful that you've missed the whole Microsoft embrace vis-à-vis email - I don't know how they can sell this crap to people.
That is an entirely too unconcerned attitude for this forum. C'mon, if we didn't argue about minutiae here, whatever would we talk about?:)
Yes, the attack robots from the future may get both of us, Mr. AC, but I'll die telling them how inconsistent their timing, appearance, and bad Austrian accents are.
I think that, if done properly, Hyperion could set a new mark for sci-fi movies in the same way that the Matrix did. There's an incredible futuristic universe, blatant disregard for causality, undertones of a vast conspiracy against humanity that are gradually uncovered as the story goes on, the trememdous blossoming of human potential as humans adapt to the various planets that they're on, and Catholic priests that commit suicide every time they're in a hurry. Oh, and the power over life and death. How could I forget?
Tough to present well, in the sense that you have to have enough of this in the first movie to get the audience hooked, while still preserving important story points for the future sequels. But wow, just think if they pulled it off!
Yeah, the whole time travel thing is a little bonkers too. For example, if you know that your previous Terminators failed, why would you send the next one only after giving the Connors some time to prepare? I would have sent the T-1000 to a time that was about 1 day after the original Terminator failed, and sent the Terminatrix in about a day after T-1000 failed, or even the week before.
Methinks these human-hating machines from the future have a very linear sense of time...
I think that was my original point exactly - if you want to do only the things that Windows lets you do, then it works just fine. From the secretarial perspective you are using, it's more like a PlayStation than a Computer - just a tool to use to meet narrowly-defined ends, not really a general-purpose computer at all.
As far as what I would want to do differently, I'm actually thinking of the times when I'm forced to mess around in VB on Windows. It is entirely painful every time until I work my way of thinking around to doing it the "Windows way", and then after that it is only somewhat painful to deal with.
And even apart from coding, it's not a foregone conclusion that my boss or his secretary are really getting their work done more efficiently under the Windows way. Maybe they would work better with a different window manager, or some other simple tweak like that. But the Windows attitude is that the boys in Redmond have picked the best way for you to work, and you'd better like it.
I'm sure that Microsoft does a lot of UI research, and through that investment they are slowly coming to find out some of the UI improvements...that Apple figured out a while back:) But they still retain the basic one-user-model-fits-all approach, which is why people are now complaining about Windows XP looking too childish. In an effort to suit the stupidest users, they've alienated the more knowledgeable user base. And they're going to keep alternating back and forth until they figure out that real people do work in different ways, and Bill doesn't always Know Best. Except that conclusion isn't in the marketing plan, unfortunately.
Hmmm, I haven't seen anything like those described here. If they only work in web browsers on Windows, then I suppose I could just morph it into an entirely Microsoft-oriented rant, though.
Y'know, reading the comments here, I had no idea what I'd been missing. You people have been stuck with ads that are literally taking over your computers, and not in the old-fashioned millions-of-onexit-porn-windows sense, either. And all you can say is "well, that's pretty annoying, so I don't go to that site anymore"?? Wake up!
At least now I know that everyone who crows about how IE is such a superior browser have been just blowing smoke for the last few years - using the supposedly "inferior" Netscape browser, all I seem to miss out on are annoying advertisements. Sure, I'll admit that Netscape has problems, but I can honestly say that nothing about using NS 4.7x over the past few years has ever been as annoying as having an ad take over my whole computer screen the way it's described here.
Face it - for all your IE boosterism, you've been using and applauding a superior marketing platform, nothing more. Considering that Microsoft is basically an advertising business, maybe this shouldn't be as much of a surprise to me...
...my god, I'm about to turn into one of those lynx-using elitists. Ack!
There's a reason for that - if you're not trying to use Windows in one of the one or two ways that it wants to let you, you can't get it to work at all. You are interpreting lack of choice to mean ease of use. In reality, getting Windows to do something that the Windows authors never thought of or didn't expect users to do (and thus never documented) is about as tough as getting Linux to do something undocumented.
...except of course for the bazillion people who have tried to do the same thing in Linux and are happy to share tips, detailed info, and code with you to help you get things done. All for free.
Anybody who purposely goes out of their way to find a more difficult way
to do a task because they mistakenly think it's more "advanced" is obviously insecure.
I agree. All you people who are walking around are obviously insecure - crawling was much easier. Why did you go to the trouble to find a more difficult and hazard-prone way to get around the room?
What's that you say? Walking lets you get the whole locomotion thing done in a tougher but ultimately more functional way? Well I'll be damned - maybe we shouldn't always take the easiest way out, then.
THE ABILITY TO USE THE UNIX COMMAND LINE DOES NOT MAKE YOU
A GENIUS!
That is very true. But it is not true that the command line is mistakenly thought to be more advanced - that is not a mistake at all. It is more functional in many cases to use the command line rather than a GUI. Just because it's harder does not mean that it was a mistake, any more than the fact that it was harder makes its practitioners any smarter.
Re:Wow, a dashboard linux box running windows, ama
on
Dashboard Linux
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm, I'll look when I get home. If so, that's an even lamer ad than I'd thought. Some ad agency had to fake a Mac email program and paste it onto a Windows computer. I can't believe they went to so much work to make their advertisement incorrect - it boggles the mind.
I'll have to get those, and brush up on my high school French.
Hmm, I wonder if a lot of my current outlook on life could be explained by early exposure to cartoons of ancient artefacts that turn out to have sci-fi uses? Psychology master students, have I a thesis for you...
Oh wow, somebody else actually saw that cartoon too? Man, that theme song is going to be stuck in my head for all day now:) Just let me know when that show ends up on the Cartoon Network, or on DVD.
Re:Wow, a dashboard linux box running windows, ama
on
Dashboard Linux
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Hmm, just like the Best Buy circular I got yesterday - the front was all about a Sony Vaio Pentium 4 with Windows XP, but of course the screen shot was showing Mac OS (and not OS X either). You may have seen it - the screenshot was an email program with a mail being composed about getting one of the new N'Sync bobble-head (there's a redundant statement) dolls. If technology companies can't get their ads straight, it's no wonder that the rest of the world is so confused about what's what.
Slashdot Mirror
That's only if you didn't already upgrade to play EverCrack :)
I would add to #1: that in some cases you don't get the whole detail, and are left wondering a little bit. For example, who really are the Wild Men, and what is their connection with the giant statues (not the two kinds on the river, the other statues on the switchbacks of that one mountain whose name I can't remember). Things like that, where you have to go back and read The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales to really get the truth.
In fact, some of those things have never been entirely explained IIRC. Tolkien writes a world that's like real life - you can never wrap up all the threads. And since there's always this level of uncertainty, it leads you to always consider the deeper motivations behind things that otherwise you would take for granted, like elves hating dwarfs, etc. You think "I wonder what part of the story Tolkien isn't telling me in that case?"
Unificator?
I sincerely hope that you do not find yourself disappointed. It usually seems that folks with the most emotional investment in a movie beforehand turn out to be the most devastated when it doesn't live up to their hopes. I'm looking forward to it too, but I'm trying to not look forward to it too much, if you know what I mean.
Although maybe your weed will get you over that :)
How about the international gross, though? That's what kept Waterworld above water.
Although I agree that "The Postman" the novella was better, the movie wasn't too bad. And it had a Tom Petty cameo - can't beat that!
It was a children's novel - note the parenthetical asides that he writes in The Hobbit that he doesn't use in the other books. IIRC I read somewhere that he used the asides because he felt it would make the story work better for kids, but then got away from that for the other books because he felt it was too distracting from the story.
New /. poll: best-loved Final Fantasy Theme
My personal favorite would have to be Beatrix' theme from FFIX ("protecting my devotion?") - it starts off as kind of an ominous theme when she's a bad guy, grows more pensive as she questions her allegiance to the mad Queen, and eventually becomes triumphant as she helps Steiner defend Alexandria.
Runners-up from FFIX: the theme from the game where the frog-king Cid has to sneak up and steal the key from the red monster, and the swamp frog-catching music. Both are laugh-out-loud funny to listen to, IMHO.
I'll have to go back and play FFVII; right now I'm having problems remembering the tunes from it as well :)
That was entirely on-topic, el moderato estupido. If you'd seen the skit about Happy Fun Ball, you'd know that it's easily more dangerous than MGS2.
Oh, come on, surely you can put together a better Microsoft troll than that - I've seen you do it in the past :).
Corrupt and powerful governments will act evilly no matter what tools they have, and I don't see how the use of Linux has made their actions much easier. They could just as easily spy on dissidents, etc. with Microsoft products.
And in fact, if you are a dissident in China, it is probably safer for you to download independent Linux sources and compile your own apps, than it is for you to use Microsoft China's products and hope that they haven't added any government-required back doors. The government's standardization on a platform that is available from many independent, non-government-controlled sources besides the official government version is a Good Thing for the people of China.
I don't think anyone here is in favor of torturing political prisoners. And I, for one, would love to be given the choice of whether or not to buy Microsoft. Unfortunately, in many cases Microsoft's actions have been concentrated on removing that choice. So I have little sympathy for when they find themselves in a situation where a government has removed them from being a choice - turnabout is fair play, says I.
Yawn. Either in cron or rc.local:
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
Point it at your own local sources, of course, not the official Debian ones, so that you have control of the patch level of your machines.
I agree with the other poster - maybe someday Microsoft will be easier to remotely administer, but that day has not come yet.
My company used Netscape email. We're gradually being Microsoftened. Our email system availability and average message throughput have both decreased as a result, and I'm not even counting productivity losses due to viruses that we couldn't even get before. At one point last year the whole company's email was down for a week due to an Exchange bug (well, except for those of us still on Unix mail at the time).
Be thankful that you've missed the whole Microsoft embrace vis-à-vis email - I don't know how they can sell this crap to people.
That is an entirely too unconcerned attitude for this forum. C'mon, if we didn't argue about minutiae here, whatever would we talk about? :)
Yes, the attack robots from the future may get both of us, Mr. AC, but I'll die telling them how inconsistent their timing, appearance, and bad Austrian accents are.
So God is something like Steve Jobs, then?
Wait, I've just had a horrible thought - you know how you never see God and Steve in the same place at the same time? ...
I think that, if done properly, Hyperion could set a new mark for sci-fi movies in the same way that the Matrix did. There's an incredible futuristic universe, blatant disregard for causality, undertones of a vast conspiracy against humanity that are gradually uncovered as the story goes on, the trememdous blossoming of human potential as humans adapt to the various planets that they're on, and Catholic priests that commit suicide every time they're in a hurry. Oh, and the power over life and death. How could I forget?
Tough to present well, in the sense that you have to have enough of this in the first movie to get the audience hooked, while still preserving important story points for the future sequels. But wow, just think if they pulled it off!
Yeah, the whole time travel thing is a little bonkers too. For example, if you know that your previous Terminators failed, why would you send the next one only after giving the Connors some time to prepare? I would have sent the T-1000 to a time that was about 1 day after the original Terminator failed, and sent the Terminatrix in about a day after T-1000 failed, or even the week before.
Methinks these human-hating machines from the future have a very linear sense of time...
I think that was my original point exactly - if you want to do only the things that Windows lets you do, then it works just fine. From the secretarial perspective you are using, it's more like a PlayStation than a Computer - just a tool to use to meet narrowly-defined ends, not really a general-purpose computer at all.
As far as what I would want to do differently, I'm actually thinking of the times when I'm forced to mess around in VB on Windows. It is entirely painful every time until I work my way of thinking around to doing it the "Windows way", and then after that it is only somewhat painful to deal with.
And even apart from coding, it's not a foregone conclusion that my boss or his secretary are really getting their work done more efficiently under the Windows way. Maybe they would work better with a different window manager, or some other simple tweak like that. But the Windows attitude is that the boys in Redmond have picked the best way for you to work, and you'd better like it.
I'm sure that Microsoft does a lot of UI research, and through that investment they are slowly coming to find out some of the UI improvements...that Apple figured out a while back :) But they still retain the basic one-user-model-fits-all approach, which is why people are now complaining about Windows XP looking too childish. In an effort to suit the stupidest users, they've alienated the more knowledgeable user base. And they're going to keep alternating back and forth until they figure out that real people do work in different ways, and Bill doesn't always Know Best. Except that conclusion isn't in the marketing plan, unfortunately.
Hmmm, I haven't seen anything like those described here. If they only work in web browsers on Windows, then I suppose I could just morph it into an entirely Microsoft-oriented rant, though.
Y'know, reading the comments here, I had no idea what I'd been missing. You people have been stuck with ads that are literally taking over your computers, and not in the old-fashioned millions-of-onexit-porn-windows sense, either. And all you can say is "well, that's pretty annoying, so I don't go to that site anymore"?? Wake up!
At least now I know that everyone who crows about how IE is such a superior browser have been just blowing smoke for the last few years - using the supposedly "inferior" Netscape browser, all I seem to miss out on are annoying advertisements. Sure, I'll admit that Netscape has problems, but I can honestly say that nothing about using NS 4.7x over the past few years has ever been as annoying as having an ad take over my whole computer screen the way it's described here.
Face it - for all your IE boosterism, you've been using and applauding a superior marketing platform, nothing more. Considering that Microsoft is basically an advertising business, maybe this shouldn't be as much of a surprise to me...
...my god, I'm about to turn into one of those lynx-using elitists. Ack!
There's a reason for that - if you're not trying to use Windows in one of the one or two ways that it wants to let you, you can't get it to work at all. You are interpreting lack of choice to mean ease of use. In reality, getting Windows to do something that the Windows authors never thought of or didn't expect users to do (and thus never documented) is about as tough as getting Linux to do something undocumented.
...except of course for the bazillion people who have tried to do the same thing in Linux and are happy to share tips, detailed info, and code with you to help you get things done. All for free.
And previous efforts to name things more descriptively haven't ended well - cf. Killustrator :)
I agree. All you people who are walking around are obviously insecure - crawling was much easier. Why did you go to the trouble to find a more difficult and hazard-prone way to get around the room?
What's that you say? Walking lets you get the whole locomotion thing done in a tougher but ultimately more functional way? Well I'll be damned - maybe we shouldn't always take the easiest way out, then.
That is very true. But it is not true that the command line is mistakenly thought to be more advanced - that is not a mistake at all. It is more functional in many cases to use the command line rather than a GUI. Just because it's harder does not mean that it was a mistake, any more than the fact that it was harder makes its practitioners any smarter.
Hmmm, I'll look when I get home. If so, that's an even lamer ad than I'd thought. Some ad agency had to fake a Mac email program and paste it onto a Windows computer. I can't believe they went to so much work to make their advertisement incorrect - it boggles the mind.
I'll have to get those, and brush up on my high school French.
Hmm, I wonder if a lot of my current outlook on life could be explained by early exposure to cartoons of ancient artefacts that turn out to have sci-fi uses? Psychology master students, have I a thesis for you...
Oh wow, somebody else actually saw that cartoon too? Man, that theme song is going to be stuck in my head for all day now :) Just let me know when that show ends up on the Cartoon Network, or on DVD.
Hmm, just like the Best Buy circular I got yesterday - the front was all about a Sony Vaio Pentium 4 with Windows XP, but of course the screen shot was showing Mac OS (and not OS X either). You may have seen it - the screenshot was an email program with a mail being composed about getting one of the new N'Sync bobble-head (there's a redundant statement) dolls. If technology companies can't get their ads straight, it's no wonder that the rest of the world is so confused about what's what.