IMHO the further you get from the Radio Series, the worse the books get (don't get me wrong they are all brilliant).
If you ask me the Radio Series is the definative version. It's the original medium. It's the one which Douglas wrote the story for. The whole experience was designed to sound like a rock album... and it did.
In some respects, turning a Radio Series into a Film is easier. But it's also a lot harder. No matter how good the special effects in the film, on the Radio the pictures are better.
I'm of the opinion that the reason HHGTTHG: The Movie was snarled up for 20 years was Douglas himself. He had a vision, he wanted to translate it to the screen. But I'm of the opinon that he didn't really know what it was he wanted.
Given enough time he'd have given us something I'm sure. It would have been totally different to anything he'd already given us. Would it have been any good? I'm not sure. But I'd have rushed out to the cinema to watch it.
Okay. So now Douglas is no more. And somebody is going to translate his works into a movie. If they and take what they need from the various HHGTTG source material, adding just a dash here and there to get the pieces to mesh - great. But if they start rewriting vast tracts of Douglas's work... hideous.
So for now I'll be cautions. I'll hope for the best. But I'm not going to celebrate just yet. After all, the movie business has a past record of raping decent stories...
Not having the internet to look stuff up is like a form of death. I really can't function without it. I Just dont do treeware any more. Even the shelf containing my O'Reilly zoo is there merely as a sort geeky form of modern art/territory marker.
The only bit of treeware I require these days is the dictionary - so I've got one in every room of the house.
Also, why bother using a card that requires some special driver? Every run of the mill Ethernet card that I've thrown in a box works just fine without any tweaking or downloading special drivers.
Well, if you get offered a couple of motherboards with the nForce chipset onboard at a really good price, it'd be nice if you could actually do somethng with them.
Besides, somebody had to write the drivers for all of them run-of-the-mill cards at some point. Or should we just have one card with one driver? Don't think so. Different chipsets have different features, so it's nice to have drivers written to get the most out of each set.
Could this be vapourware designed at reducing sales of AMD's 64-bit Athlon? As in:
"Well, I would but an Athlon, but a Intel's P5 is just around the corner"
Personally I'll withold any judgments on this until I read the first third party review of the actual chip.
Re:Yet another way to turn the nickle
on
The Borg MegaCube
·
· Score: 1
Whereas I agree with almost everything you say, I have to note that the watching some of the "goodies" included with "The Fellowship of the Ring", it's clear that Peter Jackson was intending to produce an extended DVD right from the start, and that DVD was to be the definative version of the film. Indeed several times you hear people commenting that certain scenes are being filmed for the DVD, not for the theatrical release.
As far as the film goes the extended DVD is my preferred version.
As for the "goodies"... well I can take them or leave them. For most films, however, the "goodies" are only there to stop us from questioning how come DVDs cost more when they are supposed to be cheaper to produce than Videos.
The actor who will follow in the footsteps of such popular Dr Whos as Tom Baker, has not yet been considered, she said. Possible candidates include Richard E Grant, who is appearing in a BBC internet version of Doctor Who, Paul McGann, who starred in the 1996 version, and Alan Davies, who has been linked to the role in the past.
Oh god, Withnail, Marwood, or Jonathan Creek....
Bit like an election really. Three candidates, none of whom grab me as worthwhile. As with elections, it looks like the apathetic have it.
Still, this:
The BBC hopes that Doctor Who... will once more become a fixture of Saturday early evening viewing.
Doesn't exacly strike me with much confidence that this comeback is a sure thing.
This is news? Besides he's quoting the wrong Law!
on
The Origin of Murphy's Law
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A single manufacturer is selling a "cordless cell phone headsets" which no mobile currently supports, yet somehow it's the death knell for Bluetooth, purely because it's technically superior. Does this strike anyone as a pointless product?
Betamax was better then VHS, but it's even deader than my favourite OS. So I'm still going not going to hold my breath.
Every damn hospital I've ever set foot in outright forbids the use of cell phones on hospital premises. (Use as defined in having it switched on)
But then one poster claimed mobiles in waiting rooms would be OK, and that Mobiles are not really the problems those signs make out...
We trust doctors... People who are ill are delicate... And the machines must be delicate too... So I must turn off my mobile.... I could hurt somebody... They wouldnt lie.
But then how may of us would happily lie to get mobiles banned from ALL waiting rooms, cinemas, busses & bus stations, trains & train stations, outside my bedroom window in the middle of the freaking night...
how long before someone develops a cell phone that can be dunked in alcohol or run through the autoclave to sterilize it
Yeah, then people will forget clean them.
The basic problem is that antibiotics has made us all blase about the dangers of Bacteria. So even basic hygene measures, like washing your hands, are being ignored. Every doctor I've had has washed their hands AFTER examining me. But I remember as a child they also did so BEFORE examining me... not seen them do that for years.
But not to worry, soon our lazy approach to the use of antibiotics will make most bacteria resistant in a decade or two... so we'll soon get the knack again one day.
Sarcasm aside, I'm sure I read something to back this up... 10% of patients in UK hospitals catch somthing whilst in hospital owing to poor hygene (and it can't be mobiles as they've always been banned).
In your opinion. Personally I dislike sendmail, but love BIND (just don't run it as root). But then I dislike qmail as much as sendmail, and djbdns strikes me as mildly braindamaged - so I'd hate to see them installed by default.
An ideal system would have the entire OS as packages... then all you need to do in to install your favourites....
No. I mean portupgrade trashes/usr/local/etc/apache. Not the port, PORTUPGRADE - the thing the article was talking about.
Before a port is installed by portupgrade THE OLD PORT IS DELETED. Which I've discovered - twice - trashes the current config directory. Hence the "run interactive & make a backup" caveat.
Reasonable article.... But running an automatic portupgrage without paying attention to what's actually being upgraded is a really bad move.
Upgrading Apache for instance will trash your running config. Whereas MySQL is a bitch to upgrade as by default it will fail if there is an existing DB.
I find portupgrade -ai is a much better option.
And a backup of/etc/ and/usr/local/etc would be a good idea first....
For years I've dreamed of getting hold of all the old episodes of "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue".... Now I can, and it's not going to cost me a penny more than my 80-quid licence fee.... And then there is the 1001 other things that springing to mind. No, 1002 things.... No 1003.... No,...
I love the Beeb. It's the one of the few things that makes me proud to be British.
Although I wonder how this announcement will effect UK TV - the commercial broadcaster which mainly runs BBC repeats (and, last time I checked, is 40% owned by Aunty).
Excellent news....
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I love diamonds. I really do. Staring into a diamond is like standing in a room full of mirrors. Even uncut diamonds are beautiful - I've got a nice uncut diamond brought back from Africa by a relative generations ago.
But it's always irritated me that the price of diamond has been kept artificially high by DeBeers. Given a choice between an artificial diamonds and an artificial price.... I'll take the artificial diamond.
Besides, it's not as if I'd ever be able tell the differance. Unless of course DeBeers starts supplying a fourier transform infrared spectrometer free with every diamond. Which, as I'm a techie who likes technical toys, is the only thing that would make me cough up the DeBeers premium.
Hmmm, I thought Inspiron's had ATI RAGE Mobility M4 graphics. Running X on mine at 640x480 was real easy, as was 800x600. I will admit that getting native resolution is a pain, but such issues are really down to the XFree86 Project, not the OS.
Slight errors in syntax when using ports
So the OS is at fault when you tell it to do something stoopid? You can only make such mistakes if you is root, and the world and his dog know that being root is DANGEROUS! I once fooked a Linux box when I accidentally did an rm-rf/dev but blaming the OS for my mistake would be churlish.
The configuration system doesn't allow for small changes easily
Right. And the SysV rc[0-6].d system is intuitive is it? I've always found BSD OSs much easier to reconfigure. The new RC subsystem has made this even easier.
like getting rid of an IP
ifconfig fxp1 inet 192.168.9.1 delete
Then delete the relevant line from/etc/rc.conf if it's permanemt
Linux now has: autohardware detection, good drivers, sample configs for virtually every system
As does FreeBSD.
lots and lots and lots of documentation.
Yes. And most of it is out of date crap. I picked FreeBSD because finding useful Linux documentation proved so tiresome.
How is BSD "friendlier"?
Because the core team concentrate on doing things in a thoughtful, considered, and logical way; with major changes being implemented gradually and then only after a full peer review; and versioning system that makes sense.
Oh yes, we also don't spawn a new distro every time somebody decides they want to do stuff their own way.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you want to be really geeky, read the scripts at the same time too.
A word of caution. DONT start quoting large chunks of the scripts in public....
Hell, if it wasn't for the RIAA...
Last I knew BBC stood for BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation. Nowt to do with the America....
Hasn't Aunty has decided to put their entire archive online? How soon before anyone who cares to can listen to HHGTTG for free?
Douglas Adams for one, who worked on Doctor Who
Indeed, some classic Doctor Who episodes were actually the work of Douglas. Not Douglas the Writer - Douglas the Producer.
HHGTTG is very well tailored to the book medium
The Radio Series came first.
IMHO the further you get from the Radio Series, the worse the books get (don't get me wrong they are all brilliant).
If you ask me the Radio Series is the definative version. It's the original medium. It's the one which Douglas wrote the story for. The whole experience was designed to sound like a rock album... and it did.
In some respects, turning a Radio Series into a Film is easier. But it's also a lot harder. No matter how good the special effects in the film, on the Radio the pictures are better.
I'm of the opinion that the reason HHGTTHG: The Movie was snarled up for 20 years was Douglas himself. He had a vision, he wanted to translate it to the screen. But I'm of the opinon that he didn't really know what it was he wanted.
Given enough time he'd have given us something I'm sure. It would have been totally different to anything he'd already given us. Would it have been any good? I'm not sure. But I'd have rushed out to the cinema to watch it.
Okay. So now Douglas is no more. And somebody is going to translate his works into a movie. If they and take what they need from the various HHGTTG source material, adding just a dash here and there to get the pieces to mesh - great. But if they start rewriting vast tracts of Douglas's work... hideous.
So for now I'll be cautions. I'll hope for the best. But I'm not going to celebrate just yet. After all, the movie business has a past record of raping decent stories...
Not having the internet to look stuff up is like a form of death. I really can't function without it. I Just dont do treeware any more. Even the shelf containing my O'Reilly zoo is there merely as a sort geeky form of modern art/territory marker.
The only bit of treeware I require these days is the dictionary - so I've got one in every room of the house.
Also, why bother using a card that requires some special driver? Every run of the mill Ethernet card that I've thrown in a box works just fine without any tweaking or downloading special drivers.
Well, if you get offered a couple of motherboards with the nForce chipset onboard at a really good price, it'd be nice if you could actually do somethng with them.
Besides, somebody had to write the drivers for all of them run-of-the-mill cards at some point. Or should we just have one card with one driver? Don't think so. Different chipsets have different features, so it's nice to have drivers written to get the most out of each set.
they used to be spelt in the UK before some jumped up Victorians decided it would be `better` to spell them more like the French
Your Evidence?
The way I heard it was that Webster decided to "fix" spellings when publishing his dictionary.
Could this be vapourware designed at reducing sales of AMD's 64-bit Athlon? As in:
"Well, I would but an Athlon, but a Intel's P5 is just around the corner"
Personally I'll withold any judgments on this until I read the first third party review of the actual chip.
Whereas I agree with almost everything you say, I have to note that the watching some of the "goodies" included with "The Fellowship of the Ring", it's clear that Peter Jackson was intending to produce an extended DVD right from the start, and that DVD was to be the definative version of the film. Indeed several times you hear people commenting that certain scenes are being filmed for the DVD, not for the theatrical release.
As far as the film goes the extended DVD is my preferred version.
As for the "goodies"... well I can take them or leave them. For most films, however, the "goodies" are only there to stop us from questioning how come DVDs cost more when they are supposed to be cheaper to produce than Videos.
The actor who will follow in the footsteps of such popular Dr Whos as Tom Baker, has not yet been considered, she said. Possible candidates include Richard E Grant, who is appearing in a BBC internet version of Doctor Who, Paul McGann, who starred in the 1996 version, and Alan Davies, who has been linked to the role in the past.
Oh god, Withnail, Marwood, or Jonathan Creek....
Bit like an election really. Three candidates, none of whom grab me as worthwhile. As with elections, it looks like the apathetic have it.
Still, this:
The BBC hopes that Doctor Who... will once more become a fixture of Saturday early evening viewing.
Doesn't exacly strike me with much confidence that this comeback is a sure thing.
According to FOLDOC, Murphy's Law is:
If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it.
The FOLDOC entry (from the Hacker's Lexicon I believe) also mentions the rocket sled thing....
A single manufacturer is selling a "cordless cell phone headsets" which no mobile currently supports, yet somehow it's the death knell for Bluetooth, purely because it's technically superior. Does this strike anyone as a pointless product?
Betamax was better then VHS, but it's even deader than my favourite OS. So I'm still going not going to hold my breath.
Every damn hospital I've ever set foot in outright forbids the use of cell phones on hospital premises. (Use as defined in having it switched on)
But then one poster claimed mobiles in waiting rooms would be OK, and that Mobiles are not really the problems those signs make out...
We trust doctors... People who are ill are delicate... And the machines must be delicate too... So I must turn off my mobile.... I could hurt somebody... They wouldnt lie.
But then how may of us would happily lie to get mobiles banned from ALL waiting rooms, cinemas, busses & bus stations, trains & train stations, outside my bedroom window in the middle of the freaking night...
how long before someone develops a cell phone that can be dunked in alcohol or run through the autoclave to sterilize it
Yeah, then people will forget clean them.
The basic problem is that antibiotics has made us all blase about the dangers of Bacteria. So even basic hygene measures, like washing your hands, are being ignored. Every doctor I've had has washed their hands AFTER examining me. But I remember as a child they also did so BEFORE examining me... not seen them do that for years.
But not to worry, soon our lazy approach to the use of antibiotics will make most bacteria resistant in a decade or two... so we'll soon get the knack again one day.
Sarcasm aside, I'm sure I read something to back this up... 10% of patients in UK hospitals catch somthing whilst in hospital owing to poor hygene (and it can't be mobiles as they've always been banned).
And better alternatives exist
In your opinion. Personally I dislike sendmail, but love BIND (just don't run it as root). But then I dislike qmail as much as sendmail, and djbdns strikes me as mildly braindamaged - so I'd hate to see them installed by default.
An ideal system would have the entire OS as packages... then all you need to do in to install your favourites....
Kewl, looks like you're right. But I I do a portupgrade -f apache+mod_ssl-1.3.28+2.8.15_1, I get this before:
/usr/local/etc/apache/httpd.conf
/usr/local/etc/apache/httpd.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel - 20859 Aug 22 12:46
And this after.
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel - 47887 Sep 1 19:44
So it also looks like I'm right. Sure glad I've got a backup.....
No. I mean portupgrade trashes /usr/local/etc/apache. Not the port, PORTUPGRADE - the thing the article was talking about.
Before a port is installed by portupgrade THE OLD PORT IS DELETED. Which I've discovered - twice - trashes the current config directory. Hence the "run interactive & make a backup" caveat.
No, /usr/local/etc/apache/ does get trashed.
Reasonable article.... But running an automatic portupgrage without paying attention to what's actually being upgraded is a really bad move.
Upgrading Apache for instance will trash your running config. Whereas MySQL is a bitch to upgrade as by default it will fail if there is an existing DB.
I find portupgrade -ai is a much better option.
And a backup of /etc/ and /usr/local/etc would be a good idea first....
For years I've dreamed of getting hold of all the old episodes of "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue".... Now I can, and it's not going to cost me a penny more than my 80-quid licence fee.... And then there is the 1001 other things that springing to mind. No, 1002 things.... No 1003.... No,...
I love the Beeb. It's the one of the few things that makes me proud to be British.
Although I wonder how this announcement will effect UK TV - the commercial broadcaster which mainly runs BBC repeats (and, last time I checked, is 40% owned by Aunty).
I love diamonds. I really do. Staring into a diamond is like standing in a room full of mirrors. Even uncut diamonds are beautiful - I've got a nice uncut diamond brought back from Africa by a relative generations ago.
But it's always irritated me that the price of diamond has been kept artificially high by DeBeers. Given a choice between an artificial diamonds and an artificial price.... I'll take the artificial diamond.
Besides, it's not as if I'd ever be able tell the differance. Unless of course DeBeers starts supplying a fourier transform infrared spectrometer free with every diamond. Which, as I'm a techie who likes technical toys, is the only thing that would make me cough up the DeBeers premium.
Well, it certainly looks like space-craft I'd happilly ride in. Yet I want the Brits building a rocket out of a cemet-mixer to win.
(Nvidia driver incompatable)
/dev but blaming the OS for my mistake would be churlish.
/etc/rc.conf if it's permanemt
Hmmm, I thought Inspiron's had ATI RAGE Mobility M4 graphics. Running X on mine at 640x480 was real easy, as was 800x600. I will admit that getting native resolution is a pain, but such issues are really down to the XFree86 Project, not the OS.
Slight errors in syntax when using ports
So the OS is at fault when you tell it to do something stoopid? You can only make such mistakes if you is root, and the world and his dog know that being root is DANGEROUS! I once fooked a Linux box when I accidentally did an rm-rf
The configuration system doesn't allow for small changes easily
Right. And the SysV rc[0-6].d system is intuitive is it? I've always found BSD OSs much easier to reconfigure. The new RC subsystem has made this even easier.
like getting rid of an IP
ifconfig fxp1 inet 192.168.9.1 delete
Then delete the relevant line from
Linux now has: autohardware detection, good drivers, sample configs for virtually every system
As does FreeBSD.
lots and lots and lots of documentation.
Yes. And most of it is out of date crap. I picked FreeBSD because finding useful Linux documentation proved so tiresome.
How is BSD "friendlier"?
Because the core team concentrate on doing things in a thoughtful, considered, and logical way; with major changes being implemented gradually and then only after a full peer review; and versioning system that makes sense.
Oh yes, we also don't spawn a new distro every time somebody decides they want to do stuff their own way.
The far left lane would move at the maximum speed, whereas successive lanes to the right would be decelerated.
No, a better way would the to have the lanes getting faster as you move right. Just as driving on the left is superior, more logical, etc., etc.