It almost seems as if they left out half a scene. Those are obviously elven broaches, and they didn't have them before Lorien. Maybe the scene was filmed but cut at the last minute...
Ooh, good analysis. I like it. It makes all the sense in the world.
They definitely played up the broken sword in the early half, so I was wondering what ever became of Narsil. I suspect that in the second movie Liv Tyler is going to transform herself from Glorfindel and into Elros and Elrohir, and deliver the Sword Reforged to Aragorn when he's in Rohan.
Fear not! It wasn't the Gates of Gondor, it was at the foot of Amon Hen. Perhaps what was meant was that Amon Lhaw, Amon Hen and Tol Brandir are the "Gateway to Gondor".
People really in the know will figure out my name, and some will have no problem translating it from the orginal Sindarin. It's not the name of any character in the books, so I doubt anyone will immediately connect it with LOTR.
But there's my alter-alter-persona of Brandybuck. I've had that one fifteen years, and Arandir for twenty.
Bombadil, as wonderful a character as he is, did not contribute anything to the story. The Old Forest and Bombadil were mere side excursions in the book. I would have loved seeing them in the movie, but I can certainly live without them.
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.
My favorite can only be described as a free gift to the fans: three stone trolls in the Trollshaws before they get to Rivendell. No comment on them, they were just there in the background.
What makes the book special is its language and the amazing detail with all the linguistics, anthropology, mythology, poetry, genealogy, geology, etc that J.R.R. Tolkien spent many years researching.
Then the Silmarillion must, of course, be the better book by far! But a good novel it is not. There were times in the LOTR where I couldn't put the book down, even after the twentieth reading. But I could put the Silmarillion down at any random paragraph. I'm not belittling the Silmarillion, but the LOTR has all the best stuff of Sil. PLUS action, drama, character development, grand literary themes, etc.
I think the characterization, imagery and locations are very good but not enough to recreate the content of the book.
Nothing is good enough to recreate the content of the book. But be serious now, did you really expect ANY director to subject the audience to hour after hour of elvish poetry? Would the audience have endured every word spoken at the Council of Elrond? Frankly, even Boromir's lengthy rants about the valor of Gondor every four or five pages would have put me to sleep.
But the movie did have all that language, linguistics, and anthropology, and even bits of poetry. It didn't have much geology, but then neither did the books (in the Fellowship the only reference I could find is the color of Caradhras).
We saw Tengwar, Cirth and Anthergas scripts, and even a bit of Futhark! We heard both Sindarin and Quenya spoken. We saw the inscription of the ring, heard the translation proclaimed as a translation, and then heard the orginal in the Black Speech.
We saw that the only Elves with dark hair were Elrond and his family. That may not be precisely true to the book, but it works to distinguish pure Elves from those with Mannish blood. We saw the creation of the Uruk-Hai, and commentary on them from the Wise. We saw Boromir lament the fallen glory of Gondor. We saw the heirlooms in Imladris and the reverence Aragorn had for them. The anthropology and mythology were there. I suspect that in meeting the Rohirrim and Dunlendings in the second book that we will see even more of it.
A movie must by its nature be different from a book. A book is all words that the reader must interpret and visualize. A movie is all imagery and dialogue. They are media alien to each other. Where the book described in some detail the ruins at Weathertop, the House of Elrond, the Halls of Khazad-Dum and the Mallorn trees of Lothlorien, we get to see them immediately. This is not a bad thing, but a necessity of the media.
Of course the book is not like the movie. The only way to make a movie just like a book is to have some orator sit in a chair and recite the book to the camera. Bah! The movie is a good movie. Criticising it because it is not a book is just plain wrong.
A non-profit organization is a different thing from a charity. Neither of these orgs qualifies in the moral sense as a charity, and I seriously doubt that they do in the legal sense either. But one can still make a donation to a non-profit organization.
For example, the US Boy Scouts is a non-profit that accepts donations, but which is not a charity by any stretch of the imagination.
Because Debian and Apache are not charities. I think GNU (of all people) got it right by charging $5000 for a Deluxe GNU Software set. Everyone knows that it's really a donation, but legally it's a sale.
When it comes to license compliance, you only need to worry about libraries. As long as the application gives you the right to use it, don't worry about it. But libraries are a different matter.
And when it comes to proprietary libraries, I am not aware of any that restrict how you may license your own application that links to it. Many require royalties for distributing your app, restrict how the library itself may be distributed, etc., but when it comes to restricting what you can do with your own original code, no proprietary license even comes close to certain "Free Software" licenses.
And BSD is under the BSD license, so it's even freer. The benefits of the GPL also apply to BSD software.
Now as for that USL crap that was mentioned, it may be free, but it doesn't come with the source. I just don't see how I can optimize it for my Athlon without a recompile. Or does sun offer an Athlon version?
Why don't they tap into a nice pre existing user community instead of going it alone all the time?
They did tap into a nice preexisting community, the FreeBSD community. Just because it isn't *your* community is irrelevant.
I mention Debian because it's distrobution method is superior.
Roughly on par with the FreeBSD distribution method. OpenPorts exist for OSX. Fortunately, neither it, nor apt-get, are the default package management system for the typical Apple user. Whew!
XP has rock solid stability, better hardware support, multi user ability (including logging on graphically with multiple users - Apple can only dream of that).
And so does OSX. Legendary BSD stability, best consumer hardware bar none, a true multiuser OS underneath. The stability and multiuser aspects have been with BSD for twenty years. The hardware aspects have been with Apple for almost the same amount of time. During that same time period Microsoft coudln't manage to get a stable OS until a few months ago, and the PC platform evolved into the world's biggest kludge.
Oh man, have you got issues or what? You're only going to give Apple respect when they start shipping Debian as the default OS? Hah! Hah! You need a major dose of reality. Perhaps some debrainwashing is in order as well.
Apple has contributed back TONS of software to the community. The BSD license said they didn't have to give anything back at all, but Apple did. The opened up their entire base OS. They have provided patches, fixes and enhancements to BSD. They work with BSD developers on a daily basis. But all you can do is complain that it isn't Debian. Go crawl back in your hole.
FreeBSD detected my mouse automatically, along with my sound card once I made snd0. X is a different story.
There's a good reason for this: X isn't part of the operating system. It's a separate project with one set of sources for all supporting OSs. Many Linux distros like to write their own X configurator. But FreeBSD sees X as someone else's project and doesn't touch it. Making the base system automatically configure X would be like making the base system automatically configure sendmail. That's not its job.
X comes with some configuration utilities that work quite well, as long as you know what hardware you have. I use these, even under Linux. But that said, I see no reason with a FreeBSDXConfig port/package available for newbies. I just don't know how well it would work. I haven't installed Redhat in a very long time, but I have had problems with Mandrake, SuSE and Corel trying to detect my video cards. Come to think of it, I had a bitch of a time with Windows detecting my Rage128. The problem is that there is no standard way of determing video hardware capabilities. Methods that work for most cards can crash or reboot a system with other cards.
The way around this hassle is to do what Microsoft does: get the OEM's to preinstall the operating system. My friend had a computer that generic off-the-shelf Windows would NOT install, but where the OEM CD of Windows would. Overall, I think Mandrake, SuSE, Redhat, etc., do a *much* better job of hardware detection than Windows does, for precisely this reason.
The Handbook is now in version 2. It didn't ship with 4.4-RELEASE, but it is online and you do get it with cvsup. Perhaps the old handbook didn't mention it. I certainly haven't seen any mention of sound modules, so I'm assuming this is new.
You're not being hit with a cease and desist because your employer has an officially mandated government monopoly. No one else is allowed to provide cable tv in the areas you control, by law. The way it typically works is for a local city council to erroneously decide that there can only be one cable tv provider, then choosing which provider to award an exclusive contract to.
Of course, the minute your employer "abuses" the monopoly (when some council member gets miffed by your service) a cease and desist becomes a possibility.
The degree to which the Goverment can restrict and regulate the People is strictly a function of the People's desire to be regulated
Close, but not quite. Here is how it should be worded: "The degree to which the Government can restrict and regulate the People is strictly a function of the People's desire to regulate other people's behavior". It's tyranny of the majority. If you're in the minority, just find some majority you can join and start oppressing someone else. No one wants laws passed that directly affect themselves, but all too many are happy to get laws that directly affect some group they aren't a member of.
That's not what Secure Boot is. You're scheme won't work if the BIOS won't let you. Take a BIOS with an integrated boot loader, the inability to boot anything but from the first partition of the first harddrive, and which contains a signature for that partition table. You're not even going to get to first base trying to install LILO.
But have no fear! Just because Microsoft and the RIAA love this DRMOS, doesn't mean that the consumer is going to rush to the store to buy one. They're next big sell is going to have to be to Dell, HP, IBM, every MOBO manufacturer, all the HD, CD, and DVD drive manufacturers, etc. The only way this scheme will work is if everyone in the build chain gets on board. And even if they do, there's always Apple, Inc. for your non Wintel needs.
There's nothing that says there can't be a law against making a monopolist.
In fact, there's plenty of laws *mandating* monopolies. Ever wonder why your town only has one cable tv provider? That's because it is against the law to have more than one provider. Ditto for local telephone service and electrical power distribution.
Microsoft is one of the very, very few monopolists that got their status through customer choice as opposed to artificial government fiat, grandfathering, or other legal protection. The typical slashdot reader may loathe and despise Microsoft, but the typical computer user thinks they're wonderful. Of course, the masses have always been none too bright, but that's beside the point.
I don't see the "cyberspace" speech any more regulated than "realspace" speech. It's probably even less regulated.
The laws that people cite as being oppressive to online speech apply equally well to offline speech. Replace electronic bits with the printed page and Felton would still be facing a lawsuit, Johansen would still have been arrested, and Skylarov would still have been arrested. Copy another newspaper's article and print it in your own and you get into just as much trouble as giving your friend a crack of AoE2.
The difference between the typical slashdotter and the typical judge, is that the former sees everything through the filter of their own personal interest in computer technology, while the latter is under mandate to look at the big picture. One example: the Slashdot mantra is "free speech" when it is clear that their favorite issues fall under the category of free press instead, simply because one of their heroes chose to equate the distribution of software with speech instead of press. Another example: how many in the forum are against encryption export restrictions, but in favor of gun control? Or: how many in this forum want to draw and quarter Microsoft for having a monopoly, but find nothing wrong with their local telco and cableco holding monopolies on local phone service and cable TV?
Slashdot Mirror
It almost seems as if they left out half a scene. Those are obviously elven broaches, and they didn't have them before Lorien. Maybe the scene was filmed but cut at the last minute...
The point is, it's not *movie* derived. I've been a hardcore LOTR geek for thirty years.
My department is doing the same tomorrow. It isn't the whole company, just the software department. But it's cool to get paid for watching LOTR.
Ooh, good analysis. I like it. It makes all the sense in the world.
They definitely played up the broken sword in the early half, so I was wondering what ever became of Narsil. I suspect that in the second movie Liv Tyler is going to transform herself from Glorfindel and into Elros and Elrohir, and deliver the Sword Reforged to Aragorn when he's in Rohan.
Fear not! It wasn't the Gates of Gondor, it was at the foot of Amon Hen. Perhaps what was meant was that Amon Lhaw, Amon Hen and Tol Brandir are the "Gateway to Gondor".
People really in the know will figure out my name, and some will have no problem translating it from the orginal Sindarin. It's not the name of any character in the books, so I doubt anyone will immediately connect it with LOTR.
But there's my alter-alter-persona of Brandybuck. I've had that one fifteen years, and Arandir for twenty.
Bombadil, as wonderful a character as he is, did not contribute anything to the story. The Old Forest and Bombadil were mere side excursions in the book. I would have loved seeing them in the movie, but I can certainly live without them.
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.
My favorite can only be described as a free gift to the fans: three stone trolls in the Trollshaws before they get to Rivendell. No comment on them, they were just there in the background.
What makes the book special is its language and the amazing detail with all the linguistics, anthropology, mythology, poetry, genealogy, geology, etc that J.R.R. Tolkien spent many years researching.
Then the Silmarillion must, of course, be the better book by far! But a good novel it is not. There were times in the LOTR where I couldn't put the book down, even after the twentieth reading. But I could put the Silmarillion down at any random paragraph. I'm not belittling the Silmarillion, but the LOTR has all the best stuff of Sil. PLUS action, drama, character development, grand literary themes, etc.
I think the characterization, imagery and locations are very good but not enough to recreate the content of the book.
Nothing is good enough to recreate the content of the book. But be serious now, did you really expect ANY director to subject the audience to hour after hour of elvish poetry? Would the audience have endured every word spoken at the Council of Elrond? Frankly, even Boromir's lengthy rants about the valor of Gondor every four or five pages would have put me to sleep.
But the movie did have all that language, linguistics, and anthropology, and even bits of poetry. It didn't have much geology, but then neither did the books (in the Fellowship the only reference I could find is the color of Caradhras).
We saw Tengwar, Cirth and Anthergas scripts, and even a bit of Futhark! We heard both Sindarin and Quenya spoken. We saw the inscription of the ring, heard the translation proclaimed as a translation, and then heard the orginal in the Black Speech.
We saw that the only Elves with dark hair were Elrond and his family. That may not be precisely true to the book, but it works to distinguish pure Elves from those with Mannish blood. We saw the creation of the Uruk-Hai, and commentary on them from the Wise. We saw Boromir lament the fallen glory of Gondor. We saw the heirlooms in Imladris and the reverence Aragorn had for them. The anthropology and mythology were there. I suspect that in meeting the Rohirrim and Dunlendings in the second book that we will see even more of it.
A movie must by its nature be different from a book. A book is all words that the reader must interpret and visualize. A movie is all imagery and dialogue. They are media alien to each other. Where the book described in some detail the ruins at Weathertop, the House of Elrond, the Halls of Khazad-Dum and the Mallorn trees of Lothlorien, we get to see them immediately. This is not a bad thing, but a necessity of the media.
Of course the book is not like the movie. The only way to make a movie just like a book is to have some orator sit in a chair and recite the book to the camera. Bah! The movie is a good movie. Criticising it because it is not a book is just plain wrong.
A non-profit organization is a different thing from a charity. Neither of these orgs qualifies in the moral sense as a charity, and I seriously doubt that they do in the legal sense either. But one can still make a donation to a non-profit organization.
For example, the US Boy Scouts is a non-profit that accepts donations, but which is not a charity by any stretch of the imagination.
Because Debian and Apache are not charities. I think GNU (of all people) got it right by charging $5000 for a Deluxe GNU Software set. Everyone knows that it's really a donation, but legally it's a sale.
When it comes to license compliance, you only need to worry about libraries. As long as the application gives you the right to use it, don't worry about it. But libraries are a different matter.
And when it comes to proprietary libraries, I am not aware of any that restrict how you may license your own application that links to it. Many require royalties for distributing your app, restrict how the library itself may be distributed, etc., but when it comes to restricting what you can do with your own original code, no proprietary license even comes close to certain "Free Software" licenses.
but I don't things like the NVidia drivers will work. (which means no 3d accerated games/apps)
What! You mean that NVidia makes the world's only 3D video card? Dopey me for not buying this year's mandatory video hardware.
And BSD is under the BSD license, so it's even freer. The benefits of the GPL also apply to BSD software.
Now as for that USL crap that was mentioned, it may be free, but it doesn't come with the source. I just don't see how I can optimize it for my Athlon without a recompile. Or does sun offer an Athlon version?
Why don't they tap into a nice pre existing user community instead of going it alone all the time?
They did tap into a nice preexisting community, the FreeBSD community. Just because it isn't *your* community is irrelevant.
I mention Debian because it's distrobution method is superior.
Roughly on par with the FreeBSD distribution method. OpenPorts exist for OSX. Fortunately, neither it, nor apt-get, are the default package management system for the typical Apple user. Whew!
XP has rock solid stability, better hardware support, multi user ability (including logging on graphically with multiple users - Apple can only dream of that).
And so does OSX. Legendary BSD stability, best consumer hardware bar none, a true multiuser OS underneath. The stability and multiuser aspects have been with BSD for twenty years. The hardware aspects have been with Apple for almost the same amount of time. During that same time period Microsoft coudln't manage to get a stable OS until a few months ago, and the PC platform evolved into the world's biggest kludge.
Oh man, have you got issues or what? You're only going to give Apple respect when they start shipping Debian as the default OS? Hah! Hah! You need a major dose of reality. Perhaps some debrainwashing is in order as well.
Apple has contributed back TONS of software to the community. The BSD license said they didn't have to give anything back at all, but Apple did. The opened up their entire base OS. They have provided patches, fixes and enhancements to BSD. They work with BSD developers on a daily basis. But all you can do is complain that it isn't Debian. Go crawl back in your hole.
FreeBSD detected my mouse automatically, along with my sound card once I made snd0. X is a different story.
There's a good reason for this: X isn't part of the operating system. It's a separate project with one set of sources for all supporting OSs. Many Linux distros like to write their own X configurator. But FreeBSD sees X as someone else's project and doesn't touch it. Making the base system automatically configure X would be like making the base system automatically configure sendmail. That's not its job.
X comes with some configuration utilities that work quite well, as long as you know what hardware you have. I use these, even under Linux. But that said, I see no reason with a FreeBSDXConfig port/package available for newbies. I just don't know how well it would work. I haven't installed Redhat in a very long time, but I have had problems with Mandrake, SuSE and Corel trying to detect my video cards. Come to think of it, I had a bitch of a time with Windows detecting my Rage128. The problem is that there is no standard way of determing video hardware capabilities. Methods that work for most cards can crash or reboot a system with other cards.
The way around this hassle is to do what Microsoft does: get the OEM's to preinstall the operating system. My friend had a computer that generic off-the-shelf Windows would NOT install, but where the OEM CD of Windows would. Overall, I think Mandrake, SuSE, Redhat, etc., do a *much* better job of hardware detection than Windows does, for precisely this reason.
[sorry for the rant]
The Handbook is now in version 2. It didn't ship with 4.4-RELEASE, but it is online and you do get it with cvsup. Perhaps the old handbook didn't mention it. I certainly haven't seen any mention of sound modules, so I'm assuming this is new.
You're not being hit with a cease and desist because your employer has an officially mandated government monopoly. No one else is allowed to provide cable tv in the areas you control, by law. The way it typically works is for a local city council to erroneously decide that there can only be one cable tv provider, then choosing which provider to award an exclusive contract to.
Of course, the minute your employer "abuses" the monopoly (when some council member gets miffed by your service) a cease and desist becomes a possibility.
The degree to which the Goverment can restrict and regulate the People is strictly a function of the People's desire to be regulated
Close, but not quite. Here is how it should be worded: "The degree to which the Government can restrict and regulate the People is strictly a function of the People's desire to regulate other people's behavior". It's tyranny of the majority. If you're in the minority, just find some majority you can join and start oppressing someone else. No one wants laws passed that directly affect themselves, but all too many are happy to get laws that directly affect some group they aren't a member of.
That's not what Secure Boot is. You're scheme won't work if the BIOS won't let you. Take a BIOS with an integrated boot loader, the inability to boot anything but from the first partition of the first harddrive, and which contains a signature for that partition table. You're not even going to get to first base trying to install LILO.
But have no fear! Just because Microsoft and the RIAA love this DRMOS, doesn't mean that the consumer is going to rush to the store to buy one. They're next big sell is going to have to be to Dell, HP, IBM, every MOBO manufacturer, all the HD, CD, and DVD drive manufacturers, etc. The only way this scheme will work is if everyone in the build chain gets on board. And even if they do, there's always Apple, Inc. for your non Wintel needs.
There's nothing that says there can't be a law against making a monopolist.
In fact, there's plenty of laws *mandating* monopolies. Ever wonder why your town only has one cable tv provider? That's because it is against the law to have more than one provider. Ditto for local telephone service and electrical power distribution.
Microsoft is one of the very, very few monopolists that got their status through customer choice as opposed to artificial government fiat, grandfathering, or other legal protection. The typical slashdot reader may loathe and despise Microsoft, but the typical computer user thinks they're wonderful. Of course, the masses have always been none too bright, but that's beside the point.
I don't see the "cyberspace" speech any more regulated than "realspace" speech. It's probably even less regulated.
The laws that people cite as being oppressive to online speech apply equally well to offline speech. Replace electronic bits with the printed page and Felton would still be facing a lawsuit, Johansen would still have been arrested, and Skylarov would still have been arrested. Copy another newspaper's article and print it in your own and you get into just as much trouble as giving your friend a crack of AoE2.
The difference between the typical slashdotter and the typical judge, is that the former sees everything through the filter of their own personal interest in computer technology, while the latter is under mandate to look at the big picture. One example: the Slashdot mantra is "free speech" when it is clear that their favorite issues fall under the category of free press instead, simply because one of their heroes chose to equate the distribution of software with speech instead of press. Another example: how many in the forum are against encryption export restrictions, but in favor of gun control? Or: how many in this forum want to draw and quarter Microsoft for having a monopoly, but find nothing wrong with their local telco and cableco holding monopolies on local phone service and cable TV?
Give me a reason to hate the president, I didn't vote for him!
You're supposed to hate the candidate you didn't vote for? No wonder this country is so fucked!