There's no category for those businesses/organiaztions who would be discouraged from trying Linux for the first time. This is conspicuous by its absence because the growth of the Linux market is vitally important to both vendors and customers.
Secondly, the "Yes" category included the "Maybe" category. In order for this to be more meaningful, those who would considering reducing their Linux deployment should be distinct from those who are definately reducing their Linux deployment. I am tempted to think that this inflates the number of the "Yes" category.
I am willing to speculate that those people who have decided to unequivically dump their Linux installations are fewer than 9% of the people surveyed. I would also speculate that these same people do not have extensive Linux deployment in one way or another, or cheap compute nodes are not vital to their market segment.
In the late 1990s, IBM, Sequent, and the Santa Cruz Operation were working together on a project called Monterey. Monterey/64 was designed to be a common UNIX platform running on 64-bit Intel (Merced/Itanium) and Power4. It had wide industry support from hardware and software vendors, such as Intel and Oracle. Around 2000, IBM scrapped the project based on issues with the Itanium1 platform and concerns about SCO's ability to deliver. UnixWare retained its name for some time after the SCO purchase from Novell. In the next year or two IBM acquired Sequent and Caldera acquired SCO. However, in this way did Sequent non-uniform memory access made it into UnixWare and AIX.
This is how IBM and SCO have NUMA cache concurrency code. NUMA made it into Linux because IBM wanted to improve Linux reliability on their SMP Xeon-based servers, and instructed some of their programmers including some people who worked on Dynix/Sequent that wrote NUMA in the first place. This is how NUMA came to be in Linux. What I believe is the management at SCO has little knowledge of the code history of their SVR4 UNIX product. Caldera upper level management is populated with experts in hostile takeovers and making a business out of patent and copyright enforcement. I have no doubt that they took the effort to see if the Linux kernel had any resemblance to their UNIX code tree, and lo and behold some of the SMP memory management code is identical.
SCO quickly informs IBM to stop putting UNIX code in Linux, but they don't seem to know that NUMA belongs to IBM, it is a derivitave work of AIX, which is a derivitive work of Dynix, both of which IBM owns, and on top of that IBM's source license with UNIX Systems Lab gives them intellectual property of code they create based on AT&T code.
Claims that IBM is "diluting" UNIX by putting UNIX-based code in it and having UNIX-knowledgeable software engineers working on it is rather a stretch of the imagination. If IBM has sole intellectual property on Dynix/Sequent, just because they shared it with Santa Cruz does not mean they cannot use the code elsewhere. SCO wants to compare their SVR4 UNIX with Linux code, but what we really need to see is Dynix and AIX right beside them. This will prove that IBM owns NUMA.
Claims that using NUMA in Linux will place SCO UNIX under the GPL are also false. SCO will retain rights to use and improve NUMA code they received from Monterey, because it pre-dates the NUMA code used in Linux. So in the end there are essentially who Sequent NUMA forks, the one in AIX and UnixWare cum SCO UNIX is proprietary and the other written for Linux is open source.
``If a rescue had been attempted, most likely we would have lost two shuttles and more astronauts.''
The real question is whether this is better or worse than doing nothing. Risk versus reward. The cost of doing nothing is guaranteed to result in the loss of one shuttle and crew. Is a long shot worth no shot at all?
And as a system administrator, it was an unhappy joke. I love the good things that technology can do, but I am wary of making things overcomplicated and awkward simply for the want of technology.
The first thing is that paper ballot voting is relatively simple, unless you're from Dade county Florida. I stood in one line to sign the roll and get my ballot, and I stood in another to wait for a polling booth.
With the new-fangled voting machines, the number of lines I had to stand in was doubled. I stood in one line to sign the roll, and get a chit. Stood in another line to hand the chit to a poll worker behind one of the machines. The pollworker then took my chit and enters the number from it into one of the polling computers, and then handed me a receipt. Then I stood in the last line to wait for a polling machine to vote.
One I reached the polling computer, I was suprised to find neither a touch screen, nor a display with buttons on it like an ATM. There was no joystick or mouse. Instead, this machine had a device called a "scrolling wheel." To vote I had to operate this device which revolved like a analog telephone dial. The liquid crystal screen was covered with the finger smudges of frustrated voters trying to do the natural thing which was to press a button. However, with this device I had to spin the wheel around to select my choice, and then press a rather large red button to choose it. This was quite counter intuitive despite the fact I was raised around analog telephones. The sensitivity of the wheel was set quite high, and it was easy to miss my choice on the screen. In order to go back to my choice I had to spin the wheel the other way, often passing my choice from the other direction.
Another thing I didn't like about this system was that a computer only could manage a few machines so instead of walking over to any empty polling booth I had to wait to vote only a booth attached to the box my number had been entered. After mucking about with this I decided to talk to a couple of the poll workers about this new system.
The first thing I noticed is that the poll worker machines were connected to their polling booths with a simple serial cable. Some of these cables were taped to the floor and others were suspended from the ceiling with twist ties. I examined one of the cables and the poll worker scolded me because apparently the machines were attached in a daisy chain configuration and if one of the machines was unplugged then all of them would stop working. Then a technician would have to be paged to come to the polling place to reset the equipment and the votes would be thrown out as unreliable!
Actually, his father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., voted to create ARPA or the Advanced Research Projects Agency, on Feburary 7th 1958. The directive gave ARPA the responsibility "for the direction or performance of such advanced projects in the field of research and development as the Secretary of Defense shall, from time to time, designate by individual project or by category." In 1973 it changed its name to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Note that Al Gore wasn't elected to Congress until 1976.
Al Gore had little to do with the vote to create the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, or the opening of the ArpaNet. As a Congresscritter, he would have voted on defense appropriation bills to to sustain funding for the research project agency. However, as Vice President, Al Gore had a great impact on the DARPA! In Feburary, 25 years after the creation of ARPA, then President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore changed DARPA's name back to ARPA, as detailed in the administration publication "Technology for America's Economic Growth, A New Direction to Build Economic Strength." Three years later, President Clinton signed a defense bill changing ARPA back into DARPA!
So, there you have the skinny on the Great Albert Gore Junior impact on how we all communicate today! ARPA, DARPA, ARPA, DARPA, let's call the whole thing off. If any recognition needs be made, let us do so for Al's father Albert Senior.
Frodo - Pauly Shore Sam - Chris Farley Gandalf - George Carlin Strider - Tom Cruise Merry - Jim Carey Pipin - Chris Rock Legolas - Carrot Top Gimli - Jessie Ventura Boromir - Kevin Sorbo Arwen - Rosie O'Donnel Galadriel - Britney Spears Bilbo - Willian Shatner Grima Wormtongue - Paul Rubens Gollum - Adam Sandler Elrond - Brent Spiner Saruman - Patrick Stewart Sauron - Marlon Brando
For particular niches, Linux is already attractive. We have a server farm of around 100 Xeon rackmount nodes that comprise our server farm. We have a batch queuing system which doles out user jobs to some of these machines, and others are allocated for interactive use. We are running a mix of in house software, shrink-wrapped software, and open-source software written by others in our industry. Linux has proven to be as useful for these tasks as our commercial Unix versions have been. In fact, I would say that these Linux machines do over 90% of what our Solaris servers do.
There are a few drawbacks to Linux at this junction. The major thing that our Linux servers cannot do is handle large-memory footprints, above the 3 - 4 GB RAM level. This is more of a limitation of the 32-bit PC hardware than of Linux itself. For our large memory jobs we run on our large memory Suns, but all the other jobs use Linux as the computational platform. We do not run Linux for our file servers, as we've encountered problems with the NFS implementation on Linux that Solaris doesn't seem to have. Other than that, Linux gets a big thumbs up.
While I agree that space exploration is important, let me make this analogy.
Having the space station while we also have the space shuttle, is much like building a cabin out in the woods when you already have a recreational vehicle.
I use a Powerbook to admin my Unix boxen
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 1
My opinion of XFree on OS X is quiet favorable.
I thought that XFree was slow when I first tried it, but that was before "Jaguar" or 10.2 came out. Since I upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2 everything seems much snappier now, including XFree. 10.1 may have had a lot of debugging code in it that was removed from Jaguar.
Binary installation was painless, thanks to the install wizard, or whatever Apple calls it.
It installed the binaries in/usr/X11R6 and contained all the default programs as one would expect.
Xfree on OSX has two modes, full screen and rootless. If you want to use Gnome, then run fullscreen and task swap between X-Window and Aqua. If you want you can run in "rootless" mode, in which the root window is the Aqua desktop. This is quite nice, as it lets you run X-Window clients along side Aqua applications.
X-Window applications will still need a window manager to run, and the defaut is twm. There are other window managers out there, but the one I like the best so far is Orobor OSX, which looks like the regular Aqua window decorations. Orobor OSX will automatically start the X server for you and run as the window manager in one easy click.
Update your.login with
setenv DISPLAY:0
and you can run X applications from your regular Terminal.app program. This is quite nice, because you can use Apple-C and Apple-V for cutting and pasting. This is very useful to know, because I can never remember the keyboard shortcuts to emulate a three button mouse. Having one mouse button is an annoyance sometimes, that is my only problem.
Overall, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars. With XFree running on OS X I truly have the best of both worlds; a user-friendly desktop and the power of UNIX.
Cheers to Apple Computer.
P.S. one off-topic complaint about Apple:
Dear Apple Developers! Please fix IOPCCardFamily!
My wife's work has a hundred or so G3s that need wireless access, but OS X cannot see the PCI-PCMCIA bridge that is needed put a wireless card in these older machines.
Please mod the above message up.
The T-Zero by AC Propulsion is the first electric vehicle that actually competes with gasoline automobiles in terms of performance.
In fact, this vehicle has amazing performance. It goes from 0 to 60 is 4.1 seconds, which is faster than some motorcycles to say nothing of cars. It runs the quarter mile in 13 seconds, and has a range of 100 miles if you stay under the speed limit.
By not attempting to be a hybrid, this vehicle can do away with all the extra weight of a conbustion power plant. And best of all it can be plugged into a regular house outlet.
Still, the down side is the price and the battery pack. It only has a life of about three years, and then you have to purchase a new one for about $3,000. The end price is similar to a new Porsche since these are not made on an assembly line.
Except for the price, this is it.
I am a big fan of Herbert, having read the entire Dune Chronicles several times, as well as White Plague. I haven't read the new stuff by his son about the great houses.
Overall, I think the series is worth watching, but I have some reservations and wish it could have been a little better. I am well aware that the producers didn't want to rip off the Lynch film. I understand that, and frankly are okay that they tried to be a little more understated. The motion picture was very grand, but I am left underwhelmed by the TV series.
They took a great deal of liberty with the storyline and dialogue.
First and foremost, in the TV show Princess Irulan made a visit to the first state dinner held by the Atriedes on Arrakis. There was a cute scene with the two of them bantering, and then her Imperial bodyguards get into a staring contests with Gurney's troops. I have no idea why they would even put that into the story, except to make some kind of tension from a love triangle between Paul, Chani, and the Princess. In the book, the first time Paul met the Princess was *after* he had become the superbeing, at which time he entered a marriage of convenience to secure the Imperial throne for his children. If I recall, about the most important thing Irulan did in the entire series was to slip sterility drugs to Chani. She wasn't that much of a major character in the books, so the only reason they gave her more importance was to have a device for giving more insight to the Corrino family.
I rather liked the gothic style of the film, but wasn't disappointed that the TV show was less dreary. Overall, for the TV show to do its own thing is good, but the show did go over the top in some other points, and I think the wrong ones. Since it wasn't as striking, the TV show had some problems defining characters. I had trouble distinguishing between some of the supporting characters, such as Duncan, Gurney, Thufir, and Wellington. Another gripe I had was the way the TV show hinted that Gurney was the traitor. The TV show rather blantantly hinted that it might be Gurney several times, which I thought was over done.
Another thing that was overdone, was the Fremen natives chanting Muah'dib while he was riding by. While some of the Fremen were aware of the prophesy and that Jessica and Paul might fulfill it, there was no need to belabor the point.
Another 'over the topism' was when the Harkonen fighters chased Paul and Jessica's orinithopter through the canyons. This was the Death Star trench scene, and it didn't really happen that way in the book.
When Dr. Keynes inspected Paul stillsuit, and commented that he had it hooked up correctly, Pauls reply was typical of what I thought was wrong with the TV show. In the book, Paul replied "It seemed the proper way," while in the TV show Paul's reply was "It looked like the right way to do it." While I don't have a problem with writers taking liberty with the dialogue, I think this typifies the weakness in some of the scenes. I think the show would have had better impact if much of the dialogue had bee preserved. That part was watered down at a time when going over the top would have made for a good plot point.
Another over-the-top opportunity lost, was that the scene was cut where Paul and Jessica were discovered in the desert by the Fremen. That was an opportunity for the Fremen to comment on the prophecy, as well as for Paul to show is combat prowess.
I liked the way the Harkonnens were portrayed. It was one of the things that added positively to the feel of the TV show. In the movie the Baron was well acted, but it showed him as so gross it almost undermined his evilness.
How is space settlement different from any of the other space colonization proposals?
Most thinking regarding human expansion into space has focused on the settling of the surfaces of other planets, sometimes after modifying their environments to make them more Earth-like (called terraforming). The space settlement concept maintains that planets are not the most ideal location for human colonies beyond the Earth.
Who developed the space settlement concept?
Principally, Gerard K. O'Neill (1927-1992), who was a physicist with Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study. Prior to popularizing space development, O'Neill was well known as a researcher in high-energy physics, and as the inventor of the colliding-beam storage ring, an innovation now standard on most particle accelerators.
What are the origins of the space settlement concept?
In 1969, O'Neill was teaching a physics course at Princeton. America was engaged in the Apollo effort, so O'Neill was working space travel into many of the physics problems assigned.
He was concerned about the persistent talk among academics regarding overpopulation and "limits to growth". He was also dismayed by many young people's resigned acceptance of two concepts he personally found repugnant. One was future totalitarian control over the use of resources, the other was that a decline in the standard of living was inevitable. One day he asked his students the following question: Is the surface of the Earth really the best place for an expanding, technological civilization? After some calculation, the answer seemed to be "no".
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, the "Yes" category included the "Maybe" category. In order for this to be more meaningful, those who would considering reducing their Linux deployment should be distinct from those who are definately reducing their Linux deployment. I am tempted to think that this inflates the number of the "Yes" category.
I am willing to speculate that those people who have decided to unequivically dump their Linux installations are fewer than 9% of the people surveyed. I would also speculate that these same people do not have extensive Linux deployment in one way or another, or cheap compute nodes are not vital to their market segment.
Nevermind the IBM copyrights, they are the result of laboratory contamination.
In the late 1990s, IBM, Sequent, and the Santa Cruz Operation were working together on a project called Monterey. Monterey/64 was designed to be a common UNIX platform running on 64-bit Intel (Merced/Itanium) and Power4. It had wide industry support from hardware and software vendors, such as Intel and Oracle. Around 2000, IBM scrapped the project based on issues with the Itanium1 platform and concerns about SCO's ability to deliver. UnixWare retained its name for some time after the SCO purchase from Novell. In the next year or two IBM acquired Sequent and Caldera acquired SCO. However, in this way did Sequent non-uniform memory access made it into UnixWare and AIX.
This is how IBM and SCO have NUMA cache concurrency code. NUMA made it into Linux because IBM wanted to improve Linux reliability on their SMP Xeon-based servers, and instructed some of their programmers including some people who worked on Dynix/Sequent that wrote NUMA in the first place. This is how NUMA came to be in Linux. What I believe is the management at SCO has little knowledge of the code history of their SVR4 UNIX product. Caldera upper level management is populated with experts in hostile takeovers and making a business out of patent and copyright enforcement. I have no doubt that they took the effort to see if the Linux kernel had any resemblance to their UNIX code tree, and lo and behold some of the SMP memory management code is identical.
SCO quickly informs IBM to stop putting UNIX code in Linux, but they don't seem to know that NUMA belongs to IBM, it is a derivitave work of AIX, which is a derivitive work of Dynix, both of which IBM owns, and on top of that IBM's source license with UNIX Systems Lab gives them intellectual property of code they create based on AT&T code.
Claims that IBM is "diluting" UNIX by putting UNIX-based code in it and having UNIX-knowledgeable software engineers working on it is rather a stretch of the imagination. If IBM has sole intellectual property on Dynix/Sequent, just because they shared it with Santa Cruz does not mean they cannot use the code elsewhere. SCO wants to compare their SVR4 UNIX with Linux code, but what we really need to see is Dynix and AIX right beside them. This will prove that IBM owns NUMA.
Claims that using NUMA in Linux will place SCO UNIX under the GPL are also false. SCO will retain rights to use and improve NUMA code they received from Monterey, because it pre-dates the NUMA code used in Linux. So in the end there are essentially who Sequent NUMA forks, the one in AIX and UnixWare cum SCO UNIX is proprietary and the other written for Linux is open source.
I wish I could put that in a remote controlled RX-8. That'd be a neat toy. :)
We're all gonna die!
(ob. Lexx reference)
``If a rescue had been attempted, most likely we would have lost two shuttles and more astronauts.''
The real question is whether this is better or worse than doing nothing. Risk versus reward. The cost of doing nothing is guaranteed to result in the loss of one shuttle and crew. Is a long shot worth no shot at all?
Commence Freaking. Thanks.
Paul Mockapetris is going to have hell to pay!
And as a system administrator, it was an unhappy joke. I love the good things that technology can do, but I am wary of making things overcomplicated and awkward simply for the want of technology.
The first thing is that paper ballot voting is relatively simple, unless you're from Dade county Florida. I stood in one line to sign the roll and get my ballot, and I stood in another to wait for a polling booth.
With the new-fangled voting machines, the number of lines I had to stand in was doubled. I stood in one line to sign the roll, and get a chit. Stood in another line to hand the chit to a poll worker behind one of the machines. The pollworker then took my chit and enters the number from it into one of the polling computers, and then handed me a receipt. Then I stood in the last line to wait for a polling machine to vote.
One I reached the polling computer, I was suprised to find neither a touch screen, nor a display with buttons on it like an ATM. There was no joystick or mouse. Instead, this machine had a device called a "scrolling wheel." To vote I had to operate this device which revolved like a analog telephone dial. The liquid crystal screen was covered with the finger smudges of frustrated voters trying to do the natural thing which was to press a button. However, with this device I had to spin the wheel around to select my choice, and then press a rather large red button to choose it. This was quite counter intuitive despite the fact I was raised around analog telephones. The sensitivity of the wheel was set quite high, and it was easy to miss my choice on the screen. In order to go back to my choice I had to spin the wheel the other way, often passing my choice from the other direction.
Another thing I didn't like about this system was that a computer only could manage a few machines so instead of walking over to any empty polling booth I had to wait to vote only a booth attached to the box my number had been entered. After mucking about with this I decided to talk to a couple of the poll workers about this new system.
The first thing I noticed is that the poll worker machines were connected to their polling booths with a simple serial cable. Some of these cables were taped to the floor and others were suspended from the ceiling with twist ties. I examined one of the cables and the poll worker scolded me because apparently the machines were attached in a daisy chain configuration and if one of the machines was unplugged then all of them would stop working. Then a technician would have to be paged to come to the polling place to reset the equipment and the votes would be thrown out as unreliable!
Viva Paper Ballots!
Al Gore had little to do with the vote to create the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, or the opening of the ArpaNet. As a Congresscritter, he would have voted on defense appropriation bills to to sustain funding for the research project agency. However, as Vice President, Al Gore had a great impact on the DARPA! In Feburary, 25 years after the creation of ARPA, then President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore changed DARPA's name back to ARPA, as detailed in the administration publication "Technology for America's Economic Growth, A New Direction to Build Economic Strength." Three years later, President Clinton signed a defense bill changing ARPA back into DARPA!
So, there you have the skinny on the Great Albert Gore Junior impact on how we all communicate today! ARPA, DARPA, ARPA, DARPA, let's call the whole thing off. If any recognition needs be made, let us do so for Al's father Albert Senior.
When was the last time someone was murdered with a scalpel?
Where he is dumping spammers through the trapdoor.
Now he asks, "Are you from Digital Impact? Oh, go on in!"
MAKE MONEY FAST!
I think that would be a riot.
Lord of the Rings: The Cast from Hell
Frodo - Pauly Shore
Sam - Chris Farley
Gandalf - George Carlin
Strider - Tom Cruise
Merry - Jim Carey
Pipin - Chris Rock
Legolas - Carrot Top
Gimli - Jessie Ventura
Boromir - Kevin Sorbo
Arwen - Rosie O'Donnel
Galadriel - Britney Spears
Bilbo - Willian Shatner
Grima Wormtongue - Paul Rubens
Gollum - Adam Sandler
Elrond - Brent Spiner
Saruman - Patrick Stewart
Sauron - Marlon Brando
I lost con and died. That sucked.
For particular niches, Linux is already attractive. We have a server farm of around 100 Xeon rackmount nodes that comprise our server farm. We have a batch queuing system which doles out user jobs to some of these machines, and others are allocated for interactive use. We are running a mix of in house software, shrink-wrapped software, and open-source software written by others in our industry. Linux has proven to be as useful for these tasks as our commercial Unix versions have been. In fact, I would say that these Linux machines do over 90% of what our Solaris servers do.
There are a few drawbacks to Linux at this junction. The major thing that our Linux servers cannot do is handle large-memory footprints, above the 3 - 4 GB RAM level. This is more of a limitation of the 32-bit PC hardware than of Linux itself. For our large memory jobs we run on our large memory Suns, but all the other jobs use Linux as the computational platform. We do not run Linux for our file servers, as we've encountered problems with the NFS implementation on Linux that Solaris doesn't seem to have. Other than that, Linux gets a big thumbs up.
I remember when mass storaging dipping below $1 per megabyte was a Big Deal
While I agree that space exploration is important, let me make this analogy.
Having the space station while we also have the space shuttle, is much like building a cabin out in the woods when you already have a recreational vehicle.
I thought that XFree was slow when I first tried it, but that was before "Jaguar" or 10.2 came out. Since I upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2 everything seems much snappier now, including XFree. 10.1 may have had a lot of debugging code in it that was removed from Jaguar.
Binary installation was painless, thanks to the install wizard, or whatever Apple calls it.
It installed the binaries in /usr/X11R6 and contained all the default programs as one would expect.
Xfree on OSX has two modes, full screen and rootless. If you want to use Gnome, then run fullscreen and task swap between X-Window and Aqua. If you want you can run in "rootless" mode, in which the root window is the Aqua desktop. This is quite nice, as it lets you run X-Window clients along side Aqua applications.
X-Window applications will still need a window manager to run, and the defaut is twm. There are other window managers out there, but the one I like the best so far is Orobor OSX, which looks like the regular Aqua window decorations. Orobor OSX will automatically start the X server for you and run as the window manager in one easy click.
Update your .login with
setenv DISPLAY :0
and you can run X applications from your regular Terminal.app program. This is quite nice, because you can use Apple-C and Apple-V for cutting and pasting. This is very useful to know, because I can never remember the keyboard shortcuts to emulate a three button mouse. Having one mouse button is an annoyance sometimes, that is my only problem.
Overall, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars. With XFree running on OS X I truly have the best of both worlds; a user-friendly desktop and the power of UNIX.
Cheers to Apple Computer.
P.S. one off-topic complaint about Apple:
Dear Apple Developers! Please fix IOPCCardFamily!
My wife's work has a hundred or so G3s that need wireless access, but OS X cannot see the PCI-PCMCIA bridge that is needed put a wireless card in these older machines.
Thank you and good day.
Please mod the above message up. The T-Zero by AC Propulsion is the first electric vehicle that actually competes with gasoline automobiles in terms of performance. In fact, this vehicle has amazing performance. It goes from 0 to 60 is 4.1 seconds, which is faster than some motorcycles to say nothing of cars. It runs the quarter mile in 13 seconds, and has a range of 100 miles if you stay under the speed limit. By not attempting to be a hybrid, this vehicle can do away with all the extra weight of a conbustion power plant. And best of all it can be plugged into a regular house outlet. Still, the down side is the price and the battery pack. It only has a life of about three years, and then you have to purchase a new one for about $3,000. The end price is similar to a new Porsche since these are not made on an assembly line. Except for the price, this is it.
this quote, You have heard the old saying 'guns don't kill people, people kill people?'
Well, some time around two thousand years ago, Lucius Annaeus Seneca "the younger" wrote:
"Quemadmoeum gladis nemeinum occidit, occidentis telum est"
("A sword is never a killer, it's a tool in the killer's hands")
Quemadmoeum gladis nemeinum occidit, occidentis telum est.
"A sword is never a killer, it's a tool in the killer's hands"
Lucius Annaeus Seneca "the younger" ca. (4 BC - 65 AD)
Excuse me, but my name is not Steve Ballmer.
I am a big fan of Herbert, having read the entire Dune Chronicles several times, as well as White Plague. I haven't read the new stuff by his son about the great houses.
Overall, I think the series is worth watching, but I have some reservations and wish it could have been a little better. I am well aware that the producers didn't want to rip off the Lynch film. I understand that, and frankly are okay that they tried to be a little more understated. The motion picture was very grand, but I am left underwhelmed by the TV series.
They took a great deal of liberty with the storyline and dialogue.
First and foremost, in the TV show Princess Irulan made a visit to the first state dinner held by the Atriedes on Arrakis. There was a cute scene with the two of them bantering, and then her Imperial bodyguards get into a staring contests with Gurney's troops. I have no idea why they would even put that into the story, except to make some kind of tension from a love triangle between Paul, Chani, and the Princess. In the book, the first time Paul met the Princess was *after* he had become the superbeing, at which time he entered a marriage of convenience to secure the Imperial throne for his children. If I recall, about the most important thing Irulan did in the entire series was to slip sterility drugs to Chani. She wasn't that much of a major character in the books, so the only reason they gave her more importance was to have a device for giving more insight to the Corrino family.
I rather liked the gothic style of the film, but wasn't disappointed that the TV show was less dreary. Overall, for the TV show to do its own thing is good, but the show did go over the top in some other points, and I think the wrong ones. Since it wasn't as striking, the TV show had some problems defining characters. I had trouble distinguishing between some of the supporting characters, such as Duncan, Gurney, Thufir, and Wellington. Another gripe I had was the way the TV show hinted that Gurney was the traitor. The TV show rather blantantly hinted that it might be Gurney several times, which I thought was over done.
Another thing that was overdone, was the Fremen natives chanting Muah'dib while he was riding by. While some of the Fremen were aware of the prophesy and that Jessica and Paul might fulfill it, there was no need to belabor the point.
Another 'over the topism' was when the Harkonen fighters chased Paul and Jessica's orinithopter through the canyons. This was the Death Star trench scene, and it didn't really happen that way in the book.
When Dr. Keynes inspected Paul stillsuit, and commented that he had it hooked up correctly, Pauls reply was typical of what I thought was wrong with the TV show. In the book, Paul replied "It seemed the proper way," while in the TV show Paul's reply was "It looked like the right way to do it." While I don't have a problem with writers taking liberty with the dialogue, I think this typifies the weakness in some of the scenes. I think the show would have had better impact if much of the dialogue had bee preserved. That part was watered down at a time when going over the top would have made for a good plot point.
Another over-the-top opportunity lost, was that the scene was cut where Paul and Jessica were discovered in the desert by the Fremen. That was an opportunity for the Fremen to comment on the prophecy, as well as for Paul to show is combat prowess.
I liked the way the Harkonnens were portrayed. It was one of the things that added positively to the feel of the TV show. In the movie the Baron was well acted, but it showed him as so gross it almost undermined his evilness.
Oh well, enough rambling. Farewell, slashdotters.
Please read this FAQ:
Mikes Space Settlement FAQ
Here is an excerpt:
How is space settlement different from any of the other space colonization proposals?
Most thinking regarding human expansion into space has focused on the settling of the surfaces of other planets, sometimes after modifying their environments to make them more Earth-like (called terraforming). The space settlement concept maintains that planets are not the most ideal location for human colonies beyond the Earth.
Who developed the space settlement concept?
Principally, Gerard K. O'Neill (1927-1992), who was a physicist with Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study. Prior to popularizing space development, O'Neill was well known as a researcher in high-energy physics, and as the inventor of the colliding-beam storage ring, an innovation now standard on most particle accelerators.
What are the origins of the space settlement concept?
In 1969, O'Neill was teaching a physics course at Princeton. America was engaged in the Apollo effort, so O'Neill was working space travel into many of the physics problems assigned.
He was concerned about the persistent talk among academics regarding overpopulation and "limits to growth". He was also dismayed by many young people's resigned acceptance of two concepts he personally found repugnant. One was future totalitarian control over the use of resources, the other was that a decline in the standard of living was inevitable. One day he asked his students the following question: Is the surface of the Earth really the best place for an expanding, technological civilization? After some calculation, the answer seemed to be "no".
People have rights.
Not the government, not corporations.