Perhaps the name was a bad choice, but it got the fan's attention. However, equally well it could have been called "The Three Laws", or something simmilar.
Some insight into the making of a movie... 10 people could read the same book and given the opportunity to write a screenplay, would give 10 different results. I have, and I expect others have, fantasized about being able to take a favorite book and turn it into a film. We would each emphasize what aspect of the book we identified with most strongly. In the case of I Robot it could be the Three Laws were the most important and were given central focus for the story told by the film. There's also the countless re-writes which can, as many an author has lamented, reduce a brilliant screenplay to something that fits the numbers, but resembles the original story in only peripheral aspects.
The "immensely funny" thing is curious. To be honest, completely honest... I didnt find douglas adams' work to be all that genuinely funny
I see your point. The first couple times I thought the H2G2 books (the first 3 anyway) were quite funny. The 4th was thought provoking and the 5th quite a bummer.
I did find, 10 years after reading the first three that I found them to be more cynical than I recalled, with some fairly biting sarcasm embodied by certain characters and actions I didn't really see before. Eventually I believed it was funny while taking aim at a lot of things Douglas Adams probably found frustration with, like satire. There certainly are some very visible satirical references, but it seemed to me that like much humor there is often a target which is true, though by not being familiar with it we don't get all of the joke.
Let's take a story, which is brilliantly thought provoking and strip out all the discussion which made it so stunning and just keep the fight scenes!
I pray if they ever make Tunnel In The Sky into a film they give it the treatment it deserves. Brilliant book, too, and should easily translate to the silver screen, so long as they don't try to make it Survivor or Monster movie...
Personally, in reading the books, I've always been left feeling quite indifferent to Trillian. Almost like she's a background character with little to no importance. So it sounds like they at least got that right.
It seems, according to the review, that they'll all end up as background characters. Marvin will be the star.
Fight Club was a phenomenal book that survived the transition to a movie, and then some.
Never read Fight Club. Saw the movie and thought, 'damn, not another "crazy guy" film'. Didn't read Forrest Gump, but my sister's opinion was the film was considerably better. A rarity it seems.
If this is the critic's biggest problem, I'm 'ok' with that. Besides, there were things in the book not in the BBC TV series -- or things on BBC Radio that weren't in either the book or the TV series. I realize you can't sqeeze everything (even those few 2 or 3 word chapters DNA liked to use) in to a 2 hour movie. I never expected it.
You know the thing that made the books so snappy... it was that compared to Arthur, Ford was an absolute nut. Zaphod was bombastic. Marvin was quite possibly a sorrier character. All that contrast was fairly extreme and therefore, the wossname, chemistry worked, because each's point of view was quite extraordinary. And yet, all were sane within their idiom.
They could have just sat around in chairs on board the Heart of Gold for 90 minutes cracking jokes about earthman-monkey, diodes down the left side aching, vogon poetry, etc. and many book/play fans would gobble it up. This is trying to mass appeal, what already had mass appeal. See the problem?
Hey, kids! Here's a fun game to play while waiting in line to shell big zorkmids on the latest book
series to hit the big screen. Just fill in the name of a book, any book and you get a fairly true statement, summing up
and entire movie review!
[Fill In Book Name Here] is not as bad as I had feared. Then again, it is not as good as I had hoped.
Choose from:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Cat in the Hat*
Timeline
Oracle 8.5 The Complete Reference
Jurassic Park
I Robot*
Minority Report
War of the Worlds
(Anything based upon a comic book title or character)
Note: Those marked with an '*' may actually, really and truly, suck.
Seriously, mixing american actors with british actors and trying to turn something that wasn't very bad as a BBC TV series
into a movie would be difficult, especially with the Hollywood penchant for wanting it to end differently than the book so
the audience would be surpried and trying to make britishisms translate into equally funny americanisms or vice-a-versa. Imagine the following scenario:
(brace thyself) A Hollywood remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail... que horror, eh? Imagine (told you to brace yourself, you sensitive clod!) hip-hop actors,
dimbulb comedy actors from sitcoms and the utter flattening of comedic timing to accomodate dumbed down humor. Yeah. Somethings are better left alone. Better to just
go see Spamalot.
I do expect Rickman's dead-pan voice to be perfect for Marvin, but that's about all.
well, it looks like they got smart all of a sudden, because, unlike dvd+ and dvd- R and RW...bluray and HDdvd are so far apart you practically need 2 drives for total support..
Or one seriously impaired drive, with lots of extra firmware and complex read/write heads, clunky and slow... eeewwww...
"...A PC maker, for example, would not have to equip its computers with hard drives compatible with both formats."
I didn't realize the hard drive had to be made to be compatible. I guess speed could somehow come into play, but no, never mind, they don't know what they are talking about.
Since when does that stop anyone from doing a thorough analysis? Unless they're implying, to allow PC's to have a DVD drive would require the installation, on the HD, of some DRM thingy, which would sit not at all well with myself or pretty much anyone else who understands the implication.
FrankenDVD... it was born on a cold slab of stone, when Drs. Sony and Toshiba concurred. Hundreds knew better, thousands said it was unnatural and against nature, millions didn't care as long as they could watch Star Wars: Episode VII, Revenge of the Return of the Imperial Jedi Sith...
See villagers...
See Torches...
See lightning flash and hear thunder roll...
See the monster fill a small screen near you
Scream in terror as you re-purchase all your DVD collection, while in a dark sinister lab, the next format is considered...
Has anyone seen or heard a good rationale for how Caldera, which bought SCO, distributed its own Linux before buying SCO and yet is in this bizarre twist suing people for IP abuse?
This was said five and four years ago (respectively). Sheesh - you know companies can change mindsets....Even a stone can change with time.
Yes, but you have to ask WHY do they change? Primarily, from my point of view, would be their customers have been telling them to knock off the rhetoric and make their goofy operating system more friendly to fitting into a network with more than one platform. It's well known that there are apps which run only on Windows, say Exchange, by maybe some workgroups are on Linux and you want them to talk nice to each other.
From my perspective, it leaves a taste of bile in my mouth when a vendor comes in and tells us some of our system should go because it's crappy, communist, whatever. That's not a professional way to sell the strengths of your product, by trashing the other vendors. You should be promoting your advantages, flexibility, reliability, scalability, etc. Especially when some customer may have a large investment in Unix or Linux and wants a few Windows servers for something. You have to strangle the laugh directed at someone like Ballmer, who tells you to throw away all your investment on some slander. (This guy makes billions? Where's his eye-patch and cutlass?)
I recall having a servergroup which included 4 different operating systems and trying to get them all to make nice. Windows was always the sticking point. It's well about time for them to shape up.
There, that's better. Sure, they'll convene a committee of grandstanders, a taskforce of paper shufflers and a special investigative body of stern and concerned looking faces, but unless it's a 'right to life', 'let's put some mean git in the UN' or 'drilling for oil in Alaska' issue, don't expect any midnight oil burning.
HOLLAND, MI (OOP) OSTG has revealed that member data for Slashdot.org, an online technical news site, has been compromised. "At first we thought it
was only a network error, until we noticed trends in trolling and moderation making little sense," said Rob Malda, who goes by the nickname of CmdrTaco and was one of the
sites founders. "Posts which were clearly uninformative, insightful or
interesting were receiving high marks, while better pieces were completely ignored."
Further, Malda indicated the loss may have been as high as 100,000 ids and passwords. Which in the wrong hands could tip the opinions of nerds and geeks
the world over. In early hours of trading the NASDAQ plummeted 11% on the news and downtown Holland, Michigan was in flames as
a mob of panicking and angry posters went on a rampage, before sating itself on chocolate covered espresso beans at the Rocky Peanut Company and pausing to "ooh and ahh" at shiny things
in the local Radio Shack window or gaze longingly at the poster for the upcoming Star Wars: Episode III, Revenge of the Sith outside the local theater. Said Holland mayor, Albert H. McGeehan,
"Well, isn't this a fine kettle of tulips!" At press time OSTG had not returned any calls on the matter.
More power just gives developers an excuse to use more resources. There is no reason a word processing program should lag on a 2+ ghz processor... but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does
Sounds like something that could actually get.net apps running in the near vicinity of fast, as opposed to downright hang-dog slow.
As I've seen over the years, the more CPU(s) you throw at developers (myself included) the more difficult tasts suddenly fall into the realm of 'possible' because you simply couldn't without the extra resources. However... tools which were absolutely hideously slow suddenly look acceptable (where PHB's are concerned) because they're blind to how much faster and requiring less resources something actually developed efficiently could run.
.net stuff is a dog, it's quick to develop in, but it's a dog. This is something that maybe Microsoft could wrap their heads around to take some real advantage of. (Allegedly VS 2005/APS 2.0 will be less bulky and quicker performing, as the platform matures.)
quality is also often inferior becuase to get that low bid you need to pay people less, which increases the amount of underqualified people on the job.
Reminds me of how outsourcing often works... they bidder brings in a "crash team" who are some of their sharpest people to direct transition and get things moving, then they're gradually rotated out to the next "crash site", replaced by inexperienced minions.
Some government employees aren't the brightest when it comes to computing. I wonder what sort of problems having them learn to use linux would cause?
And some of them are the brightest people you may ever meet. Don't be such a bigot. I've had to interact with man federal agencies over the years and quite a few of them know exactly what they are doing. The problems often lie in the direction of contractors who come in and technically meet the letter of a contract, but in spirit leave something lacking, which allows overruns to happen.
I once had a very amusing talk with someone at the US Dept of Education. He knew what we needed to submit and what the issue I was raising meant, but try to get the contractor to understand it.
If this works out, it will lead to a better fiscal situation on many fronts.
Not necessarily. As one familiar with public purchasing, to save a few $ some very crappy
hardware (and software) have been purchased over the year. Sometimes these items are excessively
buggy and shortlived, which means the entity goes shopping again before the anticipated lifespan
of the items has been met. Sometimes the software is such crap that it takes more man-hours to
get things done than with another package (seen happen over and over and over and over again...)
The increased competition will lower the cost to taxpayers (though the money will still get spent somewhere)
What you say? If it still gets spent then it did nothing for taxpayers.
and the wider spread of contracts will help competitors to chip away at the
dominance of Microsoft and Intel."
But it will increase the need for contract management and oversight. Further, if you have one or a few vendors
there's only so much opportunity for finger pointing when the fertilizer hits the impeller. Complexity may
be good if you're looking for jobs to make X work with Y and/or Z, because it's your specialty, but it can
be a nightmare for containing expenses.
While in general I think it's a good thing that there'll be more transparency in RFP's and RFQ's I'm too jaded
to believe this is automatically all good.
Slashdot Mirror
I eagerly await the MST3K treatment of it!
Some insight into the making of a movie... 10 people could read the same book and given the opportunity to write a screenplay, would give 10 different results. I have, and I expect others have, fantasized about being able to take a favorite book and turn it into a film. We would each emphasize what aspect of the book we identified with most strongly. In the case of I Robot it could be the Three Laws were the most important and were given central focus for the story told by the film. There's also the countless re-writes which can, as many an author has lamented, reduce a brilliant screenplay to something that fits the numbers, but resembles the original story in only peripheral aspects.
I see your point. The first couple times I thought the H2G2 books (the first 3 anyway) were quite funny. The 4th was thought provoking and the 5th quite a bummer.
I did find, 10 years after reading the first three that I found them to be more cynical than I recalled, with some fairly biting sarcasm embodied by certain characters and actions I didn't really see before. Eventually I believed it was funny while taking aim at a lot of things Douglas Adams probably found frustration with, like satire. There certainly are some very visible satirical references, but it seemed to me that like much humor there is often a target which is true, though by not being familiar with it we don't get all of the joke.
Oi! Thanks for reminding me!
Let's take a story, which is brilliantly thought provoking and strip out all the discussion which made it so stunning and just keep the fight scenes!
I pray if they ever make Tunnel In The Sky into a film they give it the treatment it deserves. Brilliant book, too, and should easily translate to the silver screen, so long as they don't try to make it Survivor or Monster movie...
Sorry, just to clarify... was that R+ or R-?
Actually, having to re-purchase your DVD collection should be Rated: Argh!
It seems, according to the review, that they'll all end up as background characters. Marvin will be the star.
Never read Fight Club. Saw the movie and thought, 'damn, not another "crazy guy" film'. Didn't read Forrest Gump, but my sister's opinion was the film was considerably better. A rarity it seems.
You know the thing that made the books so snappy ... it was that compared to Arthur, Ford was an absolute nut. Zaphod was bombastic. Marvin was quite possibly a sorrier character. All that contrast was fairly extreme and therefore, the wossname, chemistry worked, because each's point of view was quite extraordinary. And yet, all were sane within their idiom.
They could have just sat around in chairs on board the Heart of Gold for 90 minutes cracking jokes about earthman-monkey, diodes down the left side aching, vogon poetry, etc. and many book/play fans would gobble it up. This is trying to mass appeal, what already had mass appeal. See the problem?
[Fill In Book Name Here] is not as bad as I had feared. Then again, it is not as good as I had hoped.
Choose from:
Note: Those marked with an '*' may actually, really and truly, suck.
Seriously, mixing american actors with british actors and trying to turn something that wasn't very bad as a BBC TV series into a movie would be difficult, especially with the Hollywood penchant for wanting it to end differently than the book so the audience would be surpried and trying to make britishisms translate into equally funny americanisms or vice-a-versa. Imagine the following scenario: (brace thyself) A Hollywood remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail... que horror, eh? Imagine (told you to brace yourself, you sensitive clod!) hip-hop actors, dimbulb comedy actors from sitcoms and the utter flattening of comedic timing to accomodate dumbed down humor. Yeah. Somethings are better left alone. Better to just go see Spamalot.
I do expect Rickman's dead-pan voice to be perfect for Marvin, but that's about all.
Or one seriously impaired drive, with lots of extra firmware and complex read/write heads, clunky and slow... eeewwww...
not to mention the COST of bluray media...yeouch.
You mistook someone for a charity?
I didn't realize the hard drive had to be made to be compatible. I guess speed could somehow come into play, but no, never mind, they don't know what they are talking about.
Since when does that stop anyone from doing a thorough analysis? Unless they're implying, to allow PC's to have a DVD drive would require the installation, on the HD, of some DRM thingy, which would sit not at all well with myself or pretty much anyone else who understands the implication.
See villagers...
See Torches...
See lightning flash and hear thunder roll...
See the monster fill a small screen near you
Scream in terror as you re-purchase all your DVD collection, while in a dark sinister lab, the next format is considered...
RATED: R
Has anyone seen or heard a good rationale for how Caldera, which bought SCO, distributed its own Linux before buying SCO and yet is in this bizarre twist suing people for IP abuse?
No, not really.
I'm working in Monterey, CA and there's not much cheesey about the place. Lots of fish though along Cannery Row.
Yes, but you have to ask WHY do they change? Primarily, from my point of view, would be their customers have been telling them to knock off the rhetoric and make their goofy operating system more friendly to fitting into a network with more than one platform. It's well known that there are apps which run only on Windows, say Exchange, by maybe some workgroups are on Linux and you want them to talk nice to each other.
From my perspective, it leaves a taste of bile in my mouth when a vendor comes in and tells us some of our system should go because it's crappy, communist, whatever. That's not a professional way to sell the strengths of your product, by trashing the other vendors. You should be promoting your advantages, flexibility, reliability, scalability, etc. Especially when some customer may have a large investment in Unix or Linux and wants a few Windows servers for something. You have to strangle the laugh directed at someone like Ballmer, who tells you to throw away all your investment on some slander. (This guy makes billions? Where's his eye-patch and cutlass?)
I recall having a servergroup which included 4 different operating systems and trying to get them all to make nice. Windows was always the sticking point. It's well about time for them to shape up.
There, that's better. Sure, they'll convene a committee of grandstanders, a taskforce of paper shufflers and a special investigative body of stern and concerned looking faces, but unless it's a 'right to life', 'let's put some mean git in the UN' or 'drilling for oil in Alaska' issue, don't expect any midnight oil burning.
People already do stuff like that.
What's probably next is a commodities market or stock market in game.
Imagine buying futures on fictional goods in a world where common sense is overridden by fantasy... oh, right, never mind.
Wait until they find the Simpsons really do exist and to prevent a lawsuit Fox had them flown to Mars, along with several cases of Duff beer.
Sounds like something that could actually get .net apps running in the near vicinity of fast, as opposed to downright hang-dog slow.
As I've seen over the years, the more CPU(s) you throw at developers (myself included) the more difficult tasts suddenly fall into the realm of 'possible' because you simply couldn't without the extra resources. However... tools which were absolutely hideously slow suddenly look acceptable (where PHB's are concerned) because they're blind to how much faster and requiring less resources something actually developed efficiently could run.
Nah. First-hand, here's how it goes:
Reminds me of how outsourcing often works ... they bidder brings in a "crash team" who are some of their sharpest people to direct transition and get things moving, then they're gradually rotated out to the next "crash site", replaced by inexperienced minions.
And some of them are the brightest people you may ever meet. Don't be such a bigot. I've had to interact with man federal agencies over the years and quite a few of them know exactly what they are doing. The problems often lie in the direction of contractors who come in and technically meet the letter of a contract, but in spirit leave something lacking, which allows overruns to happen.
I once had a very amusing talk with someone at the US Dept of Education. He knew what we needed to submit and what the issue I was raising meant, but try to get the contractor to understand it.
Was there even a /. article about AMD spinning off their money-hole flash memory unit?
Not necessarily. As one familiar with public purchasing, to save a few $ some very crappy hardware (and software) have been purchased over the year. Sometimes these items are excessively buggy and shortlived, which means the entity goes shopping again before the anticipated lifespan of the items has been met. Sometimes the software is such crap that it takes more man-hours to get things done than with another package (seen happen over and over and over and over again...)
The increased competition will lower the cost to taxpayers (though the money will still get spent somewhere)
What you say? If it still gets spent then it did nothing for taxpayers.
and the wider spread of contracts will help competitors to chip away at the dominance of Microsoft and Intel."
But it will increase the need for contract management and oversight. Further, if you have one or a few vendors there's only so much opportunity for finger pointing when the fertilizer hits the impeller. Complexity may be good if you're looking for jobs to make X work with Y and/or Z, because it's your specialty, but it can be a nightmare for containing expenses.
While in general I think it's a good thing that there'll be more transparency in RFP's and RFQ's I'm too jaded to believe this is automatically all good.