It's funny, the problems you describe are the same problems that happen to me whenever I use UPS and, to a lesser extent, FedEX. USPS has always been flawless for me. And I'm a libertarian for crying out loud. I go with what works. USPS will also deliever 365 a year (even on Christmas, depending on the type of delivery). I don't think the other two big ones do that, but I could be wrong. They also ship packages a lot faster than UPS. Everything to anywhere in about 2-4 days. I'm talking standard delivery. I've never actually met a person who had an "actual" complaint about the post office. I've always wondered where they come from. I guess they exist.
You should try Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon. They are more like the first book. People who liked the first book but didn't like Speaker or Xenocide tend to love the last two.
You should try Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon. They are more like the first book. People who liked the first book but didn't like Speaker or Xenocide tend to love the last two.
I never pictured Harkonen as a fat, crazy King Herod knockoff, as both the movie and miniseries directors seem to do. I saw him as a cunning, smart, ambitions political and military Player. One who happened to be very obese and maybe a little crazy, sure, but not to the extent that those traits defined him.
I agree. I don't know why they keep screwing his character up. I actually think they made him worse and I didn't formerly think that was possible. He went from a David Lynch alter-ego (all of David Lynchs' villians are the same) to some poofed up drag-queen wannabe. Like the said in "Children of Dune," the Baron was consumed by excess. He wasn't really crazy. He was one of the smartest people in the book.
I reread the dinner party section as an example(page 142 for those that own the book:P) and there was a LOT there that was left out. the whole byplay where the smugglers side with the atredies, (and scare the crap out of the banker(the guy dressed in purple) who is trying to bait paul, and where paul shocks everyone by maneuvering him into a corner (verbally). Not to mention the whole plot of jessica being the traider. (and 1 sentance abotu 'imperial conditiong' certainly doesnt due justice to HOW deep that betrayel had to go.)
I was very disappointed by this too. This was one of the most interesting parts of the first book and I thought they'd surely include it in the miniseries. However, I guess that, without the voice overs, you wouldn't be able to understand the scene too well anyway. And the only way miniseries Paul could maneuver anybody into a corner verbally is by whining him into it.
I am surprised that you found the dialogue better than the movie. I thought the dialogue in the miniseries was awful. Yet I still have lines from the movie echoing in my head. It may have had too much influence from Lynch but I loved lines like the ones exchanged between Paul and Leto just before leaving Caladan about the sleeper awakening. This miniseries just left me realizing just how much I actually did like the original movie.
It may have been longer but you can't tell me that it's more detailed. It's far less detailed and part of that has to do with the lack of internal monologues. That's what Dune is. You can't have a decent screen adaptation without them.
For all of those who haven't read the book, the best part of the story is what the people are thinking. What they are thinking is far more interesting than the story itself.
Even the director/producer or whatever said in a CNN interview that he thought the biggest criticism would be over the lack of internal monologues. Most of the book was about what people were thinking.
Re:Overall good. But, some bad bad choices were ma
on
On The Dune Miniseries
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· Score: 1
Stilgar, meeting Duke Leto? What the hell was that?
Stilgar did meet Leto in the book. It was a good scene, in the book that is. But I don't think Paul was there.
According to http://www.thedigitalbits.com/ Artisan has confirmed the DVD (anamorphic) is in the works. It may or may not be the uncut version. Let's hope that version addresses things like how Paul and Jessica suddenly end up in the desert. Or perhaps they can digitally remaster it to make the acting good. It may be out as early as March. As much as I think this miniseries is shaping up to be muddled and poorly executed, I'll probably buy the DVD. I'm always looking for a new DVD and well, it's Dune.
Sure but if you didn't read the book or watch the movie, you'd have no idea what he was trying to do. You would just assume that people like usig freaky voices in the future.
Re:God what a Terrrible rendition. Down right augh
on
On The Dune Miniseries
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· Score: 1
What do they do? THEY CUT EVEN MORE OUT. There is LESS in the Miniseries
You hit the nail on the head. I'm not sure this is even possible in a 6 hour miniseries, but they managed to get in far less than the movie was able to get in by this point in the story.
Paul picks his name, Muad'Dib And it dosn't mean "Messiah" it is the name of a desert RAT.
So far the movie has been faithful to the book in this respect. They were calling him Mahdi (the Messiah), not Maud'Dib. That's straight out of the book.
Whoever wrote the miniseries must not have EVER read the book.
Oh come one, you are just nitpicking. Only minor things have been changed so far. Less than what has been changed in the movie. But the acting sucks, the costumes suck, the casting sucks, and the screenplay doesn't explain enough if you haven't read the book. Other than that, they have been pretty faithful to the book even if execution is poor.
I am a major Dune fan (read all the books many times) and I've got to say that the mini-series is leaving me feel underwhelmed. I was hoping for something that felt more comprehensive that the movie, not less. It's probably due to a lack of voice-overs but I wouldn't know what the hell was going on if I hadn't read the books.
I was never one who slammed the movie because I was amazed by how much they managed to fit into it. You may have needed to watch it a few times to fully understand it but it was there to understand. In the miniseries, you would have no idea about what was up with the voices (in the Paul-Reverend Mother exchange) if you haven't read the book.
The acting also sucked big-time. Even William Hurt. And I don't really notice acting unless it is really good or really bad. And well, I noticed it. The costumes also sucked it up. And although the Baron Harkonnen had his leanings, shall we say, in the book, he was a creature of excess, not some poofed-up faggot. He looked like Liberace. I figured that anything they did with the Baron would be an improvement on the movie. I was wrong. Neither ever properly reflected his genious.
Not all was bad though. The ships were cooler. I actually like the ornithopters much better. The worm kicked ass. Much better than the commercials had initially lead me to believe. No screwed up animals hanging everywhere (David Lynch is a freak when it comes to animals). No telepathy. No wierding modules (cool idea but they under understated the Fremems' fighting abilities). Gurney and Idaho were alright. They were the only actors I could tolerate. The shield belts were also cooler. The depiction of how the Guild navigators fold space was an improvement.
Back to the bashing though, what was up with Jessica and Paul suddenly ending up in the desert with no explanation whatsoever? There was just no coherence at all. I preferred the movie look as well. It was more appropriate for a post-Butlerian Jihad era. And I never god the feeling that Paul was a mentat, much less the Kwisatz Haderach. I guess that the feeling wouldn't mean anything since there was no explanation of what a mentat was. Or a Bene Gesserit for that matter. The various mental disciplines throughout the Dune novels was the core of the story for me. You can't have Dune without explaning, on some level, that people have abandoned most technology in favor of being able to do for themselves. That feeling of evolution needs to be there to understand Muad-Dib's place in the world.
All that being said, I love Dune. I'm glad to see any interpretation of it. I'm glad that they are making "Dune Messiah" and "Children of Dune" as well. Although I thought they were the weakest books in the series, if they do well, they might do the last three books which kicked ass. "God Emperor of Dune" was as good or better than the first novel and I would love to see it on my big screen.
WRONG!!! It is often much faster than C. Runtime optimizations tend to be far more EFFICIENT than compile time optimizations. What, did your project to port Quake to Java dissappoint you? For what it is used for, Java is fast. C is for sado-masochists who have no sense of style. They are the toliet cleaners of the programming world.
C is probably the least easy code to follow (barring assembly language). That's why god invented object-oriented languages. And as for cut and paste, ughh!!! That's the surest way to guarantee a project's failure. A little change in one place ends up causing months of debugging. Oh well, I took the bait.
I'll assume you are being sarcastic but in case you are not, are you on crack??? Java is a much better language than C++ hands down. Pointers and structs are not good things. They can be useful if you are writing games or device drivers but in the real world of programming, Java has a far cleaner model. There's less that can go wrong. By the way, everything is passed by reference in Java (barring primitive types).
As for applets, that's Java's weakness. Any competent programmer knows that you do not write applets. If anyone comes in for a job with the word applet on their resume gets shown the door. You obviously haven't done any Java server-side programming. It's incredible solid and fast.
Yes fast! I'm sick of people on Slashdot bitching about how slow Java is. It's often benchmarked as being faster that C++ due to the runtime optimizations it is capable of. It gets the slow reputation because of people like you who have never used it for anything but applets.
Oh, and as for the multiple platform issue. I don't see it as really important feature, but it is useful. Like it or not, the best development tools can be found for Windows. Most people develop on Windows for this reason. Normal people don't like vi. Then they deploy on a Unix platform for stability. It is a tremendous time saver. I get the impression that you don't earn your living as a programmer (or at least not yet). Time to market is one of the most important development consideration and, next to Smalltalk, Java is one of the best RAD languages out there (when you factor in the stability from not having to deal with pointers and such).
Maybe you don't fully realize what "the President of the sole superpower" means, but believe me, we do.
Don't, please don't tell us that there's absolutely no difference between the two candidates. There is. You may not care much about the IQ or the qualification of your president, but we definitely do, for the very reasons I mentioned above.
Do you honestly believe that it is the president you calls the shots on major matters such as war? There is no difference between the two candidates because they both represent the same center of power in the world. Consider the following quotes from former presidents and world leaders before you ascribe so much significance to the presidential decision:
"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world -- no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men." President Woodrow Wilson (Quoted in "National Economy and the Banking System," Senate Documents Co. 3, No. 23, 76th Congress, 1st session, 1939.)
"The high office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight." John F. Kennedy, at Columbia University, 10 days before his assassination
"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes." Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli
"Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." President Woodrow Wilson, from his book The New Freedom
"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes." Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice
"I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire,... The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply." Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild
"The Federal Reserve Banks are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this Nation is run by the International Bankers." Congressman Louis T. McFadden
The president is a rather insignificant figure in the grand scheme of things and democracy is all but dead. BTW, Santa Claus does not exist either. Grow up and see the world for what it is.
I had this dilema as well. I was going to vote for Nader and then I decided to vote for Browne. My problem is that there is no party that represents my views. I don't consider it to be a 180 diffence in ideology because I see big business and big goverment as one in the same. I'm a libertarian who believes strongly in corporate regulation. I don't believe corporations should be treated like individuals and I think that individuals should be granted as much freedom as is possible (short of actions that directly harm others). That being said, Nader seems more and more like a scary socialist to me. He completely lost me on the gun issue.
I'm pretty certain that the parties in Isreal and Palestine won't retain a lot of respect for that sort of President, and the US' role in the peace process, and as a result the process itself, will suffer badly for it.
If you are worried about the peace process then I would say that having a Jewish vice president, with a history of extreme support for Israel, would be far worse than having a retard for President. It's not like presidents negotiate directly anyway. However it is important that we demonstrate at least a pittance of neutrality when it comes to the peace process or there is no hope for either side.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny, the problems you describe are the same problems that happen to me whenever I use UPS and, to a lesser extent, FedEX. USPS has always been flawless for me. And I'm a libertarian for crying out loud. I go with what works. USPS will also deliever 365 a year (even on Christmas, depending on the type of delivery). I don't think the other two big ones do that, but I could be wrong. They also ship packages a lot faster than UPS. Everything to anywhere in about 2-4 days. I'm talking standard delivery. I've never actually met a person who had an "actual" complaint about the post office. I've always wondered where they come from. I guess they exist.
You should try Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon. They are more like the first book. People who liked the first book but didn't like Speaker or Xenocide tend to love the last two.
You should try Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon. They are more like the first book. People who liked the first book but didn't like Speaker or Xenocide tend to love the last two.
I never pictured Harkonen as a fat, crazy King Herod knockoff, as both the movie and miniseries directors seem to do. I saw him as a cunning, smart, ambitions political and military Player. One who happened to be very obese and maybe a little crazy, sure, but not to the extent that those traits defined him.
I agree. I don't know why they keep screwing his character up. I actually think they made him worse and I didn't formerly think that was possible. He went from a David Lynch alter-ego (all of David Lynchs' villians are the same) to some poofed up drag-queen wannabe. Like the said in "Children of Dune," the Baron was consumed by excess. He wasn't really crazy. He was one of the smartest people in the book.
I reread the dinner party section as an example(page 142 for those that own the book :P) and there was a LOT there that was left out. the whole byplay where the smugglers side with the atredies, (and scare the crap out of the banker(the guy dressed in purple) who is trying to bait paul, and where paul shocks everyone by maneuvering him into a corner (verbally). Not to mention the whole plot of jessica being the traider. (and 1 sentance abotu 'imperial conditiong' certainly doesnt due justice to HOW deep that betrayel had to go.)
I was very disappointed by this too. This was one of the most interesting parts of the first book and I thought they'd surely include it in the miniseries. However, I guess that, without the voice overs, you wouldn't be able to understand the scene too well anyway. And the only way miniseries Paul could maneuver anybody into a corner verbally is by whining him into it.
I am surprised that you found the dialogue better than the movie. I thought the dialogue in the miniseries was awful. Yet I still have lines from the movie echoing in my head. It may have had too much influence from Lynch but I loved lines like the ones exchanged between Paul and Leto just before leaving Caladan about the sleeper awakening. This miniseries just left me realizing just how much I actually did like the original movie.
It may have been longer but you can't tell me that it's more detailed. It's far less detailed and part of that has to do with the lack of internal monologues. That's what Dune is. You can't have a decent screen adaptation without them.
For all of those who haven't read the book, the best part of the story is what the people are thinking. What they are thinking is far more interesting than the story itself.
Even the director/producer or whatever said in a CNN interview that he thought the biggest criticism would be over the lack of internal monologues. Most of the book was about what people were thinking.
Stilgar, meeting Duke Leto? What the hell was that?
Stilgar did meet Leto in the book. It was a good scene, in the book that is. But I don't think Paul was there.
According to http://www.thedigitalbits.com/ Artisan has confirmed the DVD (anamorphic) is in the works. It may or may not be the uncut version. Let's hope that version addresses things like how Paul and Jessica suddenly end up in the desert. Or perhaps they can digitally remaster it to make the acting good. It may be out as early as March. As much as I think this miniseries is shaping up to be muddled and poorly executed, I'll probably buy the DVD. I'm always looking for a new DVD and well, it's Dune.
Sure but if you didn't read the book or watch the movie, you'd have no idea what he was trying to do. You would just assume that people like usig freaky voices in the future.
What do they do? THEY CUT EVEN MORE OUT. There is LESS in the Miniseries
You hit the nail on the head. I'm not sure this is even possible in a 6 hour miniseries, but they managed to get in far less than the movie was able to get in by this point in the story.
Paul picks his name, Muad'Dib And it dosn't mean "Messiah" it is the name of a desert RAT.
So far the movie has been faithful to the book in this respect. They were calling him Mahdi (the Messiah), not Maud'Dib. That's straight out of the book.
Whoever wrote the miniseries must not have EVER read the book.
Oh come one, you are just nitpicking. Only minor things have been changed so far. Less than what has been changed in the movie. But the acting sucks, the costumes suck, the casting sucks, and the screenplay doesn't explain enough if you haven't read the book. Other than that, they have been pretty faithful to the book even if execution is poor.
I am a major Dune fan (read all the books many times) and I've got to say that the mini-series is leaving me feel underwhelmed. I was hoping for something that felt more comprehensive that the movie, not less. It's probably due to a lack of voice-overs but I wouldn't know what the hell was going on if I hadn't read the books.
I was never one who slammed the movie because I was amazed by how much they managed to fit into it. You may have needed to watch it a few times to fully understand it but it was there to understand. In the miniseries, you would have no idea about what was up with the voices (in the Paul-Reverend Mother exchange) if you haven't read the book.
The acting also sucked big-time. Even William Hurt. And I don't really notice acting unless it is really good or really bad. And well, I noticed it. The costumes also sucked it up. And although the Baron Harkonnen had his leanings, shall we say, in the book, he was a creature of excess, not some poofed-up faggot. He looked like Liberace. I figured that anything they did with the Baron would be an improvement on the movie. I was wrong. Neither ever properly reflected his genious.
Not all was bad though. The ships were cooler. I actually like the ornithopters much better. The worm kicked ass. Much better than the commercials had initially lead me to believe. No screwed up animals hanging everywhere (David Lynch is a freak when it comes to animals). No telepathy. No wierding modules (cool idea but they under understated the Fremems' fighting abilities). Gurney and Idaho were alright. They were the only actors I could tolerate. The shield belts were also cooler. The depiction of how the Guild navigators fold space was an improvement.
Back to the bashing though, what was up with Jessica and Paul suddenly ending up in the desert with no explanation whatsoever? There was just no coherence at all. I preferred the movie look as well. It was more appropriate for a post-Butlerian Jihad era. And I never god the feeling that Paul was a mentat, much less the Kwisatz Haderach. I guess that the feeling wouldn't mean anything since there was no explanation of what a mentat was. Or a Bene Gesserit for that matter. The various mental disciplines throughout the Dune novels was the core of the story for me. You can't have Dune without explaning, on some level, that people have abandoned most technology in favor of being able to do for themselves. That feeling of evolution needs to be there to understand Muad-Dib's place in the world.
All that being said, I love Dune. I'm glad to see any interpretation of it. I'm glad that they are making "Dune Messiah" and "Children of Dune" as well. Although I thought they were the weakest books in the series, if they do well, they might do the last three books which kicked ass. "God Emperor of Dune" was as good or better than the first novel and I would love to see it on my big screen.
WRONG!!! It is often much faster than C. Runtime optimizations tend to be far more EFFICIENT than compile time optimizations. What, did your project to port Quake to Java dissappoint you? For what it is used for, Java is fast. C is for sado-masochists who have no sense of style. They are the toliet cleaners of the programming world.
most easy to follow somebody else's code
C is probably the least easy code to follow (barring assembly language). That's why god invented object-oriented languages. And as for cut and paste, ughh!!! That's the surest way to guarantee a project's failure. A little change in one place ends up causing months of debugging. Oh well, I took the bait.
I'll assume you are being sarcastic but in case you are not, are you on crack??? Java is a much better language than C++ hands down. Pointers and structs are not good things. They can be useful if you are writing games or device drivers but in the real world of programming, Java has a far cleaner model. There's less that can go wrong. By the way, everything is passed by reference in Java (barring primitive types).
As for applets, that's Java's weakness. Any competent programmer knows that you do not write applets. If anyone comes in for a job with the word applet on their resume gets shown the door. You obviously haven't done any Java server-side programming. It's incredible solid and fast.
Yes fast! I'm sick of people on Slashdot bitching about how slow Java is. It's often benchmarked as being faster that C++ due to the runtime optimizations it is capable of. It gets the slow reputation because of people like you who have never used it for anything but applets.
Oh, and as for the multiple platform issue. I don't see it as really important feature, but it is useful. Like it or not, the best development tools can be found for Windows. Most people develop on Windows for this reason. Normal people don't like vi. Then they deploy on a Unix platform for stability. It is a tremendous time saver. I get the impression that you don't earn your living as a programmer (or at least not yet). Time to market is one of the most important development consideration and, next to Smalltalk, Java is one of the best RAD languages out there (when you factor in the stability from not having to deal with pointers and such).
Maybe you don't fully realize what "the President of the sole superpower" means, but believe me, we do.
... The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."
Don't, please don't tell us that there's absolutely no difference between the two candidates. There is. You may not care much about the IQ or the qualification of your president, but we definitely do, for the very reasons I mentioned above.
Do you honestly believe that it is the president you calls the shots on major matters such as war? There is no difference between the two candidates because they both represent the same center of power in the world. Consider the following quotes from former presidents and world leaders before you ascribe so much significance to the presidential decision:
"We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world -- no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men."
President Woodrow Wilson (Quoted in "National Economy and the Banking System," Senate Documents Co. 3, No. 23, 76th Congress, 1st session, 1939.)
"The high office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight."
John F. Kennedy, at Columbia University, 10 days before his assassination
"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli
"Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
President Woodrow Wilson, from his book The New Freedom
"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."
Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court Justice
"I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire,
Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild
"The Federal Reserve Banks are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this Nation is run by the International Bankers."
Congressman Louis T. McFadden
The president is a rather insignificant figure in the grand scheme of things and democracy is all but dead. BTW, Santa Claus does not exist either. Grow up and see the world for what it is.
Maltheus
I had this dilema as well. I was going to vote for Nader and then I decided to vote for Browne. My problem is that there is no party that represents my views. I don't consider it to be a 180 diffence in ideology because I see big business and big goverment as one in the same. I'm a libertarian who believes strongly in corporate regulation. I don't believe corporations should be treated like individuals and I think that individuals should be granted as much freedom as is possible (short of actions that directly harm others). That being said, Nader seems more and more like a scary socialist to me. He completely lost me on the gun issue.
I'm pretty certain that the parties in Isreal and Palestine won't retain a lot of respect for that sort of President, and the US' role in the peace process, and as a result the process itself, will suffer badly for it.
If you are worried about the peace process then I would say that having a Jewish vice president, with a history of extreme support for Israel, would be far worse than having a retard for President. It's not like presidents negotiate directly anyway. However it is important that we demonstrate at least a pittance of neutrality when it comes to the peace process or there is no hope for either side.