Gandalf and Saruman meeting doesn't really do much.
I think we'll have to agree to differ on this. It's my biggest regret of PJ's entire adaptation. I have to admit, it's rather short and easy to gloss over in the book, but the last time I read it I tried to visualise Christopher Lee's Saturman being forced to walk back to his balcony by the force of Gandalf the White's willpower, and his staff cracking in his hand.
"Wow!" I thought, "I can't wait!!". Little did I know how long I'd have to wait.
Gandalf meeting the witch king at Minas Tirith is pure geek fodder but doesn't do much for the story as a whole.
Maybe, but after he put it in the RoTK trailers last year, I felt cheated by that too.
Re:RoTK with the good bits restored (finally!)
on
ROTK:EE Trailer Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Here's how these good bits could have made it into RoTK cinematic release easily :
Put Shelob back into the Two Towers where she belongs. By the end of that book, Sam is lying senseless outside the orc stronghold and Frodo has been taken by the enemy. That would have been a fine ending for the film.
Find the time for this, in turn, by drastically shortening the Helms Deep stuff. It's dull.
You can dump the Aragorn falls off a cliff guff too.
See, easy-peasy!
Disclaimer : IHNDMOEHM
(I have not directed my own 11 hour movie)
RoTK with the good bits restored (finally!)
on
ROTK:EE Trailer Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I just don't understand how Peter Jackson thought the following were optional:-
Sun does not have the operating system market on Wall Street -- they're not even close. So by McNealy's own reasoning, Sun is as insignificant as Novell is.
...
Sun's attacks on Red Hat amount to straw man tactics
Until Sun releases software under a recognized open source or free software license, do not look at it unless you know exactly what you are doing: not only is it a waste of time trying to do their software engineering for them, if you are working on a competing proprietary or open source product (e.g., the Linux kernel), looking at the Solaris code may taint you. Source releases that are not under a recognized open source license are a legal mine field. This is true both for Solaris and for Java (and anything else from Sun or any other company.)
It would be wrong to assume that Sun's policy is necessarily "release first, then see if anything encumbered slipped out"
Actually they did. They did know all about it but internet was free, something MS cant stand. They set out to build their own net, MSN Network. Since microsoft cant invent itself out of a wet paperbag their MSN network failed miserably. The internet took over almost instantly and MS had to do a 90 degree turn, something that took a while to do.
Did you mean 90?
If they had completely reversed their previous course that would have been a 180 degree turn.
A 90 degree turn means you're no longer headed directly toward your previous destination nor completely away from the opposite. It's kind of a lateral move. Maybe something like appearing to embrace open published standards whilst secretly plotting to fuck them up. So I guess you're right, they did make a 90 degree turn.
"Furthermore, we should see more successful attacks against Apache than against IIS, since the implication of the myth is that the problem is one of numbers, not vulnerabilities.
Yet this is precisely the opposite of what we find, historically."
Running through 3GB of archived log files, from Apache running on 2003 Enterprise Server, I have concluded the following:
54% of attacks against IIS (Unicode traversal, buffer overflow, cgi, alternate data streams, etc.)
46% of attacks against Apache (htpasswd.exe, httpd.conf,.htaccess, some odd batchfile script attacks with args to copy httpd.conf into htdocs, etc.)
"Precisely the opposite" is hardly the right phrase to use in this situation. Sampling error among different web sites (due to different audiences, traffic rates, etc.) could easily account for the fact that IIS out-edged Apache here.
As for the *successful* part of the author's claim, there was a 0% success rate across all queries directed at servers I either have access to logs on, or directly control.
Sorry, your statistical sample is not comparable. You quote Petreley discussing successful attacks, then you provide some figures about attacks on your machines, and then point out that none of them were successful. So, you aren't actually telling us anything about successful attacks, since you haven't seen any.
Yes, which is my point about these being positioned as iMovie machines. Most 'serious' video apps want to display two video screens (clip and timeline, e.g.), a timeline, and a file browser of some kind. Same issue with iDVD and DVD Studio Pro.
I agree - in case it's not clear, my video work is not that serious, and so far I have only used iMovie/iDVD. Nevertheless it's been great, and one of my DVDs has gone to an indie label as -the- demo for a friends band.
Pro apps assume a large display area, because you have a lot of information to manage; the iLife apps manage that information for you, by removing options. Not that they don't work just fine for most of what you would want to do. And, I know people using pro apps on those dinky 12" displays, and they still have all their hair.
I don't use pro apps, but no longer have all my hair. Should I worry?:)
It's a matter of having a nice wide area for your timeline, ample space for both the canvas and playback windows, and space for your bins.
I can work OK on my Ti 800's 15" screen, and often do, but it's so much nicer to hook up my cinema display, and really be able to see what I'm working on.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your work habits, just that I find it much more productive to work with a bigger screen when I can.
Yeah, it would be better with a bigger screen, possibly multiple. I was only trying to point out that it really is doable on the smallest Apple Powerbook - at least with iMovie and iDVD.
I hook up my mini-DV camera. Work for a bit with my laptop on my lap. Fling in a blank DVD-R and some time later out comes a DVD that works on the living room player. It still feels impressive to me!
I've produced 7 or 8 DVDs (mostly concert movies) on my 12" Powerbook 12" (867Mhz, 640MB, 60GB) at that resolution. It works fine for me working alone.
After all, 1024x768 is similar or better resolution to NTSC, right? If you are putting fine detail in a video that you need a big screen to see properly, will it really come over well on the typical system?
However, when I did a "showing" for a band so we could chop one of their gigs down to a three-live-track promo, I switched to the external VGA adapter and showed it at 1280x1024 on my external LCD monitor.
So I guess it depends how serious your video work is.
1. On the DVD when the storm troopers come rushing into the control room that C-3P0 and R2-D2 are hiding in, one hits his head on the door as its rising and falls down. This was always a little blooper that made it in. Now there is a lound *thunk* sound, which had me rolling.
I noticed this too. I was absolutely ecstatic that it's been made "canon" by adding the sound effect
2. No one ever seems to complain about it, but i think the worst change made to the trilogy is in RotJ, Jabba's Palace, the singing and dancing scene. It was fine as it was, but the new song and dance routine with the cgi-creatures and backup singers makes me want to retch.
"They're butchering the classics. John Williams must be rolling over in his grave!"
Errm, you do know he's not actually dead yet, right?
At least Lindows was only borrowing-dows from Microsoft
That's your uncle speaking...
No, Luke, I am your father...
But seriously, the first "in" in Lindows could be from Linux or from Windows. I'm sure Microsoft sees it as their product's name just with a different first character.
My WRX had this recall also (and since then it's been again for another officialy recall - possibly loose driver's seat retaining bolt).
I wasn't too concerned because (as others have mentioned) in a manual car you normally have at least three options - use the brakes, turn off the engine, depress the clutch.
In an emergency I can well imagine trying the brakes first - in a porsche, for example, although the engine is stupendously powerful, they quote the brakes in bhp equivalent figures and rate the 911 turbo as having "3000 bhp" brakes (IIRC) - more than enough!
I am sceptical about this story, however it reminds me of an attitude to software, expressed before by a French engineer, that I disliked:-
An Airbus avionics programmer appeared on a documentary about the Airbus crashes (this was in the UK so was at least seven years ago). He was quoted as saying something like "we take the attitude that, with software, if we test it well enough, then it will work".
This scared me. If you don't know why, I don't want to ride in your plane or live near YOUR nuclear reactor, either.
I've met dogmatic positions on both sides of this issue:-
Once when I was posting to a fairly unfamiliar newsgroup I made some comment about how much I still liked the Hitch-Hikers books, radio shows, even TV shows. It was in response to someone else saying that Douglas Adams had been seriously outclassed by Terry Pratchett and his Discworld series.
Some bumptious "regular" on the newsgroup responded to me with some comment like "We've already been over this, Terry Pratchett is far superior to Douglas Adams"
The "we've already been over this" comment was annoying enough - as if regulars are in charge of the "canon" of accetable geek literature and who is better than who.
Even worse though, this was dead wrong! I love my HHGTTG books to this day. Terry Pratchett, sure, they're fun to read once, maybe twice, but then that's it.I give them away by the box-load.
The phrase "Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain" will stick in my brain forever, as will the phrase "but it tastes filthy".
Explain to me how either "The Phantom Menace" or "Attack of the Clones" achieved Lucas' "truest and finest artistic expression", because from my perspective they were swamped in fruitless eye candy, bogged-down in terrible screenplays, and put-to-rest by taking superior actors and crushing their ability to perform.
You're making the incorrect assumption that I'm making a claim about those films. I'm not.
What I want in episode III is a film to rival the best of the past. Like Alex Guinness in Ep. IV ("that's no moon") or Darth Vader's special chamber that we see in Empire Strikes Back at the same time as we hear the "Darth Theme" for the very first time. Hell, even "shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level" is more enjoyable than all the scenes with kid Anakin put together. "I'll try a roll, that's a neat trick". Gaaaaah
They were B-films. Attack of the Clones was at least entertaining, but neither Ep. I or II actually achieved anything groundbreaking or even worth remembering. They were cheap summer action movies, NOT works of art by any stretch of the imagination...
Yeah, but I was talking about Episode III. You seemed to suggest he should care about what fans thought about episodes 1 and 2 and take it into account for 3. I'm saying no, if he would actually strive for greatness within his own sphere, that would serve fans best, in my view.
I can't completely dismiss Ep 1 - the lightsaber 2-against-1-in-the-reactor duel was great, great music too. Duel of the Fates? Something like that.
That being said, maybe Lucas *should* hold some focus groups with fans, because from my perspective he's totally out of touch with reality, busy strip-mining his past works to earn barrel loads of cash.
It would be nice if he would stop producing such dreck and ruining the entire series, but I don't think focus groups is the way.
Boy, I just feel all warm-and-fuzzy when I think of Lucas now... and I sure am looking forward to seeing "lava surfing" in "Revenge of the Sithians from Outer Space".
Oh get over yourself, George Lucas would serve his fans best by achieving his truest and finest artistic expression in the final Star Wars film. NOT trying to pander to specific fan wishes. What's he supposed to do, hold focus groups?
"How was that burnt skin on Anakin for you? A bit too gruesome? ok, thanks for the feedback"
Slashdot Mirror
I forgot one more way to save time in RoTK.
As my wife pithily put it "Frodo, hurry up and get on the fucking boat"
Gandalf and Saruman meeting doesn't really do much.
I think we'll have to agree to differ on this. It's my biggest regret of PJ's entire adaptation. I have to admit, it's rather short and easy to gloss over in the book, but the last time I read it I tried to visualise Christopher Lee's Saturman being forced to walk back to his balcony by the force of Gandalf the White's willpower, and his staff cracking in his hand.
"Wow!" I thought, "I can't wait!!". Little did I know how long I'd have to wait.
Gandalf meeting the witch king at Minas Tirith is pure geek fodder but doesn't do much for the story as a whole.
Maybe, but after he put it in the RoTK trailers last year, I felt cheated by that too.
Here's how these good bits could have made it into RoTK cinematic release easily :
Put Shelob back into the Two Towers where she belongs. By the end of that book, Sam is lying senseless outside the orc stronghold and Frodo has been taken by the enemy. That would have been a fine ending for the film.
Find the time for this, in turn, by drastically shortening the Helms Deep stuff. It's dull.
You can dump the Aragorn falls off a cliff guff too.
See, easy-peasy!
Disclaimer : IHNDMOEHM (I have not directed my own 11 hour movie)
I just don't understand how Peter Jackson thought the following were optional :-
Luckily they are ALL in the EE! I can't wait
You might want to rethink calling Itanium a complete failure that no one wants.
Yeah, on reflection it is a complete and utter failure that only the supercomputer crowd could possibly love.
This next bit was extra good :-
Sun does not have the operating system market on Wall Street -- they're not even close. So by McNealy's own reasoning, Sun is as insignificant as Novell is.
Sun's attacks on Red Hat amount to straw man tactics
uh-huh
Would the SPARC version be free? I need an update for a old Ultra 80 we're going to use.
Sorry, no, in fact all versions of Solaris will stop working on that machine as of the end of this week. So you better just send it to me...
kidding!
Until Sun releases software under a recognized open source or free software license, do not look at it unless you know exactly what you are doing: not only is it a waste of time trying to do their software engineering for them, if you are working on a competing proprietary or open source product (e.g., the Linux kernel), looking at the Solaris code may taint you. Source releases that are not under a recognized open source license are a legal mine field. This is true both for Solaris and for Java (and anything else from Sun or any other company.)
It would be wrong to assume that Sun's policy is necessarily "release first, then see if anything encumbered slipped out"
I'm sorry, but if you have to have "crunch time" in a project, then it hasn't been planned properly.
You're new here, aren't you?
Did you mean 90?
If they had completely reversed their previous course that would have been a 180 degree turn.
A 90 degree turn means you're no longer headed directly toward your previous destination nor completely away from the opposite. It's kind of a lateral move. Maybe something like appearing to embrace open published standards whilst secretly plotting to fuck them up. So I guess you're right, they did make a 90 degree turn.
Yet this is precisely the opposite of what we find, historically."
Running through 3GB of archived log files, from Apache running on 2003 Enterprise Server, I have concluded the following:
54% of attacks against IIS (Unicode traversal, buffer overflow, cgi, alternate data streams, etc.)
46% of attacks against Apache (htpasswd.exe, httpd.conf, .htaccess, some odd batchfile script attacks with args to copy httpd.conf into htdocs, etc.)
"Precisely the opposite" is hardly the right phrase to use in this situation. Sampling error among different web sites (due to different audiences, traffic rates, etc.) could easily account for the fact that IIS out-edged Apache here.
As for the *successful* part of the author's claim, there was a 0% success rate across all queries directed at servers I either have access to logs on, or directly control.
Sorry, your statistical sample is not comparable. You quote Petreley discussing successful attacks, then you provide some figures about attacks on your machines, and then point out that none of them were successful. So, you aren't actually telling us anything about successful attacks, since you haven't seen any.
Yes, which is my point about these being positioned as iMovie machines. Most 'serious' video apps want to display two video screens (clip and timeline, e.g.), a timeline, and a file browser of some kind. Same issue with iDVD and DVD Studio Pro.
I agree - in case it's not clear, my video work is not that serious, and so far I have only used iMovie/iDVD. Nevertheless it's been great, and one of my DVDs has gone to an indie label as -the- demo for a friends band.
Pro apps assume a large display area, because you have a lot of information to manage; the iLife apps manage that information for you, by removing options. Not that they don't work just fine for most of what you would want to do. And, I know people using pro apps on those dinky 12" displays, and they still have all their hair.
I don't use pro apps, but no longer have all my hair. Should I worry? :)
It's a matter of having a nice wide area for your timeline, ample space for both the canvas and playback windows, and space for your bins.
I can work OK on my Ti 800's 15" screen, and often do, but it's so much nicer to hook up my cinema display, and really be able to see what I'm working on.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your work habits, just that I find it much more productive to work with a bigger screen when I can.
Yeah, it would be better with a bigger screen, possibly multiple. I was only trying to point out that it really is doable on the smallest Apple Powerbook - at least with iMovie and iDVD.
I hook up my mini-DV camera. Work for a bit with my laptop on my lap. Fling in a blank DVD-R and some time later out comes a DVD that works on the living room player. It still feels impressive to me!
you don't need to see his web pages
you can go about your surfing
click along
I've produced 7 or 8 DVDs (mostly concert movies) on my 12" Powerbook 12" (867Mhz, 640MB, 60GB) at that resolution. It works fine for me working alone.
After all, 1024x768 is similar or better resolution to NTSC, right? If you are putting fine detail in a video that you need a big screen to see properly, will it really come over well on the typical system?
However, when I did a "showing" for a band so we could chop one of their gigs down to a three-live-track promo, I switched to the external VGA adapter and showed it at 1280x1024 on my external LCD monitor.
So I guess it depends how serious your video work is.
I noticed this too. I was absolutely ecstatic that it's been made "canon" by adding the sound effect
2. No one ever seems to complain about it, but i think the worst change made to the trilogy is in RotJ, Jabba's Palace, the singing and dancing scene. It was fine as it was, but the new song and dance routine with the cgi-creatures and backup singers makes me want to retch. "They're butchering the classics. John Williams must be rolling over in his grave!"
Errm, you do know he's not actually dead yet, right?
That's your uncle speaking...
No, Luke, I am your father...
But seriously, the first "in" in Lindows could be from Linux or from Windows. I'm sure Microsoft sees it as their product's name just with a different first character.
But in a WRX (you must have a bugeye since you have the seat bolt recall, I have an 04), why would you want to slow down? ;-)
Silly! The reason is obvious. You need to slow down so that you can enjoy accelerating again.
and yes, it's a bugeye sport wagon
The clip thing is a precaution. They issued a recall notice only because if it did happen, and it could, it would be really bad.
True, I was just agreeing with the comments on how many options must be removed from a car before you can really lose control this way.
My WRX had this recall also (and since then it's been again for another officialy recall - possibly loose driver's seat retaining bolt).
I wasn't too concerned because (as others have mentioned) in a manual car you normally have at least three options - use the brakes, turn off the engine, depress the clutch.
In an emergency I can well imagine trying the brakes first - in a porsche, for example, although the engine is stupendously powerful, they quote the brakes in bhp equivalent figures and rate the 911 turbo as having "3000 bhp" brakes (IIRC) - more than enough!
I am sceptical about this story, however it reminds me of an attitude to software, expressed before by a French engineer, that I disliked :-
An Airbus avionics programmer appeared on a documentary about the Airbus crashes (this was in the UK so was at least seven years ago). He was quoted as saying something like "we take the attitude that, with software, if we test it well enough, then it will work".
This scared me. If you don't know why, I don't want to ride in your plane or live near YOUR nuclear reactor, either.
I've met dogmatic positions on both sides of this issue :-
Once when I was posting to a fairly unfamiliar newsgroup I made some comment about how much I still liked the Hitch-Hikers books, radio shows, even TV shows. It was in response to someone else saying that Douglas Adams had been seriously outclassed by Terry Pratchett and his Discworld series.
Some bumptious "regular" on the newsgroup responded to me with some comment like "We've already been over this, Terry Pratchett is far superior to Douglas Adams"
The "we've already been over this" comment was annoying enough - as if regulars are in charge of the "canon" of accetable geek literature and who is better than who.
Even worse though, this was dead wrong! I love my HHGTTG books to this day. Terry Pratchett, sure, they're fun to read once, maybe twice, but then that's it.I give them away by the box-load.
The phrase "Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain" will stick in my brain forever, as will the phrase "but it tastes filthy".
Working Cray Supercomputer for sale
Explain to me how either "The Phantom Menace" or "Attack of the Clones" achieved Lucas' "truest and finest artistic expression", because from my perspective they were swamped in fruitless eye candy, bogged-down in terrible screenplays, and put-to-rest by taking superior actors and crushing their ability to perform.
You're making the incorrect assumption that I'm making a claim about those films. I'm not.
What I want in episode III is a film to rival the best of the past. Like Alex Guinness in Ep. IV ("that's no moon") or Darth Vader's special chamber that we see in Empire Strikes Back at the same time as we hear the "Darth Theme" for the very first time. Hell, even "shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level" is more enjoyable than all the scenes with kid Anakin put together. "I'll try a roll, that's a neat trick". Gaaaaah
They were B-films. Attack of the Clones was at least entertaining, but neither Ep. I or II actually achieved anything groundbreaking or even worth remembering. They were cheap summer action movies, NOT works of art by any stretch of the imagination...
Yeah, but I was talking about Episode III. You seemed to suggest he should care about what fans thought about episodes 1 and 2 and take it into account for 3. I'm saying no, if he would actually strive for greatness within his own sphere, that would serve fans best, in my view.
I can't completely dismiss Ep 1 - the lightsaber 2-against-1-in-the-reactor duel was great, great music too. Duel of the Fates? Something like that.
That being said, maybe Lucas *should* hold some focus groups with fans, because from my perspective he's totally out of touch with reality, busy strip-mining his past works to earn barrel loads of cash.
It would be nice if he would stop producing such dreck and ruining the entire series, but I don't think focus groups is the way.
Boy, I just feel all warm-and-fuzzy when I think of Lucas now... and I sure am looking forward to seeing "lava surfing" in "Revenge of the Sithians from Outer Space".
Oh get over yourself, George Lucas would serve his fans best by achieving his truest and finest artistic expression in the final Star Wars film. NOT trying to pander to specific fan wishes. What's he supposed to do, hold focus groups?
"How was that burnt skin on Anakin for you? A bit too gruesome? ok, thanks for the feedback"