I was aware that some of my spelling was incorrect. Oddly enough I don't keep a four-volume set in my office. Sorry if that bothers you - I trust my points, however, were clear.
There are three main reasons for the changes they made: pacing and tension, accessibility to non-fans, and dramatic development that works in the movies (rather than the book). If you don't understand why things had to be changed then you don't understand the different narrative demands of books and movies
Yes, this is the argument that keeps coming up. Unfortunately, it appears to many that the changes Jackson did make worked against these goals, while at the same time he took a very short and sorrowful final parting and dragged it out for 15 minutes, thus destroying all its meaning and poignancy. Jackson's characters and visuals were great; his timing and pacing were sometimes good, sometimes terrible. And most often terrible where he departed from Tolkien's text. You think that JRR guy knew a little about epics? Having translated Beowulf for example?
...That this movie was also created with the mainstream public in mind, who are not necessarily devoted fans of Tolkien. This gives allowance for changes and omissions/dramatic liberties taken; it has to appeal to the jaded masses as well as the rest of us.
That's kind of the point, though. Jackson had to make some changes (cutting out Bombadil; even cutting out the Scouring was understandable even if many disagree), and Tolkien himself wrote in letters to his agent that he knew that would be necessary for making a movie.
But the changes Jackson made in plot (leading up to the Battle of Helm's Deep for example) and dialogue were for the most part changes for the worse regardless of what type of audience he was considering. Tolkien will never get his due because of the genre in which he published, but he was a pretty dammed good writer, weaving together action and philosophy without making it boring or pretentious. Whoever sexed up the script for Jackson wasn't nearly as good, and it shows.
he question I have is this: Is there any change from the book that actually bothers people?
Let's see:
Fundamental changes to Arwen's character - totally unnecessary
Changes to Theodan's character - didn't hurt too much, but unnecessary and disruptive to the plot
Changes to Denthenor's character - turned him from King Lear into something far less tragic and meaningful
Wasting of Galadrial's encounter with Frodo - key point in the book where the Elves show they have learned something after 3000 years of stupid moves - turned into a quick special effects hit - and why does she walk around as if her stride was 5 centimeters? Such lack of physical coordination would have made it a bit difficult for her to lead the armies of the White Council against Dol Guilder, wouldn't it?
Yeah, a number of the changes bother me a lot. They were unnecessary and actually made what could have been great into something merely good.
One thing I've always wondered about, and wasn't mentioned in the nitpickers guide was Aragorn bearing a bow and using it expertly in FotR. Don't remember anything mentioned about Aragorn being skilled with the bow in the book.
90 years old; 72 years spent wandering the wilderness, served in the armies of Rohan AND Gondor; led the attack on Umbar - and in all that time he never learned to use a bow? I would find that hard to believe!
I understand why the 'Scouring of the Shire' was left out, but I don't remember the book taking so dang long to end. I've been waiting years for a good adaption of these books into film and I think Jackson did a great job. The end was just kind of long.
15 minutes could have been cut out of those final scenes, leaving time for (a) the first confrontation with Saruman at the Tower of Orthanac (b) a final confrontation with Saruman in the Shire - wouldn't have to be the whole Scouring, but would establish that Merry and Pippin had indeed grown from their experiences; and then the final scene could have been cut down to 2 minutes, making it more believable and consistant with the book.
I like the Harry Potter books, but J.K. Rowling has only about 20% of the depth of Tolkien. Her narrative voice was developed after television became common and after Star Wars had its effect on our culture. Her books translate well to movies because that is what they are at the core.
While Jackson generally did a good job with LotR, I just don't understand WHY he felt the need to make many of the changes he made. Arwen could have been given more screen time without changing her character entirely, for example. And there was no need to make gratuitous changes to the events leading up to the battle of Helm's Deep - they are quite convincing as written.
So why did Jackson make the changes? Just to prove that he was the man in charge?
And by the way, I have a hard time imagining that any woman or child of Rohan would have run screaming helplessly from a band of invading Orcs. Cried, sure. While picking up the closest sword/wooodaxe/sycthe and charging toward the orcs.
I had exactly the same experience. I am not sure exactly what the reason is, and every person's body is different. But my guess is that the fundamental causes of RSI in the wrists and shoulders are (1) use of the mouse (2) bad keyboard posture.
Most laptops today have a touchpad, and after I got used to it I found that the shoulder pain I had had since 6 months after starting with the mouse in 1989 got much better.
I typed for many years on manual typewrites, DECWriters, and similar high-force keyboards that forced good hand posture. After switching to the laptop I realized my wrist pain started when I began using soft-touch, movable, adjustable PC keyboards.
Two years ago I had a desktop built about 1.5" lower than the standard desktop height, with smooth rounded edges. I use the laptop exclusively on that surface and wrist, shoulder, and neck strain have all been a lot better.
Kind of a Robert Fulgham moment: what your (pre-1980) high school typing teacher told you was exactly right after all.
The entire letter was "acceptable" until his closing paragraph where he told them to stop wasting his time and their time... If you want to sound professional you do not tell someone to stop wasting your time in a letter. Find another way to put it.
By implying that SCO was consuming some of his organization's valuable time, the writer might have been positioning his org to sue SCO for damages should SCO's claims in the IBM and Novell be found incorrect.
Darl's words will seem pretty transparent, even funny, to anyone aware of the widespread acceptance and use of Free / Open Source software (by individuals, governments, non-profits, and even companies like SCO) -- but you might have to point this out to your servants in Congress.
Indubitably. But we need some good, solid, well-written points in rebuttal to include in those letters. Let's see what we can put together in the comments to this story.
Took a look at the MIT link; I suggest you will have to cough up the bucks and purchase the Harvard material. There are at least three layers to the case, and one of them only appears after you spend a lot of time staring at the numbers and digging out the background reading material.
The Thorn/EMI case to which I refer covers the 1970-1980 time period during which Thorn invented the CAT scanner, then threw the business away for a variety of reasons - all of them relevant to this discussion. The situation in 1990 grew out of the decisions made in 1970.
The Harvard Business School case method has its flaw, but their write-up of this case makes up for an entire MBA program spent reading their less-successful write-ups IMHO. It should be a required exercise for every fast-track-dude-on-the-way-up.
Software developers, IT Staff, and Engineers, have this failing in common: They tend to think that all problems are technical problems, things that require a larger and more well funded IT department to solve. Whatever the problem is, we can solve it, we just need more2 people/money/tools/toys.
Funny, the most common statement I hear from IT people about problems is "it is a waste of time throwing computers at this problem until the business process and organizational behaviour problems are sorted out". To which the immediate response is, "Bill Gates told me Great Plains 2004 would fix everything. Get it installed by Monday".
Make sure all suggestions are positioned from the perspective of how they will help the company achieve increased revenue, reduced costs, or a strategic advantage IN YOUR CORE BUSINESS. Management could give a shit about technology - until you translate it into dollars that they can count
Counter-argument from another experienced manager: your statement assumes that corporate management has no responsibility to, well, manage the internal operations of the business. It is a conceit of the 1990s that there are some sort of "core functions" and everything else a corporation does is non-core and can be ignored, abused, or outsourced. Read the Thorn/EMI CAT scanner case for a good example of what happens when that thinking is taken to its logical extreme...
I just pulled those off the top of my head. I'm sure there are better reasons and it's been discussed here before. Will you people stop bickering about them taking too long to move it?
Thanks to the contributors to this thread - great answers.
Just to clarify my OP, I wasn't suggesting that it should have been done faster - I would have gone slowly in the same situation. I was wondering why it was taking so much longer than the original schedule though. You have given me a lot of suggestions to dig into.
I understand that the mission controllers wanted to take their time and not make any foolish mistakes, a policy I agree with.
However, I don't understand why they kept saying that moving the rover off the lander was "dangerous". I thought the rover was designed to be able to deploy even if the lander came to rest upside down. Instead it was right-side-up on level ground. The rover had to drive over the deflated balloon, but why was that more dangerous than just driving over the surface?
Novell may be on the right side in this particular fight, but since NetWare is the scourge of the Earth, I don't know that we should go nuts here and say we "like" them.
Out of curosity, have you ever worked with a well-designed, well-engineered, and competently operated Netware network (as opposed to something a guy with 16 hours of CNA training threw together out of the box, although those tend to work fairly well also)? I personally found a lot of capabilities and concepts in Netware that were very useful, flexible, and managable, and are not duplicated in any system on the market today. Just my 0.02.
No your house isn't shielded. You are sheilded from loosing basic assets that allow you to continue to make a living. But while you won't lose your house, if there is any equity in your house, that equity will be pulled out to give to your creditors.
There is no federal law defining what "basic living quarters" are, so the federal bankruptcy courts defer to state law. In Florida, the dollar figure is something like 5,000,000 USD. That's why all the big Enron dudes bought houses in Florida and transferred their legal place of residence as soon as the poop hit the fan.
I bet their CFO wouldn't approve payment of Verisign's tremendously high fee to renew the certificate. "'Highway robbery,' he fumed. 'We aren't paying that fee!'".
When I lived in Chicago in the late 1980s, there were several large organizations that tried the 100% outsourcing model. By the mid-1990s they were all trying to rebuild their in-house IT capability, albeit not at the level had been before. General Motors went through a similar cycle (although there they only brought about 20% back in-house) for the same reason: they found that communication and friction problems overwhelmed any theoretical advantages (cost, specialization) of going out-of-house.
The problem is, in the 1990s there was still a pool of people for these orgs to use in re-insourcing. If large quantities of work move from the US to India, both current and future IT experts will move to other jobs and not be willing to return. Which could prevent a continuation of the IT insource/outsource cycle which realisitically has existed since the 50s.
Yes. One of the sites under consideration for the Thirty Meter Telescope is on an island in the Canadian high arctic. Very dark skies with remarkably good atmospherics for such a low altitude. Now about getting staff to work there....
How many people are needed to maintain and operate a large telescope of this nature? Do the astronomers running the current experiement have to be on-site, or is that all done via the Internet? Or could it be done remotely if a 10 Gb (say) connection were available from a surfer's paradise such as Edmonton?
Just trying to get a handle on how remote the physical installation can be and still be usable in a practical sense.
Slashdot Mirror
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But the changes Jackson made in plot (leading up to the Battle of Helm's Deep for example) and dialogue were for the most part changes for the worse regardless of what type of audience he was considering. Tolkien will never get his due because of the genre in which he published, but he was a pretty dammed good writer, weaving together action and philosophy without making it boring or pretentious. Whoever sexed up the script for Jackson wasn't nearly as good, and it shows.
sPh
- Fundamental changes to Arwen's character - totally unnecessary
Yeah, a number of the changes bother me a lot. They were unnecessary and actually made what could have been great into something merely good.Changes to Theodan's character - didn't hurt too much, but unnecessary and disruptive to the plot
Changes to Denthenor's character - turned him from King Lear into something far less tragic and meaningful
Wasting of Galadrial's encounter with Frodo - key point in the book where the Elves show they have learned something after 3000 years of stupid moves - turned into a quick special effects hit - and why does she walk around as if her stride was 5 centimeters? Such lack of physical coordination would have made it a bit difficult for her to lead the armies of the White Council against Dol Guilder, wouldn't it?
sPh
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So why did Jackson make the changes? Just to prove that he was the man in charge?
And by the way, I have a hard time imagining that any woman or child of Rohan would have run screaming helplessly from a band of invading Orcs. Cried, sure. While picking up the closest sword/wooodaxe/sycthe and charging toward the orcs.
sPh
Most laptops today have a touchpad, and after I got used to it I found that the shoulder pain I had had since 6 months after starting with the mouse in 1989 got much better.
I typed for many years on manual typewrites, DECWriters, and similar high-force keyboards that forced good hand posture. After switching to the laptop I realized my wrist pain started when I began using soft-touch, movable, adjustable PC keyboards.
Two years ago I had a desktop built about 1.5" lower than the standard desktop height, with smooth rounded edges. I use the laptop exclusively on that surface and wrist, shoulder, and neck strain have all been a lot better.
Kind of a Robert Fulgham moment: what your (pre-1980) high school typing teacher told you was exactly right after all.
sPh
sPh
sPh
Took a look at the MIT link; I suggest you will have to cough up the bucks and purchase the Harvard material. There are at least three layers to the case, and one of them only appears after you spend a lot of time staring at the numbers and digging out the background reading material.
sPh
The Harvard Business School case method has its flaw, but their write-up of this case makes up for an entire MBA program spent reading their less-successful write-ups IMHO. It should be a required exercise for every fast-track-dude-on-the-way-up.
sPh
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sPh
Just to clarify my OP, I wasn't suggesting that it should have been done faster - I would have gone slowly in the same situation. I was wondering why it was taking so much longer than the original schedule though. You have given me a lot of suggestions to dig into.
sPh
However, I don't understand why they kept saying that moving the rover off the lander was "dangerous". I thought the rover was designed to be able to deploy even if the lander came to rest upside down. Instead it was right-side-up on level ground. The rover had to drive over the deflated balloon, but why was that more dangerous than just driving over the surface?
sPh
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Sorry I don't have mod points today - this should be a +5 or +6.
sPh
The problem is, in the 1990s there was still a pool of people for these orgs to use in re-insourcing. If large quantities of work move from the US to India, both current and future IT experts will move to other jobs and not be willing to return. Which could prevent a continuation of the IT insource/outsource cycle which realisitically has existed since the 50s.
sPh
Just trying to get a handle on how remote the physical installation can be and still be usable in a practical sense.
sPh