Yes, thousands of people are clamoring for much needed performance tests in the areas high-end games and professional-level media software. Since Linux has long been recognized as the leader in both of those categories, I can't believe the reviewers' oversight in testing on Windows and MacOS.
Come off it... Linux only just recently got an O(1) scheduler. Windows has had that since before NT 4.0 - seven years ago at least.
Windows XP, for example, isn't all that great in this area, and often one process can too easily slow things down. This is even further emphasized when all the processes you're working with are actually the main "explorer.exe" process; eg, you do something in Windows Explorer that blocks (spin up a CD drive) and everything else (the "desktop", task bar, etc) all become unresponsive...
The kernel hasn't slowed down in that case; it's the GUI layer which has slowed down. It hit a bottleneck.
Interestingly, it would appear that Windows has used an O(1) scheduler in Windows NT and up since at least NT 4.0 (which came out in 1996).
It's also interesting to note that it has the same priority-boosting for IO threads that Linux has.
"Windows NT also uses additional priority adjustments based on other events, such as momentarily boosting thread priority when it returns from an I/O call"
*The article makes it sound like it's O(N) in places; it's not. The scheduler is using a set of priority lists, which are kept in-order at insertion time when a thread exits its context, by the thread inserting itself at the end of the list for its priority.
Re:My first computer...
on
First Computers
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A commodore+4, I think (correct me if I'm wrong please), this was released in the states as the vic 20. The plus 4 reffered to the MASSIVE 4Kb of extra RAM, this made it ideal for "Business Applications". It's currently in a loft in Scotland in my mothers house, but still works with the original tape deck and everything!
The +4 was an upgrade to the Commodore 16 (the Vic20 was much older, and had much less oomph). It had several built in apps for wordprocessing, spreadsheet work, etc.
10) God forbid, pay some federal income tax you dirtbags.
They do. Ever since Sun, Netscape, Kleiner Perkins, Oracle, et al paid their federal income tax to get the antitrust trial, Microsoft have wised up and are now paying their share of the federal income tax.
Oh sorry... you meant the real federal income tax, not the politicians' private yacht fund known as lobbying.
Remember folks, in Washington it's pay to play. If you don't pay, they won't let you play. Not for long anyway.
If apple is guilty of anything it's making the battery not easy to replace. You know, when you buy the thing there's no easy battery door, and you know batteries don't last forever.
Amusingly, compare and contrast with the Nomad Zen NX. The entire front fascia comes off, and there's a battery compartment in there.
Yet again, Creative come up with a wonderful product that works great. About the only thing the iPod has on it is the rotary controller on the front of the thing. (Creative, in their favor, have price, functionality, and the rather cool rugged case that comes with it).
Why would you need to have ballot serial numbers to prevent that? Strike a person's name off of the voter's list when he shows up to vote, hand him an unmarked ballot and let him go and vote. Done. He can't vote twice because his name has now been stroked off of the list.
Erm... there's another reason ballots would need serial numbers. Politicians currently get access to voting records after elections. Yep, your anonymous vote is not really anonymous. It's only anonymous during the election, to prevent vote buying. After that, anyone in the government can get those records.
Because that's a very useful thing for campaigners to know, there's no chance in hell that truly anonymous voting will ever occur.
A pity, but remember you're dealing with politicians here.
That you are amused by other people being scared by 28 Days Later says a lot about you.
Well, maybe it's just that I'm desensitized to horror movies. Or maybe I just know too much about how they're made. I mean, heck, it's just a guy in a suit on the screen. And you can measure the pulse of a horror movie very easily. It's usually on the 3, with one or two fakeouts in between. But you always go on the three.
The best bit, in fact, of the whole film was the deserted scenes - simply because there were pretty much no zombies wandering around. The zombies themselves didn't do anything for me. *shrugs*
Still, having said that, I know people who found the skeletons in Pirates of the Carribbean scary, so there is a spectrum of responses out there.
I actually liked the ending of Quiet Earth; the biggest problem for most people was that the pace changed - it was no longer just one man against the deserted world.
Empty London, emtpy motorways (an effect that seems simple today, but is incredibly complex when you think about it) were amazing - you could not have done that in the seventies. Vanilla Sky had already done it for New York, but this was like the whole city, and whole motorways which the UK viewers would especially appreciate.
bah... it was pathetic compared to The Quiet Earth.
God I hate Alex Garland for what he did to Danny Boyle's sense of style.
Real has a case there, because Microsoft is using the same tried-and-true approach that made IE what it is today. And the fact that they make it almost impossible to remove WMP in XP will make the case that much more believable.
Real has done the same thing. They also have lousy history of abusing customer privacy. And it's nearly impossible to remove it from my system, which arrived with it pre-installed.
Mozilla Firebird works quite well too, and isn't shareware either. And I heard you get a browser that's better than IE as a special offer!:-D
Well, apart from when you want to duplicate an existing open page in a new window or tab, it works great. Having to copy the URL over from the previous tab to get the same functionality is annoying.
Also: why no easy way to enter a URL from the keyboard? I don't want to have to tab to the address bar to do it, or click on the address bar. I just want to be able to hit a combination of keys and enter the url goddamnit!
In any case, I can assure you from personal experience that VC++ allows people with no understanding of the Windows libraries to put together complex GUI apps: I put together GUI apps in VC++ long before I understood the Windows libraries and toolkits, and so have many other people that I know.
Were they as bad as your Unix code?
disagree that VC++ is an "easier tool" in general. What VC++ is good at is handholding and user assistance, and the people who like VC++ and find it useful are people who like handholding and user assistance.
Funny... the only time I use the wizards are when I need to generate a boilerplate project, or for a small hacky project used to test a specific small piece of functionality in a standalone manner.
What was the last application you wrote, by the way? Mine controls scientific devices with network throttling, DSP analysis, generates a GUI and performs datalogging all in real-time. None of it was written using a wizard. All of it was written in Visual C++.
I'm sure that there are "many circles" in which the developers of Microsoft Word are held in high esteem.
There certainly are. Especially those circles in which people move who have attempted to write their own wordprocessor which handles unicode, bidirectional text, multiple languages, etc.
Have you written a fully fledged wordprocessor? No? Why not? Surely a programmer with such cajones and amazing make-file editing skills such as yourself could toss one off over a weekend.
But let's return to the original point.
Because you're losing this argument? Or do you just fancy a change of pace?
Spolsky, in effect, claimed that Windows and UNIX are really just variations on a theme. And I'm saying that he is wrong: the differences between the systems are far more fundamental. Windows is a mass-market product, both as far as its users and its programmer community are concerned. UNIX is a specialty product, suitable really only for skilled users and developers. And, frankly, I hope that will not change.
Remind me to put that in the next Linux advertising campaign.
"Linux - a speciality product, suitable really only for skilled users and developers".
I'd actually say that the average Windows developer cares a lot more about their userbase, because they know that their users could be anyone.
OTOH things are again inconsistent on Windows. For example I use a help authoring tool. I can invoke it from the command line and ask it to do a complete build and then exit. Amongst other things it invokes the Microsoft Help Compiler. However the help authoring tool then exits. There is no way from the start command to wait on a process and all of its children.
It could certainly very easily wait for its children to finish if it was designed to do that.
It wasn't. That's bad design on the application programmer's part.
I will certainly grant you that exec* look like a mess, but in reality it is actually all one function with different calling conventions. There is actually only one system call. We certainly won't start on calling conventions:-)
Sounds like the difference between using CreateProcess and using the runtime library exec() functions to me.
Visual C++ is targeted at "all skill levels". Or are you asserting that Microsoft really is targeting Visual C++ only at advanced developers?
Targetted at all skill levels does not mean "makes programming accessible to large numbers of people with limited experience", which was your original claim.
They don't even claim it's targetted at that. They just say that "developers of all skill levels will [enjoy using it]".
No, but the ability to do great work with such primitive tools as make and gdb demonstrates that you are a skilled and experienced programmer.
Funny... I've never used make & gdb.
I have, however, written programs in machine code, and debugged them by changing a set of bits on a single port to check where in the app it's stalling.
Your definition of a "skilled" and "experienced" programmer is pretty lame. In fact, given that most 1st year CS students at a Unix-based campus will use Make and GDB to do their initial coding, when they might not have had any prior programming experience whatsoever kind of puts that stupid myth into place.
Also, the ability to do great work with primitive tools when easier tools to use are available does not make you a 'better' programmer. It makes you the textbook definition of a masochist.
If it's a choice between using vi, make and gdb vs. using Visual C++ with Visual Assist and drag & drop project file management, I'll take Visual C++ every time. And I've been programming since 1981, on more complicated systems than you. And my reputation as a highly skilled software engineer precedes me in many circles.
Unix's fork() and exec() take only the parameters to specify the program. The equivalent Windows API takes 14 parameters... and most of those have suitable defaults, if you zero out the structure.
So let's see what CreateProcess lets you do:
BOOL CreateProcess(
LPCTSTR lpApplicationName,// name of executable module
LPTSTR lpCommandLine,// command line string
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpProcessAttributes,// SD
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpThreadAttributes,// SD
BOOL bInheritHandles,// handle inheritance option
DWORD dwCreationFlags,// creation flags
LPVOID lpEnvironment,// new environment block
LPCTSTR lpCurrentDirectory,// current directory name
LPSTARTUPINFO lpStartupInfo,// startup information
LPPROCESS_INFORMATION lpProcessInformation// process information );
Hmmm... it appears to let you specify the parameters to run the app. In detail. If you leave some out (eg. lpCurrentDirectory), you get a useful default value.
Now, fork() lets you spawn a duplicate. Great! But it doesn't let you specify anything to do with that duplicate - it just spawns, and you have to take the return code from fork and use that to set up your new processes' parameters.
How about exec()?
Welll.... it appears to certainly have plenty of parameters:
Wow! Look at all of these different exec-style() calls!
Not so simple now, is it?
Bitching about CreateProcess being too complicated would appear to mean that you've never had to start up an application in a suspended state so that you can specify the priority it runs at before it starts going. Or you've never had to monitor the processes' completion state by checking its handles. Or you've never wanted it to run with its support libraries and data files in one folder, while using another as its default folder.
In other words, exec() is great for writing CLI apps that don't do much, and are self-contained. But for anything more complicated, you really have to write a hell of a lot more code.
VB/VC++'s stated goal is to make programming accessible to large numbers of people with limited skills and experience. And, in fact, all I'm saying is that it succeeded spectacularly in that goal. Now, what's your point?
No, that's VB's stated goal. Unless you'd like to provide a reference?
Being forced to manually edit make files does NOT a good software engineer make, not matter how pumped up and superior all that text editing might make you feel.
First of all, the average work PC sits in your dentist's office or your architect's drafing room. It's not often used for web searching, that's generally done at home or in businesses/schools that do a lot of research.
Obviously you've not actually been out in the real world much, where pretty much everyone and their dog surfs the web at some point or other each and every day, from work. Including receptionists, office workers, people in cubicles, etc etc etc etc etc. And yes, receptionists in doctors and dentists offices do indeed surf the web.
Considering that only about 8% of the windows users are running XP (95, 98 and 2000 are the majority), then his comments still stand. The recent spate of articles on MS dropping support for Win98 has posted the ratios quite clearly.
That would be 38% according to Google, by the way. That study you're misquoting only surveyed a small sample of a specific market segment.
The movie opens at what I thought to be a strange spot - Smeagol's killing his friend for the Ring; why not put this in the first movie? I think this may have been foreshadowing one of the more prominent departures from the book: Jackson decided to increase the tension between Sam and Frodo over the Ring, with Golem playing on Frodo's Ring-induced distrust. This tension did exist in the book, but Jackson makes it more overt. Personally, I thought it was a little over the top.
This is one of the changes that occurred after they started shooting the first one. Originally, Gollum was going to be computer animated with very little mo-cap... but Andy Serkis changed all that, and turned Gollum's portrayal in the movies into a fully fledged character with true depth.
Of course, they'd already started shooting the first one when they discovered this, so this scene with Gollum and Smeagol was put in later.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, thousands of people are clamoring for much needed performance tests in the areas high-end games and professional-level media software. Since Linux has long been recognized as the leader in both of those categories, I can't believe the reviewers' oversight in testing on Windows and MacOS.
Come off it... Linux only just recently got an O(1) scheduler. Windows has had that since before NT 4.0 - seven years ago at least.
Windows XP, for example, isn't all that great in this area, and often one process can too easily slow things down. This is even further emphasized when all the processes you're working with are actually the main "explorer.exe" process; eg, you do something in Windows Explorer that blocks (spin up a CD drive) and everything else (the "desktop", task bar, etc) all become unresponsive...
The kernel hasn't slowed down in that case; it's the GUI layer which has slowed down. It hit a bottleneck.
Interestingly, it would appear that Windows has used an O(1) scheduler in Windows NT and up since at least NT 4.0 (which came out in 1996).
It's also interesting to note that it has the same priority-boosting for IO threads that Linux has.
"Windows NT also uses additional priority adjustments based on other events, such as momentarily boosting thread priority when it returns from an I/O call"
Detailed explanation of the NT4.0 scheduler
Easier to read version of the above
Part 1 of a slightly more indepth (but in some places inaccurate)* article
Part 2 of the article
*The article makes it sound like it's O(N) in places; it's not. The scheduler is using a set of priority lists, which are kept in-order at insertion time when a thread exits its context, by the thread inserting itself at the end of the list for its priority.
Personally, I'm waiting for the TiVo version, which won Best of Innovations for 2004.
Pics here
A commodore+4, I think (correct me if I'm wrong please), this was released in the states as the vic 20. The plus 4 reffered to the MASSIVE 4Kb of extra RAM, this made it ideal for "Business Applications". It's currently in a loft in Scotland in my mothers house, but still works with the original tape deck and everything!
The +4 was an upgrade to the Commodore 16 (the Vic20 was much older, and had much less oomph). It had several built in apps for wordprocessing, spreadsheet work, etc.
More info on the +4 (click "About")
10) God forbid, pay some federal income tax you dirtbags.
They do. Ever since Sun, Netscape, Kleiner Perkins, Oracle, et al paid their federal income tax to get the antitrust trial, Microsoft have wised up and are now paying their share of the federal income tax.
Oh sorry... you meant the real federal income tax, not the politicians' private yacht fund known as lobbying.
Remember folks, in Washington it's pay to play. If you don't pay, they won't let you play. Not for long anyway.
If apple is guilty of anything it's making the battery not easy to replace. You know, when you buy the thing there's no easy battery door, and you know batteries don't last forever.
Amusingly, compare and contrast with the Nomad Zen NX. The entire front fascia comes off, and there's a battery compartment in there.
Replacement Batteries? - $49.99.
Yet again, Creative come up with a wonderful product that works great. About the only thing the iPod has on it is the rotary controller on the front of the thing. (Creative, in their favor, have price, functionality, and the rather cool rugged case that comes with it).
You can find out whether or not a person voted in a particular election, but not who that person voted for.
Thanks for the clarification. Now I need to go find the friend who told me originally, and beat him around the head.
Why would you need to have ballot serial numbers to prevent that? Strike a person's name off of the voter's list when he shows up to vote, hand him an unmarked ballot and let him go and vote. Done. He can't vote twice because his name has now been stroked off of the list.
Erm... there's another reason ballots would need serial numbers. Politicians currently get access to voting records after elections. Yep, your anonymous vote is not really anonymous. It's only anonymous during the election, to prevent vote buying. After that, anyone in the government can get those records.
Because that's a very useful thing for campaigners to know, there's no chance in hell that truly anonymous voting will ever occur.
A pity, but remember you're dealing with politicians here.
That you are amused by other people being scared by 28 Days Later says a lot about you.
Well, maybe it's just that I'm desensitized to horror movies. Or maybe I just know too much about how they're made. I mean, heck, it's just a guy in a suit on the screen. And you can measure the pulse of a horror movie very easily. It's usually on the 3, with one or two fakeouts in between. But you always go on the three.
The best bit, in fact, of the whole film was the deserted scenes - simply because there were pretty much no zombies wandering around. The zombies themselves didn't do anything for me. *shrugs*
Still, having said that, I know people who found the skeletons in Pirates of the Carribbean scary, so there is a spectrum of responses out there.
I actually liked the ending of Quiet Earth; the biggest problem for most people was that the pace changed - it was no longer just one man against the deserted world.
I haven't seen the Quiet Earth. So explain why it was so 'pathetic' in 28 Days Later
Because the deserted London scenes were incredibly short compared to those in The Quiet Earth. That, and the movie didn't end well.
What amuses me is that people actually were scared by 28 Days Later.
Empty London, emtpy motorways (an effect that seems simple today, but is incredibly complex when you think about it) were amazing - you could not have done that in the seventies. Vanilla Sky had already done it for New York, but this was like the whole city, and whole motorways which the UK viewers would especially appreciate.
bah... it was pathetic compared to The Quiet Earth.
God I hate Alex Garland for what he did to Danny Boyle's sense of style.
who cares how good the Jekyll/Hyde CG is
No-one. Mainly because that wasn't CG.
Wish the guys who did The Hulk had tried the same thing.
Real has a case there, because Microsoft is using the same tried-and-true approach that made IE what it is today. And the fact that they make it almost impossible to remove WMP in XP will make the case that much more believable.
Real has done the same thing. They also have lousy history of abusing customer privacy. And it's nearly impossible to remove it from my system, which arrived with it pre-installed.
Do I get to sue them now too?
Hmmmm... a little hacky, but otherwise good. Thanks.
Mozilla Firebird works quite well too, and isn't shareware either. And I heard you get a browser that's better than IE as a special offer! :-D
Well, apart from when you want to duplicate an existing open page in a new window or tab, it works great. Having to copy the URL over from the previous tab to get the same functionality is annoying.
Also: why no easy way to enter a URL from the keyboard? I don't want to have to tab to the address bar to do it, or click on the address bar. I just want to be able to hit a combination of keys and enter the url goddamnit!
In any case, I can assure you from personal experience that VC++ allows people with no understanding of the Windows libraries to put together complex GUI apps: I put together GUI apps in VC++ long before I understood the Windows libraries and toolkits, and so have many other people that I know.
Were they as bad as your Unix code?
disagree that VC++ is an "easier tool" in general. What VC++ is good at is handholding and user assistance, and the people who like VC++ and find it useful are people who like handholding and user assistance.
Funny... the only time I use the wizards are when I need to generate a boilerplate project, or for a small hacky project used to test a specific small piece of functionality in a standalone manner.
What was the last application you wrote, by the way? Mine controls scientific devices with network throttling, DSP analysis, generates a GUI and performs datalogging all in real-time. None of it was written using a wizard. All of it was written in Visual C++.
I'm sure that there are "many circles" in which the developers of Microsoft Word are held in high esteem.
There certainly are. Especially those circles in which people move who have attempted to write their own wordprocessor which handles unicode, bidirectional text, multiple languages, etc.
Have you written a fully fledged wordprocessor? No? Why not? Surely a programmer with such cajones and amazing make-file editing skills such as yourself could toss one off over a weekend.
But let's return to the original point.
Because you're losing this argument? Or do you just fancy a change of pace?
Spolsky, in effect, claimed that Windows and UNIX are really just variations on a theme. And I'm saying that he is wrong: the differences between the systems are far more fundamental. Windows is a mass-market product, both as far as its users and its programmer community are concerned. UNIX is a specialty product, suitable really only for skilled users and developers. And, frankly, I hope that will not change.
Remind me to put that in the next Linux advertising campaign.
"Linux - a speciality product, suitable really only for skilled users and developers".
I'd actually say that the average Windows developer cares a lot more about their userbase, because they know that their users could be anyone.
OTOH things are again inconsistent on Windows. For example I use a help authoring tool. I can invoke it from the command line and ask it to do a complete build and then exit. Amongst other things it invokes the Microsoft Help Compiler. However the help authoring tool then exits. There is no way from the start command to wait on a process and all of its children.
It could certainly very easily wait for its children to finish if it was designed to do that.
It wasn't. That's bad design on the application programmer's part.
I will certainly grant you that exec* look like a mess, but in reality it is actually all one function with different calling conventions. There is actually only one system call. We certainly won't start on calling conventions :-)
Sounds like the difference between using CreateProcess and using the runtime library exec() functions to me.
You do know that you can use exec functions under windows, don't you?
Visual C++ is targeted at "all skill levels". Or are you asserting that Microsoft really is targeting Visual C++ only at advanced developers?
Targetted at all skill levels does not mean "makes programming accessible to large numbers of people with limited experience", which was your original claim.
They don't even claim it's targetted at that. They just say that "developers of all skill levels will [enjoy using it]".
No, but the ability to do great work with such primitive tools as make and gdb demonstrates that you are a skilled and experienced programmer.
Funny... I've never used make & gdb.
I have, however, written programs in machine code, and debugged them by changing a set of bits on a single port to check where in the app it's stalling.
Your definition of a "skilled" and "experienced" programmer is pretty lame. In fact, given that most 1st year CS students at a Unix-based campus will use Make and GDB to do their initial coding, when they might not have had any prior programming experience whatsoever kind of puts that stupid myth into place.
Also, the ability to do great work with primitive tools when easier tools to use are available does not make you a 'better' programmer. It makes you the textbook definition of a masochist.
If it's a choice between using vi, make and gdb vs. using Visual C++ with Visual Assist and drag & drop project file management, I'll take Visual C++ every time. And I've been programming since 1981, on more complicated systems than you. And my reputation as a highly skilled software engineer precedes me in many circles.
Unix's fork() and exec() take only the parameters to specify the program. The equivalent Windows API takes 14 parameters ... and most of those have suitable defaults, if you zero out the structure.
// name of executable module // command line string // SD // SD // handle inheritance option // creation flags // new environment block // current directory name // startup information // process information
..., const char *argn,
..., const char *argn,
..., const char *argn,
So let's see what CreateProcess lets you do:
BOOL CreateProcess(
LPCTSTR lpApplicationName,
LPTSTR lpCommandLine,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpProcessAttributes,
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES lpThreadAttributes,
BOOL bInheritHandles,
DWORD dwCreationFlags,
LPVOID lpEnvironment,
LPCTSTR lpCurrentDirectory,
LPSTARTUPINFO lpStartupInfo,
LPPROCESS_INFORMATION lpProcessInformation
);
Hmmm... it appears to let you specify the parameters to run the app. In detail. If you leave some out (eg. lpCurrentDirectory), you get a useful default value.
Now, fork() lets you spawn a duplicate. Great! But it doesn't let you specify anything to do with that duplicate - it just spawns, and you have to take the return code from fork and use that to set up your new processes' parameters.
How about exec()?
Welll.... it appears to certainly have plenty of parameters:
exec man page
int execl (const char *path, const char *arg0,
(char *)0);
int execv (const char *path, char *const *argv);
int execle (const char *path, const char *arg0,
(char *)0, const char *envp[]);
int execve (const char *path, char *const *argv, char *const *envp);
int execlp (const char *file, const char *arg0,
(char *)0);
int execvp (const char *file, char *const *argv);
but wait... what's this?
exec, execl, execv, execle, execve, execlp, execvp
Wow! Look at all of these different exec-style() calls!
Not so simple now, is it?
Bitching about CreateProcess being too complicated would appear to mean that you've never had to start up an application in a suspended state so that you can specify the priority it runs at before it starts going. Or you've never had to monitor the processes' completion state by checking its handles. Or you've never wanted it to run with its support libraries and data files in one folder, while using another as its default folder.
In other words, exec() is great for writing CLI apps that don't do much, and are self-contained. But for anything more complicated, you really have to write a hell of a lot more code.
VB/VC++'s stated goal is to make programming accessible to large numbers of people with limited skills and experience. And, in fact, all I'm saying is that it succeeded spectacularly in that goal. Now, what's your point?
No, that's VB's stated goal. Unless you'd like to provide a reference?
Being forced to manually edit make files does NOT a good software engineer make, not matter how pumped up and superior all that text editing might make you feel.
First of all, the average work PC sits in your dentist's office or your architect's drafing room. It's not often used for web searching, that's generally done at home or in businesses/schools that do a lot of research.
Obviously you've not actually been out in the real world much, where pretty much everyone and their dog surfs the web at some point or other each and every day, from work. Including receptionists, office workers, people in cubicles, etc etc etc etc etc. And yes, receptionists in doctors and dentists offices do indeed surf the web.
Considering that only about 8% of the windows users are running XP (95, 98 and 2000 are the majority), then his comments still stand. The recent spate of articles on MS dropping support for Win98 has posted the ratios quite clearly.
That would be 38% according to Google, by the way. That study you're misquoting only surveyed a small sample of a specific market segment.
The movie opens at what I thought to be a strange spot - Smeagol's killing his friend for the Ring; why not put this in the first movie? I think this may have been foreshadowing one of the more prominent departures from the book: Jackson decided to increase the tension between Sam and Frodo over the Ring, with Golem playing on Frodo's Ring-induced distrust. This tension did exist in the book, but Jackson makes it more overt. Personally, I thought it was a little over the top.
This is one of the changes that occurred after they started shooting the first one. Originally, Gollum was going to be computer animated with very little mo-cap... but Andy Serkis changed all that, and turned Gollum's portrayal in the movies into a fully fledged character with true depth.
Of course, they'd already started shooting the first one when they discovered this, so this scene with Gollum and Smeagol was put in later.
He tried it once before. People didn't like what he said, nailed him to a cross and stuck him on a hill.
Tough crowd, huh?
Besides, I wasn't talking about sending lesser deities. I was talking about the big Kahuna himself. Not the metatron. Not an archangel. The cheese.
After all, you can't nail a God to a cross. Not one that likes to smote and turn things into salt, anyway.