But in practice, multithreaded programs are almost always interactive, and thus are primarily limited by
user response times,
I would disagree with this wholeheartedly. What about databases like Oracle, MS SQL Server, and so on? They're internally multithreaded, and most definitely not "interactive" after you initiate a SQL query.
I believe apache 2.0 is threaded. HTTP by nature is not interactive. And so on. There are many other examples, left as an exercise to the reader.
While it is true that threads are very useful for interactive programs, in fact critical, their use does not stop there by a longshot. Any program which needs to do two things at once without fear of blocking on a system call is a candidate for threads. Threads are also useful for distributing compute cycles over multiple processors within a single process, allowing it to gain the benefit of concurrency.
The project I'm currently working on is a custom database application, and without threads it would be useless. And there are no users talking to it directly, that's for sure.
reducing the
amount of input required from the user will always pay off better than any optimizations.
I find this perplexing. Nobody cares about optimizing a user dialog. Reducing user input or optimization of user input code would serve little purpose in most multithreaded applications I'm aware of. Generally, interactive multithreaded programs use threads so they can interact with users while simultaneously performing some other task that shouldn't be stalled by waiting for user input. For example, a network monitor might have three threads: one for watching network traffic, one for resolving IP addresses to hostnames, and one for taking user input. It doesn't matter how long the user input thread sits around waiting for the user to type/click something. There are two other threads working away in the meantime, watching traffic and displaying it for the user, oblivious to whether or not the user is doing anything. In such a case as this, profiling the watcher/resolver threads might be very useful indeed, since they need to be more or less realtime.
This gprof problem is a serious issue, and minimizing it by saying that threaded programs generally wouldn't benefit from profiling is naive.
There are jillions of SSH solutions. All of the ones I've used (including OpenSSH) are far, far more secure than any FTP server I've ever seen. FTP is an ancient protocol, inherently insecure, and FTP servers are constantly showing up on Bugtraq with buffer overflows, etc. SSH shows up there too, but not nearly as often and usually with less severe problems. Any boss not willing to use a freeware SSH is ignorant, but any boss not willing to at least use a commercial one is incompetent. (Ignoring the fact that commercial != better.)
BTW, for a bitchin' Windows SSH client, check out "putty". Awesome. Puts Tera Term to shame.
For those of you asking this question, the answer is "evidence". The people who were busted had been communicating with each other, presumably through email. That email will quite possibly be sitting on their computers. That alone would justify the cops taking away the computers for examination.
Not to mention evidence of tampering with the modems might be somewhere on the computers too. Things like cable modem mod HOWTOs, software, etc.
One of my favorites
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Way back when, I worked for a company that produced a special version of SysV Unix. One of our developers was going through all the source code and looking for places where global variables were initialized to zero, thusly:
int x = 0;
and changing them to be implicit:
int x;
This had the effect of reducing the size of the data section of the binary and moved the variable to the BSS section. A simple and safe optimization, albeit somewhat anal.
Shortly thereafter things started acting funny. The OS would slowly go crazy in very subtle ways after booting. It was not clear what was wrong or if anything actually was wrong, and nobody connected the variable initialization change to the problems with the kernel. After something like 3 months, they finally figured out that when this change was applied to a single variable in the C library it invoked a compiler bug that caused the library to be compiled in such a way that caused the kernel to fail to reset the CPU's floating point registers during a context switch. (How a faulty C library could cause the kernel to do this is still a mystery to me.) This is one of the weirdest bugs I've experienced, though I'm not doing it justice here due to fading memory.
I want to see them die in flames. For several years now I have refused to patronize these guys
in any way, after they tried to screw me good.
I used to have MCI Worldcom as my wireless phone provider, and it took me *five months* to cancel my account when I switched to another provider. In the meantime, they billed me for other peoples' calls and double-and-triple-billed me each month. I called them every month when I got a new bogus bill, and had to wait in the queue for an hour each time. Each time I called they had no record of my previous calls, so it was back to square one. In the meantime, bills continued rolling in, and they refused to reverse the charges because they had no proof that I had already cancelled service. I finally screamed at someone loud enough that they fixed the problem.
In repayment, I cancelled all services I had with them (long distance service) and promptly hung up on any of their telemarketers brazen enough to solicit me. Seeing them go under would be justice. I don't believe that companies run so poorly should continue to exist.
But then you have charges of destroying evidence to contend with. The tapes were subpoenaed, making destroying them illegal.
That's true, of course, but I always wondered why erasing them wasn't considered tantamount to destruction. Especially given that it's been established that the 18 minute section was repeatedly erased.
Admittedly, the first part of Yoda's lightsaber battle was reasonably cool. But once he started bouncing around like a freaking bumblebee, it got annoying fast.
I think the whole thing should have been taken out. Yoda is above physical combat, or at least he should be. I really love the line in the movie where Dooku says something like, "It looks like this can't be settled with the force - we'll have to use lightsabers." Uhm, isn't the force supposed to be more powerful than lightsabers? Why didn't they just play rock-paper-scissors instead? It seems like the force isn't useful for a whole lot, since the Jedi always immediatly pull out their light sabers before even trying to thrash each other mentally.
I really hated the movie, and Lucas' mistreatment of Yoda was one of the reasons. Our only hope for the next movie is if Lucas kicks the bucket in the next couple of months and they appoint me writer/director. I promise I'll set things right.:)
The main problem for me is the fact that you have to pay a monthly subscription fee. That's really hard for me to wrap my head around, since I'm so used to paying nothing. For a fee of $10/month or whatever they charge, I would expect ALL commercial-free programming. However, they only claim that "most" of their stations are commercial-free. Why am I supposed to pay for stations with commercials? Even if it were truly commercial-free, I wouldn't want to pay. That's just too annoying. I have enough bills to pay without having yet another one buzzing around.
Also, I'm unconvinced that it works well in metro areas. Like GPS, the signal gets blocked by obstructions like buildings, trees, etc. To get around this, they have repeaters in places where the signal is likely to get blocked. I'd put money on those transmitters not doing the trick everywhere you might go in, say, SF or New York, where you would expect lots of repeaters, much less smaller population centers that still have tall buildings. And what do you want to bet that it won't work for crap in mountainous areas where there are absolutely no repeaters.
Why pay for the novelty of receiving radio from satellites if it has to fall back to a more conventional terrestrial transmission much of the time anyway? Truly, the only real use I can see for this is if you travel cross-country a lot and want to be able to hear the same stations wherever you go, or if you use it at home and are just really married to some station on XM or Sirius that you can't get elsewhere.
All I can say is, I hope they don't have region encoding or encrypted data in this new format.
If it's truly open, encryption should be unnecessary. And region encoding is totally annoying.
Since I signed up for the "Privacy Manager" service offered by Pacific Bell, I haven't gotten a single telemarket call. It blocks out people who don't have their caller ID exposed, requiring them to turn it on (at a prompt) or to speak their name so their call can be screened. Telemarketers never make it past the service, because their computerized dialers can't deal with it properly.
Some idiot in the CA assembly has proposed a state law to force telemarketers to reveal their caller ID so consumers can screen them out manually. This would totally hose me, because then they'd skate past the privacy manager prompt. Yes, I'd be able to see who's calling (how much you want to bet that the caller ID info would be "misleading" anyway?), but the main problem is that the phone would actually ring, requiring me to pick it up. I haven't gotten a telemarket call in the 8 months or so since signing up for the service. I used to get 5-10 a day, and I don't want to experience that again even if it only means checking the caller ID window on my phone.
If they want to pass an anti-telemarketing law, it should be one that forces telemarketers to keep their caller ID hidden and that forces the telephone company to offer Privacy Manager to everyone free of cost. Otherwise, don't f*ck with a beautiful thing!!
We'll find out tomorrow, but the explanation for this could be as simple as an error on the website, a dream sequence featuring the lone gunmen, or even a flashback. Of course, it's always possible they didn't really die, or that they got resurrected (happens all the time on the show:). As in soap operas, nothing is guaranteed permanent.
How I would respond to that, "It's a Mac. I'll take it out of the box , rack it, turn it on, spend about 1/2 an hour setting it up, and walk away.
What other system in that class can you say that about?"
You obviously aren't responsible for budgeting large arrays of rack-mounted PC class servers. The people who have to actually *pay* for rows of servers generally don't give a rat's ass how cool a server is. They want the cheapest one that does what it's supposed to. You'd be a loser to use Macs for this sort of thing, unless there was some Mac-only application you had to run on them.
We get 5.2 quakes in CA several times a year. They're not even half as bumpy as a takeoff aboard an airliner. I felt it, and though it was rather lengthy, was not very noticable (and I'm near the epicenter).
I was practically on top of the epicenter of the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, a 7.2 quake. Now *that's* an earthquake. Anything less than that is barely worth mentioning, especially here.
Huh? How can this movie be in violation of the DMCA? The account of Enigma and how Ultra and the Polish cracked it is old hat. It's been published many times, long before there ever was a DMCA. And Enigma technology is in the public domain - nobody "owns" it. And if someone was silly enough to actually use the Enigma algorithm in a commercial product these days, when there are numerous other better forms of encryption in the public domain to use, it still wouldn't matter. Publishing general information on a well-known algorithm is not the same as reverse-engineering someone's implementation of that algorithm and publishing that information.
I guess he just had to throw the obligatory YRO question in there.
One doesn't have to wonder. They'll just tap in at the routers
at either end of the connection instead of trying to tap into the line
itself. Quantum cryptography is only useful point-to-point. Once the
data hits either end, it can be observed because the quantum part
of the cryptography (the polarity of the light particles) is out of the
picture. It is impossible (currently, at least; if this ever becomes possible, then
quantum cryptography will be less secure than even weak encryption is
now) to have a "light repeater" or somesuch
for the purpose of bridging more than two end-to-end points, so there is
no way around this except to secure both ends physically. That is a
limitation that would-be observers can get around any number of ways.
It doesn't matter if the signal is being through a satellite,
as the article explains the goal to be - there are
still two ends on the ground (and the satellite itself) to hack into.
How will they tax me if I only buy individual components and not a prebuilt system? They'll have to tack on a 10% charge to all components or something. Taxing a "new PC" seems pretty impractical.
How will they enforce that this money be spent on recycling/properly disposing of used computer parts? Like any other tax, I expect it would end up getting spent on things like balancing the budget.
Why don't they have a recycling tax on things like used batteries, smoke detectors (radioactive!), motor oil, and so on? Well, perhaps they do, I wouldn't know because it's certainly not easy to figure out where and how to recycle them. I don't have some battery recycling truck coming by every Thursday to pick up my used batteries along with my empty bottles and old newspapers. If they're worried about computers poisoning the environment and using up landfill, they should be doubly concerned about the more common and hazardous stuff too.
At one time I was so addicted to the Warlord of Mars series I read practically nothing else. For some strange reason my dad had a collection of the first three books in one volume sitting on a shelf in his library (aka my bedroom), and one day I discovered it. Normally, I completely ignored his books because they were mostly really boring things, but the cover caught my attention. His books all came from the book of the month club, I guess, because he didn't want to waste time finding books on his own. If I hadn't pulled Warlord of Mars off the shelf, it never would have been read and would surely have ended up at Goodwill.
I took it with me when I left home to go live in the woods for the summer after high school. It was the only thing I had to read, other than the 10 year old magazines lying around the camp I stayed at. If only I had brought all of the books in the series with me, I would have had something else to read after the first week. I ended up reading it something like 5 times that summer.
And now - this. I've always hoped they would make a Warlord of Mars movie, and I've always dreaded it. It's always a crapshoot when Hollywood gets a hold of something you cherish, except the odds are far worse than craps. Looks like they've rolled snake eyes this time. How could they do this?! How could they hand something this precious to the Mummy idiots? Their first mummy movie sucked, and the second one was one of the worst movies I've ever seen (if not *the* worst).
Just watch, they'll have some dipshit like the Rock as John Carter and Pamela Anderson as Dejah Thoris. Or some doughboy like Kevin Costner and a wench like Cameron Diaz. Oh god, I feel ill.
Okay, melodrama aside, it's going to be a disaster. Why not give it to someone who makes quality action/fantasy films instead of just someone who can rake in the $$? How about Peter Jackson, who's already shown he can adapt classic fantasy to the big screen?
Slashdot Mirror
But in practice, multithreaded programs are almost always interactive, and thus are primarily limited by user response times,
I would disagree with this wholeheartedly. What about databases like Oracle, MS SQL Server, and so on? They're internally multithreaded, and most definitely not "interactive" after you initiate a SQL query.
I believe apache 2.0 is threaded. HTTP by nature is not interactive. And so on. There are many other examples, left as an exercise to the reader.
While it is true that threads are very useful for interactive programs, in fact critical, their use does not stop there by a longshot. Any program which needs to do two things at once without fear of blocking on a system call is a candidate for threads. Threads are also useful for distributing compute cycles over multiple processors within a single process, allowing it to gain the benefit of concurrency.
The project I'm currently working on is a custom database application, and without threads it would be useless. And there are no users talking to it directly, that's for sure.
reducing the amount of input required from the user will always pay off better than any optimizations.
I find this perplexing. Nobody cares about optimizing a user dialog. Reducing user input or optimization of user input code would serve little purpose in most multithreaded applications I'm aware of. Generally, interactive multithreaded programs use threads so they can interact with users while simultaneously performing some other task that shouldn't be stalled by waiting for user input. For example, a network monitor might have three threads: one for watching network traffic, one for resolving IP addresses to hostnames, and one for taking user input. It doesn't matter how long the user input thread sits around waiting for the user to type/click something. There are two other threads working away in the meantime, watching traffic and displaying it for the user, oblivious to whether or not the user is doing anything. In such a case as this, profiling the watcher/resolver threads might be very useful indeed, since they need to be more or less realtime.
This gprof problem is a serious issue, and minimizing it by saying that threaded programs generally wouldn't benefit from profiling is naive.
There are jillions of SSH solutions. All of the ones I've used (including OpenSSH) are far, far more secure than any FTP server I've ever seen. FTP is an ancient protocol, inherently insecure, and FTP servers are constantly showing up on Bugtraq with buffer overflows, etc. SSH shows up there too, but not nearly as often and usually with less severe problems. Any boss not willing to use a freeware SSH is ignorant, but any boss not willing to at least use a commercial one is incompetent. (Ignoring the fact that commercial != better.)
BTW, for a bitchin' Windows SSH client, check out "putty". Awesome. Puts Tera Term to shame.
This article accurately describes just about every Internet salesman I've ever known.
Goodbye John. At least I got to see you play a few times.
Part of me keeps hoping this is just another practical joke from The Who. I guess those days died with Keith.
For those of you asking this question, the answer is "evidence". The people who were busted had been communicating with each other, presumably through email. That email will quite possibly be sitting on their computers. That alone would justify the cops taking away the computers for examination.
Not to mention evidence of tampering with the modems might be somewhere on the computers too. Things like cable modem mod HOWTOs, software, etc.
Way back when, I worked for a company that produced a special version of SysV Unix. One of our developers was going through all the source code and looking for places where global variables were initialized to zero, thusly:
int x = 0;
and changing them to be implicit:
int x;
This had the effect of reducing the size of the data section of the binary and moved the variable to the BSS section. A simple and safe optimization, albeit somewhat anal.
Shortly thereafter things started acting funny. The OS would slowly go crazy in very subtle ways after booting. It was not clear what was wrong or if anything actually was wrong, and nobody connected the variable initialization change to the problems with the kernel. After something like 3 months, they finally figured out that when this change was applied to a single variable in the C library it invoked a compiler bug that caused the library to be compiled in such a way that caused the kernel to fail to reset the CPU's floating point registers during a context switch. (How a faulty C library could cause the kernel to do this is still a mystery to me.) This is one of the weirdest bugs I've experienced, though I'm not doing it justice here due to fading memory.
Would it really have made any difference? And I would have wasted a buck instead of making them pay for my toll-free call.
I want to see them die in flames. For several years now I have refused to patronize these guys in any way, after they tried to screw me good.
I used to have MCI Worldcom as my wireless phone provider, and it took me *five months* to cancel my account when I switched to another provider. In the meantime, they billed me for other peoples' calls and double-and-triple-billed me each month. I called them every month when I got a new bogus bill, and had to wait in the queue for an hour each time. Each time I called they had no record of my previous calls, so it was back to square one. In the meantime, bills continued rolling in, and they refused to reverse the charges because they had no proof that I had already cancelled service. I finally screamed at someone loud enough that they fixed the problem.
In repayment, I cancelled all services I had with them (long distance service) and promptly hung up on any of their telemarketers brazen enough to solicit me. Seeing them go under would be justice. I don't believe that companies run so poorly should continue to exist.
I wonder what these bozos think about "Ask Jeeves", which frames every site it links to? My guess is that some Internet-illiterate management-type person at NPR wrote this policy after experiencing net plagiarism or something. That still does not excuse them however.
But then you have charges of destroying evidence to contend with. The tapes were subpoenaed, making destroying them illegal.
That's true, of course, but I always wondered why erasing them wasn't considered tantamount to destruction. Especially given that it's been established that the 18 minute section was repeatedly erased.
You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.
I have a blowtorch that says magnetic tape can be erased.
You obviously have a very short attention span...
No, I just have a very low tolerance for annoyance.
Admittedly, the first part of Yoda's lightsaber battle was reasonably cool. But once he started bouncing around like a freaking bumblebee, it got annoying fast.
:)
I think the whole thing should have been taken out. Yoda is above physical combat, or at least he should be. I really love the line in the movie where Dooku says something like, "It looks like this can't be settled with the force - we'll have to use lightsabers." Uhm, isn't the force supposed to be more powerful than lightsabers? Why didn't they just play rock-paper-scissors instead? It seems like the force isn't useful for a whole lot, since the Jedi always immediatly pull out their light sabers before even trying to thrash each other mentally.
I really hated the movie, and Lucas' mistreatment of Yoda was one of the reasons. Our only hope for the next movie is if Lucas kicks the bucket in the next couple of months and they appoint me writer/director. I promise I'll set things right.
The main problem for me is the fact that you have to pay a monthly subscription fee. That's really hard for me to wrap my head around, since I'm so used to paying nothing. For a fee of $10/month or whatever they charge, I would expect ALL commercial-free programming. However, they only claim that "most" of their stations are commercial-free. Why am I supposed to pay for stations with commercials? Even if it were truly commercial-free, I wouldn't want to pay. That's just too annoying. I have enough bills to pay without having yet another one buzzing around.
Also, I'm unconvinced that it works well in metro areas. Like GPS, the signal gets blocked by obstructions like buildings, trees, etc. To get around this, they have repeaters in places where the signal is likely to get blocked. I'd put money on those transmitters not doing the trick everywhere you might go in, say, SF or New York, where you would expect lots of repeaters, much less smaller population centers that still have tall buildings. And what do you want to bet that it won't work for crap in mountainous areas where there are absolutely no repeaters.
Why pay for the novelty of receiving radio from satellites if it has to fall back to a more conventional terrestrial transmission much of the time anyway? Truly, the only real use I can see for this is if you travel cross-country a lot and want to be able to hear the same stations wherever you go, or if you use it at home and are just really married to some station on XM or Sirius that you can't get elsewhere.
All I can say is, I hope they don't have region encoding or encrypted data in this new format. If it's truly open, encryption should be unnecessary. And region encoding is totally annoying.
Since I signed up for the "Privacy Manager" service offered by Pacific Bell, I haven't gotten a single telemarket call. It blocks out people who don't have their caller ID exposed, requiring them to turn it on (at a prompt) or to speak their name so their call can be screened. Telemarketers never make it past the service, because their computerized dialers can't deal with it properly.
Some idiot in the CA assembly has proposed a state law to force telemarketers to reveal their caller ID so consumers can screen them out manually. This would totally hose me, because then they'd skate past the privacy manager prompt. Yes, I'd be able to see who's calling (how much you want to bet that the caller ID info would be "misleading" anyway?), but the main problem is that the phone would actually ring, requiring me to pick it up. I haven't gotten a telemarket call in the 8 months or so since signing up for the service. I used to get 5-10 a day, and I don't want to experience that again even if it only means checking the caller ID window on my phone.
If they want to pass an anti-telemarketing law, it should be one that forces telemarketers to keep their caller ID hidden and that forces the telephone company to offer Privacy Manager to everyone free of cost. Otherwise, don't f*ck with a beautiful thing!!
...to stop those Klez virus emails from filling my mailbox. Someone should pass a law banning those.
We'll find out tomorrow, but the explanation for this could be as simple as an error on the website, a dream sequence featuring the lone gunmen, or even a flashback. Of course, it's always possible they didn't really die, or that they got resurrected (happens all the time on the show :). As in soap operas, nothing is guaranteed permanent.
How I would respond to that, "It's a Mac. I'll take it out of the box , rack it, turn it on, spend about 1/2 an hour setting it up, and walk away. What other system in that class can you say that about?"
You obviously aren't responsible for budgeting large arrays of rack-mounted PC class servers. The people who have to actually *pay* for rows of servers generally don't give a rat's ass how cool a server is. They want the cheapest one that does what it's supposed to. You'd be a loser to use Macs for this sort of thing, unless there was some Mac-only application you had to run on them.
...until they can bring the price down to levels that are competitive with PCs or even Suns.
We get 5.2 quakes in CA several times a year. They're not even half as bumpy as a takeoff aboard an airliner. I felt it, and though it was rather lengthy, was not very noticable (and I'm near the epicenter).
I was practically on top of the epicenter of the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, a 7.2 quake. Now *that's* an earthquake. Anything less than that is barely worth mentioning, especially here.
Huh? How can this movie be in violation of the DMCA? The account of Enigma and how Ultra and the Polish cracked it is old hat. It's been published many times, long before there ever was a DMCA. And Enigma technology is in the public domain - nobody "owns" it. And if someone was silly enough to actually use the Enigma algorithm in a commercial product these days, when there are numerous other better forms of encryption in the public domain to use, it still wouldn't matter. Publishing general information on a well-known algorithm is not the same as reverse-engineering someone's implementation of that algorithm and publishing that information.
I guess he just had to throw the obligatory YRO question in there.
One can only wonder what the FBI will do.
One doesn't have to wonder. They'll just tap in at the routers at either end of the connection instead of trying to tap into the line itself. Quantum cryptography is only useful point-to-point. Once the data hits either end, it can be observed because the quantum part of the cryptography (the polarity of the light particles) is out of the picture. It is impossible (currently, at least; if this ever becomes possible, then quantum cryptography will be less secure than even weak encryption is now) to have a "light repeater" or somesuch for the purpose of bridging more than two end-to-end points, so there is no way around this except to secure both ends physically. That is a limitation that would-be observers can get around any number of ways.
It doesn't matter if the signal is being through a satellite, as the article explains the goal to be - there are still two ends on the ground (and the satellite itself) to hack into.
How will they tax me if I only buy individual components and not a prebuilt system? They'll have to tack on a 10% charge to all components or something. Taxing a "new PC" seems pretty impractical.
How will they enforce that this money be spent on recycling/properly disposing of used computer parts? Like any other tax, I expect it would end up getting spent on things like balancing the budget.
Why don't they have a recycling tax on things like used batteries, smoke detectors (radioactive!), motor oil, and so on? Well, perhaps they do, I wouldn't know because it's certainly not easy to figure out where and how to recycle them. I don't have some battery recycling truck coming by every Thursday to pick up my used batteries along with my empty bottles and old newspapers. If they're worried about computers poisoning the environment and using up landfill, they should be doubly concerned about the more common and hazardous stuff too.
At one time I was so addicted to the Warlord of Mars series I read practically nothing else. For some strange reason my dad had a collection of the first three books in one volume sitting on a shelf in his library (aka my bedroom), and one day I discovered it. Normally, I completely ignored his books because they were mostly really boring things, but the cover caught my attention. His books all came from the book of the month club, I guess, because he didn't want to waste time finding books on his own. If I hadn't pulled Warlord of Mars off the shelf, it never would have been read and would surely have ended up at Goodwill.
I took it with me when I left home to go live in the woods for the summer after high school. It was the only thing I had to read, other than the 10 year old magazines lying around the camp I stayed at. If only I had brought all of the books in the series with me, I would have had something else to read after the first week. I ended up reading it something like 5 times that summer.
And now - this. I've always hoped they would make a Warlord of Mars movie, and I've always dreaded it. It's always a crapshoot when Hollywood gets a hold of something you cherish, except the odds are far worse than craps. Looks like they've rolled snake eyes this time. How could they do this?! How could they hand something this precious to the Mummy idiots? Their first mummy movie sucked, and the second one was one of the worst movies I've ever seen (if not *the* worst). Just watch, they'll have some dipshit like the Rock as John Carter and Pamela Anderson as Dejah Thoris. Or some doughboy like Kevin Costner and a wench like Cameron Diaz. Oh god, I feel ill.
Okay, melodrama aside, it's going to be a disaster. Why not give it to someone who makes quality action/fantasy films instead of just someone who can rake in the $$? How about Peter Jackson, who's already shown he can adapt classic fantasy to the big screen?