It is certainly not a too-late response to Android, but rather rather trying to cut off its market before it gains too much of a foothold.
I wasn't very clear about it -- I was implying that it was jumping on the opensource bandwagon, much as Mac OS X tried to ride the increasing interest in opensource technologies without the pesky problems of having to actually contribute much back, hence their choice of a BSD licensed operating system on which to base their code.
I've seen a bunch of other people talking about how widespread adoption of Symbian is compared to Android. But I'd also remind everyone that WinMo and the Blackberry OS are both in use on millions of handsets (I've had phones based on both), and yet have horrendous user interfaces. Lots of people using something doesn't make it well written or well designed.
Any of the fans of the book would already know it -- it would have had to have been for the moviegoers who didn't already know the plot of the book, I'd figure.
As long as you don't think that because a director changes the content, that makes them somehow a valid artist.
I haven't heard anyone try to say that "V for Vendetta" was a good adaptation because the Wachowski Brothers decided to write their own (IMHO inferior) ending to the original, more or less completely missing the point of the source material. Yes, it may be something completely different, in the same way that mashups are a completely different art form, with some sort of artistic validity. I somehow doubt, however, that if someone took Finnegan's Wake (or some other piece of classic literature, take your pick) and rewrote it as a film while changing plot and characters, that they would be heralded as a genius.
I'm also assuming that your perception of the director as being perfectly valid as an artist is somewhat colored by your slight disdain for the original medium in which it was presented. No one expects an exact page-to-screen conversion, but if the points for sections go flying over your head, you can't expect the original content to shine though.
All that being said, it was *far* more faithful an adaptation than I had expected, and it did indeed profit from some of the "enhancements" that the director had made, in the same way that certain changes weren't necessarily improvements. Snyder had said in interviews that he had to substantially alter what he was going to present in order to be allowed to release the movie, and that the Director's Cut would most likely have more of the source material in it.
Well... I'd say it is more in the lines of "what could the *original author* know about film making?"
Yeah, I guess the guy who did such classics as "300" and "Dawn of the Dead" knows more about his genre than a guy who authored a great number of classics in his genre.
The director in question had said in interviews that he greatly respected the source material, which makes the changes seem even more ridiculous. Throwing wire-frame action shots or making a scene contain more gratuitous gore doesn't exactly seem like it comes from a master of film, since it highlights style over substance.
The generals/President was kind of corny. I don't know how intentional it was, but they felt like one dimensional cartoons compared to the main characters.
I think given time, Nixon probably would have evolved into even more of a caricature of himself than what we remember of him.
That being said, the somewhat subtle reference to Doctor Strangelove (the war room) was cute.
There's a very strange tendency for directors to decide suddenly that they'll take a classic work (be it Watchmen, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and rewrite it, because damn it, what could the *original author* know about the *story*? I found Gene Wilder to be a thousand times better than Johnny Depp (who seems to play the same character in most Tim Burton movies) as Willy Wonka.
I had always figured that if Watchmen were made into a movie, they wouldn't show two things:
Destroying New York (or at least killing most of the people there) because of some need to appear sensitive to 9/11.
Blue dong.
I was wrong with both of those, but they couldn't have a guy getting burned to death, a throat being slit or a hideous squid-looking thing. Strange how that works.
Re:Here's my spoiler free rundown
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Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
When Rorschach finishes off Big Figure, they actually panned the camera back to the bathroom to show blood coming out along the floor. Do we need to be beat over the head like this? I think we can figure out that he's dead! About as subtle as rape, that scene.
There's a panel in the original comic which shows blood coming out from under the bathroom door as Rorschach walks away in Watchmen #8 (page 20, bottom right corner if you want to check it).
Re:Not very "Family Friendly" either
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Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
I had a whole group of emo-looking 12 year old kids who dragged one parent to escort them to see Watchmen when I saw it last night. And a screaming baby, to round out the experience.
Discounting the prolonged sex scene, there's a bunch of other thematic material in Watchmen which isn't stuff that most 12 year old kids can digest easily. This isn't full of Disney "the good guy has light hair, bad guy has dark hair and a deep voice" absolutes, and shouldn't be treated as such by idiot parents.
I found a few changes that I wasn't really cool with.
One was the entire prison "sequence" being condensed to a single interview (taking the psychiatrist almost completely out as a character) and going with the cheap satisfying gore of hatcheting the kidnapper's head instead of burning him to death while Rorschach stood outside and listened to him scream. Was a serious piece of character development which just got left behind.
Another was leaving out Manhattan/Ostermann's best line: "we're all puppets, I'm just a puppet who can see the strings". Damn that Snyder and thinking he writes better than Moore. His additional tacked-on dialog was... bad for the most part.
(spoiler here) And why did they make it so incredibly obvious that Veidt was the one to kill the Comedian? Instead of a shadowy figure, you can very obviously see his outline as he walks into the apartment.
Positively, most of the visuals were there, especially the very memorable panels. I just hope they jam most of the good stuff that got left out back in for the Director's cut.
HAproxy (which is the one I use) has the ability to define "backup" servers which can be used in the event of a complete failure of all servers in the pool, even if there is only one server in the main pool. If you're trying to do this on the cheap, that may help. It also has embedded builds for things like the NSLU2, so it may be easy to run on an embedded device you already have.
In contrast to that, I haven't had any problems with my 40D at all, and the 350D I had before that only occasionally had issues with dirty contacts on the lens throwing that nasty "error 99" every once in a while.
I guess with DSLRs (or SLRs, really) you buy into whichever brand of dog food you are interested in, since lens cost will eventually eclipse camera body cost as you build a collection of lenses. We can bicker and argue about one brand being better than another, but as long as they take pretty faithful pictures, it doesn't really matter.
Mod parent up. Never understood this particular American obsession with tearing down the government and then proudly claiming it sucks. Sounds insane to me.
The issue with e-prescribing in the United States is that, although NCPDP SCRIPT (the standard) is more or less free, there's a horrible system where providers have to pay per transaction to send prescriptions to pharmacies through a cartel of companies. For examples, check out surescripts or rxhub, who run the "Pharmacy Health Information Exchange."
Like everything else in the past eight years, a monopoly on something has been sold out to one or more companies, then codified into law. Several states have set deadlines *mandating* using e-prescribing, which is essentially forcing providers to shovel money into these guys.
Walmart's prices on electronics aren't all that spectacular, considering that they generally tend to sell a lot of merchandise that inexplicably breaks a few days after their return policy expires.
That being said, the Phillips DVP5990 isn't a bad deck, and I haven't had any problems with it since I bought it from the goons at the local Walmart a few months ago.
Florence Finnegan: It'll send out a magnetic pulse that'll fry the brain stems of every living thing within 250,000 miles. Except for me. Safe in this room.
does anyone seriously believe windows 2003 with sql server 2005 is a bad platform? i'd suggest if you do you've never used it.
The last two companies I've worked for have used Linux boxes running enterprise Java software running with opensource database software. We've used puppet along with serial console servers to manage them, which was less expensive than a full remote KVM solution would have been.
MS SQL Server and Windows are fine for certain people, but they're not necessary to run enterprise applications.
With the Linux boxes we've run, the issues have usually been hardware failures and other physical issues rather than anything operating system related.
Zack Snyder is no Terry Gilliam, I think that is certain. Mr. Snyder is a good stylist, but after 30 Days of Night I think it's pretty clear he never heard a studio note he didn't like.
True. I wasn't placing Snyder in the same league (or indeed, in the same sport) as Gilliam, but rather pointing out that there are ways of letting a film out without going through the proper channels.
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Noscript is one of the primary reasons I like Firefox. The added security stops a lot of potential issues.
Well, that and I don't like needing Wine to run a web browser.
I wasn't very clear about it -- I was implying that it was jumping on the opensource bandwagon, much as Mac OS X tried to ride the increasing interest in opensource technologies without the pesky problems of having to actually contribute much back, hence their choice of a BSD licensed operating system on which to base their code.
I've seen a bunch of other people talking about how widespread adoption of Symbian is compared to Android. But I'd also remind everyone that WinMo and the Blackberry OS are both in use on millions of handsets (I've had phones based on both), and yet have horrendous user interfaces. Lots of people using something doesn't make it well written or well designed.
Sounds like a response to Android, but a little late.
Other than install base for phones, what advantage does an opensourced Symbian have over Android?
There were rumors of Android and Symbian merging for a while, but it seems as though Symbian has taken to cheap heckling.
Try PDFTOHTML.
Any of the fans of the book would already know it -- it would have had to have been for the moviegoers who didn't already know the plot of the book, I'd figure.
As long as you don't think that because a director changes the content, that makes them somehow a valid artist.
I haven't heard anyone try to say that "V for Vendetta" was a good adaptation because the Wachowski Brothers decided to write their own (IMHO inferior) ending to the original, more or less completely missing the point of the source material. Yes, it may be something completely different, in the same way that mashups are a completely different art form, with some sort of artistic validity. I somehow doubt, however, that if someone took Finnegan's Wake (or some other piece of classic literature, take your pick) and rewrote it as a film while changing plot and characters, that they would be heralded as a genius.
I'm also assuming that your perception of the director as being perfectly valid as an artist is somewhat colored by your slight disdain for the original medium in which it was presented. No one expects an exact page-to-screen conversion, but if the points for sections go flying over your head, you can't expect the original content to shine though.
All that being said, it was *far* more faithful an adaptation than I had expected, and it did indeed profit from some of the "enhancements" that the director had made, in the same way that certain changes weren't necessarily improvements. Snyder had said in interviews that he had to substantially alter what he was going to present in order to be allowed to release the movie, and that the Director's Cut would most likely have more of the source material in it.
Call Alexander Yahlt...
Well... I'd say it is more in the lines of "what could the *original author* know about film making?"
Yeah, I guess the guy who did such classics as "300" and "Dawn of the Dead" knows more about his genre than a guy who authored a great number of classics in his genre.
The director in question had said in interviews that he greatly respected the source material, which makes the changes seem even more ridiculous. Throwing wire-frame action shots or making a scene contain more gratuitous gore doesn't exactly seem like it comes from a master of film, since it highlights style over substance.
I think given time, Nixon probably would have evolved into even more of a caricature of himself than what we remember of him.
That being said, the somewhat subtle reference to Doctor Strangelove (the war room) was cute.
There's a very strange tendency for directors to decide suddenly that they'll take a classic work (be it Watchmen, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and rewrite it, because damn it, what could the *original author* know about the *story*? I found Gene Wilder to be a thousand times better than Johnny Depp (who seems to play the same character in most Tim Burton movies) as Willy Wonka.
I had always figured that if Watchmen were made into a movie, they wouldn't show two things:
I was wrong with both of those, but they couldn't have a guy getting burned to death, a throat being slit or a hideous squid-looking thing. Strange how that works.
There's a panel in the original comic which shows blood coming out from under the bathroom door as Rorschach walks away in Watchmen #8 (page 20, bottom right corner if you want to check it).
I had a whole group of emo-looking 12 year old kids who dragged one parent to escort them to see Watchmen when I saw it last night. And a screaming baby, to round out the experience.
Discounting the prolonged sex scene, there's a bunch of other thematic material in Watchmen which isn't stuff that most 12 year old kids can digest easily. This isn't full of Disney "the good guy has light hair, bad guy has dark hair and a deep voice" absolutes, and shouldn't be treated as such by idiot parents.
I found a few changes that I wasn't really cool with.
One was the entire prison "sequence" being condensed to a single interview (taking the psychiatrist almost completely out as a character) and going with the cheap satisfying gore of hatcheting the kidnapper's head instead of burning him to death while Rorschach stood outside and listened to him scream. Was a serious piece of character development which just got left behind.
Another was leaving out Manhattan/Ostermann's best line: "we're all puppets, I'm just a puppet who can see the strings". Damn that Snyder and thinking he writes better than Moore. His additional tacked-on dialog was ... bad for the most part.
(spoiler here) And why did they make it so incredibly obvious that Veidt was the one to kill the Comedian? Instead of a shadowy figure, you can very obviously see his outline as he walks into the apartment.
Positively, most of the visuals were there, especially the very memorable panels. I just hope they jam most of the good stuff that got left out back in for the Director's cut.
HAproxy (which is the one I use) has the ability to define "backup" servers which can be used in the event of a complete failure of all servers in the pool, even if there is only one server in the main pool. If you're trying to do this on the cheap, that may help. It also has embedded builds for things like the NSLU2, so it may be easy to run on an embedded device you already have.
In contrast to that, I haven't had any problems with my 40D at all, and the 350D I had before that only occasionally had issues with dirty contacts on the lens throwing that nasty "error 99" every once in a while.
I guess with DSLRs (or SLRs, really) you buy into whichever brand of dog food you are interested in, since lens cost will eventually eclipse camera body cost as you build a collection of lenses. We can bicker and argue about one brand being better than another, but as long as they take pretty faithful pictures, it doesn't really matter.
Don't reply to those. Every linux article has to have someone say that Ybuntu has been doing x for years
I think the instance of ubuntu doing that would be "uck". SUSE Studio does seem to be more aimed at end users, though.
4. Audacity I have at least heard of, but never used. XMMS and the multitude of others mean that it is hardly a barrier.
I think you're confusing audacity with audacious. Audacity is a sound file editor, XMMS and audacious are sound file players.
Mod parent up. Never understood this particular American obsession with tearing down the government and then proudly claiming it sucks. Sounds insane to me.
Blame Ronnie Raygun. He popularized the idea that "government is the problem", while blowing enormous quantities of money on militarization, possibly in hopes of bankrupting the federal government. Never trust someone to run something when they believe it's a stupid idea to begin with, they'll usually just mess it up.
The issue with e-prescribing in the United States is that, although NCPDP SCRIPT (the standard) is more or less free, there's a horrible system where providers have to pay per transaction to send prescriptions to pharmacies through a cartel of companies. For examples, check out surescripts or rxhub, who run the "Pharmacy Health Information Exchange."
Like everything else in the past eight years, a monopoly on something has been sold out to one or more companies, then codified into law. Several states have set deadlines *mandating* using e-prescribing, which is essentially forcing providers to shovel money into these guys.
Walmart's prices on electronics aren't all that spectacular, considering that they generally tend to sell a lot of merchandise that inexplicably breaks a few days after their return policy expires.
That being said, the Phillips DVP5990 isn't a bad deck, and I haven't had any problems with it since I bought it from the goons at the local Walmart a few months ago.
Florence Finnegan: It'll send out a magnetic pulse that'll fry the brain stems of every living thing within 250,000 miles. Except for me. Safe in this room.
OT: I do like Doctor Who, but didn't that sound an awful lot like that "magic phone booth" in Superman II where he magically avoided losing his powers by (insert cheesy script device here) and standing in the booth?
Of course, the cheese was expected in that episode of Doctor Who, since it was written by Russell T Davis.
Boastful, forgetful, a fucking liar? Who knows.
When you've got his kind of money, you can buy whatever kind of truth you want, apparently.
The last two companies I've worked for have used Linux boxes running enterprise Java software running with opensource database software. We've used puppet along with serial console servers to manage them, which was less expensive than a full remote KVM solution would have been.
MS SQL Server and Windows are fine for certain people, but they're not necessary to run enterprise applications.
With the Linux boxes we've run, the issues have usually been hardware failures and other physical issues rather than anything operating system related.
Zack Snyder is no Terry Gilliam, I think that is certain. Mr. Snyder is a good stylist, but after 30 Days of Night I think it's pretty clear he never heard a studio note he didn't like.
True. I wasn't placing Snyder in the same league (or indeed, in the same sport) as Gilliam, but rather pointing out that there are ways of letting a film out without going through the proper channels.