I was a huge fan of Star Wars until the abomination that was episode 1. I watched episode 2 at the theater we affectionately call "The Welfare Flicks", a second run theater. For the third, I just rented the DVD and that was just for closure. Now, I have no more interest in Star Wars. He f*cked up the originals, and I just don't even care anymore if he ever releases a decent DVD of the originals.
I still like the originals. I don't want to see the CGI-sharted touchups, give me the originals. Haven't had the urge to watch them again but I'll download them when I do. He's not getting another fucking dime. But the expanded universe stuff, the video games? Oh, god, it's so much artless shit. I read up on that new legacy of the force series they did with luke's great great godson or whoever, Wankstain Skywalker I think they called him. All darker and edgier like Rob Liefeld came up with him.
Used to be a Trek fan but they ran that one into the ground so hard it's actually ruined my enjoyment of the better shows. I can't even manage to enjoy TNG because I can't get the taste of Voyager out of my mouth.
Whoever said it above said it right -- Lucas should have found himself a 20-something wunderkind from the current generation of directors and handed artistic control over to him while staying a producer. He could have still retained the title of brilliant this and that while getting good art created in his name. There's plenty of interesting pathos in showing how a republic fell, how a vader was made. Still not a fan of flashback movies but I am a fan of showing how something you cannot accept comes to be. Even the villain is the hero of his own story as they say. Can he convince you of the injustice of his position, the necessity for his revenge? And how exactly could a good man fall into such darkness yet still have it be said of him that there is good inside? But that story will never be told now.
I fully equate the Star Wars prequels with the Matrix sequels. It's hard to find anyone who can appreciate the Matrix these days without wincing and saying "Yeah, if only you can ignore the sequels."
We want sequels to Return of the Jedi. Wasn't he originally going to do 3 sets of trilogies: with the 3rd set later on, and the only common characters would be the 2 droids?
Read the Kevin J. Anderson novels from the Expanded Universe and realize that they're probably better than what Lucas could come up with. And Kevin J. Anderson novels were the worst things in the Star Wars universe before the prequels.
Google has gone so far downhill, I've actually tried Bing!. I *HATE* Microsoft. I _LOATH_ them. Google is just getting so bad, however, I had to try!
Heck, it's almost impossible to search for what you want on Google now, as it constantly changes your search terms. You pretty much have to add a + in front of every search keyword, in order to get what you want. Shouldn't that be opt-out? You know, an "actually search for things I asked for, not things you suggest" option?
In my mind's eye I'm reading this as subtitles to that angry german kid video on Youtube. Bravo, sir.
This might be interesting if they manage to get the privacy thing right. If they don't, I see it as a disaster. I use gmail to communicate with a much wider audience than Facebook. If somehow they managed to let me easily and effectively segment users into different groups, with STRONG WALLS between groups, then it might be interesting. Although it would take quite a few HCI PhDs to figure out how to do it all without cluttering an already cluttery gmail UI.
Wouldn't you really just need to have two accounts, your real life account and then your second one for all the naughty stuff you don't want people to find out about? Of all the drama stories I've seen or heard about, it's usually because the two lives mixed. Embarrassing photos associated with your name on your facebook, web posts associated back to you, mistress texting you on the same phone you use for your normal life with the wife able to read said messages when you set the phone down for a moment, messages coming in to your regular mailbox and she reads them, etc.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that if you're doing stuff you don't want your spouse to know about, you need to reexamine why you got married and whether you should still be married. It might be kinder to just end the pretense and you can both get on with your lives. If you want to be a freaky swinger, just be honest and start dating the freaky swingers. If you wanted to be an ultra-orthodox jew you wouldn't start out dating regular women and spring the religion surprise, right? Of course not. You start from the hardest criteria first and find women you like who fall into it. If you find yourself torn between wanting to be a televangelist and having gay sex with male prostitutes, you have to decide which is more important to you, Jesus or the dong. Maybe you could move your ministry to a gay-friendly denomination? The lying and hypocrisy is too much BS.
I think it would be ok to have gmail with groups for church friends, rpg friends, work friends, family, etc, there's no embarrassment if the those get mixed. But anything that could be embarrassing should be on a separate account and your real name should not be associated with it.
According to TFA their plan is to make the body panels act as one plate of a huge capacitor. I can't even begin to list all the technical flaws in their proposal; just reading it made my head hurt. They really should run their promotional pieces past a real engineer before spreading them all over the net.
I have visions of car crashes involving brilliant blue flashes and passengers exploding from the sudden discharge of electricity. Then again, we're already driving around in steel coffins filled with gallons of explosively flammable liquid so there's not much left to lose.
You're not "supposed" to care, it's just that a lot of us do as result of him being a celebrity among geeks. Besides, his viewpoint is more likely to be closer to ours, as a fellow geek, than that of Steve Jobs or any such marketeer that gets published by pop media.
He's exactly the sort of person I would want to hear give an opinion about this stuff. I may not agree with his opinion, time may prove him wrong, but it certainly provides an interesting starting point for a debate. Look at Clifford Stoll and his whole Silicon Snake Oil thing. He raised interesting questions about the internet and viability of e-commerce. I disagreed with his thesis and he has subsequently been proven wrong.
I'll listen to what a Jobs has to say. While I may not agree with all of his ideas, he has certainly had some winners over the years. He's someone who understands the industry. People I'd be less interested in listening to are Balmer and Gates. I don't think they really have a good grasp on the industry at this point and feel that we're living in the time future historians will point to as their decline years. I could be wrong, it's certainly good debate fodder, and time will prove it one way or another.
Toyota's gonna catch holy hell for the whole "car randomly becomes kamikaze" bug with the accelerator. There are regulations and laws about this sort of thing. If I run a slaughterhouse and knowingly ship bad meat, I could go to jail. This isn't home hobbyist shit anymore, computers are serious business and Microsoft is wearing the big boy pants. Lives are at stake over this sort of thing. Dissidents can be targeted and killed. And even if it's not political but just plain' ol' computer crime, the losses can really add up.
I'm not a fan of bogging the industry down with so much regulation that nobody can get anything done but it's clear that businesses are, generally, not self-policing and concern for public welfare is not on the agenda. They will not consider it until compelled to by force of law. And to all the business apologists complaining about the stifling hand of government laying heavily upon the necks of business, just remember that there wouldn't be a call for regulation if there wasn't a need for regulation. If slaughterhouse owners applied the same standard to meat intended for public consumption that they would apply for meat intended for their own tables, Upton Sinclair wouldn't have had a novel and we wouldn't have had an FDA.
The funny part, is the only reason the shuttle program exists is to visit the station, and the only reason the station exists is to have a place for the shuttle to go. Every other purpose had to be removed to save money in budget crunches. So now that the shuttles are going away, the "almost finished" station will be deorbited in 3... 2... 1...
It's kind of the spacecraft equivalent of "dig a hole and fill it back in, repeat". No one makes money off a built station that has been budget crunched to the point that it does nothing. But you can make lots of money by building a station.
Now that the station on longer has to be in a shuttle-accessible orbit, could we not fit it with a nifty little ion engine and slowly boost it to a higher altitude?
I thought it was a sweet ad. At the end, though, I had him googling "divorce lawyer."
There are going to be a metric shit ton of parody ads following this format, more than mac/pc even. Googles divorce, sees the cost, googles bodies -- the disposal of, etc.
This being Slashdot, I understand how this might seem confusing to some readers, but that's actually the way some romances happen. A guy meets a girl, likes her, tries to impress her, and amazingly, it works.
Maybe it's just me but I was also expecting to see searches for "lotion," "skin," and "hoses."
I believe the movie you're looking for starred Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.
artificial life, with serial numbers on DNA, and a pre-programmed lifespan... where did DARPA replicate that idea from, and when can I get a basic pleasure model?
Don't worry, they spliced the replicant DNA with amphibian DNA so they can't breed.
Large institutions hamper creativity, innovation...
The same thing was going on at Apple before the Return of Jobs. The road to OSX was bumpy.
[quote]Meanwhile, Apple was facing commercial difficulties of its own. The decade-old Mac OS had reached the limits of its single-user, co-operative multitasking architecture, and its once-innovative user interface was looking increasingly dated. A massive development effort to replace it, known as Copland, was started in 1994, but was generally perceived outside of Apple to be a hopeless case due to political infighting. By 1996, Copland was nowhere near ready for release, and the project was eventually cancelled. Some elements of Copland were incorporated into Mac OS 8, released on July 26, 1997. After considering the purchase of BeOS -- a multimedia-enabled, multi-tasking OS designed for hardware similar to Apple's -- the company decided instead to acquire NeXT and use OPENSTEP as the basis for their new OS. Avie Tevanian took over OS development, and Steve Jobs was brought on as a consultant. At first, the plan was to develop a new operating system based almost entirely on an updated version of OPENSTEP, with an emulator -- known as the Blue Box -- for running "classic" Macintosh applications. The result was known by the code name Rhapsody, slated for release in late 1998. Apple expected that developers would port their software to the considerably more powerful OPENSTEP libraries once they learned of its power and flexibility. Instead, several major developers such as Adobe told Apple that this would never occur, and that they would rather leave the platform entirely. This "rejection" of Apple's plan was largely the result of a string of previous broken promises from Apple; after watching one "next OS" after another disappear and Apple's market share dwindle, developers were not interested in doing much work on the platform at all, let alone a re-write.
Apple's financial losses continued and the board of directors lost confidence in CEO Gil Amelio. The board of directors asked him to resign. The board convinced Steve Jobs to lead the company on an interim basis. Jobs was, in essence, given carte blanche by Apple's board of directors to make changes in order to return the company to profitability. When Jobs announced at the World Wide Developer's Conference that what developers really wanted was a modern version of the Mac OS, and Apple was going to deliver it[citation needed], he was met with thunderous applause. [/quote]
"lobbying" is nothing else, than a euphemism for bribing. Which would be equal to treason for the politician, if that were not changed trough... you guessed it... bribing. Which would mean at least a decade of well-deserved prison or death penalty, in most law systems.
I morally believe in the justice of a death penalty but trust no government with the authority to actually carry it out. But I would make an exception for this in two cases: bribery and vote tampering. Voting is the holiest of holies in a democratic system and fucking with it should evoke the same short of shuddering horror as incest, pedophilia, and furries. Once people no longer trust the vote the whole system is fucked.
Sheriff: "Then he'll miss. You see, you can only draw, aim, and shoot so fast. Me, this is about as fast as I can draw my gun and hit anything smaller than a barn. The guy that keeps a cool head, he'll come out standing."
There was an interview with someone who'd been in a few gunfights and come out the winner. He said he was not that great of a shot but simply did not panic when he had to shoot someone for real.
You can test out this phenomenon in real life quite easily. Find someone who can consistently sink 3 pointers and tell him the next basket has $25k riding on it. More than likely he'll muff the next shot now that he knows something is riding on it. If he can put that out of his mind and take the next shot like he did the last fifty, your wallet's gong to be lighter.
But if the guy doing the first draw is as calm and collected as you hope to be, you're still likely dead.
That's because, by the time you get to the last two or three books, it's purely intellectual masturbation on the part of Herbert. The Dune series was the biggest test for my "if I start a series, I finish it" rule. The first book is very good, the next two were okay (I enjoyed them), the fourth book was still interesting on a certain level, if a over the top. The last two books were sewage.
The first three books were the original plan. Everything else was bolted on. I liked the first one the best and I think it's because we saw Paul in his rise to the top. Taken alone, this isn't tragedy or comedy but the third type of story, triumph. But it quickly becomes tragedy and that's not so fun to watch.
I thought the final book really sealed it off. It was a vision of true panspermia intentionally designed to insure the survival of their civilization.
Not the right word. Herbert called it an exodus iirc and I think that's more accurate.
Paul foresaw several problems. And by Paul we can also say by extension Herbert because Dune is a huge allegory for the 20th century.
1. Even having gone to the stars, all of humanity remained within the control of a relatively small number of grasping assholes. Same on earth as it is in the heavens.
2. This level of control threatens staticism and decline leading to eventual collapse of civilization. While it's possible to see the risk of Earth falling to this, I'm not quite sure I agree that a 10,000 world Imperium could suffer a similar fate. But it's Herbert's story and according to him it could happen.
3. Even without prescience, staticism threatens humanity. Prescience just makes it all the worse. Presumably this prescience is what cements the likelihood of everything turning to shit even across an inhabited galaxy.
4. The Golden Path to keep humanity alive is to become the ultimate tyrant and put society under so much pressure that when things burst pieces will be flung so far apart they'll never come back together again. There will always be far-flung pieces of humanity to survive even if all the rest fail. And just like nobody wants to see another Hitler, Leto II planned on being such a bastard that nobody would want to see another god emperor.
5. A secondary goal of all this is to breed humans impervious to prescience. That negates the power of a tyrant such as the god-emperor.
When I first read it, I thought that just and excellent, but looking back, I think the point may have been to ask what exactly we are trying to preserve when we say we want to insure our survival as a race? Backstabbing and intrigue? The strong overpowering the weak?
I'd say that's not the part of humanity to be preserved, rather a symptom of the weakness Paul/Herbert saw that would doom us all without implementation of the Golden Path.
I really don't think that it was as incoherent as it's often made out to be. Herbert was not just a hack churning out books.
I like the idea of exploring the rise and fall of a messiah and how his life and teachings become twisted by his followers. I'm sure this sort of tale has been told before but Dune is the first time I encountered it. The story was also retold quite well in The Man From Earth. If you have not seen it, read nothing more but just rent it and watch it cold. You will thank me later.
As I said in another post, I didn't like where the story went with the whole god emperor bit. And after that Herbert lost his muse and was just churning out books for the paycheck, just like Clarke in his later years. Awful, awful Space Odyssey sequels, Rama sequels, and Gentry Lee bullshit.
If your books are about half imagery and half story, when the movies end up having about an hours worth of plot and the rest as battle scenes and aforementioned imagery then I guess you have done a bang-up job. But Dune is a bit of a bigger undertaking. It's like trying to create a movie around The Foundation Saga. It's just not as easy as massive battle scenes full of cut and paste soldiers.
Gonna start a nerd holy war on that one.:) Lord of the Rings, both the movie and the book, was about more than just battles and imagery. Dune really is more of a psychological story than Lord of the Rings which was meant to be epic myth-making on an epic scale. Dune has a lot of character-driven conflict that could just as easily be played out on an empty stage. Lots of eye-candy and worldbuilding will be icing on the cake but there's nothing about the book that says the story has to remain in the book. The hard part, of course, is handling exposition in a fashion that is not an infodump but remains interesting and engaging.
The part I'm not entirely satisfied with in Dune is Leto II's interpretation of the Golden Path and the whole transformation into the god emperor. That was the point where the story felt like it slid off the rails and the following books cemented that feeling. The whole Honored Matres thing felt tacked on.
The other part that really bothered me was the whole other memory thing. The Dune universe is presented as materialistic and godless, at least with no more proof of God's existence or lack thereof than in our own world here and now. But there's evidence of supernatural things such as the other memories awakened within the bene gesserit by the spice. The baron's own personality lived on within Alia and consumed her. How is this so? Is there some sort of junian universal subconscious, a collective soul we're all connected to? Or is all of that memory supposed to preexist within the eggs of the female line? But then the male reverend mother they sought would have access to the male side of the memories as well so this means they're passed through sperm, too? Or is it really an external thing? And if there is such a thing, could it may as well be God for all intents and purposes? A god made manifest by the shared minds of humanity. And clones presumably only need the source DNA. But Herbert never explains it and the whole mystical side seems out of place given the otherwise hard scifi setting. I can buy superb mental conditioning and powerful developments of the human mind in the post-AI age. I can buy abilities that lie within the extremes of the physically possible. But the mystic stuff presupposes a mechanism to explain it and that raises a whole host of new questions. If I see a vampire, I now wonder if there are werewolves. If I see inexplicable psychic powers, now I wonder what else could be possible.
"Dune" is probably the greatest 20th-century science fiction novel. It is, for better or worse, unfilmable.
No. It's a difficult adaptation but not impossible. LOTR was thought to be impossible. I think Peter Jackson did a bang-up job. Your mileage may vary.
The mini-series adaptations were noble in effort if flawed in execution. The problem with something like Dune is that it really demands to be made into a full season. Take the first three novels since they were meant to be the original story. Season 1, season 2, season 3. 13 episodes a piece. That's more than enough time to tell the story. As it stands, the miniseries would probably be incomprehensible to anyone not already familiar with the story. And trying to do it in a single movie? Impossible. Madness.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a huge fan of Star Wars until the abomination that was episode 1. I watched episode 2 at the theater we affectionately call "The Welfare Flicks", a second run theater. For the third, I just rented the DVD and that was just for closure. Now, I have no more interest in Star Wars. He f*cked up the originals, and I just don't even care anymore if he ever releases a decent DVD of the originals.
I still like the originals. I don't want to see the CGI-sharted touchups, give me the originals. Haven't had the urge to watch them again but I'll download them when I do. He's not getting another fucking dime. But the expanded universe stuff, the video games? Oh, god, it's so much artless shit. I read up on that new legacy of the force series they did with luke's great great godson or whoever, Wankstain Skywalker I think they called him. All darker and edgier like Rob Liefeld came up with him.
Used to be a Trek fan but they ran that one into the ground so hard it's actually ruined my enjoyment of the better shows. I can't even manage to enjoy TNG because I can't get the taste of Voyager out of my mouth.
Whoever said it above said it right -- Lucas should have found himself a 20-something wunderkind from the current generation of directors and handed artistic control over to him while staying a producer. He could have still retained the title of brilliant this and that while getting good art created in his name. There's plenty of interesting pathos in showing how a republic fell, how a vader was made. Still not a fan of flashback movies but I am a fan of showing how something you cannot accept comes to be. Even the villain is the hero of his own story as they say. Can he convince you of the injustice of his position, the necessity for his revenge? And how exactly could a good man fall into such darkness yet still have it be said of him that there is good inside? But that story will never be told now.
I fully equate the Star Wars prequels with the Matrix sequels. It's hard to find anyone who can appreciate the Matrix these days without wincing and saying "Yeah, if only you can ignore the sequels."
We want sequels to Return of the Jedi. Wasn't he originally going to do 3 sets of trilogies: with the 3rd set later on, and the only common characters would be the 2 droids?
Read the Kevin J. Anderson novels from the Expanded Universe and realize that they're probably better than what Lucas could come up with. And Kevin J. Anderson novels were the worst things in the Star Wars universe before the prequels.
Iran just doesn't want the Chinese to be reading Iranian dissident mail before they do.
All hail the IT monoculture! Praise and glory to the brand!
BAH!
Google has gone so far downhill, I've actually tried Bing!. I *HATE* Microsoft. I _LOATH_ them. Google is just getting so bad, however, I had to try!
Heck, it's almost impossible to search for what you want on Google now, as it constantly changes your search terms. You pretty much have to add a + in front of every search keyword, in order to get what you want. Shouldn't that be opt-out? You know, an "actually search for things I asked for, not things you suggest" option?
In my mind's eye I'm reading this as subtitles to that angry german kid video on Youtube. Bravo, sir.
This might be interesting if they manage to get the privacy thing right. If they don't, I see it as a disaster. I use gmail to communicate with a much wider audience than Facebook. If somehow they managed to let me easily and effectively segment users into different groups, with STRONG WALLS between groups, then it might be interesting.
Although it would take quite a few HCI PhDs to figure out how to do it all without cluttering an already cluttery gmail UI.
Wouldn't you really just need to have two accounts, your real life account and then your second one for all the naughty stuff you don't want people to find out about? Of all the drama stories I've seen or heard about, it's usually because the two lives mixed. Embarrassing photos associated with your name on your facebook, web posts associated back to you, mistress texting you on the same phone you use for your normal life with the wife able to read said messages when you set the phone down for a moment, messages coming in to your regular mailbox and she reads them, etc.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that if you're doing stuff you don't want your spouse to know about, you need to reexamine why you got married and whether you should still be married. It might be kinder to just end the pretense and you can both get on with your lives. If you want to be a freaky swinger, just be honest and start dating the freaky swingers. If you wanted to be an ultra-orthodox jew you wouldn't start out dating regular women and spring the religion surprise, right? Of course not. You start from the hardest criteria first and find women you like who fall into it. If you find yourself torn between wanting to be a televangelist and having gay sex with male prostitutes, you have to decide which is more important to you, Jesus or the dong. Maybe you could move your ministry to a gay-friendly denomination? The lying and hypocrisy is too much BS.
I think it would be ok to have gmail with groups for church friends, rpg friends, work friends, family, etc, there's no embarrassment if the those get mixed. But anything that could be embarrassing should be on a separate account and your real name should not be associated with it.
Question: Are there no laws on the merchantability of a product where you live?
Not for software. The EULA's seem to indemnify software companies of all liability. You don't like it, don't use computers.
According to TFA their plan is to make the body panels act as one plate of a huge capacitor. I can't even begin to list all the technical flaws in their proposal; just reading it made my head hurt. They really should run their promotional pieces past a real engineer before spreading them all over the net.
I have visions of car crashes involving brilliant blue flashes and passengers exploding from the sudden discharge of electricity. Then again, we're already driving around in steel coffins filled with gallons of explosively flammable liquid so there's not much left to lose.
You're not "supposed" to care, it's just that a lot of us do as result of him being a celebrity among geeks. Besides, his viewpoint is more likely to be closer to ours, as a fellow geek, than that of Steve Jobs or any such marketeer that gets published by pop media.
He's exactly the sort of person I would want to hear give an opinion about this stuff. I may not agree with his opinion, time may prove him wrong, but it certainly provides an interesting starting point for a debate. Look at Clifford Stoll and his whole Silicon Snake Oil thing. He raised interesting questions about the internet and viability of e-commerce. I disagreed with his thesis and he has subsequently been proven wrong.
I'll listen to what a Jobs has to say. While I may not agree with all of his ideas, he has certainly had some winners over the years. He's someone who understands the industry. People I'd be less interested in listening to are Balmer and Gates. I don't think they really have a good grasp on the industry at this point and feel that we're living in the time future historians will point to as their decline years. I could be wrong, it's certainly good debate fodder, and time will prove it one way or another.
Toyota's gonna catch holy hell for the whole "car randomly becomes kamikaze" bug with the accelerator. There are regulations and laws about this sort of thing. If I run a slaughterhouse and knowingly ship bad meat, I could go to jail. This isn't home hobbyist shit anymore, computers are serious business and Microsoft is wearing the big boy pants. Lives are at stake over this sort of thing. Dissidents can be targeted and killed. And even if it's not political but just plain' ol' computer crime, the losses can really add up.
I'm not a fan of bogging the industry down with so much regulation that nobody can get anything done but it's clear that businesses are, generally, not self-policing and concern for public welfare is not on the agenda. They will not consider it until compelled to by force of law. And to all the business apologists complaining about the stifling hand of government laying heavily upon the necks of business, just remember that there wouldn't be a call for regulation if there wasn't a need for regulation. If slaughterhouse owners applied the same standard to meat intended for public consumption that they would apply for meat intended for their own tables, Upton Sinclair wouldn't have had a novel and we wouldn't have had an FDA.
The funny part, is the only reason the shuttle program exists is to visit the station, and the only reason the station exists is to have a place for the shuttle to go. Every other purpose had to be removed to save money in budget crunches. So now that the shuttles are going away, the "almost finished" station will be deorbited in 3... 2... 1...
It's kind of the spacecraft equivalent of "dig a hole and fill it back in, repeat". No one makes money off a built station that has been budget crunched to the point that it does nothing. But you can make lots of money by building a station.
Now that the station on longer has to be in a shuttle-accessible orbit, could we not fit it with a nifty little ion engine and slowly boost it to a higher altitude?
I thought it was a sweet ad. At the end, though, I had him googling "divorce lawyer."
There are going to be a metric shit ton of parody ads following this format, more than mac/pc even. Googles divorce, sees the cost, googles bodies -- the disposal of, etc.
This being Slashdot, I understand how this might seem confusing to some readers, but that's actually the way some romances happen. A guy meets a girl, likes her, tries to impress her, and amazingly, it works.
Maybe it's just me but I was also expecting to see searches for "lotion," "skin," and "hoses."
Why is my poop green
St. Patty's Day. Colon's just trying to get into the spirit.
I believe the movie you're looking for starred Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.
artificial life, with serial numbers on DNA, and a pre-programmed lifespan... where did DARPA replicate that idea from, and when can I get a basic pleasure model?
Don't worry, they spliced the replicant DNA with amphibian DNA so they can't breed.
How could it possibly go right?
Large institutions hamper creativity, innovation...
The same thing was going on at Apple before the Return of Jobs. The road to OSX was bumpy.
[quote]Meanwhile, Apple was facing commercial difficulties of its own. The decade-old Mac OS had reached the limits of its single-user, co-operative multitasking architecture, and its once-innovative user interface was looking increasingly dated. A massive development effort to replace it, known as Copland, was started in 1994, but was generally perceived outside of Apple to be a hopeless case due to political infighting. By 1996, Copland was nowhere near ready for release, and the project was eventually cancelled. Some elements of Copland were incorporated into Mac OS 8, released on July 26, 1997.
After considering the purchase of BeOS -- a multimedia-enabled, multi-tasking OS designed for hardware similar to Apple's -- the company decided instead to acquire NeXT and use OPENSTEP as the basis for their new OS. Avie Tevanian took over OS development, and Steve Jobs was brought on as a consultant. At first, the plan was to develop a new operating system based almost entirely on an updated version of OPENSTEP, with an emulator -- known as the Blue Box -- for running "classic" Macintosh applications. The result was known by the code name Rhapsody, slated for release in late 1998.
Apple expected that developers would port their software to the considerably more powerful OPENSTEP libraries once they learned of its power and flexibility. Instead, several major developers such as Adobe told Apple that this would never occur, and that they would rather leave the platform entirely. This "rejection" of Apple's plan was largely the result of a string of previous broken promises from Apple; after watching one "next OS" after another disappear and Apple's market share dwindle, developers were not interested in doing much work on the platform at all, let alone a re-write.
Apple's financial losses continued and the board of directors lost confidence in CEO Gil Amelio. The board of directors asked him to resign. The board convinced Steve Jobs to lead the company on an interim basis. Jobs was, in essence, given carte blanche by Apple's board of directors to make changes in order to return the company to profitability. When Jobs announced at the World Wide Developer's Conference that what developers really wanted was a modern version of the Mac OS, and Apple was going to deliver it[citation needed], he was met with thunderous applause. [/quote]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS_X
TFA's description of the infighting within Microsoft matches the details behind what I pasted above.
"lobbying" is nothing else, than a euphemism for bribing. Which would be equal to treason for the politician, if that were not changed trough... you guessed it... bribing.
Which would mean at least a decade of well-deserved prison or death penalty, in most law systems.
I morally believe in the justice of a death penalty but trust no government with the authority to actually carry it out. But I would make an exception for this in two cases: bribery and vote tampering. Voting is the holiest of holies in a democratic system and fucking with it should evoke the same short of shuddering horror as incest, pedophilia, and furries. Once people no longer trust the vote the whole system is fucked.
"Hans' hot first"
AKA "How I Learned To Enjoy Wookiee Lovin'"
You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought.
They explained that in Unforgiven
Wrter: "But what if he draws first?"
Sheriff: "Then he'll miss. You see, you can only draw, aim, and shoot so fast. Me, this is about as fast as I can draw my gun and hit anything smaller than a barn. The guy that keeps a cool head, he'll come out standing."
There was an interview with someone who'd been in a few gunfights and come out the winner. He said he was not that great of a shot but simply did not panic when he had to shoot someone for real.
You can test out this phenomenon in real life quite easily. Find someone who can consistently sink 3 pointers and tell him the next basket has $25k riding on it. More than likely he'll muff the next shot now that he knows something is riding on it. If he can put that out of his mind and take the next shot like he did the last fifty, your wallet's gong to be lighter.
But if the guy doing the first draw is as calm and collected as you hope to be, you're still likely dead.
Then come back to earth and take us over. Underworld: Rise of the Lichen. Gonna net to get some space reindeer to save us.
That's because, by the time you get to the last two or three books, it's purely intellectual masturbation on the part of Herbert. The Dune series was the biggest test for my "if I start a series, I finish it" rule. The first book is very good, the next two were okay (I enjoyed them), the fourth book was still interesting on a certain level, if a over the top. The last two books were sewage.
The first three books were the original plan. Everything else was bolted on. I liked the first one the best and I think it's because we saw Paul in his rise to the top. Taken alone, this isn't tragedy or comedy but the third type of story, triumph. But it quickly becomes tragedy and that's not so fun to watch.
I thought the final book really sealed it off. It was a vision of true panspermia intentionally designed to insure the survival of their civilization.
Not the right word. Herbert called it an exodus iirc and I think that's more accurate.
Paul foresaw several problems. And by Paul we can also say by extension Herbert because Dune is a huge allegory for the 20th century.
1. Even having gone to the stars, all of humanity remained within the control of a relatively small number of grasping assholes. Same on earth as it is in the heavens.
2. This level of control threatens staticism and decline leading to eventual collapse of civilization. While it's possible to see the risk of Earth falling to this, I'm not quite sure I agree that a 10,000 world Imperium could suffer a similar fate. But it's Herbert's story and according to him it could happen.
3. Even without prescience, staticism threatens humanity. Prescience just makes it all the worse. Presumably this prescience is what cements the likelihood of everything turning to shit even across an inhabited galaxy.
4. The Golden Path to keep humanity alive is to become the ultimate tyrant and put society under so much pressure that when things burst pieces will be flung so far apart they'll never come back together again. There will always be far-flung pieces of humanity to survive even if all the rest fail. And just like nobody wants to see another Hitler, Leto II planned on being such a bastard that nobody would want to see another god emperor.
5. A secondary goal of all this is to breed humans impervious to prescience. That negates the power of a tyrant such as the god-emperor.
When I first read it, I thought that just and excellent, but looking back, I think the point may have been to ask what exactly we are trying to preserve when we say we want to insure our survival as a race? Backstabbing and intrigue? The strong overpowering the weak?
I'd say that's not the part of humanity to be preserved, rather a symptom of the weakness Paul/Herbert saw that would doom us all without implementation of the Golden Path.
I really don't think that it was as incoherent as it's often made out to be. Herbert was not just a hack churning out books.
I like the idea of exploring the rise and fall of a messiah and how his life and teachings become twisted by his followers. I'm sure this sort of tale has been told before but Dune is the first time I encountered it. The story was also retold quite well in The Man From Earth. If you have not seen it, read nothing more but just rent it and watch it cold. You will thank me later.
As I said in another post, I didn't like where the story went with the whole god emperor bit. And after that Herbert lost his muse and was just churning out books for the paycheck, just like Clarke in his later years. Awful, awful Space Odyssey sequels, Rama sequels, and Gentry Lee bullshit.
If your books are about half imagery and half story, when the movies end up having about an hours worth of plot and the rest as battle scenes and aforementioned imagery then I guess you have done a bang-up job. But Dune is a bit of a bigger undertaking. It's like trying to create a movie around The Foundation Saga. It's just not as easy as massive battle scenes full of cut and paste soldiers.
Gonna start a nerd holy war on that one. :) Lord of the Rings, both the movie and the book, was about more than just battles and imagery. Dune really is more of a psychological story than Lord of the Rings which was meant to be epic myth-making on an epic scale. Dune has a lot of character-driven conflict that could just as easily be played out on an empty stage. Lots of eye-candy and worldbuilding will be icing on the cake but there's nothing about the book that says the story has to remain in the book. The hard part, of course, is handling exposition in a fashion that is not an infodump but remains interesting and engaging.
The part I'm not entirely satisfied with in Dune is Leto II's interpretation of the Golden Path and the whole transformation into the god emperor. That was the point where the story felt like it slid off the rails and the following books cemented that feeling. The whole Honored Matres thing felt tacked on.
The other part that really bothered me was the whole other memory thing. The Dune universe is presented as materialistic and godless, at least with no more proof of God's existence or lack thereof than in our own world here and now. But there's evidence of supernatural things such as the other memories awakened within the bene gesserit by the spice. The baron's own personality lived on within Alia and consumed her. How is this so? Is there some sort of junian universal subconscious, a collective soul we're all connected to? Or is all of that memory supposed to preexist within the eggs of the female line? But then the male reverend mother they sought would have access to the male side of the memories as well so this means they're passed through sperm, too? Or is it really an external thing? And if there is such a thing, could it may as well be God for all intents and purposes? A god made manifest by the shared minds of humanity. And clones presumably only need the source DNA. But Herbert never explains it and the whole mystical side seems out of place given the otherwise hard scifi setting. I can buy superb mental conditioning and powerful developments of the human mind in the post-AI age. I can buy abilities that lie within the extremes of the physically possible. But the mystic stuff presupposes a mechanism to explain it and that raises a whole host of new questions. If I see a vampire, I now wonder if there are werewolves. If I see inexplicable psychic powers, now I wonder what else could be possible.
"Dune" is probably the greatest 20th-century science fiction novel. It is, for better or worse, unfilmable.
No. It's a difficult adaptation but not impossible. LOTR was thought to be impossible. I think Peter Jackson did a bang-up job. Your mileage may vary.
The mini-series adaptations were noble in effort if flawed in execution. The problem with something like Dune is that it really demands to be made into a full season. Take the first three novels since they were meant to be the original story. Season 1, season 2, season 3. 13 episodes a piece. That's more than enough time to tell the story. As it stands, the miniseries would probably be incomprehensible to anyone not already familiar with the story. And trying to do it in a single movie? Impossible. Madness.