...which is why GNOME and KDE are harmful! GNOME and KDE represent a huge duplication of effort, which should have instead been put into libraries that are designed to work for any unix-like system. We did it for libc, we did it for SDL, we did it for XLib, we did it for ALSA... why can't we do it for widget sets?!
It's already done.
The widget libraries (GTK+ and Qt) are standardized and available for multiple platforms. You can run GTK apps in GNOME, KDE, Windows, MacOS X, etc.. Same for Qt apps.
You are confusing GNOME/KDE with GTK+/Qt. The former are much more than just widgets, they are Desktop Environments. There's a lot plumbing underneath (think KParts, Bonobo, etc.) Turning all this plumbing into neutral components (Desktop-wise) would be a hugely complex task.
IHMO, both KDE and GNOME are necessary because they represent different underlying philosophies. KDE is struggling to become a fully featured Desktop ("More is better"). GNOME is aiming to become the "It just works" Desktop. If you intertwin them, you get an ugly inconsistent unusable beast.
The color wheel is a inherently imprecise selection mechanism, meant to pick a color in a fast and simple way, e.g, "I want a light-greenish tone". If you want a precise color, you should use the RGB or HSV spinners.
Complaining about lack of pixel-perfection in the edges of the color wheel is like complaining about lack of pixel-precise proportion of scrollbar thumbs.
First, it is not the U.S., only some neocons in charge that are gungho about a world economy. Most people don't like the idea.
Most Americans don't understand the idea of a world economy. They fail to see that their nice and relatively cheap Dell laptops and Nike sneakers are a product of that same world economy. Would you pay a high premium on all your fancy electronic gadgets and clothes to bring back to the US those manufacturing industries? (that would surely reduce unemployment too... all those factories require lots of hands) No? Well, guess what, repetitive and less creative white-collar jobs are going the way of manufacturing jobs, it's inevitable, and the US won't descend into misery because of that -- Americans have always found a way to adapt.
Second, patriotism might have something to do with objecting to exporting jobs (for those who understand the danger), but it's more likely nationalism and enlightened self-interest, which is not a bad thing if you happen to like your country.
Nice keywords: ''patriotism'', ''danger'', ''enlightened'', ''nationalism''. I fail to grasp why Americans (no, I'm not an American) appeal so frequently to emotional arguments in rational discussions. Outsourcing is all about economic rationalism. What has patriotism to do with it? Is an American who buys a Japanese car less patriotic that one that buys an American one? If The US is ''exporting jobs'' at an alarming rate, how come than the US has actually a far lower unemployment rate than that of the ''more patriotic'' countries, like Italy and France, that are resisting the urge to outsource for ''nationalistic'' reasons?
What happens to the U.S. when we are dependent on other countries, many not friendly, for basic things like IT, steel, textiles, electronics, etc.?.
I will tell you what will happen: absolutely nothing. Take a look at the oil industry. The US is already dependent on oil from not-so-friendly countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela. Will any of those countries risk heavy economic retaliation if they cut their oil supply to the US? No, they won't, because they will suffer at least as much as the US if they were to do so. The world is becoming increasingly inter-dependent -- no single important country can start a trade war without suffering itself a lot.
IIRC, it was Alexander Hamilton who wrote that a nation should keep all industries necessary to its well-being within its borders. That's something a real patriot should be able to understand.
That probably made sense in Hamilton's time. I fail to see it as wise advice for the 21st century. The notion of ''true patriotism'' has evolved since 1776.
This is not the first time Mr Gates has used the dreaded C-word to attack an idea. During the early years of the commercial Web, when Microsoft was still developing its strategy for Internet Explorer, he used it plenty of times. From How the Web was won: Microsoft from Windows to the Web:
The problem was, there was no indication yet of how Microsoft could make money on any of this [the Web], [whereas] there were suspicions it might lose a business or two. Undaunted, [Ben Slivka, head of Microsoft's browser effort,] forged ahead. He took the opportunity to discuss some new features to the O'Hare browser [Explorer's code name], including support for specifying different fonts in HTML. It was a nifty little touch, enabling Web authors to choose preferred fonts instead of the same old Times standard. Because Mosaic and Netscape were cross-platform, they lacked font capability. ''So I was like, let's give away TrueType fonts so people can have cool, sexy [Web sites] that look best on Internet Explorer,'' Slivka said later. ''What the heck, right? And Bill was like, What are you, a communist? Those fonts cost money! Why would we give those away?''
At one time or other Gates had called just about all the Internet idealists at Microsoft communists. It was almost a joke around Microsoft-one that the chairman was fond of perpetuating. In 1993, when he faced a showdown with the Federal Trade Commission over antitrust allegations, Gates had reportedly used the term in a behind-closed-doors meeting with the commissioners. Since then it had gained a mythic quality at Redmond. It was almost a badge of honor to be so designated....
The irony is that Microsoft finally embraced a ''communist'' strategy when they started giving away IE 4 for free. Also, isn't Microsoft's ''shared source'' strategy an implicit acceptance of Open Source?.
Nice troll... but since I've seen other misinformed posts been modded up, I feel the need to reply.
First, Chavez is not a dictator. He was democratically elected, and recently won a referendum on his mandate, which was endorsed by international observers. Also, I can personally tell you that the Venezuelan media enjoys a high degree of freedom and independence, the opposition has never been outlawed, and Venezuelans have all their civil rights protected by the Constitution. The problem with Chavez is his tendency to inflamatory speeches, his ultra-nationalistic rhetoric, and his close friendship with Fidel Castro, which gives the casual observer the impression that he's a classic communist dictator. But if you dig a little deeper you will find out that's far from being so. If you judge him by what he has actually done (opposed to what he merely said in ultra-patriotic rallies and speeches directed toward their partisans), you conclude that's he's no more left-leaning than Brazilian President Lula or Argentinian Nestor Kirchner. And no one is accussing the latter two of being dictators.
Second, this step from Venezuela may have important implications for Latin America. If a country manages to successfully switch an important part of his governmental software infrastructure to FOSS, it might start a landslide of investment in FOSS in other Latin American countries, as the local goverment is usually the biggest spender in IT in Latin American countries.
Third, this is not a ploy to getter deal from Microsoft (they already did that), since is a decree -- that means it's official policy, not something you can casually use to bargain a better deal from a vendor.
Interestingly enough, the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation was working in a project to provide early warnings / relief support in the event of tsunamis. From the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation's website (see here):
PROJECT WARN in Partnership with the Japan US Science Technology and Space Applications Program (JUSTSAP). The purpose of Project Warn is combine enhanced communications and IT systems to provide warning of impending natural or man-made disasters and to provide on-going communications and remote sensing and GIS support during disaster relief operations. The Clarke Foundation is working with the Pacific Disaster Center, the Asian Disaster Mitigation Organization, the United Nations, and the US and Japanese Governments as coordinated through the JUSTSAP organization to carry out a suitable test and demonstration in this area. In particular a simulation and test is being planned in the Pacific Region in 2005 to determine to how to use the latest information and sensing technology more effectively in the advent of that a major Tsunami might impact an Asian country or island. Clarke Foundation personnel are providing technical advice and support on a volunteer basis to this project.[ emphasis mine]
Note that the test was scheduled for 2005... unfortunately a little too late. Also, they were focusing on the Pacific instead of the Indian Ocean. Given that Clarke himself lives in Sri Lanka, I wonder how the current events would affect the project. It is clear to me that the Indian Ocean has been somewhat neglected.
Mono (.NET) for non-Windows applications is just as viable as Java for multi-platform use. You could do.NET AND Mono deployments (or just pick one).
Mono reached 1.0 only very recently (July-August), and I'm not aware of any significative medium to large deployment of production-quality systems based on it yet. Java is a mature and proven technology, and while it has its problems, equalling Mono to Java in terms of viability, as of this date, is IMHO overstretching Mono's virtues.
I would rather wait until Mono matures before risking a deployment on the healthcare industry.
That they took the stats off Zeitgeist, however, that's what I don't get.
I guess they did it to stop clueless IT journalists (ab)using Google's unreliable stats for purposes they weren't intended for. Fortunately,/. polls are still available for their research:-)
BTW, those who don't like reading the articles would wish all stories were like this;)
Well, I, for one, keep reading/. for the sole purpose of watching all those Very Well Informed Slashdotters With a Giant Cluestick playing whack-a-mole with the poor victims who don't care to RTFA. You don't want to deprive us from the fun, do you?:-)
I can feel your pain:-). I had a similar experience installing Debian woody on my home server. That's why that particular box is now running in console-only mode.
But there's a light of hope. For excellent GeForce support, try Gentoo. Their documentation is truly outstanding.
I use Gentoo on a daily basis on my main machine; the Windows partition has been since then relegated to games and compatibility tests.
Mmh. They keep choosing the wrong book...
on
Will Smith as I, Robot
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Personally, I don't understand why is Hollywood (apparently) fascinated with Asimov's robot stories. They're not very cinematic (in a Hollywoodesque sense), as they tend to focus on philosophical, social and ethical consequences of his Three Laws rather than an interesting plot. Thus, they're not very approchable in cinematographic terms without losing an essential common denominator, namely, forcing the reader to think about the real social ramifications and implications of creating autonomous non-human intelligence. Strip an Asimov robot story of this cold intellectual factor, and you get a mediocre and innocuous tear-jerker.
A much better choice for a Hollywood flick would be The End of Eternity, for several reasons,
Unlike the Foundation series, is a self-contained book -- you don't need to read a whole series to truly appreciate it.
It's a fast-paced, grabbing reading, very amenable to be turned into a movie script.
It has lots of plot twists, especially at the end (I won't spoil it, go read the book).
Unlike most of Asimovian Robot stories, it has a love story (a must for commercial movies)
There are plenty of opportunities to show digital F/X (another must for commercial SF movies).
The story doesn't rely much on the characters themselves, so even Will Smith could deliver a decent performance.
First among these creatures is the majestic gryphon. The gryphon has very distinct characteristics, with the body, hind legs, and tail of a lion, conjoined to the head and claws of an eagle. It is also said to have the wings of an eagle and feline ears. Gryphons run rampant in Medieval art and literature.
Gryphons look also similar to Chimeras, so it sounds good to me.
Mmmm... I use Gentoo and am pretty happy with it. I frequently read their forums, and judging by their answers, the vast majority of developers and package maintainers are very helpful and collaborative.
Also, their documentation is by far the best I've found for any distro I've tried.
If you really have an issue with a package maintainer, try emailing him in private, and politely advise him that a "RTFM, you LUSER!" attitude is pointless.
Anonymously posting your complaints, calling someone a jerk, and dissing a whole distro because of a personal issue doesn't help anyone.
I have only slow modem connection at home. Can I download sources somewhere else and add them to my system?
Definitely. You can run emerge --pretend package to see what programs are going to be installed. Download sources and bring them on any media home. Put the sources into/usr/portage/distfiles and run emerge package to see it picking up the sources you just brought in!
So, I thought, all I need is to get the right sources copied into/usr/portage/distfiles before emerge'ing.
With this in mind, I downloaded 6GB of sources from the Gentoo site using wget. I did this at work (where they have xDSL), scheduling wget to run late at night using 'at' (yes, Win2K DOES have an 'at' command:-). Later, I burned all that stuff into a bunch of CD-Rs and brought them home.
At home, I ls'd the contents of the CD-Rs and created a small set of 'Table of Contents' files, then wrote a small Ruby script to tell me in what CD-R was any particular tarball I needed. I eventually improved the script to the point where I can pipe the output from emerge --pretend through my script, and it will create a series of bash scripts to copy only the necessary tarballs from the right CDs. So I can run, for instance,
And automagically I get a bunch of bash scripts like these,
cp-from-cd-X.sh
Which I can run to get only the necessary tarballs for KOffice copied from the right CD-Rs. Once the source tarballs are copied, you can emerge your package and Portage won't try to download anything since the sources are already in/usr/portage/distfiles.
As I see it, there's really nothing to worry about. Imagine the following long-term scenarios:
(a).NET fails to gain mindshare (and market share) among developers and, after years of fruitless marketing, slowly fades into oblivion. In this scenario, Mono is simply irrelevant.
(b).NET catches on like wildfire on a savannah, and the market is flooded with 'Designed for.NET' software. In this case, assuming that Mono effectively achieves total compatibility, the underlying OS will suddenly become irrelevant, and [GNU/]Linux will benefit from instant availability of commercial development efforts. [GNU/]Linux might become mainstream!
(c).NET gains enough maket share to stay alive and kicking, but is just another player in an increasingly heterogeous world (this is my bet, BTW). In this scenario,.NET is much like Java: a strong niche player, but a niche player nonetheless, with no real power to really affect the Open Source movement in significant ways.
Note that if Micro$oft is really committed to make.NET a truly platform-agnostic standard, then any advantage that.NET-on-Windows might have could vanish when the technology is mature enough. Again, look at Java. Is Sun's JVM implementation on Solaris significantly better that [pick you favorite JVM] on [pick your favorite OS]? Has the fact that Sun invented Java improved the situation for Solaris in the server arena? THe same could happen for.NET: Mono could potentially be better than Microsoft's.NET implementation (at least on certain niches).
In conclussion: at worst, Mono simply doesn't hurt, at best, it could help a lot.
[...] sell my lemonade for $0.50, which is less than it takes for you to make lemonade. For you to compete is for you to lose money. I can afford it, because I have capital sitting in a bank account. You go out of business, and I raise my price back to $5.
This is what MS is doing!
Its basic economics, people.
The practice described above is not basic economics. It's blatant dumping and it's illegal in all decent countries.
If Micro$oft started offering their software and services for a price below the actual cost of producing them, with the sole purpose of driving their competitors out of business, they should be sued for unfair practices.
I think this is the price great actors pay for performing admirably in high-profile films -- they always get remembered as the character they so vividly embodied. But Hugo Weaving is hardly alone in this predicament.
At some point, in the scene in Isengard where Saruman is trying to lure Gandalf into the Dark Side of the Fo--, er, the Shadows of the Dark Lord Sauron, I half expected Saruman to suddenly open his mouth to reveal two vampiric fangs, as I can't help but remember him as Count Dracula. (Alas, I'm afraid most of you kids don't even know that such classic movies exist, do you?)
But that was only a trick my mind was playing on me, because objectively speaking, Mr. Lee's performance was simply outstanding, as always. And regarding Hugo Weaving as Elrond, well, he was not exactly as I imagined him. I tended to think of Elrond as a wise old elf (3,000+ year- old is quite old, just picture the birthday cake!). But, that's only another trick of my imprecise imagination, because Tolkien crearly states in the book, when describing Elrond, that he looks "neither young nor old", so Peter Jackson's interpretation is closer to the book than the eye of my mind.
Anyway, don't let the nit-pickers bother you -- IMHO, the cast is close to being perfect. Let me repeat myself: the actors were as close to being perfect as posible for Mortal Men (and Women), and this is the main reason why FoTR is easily the greatest epic-fantasy movie ever made to date.
That said, I did have a "Mr Anderson" moment:
Agent Glorfindel: The halfling will bear the One Ring
Agent Elrond: Never send a Hobbit to do an Elf's job
Slashdot Mirror
It's already done.
The widget libraries (GTK+ and Qt) are standardized and available for multiple platforms. You can run GTK apps in GNOME, KDE, Windows, MacOS X, etc.. Same for Qt apps.
You are confusing GNOME/KDE with GTK+/Qt. The former are much more than just widgets, they are Desktop Environments. There's a lot plumbing underneath (think KParts, Bonobo, etc.) Turning all this plumbing into neutral components (Desktop-wise) would be a hugely complex task.
IHMO, both KDE and GNOME are necessary because they represent different underlying philosophies. KDE is struggling to become a fully featured Desktop ("More is better"). GNOME is aiming to become the "It just works" Desktop. If you intertwin them, you get an ugly inconsistent unusable beast.
Why make a billion when we could make...(dramatic pause) ... a MILLION?
The color wheel is a inherently imprecise selection mechanism, meant to pick a color in a fast and simple way, e.g, "I want a light-greenish tone". If you want a precise color, you should use the RGB or HSV spinners.
Complaining about lack of pixel-perfection in the edges of the color wheel is like complaining about lack of pixel-precise proportion of scrollbar thumbs.
Like this one?
Most Americans don't understand the idea of a world economy. They fail to see that their nice and relatively cheap Dell laptops and Nike sneakers are a product of that same world economy. Would you pay a high premium on all your fancy electronic gadgets and clothes to bring back to the US those manufacturing industries? (that would surely reduce unemployment too... all those factories require lots of hands) No? Well, guess what, repetitive and less creative white-collar jobs are going the way of manufacturing jobs, it's inevitable, and the US won't descend into misery because of that -- Americans have always found a way to adapt.
Nice keywords: ''patriotism'', ''danger'', ''enlightened'', ''nationalism''. I fail to grasp why Americans (no, I'm not an American) appeal so frequently to emotional arguments in rational discussions. Outsourcing is all about economic rationalism. What has patriotism to do with it? Is an American who buys a Japanese car less patriotic that one that buys an American one? If The US is ''exporting jobs'' at an alarming rate, how come than the US has actually a far lower unemployment rate than that of the ''more patriotic'' countries, like Italy and France, that are resisting the urge to outsource for ''nationalistic'' reasons?
I will tell you what will happen: absolutely nothing. Take a look at the oil industry. The US is already dependent on oil from not-so-friendly countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela. Will any of those countries risk heavy economic retaliation if they cut their oil supply to the US? No, they won't, because they will suffer at least as much as the US if they were to do so. The world is becoming increasingly inter-dependent -- no single important country can start a trade war without suffering itself a lot.
That probably made sense in Hamilton's time. I fail to see it as wise advice for the 21st century. The notion of ''true patriotism'' has evolved since 1776.
This is not the first time Mr Gates has used the dreaded C-word to attack an idea. During the early years of the commercial Web, when Microsoft was still developing its strategy for Internet Explorer, he used it plenty of times. From How the Web was won: Microsoft from Windows to the Web:
The irony is that Microsoft finally embraced a ''communist'' strategy when they started giving away IE 4 for free. Also, isn't Microsoft's ''shared source'' strategy an implicit acceptance of Open Source?.
Nice troll... but since I've seen other misinformed posts been modded up, I feel the need to reply.
First, Chavez is not a dictator. He was democratically elected, and recently won a referendum on his mandate, which was endorsed by international observers. Also, I can personally tell you that the Venezuelan media enjoys a high degree of freedom and independence, the opposition has never been outlawed, and Venezuelans have all their civil rights protected by the Constitution. The problem with Chavez is his tendency to inflamatory speeches, his ultra-nationalistic rhetoric, and his close friendship with Fidel Castro, which gives the casual observer the impression that he's a classic communist dictator. But if you dig a little deeper you will find out that's far from being so. If you judge him by what he has actually done (opposed to what he merely said in ultra-patriotic rallies and speeches directed toward their partisans), you conclude that's he's no more left-leaning than Brazilian President Lula or Argentinian Nestor Kirchner. And no one is accussing the latter two of being dictators.
Second, this step from Venezuela may have important implications for Latin America. If a country manages to successfully switch an important part of his governmental software infrastructure to FOSS, it might start a landslide of investment in FOSS in other Latin American countries, as the local goverment is usually the biggest spender in IT in Latin American countries.
Third, this is not a ploy to getter deal from Microsoft (they already did that), since is a decree -- that means it's official policy, not something you can casually use to bargain a better deal from a vendor.
Interestingly enough, the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation was working in a project to provide early warnings / relief support in the event of tsunamis. From the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation's website (see here):
Note that the test was scheduled for 2005... unfortunately a little too late. Also, they were focusing on the Pacific instead of the Indian Ocean. Given that Clarke himself lives in Sri Lanka, I wonder how the current events would affect the project. It is clear to me that the Indian Ocean has been somewhat neglected.
Mono reached 1.0 only very recently (July-August), and I'm not aware of any significative medium to large deployment of production-quality systems based on it yet. Java is a mature and proven technology, and while it has its problems, equalling Mono to Java in terms of viability, as of this date, is IMHO overstretching Mono's virtues.
I would rather wait until Mono matures before risking a deployment on the healthcare industry.
While people who 'steal' other copyrighted works such as music and movies should be protected?
But no-one should contact the MPAA/RIAA regarding unappropriate use or distribution of copyrighted works, right?
Actually, a variation on a standard authoritative quote:
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
No, we would be using Minix.
I guess they did it to stop clueless IT journalists (ab)using Google's unreliable stats for purposes they weren't intended for. Fortunately, /. polls are still available for their research :-)
Well, I, for one, keep reading /. for the sole purpose of watching all those Very Well Informed Slashdotters With a Giant Cluestick playing whack-a-mole with the poor victims who don't care to RTFA. You don't want to deprive us from the fun, do you? :-)
I can feel your pain :-). I had a similar experience installing Debian woody on my home server. That's why that particular box is now running in console-only mode.
But there's a light of hope. For excellent GeForce support, try Gentoo. Their documentation is truly outstanding.
I use Gentoo on a daily basis on my main machine; the Windows partition has been since then relegated to games and compatibility tests.
Personally, I don't understand why is Hollywood (apparently) fascinated with Asimov's robot stories. They're not very cinematic (in a Hollywoodesque sense), as they tend to focus on philosophical, social and ethical consequences of his Three Laws rather than an interesting plot. Thus, they're not very approchable in cinematographic terms without losing an essential common denominator, namely, forcing the reader to think about the real social ramifications and implications of creating autonomous non-human intelligence. Strip an Asimov robot story of this cold intellectual factor, and you get a mediocre and innocuous tear-jerker.
A much better choice for a Hollywood flick would be The End of Eternity, for several reasons,
Mmmm... I use Gentoo and am pretty happy with it. I frequently read their forums, and judging by their answers, the vast majority of developers and package maintainers are very helpful and collaborative.
Also, their documentation is by far the best I've found for any distro I've tried.
If you really have an issue with a package maintainer, try emailing him in private, and politely advise him that a "RTFM, you LUSER!" attitude is pointless.
Anonymously posting your complaints, calling someone a jerk, and dissing a whole distro because of a personal issue doesn't help anyone.
Just MHO.
Certainly, you'd better have broadband at home to install Gentoo...
...or you can try an alternative strategy.
From the Gentoo FAQ:
So, I thought, all I need is to get the right sources copied into /usr/portage/distfiles before emerge'ing.
With this in mind, I downloaded 6GB of sources from the Gentoo site using wget. I did this at work (where they have xDSL), scheduling wget to run late at night using 'at' (yes, Win2K DOES have an 'at' command :-). Later, I burned all that stuff into a bunch of CD-Rs and brought them home.
At home, I ls'd the contents of the CD-Rs and created a small set of 'Table of Contents' files, then wrote a small Ruby script to tell me in what CD-R was any particular tarball I needed. I eventually improved the script to the point where I can pipe the output from emerge --pretend through my script, and it will create a series of bash scripts to copy only the necessary tarballs from the right CDs. So I can run, for instance,
And automagically I get a bunch of bash scripts like these,
Which I can run to get only the necessary tarballs for KOffice copied from the right CD-Rs. Once the source tarballs are copied, you can emerge your package and Portage won't try to download anything since the sources are already in /usr/portage/distfiles.
As I see it, there's really nothing to worry about. Imagine the following long-term scenarios:
(a) .NET fails to gain mindshare (and market share) among developers and, after years of fruitless marketing, slowly fades into oblivion. In this scenario, Mono is simply irrelevant.
(b) .NET catches on like wildfire on a savannah, and the market is flooded with 'Designed for .NET' software. In this case, assuming that Mono effectively achieves total compatibility, the underlying OS will suddenly become irrelevant, and [GNU/]Linux will benefit from instant availability of commercial development efforts. [GNU/]Linux might become mainstream!
(c) .NET gains enough maket share to stay alive and kicking, but is just another player in an increasingly heterogeous world (this is my bet, BTW). In this scenario, .NET is much like Java: a strong niche player, but a niche player nonetheless, with no real power to really affect the Open Source movement in significant ways.
Note that if Micro$oft is really committed to make .NET a truly platform-agnostic standard, then any advantage that .NET-on-Windows might have could vanish when the technology is mature enough. Again, look at Java. Is Sun's JVM implementation on Solaris significantly better that [pick you favorite JVM] on [pick your favorite OS]? Has the fact that Sun invented Java improved the situation for Solaris in the server arena? THe same could happen for .NET: Mono could potentially be better than Microsoft's .NET implementation (at least on certain niches).
In conclussion: at worst, Mono simply doesn't hurt, at best, it could help a lot.
The practice described above is not basic economics. It's blatant dumping and it's illegal in all decent countries.
If Micro$oft started offering their software and services for a price below the actual cost of producing them, with the sole purpose of driving their competitors out of business, they should be sued for unfair practices.
I think this is the price great actors pay for performing admirably in high-profile films -- they always get remembered as the character they so vividly embodied. But Hugo Weaving is hardly alone in this predicament.
At some point, in the scene in Isengard where Saruman is trying to lure Gandalf into the Dark Side of the Fo--, er, the Shadows of the Dark Lord Sauron, I half expected Saruman to suddenly open his mouth to reveal two vampiric fangs, as I can't help but remember him as Count Dracula. (Alas, I'm afraid most of you kids don't even know that such classic movies exist, do you?)
But that was only a trick my mind was playing on me, because objectively speaking, Mr. Lee's performance was simply outstanding, as always. And regarding Hugo Weaving as Elrond, well, he was not exactly as I imagined him. I tended to think of Elrond as a wise old elf (3,000+ year- old is quite old, just picture the birthday cake!). But, that's only another trick of my imprecise imagination, because Tolkien crearly states in the book, when describing Elrond, that he looks "neither young nor old", so Peter Jackson's interpretation is closer to the book than the eye of my mind.
Anyway, don't let the nit-pickers bother you -- IMHO, the cast is close to being perfect. Let me repeat myself: the actors were as close to being perfect as posible for Mortal Men (and Women), and this is the main reason why FoTR is easily the greatest epic-fantasy movie ever made to date.
That said, I did have a "Mr Anderson" moment:
Agent Glorfindel: The halfling will bear the One Ring
Agent Elrond: Never send a Hobbit to do an Elf's job