"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
-- Douglas Adams, personal quote (and nicely included in the Quintessential Phase radio shows)
it fits, doesn't it? stereos were part of these men's natural order of things; cds were invented when they were under 35 so they got a career in it; mp3s were invented while they were fat old execs and therefore are against their particular natural order of things.
i'm sure its evolutionarilly necessary for our survival as a species for such short-sightedness to reign in the long run, but in the short run, it simply pisses me off.
oh, by the way, i'm 35 as of saturday. so nobody better go invent anything, ok?
that's exactly the process i'm doing, and its tedious as hell and while we're at it, not entirely successful.
in particular is the hassles that occur when one particular mbean declaration gets moved (or becomes "optional" when before it was required). there are a lot of those to deal with in upgrades that skip release generations.
"How the hell to upgrade my EJB+JSP+MBean+JMS from one version to another when every configuration file i've had to modify to get my app to work right has changed formats on me."
Seriously, JBoss 321 -> 327 has had major changes outside of the obvious tomcat 4 to 5 one (the reason we had to do this in the first place), and 327 to 402 is even worse. the JMS subsystem is the worst moving target, as its configuration is significantly different in all three releases we're now arguing with.
JBoss guys, i really do have better things to do with my time than read through and compare 1000 lines of XML between two releases to figure this crap out. A simple "upgrade instructions" document would have been nice.
the reality is that the *vast* majority of those files are currently undocumented and anything anybody does with them is pure guesswork.
Yeah -- the curse of the vehicle voltron was that, like the conversion from Gatchaman into Battle of the Planets, there was so much in the way of violence that had to be trimmed out, particularly near the finale, that several episodes came up short of the 23 min needed to broadcast.
Battle of the Planets solved that by getting some cheap company (made up, it seems, of ex- Hanna Barberra artists) to animate the links with 7-Zark-7.
Vehicle Voltron, however, decided instead to simply not show those episodes, figuring nobody would notice. The result is that the rather complex plot, particularly after the climactic battle on the bad guy's homeworld and the team trying to deal with a major refuge problem, got completely lost and discarded. It seems they learned nothing from the popularity of Star Blazers (and this pre-dated Robotech).
I personally would love to get the original Japanese for that series.
Lions-Voltron, on the other hand, had the basic same-old-same-old issue of any sitcom where each episode ends in exactly the same state as it began. No character development, no plot, no nothing that makes real anime fans watch anime. To my mind, it ranks just slightly higher than the pokemon/digimon craze.
I was on the original ToonMUSH, a similarly-themed one inspired by toontown in Roger Rabbit...until that server died. I quit MUDs by my junior year of college because every MUD (or muck or mush) I was on either got corrupted or the owners of the machine found a real use for it (not knowing the students had set up the MUD) and shutdown the server. Usually this shutdown involved a re-install of the O/S without a decent backup so the entire MUD contents were gone.
ALL of them went through this (around 1991). After having had to recreate my character(s) 3 times in 4 months and then arguing with new admins for muck-forth privs again and again to recreate my "home", I just gave up.
actually the main opponents wouldn't be the MPAA directly. The real problem is the unions.
A band like Marillion can sell an album before making with no problem because record producers and engineers aren't all unionized with mutual alliances to the RIAA. They can easily hire the people they want, at union rates (if necessary), and not have to deal with all that politics.
The MPAA's relationship with the Screen Actors' Guild and the Directors' Guild, among others (like CPA for casting Americans, and half the effects shops out there though WETA isn't one of those) is FAR tighter. Members can't work outside of "the studio" for certain projects unless they are prepared to pay a hefty fine (which ends up being paid for by the producer). For Empire, George Lucas paid almost a million dollars total in fines to the various unions including the Directors' Guild for having to work outside of union regs. Its the key reason he went with a non-union director for Jedi.
so even if he got the money, he couldn't use it on most of the people he would need to mount such a project...
RSS 1.0, based on the RDF standard, is extensible through a documented mechanism involving RDF and namespaces. (I highly doubt MS has any interest in the 1.0 RDF-based standard at all)
RSS 2.0 (not RDF based, but itself an extension of 0.92) basically permits anything outside of its standard as an extension, provided the tags are in their own namespace.
If microsoft invents an extension that conforms with those rules, their feeds will not break existing browsers/readers/aggregators at all.
Its only a problem if they thumb their nose at the namespace thing and just blithely add tags in the "default". THEN they'll have pissed off a number of people.
In the end, it matters little. RSS systems have been built like HTML systems (and following the knuth policy) -- be specific in what you write; be generous in what you read.
...than their promise to have a Linux version of Windows Media Player running. That piece of vaporware nothingness is over 2 years old (my blog entry on it is dated 4/30/03).
so having "experiments" is still more than they have for some products they've announced over the years...
I need to really only share things with my wife, so i've got a web calendar and a to do manager modified (extensively).
We use my modified ToDo @ work, along with a Wiki, to manage the "little details" of software development, things where our bug management system is overkill. The main mods I added were more states besides "complete" and "not complete" -- we need "planned", "active", "on hold", "at risk", "not doing", "complete", and "on going". In addition, I improved the sorting and layout, added filters and the ability to move items among projects, a "copy" capability, the ability to assign a release, and a way to store the submitter of the item, with cookies to reduce the entry tedium of some of those.
I love open-source sometimes. I need to subnit my change back to the author to see what he thinks, since he hasn't updated it in a year.
i think climate change is the key but for different reasons, one of which made it easier for humans to hunt them, but they were going to die anyways.
the climate change and end of the ice ages caused the trees to start growing, blocking some of the migration paths. this combined with the warming trend reduced the amount of land the larger (especially wooley) beasts could live in for food. reduce available land and you reduce the population. The increased water flow from the thaw also changed the landscape in major ways (niagra, anyone?) that made additional geographic cuts in the migration paths.
THEN bring in species (like us) that have no problem with the warmer weather and you have competition for food supplies.
it was going to happen. it was inevitable. if it wasn't *us* moving in and taking advantage of the warmer weather, other species would have done it. the megabeasts were trapped: their lifestyle of migration physically impossible to maintain for new forests and newly-formed caverns from the massive water flow.
take them out and you start to take out some of the predators that fed on them. climate change is survived by either generalists (us) or those that can move to an area changing less drastically (the buffalo, for example).
australia is something like 90% desert. it probably wasn't in the past, but i'm not well read on its geological history beyond the basics of its connection with pangea and antarctica back in the triassic and jurassic eras. but extrapolating from how the geography of america changed i would surmise that just like northern america (with forests and rock caverns) and europe (with a lot more water like the baltic sea), the climate change helped create the desert which greatly reduced the amount of land that the larger animals could live off of. THEN bring in generalists like humans into the mix and see what happens.
again, it didn't have to be us and things would still have gone the way they did. we were the ones, but it could have been any species.
Like with Star Wars (where the comic book had its version of the footage where Luke shows the battle to Biggs before he leaves) and Empire (where there's footage shot involving a wampa cave that C3PO deceives some snowtroopers into entering), the comic book adaptation of Sith has a LOT more scenes in it that were cut from the final edit.
In particular is a lot of material involving Bail Organa and Mon Mothma (see IMDB where there's a credit line for an actress playing that role) and Bail discussing his wife's miscarriage (thus leading to the desire to adopt). There's also an assassignation of Chancelor Valorum (from Phantom Menace). I'm sure many of these scenes will be in the "deleted scenes" portion of the DVD, like the other two prequels had.
One particular moment, seemingly cut from the film, is QuiGon's voice directly talking to Yoda while he's on the space station where Padme's giving birth.
As for "what happens next?" Check the/. archives but i'm pretty sure they ran a story about the rumor of there being a couple of TV series, one all-cgi, one live-action+effects, which would look at more details in the 17 years between Sith and Hope. Now, of course, that's probably still in the rumor mill, but there you go.
I figure the quality of those will be on-par with the Young Indiana Jones tv series, which wasn't bad for what it tried to achieve.
well, to my mind i don't see it making it past the first sequel, resolved by taking Malkovitch's character to the Man in the Shack, rather than the Guide editor that Zaphod ran into.
the main reason for planning for multiple sequels is that its easier to budget people, sets, and effects services, particularly when you do them "at once" aka back to the future and the matrix (and the upcoming Pirates of the Caribean). on the other hand, they have a knack for rushing them in the editing process because of the tighter time-limits (especially to get post-production started).
on the other hand, if one's a flop, it can take the other with it before its even released. #1 or not, its still only cleared $21mil in america, which isn't "instant gotta do a sequel" numbers by comparison to the 40 mil some films make in the summertime. Men In Black also shows the concern that sci-fi comedy may be a flash in the pan in Hollywood - first works on originality but you eventually run out of jokes (though not being a (totally) original project, there's plenty of Adams jokes to call upon).
So I think 1 more is it. Do the restaurant section, split everybody up so Zaphod can do the total perspective vortex, arthur and ford the 2 million years ago b-arc, and trillian gets some original subplot, then unite them all to resolve everything at the man in the shack.
one thing about the ending of the movie is that it makes the 4th book's entire premise useless -- 1) arthur now has somebody, and 2) the earth has already been reconstructed. So "flying" and God's Final Message is all there is, not enough to justify a film.
as i've posted before, if you want the 3rd, 4th, 5th books, go to BBC Radio 4.
DNA had been working on the script for years, off and on based on the chances of the damned thing actually being made. He really set himself to writing it (while still doing his environmental and macintosh writings on the side), while reediting Salmon of Doubt for the umpteenth time, when the contract with Disney was signed and Jay Roach kept as a producer to help bridge the Anglo-American gap as he had with the Austin Powers series.
DNA's own journals have said that the script he submitted was the first movie script in 20 years he had written that he was truly happy with (and that's saying something, considering he was rarely happy with any of his writings). I can't recall the source, but I recall reading somewhere that most of the plot changes were his, including the romance, the character played by malkovitch (it gives Zaphod some motivation and backstory that was nonexistent before), and he hinted at a surprise ending (which I would take to be the reconstruction of earth, something not done in the books/radio as the mice backed out on the deal at the last second).
having a screenwriter available to do rewrites is a mandatory requirement in moviemaking, as the director can't always see what's not working until he's on the set, or will have new ideas come up once he's seen particular sets or effects (ala Jurassic Park making t-rex save the day in order to clone the "When the Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" poster -- that idea didn't come to Spielberg until he saw t-rex walk for the first time).
that screenwriter, if different from the original scriptwriter, only has to consider the original script as "the author's vision", which he has to rectify with the director's vision.
of course, as Brazil has shown, the editing room can still drastically change a movie from the screenwriter's vision even when it was filmed to the word.
well, from what I read, the love story IS in douglas's final script (not added by the directory or the replacement author) and is something he wanted for quite some time. he didn't write it before because he hadn't made Trillian a strong enough character and wouldn't until Life... Now that he had a stronger idea of what she could be/do, and how to write women's roles in general (Fenchurch and the very strong women in the Dirk Gently books) he could reapproach that character from the beginning. She became a strong enough character that a real romance could work, so he wrote it to make it work.
of course, this means that they likely couldn't do a 4th book as movie, but I don't see the film series surviving that long anyways (few cults do). they'll do Restaurant to close things out, inserting Malkovitch as a major player in the "old man in the shack" sequence instead of the Guide editor from the radio/book. or at least, that's my prediction.
the one thing that changes things, of course, is the love story itself. Ending Ford & Arthur 2 million years in the past would require somehow separating Arthur from Trillian, and (by virtue of the reconstructed earth) removing the importance of the golgafrinchan fleet as the true origins of humans kinda changes the focus quite a lot. Rather than Arthur looking for some sense of contentment whereever he goes (his quest in books 3 and 5), he'd be permanently uncontent (as he was in the beginning of 5), and that would disturb the ending of Restaurant if its kept the same as the book; the audience would feel as discontented as he would be.
at any rate, the best way to enjoy the 3rd/4th/5th books a second way is the new radio series at BBC 4 (3rd series on sale in CD form in the UK).
I had to switch to GAIM not for any particular feature, but to get rid of the advertising.
Seemed the version of AIM I was using at the time allowed Flash advertisements with sound, and the sound completely ignored my other settings in the AIM client to turn all sounds off.
so here i am, in my quiet little room trying to get work done, and suddenly I get interrupted by a trailer for some movie coming from the one app that should have been totally silent.
NT on Alpha 10 years ago was NOT a 64 bit os. It was a 32 bit OS running on a 64 bit cpu.
my point is that they had a start -- they had a working OS on a 64 bit chip that they could have worked on to convert to 64 had they started 10 years ago and would have been easily ready for the current generation of 64 bit chips rather than slowing 64bit adoption down because nobody (outside unix) had an os for it.
of course, that would have required the NT team to be aware of the coming desktop monopoly that windows 95/98 and 2000 would bring, which they couldn't have known since at the time Microsoft's OS teams were still trying to figure out how O/S 2 would do, along with every other analyst out there.
Considering they had a version of Windows NT for the 64-bit DEC Alpha over 10 years ago...
M$, like everybody else, totally lost 7 years of 64-bit potential by sacrificing the Alpha. Compaq could have taken the chip when they bought DEC, slapped the intel instruction set onto it in some fashion, and had a 4 year head-start on AMD and Intel BOTH in producing the 64-bit PC.
my CS class at JMU '93 graduated with only 24 (out of over 2000 graduates per year). Being so small we were told of stories of how they used to have over 200 graduates in the CS program back in the 80s (the original micro-computer boom time, when computers were popular).
years later, by '98 (the second computer boom-time thanks to the 'net) the CS classes were back up to over 200 / year.
now, they're dropping again.
i would put it that the reason is that there's no major "popularity" in Computers right now. they're just there, rather than being full of new and interesting things. the two peaks of CS student-hood were at times when there were tons of new things to do and discover. related to that was the idea that if one was into it at the time, one could get a guarenteed high-paying job fresh out of school.
the valley i was in was at a time of staticness. DOS hadn't changed in 5 years, windows was unheard of, "IBM-compatibility" was taking over the world, the mac was too expensive to become a hacker box, and most people getting into CS had never heard of "unix" before (much less VMS or the AS/400s where the real work was still being done). at the time, nothing looked like it would change. many in my class got into CS from other degree programs (physics in my case) because we discovered we were decent programmers first once exposed to real hardware.
today we're in another valley. the 90s saw a ton of good stuff and a ton of junk get made in a very short time, but right now there's little being done that a high school grad could recognize and go "hey, that's something i could be doing in 5 years". yeah, there's lots of stuff in XML -- but would a high school kid really know what it was or how it was useful to them?
its kinda like getting into open-source programming: having an itch to scratch, a peek of curiosity. the peaks of CS student-counts happen at times when there's so much going on that's obvious to anyone outside of the industry, enough to get kids to go "i wonder how they did that?" and get into the degree program to find out.
the valleys like now or like the late 80s to early 90s happen when what is going on in the industry is really only of interest to those within the industry.
we're back into a gadget world (digital cameras, mp3 players), and gadgets are known for being "black boxes" outside the industry. contrast that to the early micro- world where everybody had "BASIC", or the internet world where anybody could hack together a page of html, gifs, and perl scripts. you can't look at an iPod and go "i could make my own" the way you could some trendy web page or early 6502 game.
so really the downtimes comes down to being in a time where you can't see what you would do with a CS degree, compared to other times where it seemed obvious what you could do with one.
actually, interviews for actors for dvd-special-features cost a lot more than a couple hundred bucks. heck, just getting the rights to use interview footage from other sources like a movie's "red carpet premiere" can cost in the thousands. (consider how the documentary market is getting stagnated because the news people who hold the rights of post-viet-nam footage are charging too much to the point that non-profit companies like PBS's CPB can't afford it).
the only exception are those for whom their contract involved a percentage of the gross, like the producers, directors, and lead actors. they get paid a substantially higher portion of the dvd sales than the regular actors do.
for this reason, some dvd releases of classic movies don't get the "special edition" treatment up front (ala Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Chariots of Fire) -- the sales of the first release measure the interest. the profits are then used to pay the actors and other people (critics such as Leonard Maltin in the Disney films) to film the new interview footage.
its akin to getting a public speaking engagement. those generally run in the thousands, plus transportation and hotel fees, even for small actors like the various Imperial generals/admirals at Star Wars cons. Agents of actors NEVER let them do anything for free, because it reduces their value in the next film's negotiations.
however, its extremely rare for TV show actors to get a percentage of the gross unless its the fifth season and beyond of a HUGE hit like seinfeld or friends. just as the actors normally don't get a piece of syndication sales, they also rarely get a piece of dvd sales.
but you're criticising the faults (in your eyes) of NASA as being because they are not a private company.
That to me is overreading what I've been saying. I was only comparing NASA to how a private company operates which is not the same thing.
Someone like the NSF should be building and operating these things now. If I were the head of NASA, I'd declare the whole thing a smashing success and give it to someone else as a Christmas present.
Remember in one of my posts, I described how in private companies, "one group gets on with designing and building the next one while another group maintains and continues to get what they can supporting the old."
All you're saying is reverse the roles from my potential suggestion -- let NASA continue to get from what's out there while looking for completely new things to do, and other companies "design and build the next one" in the short term or mid-range. I can agree with that.
Trouble is, for just "knowledge" there simply isn't enough money for it given government spending habits i've already discussed.:( NSF is under even more pressure than NASA is to "produce" stuff that has short-term value -- turning real research into "research and development", which isn't what NSF or NASA should be up to.
but staring at stars simply isn't profitable...
government leaders keep comparing the space explorers to the early explorers of the new world, but there's a huge difference.
the explorers of the new world (and more importantly, their investors) got a zillion-percent return on investment because the resources found could easily be exploited (no new technology was needed, although as the Dutch showed, ships could be improved) or were rare commodities relatively speaking, like the gold (nevermind the rediculous inflation the sudden influx caused at the time).
The way I see it, (assuming the parallel holds) until someone finds "gold" on another planet, nobody's going there because in the New World that was the #1 reason ANYBODY went anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
-- Douglas Adams, personal quote (and nicely included in the Quintessential Phase radio shows)
it fits, doesn't it? stereos were part of these men's natural order of things; cds were invented when they were under 35 so they got a career in it; mp3s were invented while they were fat old execs and therefore are against their particular natural order of things.
i'm sure its evolutionarilly necessary for our survival as a species for such short-sightedness to reign in the long run, but in the short run, it simply pisses me off.
oh, by the way, i'm 35 as of saturday. so nobody better go invent anything, ok?
that's exactly the process i'm doing, and its tedious as hell and while we're at it, not entirely successful.
in particular is the hassles that occur when one particular mbean declaration gets moved (or becomes "optional" when before it was required). there are a lot of those to deal with in upgrades that skip release generations.
"How the hell to upgrade my EJB+JSP+MBean+JMS from one version to another when every configuration file i've had to modify to get my app to work right has changed formats on me."
Seriously, JBoss 321 -> 327 has had major changes outside of the obvious tomcat 4 to 5 one (the reason we had to do this in the first place), and 327 to 402 is even worse. the JMS subsystem is the worst moving target, as its configuration is significantly different in all three releases we're now arguing with.
JBoss guys, i really do have better things to do with my time than read through and compare 1000 lines of XML between two releases to figure this crap out. A simple "upgrade instructions" document would have been nice.
the reality is that the *vast* majority of those files are currently undocumented and anything anybody does with them is pure guesswork.
Yeah -- the curse of the vehicle voltron was that, like the conversion from Gatchaman into Battle of the Planets, there was so much in the way of violence that had to be trimmed out, particularly near the finale, that several episodes came up short of the 23 min needed to broadcast.
Battle of the Planets solved that by getting some cheap company (made up, it seems, of ex- Hanna Barberra artists) to animate the links with 7-Zark-7.
Vehicle Voltron, however, decided instead to simply not show those episodes, figuring nobody would notice. The result is that the rather complex plot, particularly after the climactic battle on the bad guy's homeworld and the team trying to deal with a major refuge problem, got completely lost and discarded. It seems they learned nothing from the popularity of Star Blazers (and this pre-dated Robotech).
I personally would love to get the original Japanese for that series.
Lions-Voltron, on the other hand, had the basic same-old-same-old issue of any sitcom where each episode ends in exactly the same state as it began. No character development, no plot, no nothing that makes real anime fans watch anime. To my mind, it ranks just slightly higher than the pokemon/digimon craze.
I was on the original ToonMUSH, a similarly-themed one inspired by toontown in Roger Rabbit...until that server died. I quit MUDs by my junior year of college because every MUD (or muck or mush) I was on either got corrupted or the owners of the machine found a real use for it (not knowing the students had set up the MUD) and shutdown the server. Usually this shutdown involved a re-install of the O/S without a decent backup so the entire MUD contents were gone.
ALL of them went through this (around 1991). After having had to recreate my character(s) 3 times in 4 months and then arguing with new admins for muck-forth privs again and again to recreate my "home", I just gave up.
actually the main opponents wouldn't be the MPAA directly. The real problem is the unions.
A band like Marillion can sell an album before making with no problem because record producers and engineers aren't all unionized with mutual alliances to the RIAA. They can easily hire the people they want, at union rates (if necessary), and not have to deal with all that politics.
The MPAA's relationship with the Screen Actors' Guild and the Directors' Guild, among others (like CPA for casting Americans, and half the effects shops out there though WETA isn't one of those) is FAR tighter. Members can't work outside of "the studio" for certain projects unless they are prepared to pay a hefty fine (which ends up being paid for by the producer). For Empire, George Lucas paid almost a million dollars total in fines to the various unions including the Directors' Guild for having to work outside of union regs. Its the key reason he went with a non-union director for Jedi.
so even if he got the money, he couldn't use it on most of the people he would need to mount such a project...
RSS 1.0, based on the RDF standard, is extensible through a documented mechanism involving RDF and namespaces. (I highly doubt MS has any interest in the 1.0 RDF-based standard at all)
RSS 2.0 (not RDF based, but itself an extension of 0.92) basically permits anything outside of its standard as an extension, provided the tags are in their own namespace.
If microsoft invents an extension that conforms with those rules, their feeds will not break existing browsers/readers/aggregators at all.
Its only a problem if they thumb their nose at the namespace thing and just blithely add tags in the "default". THEN they'll have pissed off a number of people.
In the end, it matters little. RSS systems have been built like HTML systems (and following the knuth policy) -- be specific in what you write; be generous in what you read.
...than their promise to have a Linux version of Windows Media Player running. That piece of vaporware nothingness is over 2 years old (my blog entry on it is dated 4/30/03).
so having "experiments" is still more than they have for some products they've announced over the years...
i wonder if her arm's going to get tired with that thing in that little tiny purse of hers. it probably weighs twice as much as it did before...
I need to really only share things with my wife, so i've got a web calendar and a to do manager modified (extensively).
We use my modified ToDo @ work, along with a Wiki, to manage the "little details" of software development, things where our bug management system is overkill. The main mods I added were more states besides "complete" and "not complete" -- we need "planned", "active", "on hold", "at risk", "not doing", "complete", and "on going". In addition, I improved the sorting and layout, added filters and the ability to move items among projects, a "copy" capability, the ability to assign a release, and a way to store the submitter of the item, with cookies to reduce the entry tedium of some of those.
I love open-source sometimes. I need to subnit my change back to the author to see what he thinks, since he hasn't updated it in a year.
i think climate change is the key but for different reasons, one of which made it easier for humans to hunt them, but they were going to die anyways.
the climate change and end of the ice ages caused the trees to start growing, blocking some of the migration paths. this combined with the warming trend reduced the amount of land the larger (especially wooley) beasts could live in for food. reduce available land and you reduce the population. The increased water flow from the thaw also changed the landscape in major ways (niagra, anyone?) that made additional geographic cuts in the migration paths.
THEN bring in species (like us) that have no problem with the warmer weather and you have competition for food supplies.
it was going to happen. it was inevitable. if it wasn't *us* moving in and taking advantage of the warmer weather, other species would have done it. the megabeasts were trapped: their lifestyle of migration physically impossible to maintain for new forests and newly-formed caverns from the massive water flow.
take them out and you start to take out some of the predators that fed on them. climate change is survived by either generalists (us) or those that can move to an area changing less drastically (the buffalo, for example).
australia is something like 90% desert. it probably wasn't in the past, but i'm not well read on its geological history beyond the basics of its connection with pangea and antarctica back in the triassic and jurassic eras. but extrapolating from how the geography of america changed i would surmise that just like northern america (with forests and rock caverns) and europe (with a lot more water like the baltic sea), the climate change helped create the desert which greatly reduced the amount of land that the larger animals could live off of. THEN bring in generalists like humans into the mix and see what happens.
again, it didn't have to be us and things would still have gone the way they did. we were the ones, but it could have been any species.
(and maybe the novelization has it as well).
/. archives but i'm pretty sure they ran a story about the rumor of there being a couple of TV series, one all-cgi, one live-action+effects, which would look at more details in the 17 years between Sith and Hope. Now, of course, that's probably still in the rumor mill, but there you go.
Like with Star Wars (where the comic book had its version of the footage where Luke shows the battle to Biggs before he leaves) and Empire (where there's footage shot involving a wampa cave that C3PO deceives some snowtroopers into entering), the comic book adaptation of Sith has a LOT more scenes in it that were cut from the final edit.
In particular is a lot of material involving Bail Organa and Mon Mothma (see IMDB where there's a credit line for an actress playing that role) and Bail discussing his wife's miscarriage (thus leading to the desire to adopt). There's also an assassignation of Chancelor Valorum (from Phantom Menace). I'm sure many of these scenes will be in the "deleted scenes" portion of the DVD, like the other two prequels had.
One particular moment, seemingly cut from the film, is QuiGon's voice directly talking to Yoda while he's on the space station where Padme's giving birth.
As for "what happens next?" Check the
I figure the quality of those will be on-par with the Young Indiana Jones tv series, which wasn't bad for what it tried to achieve.
SPOILER WARNING
well, to my mind i don't see it making it past the first sequel, resolved by taking Malkovitch's character to the Man in the Shack, rather than the Guide editor that Zaphod ran into.
the main reason for planning for multiple sequels is that its easier to budget people, sets, and effects services, particularly when you do them "at once" aka back to the future and the matrix (and the upcoming Pirates of the Caribean). on the other hand, they have a knack for rushing them in the editing process because of the tighter time-limits (especially to get post-production started).
on the other hand, if one's a flop, it can take the other with it before its even released. #1 or not, its still only cleared $21mil in america, which isn't "instant gotta do a sequel" numbers by comparison to the 40 mil some films make in the summertime. Men In Black also shows the concern that sci-fi comedy may be a flash in the pan in Hollywood - first works on originality but you eventually run out of jokes (though not being a (totally) original project, there's plenty of Adams jokes to call upon).
So I think 1 more is it. Do the restaurant section, split everybody up so Zaphod can do the total perspective vortex, arthur and ford the 2 million years ago b-arc, and trillian gets some original subplot, then unite them all to resolve everything at the man in the shack.
one thing about the ending of the movie is that it makes the 4th book's entire premise useless -- 1) arthur now has somebody, and 2) the earth has already been reconstructed. So "flying" and God's Final Message is all there is, not enough to justify a film.
as i've posted before, if you want the 3rd, 4th, 5th books, go to BBC Radio 4.
DNA had been working on the script for years, off and on based on the chances of the damned thing actually being made. He really set himself to writing it (while still doing his environmental and macintosh writings on the side), while reediting Salmon of Doubt for the umpteenth time, when the contract with Disney was signed and Jay Roach kept as a producer to help bridge the Anglo-American gap as he had with the Austin Powers series.
DNA's own journals have said that the script he submitted was the first movie script in 20 years he had written that he was truly happy with (and that's saying something, considering he was rarely happy with any of his writings). I can't recall the source, but I recall reading somewhere that most of the plot changes were his, including the romance, the character played by malkovitch (it gives Zaphod some motivation and backstory that was nonexistent before), and he hinted at a surprise ending (which I would take to be the reconstruction of earth, something not done in the books/radio as the mice backed out on the deal at the last second).
having a screenwriter available to do rewrites is a mandatory requirement in moviemaking, as the director can't always see what's not working until he's on the set, or will have new ideas come up once he's seen particular sets or effects (ala Jurassic Park making t-rex save the day in order to clone the "When the Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" poster -- that idea didn't come to Spielberg until he saw t-rex walk for the first time).
that screenwriter, if different from the original scriptwriter, only has to consider the original script as "the author's vision", which he has to rectify with the director's vision.
of course, as Brazil has shown, the editing room can still drastically change a movie from the screenwriter's vision even when it was filmed to the word.
well, from what I read, the love story IS in douglas's final script (not added by the directory or the replacement author) and is something he wanted for quite some time. he didn't write it before because he hadn't made Trillian a strong enough character and wouldn't until Life... Now that he had a stronger idea of what she could be/do, and how to write women's roles in general (Fenchurch and the very strong women in the Dirk Gently books) he could reapproach that character from the beginning. She became a strong enough character that a real romance could work, so he wrote it to make it work.
of course, this means that they likely couldn't do a 4th book as movie, but I don't see the film series surviving that long anyways (few cults do). they'll do Restaurant to close things out, inserting Malkovitch as a major player in the "old man in the shack" sequence instead of the Guide editor from the radio/book. or at least, that's my prediction.
the one thing that changes things, of course, is the love story itself. Ending Ford & Arthur 2 million years in the past would require somehow separating Arthur from Trillian, and (by virtue of the reconstructed earth) removing the importance of the golgafrinchan fleet as the true origins of humans kinda changes the focus quite a lot. Rather than Arthur looking for some sense of contentment whereever he goes (his quest in books 3 and 5), he'd be permanently uncontent (as he was in the beginning of 5), and that would disturb the ending of Restaurant if its kept the same as the book; the audience would feel as discontented as he would be.
at any rate, the best way to enjoy the 3rd/4th/5th books a second way is the new radio series at BBC 4 (3rd series on sale in CD form in the UK).
yes, Izzard was there acting like he was a Pythoner 'til the rest kicked him off the set.
...like using pure Flash for advertisements?
I had to switch to GAIM not for any particular feature, but to get rid of the advertising.
Seemed the version of AIM I was using at the time allowed Flash advertisements with sound, and the sound completely ignored my other settings in the AIM client to turn all sounds off.
so here i am, in my quiet little room trying to get work done, and suddenly I get interrupted by a trailer for some movie coming from the one app that should have been totally silent.
I was not amused.
and AIM was off my box in seconds.
Sting observed that when The Police finally hit #1 with Synchronicity -- when did the "alternative" become the mainstream?
unless i'm getting paid to write, i never use caps consistently...
NT on Alpha 10 years ago was NOT a 64 bit os. It was a 32 bit OS running on a 64 bit cpu.
my point is that they had a start -- they had a working OS on a 64 bit chip that they could have worked on to convert to 64 had they started 10 years ago and would have been easily ready for the current generation of 64 bit chips rather than slowing 64bit adoption down because nobody (outside unix) had an os for it.
of course, that would have required the NT team to be aware of the coming desktop monopoly that windows 95/98 and 2000 would bring, which they couldn't have known since at the time Microsoft's OS teams were still trying to figure out how O/S 2 would do, along with every other analyst out there.
Considering they had a version of Windows NT for the 64-bit DEC Alpha over 10 years ago...
M$, like everybody else, totally lost 7 years of 64-bit potential by sacrificing the Alpha. Compaq could have taken the chip when they bought DEC, slapped the intel instruction set onto it in some fashion, and had a 4 year head-start on AMD and Intel BOTH in producing the 64-bit PC.
but they blew it. as did everybody else.
yeah, that was quite a ramble, but who has time to edit on /. anyways?
my CS class at JMU '93 graduated with only 24 (out of over 2000 graduates per year). Being so small we were told of stories of how they used to have over 200 graduates in the CS program back in the 80s (the original micro-computer boom time, when computers were popular).
years later, by '98 (the second computer boom-time thanks to the 'net) the CS classes were back up to over 200 / year.
now, they're dropping again.
i would put it that the reason is that there's no major "popularity" in Computers right now. they're just there, rather than being full of new and interesting things. the two peaks of CS student-hood were at times when there were tons of new things to do and discover. related to that was the idea that if one was into it at the time, one could get a guarenteed high-paying job fresh out of school.
the valley i was in was at a time of staticness. DOS hadn't changed in 5 years, windows was unheard of, "IBM-compatibility" was taking over the world, the mac was too expensive to become a hacker box, and most people getting into CS had never heard of "unix" before (much less VMS or the AS/400s where the real work was still being done). at the time, nothing looked like it would change. many in my class got into CS from other degree programs (physics in my case) because we discovered we were decent programmers first once exposed to real hardware.
today we're in another valley. the 90s saw a ton of good stuff and a ton of junk get made in a very short time, but right now there's little being done that a high school grad could recognize and go "hey, that's something i could be doing in 5 years". yeah, there's lots of stuff in XML -- but would a high school kid really know what it was or how it was useful to them?
its kinda like getting into open-source programming: having an itch to scratch, a peek of curiosity. the peaks of CS student-counts happen at times when there's so much going on that's obvious to anyone outside of the industry, enough to get kids to go "i wonder how they did that?" and get into the degree program to find out.
the valleys like now or like the late 80s to early 90s happen when what is going on in the industry is really only of interest to those within the industry.
we're back into a gadget world (digital cameras, mp3 players), and gadgets are known for being "black boxes" outside the industry. contrast that to the early micro- world where everybody had "BASIC", or the internet world where anybody could hack together a page of html, gifs, and perl scripts. you can't look at an iPod and go "i could make my own" the way you could some trendy web page or early 6502 game.
so really the downtimes comes down to being in a time where you can't see what you would do with a CS degree, compared to other times where it seemed obvious what you could do with one.
actually, interviews for actors for dvd-special-features cost a lot more than a couple hundred bucks. heck, just getting the rights to use interview footage from other sources like a movie's "red carpet premiere" can cost in the thousands. (consider how the documentary market is getting stagnated because the news people who hold the rights of post-viet-nam footage are charging too much to the point that non-profit companies like PBS's CPB can't afford it).
the only exception are those for whom their contract involved a percentage of the gross, like the producers, directors, and lead actors. they get paid a substantially higher portion of the dvd sales than the regular actors do.
for this reason, some dvd releases of classic movies don't get the "special edition" treatment up front (ala Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Chariots of Fire) -- the sales of the first release measure the interest. the profits are then used to pay the actors and other people (critics such as Leonard Maltin in the Disney films) to film the new interview footage.
its akin to getting a public speaking engagement. those generally run in the thousands, plus transportation and hotel fees, even for small actors like the various Imperial generals/admirals at Star Wars cons. Agents of actors NEVER let them do anything for free, because it reduces their value in the next film's negotiations.
however, its extremely rare for TV show actors to get a percentage of the gross unless its the fifth season and beyond of a HUGE hit like seinfeld or friends. just as the actors normally don't get a piece of syndication sales, they also rarely get a piece of dvd sales.
actually, we're not that far off.
:( NSF is under even more pressure than NASA is to "produce" stuff that has short-term value -- turning real research into "research and development", which isn't what NSF or NASA should be up to.
but you're criticising the faults (in your eyes) of NASA as being because they are not a private company.
That to me is overreading what I've been saying. I was only comparing NASA to how a private company operates which is not the same thing.
Someone like the NSF should be building and operating these things now. If I were the head of NASA, I'd declare the whole thing a smashing success and give it to someone else as a Christmas present.
Remember in one of my posts, I described how in private companies, "one group gets on with designing and building the next one while another group maintains and continues to get what they can supporting the old."
All you're saying is reverse the roles from my potential suggestion -- let NASA continue to get from what's out there while looking for completely new things to do, and other companies "design and build the next one" in the short term or mid-range. I can agree with that.
Trouble is, for just "knowledge" there simply isn't enough money for it given government spending habits i've already discussed.
but staring at stars simply isn't profitable...
government leaders keep comparing the space explorers to the early explorers of the new world, but there's a huge difference.
the explorers of the new world (and more importantly, their investors) got a zillion-percent return on investment because the resources found could easily be exploited (no new technology was needed, although as the Dutch showed, ships could be improved) or were rare commodities relatively speaking, like the gold (nevermind the rediculous inflation the sudden influx caused at the time).
The way I see it, (assuming the parallel holds) until someone finds "gold" on another planet, nobody's going there because in the New World that was the #1 reason ANYBODY went anywhere.