Moreover, at least according to Christopher, Tolkien had generated a fair bit of the rewrite over the years. He had originally intended for more to be published in the appendicies, but later decided to include a much abridged version. See The Annotated Hobbit for more information, including much of the text of the rewrite.
> Tolkien stopped because it wasn't the hobbit anymore
Well, more accurately, "He abandoned the new revision [...] after he received criticism that it 'just wasn't The Hobbit'" (Emphasis mine.) Like any writer, Tolkien had to make some concessions in order to get published. For instance, his first follow-on to The Hobbit was a draft of The Silmarillion, which was rejected, which led to his writing Lord of the Rings instead.
> I don't want Christopher's money grabbing bastardization. I wanted the Hobbit. A fun story with Epic bits about a hobbit./ Not Oakenshield's really, really, really serious adventures about really really serious stuff with serious people who seriously want to be serious.
Fair enough. (And very glib. You made me laugh. And you're right, they do tend to take seriousness way to seriously.) And for you, there will always be this version. Richard Boone is great as the voice of Smaug. But the rest of the film makes my teeth hurt. Your mileage may vary.
> Plus the movie had bits that were outright stupid.
Agreed. This seems to often be the fate of books translated to film -- there will inevitably be some parts that make you squirm in your seat and check the exits. An argument could be made that The Hobbit had more than its share.
> The Ending of Enders is pretty lame to anyone with a lot of reading experience. It's great for kids; which then remember it with overly found memories of their past.
Daughter and I discussed Ender's Game after we saw it, and one thing was that some points, like "third child" and the twist at the end, had become common scifi plot points to the extent that for most people they didn't need to be explained. I think the revelation at the end was needed because it prompts Ender's way way WAY overdue revolt from manipulation by his handlers. But not having read the books, I can't say how it compares.
I agree with you on I, Robot, but there was a method to Jackson's madness in The Hobbit.
As the story goes, Way back when, Tolkien decided to write a sequel to The Hobbit, and the sequel "got away from him" and became a lot longer and darker and more adult than the first, children's story. Years later, Tolkien wanted to rewrite The Hobbit in the same adult tone as Lord of the Rings, rework some of the inconsistencies, and fold it into the same overall story arc. He apparently spent a lot of time on this. Some of his notes are in the appendices of Return of the King. Tolkien died before he could complete it.
His son Christopher completed the story, renamed "The Quest for Erebor", posthumously.
You'll notice, perhaps, that Thorin called their journey "The Quest for Erebor" in the first Hobbit movie.
But there are legal tangles. Tolkien sold the rights to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which eventually came into Jackson's hands, but not any of the materials he had written since, and the Tolkien estate (read: Christopher Tolkien) has refused to consider selling the rights to any other Tolkien works. So Jackson has access to The Hobbit, and he has access to parts of the story that are in Return of the King. He wanted to do The Quest for Erebor (for whatever reason, imagine dollar signs if that works for you) as two films (later three) but couldn't get the rights to Tolkien's other notes on the rewrite, because Christopher Tolkien wouldn't deal. So basically, they did what they could with the materials they owned, and basically pulled the rest of the story out of their collective ass.
So, how well or ill the final product was, is as always up to the viewer to decide. But my POINT is, the INTENTION was to tell the larger story that the author had imagined it becoming. As described in the appendices of Return of the King (which are for the most part worth reading) a very key part of the War of the Ring, and Gandalf's own personal goals, were: (a) the elimination of Smaug, (b) the reestablishment of a dwarf stronghold under the mountain, and (c) driving the necromancer out of mirkwood. One could say that a side goal was to get the Mirkwood elves engaged for the coming war. These are all important preludes to the War of the Ring.
Sorry to be so long winded, but the point is, there is actually an author-inspired reason to make The Hobbit a trilogy, although I'm sure money had a lot to do with it also.
But don't bother asking these question in rec.arts.tolkien. They hate hate HATE Jackson over there, and any discussion of the movies rapidly gets incoherent.
Back on topic, I remember all the furor on Usenet back in the eighties when Ender's Game first came out, (you can probably still find it in the Google Groups archives) but never got around to actually reading the books. I really liked the film, but I went in being familiar with some of the story's plot points from reading the discussions all those years ago. I can't speak to how someone who had never heard of it might like it, EXCEPT, my daughter, who had never heard of the story, went in cold and really really liked it. She considers the film a keeper. To put this in perspective, she hated Avatar.
Right, but that leads us to Oliver's Solution to the Fermi Paradox: That civilization advances to the point where it creates reality TV, and then it collapses.
I remember being very small but already a scifi fanatic, and my (single at the time) mother who had been taking some college courses remarked once, appropos of nothing much, that stars were little bits of fire that weren't that far away.
I asked her where she had heard that. She said in one of her college courses.
After a long while, I asked "are you sure it was a science course?"
It was a few years later that I got around to reading Orwell, and understanding that she was probably misremembering a discussion in a literature class. But it sure did give me a turn at the time.
Hey, I don't see you complaining about unsanitary telephones!
I've often suspected that our planet was colonized by the "B" ark. There's so many indicators... The Kardashians, reality TV in general, pop music, sensationalist news, congressional press releases, the MPAA, offshore helpdesks, Snooki being on TV for any reason whatsoever, Darwin awards, the Kardashians. Pretty much confirmed, really.
I was going to point out this was a dupe, but a bazillion people beat me to it.
But I also wanted to say, this is pretty cool, and we'll discover some practical solutions getting this thing operational. My one regret is that it is unmanned. Someone should be able to climb in, take off from a runway, and fly it to Mach 6, just to be able to say we could do it.
Plus, at work you don't necessarily have the latitude (or even the permission) to replace the shell in your Windows computer. Which may be one of the reasons my company has no intention of adopting Win8. We're going to leapfrog over it, as we did with Vista, and hope for the best.
"slow down" is not a universal solution. Back in the days of the double nickel, a case was made that with current technology all auto-to-auto collisions could be made survivable if we made the maximum national speed 35 miles per hour, draconically enforced. And they were probably right. But nobody wants to spend 12 hours on the road between SF and LA, not even Prius owners, which leads us to the topic of Managed Risk.
I'd submit that the risk difference between 70 and 80 is nominal, but it's not necessary to make that argument. The speed limit on those ridiculously long, straight roads in Texas is 80, and driving significantly slower than traffic also puts one's self at risk.
Moreover, risk is somewhat proportional merely to the time spent on the road, regardless of speed.
Exactly. Let's see. Stick with Win7, which works, or pay to upgrade to Win8, which even the people who like it admit they have to dick with in order to make it usable.
Ok, the way I do it is via sneakernet (or truck-net if you will). I have one 'a' those hard drive plug-in devices, and every once in awhile, I plug in a terabyte drive, do a backup of my stuff, and drive it over to a friend five miles away, who has a fire safe. Swap the drive with the one already in there, and bring it back.
...but that's before I discovered Dropbox. Phase two will require a dropbox folder on an external drive that's mirrored with a similar dropbox folder on a drive at friend's location. What I want backed up drops in the folder, and what he needs backed up also drops in the folder, and we both have copies of both sets of files, automatically syncronized.
This isn't the same as an automatic process that backs up everything, but it protects the stuff I care about. As I write this, I wonder if Ghost can't be rigged to do automatic backups to the dropbox folder.
In any case, I can absolutely sympathize with what you're trying to do. I do photography professionally, and have just under a terabyte of my own work online. A house fire would completely wipe me out. So now I have small scale geo-backup, and it'd take quite the natural disaster to get both copies.
Well, yes. We use it because for one reason or another, we have to, usually because a commercial product is required, and we complain bitterly about it -- who, that didn't actually work in Redmond, wouldn't? (Actually, that's not entirely true -- even there, people complain, but quietly, to trusted friends.)
As to FOSS, yeah, my website and blog and my daughter's blog all run on a Linux box I administrate, using software I partly wrote, and if all I ever did in life was use EMACS to pound out Python, I'd drop Windows in a heartbeat. But some of us have things to do that can't be had from sourceforge.
Mind you, I'm hanging onto Windows 7 with both hands. We have a touch screen laptop running Win8, and it's junk. Maybe it'll run Android some day.
We had such software back in late 90s as well during icq days, so makes no sense that they can sue you over something that has been around long before skype.
But we've seen that obvious prior art doesn't preclude some large company suing the living hell out of you. It could be a major fight, even if at the end Microsoft would have to give in.
Fair enough. It's worth a try, but one could make a case that Microsoft has a history of ignoring the wishes of their customers (and programmers, testers, product managers -- see "shooting one's self in the foot" in an earlier response) and doing whatever the hell Ballmer wants... or whomever is in charge now. But still, for completeness, it's worth doing.
> Everyone uses Skype. Every other product in the field is a niche compared to Skype.
I think you're right. And everyone (especially old people) at one point thought AOL was The Internet.
That's not a totally fair comparison because at one time Skype was, you know, good. But you know as well as I that this move by Microsoft will have the direct result of making alternatives more interesting, and a name will eventually replace Skype in our lexicon, just like certain names replaced Internet Explorer. (Nothing specific replaced AOL in our mindshare because everyone realized that a generic broadband connection gave them everything AOL had to offer and more, included with the price of the connection.)
I think you're right. Does this mean that Microsoft is trying to force people into Windows tablets by dangling Skype in front of them? Isn't that a little like saying "you must use Windows, we're the only people who have IE", back when, completely ignoring the fact that they've just supercharged the alternative browser market?
>> Did the populace at large suddenly become better drivers when the double nickel was repealed?
> The cars became safer, you stupid fucking shitball.
Sigh. Easy to say as an anonymous coward. Ok, I'll bite -- then if cars suddenly became safer when the national speed limit was repealed in 1995, does this also mean that cars were safer before it was enacted in 1974? And are cars safer in Texas, where the maximum speed limit is 80, than in California where it's 70, or Oregon where it's 65?
You are almost certainly too young to remember, but the purpose of the national speed limit wasn't anything to do with safety, although there were retroactive arguments along those lines. Check the wiki for "national maximum speed limit", it's illuminating.
Actually reckless driving is a matter of law, not opinion. You don't look in a simple dictionary for legal definitions. For example, in my state the traffic code specifically declares that three acts which constitute moving violations during a single continuous act of driving is an act of reckless driving.
Legally, you're probably right. I have a dim memory that in California (or was it Arizona?) any speeding over a certain speed (100 mph?) was automatically considered reckless by law, for instance.
Previous poster had followed "this is clear cut reckless driving" with the ridiculous homily "speed limits are posted to keep the public safe", which led me to believe that "this is clear cut reckless driving" is a personal, emotional judgement and not speaking directly to the law. That being the premise, I was trying to address "reckless" from the standpoint of whether this could emotionally be judged to be reckless, or not. I'd still make the argument in court, especially were it a jury trial.
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Moreover, at least according to Christopher, Tolkien had generated a fair bit of the rewrite over the years. He had originally intended for more to be published in the appendicies, but later decided to include a much abridged version. See The Annotated Hobbit for more information, including much of the text of the rewrite.
> Tolkien stopped because it wasn't the hobbit anymore
Well, more accurately, "He abandoned the new revision [...] after he received criticism that it 'just wasn't The Hobbit'" (Emphasis mine.) Like any writer, Tolkien had to make some concessions in order to get published. For instance, his first follow-on to The Hobbit was a draft of The Silmarillion, which was rejected, which led to his writing Lord of the Rings instead.
> I don't want Christopher's money grabbing bastardization. I wanted the Hobbit. A fun story with Epic bits about a hobbit./
Not Oakenshield's really, really, really serious adventures about really really serious stuff with serious people who seriously want to be serious.
Fair enough. (And very glib. You made me laugh. And you're right, they do tend to take seriousness way to seriously.) And for you, there will always be this version. Richard Boone is great as the voice of Smaug. But the rest of the film makes my teeth hurt. Your mileage may vary.
> Plus the movie had bits that were outright stupid.
Agreed. This seems to often be the fate of books translated to film -- there will inevitably be some parts that make you squirm in your seat and check the exits. An argument could be made that The Hobbit had more than its share.
> The Ending of Enders is pretty lame to anyone with a lot of reading experience. It's great for kids; which then remember it with overly found memories of their past.
Daughter and I discussed Ender's Game after we saw it, and one thing was that some points, like "third child" and the twist at the end, had become common scifi plot points to the extent that for most people they didn't need to be explained. I think the revelation at the end was needed because it prompts Ender's way way WAY overdue revolt from manipulation by his handlers. But not having read the books, I can't say how it compares.
I agree with you on I, Robot, but there was a method to Jackson's madness in The Hobbit.
As the story goes, Way back when, Tolkien decided to write a sequel to The Hobbit, and the sequel "got away from him" and became a lot longer and darker and more adult than the first, children's story. Years later, Tolkien wanted to rewrite The Hobbit in the same adult tone as Lord of the Rings, rework some of the inconsistencies, and fold it into the same overall story arc. He apparently spent a lot of time on this. Some of his notes are in the appendices of Return of the King. Tolkien died before he could complete it.
His son Christopher completed the story, renamed "The Quest for Erebor", posthumously.
You'll notice, perhaps, that Thorin called their journey "The Quest for Erebor" in the first Hobbit movie.
But there are legal tangles. Tolkien sold the rights to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which eventually came into Jackson's hands, but not any of the materials he had written since, and the Tolkien estate (read: Christopher Tolkien) has refused to consider selling the rights to any other Tolkien works. So Jackson has access to The Hobbit, and he has access to parts of the story that are in Return of the King. He wanted to do The Quest for Erebor (for whatever reason, imagine dollar signs if that works for you) as two films (later three) but couldn't get the rights to Tolkien's other notes on the rewrite, because Christopher Tolkien wouldn't deal. So basically, they did what they could with the materials they owned, and basically pulled the rest of the story out of their collective ass.
So, how well or ill the final product was, is as always up to the viewer to decide. But my POINT is, the INTENTION was to tell the larger story that the author had imagined it becoming. As described in the appendices of Return of the King (which are for the most part worth reading) a very key part of the War of the Ring, and Gandalf's own personal goals, were: (a) the elimination of Smaug, (b) the reestablishment of a dwarf stronghold under the mountain, and (c) driving the necromancer out of mirkwood. One could say that a side goal was to get the Mirkwood elves engaged for the coming war. These are all important preludes to the War of the Ring.
Sorry to be so long winded, but the point is, there is actually an author-inspired reason to make The Hobbit a trilogy, although I'm sure money had a lot to do with it also.
But don't bother asking these question in rec.arts.tolkien. They hate hate HATE Jackson over there, and any discussion of the movies rapidly gets incoherent.
Back on topic, I remember all the furor on Usenet back in the eighties when Ender's Game first came out, (you can probably still find it in the Google Groups archives) but never got around to actually reading the books. I really liked the film, but I went in being familiar with some of the story's plot points from reading the discussions all those years ago. I can't speak to how someone who had never heard of it might like it, EXCEPT, my daughter, who had never heard of the story, went in cold and really really liked it. She considers the film a keeper. To put this in perspective, she hated Avatar.
Right, but that leads us to Oliver's Solution to the Fermi Paradox: That civilization advances to the point where it creates reality TV, and then it collapses.
I remember being very small but already a scifi fanatic, and my (single at the time) mother who had been taking some college courses remarked once, appropos of nothing much, that stars were little bits of fire that weren't that far away.
I asked her where she had heard that. She said in one of her college courses.
After a long while, I asked "are you sure it was a science course?"
It was a few years later that I got around to reading Orwell, and understanding that she was probably misremembering a discussion in a literature class. But it sure did give me a turn at the time.
So much for intelligent life... on THIS planet.
Hey, I don't see you complaining about unsanitary telephones!
I've often suspected that our planet was colonized by the "B" ark. There's so many indicators... The Kardashians, reality TV in general, pop music, sensationalist news, congressional press releases, the MPAA, offshore helpdesks, Snooki being on TV for any reason whatsoever, Darwin awards, the Kardashians. Pretty much confirmed, really.
Yeah, I miss that show, too.
I was going to point out this was a dupe, but a bazillion people beat me to it.
But I also wanted to say, this is pretty cool, and we'll discover some practical solutions getting this thing operational. My one regret is that it is unmanned. Someone should be able to climb in, take off from a runway, and fly it to Mach 6, just to be able to say we could do it.
What X0563511 said in reply.
Plus, at work you don't necessarily have the latitude (or even the permission) to replace the shell in your Windows computer. Which may be one of the reasons my company has no intention of adopting Win8. We're going to leapfrog over it, as we did with Vista, and hope for the best.
"slow down" is not a universal solution. Back in the days of the double nickel, a case was made that with current technology all auto-to-auto collisions could be made survivable if we made the maximum national speed 35 miles per hour, draconically enforced. And they were probably right. But nobody wants to spend 12 hours on the road between SF and LA, not even Prius owners, which leads us to the topic of Managed Risk.
I'd submit that the risk difference between 70 and 80 is nominal, but it's not necessary to make that argument. The speed limit on those ridiculously long, straight roads in Texas is 80, and driving significantly slower than traffic also puts one's self at risk.
Moreover, risk is somewhat proportional merely to the time spent on the road, regardless of speed.
And finally, my time is worth something, too.
Exactly. Let's see. Stick with Win7, which works, or pay to upgrade to Win8, which even the people who like it admit they have to dick with in order to make it usable.
Ok, the way I do it is via sneakernet (or truck-net if you will). I have one 'a' those hard drive plug-in devices, and every once in awhile, I plug in a terabyte drive, do a backup of my stuff, and drive it over to a friend five miles away, who has a fire safe. Swap the drive with the one already in there, and bring it back.
This isn't the same as an automatic process that backs up everything, but it protects the stuff I care about. As I write this, I wonder if Ghost can't be rigged to do automatic backups to the dropbox folder.
In any case, I can absolutely sympathize with what you're trying to do. I do photography professionally, and have just under a terabyte of my own work online. A house fire would completely wipe me out. So now I have small scale geo-backup, and it'd take quite the natural disaster to get both copies.
Good point... The "M" in KVM is kinda basic...
> Another satiesfied Microsoft customer?
Well, yes. We use it because for one reason or another, we have to, usually because a commercial product is required, and we complain bitterly about it -- who, that didn't actually work in Redmond, wouldn't? (Actually, that's not entirely true -- even there, people complain, but quietly, to trusted friends.)
As to FOSS, yeah, my website and blog and my daughter's blog all run on a Linux box I administrate, using software I partly wrote, and if all I ever did in life was use EMACS to pound out Python, I'd drop Windows in a heartbeat. But some of us have things to do that can't be had from sourceforge.
Mind you, I'm hanging onto Windows 7 with both hands. We have a touch screen laptop running Win8, and it's junk. Maybe it'll run Android some day.
We had such software back in late 90s as well during icq days, so makes no sense that they can sue you over something that has been around long before skype.
But we've seen that obvious prior art doesn't preclude some large company suing the living hell out of you. It could be a major fight, even if at the end Microsoft would have to give in.
Fair enough. It's worth a try, but one could make a case that Microsoft has a history of ignoring the wishes of their customers (and programmers, testers, product managers -- see "shooting one's self in the foot" in an earlier response) and doing whatever the hell Ballmer wants... or whomever is in charge now. But still, for completeness, it's worth doing.
> Everyone uses Skype. Every other product in the field is a niche compared to Skype.
I think you're right. And everyone (especially old people) at one point thought AOL was The Internet.
That's not a totally fair comparison because at one time Skype was, you know, good. But you know as well as I that this move by Microsoft will have the direct result of making alternatives more interesting, and a name will eventually replace Skype in our lexicon, just like certain names replaced Internet Explorer. (Nothing specific replaced AOL in our mindshare because everyone realized that a generic broadband connection gave them everything AOL had to offer and more, included with the price of the connection.)
I think you're right. Does this mean that Microsoft is trying to force people into Windows tablets by dangling Skype in front of them? Isn't that a little like saying "you must use Windows, we're the only people who have IE", back when, completely ignoring the fact that they've just supercharged the alternative browser market?
Skype is dead. Start looking for alternatives.
These are the same scientists who predicted a horrible, horrible hurricane season this year, due to "global warming"?
I suspect not.
>> Did the populace at large suddenly become better drivers when the double nickel was repealed?
> The cars became safer, you stupid fucking shitball.
Sigh. Easy to say as an anonymous coward. Ok, I'll bite -- then if cars suddenly became safer when the national speed limit was repealed in 1995, does this also mean that cars were safer before it was enacted in 1974? And are cars safer in Texas, where the maximum speed limit is 80, than in California where it's 70, or Oregon where it's 65?
You are almost certainly too young to remember, but the purpose of the national speed limit wasn't anything to do with safety, although there were retroactive arguments along those lines. Check the wiki for "national maximum speed limit", it's illuminating.
Actually reckless driving is a matter of law, not opinion. You don't look in a simple dictionary for legal definitions. For example, in my state the traffic code specifically declares that three acts which constitute moving violations during a single continuous act of driving is an act of reckless driving.
Legally, you're probably right. I have a dim memory that in California (or was it Arizona?) any speeding over a certain speed (100 mph?) was automatically considered reckless by law, for instance.
Previous poster had followed "this is clear cut reckless driving" with the ridiculous homily "speed limits are posted to keep the public safe", which led me to believe that "this is clear cut reckless driving" is a personal, emotional judgement and not speaking directly to the law. That being the premise, I was trying to address "reckless" from the standpoint of whether this could emotionally be judged to be reckless, or not. I'd still make the argument in court, especially were it a jury trial.
Dunno. Maybe that's how they can give cheaper insurance to us old pharts.