The studio (the ones who fund the movies) only wanted to pay for 2 3-hour movies. That was it. Total. Peter Jackson pulled off an enormous feat by convincing them to make 3 3-hour movies instead. How many times have you ever seen a studio commit to 9 hours of film? Never. It was quite a politicing job by a director whose biggest productions to that point had been 'The Frighteners' and 'Heavenly Creatures'.
This was also a huge risk for the studio. It was one of the longest and biggest productions in movie history. $94 million invested in a movie that many people said couldn't be done for any price.
They didn't get some of the actors they wanted for the movie because they couldn't commit to the unheard of 3-year primary production filming timeframe.
Did Jackson have to do some cutting to get it to fit into 9 hours of film? Of course. Lots and lots. Did he have to make some artistic choices? Yes. To tell the tale with much of the background that is in the books but not spoken by the characters, he would have had to make vastly different choices. Like having lots, and lots and lots of 3rd person narrations going on during most of the story to give all the extra background material, such as reading all those letters Bilbo left behind, etc, etc, etc. Would this have interrupted the flow of the story? Yes. Some things work well in a book, but don't translate well to film. Jackson understands this. He also was under some enormous time constraints put on by the studio. Just the extra 3rd person narrations would have added 3 more hours of film to the movies. What do you think the chances are that they would have given him a 4th 3-hours of film? Nill.
Now imagine what it would take to include all the extra scenes (Tom Bombadil, etc, etc) that we'd all like to be there and do it 'right' according to the hardcore aficionado's. It would take more like *6* 3-hour films. Or more! The budget would have to be doubled at least. They'd have an even harder time getting actors that they want who would commit to 5+ years of primary filming. Would all that ever have happen? No.
There was zero chance that a LotR movie would be made without major compromises. The choices were having a trimmed down LotR trilogy, or the movie never being made. I'm glad they made it. Is it a perfect movie? No. Is it a better movie than I expected anyone to ever pull off given realistic limitations on time, budget and vision? Yes. Much much better than I expected. It's a very good movie. No movie is a perfect adaptation of a book. No others have tried to tackle such a truly mammoth body of work or with such a vast scope as this. The comparison of the grandparent of 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' is laughable. The director and studio didn't face 1/10 the challenges that Jackson did in taking on LotR.
I'm not digging myself in a hole. I understand reality. You seem to be stuck in fantasy if you expected a perfect complete adapation. I tell you what, let me know when a studio gives you $300 million to 'do it right'. Forgive me if I don't hold my breath. Until then I'll just enjoy my LotR DVDs.
You may have read the books without understanding them.
Yeah, I could be a real idiot.
Or you could relax a bit and not seem to be such a pretentious snob and enjoy a very good, though not perfect movie adaption of a set of books that was an enormous challenge to adapt to the screen at all (let alone while trying to please a studio that wanted it all done in just 2 3-hour films).
All my friends really like the LotR movies, and I suppose they're good movies, if you've never read Tolkien's books and/or don't care about Tolkien's world. However I happen to like Tolkien's world, and The Silmarillion, and as a result I don't care for the movies at all.
I think you mean to say, "if you've never read Tolkien's *other* books".
I've read The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings, which are Tolkien's books, and loved the movie. The movie expressed the world fine as it appeared in that set of books.
You seriously don't think 62 is a lot for a a couple researchers to find in one month? This was hardly an extensive complete audit of MacOS. It was what they found in 30 days. Sorry, that just doesn't seem confidence inspiring to me.
Here's a huge hint for you. Internet1 used to be a large non-profit run, high speed (for the times) network among universities and military bases. In a few decades time it now under the looming threat of major telco's who want you to have to pay for both incoming and outgoing traffic, based on who is serving or receiving it, and how much they paid that telco in particular for the service of allowing traffic in/out of their network.
A study in pigs would cost a *LOT* more than a study in rats. The point of the rat study is to determine if there is anything which indicates further, much more extensive and expensive studies should be done. It looks like Monsanto covered up an answer which would have been 'yes'.
I'm always for taking anything Greepeace says with a big old grain of salt, because you know they are very likely to spin it hard. But Monsanto, the makers of Agent Orange, the milk, etc, etc, etc, has a long long history of covering up damning evidence if they can make some $$$.
GM is still in it's infancy. Some GM foods are going to turn out to be really good, others are going to turn out to have serious issues. It's not a black/white issue for GM overall. It depends on the specific genetic change to what specific species we are talking about. For right now, we should side on caution, which means extensive studies done completely by totally independent 3rd parties before anything is released. Not studies by 3rd parties, then cooking the statistics in-house.
As for your financial analysis, also remember that right now a large chunk of money is flying out of the US, EU, etc, to other countries to buy those fossil fuels. If we get renewable energy sources cranked up within our own countries, that chunk that we can keep in-house will add considerably to that GDP.
Any of those three is, right now, a crapshoot; for example, a warmer planet will enliven a great deal of otherwise useless tundra.
Scientists working in the field for years and years have put a lot of thought into the variables in the 'crapshoot'. We know that snow on the tundra reflects a lot more incoming radiation than the desert which will be created in the warmer climates. Thus increasing heating further. There is a lot more science behind the 'crapshoot' than you are giving credit for.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD aren't distributions. They are entirely different operating systems, with different kernels. The userland utilities are written by the same folks that work on the kernel.
Horrible analogy. You don't upload any of your own data to the broadcaster. You play your own data on your VCR/DVD-player, etc. You use the same TV set, but you are free to record/play your own data even if the broadcaster goes offline.
Putting your productivity apps on someone else's server is actually a great idea. You have no software licensing cost ($300-$400 per copy of Office 2007).
You don't have any with OpenOffice either, which was what my suggestion was for.
There are little to no rollout or upgrade costs with a hosted app (someone actually has to INSTALL Office on all of the machines).
If you have a decent administrator, those should be rolled out smoothly over the network to your machines, so the overhead for that is fairly low.
You don't have to worry about patches, upgrades, backups or security
Oh yes you do. You have to worry that the 3rd party company is backing things up. If they screw up, it's your documents that are toast. Those documents mean a lot more to your company than they do to the 3rd party. You have to worry about patches as well, because if they have bugs those are going to get you. And you most certainly have to worry about security. You can't do much about it yourself of course becase it's now totally out of your control, but you have to worry that the 3rd party *IS* doing it right. Especially when all your documents are potentially open to the world through the internet if they get it wrong.
and a hosted application is going to be down a lot less than the collective crashes of Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint across all of your machines.
If Bob's copy of Excel is crashing for some unknown reason, he can go to the cubical next door and ask Fred to look something up. If the hosted 3rd party web app is down. It's down. Everyone at your company is now going to sit around with his thumb up his bum until it comes back online.
The problem with Google Apps is functionality and offline use.
The *extra* problems with Google apps is functinality and offline use.
At some point, hosted apps will become a better solution than applications that are locally installed.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one.
Qualified in-house support staff are able to find and understand information such as registry change patches and other tools online and implement them on their network. MS actually has a list of the changes and tools you need to do everything available online. But it takes a while to read, understand what needs done, and do it. I just rolled out a patch to our networks win2k boxes last week. It took in total about half an hour to research it, create the patches, and set the policy in active directory to update the machines. MS wanted $4000 for an automagic tool to do that. I'd say that that makes it well worth the in-house staff.
That said, I don't think the transition to Google Apps on Linux would be any more painful than the transition to Vista running Office.
I don't know about that. This is the same Google Apps that many users got locked out of a couple weeks ago. Putting your productivity apps on someone else's servers just isn't a good idea. OpenOffice would probably be a much more prudent move.
That would be dumb. Then no 'little guy's could afford to patent a great idea. Only corporations with deep pockets could. It's already very expensive for a regular working guy with a great idea to try to patent it and make some money off the invention. Don't make it worse.
Because the bacteria don't always lose resistance quickly. Some keep it for a long time. Eventually those strains may become resistant to everything in our arsenal. This is why antibiotics shouldn't be used at all for agriculture.
There are so many things wrong with this short post...
Who is to say that bacteria won't evolve defenses either way?
Natural selection isn't anywhere near as likely keep a random mutation which just happens to confer resistance to those drugs when the bacteria aren't being challenged by them. Whereas if they are being challenged with those drugs, drug resistance to them offers a HUGE survival benefit to the bacteria which have and keep this mutation.
The AMA understand this basic part of evolution which you and the Bush administration appear to be ignorant of.
I think they should concentrate their resources on finding -new- antibiotics instead of worrying about what happens to the few that are known. It's a battle that can never be won, and folks should realize that it's better to continuously evolve (live on the edge, in a way) new defenses than to assume our current defenses are silver bullets.
First of all the AMA doesn't have resources directed at finding new antibiotics. The NIH and pharmaceutical companies do.
The AMA does however understand the difficulties and slow pace of drug development. You apparently don't. Finding drugs which can knock out pathogens which also don't have any severe negative reactions acting within the human body is difficult. If they were easy to develop and plentiful we wouldn't already be dependent on a small number that we call a last line of defense against resistant bugs.
Have you ever worked or played with an inflatable... anything? Anyone touching the inside walls of the inflatable structure while they move around are likely to cause slight shifts in the outside of the inflatable walls, which means shifting against the regolith they are talking about possibly burying it in. Since there is no air and low gravity, there is a good likelihood that dust/rocks will be kicked up by folks simply walking around (or driving a moon buggy) outside of a surface structure, which could also wear on it. I'm not saying that would necessarily puncture anything soon, but it is something to consider.
I'm sure they will use something strong for it. But lunar soil is supposed to be so sharp/abrasive as well as clingy due to charge and the size of the powder that it presents a formidable problem. Especially if they are planning on burying some of the inflatable structures as the article seems to indicate. I wish they would give more details on how they are simulating the super abrasive rocks/dust during testing.
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Please see my other post in this thread about 'reality check'.
The slow pace of the book was not doable for the movie for many reasons.
Reality check.
The studio (the ones who fund the movies) only wanted to pay for 2 3-hour movies. That was it. Total. Peter Jackson pulled off an enormous feat by convincing them to make 3 3-hour movies instead. How many times have you ever seen a studio commit to 9 hours of film? Never. It was quite a politicing job by a director whose biggest productions to that point had been 'The Frighteners' and 'Heavenly Creatures'.
This was also a huge risk for the studio. It was one of the longest and biggest productions in movie history. $94 million invested in a movie that many people said couldn't be done for any price.
They didn't get some of the actors they wanted for the movie because they couldn't commit to the unheard of 3-year primary production filming timeframe.
Did Jackson have to do some cutting to get it to fit into 9 hours of film? Of course. Lots and lots. Did he have to make some artistic choices? Yes. To tell the tale with much of the background that is in the books but not spoken by the characters, he would have had to make vastly different choices. Like having lots, and lots and lots of 3rd person narrations going on during most of the story to give all the extra background material, such as reading all those letters Bilbo left behind, etc, etc, etc. Would this have interrupted the flow of the story? Yes. Some things work well in a book, but don't translate well to film. Jackson understands this. He also was under some enormous time constraints put on by the studio. Just the extra 3rd person narrations would have added 3 more hours of film to the movies. What do you think the chances are that they would have given him a 4th 3-hours of film? Nill.
Now imagine what it would take to include all the extra scenes (Tom Bombadil, etc, etc) that we'd all like to be there and do it 'right' according to the hardcore aficionado's. It would take more like *6* 3-hour films. Or more! The budget would have to be doubled at least. They'd have an even harder time getting actors that they want who would commit to 5+ years of primary filming. Would all that ever have happen? No.
There was zero chance that a LotR movie would be made without major compromises. The choices were having a trimmed down LotR trilogy, or the movie never being made. I'm glad they made it. Is it a perfect movie? No. Is it a better movie than I expected anyone to ever pull off given realistic limitations on time, budget and vision? Yes. Much much better than I expected. It's a very good movie. No movie is a perfect adaptation of a book. No others have tried to tackle such a truly mammoth body of work or with such a vast scope as this. The comparison of the grandparent of 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' is laughable. The director and studio didn't face 1/10 the challenges that Jackson did in taking on LotR.
I'm not digging myself in a hole. I understand reality. You seem to be stuck in fantasy if you expected a perfect complete adapation. I tell you what, let me know when a studio gives you $300 million to 'do it right'. Forgive me if I don't hold my breath. Until then I'll just enjoy my LotR DVDs.
You may have read the books without understanding them.
Yeah, I could be a real idiot.
Or you could relax a bit and not seem to be such a pretentious snob and enjoy a very good, though not perfect movie adaption of a set of books that was an enormous challenge to adapt to the screen at all (let alone while trying to please a studio that wanted it all done in just 2 3-hour films).
All my friends really like the LotR movies, and I suppose they're good movies, if you've never read Tolkien's books and/or don't care about Tolkien's world. However I happen to like Tolkien's world, and The Silmarillion, and as a result I don't care for the movies at all.
I think you mean to say, "if you've never read Tolkien's *other* books".
I've read The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings, which are Tolkien's books, and loved the movie. The movie expressed the world fine as it appeared in that set of books.
You seriously don't think 62 is a lot for a a couple researchers to find in one month? This was hardly an extensive complete audit of MacOS. It was what they found in 30 days. Sorry, that just doesn't seem confidence inspiring to me.
This story deserves a 'haha' in the tagging beta if any ever did.
Apple got a very deserved smackdown. I hope they handle themselves better in the future.
Here's a huge hint for you. Internet1 used to be a large non-profit run, high speed (for the times) network among universities and military bases. In a few decades time it now under the looming threat of major telco's who want you to have to pay for both incoming and outgoing traffic, based on who is serving or receiving it, and how much they paid that telco in particular for the service of allowing traffic in/out of their network.
Did half-life 2 teach us NOTHING about the dangers of compressed air cannisters?
You mean you actually accept Google's cookie?
Personally I don't accept any cookies except for specific sites I want/need them for.
A study in pigs would cost a *LOT* more than a study in rats. The point of the rat study is to determine if there is anything which indicates further, much more extensive and expensive studies should be done. It looks like Monsanto covered up an answer which would have been 'yes'.
I'm always for taking anything Greepeace says with a big old grain of salt, because you know they are very likely to spin it hard. But Monsanto, the makers of Agent Orange, the milk, etc, etc, etc, has a long long history of covering up damning evidence if they can make some $$$.
GM is still in it's infancy. Some GM foods are going to turn out to be really good, others are going to turn out to have serious issues. It's not a black/white issue for GM overall. It depends on the specific genetic change to what specific species we are talking about. For right now, we should side on caution, which means extensive studies done completely by totally independent 3rd parties before anything is released. Not studies by 3rd parties, then cooking the statistics in-house.
Yeah, I wouldn't trust those nuts who think they are trying to save the environment either.
Much better to trust the manufacturer of Agent Orange.
Oh, wait...
Since when is Youtube a scientifically peer-reviewed source?
An astroturf ad on Youtube does not an accepted scientific paper make.
As for your financial analysis, also remember that right now a large chunk of money is flying out of the US, EU, etc, to other countries to buy those fossil fuels. If we get renewable energy sources cranked up within our own countries, that chunk that we can keep in-house will add considerably to that GDP.
Any of those three is, right now, a crapshoot; for example, a warmer planet will enliven a great deal of otherwise useless tundra.
Scientists working in the field for years and years have put a lot of thought into the variables in the 'crapshoot'. We know that snow on the tundra reflects a lot more incoming radiation than the desert which will be created in the warmer climates. Thus increasing heating further. There is a lot more science behind the 'crapshoot' than you are giving credit for.
If you know the history of the Berkeley Software Distribution, it's not odd at all.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD aren't distributions. They are entirely different operating systems, with different kernels. The userland utilities are written by the same folks that work on the kernel.
Horrible analogy. You don't upload any of your own data to the broadcaster. You play your own data on your VCR/DVD-player, etc. You use the same TV set, but you are free to record/play your own data even if the broadcaster goes offline.
Putting your productivity apps on someone else's server is actually a great idea. You have no software licensing cost ($300-$400 per copy of Office 2007).
You don't have any with OpenOffice either, which was what my suggestion was for.
There are little to no rollout or upgrade costs with a hosted app (someone actually has to INSTALL Office on all of the machines).
If you have a decent administrator, those should be rolled out smoothly over the network to your machines, so the overhead for that is fairly low.
You don't have to worry about patches, upgrades, backups or security
Oh yes you do. You have to worry that the 3rd party company is backing things up. If they screw up, it's your documents that are toast. Those documents mean a lot more to your company than they do to the 3rd party. You have to worry about patches as well, because if they have bugs those are going to get you. And you most certainly have to worry about security. You can't do much about it yourself of course becase it's now totally out of your control, but you have to worry that the 3rd party *IS* doing it right. Especially when all your documents are potentially open to the world through the internet if they get it wrong.
and a hosted application is going to be down a lot less than the collective crashes of Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint across all of your machines.
If Bob's copy of Excel is crashing for some unknown reason, he can go to the cubical next door and ask Fred to look something up. If the hosted 3rd party web app is down. It's down. Everyone at your company is now going to sit around with his thumb up his bum until it comes back online.
The problem with Google Apps is functionality and offline use.
The *extra* problems with Google apps is functinality and offline use.
At some point, hosted apps will become a better solution than applications that are locally installed.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one.
Qualified in-house support staff are able to find and understand information such as registry change patches and other tools online and implement them on their network. MS actually has a list of the changes and tools you need to do everything available online. But it takes a while to read, understand what needs done, and do it. I just rolled out a patch to our networks win2k boxes last week. It took in total about half an hour to research it, create the patches, and set the policy in active directory to update the machines. MS wanted $4000 for an automagic tool to do that. I'd say that that makes it well worth the in-house staff.
That said, I don't think the transition to Google Apps on Linux would be any more painful than the transition to Vista running Office.
I don't know about that. This is the same Google Apps that many users got locked out of a couple weeks ago. Putting your productivity apps on someone else's servers just isn't a good idea. OpenOffice would probably be a much more prudent move.
That would be dumb. Then no 'little guy's could afford to patent a great idea. Only corporations with deep pockets could. It's already very expensive for a regular working guy with a great idea to try to patent it and make some money off the invention. Don't make it worse.
Because the bacteria don't always lose resistance quickly. Some keep it for a long time. Eventually those strains may become resistant to everything in our arsenal. This is why antibiotics shouldn't be used at all for agriculture.
There are so many things wrong with this short post...
Who is to say that bacteria won't evolve defenses either way?
Natural selection isn't anywhere near as likely keep a random mutation which just happens to confer resistance to those drugs when the bacteria aren't being challenged by them. Whereas if they are being challenged with those drugs, drug resistance to them offers a HUGE survival benefit to the bacteria which have and keep this mutation.
The AMA understand this basic part of evolution which you and the Bush administration appear to be ignorant of.
I think they should concentrate their resources on finding -new- antibiotics instead of worrying about what happens to the few that are known. It's a battle that can never be won, and folks should realize that it's better to continuously evolve (live on the edge, in a way) new defenses than to assume our current defenses are silver bullets.
First of all the AMA doesn't have resources directed at finding new antibiotics. The NIH and pharmaceutical companies do.
The AMA does however understand the difficulties and slow pace of drug development. You apparently don't. Finding drugs which can knock out pathogens which also don't have any severe negative reactions acting within the human body is difficult. If they were easy to develop and plentiful we wouldn't already be dependent on a small number that we call a last line of defense against resistant bugs.
Watch the movie Johnny Dangerously sometime.
It's full of fargin bastages.
Have you ever worked or played with an inflatable... anything? Anyone touching the inside walls of the inflatable structure while they move around are likely to cause slight shifts in the outside of the inflatable walls, which means shifting against the regolith they are talking about possibly burying it in. Since there is no air and low gravity, there is a good likelihood that dust/rocks will be kicked up by folks simply walking around (or driving a moon buggy) outside of a surface structure, which could also wear on it. I'm not saying that would necessarily puncture anything soon, but it is something to consider.
I'm sure they will use something strong for it. But lunar soil is supposed to be so sharp/abrasive as well as clingy due to charge and the size of the powder that it presents a formidable problem. Especially if they are planning on burying some of the inflatable structures as the article seems to indicate. I wish they would give more details on how they are simulating the super abrasive rocks/dust during testing.