Anyone who's read all three books will know you can't compress it into a two hour movie, but that's what Silver was saying in the press I saw.
The first part, which deals with V's vendetta against those that imprisoned him would make a darn good movie, true enough. But the second part which deals with the deconstruction of Evey and that detective from the Finger is a totally different ball game. It's introverted, thoughtful, bugger all action and V himself is absent for most of it. You *might* get away with that as a seperate Twin Peaks styles of movie but you'll have lost your audience from the first one. The third book is more workmanlike, it wraps up the story nicely but it relies heavily on the reader having read and understood the events of the second book. I don't blame Mr Moore for keeping his distance from this project, it's just a shame he lost control of his so that it actually fell into Silver's hands:(
Every distro I've used in the last few years comes with a kernel and associated modules for creating an encrypted filesystem, encrypting (securely) individual files or directory trees.
This is part of the stock install, so am I showing criminal intent by running Linux at home ??
...the author of the original story I mean.
He gets plenty of prior warning he's moving to the UK, he even spends a month or more here in a BB equipped place and does he bother to a single piece of research into how to get BB in his new country of residence ??
The entire story is peppered with remarks along the lines of "it's not like this in the States."
Well of course it's not you great wally, it's a foreign country and they do things differently.
It's not like we don't have a whole shedload of mags on the newsstands every month that print guides to getting online in the UK, and every month at least one of them will have a step by step guide for non-techies. But no he's just too busy wanking and playing the latest FPS with his existing BB connection in his first flat.
Hell even a Google will bring up dozens of forums about BB in the UK, most of them have FAQs, all of them are searchable.
This guy has only got himself to blame.
If you're gonna live in a foreign country at least take the trouble to learn about it first.
Note to Author: we drive on the other side of the road here and use different types of electrical plugs, when you get change from your Big Mac you may just notice it's not dollars and cents you're getting....
Also from the early 90s another quote about the internet was popular, when Al Gore described it as "the information superhighway". All nations have highways of one sort or another and they all apply their regional laws to the roads that go through their country. That's their right. In the same way nations should be allowed to police their own stretch of the information superhighway. I've worked in the Middle East where similar censorship applies, maybe not as restrictive on the political content as China but playboy.com was definitely off limits, you have to respect the local laws. When in Rome... and all that. Yes freedom of speech, freedom to voice disatisfaction with the government, freedom to communicate, these are all vitally important to us in the west, but look where our unregulated superhighway has gotten us. Script kiddies, trojans, worms and spam, the equivalent of boy racers on the highway. All these things plague us and we all bemoan them, but then we don't like laws that bring regulation. Which is better ?
On my linux server at home I have a 40GB filesystem that's encrypted with AES.
The password is a 20 character phrase that has significance for me, it's not recorded, written down, no one else knows it.
The filesystem unmounts itself after a few minutes of inactivity, which can be a pain sometimes, but stories like this give me a warm happy that I'm taking these precautions.
Needless to say it's not automatically remounted on reboot.
I used to love DVD shopping but in the last two years my "habit" has come under severe control. Everytime I think about buying a DVD I ask myself what I'm paying for that I couldn't get online for free. Are the extras (if any) really worth £15.99 ? Nope. So I'll go and download myself a good DivX encoding and add it to the library. The only DVDs I do buy these days tend to be box sets and hard to get titles, even that's a rarity.
I amassed over a hundred titles in my first two years of DVD ownership, I think I've bought maybe half a dozen in the two years just gone.
They can't just tax computers en masse, does my microwave count, what about my burglar alarm, etc.
I think what they'll end up taxing is something like "visual display hardware capable of rendering full motion video at a minimum resolution of xxx by yyy at zzz frames per sec".
There's no other way to do it. Video cards, projectors, what else would need to be covered I wonder ? It would include mobile phones which are increasingly being used to view sports clips, news headlines, music videos and movie trailers.
I don't know how they'll manage to avoid licensing cinemas though. I mean define a cinema, plenty of pubs fall into the category of large screen places for public viewing of video. So what's the difference.
The so called detector vans were a myth cooked up a few decades ago, but one that endured. What detection technology they did have picked up such a wide range of devices (CB radios, microwave ovens etc) that they were technically useless. So the Beeb chose a more dracionian approach, they operated under the assumption that all households would have a TV set and so they must all pay the license fee. When an address came up on their system that didn't have a paid fee or a license due to expire, they sent round warning letters about inspectors patrolling your area intimidating folks into paying the fee or facing a £1000 fine. I don't really like the BBC and resent having to pay a full license fee for the fraction of a percentage of their services I occasionally use, but I can the need for a public service broadcasting system free of advertisements. Gotta tell ya though, the full size matt black posters with white bold text saying you *will* get caught, they even list names and postcodes of people who've been caught, are very sinister, very 1984ish.
That's where BitTorrent comes into play, a lot of the yankistanis where downloading BG within hours of it airing in the UK and the reverse applies, we're able to keep up with shows like Lost, Alias and Medium months before they air on the PPV channels over here.
Decent SF is thin on the ground and yes, Skiffy had a lot to answer for in the last few years (killing 'Scape, continuing SG1, etc) and there's been plenty of Save Our Show type rallies from the various affected fans promising Hell and Damnation.
But now lets show the other face of fandom and actually say thanks to these guys for giving BSG another season, who knows, they might just do it again....
Never heard that nickname for the original series, I do have a few old issues of Analog and Asimov's where they refer to it as Prattlestar Galaxitive though:)
People just won't pony up for this. We are the/. Generation, we like Open Source, cheap broadband, we download movies, shows and music as a matter of routine. We are very very pampered right now and we've gotten used to getting top quality product for free or next to nothing.
Take a look at the BT sites, most of them have a Paypal link to help with running costs but they don't get a hell of a lot. Hell even LokiTorrent has to work hard to drum up the tens of thousands it needs to retain lawyers to defend against The Man. And look what it offers (ed) in return, a huge library of movies and shows at DVD quality, more gamez and appz than you could ever use and an iPod busting MP3 collection. That's a hell of a lot and they have to *work* to raise a five figure sum.
You think Trek-heads will pony up a buck or two for an hour of advert riddled TV.....
Mutant Enemy was shutdown a while back:( From reading the press I think Joss has decided to concentrate on movies for a while. SMG, David Boreanaz and Eliza Dushku have all said in the last 18 months that they'd like to leave the Buffyverse behind and concentrate on other projects, at least for a while.
Being a contracter I've been in this situation a few times in various places over the years. Deploying linux has *always* saved money, providing you have the expertise onsite to support it. You don't need to be *nix gurus, just an ability to walk and chew gum at the same time will usually suffice. Deploying linux in the server room lets you recycle / life extend existing hardware, maybe even some old junk gathering dust in a storeroom somewhere. Linux on the desktop is also viable but it very much depends on the needs of your clients. Browsing, email, Open Office would do the job for most folks providing your desktop of choice has a shallow enough learning curve for Windows users. It goes without saying that going with Open Source saves a shitload in license fees.
Think about teleworking if it's possible. Over ten years ago I did a study for a London publishing firm that showed they'd actually make money (and this was using expensive 64Kbps leased lines) implementing teleworking then leasing out the vacated office space.
If you need to expand your network, think about wi-fi vs the cost of laying more structured cabling. As long as you're not using DHCP it's possible to run just about everything else over ssh or SSL so that should alieviate some of your security concerns.
Cut down on printing, copying and faxing, save a bundle on your supply budget. Emailed attachments are much more efficient.
Could your telephone system work with an open source VOIP solution ? Would the working culture be hostile to the use of instant messenger ?
Can anyone tell me what it is that's supposed to've brought down the wrath of the gods ?
I've read his blog, compared it what's in Google's own cache and also Yahoo's cache, I can't find *anything* that would lead to him getting fired.
He doesn't like the boring HR presentations, so what who the hell does ? He tells us they have his spiffy new laptop ready and his c00bical all kitted out for him when he arrives, which he applauds, big deal.
He seems a hell of a lot more positive about the company than negative, and yeah okay he was prolly dazzled a little by all the freebies, perks and other little baubles they threw at him when he arrived. But again, so what ??
Seriously, can someone tell me what this posted that was *such* a big deal ?
Some nice ideas about in there about pooling resources between TV / film production, but it wouldn't fly for a couple of reasons.
Unions - I'm pretty damn sure film crews get different rates from TV crews, they may even have to belong to different unions, I'm not sure. But either way it wouldn't fly.
Makeup / Sets - I remember a very informative interview with Jonathon Frakes about the challenges of bringing the Borg to the big screen in ST:FC he said they basically had to redesign the Borg in order to make them look good on the big screen. It's a good point. You can cut corners and blur some details when your target audience will most likely be watching on (at best) a 42inch screen, and more probably nothing bigger than 32 inches, but you need to pay attention to detail for cinema viewing.
I suppose you *could* just go ahead and record everything to film / movie standards anyways but that would really push up the already expensive costs of the show.
Sounds very very similar to Freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/) but without the anonymity and inherent problems of that system. But all the features the author describes are already in Freenet.
The fact is that news came through the series was gonna be cancelled while they were filming the early stories of season 4. So, in a truly Herculean effort, JMS rewrote the last *two* seasons on the fly, compressing them down into one season. The Shadow War was supposed to take up the whole of S4 and the Earth Liberation War was supposed to be the main arc of season 5. Then Sod's Law kicks into play and TNT announced they'd pick up the fifth season of B5 as the last episodes of S4 were airing. On the surface this was good news, but unfortunately JMS didn't have enough material left, he'd just filmed it all and used up all his good plotlines. This is why season 4 seems rushed and flawed and why season 5 is a stinking pile of crap for the most part. It also explains the very odd series finale. Although it was shown at the end of S5, and appears like that in the boxsets, it was actually filmed at the end of series 4 but they held over transmission for the last year. That's why Claudia Christian appears in it when she'd been absent for the rest of the last series.
IMHO JMS shoulda ditched the (mostly) lousy plot he used for S5 and used that year to give us a B5 / Crusade hybrid series, kinda sneaking Crusade in the back door. Now that would've been a helluva series, but hindsight is a wonderful thing....
Must've been around '90 or '91. It was a genuine IBM -XT type case, in the days when they were making them out dwarf star alloy. It was at a customer's site and the only noticeable thing about it was that it had a cassette (as in the old Philips audio jobs) in one of the 5.25 drive bays as a back-up device. I thought this was pretty cool in such an old box so I ran my totally legit copy of PC-Tools 4.24 to see what else it had with the sys-info page. And there it was, a 186 CPU. I think it ran at 8.x MHz and had 512KB RAM. It was being used as an office machine and apart from a keyboard gunged up with enough organic matter to interest Friends Of The Earth, it was still going strong. Ahhh, memories...
My girlfriend's browsing my library of TV series, which are stored in seperate folders in the root directory of a linux fileserver. Suddenly she pipes up, "Ohhh, you've got Lost *and* Found, I didn't know there was a sequel, is it any good ??"
It's not so much tenancy agreements, but over here in the UK we have what are known as "listed" buildings. These are structures of historical and/or cultural significance and they enjoy certain protections under law. The owner (never mind a mere tenant) may not be allowed to even make certain types of repairs to the building, so you can imagine how far down food chain putting a satellite dish is.
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Anyone who's read all three books will know you can't compress it into a two hour movie, but that's what Silver was saying in the press I saw.
:(
The first part, which deals with V's vendetta against those that imprisoned him would make a darn good movie, true enough.
But the second part which deals with the deconstruction of Evey and that detective from the Finger is a totally different ball game. It's introverted, thoughtful, bugger all action and V himself is absent for most of it. You *might* get away with that as a seperate Twin Peaks styles of movie but you'll have lost your audience from the first one.
The third book is more workmanlike, it wraps up the story nicely but it relies heavily on the reader having read and understood the events of the second book.
I don't blame Mr Moore for keeping his distance from this project, it's just a shame he lost control of his so that it actually fell into Silver's hands
...And most other unices ?
Every distro I've used in the last few years comes with a kernel and associated modules for creating an encrypted filesystem, encrypting (securely) individual files or directory trees.
This is part of the stock install, so am I showing criminal intent by running Linux at home ??
Now I can finally watch the BBC in the UK and I don't need a license fee, PCs and internet content don't need one.
So.... either they've shot themselves in the foot here (unlikely) or after the trial they'll press for PCs to be require a "TV" license.
...the author of the original story I mean. He gets plenty of prior warning he's moving to the UK, he even spends a month or more here in a BB equipped place and does he bother to a single piece of research into how to get BB in his new country of residence ?? The entire story is peppered with remarks along the lines of "it's not like this in the States." Well of course it's not you great wally, it's a foreign country and they do things differently. It's not like we don't have a whole shedload of mags on the newsstands every month that print guides to getting online in the UK, and every month at least one of them will have a step by step guide for non-techies. But no he's just too busy wanking and playing the latest FPS with his existing BB connection in his first flat. Hell even a Google will bring up dozens of forums about BB in the UK, most of them have FAQs, all of them are searchable. This guy has only got himself to blame. If you're gonna live in a foreign country at least take the trouble to learn about it first. Note to Author: we drive on the other side of the road here and use different types of electrical plugs, when you get change from your Big Mac you may just notice it's not dollars and cents you're getting....
Also from the early 90s another quote about the internet was popular, when Al Gore described it as "the information superhighway".
All nations have highways of one sort or another and they all apply their regional laws to the roads that go through their country. That's their right.
In the same way nations should be allowed to police their own stretch of the information superhighway. I've worked in the Middle East where similar censorship applies, maybe not as restrictive on the political content as China but playboy.com was definitely off limits, you have to respect the local laws. When in Rome... and all that.
Yes freedom of speech, freedom to voice disatisfaction with the government, freedom to communicate, these are all vitally important to us in the west, but look where our unregulated superhighway has gotten us.
Script kiddies, trojans, worms and spam, the equivalent of boy racers on the highway. All these things plague us and we all bemoan them, but then we don't like laws that bring regulation. Which is better ?
If your girlfriend gives you this as present, it probably means "goodbye"
On my linux server at home I have a 40GB filesystem that's encrypted with AES. The password is a 20 character phrase that has significance for me, it's not recorded, written down, no one else knows it. The filesystem unmounts itself after a few minutes of inactivity, which can be a pain sometimes, but stories like this give me a warm happy that I'm taking these precautions. Needless to say it's not automatically remounted on reboot.
...for me anyway.
I used to love DVD shopping but in the last two years my "habit" has come under severe control.
Everytime I think about buying a DVD I ask myself what I'm paying for that I couldn't get online for free. Are the extras (if any) really worth £15.99 ? Nope. So I'll go and download myself a good DivX encoding and add it to the library.
The only DVDs I do buy these days tend to be box sets and hard to get titles, even that's a rarity.
I amassed over a hundred titles in my first two years of DVD ownership, I think I've bought maybe half a dozen in the two years just gone.
They can't just tax computers en masse, does my microwave count, what about my burglar alarm, etc.
I think what they'll end up taxing is something like "visual display hardware capable of rendering full motion video at a minimum resolution of xxx by yyy at zzz frames per sec".
There's no other way to do it. Video cards, projectors, what else would need to be covered I wonder ?
It would include mobile phones which are increasingly being used to view sports clips, news headlines, music videos and movie trailers.
I don't know how they'll manage to avoid licensing cinemas though. I mean define a cinema, plenty of pubs fall into the category of large screen places for public viewing of video. So what's the difference.
The so called detector vans were a myth cooked up a few decades ago, but one that endured.
What detection technology they did have picked up such a wide range of devices (CB radios, microwave ovens etc) that they were technically useless.
So the Beeb chose a more dracionian approach, they operated under the assumption that all households would have a TV set and so they must all pay the license fee. When an address came up on their system that didn't have a paid fee or a license due to expire, they sent round warning letters about inspectors patrolling your area intimidating folks into paying the fee or facing a £1000 fine.
I don't really like the BBC and resent having to pay a full license fee for the fraction of a percentage of their services I occasionally use, but I can the need for a public service broadcasting system free of advertisements.
Gotta tell ya though, the full size matt black posters with white bold text saying you *will* get caught, they even list names and postcodes of people who've been caught, are very sinister, very 1984ish.
That's where BitTorrent comes into play, a lot of the yankistanis where downloading BG within hours of it airing in the UK and the reverse applies, we're able to keep up with shows like Lost, Alias and Medium months before they air on the PPV channels over here.
Decent SF is thin on the ground and yes, Skiffy had a lot to answer for in the last few years (killing 'Scape, continuing SG1, etc) and there's been plenty of Save Our Show type rallies from the various affected fans promising Hell and Damnation.
But now lets show the other face of fandom and actually say thanks to these guys for giving BSG another season, who knows, they might just do it again....
Never heard that nickname for the original series, I do have a few old issues of Analog and Asimov's where they refer to it as Prattlestar Galaxitive though :)
...and I'll pay it to anyone who can guarantee the franchise is given a rest for at least a decade.
People just won't pony up for this. We are the /. Generation, we like Open Source, cheap broadband, we download movies, shows and music as a matter of routine.
We are very very pampered right now and we've gotten used to getting top quality product for free or next to nothing.
Take a look at the BT sites, most of them have a Paypal link to help with running costs but they don't get a hell of a lot.
Hell even LokiTorrent has to work hard to drum up the tens of thousands it needs to retain lawyers to defend against The Man. And look what it offers (ed) in return, a huge library of movies and shows at DVD quality, more gamez and appz than you could ever use and an iPod busting MP3 collection. That's a hell of a lot and they have to *work* to raise a five figure sum.
You think Trek-heads will pony up a buck or two for an hour of advert riddled TV.....
Mutant Enemy was shutdown a while back :(
From reading the press I think Joss has decided to concentrate on movies for a while. SMG, David Boreanaz and Eliza Dushku have all said in the last 18 months that they'd like to leave the Buffyverse behind and concentrate on other projects, at least for a while.
but I choked under the pressure of thinking of something to write, guess I'm just too smart...
Being a contracter I've been in this situation a few times in various places over the years.
Deploying linux has *always* saved money, providing you have the expertise onsite to support it. You don't need to be *nix gurus, just an ability to walk and chew gum at the same time will usually suffice.
Deploying linux in the server room lets you recycle / life extend existing hardware, maybe even some old junk gathering dust in a storeroom somewhere.
Linux on the desktop is also viable but it very much depends on the needs of your clients. Browsing, email, Open Office would do the job for most folks providing your desktop of choice has a shallow enough learning curve for Windows users.
It goes without saying that going with Open Source saves a shitload in license fees.
Think about teleworking if it's possible. Over ten years ago I did a study for a London publishing firm that showed they'd actually make money (and this was using expensive 64Kbps leased lines) implementing teleworking then leasing out the vacated office space.
If you need to expand your network, think about wi-fi vs the cost of laying more structured cabling. As long as you're not using DHCP it's possible to run just about everything else over ssh or SSL so that should alieviate some of your security concerns.
Cut down on printing, copying and faxing, save a bundle on your supply budget. Emailed attachments are much more efficient.
Could your telephone system work with an open source VOIP solution ? Would the working culture be hostile to the use of instant messenger ?
Just a few thoughts, HTH.
Can anyone tell me what it is that's supposed to've brought down the wrath of the gods ?
I've read his blog, compared it what's in Google's own cache and also Yahoo's cache, I can't find *anything* that would lead to him getting fired.
He doesn't like the boring HR presentations, so what who the hell does ? He tells us they have his spiffy new laptop ready and his c00bical all kitted out for him when he arrives, which he applauds, big deal.
He seems a hell of a lot more positive about the company than negative, and yeah okay he was prolly dazzled a little by all the freebies, perks and other little baubles they threw at him when he arrived. But again, so what ??
Seriously, can someone tell me what this posted that was *such* a big deal ?
Some nice ideas about in there about pooling resources between TV / film production, but it wouldn't fly for a couple of reasons.
Unions - I'm pretty damn sure film crews get different rates from TV crews, they may even have to belong to different unions, I'm not sure. But either way it wouldn't fly.
Makeup / Sets - I remember a very informative interview with Jonathon Frakes about the challenges of bringing the Borg to the big screen in ST:FC he said they basically had to redesign the Borg in order to make them look good on the big screen. It's a good point. You can cut corners and blur some details when your target audience will most likely be watching on (at best) a 42inch screen, and more probably nothing bigger than 32 inches, but you need to pay attention to detail for cinema viewing.
I suppose you *could* just go ahead and record everything to film / movie standards anyways but that would really push up the already expensive costs of the show.
Sounds very very similar to Freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/) but without the anonymity and inherent problems of that system.
But all the features the author describes are already in Freenet.
...although it was supposed to.
The fact is that news came through the series was gonna be cancelled while they were filming the early stories of season 4. So, in a truly Herculean effort, JMS rewrote the last *two* seasons on the fly, compressing them down into one season.
The Shadow War was supposed to take up the whole of S4 and the Earth Liberation War was supposed to be the main arc of season 5.
Then Sod's Law kicks into play and TNT announced they'd pick up the fifth season of B5 as the last episodes of S4 were airing. On the surface this was good news, but unfortunately JMS didn't have enough material left, he'd just filmed it all and used up all his good plotlines.
This is why season 4 seems rushed and flawed and why season 5 is a stinking pile of crap for the most part. It also explains the very odd series finale. Although it was shown at the end of S5, and appears like that in the boxsets, it was actually filmed at the end of series 4 but they held over transmission for the last year. That's why Claudia Christian appears in it when she'd been absent for the rest of the last series.
IMHO JMS shoulda ditched the (mostly) lousy plot he used for S5 and used that year to give us a B5 / Crusade hybrid series, kinda sneaking Crusade in the back door. Now that would've been a helluva series, but hindsight is a wonderful thing....
Must've been around '90 or '91. It was a genuine IBM -XT type case, in the days when they were making them out dwarf star alloy.
It was at a customer's site and the only noticeable thing about it was that it had a cassette (as in the old Philips audio jobs) in one of the 5.25 drive bays as a back-up device.
I thought this was pretty cool in such an old box so I ran my totally legit copy of PC-Tools 4.24 to see what else it had with the sys-info page. And there it was, a 186 CPU.
I think it ran at 8.x MHz and had 512KB RAM. It was being used as an office machine and apart from a keyboard gunged up with enough organic matter to interest Friends Of The Earth, it was still going strong.
Ahhh, memories...
While we were chatting about this...
My girlfriend's browsing my library of TV series, which are stored in seperate folders in the root directory of a linux fileserver.
Suddenly she pipes up, "Ohhh, you've got Lost *and* Found, I didn't know there was a sequel, is it any good ??"
It's not so much tenancy agreements, but over here in the UK we have what are known as "listed" buildings. These are structures of historical and/or cultural significance and they enjoy certain protections under law.
The owner (never mind a mere tenant) may not be allowed to even make certain types of repairs to the building, so you can imagine how far down food chain putting a satellite dish is.