It strikes me as irrelevant. My Nexus 7 weighs very little, and the 15" notebook isn't too bad. I don't put things on a scale, and use that as my sole measure for whether I should buy them or not. The price of the Surface Pro 3 is too high for what it can actually deliver.
I found the original Zahn trilogy just over the top on exposition. The prose seemed very leaden, even if the plot itself was reasonably interesting. I admit it's been about 20 years or so since I read his original books, but I remember from the very first page, where Luke is talking to Obiwan's force ghost for the last time, that it just felt like very long-winded and exposition-heavy prose.
The original films were all about good battling evil, and they managed to do it, for the most part, without weighting the film down with a whole political sideshow. Just look at the gravitas of the scenes with Vader and the Emperor trying to pervert Luke to the Dark Side. Pretty good action, lots of cackling by the bad guy, Vader being Vader, and it worked because it was done economically. It helped that the filmgoer could relate to Luke, who was played as a likable fellow by Hamill, as opposed to Anakin, played by Hayden Christensen, an actor with the charisma of a block of wood. Frankly, I didn't care at all about Anakin, whereas Mark Hamill's Luke was someone I could like, care about, feel the tension as he fights his darker half, and then cheer at is final rejection of evil.
I agree absolutely. Even the best EU books are mediocre at best, and the worst are worse than fan fiction. There was no way Disney was going to take this franchise it had spent a bazillion dollars and hang it on the EU series'. No one in their right minds would.
I don't agree. Star Trek The Motion Picture largely worked, and I've come to appreciate it far more over the years. In fact, the the ST:TOS films did a pretty damned good job all in all of moving the franchise from the 1960s TV series into the film world, and set the stage for the franchise's later successes. The key to TOS, television series and films, was that the characters were so sufficiently defined that you could literally hang any damned story you wanted on them and make it work.
I remember watching RotJ ad intensely disliking the Ewok scenes. They still seem absurd, pointless and jarring, and are one of the reasons RotJ is the lesser of the original three films. Yoda, on the other hand, was one of the breakout characters of the whole franchise; wise, powerful and a bit cranky, pretty much a kung fu master transplanted into a galaxy far far away.
But Jar Jar was a whole other level of awful. First of all, he was, whether Lucas intended it or not, a horrible racial caricature, but even if you look beyond that, he literally serves no purpose. As a comic foil, which C3PO was so successfully in the first films, he just stunk. Lucas clearly didn't like him, as he spent a good deal of script space having the other characters abuse him, culminating in Jar Jar selling out the whole bloody Republic by recommending to the Senate that they give Palpatine unlimited powers. C3PO and R2D2 may have been comic foils, much as the characters they were based on from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, but they were still, by and large, loyal and trusted companions. Jar Jar was a pathetic idiot intensely disliked by everyone.
I can't imagine anything worse than making a Stargate sequel that references SG-1, Atlantis and all the other dreck they pumped out. A sequel to the movie, now that would be cool.
If air support has been part of battle in the real world for a hundred years now, one would think that the Trade Federation would have invested in some jet aircraft. Review that final battle on Naboo, and tell me that some fighter jets wouldn't have obliterated the entire Gungan army in very short order indeed.
But Lucas's ground battle scenes have never made sense. The Hoth and Endor ground battles had ludicrous hardware. If they were itching to beat the Rebels on Endor, why didn't they just go Tet Offensive; burn the forest to the ground. We're talking about a bunch of teddy bears and a very small number of Rebels with little more than blasters. I get that the first squad was taken by surprise, but once they realized Death Star II's shield generator was about to be compromised, why fuck around at all? What, they don't have napalm in a galaxy far far away?
But the Gungan-Trade Federation final battle was really silly.
Anything but the Borg... Please! Incredibly cool the first few times, but if there's an entry in the dictionary for overused villains, the Borg are the primary entry.
The whole point was that the original trilogy was very much a whiz-bang adventure story with cool looking aliens (well, providing you exclude the cantina scene from A New Hope). Things were goofy, lots of knockoffs of Golden Age B film serials, but it was all a great deal of fun. Even when things got a bit more serious in Empire and RotJ, there was still that goofiness; Yoda was funny and cool all at once, the Emperor was spooky and just over the top enough that a Nazi SS uniform wouldn't have been out of place.
And then you get the prequels, filled with a late middle aged Lucas's political angst, his desire to make these big expensive films that would make some sort of point beyond just being some crazy action sequences interrupted by a little green guy spewing Zen-like metaphysical phrases. Oh no, it had to be about THE FALL OF DEMOCRACY AND THE RISE OF TYRANNY, and everything that actually made Star Wars a silly and fun experience was tossed out the window.
Too bad Lucas didn't review that whole section of Empire before creating the concept of midichlorians. I tend to think of the Prequels as prequels to a film trilogy that vaguely resembles Episodes IV-VI, but populated by wooden, semi-coherent beings that need some bacteria to make them walk or talk at all.
Many? How many? Just by Surface pro sales thus far (or at least what we can divine), the number of people is exceedingly small. And really, you're just rehashing the same arguments that Microsoft has been making for two years now, with little to show for it. Android and iOS devices still dominate the tablet and smartphone world, and Microsoft is still dumping boatloads of money into platforms that have few actual consumers.
But that's largely impossible, as it is clear that Disney intended on having the main heroes from the original trilogy reappear. It would be one thing if you were telling the stories of other characters in the Expanded Universe, but I'd argue even that would be a mistake. If Star Wars is going to be a functioning film franchise again, it has to link directly to the previous films. It can't be simply "it happens in the same universe...", for them to refire the franchise, they need to have major crossover; that means, Han, Luke and Leia, even if only in a more secondary role. Since pretty much every move those three characters make for decades after RotJ is mapped out by the Expanded Universe, I can't see how it could be done, or why one would even try. Once they get the franchise up, then they can make their other "in the same universe" films, but the first film out of the gates has to be a direct sequel to RotJ, and Abrams and the writers cannot bind themselves down like Lucas was to the prequels.
I'll be blunt, the Expanded Universe fans are only a small subset of the potential ticket and merchandise buyers that Disney needs to convince to spend money. I get that the fans of the Expanded Universe are feeling let down, but they don't have the numbers to make or break the franchise, and Disney isn't going to worry its head off about maybe a few tens of thousands of readers when it wants to go after a billion+ theater-goers, toy buyers and McHappy Meal eaters.
The midichlorians were so absolutely unnecessary, and in many respects made no sense to the way the Force had been explained before. In the original films, Vader could sense Luke was strong with the force. Everything was predicated on the Force being this all-encompassing field that everyone, even rocks, had (remember Yoda explaining the Force to Luke in Empire... "the rock, your ship"). They did nothing to enhance the viewer's knowledge of the Force, and rendered much of the original Dagobah scenes', where Luke is receiving his tutelage, just plain wrong. It's baffling why they are in the prequels.
The problem with the prequels was that, for all the incredible CGI techniques, they were just dull fucking films. You have that pod race that is the major mid-film set piece, and, it's absolutely a snoozer compared to the speeder chase at the middle of RotJ, even though in every way the pod racer scenes are miles more sophisticated from a visual point of view than the pretty brief speeder bike scenes.
I think one could look at why the chase scenes in RotJ worked, and why the pod racer bit didn't, and I sometimes wonder if the all-too-perfect effects in some ways made the Phantom Menace seem more like watching a video game over one someone else's shoulder.
Yup, right from the beginning. Why the f--- did the Trade Federation invest God knows how much on a bazillion combat droids that were so utterly fucking useless. After the very first scene where they were introduced and the Jedi were KNOCKING them apart with their telekinetic powers, I was like "Wow, it's like being attacked by Lego men!" Even the Storm Troopers from the original films, metaphorical red shirts one and all, were more effective. The final battle scenes were just awful; a young Anakin almost accidentally wipes out their entire fleet (the Force is apparently more of a lottery than a talent) whilst simultaneously a bunch of semi-literate amphibians won by playing a form of nine pins on the ground with yet more inept battle droids who could have cords in their backs that, when pulled, said such nifty phrases as "Roger roger" and "Uh oh". I remember watching the Phantom Menace the first time and just wondering "Trade Federation assholes, ever heard of fucking AIR SUPPORT!" I mean, even a few dozen fucking fighters could have wiped out that pathetic Gungan army in about fifteen minutes. For chrissakes, with some tactical nukes (it's not like the Trade Federation seemed to give a fuck about the rain forest anyways) and they'd have won without using ANY of those moronic droids.
Well, the fact that we knew in broad strokes what would happen wasn't the ONLY problem with the prequels. I don't want to get into another tired discussion of why they, by and large, stunk; suffice it to say they suffered an incurable case of Lucasitis, with his lack of decent writing, theme planets, ponderous dialog, crap plotting and general inability to even make his plotting fit with the other films... but at any rate...
I think making the prequels decent films was a taller mountain to climb than the first three movies. It wasn't impossible, and in the hands of decent scriptwriters it might have worked, though I still think the magic that the first three films, even awkwardly at times, were able to invoke simply wasn't possible. But even here, Lucas mucked things up. Midichlorians, taking the battle between Anakin/Vader and Obiwan over a lava pit becoming a battle on a whole fucking molten world, even making Leia's statement in RotJ that she vaguely remembered her mother a completely rubbish statement as Padme died about ten seconds after giving birth, the Clone Wars largely incoherent, and, by and large, the utter lack of subtlety in Anakin's transformation into Vader meant the films were, for all the new sophisticated filmmaking techniques, dull and wooden affairs.
It's one of the things I hope the original cast returning can bring to it. Yes, they're in sixties and seventies, and certainly none of them were spectacular actors at the time (or ever in some cases), but at least they felt like real people and not archetypes with about as much energy as chess pieces.
I tend to agree, and this is exactly why Disney needed to throw the Expanded Universe under the bus. Simply filling out known history was going to make the new movies essentially another prequel series, with all the same problems.
Frankly, I'm glad the Expanded Universe has been flushed down the toilet. Most of the books I read (and every few years, I'd take a chance and try again) just plain stunk; worse than some fan fiction I wrote. Even the much-vaunted Timothy Zahn novels, which I read the entire series of, were so heavy on exposition that I find the prose ponderous and often dull. I can't imagine any serious studio, director or screenwriters binding themselves to the load of rotting feces that is the Expanded Universe.
"Pulling" my laptop out means just pulling it out. It means finding a flat surface if i want to do serious work, so I don't see how a Surface Pro is going to make any difference in that department. If it's just checking email, reviewing documents, spreadsheets and that kind of work, frankly i find my Nexus more than fills the role.
Ultimately I see no point to this device for the way i work. If I need a keyboard, I have my notebook, if I don't, then my tablet does the job. The price tag for this is just nutso to me.
Huh? My Nexus can fit inside a compartment along side my notebook, and still take up less room than this critter with keyboard and other peripherals. This product seems to solve a problem I do not have.
The Daily Telegraph is owned by the Barclay Brothers, though most certainly they have the same biases as Murdoch. The editorial section of the paper is fascinating; unapologetically pro-Tory (which is why they call it the Torygraph), very pro-Catholic, pro-fossil fuel and staunchly anti-AGW. They give that crank Christopher Booker as much column space as he wants to repeatedly write the same "AGW is false, and it's being debunked as we speak."
Which is fine, that crap belongs in the editorial section. The problem with the Telegraph is that they use the actual front pages to openly attack scientists, the NHS, windfarms, and anything else the Barcklays don't like.
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It strikes me as irrelevant. My Nexus 7 weighs very little, and the 15" notebook isn't too bad. I don't put things on a scale, and use that as my sole measure for whether I should buy them or not. The price of the Surface Pro 3 is too high for what it can actually deliver.
It can do what it looks. For $900 I can buy a tablet and a notebook, with money to spare.
I found the original Zahn trilogy just over the top on exposition. The prose seemed very leaden, even if the plot itself was reasonably interesting. I admit it's been about 20 years or so since I read his original books, but I remember from the very first page, where Luke is talking to Obiwan's force ghost for the last time, that it just felt like very long-winded and exposition-heavy prose.
The original films were all about good battling evil, and they managed to do it, for the most part, without weighting the film down with a whole political sideshow. Just look at the gravitas of the scenes with Vader and the Emperor trying to pervert Luke to the Dark Side. Pretty good action, lots of cackling by the bad guy, Vader being Vader, and it worked because it was done economically. It helped that the filmgoer could relate to Luke, who was played as a likable fellow by Hamill, as opposed to Anakin, played by Hayden Christensen, an actor with the charisma of a block of wood. Frankly, I didn't care at all about Anakin, whereas Mark Hamill's Luke was someone I could like, care about, feel the tension as he fights his darker half, and then cheer at is final rejection of evil.
I agree absolutely. Even the best EU books are mediocre at best, and the worst are worse than fan fiction. There was no way Disney was going to take this franchise it had spent a bazillion dollars and hang it on the EU series'. No one in their right minds would.
I don't agree. Star Trek The Motion Picture largely worked, and I've come to appreciate it far more over the years. In fact, the the ST:TOS films did a pretty damned good job all in all of moving the franchise from the 1960s TV series into the film world, and set the stage for the franchise's later successes. The key to TOS, television series and films, was that the characters were so sufficiently defined that you could literally hang any damned story you wanted on them and make it work.
I remember watching RotJ ad intensely disliking the Ewok scenes. They still seem absurd, pointless and jarring, and are one of the reasons RotJ is the lesser of the original three films. Yoda, on the other hand, was one of the breakout characters of the whole franchise; wise, powerful and a bit cranky, pretty much a kung fu master transplanted into a galaxy far far away.
But Jar Jar was a whole other level of awful. First of all, he was, whether Lucas intended it or not, a horrible racial caricature, but even if you look beyond that, he literally serves no purpose. As a comic foil, which C3PO was so successfully in the first films, he just stunk. Lucas clearly didn't like him, as he spent a good deal of script space having the other characters abuse him, culminating in Jar Jar selling out the whole bloody Republic by recommending to the Senate that they give Palpatine unlimited powers. C3PO and R2D2 may have been comic foils, much as the characters they were based on from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, but they were still, by and large, loyal and trusted companions. Jar Jar was a pathetic idiot intensely disliked by everyone.
I can't imagine anything worse than making a Stargate sequel that references SG-1, Atlantis and all the other dreck they pumped out. A sequel to the movie, now that would be cool.
If air support has been part of battle in the real world for a hundred years now, one would think that the Trade Federation would have invested in some jet aircraft. Review that final battle on Naboo, and tell me that some fighter jets wouldn't have obliterated the entire Gungan army in very short order indeed.
But Lucas's ground battle scenes have never made sense. The Hoth and Endor ground battles had ludicrous hardware. If they were itching to beat the Rebels on Endor, why didn't they just go Tet Offensive; burn the forest to the ground. We're talking about a bunch of teddy bears and a very small number of Rebels with little more than blasters. I get that the first squad was taken by surprise, but once they realized Death Star II's shield generator was about to be compromised, why fuck around at all? What, they don't have napalm in a galaxy far far away?
But the Gungan-Trade Federation final battle was really silly.
Wait for the dupes.
Anything but the Borg... Please! Incredibly cool the first few times, but if there's an entry in the dictionary for overused villains, the Borg are the primary entry.
The whole point was that the original trilogy was very much a whiz-bang adventure story with cool looking aliens (well, providing you exclude the cantina scene from A New Hope). Things were goofy, lots of knockoffs of Golden Age B film serials, but it was all a great deal of fun. Even when things got a bit more serious in Empire and RotJ, there was still that goofiness; Yoda was funny and cool all at once, the Emperor was spooky and just over the top enough that a Nazi SS uniform wouldn't have been out of place.
And then you get the prequels, filled with a late middle aged Lucas's political angst, his desire to make these big expensive films that would make some sort of point beyond just being some crazy action sequences interrupted by a little green guy spewing Zen-like metaphysical phrases. Oh no, it had to be about THE FALL OF DEMOCRACY AND THE RISE OF TYRANNY, and everything that actually made Star Wars a silly and fun experience was tossed out the window.
Too bad Lucas didn't review that whole section of Empire before creating the concept of midichlorians. I tend to think of the Prequels as prequels to a film trilogy that vaguely resembles Episodes IV-VI, but populated by wooden, semi-coherent beings that need some bacteria to make them walk or talk at all.
You mean like how Zahn did with the Emperor's ghost and clone?
I read Zahn's books. While certainly better than the other trash to be found in the Expanded Universe, they were pretty bad.
Many? How many? Just by Surface pro sales thus far (or at least what we can divine), the number of people is exceedingly small. And really, you're just rehashing the same arguments that Microsoft has been making for two years now, with little to show for it. Android and iOS devices still dominate the tablet and smartphone world, and Microsoft is still dumping boatloads of money into platforms that have few actual consumers.
But that's largely impossible, as it is clear that Disney intended on having the main heroes from the original trilogy reappear. It would be one thing if you were telling the stories of other characters in the Expanded Universe, but I'd argue even that would be a mistake. If Star Wars is going to be a functioning film franchise again, it has to link directly to the previous films. It can't be simply "it happens in the same universe...", for them to refire the franchise, they need to have major crossover; that means, Han, Luke and Leia, even if only in a more secondary role. Since pretty much every move those three characters make for decades after RotJ is mapped out by the Expanded Universe, I can't see how it could be done, or why one would even try. Once they get the franchise up, then they can make their other "in the same universe" films, but the first film out of the gates has to be a direct sequel to RotJ, and Abrams and the writers cannot bind themselves down like Lucas was to the prequels.
I'll be blunt, the Expanded Universe fans are only a small subset of the potential ticket and merchandise buyers that Disney needs to convince to spend money. I get that the fans of the Expanded Universe are feeling let down, but they don't have the numbers to make or break the franchise, and Disney isn't going to worry its head off about maybe a few tens of thousands of readers when it wants to go after a billion+ theater-goers, toy buyers and McHappy Meal eaters.
The midichlorians were so absolutely unnecessary, and in many respects made no sense to the way the Force had been explained before. In the original films, Vader could sense Luke was strong with the force. Everything was predicated on the Force being this all-encompassing field that everyone, even rocks, had (remember Yoda explaining the Force to Luke in Empire... "the rock, your ship"). They did nothing to enhance the viewer's knowledge of the Force, and rendered much of the original Dagobah scenes', where Luke is receiving his tutelage, just plain wrong. It's baffling why they are in the prequels.
The problem with the prequels was that, for all the incredible CGI techniques, they were just dull fucking films. You have that pod race that is the major mid-film set piece, and, it's absolutely a snoozer compared to the speeder chase at the middle of RotJ, even though in every way the pod racer scenes are miles more sophisticated from a visual point of view than the pretty brief speeder bike scenes.
I think one could look at why the chase scenes in RotJ worked, and why the pod racer bit didn't, and I sometimes wonder if the all-too-perfect effects in some ways made the Phantom Menace seem more like watching a video game over one someone else's shoulder.
Yup, right from the beginning. Why the f--- did the Trade Federation invest God knows how much on a bazillion combat droids that were so utterly fucking useless. After the very first scene where they were introduced and the Jedi were KNOCKING them apart with their telekinetic powers, I was like "Wow, it's like being attacked by Lego men!" Even the Storm Troopers from the original films, metaphorical red shirts one and all, were more effective. The final battle scenes were just awful; a young Anakin almost accidentally wipes out their entire fleet (the Force is apparently more of a lottery than a talent) whilst simultaneously a bunch of semi-literate amphibians won by playing a form of nine pins on the ground with yet more inept battle droids who could have cords in their backs that, when pulled, said such nifty phrases as "Roger roger" and "Uh oh". I remember watching the Phantom Menace the first time and just wondering "Trade Federation assholes, ever heard of fucking AIR SUPPORT!" I mean, even a few dozen fucking fighters could have wiped out that pathetic Gungan army in about fifteen minutes. For chrissakes, with some tactical nukes (it's not like the Trade Federation seemed to give a fuck about the rain forest anyways) and they'd have won without using ANY of those moronic droids.
Well, the fact that we knew in broad strokes what would happen wasn't the ONLY problem with the prequels. I don't want to get into another tired discussion of why they, by and large, stunk; suffice it to say they suffered an incurable case of Lucasitis, with his lack of decent writing, theme planets, ponderous dialog, crap plotting and general inability to even make his plotting fit with the other films... but at any rate...
I think making the prequels decent films was a taller mountain to climb than the first three movies. It wasn't impossible, and in the hands of decent scriptwriters it might have worked, though I still think the magic that the first three films, even awkwardly at times, were able to invoke simply wasn't possible. But even here, Lucas mucked things up. Midichlorians, taking the battle between Anakin/Vader and Obiwan over a lava pit becoming a battle on a whole fucking molten world, even making Leia's statement in RotJ that she vaguely remembered her mother a completely rubbish statement as Padme died about ten seconds after giving birth, the Clone Wars largely incoherent, and, by and large, the utter lack of subtlety in Anakin's transformation into Vader meant the films were, for all the new sophisticated filmmaking techniques, dull and wooden affairs.
It's one of the things I hope the original cast returning can bring to it. Yes, they're in sixties and seventies, and certainly none of them were spectacular actors at the time (or ever in some cases), but at least they felt like real people and not archetypes with about as much energy as chess pieces.
I tend to agree, and this is exactly why Disney needed to throw the Expanded Universe under the bus. Simply filling out known history was going to make the new movies essentially another prequel series, with all the same problems.
Frankly, I'm glad the Expanded Universe has been flushed down the toilet. Most of the books I read (and every few years, I'd take a chance and try again) just plain stunk; worse than some fan fiction I wrote. Even the much-vaunted Timothy Zahn novels, which I read the entire series of, were so heavy on exposition that I find the prose ponderous and often dull. I can't imagine any serious studio, director or screenwriters binding themselves to the load of rotting feces that is the Expanded Universe.
"Pulling" my laptop out means just pulling it out. It means finding a flat surface if i want to do serious work, so I don't see how a Surface Pro is going to make any difference in that department. If it's just checking email, reviewing documents, spreadsheets and that kind of work, frankly i find my Nexus more than fills the role.
Ultimately I see no point to this device for the way i work. If I need a keyboard, I have my notebook, if I don't, then my tablet does the job. The price tag for this is just nutso to me.
Huh? My Nexus can fit inside a compartment along side my notebook, and still take up less room than this critter with keyboard and other peripherals. This product seems to solve a problem I do not have.
But if it works for you, that's great.
There is wide acceptance in the scientific community.
The Daily Telegraph is owned by the Barclay Brothers, though most certainly they have the same biases as Murdoch. The editorial section of the paper is fascinating; unapologetically pro-Tory (which is why they call it the Torygraph), very pro-Catholic, pro-fossil fuel and staunchly anti-AGW. They give that crank Christopher Booker as much column space as he wants to repeatedly write the same "AGW is false, and it's being debunked as we speak."
Which is fine, that crap belongs in the editorial section. The problem with the Telegraph is that they use the actual front pages to openly attack scientists, the NHS, windfarms, and anything else the Barcklays don't like.