Vista failed to deliver innovation in operating systems, Windows 7 is just Microsoft playing catchup with Apple [...]
People say this a lot, but is there really that much innovation to be done in the operating system space, at least for end users? (The server space is, of course, quite different.) Personally, I'd be a lot happier if Microsoft stopped "innovating" with Windows, unless the innovation in question is to get the hell out of my face and operate smoothly so I can focus on my applications, which are why I have a computer in the first place. It's 2010, for crying out loud. The personal computer OS is a mature product category, and would be better served -- especially in Microsoft's case -- by fixing its plethora of bugs and security holes and misfeatures and just supporting new hardware as it comes along. While they're at it, maybe they could focus on optimizing its memory and CPU usage so that there's more left over for -- again -- the applications its supposed to support.
Being as we are, as a group, actually interested in the inner workings of operating systems, it's sometimes hard to remember that operating systems are mainly visible to users to the extent that they don't work as well as they should. A good operating system is unnoticeable for users and highly tractable for developers. Microsoft is failing miserably (and, for misguided marketing purposes, deliberately) at both.
Fuck him. For any public official in a western democracy to be openly clamoring for things to be more like China is a disgrace, to say nothing of the corrosive effect it has on liberties elsewhere. Here's hoping that the good people of Australia will feed him to the sharks.
The complex behaviors of the human mind are what leads to intelligence, they do not detract from it.
I'm inclined to take an almost diametrically opposed position and say that this kind of species-narcissism is our major barrier. We think way too highly of ourselves, and as a result, we think that all of our quirks and flaws are somehow special. The neocortex, where all of the useful higher mental faculties are located, is a barely 2mm thick shell around a vast mass of tissue that performs much less exciting tasks, many of which have already been matched or surpassed by much simpler intelligently designed software, as opposed to the brain's crudely evolved inefficiency. We don't have to figure out how the whole thing works at a very high level of detail, we mainly need to understand how the neocortex works, and contrary to many of the appallingly uninformed comments to this story, we're actually making substantial and rapid progress in that area.
Emotion? Pfft. It's little more than a set of accumulators that are incremented and decremented proportionally by stimulus events and whose current values determine the frequency with which behavioral subroutines are triggered. And given that the vast majority of emotionally-inspired human activity is useless or actually harmful, I don't think it's a feature we need to simulate very closely in our machines.
Humans mainly jockey for social status, compulsively accumulate shiny objects, seek (mostly) passive stimulation, engage in very complex but essentially imitative behavior, and kill each other in large numbers. The remaining 0.01% of human activity is what's actually interesting and beneficial, and despite humans not being anywhere near as bright as they like to think they are, and being really, really bad at actual creativity, duplicating that tiny fraction is not at all unrealistic. We should, moreover, be deliberately aiming at exceeding human intelligence. We already have billions of humans, many of them lying idle because of the inefficiency of our social and economic systems, and hundreds of millions of them are available for less than a dollar a day. Unless AI ends up being considerably better than human intelligence, there's not much use for it -- though we are, as a species, probably dumb enough to use human-level AI to eliminate all paying jobs, at which point the economy that sustains them will collapse for lack of consumers, and we'll all go back to work. We are, after all, too greedy and devoted to our social hierarchies to provide a life of leisure and plenty for everyone even if it were possible.
That was meant to be friendly teasing; sorry if I didn't make that clear. You can't spit without hitting a surveillance camera here, either. The anglosphere in general seems to be prone to both moral panics and excessive police powers. But I guess the US and the UK can at least take comfort in knowing that at least we're not Australia.
Sadly, we're not New Zealand, either. I'd envy Canada, too, but I'd rather be watched and warm than unwatched and freezing my ass off.;)
You poor chaps over the pond really do seem to have the most bizarre legal decisions made for you, sometimes.
Bold words from someone living in the world's leading surveillance state. Next time, put on a hoodie and wave at one of the dozen nearest cameras while holding up a sign reading "PAEDOPHILE" before you start feeling superior about one of our moral panics.
It depends on what your system is doing. If you're an end user running desktop apps, mostly it's just a pain in the ass. If you're maintaining a server that does something that has to be available all the time, the results range from expensive to disastrous. If the server in question handles credit card transactions for a bank, downtime costs the bank money -- they profit from transaction fees -- and it also costs vendors that use the bank's services. If the server handles air traffic control, the operation of a nuclear power plant, or life support for patients in a hospital, downtime can cost lives. It all depends on what the machine is responsible for.
While it's probably not all that directly important to you (or, for that matter, for me, since I am blessedly free of sysadmin duties at the moment), it does affect all of us indirectly, since the perceived reliability of Linux has a marked effect on the resources any number of companies and institutions are willing to pour into it, some of which is going to be source code that is then shared by everyone.
But the short answer is it doesn't matter much in 99.9% of cases. For the remaining 0.1%, rebooting can be a very big deal.
Well, yes, of course Windows sucks, but the SysInternals package really does mitigate the suckage to a surprising degree. Arguably, it's stuff that should have been part of Windows all along. I've been using it for a couple of years and it has made it much, much easier to beat Windows into submission. It's also extremely useful for finding and removing the crap that virus and malware scanners are apparently incapable of dealing with, as well as finding the mounds of not-actually-temporary temporary files that both Windows and a lot of applications like to consume unreasonable amounts of drive space with.
The requirement for physical access aside, it really doesn't matter how difficult the rest of the process is, since someone will eventually figure it out and implement software to do it automatically so any script kiddie can do it. Math -- crypto included -- is funny that way. Considering the amount of money companies invest in products like these, you'd think they'd figure that out sooner or later.
It should be interesting to see the fallout from this. 4channers aren't exactly the paragon of maturity.
I confess that I don't get why Verizon would do this, except possibly cluelessness. While the 4chan crowd certainly overestimates its power, they have many times demonstrated that they can be a serious, long-term pain in the ass. Sure, no one will die, and no great fortunes will be lost, but still... why invite that level of aggravation?
To be fair, what Jobs has done, at least since returning to Apple, is very successfully doing what no one in the field had done before him: he made his products fashionable. People -- some of them, anyway -- want to be seen using Apple products. It's very much like designer jeans: in terms of functionality, they're not a whole lot better or worse than generic jeans, but in certain circles, they carry social status benefits.
Bullshit? From the standpoint of technological merit, sort of. The trendiness of Apple products is certainly irrelevant from a technological standpoint. But they aren't bad products, technically speaking, and from the standpoint of fashion goods, they're quite successful. This stands in contrast to, let's say, Dell and Microsoft, whose products are measurably worse than the competition both technically and socially, and yet they still manage to maintain market shares that Apple would love to have. In short, there are kinds and degrees of bullshit.
But yeah, I'm still bitter about what happened to the Apple II, especially since the last of the IIgs line was technically superior to the first of the Macs in every respect. But it would be hard to say that Apple (and Jobs) didn't reap the consequences of that decision, going from the dominant personal computer maker to being a permanent niche producer whose largest successes have, even now, come from appliances and media distribution channels and whose main personal computer product is basically a slightly modified PC clone. And banking on fashion fads carries its own inherent instability, as some new designer will come along with the next hot new look before long, and the flow of money will be redirected to the next undeserving bunch of style-makers.
Techies often have trouble understanding this, coming as they do from a very strongly meritocratic culture: the world at large is so far from being meritocratic that the sheer extent of its non-meritocracy strains the imagination. Professional academics often run into the same blank wall of incomprehension.
By no means am I saying that this is a good thing, or even that it is strictly necessary (though that is certainly a possibility given primate psychology), but the fact remains that the normal means of acquiring wealth is by conniving, cheating, swindling, and deceiving to one degree or another. If wealth was awarded on the basis of hard work, knowledge, or creativity, then the world would be full of super-rich construction workers, mathematicians, and artists. Instead, it is awarded on the basis of how good you are at talking (or coercing) people into giving it to you. Period. Things like quality, reliability, creativity, and utility are, at most, means to an end, and are by no means indispensable, except perhaps as grist for motivational speeches given to the people who do the work by the people who receive the rewards.
Even people famous for endless tinkering still like a simple, clean user experience once in a while.
Once in a while? I find that I want to tinker with the subjects in which I am most interested, and prefer drool-proof interfaces the rest of the time. FOSS at its (unusual) best makes tinkering possible but not necessary. Programs should work well off the shelf but be readily amenable to user modification if the user cares to.
"Hey, I wonder what would happen if you blasted a cavity with plasma?" How do you even think of questions like that without being stoned?
I'm assuming the researcher in question happened to have a cool plasma torch and was looking for things to do with it. It's the same instinct that leads people who've learned a new programming language to reimplement some perfectly good existing piece of software for the umpteenth time just to use the language. If you could do dentistry with code, you can bet you'd see PyDrill and JDentures on Freshmeat.
'When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.'
Actually, it sounds like the market worked with almost textbook efficiency.
Easy with one caveat. It would only be easy for people who wouldn't want to take part in the first place.
Indeed. All you'd have to do is get a friend to give you a lift to a national park and spend the month camping, and when you need something, walk out to the nearest town and pay in cash. This time of year, you'd probably want to choose a park in the southern parts of the country -- the accompanying Deliverance joke is left as an exercise to the reader -- but that's about it. Even if you're the governor of South Carolina -- the Appalachian Trail is the last place they'd look for you.
copyright law is BLOCKING the long tail and therefore blocking profit making for authors via ancillary means
So your argument boils down to this: There is money to be made, so fuck the rights of everyone involved and hand that gigantic wad of cash as an exclusive deal to one of the richest corporations in the world?
Here's one for you: Just because you want something, even if you want it badly, doesn't give you a right to it.
it gets to a point where copyright law is simply gets in the way of technological, social, and cultural progress
Bold words coming from a guy who hasn't figured out punctuation or capitalization. How's that cultural progress working for you?
My objection was to the terminology, not the notion of the threat. Americans have this very unproductive habit of trying to cast every struggle in terms of a war of some kind: the war on drugs, the war on terror, even the war on cancer. The problem is that warfare is not a very effective model for much of anything except actual war, where it is arguably not terribly effective at anything except wasting lives and resources. Securing a system is not in any way like warfare. It is a whole lot like engineering, mathematics, and systems analysis, among other disciplines.
If the congressional bozo in question had called for engineers, technicians, and scientists, that would have been fine. Instead, he called for "warriors", which is at best empty rhetoric and at worst betrays a complete failure to grasp the nature of the situation. I know very well that the threats are real. I also know very well that none of those complex, multidisciplinary threats are going to be effectively met by simplistic militaristic thinking.
Every time I hear a government official -- or, for that matter, anyone else -- refer to a "cyber warrior" outside of the context of a game or movie review, I want to take their television away from them until they're old enough to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. And in the case of this buffoon and his thousand extra cyber warriors per year, he also needs to read The Mythical Man-Month before he's allowed to leave his room.
Ironically, Frank Herbert seems to be one of the movie's biggest fans*. Perhaps he understood that a movie is by nature a different form of story-telling than a book and that a direct translation is not always the best solution.
Agreed. Expecting the movie version of a book, especially one as complex as Dune, to be a faithful copy of the original is a bit like expecting the sculpture version of a symphony to be a faithful copy. A novel is not a movie script, much less a novel. And frankly, despite some excesses, Lynch's version is, as the original poster said, pretty faithful to the "feel" of the novel.
Where Lynch's version goes wrong is that it makes it seem like the story is all about Paul Atreides and that the Bene Gesserit are just some minor detail on the side, which is actually the reverse of the emphasis in the series of novels as a whole: Paul is just one of many tools of the Bene Gesserit in a series of stories that are, in the end, all about the Bene Gesserit. That said, I'm not sure how you could tell that story within the brief confines of a movie. We are, after all, talking about a novel that spends the first hundred and fifty pages just introducing the major characters and themes.
I will give Lynch's version this much: prior to seeing it, I had tried on three separate occasions to get through the confusing tedium of those first hundred and fifty pages and given up. After I saw the movie, I was motivated to make a fourth attempt and ended up reading the book in its entirety that weekend, and then read the remaining books, one per day, over the next week. (I was a freshman in high school at the time -- I wish I had that kind of time to read now.) And yes, it was immediately obvious how far from the novel the movie was, but considered as a thing in itself, the movie is actually not bad at all. It's visually stunning, has some first rate actors, and has some genuinely stirring moments.
The people who bitch the loudest about Lynch's adaptation of Dune will be the ones begging for mercy when someone finally does a faithful adaptation of God Emperor of Dune. I'd love to pitch that to the studios: "It's a good six seasons worth of a human-sandworm hybrid sitting in a hole in the ground, thinking to himself, until the climactic final episode when he knowingly allows himself to be lured to the surface by a cute chick and he falls to his death from a bridge. And for a followup, we have easily another ten seasons of the spinoff series, Everyone Kills Duncan Idaho. It's television gold, I tell ya!"
Yeah... Just what we need -- more tiny objects in orbit around Earth. We have enough problems avoiding crashing into the big satellites we can actually see with radar, let alone worrying about a few hundred rubic's cubes up there.
That was my first thought, too. My second thought, after reading TFA, was that this guy has slightly modified the basic design of an inkjet printer and figured out a way to avoid having his business cut into by refill vendors.
That said, this is the sort of situation that inevitably arises when violating the law. If you steal cars, and someone steals your stolen goods -- or tries to extort protection money from you, who are you going to call? A considerable proportion of organized crime exists because of this quandary. Ergo, my guess is that the lid was blown off this situation when the miscreant, probably carelessly, tried to lean on a student who wasn't actually pirating anything.
Is it just me, or is there anyone else out there who wants a big tablet instead of some small, sleek, fashionable, and largely useless piece of overpriced tech trinketry? At this point, I'm about to pick up an old Thinkpad on eBay and make one myself -- and still probably come out cheaper than the latest and greatest. And no, I don't need a touch screen. I'd be perfectly content to mount a few programmable keys down one side and the Trackpoint hardware on the other. All I want to do is be able to read PDFs in color and at a reasonable scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista failed to deliver innovation in operating systems, Windows 7 is just Microsoft playing catchup with Apple [...]
People say this a lot, but is there really that much innovation to be done in the operating system space, at least for end users? (The server space is, of course, quite different.) Personally, I'd be a lot happier if Microsoft stopped "innovating" with Windows, unless the innovation in question is to get the hell out of my face and operate smoothly so I can focus on my applications, which are why I have a computer in the first place. It's 2010, for crying out loud. The personal computer OS is a mature product category, and would be better served -- especially in Microsoft's case -- by fixing its plethora of bugs and security holes and misfeatures and just supporting new hardware as it comes along. While they're at it, maybe they could focus on optimizing its memory and CPU usage so that there's more left over for -- again -- the applications its supposed to support.
Being as we are, as a group, actually interested in the inner workings of operating systems, it's sometimes hard to remember that operating systems are mainly visible to users to the extent that they don't work as well as they should. A good operating system is unnoticeable for users and highly tractable for developers. Microsoft is failing miserably (and, for misguided marketing purposes, deliberately) at both.
Fuck him. For any public official in a western democracy to be openly clamoring for things to be more like China is a disgrace, to say nothing of the corrosive effect it has on liberties elsewhere. Here's hoping that the good people of Australia will feed him to the sharks.
The complex behaviors of the human mind are what leads to intelligence, they do not detract from it.
I'm inclined to take an almost diametrically opposed position and say that this kind of species-narcissism is our major barrier. We think way too highly of ourselves, and as a result, we think that all of our quirks and flaws are somehow special. The neocortex, where all of the useful higher mental faculties are located, is a barely 2mm thick shell around a vast mass of tissue that performs much less exciting tasks, many of which have already been matched or surpassed by much simpler intelligently designed software, as opposed to the brain's crudely evolved inefficiency. We don't have to figure out how the whole thing works at a very high level of detail, we mainly need to understand how the neocortex works, and contrary to many of the appallingly uninformed comments to this story, we're actually making substantial and rapid progress in that area.
Emotion? Pfft. It's little more than a set of accumulators that are incremented and decremented proportionally by stimulus events and whose current values determine the frequency with which behavioral subroutines are triggered. And given that the vast majority of emotionally-inspired human activity is useless or actually harmful, I don't think it's a feature we need to simulate very closely in our machines.
Humans mainly jockey for social status, compulsively accumulate shiny objects, seek (mostly) passive stimulation, engage in very complex but essentially imitative behavior, and kill each other in large numbers. The remaining 0.01% of human activity is what's actually interesting and beneficial, and despite humans not being anywhere near as bright as they like to think they are, and being really, really bad at actual creativity, duplicating that tiny fraction is not at all unrealistic. We should, moreover, be deliberately aiming at exceeding human intelligence. We already have billions of humans, many of them lying idle because of the inefficiency of our social and economic systems, and hundreds of millions of them are available for less than a dollar a day. Unless AI ends up being considerably better than human intelligence, there's not much use for it -- though we are, as a species, probably dumb enough to use human-level AI to eliminate all paying jobs, at which point the economy that sustains them will collapse for lack of consumers, and we'll all go back to work. We are, after all, too greedy and devoted to our social hierarchies to provide a life of leisure and plenty for everyone even if it were possible.
That was meant to be friendly teasing; sorry if I didn't make that clear. You can't spit without hitting a surveillance camera here, either. The anglosphere in general seems to be prone to both moral panics and excessive police powers. But I guess the US and the UK can at least take comfort in knowing that at least we're not Australia.
Sadly, we're not New Zealand, either. I'd envy Canada, too, but I'd rather be watched and warm than unwatched and freezing my ass off. ;)
You poor chaps over the pond really do seem to have the most bizarre legal decisions made for you, sometimes.
Bold words from someone living in the world's leading surveillance state. Next time, put on a hoodie and wave at one of the dozen nearest cameras while holding up a sign reading "PAEDOPHILE" before you start feeling superior about one of our moral panics.
It depends on what your system is doing. If you're an end user running desktop apps, mostly it's just a pain in the ass. If you're maintaining a server that does something that has to be available all the time, the results range from expensive to disastrous. If the server in question handles credit card transactions for a bank, downtime costs the bank money -- they profit from transaction fees -- and it also costs vendors that use the bank's services. If the server handles air traffic control, the operation of a nuclear power plant, or life support for patients in a hospital, downtime can cost lives. It all depends on what the machine is responsible for.
While it's probably not all that directly important to you (or, for that matter, for me, since I am blessedly free of sysadmin duties at the moment), it does affect all of us indirectly, since the perceived reliability of Linux has a marked effect on the resources any number of companies and institutions are willing to pour into it, some of which is going to be source code that is then shared by everyone.
But the short answer is it doesn't matter much in 99.9% of cases. For the remaining 0.1%, rebooting can be a very big deal.
Well, yes, of course Windows sucks, but the SysInternals package really does mitigate the suckage to a surprising degree. Arguably, it's stuff that should have been part of Windows all along. I've been using it for a couple of years and it has made it much, much easier to beat Windows into submission. It's also extremely useful for finding and removing the crap that virus and malware scanners are apparently incapable of dealing with, as well as finding the mounds of not-actually-temporary temporary files that both Windows and a lot of applications like to consume unreasonable amounts of drive space with.
The requirement for physical access aside, it really doesn't matter how difficult the rest of the process is, since someone will eventually figure it out and implement software to do it automatically so any script kiddie can do it. Math -- crypto included -- is funny that way. Considering the amount of money companies invest in products like these, you'd think they'd figure that out sooner or later.
It should be interesting to see the fallout from this. 4channers aren't exactly the paragon of maturity.
I confess that I don't get why Verizon would do this, except possibly cluelessness. While the 4chan crowd certainly overestimates its power, they have many times demonstrated that they can be a serious, long-term pain in the ass. Sure, no one will die, and no great fortunes will be lost, but still... why invite that level of aggravation?
To be fair, what Jobs has done, at least since returning to Apple, is very successfully doing what no one in the field had done before him: he made his products fashionable. People -- some of them, anyway -- want to be seen using Apple products. It's very much like designer jeans: in terms of functionality, they're not a whole lot better or worse than generic jeans, but in certain circles, they carry social status benefits.
Bullshit? From the standpoint of technological merit, sort of. The trendiness of Apple products is certainly irrelevant from a technological standpoint. But they aren't bad products, technically speaking, and from the standpoint of fashion goods, they're quite successful. This stands in contrast to, let's say, Dell and Microsoft, whose products are measurably worse than the competition both technically and socially, and yet they still manage to maintain market shares that Apple would love to have. In short, there are kinds and degrees of bullshit.
But yeah, I'm still bitter about what happened to the Apple II, especially since the last of the IIgs line was technically superior to the first of the Macs in every respect. But it would be hard to say that Apple (and Jobs) didn't reap the consequences of that decision, going from the dominant personal computer maker to being a permanent niche producer whose largest successes have, even now, come from appliances and media distribution channels and whose main personal computer product is basically a slightly modified PC clone. And banking on fashion fads carries its own inherent instability, as some new designer will come along with the next hot new look before long, and the flow of money will be redirected to the next undeserving bunch of style-makers.
Techies often have trouble understanding this, coming as they do from a very strongly meritocratic culture: the world at large is so far from being meritocratic that the sheer extent of its non-meritocracy strains the imagination. Professional academics often run into the same blank wall of incomprehension.
By no means am I saying that this is a good thing, or even that it is strictly necessary (though that is certainly a possibility given primate psychology), but the fact remains that the normal means of acquiring wealth is by conniving, cheating, swindling, and deceiving to one degree or another. If wealth was awarded on the basis of hard work, knowledge, or creativity, then the world would be full of super-rich construction workers, mathematicians, and artists. Instead, it is awarded on the basis of how good you are at talking (or coercing) people into giving it to you. Period. Things like quality, reliability, creativity, and utility are, at most, means to an end, and are by no means indispensable, except perhaps as grist for motivational speeches given to the people who do the work by the people who receive the rewards.
Even people famous for endless tinkering still like a simple, clean user experience once in a while.
Once in a while? I find that I want to tinker with the subjects in which I am most interested, and prefer drool-proof interfaces the rest of the time. FOSS at its (unusual) best makes tinkering possible but not necessary. Programs should work well off the shelf but be readily amenable to user modification if the user cares to.
"Hey, I wonder what would happen if you blasted a cavity with plasma?" How do you even think of questions like that without being stoned?
I'm assuming the researcher in question happened to have a cool plasma torch and was looking for things to do with it. It's the same instinct that leads people who've learned a new programming language to reimplement some perfectly good existing piece of software for the umpteenth time just to use the language. If you could do dentistry with code, you can bet you'd see PyDrill and JDentures on Freshmeat.
'When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.'
Actually, it sounds like the market worked with almost textbook efficiency.
Don't worry. Some of the bugs created by Microsoft this year will be around in 17 years, too.
Easy with one caveat. It would only be easy for people who wouldn't want to take part in the first place.
Indeed. All you'd have to do is get a friend to give you a lift to a national park and spend the month camping, and when you need something, walk out to the nearest town and pay in cash. This time of year, you'd probably want to choose a park in the southern parts of the country -- the accompanying Deliverance joke is left as an exercise to the reader -- but that's about it. Even if you're the governor of South Carolina -- the Appalachian Trail is the last place they'd look for you.
copyright law is BLOCKING the long tail and therefore blocking profit making for authors via ancillary means
So your argument boils down to this: There is money to be made, so fuck the rights of everyone involved and hand that gigantic wad of cash as an exclusive deal to one of the richest corporations in the world?
Here's one for you: Just because you want something, even if you want it badly, doesn't give you a right to it.
it gets to a point where copyright law is simply gets in the way of technological, social, and cultural progress
Bold words coming from a guy who hasn't figured out punctuation or capitalization. How's that cultural progress working for you?
My objection was to the terminology, not the notion of the threat. Americans have this very unproductive habit of trying to cast every struggle in terms of a war of some kind: the war on drugs, the war on terror, even the war on cancer. The problem is that warfare is not a very effective model for much of anything except actual war, where it is arguably not terribly effective at anything except wasting lives and resources. Securing a system is not in any way like warfare. It is a whole lot like engineering, mathematics, and systems analysis, among other disciplines.
If the congressional bozo in question had called for engineers, technicians, and scientists, that would have been fine. Instead, he called for "warriors", which is at best empty rhetoric and at worst betrays a complete failure to grasp the nature of the situation. I know very well that the threats are real. I also know very well that none of those complex, multidisciplinary threats are going to be effectively met by simplistic militaristic thinking.
Every time I hear a government official -- or, for that matter, anyone else -- refer to a "cyber warrior" outside of the context of a game or movie review, I want to take their television away from them until they're old enough to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. And in the case of this buffoon and his thousand extra cyber warriors per year, he also needs to read The Mythical Man-Month before he's allowed to leave his room.
Ironically, Frank Herbert seems to be one of the movie's biggest fans*. Perhaps he understood that a movie is by nature a different form of story-telling than a book and that a direct translation is not always the best solution.
Agreed. Expecting the movie version of a book, especially one as complex as Dune, to be a faithful copy of the original is a bit like expecting the sculpture version of a symphony to be a faithful copy. A novel is not a movie script, much less a novel. And frankly, despite some excesses, Lynch's version is, as the original poster said, pretty faithful to the "feel" of the novel.
Where Lynch's version goes wrong is that it makes it seem like the story is all about Paul Atreides and that the Bene Gesserit are just some minor detail on the side, which is actually the reverse of the emphasis in the series of novels as a whole: Paul is just one of many tools of the Bene Gesserit in a series of stories that are, in the end, all about the Bene Gesserit. That said, I'm not sure how you could tell that story within the brief confines of a movie. We are, after all, talking about a novel that spends the first hundred and fifty pages just introducing the major characters and themes.
I will give Lynch's version this much: prior to seeing it, I had tried on three separate occasions to get through the confusing tedium of those first hundred and fifty pages and given up. After I saw the movie, I was motivated to make a fourth attempt and ended up reading the book in its entirety that weekend, and then read the remaining books, one per day, over the next week. (I was a freshman in high school at the time -- I wish I had that kind of time to read now.) And yes, it was immediately obvious how far from the novel the movie was, but considered as a thing in itself, the movie is actually not bad at all. It's visually stunning, has some first rate actors, and has some genuinely stirring moments.
The people who bitch the loudest about Lynch's adaptation of Dune will be the ones begging for mercy when someone finally does a faithful adaptation of God Emperor of Dune. I'd love to pitch that to the studios: "It's a good six seasons worth of a human-sandworm hybrid sitting in a hole in the ground, thinking to himself, until the climactic final episode when he knowingly allows himself to be lured to the surface by a cute chick and he falls to his death from a bridge. And for a followup, we have easily another ten seasons of the spinoff series, Everyone Kills Duncan Idaho. It's television gold, I tell ya!"
Don't cross the torrents. That would be bad.
Yeah... Just what we need -- more tiny objects in orbit around Earth. We have enough problems avoiding crashing into the big satellites we can actually see with radar, let alone worrying about a few hundred rubic's cubes up there.
That was my first thought, too. My second thought, after reading TFA, was that this guy has slightly modified the basic design of an inkjet printer and figured out a way to avoid having his business cut into by refill vendors.
Okay, so it won't be solved by someone in their garage safely or legally, but what else is new?
...and I think it's "asshole". Wow, what a jerk.
That said, this is the sort of situation that inevitably arises when violating the law. If you steal cars, and someone steals your stolen goods -- or tries to extort protection money from you, who are you going to call? A considerable proportion of organized crime exists because of this quandary. Ergo, my guess is that the lid was blown off this situation when the miscreant, probably carelessly, tried to lean on a student who wasn't actually pirating anything.
Five to ten inches? Thanks, but I'll pass.
Is it just me, or is there anyone else out there who wants a big tablet instead of some small, sleek, fashionable, and largely useless piece of overpriced tech trinketry? At this point, I'm about to pick up an old Thinkpad on eBay and make one myself -- and still probably come out cheaper than the latest and greatest. And no, I don't need a touch screen. I'd be perfectly content to mount a few programmable keys down one side and the Trackpoint hardware on the other. All I want to do is be able to read PDFs in color and at a reasonable scale.