Slashback: Bnetd, Salmon, Towers 295
All I'm certain of is my true love's hair. CompaniaHill writes: "As previously reported on /., first they though it was turquoise. Then they found an error in their early calculations, and announced it was really beige. But doubts lingered, and color experts pointed out that an objective color as viewed from the theoretical blackness of space would appear different when viewed on Earth in typical daylight. So adjustments were made, and calculations were revised and rechecked by color scientists Michael Brill of McClendon Automation Inc. and Mark Fairchild of the Munsell Color Science Laboratories. And now, at last, Ivan Baldry and Karl Glazebrook, astronomers at Johns Hopkins University, using spectral data from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, have announced the final result: The universe is decidedly salmon. Really."
The milestones are getting closer together. Dare Obasanjo writes: "Xindice (http://xml.apache.org/xindice), the Apache native XML database has finally reached version 1.0. Xindice used to be called dbXML and was mentioned in my article on XML and databases."
Three From the Courts TheFrood writes: "It looks as though the battle between Blizzard and bnetd (as reported in previous stories here(1), here(2), and here(3))is heating up. Vivendi has sent another letter to the EFF, which has wasted no time responding."
ElitusPrime writes with an update in the strange case of Ken Hamidi, the Intel employee whose mass-mail to Intel employees brought charges of trespassing. Now the California Supreme Court may take another look at the case. Says ElitusPrime: "If this guy is put in jail, I can think of more then a few other spammers that need to go up the creek with him..."
In a very different case, pagan26 writes: "It seem that DMCA will have its day in court. With ElmcoSoft."
Well, at least you can trust their word, right? Masem writes: "According to MSNBC, the developers of the spyware program WinWhatWhere will no longer have their install program trample the bits of anti-spyware programs, after word broke that this behavior was occurring. However, no word has been made by a similar spyware program developed by SpectreSoft that does similar damage."
I will fork out to see this, happily. Pingsmoth writes "It looks like the faithful fans of Peter Jackson and Tolkien will be able to catch a glimpse of The Two Towers this Saturday. Lordoftherings.net is reporting, through a video of Peter Jackson, that a preview (read: not a trailer) of The Two Towers will be shown in theatres this Saturday, presumably attached to The Fellowship of the Ring. Maybe at the end? At any rate, it looks like I'll be seeing the film at least seven times now, and it's a good thing I got a morning shift tomorrow." For a more colorful description of this 4-minute tease, check out Ain't it Cool News' version.
Ken Hamidi is not an ordinary spammer (Score:4, Insightful)
Commercial speech deservces less protection than non-commercial speech. In addition, complaints about employment practices may come under protection by the ADA, FMLA, Title VII, and the NLRA [nlrb.gov].
But, this intersect with the rights of Intel to have control over their mail servers. Maybe the lawmakers should look at this case when drafting anti-spam statutes.
teasers, previews, trailers (Score:3, Insightful)
I would think that this is a way to get people to see movies repeatedly in the theater at the inflated price... your average geek can see LOTR on some pirated version by now, so all the replay value has to be added via these teasers n'previews.
You are drooling because of a very short piece of film, and you are allowing yourself to be marketed to. The fansites could be very useful centers of discussion and analysis, if they weren't so breathlessly following announcements of a teaser of a trailer.
Re:DMCA in action (Score:5, Insightful)
You're either a troll, or someone incredibly ignorant. Did it occur to you that Vivendi might just be firing off BULLSHIT in their letters? Reading a legal document from the bad guy isn't going to give you an accurate profile of the entirety of the situation. Hence, your ignorance.
Bnetd wasn't created to pirate Blizzard games any more than DeCSS was created to pirate DVDs. It was created so people playing Blizzard games could have multiplayer games on local LANs without having to rely on battle.net.
Blizzard is just using the lack of CD key authentication as a reason to kill the project. Bnetd asked Blizzard to provide a means to authenticate CD keys, and Blizzard refused. So what happens? Bnetd functions happily without it.
They tried to take their ball and run home, but they made their OWN ball. Boo hoo for Blizzard.
Re:Ken Hamidi is not an ordinary spammer (Score:1, Insightful)
A private company has a right to keep protesters off its own property, but not off the sidewalk. Likewise, a company has the right to keep protesters off its email servers, but not to kick them off the Internet.
Disclaimer: I work at Intel and I LIKE it here.
Re:with apologies to Douglas Adams... (Score:4, Insightful)
Russ %-)
Gheez.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:LOTR (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, it's a good movie in its own right; millions who have never read the books saw it and enjoyed it as a movie. Obviously Peter Jackson is doing something right.
Complaining about what was left out - especially Tom Bombadil or the Barrow Downs - is just plain silly. There is no way Jackson - or anyone - could have included that material without totally bogging the storyline down and ruining the movie. It had to go.
Similarly, the other changes were necessary to make the story flow as a movie script. There is no way of avoiding these necessary changes.
I suggest you do what I did: see the movie again. I enjoyed it the first time, but spent too much time obsessing over every little thing that was changed. By the second and third viewing I was simply enjoying the movie, and not worrying about the changes.
Re:LOTR (Score:2, Insightful)
anyways...
He hardly has time to remain 100% true to the story. Which is basically an unachievable goal. I can't think of any case where that has happened. It might be close but there are ALWAYS differences. That is notwithstanding poor casting, which IMO, did not happen in FOTR.
Lord of the Rings is about half a million words. There is no conceivable way that even with selective edits and ellipsis that that big of a work can be compressed accurately into 9-10 hours of screenplay (for all three parts of the story). The BBC's radio version was very near 13 hours.
Again other mitigating circumstances appear. While yourself, most of the people here, and I can vividly recall almost every scene and the order that each character is introduced the vast majority of the public cannot. In fact, this might be their introduction to it. Thus the story had to have more edits (other than those due to time constraints).
With the fact that it could not replicate every detail or even attempt to... It was still superb. It was epic; it was fun; it was well acted... It did indeed capture the essence of the original work.
If you looked closely you could see several details of exactly how well crafted it was. The broaches given to the company appeared after visiting Galadriel -- time constraints didn't allow that story to be told. But the items themselves WERE there. There are several similar circumstances were time would not allow everything to be told, but they still happened.
Take it as it was offered - A standalone work that did well to represent the original and brought more people into the realm of Middle-Earth
Re:Blizzard doesn't have a leg to stand on. (Score:3, Insightful)
What I'd LIKE to point out to them is that there are several solutions (hello! math!) where they can guarantee that only legal copies are being used on battle.net, and provide an easy way for bnetd to prevent illegal copies there as well.
(Someone correct me if I'm wrong. I'm aware hackers could work around this, but it would take a lot of effort, and they'd have to hack both bnetd and their own client, so then it's not so easy)
You could easily give the CD-KEY to a blizzard keychecking server, which then not only figures out if the key is correct, but then generates a unique number, which, when hashed together with the original CD-KEY on the client, activates the product. Blizzard then forwards the result back to the bnetd server, and the bnetd server passes it back to the client. If it's incorrect, the client doesn't run (here's the key - the CLIENT doesn't run, not the server doesn't allow the client. The DMCA prevents you from bypassing something designed to prevent CLIENT copying, on the CLIENT).
You could hack around this, by altering both the bnetd server, and hacking the client to do it as well, but that's complicated and then Blizzard could go after people who are distributing the hacks that do that, rather than bnetd, because THAT would be clearly illegal.
This is better than a simple blind "accept/reject" system because it requires that any battle.net server has to communicate with Blizzard (or figure out the algorithm behind the Battle.net check/second key generation, which can be made quite difficult) and Blizzard guarantees that things are OK.
Re:Blizzard doesn't have a leg to stand on. (Score:2, Insightful)
First, it wouldn't be incredibly hard to develop a method by which one found a bunch of valid keys by spamming the keyserver.
Second, if you're going to say that the server itself never knows that the key going through it is actually valid, you don't need to hack the bnetd server, just the client. If the bnetd server knows if it's correct or not, then (since this is an OSS product, it's made easier) one could make their server dump all keys that came up valid to a file, and thereby harvest many many keys.
And third, as has already been pointed out, they don't care about piracy, they want to charge for b.net access. The piracy slant is a coverup.
Trespassing (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonsense. (Score:4, Insightful)
Idiot.
TheFrood
Re:preview vs trailer (Score:2, Insightful)
first you say Trailers have always been shown before the film
then later you quote
The coming attractions reel would be spliced onto the end of the last reel of the movie, hence trailer. From the perspective of the audience member who arrived on time or a little early, the coming attractions would appear before the feature, even though technically it was at the end.
So basically, trailers used to be at the end(but some people didn't realize it), and now they are at the beginning, which is what they parent post was saying.
Re:Trespassing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:LOTR (Score:1, Insightful)
Read before replying. What he actually said was:
"Once he decided to remove Tom Bombadil/The Barrow Downs he easily had enough time to remain true to the story, and so many of his alterations took longer to correct later on in the story than he would have ever have saved if he'd just left it be."
> Similarly, the other changes were necessary to make the story flow as a movie script. There is no way of avoiding these necessary changes.
The screenwriters cut Tom for time. Fine. BBC Radio did the same thing. However, PJ then spends 20 minutes on every fight scene, and very little time on dialogue after they leave Hobbiton. The fight scenes don't flow worth a damn, and take time away from actual story and character development. I loved the books, but the movie fell way short of expectation. They miss key themes and key scenes. They change events around for no useful reason.
The acting and directing were good, but that script just sucked. Philippa Boyens was a first-time screenwriter who spewed out nonsense like this:
"For example, in the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, there are
four Hobbits who go on a journey," Boyens says. "If you were sitting
down quite callously just to make a screenplay, you wouldn't
necessarily want to use all four characters. But I thought it was
important to have all four Hobbits in the fellowship, so we kept them
in. That's just part of the job, making creative decisions and dealing
with details."
Uh, yeah, Tolkien didn't know what he was doing. But she's the expert?
Merry and Pippin are reduced to comic relief and bonehead mistakes. Frodo is saved by Arwen, who gets the drop on Aragorn (the scared) while Boromir is a sensitive guy who cries when Gandalf LETS GO of the bridge. Gimli doesn't want to be tossed.
Frodo never stands up to the Riders at the Ford. Pippin does not, of his own free will, drop a stone down the well in Moria -- it's an accident! This incident, along with the Palantir, were actually important choices Pippin makes. Everyone at the Council is an expert on the Ring. Sauron is defeated by having his fingers sliced off -- instead of being defeated by the Last Alliance of Elves and Men with their two leaders perishing even as they overthrow Sauron and then Isildur taking the Ring from Sauron's lifeless body. Lothlorien is pretty run-down (it should have no blemish at all). Haldir is a pasty fat Elf. Arwen is a Level 18 Magic-User. She also becomes mortal after PRAYING, instead of by her choice to remain in Middle-Earth after the end of the Third Age. This was done to give Frodo an Elf-infusion so he wouldn't kick off. However, Hobbits are SUPPOSED to be tough in the fibre, Frodo especially, that's why they can resist the Ring. Aragorn sends Frodo away while Merry and Pippin distract the Orcs. Sam is never given a chance to FIGURE THINGS OUT, yet another pivotal scene in the book. Saruman is MIND-CONTROLLED by Sauron, he doesn't choose his own path, either!
It goes on and on. Face it, it IS possible to do a better job of FOTR in 3 hours. You just spend less time on cave trolls, orcs, etc. getting dismembered. Then you can fit more story in. It was ridiculous how in many scenes they changed details for no apparent reason. They take more time with their own additions than with the original story.
The best that can be said about the movie is "The film and the book share many similarities".