The Fellowship of the Ring: Too much?
Ever read an article description and think “That is so wrong!” and then
read the article itself and find yourself agreeing? That happened to me
with this
comparison of
The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, which argues
that the long-ago space opera is the superior movie.
My first reaction was incredulous disbelief, but reading the article
I began rethinking my position. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is
a great work, but one mustn’t use the book to defend the movie of the same
title.
Taken on its own, there’s a lot in Peter Jackson’s film which doesn’t make
sense or is poorly explained. It rushes, having hundreds of pages of material
to cover, without giving its characters much time to develop personalities or
(in extreme cases) make it clear to the audience who they are. Even as important
a character as Sam Gamgee barely appears on-screen, which must make the end
of the film somewhat perplexing to newcomers. (I was only able to identify
him because I knew the story.)
Star Wars, through virtue of its simpler plot and smaller
cast, is able to tell its story and develop its characters while still having time
left for quiet bits of humor.
Thus: the unthinkable question. Would The Fellowship of the Ring
have been a better movie if Mr Jackson had cut more events and combined
more characters? Maybe. Or maybe they could have spent less time adding
computer-generated trolls and cheesy wizard fights and more time with
the characters.
(I mean, come on. The movie was great but that fight between Saruman
and Gandalf was just silly.)
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CD copy-protection irritates several
The CD copy-protection thing
just keeps adding wrinkles. Around the time I posted the previous entry,
Wesley Felter noted an article about
a question raised in Congress over
whether
copy-protection is legal.
The music industry has played the “people will copy music and not pay
for it” card before, leading to surcharges on various blank recording
media which are given to various entertainment industries to make up for
any business lost to illegal copying. What one congressman has noted is
that these surcharges are redundant if CDs
can’t be copied. I’m not terribly optimistic about whether the inquiry
will lead to anything useful for customers, but it’s gratifying to learn
that somebody in Washington is paying attention.
(I’m being terribly U.S.-centric,
aren’t I? I suppose I should be more obvious about my national context if
I want to refer to “the government” and assume people know what I’m talking
about.)
Of course, there are other rules to be broken. Kevin Marks notes that
these protection schemes may
violate the
CD specifications, which would
prevent companies using them from displaying the compact disk logo. In fact,
Philips, co-creator of the CD, has
expressed
skepticism about the protection schemes, stating that they probably
won’t work in the marketplace.
Certainly, it won’t work with customers like Mr Marks. He wrote
to Universal, asking why they were making CDs
he couldn’t play on his Macintosh, and
posted their response with his commentary.
One quote that should (but probably won’t) give Universal pause:
When I buy CDs at the moment, I look at the artists name, not the
record label. Now I’ll need to check that its not a Universal
CD, in case you
have “protected” me from listening to it. This is one way of building awareness
of the Universal brand, but probably not a useful one.
Meanwhile, forces in different industries (and different segments of the same
industries) are working to insinuate
copy-protection schemes into wireless networking protocols. (via
Doc Searls,
Kevin Marks, and
Wesley Felter)
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Domain attraction
The original idea behind the domain name system was pretty simple.
On most computer networks, machines are given names (often whimsical)
so that their human users don’t need to remember their numeric IDs.
That works fine with a single, centrally controlled network, but on the
Internet there needs to be some way of preventing two machines from
both being called “frodo” or else the computers won’t know what their
human users are talking about. (That is, more so than usual.)
The idea was to create a hierarchical naming system, where each
independent organization gets a defined section of the overall
namespace that doesn’t overlap any other organization’s. Within this
namespace, it is free to pick any name it chooses without worrying
whether it conflicts with a name chosen by a different group.
In fact, the domain name system goes further, putting different
types of organizations in disjoint sections of the namespace. These
are the top-level domains: “com” for commercial organizations,
“org” for non-profits, “edu” for 4-year colleges, “gov” for the United
States government, “mil” for the U.S.
military, “net” for network service providers, and the hundreds of
country-specific domains (“uk”, “jp”, and so forth).
An organization with a second-level domain (like “company.com”) is free
to create as many third-level names as it pleases (like “frodo.company.com”).
Another company can use the same third-level name without fear of conflict
(like “frodo.anothercompany.com”). (There’s no limit to the number of levels
one can use, but that isn’t important here.)
This started to become a problem with the popularity of the World
Wide Web, because the most common way for people to visit new sites
in the “old” days was to type in the address manually. As people started
seeing commercial applications for the web, companies scrambled to get
“good” domain names that people would be likely to visit. There were
lawsuits, speculators, squatters, all kinds of craziness.
There’s a chance that things will change. Dan Gillmor argues that
modern search
engines are reducing the need for “good” domain names. Now people looking
for Bob’s Meats can just query Google rather than try to guess whether to try
bobsmeats.com, bobs-meats.com, bob.meat.com, or some other variant. (Those
are all intended to be hypothetical, by the way. If they turn out to be real…
well, the net is vast.)
Bob Frankston has posted a
more
complete discussion of this topic, including suggestions on how to make
domain names more useful. David Weinberger, meanwhile, looks at the
social status which
might accrue to those with good domain names.
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