Brent’s Thoughts

I have debated over how to write this review for close to two days now and I haven’t gotten any closer to a solution so here is my thoughts on it rate it how you will and take from it what you will.

First, if have never read they original books then chances are that you are gonna love this movie. It is action packed, has a love story, and has a great script and dialog. Got see it now… no I mean now… go … shoo…

If you have read the book, but not recently and don’t have a very good recollection of what happened in them something along the lines of this: “There was some chasing and Tree people, they attacked a tower and there was a big fight at a castle. Frodo hooked up with Gollum and… um…they did some shit.” Then you sort of fall into the first category and you should head out there to see it as well. Make sure you don’t pick up the book or anything on your way out though.

If you have read the book and know what goes on in it you can tell me how long the entmoot lasted and what the result is then most likely this movie is going to piss you off. Don’t read to much into that, it is a great movie, but it runs along the lines of the 2001/2010 series of movies. They are sort of loosely based on the books as is this movie. I don’t know what the director has against the Stewards of Gondor, but he persists in both movies to make them evil and obsessed with the ring, while in the books that isn’t the case at all. He also completely turns around the Ents and their parts in it all and I have no fucking idea why. It almost makes you wonder if someone got to his copy of the books and edited to fit their view of them or something. He adds a lot of Gollum that wasn’t there and takes out a lot of the Ents and Riders that should. I have no idea where the Warg battle came from or why Strider fell. Maybe he had the cliff notes or something. Watching the movie I can tell you that in the second release of this movie one of the added scenes will be the origin or Gollum, since it is painfully obvious that it was supposed to be in there (Hell it is even shown in the “Two Towers a visual reference” book the they are selling. Elves (besides Leoglas) at the battle of helm’s deep…WTF? The whole movie is different from the book and to someone that has just read the book it is a white hot shard in your brain how different the story is and how much it changes everything about all the characters. If they are publishing books based on this movie then I fear that there will be people pick them up and think that is how the actual books are written and don’t think that is a very good thing. IMO There should be a disclaimer that says that the movies are an adaptation and do not follow the actual books. That is how different this movie is from the book.

Effects are good an I wish I had time to tell you how they did the battle at helm’s deep in the computers. In short it is easiest to say that every Orc, Elf and human had its own AI and that it fought its own battle with every other enemy. Gollum’s stuff is good, though at some points his screeching can get pretty annoying.

Like I said it is a good movie, but a bad adaptation.

Recently, there have been a group of people predicting that MS would start selling Linux versions of its software in the future. This prompted a lot of talk on slashdot and a few of my friends over at the lovely company of AFNI, started tossing around the idea. Since it seems that people are in the mood to believe guesses, I would like to take this moment and my space on the web to tell you, MS will not start selling Linux products for any kind of monetary gains. They might sell them for other reasons, try to disprove monopolist ideas, draw Linux users to Windows, or to destroy the space-time continuum, but they aren’t going to sell them for a direct profit. There is no way that MS could make a profit on selling apps for Linux. Follows are reasons why:

There are two types of apps MS could sell for Linux, desktop and server. Lets break each up for a closer look, since they have different fundamental reasons.

Desktop: It is pretty much a given that right now MS holds the desktop market in a stranglehold, that, despite the recent DOJ ruling, they have no reason to give up. They are losing some people to Linux on the desktop but a good percentage of Linux users are stuck using Windows at work and/or home, because they have to have the Office apps to work with the business. In the end it is difficult to convince a “suit” that OpenOffice or StarOffice will work flawlessly with other MS Office users. It is equally hard to convince them to give up the effects of Outlook for meetings and such, or even to purchase Ximian Connector to enable Evolution to do the deal. So they run Windows and their company (or them) pays for the license to MS. So what happens if MS makes Office for Linux? All the geeks and techs that want to can now switch to Linux and their companies can stop paying for Windows licenses. The only way MS can keep their revenues the same is to tack the cost of a Windows license into the purchase price of Office for Linux. If that is done then there is no reason for people to purchase Office for Linux from a company standpoint since it will cost the same to have their workers use Windows. Yeah they get the added stability of Linux, but most suits aren’t going to see that.

Server: Right now, according to all the surveys, this is where Windows is really starting to lose its foothold to Linux. Linux is eating up not only Windows server share but also other Unix style systems. If that is the case then why would anyone want to have MS stuff on Linux? Right now it seems that people are perfectly happy to switch out to Linux and what it has to offer, so why do they need the Windows server stuff at all? Well people like to use what they are familiar with and for a lot of server admins that is Windows. So perhaps they might take a robust server off of their Linux machine and install IIS with all of its security issues and problems, or perhaps exchange is really what they want and it will get installed on a Redhat box, but wait we forgot one important thing… MS again has no reason to make these products. Right now if you want/have to use exchange you have to not only purchase Exchange Server 2000 (or XP or .net or whatever), but you also have to purchase a Server License and Client Access Licenses for every computer that will connect to that machine. And that is the same for every Windows Server. No matter if it is filesharing, print sharing, domain controller, or proxy. If you know can just put one Windows thing on a Linux box, do you then have to buy CALs? It is obvious you don’t have to buy a server license. If you put this stuff on a Linux machine it is awfully easy for you to just turn on SAMBA sharing and not pay the CALs for another Windows box to be your fileserver. See by enabling people to pick what OS they run for these Windows servers they are enabling people to avoid paying them money that they would normally get. People run exchange for its groupware effects, therefore they pay MS for all the Windows stuff mentioned earlier. If they can run that on Linux and get all the groupware effects without paying all the MS stuff, they have little reason to pay it and MS loses money. Therefore MS has little reason to make it.

Ok first thing first. Two cool points to anyone that comes up with the song that snippet is from.

Now on with the show….

Ahhh a four day weekend. Seems to be the first in a long time, and perhaps the most invigorating in a while as well. Wednesday night was dinner of Chicken and Rice with the family (including Pauline). One of my favorites only made better by the attendance of P. Thursday we awoke at 5 and began a trip to Indiana. Despite all the hoopla traffic was decent and I think I was a fairly nice ride. I got through some more of the Lord of the Rings (which I am re-reading, Damn Movies!!!) on the way there. We had Thanksgiving with Grandma, which was awesome. Turkey, ham, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, baked beans, turkey and noodles, salad, rasberry cobbler, stawberry shortcake, and pecan pie were all served there. Though I felt full several times it was all just to good to stop eating. We played some games of aggrevation and had a good time. The next morning we headed to Nana’s and spent some time with her. We then headed back and got home about 8:30 on Friday.

After some discussion with Lamar and Pauline it was decided that we would head to Nashville early on Saturday. It was mainly to go to a computer show that was going on there but P saw it as a chance to get to the mall in Nashville as well. We spent a fair amount of time at the computer show with Lamar and his friends looking at stuff. There was a lot of stuff there that would be cool to have, but the fact that I am somewhat without a project, coupled with having spent all my cash on brakes for my car, all I came home with was a microATX size case to build my Tivo box out of. We then headed over to Consumer Depot (the BigLots of computers) where they had a docking station for Gears that I promptly forgot to pickup.

Lamar headed back to BG and P and I headed to Rivergate Mall. We spent about an equal amount of time there and P got lots of chances to look at the stuff that she wanted. We came back to BG around 5 and headed to O’Charley’s where we were told that there was about a 25 minute wait. An hour and 20 minutes later, we got seated. P mentioned this to the waiter and the gave us free apetizers, dessert and our sweet tea, leaving us to only pay for the one entree, which we actually split. I left the waiter a fairly nice tip to thank him for working on getting all of that free.

Today was a day of rest that let me work on the beginning of learning how to make a Tivo box and just general testing of various junk. I feel rested and well, though as I write this I feel a mild headache working in the background that I am wondering about.