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Kleenex makes perfect sense when you know where came from, and yes it would inspire you to rub it on your face.

https://www.kleenex.com/FAQ.as...

You place some absorbent material over the end of the tubes and apply some extremely high voltage thru the third gate.

No. "Prior art" is a term only relevant in patent law. For example, the term "Linux" was in widespread use before it was trademarked (as was "Unix", for that matter). "Windows" has a perfectly ordinary meaning, and even a fairly specific one in computer interfaces, but it's still a valid trademark.

You can lose a trademark if it becomes an ordinary word for the product (aspirin, zipper, yo-yo, linoleum, etc). That's why Google become concerned over use of the verb "to google", and why you so often see the trademark awkwardly and ostentatiously employed as an adjective ("Kleenex(R) brand facial tissues" or "M&M(tm) brand chocolate candies".

You can trademark a common word, but if it's already the word used for the product you'll lose your trademark fast. When "Windows" replaces the term "operating system" for any and all products ("hey, take a look at this cool new Linux windows I installed on my PC") then it'll cease to be a trademark, but not otherwise.

Gearing Up For a Gaming Session
posted at 12/07/2006 10:09 PM PST
  9 Thumbs
I know I always have my usual ritual I go through before I sit down for a gaming session. Be it 1 hour or 15, I need to be prepared. It wasn't till I started hanging around more gamers, that I noticed EVERYONE has their own checklist they run through before the console is powered up. I will let you in on my ritual, and maybe you can share yours as well...

1. Food - Snacks are a MUST when gaming with me. My personal favorite has always been the Bold and Zesty Chex mix... Followed closely by Salt and Vinegar chips... MMMmmm...
[image of chex mix, with brand prominently displayed[

2. Caffeine - Any kind... Must have it! Either doing the Dew or meeting Juan Valdez for that perfect cup of coffee, There has to be caffeine around and in immediate proximity!
[image of a starbuck's brand cup of coffee, with logo prominent and a slogan (starbucks is now open in your neighborhood) in the corner]

3. Comfortable Seat - After the food and drink are covered, its off to find a nice plush palace for my ass to sit in while I am blasting away on GoW. Now, at my place, I'll kick people out of my favorite seat. At a friends place, I'll search till I find the spot and will not let it go. I'm deadly when it comes to keeping my ass comfy. I may need to get one of these...

4. Celebration Dance - Oh yes! I actually think of a new celebration dance to do each week when I totally kick someones ass on a game. Haha! I wish you guys could have seen some of the ones in the past... Good times! (Even if there is no one around, I still do it to the screen!)

Well, that about sums it up for me. After my checklist has been satisfied, its on! Turn it on and let the games begin!

Theese people knocked the snot out of Kleenax.

Well, Kleenex started up in 1924, and you have to admit that the term "Kleenex" as opposed to "facial tissue" is still in use... Band-Aid first came on the market in 1920; these days, it's rare to hear someone ask where they can find the "adhesive bandages".

So yes, anything that was the first of its kind to become popular often will stand the test of time. "Walkman" and "rollerblades" have also become popularly used to replace "portable cassette deck" and "in-line skates," but they haven't been around long enough to pass the 50-year test. Although, from what I have observed, it really depends on the level of technology with regards to how long a name sticks around. With the invention of CD's, and now mp3 players, nobody really uses the traditional Walkman anymore (although Sony has also labelled their mp3 players "Walkmans", the term still seems to apply to portable cassette players in popular jargon). Rollerblades, too, while less techy than a walkman, aren't nearly as popular as at their first inception. However, terms like Kleenex and Band-Aids stick around for a long time because they have evolved very little since the product was first marketed.

As an aside, I would personally hope that the term blogosphere does not stand the test of time. It's possibly one of the silliest terms I have ever heard. But with my luck, it will stick around forever, or perhaps be replaced by something much worse...

By your logic, then Kleenex has a monopoly on Kleenex Tissues, Clorox has a monopoly on Clorox Bleach, and Domino's has a monopoly on Domino's Pizza.

Apple is not a monopoly.

Well it is true that Red Hat has the highest market share out of all Linux servers.

According to Netcraft, most Linux servers are running Red Hat:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/07/12/sligh t_linux_market_share_loss_for_red_hat.html

The other distributions each by its own numbers do not make a difference at all!

Red Hat is single handedly the most easy to use and biggest known Linux brand name. Most of the IT people I know use Red Hat interchangably with Linux. It's like Kleenex or Aspirin Aspirin. It has become an every day household name.

(All information will be used for mailing purposes only and will not be distributed to any outside organizations. Except maybe the paramedics if your free trial gets out of hand.)

Actually, Kleenex still has a trademark. See the USPTO web site. (Also check out the Kleenex web site in contrast to the Puffs site. The Kleenex site rather prominently features the logo and circle R for Kleenex.) Other manufacturers, such as Puffs or generic brands, call their products facial tissues. I think you're right in that some people say Kleenex to mean facial tissues, but it hasn't quite reached the state of genericness.

But I think operating systems are a different question entirely, in that a user of an OS is at least slightly more sophisticated than a user of facial tissue. I think most people, even general users, realize that a Mac doesn't run Windows, even though OS X features windows on the screen.

Plus, an OS is not like Kleenex or Saran Wrap. If you ask for Kleenex, someone isn't going to say, "I only have Puffs, is that OK?" But if a lay user were to say to a Mac or Linux user, "So you are running Windows, eh?" they would be corrected pretty promptly ;-).

The morons are using a background containing solid black [lib.oh.us] when essential text on top of it is black.

Looks fine to me, but then I long ago decided that I knew my preferences better than any webmaster and forced my color scheme.

They use a number of different typefaces on pages, creating a non-uniform look, which slows down reading.

Same thing. Looks fine here.

The icons [lib.oh.us] are unintuitive or unclear. What does the icon for local history and genealogy represent? Looks like flying hot dogs to me.

I do agree, but I think that using icons on websites is just annoying anyway. I've never seen an icon at all that I think is a good idea. It's much easier to just have text links (unless you're catering to a non-English audience, perhaps, but this is a local US library). They have the text right next to each icon -- is it *that* hard to tell what's what on that page?

They link to pages that are under construction [lib.oh.us] without indicated that such is the case.

Uh..yeah? So?

From a technical standpoint (unless you have some layer of stuff that preprocesses your static pages), that's a *much* better system. If you update a page, you shouldn't track down every link to said page -- hell, they could be anywhere on the Internet.

I do agree that the fact that they used Tux on an FP site is a bit funny, but what's more likely is that the guy got all of the Tux stuff from a cheapo Web clipart collections (looking for "computer" stuff), and didn't have any idea what it meant. This isn't like the library blew zillions of dollars hiring techies...

They use ALL [lib.oh.us] CAPS [lib.oh.us] for a publication where emphasis can and should be marked in other ways.

The ALL CAPS bit is hardly that egregious. Yes, it's not the ideal mechanism, but the idea is to make a short bit of text clearly stand out and still be readable, which this successfully does. Sure, a professional publisher would get twitchy because it violates some "rules" that are reasonably-well grounded...but big deal. It does the job, which is what matters.

They use single line breaks [lib.oh.us] instead of paragraphs, which makes it very hard to read.

This is true.

It doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out that they will never keep static pages like this [lib.oh.us] updated, which will lead to large portions of the site being useless.

True enough. However, from what I can see, this is a library staff doing the work. This is not a company with a budget to hire a bunch of programmers and whatnot. I doubt anyone there has significant scripting knowledge. For the resources available, this is hardly awful.

I think the reason that I'm reluctant to criticize the site is that many sites that are considered "professional" do a far worse job than this one of holding to the spirit of HTML. They use Javascript for regular linking, they force pixel-level layout, they embed Flash bits all over. Going to this site reminded me of lots of mid-90s websites, when people still gave something of a shit about what HTML looks like. You've done a good job of finding issues with the website, and I suppose I'm a bit biased in favor of it. But even so, I wish more websites would look like this again, instead of some "professional" websites.

There's been some improvement. Designers have finally learned that websites should resize, that people don't all have Javascript/cookies/Flash on (and use fallbacks), that users are *not* going to change their resolution to view a website, that hierarchies are good, that images of text (instead of just text) are bad, that massive amounts of tables with tons of links are bad...when the initial move away from simple, HTML-2.0-ish sites started, I wasn't that thrilled, but it's started to come back around.

Som examples of sites that I really don't like (though they're considered "professional" and major sites):

ICQ. There's a lot of, uh, *stuff* on the main page. This "massive amounts of stuff on the main page" motif has survived multiple redesigns.

HotBot. Lots of stuff, ugly color scheme (which appeared after the Wired purchase of HotBot).

Sony. Nobody likes rollover menus.

RCA. Rollover menus from hell.

Kraft. Nonresizeable (and wide), rather bizarre news format (which also limits them to four news items).

BIC (Yeah, the guys that make pens). All the effort of rendering fonts into an image so that you can make a website look unreadable.

Kleenex. When I go here, I want to find out how much lotion is in a given tissue, not look at a bunch of Flash crap.

So here's why I like their website. It renders cleanly in older and text-based browsers. It's fast and small. No Javascript or pop-up menus are present. It doesn't tell you to change your resolution. It provides actual email links (i.e. you don't have to go through a form). It's fairly easy to find what you want, and the immediately useful information (library hours, telephone numbers) are right on the front page.

There are, as you've found, some issues. But I'd far rather read their website than any of the big, "professional", heavily-funded websites that I listed above.

Frankly, the only popular website that I really think has good design any more is Google, which has a team that's fanatically committed to a spartan, light interface. Everyone I talked to said that it looked out of date or old when everyone else was going bigger, flashier, and more bitmapped...and now, look who's on top. :-) People *like* simple, fast web pages, not big monstrosities.

It's true that the guy didn't say Flash, so I probably misread it. I just see the one website in a long time that gets back to the basics, and I see tons of people slamming it...it comes off wrong.

Lemme check out your own website...I'm guessing that we'd differ on some of the things you did as well.

You use frames -- I firmly feel that frames are a bad idea, and after a four year love-hate relationship (i.e. designers loved frames, viewers hated them), they pretty much went away. As such, you have to slap a "this webpage is better with browsers X, Y, and Z at the bottom of your page.

You complained about hard to read icons, yet your own site has a block of six quite unidentifiable icons. Sure, you can run the mouse over them to get the text, but then they partly cover up neighboring icons. So I pretty much end up moving the mouse over an icon, moving it away, moving it onto another one...repeat six times *just* to find out what the links on your site are.

You apparently did the ford.se site, according to your CV. This is Flash only.

You use Javascript for normal links

Your poetry page has a miniscule frame that makes it extremely difficult to read any text.

On the upsite, your site *is* accessable with older browsers, even if it's a little annoying to click through frame-related links.

Everyone has the elements that they find valuable in a website. I rather like theirs. :-)

No Kleenex for you!

Seriously, though, I don't think that's really true. Xerox similar brand name power. I think the important thing is that brand name!=profit. Xerox has struggled mightily, and Tivo might very well do the same (if we are to believe that one-sided article).

Where you been, son? Mac OS X was released over a year ago!

Yes, but Mac® OS X is not a UNIX® brand system. FreeBSD's not UNIX. NetBSD's not UNIX. GNU's not UNIX. (This trademark confusion almost makes me want to put together a distribution of GNU/Linux software and call it KLEENIX.)

OK, now what UNIX® system has a GUI as pretty as Mac OS X's?

In fact, Kimberly-Clark does call their product tissues. They're "Kleenex Brand Tissues;" it says so right on their web site. SC Johnson Wax calls their product line "Windex Glass and Surface Cleaners." Just look at their domain name - www.windexglasscleaner.com.

However, that's exactly the point. Adobe's product is called "Adobe Illustrator." That's even how they refer to it themselves. Adobe is like a brand, Illustrator is like a generic product name (an illustration program).

Adobe : Illustrator :: Kleenex : Tissues

A product called KAdobe could clearly be confused with something from Adobe. But if I sold Mistered's Tissues, Kimberly-Clark surely wouldn't care.

Ok, ok, in general when people say "illustrator" when they're talking about computer software, they mean Adobe Illustrator. I just wanted to point out that Kleenex and Windex both do have a common product name associated with them, but it's just not in common use. Also it pisses me off that Adobe or their representative would send a nastygram with a demand for $$$ right off the bat. If I was the author and Adobe said "we think KIllustrator is going to confuse people, do you think you could pick another name?" I'd say sure. However, tell me to destroy it and pay your legal costs, and I'd tell them where to go.

I'm looking at a pornwebsite, and get all these silly links on sex ed, breastcancer and venereal diseases.

It's rare that you see someone giving up rather than sueing

We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.

I know: a stack of those brown envelopes that look all official like they're from a government agency, but when you open them up - just a sales pitch?