So what? Apple's device, whatever they're calling it this week, is a multi-touch surface. You can copy the image, but it can't be manipulated like Apple's interface on single-touch devices.
Multi-touch is going to be a big deal. Being able to grab two things and manipulate them at the same time is a huge win. It's the next step beyond the object-verb and verb-object GUI approaches.
I'm responsible for some of this. Here's the first ragdoll falling downstairs, from 1997. Yes, that's how that cliche started. I'd written the first ragdoll system that really worked right, so it was time to make demos. The first try had six-legged bugs dropping through a funnel, which is tough technically but not very interesting. Then there was the big mecha toss, to show that we did heavy objects right. (Most game physics systems still get that wrong. The physically animated objects all move like they're very light. We call this the "boink problem". There's a cube/square law in contact handling that's not captured by the impulse/constraint systems.) So I was looking for a hard case that exercised the system and was way beyond what anybody else could do back then. The
fall down a circular staircase was it. It's a tough multiple-collisions problem with friction against multiple surfaces, and contact computed against the polygonal geometry, not some oversimplified model. Every step and every stair railing is an individual object; the feet can slip through the space between the railings.
After we did that, everybody did ragdolls falling downstairs. It got to be a cliche, like caustics on shiny logos. One vendor in the early 2000s had a waterfall of bodies falling downstairs as a GDC demo.
Our original plan was that this was a step to physically-based character animation, where the chararacters really balanced and moved because their feet had friction with the ground. My eventual goal was real martial arts moves, where the throws really were throws.
But the industry went off in a different direction - motion capture with interpolation.
This provides a reasonably good look without having to solve all the control problems of robotics. The companies trying to solve the hard problem went bust, even after some systems that worked, so that didn't seem to be a direction worth pursuing.
So what did we get from game physics engines? Dead bodies. As CPUs got faster and the algorithms improved, lots of dead bodies. Then, "infinitely destructible environments".
Disappointing.
Re:Science is prediction, not explaination
on
The Trouble with Physics
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think it's more about us as human beings reaching our "biological" limit on how much we can understand the nature of universe.
No, that's not it. The problem is a lack of experimental data. We don't have the capability to conduct experiments at the scale at which superstrings are hypothesized to exist. But maybe somebody will find a way to do that. After all, there was a time when it was considered hopeless to ever take a picture of an atom.
There's still the basic problem that general relativity and quantum mechanics are inconsistent. Until that's resolved, it's clear that there's some basic physics we don't understand yet. String theory was developed to try to resolve that issue.
"Science is prediction, not explanation" - Fred Hoyle
The serious problem with string theory is that it doesn't yield falsifiable predictions. Theories which don't yield falsifiable predictions are not useful - you can't check them by experiment, you can't effectively choose between them, and you can't develop engineering based on them.
This matters. From subatomic physics we got nuclear power. From quantum electrodynamics we got semiconductors and lasers. From string theory we got nothing. If you can't make predictions, you can't do engineering design.
With string theory, you can create pretty mathematical objects, but it's not clear that there's any connection to the real world. Smolin says that's bad physics, and he's probably right.
There's real progress in physics, but it's mostly at the low-energy, low temperature end. Seemingly impossible objects like Bose-Einstein condensates and materials with negative indices of refraction have both been demonstrated. Quantum computing is hard to do, but real. That's progress.
But the high energy physicists and the cosmologists have been stuck for a while.
It's possible for an entire field to take a wrong turn like this. Artificial intelligence did, back in the 1980s, when the expert systems people were claiming that strong AI was just around the corner. Then came the "AI winter". Twenty years later, AI is moving again, but with new approaches (more statistics, less formal logic) and new people.
This is a unionized job. So there's a union contract in effect.
There's no intellectual property clause in that union contract. But there's an overtime clause, which provides for time and a half for overtime and includes the line "Implementation of alternative work patterns or any variation
thereof shall be by mutual agreement between the Employer and the Union." That says "Employer and the Union", not "Employer and the Employee", as is standard in labor contracts. Any special deals on hours have to be done through the union. This prevents the employer from pressuring employees individually. Any special arrangements about working at home have to be cleared with the union, and, of course, that's paid time.
"Work for Hire" is a very explicit thing in a union job. The company does not own your life outside work.
Across the street from the Apple store in Palo Alto, we have the Helio store. Helio "don't call it a phone" is another integrated communicator device, and may be cooler than the iPhone. Not only does it have music and video, but it has direct Myspace integration. There's "Buddy Beacon"; if you're not in "cloaking mode", your position shows on your friends' maps. These are integrated, of course. Social networking is now location-aware.
The iPhone is mostly about content delivery, "Web 1.0" stuff. Helio is more about social networking, "Web 2.0" stuff.
Get an iPhone, get entertained. Get a Helio, get laid.
Since there's no public OID list for these certificates, I've added one to the Wikipedia entry for Extended Validation Certificates. Entrust, Verisign, and Comodo are filled in; if you can find the documented values for other vendors, please add them. Thanks.
Registration Number:
Certificate Field: Subject:serialNumber (OID 2.5.4.5)
Required/Optional: Required
Contents: This field MUST contain the unique Registration Number assigned
to the Subject by the Incorporating Agency in its Jurisdiction of Incorporation
(for Private Organization Subjects only).
So when you go to validate the certificate against incorporation records, it bounces.
The whole point of Extended Validation certificates was that the organization was supposed to be identified unambiguously. Earlier versions of the spec required a full physical address of the business, but the CA forum backed off, and now companies can get by with just giving city and state, which may not be unique.
OK, here's Entrust's SSL certificate. Let's see what we've got.
Domain: www.entrust.com
Server identity:
CN = www.entrust.com serialNumber = DOC:19961216 OU = it O = Entrust Inc jurisdictionOfIncorporationStateOrProvinceName = MD jurisdictionOfIncorporationCountryName = US L = Ottawa ST = Ontario C = CA Issuer identity:
CN = Entrust Certification Authority - L1A OU = (c) 2006 Entrust, Inc. OU = www.entrust.net/CPS is incorporated by reference OU = CPS CONTAINS IMPORTANT LIMITATIONS OF WARRANTIES AND LIABILITY OU = AND ADDITIONAL TERMS GOVERNING USE AND RELIANCE O = Entrust, Inc. C = US Certificate has 10 extensions.
Extension #0: keyUsage = Digital Signature, Key Encipherment
Extension #1: privateKeyUsagePeriod = Not Before: Jan 12 13:57:28 2007 GMT, Not After: Jan 12 14:17:41 2009 GMT
Extension #2: extendedKeyUsage = TLS Web Server Authentication, TLS Web Client Authentication
Extension #5: certificatePolicies = Policy: 2.16.840.1.114028.10.1.2
CPS: http://www.entrust.net/cps
User Notice:
Explicit Text: The Entrust SSL Web Server Certification Practice Statement (CPS) available at www.entrust.net/cps is hereby inc
orporated into your use or reliance on this Certificate. This CPS contains limitations on warranties and liabilities. Copyright (c)
2002 Entrust Limited
How do you tell this is an Extended Validation certificate? That's not in the CA Browser Forum's standard. It's dependent on the certificate issuer.
It's documented, on Entrust's web site
"Each EV SSL Certificate issued by the Entrust EV SSL CA to a Subscriber contains an Object Identifier (OID) defined by the Entrust EV SSL CA in the certificate's certificatePolicies extension... which
by pre-agreement with Application Software Vendors, marks the certificate as being an EV SSL Certificate.
The following OID has been registered by the Entrust EV SSL CA for inclusion in EV SSL Certificates:
2.16.840.1.114028.10.1.2"
That OID number appears in the middle of a comment in the certificatePolicies extension. So, for each issuer, you have to look for something different.
The certificate checker has to be really careful. To verify that a certificate is an Extended Validation certificate, it's not enough to find that OID. You have to make sure that the certificate was issued by the issuer entitled to use that OID. Otherwise, it's easy to forge these certificates.
But if you're too thorough in the checking, the certificate bounces.
The whole point of an Extended Validation certificate is to validate the company's identity. So we have the new fields "serialNumber", "jurisdictionOfIncorporationStateOrProvinceName", and "jurisdictionOfIncorporationCo
This is just some bloggers, not a legal opinion, even if it's from a lawyer.
Here's a demonstration that Cisco was continuously using the trademark: the support web site for the iPhone, as archived at archive.org. "With InfoGear recently being acquired by Cisco Systems, there is currently no change to your iPhone coverage. We hope you continue to enjoy using your iPhone, and we thank you for your business. So, even if Cisco wasn't selling new units, they were still supporting the old ones. That page has been archived every year since 2000, so that's a form of continuous use.
There's an active user base. The University of Florida went iPhone. There's a description of their configuration here. They have a VoIP infrastructure with three Cisco CallManagers, two Cisco 6608 VoIP gateways, a Cisco Unity voice mail system, and many Cisco IP telephones, some of which are iPhone units, on desktops. The University of Pennsylvania also went iPhone. There are probably corporate installations too, but they tend not to publish their phone instructions on the public web. Those installations have to be supported, which is something Cisco does, and gets paid for. Cisco is in the network infrastructure business, after all.
As long as there's support, and support-related revenue, the trademark is clearly in use.
Fundamentally we wanted an open approach. We hoped our products could interoperate in the future. In our view, the network provides the basis to make this happen--it provides the foundation of innovation that allows converged devices to deliver the services that consumers want. Our goal was to take that to the next level by facilitating collaboration with Apple. And we wanted to make sure to differentiate the brands in a way that could work for both companies and not confuse people, since our products combine both web access and voice telephony. That's it. Openness and clarity. - Cisco's general counsel.
This suit is backwards. SCO brought this suit, yet they want to stall. Usually, the plaintiff wants to push the case forward, and the defense wants to stall. The system is set up so that the plaintiff pushes the case forward, which is why this is dragging on.
Bear in mind that SCO's stalling isn't a problem for IBM. Is IBM losing customers over this? No. Is it costing IBM significant amounts of money? No. (IBM total revenue for 1995: $91 billion. Gross profit: $37 billion). Can SCO afford to keep this up much longer? No. Is SCO likely to win in the end? No. Not a problem.
What's actually happening is that the summary judgment motions by IBM are about to be decided. SCO is desperately trying to distract attention from that, but that's where the real action is.
It looks impressive, but you can't get to orbit that way.
Single stage to orbit craft have to be somewhere above 97% fuel, with the best chemical fuels possible. People have tried to build SSTO craft, Rotary Rocket being a good example, but when your weight budget is that tight, it's next to impossible, and even if it works, the payloads are dinky.
Two stages work. The Shuttle is two stages; the solid boosters and the external tank are dropped off. To get to orbit on chemical fuels and have any useful payload, you have to dump some mass during lift. Even with two stages, the weight reduction efforts result in fragile spacecraft.
Now if we had nuclear rockets, we could get somewhere.
Cisco clearly owns the trademarked name, and in the phone category. And they've owned it sine long before the iPod, a name registered only in 2001. And they're using it. Sooner or later, probably sooner, Apple will have to pay money to Cisco. Lots of money.
Word Mark: IPHONE Category:
Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: computer hardware and software for providing integrated telephone communication with computerized global information networks.
FIRST USE: 1997-06-06. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 1997-06-06
Registration Number: 2293011
Registration Date: November 16, 1999
REGISTRANT: INFOGEAR TECHNOLOGY CORPORATION CORPORATION CALIFORNIA 1775 WOODSIDE ROAD REDWOOD CITY CALIFORNIA 94061
LAST LISTED OWNER: CISCO TECNOLOGY, INC. CORPORATION CALIFORNIA 170 WEST TASMAN SAN JOSE CALIFORNIA 95134
Putting in heating, ventilating, and air conditioning will be a tough job. I know someone who converted an old stone barn, and that was a major project, even with substantial spending.
Do you notice something? Google is amongst the top places when it comes to benefits, and they're also one of the top players when it comes to productivity. Could it be that satisfied workers are productive workers? Even if they put 20% of their time into private projects?
That's more the nature of the business. They don't make anything physical, and they provide very little customer service.
All of Google's businesses other than search generate little if any revenue. Really, stuff like Google's office systems exist to push back against Microsoft, not because running a word processor in the browser is a good idea.
Software development isn't really very hard today. At least not at the level at which 90% of programmers work. The tools mostly work, many of the languages are quite forgiving, there are plenty of books, you can get help from Google, and much code can be downloaded.
Yes, there are people doing hard stuff - real time control, database internals, game physics, stuff like that. But ordinary web programming is almost a no-brainer today. Look at the people doing it.
And if you need to do something hard, it's amazing how much one person can get done today. It's a great time to be a serious programmer.
There are design problems, yes. Microsoft's world is overly complex because they need it to be complex; if it were straightforward, nobody would need Microsoft. The Linux/Unix world is overly complicated because it has too much legacy dating back to the 1970s. The CSS world is overly complicated because the approach to page layout was botched. (Layout is a constraint problem, but isn't being approached as one.)
What we do have is too much tolerance for the mess at the bottom. What we need is, say, a "Just Say No to Bad Software" from Fortune 1000 CIOs. As in "We're not buying Vista until this list of problems is dealt with".
I don't see this as an "all in one" device. It's really just a TV set for today.
Inputs are an Internet connection, a cable TV connection, a 5.25" drive for optical media, and a remote control. Outputs are a screen and speakers. You can select various sources and view them. No big deal.
If it weren't for digital rights management, this would be straightforward. But the DRM on the cable signals, the streaming media, and the discs complicates the problem.
We don't need more TLDs. We need fewer of them. ".info", ".aero", and ".museum" should be retired due to lack of interest. (The entire list of.museum domains appears on this page.)
The ".biz" TLD should be retired as a slum-clearance project.
Those half-dead TLDs should be put on maintenance level support - no new registrations, and old ones expire in two years.
So how can Tesla, a startup company with little manufacturing and car experience relative to GM, build an electric car that can make it 200 miles on a charge
The Tesla's sticker price of $92,500 makes it possible.
We're making progress, though. The only real remaining problem with high performance electric cars is battery cost. The necessary energy density is available if you pay enough.
First, already this is the top story on MediaPost, a web site for ad buyers. This is very bad for a radio station.
Then their big mistake: On Nov. 14th Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi: "We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes."(from the Daily Kos)
...Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail or for a delivery from any post office or by any letter carrier any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect, or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."
They said that after the November election, when Ms. Pelosi was Speaker-elect of the House. (The Speaker of the House is second in line for the Presidency, after the Vice President.) Somebody is probably going to be asking some hard questions of the people at that radio station.
There's a legitimate First Amendment issue here, but it's in that grey area between political speech and death threats. Morgan, KSFO and Disney may have some unpleasant months ahead. This could create liabilities that would interfere with the planned sale of the station to Citadel Broadcasting. That sale was supposed to happen during 2006, but on November 22, the deal was postponed and repriced, and not to Disney's advantage. ("the potential amount of cash retained by Disney has been reduced by $300 million in the aggregate, $100 million of which is an outright reduction in the cash...")
In terms of financial losses by a media company, this could be bigger than the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction."
Slashdot Mirror
So what? Apple's device, whatever they're calling it this week, is a multi-touch surface. You can copy the image, but it can't be manipulated like Apple's interface on single-touch devices.
Multi-touch is going to be a big deal. Being able to grab two things and manipulate them at the same time is a huge win. It's the next step beyond the object-verb and verb-object GUI approaches.
I'm responsible for some of this. Here's the first ragdoll falling downstairs, from 1997. Yes, that's how that cliche started. I'd written the first ragdoll system that really worked right, so it was time to make demos. The first try had six-legged bugs dropping through a funnel, which is tough technically but not very interesting. Then there was the big mecha toss, to show that we did heavy objects right. (Most game physics systems still get that wrong. The physically animated objects all move like they're very light. We call this the "boink problem". There's a cube/square law in contact handling that's not captured by the impulse/constraint systems.) So I was looking for a hard case that exercised the system and was way beyond what anybody else could do back then. The fall down a circular staircase was it. It's a tough multiple-collisions problem with friction against multiple surfaces, and contact computed against the polygonal geometry, not some oversimplified model. Every step and every stair railing is an individual object; the feet can slip through the space between the railings.
After we did that, everybody did ragdolls falling downstairs. It got to be a cliche, like caustics on shiny logos. One vendor in the early 2000s had a waterfall of bodies falling downstairs as a GDC demo.
Our original plan was that this was a step to physically-based character animation, where the chararacters really balanced and moved because their feet had friction with the ground. My eventual goal was real martial arts moves, where the throws really were throws. But the industry went off in a different direction - motion capture with interpolation. This provides a reasonably good look without having to solve all the control problems of robotics. The companies trying to solve the hard problem went bust, even after some systems that worked, so that didn't seem to be a direction worth pursuing.
So what did we get from game physics engines? Dead bodies. As CPUs got faster and the algorithms improved, lots of dead bodies. Then, "infinitely destructible environments". Disappointing.
I think it's more about us as human beings reaching our "biological" limit on how much we can understand the nature of universe.
No, that's not it. The problem is a lack of experimental data. We don't have the capability to conduct experiments at the scale at which superstrings are hypothesized to exist. But maybe somebody will find a way to do that. After all, there was a time when it was considered hopeless to ever take a picture of an atom.
There's still the basic problem that general relativity and quantum mechanics are inconsistent. Until that's resolved, it's clear that there's some basic physics we don't understand yet. String theory was developed to try to resolve that issue.
Wikipeida has a reasonably decent article on this.
"Science is prediction, not explanation" - Fred Hoyle
The serious problem with string theory is that it doesn't yield falsifiable predictions. Theories which don't yield falsifiable predictions are not useful - you can't check them by experiment, you can't effectively choose between them, and you can't develop engineering based on them.
This matters. From subatomic physics we got nuclear power. From quantum electrodynamics we got semiconductors and lasers. From string theory we got nothing. If you can't make predictions, you can't do engineering design.
With string theory, you can create pretty mathematical objects, but it's not clear that there's any connection to the real world. Smolin says that's bad physics, and he's probably right.
There's real progress in physics, but it's mostly at the low-energy, low temperature end. Seemingly impossible objects like Bose-Einstein condensates and materials with negative indices of refraction have both been demonstrated. Quantum computing is hard to do, but real. That's progress. But the high energy physicists and the cosmologists have been stuck for a while.
It's possible for an entire field to take a wrong turn like this. Artificial intelligence did, back in the 1980s, when the expert systems people were claiming that strong AI was just around the corner. Then came the "AI winter". Twenty years later, AI is moving again, but with new approaches (more statistics, less formal logic) and new people.
This is a unionized job. So there's a union contract in effect.
There's no intellectual property clause in that union contract. But there's an overtime clause, which provides for time and a half for overtime and includes the line "Implementation of alternative work patterns or any variation thereof shall be by mutual agreement between the Employer and the Union." That says "Employer and the Union", not "Employer and the Employee", as is standard in labor contracts. Any special deals on hours have to be done through the union. This prevents the employer from pressuring employees individually. Any special arrangements about working at home have to be cleared with the union, and, of course, that's paid time.
"Work for Hire" is a very explicit thing in a union job. The company does not own your life outside work.
Unions - the people who brought you the weekend.
Across the street from the Apple store in Palo Alto, we have the Helio store. Helio "don't call it a phone" is another integrated communicator device, and may be cooler than the iPhone. Not only does it have music and video, but it has direct Myspace integration. There's "Buddy Beacon"; if you're not in "cloaking mode", your position shows on your friends' maps. These are integrated, of course. Social networking is now location-aware.
The iPhone is mostly about content delivery, "Web 1.0" stuff. Helio is more about social networking, "Web 2.0" stuff.
Get an iPhone, get entertained. Get a Helio, get laid.
Since there's no public OID list for these certificates, I've added one to the Wikipedia entry for Extended Validation Certificates. Entrust, Verisign, and Comodo are filled in; if you can find the documented values for other vendors, please add them. Thanks.
No, the spec says, on page 9:
Registration Number:
Certificate Field: Subject:serialNumber (OID 2.5.4.5)
Required/Optional: Required
Contents: This field MUST contain the unique Registration Number assigned to the Subject by the Incorporating Agency in its Jurisdiction of Incorporation (for Private Organization Subjects only).
So when you go to validate the certificate against incorporation records, it bounces.
The whole point of Extended Validation certificates was that the organization was supposed to be identified unambiguously. Earlier versions of the spec required a full physical address of the business, but the CA forum backed off, and now companies can get by with just giving city and state, which may not be unique.
Domain: www.entrust.com
Server identity:
CN = www.entrust.com
serialNumber = DOC:19961216
OU = it
O = Entrust Inc
jurisdictionOfIncorporationStateOrProvinceName = MD
jurisdictionOfIncorporationCountryName = US
L = Ottawa
ST = Ontario
C = CA
Issuer identity:
CN = Entrust Certification Authority - L1A
OU = (c) 2006 Entrust, Inc.
OU = www.entrust.net/CPS is incorporated by reference
OU = CPS CONTAINS IMPORTANT LIMITATIONS OF WARRANTIES AND LIABILITY
OU = AND ADDITIONAL TERMS GOVERNING USE AND RELIANCE
O = Entrust, Inc.
C = US Certificate has 10 extensions.
The CA Browser Forum has published a standard for these certificate. So that's what we go by.
How do you tell this is an Extended Validation certificate? That's not in the CA Browser Forum's standard. It's dependent on the certificate issuer.
It's documented, on Entrust's web site "Each EV SSL Certificate issued by the Entrust EV SSL CA to a Subscriber contains an Object Identifier (OID) defined by the Entrust EV SSL CA in the certificate's certificatePolicies extension ... which
by pre-agreement with Application Software Vendors, marks the certificate as being an EV SSL Certificate.
The following OID has been registered by the Entrust EV SSL CA for inclusion in EV SSL Certificates: 2.16.840.1.114028.10.1.2"
That OID number appears in the middle of a comment in the certificatePolicies extension. So, for each issuer, you have to look for something different.
The certificate checker has to be really careful. To verify that a certificate is an Extended Validation certificate, it's not enough to find that OID. You have to make sure that the certificate was issued by the issuer entitled to use that OID. Otherwise, it's easy to forge these certificates.
But if you're too thorough in the checking, the certificate bounces. The whole point of an Extended Validation certificate is to validate the company's identity. So we have the new fields "serialNumber", "jurisdictionOfIncorporationStateOrProvinceName", and "jurisdictionOfIncorporationCo
This is just some bloggers, not a legal opinion, even if it's from a lawyer.
Here's a demonstration that Cisco was continuously using the trademark: the support web site for the iPhone, as archived at archive.org. "With InfoGear recently being acquired by Cisco Systems, there is currently no change to your iPhone coverage. We hope you continue to enjoy using your iPhone, and we thank you for your business. So, even if Cisco wasn't selling new units, they were still supporting the old ones. That page has been archived every year since 2000, so that's a form of continuous use.
There's an active user base. The University of Florida went iPhone. There's a description of their configuration here. They have a VoIP infrastructure with three Cisco CallManagers, two Cisco 6608 VoIP gateways, a Cisco Unity voice mail system, and many Cisco IP telephones, some of which are iPhone units, on desktops. The University of Pennsylvania also went iPhone. There are probably corporate installations too, but they tend not to publish their phone instructions on the public web. Those installations have to be supported, which is something Cisco does, and gets paid for. Cisco is in the network infrastructure business, after all.
As long as there's support, and support-related revenue, the trademark is clearly in use.
Presumably they've cleared this with ELO, manufacturers of iTouch touchscreens. If your bank's ATM has a touchscreen CRT, it's probably an iTouch.
Then there's Logitech's iTouch., and the Logitech iTouch cordless keyboard and mouse.
And yes, both have registered trademarks.
Cisco, which owns the iPhone trademark, has announced what they want for it.
An "open approach". Interoperability.
Fundamentally we wanted an open approach. We hoped our products could interoperate in the future. In our view, the network provides the basis to make this happen--it provides the foundation of innovation that allows converged devices to deliver the services that consumers want. Our goal was to take that to the next level by facilitating collaboration with Apple. And we wanted to make sure to differentiate the brands in a way that could work for both companies and not confuse people, since our products combine both web access and voice telephony. That's it. Openness and clarity. - Cisco's general counsel.
This suit is backwards. SCO brought this suit, yet they want to stall. Usually, the plaintiff wants to push the case forward, and the defense wants to stall. The system is set up so that the plaintiff pushes the case forward, which is why this is dragging on.
Bear in mind that SCO's stalling isn't a problem for IBM. Is IBM losing customers over this? No. Is it costing IBM significant amounts of money? No. (IBM total revenue for 1995: $91 billion. Gross profit: $37 billion). Can SCO afford to keep this up much longer? No. Is SCO likely to win in the end? No. Not a problem.
What's actually happening is that the summary judgment motions by IBM are about to be decided. SCO is desperately trying to distract attention from that, but that's where the real action is.
I posted this problem yesterday here.
Apparently Apple didn't meet Cisco's terms.
Now, Apple is in a terrible position. They either meet Cisco's terms, or change the name. Cisco could have Apple products seized and forfeited at Customs for trademark infringement.
Cisco has been selling and servicing products under the iPhone name for years. Here's the original InfoGear iPhone product announcement from 1999. "With just a few simple points of the stylus, you can make phone calls, check email, or search the Web." It was even on Slashdot.
It looks impressive, but you can't get to orbit that way.
Single stage to orbit craft have to be somewhere above 97% fuel, with the best chemical fuels possible. People have tried to build SSTO craft, Rotary Rocket being a good example, but when your weight budget is that tight, it's next to impossible, and even if it works, the payloads are dinky.
Two stages work. The Shuttle is two stages; the solid boosters and the external tank are dropped off. To get to orbit on chemical fuels and have any useful payload, you have to dump some mass during lift. Even with two stages, the weight reduction efforts result in fragile spacecraft.
Now if we had nuclear rockets, we could get somewhere.
I met this artist in 93 or 94, he had built the world's first 3D printer.
The first stereolithography machines date from the early 1980s.
Cisco clearly owns the trademarked name, and in the phone category. And they've owned it sine long before the iPod, a name registered only in 2001. And they're using it. Sooner or later, probably sooner, Apple will have to pay money to Cisco. Lots of money.
Word Mark: IPHONE
Category: Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: computer hardware and software for providing integrated telephone communication with computerized global information networks.
FIRST USE: 1997-06-06.
FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 1997-06-06
Registration Number: 2293011
Registration Date: November 16, 1999
REGISTRANT: INFOGEAR TECHNOLOGY CORPORATION CORPORATION CALIFORNIA 1775 WOODSIDE ROAD REDWOOD CITY CALIFORNIA 94061
LAST LISTED OWNER: CISCO TECNOLOGY, INC. CORPORATION CALIFORNIA 170 WEST TASMAN SAN JOSE CALIFORNIA 95134
Putting in heating, ventilating, and air conditioning will be a tough job. I know someone who converted an old stone barn, and that was a major project, even with substantial spending.
Do you notice something? Google is amongst the top places when it comes to benefits, and they're also one of the top players when it comes to productivity. Could it be that satisfied workers are productive workers? Even if they put 20% of their time into private projects?
That's more the nature of the business. They don't make anything physical, and they provide very little customer service.
All of Google's businesses other than search generate little if any revenue. Really, stuff like Google's office systems exist to push back against Microsoft, not because running a word processor in the browser is a good idea.
Software development isn't really very hard today. At least not at the level at which 90% of programmers work. The tools mostly work, many of the languages are quite forgiving, there are plenty of books, you can get help from Google, and much code can be downloaded. Yes, there are people doing hard stuff - real time control, database internals, game physics, stuff like that. But ordinary web programming is almost a no-brainer today. Look at the people doing it.
And if you need to do something hard, it's amazing how much one person can get done today. It's a great time to be a serious programmer.
There are design problems, yes. Microsoft's world is overly complex because they need it to be complex; if it were straightforward, nobody would need Microsoft. The Linux/Unix world is overly complicated because it has too much legacy dating back to the 1970s. The CSS world is overly complicated because the approach to page layout was botched. (Layout is a constraint problem, but isn't being approached as one.)
What we do have is too much tolerance for the mess at the bottom. What we need is, say, a "Just Say No to Bad Software" from Fortune 1000 CIOs. As in "We're not buying Vista until this list of problems is dealt with".
I don't see this as an "all in one" device. It's really just a TV set for today. Inputs are an Internet connection, a cable TV connection, a 5.25" drive for optical media, and a remote control. Outputs are a screen and speakers. You can select various sources and view them. No big deal.
If it weren't for digital rights management, this would be straightforward. But the DRM on the cable signals, the streaming media, and the discs complicates the problem.
We don't need more TLDs. We need fewer of them. ".info", ".aero", and ".museum" should be retired due to lack of interest. (The entire list of .museum domains appears on this page.)
The ".biz" TLD should be retired as a slum-clearance project.
Those half-dead TLDs should be put on maintenance level support - no new registrations, and old ones expire in two years.
So how can Tesla, a startup company with little manufacturing and car experience relative to GM, build an electric car that can make it 200 miles on a charge
The Tesla's sticker price of $92,500 makes it possible.
We're making progress, though. The only real remaining problem with high performance electric cars is battery cost. The necessary energy density is available if you pay enough.
First, already this is the top story on MediaPost, a web site for ad buyers. This is very bad for a radio station.
Then their big mistake: On Nov. 14th Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi: "We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (from the Daily Kos)
That might be a felony. 18 USC Sec. 871
They said that after the November election, when Ms. Pelosi was Speaker-elect of the House. (The Speaker of the House is second in line for the Presidency, after the Vice President.) Somebody is probably going to be asking some hard questions of the people at that radio station.
There's a legitimate First Amendment issue here, but it's in that grey area between political speech and death threats. Morgan, KSFO and Disney may have some unpleasant months ahead. This could create liabilities that would interfere with the planned sale of the station to Citadel Broadcasting. That sale was supposed to happen during 2006, but on November 22, the deal was postponed and repriced, and not to Disney's advantage. ("the potential amount of cash retained by Disney has been reduced by $300 million in the aggregate, $100 million of which is an outright reduction in the cash...")
In terms of financial losses by a media company, this could be bigger than the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction."