Indeed. My armchair legal analysis always comes down to - who got hurt?
In this case, show me the guy who bought or is planning to buy LindowsOS thinking that he is buying a Microsoft product. My guess is that he doesn't exist. To reinstate my earlier point, it's not like someone walking into a Microsoft meeting room asking where Bill's PalmPilot went.
There might, indeed be some name confusion. If I said "Lindows" to my mom, she would probably think that there was some Microsoft connection. Of course, my mother never bought her operating system, it conveniently came on her computer for her. As did what, 90% of the people with computers today? So, show me the guy who is buying LindowsOS thinking he is buying a Microsoft product.
First, show me the guy wanting to buy the Microsoft product. Anyone actually purchasing the operating system for their computer is likely computer savvy. They will do some research and know what they want, and when it comes down to that, LindowsOS and Microsoft Windows XP are miles apart.
As for the Apple OS9, I think that Microware should have been in the right. The names are essentially identical. Confusion in communication (newsgroups posts, emails, etc) alone should be proof of harm.
Maybe MS should sue themselves, actually. I mean, I had a Best Buy employee tell me that WindowsME and Windows2k were essentially the same thing...maybe one dept is causing confusion on the other???
The only reason anyone needs to light a cigar and drink brandy is that the name of the current day
ends in "day". It should be part of anyone's daily regiment.
Many of us are stuck with using multiple OS's. At home I have Nix, Win2k, WinXP and OSX. So any news relating to any of them is welcome.
Right now, however, more than ever, I think there should be as much press as possible about MS security. MS is trying to position themselves as the online middle-man for all your needs and wares, and you all you have to do is trust them with storing your personal data online.
If people realize that these people are the same ones who shipped an OS which was hackable out of the box, they might think twice about it.
Michael - I wish you luck in your legal battle. The recent battles with Microsoft have really disturbed me as the trend of how this country deals with corporate crime. Microsoft has been found guilty of essentially robbing our entire economy of billions of dollars via an illegal monopoly, using illegal methods - and the most we seem able to do is allow them the right to hand more of the illegally distributed software to schools so that they can increase their market share some more.
If I hacked into everybody's personal account and robbed them of $20 (I am not, for the benefit of any Echelon-type devices listening - even remotely capable of such a thing - I can barely telnet with skill), eventually netting thousands, millions or billions of dollars, I would be thrown in jail and casted in the press as a horrible evil hacker and a scourge of society. All of my computer equipment would be confiscated. I would be incarcerated with a fine and any financial assets I earned from my illegal activities would be siezed.
Microsoft, however, can do it and has done it for years. And they get community service.
Welcome to Bush's America, I guess.
inky
ps - my sympathy to any ex-enron workers out there.
And the paranoid would do well to treat this as a trojan? Why would one have to be paranoid to think that a file from a random website offering a completely false set of features under false pretenses might possibly be something it's not?
Note to self - never EVER ask/. for security advice. Nice bullet you guys dodged there.
I just posted about the same thought. It's shame someone moderated this down. Gotta love/.
Especially since this is such a great social engineering design for a virus. Get something which a mass of people will want to download and try out quickly (before lawyers block it). And it could do weird things in install, people probably wouldn't even suspect it because it's a weird beta emulator...
Now I've never upheld/. as any kind of standard for either journalism or writing (and much of the time, not even news).
But this is ridiculous.
Here we have/. placing an article to web site which is more than likely (by the evidence of the messages here, I'd say very likely) is a hoax. Now they, again, on the front page - are asking people to download it and try it out.
If I recall, it's just mentioned that they looked different because of something the klingons "dont like to talk about"...it doesnt say all klingons looked like that for all time. Perhaps they had a brush with a bad plastic surgeon for a generation.
A scifi pilot is never an easy thing, even one with an established backdrop like Trek. You have to create something interesting, explain all of it's nuances and throw a plot in there to keep people's attention.
In fact, I haven't liked a lot of pilots for shows I ended up liking. I thought B5's was just clunky, NG's just hokey, and DS9's just weird. But they still presented enough that I kept watching the shows and certainly in some cases (B5) the shows were phenom.
Some spoilers may follow.
If anything, I'll have to give Enterprise bonus points for putting some real thought into the show. There are lots of great details which prove that this is the pre-trek star trek mode. Not just the "phase guns", wires hanging out of walls, or little model spaceships, but in the character design, their backgrounds and interactions. Bakula or no Bakula, this Trek will succeed or fail depending on if it makes good on it's premise. Voyager failed it's premise horribly, and we saw the results.
Enterprise seems to want to make good on it's premise.
On some of the other notes -
the soft core porn scene was completely uncalled for and visibly broke from the rest of the episode. It was just fan service and if ST is going to steal some anime ideas, let's not steal that one....it works better in anime:).
I don't care what color of blood the Klingons had, I want to know what was said at the end of the episode. It might explain a "botched" first contact with the Klingons.
Old Tripp still has time to grow, but god he better do it fast. I kinda like him because he reminds me of a character out of an old Irwin Allen show. I kinda hate him because he reminds me of a character out of an old Irwin Allen show.
You owe nothing to mother company, especially in IT. The same company that pays you a nice salary, healthy benefits, and stock options (stop snickering) will knock you out on your keister in a heartbeat if it so suits them. No two weeks notice, sometimes not even a handshake - just place your things in this box, sign these papers and leave the building.
But, you do owe something to the people you work with, the clients your work, the integrity of your labors. Especially as CTO - part of the job *is* loyalty to those who work underneath you. Never forget why you make the big bucks (well, at least bigger bucks;). So the question shouldn't be what is the best thing for you, or for the company at large, but what is the best thing for the people you work with everyday.
OK, so maybe it's not that simple of an answer. Good luck.
These situations have almost made me leave usenet forever, stop talking to "up and coming" web developers, and bury my head in the past where HTML meant you could view a document from any computer and any browser.
My biggest problem with this is that it isn't that hard to design pages that work *everywhere*. I mean lynx, netscape, opera, etc. You can still have your fancy flash and DHTML (and cross-browser DHTML is not hard), as long as your core stuff is there in the basics.
The fact that 85% of the web users are running WinBoxes with IE5 pre-installed isn't an excuse to alienate the other 15%. It's also stupid unless you like recoding your pages every 6 months for the latest greatest, want to keep working around the bugs and the changes from MS, the whims of the monopoly.
If web developers want to hand the internet over to Bill Gates, the man who didn't see the value of the web until Netscape showed it to him, fine. Just learn to accept all the stupid nuances and new technology it will take to support your dumb decision.
This is timely for me, as I plan on publishing some white papers on inkless.com about making insanely compatible pages. If anyone wants in on it, email me.
I stopped reading this site after the whole Apogee incident a while back, now I'm tempted to hop off again. I mean c'mon, this article is nothing but a trolling rock of flamebait, and a bad one at that - it could have been condensed into a one paragraph synopsis of "I hate OOP because..."
This article is nothing but rant. There are no sources, especially for it's "graphs" (which I suspect took someone about 10 minutes in PhotoShop to research). It's almost completely subjective rhetoric with some mock code tossed in for good measure. My cats running on the keyboard chasing a string could have written a more constructive and thought-out analysis of OOP.
The description for this should have read: Here are some good links on OOP. They're at the bottom of this otherwise useless webpage, so scroll quickly.
OOP is a mindmelding piece of communism?? I mean do you guys read these things before posting them??
Have to agree with Scott M here, folksa, this a knee jerk reaction followed by a herd instinct. Most companies are not verbal about their trademark laws (how many do you see spelled out so well on their web site?) and will flat out sue a somebody for posting an image of a logo, etc., without permission. Let's not forget that other companies have threatened legal action against web site operators for putting *any* of their trademarks *anywhere*. Only by reading it to it's most extreme can you draw the conclusion brought on by a majority of these posts, and we should all know that if Apogee really did try and push such restrictions it would be laughed out of court. They are merely trying to make a defensible position for holding their trademarks, which by trademark law you need to do or risk losing them.
Be glad that you don't have to ask permission to use their logos, trademarks, etc., if you so wish.
(although, and scott feel free to respond if you're reading - i do think it's rather silly/wrong that they tradmarked "hail to the king" and "come get some", when it's all but Bruce Campbell's voice saying it. But hey, that's just what we call pillow talk, baby)
Leave it to good old/. to whine about a good thing. Of course, because there is the gimp, and it's open source, it has to be the end all be all.
C'mon folks, learn to welcome things with open arms, and maybe people *will* open up the source. Bash them like a bunch of rabid hounds, and next time they won't even port.
And Photogenics rocks. It's possibly one of the best image manipulators out there, be glad you can use it. And Gimp isn't perfect. The last two Linux boxes I put Gimp on, it *crashed* them if I chose the wrong Script fu or font. It's a good package, but I'll be glad to see more out there.
OK, I'm certainly no COS fan, and I think they bend the idea of freedom of religion pretty bad, but what are you talking about??
For one thing, Alanon is not for recovering alcoholics, it's for the friends and family of alcoholics, and I think Narcanon is the same. Yeah, the CAN thing has some evidence, but I don't think you can say that AA is a secret COS front.
True, back when having onboard chips for video was the fastest, most powerful solution. Now, it's smarter to let you nVidia's and 3dfx's do the high -end chip design and keep the box upgradeable.
Cool idea for then, just not for now...unles it's a console yer looking for;)
According to an earlier post, over a hundred Amiga apps will be ported over. Of course, this sounds a little bit like a MacOS-upgrade promise to me, so we'll see.
Wowza, nothing brings out the interesting posts like a good Amiga article.
For all y'all that think the Amiga is simply RIP and we shouldn't bother reading this, bite me. Good ideas never die, and the AmigaOS was a good idea. Run on ancient tech? Oh heck yeah, but it still can do things on an old 020 faster than a Windows Box, and probably has the most elegant multitasking around. Do you know why some developers decided not to bother with memory protection? They weren't sure the Amiga *needed* it, since things simply didn't crash that often. (Which, from my experience, was true).
Why this could be a good thing: The AmigaOS had the potential to be the best consumer OS around. It had the GUI of the Mac, the versatility of Unix, and at one time, lots and lots of games;). It had multimedia, plug and play, and object-orientation (like people said, read on BOOPSIE or MUI) in front of consumers before some of those things had names. A *good* consumer OS is becoming harder to find.
Why I'm not holding my breath: This is actually the first Amiga announcement in about 2 years which I'm inclined to believe. Amiga needed to get out of the corporate manhandling it's been going through. But, even if this does work, the best it sounds we're going to get is another BeOS, a renegade OS with little driver and application support (don't get me started on BeOS, I tried two different machines with bad, bad results.)
So yeah, I'm doubtful. But I wish them all the luck.
Slashdot Mirror
the fact that this got mod'd to 3 is darn silly.
Um yeah. You know I heard somewhere something about a monopoly. So Linux is pathetic because someone else broke the law. OK.
inky
Indeed. My armchair legal analysis always comes down to - who got hurt?
In this case, show me the guy who bought or is planning to buy LindowsOS thinking that he is buying a Microsoft product. My guess is that he doesn't exist. To reinstate my earlier point, it's not like someone walking into a Microsoft meeting room asking where Bill's PalmPilot went.
There might, indeed be some name confusion. If I said "Lindows" to my mom, she would probably think that there was some Microsoft connection. Of course, my mother never bought her operating system, it conveniently came on her computer for her. As did what, 90% of the people with computers today? So, show me the guy who is buying LindowsOS thinking he is buying a Microsoft product.
First, show me the guy wanting to buy the Microsoft product. Anyone actually purchasing the operating system for their computer is likely computer savvy. They will do some research and know what they want, and when it comes down to that, LindowsOS and Microsoft Windows XP are miles apart.
As for the Apple OS9, I think that Microware should have been in the right. The names are essentially identical. Confusion in communication (newsgroups posts, emails, etc) alone should be proof of harm.
Maybe MS should sue themselves, actually. I mean, I had a Best Buy employee tell me that WindowsME and Windows2k were essentially the same thing...maybe one dept is causing confusion on the other???
inky
The only reason anyone needs to light a cigar and drink brandy is that the name of the current day
:)
ends in "day". It should be part of anyone's daily regiment.
Many of us are stuck with using multiple OS's. At home I have Nix, Win2k, WinXP and OSX. So any news relating to any of them is welcome.
Right now, however, more than ever, I think there should be as much press as possible about MS security. MS is trying to position themselves as the online middle-man for all your needs and wares, and you all you have to do is trust them with storing your personal data online.
If people realize that these people are the same ones who shipped an OS which was hackable out of the box, they might think twice about it.
troll.
inky
Here is the real question of trademark:
Did you, have you or could you confuse the LindowOS brand name with anything Microsoft related?
Probably not. It's not like calling some *Palm*PC when the major competitor is a *Palm*Pilot.
Don't fool yourself, this is a business tactic being fought by lawyers.
inky
Michael - I wish you luck in your legal battle. The recent battles with Microsoft have really disturbed me as the trend of how this country deals with corporate crime. Microsoft has been found guilty of essentially robbing our entire economy of billions of dollars via an illegal monopoly, using illegal methods - and the most we seem able to do is allow them the right to hand more of the illegally distributed software to schools so that they can increase their market share some more.
If I hacked into everybody's personal account and robbed them of $20 (I am not, for the benefit of any Echelon-type devices listening - even remotely capable of such a thing - I can barely telnet with skill), eventually netting thousands, millions or billions of dollars, I would be thrown in jail and casted in the press as a horrible evil hacker and a scourge of society. All of my computer equipment would be confiscated. I would be incarcerated with a fine and any financial assets I earned from my illegal activities would be siezed.
Microsoft, however, can do it and has done it for years. And they get community service.
Welcome to Bush's America, I guess.
inky
ps - my sympathy to any ex-enron workers out there.
And the paranoid would do well to treat this as a trojan? Why would one have to be paranoid to think that a file from a random website offering a completely false set of features under false pretenses might possibly be something it's not?
/. for security advice. Nice bullet you guys dodged there.
Note to self - never EVER ask
inky
inky
I just posted about the same thought. It's shame someone moderated this down. Gotta love /.
Especially since this is such a great social engineering design for a virus. Get something which a mass of people will want to download and try out quickly (before lawyers block it). And it could do weird things in install, people probably wouldn't even suspect it because it's a weird beta emulator...
inky
Woah. I mean woah.
/. as any kind of standard for either journalism or writing (and much of the time, not even news).
/. placing an article to web site which is more than likely (by the evidence of the messages here, I'd say very likely) is a hoax. Now they, again, on the front page - are asking people to download it and try it out.
Now I've never upheld
But this is ridiculous.
Here we have
Hey. Did anyone ask the question -
What if this was a virus?
Real smart.
inky.
If I recall, it's just mentioned that they looked different because of something the klingons "dont like to talk about"...it doesnt say all klingons looked like that for all time. Perhaps they had a brush with a bad plastic surgeon for a generation.
A scifi pilot is never an easy thing, even one with an established backdrop like Trek. You have to create something interesting, explain all of it's nuances and throw a plot in there to keep people's attention.
:).
In fact, I haven't liked a lot of pilots for shows I ended up liking. I thought B5's was just clunky, NG's just hokey, and DS9's just weird. But they still presented enough that I kept watching the shows and certainly in some cases (B5) the shows were phenom.
Some spoilers may follow.
If anything, I'll have to give Enterprise bonus points for putting some real thought into the show. There are lots of great details which prove that this is the pre-trek star trek mode. Not just the "phase guns", wires hanging out of walls, or little model spaceships, but in the character design, their backgrounds and interactions. Bakula or no Bakula, this Trek will succeed or fail depending on if it makes good on it's premise. Voyager failed it's premise horribly, and we saw the results.
Enterprise seems to want to make good on it's premise.
On some of the other notes -
the soft core porn scene was completely uncalled for and visibly broke from the rest of the episode. It was just fan service and if ST is going to steal some anime ideas, let's not steal that one....it works better in anime
I don't care what color of blood the Klingons had, I want to know what was said at the end of the episode. It might explain a "botched" first contact with the Klingons.
Old Tripp still has time to grow, but god he better do it fast. I kinda like him because he reminds me of a character out of an old Irwin Allen show. I kinda hate him because he reminds me of a character out of an old Irwin Allen show.
You owe nothing to mother company, especially in IT. The same company that pays you a nice salary, healthy benefits, and stock options (stop snickering) will knock you out on your keister in a heartbeat if it so suits them. No two weeks notice, sometimes not even a handshake - just place your things in this box, sign these papers and leave the building.
;). So the question shouldn't be what is the best thing for you, or for the company at large, but what is the best thing for the people you work with everyday.
But, you do owe something to the people you work with, the clients your work, the integrity of your labors. Especially as CTO - part of the job *is* loyalty to those who work underneath you. Never forget why you make the big bucks (well, at least bigger bucks
OK, so maybe it's not that simple of an answer. Good luck.
These situations have almost made me leave usenet forever, stop talking to "up and coming" web developers, and bury my head in the past where HTML meant you could view a document from any computer and any browser.
My biggest problem with this is that it isn't that hard to design pages that work *everywhere*. I mean lynx, netscape, opera, etc. You can still have your fancy flash and DHTML (and cross-browser DHTML is not hard), as long as your core stuff is there in the basics.
The fact that 85% of the web users are running WinBoxes with IE5 pre-installed isn't an excuse to alienate the other 15%. It's also stupid unless you like recoding your pages every 6 months for the latest greatest, want to keep working around the bugs and the changes from MS, the whims of the monopoly.
If web developers want to hand the internet over to Bill Gates, the man who didn't see the value of the web until Netscape showed it to him, fine. Just learn to accept all the stupid nuances and new technology it will take to support your dumb decision.
This is timely for me, as I plan on publishing some white papers on inkless.com about making insanely compatible pages. If anyone wants in on it, email me.
I stopped reading this site after the whole Apogee incident a while back, now I'm tempted to hop off again. I mean c'mon, this article is nothing but a trolling rock of flamebait, and a bad one at that - it could have been condensed into a one paragraph synopsis of "I hate OOP because..."
This article is nothing but rant. There are no sources, especially for it's "graphs" (which I suspect took someone about 10 minutes in PhotoShop to research). It's almost completely subjective rhetoric with some mock code tossed in for good measure. My cats running on the keyboard chasing a string could have written a more constructive and thought-out analysis of OOP.
The description for this should have read: Here are some good links on OOP. They're at the bottom of this otherwise useless webpage, so scroll quickly.
OOP is a mindmelding piece of communism?? I mean do you guys read these things before posting them??
oh - yeah...and Duke Nukem didn't suck.
Have to agree with Scott M here, folksa, this a knee jerk reaction followed by a herd instinct. Most companies are not verbal about their trademark laws (how many do you see spelled out so well on their web site?) and will flat out sue a somebody for posting an image of a logo, etc., without permission. Let's not forget that other companies have threatened legal action against web site operators for putting *any* of their trademarks *anywhere*. Only by reading it to it's most extreme can you draw the conclusion brought on by a majority of these posts, and we should all know that if Apogee really did try and push such restrictions it would be laughed out of court. They are merely trying to make a defensible position for holding their trademarks, which by trademark law you need to do or risk losing them.
Be glad that you don't have to ask permission to use their logos, trademarks, etc., if you so wish.
(although, and scott feel free to respond if you're reading - i do think it's rather silly/wrong that they tradmarked "hail to the king" and "come get some", when it's all but Bruce Campbell's voice saying it. But hey, that's just what we call pillow talk, baby)
I don't think that's true. I have a PalmV and an Omnisky, and I get good coverage not only around Chicago, but anywhere around Central Illinois too.
I highly recommend it, great service, great device.
Leave it to good old /. to whine about a good thing. Of course, because there is the gimp, and it's open source, it has to be the end all be all.
C'mon folks, learn to welcome things with open arms, and maybe people *will* open up the source. Bash them like a bunch of rabid hounds, and next time they won't even port.
And Photogenics rocks. It's possibly one of the best image manipulators out there, be glad you can use it. And Gimp isn't perfect. The last two Linux boxes I put Gimp on, it *crashed* them if I chose the wrong Script fu or font. It's a good package, but I'll be glad to see more out there.
OK, I'm certainly no COS fan, and I think they bend the idea of freedom of religion pretty bad, but what are you talking about??
For one thing, Alanon is not for recovering alcoholics, it's for the friends and family of alcoholics, and I think Narcanon is the same. Yeah, the CAN thing has some evidence, but I don't think you can say that AA is a secret COS front.
Shadow of the beast maybe :)
that was worthwhile. Out of curiosity, do you use a bucket when you start hitting your head against walls, or are you a au natural type?
I don't really care if it has an x86 motherboard, provided the rest are true. Oh, and I demand that they make another version of Elite...
True, back when having onboard chips for video was the fastest, most powerful solution. Now, it's smarter to let you nVidia's and 3dfx's do the high -end chip design and keep the box upgradeable.
;)
Cool idea for then, just not for now...unles it's a console yer looking for
According to an earlier post, over a hundred Amiga apps will be ported over. Of course, this sounds a little bit like a MacOS-upgrade promise to me, so we'll see.
Wowza, nothing brings out the interesting posts like a good Amiga article.
;). It had multimedia, plug and play, and object-orientation (like people said, read on BOOPSIE or MUI) in front of consumers before some of those things had names. A *good* consumer OS is becoming harder to find.
For all y'all that think the Amiga is simply RIP and we shouldn't bother reading this, bite me. Good ideas never die, and the AmigaOS was a good idea. Run on ancient tech? Oh heck yeah, but it still can do things on an old 020 faster than a Windows Box, and probably has the most elegant multitasking around. Do you know why some developers decided not to bother with memory protection? They weren't sure the Amiga *needed* it, since things simply didn't crash that often. (Which, from my experience, was true).
Why this could be a good thing:
The AmigaOS had the potential to be the best consumer OS around. It had the GUI of the Mac, the versatility of Unix, and at one time, lots and lots of games
Why I'm not holding my breath:
This is actually the first Amiga announcement in about 2 years which I'm inclined to believe. Amiga needed to get out of the corporate manhandling it's been going through. But, even if this does work, the best it sounds we're going to get is another BeOS, a renegade OS with little driver and application support (don't get me started on BeOS, I tried two different machines with bad, bad results.)
So yeah, I'm doubtful. But I wish them all the luck.