Katz writes: Celebration is ultimately a sad, even hopeless story. Clearly, many Americans are unhappy with the noise, enforced mobility and disconnection of contemporary life, even as they rush to malls to save every penny they can. It?s depressing that an entertainment conglomerate is the only prominent entity in the America that has taken any bold step towards addressing these concerns.
Jon, please read up on the New Urbanism, especially the work of Andres Duany and his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Celebration is just one corporate-influenced interpretation. Others have been done with less autocratic standards and more attention to variety in the architecture, from the Duany Associates community Seaside Florida (location of The Truman Show) to newer developments in Seattle, San Francisco, and Atlanta. This dialog is far from complete.
The federal government has largely opted out of urban planning, and most corporations are too volatile and bottom-line driven to persevere through ambitious, even radical undertakings.
As well they should. Urban planning is by necessity a local process; the only thing that the feds or corporations can do is direct it away from the community's interests.
Here was one of the bolder efforts in modern times to return some sense of community and beauty to a country whose home dwellers are forced to choose between declining urban environments that are either declining or ascending so quickly as to price out the middle class, and ugly and increasingly congested suburban ones. Celebration, an effort at a better middle ground, deserved more support scrutiny than either Disney or the media has provided.
Again, I share these frustrations over modern social values -- but Celebration is only one data point in this movement. To some extent, it's already become received wisdom among urban planners and some developers, who have adjusted their approaches without creating wholly unique communities.
The history of such experimental communities is replete with failures or at the very least failures with regard to (often very unrealistic) expectations.
The New Urbanists are a set of architects and city planners who believe that America lost its soul when it moved to the auto-oriented suburbs, from Levittown right up to the Antelope Valley... or Littleton. [There's the Katz connection!] When you insulate yourself from your neighbors, when you eat at Appleby's and shop at Target or the Gap, you're eliminating most of the sense of community that was important to people's lives just a generation ago.
New Urbanists believe that encouraging small, close-knit, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods with neo-traditional architecture is one of the keys toward restoring that social structure.
I'm not convinced, and if anything, Disney's experiment in Celebration shows that this ideal can have a dark side. Still, there are many other examples that are not run by The Mouse; in fact other communities often eschew the corporate influence that seems endemic here. That doesn't mean they don't (for instance) have a Starbucks -- but it may mean requiring a franchise operator to be a resident.
The school at Celebration has been one of the touchiest problems they've dealt with. Florida law didn't allow them to run a private school here, so they had to accomodate many state laws and found they couldn't do some innovative things they wanted. Say what you will about Disney; they do care about education. It's the parents, ironically, who've objected to the direction the school has taken.
There's also links to a whole bunch of other neat-o Altair stuff, like full-color images of some of the print ads (Napoleon?!), chronology of the various models, accessory prices...
When we can get the gov't to privatize NASA, so its inherant conservatism is based on the engineering rather than beaureaucratic hoop jumping we all may just get to see our childrens children living in space.
NASA should be doing stuff like this -- studying advanced or experimental rocket technologies, the same way they study advanced flight technology. The difference is that in space, NASA is also expected to actually do the job, but for flight, the airplane industry does it.
NASA needs to get out of the spaceflight business entirely (and that is happening, sorta) and concentrate on a) research, b) planetary exploration, and c) satellite science. But this ACE delivery service stuff is well past the point where we should let private industry take over. Hopefully, some of the companies at the cusp of doing this, like Rotary Rocket or the Pioneer Pathfinder folks, will succeed in the next couple of years, and pick up where NASA left off.
This still leaves NASA with responsibility for stuff like Chandra or Cassini -- but getting "us" living in space shouldn't be a government program, just for the reasons you mention.
cthulahoops wrote: That's what I'm thinking. If they can get to.05 c then they can get a probe to alpha-centauri in not too much over twenty years + 4 odd years return time for some pretty data. Close up readings of another Star in our life time == good thing.
Unfortunately, the top speed achieved here is more like 0.0025 c... or maybe 3 tenths of one percent of lightspeed. The fastest this technique could get a probe to Alpha Centauri would be, oh, 1600 years. Realistically, we need at least an order of magnitude improvement to get it down to a century or so, when it might be worthwhile trying, assuming we can develop long-lived space probes.
This is easy to work out -- light speed is ~300,000kM/s and the solar wind is ~1000kM/s. As you can see it's a long way off.
We'd still need a plasma drive of some sort to provide continuous acceleration -- this collector is a start in that direction but it's not yet there.
And films like _Blair Witch_ killed it -- or at least, that's what a lot of critics have felt for some time.
There was a brief flowering of truly original, offbeat product, culminating in the success of studios like Miramax and New Line -- which were then bought by mainstream studios (Disney and Time/Warner, respectively), eventually leading to more mainstream product.
The most prominent indie film festival is Sundance, and Robert Redford, its founder, just quit on the grounds that it no longer showcases innovative product. The films brought to Sundance aren't original films by people who would never get work in Hollywood, but derivative low-budget fare made by people trying to GET work in Hollywood. Just look at the decline in ethnic faces and the rise in white faces in so-called indie movies, and you'll see that marketing forces have had their say. Perhaps a film like _Office Space_ or _In the Company of Men_ is worthwhile, but they no longer represent cutting-edge filmmaking using ideas Hollywood would never touch.
Also, the rise of what probably should be called "alternative" moviemaking has all but obliterated the market for any kind of foreign film in the US. It's no coincidence that some of the most intriguing films lately have been made by directors in such odd places as Iran or Croatia: the corporate Hollywood product practically doesn't exist there, so there's a market for local films.
It's really sad, because you're right -- BWP is more innovative and interesting than standard H'wood fare such as _The Haunting_, which despite a highbrow cast chose to rely on expensive CGI to make itself scary. On the other hand, a standard studio film such as _The Sixth Sense_ also makes the same point, effectively telling a scary story without lazily relying on effects, and generating some of the strongest word-of-mouth referral business in some time. So it's not impossible.
Mr. Showbiz interviewed the Last Broadcast team and while there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that the BWP people saw the other film, BWP had been filming off-and-on for at least six months before the film of LB was available. There's nothing in this article saying anything about 'reviewing options with lawyers', either; the LB guys are very cordial. Actually, if they're smart, they realize that the BWP success is the best possible thing for their movie -- at this point THEY might be the beneficiaries of a million-dollar deal.
No matter your feelings on the paper trail here, there have been dozens of student-film projects along the same lines. The cinema-verite-made-cheaply-with-videocams idea is certainly not new; the student-actors-on-a-roadtrip idea is not new; and the we-aint-tellin-if-its-true idea is not new. In fact, the only thing BWP has going for it is technique... and some effective grassroots marketing.
Eh. "linn-ucks" is just a natural compression of "lee-nooks" in American. They're close enough that most people won't even notice the difference.
For myself, I choose to pronounce it "linn-ucks" rather than "line-ucks" just because it sounds nicer, but also because it's closer in sound to both "unix" and "minix".
There isn't a "should" here, since there aren't any real rules for when a word jumps languages, especially an invented word. I'm more of a usage-descriptive dictionary type, myself, anyway. Most words that come to us start out being pronounced like the original word, then gradually come to be pronounced according to local rules. Example: French "forte", which is one syllable. But it came to be pronounced "for-tay", which is wrong, but makes more sense to English-speakers, because the "e" at the end is superfluous. Or the Greek "gyros" -- do you say "YOU-rohss", "GHEE-rohss", or "JY-rose"? Most of the people who sell them are just happy you're buying.;-)
(On the other hand, I speak French well enough that I absolutely refuse to say "lingerie" lahn-zha-RAY. It's LANN-zhay-ree, dammit!)
I think the LEE-nucks and LINN-ucks pronunciations will eventually be supplanted by LINE-ucks, just because American English works that way... till then, we should all just be happy people are using it!
You only have to aggresively defend patents. You can let trademarks go w/ no fear of losing the trademark. Look at "linux" for an example. Linus afaik does NOTHING to defend the trademark, yet it's still his.
Why don't you give that bit of sage advice to the originators of heroin, zipper, aspirin, escalator, granola, yo-yo and linoleum... all trademarks that were not protected, and lost.
It's the responsibility of the trademark owner to research the mark's distinctiveness in the beginning, to police the market for competitors' use of possibly infringing marks, and to object before an "unreasonable" time has passed -- otherwise there aren't legal grounds to claim infringement.
As for Linus -- he's actually vigorously and quickly defended the Linux trademark. Note that allowing others to use the trademark doesn't infringe, if they are doing so as agents of the owner. Variant Linux distributions fall under that rubric. Granted, this is a special -- perhaps very nearly unique -- case, but in principle it's not very different from, say, a restaurant franchising operation.
The trouble is that in the world of high-tech, those codenames are used as early marketing tools. There are magazine articles written about them, the specs are often available, the companies have webpages for them... these guys are not blameless, they KNOW they are marketing tools.
Besides, it's not that Lucas was pissed off. It's that "Jedi" is a trademark in itself, and if you do not protect a trademark... this is the law!... you can lose it. While "Sagan" wasn't likely trademarked by the good doctor, there are laws about unauthorized use of celebrity images and names.
So does this mean I can legally say "xerox" now instead of "photocopy" and "kleenex" instead of "facial tissue"? "Magic markers" instead of the generic "permanent markers"? Can I sell some Band-aids now?
None of those make any sense. The judge didn't rule that trademarks in general are invalid; he just ruled that AOL didn't have sufficient claim to the generic phrase "You've got mail" to make it a unique trademark.
So now I suppose I can start up a content providing business and call it "NAOL" (North America Online" or "WOL" (World Online) and add in a nifty little program called NIM or WIM which has a "buddy list"? And when people get email, a nice happy voice of a guy from Orville can tell you "You've got mail!" Think of the possibilities...
WOL might work, but NAOL would be too close. (The "consumer confusion" clause.) But yes, it appears that "buddy list" is now up for grabs -- which, to me, is the only one of the three that makes sense for AOL to own. Although, actually, the ZDNN article makes reference to "You have mail" being the operative phrase, which I would say NO WAY could AOL have trademark claim over since their phrase is "You've GOT mail."
There's no real new law here -- the rules have always made it harder to trademark an existing common phrase than a made-up word. For example, starting a business named "Joe's Convenience Store" doesn't mean you now have rights to the phrase "convenience store" -- but it would be hard to deny someone protection for "Joe's Conven-i-o-mart". And then they'd have to be aggressive about protecting the phrase "conveniomart" from becoming generic, or the only protectable part of the name would be "Joe's" (and then only for businesses in the 24/7 store arena).
I suspect (not having seen it, I can't confirm) that the title was actually in the end an example of product placement. In other words, AOL paid THE MOVIE PRODUCERS for them to use the title, instead of the other way around.
For a while in pre-production the film had a couple of different titles (such as You Have Mail), only changing to You've Got Mail in April '98 -- so it's likely that they initially avoided [read:played coy] any association, until AOL ponied up in some way (which could have been as simple as running "co-op ads").
There are wizards and things, and there are ways to have Exchange create mail users automagically from an NT Server userID database, but it definitely is a pain. I believe there are third-party products which do simplify the process.
Dreaming of space travel
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I used to be one of those wide-eyed kids who thought NASA could do no wrong. If something like Challenger happened, well, that was pressure from the White House; NASA was bright engineers interested in finding problems and fixing them.
Since then, I've been enlightened. Probably the biggest kick in the pants came from reading _The Hubble Wars_ and _Dragonfly_, about the space telescope and Shuttle-Mir programs, respectively. I've now realized that the astronauts put up with a hell of a lot of crap for the one to three chances most of them get to fly in space. The politics is unbelievably craven. The programs NASA touts as its future -- like ISS -- are boondoggles that have been disavowed by the scientific community. NASA program justifications become bureaucratese circular logic ("Why are we building a space station? So we can know how to build a space station."), keeping the congressional gravy train going. The space vehicle projects (like X-37) have some utility, and may be better managed than in the past (i.e. a program that successfully demonstrates a handful of technologies is probably superior to one that never gets off the ground due to sheer hubris), but the shuttle system still has years to go -- these puppies are rated for 100 flights, which gives them 80 (avg) remaining X 4 orbiters / 10 (optimistic) flights a year = three more decades.
VentureStar isn't the answer: VS is corporate welfare for LockMart, a defense contractor down in the dumps due to the end of the Cold War. X-38 is a useful project to provide a Crew Return Vehicle for the ISS; the X-33 and X-34 may succeed in showing off their tech for future projects.
X-37, though, is definitely just pork, a disappointing project designed to revive technopride or something like that. As Concorde has proven, superfast transport may look good on paper, but the business model may not be able to support it out in the real world.
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As mentioned, the debris hazard is one reason. The other is that the tanks aren't very useful by themselves; since nearly every shuttle orbit is to a different altitude or inclination (let alone that being in the same inclination can mean orbits as much as 90 degrees perpendicular!), there's no easy way to collect a bunch of them in one place. (Perhaps if the shuttle-derived orbital transfer vehicle had been approved...) Then came Challenger, and the end of commercial space launches, and the approval of ISS. Why spend money on a "cheap" space station, if you're trying to get approval for a space station costing $billions? Bad politics. Finally, ISS flights -- the majority of future scheduled flights now -- will utilize the maximum capability of the shuttle system; the extra effort to boost the tanks isn't worth the safety risk.
Good point -- it is nice not to crash in the first place. But there are certainly enterprise-level and other mission-critical functions that will require a JFS safety-net. We shouldn't lose sight of that. Crashes aren't all due to the OS, remember (ever have a backhoe twenty miles away take down your WAN?). And even if Linux is only X% as likely to crash as NT -- that's no comfort to the IS director for whom one crash, at the wrong time, could be professional suicide.
I've had a chance to work with the latest Beta (Beta 3, I think), and it's quite stable. Our W2K team believes it's a release candidate, so 4Q '99 is easily believable.[1]
Present strategy is (I believe) to eke out at least one more major release on the W95-W98 base, then start herding consumers toward a "personal" version of W2K, after which there will once again be "only one Windows". But it will come in at least 5 and maybe more "sizes", from personal to SOHO to enterprise. It may be a bit confusing, but certainly no MORE confusing than the present situation.
[1] None of this should be taken to mean that I love W2K. I "like" it only in that it's a clear improvement over NT4.
SirSlud wrote: But that amendment confuses the hell out of me at any rate: if you're doing something wrong, shouldn't you be working to change the law that makes it wrong rather than trying to uphold the amendment which keeps you from incriminating yourself for it?
I think the way to look at it is through the other end of the lens, Slud.... The Fifth was written as a reaction against British "Star Chambers" [no Kenneth jokes please] where victims were forced to "confess" often-invented "crimes". In other words, the amendment protects us from the state changing the laws to incriminate you, or taking your own words and twisting them into a confession. It's a bulwark against the overwhelming power of the government, and as such has proven to be a fundamental building-block of American-style democracy.
The two most-famous examples in recent history would be the McCarthyist witch-hunts for Communists in government, industry, and even Hollywood ("are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?"). Here a majority in Congress abused the power of the subpoena to intimidate citizens who had violated no laws in order to persecute people in an extra-legal way (by for instance ending their careers); the Fifth was the only defense left to the victims of HUAC or Tailgunner Joe. The other was in the Watergate hearings, where many of the conspirators resorted to it in an attempt to protect themselves or the President. Fortunately there was plenty of corroborating evidence.
The penultimate result of Watergate -- the Clinton impeachment -- was deliberately conducted (by Ken Star Chamber, er, Starr) via grand jury proceedings, precisely because a grand jury proceeding is exempt from the restrictions against self-incrimination. In short, no Fifth Amendment.
To paraphrase another poster, one of the hallmarks of our democracy is the principle that it's better to let ten guilty men go free, than to send one innocent man to jail. In the same spirit, the men behind the Bill of Rights recognized that it's better to let ten guilty men go free, than to let the state use its power to violate individual privacy.
We can only hope that present and future governments keep this in mind!
Are you suggesting there should be one news article when a project is started, and no more news articles on that project until... when?
Sheesh.
Slashdotters are very spoiled. Instant news! Worldwide distribution! Five minute lead times!
"Hey, I've known that since at least yesterday!"
"This was posted in a response to slashdot item on Linux clustering that drifted into a discussion of planetary orbits. Since I read everything on/., I've known about it for three hours and fourteen minutes already, why is Hemos wasting my time with old news like this?!"
Even if it's small, it's going very fast -- generally 10 or more times the maximum speed that any human-built spacecraft have ever achieved (including via gravity assist).
Now assume we have a spacecraft with ten times the capability of anything built today. You would need to have it rendezvous with the comet at the edge of the solar system, then expend all its fuel slowing down an object that's at least a factor of 100 larger in mass than itself, and.... well, if you could do that, you might be able to achieve placing its orbit into a slightly lazier circle that wouldn't get as much acceleration from the sun. Repeat this ten times (in ten 20-year cometary orbits) and you might get a comet that you can aim roughly at the earth.
Because it's true, that's why. The US funds science missions at a small fraction of the money spent on the largely useless manned space program. (Q. Why do we send people into space? A. So we can learn how to send people into space.)
The Europeans are justifiably proud of their space science program, which is a much higher portion of ESA spending, and in particular (like the Japanese) seems to be a little more skilled overall at meeting deadline-oriented projects.
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Katz writes:
Celebration is ultimately a sad, even hopeless story. Clearly, many Americans are unhappy with the noise, enforced mobility and disconnection of contemporary life, even as they rush to malls to save every penny they can. It?s depressing that an entertainment conglomerate is the only prominent entity in the America that has taken any bold step towards addressing these concerns.
Jon, please read up on the New Urbanism, especially the work of Andres Duany and his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Celebration is just one corporate-influenced interpretation. Others have been done with less autocratic standards and more attention to variety in the architecture, from the Duany Associates community Seaside Florida (location of The Truman Show) to newer developments in Seattle, San Francisco, and Atlanta. This dialog is far from complete.
The federal government has largely opted out of urban planning, and most corporations are too volatile and bottom-line driven to persevere through ambitious, even radical undertakings.
As well they should. Urban planning is by necessity a local process; the only thing that the feds or corporations can do is direct it away from the community's interests.
Here was one of the bolder efforts in modern times to return some sense of community and beauty to a country whose home dwellers are forced to choose between declining urban environments that are either declining or ascending so quickly as to price out the middle class, and ugly and increasingly congested suburban ones. Celebration, an effort at a better middle ground, deserved more support scrutiny than either Disney or the media has provided.
Again, I share these frustrations over modern social values -- but Celebration is only one data point in this movement. To some extent, it's already become received wisdom among urban planners and some developers, who have adjusted their approaches without creating wholly unique communities.
The history of such experimental communities is replete with failures or at the very least failures with regard to (often very unrealistic) expectations.
Gee, that sounds ominous, doesn't it?
... or Littleton. [There's the Katz connection!] When you insulate yourself from your neighbors, when you eat at Appleby's and shop at Target or the Gap, you're eliminating most of the sense of community that was important to people's lives just a generation ago.
...
The New Urbanists are a set of architects and city planners who believe that America lost its soul when it moved to the auto-oriented suburbs, from Levittown right up to the Antelope Valley
New Urbanists believe that encouraging small, close-knit, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods with neo-traditional architecture is one of the keys toward restoring that social structure.
I'm not convinced, and if anything, Disney's experiment in Celebration shows that this ideal can have a dark side. Still, there are many other examples that are not run by The Mouse; in fact other communities often eschew the corporate influence that seems endemic here. That doesn't mean they don't (for instance) have a Starbucks -- but it may mean requiring a franchise operator to be a resident.
The school at Celebration has been one of the touchiest problems they've dealt with. Florida law didn't allow them to run a private school here, so they had to accomodate many state laws and found they couldn't do some innovative things they wanted. Say what you will about Disney; they do care about education. It's the parents, ironically, who've objected to the direction the school has taken.
This experiment still has much to teach us
Here's an article on Celebration, with several photos.
Here's a visitor's overview of Celebration.
Sources for a dissertation on Celebration.
New Urbanism and Celebration.
It wasn't the first 8800, it was a slightly improved model available later. This one could be upgraded as far as 64K memory.
...
Altair 8800b Photo and Specs
There's also links to a whole bunch of other neat-o Altair stuff, like full-color images of some of the print ads (Napoleon?!), chronology of the various models, accessory prices
Well, long before there was a paperclip in Office, there was the Paperclip Computer ....
Click on PC milestones & search
Does he have any idea what that Altair is worth???? Those things are going on Ebay for serious money
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Serious money == $2500. A little short of what he got in return, I'd say
he should be thinking about how to maintain and restore and it to pristine shape!
Presumably the folks at the computer museum will take care of that.
Just a question. Is everybody's mother supposed to be a network engineer?
When we can get the gov't to privatize NASA, so its inherant conservatism is based on the engineering rather than beaureaucratic hoop jumping we all may just get to see our childrens children living in space.
NASA should be doing stuff like this -- studying advanced or experimental rocket technologies, the same way they study advanced flight technology. The difference is that in space, NASA is also expected to actually do the job, but for flight, the airplane industry does it.
NASA needs to get out of the spaceflight business entirely (and that is happening, sorta) and concentrate on a) research, b) planetary exploration, and c) satellite science. But this ACE delivery service stuff is well past the point where we should let private industry take over. Hopefully, some of the companies at the cusp of doing this, like Rotary Rocket or the Pioneer Pathfinder folks, will succeed in the next couple of years, and pick up where NASA left off.
This still leaves NASA with responsibility for stuff like Chandra or Cassini -- but getting "us" living in space shouldn't be a government program, just for the reasons you mention.
cthulahoops wrote: That's what I'm thinking. If they can get to .05 c then they can get a probe to alpha-centauri in not too much over twenty years + 4 odd years return time for some pretty data. Close up readings of another Star in our life time == good thing.
... or maybe 3 tenths of one percent of lightspeed. The fastest this technique could get a probe to Alpha Centauri would be, oh, 1600 years. Realistically, we need at least an order of magnitude improvement to get it down to a century or so, when it might be worthwhile trying, assuming we can develop long-lived space probes.
Unfortunately, the top speed achieved here is more like 0.0025 c
This is easy to work out -- light speed is ~300,000kM/s and the solar wind is ~1000kM/s. As you can see it's a long way off.
We'd still need a plasma drive of some sort to provide continuous acceleration -- this collector is a start in that direction but it's not yet there.
And films like _Blair Witch_ killed it -- or at least, that's what a lot of critics have felt for some time.
There was a brief flowering of truly original, offbeat product, culminating in the success of studios like Miramax and New Line -- which were then bought by mainstream studios (Disney and Time/Warner, respectively), eventually leading to more mainstream product.
The most prominent indie film festival is Sundance, and Robert Redford, its founder, just quit on the grounds that it no longer showcases innovative product. The films brought to Sundance aren't original films by people who would never get work in Hollywood, but derivative low-budget fare made by people trying to GET work in Hollywood. Just look at the decline in ethnic faces and the rise in white faces in so-called indie movies, and you'll see that marketing forces have had their say. Perhaps a film like _Office Space_ or _In the Company of Men_ is worthwhile, but they no longer represent cutting-edge filmmaking using ideas Hollywood would never touch.
Also, the rise of what probably should be called "alternative" moviemaking has all but obliterated the market for any kind of foreign film in the US. It's no coincidence that some of the most intriguing films lately have been made by directors in such odd places as Iran or Croatia: the corporate Hollywood product practically doesn't exist there, so there's a market for local films.
It's really sad, because you're right -- BWP is more innovative and interesting than standard H'wood fare such as _The Haunting_, which despite a highbrow cast chose to rely on expensive CGI to make itself scary. On the other hand, a standard studio film such as _The Sixth Sense_ also makes the same point, effectively telling a scary story without lazily relying on effects, and generating some of the strongest word-of-mouth referral business in some time. So it's not impossible.
You're way overstating the case here.
... and some effective grassroots marketing.
Mr. Showbiz interviewed the Last Broadcast team and while there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that the BWP people saw the other film, BWP had been filming off-and-on for at least six months before the film of LB was available. There's nothing in this article saying anything about 'reviewing options with lawyers', either; the LB guys are very cordial. Actually, if they're smart, they realize that the BWP success is the best possible thing for their movie -- at this point THEY might be the beneficiaries of a million-dollar deal.
No matter your feelings on the paper trail here, there have been dozens of student-film projects along the same lines. The cinema-verite-made-cheaply-with-videocams idea is certainly not new; the student-actors-on-a-roadtrip idea is not new; and the we-aint-tellin-if-its-true idea is not new. In fact, the only thing BWP has going for it is technique
Eh. "linn-ucks" is just a natural compression of "lee-nooks" in American. They're close enough that most people won't even notice the difference.
;-)
... till then, we should all just be happy people are using it!
For myself, I choose to pronounce it "linn-ucks" rather than "line-ucks" just because it sounds nicer, but also because it's closer in sound to both "unix" and "minix".
There isn't a "should" here, since there aren't any real rules for when a word jumps languages, especially an invented word. I'm more of a usage-descriptive dictionary type, myself, anyway. Most words that come to us start out being pronounced like the original word, then gradually come to be pronounced according to local rules. Example: French "forte", which is one syllable. But it came to be pronounced "for-tay", which is wrong, but makes more sense to English-speakers, because the "e" at the end is superfluous. Or the Greek "gyros" -- do you say "YOU-rohss", "GHEE-rohss", or "JY-rose"? Most of the people who sell them are just happy you're buying.
(On the other hand, I speak French well enough that I absolutely refuse to say "lingerie" lahn-zha-RAY. It's LANN-zhay-ree, dammit!)
I think the LEE-nucks and LINN-ucks pronunciations will eventually be supplanted by LINE-ucks, just because American English works that way
You only have to aggresively defend patents. You can let trademarks go w/ no fear of losing the trademark. Look at "linux" for an example. Linus afaik does NOTHING to defend the trademark, yet it's still his.
... all trademarks that were not protected, and lost.
Why don't you give that bit of sage advice to the originators of heroin, zipper, aspirin, escalator, granola, yo-yo and linoleum
It's the responsibility of the trademark owner to research the mark's distinctiveness in the beginning, to police the market for competitors' use of possibly infringing marks, and to object before an "unreasonable" time has passed -- otherwise there aren't legal grounds to claim infringement.
As for Linus -- he's actually vigorously and quickly defended the Linux trademark. Note that allowing others to use the trademark doesn't infringe, if they are doing so as agents of the owner. Variant Linux distributions fall under that rubric. Granted, this is a special -- perhaps very nearly unique -- case, but in principle it's not very different from, say, a restaurant franchising operation.
The trouble is that in the world of high-tech, those codenames are used as early marketing tools. There are magazine articles written about them, the specs are often available, the companies have webpages for them ... these guys are not blameless, they KNOW they are marketing tools.
... this is the law! ... you can lose it. While "Sagan" wasn't likely trademarked by the good doctor, there are laws about unauthorized use of celebrity images and names.
Besides, it's not that Lucas was pissed off. It's that "Jedi" is a trademark in itself, and if you do not protect a trademark
So does this mean I can legally say "xerox" now instead of "photocopy" and "kleenex" instead of "facial tissue"? "Magic markers" instead of the generic "permanent markers"? Can I sell some Band-aids now?
None of those make any sense. The judge didn't rule that trademarks in general are invalid; he just ruled that AOL didn't have sufficient claim to the generic phrase "You've got mail" to make it a unique trademark.
So now I suppose I can start up a content providing business and call it "NAOL" (North America Online" or "WOL" (World Online) and add in a nifty little program called NIM or WIM which has a "buddy list"? And when people get email, a nice happy voice of a guy from Orville can tell you "You've got mail!" Think of the possibilities...
WOL might work, but NAOL would be too close. (The "consumer confusion" clause.) But yes, it appears that "buddy list" is now up for grabs -- which, to me, is the only one of the three that makes sense for AOL to own. Although, actually, the ZDNN article makes reference to "You have mail" being the operative phrase, which I would say NO WAY could AOL have trademark claim over since their phrase is "You've GOT mail."
There's no real new law here -- the rules have always made it harder to trademark an existing common phrase than a made-up word. For example, starting a business named "Joe's Convenience Store" doesn't mean you now have rights to the phrase "convenience store" -- but it would be hard to deny someone protection for "Joe's Conven-i-o-mart". And then they'd have to be aggressive about protecting the phrase "conveniomart" from becoming generic, or the only protectable part of the name would be "Joe's" (and then only for businesses in the 24/7 store arena).
I suspect (not having seen it, I can't confirm) that the title was actually in the end an example of product placement. In other words, AOL paid THE MOVIE PRODUCERS for them to use the title, instead of the other way around.
For a while in pre-production the film had a couple of different titles (such as You Have Mail), only changing to You've Got Mail in April '98 -- so it's likely that they initially avoided [read:played coy] any association, until AOL ponied up in some way (which could have been as simple as running "co-op ads").
There are wizards and things, and there are ways to have Exchange create mail users automagically from an NT Server userID database, but it definitely is a pain. I believe there are third-party products which do simplify the process.
I used to be one of those wide-eyed kids who thought NASA could do no wrong. If something like Challenger happened, well, that was pressure from the White House; NASA was bright engineers interested in finding problems and fixing them.
Since then, I've been enlightened. Probably the biggest kick in the pants came from reading _The Hubble Wars_ and _Dragonfly_, about the space telescope and Shuttle-Mir programs, respectively. I've now realized that the astronauts put up with a hell of a lot of crap for the one to three chances most of them get to fly in space. The politics is unbelievably craven. The programs NASA touts as its future -- like ISS -- are boondoggles that have been disavowed by the scientific community. NASA program justifications become bureaucratese circular logic ("Why are we building a space station? So we can know how to build a space station."), keeping the congressional gravy train going. The space vehicle projects (like X-37) have some utility, and may be better managed than in the past (i.e. a program that successfully demonstrates a handful of technologies is probably superior to one that never gets off the ground due to sheer hubris), but the shuttle system still has years to go -- these puppies are rated for 100 flights, which gives them 80 (avg) remaining X 4 orbiters / 10 (optimistic) flights a year = three more decades.
VentureStar isn't the answer: VS is corporate welfare for LockMart, a defense contractor down in the dumps due to the end of the Cold War. X-38 is a useful project to provide a Crew Return Vehicle for the ISS; the X-33 and X-34 may succeed in showing off their tech for future projects.
X-37, though, is definitely just pork, a disappointing project designed to revive technopride or something like that. As Concorde has proven, superfast transport may look good on paper, but the business model may not be able to support it out in the real world.
As mentioned, the debris hazard is one reason. The other is that the tanks aren't very useful by themselves; since nearly every shuttle orbit is to a different altitude or inclination (let alone that being in the same inclination can mean orbits as much as 90 degrees perpendicular!), there's no easy way to collect a bunch of them in one place. (Perhaps if the shuttle-derived orbital transfer vehicle had been approved...) Then came Challenger, and the end of commercial space launches, and the approval of ISS. Why spend money on a "cheap" space station, if you're trying to get approval for a space station costing $billions? Bad politics. Finally, ISS flights -- the majority of future scheduled flights now -- will utilize the maximum capability of the shuttle system; the extra effort to boost the tanks isn't worth the safety risk.
Good point -- it is nice not to crash in the first place. But there are certainly enterprise-level and other mission-critical functions that will require a JFS safety-net. We shouldn't lose sight of that. Crashes aren't all due to the OS, remember (ever have a backhoe twenty miles away take down your WAN?). And even if Linux is only X% as likely to crash as NT -- that's no comfort to the IS director for whom one crash, at the wrong time, could be professional suicide.
Disclaimer: my company is a "Microsoft Partner".
I've had a chance to work with the latest Beta (Beta 3, I think), and it's quite stable. Our W2K team believes it's a release candidate, so 4Q '99 is easily believable.[1]
Present strategy is (I believe) to eke out at least one more major release on the W95-W98 base, then start herding consumers toward a "personal" version of W2K, after which there will once again be "only one Windows". But it will come in at least 5 and maybe more "sizes", from personal to SOHO to enterprise. It may be a bit confusing, but certainly no MORE confusing than the present situation.
[1] None of this should be taken to mean that I love W2K. I "like" it only in that it's a clear improvement over NT4.
SirSlud wrote:
.... The Fifth was written as a reaction against British "Star Chambers" [no Kenneth jokes please] where victims were forced to "confess" often-invented "crimes". In other words, the amendment protects us from the state changing the laws to incriminate you, or taking your own words and twisting them into a confession. It's a bulwark against the overwhelming power of the government, and as such has proven to be a fundamental building-block of American-style democracy.
But that amendment confuses the hell out of me at any rate: if you're doing something wrong, shouldn't you be working to change the law that makes it wrong rather than trying to uphold the amendment which keeps you from incriminating yourself for it?
I think the way to look at it is through the other end of the lens, Slud
The two most-famous examples in recent history would be the McCarthyist witch-hunts for Communists in government, industry, and even Hollywood ("are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?"). Here a majority in Congress abused the power of the subpoena to intimidate citizens who had violated no laws in order to persecute people in an extra-legal way (by for instance ending their careers); the Fifth was the only defense left to the victims of HUAC or Tailgunner Joe. The other was in the Watergate hearings, where many of the conspirators resorted to it in an attempt to protect themselves or the President. Fortunately there was plenty of corroborating evidence.
The penultimate result of Watergate -- the Clinton impeachment -- was deliberately conducted (by Ken Star Chamber, er, Starr) via grand jury proceedings, precisely because a grand jury proceeding is exempt from the restrictions against self-incrimination. In short, no Fifth Amendment.
To paraphrase another poster, one of the hallmarks of our democracy is the principle that it's better to let ten guilty men go free, than to send one innocent man to jail. In the same spirit, the men behind the Bill of Rights recognized that it's better to let ten guilty men go free, than to let the state use its power to violate individual privacy.
We can only hope that present and future governments keep this in mind!
The reference was to Jet Li's seven or more chapters of _Once Upon a Time in China_ (various other English titles).
Are you suggesting there should be one news article when a project is started, and no more news articles on that project until ... when?
/., I've known about it for three hours and fourteen minutes already, why is Hemos wasting my time with old news like this?!"
Sheesh.
Slashdotters are very spoiled. Instant news! Worldwide distribution! Five minute lead times!
"Hey, I've known that since at least yesterday!"
"This was posted in a response to slashdot item on Linux clustering that drifted into a discussion of planetary orbits. Since I read everything on
Three words: Conservation of Momentum.
.... well, if you could do that, you might be able to achieve placing its orbit into a slightly lazier circle that wouldn't get as much acceleration from the sun. Repeat this ten times (in ten 20-year cometary orbits) and you might get a comet that you can aim roughly at the earth.
Even if it's small, it's going very fast -- generally 10 or more times the maximum speed that any human-built spacecraft have ever achieved (including via gravity assist).
Now assume we have a spacecraft with ten times the capability of anything built today. You would need to have it rendezvous with the comet at the edge of the solar system, then expend all its fuel slowing down an object that's at least a factor of 100 larger in mass than itself, and
Which you would want to do, why?
Because it's true, that's why. The US funds science missions at a small fraction of the money spent on the largely useless manned space program. (Q. Why do we send people into space? A. So we can learn how to send people into space.)
The Europeans are justifiably proud of their space science program, which is a much higher portion of ESA spending, and in particular (like the Japanese) seems to be a little more skilled overall at meeting deadline-oriented projects.