You'll see plenty that are as you describe, the same way every time. Things like NBC, Intel, MGM, AT&T (even though they obviously recorded their 'official' version through a phone system, then compressed it down to 8kbps, then cut off the last half second), THX, Fox fanfare etc are always the same.
But look at some of the others on there - Fox got a mark for Homer's "D'oh" sound, that's not always the same thing. Same with the AFLAC duck, he's on there too. There are several generic commercials on there of people just saying tag lines over music (is it really necessary to mark "At Beneficial TOOT TOOT You're Good for More"?)
And if you're feeling nostalgic, ELORG's second clip is the way to go. Also, Certus' Shakuhachi sound is pretty sweet (if only a generic instrument sound), and the THX tone always gives me chills. And apparently you can mark Hanson's Symphony 2, op. 30 even if you're not Hanson.
I would tend to agree with that before I realize that MGM marked their lion roar, which you could argue the same way. You would never be able to convince a court to revoke MGM's mark though.
What strikes me as strange about this particular case is that the sound in question isn't a specific sound, it's made by the company's customers. MGM's lion is a specific sound, it's recorded and always the same, the duck sound is made by customers though, it seems a little strange.
This isn't about Italians using or not using Google. This is the Italians wondering why their news sources aren't ranked higher on Google News.
The newspapers don't opt-in to Google News, they aren't "users" of Google News, the public are the users. The newspapers want to know, considering the fact that a lot of people use Google News, how do they get their content listed higher, and are they being unfairly discriminated against?
But regardless of the details, this isn't a "if you don't like it use something else" scenario, the newspapers aren't "using" Google News. The public is.
Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results, he said, newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising.
it makes boys think dating a high level elf huntress is better than having a real girlfriend.
I hate to be the one to point it out, but if someone thinks that way, it's not the game's fault. They were already like that before they got the game, your friends just either weren't able to pick up on it, or thought they could "fix" the guy.
nothing made her more attractive to me than her dancing as her troll priest avatar.
... and this is why geeks have the female stigma that we do. You're saying that *nothing* makes your girlfriend more attractive than when she logs in to a video game and presses a key. I mean, you've seen the girl naked before, right? But you would prefer watching a character dance onscreen than actually interacting with your girlfriend's physical body?
Well hell, why stop there? You can learn all about how to handle medical emergencies from WMD. If you're really nice, I'll even tell you how to open the debug console and set your score to 100.
I never thought your on-line courses being just one static page.
Our online courses aren't "pages" at all, they're Flash movies. The course shell itself is a single Flash movie that contains all of the base code, and paging through the course instructs the shell to load the next or previous Flash movie to show in the content area of the shell. The shell SWF is often linked to directly, i.e. not embedded on a web page at all. An LMS only needs to embed the Flash content on a web page if the course needs to communicate with the LMS through Javascript (e.g. for SCORM tracking).
Most commercial sites that include some form of flash presentations, on-line videos, etc. are web sites no more
No dummy, youtube.com is a web site. The Flash video player on youtube.com, and the videos themselves, are not web sites. Likewise, an LMS is a web site. The training pieces that the LMS hosts are not necessarily web sites. You can use youtube.com without the Flash plugin, there are other things you can do besides watch the videos. But you can't watch the video without Flash, so the video player is not a web site.
Would you feel equally comfortable making a statement of law such as "Murder is perfectly OK" in one of your training videos?
I'm not sure what you're getting at, I didn't say I agreed with the content in the training piece. I was responding to the GP's claim that all government vendors produce crap, not any ethical or moral issues around downloading music.
Obviously it's an over-simplification to say that downloading music without purchasing it is illegal. The iTunes argument doesn't apply to this training piece though, because they specify "without purchase". Still, there are plenty of instances where it's perfectly legal to download a piece of music without explicitly paying for it.
That's not what my post was about though.
hello slander lawsuit with the punitive damages!
Not really.. slander requires bad faith, if the accuser really thought the accused was doing something illegal then he made the accusation in good faith. It would only be slander if the accuser knew the act was actually legal and still accused the other of a crime. Moreover, producing a receipt in court would get the judge to dismiss the case entirely.
Yeah I try to keep Pandora to off-peak hours. I mentioned above that our 6 phone lines share our T1, when people start to take their lunch breaks and watch movie or game trailers or whatever I can tell, Pandora starts skipping. That's when I shut it down until the afternoon.
At least I don't email everyone else and insist though, that's pretty classic.
No kidding, the sooner we evict Qwest and their ridiculous pricing structure and "service", the better. My internet service at home is several times faster, both up and down, and cheaper. When you slap a static IP on the connection they jack the price way up.
Hell, I used to have commercial Cox service at my house, that was still cheaper than what the boss is paying Qwest, and we had 10mb down.
Oh, did I mention that our phone system also uses the T1? Each of the 6 lines uses 128k when someone is on the phone. If we have all lines full our bandwidth is cut in half.
-Is it its main access mech an HTTP-based URL? -Is it intended to be accessed on-line? -Does it start within a browser at the reach of an URL or is it marked for download?
That's not how I define "web site". For one thing, a web site is more than a single page. Another might be that a web site doesn't require a plugin in order to operate correctly. If it requires a plugin, it's something other than a web site.
Again, not everything that is online is a web site. Just like not everything that has a street address is a house.
The "website for online training" is the LMS, the learning management system. For the LMS I develop for my company, I either refer to it as a "web application" or "web site", depending on who I'm talking to. It's fair to describe the system that launches and tracks the online courses as a "web site". It doesn't make a lot of sense to refer to each individual piece of training content as another web site though. And it's also not the same as using your human-readable language of choice to produce machine code.
What if, instead of Flash, the training piece was one long video. Would you call that video a web site?
It's pedantic, sure, but there's no better place for that than here.
We don't exclusively do government work, and this isn't the only company I can work for. I work here because the people who work here are good, qualified people who are motivated to make a good product, and we also happen to get government contracts. If he's going to make blanket statements like this:
They overspend money to create sub-par pieces of crap
then I'm going to take exception to that, because that's not what we're involved in. We don't overcharge, and we produce a good product. It's not because my livelihood depends on it, it's because I have pride in my company's work. It's not fair to say that all government vendors overcharge and produce crap, because that's not the reality of the situation.
I'm sure that's more about bandwidth than any ethical considerations. I can use Pandora to stream music at 192kbps, which works great when I'm at home. When I'm on the corporate T-1 that also has a public web server on it, I keep it down to 128kbps (aren't I nice?).
PDF documents, Word files, Excel spreadsheets, and Flash training courses all have URLs. It doesn't make them web sites. This training piece is no more of a web site than a PDF document is a web site. When people describe everything online as a "web site", it does irk me. If I tell someone the company I work for creates online training courses and they respond "oh, you mean web sites?", I tend to think that that person doesn't really know what they're talking about. That's like saying that everything that has a street address is a house.
Yeah, mostly. The training industry has the Brandon Hall Awards (Brandon Hall says that they're the "Oscars of the training industry", of course), plus IEEE awards, Society For Technical Communication awards, etc. Yeah, they don't mean a lot, but it also makes you feel pretty good when you're being presented with the best award you can possibly get for your industry (even though you wouldn't be able to trade it for a free drink).
The last award we got for something I worked on, we submitted our piece to Brandon Hall, I think it was in the Learning Technology category, which doesn't have too much competition. They might get 100 submissions total for that one, versus several thousand for the "Custom Learning Content" category. We were told we won an award and went to the ceremony with our Air Force buds (the work was for them), and we sat there confused as they announced all of the winners for the Learning Tech. category and left us out. They keep going and get to the very end of the Custom category, and announce us the gold winner. They were so impressed with our stuff (military training that ran on a PDA, so the soldiers could train in the aircraft en route) that they bumped us up to the higher category and still gave us the gold.
So yeah, I still can't trade that award for a free drink, but it does feel pretty good to get a little peer recognition every now and then. Especially when the people who got the bronzes and silvers were companies like IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, and Adobe (yeah, we beat Adobe at creating Flash-based training content, which didn't come as that much of a shock really). In other words, companies whose annual revenue are greater than our total revenue over the last 13 years, that feels pretty good to beat them. And it always feels good to beat Microsoft at anything, I don't care what the competition is.
If you're saying they don't work, then you're not dealing with my life's work. I don't deliver things that don't work and neither does the company I work for, regardless of who the client is. I'm sorry you have to use products from other vendors.
I partially agree with you, I've seen a lot of CBTs that look like they were written, designed, and programmed by high school kids. That's not what we do.
Slashdot Mirror
not impressed
Take a look at some of the other sound marks:
http://www.uspto.gov/go/kids/kidsound.html
You'll see plenty that are as you describe, the same way every time. Things like NBC, Intel, MGM, AT&T (even though they obviously recorded their 'official' version through a phone system, then compressed it down to 8kbps, then cut off the last half second), THX, Fox fanfare etc are always the same.
But look at some of the others on there - Fox got a mark for Homer's "D'oh" sound, that's not always the same thing. Same with the AFLAC duck, he's on there too. There are several generic commercials on there of people just saying tag lines over music (is it really necessary to mark "At Beneficial TOOT TOOT You're Good for More"?)
And if you're feeling nostalgic, ELORG's second clip is the way to go. Also, Certus' Shakuhachi sound is pretty sweet (if only a generic instrument sound), and the THX tone always gives me chills. And apparently you can mark Hanson's Symphony 2, op. 30 even if you're not Hanson.
I would tend to agree with that before I realize that MGM marked their lion roar, which you could argue the same way. You would never be able to convince a court to revoke MGM's mark though.
What strikes me as strange about this particular case is that the sound in question isn't a specific sound, it's made by the company's customers. MGM's lion is a specific sound, it's recorded and always the same, the duck sound is made by customers though, it seems a little strange.
This isn't about Italians using or not using Google. This is the Italians wondering why their news sources aren't ranked higher on Google News.
The newspapers don't opt-in to Google News, they aren't "users" of Google News, the public are the users. The newspapers want to know, considering the fact that a lot of people use Google News, how do they get their content listed higher, and are they being unfairly discriminated against?
But regardless of the details, this isn't a "if you don't like it use something else" scenario, the newspapers aren't "using" Google News. The public is.
Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results, he said, newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising.
Yeah, I know.. but..
"nothing made her more attractive"
"nothing"
not anything
The single most attractive thing she could possibly do would be to log in to WoW and hit the "dance" button. woooooo!
Maybe I just can't relate because all of my girlfriends have disliked video games, but still.. nothing?? really?
I guess.. I mean, it's no alien sideboob, but I guess if that's your thing.
Yeah, I know, but "nothing more attractive"? Really?
I mod you -1 stupid for referring to girlintraining as "man".
it makes boys think dating a high level elf huntress is better than having a real girlfriend.
I hate to be the one to point it out, but if someone thinks that way, it's not the game's fault. They were already like that before they got the game, your friends just either weren't able to pick up on it, or thought they could "fix" the guy.
nothing made her more attractive to me than her dancing as her troll priest avatar.
... and this is why geeks have the female stigma that we do. You're saying that *nothing* makes your girlfriend more attractive than when she logs in to a video game and presses a key. I mean, you've seen the girl naked before, right? But you would prefer watching a character dance onscreen than actually interacting with your girlfriend's physical body?
To each his own I guess..
Well hell, why stop there? You can learn all about how to handle medical emergencies from WMD. If you're really nice, I'll even tell you how to open the debug console and set your score to 100.
Way to miss the point.
I never thought your on-line courses being just one static page.
Our online courses aren't "pages" at all, they're Flash movies. The course shell itself is a single Flash movie that contains all of the base code, and paging through the course instructs the shell to load the next or previous Flash movie to show in the content area of the shell. The shell SWF is often linked to directly, i.e. not embedded on a web page at all. An LMS only needs to embed the Flash content on a web page if the course needs to communicate with the LMS through Javascript (e.g. for SCORM tracking).
Most commercial sites that include some form of flash presentations, on-line videos, etc. are web sites no more
No dummy, youtube.com is a web site. The Flash video player on youtube.com, and the videos themselves, are not web sites. Likewise, an LMS is a web site. The training pieces that the LMS hosts are not necessarily web sites. You can use youtube.com without the Flash plugin, there are other things you can do besides watch the videos. But you can't watch the video without Flash, so the video player is not a web site.
Would you feel equally comfortable making a statement of law such as "Murder is perfectly OK" in one of your training videos?
I'm not sure what you're getting at, I didn't say I agreed with the content in the training piece. I was responding to the GP's claim that all government vendors produce crap, not any ethical or moral issues around downloading music.
Obviously it's an over-simplification to say that downloading music without purchasing it is illegal. The iTunes argument doesn't apply to this training piece though, because they specify "without purchase". Still, there are plenty of instances where it's perfectly legal to download a piece of music without explicitly paying for it.
That's not what my post was about though.
hello slander lawsuit with the punitive damages!
Not really.. slander requires bad faith, if the accuser really thought the accused was doing something illegal then he made the accusation in good faith. It would only be slander if the accuser knew the act was actually legal and still accused the other of a crime. Moreover, producing a receipt in court would get the judge to dismiss the case entirely.
Yeah I try to keep Pandora to off-peak hours. I mentioned above that our 6 phone lines share our T1, when people start to take their lunch breaks and watch movie or game trailers or whatever I can tell, Pandora starts skipping. That's when I shut it down until the afternoon.
At least I don't email everyone else and insist though, that's pretty classic.
No kidding, the sooner we evict Qwest and their ridiculous pricing structure and "service", the better. My internet service at home is several times faster, both up and down, and cheaper. When you slap a static IP on the connection they jack the price way up.
Hell, I used to have commercial Cox service at my house, that was still cheaper than what the boss is paying Qwest, and we had 10mb down.
Oh, did I mention that our phone system also uses the T1? Each of the 6 lines uses 128k when someone is on the phone. If we have all lines full our bandwidth is cut in half.
-Is it its main access mech an HTTP-based URL?
-Is it intended to be accessed on-line?
-Does it start within a browser at the reach of an URL or is it marked for download?
That's not how I define "web site". For one thing, a web site is more than a single page. Another might be that a web site doesn't require a plugin in order to operate correctly. If it requires a plugin, it's something other than a web site.
Again, not everything that is online is a web site. Just like not everything that has a street address is a house.
The "website for online training" is the LMS, the learning management system. For the LMS I develop for my company, I either refer to it as a "web application" or "web site", depending on who I'm talking to. It's fair to describe the system that launches and tracks the online courses as a "web site". It doesn't make a lot of sense to refer to each individual piece of training content as another web site though. And it's also not the same as using your human-readable language of choice to produce machine code.
What if, instead of Flash, the training piece was one long video. Would you call that video a web site?
It's pedantic, sure, but there's no better place for that than here.
We don't exclusively do government work, and this isn't the only company I can work for. I work here because the people who work here are good, qualified people who are motivated to make a good product, and we also happen to get government contracts. If he's going to make blanket statements like this:
They overspend money to create sub-par pieces of crap
then I'm going to take exception to that, because that's not what we're involved in. We don't overcharge, and we produce a good product. It's not because my livelihood depends on it, it's because I have pride in my company's work. It's not fair to say that all government vendors overcharge and produce crap, because that's not the reality of the situation.
Who did Apple buy iTunes from? I don't use it myself, I'm not sure.
I'm sure that's more about bandwidth than any ethical considerations. I can use Pandora to stream music at 192kbps, which works great when I'm at home. When I'm on the corporate T-1 that also has a public web server on it, I keep it down to 128kbps (aren't I nice?).
"Web site" is the term I was arguing against, not "Flash-heavy".
PDF documents, Word files, Excel spreadsheets, and Flash training courses all have URLs. It doesn't make them web sites. This training piece is no more of a web site than a PDF document is a web site. When people describe everything online as a "web site", it does irk me. If I tell someone the company I work for creates online training courses and they respond "oh, you mean web sites?", I tend to think that that person doesn't really know what they're talking about. That's like saying that everything that has a street address is a house.
I dare not click a link to femdomworld.com at work, but I love the fact that someone thinks it's interesting.
most industry awards are useless.
Yeah, mostly. The training industry has the Brandon Hall Awards (Brandon Hall says that they're the "Oscars of the training industry", of course), plus IEEE awards, Society For Technical Communication awards, etc. Yeah, they don't mean a lot, but it also makes you feel pretty good when you're being presented with the best award you can possibly get for your industry (even though you wouldn't be able to trade it for a free drink).
The last award we got for something I worked on, we submitted our piece to Brandon Hall, I think it was in the Learning Technology category, which doesn't have too much competition. They might get 100 submissions total for that one, versus several thousand for the "Custom Learning Content" category. We were told we won an award and went to the ceremony with our Air Force buds (the work was for them), and we sat there confused as they announced all of the winners for the Learning Tech. category and left us out. They keep going and get to the very end of the Custom category, and announce us the gold winner. They were so impressed with our stuff (military training that ran on a PDA, so the soldiers could train in the aircraft en route) that they bumped us up to the higher category and still gave us the gold.
So yeah, I still can't trade that award for a free drink, but it does feel pretty good to get a little peer recognition every now and then. Especially when the people who got the bronzes and silvers were companies like IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, and Adobe (yeah, we beat Adobe at creating Flash-based training content, which didn't come as that much of a shock really). In other words, companies whose annual revenue are greater than our total revenue over the last 13 years, that feels pretty good to beat them. And it always feels good to beat Microsoft at anything, I don't care what the competition is.
If you're saying they don't work, then you're not dealing with my life's work. I don't deliver things that don't work and neither does the company I work for, regardless of who the client is. I'm sorry you have to use products from other vendors.
I partially agree with you, I've seen a lot of CBTs that look like they were written, designed, and programmed by high school kids. That's not what we do.