I first played Adventure in 1979 via a TI Silent 700 thermal paper terminal (with built in 300 baud acoustic modem) connected to a PDP-11/83 running Seventh Edition UNIX at Bell Labs. Yep, I'm that old.
In the case of a red cross, the vast majority of Americans associate it with the International Red Cross, not Johnson & Johnson. Use of a red cross by Johnson & Johnson would likely confuse people into thinking the product was connected with the Red Cross, while usage by the Red Cross would not mislead people into thinking it connected with Johnson & Johnson.
Actually, I think you've got it completely backwards. The vast majority of Americans associate the red cross with Johnson & Johnson when the red cross appears on a health product, such as toothpaste or shampoo. For over 100 years both J&J and the Red Cross have been using the trademark without confusing the marketplace, but now the Red Cross has decided to license the red cross for use in health products for consumers. Because the red cross symbol has appeared in your local drug store for over 100 years on J&J products, it stands to reason that consumers would believe the new Red Cross licensed products were also from J&J.
The site seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different comments commented in the site? The answer is Dynamic HTML Programming.
That would be the iPhone Shuffle, which randomly calls someone in your address book when you press Call.
Re:Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore Pet
on
The Apple II At 30
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Claim 3 is wrong..
LOL. Claim is indisputably correct and the fact that you don't know this leads me to believe you weren't even born when the Apple II was released. Not only could one program the Apple II in machine language, but Woz built a debugger and disassembler into the ROM to make it easier to do so.
The TRS-80 was limited ito 4K and 8K DRAM configurations, and the Apple II could be expanded to 48K DRAM on the motherboard and even more via the expandable slots (which the TRS-80 and PET lacked).
And the only "real-world" application that mattered was VisiCalc which was only available for the Apple II.
Clearly you hate today's Apple, but don't confuse Woz's groundbreaking machine with today's company.
Re:Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore Pet
on
The Apple II At 30
·
· Score: 1
I think the only reason to single out the Apple II is that Apple is still around, since the TRS-80 and Commodore Pet were technically at least as good as the Apple II.
That couldn't be further from the truth.
The Apple II was the only of the three consumer computers that year that 1) supported color 2) had addressable pixels 3) could be programmed in machine language and 4) could be hooked up to your color TV. Those facts alone probably cemented its success in the consumer space since a new gaming industry opened around the Apple II whereas the TRS-80 and Pet were limited to simple "games" written in BASIC with ASCII character graphics.
IMHO, those machines had much more in common with the Apple I (in fact, Woz mentions in his book that he felt they were simply cheap knock offs of the Apple I which didn't bother him a whit since he had the Apple II up his sleeve).
The Windows Sidebar is modeled after Apples Dashboard, which allows customized applets to be displayed and used. A useful cautionary note mentions that the Sidebar gadgets dont save data or configurations when closed. You must start all over again.
Actually, this "warning" of losing preferences when closing gadgets also applies Apple's Dashboard: any widget removed from the Dashboard loses its preferences. The act of moving a gadget (widget) from the Gallery (Shelf) into the Sidebar (Dashboard) is what instantiaties a new gadget (widget). Persistence of configuration data is only acheived by keeping the gadget (or widget) alive. Both platforms save configuration data between logouts/shutdowns -- but for instantiated widgets (gadgets) only. Close them, and their done.
And now, some shameless self-promotion for you Vista early adopters, courtesy of lifehacker: Turn any web widget into a Vista Gadget The Amnesty Generator for Windows is designed to let you convert any embeddable web site widget (including Google Gadgets) into a Vista Sidebar Gadget with very little work.
Compared to Vista's Gadget library's relatively meager 275 gadgets, Google Gadgets for your web page, for example, currently sports over 3000 widgets - meaning that if you're a fan of Vista Gadgets and you want to expand your palette, the Amnesty Generator looks like a good way to do that. If this sounds at all familiar, OS X Dashboard-lovers may remember that Amnesty Generator is also available for Dashboard. Right now the generator still has a few kinks (particularly in the looks department), but in all it seems to work fairly well.
Ever hear of Zillow, the real estate "estimator"? They already have detailed pictures of homes in many major U.S. cities, from four different angles (taken by plane, natch). These aerial shots, of course, blow sat images away when it comes to level of detail.
The computational effort for short word sequences is no longer much of an issue. For example, the web clustering algorithm in the free application CQ web computes clusters in corpus phrases up to seven words in length, and it runs without a hiccup on your standard Windows or Mac desktop.
4. The first time that a single query will bring a gallery of
results equivalent to running multiple queries about the
meaningful variations of the same topic.
5. The first time a search engine will let users evaluate answers
on the spot by displaying uninterrupted and coherent text
snippets, often letting searchers forgo having to click through
to links and saving time.
Both of these have been available for a couple of years: e.g. searching on the single query "semantic web" using CQ web, reveals clusters such as these:
fuzzy sets fuzzy systems neural networks set theory soft computing aritifical intelligence control systems expert systems
And each one of which is linked to a specific page of results using sentences instead of snippets, e.g. for artificial intelligence:
1. This paper will present the foundations of fuzzy systems...noteworthy objections to its use with examples drawn from current research in the field of artificial intelligence. Fuzzy Systems - A Tutorial 2. The most obvious implementation for the fuzzy logic is the field of artificial intelligence. Fuzzy Logic 3. Ultimately it will be demonstrated...fuzzy systems makes a viable addition to the field of artificial intelligence and perhaps more generally to formal mathematics. Fuzzy Systems - A Tutorial 4. The paper gives examples of the fuzzy logic applications with emphasis on the field of artificial intelligence. Fuzzy Logic 5. A collection of articles and other technical resources for artificial intelligence. PC AI - Fuzzy Logic
t's good for temporary use but I agree with the premise of using widgets as apps.
You can convert any Dashboard widget into an OS X app using Amnesty Singles (awhich also lets you select what level your widget app sits in, so it isn't floating all the time).
Another solution is to use the shareware apps Amnesty Widget Broswer or Amnesty Singles, which unlike the "devmode" trick actually allow you to set the window level your Dashboard widgets stay in on the desktop.
If Singh's technical expertise and history of OS X wizardry any indication, we can hope for some cool Mac software from Google.
Although Singh's hiring is definitely a step in the right direction concerning Google's commitment to the Mac, it's been a long time coming. In the meantime, independent Mac developers have already started writing tools and utilities that bridge the gap between OS X and Google. Just a few examples (the first being a shameless plug, natch):
Amnesty Generator – converts Google web page hosted gadgets into Dashboard widgets.
Google Maps Plugin – integrates Apple Address Book with Google Maps and Google Earth.
Dashalytics – gives you quick access to prettified Google Analytics stats in a widget.
From macintouch.com: Mesa Dynamics released Amnesty Generator 0.5b, a utility that converts any Google web page gadget into a Mac OS X Dashboard widget. The software "automates the process of embedding [Google's] gadget code into locally hosted web pages that are implemented inside Dashboard widgets."
Yahoo! already has their own social networking site: Yahoo! 360. But as the article states, 360 has failed to attract the kids, and so now their only option is to buy their way into an established userbase.
IMHO, Ehrlich (how it's actually spelled) is only trying to setup a platform for challenging the results if the election ends up being close. It is pretty much impossible to replace the entire voting system with paper ballots in time before the election, and since Ehrlich knows this, the only reason he'd state such a position is to seed FUD prior to the election date. If a recount or court challenge is needed by the GOP in Maryland, the public might be more receptive to his position (which will likely be "voter fraud") if they've been "educated" that the electronic system in Maryland is broken.
The Alto did not have true overlapping windows. However, Bill Atkinson saw the Smalltalk demo, assumed that the windows were indeed overlapping, and then invented Quickdraw regions to take care of it.
From folklore.org: Smalltalk has no Finder, and no need for one, really. Drag-and- drop file manipulation came from the Mac group, along with many other unique concepts: resources and dual-fork files for storing layout and international information apart from code; definition procedures; drag-and-drop system extension and configuration; types and creators for files; direct manipulation editing of document, disk, and application names; redundant typed data for the clipboard; multiple views of the file system; desk accessories; and control panels, among others. The Lisa group invented some fundamental concepts as well: pull down menus, the imaging and windowing models based on QuickDraw, the clipboard, and cleanly internationalizable software.
Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front. One Macintosh feature identical to a Smalltalk feature is selection-based modeless text editing with cut and paste, which was created by Larry Tesler for his Gypsy editor at PARC.
1) There is nothing wrong with using everyday words as trademarks. Many consumer products do (just check out your supermarket aisles).
2) Trademarks, when applied for, must describe the market for their good and/or service. A trademark simply protects the good/service in that market, and does not stop anyone from using the word in any other context (or even for any other product/service, given some caveats, e.g. famous marks).
3) Trademarks need to be actively defended, so a C+D letter or even a lawsuit needs to be seen as a necessary requirement to defending a registered mark.
4) A trademark cannot be "held" to block others. A necessary requirement for keeping a trademark is production of your good and/or service. If you never produce anything, you'll lose the trademark. In other words, unscrupulous people aren't going to make much use of trademarks that they aren't actually using.
So, if "dot-net" is registered as a trademark (which it perfectly can), for say a software company or a web 2.0 service, it really doesn't affect anyone except/.ers who feel like getting worked about meaningless things.
Actually, Apple has been working on system level resolution independence since 2004, and in Tiger it can be turned on via a developer-only mode switch (to allow developers to modify their application accordingly, esp. those that roll-their-own UI widgets). I would assume this will be delivered in Leopard.
For those of us who remember the rogue-like games, from Ken Arnold's & Michael Toy's original, through moria, hack, larn, omega and arguably perfected in nethack (probably the first game ever developed over the Internet by various programmers), we know that gameplay mechanics, especially in interfaces that require an active imagination to fully express, were the games that lasted and are still forever playable.
Contrary to the notion in the article, it's the lack of realistic graphics and sound that make these complex games long-lived. Were there stinkers in the past? Hell yes. But nothing will ever match the groundbreaking creativity behind some of the true classics. After all, demand for eye-candy hasn't obviated the deck of cards, the checkerboard, the chess board, the backgammon board or dominoes. Truly "classic" games (whether played on UNIX terminals, 80s arcades or early consoles) demanded good and inventive game play precisley because the graphics sucked.
Many of today's games are proof that photorealistic and awesome physics engines can't substitute for lack of plot, strategy or complexity. In 100 years, nobody will be talking about Quake IV, but there will still be articles about Zork, Gauntlet and Zelda.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who are interested, a C version of the game is part of OpenBSD:t ure
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/src/games/adven
I first played Adventure in 1979 via a TI Silent 700 thermal paper terminal (with built in 300 baud acoustic modem) connected to a PDP-11/83 running Seventh Edition UNIX at Bell Labs. Yep, I'm that old.
In the case of a red cross, the vast majority of Americans associate it with the International Red Cross, not Johnson & Johnson. Use of a red cross by Johnson & Johnson would likely confuse people into thinking the product was connected with the Red Cross, while usage by the Red Cross would not mislead people into thinking it connected with Johnson & Johnson.
Actually, I think you've got it completely backwards. The vast majority of Americans associate the red cross with Johnson & Johnson when the red cross appears on a health product, such as toothpaste or shampoo. For over 100 years both J&J and the Red Cross have been using the trademark without confusing the marketplace, but now the Red Cross has decided to license the red cross for use in health products for consumers. Because the red cross symbol has appeared in your local drug store for over 100 years on J&J products, it stands to reason that consumers would believe the new Red Cross licensed products were also from J&J.
The site seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different comments commented in the site? The answer is Dynamic HTML Programming.
That would be the iPhone Shuffle, which randomly calls someone in your address book when you press Call.
Claim 3 is wrong..
LOL. Claim is indisputably correct and the fact that you don't know this leads me to believe you weren't even born when the Apple II was released. Not only could one program the Apple II in machine language, but Woz built a debugger and disassembler into the ROM to make it easier to do so.
The TRS-80 was limited ito 4K and 8K DRAM configurations, and the Apple II could be expanded to 48K DRAM on the motherboard and even more via the expandable slots (which the TRS-80 and PET lacked).
And the only "real-world" application that mattered was VisiCalc which was only available for the Apple II.
Clearly you hate today's Apple, but don't confuse Woz's groundbreaking machine with today's company.
I think the only reason to single out the Apple II is that Apple is still around, since the TRS-80 and Commodore Pet were technically at least as good as the Apple II.
That couldn't be further from the truth.
The Apple II was the only of the three consumer computers that year that 1) supported color 2) had addressable pixels 3) could be programmed in machine language and 4) could be hooked up to your color TV. Those facts alone probably cemented its success in the consumer space since a new gaming industry opened around the Apple II whereas the TRS-80 and Pet were limited to simple "games" written in BASIC with ASCII character graphics.
IMHO, those machines had much more in common with the Apple I (in fact, Woz mentions in his book that he felt they were simply cheap knock offs of the Apple I which didn't bother him a whit since he had the Apple II up his sleeve).
Ads for nerds. Stuff that maddens.
The Windows Sidebar is modeled after Apples Dashboard, which allows customized applets to be displayed and used. A useful cautionary note mentions that the Sidebar gadgets dont save data or configurations when closed. You must start all over again.
Actually, this "warning" of losing preferences when closing gadgets also applies Apple's Dashboard: any widget removed from the Dashboard loses its preferences. The act of moving a gadget (widget) from the Gallery (Shelf) into the Sidebar (Dashboard) is what instantiaties a new gadget (widget). Persistence of configuration data is only acheived by keeping the gadget (or widget) alive. Both platforms save configuration data between logouts/shutdowns -- but for instantiated widgets (gadgets) only. Close them, and their done.
And now, some shameless self-promotion for you Vista early adopters, courtesy of lifehacker:
Turn any web widget into a Vista Gadget
The Amnesty Generator for Windows is designed to let you convert any embeddable web site widget (including Google Gadgets) into a Vista Sidebar Gadget with very little work.
Compared to Vista's Gadget library's relatively meager 275 gadgets, Google Gadgets for your web page, for example, currently sports over 3000 widgets - meaning that if you're a fan of Vista Gadgets and you want to expand your palette, the Amnesty Generator looks like a good way to do that. If this sounds at all familiar, OS X Dashboard-lovers may remember that Amnesty Generator is also available for Dashboard. Right now the generator still has a few kinks (particularly in the looks department), but in all it seems to work fairly well.
Amnesty Generator for Vista
Ever hear of Zillow, the real estate "estimator"? They already have detailed pictures of homes in many major U.S. cities, from four different angles (taken by plane, natch). These aerial shots, of course, blow sat images away when it comes to level of detail.
The computational effort for short word sequences is no longer much of an issue. For example, the web clustering algorithm in the free application CQ web computes clusters in corpus phrases up to seven words in length, and it runs without a hiccup on your standard Windows or Mac desktop.
4. The first time that a single query will bring a gallery of
results equivalent to running multiple queries about the
meaningful variations of the same topic.
5. The first time a search engine will let users evaluate answers
on the spot by displaying uninterrupted and coherent text
snippets, often letting searchers forgo having to click through
to links and saving time.
Both of these have been available for a couple of years: e.g. searching on the single query "semantic web" using CQ web, reveals clusters such as these:
fuzzy sets
fuzzy systems
neural networks
set theory
soft computing
aritifical intelligence
control systems
expert systems
And each one of which is linked to a specific page of results using sentences instead of snippets, e.g. for artificial intelligence:
1. This paper will present the foundations of fuzzy systems...noteworthy objections to its use with examples drawn from current research in the field of artificial intelligence.
Fuzzy Systems - A Tutorial
2. The most obvious implementation for the fuzzy logic is the field of artificial intelligence.
Fuzzy Logic
3. Ultimately it will be demonstrated...fuzzy systems makes a viable addition to the field of artificial intelligence and perhaps more generally to formal mathematics.
Fuzzy Systems - A Tutorial
4. The paper gives examples of the fuzzy logic applications with emphasis on the field of artificial intelligence.
Fuzzy Logic
5. A collection of articles and other technical resources for artificial intelligence.
PC AI - Fuzzy Logic
t's good for temporary use but I agree with the premise of using widgets as apps.
You can convert any Dashboard widget into an OS X app using Amnesty Singles (awhich also lets you select what level your widget app sits in, so it isn't floating all the time).
Another solution is to use the shareware apps Amnesty Widget Broswer or Amnesty Singles, which unlike the "devmode" trick actually allow you to set the window level your Dashboard widgets stay in on the desktop.
And we all know the MS formula of [B]floating something[/B] tha sucks and refining it until people actually like it.
Finally, a decent explanation for the brown Zune.
Although Singh's hiring is definitely a step in the right direction concerning Google's commitment to the Mac, it's been a long time coming. In the meantime, independent Mac developers have already started writing tools and utilities that bridge the gap between OS X and Google. Just a few examples (the first being a shameless plug, natch):
I suppose the real question is: does Google's newfound enthusiasm for OS X simply mean rewriting all these existing tools in-house?
From macintouch.com:
Mesa Dynamics released Amnesty Generator 0.5b, a utility that converts any Google web page gadget into a Mac OS X Dashboard widget. The software "automates the process of embedding [Google's] gadget code into locally hosted web pages that are implemented inside Dashboard widgets."
"U2" was already taken
The Coldplay limited edition Zune will kick ass.
Trademarks are ridiculous when they're normal, everyday words.
Tide
Crest
Dove
Dawn
these don't bother you?
Yahoo! already has their own social networking site: Yahoo! 360. But as the article states, 360 has failed to attract the kids, and so now their only option is to buy their way into an established userbase.
IMHO, Ehrlich (how it's actually spelled) is only trying to setup a platform for challenging the results if the election ends up being close. It is pretty much impossible to replace the entire voting system with paper ballots in time before the election, and since Ehrlich knows this, the only reason he'd state such a position is to seed FUD prior to the election date. If a recount or court challenge is needed by the GOP in Maryland, the public might be more receptive to his position (which will likely be "voter fraud") if they've been "educated" that the electronic system in Maryland is broken.
Serisouly, that's innuendo up the woz.
The Alto did not have true overlapping windows. However, Bill Atkinson saw the Smalltalk demo, assumed that the windows were indeed overlapping, and then invented Quickdraw regions to take care of it.
From folklore.org:
Smalltalk has no Finder, and no need for one, really. Drag-and- drop file manipulation came from the Mac group, along with many other unique concepts: resources and dual-fork files for storing layout and international information apart from code; definition procedures; drag-and-drop system extension and configuration; types and creators for files; direct manipulation editing of document, disk, and application names; redundant typed data for the clipboard; multiple views of the file system; desk accessories; and control panels, among others. The Lisa group invented some fundamental concepts as well: pull down menus, the imaging and windowing models based on QuickDraw, the clipboard, and cleanly internationalizable software.
Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front. One Macintosh feature identical to a Smalltalk feature is selection-based modeless text editing with cut and paste, which was created by Larry Tesler for his Gypsy editor at PARC.
To answer the big question:
/.ers who feel like getting worked about meaningless things.
1) There is nothing wrong with using everyday words as trademarks. Many consumer products do (just check out your supermarket aisles).
2) Trademarks, when applied for, must describe the market for their good and/or service. A trademark simply protects the good/service in that market, and does not stop anyone from using the word in any other context (or even for any other product/service, given some caveats, e.g. famous marks).
3) Trademarks need to be actively defended, so a C+D letter or even a lawsuit needs to be seen as a necessary requirement to defending a registered mark.
4) A trademark cannot be "held" to block others. A necessary requirement for keeping a trademark is production of your good and/or service. If you never produce anything, you'll lose the trademark. In other words, unscrupulous people aren't going to make much use of trademarks that they aren't actually using.
So, if "dot-net" is registered as a trademark (which it perfectly can), for say a software company or a web 2.0 service, it really doesn't affect anyone except
Actually, Apple has been working on system level resolution independence since 2004, and in Tiger it can be turned on via a developer-only mode switch (to allow developers to modify their application accordingly, esp. those that roll-their-own UI widgets). I would assume this will be delivered in Leopard.
For those of us who remember the rogue-like games, from Ken Arnold's & Michael Toy's original, through moria, hack, larn, omega and arguably perfected in nethack (probably the first game ever developed over the Internet by various programmers), we know that gameplay mechanics, especially in interfaces that require an active imagination to fully express, were the games that lasted and are still forever playable.
Contrary to the notion in the article, it's the lack of realistic graphics and sound that make these complex games long-lived. Were there stinkers in the past? Hell yes. But nothing will ever match the groundbreaking creativity behind some of the true classics. After all, demand for eye-candy hasn't obviated the deck of cards, the checkerboard, the chess board, the backgammon board or dominoes. Truly "classic" games (whether played on UNIX terminals, 80s arcades or early consoles) demanded good and inventive game play precisley because the graphics sucked.
Many of today's games are proof that photorealistic and awesome physics engines can't substitute for lack of plot, strategy or complexity. In 100 years, nobody will be talking about Quake IV, but there will still be articles about Zork, Gauntlet and Zelda.