An LCD iMac would be interesting, to be sure. It'd wind up being a really weird shape though.
However, I doubt it'll be a G4. The G4s are still way too expensive for the iMac line. IMO, it was the G4 processor that killed the Cube.
I also doubt it'll have a processor speed that high. I also suspect: no DVD-ROM, except maybe on the high-end, with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW. Apple's spent too much money on Rip. Mix. Burn. to give up CD-RW on any iMac.
My other suspicion: 256MB of RAM, to help it with OS X. RAM prices are crashing through the floor right now. Why wouldn't Apple take advantage of this?
my iMac is silent, and I think it looks pretty cool. the only reason I was tempted by a cube was the external speakers, but I can get those for my iMac anyway. and hey, harmon/kardon is nice regardless.
I think that's why the cube died. It was basically a high-end iMac, and not as slick. so it had a G4. whoopee. like I really need more processor power.:)
The Atari and C64 had the ability to do 256 colours at about 320x200 (with some seriously clever programming) and had 16-bit sound!
Yeah, that'd have to be pretty clever. Folks, the C=64 had 4-BIT SOUND! (That's if you modulated the volume control to get digital audio. Normally, it was a sound synthesizer type technology.) The Amiga was viewed as a quantum leap forward, having 8-bit native digital stereo sound. Not until the Soundblaster was released did any micro have 16-bit. (Which was a large reason for the death of the Amiga: superior sound in the PC world. When the Amiga was released, PC gamers were still stuck with the ^G bell.:)
Also, the 64 had a 16-colour palette. In bitmap mode, you could select 2 colours for each 8x8 pixel grid. 256? Wow, whatta dream. Heh.
The other reason people dreamed of the Mac is because it had a Motorola 68000, which at the time was way more powerful than any other PC CPU on the market. Most machines were 8-bit, the IBMs were 8/16, but the Mac was 16/32.
Bloody nothing to do with.NET. Hey guys, the ports tree has been around for a while. It's one of the main really cool things about FreeBSD, yes, good that you're giving it the recognition it deserves, pity that you seem to have inspired a slew of idiotic pro- and anti-BSD trolls, but.NET?!
Never happened to me, except for disk space failures. Then, it fails, and cleans itself up automagically.
How do you debug it?
You don't. Ah, the joy. It just runs.
Is there a GUI interface to it?
Not really, unless you can count/stand/sysinstall. Which is circa-mid-80s-style text-based menu interface. Of course, you don't have to use that, but I like it, aging 64 hacker that I am.:)
How will you explain to Windows users why it will take 2 hours to install a program because they have to download and then compile it?
It won't. I know, I have DSL, but even considering that advantage, all my installs on my trusty 486DX/80 took like seconds.
As for the term's genericity: I'm not sure. I think Adobe's case is good, merely that the legal action taken was too extreme for the situation. I don't think the Linux market is the actual target market; rather I would think of the target market as being microcomputer drawing programs.
I agree about the lameness of the lawyers though.:)
Fair use is an American legal concept, applies only to copyright, not trademark, so wouldn't help.
However, inserting a parody in the opening credits might well do something in trademark law, in terms of preventing the end-user from being confused as to the source of the program. Dunno. Easier just to change the name.
Actually, Adobe might have a case to make against them even if they're working on retainer for Adobe. Their conduct strikes me as being negligent, and Adobe could well sue for negligence.
Adobe's main competitors are Corel and Macromedia. Corel doesn't support the Mac as far as I know, but Macromedia definitely does.
The competition for Photoshop is Fireworks and Photo-Paint (included with CorelDraw). I haven't used Fireworks yet, but I'm seriously thinking about it, assuming this isn't just a case of rogue lawyers gone mad.
Extortion is only illegal when the thing you're threatening to do is against the law. for example, if you don't give me a hundred dollars this week, I break your legs.
It's in the lawyers' rights to sue the university. Thusly, it's not extortion. Merely scuzzy.
On the other hand, this smells somewhat of professional misconduct. If I were a university lawyer, I'd be thinking about complaining to the German equivalent of the bar association.
Due process is an American legal concept. Nevertheless, citizens of other countries do have legal rights. German citizens, in fact, have constitutional rights.
I suggest a floating server in the ocean. Hah. International law has not yet recognized the Berne Convention as binding on the seas.
Bill Gates isn't the author of MS-DOS. I believe it would be considered a work of corporate authorship, which in the non-US world means that whole life part disappears, and it just becomes 70 years (or 50 in the more traditional Berne Convention states, or 80 in Spain).
That's true of most software works, too. Generally speaking, American works for hire usually become works of corporate authorship when they cross the borders.
In regards to the generic-ness of a name, who dictates what that is?
The general public. Really.
As I said in my other post, it's all down to consumer perception. If the target audience of the item will be confused between the two products, it's a trademark violation.
How do you prove it in court? Well, a good way is to run surveys. No, I'm not kidding. Trademark trial lawyers run stats.
Depends on the jurisdiction. However, in most jurisdictions, yes, you can. Then, the person getting the money sends back an agreement saying they won't sue. This agreement is legally binding.
First of all, I want to deal with something that's technically offtopic. Patent law is not based on a use-it-or-lose-it theory, at all. You can let a patent sit dormant for long periods of time, then threaten to sue. However, typically you only get damages from the time the lawsuit is issued onwards, so people usually sue fairly early in the process.
Trademark law isn't explicitly based on a use-it-or-lose-it theory. However, the theory it is based on is different. The above poster seems to have a decent grasp of the effects of the theory, but I should try my best to explicate the actual theory.
Basically, the idea is to prevent consumer confusion. The test is, if a consumer looking at the two products, thought they were either the same or in some way connected to the same source, then it's a trademark infringement. Look and feel can get involved in interesting ways.
For example, suppose I market a cola product. If its logo looks quite a lot like one of the Major Producers (but not totally identical - that gets me into copyright, and I'm fried anyway), I'm probably violating trademark law, because a consumer would likely be confused as to where the pop came from at the point of purchase. On the other hand, suppose I market a nacho chip bag with the same logo. I'm probably still violating trademark law, because a consumer would think the aforementioned Major Producer had branched out. But suppose I'm marketing a brand of tampons. Then, the odds become fairly high that the consumer will not be confused, and on I go.
So in this case, the question is whether a consumer, looking at the KIllustrator product, would think its source was Adobe, or simply the same source as Adobe Illustrator. If the answer is yes, then ding, it's gone.
Since it's part of an integrated package, Koffice, which looks nothing like Illustrator, I think they could've fought it. However, they've rolled over. Pity.
As for goodwill: Who uses Illustrator? Really. Photoshop, yes, PageMaker, yes, many other Adobe products, yes, but...
Finally, as for the use-it-or-lose-it part of trademark law. This is more of a practical side of the law, rather than an actual legal principle. Basically, the problem is that if the ordinary consumer starts using a trademark as a generic term, then it loses its trademark value, legally. The most famous example is the word "thermos". This was originally a trademarked word, coined for a patented device, the vacuum bottle. The Thermos company used to keep battalions of lawyers around to sue stores to stop them from labelling the areas in their stores where they kept the vacuum bottles Thermos, but instead put up signs like Vacuum Bottles.
The short version of the story: They failed. Partly because they used patent protection to ensure that people thought that all vacuum bottles had the name Thermos on them. So, when the patents expired, people referred to all their competitors as thermos makers.
The same thing has probably happened to Xerox, but it hasn't been tested in a court so far as I know.
But, their vigorous suing did prolong the length of life of their trademark. By suing people to stop them from referring to their trademark in a generic way, they reduced the likelihood that courts would think that people actually were using it in a generic way.
The basic principle: Trademarks embody the value of commercial propaganda. The better your propaganda, the more valuable your trademark.
Valid point about Disney; the reason I suggested 2050 was because the cap in most of the world is 70 years, where the work-for-hire doctrine doesn't apply (it's US only). and hey, if you can copy it in the UK legally, I'm not sure you could do much about net.piracy.;)
The general point remains, though. MS-DOS 1.0 should be considered fairly out of date by whenever it finally escapes copyright, unlike, for example, Dickens, which people still read and enjoy, even though it's no longer copyrighted.
actually, I looked at the patent. it reads like a patent for a specific kind of bike wheel. perhaps not a great patent, but not, you know, 6000 B.C. kinds of stuff.:)
I actually agree with the above posting, despite being an avowed despiser of proprietary software constructed in corporate caves. Why? Well, read on.
Patents, in order to be effective, require a patent filing, which is supposed to explain how the invention (in this case, it would be the program) actually works, well enough so that a person skilled in the art (i.e. a programmer) could construct the invention (code the program) without any real difficulty (well, there's always debugging I guess).
In this, they are unlike copyright law as applied to computer software. In order to get a copyright on a piece of code, you don't have to release the source code. (This is the curse of modern copyright law that the GPL tries to get around.) Note that this make computer programming copyright different from all other forms of copyright. When I read a book or watch a movie, I can figure out how the copyrighted item was made relatively easily. In the computer programming field, however, reverse engineering in some cases is actually illegal.
Not so in patent law. The idea is the patent filing is supposed to make reverse engineering not only legal, but quite easy. The tradeoff? The patent-holder gets 20 years of protection, after which time reverse engineering is completely legal.
20 years might seem like a long time, and it is. However, what it means -now- is that if you have, say, an early Apple ][, there are no patent rights associated with it. This may not seem like a big deal, but sometime in the 2010s when all the Pentium patents expire, look for some really, really cheap webservers. (How much does silicon cost?;)
But okay. Software companies get to have their cake and eat it too. After the patent rights expire, they still have copyright control over the code, for a fantastically long time. MS-DOS 1.0's copyright should expire sometime around 2050 or so.
This is the problem. Why do we allow copyright to apply to software, especially binary software code? It's dumb. We're protecting people who want to hide their code.
We should just use the patent system. Sure, sometimes patents would be issued for programs that shouldn't get them, but look at the upside: only 20 years of protection anyway, and the IP rights holders would have to explain at least somewhat what their programs do.
Sound like the GPL? Thought so. But try telling RMS that. sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just see it now... all the quakeheads wind up with aol.com emails, and get automatically deleted from usenet. loopy. :)
An LCD iMac would be interesting, to be sure. It'd wind up being a really weird shape though.
However, I doubt it'll be a G4. The G4s are still way too expensive for the iMac line. IMO, it was the G4 processor that killed the Cube.
I also doubt it'll have a processor speed that high. I also suspect: no DVD-ROM, except maybe on the high-end, with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW. Apple's spent too much money on Rip. Mix. Burn. to give up CD-RW on any iMac.
My other suspicion: 256MB of RAM, to help it with OS X. RAM prices are crashing through the floor right now. Why wouldn't Apple take advantage of this?
However, the iMac does have 10/100.
my iMac is silent, and I think it looks pretty cool. the only reason I was tempted by a cube was the external speakers, but I can get those for my iMac anyway. and hey, harmon/kardon is nice regardless.
I think that's why the cube died. It was basically a high-end iMac, and not as slick. so it had a G4. whoopee. like I really need more processor power. :)
Yeah, that'd have to be pretty clever. Folks, the C=64 had 4-BIT SOUND! (That's if you modulated the volume control to get digital audio. Normally, it was a sound synthesizer type technology.) The Amiga was viewed as a quantum leap forward, having 8-bit native digital stereo sound. Not until the Soundblaster was released did any micro have 16-bit. (Which was a large reason for the death of the Amiga: superior sound in the PC world. When the Amiga was released, PC gamers were still stuck with the ^G bell. :)
Also, the 64 had a 16-colour palette. In bitmap mode, you could select 2 colours for each 8x8 pixel grid. 256? Wow, whatta dream. Heh.
The other reason people dreamed of the Mac is because it had a Motorola 68000, which at the time was way more powerful than any other PC CPU on the market. Most machines were 8-bit, the IBMs were 8/16, but the Mac was 16/32.
The archive has moved to etext, as EFF clearly states here. See here for the offending text.
Bloody nothing to do with .NET. Hey guys, the ports tree has been around for a while. It's one of the main really cool things about FreeBSD, yes, good that you're giving it the recognition it deserves, pity that you seem to have inspired a slew of idiotic pro- and anti-BSD trolls, but .NET?!
Never happened to me, except for disk space failures. Then, it fails, and cleans itself up automagically.
You don't. Ah, the joy. It just runs.
Not really, unless you can count /stand/sysinstall. Which is circa-mid-80s-style text-based menu interface. Of course, you don't have to use that, but I like it, aging 64 hacker that I am. :)
It won't. I know, I have DSL, but even considering that advantage, all my installs on my trusty 486DX/80 took like seconds.
'Course, I never bothered to install X. :)
Paul Simon is correct. See here.
As for the term's genericity: I'm not sure. I think Adobe's case is good, merely that the legal action taken was too extreme for the situation. I don't think the Linux market is the actual target market; rather I would think of the target market as being microcomputer drawing programs.
I agree about the lameness of the lawyers though. :)
Americans.
Actually, many people do share their cars. Go here to find out more. (Needs Javascript to play in English, I'm afraid.)
Fair use is an American legal concept, applies only to copyright, not trademark, so wouldn't help.
However, inserting a parody in the opening credits might well do something in trademark law, in terms of preventing the end-user from being confused as to the source of the program. Dunno. Easier just to change the name.
Actually, Adobe might have a case to make against them even if they're working on retainer for Adobe. Their conduct strikes me as being negligent, and Adobe could well sue for negligence.
Adobe's main competitors are Corel and Macromedia. Corel doesn't support the Mac as far as I know, but Macromedia definitely does.
The competition for Photoshop is Fireworks and Photo-Paint (included with CorelDraw). I haven't used Fireworks yet, but I'm seriously thinking about it, assuming this isn't just a case of rogue lawyers gone mad.
It's legal, even in the states.
Extortion is only illegal when the thing you're threatening to do is against the law. for example, if you don't give me a hundred dollars this week, I break your legs.
It's in the lawyers' rights to sue the university. Thusly, it's not extortion. Merely scuzzy.
On the other hand, this smells somewhat of professional misconduct. If I were a university lawyer, I'd be thinking about complaining to the German equivalent of the bar association.
xerox, in fact, did have a team of lawyers to defend its name. however, didn't work. the Hormel example is a better one.
Due process is an American legal concept. Nevertheless, citizens of other countries do have legal rights. German citizens, in fact, have constitutional rights.
I suggest a floating server in the ocean. Hah. International law has not yet recognized the Berne Convention as binding on the seas.
Bill Gates isn't the author of MS-DOS. I believe it would be considered a work of corporate authorship, which in the non-US world means that whole life part disappears, and it just becomes 70 years (or 50 in the more traditional Berne Convention states, or 80 in Spain).
That's true of most software works, too. Generally speaking, American works for hire usually become works of corporate authorship when they cross the borders.
It should be noted that PageMaker, the program that caused the DTP revolution and sold a whole pile of Macs, was originally an Aldus product.
Adobe bought Aldus.
Though, Adobe did have a prominent role in DTP early on. They wrote Postscript themselves, IIRC.
The general public. Really.
As I said in my other post, it's all down to consumer perception. If the target audience of the item will be confused between the two products, it's a trademark violation.
How do you prove it in court? Well, a good way is to run surveys. No, I'm not kidding. Trademark trial lawyers run stats.
Depends on the jurisdiction. However, in most jurisdictions, yes, you can. Then, the person getting the money sends back an agreement saying they won't sue. This agreement is legally binding.
First of all, I want to deal with something that's technically offtopic. Patent law is not based on a use-it-or-lose-it theory, at all. You can let a patent sit dormant for long periods of time, then threaten to sue. However, typically you only get damages from the time the lawsuit is issued onwards, so people usually sue fairly early in the process.
Trademark law isn't explicitly based on a use-it-or-lose-it theory. However, the theory it is based on is different. The above poster seems to have a decent grasp of the effects of the theory, but I should try my best to explicate the actual theory.
Basically, the idea is to prevent consumer confusion. The test is, if a consumer looking at the two products, thought they were either the same or in some way connected to the same source, then it's a trademark infringement. Look and feel can get involved in interesting ways.
For example, suppose I market a cola product. If its logo looks quite a lot like one of the Major Producers (but not totally identical - that gets me into copyright, and I'm fried anyway), I'm probably violating trademark law, because a consumer would likely be confused as to where the pop came from at the point of purchase. On the other hand, suppose I market a nacho chip bag with the same logo. I'm probably still violating trademark law, because a consumer would think the aforementioned Major Producer had branched out. But suppose I'm marketing a brand of tampons. Then, the odds become fairly high that the consumer will not be confused, and on I go.
So in this case, the question is whether a consumer, looking at the KIllustrator product, would think its source was Adobe, or simply the same source as Adobe Illustrator. If the answer is yes, then ding, it's gone.
Since it's part of an integrated package, Koffice, which looks nothing like Illustrator, I think they could've fought it. However, they've rolled over. Pity.
As for goodwill: Who uses Illustrator? Really. Photoshop, yes, PageMaker, yes, many other Adobe products, yes, but...
Finally, as for the use-it-or-lose-it part of trademark law. This is more of a practical side of the law, rather than an actual legal principle. Basically, the problem is that if the ordinary consumer starts using a trademark as a generic term, then it loses its trademark value, legally. The most famous example is the word "thermos". This was originally a trademarked word, coined for a patented device, the vacuum bottle. The Thermos company used to keep battalions of lawyers around to sue stores to stop them from labelling the areas in their stores where they kept the vacuum bottles Thermos, but instead put up signs like Vacuum Bottles.
The short version of the story: They failed. Partly because they used patent protection to ensure that people thought that all vacuum bottles had the name Thermos on them. So, when the patents expired, people referred to all their competitors as thermos makers.
The same thing has probably happened to Xerox, but it hasn't been tested in a court so far as I know.
But, their vigorous suing did prolong the length of life of their trademark. By suing people to stop them from referring to their trademark in a generic way, they reduced the likelihood that courts would think that people actually were using it in a generic way.
The basic principle: Trademarks embody the value of commercial propaganda. The better your propaganda, the more valuable your trademark.
Valid point about Disney; the reason I suggested 2050 was because the cap in most of the world is 70 years, where the work-for-hire doctrine doesn't apply (it's US only). and hey, if you can copy it in the UK legally, I'm not sure you could do much about net.piracy. ;)
The general point remains, though. MS-DOS 1.0 should be considered fairly out of date by whenever it finally escapes copyright, unlike, for example, Dickens, which people still read and enjoy, even though it's no longer copyrighted.
actually, I looked at the patent. it reads like a patent for a specific kind of bike wheel. perhaps not a great patent, but not, you know, 6000 B.C. kinds of stuff. :)
I actually agree with the above posting, despite being an avowed despiser of proprietary software constructed in corporate caves. Why? Well, read on.
Patents, in order to be effective, require a patent filing, which is supposed to explain how the invention (in this case, it would be the program) actually works, well enough so that a person skilled in the art (i.e. a programmer) could construct the invention (code the program) without any real difficulty (well, there's always debugging I guess).
In this, they are unlike copyright law as applied to computer software. In order to get a copyright on a piece of code, you don't have to release the source code. (This is the curse of modern copyright law that the GPL tries to get around.) Note that this make computer programming copyright different from all other forms of copyright. When I read a book or watch a movie, I can figure out how the copyrighted item was made relatively easily. In the computer programming field, however, reverse engineering in some cases is actually illegal.
Not so in patent law. The idea is the patent filing is supposed to make reverse engineering not only legal, but quite easy. The tradeoff? The patent-holder gets 20 years of protection, after which time reverse engineering is completely legal.
20 years might seem like a long time, and it is. However, what it means -now- is that if you have, say, an early Apple ][, there are no patent rights associated with it. This may not seem like a big deal, but sometime in the 2010s when all the Pentium patents expire, look for some really, really cheap webservers. (How much does silicon cost? ;)
But okay. Software companies get to have their cake and eat it too. After the patent rights expire, they still have copyright control over the code, for a fantastically long time. MS-DOS 1.0's copyright should expire sometime around 2050 or so.
This is the problem. Why do we allow copyright to apply to software, especially binary software code? It's dumb. We're protecting people who want to hide their code.
We should just use the patent system. Sure, sometimes patents would be issued for programs that shouldn't get them, but look at the upside: only 20 years of protection anyway, and the IP rights holders would have to explain at least somewhat what their programs do.
Sound like the GPL? Thought so. But try telling RMS that. sigh.
I'm still wait for people to use Forth for scripts.
I mean, after all, P-code is still interpreted code.
ok, I'll shut up about Forth now. :)