They can't trademark the name "apps" for applications, because people have been calling things that forever. But "App Store?" Microsoft has "Windows Marketplace." Valve has "Steam." The various Linux distros have their own purchasing systems in place, none of which are called "App Store."
It's about as generic as "Food, inc" might be for a grocery store. It's pretty straightforward and descriptive, but nobody had been using that particular combination of words. If that was the dominant grocery store in the US, and courts interpreted it to be specifically "Food inc" and not just any usage of the term Food in a title, I could easily see it granted.
We'll have to see how much Apple pushes forth the idea that because it owns a trademark "app store" in reference to an e-commerce website, that it owns any usage of the term "app" or "store." But this seems viable.
Don't shoot the Messenger Agent, but even a Student can see that Microsoft's Projects are all creatively named, protectable trademarks. My Word, your Office's Assistants and Publishers could easily tell you that. Movie Maker.
I still have a Janet Jackson CD from the early days of the medium. The music is old and crufty, but it was amazing how much they played with changes in intensity and volume. Nowadays, if someone whispers on a music track it's at exactly the same volume level as the regular singing. There is just a contrast that is lost.
Of course, making 24 bit masters from 48 bit sound files that were intended for 16 bit CD's isn't going to sound very different than the CD originally did. They'd need to re-master the music, and that's an expensive process.
Of course, I'd take a YouTube stream of a well-mastered song over a perfect 24-bit reproduction of an album that was mixed by some overbearing 40-year-old producer used to working for radio. Heck, for the most part I'd take a 96 kbps MP3 mixed by some teen on their laptop, so long as they hadn't been indoctrinated into the cult of "clip the hell out of it."
Hysterical claims of piracy are effective tools for explaining to investors why "The Last Airbender" tanked massively at the box office, despite "having a perfect director" and being "in 3D" and being "for kids!" Piracy is a wonderfully convenient scapegoat to avoid having to say "we re-made the same damned movie too many times, only this time we sucked at it."
The intent of DRM is to meet legal minimums of protection to get shutdown notices for people who host tools that simplify the pirating of your content. Even DRM companies count the amount of time that it will slow down complete digital reproductions by days, not weeks. Even then some things (like DVD's) frequently hit before the actual release.
Buy a disk. You're out at Target picking up kitty litter, and there happens to be a disk there. It will probably work. $20.
Or: Pirate it. You go home, search this pirate bay thingie, find something, download it, it turns out to be the movie in Chinese, with Thai subtitles. You download another one. It works. Success!
Or: Stream on Hulu or Netflix. It will work, immediately. $20 a month for as many A-minus movies as you'd like to see.
The problem is that the analog hole isn't the big hole that everything drains down. That's the "ripping from a computer" hole. And until they control the Hardware, Bios, Bootloaders, OS, and Software, and none of their lowest-bidder contractors screw anything up, they're not going to be able to plug that one.
The analog hole, in the grand scheme of things, is only a hole for those people whose view of technology is stuck in the 80's. They might as well be trying to call in horse-bound cavalry against virus writers.
The problem with the N-Gage was that it was an incredibly poorly designed piece of junk. Talk like a taco? Have to pull out the battery to change the cartridge? You might as well have shipped each one with typhoid fever and a cue-cat.
And the PSP has seen worldwide sales of 62 million units. It's not as over-the-top popular as the more innovative (and slightly cheaper) DS was, but it was by no means a failure.
Yes. Because the kind of consumers that would notice a 540 downsampling are the kind of consumers that connect their HDTV's to Blu-Ray players via analog cables.
The Watchmen wasn't a superhero Kick Ass movie. It was a movie about the realities of getting old and forgotten, while having trouble letting go of the foolish idealism of youth. Some people really didn't get that, and just thought it was going to be mindless entertaining drivel. In part, the advertising for the movie was terrible in that it showcased the action sequences, when really the most telling sequence was the two old owls getting together and drinking to the old days.
Great films are made all of the time with no-name actors and low budgets. Moon *barely* eeked back its 5 million dollar budget, and that was one of 2009's best films.
The reason why studios stick big names in shiny films with soundtracks plastered across MTV is because IT WORKS. They're not dumb.
Considering HTML 5 compatible browser penetration is hovering around 20%, then yes, to the great majority of people who might be visiting your website the HTML 5 code you write doesn't exist.
There were mountains of arguments that went with losing the 5% of people who were stuck on I.E. 5. Suddenly cutting out 80% of your audience is an instant no-go for any professional web developer.
Industry Essentials / can't live without - Photoshop, Illustrator, PDF, InDesign, Dreamweaver (arguable) Not dominant, but competitive - After Effects, Premiere Pro
I'm sure they're always looking for a new acquisition. But I can't imagine any creative industry avoiding Adobe products entirely, no matter how hard they tried.
Yes. This move truly shows the advantage of technologies from the future over tech that has been live and working for about ten years now.
Flash is bulky. And it should never be used for cases where base HTML would do. But it revolutionized both casual games and independent animation. And, unlike HTML 5, it actually exists.
I'm not saying the laws we have are good or bad. Just that there are many things which you are freer to do in other countries. Some of the things you're free to do in other countries are really, really stupid. Like car surfing. Or snooping around the rotting chemicals of abandoned buildings.
Just because it puts the "dumb" in freedom doesn't mean it doesn't count.
The French government identified a problem a few years ago: Too much STD transmission was going on, because people weren't using condoms enough. To help address this problem, the government sponsored a series of 5 short pornographic films (10 minutes or so), that prominently featured condom usage. These were shown repeatedly late at night in 1998 on broadcast television.
Can you imagine the public backlash against the US Government trying that?
In most of the rest of the world you can wander around outside with a Beer in your hand. In many places in the US, that will get you arrested. Here in Cambridge, bars have to close at 2AM, and liquor stores have to close at 12. Heck, here in Cambridge you have to be *Licensed* to sing on the street for coins. In Mexico, if you want to throw a dance party you go ahead and throw a dance party. In the US, there are all sorts of rules and regulations around gatherings above 8 people with public music, etc. In Mexico, if you want to fill a truck with 20 people, you install some grab ropes on the back of your truck, and you fill it with 20 people. In the US, you'd get arrested on sight.
Heck Jay Walking is still a punishable offence in most of the US. Building and selling your own toys is illegal (you need an expensive Lead test). Adult toys are still by and large illegal. Go to the rest of the world, and you'll see that while we do have a good amount of freedom in this country, every other country has certain ways in which they are more free than us.
Indecent exposure laws and reasonably normal restaurants get their rules from Christianity, largely. I can wander around outside without a shirt on, but my wife can't (despite, at this point in my old age, my having about the same boobies as she does). There are places that one can't go with short-shorts on. And I've definitely been kicked out of restaurants for wearing a tank top.
In the bible, women are forbidden from wearing men's clothing... Leading to things like Schwarzenegger's wife being forbidden from wearing pants. Men are forbidden from wearing women's clothing as well, though any man who would willingly subject himself to women's shoes is more of a masochist than I. The old testament forbids wearing wool and linen woven together, for some reason.
There are new testament passages that certain Christians interpret as meaning that women should never wear jewelry or makeup. Paul swore in the new testament that women had to wear head coverings while praying, which you see more often in South American Catholic communities. And of course, that men had to remove head coverings to pray.
And let's not get started on Catholic School dress requirements. Slashdot, after all, doesn't allow posting of photographs.
Duke Nukem Forever is news. The game has been in development for longer than some of the people who will play it. The trials, tribulations, and vaporware status have fallen into legend. Wired named it vaporware of the year for something like 3 years straight, before giving it a lifetime achievement award and sending it to bed. It's right up there with "Chinese Democracy" as far as failure to launch / failure to fail goes, except this cost way more money. And even once it was finally, absolutely, Developers-Went-Broke-And-Closed-Up-Shop dead, a white-horse investor swooped back in and rescued the project.
It's not that Duke Nukem was great. But Duke Nukem Forever is a legend.
In the early days, Ubuntu was basically framed as "Debian on a disk." Anyone in the know, knows that Ubuntu (like MEPIS and a lot out there) is based upon Debian. Debian is just stable, solid, and unencumbered enough to form the basis of a lot of good stuff.
And these days, who still uses Fedora? openSUSE? Mandriva? Ubuntu pretty much won the Linux desktop wars by finally providing something better than Windows (a no-install install). And on servers, you options are basically the stability obsessed gnomes of Debian, the Customer Support of Red Hat, the customization of Gentoo, or one of the purpose-built systems-in-a-box out there.
And who can forget the magical feeling the first time you typed "apt-get install koffice" from a raw command line with no shell, and the system just figured out all of the dependencies and installed an OS basically from scratch?
Call me paranoid, but why not have the pump notify the credit card company, which texts a single-use validation pin to your phone, which you enter at the point of sale?
Slashdot Mirror
They can't trademark the name "apps" for applications, because people have been calling things that forever. But "App Store?" Microsoft has "Windows Marketplace." Valve has "Steam." The various Linux distros have their own purchasing systems in place, none of which are called "App Store."
It's about as generic as "Food, inc" might be for a grocery store. It's pretty straightforward and descriptive, but nobody had been using that particular combination of words. If that was the dominant grocery store in the US, and courts interpreted it to be specifically "Food inc" and not just any usage of the term Food in a title, I could easily see it granted.
We'll have to see how much Apple pushes forth the idea that because it owns a trademark "app store" in reference to an e-commerce website, that it owns any usage of the term "app" or "store." But this seems viable.
Don't shoot the Messenger Agent, but even a Student can see that Microsoft's Projects are all creatively named, protectable trademarks. My Word, your Office's Assistants and Publishers could easily tell you that. Movie Maker.
I.E. 6! Heaven for I.E. 6. I still know people who are stuck coding for I.E. 5.
I still have a Janet Jackson CD from the early days of the medium. The music is old and crufty, but it was amazing how much they played with changes in intensity and volume. Nowadays, if someone whispers on a music track it's at exactly the same volume level as the regular singing. There is just a contrast that is lost.
Of course, making 24 bit masters from 48 bit sound files that were intended for 16 bit CD's isn't going to sound very different than the CD originally did. They'd need to re-master the music, and that's an expensive process.
Of course, I'd take a YouTube stream of a well-mastered song over a perfect 24-bit reproduction of an album that was mixed by some overbearing 40-year-old producer used to working for radio. Heck, for the most part I'd take a 96 kbps MP3 mixed by some teen on their laptop, so long as they hadn't been indoctrinated into the cult of "clip the hell out of it."
Hysterical claims of piracy are effective tools for explaining to investors why "The Last Airbender" tanked massively at the box office, despite "having a perfect director" and being "in 3D" and being "for kids!" Piracy is a wonderfully convenient scapegoat to avoid having to say "we re-made the same damned movie too many times, only this time we sucked at it."
The intent of DRM is to meet legal minimums of protection to get shutdown notices for people who host tools that simplify the pirating of your content. Even DRM companies count the amount of time that it will slow down complete digital reproductions by days, not weeks. Even then some things (like DVD's) frequently hit before the actual release.
Every legitimate customer stopped from viewing your content is a potential future pirate thwarted from being the source of an outbreak.
Your choices are:
Buy a disk. You're out at Target picking up kitty litter, and there happens to be a disk there. It will probably work. $20.
Or:
Pirate it. You go home, search this pirate bay thingie, find something, download it, it turns out to be the movie in Chinese, with Thai subtitles. You download another one. It works. Success!
Or:
Stream on Hulu or Netflix. It will work, immediately. $20 a month for as many A-minus movies as you'd like to see.
The problem is that the analog hole isn't the big hole that everything drains down. That's the "ripping from a computer" hole. And until they control the Hardware, Bios, Bootloaders, OS, and Software, and none of their lowest-bidder contractors screw anything up, they're not going to be able to plug that one.
The analog hole, in the grand scheme of things, is only a hole for those people whose view of technology is stuck in the 80's. They might as well be trying to call in horse-bound cavalry against virus writers.
The problem with the N-Gage was that it was an incredibly poorly designed piece of junk. Talk like a taco? Have to pull out the battery to change the cartridge? You might as well have shipped each one with typhoid fever and a cue-cat.
And the PSP has seen worldwide sales of 62 million units. It's not as over-the-top popular as the more innovative (and slightly cheaper) DS was, but it was by no means a failure.
Yes. Because the kind of consumers that would notice a 540 downsampling are the kind of consumers that connect their HDTV's to Blu-Ray players via analog cables.
The Watchmen wasn't a superhero Kick Ass movie. It was a movie about the realities of getting old and forgotten, while having trouble letting go of the foolish idealism of youth. Some people really didn't get that, and just thought it was going to be mindless entertaining drivel. In part, the advertising for the movie was terrible in that it showcased the action sequences, when really the most telling sequence was the two old owls getting together and drinking to the old days.
Great films are made all of the time with no-name actors and low budgets. Moon *barely* eeked back its 5 million dollar budget, and that was one of 2009's best films.
The reason why studios stick big names in shiny films with soundtracks plastered across MTV is because IT WORKS. They're not dumb.
Considering HTML 5 compatible browser penetration is hovering around 20%, then yes, to the great majority of people who might be visiting your website the HTML 5 code you write doesn't exist.
There were mountains of arguments that went with losing the 5% of people who were stuck on I.E. 5. Suddenly cutting out 80% of your audience is an instant no-go for any professional web developer.
Adobe has:
Industry Essentials / can't live without - Photoshop, Illustrator, PDF, InDesign, Dreamweaver (arguable)
Not dominant, but competitive - After Effects, Premiere Pro
I'm sure they're always looking for a new acquisition. But I can't imagine any creative industry avoiding Adobe products entirely, no matter how hard they tried.
To be fair, the old /. design was an even bigger Javascript / AJAX mess. At least they bugfixed this one before launching it.
Yes. This move truly shows the advantage of technologies from the future over tech that has been live and working for about ten years now.
Flash is bulky. And it should never be used for cases where base HTML would do. But it revolutionized both casual games and independent animation. And, unlike HTML 5, it actually exists.
I'm not saying the laws we have are good or bad. Just that there are many things which you are freer to do in other countries. Some of the things you're free to do in other countries are really, really stupid. Like car surfing. Or snooping around the rotting chemicals of abandoned buildings.
Just because it puts the "dumb" in freedom doesn't mean it doesn't count.
The French government identified a problem a few years ago: Too much STD transmission was going on, because people weren't using condoms enough. To help address this problem, the government sponsored a series of 5 short pornographic films (10 minutes or so), that prominently featured condom usage. These were shown repeatedly late at night in 1998 on broadcast television.
Can you imagine the public backlash against the US Government trying that?
In most of the rest of the world you can wander around outside with a Beer in your hand. In many places in the US, that will get you arrested. Here in Cambridge, bars have to close at 2AM, and liquor stores have to close at 12. Heck, here in Cambridge you have to be *Licensed* to sing on the street for coins. In Mexico, if you want to throw a dance party you go ahead and throw a dance party. In the US, there are all sorts of rules and regulations around gatherings above 8 people with public music, etc. In Mexico, if you want to fill a truck with 20 people, you install some grab ropes on the back of your truck, and you fill it with 20 people. In the US, you'd get arrested on sight.
Heck Jay Walking is still a punishable offence in most of the US. Building and selling your own toys is illegal (you need an expensive Lead test). Adult toys are still by and large illegal. Go to the rest of the world, and you'll see that while we do have a good amount of freedom in this country, every other country has certain ways in which they are more free than us.
Indecent exposure laws and reasonably normal restaurants get their rules from Christianity, largely. I can wander around outside without a shirt on, but my wife can't (despite, at this point in my old age, my having about the same boobies as she does). There are places that one can't go with short-shorts on. And I've definitely been kicked out of restaurants for wearing a tank top.
In the bible, women are forbidden from wearing men's clothing... Leading to things like Schwarzenegger's wife being forbidden from wearing pants. Men are forbidden from wearing women's clothing as well, though any man who would willingly subject himself to women's shoes is more of a masochist than I. The old testament forbids wearing wool and linen woven together, for some reason.
There are new testament passages that certain Christians interpret as meaning that women should never wear jewelry or makeup. Paul swore in the new testament that women had to wear head coverings while praying, which you see more often in South American Catholic communities. And of course, that men had to remove head coverings to pray.
And let's not get started on Catholic School dress requirements. Slashdot, after all, doesn't allow posting of photographs.
Duke Nukem isn't news.
Duke Nukem Forever is news. The game has been in development for longer than some of the people who will play it. The trials, tribulations, and vaporware status have fallen into legend. Wired named it vaporware of the year for something like 3 years straight, before giving it a lifetime achievement award and sending it to bed. It's right up there with "Chinese Democracy" as far as failure to launch / failure to fail goes, except this cost way more money. And even once it was finally, absolutely, Developers-Went-Broke-And-Closed-Up-Shop dead, a white-horse investor swooped back in and rescued the project.
It's not that Duke Nukem was great. But Duke Nukem Forever is a legend.
In the early days, Ubuntu was basically framed as "Debian on a disk." Anyone in the know, knows that Ubuntu (like MEPIS and a lot out there) is based upon Debian. Debian is just stable, solid, and unencumbered enough to form the basis of a lot of good stuff.
And these days, who still uses Fedora? openSUSE? Mandriva? Ubuntu pretty much won the Linux desktop wars by finally providing something better than Windows (a no-install install). And on servers, you options are basically the stability obsessed gnomes of Debian, the Customer Support of Red Hat, the customization of Gentoo, or one of the purpose-built systems-in-a-box out there.
And who can forget the magical feeling the first time you typed "apt-get install koffice" from a raw command line with no shell, and the system just figured out all of the dependencies and installed an OS basically from scratch?
Steven Vaughan-Nichols is calling it "no longer as important as it once was"
He should know. He's on ZDnet.
I should know, I'm commenting on Slashdot.
Call me paranoid, but why not have the pump notify the credit card company, which texts a single-use validation pin to your phone, which you enter at the point of sale?
Good luck with those DIY laptops.