Look at the success of Passion of the Christ, despite all the liberal media bashing.
Oh, please. It was only because the "liberal media" gave TPotC a zillion dollars worth of free publicity that the anyone went to see the movie at all. Cry me a river about the liberal media while Mel Gibson lines his pockets.
The way Peter Jackson has been handling things, he doesn't seem to be a money grubbing a-hole like Lucas.
I know it's now cool to laud Jackson and hate Lucas on/. now, but there hasn't even been *one* version of the Star Wars trilogy on DVD, and there were/are already *two* of each LotR movie in the first year alone!. The last issue of an OT Star Wars video set was sometime around 1998-99. Eps I and II had a single DVD set apiece, priced right in line with every other DVD.
I'm not ratting on LotR, but I think you're being unfair here. The $60 TTT Extended Edition with the Gollem figurine certainly suggests to me that Jackson and his crew have no problem making a buck off of fanboys.
If you want to bitch about someone, bitch about Sam Raimi, who has released no fewer than fivedifferentversions of Army of Darkness on DVD. Why isn't anyone kvetching about that instead of whining about Lucas?
Warren Spector said in an IGN video interview there would be no steam-powered robots. He said it wiht a tone of voice that suggested that he realized it was a bad idea in retrospect.
I'd also think the HD is the component that has the highest rate of failure.
I'm pretty sure that would be the optical drive. Every Xbox failure I've ever heard of or read about is a failure of the DVD drive. The hard drives seem to do just fine -- as they should, since a console is only run maybe two hours most days while lots of PCs are on year-round.
That's actually not true. I'm not really sure what you mean by "cancel Napster," but you don't lose your music if you choose not to buy anything anymore. You have to keep your player activated, but that's exactly the same as iTMS.
Not what I was responding to -- I was just making the point that common nouns are trademarked all the time.
But c'mon... first off, "Lindows" and "Windows" are hominyms. Say them out loud -- they sound virtually identical. You can't come out with the Ahppell Nackintoush and say that becuase it doesn't look like a trademark that it doesn't infringe on one.
When Lindows was launched originally, its whole marketing campaign was that it would run Windows programs -- hence, "Windows crossed with Linux." They've since backed off that claim, but they were clearly trying to build their market off of the similarity to the Windows name which is prohibited by trademark law.
The real question is, is Lindows a good product? If it is, they'd be better served by having a name that they could make for themselves, rather than focusing all of their attention on being "similar to, but not quite the same as, Windows."
Yeah, I know, how can an organisation trademark a word that's a common noun?
People do it every day...
Apple Tide All Bounty Quake All Surf Maci ntosh Word Excel Illustrator
It's completely reasonable to trademark common words for narrow uses and it's completely reasonable to expect that those trademarks would be protected.
Here's a little exercise: name your next Linux distro Lacintosh and count the milliseconds until Apple serves you with a cease and desist order... and they'd be right to do so.
The X-Box has essentially no good games (yes I'm exaggerating a little)
You're actually exaggerating a lot... looking at the average rating for the top 200 games on GameRankings gives the PS2 an 84%, the Xbox gets an 81% and the GameCube a 78%. The no. 200 game for GameCube gets a 65%, the Xbox is a 72% and PS2 has a 78%.
My point? All three consoles have good games -- PS2 has the most games with good reviews (making sense, because it has the most games overall), GameCube has the least. Xbox is right in the middle.
You know what, you're right, except you the point you've made is the opposite of the one I think you intended. If Lindows decided it wanted to go after Apple instead of Microsoft and came out with OS L, Apple would sue them and would win. "OS X" is Apple's trade name for their OS and they've trademarked it, and that's the way the system is supposed to work.
Either way, the standard has to be, "Is this intended to, or could it, cause consumer confusion?" Lindows does. OS L would too.
Duh, it's Linux that acts like Windows, Lindows, what's wrong with that? No one is going to get confused are they?
Yeah, they'll get confused. They're practically hominyms. Imagine a novice is in a store and the salesperson says, "and this model comes with Lindows." There's no doubt that there'd be massive customer confusion, which is what trademark law helps prevent.
It's a publicity stunt; nothing more.
Illustrator is a common word and a trademark. Macintosh is a common word and a trademark. Tide is a common word and a trademark. This kind of thing happens every day and there's nothing wrong with it. It's why you can pick up a bottle of "All" in the laundry aisle and not worry that it's actually someone trying to rip you off by selling you "Alll."
1. Bring to market a version of Linux with an interface that looks like OS X. 2. Announce that you're calling it the Lacintosh, or LacOS X. 3. Count how many milliseconds until Steve Jobs personally serves you with a cease and desist order (and he'd be right to).
This is just Robertson trying to get publicity for himself. It's a pretty clear case of trademark infringement; if his product is good enough, it shouldn't need to be named something that is only intended to generate confusion in the marketplace.
To be fair, though, Apple's iLife only runs on an Apple operating system that is only able to run on Apple hardware (for which there's usually a pretty tidy premium paid). That being the case, Apple has less to worry about with people copying since they're the sole supplier of the OS software and hardware that you're able to run iLife on.
By contrast, if you steal Doom III from Id or Photoshop from Adobe, they have no other way to make any money off of you, so it's in their best interest to try to prevent casual copying.
That said, iLife '04 is a really good deal at $50; no reason to steal it except to be an asshole.
And they'd be right... this is a really stupid thing for people to get their hackles up about. Who actually clicks the "Buy Music" button in Media Player anyway?
You can mod me down, but no one seems to want to answer my question -- what devices other than the iPod are compatible with iTunes? I can't find a list anywhere on Apple's site, if in fact anything other than the iPods actually work with it.
Apple's nuts not to include support for secure WMA in the iPod. They aren't making any money off the music store anyway, and they're not allowing any other players to play DRM'ed AAC files, so the iPod could be the only player that could play everything. It would be killer if you could play songs from iTMS, Napster, Wal-Mart or wherever on your iPod, and it would help them sell more iPods, which they claim is the whole purpose of the iTMS to begin with.
What's funny is that NBC seems to also be working *with* TiVo, as during commercials for new NBC programs they're sending a signal that makes "Press Thumbs Up to Record" flash on the screen so you can automatically add it to your TiVo To-Do list. Interesting stuff.
All's I know is that the wmplayer.exe process takes was taking up 6MB above and beyond the OS, while the iTunes processes were taking upwards of 40MB above and beyond the OS.
"You just can't see it directly because it's all in the core system" doesn't really make sense. Surely some of the widget libraries are loaded all the time, and it uses the IE control for the main info page, but what "core system" processes are used when I'm tooling around the media library?
For what it's worth, Apple could have used native system widgets too, but chose not to.
Two processes... ituneshelpher.exe and ipodservice.exe, the first of which I've seen take as much as 11MB of RAM, added to the 30MB the player itself takes up. That's compared to WMP, which is taking less than 6MB. iTunes could use some serious optimization -- what are they doing, running a Quartz emulator in DirectX?
That's one way of looking at it -- another is that MS is enabling Samsung, ViewSonic, iRiver, and Creative to get into a market to create some competition. Apple might not like that, but it doesn't look like MS has scared off anyone.
I was responding to this comment -- "I'm just plain against trademarks like this, nobody should be able to trademark a dictionary word" -- which is why I brought up Oracle, Apple and Sun (and Tide and Dial and any of the other dictionary words that are trademarked reasonable).
The dangerous thing is that if the Windows trademark is overturned (and it should be upheld, IMHO), it opens up a huge can of worms because of the number of products with "generic" names (Illustrator comes immediately to mind).
You absolutely should be able to trademark words in a dictionary for specific uses. I mean, almost every product people use has a trademarked dictionary word: Tide, Dial, Yahoo.... the list is endless. Does everything have to be named something absurd to be trademarked? I mean, do you really want to buy Tydro detergent instead of Tide? The supermarket shelf would look like the ad pages of Wired circa 1999 -- not pretty.
What about Sun? What about Apple? What about Oracle?
The ability to trademark common words, under narrow conditions (e.g., you could still make a cleaning product called Windows), is pretty integral to the ability to market just about anything.
I mean, let's be honest: they named their operating system product "Lindows" to cause confusion with "Windows" (or, more specifically, to suggest "Windows crossed with Linux") -- otherwise, Lindows is a pretty stupid name.
If Microsoft made a product called Winux, the same argument would apply.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the success of Passion of the Christ, despite all the liberal media bashing.
Oh, please. It was only because the "liberal media" gave TPotC a zillion dollars worth of free publicity that the anyone went to see the movie at all. Cry me a river about the liberal media while Mel Gibson lines his pockets.
The way Peter Jackson has been handling things, he doesn't seem to be a money grubbing a-hole like Lucas.
/. now, but there hasn't even been *one* version of the Star Wars trilogy on DVD, and there were/are already *two* of each LotR movie in the first year alone!. The last issue of an OT Star Wars video set was sometime around 1998-99. Eps I and II had a single DVD set apiece, priced right in line with every other DVD.
I know it's now cool to laud Jackson and hate Lucas on
I'm not ratting on LotR, but I think you're being unfair here. The $60 TTT Extended Edition with the Gollem figurine certainly suggests to me that Jackson and his crew have no problem making a buck off of fanboys.
If you want to bitch about someone, bitch about Sam Raimi, who has released no fewer than five different versions of Army of Darkness on DVD. Why isn't anyone kvetching about that instead of whining about Lucas?
Warren Spector said in an IGN video interview there would be no steam-powered robots. He said it wiht a tone of voice that suggested that he realized it was a bad idea in retrospect.
I've heard mixed reviews about the FM reception on that card -- how's yours? I'd really like to get it, but don't want to get fuzzy reception.
I'd also think the HD is the component that has the highest rate of failure.
I'm pretty sure that would be the optical drive. Every Xbox failure I've ever heard of or read about is a failure of the DVD drive. The hard drives seem to do just fine -- as they should, since a console is only run maybe two hours most days while lots of PCs are on year-round.
That's actually not true. I'm not really sure what you mean by "cancel Napster," but you don't lose your music if you choose not to buy anything anymore. You have to keep your player activated, but that's exactly the same as iTMS.
Not what I was responding to -- I was just making the point that common nouns are trademarked all the time.
But c'mon... first off, "Lindows" and "Windows" are hominyms. Say them out loud -- they sound virtually identical. You can't come out with the Ahppell Nackintoush and say that becuase it doesn't look like a trademark that it doesn't infringe on one.
When Lindows was launched originally, its whole marketing campaign was that it would run Windows programs -- hence, "Windows crossed with Linux." They've since backed off that claim, but they were clearly trying to build their market off of the similarity to the Windows name which is prohibited by trademark law.
The real question is, is Lindows a good product? If it is, they'd be better served by having a name that they could make for themselves, rather than focusing all of their attention on being "similar to, but not quite the same as, Windows."
Macintosh, too, is a common noun.
Yeah, I know, how can an organisation trademark a word that's a common noun?
i ntosh
People do it every day...
Apple
Tide
All
Bounty
Quake
All
Surf
Mac
Word
Excel
Illustrator
It's completely reasonable to trademark common words for narrow uses and it's completely reasonable to expect that those trademarks would be protected.
Here's a little exercise: name your next Linux distro Lacintosh and count the milliseconds until Apple serves you with a cease and desist order... and they'd be right to do so.
The X-Box has essentially no good games (yes I'm exaggerating a little)
You're actually exaggerating a lot... looking at the average rating for the top 200 games on GameRankings gives the PS2 an 84%, the Xbox gets an 81% and the GameCube a 78%. The no. 200 game for GameCube gets a 65%, the Xbox is a 72% and PS2 has a 78%.
My point? All three consoles have good games -- PS2 has the most games with good reviews (making sense, because it has the most games overall), GameCube has the least. Xbox is right in the middle.
You know what, you're right, except you the point you've made is the opposite of the one I think you intended. If Lindows decided it wanted to go after Apple instead of Microsoft and came out with OS L, Apple would sue them and would win. "OS X" is Apple's trade name for their OS and they've trademarked it, and that's the way the system is supposed to work.
Either way, the standard has to be, "Is this intended to, or could it, cause consumer confusion?" Lindows does. OS L would too.
Duh, it's Linux that acts like Windows, Lindows, what's wrong with that? No one is going to get confused are they?
Yeah, they'll get confused. They're practically hominyms. Imagine a novice is in a store and the salesperson says, "and this model comes with Lindows." There's no doubt that there'd be massive customer confusion, which is what trademark law helps prevent.
It's a publicity stunt; nothing more.
Illustrator is a common word and a trademark. Macintosh is a common word and a trademark. Tide is a common word and a trademark. This kind of thing happens every day and there's nothing wrong with it. It's why you can pick up a bottle of "All" in the laundry aisle and not worry that it's actually someone trying to rip you off by selling you "Alll."
Try this:
1. Bring to market a version of Linux with an interface that looks like OS X.
2. Announce that you're calling it the Lacintosh, or LacOS X.
3. Count how many milliseconds until Steve Jobs personally serves you with a cease and desist order (and he'd be right to).
This is just Robertson trying to get publicity for himself. It's a pretty clear case of trademark infringement; if his product is good enough, it shouldn't need to be named something that is only intended to generate confusion in the marketplace.
To be fair, though, Apple's iLife only runs on an Apple operating system that is only able to run on Apple hardware (for which there's usually a pretty tidy premium paid). That being the case, Apple has less to worry about with people copying since they're the sole supplier of the OS software and hardware that you're able to run iLife on.
By contrast, if you steal Doom III from Id or Photoshop from Adobe, they have no other way to make any money off of you, so it's in their best interest to try to prevent casual copying.
That said, iLife '04 is a really good deal at $50; no reason to steal it except to be an asshole.
And they'd be right... this is a really stupid thing for people to get their hackles up about. Who actually clicks the "Buy Music" button in Media Player anyway?
This is a total non-story.
You can mod me down, but no one seems to want to answer my question -- what devices other than the iPod are compatible with iTunes? I can't find a list anywhere on Apple's site, if in fact anything other than the iPods actually work with it.
Apple's nuts not to include support for secure WMA in the iPod. They aren't making any money off the music store anyway, and they're not allowing any other players to play DRM'ed AAC files, so the iPod could be the only player that could play everything. It would be killer if you could play songs from iTMS, Napster, Wal-Mart or wherever on your iPod, and it would help them sell more iPods, which they claim is the whole purpose of the iTMS to begin with.
Not a finger!
That's funny, because iTunes also supports multiple players and platforms.
What players other than the iPod does it support?
Ah, the iPod mini. Thanks.
What's funny is that NBC seems to also be working *with* TiVo, as during commercials for new NBC programs they're sending a signal that makes "Press Thumbs Up to Record" flash on the screen so you can automatically add it to your TiVo To-Do list. Interesting stuff.
All's I know is that the wmplayer.exe process takes was taking up 6MB above and beyond the OS, while the iTunes processes were taking upwards of 40MB above and beyond the OS.
"You just can't see it directly because it's all in the core system" doesn't really make sense. Surely some of the widget libraries are loaded all the time, and it uses the IE control for the main info page, but what "core system" processes are used when I'm tooling around the media library?
For what it's worth, Apple could have used native system widgets too, but chose not to.
Two processes... ituneshelpher.exe and ipodservice.exe, the first of which I've seen take as much as 11MB of RAM, added to the 30MB the player itself takes up. That's compared to WMP, which is taking less than 6MB. iTunes could use some serious optimization -- what are they doing, running a Quartz emulator in DirectX?
That's one way of looking at it -- another is that MS is enabling Samsung, ViewSonic, iRiver, and Creative to get into a market to create some competition. Apple might not like that, but it doesn't look like MS has scared off anyone.
I was responding to this comment -- "I'm just plain against trademarks like this, nobody should be able to trademark a dictionary word" -- which is why I brought up Oracle, Apple and Sun (and Tide and Dial and any of the other dictionary words that are trademarked reasonable).
The dangerous thing is that if the Windows trademark is overturned (and it should be upheld, IMHO), it opens up a huge can of worms because of the number of products with "generic" names (Illustrator comes immediately to mind).
Uh... "Google" appears in the dictionary.
You absolutely should be able to trademark words in a dictionary for specific uses. I mean, almost every product people use has a trademarked dictionary word: Tide, Dial, Yahoo.... the list is endless. Does everything have to be named something absurd to be trademarked? I mean, do you really want to buy Tydro detergent instead of Tide? The supermarket shelf would look like the ad pages of Wired circa 1999 -- not pretty.
What about Sun? What about Apple? What about Oracle?
The ability to trademark common words, under narrow conditions (e.g., you could still make a cleaning product called Windows), is pretty integral to the ability to market just about anything.
I mean, let's be honest: they named their operating system product "Lindows" to cause confusion with "Windows" (or, more specifically, to suggest "Windows crossed with Linux") -- otherwise, Lindows is a pretty stupid name.
If Microsoft made a product called Winux, the same argument would apply.