"Xerox" as a verb didn't dillute their trademark value. It made them a fortune. It's every brand's wet dream to become a verb, or a noun that names the entire product class (i.e.: "I bought this xerox machine from nashua").
Xerox's mistake was selling OTHER PRODUCTS AND SERVICES under the exact same brand. A Xerox inkjet printer makes sense? I never thought so.
Interesting bit of trivia: here in Brazil people do not recognize the Wright Brothers as the fathers of heavier-than-air flight, but rather our own Alberto Santos-Dumont (link, link). Never dug inside the story properly to know who's right and who's wrong.
Battle on Endor: This is so Vietnam, the Imperials get creamed by the indiginous population because they know the land better, even if they have cruder weaponry.
No, dude, they got creamed because if there's anything that would scare viewers more than Ewoks is a horde of dead Ewoks.
What you don't understand is a very simple concept: a very small percentage of the internet population are aware / able to use boolean queries (there is an unusually high concentration in Slashdot, but don't let that cloud that your judgement:) ). So if you want to build a search engine that WORKS you must work around this simple fact of life: people won't learn to use 'arcane' boolean queries - they want to write keywords on a form field, hit submit and be out of there in seconds. Google managed to solve this problem gracefully. Google is actually telling you: if your search engine needs boolean to get good results, don't worry - that's just because it sucks.
Developing cross-browser multimedia applications is such a pain in the butt that this is where we are ending up - betting our hopes in a plugin as the only feasable alternative to have the same experience through several different platforms.
People like to diss Flash as a little gimmick or toy, suitable only for funny movies or stupid games, put in reality it can be as powerful as Macromedia wants it to be - and it will be, since the installed base grows frenetically.
Now that's a smart move - release basic user interface libraries for it. Taking advantage of the mess the browser war left us in. Sincerely, no one can blame Macromedia for it.
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...WiFi taxes YOU!
Now that Linus does not work at Transmeta anymore, do we still like them?
Insanely utter, as Steve would put it.
You make Steve Jobs sound WAY more powerful than he actually is. Outside of his sect of Apple employees/users, he has very little if any power.
"Xerox" as a verb didn't dillute their trademark value. It made them a fortune. It's every brand's wet dream to become a verb, or a noun that names the entire product class (i.e.: "I bought this xerox machine from nashua"). Xerox's mistake was selling OTHER PRODUCTS AND SERVICES under the exact same brand. A Xerox inkjet printer makes sense? I never thought so.
Interesting bit of trivia: here in Brazil people do not recognize the Wright Brothers as the fathers of heavier-than-air flight, but rather our own Alberto Santos-Dumont (link, link). Never dug inside the story properly to know who's right and who's wrong.
KDE development is bound to hit a brickwall in a couple of years, as they're only so many nouns in english that begin with "K".
Battle on Endor: This is so Vietnam, the Imperials get creamed by the indiginous population because they know the land better, even if they have cruder weaponry. No, dude, they got creamed because if there's anything that would scare viewers more than Ewoks is a horde of dead Ewoks.
What you don't understand is a very simple concept: a very small percentage of the internet population are aware / able to use boolean queries (there is an unusually high concentration in Slashdot, but don't let that cloud that your judgement :) ). So if you want to build a search engine that WORKS you must work around this simple fact of life: people won't learn to use 'arcane' boolean queries - they want to write keywords on a form field, hit submit and be out of there in seconds. Google managed to solve this problem gracefully. Google is actually telling you: if your search engine needs boolean to get good results, don't worry - that's just because it sucks.
Developing cross-browser multimedia applications is such a pain in the butt that this is where we are ending up - betting our hopes in a plugin as the only feasable alternative to have the same experience through several different platforms. People like to diss Flash as a little gimmick or toy, suitable only for funny movies or stupid games, put in reality it can be as powerful as Macromedia wants it to be - and it will be, since the installed base grows frenetically. Now that's a smart move - release basic user interface libraries for it. Taking advantage of the mess the browser war left us in. Sincerely, no one can blame Macromedia for it.