Wait, WTF? Weren't we all promised cool, sleek, aerodynamic FLYING CARS? Who authorized the downgrade to something as boring as regular cars, without drivers, that shuttle pizza hither and yon?
I want my flying car, or at *minimum* I want pizza delivery to change to something more like the first chapter of Snowcrash.
"generic for the goods and/or services identified in the application" means a generic term for the product. Thus you can't trademark "car" or "soft drink".
In general, I believe they can trademark not the words themselves, but a specific stylized presentation of the words that aren't readily mistakable-for or easily conflated-with the existing more general usage.
Thus: "Let's Play!" in a specific typeface and color, basically as a logo of some sort, ought to be OK to register as a mark.
The pinball game in windows is designed, someone once told me, to use pretty much all of win32. Don't if that's apocryphal or not, can anyone else say?
I wonder if they'd move themselves forward by forcing themselves to get pinball working.
My first reaction to your remark was to respond that you're wrong, that for the most part work on open source is separate from work for pay, and that people do it in their own time out of intrinsic interest and not out extrinsic reward overcoming intrinsic indifference.
Paying them would then be pernicious and wrong because it changes there story from "I do this because I'm good at it and value it" to "I do this for spare cash", and I've seen that have a bad affect on people. Their intrinsic sense of reward and their own story about themselves is changed into a sense of extrinsic reward.
What stops me from saying that whole-heartedly is that there *are* aspects of writing software that are essentially unrewarding for many people, and intrinsic interest in making something work (especially just for the person writing code) is very different from the activity of making it work for everyone. Some people will do it from altruism, but many people will get it working good enough for their own needs and be done with it.
So in that turning-the-crank, grinding-out part of the task, maybe there's room for something like this service... though there are other services like it, as others have already pointed out, and I agree that the name sucks.
Chapter 1 of Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers", which is basically this article from his site: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html/.
You should try to decide for yourself how much this applies to your situation, but there's another set of articles, one called "Choices = Headaches" that you should look at as well.
You may not agree with everything you read, and you won't get a simple answer to your question, but these will be food for thought.
... as long as you only care about 0% and 100% done.
If you want the progress bar to reflect finer increments of work, say 10%, then it might be hard for at least two reasons:
1. there may be a large variance in different portions of the task tracked by the progress bar
2. exceptional occurrences (network lag, errors, the user suddenly increasing load on the system) can change how long things take
In general though, progress bars are no harder or easier than the estimation task for what they should track. The estimation task is hell, partially because of leaky abstractions, partially just inherently.
Progress bars with milestones can help, but there's no easy answer to the basic problem: it's the estimation that's difficult.
It has a nasty ending that's incredibly sad and is based on an alternate future that would be roughly now. And if you think about how war is conducted and has been conducted since it was written, the basic idea isn't too far-fetched, but was outre when Blish wrote the story.
It's in a collection called "Galactic Cluster". I've claimed to various people that this story is basically cyberpunk despite predating cyberpunk by roughly 30 years, and not because of the goggle, by the way, but rather because of the tone and sensibility. I'll lay odds that Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, W. Jon Williams, and others may have read it. I'll assert that if they haven't then they should, dammit.
Oh, and another selection by Blish: A Case of Conscience
Seems like a lot of problems would have to be carfully mapped to such a systems... or, basically, you have to ask a crowdsource systems your questions carefully.
It might be tempting to think that a crowd acts like a nondeterministic Turing machine, but it really doesn't because the space of possible solutions it might try to verify is bounded by the pool of respondents (not just the size of the pool, but what you might call the "imaginative range" of the pool).
Oh, and this really reminds me of Vernor Vinge's book "A Deepness in the Sky", in which a spacefaring civilization that figures prominently in the narrative uses human slave labor given drugs to give them something like autism or OCD as processing power (they're not the good guys...).
... to any friends who might work on the content for these systems.
Somewhere an irate customer on a support call could be told to "take a stress pill and lie down" during a suppot call.
Of course, the customer will be irate because they were just told, over and over, "I'm sorry, , I can't do that." and "I can see your upset,.".
The hold music, naturally, will be "Daisy".
I'll take the previous poster's comments one at a time and try to add some analysis:
Quite often, the physical book is cheaper, thanks to Amazon or some
other discount provider. eBooks are overpriced and rarely discounted. I have a Sony Reader and I've found this to be false. The real liability is that books I have to buy must be mostly bought from Sony's store... no mobipocket books and most extant books in PDF distribution don't seem to be available in a customizable form, unlike the "Custom PDF" download option for all of the free books at manybooks.net.
I cannot loan an eBook to a friend. I do this a lot with regular books,
so it's a real concern. This is a perfectly legitimate concern for the most part. I believe you can transfer books with a Sony Reader but I haven't tried it, and I'll grant you that it's a bit of cold comfort to say "sure you can, just have all your friend buy a reader".
I cannot borrow an eBook from a library. Thousands of books for free. Project Gutenberg and the huge collection (including Gutenberg) at manybooks.net are all free. manybooks.net has free downloads of most Gutenberg texts formatted specifically for individual devices. So there are *are* thousands of books for free, it's just that most aren't current.
I cannot sell the eBook when I'm done with it. Same basic
point; I cannot buy a used eBook like I can a real book (and used books
can be rather cheap). Again, a valid criticism. Any formal resale operation is inhibited strongly by e-texts.
DRM. I run the risk that the permission granting service closes up shop.
This has happened to other media, so it's a real concern. I'm not too worried about this with my Sony Reader and I don't think most owners of the Iliad iReader or the Kindle are quaking in their boots about it. All of these are able to use PDFs... though getting a properly formatted PDF could become an issue.
I've had my Sony Reader about a year now and I'm very pleased with it. All of three of the Kindle, Sony Reader, and Iliad iReader have very interesting features and all three have the eInk display.
The iReader's is bigger and works as a touch-screen (though the online demo video was unimpressive), and the iReader has WiFi. Because of this, it's battery life is nowhere near that of the other two.
The Kindle has free wireless but it looks like materials are more expensive. It has good battery life expectations, but naturally lower than the Sony Reader, which is not going to spending any power on pushing bits through the luminiferous aether.
The Sony is just a book, and that's what I like about it. Both the Kindle and iReader are more expensive and have more features. The eInk displays in all of three in this generation are too slow to do a lot of flipping around comfortably and the Sony itself feels a bit underpowered as evidenced by rendering speed and responsiveness.
But for books and other materials that you want to carry around compactly and read _linearly_ for the most part, all three are very useful. I don't want to take notes while I read (I often read while walking on the treadmill anyway), and I like that I only charge my Sony device every one to one and a half weeks (I do _not_ listen to music on it -- that chews the battery fast).
So for me, the Sony is the right feature set at the right price, though I still drool over the Iliad iReader. The Kindle is also very interesting, but it's not motiviating to trade in my Sony for it... I can carry around so much that I don't need to be in constant contact... it has the next six or seven things I want to read all the time. That's why it's a good thing: you don't _need_ wireless if y
I think everyone's getting carried away by the use of the words "insect" and "dragonfly". The article only says "larger than", not even how much larger. There's a picture here: http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2627196/. They're advertised on TV. They're significantly larger than an insect, but consider also the helicopters and other flying toys available in the back of Popular Science or through Think Geek, as shown here: http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/rc/. In a crowd and from many feet below, it might be hard to tell the difference between a palm-size RC helicopter and a palm-sized insectoid robot.
So the little flying doohickeys exist and are easy to get and it could've just been someone in the crowd horsing around with a toy.
Of course, this also means the government could easily have a form of the same thing with cameras and microphones, but, as has been pointed out, that's a long way to go to listen in on protestors.
The "field test" theory doesn't work either: the consequences of losing the item are too great if they're trying to keep it secret.
But if the governement really uses these, no problem-o. Go buy a toy, take it to your next protest, and crash it into the teeny tiny "black helicopters". Fun for all!
... to the age-old question: "What would a movie that combined 'The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' and 'Ben' be like?"
Or perhaps it's "The Secret of Nim" meets "Fifty First Dates".
Or even "Flowers for Algernon" crossed with "Memento".
I, for one, welcome our new amnesiac rodent overlords.
I've been watching the portable reader for a while and watched it slip its schedule twice, realized the screen is smaller than I thought/hoped earlier, and wished it had a stylus. What I always wanted was an 11" screen with these features and the ability to just draw ink onto bitmaps that I save. No text recognition, none of that crap. Just electronic paper (literally: just let me make marks on a blank page) and the reader funcitons.
The closest I've seen is this:
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/main/devices/device11 .htm/
and the goReader seems defunct and was way too expensive. So this seems like just another near miss to me.
The problem seems to be that no one can ever bring themselves to offer the product I described: they start pumping up the functionality until it just *has* to cost close to $1000 or they make the sony reader, which shoots a little too low, like the previous paperback-sized reader that didn't take off --anybody remember the Rocket reader? I actually saw one in a store a few years ago.
Is there any hope that someone's eventually going to make what I want?
PDA screens are too small. And I don't want PDA functions.
Most readers are just readers.
What I want is the sony reader with a digitizer and an 11" diagonal screen. I don't even ask to annotate books. Just let me draw on blank pages. Work on the software for later. I'll even pay mark-up to add software to do more things later. Just give me that damn device, so I can avoid carrying paper documents and a notepad and not carry a portable computer. An not path $2500 for a whole tablet computer, since that's not what I want.
In excess of half the business world would by my device, why won't anyone build it?
A lot of what's been said above can be reduced to this:
Management is a service to your coworkers: those people are under your care, not in your power.
There was also a remark about having some degree of "monoculture" in your group. What that person wanted to say was that your group needs an ethos, a group identity, a sense of common cause even when goals are ill-defined.
There's one piece of excellent reading about the early days of WinNT... and its not the one at winsupersite... I found via slashdot over a year ago and can't find now. It was an account as told by someone on the team or it might've been Lucovsky or Cutler. In any event, it went deeper into what was different from the early OS development at Microsoft about the early NT effort, discusses "ethos" briefly, and touches on how difficult that ethos was to maintain as the project grew. That last part was a bit heart-breaking to read...
The Business Of Killing
Religious Interface Design (properly modest interfaces
keep 90% of the screen occluded at all times).
Well, I guess we yanked Cat Stevens off of a plane
because he was on a no-fly list... having noticed
AFTER the plane was in the air... so maybe we oughtn't
be vigorously throwing rocks at this one.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like automating both pareidolia and apophenia. And then taking the conclusions of both seriously because "numbers don't lie".
Wait, WTF? Weren't we all promised cool, sleek, aerodynamic FLYING CARS? Who authorized the downgrade to something as boring as regular cars, without drivers, that shuttle pizza hither and yon?
I want my flying car, or at *minimum* I want pizza delivery to change to something more like the first chapter of Snowcrash.
"generic for the goods and/or services identified in the application" means a generic term for the product. Thus you can't trademark "car" or "soft drink".
In general, I believe they can trademark not the words themselves, but a specific stylized presentation of the words that aren't readily mistakable-for or easily conflated-with the existing more general usage.
Thus: "Let's Play!" in a specific typeface and color, basically as a logo of some sort, ought to be OK to register as a mark.
Can anyone confirm or deny?
The pinball game in windows is designed, someone once told me, to use pretty much all of win32. Don't if that's apocryphal or not, can anyone else say? I wonder if they'd move themselves forward by forcing themselves to get pinball working.
My first reaction to your remark was to respond that you're wrong, that for the most part work on open source is separate from work for pay, and that people do it in their own time out of intrinsic interest and not out extrinsic reward overcoming intrinsic indifference.
Paying them would then be pernicious and wrong because it changes there story from "I do this because I'm good at it and value it" to "I do this for spare cash", and I've seen that have a bad affect on people. Their intrinsic sense of reward and their own story about themselves is changed into a sense of extrinsic reward.
What stops me from saying that whole-heartedly is that there *are* aspects of writing software that are essentially unrewarding for many people, and intrinsic interest in making something work (especially just for the person writing code) is very different from the activity of making it work for everyone. Some people will do it from altruism, but many people will get it working good enough for their own needs and be done with it.
So in that turning-the-crank, grinding-out part of the task, maybe there's room for something like this service... though there are other services like it, as others have already pointed out, and I agree that the name sucks.
If I had a mod point, I'd mod you up.
Sorry... that URL should be:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html
Chapter 1 of Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers", which is basically this article from his site: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html/. You should try to decide for yourself how much this applies to your situation, but there's another set of articles, one called "Choices = Headaches" that you should look at as well. You may not agree with everything you read, and you won't get a simple answer to your question, but these will be food for thought.
... as long as you only care about 0% and 100% done. If you want the progress bar to reflect finer increments of work, say 10%, then it might be hard for at least two reasons: 1. there may be a large variance in different portions of the task tracked by the progress bar 2. exceptional occurrences (network lag, errors, the user suddenly increasing load on the system) can change how long things take In general though, progress bars are no harder or easier than the estimation task for what they should track. The estimation task is hell, partially because of leaky abstractions, partially just inherently. Progress bars with milestones can help, but there's no easy answer to the basic problem: it's the estimation that's difficult.
It has a nasty ending that's incredibly sad and is based on an alternate future that would be roughly now. And if you think about how war is conducted and has been conducted since it was written, the basic idea isn't too far-fetched, but was outre when Blish wrote the story. It's in a collection called "Galactic Cluster". I've claimed to various people that this story is basically cyberpunk despite predating cyberpunk by roughly 30 years, and not because of the goggle, by the way, but rather because of the tone and sensibility. I'll lay odds that Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, W. Jon Williams, and others may have read it. I'll assert that if they haven't then they should, dammit. Oh, and another selection by Blish: A Case of Conscience
Um, no. It's the song the children sing before going to bed in "The Sound of Music" that he appears to have in mind.
Seems like a lot of problems would have to be carfully mapped to such a systems... or, basically, you have to ask a crowdsource systems your questions carefully. It might be tempting to think that a crowd acts like a nondeterministic Turing machine, but it really doesn't because the space of possible solutions it might try to verify is bounded by the pool of respondents (not just the size of the pool, but what you might call the "imaginative range" of the pool). Oh, and this really reminds me of Vernor Vinge's book "A Deepness in the Sky", in which a spacefaring civilization that figures prominently in the narrative uses human slave labor given drugs to give them something like autism or OCD as processing power (they're not the good guys...).
... to any friends who might work on the content for these systems. Somewhere an irate customer on a support call could be told to "take a stress pill and lie down" during a suppot call. Of course, the customer will be irate because they were just told, over and over, "I'm sorry, , I can't do that." and "I can see your upset, .".
The hold music, naturally, will be "Daisy".
I'll take the previous poster's comments one at a time and try to add some
analysis:
Quite often, the physical book is cheaper, thanks to Amazon or some
other discount provider. eBooks are overpriced and rarely discounted.
I have a Sony Reader and I've found this to be false. The real liability
is that books I have to buy must be mostly bought from Sony's store... no
mobipocket books and most extant books in PDF distribution don't seem to be
available in a customizable form, unlike the "Custom PDF" download option
for all of the free books at manybooks.net.
I cannot loan an eBook to a friend. I do this a lot with regular books,
so it's a real concern.
This is a perfectly legitimate concern for the most part.
I believe you can transfer books with a Sony Reader but I haven't tried it,
and I'll grant you that it's a bit of cold comfort to say "sure you can,
just have all your friend buy a reader".
I cannot borrow an eBook from a library. Thousands of books for free.
Project Gutenberg and the huge collection (including Gutenberg) at
manybooks.net are all free. manybooks.net has free downloads of most
Gutenberg texts formatted specifically for individual devices. So there
are *are* thousands of books for free, it's just that most aren't current.
I cannot sell the eBook when I'm done with it. Same basic
point; I cannot buy a used eBook like I can a real book (and used books
can be rather cheap).
Again, a valid criticism. Any formal resale operation is inhibited
strongly by e-texts.
DRM. I run the risk that the permission granting service closes up shop.
This has happened to other media, so it's a real concern.
I'm not too worried about this with my Sony Reader and I don't think most
owners of the Iliad iReader or the Kindle are quaking in their boots about
it. All of these are able to use PDFs... though getting a properly
formatted PDF could become an issue.
I've had my Sony Reader about a year now and I'm very pleased with it. All
of three of the Kindle, Sony Reader, and Iliad iReader have very
interesting features and all three have the eInk display.
The iReader's is bigger and works as a touch-screen (though the online demo
video was unimpressive), and the iReader has WiFi. Because of this, it's
battery life is nowhere near that of the other two.
The Kindle has free wireless but it looks like materials are more
expensive. It has good battery life expectations, but naturally lower than
the Sony Reader, which is not going to spending any power on pushing bits
through the luminiferous aether.
The Sony is just a book, and that's what I like about it. Both the Kindle
and iReader are more expensive and have more features. The eInk displays
in all of three in this generation are too slow to do a lot of flipping
around comfortably and the Sony itself feels a bit underpowered as
evidenced by rendering speed and responsiveness.
But for books and other materials that you want to carry around compactly
and read _linearly_ for the most part, all three are very useful. I don't
want to take notes while I read (I often read while walking on the
treadmill anyway), and I like that I only charge my Sony device every one
to one and a half weeks (I do _not_ listen to music on it -- that chews the
battery fast).
So for me, the Sony is the right feature set at the right price, though
I still drool over the Iliad iReader. The Kindle is also very interesting,
but it's not motiviating to trade in my Sony for it... I can carry around
so much that I don't need to be in constant contact... it has the next six
or seven things I want to read all the time. That's why it's a good thing:
you don't _need_ wireless if y
I think everyone's getting carried away by the use of the words "insect" and "dragonfly". The article only says "larger than", not even how much larger. There's a picture here: http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2627196/. They're advertised on TV. They're significantly larger than an insect, but consider also the helicopters and other flying toys available in the back of Popular Science or through Think Geek, as shown here: http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/rc/. In a crowd and from many feet below, it might be hard to tell the difference between a palm-size RC helicopter and a palm-sized insectoid robot.
So the little flying doohickeys exist and are easy to get and it could've just been someone in the crowd horsing around with a toy.
Of course, this also means the government could easily have a form of the same thing with cameras and microphones, but, as has been pointed out, that's a long way to go to listen in on protestors.
The "field test" theory doesn't work either: the consequences of losing the item are too great if they're trying to keep it secret. But if the governement really uses these, no problem-o. Go buy a toy, take it to your next protest, and crash it into the teeny tiny "black helicopters". Fun for all!
... to the age-old question: "What would a movie that combined 'The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' and 'Ben' be like?" Or perhaps it's "The Secret of Nim" meets "Fifty First Dates". Or even "Flowers for Algernon" crossed with "Memento". I, for one, welcome our new amnesiac rodent overlords.
I've been watching the portable reader for a while and watched it slip its schedule twice, realized the screen is smaller than I thought/hoped earlier, and wished it had a stylus. What I always wanted was an 11" screen with these features and the ability to just draw ink onto bitmaps that I save. No text recognition, none of that crap. Just electronic paper (literally: just let me make marks on a blank page) and the reader funcitons. The closest I've seen is this: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/main/devices/device11 .htm/
and the goReader seems defunct and was way too expensive. So this seems like just another near miss to me.
The problem seems to be that no one can ever bring themselves to offer the product I described: they start pumping up the functionality until it just *has* to cost close to $1000 or they make the sony reader, which shoots a little too low, like the previous paperback-sized reader that didn't take off --anybody remember the Rocket reader? I actually saw one in a store a few years ago.
Is there any hope that someone's eventually going to make what I want?
PDA screens are too small. And I don't want PDA functions.
Most readers are just readers.
What I want is the sony reader with a digitizer and an 11" diagonal screen. I don't even ask to annotate books. Just let me draw on blank pages. Work on the software for later. I'll even pay mark-up to add software to do more things later. Just give me that damn device, so I can avoid carrying paper documents and a notepad and not carry a portable computer. An not path $2500 for a whole tablet computer, since that's not what I want.
In excess of half the business world would by my device, why won't anyone build it?
Argh. Make that "the vicinity of the star". Damn.
WalMart has announced plans to open a supercenter in the vicinity of the store in 2100.
A lot of what's been said above can be reduced to this:
Management is a service to your coworkers: those people are under your care, not in your power.
There was also a remark about having some degree of "monoculture" in your group. What that person wanted to say was that your group needs an ethos, a group identity, a sense of common cause even when goals are ill-defined.
There's one piece of excellent reading about the early days of WinNT... and its not the one at winsupersite... I found via slashdot over a year ago and can't find now. It was an account as told by someone on the team or it might've been Lucovsky or Cutler. In any event, it went deeper into what was different from the early OS development at Microsoft about the early NT effort, discusses "ethos" briefly, and touches on how difficult that ethos was to maintain as the project grew. That last part was a bit heart-breaking to read...
Joel On Shiites, that is.
Also down:
Joel On Insurgency (relates more to Iraq)
and his forums:
The Business Of Killing
Religious Interface Design (properly modest interfaces
keep 90% of the screen occluded at all times).
Well, I guess we yanked Cat Stevens off of a plane because he was on a no-fly list... having noticed AFTER the plane was in the air... so maybe we oughtn't be vigorously throwing rocks at this one.