I'm interested in seeing hybrid drives, say, in a laptop form factor, with 50% of the storage on flash media and 50% on platters. If the system is smart and can move write-once-read-often data to the flash partition, and can keep oft-changing files on the platters, that'd be awesome.
Put my OS on SSD for super-fast booting. Put my photo library for fast browsing, but if I start editing a picture, put the edit data on the platters until I'm done. I'm sure some of the decision-making could be done by the drive itself, although the OS or applications could also help with metadata flags. Heck, there could even be an option for user override if necessary...
Good point. If game companies reduced the cost of games to start with, that would have a cascading effect. Resale value would be lower, meaning that there would be lower margins for the local game shops that deal in used games. This might actually put some of them out of business, reducing the overall game market.
At the very least, when we're talking about sequels, it would be great if they could bundle the prequels with the sequels, since the incremental cost of delivery is almost nil.
Yup, that's pretty good. The problem is that if you want reasonably accurate correlations, you need mountains of data. They've got those data for these 10 images; start with another 10 or 20 or 100 and you're starting from scratch again.
There are not "correct" answers. There are mountains and mountains of actuarial data as far as the types of things that people see and associate with the images.
These data are cross-referenced against issues that people have, personality disorders, whether they are known to be lying or trying to manipulate the test administrator, etc. So as much as it is touchy-feely, it's a study in statistics as well.
All the actuarial data is based on people seeing the images for the first time and having an honest first-reaction to them. Not to say that they aren't lying about what they see, but it's honestly the first time they're seeing them. I think it's true that knowing the test images would change the test.
IANAPsychologist, but a friend of my wife was getting her PhD, and used me as a guinnea pig for practicing test administration, and I took this one. It was actually a unique experience, different than I'd ever imagined it to be, and quite emotional. I'm glad I got to take it only having heard of it and having seen fake images (i.e. in Bugs Bunny cartoons).
Wikipedia's great and all, but I think this falls under the category of, "just because we can doesn't mean we should."
That being said, just because a teen's views are limited and will change in a few years doesn't mean that marketers shouldn't listen, right? They may be scraping together a few quid to buy phone credits, but there are gazillions of them doing it. And someone bought them the phones/game consoles in the first place.
It's not simple to keep up with the fickle desires of teenagers, but if you can occasionally land one step ahead of them, in their path, then you can, at least temporarily, rule the world.
Yeah because Google wasnt named after googol or anything.
What does this have to do with the parent post?
You mean like Windows or Office? It makes sense to name your company or product with something relevant to what it is/does.
Any IP lawyer would tell you that all of these are weak trademarks. If you link your name to something that is too commonly used in normal speech, it is harder to defend against infringement.
But it's not really possible to tell what you are getting at. Google's name isn't at issue; neither are Windows nor Office. The parent poster was suggesting that RS chose their name because the actual Rosetta Stone is a well known artifact which has become synonymous with languages/translation. The poster is saying that it's quite reasonable to think that other people who are interested in searching for language software might search on the name because of the association with the artifact, not the company.
Rosetta Stone, Inc. did not make the name famous with years of hard work. There may have been years of hard work in building their product, but the name was already famous. Thus, it's a weak trademark, and it's within the realm of possibility that they not only lose, but they lose the ability to protect their trademark at all. This is a dangerous fight to fight, if you're not sure you're going to win.
Your Google/googol comparison is particularly strange because it doesn't follow much of a parallel with the parent poster's point at all. The original word "googol" does not have anything to do with searching or organizing information, or email or advertising or document editing and storage or news. "Googol" is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. I think if some company went into the business of selling large numbers (?) and Google sued them for using the name "Googol", your comparison might be somewhat apt, but... Gee, I just don't know.
IMHO, allowing Google to redirect trademark searches to a competitors site is a trademark violation
IMHO, it is not. It seems obvious to me, but I guess our disagreement reflects the disagreement between RS and Google and the RS competitors. Pity it has to end up in court and waste so many resources, but if this thread is a reasonable microcosm, it's clear that there's not overwhelming agreement with one side or the other.
This seems like a pretty obvious infringement issue.
Are you saying it would be wrong for me to say that my product is twice as effective as Rosetta Stone (tm) at half the cost, in my own advertisements?
By choosing a name that is already in the lexicon, they have chosen a weak trademark. A strong trademark is something like "Kodak" which Eastman chose because it did not mean anything in any language. If they pursue this too far, they may find that they lose the trademark because there is an actual rosetta stone, and that any company that does translation or language-learning software should have the right to refer to it in their own names, their product lines, their literature and their advertising.
Heck, I'm suddenly worried that I might be infringing by using Rosetta Stone (tm)'s name in this post!
It seems to me that companies have been using competitors' trademarks in advertising since he dawn of time. Comparison-based advertising is a trend that waxes and wanes periodically.
Using competitor names in keyword advertising seems to me to be a reasonable extension of this. When I search for Kleenex, I'm really interested in facial tissue; For competitors to be blocked from being visible in the context of this sort of search seems pretty unreasonable to me. If I go to a store and ask where their Kleenex is, they point me to an aisle where there's lots of competition. What a world we'd live in if they were forced to only allow me to see Kleenex.
Of course, it's one thing if a company just wants to be visible on a searches for a competitor, or even if they want to put up advertising saying their product is better, faster or cheaper than this competitor. It's another thing altogether if they pretend to be that company. That would be wrong. But I'd bet in the majority of cases, this is not the issue.
Maybe Google could resolve this by keeping lists of competing products or company names that go together in some sort of affinity system, similar to Google Sets (or whatever it's called). This way, you just register your own name as an advertiser, and Google knows that if you're a facial tissue maker, they'll figure out that you should show up when people search for any manufacturer of facial tissue, even Kleenex. In this case, Google would effectively be the store from my example, and the affinity-based advertising would be like visiting the right aisle.
An even better question is: do we really need copyright?
Fair question, but I think the short answer is yes. But the point of copyright protection was once to protect creators from abuses by big business. In the time of Goethe, for instance, if he did not have family money and wealthy patrons, his writing would not have supported him. When he finished a book, it would get one good printing, and then all the feeder-level publishers would buy one copy each, and make copies themselves. All works would immediately become commodities.
A little more recently, you can look to artists like Little Richard, whose songs were used in Disney films, commercials, TV shows, over and over and over, without any payment to him, because ASCAP wasn't there to enforce copyright protections.
Metallica aside, most artists aren't worried about individuals pirating their music. Hell, I'd be thrilled if someone decided that my old band's music was awesome and it hit number one on the torrents. That would mean that my art touched people. But if Roy Disney decided that one of my songs was great for his multi-billion-dollar film and didn't want to pay me a dime, that would be unacceptable.
My feeling is that copyright is necessary, but it's being abused, and the abusers are working hard to limit--even destroy--any "fair use" cases that we've taken for granted.
Had I had mod points, I would have given this one a +1 interesting. The implicit message here, to me, is that by not letting the big companies fail, we may be preventing the next great success story from being realized.
It's a pity that--assuming you believe that time is a single vector, moving in only one direction and at a constant speed--our lives are a conglomeration of one-act plays with no rehearsal. We can not know how much better or worse off we would have been having made different decisions, especially considering everyone has a different picture of what "we" means.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm interested in seeing hybrid drives, say, in a laptop form factor, with 50% of the storage on flash media and 50% on platters. If the system is smart and can move write-once-read-often data to the flash partition, and can keep oft-changing files on the platters, that'd be awesome.
Put my OS on SSD for super-fast booting. Put my photo library for fast browsing, but if I start editing a picture, put the edit data on the platters until I'm done. I'm sure some of the decision-making could be done by the drive itself, although the OS or applications could also help with metadata flags. Heck, there could even be an option for user override if necessary...
A web browser should never, and I mean NEVER, need half a gig of memory to view my open tabs
Well, apparently Bill Gates didn't really say it, but here you are on record, saying that 512 MB should be enough for anybody's browser needs.
/. ID isn't PII, or people would be able to attribute it to you and you'd be heckled for life.
Good thing that your
I prefer "going bananas".
Neither does real life.
and then we'd introduce the problem of neck strain due to the weight of the unit.
Easy... just attach helium balloons to the front of the unit to offset the weight!
Good point. If game companies reduced the cost of games to start with, that would have a cascading effect. Resale value would be lower, meaning that there would be lower margins for the local game shops that deal in used games. This might actually put some of them out of business, reducing the overall game market.
Won't someone PLEASE think of the gamers?!
At the very least, when we're talking about sequels, it would be great if they could bundle the prequels with the sequels, since the incremental cost of delivery is almost nil.
Yup, that's pretty good. The problem is that if you want reasonably accurate correlations, you need mountains of data. They've got those data for these 10 images; start with another 10 or 20 or 100 and you're starting from scratch again.
I'm tired of evaluating art. I want to look at poetry. Anyone know where I can find works by Raymond Kertecz? He's my favorite poet!
There are not "correct" answers. There are mountains and mountains of actuarial data as far as the types of things that people see and associate with the images.
These data are cross-referenced against issues that people have, personality disorders, whether they are known to be lying or trying to manipulate the test administrator, etc. So as much as it is touchy-feely, it's a study in statistics as well.
All the actuarial data is based on people seeing the images for the first time and having an honest first-reaction to them. Not to say that they aren't lying about what they see, but it's honestly the first time they're seeing them. I think it's true that knowing the test images would change the test.
IANAPsychologist, but a friend of my wife was getting her PhD, and used me as a guinnea pig for practicing test administration, and I took this one. It was actually a unique experience, different than I'd ever imagined it to be, and quite emotional. I'm glad I got to take it only having heard of it and having seen fake images (i.e. in Bugs Bunny cartoons).
Wikipedia's great and all, but I think this falls under the category of, "just because we can doesn't mean we should."
0. The guy in question is Kevin Bacon.
Insightful post. Wish I had mod points.
That being said, just because a teen's views are limited and will change in a few years doesn't mean that marketers shouldn't listen, right? They may be scraping together a few quid to buy phone credits, but there are gazillions of them doing it. And someone bought them the phones/game consoles in the first place.
It's not simple to keep up with the fickle desires of teenagers, but if you can occasionally land one step ahead of them, in their path, then you can, at least temporarily, rule the world.
Yeah because Google wasnt named after googol or anything.
What does this have to do with the parent post?
You mean like Windows or Office? It makes sense to name your company or product with something relevant to what it is/does.
Any IP lawyer would tell you that all of these are weak trademarks. If you link your name to something that is too commonly used in normal speech, it is harder to defend against infringement.
But it's not really possible to tell what you are getting at. Google's name isn't at issue; neither are Windows nor Office. The parent poster was suggesting that RS chose their name because the actual Rosetta Stone is a well known artifact which has become synonymous with languages/translation. The poster is saying that it's quite reasonable to think that other people who are interested in searching for language software might search on the name because of the association with the artifact, not the company.
Rosetta Stone, Inc. did not make the name famous with years of hard work. There may have been years of hard work in building their product, but the name was already famous. Thus, it's a weak trademark, and it's within the realm of possibility that they not only lose, but they lose the ability to protect their trademark at all. This is a dangerous fight to fight, if you're not sure you're going to win.
Your Google/googol comparison is particularly strange because it doesn't follow much of a parallel with the parent poster's point at all. The original word "googol" does not have anything to do with searching or organizing information, or email or advertising or document editing and storage or news. "Googol" is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. I think if some company went into the business of selling large numbers (?) and Google sued them for using the name "Googol", your comparison might be somewhat apt, but... Gee, I just don't know.
Good point. Maybe Rosetta Stone is taking a page from the SCO playbook. It's their new revenue model. Let's see how that works for them.
IMHO, allowing Google to redirect trademark searches to a competitors site is a trademark violation
IMHO, it is not. It seems obvious to me, but I guess our disagreement reflects the disagreement between RS and Google and the RS competitors. Pity it has to end up in court and waste so many resources, but if this thread is a reasonable microcosm, it's clear that there's not overwhelming agreement with one side or the other.
This seems like a pretty obvious infringement issue.
Are you saying it would be wrong for me to say that my product is twice as effective as Rosetta Stone (tm) at half the cost, in my own advertisements?
By choosing a name that is already in the lexicon, they have chosen a weak trademark. A strong trademark is something like "Kodak" which Eastman chose because it did not mean anything in any language. If they pursue this too far, they may find that they lose the trademark because there is an actual rosetta stone, and that any company that does translation or language-learning software should have the right to refer to it in their own names, their product lines, their literature and their advertising.
Heck, I'm suddenly worried that I might be infringing by using Rosetta Stone (tm)'s name in this post!
It seems to me that companies have been using competitors' trademarks in advertising since he dawn of time. Comparison-based advertising is a trend that waxes and wanes periodically.
Using competitor names in keyword advertising seems to me to be a reasonable extension of this. When I search for Kleenex, I'm really interested in facial tissue; For competitors to be blocked from being visible in the context of this sort of search seems pretty unreasonable to me. If I go to a store and ask where their Kleenex is, they point me to an aisle where there's lots of competition. What a world we'd live in if they were forced to only allow me to see Kleenex.
Of course, it's one thing if a company just wants to be visible on a searches for a competitor, or even if they want to put up advertising saying their product is better, faster or cheaper than this competitor. It's another thing altogether if they pretend to be that company. That would be wrong. But I'd bet in the majority of cases, this is not the issue.
Maybe Google could resolve this by keeping lists of competing products or company names that go together in some sort of affinity system, similar to Google Sets (or whatever it's called). This way, you just register your own name as an advertiser, and Google knows that if you're a facial tissue maker, they'll figure out that you should show up when people search for any manufacturer of facial tissue, even Kleenex. In this case, Google would effectively be the store from my example, and the affinity-based advertising would be like visiting the right aisle.
...he played upright bass in the pit orchestra for "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" many years back. Wonder if this is the same guy...
This. If you get a 17", you'll regret it. I squint at my little 20" and wonder, why oh why didn't I get a 24"?
Now you're just being shilly. OK, that was bad, even for a pun, but I couldn't resist.
An even better question is: do we really need copyright?
Fair question, but I think the short answer is yes. But the point of copyright protection was once to protect creators from abuses by big business. In the time of Goethe, for instance, if he did not have family money and wealthy patrons, his writing would not have supported him. When he finished a book, it would get one good printing, and then all the feeder-level publishers would buy one copy each, and make copies themselves. All works would immediately become commodities.
A little more recently, you can look to artists like Little Richard, whose songs were used in Disney films, commercials, TV shows, over and over and over, without any payment to him, because ASCAP wasn't there to enforce copyright protections.
Metallica aside, most artists aren't worried about individuals pirating their music. Hell, I'd be thrilled if someone decided that my old band's music was awesome and it hit number one on the torrents. That would mean that my art touched people. But if Roy Disney decided that one of my songs was great for his multi-billion-dollar film and didn't want to pay me a dime, that would be unacceptable.
My feeling is that copyright is necessary, but it's being abused, and the abusers are working hard to limit--even destroy--any "fair use" cases that we've taken for granted.
That "jackass" was me, you insensitive clod!
I totally agree with this and wish I had moderator points.
Had I had mod points, I would have given this one a +1 interesting. The implicit message here, to me, is that by not letting the big companies fail, we may be preventing the next great success story from being realized.
It's a pity that--assuming you believe that time is a single vector, moving in only one direction and at a constant speed--our lives are a conglomeration of one-act plays with no rehearsal. We can not know how much better or worse off we would have been having made different decisions, especially considering everyone has a different picture of what "we" means.
OK, then it'd be the fastest *road legal* datacenter on Earth.