The US Patent and Trademark Office maintains searchable databases of both patents and trademarks. The earliest Excel I see is from 1925, serial number 71215931, a footware trademark owned by BF Goodrich. There's another (72419485) dating from 1972 in current use for "CHAINS AND MORE SPECIFICALLY ROLLER CHAINS" by what seems to be the Jeffery Chain corporation. Around the time that M$ was starting to put together their cute-and-fuzzy little office suite, Hyundai (aka Hyunda) were using Excel (73511599) as the name for a car model.
There's only so many phoneme combinations to go around; a certain amount of overlap is necessary. You'd have to ask a lawyer -- and specifically, a trademark specialist -- to find out if the theory that the failure to register for trademark protection this long results in abandonment of enforcement rights.
EB in Australia will except returns for any game for any reason within 7 days.
Most US stores will only do exchanges for defective disks within the first fourteen days, and direct sustomers seeking refunds for open software to the original manufacturer. Most software manufacturers handle such requests given in the first 30 days with few questions asked, and issue RMAs and refunds regardless of most of the answers. (Exception: "Do you have your receipt?")
...Or some guy just liked using his cracked copy of SF, and brought it into work to use.
...or took did some work at home, and brought the results in to work. He may not have brought in outside software, but only data manipulated by outside software.
A good choice, still available if you so choose. My sister has a couple tins hidden in her Xmas supplies, just in case one of her rugrats really deserves something special one year.
...is another good one. Nowadays, you can get off-brand in medium quantities, or direct from Dow in industrial amounts. What would your kid do with their weight in Silly Putty?
Let me add in to legos praises: they LAST. True, kids will lose some pieces, but usually not too many-- and those sometimes turn up again later. My parents started buying legos in 1970 or so. Aside from one small box around 1973 (when Lego briefly switched plastics, until realizing the new one was lousy), all of the massive collection Legos bought for us are still perfectly usable, some 10000 pieces or so. My older sister's kids rebuilt my LL924 Space Cruiser and several other sets last Christmas, and I expect that most of the pieces will survive until either I or they start having kids in turn. They're good for thousands of hours of entertainment.
How many of those battery powered gizmos will still work at all in five years, much less thirty? Although, come to think of it, there's an old pre-Technics Lego gears-and-motor set in our stuff that still works....
Hi. I prefer unions, despite none of my family (including myself) ever having been in one in my lifetime. (Mom was in the teacher's union during her eight years as an English teacher, Before Kids.) I have substantial respect for the function Unions serve. You may blame this on too much time spent with professors specializing in the history of science and engineering. I understand the reasons for Unions. I understand their drawbacks. Overly strong, Unions grow lazy, corrupt, and stupid. On the other hand, without unions (or the rarest of charismatic absolute rules at the top of management determined to prevent it) management will work employees hard enough to be detrimental to society at large.
Unions are the enemy of talented and productive people that understand you don't need a union, just the freedom to do whatever you want.
...and command of sufficient financial and capital assets to do it. I have a freind who has the potential to be a damn fine architect. However, he's not quite visionary enough to be the next Frank Lloyd Wright. So, he's stuck in a deeply crappy job doing grunt work to pay the bills. How crappy? Crappy enought that he's looking for jobs in computer gaming at EA, despite full awareness of stories like these. Quoth he, "it's still an improvement."
As for myself, due to their corporate union attitudes, I don't buy anything made by EA, and I only buy things from Wal-Mart after checking if ANYONE else in town carries it at any price. (Last thing I bought was a 3.5 inch glue-top memo cube filler two years ago.)
Why would a really productive programmer want a union which represents them and someone who does a 1/10 as much productive work? They'll only lose out to the benefit of the slackers.
Crunch times raise error rates for EVERYONE, increasingly as crunches progress onward. This makes it more likely that the bad coders will become a negative marginal contribution to the projects. This makes ending such practices of benefit even to superhuman coders who make no mistakes even during a 168-hour-a-week death march.
Unions may indeed bring other undesirable problems, such as artificial and inappropriate pay equity. If the employees come to percieve unions as a lesser evil than the perputual death march (which seems more and more likely), the game industries may face a crossroads.
Security officer is not qualified to make this judgement.
This depends on the security officer; it's a standard cost/benefits analysis, which is covered (at least around here) in standard undergrad engineering classes-- and I've never heard of a computer security job that didn't want at least BS CS. The SO may need to get numbers from the local bean counters, but that's not usually too hard.
On the other hand, any time someone overrides the Security officer for "higher" priorities, he should be able to document the consequent risks, and require WHOEVER is overriding him to document what they think is a higher priority, and assume responsibilty. Drop copies off with the legal department and the bean counters, and let them know where to to bury the axe.
On the other hand, I don't object to this kind of patent lawsuit, given the Amazon v. B&N case: it's called "Karma", and I don't mean the warm-and-fuzzy Slashdot kind.
I recommend AOL to the unclueable seeking dialup, or those seeking dialup who have kids, and care if they surf porn. For those who are smart enough to use a fork, and who don't care to bother censoring PR0N in their house, I usually recommend Earthlink.
I just use pop3 and smtp commands inside a telnet window.... I consider this the safest.
Telnet is insecure against packet sniffing. Of course, so are most mail program POP/IMAP connections. Nothing I know of is quite as secure as ssh to a dual mail/shell server.
Actually, the "moral values" card was Bush's big edge from what the networks said; ergo, opposition to abortion and to gay marriage/civil unions may have been a major factor (although no poll I know of asked: "What issue do you feel best reflects this criteria" or similar.)
The voting SHOULD be skewed towards urban interests, because that's where most of the people are.
Beware the tyranny of the majority.
Only 1% of the population are now farmers
...who feed the whole country, plus much of the world. Maintaining the US as a net exporter of food should be high up the priority list of national security items. So high as to largely be invisible, in fact-- like maintaining breathable air for example.
The results from 2000 accurately pick the final result so far on every state that's been called so far (I'm waiting for the Old Grey Lady's calls myself, but so far no network has made a FL2K "oops" this time), although with different margins. FL turned a little redder-- it looks like the margin won't be less than 1000 votes this time there. Furthermore, FL is an unhappy one to miscall, carrying 27 electoral votes.
More interesting will be the Votemaster's analysis of which pollsters' methodologies seemed soundest this time around, in hopes of better info for 2008... assuming out new Electronic Voting Machine Overlords bother with elections then. =)
Well, today's slashdot election poll has itself apparently been Slashdotted; I've been alternately getting 503 and 500 errors for the last hour. =)
The Votemaster is reporting another "attack" this morning, but I think he may have just seen a CNN-grade slashdotting. =) Of course, even at the worst that I saw (when I checked it at 8ish after my morning comics), the attack didn't reach the third of his eight servers. Fortunately, he also reports he has co-workers who are researching flash crowds. Lucky them!
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, USPTO.gov search sessions expire, so the given link is broken. The earliest "Microsoft" trademark is serial number 73236080.
The US Patent and Trademark Office maintains searchable databases of both patents and trademarks. The earliest Excel I see is from 1925, serial number 71215931, a footware trademark owned by BF Goodrich. There's another (72419485) dating from 1972 in current use for "CHAINS AND MORE SPECIFICALLY ROLLER CHAINS" by what seems to be the Jeffery Chain corporation. Around the time that M$ was starting to put together their cute-and-fuzzy little office suite, Hyundai (aka Hyunda) were using Excel (73511599) as the name for a car model.
There's only so many phoneme combinations to go around; a certain amount of overlap is necessary. You'd have to ask a lawyer -- and specifically, a trademark specialist -- to find out if the theory that the failure to register for trademark protection this long results in abandonment of enforcement rights.
Most US stores will only do exchanges for defective disks within the first fourteen days, and direct sustomers seeking refunds for open software to the original manufacturer. Most software manufacturers handle such requests given in the first 30 days with few questions asked, and issue RMAs and refunds regardless of most of the answers. (Exception: "Do you have your receipt?")
Well, if you just want a shark, there's always EBay.
A good choice, still available if you so choose. My sister has a couple tins hidden in her Xmas supplies, just in case one of her rugrats really deserves something special one year.
Apparently.
How many of those battery powered gizmos will still work at all in five years, much less thirty? Although, come to think of it, there's an old pre-Technics Lego gears-and-motor set in our stuff that still works....
Unions are the enemy of talented and productive people that understand you don't need a union, just the freedom to do whatever you want.
As for myself, due to their corporate union attitudes, I don't buy anything made by EA, and I only buy things from Wal-Mart after checking if ANYONE else in town carries it at any price. (Last thing I bought was a 3.5 inch glue-top memo cube filler two years ago.)
Crunch times raise error rates for EVERYONE, increasingly as crunches progress onward. This makes it more likely that the bad coders will become a negative marginal contribution to the projects. This makes ending such practices of benefit even to superhuman coders who make no mistakes even during a 168-hour-a-week death march.
Unions may indeed bring other undesirable problems, such as artificial and inappropriate pay equity. If the employees come to percieve unions as a lesser evil than the perputual death march (which seems more and more likely), the game industries may face a crossroads.
Who uses -R? Well, anyone who tries rm * in a folder containing a file named -R. No need to move the pinky-- * is on most numeric keypads. =)
This depends on the security officer; it's a standard cost/benefits analysis, which is covered (at least around here) in standard undergrad engineering classes-- and I've never heard of a computer security job that didn't want at least BS CS. The SO may need to get numbers from the local bean counters, but that's not usually too hard.
On the other hand, any time someone overrides the Security officer for "higher" priorities, he should be able to document the consequent risks, and require WHOEVER is overriding him to document what they think is a higher priority, and assume responsibilty. Drop copies off with the legal department and the bean counters, and let them know where to to bury the axe.
On the other hand, I don't object to this kind of patent lawsuit, given the Amazon v. B&N case: it's called "Karma", and I don't mean the warm-and-fuzzy Slashdot kind.
I recommend AOL to the unclueable seeking dialup, or those seeking dialup who have kids, and care if they surf porn. For those who are smart enough to use a fork, and who don't care to bother censoring PR0N in their house, I usually recommend Earthlink.
Either way, I don't get many help requests.
So, why didn't you double post this?
That could give a whole new shade of meaning to "War Dialing".
Telnet is insecure against packet sniffing. Of course, so are most mail program POP/IMAP connections. Nothing I know of is quite as secure as ssh to a dual mail/shell server.
Beware the tyranny of the majority.
Only 1% of the population are now farmers
More interesting will be the Votemaster's analysis of which pollsters' methodologies seemed soundest this time around, in hopes of better info for 2008... assuming out new Electronic Voting Machine Overlords bother with elections then. =)
This is slashdotters way of being helpful.
The Votemaster is reporting another "attack" this morning, but I think he may have just seen a CNN-grade slashdotting. =) Of course, even at the worst that I saw (when I checked it at 8ish after my morning comics), the attack didn't reach the third of his eight servers. Fortunately, he also reports he has co-workers who are researching flash crowds. Lucky them!