Slashdot is exclusively latin-1, if I remember correctly. Don't try to use HTML escapes, either. you can use Umlauts and similar characters all you want, but the Euro sign or anything else outside latin-1 is silently dropped.
Oh, come on. How is it news when a pharma corporation sells its stuff at high prices? Starbucks just knew of the beneficial effects of coffee long before everyone else...
A hot ball of burning radioactive gas outside the Earth's athmosphere. Is strongly advise against trying to lie down inside the sun, as the high temperatures would cause severe side effects such as heavy burns, denaturation of vital proteins and instant vaporization. Also, the radiation emitted by the sun is known to cause cancer, which is why direct line of sight should be avoided at any cost.
Once you have glassed your enemies, nobody is going to complain about you anymore. Nobody's going to to business with you, either, but at least you're safe.
Actually, they care only about sectors they themselves are busy in, like mobile communications. It's still a hassle, but that's what you get when a company centers their corporate identity around a color. Still, it's much easier to indulge them than to defend one's right to build a mobile communications-themed website with a magenta-ish background. (Indulging them has the added advantage of not using a rather loud color for large parts of your website. Seriously, Engadget Mobile is pretty eye-hostile with that color scheme.)
By the way, I think aspirin got genericized after one of the world wars. Bayer was forced to release the formula; I think the trademark went with it.
I will repeat wht I (and others) have said before:
1.) If T-Mobile doesn't defend their trademarks they might lose them.
2.) The color magenta is SUPER EXTREMELY ÜBER-IMPORTANT to T-Mobile and its sister companies in Germany. It defines their whole corporate design and every German knows them by this color. They can't afford to lose their color trademark.
3.) The Engadget Mobile logo is similar to T-Mobile's corporate design in more ways than the color - the decorative bar between the words is similar to the "Digits" (small squares) that have been a mainstay of the various T-corporations' corporate design for years.
4.) The letter written by T-Mobile was polite, non-threatening and friendly. They merely asked Engadget to please pick a different color.
5.) Engadget showed that success does not equate professionalism and decided to answer in the most pissy way possible. "We don't have to play nice! We're the internet! Woo!"
I agree that corporations usually are soulless beasts hellbent on making our lives miserable in the name of profit, but T-Mobile is hardly being evil here. They perceive a threat to one of their most important trademarks and before they even get out the legal club they nicely ask Engadget to pick a different color. Given that losing that trademark could cost them millions of Euros and years of lost PR work they're being exceptionally nice.
The Deutsche Telekom (and its various T-subsidiaries) is somewhat reasonable about it. They're generally cool with magenta websites unless the website is in the same area as one of their businesses. However, they take issues with German websites beginning with "T-". Sites like "t-beutel.de" ("t-beutel" "t-bag", the pun works in both languages) have been killed off because DT believes itself to be the sole owner of the T-Dash prefix.
But now imagine there's a TV station devoted to reviewing movies and they call themselves "Next Century Foxx", with a logo that has the words stacked on top of each other. What do you think, would someone without insight into New Century Foxx's business believe they actually are a 20th Century Fox front? Damn sure they would, even though 20th Century makes movies and New Century makes movie reviews.
Actually, the Deutsche Telekom has a trademark on a very specific shade of Magenta, RAL 4010. However, due to there being many similar shades of magenta, any shade of magenta might cause someone to confuse an independent mobile phone website with a T-Mobile website. Thus they must move to counter the potential infringement.
Think of the fact that undefended trademarks can vanish - if they don't defend their association between mobile communication ans magenta, they might lose the color trademark their entire corporate design rests on. In Germany they have successfully managed to get magenta universally recognized as "their" color. They can't afford to lose that color. Even if they draw the ire of all geeks worlwide by suing Engadget; the alternative is a direct threat to their corporate design.
Nonwithstanding that so far they just humbly asked Engadget to stop using magenta. They might threaten later, but so far it was not T-Mobile who behaved like a bunch of asshats.
Apart from the fact that in Germany magenta does carry "Deutsche Telekom subsidiary" as its primary connotation, T-Mobile might think that a website about mobile communication is similar enough to their business to have people confused by the color.
Also note that the Engadget Mobile logo contains a small bar made from rectangles. Small squares (DT calls them "Digits") are an important part of DT's corporate design and are commonly found in their logos. This might be another factor that has prompted T-Mobile to spring to action.
I know that Engadget's design is much different from T-Mobile's - DT tends to brefer blocky designs with sharp corners. But then again I'm in Germany and DT is still the main ISP over here (especially in rural areas), so I neccessarily deal with them occasionally. Most people in the States don't.
They might be overreacting, but I think it's not hard at all to see their case.
The Deutsche Telekom, of which T-Online is a subsidiary, does have a so-called Farbmarke (color trademark) on magenta (to be precise, on the color RAL 4010). This is not really unusual; Heinz has a color trademark on the background color of the label on their baked beans cans.
Important is that a color trademark only works to prevent people from confusing companies or products. I could release baked beans in a RAL 4010 colored can any day, just as I could start an ISP with a turqoise website. However, having a RAL 4010 colored can of beans with a large T on it might infringe on DT's trademarks again due to being too similar to their corporate design.
By the way, US law does accept color trademarks as valid since the Lanham Act and especially since Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Products Co., Inc.. (source)
IANAL, but I do posess the rare skill of being able to use Google effectively.
In that case I find the lacking speed of the display quite appalling. In large dark grey areas the display has quite noticable grey-to-grey flicker. If they won't go for color quality they can at least go for speed.
Here's a quote from the astronomer who found the systems, Dr. Val Egirl: "Like, oh my God, those systems are, like, totally unique fer shur. Those other astrophysicists are all like, 'they aren't unique if there's two of them', but, like, whatever!"
It's not an EU thing. The national committees have a chairman each. The chairman makes up the rules. Microsoft has bought/replaced a number of chairmen with interesting results (such as people not allowed to vote No in Germany or absentees essentially being counted as Yes in Poland). I don't know how they sabotaged the Norwegian committee (as apparently the chairman wasn't bought by MS), but it's most likely by abusing some aspect of the committee rules, like everywhere else.
The problem lies in the fact that the voting process was designed without tampering in mind, because tampering with committees all over the world is ludicrously expensive. Unfortunately, Microsoft has that kind of money.
OFFICE OPEN XML IS NOT THE MICROSOFT OFFICE FILE FORMAT!
This is one very important point. The current DOCX format is not OOXML and Microsoft has officially stated that future Office file formats won't conform to the spec either, if Microsoft doesn't agree with what the spec says. There is no correct implementation of OOXML now and there most likely never will be.
If Microsoft would have published the DOCX format specification (most likely less than 6000 pages long) and stuck to that specification/released new specs whenever the format changed, then we'd be talking about the Office format being an open standard. But as it is the Office format is only related to an open standard. As time goes on, the formats will diverge. I predict that using the OOXML specs to work with the Office 15 file format will be as easy as using only the SGML specs to correctly interpret SVG.
This specification isn't about Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and IBM. Its about government documentation funded by the public that needs to be available a thousand years from now.
No, it's about Microsoft's profits for the next three to five fiscal quarters. Everything else is irrelevant.
Microsoft is doing exactly what it's supposed to do as a publicly traded company: Increase growth by any means they can get away with. That's how modern economy works. Blame the shareholders for not demanding that Microsoft ruins the value of their portfolio by doing business honestly.
Yes, Microsoft are being plain evil here, but then again how are they supposed to grow much without taking any risks? They are beholden to their shareholders and the shareholders demand stability and growth. Destroying ISO is relatively cheap and safe, so Microsoft does that rather than developing a new product to monetize.
In today's society increasing shareholder value is the absolute imperative. Everything else is only relevant insofar as it might hinder stock value growth - for example you can't work people to death because the PR backlash and legal red tape would be costly and thus undesirable for the shareholder. Destroying ISO is fair game because most consumers won't really notice or understand what you did and there are no laws against discrediting an international standards body. And even if there are, governments aren't that expensive, either.
1.) The Microsoft cronies are flushed from the committees.
2.) ISO fixes its voting rules and makes corruption/stacking/etc. very difficult to do without everyone knowing while at the same time adding anti-corruption rules (á la "irregularities will lead to the NB being ignored for the rest of the standardization process").
3.) ISO withdraws the OOXML standard on the grounds that it is flawed.
1.) would result from the preparations for 2.); 2.) would be a very wise thing to do for ISO anyway and 3.) could be triggered by having a sanitized ISO receive complaints about the shoddy quality of the OOXML standard.
It's not impossible, but it does hinge on ISO dropping the trust model and developing some robust rules.
I especially like "(Score:-)". Apparently either the software can't properly determine where the comments begin or end* or someone referenced a moderation result in a post. Either way, the result is pretty much a gead giveaway for a markov spammer - there's not a lot of useful matching rules for the colon and even if the next part would fit, it's still difficult to place a moderation reference in a post without the result looking extremely weird.
* Possibly because it used those special parts to make its robot friends, but I'm not certain.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is exclusively latin-1, if I remember correctly. Don't try to use HTML escapes, either. you can use Umlauts and similar characters all you want, but the Euro sign or anything else outside latin-1 is silently dropped.
Oh, come on. How is it news when a pharma corporation sells its stuff at high prices? Starbucks just knew of the beneficial effects of coffee long before everyone else...
A hot ball of burning radioactive gas outside the Earth's athmosphere. Is strongly advise against trying to lie down inside the sun, as the high temperatures would cause severe side effects such as heavy burns, denaturation of vital proteins and instant vaporization. Also, the radiation emitted by the sun is known to cause cancer, which is why direct line of sight should be avoided at any cost.
I'm going the middle road. I take several stakes and arrange them in a lattice. Then I eat them. Crunchy and semi-healthy.
Once you have glassed your enemies, nobody is going to complain about you anymore. Nobody's going to to business with you, either, but at least you're safe.
Actually, they care only about sectors they themselves are busy in, like mobile communications. It's still a hassle, but that's what you get when a company centers their corporate identity around a color. Still, it's much easier to indulge them than to defend one's right to build a mobile communications-themed website with a magenta-ish background. (Indulging them has the added advantage of not using a rather loud color for large parts of your website. Seriously, Engadget Mobile is pretty eye-hostile with that color scheme.)
By the way, I think aspirin got genericized after one of the world wars. Bayer was forced to release the formula; I think the trademark went with it.
I will repeat wht I (and others) have said before:
1.) If T-Mobile doesn't defend their trademarks they might lose them.
2.) The color magenta is SUPER EXTREMELY ÜBER-IMPORTANT to T-Mobile and its sister companies in Germany. It defines their whole corporate design and every German knows them by this color. They can't afford to lose their color trademark.
3.) The Engadget Mobile logo is similar to T-Mobile's corporate design in more ways than the color - the decorative bar between the words is similar to the "Digits" (small squares) that have been a mainstay of the various T-corporations' corporate design for years.
4.) The letter written by T-Mobile was polite, non-threatening and friendly. They merely asked Engadget to please pick a different color.
5.) Engadget showed that success does not equate professionalism and decided to answer in the most pissy way possible. "We don't have to play nice! We're the internet! Woo!"
I agree that corporations usually are soulless beasts hellbent on making our lives miserable in the name of profit, but T-Mobile is hardly being evil here. They perceive a threat to one of their most important trademarks and before they even get out the legal club they nicely ask Engadget to pick a different color. Given that losing that trademark could cost them millions of Euros and years of lost PR work they're being exceptionally nice.
The Deutsche Telekom (and its various T-subsidiaries) is somewhat reasonable about it. They're generally cool with magenta websites unless the website is in the same area as one of their businesses. However, they take issues with German websites beginning with "T-". Sites like "t-beutel.de" ("t-beutel" "t-bag", the pun works in both languages) have been killed off because DT believes itself to be the sole owner of the T-Dash prefix.
-nt-
But now imagine there's a TV station devoted to reviewing movies and they call themselves "Next Century Foxx", with a logo that has the words stacked on top of each other. What do you think, would someone without insight into New Century Foxx's business believe they actually are a 20th Century Fox front? Damn sure they would, even though 20th Century makes movies and New Century makes movie reviews.
Actually, the Deutsche Telekom has a trademark on a very specific shade of Magenta, RAL 4010. However, due to there being many similar shades of magenta, any shade of magenta might cause someone to confuse an independent mobile phone website with a T-Mobile website. Thus they must move to counter the potential infringement.
Think of the fact that undefended trademarks can vanish - if they don't defend their association between mobile communication ans magenta, they might lose the color trademark their entire corporate design rests on. In Germany they have successfully managed to get magenta universally recognized as "their" color. They can't afford to lose that color. Even if they draw the ire of all geeks worlwide by suing Engadget; the alternative is a direct threat to their corporate design.
Nonwithstanding that so far they just humbly asked Engadget to stop using magenta. They might threaten later, but so far it was not T-Mobile who behaved like a bunch of asshats.
Apart from the fact that in Germany magenta does carry "Deutsche Telekom subsidiary" as its primary connotation, T-Mobile might think that a website about mobile communication is similar enough to their business to have people confused by the color.
Also note that the Engadget Mobile logo contains a small bar made from rectangles. Small squares (DT calls them "Digits") are an important part of DT's corporate design and are commonly found in their logos. This might be another factor that has prompted T-Mobile to spring to action.
I know that Engadget's design is much different from T-Mobile's - DT tends to brefer blocky designs with sharp corners. But then again I'm in Germany and DT is still the main ISP over here (especially in rural areas), so I neccessarily deal with them occasionally. Most people in the States don't.
They might be overreacting, but I think it's not hard at all to see their case.
T-Mobile, not T-Online. Both are subsidiaries of DT, but it's the Mobile one we're talking about, of course.
The Deutsche Telekom, of which T-Online is a subsidiary, does have a so-called Farbmarke (color trademark) on magenta (to be precise, on the color RAL 4010). This is not really unusual; Heinz has a color trademark on the background color of the label on their baked beans cans.
Important is that a color trademark only works to prevent people from confusing companies or products. I could release baked beans in a RAL 4010 colored can any day, just as I could start an ISP with a turqoise website. However, having a RAL 4010 colored can of beans with a large T on it might infringe on DT's trademarks again due to being too similar to their corporate design.
By the way, US law does accept color trademarks as valid since the Lanham Act and especially since Qualitex Co. v. Jacobson Products Co., Inc.. (source)
IANAL, but I do posess the rare skill of being able to use Google effectively.
In that case I find the lacking speed of the display quite appalling. In large dark grey areas the display has quite noticable grey-to-grey flicker. If they won't go for color quality they can at least go for speed.
First you have one peanuts, then you have two peanuts. Of course this ignores the fact that some peanuts only seem to contain one kernel.
Here's a quote from the astronomer who found the systems, Dr. Val Egirl: "Like, oh my God, those systems are, like, totally unique fer shur. Those other astrophysicists are all like, 'they aren't unique if there's two of them', but, like, whatever!"
No, he's actually right. A recent census has shown that the USA actually only has a population of 3%.
It's not an EU thing. The national committees have a chairman each. The chairman makes up the rules. Microsoft has bought/replaced a number of chairmen with interesting results (such as people not allowed to vote No in Germany or absentees essentially being counted as Yes in Poland). I don't know how they sabotaged the Norwegian committee (as apparently the chairman wasn't bought by MS), but it's most likely by abusing some aspect of the committee rules, like everywhere else.
The problem lies in the fact that the voting process was designed without tampering in mind, because tampering with committees all over the world is ludicrously expensive. Unfortunately, Microsoft has that kind of money.
OFFICE OPEN XML IS NOT THE MICROSOFT OFFICE FILE FORMAT!
This is one very important point. The current DOCX format is not OOXML and Microsoft has officially stated that future Office file formats won't conform to the spec either, if Microsoft doesn't agree with what the spec says. There is no correct implementation of OOXML now and there most likely never will be.
If Microsoft would have published the DOCX format specification (most likely less than 6000 pages long) and stuck to that specification/released new specs whenever the format changed, then we'd be talking about the Office format being an open standard. But as it is the Office format is only related to an open standard. As time goes on, the formats will diverge. I predict that using the OOXML specs to work with the Office 15 file format will be as easy as using only the SGML specs to correctly interpret SVG.
Children are extremely good at adapting. Large multinational organizations usually aren't.
Or an OSS converter that has modules for every Office format and tries to convert it to ODF. Which might be a good idea anyway.
Microsoft is doing exactly what it's supposed to do as a publicly traded company: Increase growth by any means they can get away with. That's how modern economy works. Blame the shareholders for not demanding that Microsoft ruins the value of their portfolio by doing business honestly.
Yes, Microsoft are being plain evil here, but then again how are they supposed to grow much without taking any risks? They are beholden to their shareholders and the shareholders demand stability and growth. Destroying ISO is relatively cheap and safe, so Microsoft does that rather than developing a new product to monetize.
In today's society increasing shareholder value is the absolute imperative. Everything else is only relevant insofar as it might hinder stock value growth - for example you can't work people to death because the PR backlash and legal red tape would be costly and thus undesirable for the shareholder. Destroying ISO is fair game because most consumers won't really notice or understand what you did and there are no laws against discrediting an international standards body. And even if there are, governments aren't that expensive, either.
Alternative:
1.) The Microsoft cronies are flushed from the committees.
2.) ISO fixes its voting rules and makes corruption/stacking/etc. very difficult to do without everyone knowing while at the same time adding anti-corruption rules (á la "irregularities will lead to the NB being ignored for the rest of the standardization process").
3.) ISO withdraws the OOXML standard on the grounds that it is flawed.
1.) would result from the preparations for 2.); 2.) would be a very wise thing to do for ISO anyway and 3.) could be triggered by having a sanitized ISO receive complaints about the shoddy quality of the OOXML standard.
It's not impossible, but it does hinge on ISO dropping the trust model and developing some robust rules.
I especially like "(Score:-)". Apparently either the software can't properly determine where the comments begin or end* or someone referenced a moderation result in a post. Either way, the result is pretty much a gead giveaway for a markov spammer - there's not a lot of useful matching rules for the colon and even if the next part would fit, it's still difficult to place a moderation reference in a post without the result looking extremely weird.
* Possibly because it used those special parts to make its robot friends, but I'm not certain.