"Office is now Microsoft 365, the premier productivity suite with innovative productivity apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security. Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows are combined in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app—with a new icon, new look, and even more features."
You can count on Microsoft to mess up their marketing message in the craziest ways. Why stick with the best-known productivity software brand on the planet when you can call it "365 Copilot"?
I doubt this will stop the lawsuit. Also Microsoft still absolutely sells Office 365 tiers separately from Microsoft 365 tiers. Their marketing is terrible and confusing but Offie definitely still exits as a brand, and you can bet your bottom dollar the lawyers are going to be having a great day on Monday.
Microsoft does not have a trademark for "Office", which is clearly a type of product and can't be used as a program name (just like you can't name your oatmeal "Oatmeal" and expect trademark protection).
The only way this would be infringing is if office.eu usage could be confused with Microsoft other's trademarks - like Microsoft Office - but I don't see that.
So no, office.eu will have a calm Monday on that front, just like hundreds of other companies offering products with "Office" in their name.
(I'm not a lawyer. Talk to a lawyer before deciding to take on a trillion dollar company).
I can't wait to launch my Office alternative in Cameroon, office.cm. I do suspect using such a generic TLD swap of Office's well-known domain for a knockoff is particularly perilous compared to others mentioned. Bear in mind the possibility for consumer confusion is a top criteria.
>just like hundreds of other companies offering products with "Office" in their name
There may be hundreds of other companies selling products with the noun "office" in their names, but there only is one producing a productivity suite called simply "Office". I would expect launching another productivity suite called "Office" would be trademark infringement. Just like I can't release a car called "Beetle" or "Golf".
I mean, I think that ship has probably sailed. Borland Office showed up at about the same time as Microsoft Office, in the late 80s. Then StarOffice, Corel Office, Wordperfect Office, throughout the 90s... If Microsoft had a defensible trademark there, then this would hardly be the first target. And Microsoft barely uses the "Office" brand _itself_, these days, and hasn't for years.
(There is still a product called Microsoft Office, but the thing that most users would think of as MS Office is now, bafflingly, branded "Microsoft 365 Copilot".)
This kind of conditioning has to be damaging to the model’s reasoning.
Consider how research worked in the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Scientists had to be mindful of topics where they needed to either avoid it completely or explicitly adapt it to the leader’s ideology.
Their alignment is probably more strategically built in during the training phase.
At least I assume Xi Jinping doesn’t just call up DeepSeek on a whim and dictate what they should have in model context (like Musk apparently does at xAI).
The virtualization itself is not the bizarre part. The bizarre part is where the actual OS is 16 bit and runs as the singular "task" of a thin 32 bit layer that merely calls itself a "memory manager". The details of that machinery (segmentation, DPMI, ...) are quite a sight to behold. And it's all because of how PCs evolved at that time, and because we needed to keep running DOS and still wanted to make use of all the extra memory that wouldn't fit into its address space.
Author here. The essay's argument is actually the opposite of that. The team was talented. Proof-of-Transfer was a real technical contribution. The SEC qualification was historic. What I'm describing is how structural incentives bent a legitimate effort toward narrative optimization over time. That's a harder problem than fraud. There's no villain, just a system that rewards the wrong things. Reducing it to "scams" makes it too easy and misses the lesson for anyone building with a financial instrument attached.
Here's another take: The idea that you can only choose between one set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) and another set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) is stupid.
Not to disrespect you personally, but as someone originally from Russia I'd argue the "cure" of state censorship is worse than the disease of centralisation.
The outcome here is still centralized control, which is why people don't like Cloudflare eating the internet. The Russian government doing it instead is the same outcome.
This is Russian government censorship. Where "constitutional rights" don't really apply, either. And probably quite a bit less sueable than Cloudflare.
> “the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something”
I always thought that, out of the Clarke novels, “Songs of Distant Earth” would make a good movie adaptation.
Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it, as happened to Foundation. (I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.)
For sci-fi takes on truly alien first contacts, Lem’s “Solaris” still holds its own, and the Tarkovsky movie is its own standalone classic (again something very different from the book).
Foundation as a series is already somewhat uneven and less than “pure.” Asimov pulled a Lucas and cluttered it with sequels and prequels that muddled it with connections to his robot novels. Then there’s the additional books by other writers. And if you want to get real picky, Second Foundation gets real pseudoscientific with the pseudo-psionics compared to the first two books.
>as happened to Foundation. (I actually like the Apple TV version, but it’s definitely its own thing.)
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Others have noted that a faithful adaptation would have been a snooze-fest and inconsistent at best. There's lots of cases where a movie/TV version departed greatly from the source material, and was better for it.
>Rama may turn out unrecognizable after the Hollywood script jockeys have been through with it
It's being helmed by Denis Villeneuve, the guy who did Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, and the new Dune movies. If anyone can do a good job with it, he can.
> There's lots of cases where a movie/TV version departed greatly from the source material, and was better for it.
Yeah. The idea of the genetic dynasty with brothers Dawn/Day/Dusk, as well as how Demerzel fits in has been pretty great, and none of that was in the novels.
As much as I love "Songs of Distant Earth", I suspect a Hollywood version of it would amount to "giant lobsters vs space marines", whereas in the book they're a minor sideshow.
I tend to agree. I've always thought it would work well as a TV show in the more heady days of streaming (let's say 2012 - 2020) when networks and studios where it still felt like they had some room to take more risk. It's more towards the end of the last TV "golden age" but an adaptation like something like Apple's take on "Tales from the Loop". Not brash or loud or too formulaic but somehow still got made
I loved "Tales From the Loop", and wished they'd made more. It has a kind of atmospheric sensibility that sticks (with me, at least) long after the details of the plot are forgotten. That's appropriate, I guess, for something based on a portfolio of paintings. It's a hidden gem that I enjoy recommending.
Yes! Amazing show, one of my favourite shows of the last decade or two. I think what really does it for me is that they really bring the audience into the world itself. I think that's partly because there's no need to always be pushing the plot forward, which I think is a bugbear of mine of newer shows now. There's something to letting things just breathe and tales from the loop really excels at that.
The Phillip Glass soundtrack particularly elevates it too.
So basically Avatar just without all the Smurfs huh?
It would be surely minced thru to fit all the standard of the industry - and that's the fear I'm having while craving for screen adaptations of books today.
"a fall of moondust" would translate extremely well to screen, and "the martian" has shown that it's the kind of movie that would do well enough in terms of reception.
The first Clarke I read as a kid and still one of my favourites. It hasn’t aged well, not least because it was written before we landed on the moon and now know its surface isn’t like that.
Counterpoint, I very much enjoyed the sequels (all but the last). They added three dimensional characters, especially women and explored a variety of aspects of first contact. They're a believable examination of how humans recreate the same social ills over and over, given the opportunity for utopia.
I thought they were reasonably interesting as well, though not quite the same vibe as the original.
Maybe it's that whole sense of wonder thing. When you have no idea why this thing was built and sent here, it's easy to imagine it was something exotic, amazing, high and mighty, wholesome, etc. When it's revealed that the reason was quite ordinary and kind of distasteful to modern human sensibilities, it's kind of a let-down.
I'd all the Southern Reach trilogy (quadrilogy? now) to this list. It's more on the cosmic/eldritch side, but similar sense of unknowable.
SPOILER WARNING
My interruption is that Area X/The Crawler is a probe built to study and build a bridge back to its creator. Area X is expanding because it's the inside of a wormhole. But whatever is on the other side is long dead, and the probe is acting on instinct.
Lem is underappreciated. I've recently reread a book with his interviews Tako rzecze... Lem (in Russian, English version does not exist). This caused me to remember some of his works.
While he is a bit snobby and complaints too much, you can't deny he really envisioned huge amount of things to come. His imagination is next to none, and probably some things he described we will see only in the distant future, or maybe during the singularity, if it happens.
back in 1994, when I was 9 years old, one of my favorite albums that got me into electronic music as a young boy was the concept album "Songs of Distant Earth" by Mike Oldfield.. Also the remixes by Jam&Spoon.. I think he released some kind of weird software about it too.. I think its time to finally read the book.
"The US has been acting powerful recently..." sure_jan.gif
I can commiserate with this person cooking up a rant based on a faulty initial premise but it's a doozy. Kidnapping heads of state and indiscriminate bombing campaigns with massive collateral damage certainly don't fit my conception of "acting powerful."
If anything, the SCOTUS decision would seem to imply that generative AI transformations produce no additional creative contribution and therefore the original copyright holder has all rights to any derived AI works.
that is a very good formulation of what I have been trying to say
but also probably not fully right
as far as I understand they avoid the decision of weather an AI can produce creative work by saying that the neither the AI nor it's owner/operator can claim ownership of copyright (which makes it de-facto public domain)
this wouldn't change anything wrt. derived work still having the original authors copyright
but it could change things wrt. parts in the derived work which by themself are not derived
That's a reasonable theory though it's stuck with the problem that any model will by its training be derivative of codebases that have incompatible licenses, and that in fact every single use of an LLM is therefore illegal (or at least tortious).
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-offi...
"Office is now Microsoft 365, the premier productivity suite with innovative productivity apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security. Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows are combined in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app—with a new icon, new look, and even more features."
You can count on Microsoft to mess up their marketing message in the craziest ways. Why stick with the best-known productivity software brand on the planet when you can call it "365 Copilot"?
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