DT: Hollywood versus Los Allamos: You cannot call your Teraflop computer 'Road runner'.

Only idiots would come up with that! First the name is relatively generic, since it is a bird, second the cartoon is not about computers.

That case would last about 30 seconds in federal court, before the judge said: "Get out, you idiots!"

Time-Warner will just invoke a little-known backdoor in the DMCA, and wind up owning the computer. (You think the Patriot Act is draconian, read the DMCA!)

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

In that case, does Time Warner own Chrysler? ISTR a little muscle car they made called a "Road Runner"...

However, their new cartoon series--featuring a super-computer being chased by a ravenous predator--will unexpectedly fizzle after a scene where the computer is dropped off a mesa, run over by a truck, then crushed by a falling boulder.

Cheers, James Arthur

Or worse... recalled because it's not ROHS compliant...

Unfortunately, the manufacturer (ACME Corporation) is notorious for producing dangerous and/or defective products. Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Cite?

character,

In other legal news:

Michael

On a sunny day (Wed, 18 Jun 2008 08:53:42 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

So you do not believe me! Bad bad bad, but anyways:

To translate the essential part: At the opening of the international super computer conference SC2008, professor Hans Meuer stated that IBM's legal department had let him know that the name 'Roadrunner' for the new number 1, the Peta flop cracker of the Los Alamos laboratory (LANL), cannot be used officially. It seem there is a name conflict with the Time Warner company, who has rights to a comic character (with acoustical signature of 'meep meep' (link) ), and runs the ISP service "Road Runner High Speed Online". In spite of that, the representative of LANL and IBM, Don Grice and Dr. White, were handed the winner award for their so called 'Roadrunner'.

Yours is fake.

Alamos

IBM's legal department themselves decided that calling the computer Road Runner was not such a good idea.

Time-Warner made no legal threats.

It seemed a long shot anyway, since a google search on Road Runner gave a high-speed internet service, a sports team, a record label and a motorcycle touring magazine.

Yes I know. Amusing though.

Michael

On a sunny day (Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:22:54 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

Alamos

),

IBM's legal department would likely not have given a f*ck if they had not somehow been contacted by Hollywood.

How do you know?

Exactly why it must have been triggered by Hollywood.

character,

A TeraFLOPS is what the new nVidia chipset will do in a PC. Nothing special anymore.

If they ask nicely, Warner might license the name and logo to them.

Cheers! Rich

On a sunny day (Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:12:24 +0100) it happened Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote in :

character,

Or the AMD GPU card: AMD breaks Teraflop limit In German:

I ment Peta of course.

character,

bit.

I remember in the good old days when 1TFLOPS was quite fast...

On a sunny day (Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:37:07 +0100) it happened Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote in :

character,

GPU,

bit.

I rememeber Sinclair BASIC on a Timex-Sinclair ZX80 And I remember CP/M on a 4 MHz Z80. And _still_ Vista does not start up faster then win 3.1 :-)

character,

GPU,

I remember Isis on and Intel 8080...

No. Road Runner is a bird species.

Regardless, it is not trademark infringement.

Ooops... "Don't want to piss those boys off."

That would be a valid remark if we were Russian.

In that case, they WOULD make it RoHS compliant!

They already did... to Motorola, on the "RoadRunner" cable modems that were the first series of cable based Internet connectivity. Of course, they were for Time Warner cable systems.